“They make dumplings?” Craig let his spoon hover over the bowl for a moment, as if this were a bowl of absurdity itself. He shook his long dirty-blond rock-star bangs out of his face by whipping his face to the left—a kind of cool twitch Perry had seen on VH1 more than a few times.
“No,” Perry said. “The restaurant’s called Dumplings.”
Craig snorted loudly and leaned back in his chair. This was routine for Craig as far as Perry could tell. Everything about the Midwest was one big joke to Craig Clements-Rabbitt—the food, the trees, the names of the streets, the girls.
“It’s the most popular restaurant in Bad Axe,” Perry said, again sounding, and wishing he didn’t, as if he had some personal investment in this. Craig opened his mouth as if at news too astonishing to believe. Perry looked away, shaking his head.
One might think, from his attitude, that this Craig Clements-Rabbitt came from a huge city, but when pressed for the details it turned out that the town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in was, if anything, a bit smaller than Bad Axe.
“But it’s not the same,” Craig had said, sounding weary already, as if the whole subject would be too complicated to explain and he dreaded the task. This had been the first night in their shared dorm room, while they were still attempting to be polite to each other. Craig had left his duffel bag unpacked at the foot of his bed, and rolled out the technologically advanced sleeping bag onto his mattress. It was made of some sort of metallic material that even Perry, with a great deal of outdoor-gear expertise from the Boy Scouts, didn’t recognize. No pillow.
“The town I live in is small,” Craig said, “but nobody’s from it. Everybody’s got a place there because they work on the Internet, or only have to travel to Boston or New York every couple of weeks. Or they’re independently wealthy, or they retired early. Except for a couple of people whose parents work at the ski resort. I guess they’re sort of like small-town kids. But not really.”
Perry imagined a few hundred families like Craig’s: Mothers in slim beige skirts, rolling their eyes. Fathers in corduroy jackets and jeans.
In fact, while Rod Clements had been wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket earlier that day, he’d also been wearing bright green Converse All Stars and a couple of hemp bracelets around his wrist, as if he were in middle school, while the little brother, Scar, already looked like an old man, if old men had ponytails. The kid’s face had appeared chiseled in stone, as if he hadn’t laughed or frowned in his whole life—and although Perry had not yet asked Craig why his brother was called Scar, he felt sure there was some story behind it. Perry had only been in the company of the Clements-Rabbitts for an hour before they’d managed to share several seemingly amusing stories about Craig.
(“Oh, Perry,” Craig’s mother had said, “I hope you can adjust to living with our son. We knew he was different when he was only three years old and asked, in all seriousness, if he could have for his birthday his own agent.”)
And the family.
(“Remember that time,” his father had asked, looking around the dorm room skeptically, “when we thought we were renting a cottage on the beach in Costa Rica and it turned out to be a storage shed?”)
“Dumplings,” Craig repeated, trancelike, as he watched Nicole Werner cross the cafeteria. She was carrying her tray ahead of her as if it had something radioactive on it. Perry knew her well enough, after thirteen years of sharing classrooms with her, to know that Nicole was walking that way because she knew she was being watched, and she didn’t particularly mind it. Her ponytail was swinging behind her like an actual pony’s tail, the palest of blond, just like the hair of all the other Werners—except Etta Werner, who was Nicole’s grandmother, a nice old lady who lived down the block from Perry’s family and who always had on hand the most incredible homemade cookies you could imagine. Her hair was pure white.
“She looks like a milkmaid.”
Perry didn’t respond to this. He supposed it was intended as an insult. He might not have been Nicole Werner’s biggest fan himself, but he couldn’t help feeling protective. For one thing, he was pretty sure any insults Craig Clements-Rabbitt was going to think up for Nicole—hick, nerd, etc.—would eventually come around to him. When Perry had asked him about his last name, the hyphen, Craig had rolled his eyes and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a hyphenated name before. Are the womenfolk in your town allowed to vote yet?”
In truth, Perry hadn’t ever known anyone with a hyphenated name.
“I have two parents,” Craig had said. “A Clements and a Rabbitt.”
“I thought your dad was the Clements,” Perry said.
“So you have seen hyphenated names—enough to know that my parents are so hip they decided to put my mother’s name last.”
Really, Perry hadn’t figured that out himself. A guy on their hall had speculated that Craig’s mother was actually R. E. Clements, because of the order of the names. His girlfriend had said, “No way. Have you read those books? No woman would write anything so stupid. That’s testosterone-inspired schlock.”
“So,” Craig said, plunging his spoon into the chili, spilling more onions around the bowl, “in this town of yours, this Bad Ass, do all the girls look like that?”
“Like what?” Perry asked.
“Rosy-cheeked? Sunny blond? Strong but slender limbs? Big hooters?”
Perry thought about this for a minute, and then said, quite honestly, “Pretty much.”
“Fair enough,” Craig said. “So, when you go with your family to this”—he waved his free hand in the air—“this Dumplings, do you see Nicole Werner there?”
Perry had to think again, but then remembered that, yes, she’d started working as a waitress the summer before last. She was there, it seemed, mostly on Friday nights and some Saturday afternoons, moving quickly from table to table in her bustley skirt and frilly top. But usually his family went to Dumplings on Sunday, after church, with Perry’s grandfather, who loved the sauerbraten, and although Perry saw Nicole in church, he never saw her at Dumplings those afternoons. Sundays must have been her day off.
“What’s the uniform like?”
Perry described it. The wide blue satin belt. The—what’d-ya-call it?—peasant blouse. The pinstriped skirt.
“Oh, man, stop.” Craig put up his hand and shook his head. “You’re going to make me come.”
Perry cleared his throat, and when Nicole looked over at him and gave him her usual polite (apologetic?) smile from across the cafeteria, Perry could feel himself blushing from his Adam’s apple up.
“How’d you get so fucking idealistic, man?” Craig asked one night a few weeks later, after their relationship had become openly hostile. Perry had come back from the library once again to find his roommate lying on his back in bed on top of the covers (he’d rolled up the high-tech sleeping bag he’d arrived with and put it in the closet), wearing boxer shorts and headphones. He had a paperback open on his bare stomach, a novel his father had published a few years ago and which, according to Craig at least, had been a big hit. Brain Freeze, by R. E. Clements. A lot of the other students in the Honors College seemed to know who Craig’s father was, and not to hold him in very high regard, but Perry had never heard of him.
It was an achingly beautiful autumn. Clear and dry, skies so blue day after day that somehow it was possible to see the moon hanging there above the library, as if all the atmosphere had been scoured away. And the brightness of the changing red and gold and russet leaves of the big trees that lined Campus Ave seemed more like cinema than nature in so much light.