She glanced at him through narrowed eyes before turning back to the road. “Sweet talker.”
“Look what it did for the Kardashians. We’re at least as talented as they are.”
“You think comparing me to a Kardashian is the best way to seduce me?”
They passed a prim white farmhouse with two huge barns and a line of dairy cows chewing drowsily in the muck.
“It could be my comeback,” Benji said. “No pun intended.”
Cat rolled her eyes. “Gross.”
“The guy from Saved by the Bell did one.”
“Mario Lopez?” She perked up.
“The other one. The one you’d least want to see in a sex tape. Whatshisname? At the end, he does a dirty Sanchez.”
“I seriously hope that’s not referring to a person. Actually, I don’t want to know what that is.”
Benji laughed. “If nothing else, it would be another feather in my father’s cap. One more thing to prove him right about me.” He knew how dreary this line of conversation was, how decidedly unappealing self-deprecation could be, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was as painful as scratching a rash but also as satisfying. And besides, leaving the house, bursting that bright little bubble of Edenic seclusion, left him feeling embattled, in want of a target, even if he was the one locked in his sights.
“Crackpot theory?” Cat asked.
It made him smile, the lingo developing between them, their own little dictionary and standing invitation to amateur psychoanalysis. “Please.”
“I think you like proving your father right. You get off on it.” She turned down the music and tightened her grip on the wheel, her shoulders, her entire upper body gone rigid with conviction. “It’s more than just pissing him off. It’s your way of staying connected. The antagonism. The impasse. It’s how you stay close.” He considered her profile, her creased forehead, the straight line of her small nose, the pale down above her upper lip turned to gold by the sun. “Maybe it’s why you take these jobs that. That.”
Benji watched her teeter on a ledge, not knowing how to finish her sentence without falling off. “Suck,” he offered.
“That’s your word. I was going to say that are less than what you’re capable of.”
“How do you know what I’m capable of?”
Cat shrugged. “You act interested when I read to you from Middlemarch. You can be very convincing when you want to be.” She pulled the car to a stop at a deserted intersection and turned onto the pocked rural road that would deposit them in downtown Alluvia. “What would it mean if you were Hamlet?” she asked. “Not the Ghost. Not the understudy for Horatio. Not the butt of your own joke. But Hamlet. You’d have to change your entire worldview.”
“I’d have to memorize a lot more lines.”
“You’d have to live with proving your father wrong. And who would you be then? If you weren’t failing Henry Fisher?”
Benji plucked a bottle of warm, flat soda from the cup holder and took a swig. “It wouldn’t matter. I could be Hamlet. I could be Ralph fucking Fiennes. My father’s totally unimpressed by fame.”
“That’s easy for him to say. You could sink a boat with the awards he’s won. But I’m not talking about fame,” Cat said. She sounded like a schoolteacher saddled with some incorrigibly dull kid. “I’m not talking about being famous. I’m talking about being — I don’t know. What am I talking about?”
“Happy?” Benji tried.
“Happy is overrated. Happy comes and goes.” She put a hand on his knee and looked at him longer than a person behind the wheel of a moving vehicle should. “Is that really what you want? In the end? To be famous?”
It was. Of course it was. He’d had a taste of it, the largest possible dose a boy could squeeze from a second-tier sitcom in the days before the Internet. The giggling requests for autographs, usually made by moonfaced, acne-prone girls, as he walked through the mall. The jean-jacketed spread in Teen Beat. Strangers doing double takes and tugging each other’s sleeves as they passed him by. That’s what you think! That’s what you think! Hell yes, he wanted to be famous.
“No. That’s not what I want. Not the only thing.”
The grassy fields gave way to more or less tended lawns, clusters of cheap, vinyl-sided split-level ranches, and cul-de-sac developments named with the puzzlingly idyllic optimism of mental health facilities. Echo Valley. Windview Fields. They passed the tennis courts, the Elks Lodge, the municipal swimming pool (closed for the season) before crossing the town line and crawling down Main Street, past the post office, hardware store, hair salon, gas mart, past the pizza parlor and the library and the steepled Presbyterian church that comprised Alluvia’s business district. Cat turned right onto School Street, then left onto Palmer, then left again into the Fishers’ drive.
And there it was. As soon as Benji saw it, his foot began pumping the imaginary brake that provides comfort to so many frazzled mothers when driving with their lead-footed teenage sons. “Whoa,” he said. “Whoa.”
The silver Mercedes he’d noticed three days earlier sat under the elm at the curb in a dappled pool of light. He’d assumed the car belonged to Roger, but Roger Fitch would no sooner spend three days in Alluvia than in Al Anbar, and someone, someone of size, someone with hair, someone decidedly not Roger, was sitting in the front seat.
“Back up,” Benji said. “Back up to that car.”
“Who is it?” Cat asked with a tinge of alarm, letting the car roll slowly down the sloped blacktop.
Benji saw a silhouette, nothing more, but he could tell from the rigid, upright shape that the person was considering whether to flee. He rolled down his window and waved. “Hey,” he called. “You. Hey.”
In the largest, most fundamentally solipsistic region of his mind, Benji assumed the car was somehow there for him. He entertained the idea that the car belonged to a fan. An enthusiast of eighties television, come to ask for his autograph or to wish him well or, more darkly, to stalk and possibly shoot him. Or did he owe somebody money? Had he fucked (or fucked over) somebody’s sister? Was he about to get his other leg broken? There were, of course, more realistic possibilities — perhaps the man (it seemed to be a man) numbered among the doctoral candidates who appeared every so often, like pilgrims at a holy site, journeying to meet the esteemed author, the subject of a dissertation on rural ennui or imploding masculinity.
The door of the Mercedes swung open and, after a minute, a boy climbed out of the car. He was less handsome than pretty, possessed of a pale, waxen beauty that, were it not for the shadow of stubble on his cheeks and a small silver barbell piercing the upper curve of his ear, belonged to a porcelain doll. He was tall and thin with big, staring blue eyes, a slender nose, and a perfect Cupid’s bow for a mouth. His dark hair, oiled to a high, almost plastic sheen, was pushed back. He wore black camouflage pants, cut off at the knee, and a lilac shirt with a deep V-neck that exposed the taut and, despite his otherwise androgynous mien, surprisingly hairy plates of his chest. He was eighteen, Benji guessed. Or twenty-five. It was hard to tell. The only thing Benji could say with certainty was that the kid had never seen Prodigy.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“You’ve been sitting there for three days.”
“Not the whole time.”
“And not because you like the block.”
The boy considered his car, flicked a rock at the tire with a shy sweep of his boot. “No,” he answered.