and deleted it. Then undid the delete.
He called up The Inventory and stroked the spacebar with his thumb,
paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags and
scanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted his
sentence.
My dead brother had been hiding out on the synagogue's roof for
God knows how long.
The last thing he wanted was to write an autobiography. He wanted to
write a story about the real world, about the real people who inhabited
it. He hit the delete key.
The video-store girl never got bored behind her counter, because
she could always while away the hours looking up the rental
histories of the popular girls who'd shunned her in high school.
That's when Link rang his doorbell and he startled guiltily and quit the
text editor, saving the opening sentence. Which had a lot of promise, he
thought.
"Link!" he said. "Come in!"
The kid had put on ten or fifteen pounds since they'd first met, and no
longer made Alan want to shout, *Someone administer a sandwich* stat*!*
Most of it was muscle from hard riding as a bike messenger, a gig that
Link had kept up right through the cold winter, dressing up like a
gore-tex Martian in tights and ski goggles and a fleece that showed
hints of purple beneath its skin of crusted road salt and pollution.
Andrew had noticed the girls in the Market and at Kurt's shop noticing
Link, whose spring wardrobe showed off all that new muscle to new
effect, and gathered from the various hurt looks and sulks from the
various girls that Link was getting more ass than a toilet-seat.
Her brother spent the winter turning into the kind of stud that
she'd figured out how to avoid before she finished high school,
and it pained her to see the hordes of dumb-bunnies making
goo-goo eyes at him.
That would be a good second sentence for his story.
"You okay, Abby?" Link said, looking concerned. Albert realized that
he'd been on another planet for a moment there.
"Sorry, just fell down a rabbit hole," he said, flapping his arms
comically. "I was writing " -- felt *good* to say that -- "and I'm in a
bit of a, how you say, creative fog."
Link took a step back. "I don't want to disturb you," he said.
But for all that, she still approved his outfits before he left
the house, refusing to let him succumb to the ephemeral awful
trendiness of mesh-back caps and too-tight boy-scout jamboree
shirts. Instead, she put him into slightly fitted cotton shirts
that emphasized his long lean belly and his broad shoulders.
"Don't sweat it. I could use a break. Come in and have a drink or
something." He checked the yellowing face of the tick-tock clock he kept
on the mantelpiece and saw that it was just past noon. "Past lunchtime,
that means that it's okay to crack a beer. You want a beer?"
And for all that, her brother still managed to come home looking
like some kind of frat-rat pussy-hound, the kind of boy she'd
always hoped he wouldn't be.
"Beer would be great," Link said. He stepped into the cool of the living
room and blinked as his eyes adjusted. "This really is a hell of a
place," he said, looking around at the glass cases, the teetering stacks
of books that Andrew had pulled down and not reshelved, making ziggurats
of them instead next to all the chairs.
"What can I do for you?" Adam said, handing him a glass of Upper Canada
Lager with a little wedge of lime. He'd bought a few cases of beer that
week and had been going through them steadily in the living room, paging
through the most favored of his books, trying to find something, though
he wasn't sure what.
Link sipped. "Summer's here," he said.
"Yeah," Alan said.
"Well, the thing is, summer. I'm going to be working longer hours and,
you know, evenings. Well. I mean. I'm 19 years old, Andy."
Alan raised an eyebrow and sat back in his chair. "What's the message
you're trying to convey to me, Link?"
"I'm not going to be going around your friend's shop anymore. I really
had fun doing it all year, but I want to try something different with my
spare time this summer, you understand?"
"Sure," Alan said. He'd had kids quit on him before. That's what kids
did. Attention spans.
"Right. And, well, you know: I never really understood what we were
*doing*..."
"Which part?"
"The WiFi stuff --"
"Well, you see --"
"Stop, okay? I've heard you explain it ten times now and I still don't
get it. Maybe after a semester or two of electrical engineering it'll
make more sense."
"Okay," Adam said, smiling broadly to show no hard feelings. "Hey," he
said, carefully. "If you didn't understand what we were doing, then why
did you do it?"
Link cocked his head, as if examining him for traces of sarcasm, then
looked away. "I don't know. It was exciting, even if I didn't quite get
it. Everyone else seemed to get it, sort of, and it was fun to work
alongside of them, and sometimes the money was okay."