"Uh, sorry. I just spaced out."
"Were you looking at my ass?"
"No," said Doug, who at the mere mention of the word "ass" had almost looked at her ass again. "I wouldn’t look at your ass if it had a Playboy stapled to it."
"Nice."
Doug spun around and walked, pink cheeked, back to Jay’s room.
"Okay," he said as he crossed the threshold. "I’m ready to go." Chewbacca stretched up Doug’s leg, paws on his knee.
Jay didn’t look up from his computer. "Cat’s bringing her laptop over here now. Cat and Sejal. She said something like, ‘No way with my mom on the rag’ and said she didn’t want anyone at her house."
Doug could tell he was trying to be standoffish, but Jay still couldn’t keep a straight face while saying "on the rag." "They’re coming here? Shouldn’t you clean up a little?"
Jay looked around his room, which was spotless as always.
"Clean up what?"
"I dunno. At least take down the Darth Maul poster, right?"
Jay shook his head. "You’re just like Adam."
"Okay," said Doug, "I’m sorry you’re upset. I thought, you know, we’ve been friends a long time, and friends kid each other. I didn’t know I’d been hurting your feelings."
It sounded reasonable to Doug as he said it, as if it could even be the truth. There was a flimsy nobility to it, like a paper crown. Just then the doorbell rang.
Doug nearly collided with Pamela in the hallway. Chewbacca rushed past to bark at the door.
"No!" Doug said. "This time we want to answer it."
Pamela held out her hand. "Three bucks," she said.
Doug stared at her, hard. "You will let me answer the door," he told her.
"Yeah. For three bucks. Stop looking at me like that."
"I thought," Doug said, fishing his Velcro wallet from his back pocket, "that trolls…were supposed to ask you a riddle"—the wallet was free now, and he paid Pamela—"not demand cash."
"You’re thinking of sphinxes."
Doug ran to the entryway, then skidded to a halt and took a couple of leisurely steps to the door.
The door wouldn’t open, so he turned the deadbolt, found that he’d just locked it rather than unlocked it, turned the small handle lock instead, and soon he was looking out onto the stoop, and yard, and Sejal.
Jay’s house faced the south, and that dazzling midday light made the neighborhood incandescent and traced a hot red edge around Sejal’s small body. Cat was there, too.
"Cat, Sejal, come in," he told the girls. Chewbacca seized with happiness at having so many visitors.
Cat had her computer under one arm and a backpack over her shoulder. Sejal was wearing a long-sleeved red shirt that you could see through to a black tank top beneath.
"Hey, Meatball."
"Hi, Doug," said Sejal.
Doug led them down the hall and said, "Jay mentioned you might be coming by, but I thought I’d have to miss you. I have an appointment later."
"He paid me three dollars to let him open the door!" Pamela shouted from her room. "Which one of you does he have the crush on?"
"Sejal!" Cat shouted back, and entered Jay’s room.
Doug winced at Sejal. "You look nice," he said.
She looked beautiful. Each time he saw her now, she was more lovely. It hurt a little to look at her, hurt in a part of Doug’s body that he couldn’t immediately define.
"Thank you, Doug. I didn’t know you were going to be here," she said, as though explaining something, though Doug couldn’t imagine what. "This dog is very taken with your pants."
"Yeah…well," Doug said. There didn’t seem to be a great way to spin a comment like that.
In the bedroom, Cat and Jay were talking like they were friends.
"Well, I hope you don’t mind that I brought a bunch of music over," Cat was saying as she dumped a pile of CDs onto the floor. "I don’t know what you’re into. Where are your CDs?"
"I don’t really buy them anymore," said Jay. "I have everything on a networked hard drive. I like They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot…"
"Awesome! Nerdcore!"
"What?"
"That last guy was nerdcore. Are you nerdcore? I think that stuff’s hilarious. Oh, my effing God! Is that a theremin?"
Cat jumped up from the floor and over to a long black box on a microphone stand in the corner. Dials and knobs studded one side of the box, and fat antennas trimmed the ends.
"He’s really good at it," said Doug. "He can play anything. Play something, Jay."
"Maybe later," said Jay, his ears blushing as red as brake lights.
"Oh, you have to! That is so rad," said Cat. "A theremin’s this electronic instrument you play without touching, Sejal. You just wave your hands around. You should totally start your own nerdcore band, Jay!"
"So what kind of music is all this?" asked Doug as he sifted through the CDs on the floor. "Goth?"
Cat made a face. "That word doesn’t even mean anything anymore. There’s a bunch of different styles in there: darkwave, batcave, deathrock, death metal, queercore, slowcore, nocore, shoegaze, postindustrial—"
"Jesus. How many different kinds of music are there?"
"I don’t know. Four hundred and twenty-seven. Lots."
"At Booktopia there’s only, like, five," said Doug.
"Booktopia doesn’t know dick," said Cat, and she turned to Jay. "So what do we do to get me using Linux?"
"Well," said Jay, "do you have all your files backed up?"
"Hell, no."
"We should back them up first."
"I don’t know anything about computers," offered Sejal to no one in particular. Doug nonetheless treated it as an opening.
"I don’t know anything about music, apparently," he said to her. "It’s like…it’s like how many different kinds of musical labels do you need? There’s almost as many as there are bands. Like in the future we’ll reach some singularity and the ratio will be exactly one to one. ‘Hey, you like the Rolling Stones?’ ‘What kind of music do they play?’ ‘Oh, you know — mid to late Rolling Stones.’"
Sejal smiled. Barely. If there had been a smile-o-meter on her face, the needle would have stopped at "Polite." Doug retreated and sat next to Cat on the bed.
"You’re in good hands — Jay really knows computers," he said. Jay gave him kind of a weird look but he pressed on. "Way more than I do. He grew up learning a lot of stuff we didn’t ’cause he was homeschooled."
"No way," said Cat.
"Up until sixth grade," Jay admitted.
His father had sent away for curricula and textbooks and Cricket magazine and acted as Jay’s one and only teacher until he was ten. He had play dates with other homeschooled kids, and of course with Doug. Then Jay’s mother came home one day with a child development study that concluded that homeschooled kids did worse in college interviews than their traditionally schooled peers. His parents panicked and rushed him into Doug’s junior high. It didn’t matter that another study refuted the first one just six months later — the damage was done.
It was as if he’d been raised in captivity, at Sea World maybe, and was used to popping his head above water every hour and showing off what he knew. But now out of a misguided concern for his welfare, he was being released into the worst kind of ocean. Middle school was shark-infested water, and even the other dolphins couldn’t understand why Jay was so eager to jump through hoops.
This had been an uncomfortable time for Doug. Jay had never met School Doug before, and School Doug didn’t want to be thought of as the sort of person who’d be friends with a boy like Jay. He hadn’t been so complimentary then.