Page 22 of Twice
“No. Didn’t work out.”
“Too bad.”
I shrugged. “You want to go to Burger King?”
“Nah,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
She looked across the street and waved at some friends.
“Gotta go,” she said.
I watched her run off. She had zero interest in me. I couldn’t understand what had happened.
A few years later, I would.
Nassau
“OK, now you got me curious,” LaPorta said. “Why’d the ugly girl turn on you?”
“She wasn’t ugly.”
“You said she had acne and an overbite.”
“She did.”
“So why’d she change?”
Alfie shifted in his chair. “I told you I’d gone back to redo my junior year.”
“Yeah. To try and impress the hot one. Jo Ann.”
“That’s right.”
“And?”
“I discovered my gift has a limit.”
“What kind of limit?”
“The kind that changes the equation.”
“You gonna tell me, or make me guess?”
Alfie tapped his fingers on the notebook’s open page. LaPorta grimaced.
“Yeah. I know. It’s all in there. I don’t really care. Just hurry up.”
The Composition Book
Now, as I mentioned, Boss, Wesley was older than me. He didn’t tell anyone for a long time, and most kids just assumed he was the same age as the rest of the class. But he had turned eighteen before our senior year started and sometime in early October he stopped coming to school. I went to his house and found him packing a duffel bag.
“What are you doing?”
“I joined the Marines.”
“Why?”
“They’ll pay for me to go to college. And I want to get it over with.”
