E.D. examined Jase—who suddenly seemed much younger and less sure of himself—then told him to run in the house and clean up.

Then he turned to me.

"Tyler," he said.

"Sir?"

"I'm assuming you're not responsible for this. I hope that's true."

Had he noticed that my own bike was missing and that Jason's was unscathed? Was he accusing me of something? I didn't know what to say. I looked at the lawn.

E.D. sighed. "Let me explain something. You're Jason's friend. That's good. Jason needs that. But you have to understand, as your mother understands, that your presence here comes with certain responsibilities. If you want to spend time with Jason, I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Maybe he seems ordinary to you. But he's not. Jason's gifted, and he has a future ahead of him. We can't let anything interfere with that."

"Right," Carol Lawton chimed in, and now I knew for a fact that Jason's mom had been drinking. She tilted her head and almost stumbled into the gravel berm that separated the driveway from the hedge. "Right, he's a fucking genius. He's going to be the youngest genius at M.I.T. Don't break him, Tyler, he's fragile."

E.D. didn't take his eyes off me. "Go inside, Carol," he said tonelessly. "Do we understand each other, Tyler?"

"Yessir," I lied.

I didn't understand E.D. at all. But I knew some of what he had said was true. Yes, Jason was special. And yes, it was my job to look after him.

TIME OUT OF JOINT

I first heard the truth about the Spin, five years after the October Event, at a sledding party, on a bitterly cold winter night. It was Jason, typically, who broke the news.

The evening began with dinner at the Lawtons'. Jason was home from university for Christmas break, so there was a sense of occasion about the meal even though it was "just family"—I had been invited at Jase's insistence, probably over E.D.'s objections.

"Your mother should be here, too," Diane whispered when she opened the door for me. "I tried to get E.D. to invite her, but…" She shrugged.

That was okay, I told her, Jason had already stopped by to say hello. "Anyway, she's not feeling well." She was in bed with a headache, unusually. And I was hardly in a position to complain about E.D.'s behavior: just last month E.D. had offered to underwrite my med school tuition if I passed the MCAT, "because," he said, "your father would have liked that." It was a gesture both generous and emotionally false, but it was also a gesture I couldn't afford to refuse.

Marcus Dupree, my father, had been E. D. Lawton's closest (some said only) friend back in Sacramento, back when they were pushing aerostat monitoring devices to the weather bureau and the Border Patrol. My own memories of him were sketchy and had morphed into my mother's stories about him, though I did distinctly remember the knock at the door the night he died. He had been the only son of a struggling French-Canadian family in Maine, proud of his engineering degree, talented, but naive about money: he had lost his savings in a series of stock market gambles, leaving my mother with a mortgage she couldn't carry.

Carol and E.D. hired my mother as a housekeeper when they moved east, in what might have been E.D.'s attempt at a living memorial for his friend. Did it matter that E.D. never let her forget he'd done her this favor? That he treated her thenceforth as a household accessory? That he maintained a sort of caste system in which the Dupree family was conspicuously second class? Maybe, maybe not. Generosity of any kind is a rare animal, my mother used to say. So maybe I was imagining (or too sensitive to) the pleasure he seemed to take in the intellectual gap between Jason and myself, his apparent conviction that I was born to be Jason's foil, a conventionally normal yardstick against which Jason's specialness could be gauged.

Fortunately both Jase and I knew this was bullshit.

Diane and Carol were at the table when I sat down. Carol was sober tonight, remarkably, or at least not so drunk that it showed. She had given up her medical practice a couple of years back and these days tended to stick around the house in order to avoid the risk of DWI charges. She smiled at me perfunctorily. "Tyler," she said. "Welcome."

After a few minutes Jason and his father came downstairs together, exchanging glances and frowning: obviously something was up. Jase nodded distractedly when he took the chair next to mine.

Like most Lawton family occasions, dinner was cordial but strained. We passed the peas and made small talk. Carol was remote, E.D. was uncharacteristically quiet. Diane and Jason took stabs at conversation, but clearly something had passed between Jason and his father that neither wanted to discuss. Jase seemed so restrained that by dessert I wondered whether he was physically ill—his eyes seldom left his plate, which he had barely touched. When it was time to leave for the sledding party he stood up with obvious reluctance and seemed about to beg off until E. D. Lawton said, "Go ahead, take a night off. It'll be good for you." And I wondered: a night off from what?

We drove to the party in Diane's car, an unassuming little Honda, "a my-first-car kind of car," as Diane liked to describe it. I sat behind the driver's seat; Jase rode in the passenger seat next to his sister, his knees crowding the glove compartment, still glum.

"What'd he do," Diane asked, "spank you?"

"Hardly."

"You're acting like it."

"Am I? Sorry."

The sky, of course, was dark. Our headlights swept past snowy lawns, a wall of leafless trees as we turned north. We'd had a record snowfall three days ago, followed by a cold snap that had embalmed the snow under a skin of ice wherever the plows hadn't been. A few cars passed us at a cautious speed.

"So what was it," Diane asked, "something serious?"

Jason shrugged.

"War? Pestilence? Famine?"

He shrugged again and turned up the collar of his jacket.

* * * * *

He wasn't much better at the party. Then again, it wasn't much of a party.

It was a gathering of Jason and Diane's ex-classmates and acquaintances from Rice, hosted by the family of another Rice alumnus home from some Ivy League college. His parents had tried to arrange a dignified theme event: finger sandwiches, hot cocoa, and sledding on the mild slope behind the house. But for the majority of the guests—somber preppies who had skied at Zermatt or Gstaad long before their braces came off—it was just another excuse for clandestine drinking. Outside, under strings of colored lights, silver flasks circulated freely; in the basement a guy named Brent was selling gram weights of Ecstasy.

Jason found a chair in a corner and sat scowling at anyone who looked friendly. Diane introduced me to a big-eyed girl named Holly and then deserted me. Holly struck up a monologue about every movie she had seen in the last twelve months. She paced me around the room for most of an hour, pausing now and then to snatch California rolls from a tray. When she excused herself for a bathroom visit I scooted over to Jason's sulking place and begged him to go outside with me.

"I'm not in the mood for sledding."

"Neither am I. Just do me a favor, okay?"

So we put on our boots and jackets and trudged outside. The night was cold and windless. A half dozen Rice scholars stood huddled in a haze of cigarette smoke on the porch, glaring at us. We followed a path in the snow until we were more or less by ourselves at the top of a low hill, looking down on a few halfhearted sledders skidding through the circus glow of the Christmas lights. I told Jason about Holly, who had attached herself to me like a leech in Gap clothing. He shrugged and said, "Everybody's got problems."

"What the hell is wrong with you tonight?"