Then the song ended. I didn’t want to look up, to make eye contact with Conchita; I didn’t particularly want to be in the same room with her.
“Here’s another good one,” she said. “It’s called ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ ”
The word homesick gave me hope, but the song was just clever chanting. It sounded political, and I wanted another song of longing. Conchita played a few more songs, switching CDs, sometimes cutting off the songs midway. By the end, the one I still liked the best was “Lay, Lady, Lay.” As I was leaving, Conchita said, “You can borrow the album.”
“That’s okay.”
“You’re welcome to.”
“I don’t have a CD player,” I said.
“Do your roommates? You room with Dede and Sin-Jun, right?”
She really had done her research.
“Dede has a stereo,” I said. “But we’re not good friends.”
I had my hand on the doorknob when she said, “Want to get dinner in town? The dining hall is having halibut, so I just thought if you’re not busy.”
If there was no formal dinner, you were allowed to leave campus, but I never did. The only time I went into town was on the weekend, when I borrowed Sin-Jun’s bike and rode to the grocery store to buy toothpaste or saltines.
“We could get pizza or go to that Chinese place,” Conchita said.
I’d never set foot in either restaurant. Somehow, the more time that passed without my going, the more I felt like going required an invitation; these places seemed to belong to other people, to juniors and seniors, or to rich students, or to students with friends. But here, in this moment, I’d received an invitation. Conchita liked me, I thought. She was kind. If I accepted her offer, I could do the things that other people did. “Let’s get pizza,” I said. “I’ll go get a bike and meet you back here.”
“Wait.”
I turned.
“I don’t have a bike,” she said.
“I don’t either. I’m borrowing Sin-Jun’s.”
She hesitated. “I mean I don’t know how to ride a bike.”
I blinked at her.
“I’ve walked before,” she said. “It doesn’t take that long.”
Outside her dorm, we headed out the campus gates and turned onto the two-lane road. “So you just never learned?” I said, and I hoped that she couldn’t tell how astonished I was. I had never heard of anyone over the age of five who didn’t know how to ride a bike.
“There wasn’t any special reason if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But when you were little, didn’t the kids in your neighborhood ride bikes?”
“I didn’t know the other kids that well.”
I thought of my own neighborhood, how gangs of children between the ages of eight and twelve would ride around, how I had done so myself. We’d go down to the park and back, and just before darkness, as the streetlights were flickering on and the hum of the cicadas was thickening, we’d pedal home, sweaty, with streaks of dirt on our faces.
“Do you wish you knew how?” I asked.
“I haven’t thought about it much.”
We both were quiet. Then I said, “I could teach you. At least I could try.”
She did not respond immediately, but I could feel a kind of happy nervousness come over her, a tentative excitement. I couldn’t see her face because we were side by side, but I sensed that she was smiling. “You don’t think it’s too late for me?” she asked.
“Definitely not. It’s one of those things where once you know how, you can’t believe you ever didn’t know. It would probably only take a few days.” I thought about how Conchita wouldn’t want other students to see. “We could use the road behind the infirmary,” I said. “We could do it in the morning, maybe, before chapel.”
My first target in Assassin was Devin Billinger, a boy in my class who had, at that time, no particular significance to me. In my mailbox, I found the slip of paper with my name and his name typed on it and, attached by a paper clip, the sheet of round orange stickers. All around me, other students were finding their assignments, talking noisily. It was the beginning of sixth period, and I left the mail room to walk to the dining hall for lunch. I was just outside the stairwell leading from the basement to the first floor when, amazingly, I came face-to-face with Devin himself. Like me, he was alone. We made eye contact and did not say hi, and he turned into the stairwell.
I was still holding the assignment sheet and the stickers. I peeled off a sticker with my index finger and thumb, keeping it affixed to my fingertip. Immediately, both my hands began to shake. I entered the stairwell. “Devin,” I said.
He stopped a few steps up and looked back. “Huh?”
Without saying anything, I closed the space between us. When we were standing on the same step, I reached out and placed the sticker on the upper part of his left arm. “You’re dead,” I said, and I bit my lip, trying not to smile.
He looked at his arm as if I’d spit on it. “What the fuck is that?”
“It’s for Assassin,” I said. “You’re my target.”
“It hasn’t started yet.”
“Yes, it has.” I held out my wrist to him, so he could read my watch: It was ten after one.
“This is bullshit.” His voice was more than irritated; possibly, though I didn’t know him well enough to be certain, he was furious. He glared at me and turned, as if to continue up the steps.
“Wait,” I said. “You have to give me your target.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
We looked at each other, and I actually laughed. In theory, pissing off Devin Billinger should have unnerved me. He was one of a group of six or seven guys in our class known as bank boys-most of them were from New York and most of their dads had jobs having to do with investments and brokerage and other money-related matters I had no grasp of. (Technically, a bank boy didn’t have to be from New York or have a banking father-he just had to seem as if he could.) But the reality of Devin’s anger was more ridiculous than scary; he reminded me of a pouting six-year-old. “Are you planning to cheat?” I asked.
“Why are you so righteous? It’s a game.”
“And I’m just playing by the rules.”
Devin glared at me, then shook his head. He reached into his pocket, withdrew some small crumpled bits of paper, and thrust them toward me. “Here. Are you happy?”
“Yeah, I am,” I said. “Thank you.”
The next morning, when we were supposed to meet for Conchita’s first bike lesson, gray clouds hung overhead and thunder rumbled in the distance. I wondered whether Conchita would show up; she seemed like someone who might change her plans due to the mere intimation of bad weather. But when I got to the road behind the infirmary, she was waiting, wearing a hot pink transparent rain slicker and a matching hat-a sou’wester, like what fishermen wear, except that I had difficulty imagining any fisherman in transparent pink.
I had ridden over on Sin-Jun’s bike, and I slowed down, came to a stop next to Conchita, and climbed off. “Start by getting on the bike,” I said.
She slung one leg over so she was straddling the crossbar, her feet planted on the ground.
“Now sit down,” I said.
She eased backward.
“Put your feet on the pedals.”
“Are you holding on?”
“Yeah, of course.” I’d been gripping the carrier, and I moved one hand to the crossbar and one to the back of the seat. “Does that feel steadier?”
She lifted her right foot and set it on the pedal, then lifted her left foot. But the pedals had toe clips, and Conchita missed the opening and kicked the pedal so it spun several times. “Sorry,” she said.
“Just try again.”
The second time, she successfully inserted her foot.
“Okay,” I said. “Now kind of push down. You use-I guess you use your thigh muscles.”