"Since I was seventeen. Don't tell my mother." He cuts the foil. "Welcome to headquarters."
"Headquarters."
"Bardot Adventure Enterprises. The original office."
I look into the crate he pulled the corkscrew from. It's full of old comic books. Dozens and dozens of them, soft with handling, some of the covers gone, spines worn white. Spider-Man. X-Men. A boy's entire library, hidden in a barn. I teach struggling readers. I know exactly what I'm looking at.
The fact that Finn's secret reading stash confirms my own ideas about teaching dyslexic students with unconventional methods only makes this revelation hit me even harder.
"This was mine," he says. The showman is gone from his voice, the way it went on my staircase Thursday. "From about ten years old on. When school got loud, or my father did, I came here." He works the cork loose without looking at me. "I could read these. Mostly. The pictures carry you over the hard words. You get enough of the story from the panels that the letters stop being a wall. I read until the covers came off, and it was the only reading in my life that didn't feel like drowning."
I sit down hard on a hay bale. Years of teaching reading, and I have never heard the case for graphic novels made better than a dyslexic boy alone in a barn made it just now, without knowing he was making it.
He pours the wine, hands me a glass, and sits on the bale across from me, forearms on his knees, close enough that his knee grazes mine when he settles. He doesn't move it away. Neither do I, and the inch of denim where we're touching stays warm the whole time he talks.
"My father called this barn a waste of lumber," he says. "He called me worse. You know most of that already." He gives a shrug that doesn't pretend to be easy. "By graduation I'd worked out that the only place I could be somebody new was somewhere nobody had known me since fourth grade. So I picked the farthest cliff and kept going."
"So you left Mattichogue and didn't look back. That took some courage."
He looks at me. "It wasn't brave. It was just... somewhere else."
"And now?" I ask. "What's the dream now? Besides toppling trivia dynasties, obviously."
"Obviously." The grin comes back, and then his hands take over the way they do, sketching in the air while he describes some of his latest business ideas. Adventure resorts. Family-run feel, real wilderness, guides who eat dinner with the guests. He's been scouting land in Colorado, he tells me—the only meeting on his calendar he looks forward to—and watching Finn Bardot talk about something he loves is like standing at the front of a coming storm. The whole barn feels busier, more alive.
Then he stops, and points his glass at me. "Your turn. Trade. One dream you've never said out loud at a party."
I look into my wine, which is extraordinary and no help at all.
"I want to write books. Someday. And before that, sooner than that, I want to run an afterschool literacy program. Built on comics, in fact." His face changes—softens slightly—and I keep going before I lose my nerve. "Graphic novels for the kids thereading wars are losing. I've been quietly planning it for two years and I have never told a single person I'm serious."
Finn has gone still. Fully still, hands and all, the stillness I once wrote off as a fluke and now know better. It is a strange, heady thing, being the reason a man like that holds still.
"Why haven't you started your program?" he asks.
"I was getting close. I had some money saved up to get it launched, but..." I glance down and swirl my wine for a moment. "I used the money for something else recently."
He groans quietly. "Ah. Let me guess. Revenge on some asshole bully?"
I nod, pointing my finger in a "you've got it" gesture.
He looks at me. "What will it take to start? Sit down sometime and put a real number on it, because I want to be your first backer."
"Finn, that’s not?—"
"I'm not being polite." He sets his glass down, which from him is punctuation. "I fund things every quarter that matter less than this. When you're ready, it's one phone call, and I'll be irritating about it until you let me help."
I open my mouth to deflect, and nothing comes out, because he means it. Whatever else Finn Bardot has ever been, he doesn’t fake his feelings in front of me. The town gets the show. Apparently I get this.
"Fine. I'll hold you to it," I manage.
"Good."
The wine is half gone and the light has gone from gold to amber, and maybe that's why I finally muster the nerve to ask.
"Can I ask you about school? One more thing, and then I promise I'll retire the subject."
"Ask."
