Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,2

his eyes. He didn’t have time to mess around; his mother was gone. He needed money, more money than Jude could pickpocket with an umbrella. His body clenched with his last memory of her—the acrid, scotchy stink of her vomit through the bathroom door; the blathering hiccups of her sobs. Had she been crying because she was leaving, or just because she was wasted?

Then the umbrella, the pointy part, speared him in the gut.

“Ow, man.” Teddy opened his eyes.

“You were supposed to catch it,” said Jude.

Teddy looked up into the bleachers. The girl was gone. But a moment later, a pair of blue-jeaned legs appeared over the wall behind them.

They watched as the girl jumped from the ledge, her jacket parachuting as she plummeted. She landed feetfirst and fell forward to catch her balance, then strutted a slow-motion, runway strut in their direction. She stopped a car length away and stood with her hands on her hips, inspecting them. Her eyes were shining with disdain.

If you were a girl, Jude Keffy-Horn was a person you looked at, hard, and then didn’t look at again. His blue eyes, set wide apart, watched the world from under hooded lids, weighed down by distrust, THC, and a deep, hormonal languor. A passing stranger would not have guessed them to be the eyes of a hyperactive teenager with attention deficit disorder, but his mouth, which rarely rested, betrayed him. He was thin in the lip, fairly broad in the forehead, tall and flat in the space between mouth and upturned nose, the whole plane of his face scattered with freckles usurped daily by a lavender brand of acne. He wore not one but two retainers. He wasn’t tall, but he was built like a tall person, with skinny arms and legs and big knees and elbows that knocked around when he walked. He wasn’t bad-looking. He was good-looking enough. He was the kid whose name you knew only because the teacher kept calling it. Jude. Jude. Mr. Keffy-Horn, is that a cigarette you’re rolling?

Teddy shared Jude’s uniform, his half-swallowed smirk, but due to the blood of his Indian father (Queen Bea was purebred white trash), his hair was the blue-black of comic book villains, his complexion as dark and smooth as a brown eggshell. By the population of Ira Allen High School he was rumored halfheartedly to be Jewish, Arab, Mexican, Greek, and most often, simply “Spanish.” When Jude had asked, Teddy had told him “Indian,” then quipped, nearly indiscernibly, for he was a mumbler, “Gandhi, not Geronimo.” With everyone else, though, he preferred to allow his identity to flourish in the shadowed domain of myth. Teddy’s eyelashes were long, like the bristles of a paintbrush; through his right eyebrow was an ashen scar from the time he’d spilled off his skateboard at age ten. Then his face had been cherubic; now, at fifteen, it had sloughed off the baby fat and gone angular as a paper airplane. He had a delicate frame; he had an Adam’s apple like a brass knuckle; he had things up the sleeve of that too-big coat—a Chinese star, the wire of a Walkman, a cigarette for after class, which he was always more careful than Jude to conceal.

What’s that kid up to?

That was the way the girl was looking at both of them now, under the bleachers. “What are you people doing down here?”

Jude stabbed the umbrella into the ground. “Hanging out.”

“Are you smoking marijuana?”

“You can’t smell it,” Jude said. “We’re out in the open.”

“Can I have my umbrella, please?”

“Why? It’s not raining.”

“It’s supposed to snow, for your information.”

“Oh, for my information, okay. It’s a snow umbrella.” Now he was pretending that the umbrella was a gun. He held it cocked at his hip, the metal tip against his cheek, ready to shoot around a corner.

“Jude,” Teddy said. “Over here.”

He clapped his hands, and Jude obediently, joyfully tossed him the umbrella.

“Motherfucking monkey in the middle!” said Jude.

Teddy walked three paces toward the girl, head down, and returned it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Hey,” Jude said.

“Brit?” In the bleachers above, two more girls were peering down at them. They never came alone, girls; they always came in packs. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll be right there!” A moment later, she was gone.

“Brit the shit,” Jude said, but Teddy didn’t say anything.

Jude Keffy-Horn, adopted by Lester Keffy and Harriet Horn of Lintonburg, Vermont, met Teddy McNicholas on the second day of seventh grade, in 1984. Teddy had moved there with his half