Crossroads

“Judson is like your pet. That’s exactly the way you treat him. You use him when you need him and you ignore him when you don’t. You use your friends, you use their drugs, you use their houses. And, I swear to God, you’re using Crossroads, too. You’re smart enough to get away with it, but I can see what you’re doing. That first Sunday, when people were telling me how great you are, I thought I was crazy. But you know who else agrees with me? Rick Ambrose.”

Although the linoleum floor was cold, the closet felt overwarm to Perry, short on oxygen, bathyspheric.

“He thinks you’re trouble,” Becky said relentlessly. “That’s what he told me.”

Perry’s mind started down the road of imagining the circumstances under which she’d heard this from Ambrose but stopped and turned back. It was as if he’d been born dispossessed, by his sister. No sooner had he found a game he could play well, a place where he was valued for his skill at playing it, an adult whom he could actually admire, than his sister came along and overnight turned Ambrose against him, claimed Ambrose for herself.

“So it isn’t that you don’t like me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “That’s not the barrier. The barrier is that you hate me.”

“No. It’s that—”

“I don’t hate you.”

“I don’t even know you well enough to have a feeling about you. I don’t think anybody really knows you. I think the people who think they do are wrong. And boy are you good at using them. Have you ever once in your life done something for another person that cost you something? All I’ve ever seen from you is selfishness and self-involvement and selfish pleasure.”

He slumped forward and surrendered to tears, hoping they might soften her toward him, elicit a redemptive hug. But they did not. He struggled to think of a thing he’d ever done to harm her, a thing more visible than the occasionally unkind thoughts he had about her, to explain her hatred. Unable to think of one thing, he was forced to conclude that she hated him on principle, because he was an evil, selfish worm, and that she was testifying now merely to redress the abstract injustice of his being praised by other people.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this must be hard to hear. I mean, you are my brother. But maybe it’s good you picked my name tonight, because I’ve lived with you my whole life. I can see you better than other people can. I … I do want to get to know you better. You’re my brother. But first I have to see that there’s a person there worth knowing.”

She stood up and left him in the closet like a city leveled by a hydrogen bomb. Out of the rubble, he painfully reconstructed the gist of what she’d said. She knew a lot more about his extracurricular activities than he might have imagined. (The only blessing there was that she didn’t seem to know that he sold drugs to seventh graders.) Ambrose thought he was “trouble.” (The only consolation there was the certainty that Ambrose would be angry if he knew she’d betrayed this confidence.) His seeming good works in Crossroads counted for nothing. (But at least she’d reported that people thought well of him.) He was a bad person. He merely used Judson.

Too ashamed and self-pitying to leave the closet, he listened to the group reassembling in the function hall, the glad buzz of dyad partners who’d successfully worked on their relationships, the barking of Ambrose, the skillful strumming of guitars, the sing-along of “All Good Gifts” and “You’ve Got a Friend.” He wondered if anyone noticed he was missing. Though not yet in the inner circle, he was among the sophomores most likely to get there, a fairly bright star in the Crossroads sky, and he certainly would have noticed if, say, one of the stars in Orion’s Belt went dark. As the meeting broke up, he waited for a tap on the closet door from someone—a remorseful Becky, a worried adviser, a reassuring Ambrose, a fellow member who valued him, or even just someone who saw the strip of light under the door when the function-hall lights were turned off. That no one came to him, not one person, seemed to him a damning confirmation of Becky’s judgment. He was not a person worth knowing.

It was partly to prove his sister wrong and partly to become a person whom Rick Ambrose ought to trust (and perhaps prefer to Becky) that he’d formed his new resolution that night. Not the purest-hearted of motives, surely; but one had to begin somewhere.

Leaving only two Quaaludes behind in his strongbox, as a tiny Christmas present to himself, he readmitted Judson to their bedroom and hurried forth in his parka, under snow-threatening skies, to Ansel Roder’s house. A peculiarity of the Crappier Parsonage was that, although more in need of razing than of renovation, it stood in a much tonier part of town than the senior minister’s house. All of Perry’s old drug buddies lived close by. In his reluctance to liquidate the asset, he’d dithered past the start of Christmas vacation and now couldn’t rely on finding any of his regular customers behind the Lifton Central baseball backstop, but Roder was always Mr. Liquidity. The stuccoed Roder manse had a round turret with terra-cotta shingles. Inside were beam-ceilinged rooms whose least-fine piece of furniture was finer than Perry’s family’s finest. Such was the heating situation that Roder came to the front door barefoot and shirtless, like G.I. Joe on a beach holiday. “Just the man I’m looking for,” he said. “I’m getting this weird fuzz tone in my speakers.”