Chapter 1:
The Debutante

The autumn of my sixteenth birthday, I worked after school and on Sundays, serving apfelstrudel and einspänners at Ludwig’s Café in the Raleigh Museum of Art. Sundays were the best days for tips, because all the patrons getting out of church were feeling simultaneously undercaffeinated and overcharitable. Before the bells were done ringing, all the most affluent ladies in North Raleigh were rushing over from Methodist Saints United, wearing hats that my buddy Rodrigo joked ought to be in the abstract art exhibits. But the real reason I looked forward to Sundays was that the Terpsichorean Society held its debutante classes in the event space across the hall, and while the well-heeled mothers lost track of time gossiping at Ludwig’s beneath the golden Portrait of Colette Marsh, Rodrigo and I would go back to the storeroom window and stare at the debutantes.

After their class ended, the debutantes would line up in the narrow space between the café’s dumpsters, where their mothers couldn’t see them, and pass Camels carefully, so as not to fleck ash on their white rehearsal dresses. When they saw us looking they tossed cigarette butts at the window, but they couldn’t do anything too loudly or they’d risk blowing their cover. It was the end of 1993, and we knew we’d become adults inside of a new century—and there these girls were, being trained for the last one. Mostly they ignored us until Rodrigo tapped on the window to warn them that the mothers were calling for their checks and that they had better hurry back inside.

Some Sundays Rodrigo just looked and some Sundays he called out to Suzanne White, the tall girl from our school whom he swore he would marry. Together, he claimed, they would breed a superior race of half–Puerto Rican/half–Southern Belle babies. For my part, I slunk down, hoping that none of them would see me in my feathered cap and olive lederhosen, and pretending that I just happened to be passing my break reading The Woman in White near the window.

“We were supposed to read that for school or something?” Rodrigo would ask.

“Extra credit,” I’d lie.

The truth was that I liked to read—especially old books about eccentric heiresses and menacing counts and guys with names like Sir Percival Glyde, but I’d learned long ago that this was a preference best kept to myself.

“What is wrong with you?” Rodrigo would ask. “Don’t you want to look at these fine ladies?” He gave his cap a stylish slant and let one suspender fall off his shoulder, as if he wore this sort of thing especially for them.

“Sure,” I’d say, “I just don’t want themto look at me.”

“Well, how are they ever going to talk to you unless they know you’re looking?”

“I don’t want them to talk to me. They don’t want to talk to me. They don’t even want to talk to you.”

Rodrigo’s eyes would bug as if I’d just tried to convince him that the sun would burn out tomorrow. “Hell yes they want to talk to me.”

“We clean tables at an Austrian coffeehouse, in a city whose residents generally think Austria is where kangaroos come from. Come on. Your mother is a housekeeper and your father mows lawns.”

“My mom runs a cleaning service. My dad owns a landscaping company. We’re entrepreneurs, jerk.”

“But they’re debutantes,” I’d remind him. “They’re going to go to Princeton and Duke and marry inbred trust-funders with yachts who play polo and shoot skeet.”

“That’s pretty funny, coming from Mr. Ten-Under-Par.”

Rodrigo liked to tease me for playing golf on the high school team. In truth, being on the team did my reputation more harm than good. I loved to play, but the other boys on the team all hated me, because I was better than them and because my mother was a flight attendant and didn’t belong to the Briar Creek Country Club like their mothers did. My father was a man she’d met seventeen years ago, during a layover in Newark. Together they’d gotten swept up in the heady, romantic winter of 1976.

“So, they marry Mr. Trust Fund,” Rodrigo would say, cracking open the window so the girls could hear. “But they’ll be home all day making sweet, sweet love to me!”

Suzanne would glare, and as the other girls pretended to be shocked, she’d flip her perfectly manicured middle finger straight up in the air, and smile.

Meanwhile, I’d angle one of the silver baking trays toward the window so that I could catch the reflection of Betsy Littleford, the only other girl there from our school. A silent blonde with ice blue eyes, Betsy Littleford never smiled. Not as far as I could remember. Not even all the way back to the fifth grade when I’d first seen her.

“That’s funny,” she’d say flatly whenever some teacher tried to coax even the slightest giggle from her with a joke in class. “That’s really very funny.”

Rodrigo called her “Stepford Betsy” and liked to theorize that inside she was just all Disney animatronics. He loudly speculated about someday finding out for himself, but I dreamed of simply someday making her smile. Just once.

And I’d never have done it if her brother hadn’t gotten his skull caved in during our match against Asheville late that fall.