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Jason studied me for a while with those big, dumb, kind eyes.
“Man,” he said, softly, “you say his name a lot.”
“I do not.”
“You’ve said it eleven times since we sat down.”
“You counted? “
“I’m a defenseman, I count things.”
I was saved by the two Jägermeisters. They chose that moment to reach my bloodstream, all at once, like a train. The whole bar tilted a few degrees to the left. My cheeks went warm. My fingers, all ten, began to feel like they belonged to someone kinder than me.
“Jason,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you believe in… stuff?”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Like. Stuff. Things that aren’t supposed to exist. But turn out to. And they’re right in front of you. And they buy you bread.”
Jason thought about that with great seriousness.
“My grandma’s house had a ghost,” he said. “She called him Harold. He’d move the salt shakers. She’d say, ‘Harold, leave it.’ And he’d leave it.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I’m just saying. If you’ve got a Harold, it’s okay. You can tell me. I won’t judge.” He patted my arm. “I’m not scared of Harolds.”
I love him. I really do. I wanted to tell him so, and then to weep on his shoulder, and then to tell him that his new roommate’s ex-roommate was a hundred-year-old man with fangs.
Instead I said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and stood up, and the floor took a moment to agree.
I made it as far as the pay phone in the hallway before my own phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out. I looked at the screen. It said DAD.
Now. There are three people in my life whose calls I answer on the first ring. One is Jason. One is my mother. The other is my father, and the reason I answer is that if I don’t, he sends a car.
I hit the green button. I put the phone to my ear.
“Jason,” I said, “I mean— hello. Dad.”
Four seconds of silence followed, and I could feel my father recalculating.
“Alexander,” said Richard Pendleton. “Are you drinking?”
“No.”
“You sound as though you are drinking.”
“I’m eating onion rings.”
“Onion rings do not slur, Alexander.”
“They do if you say ‘onion rings’ enough times.”
