Now Kerry drained the pasta, and the room filled with steam. She made everyone hold hands to say grace, and that meant Aidan had to reach across to Diana. Kerry bowed her head, but Diana and Aidan kept their eyes on the counter, where the brownies were cooling, half with pecans and half without. “Thank you for this food,” Kerry said. “Thank you for our family,” and then she added silently, Help me figure out what Aidan plans to do.
“Mom?” Diana asked.
Kerry looked up, and everybody said amen.
Diana had seconds and Aidan had thirds of the spaghetti, although he picked out all the onion from the glistening sauce. Kerry asked what was going on in school, and the twins said nothing, and they said, stuff. It was an ordinary dinner, with Aidan clearing and Diana taking out the recycling, even as Kerry held up Diana’s copy of The Scarlet Letter, with its cover torn away. “Why do you mutilate your books like that?”
Diana stood in the doorway holding an overflowing bag of newspapers. “They’re all online anyway.”
Kerry said, “You’re mumbling. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
Aidan said, “Yeah, Diana,” who shot back, “Shut up, Aidan,” and their mother looked nostalgic because they were bickering again.
But that night, Aidan lay awake, listening to the sleeping house. He heard his sister snoring in her room next door, pictured his mother buried deep in bed. Fully dressed, he heard dark old beams settling, snow dripping, tiny paws thumping as animals ran across the roof.
He crept downstairs in his socks, and stepped into his waiting boots. Slipped on coat and gloves, collected the bag he’d hidden behind Priscilla’s fermenting compost bin. He felt nothing as he walked to the corner, not the slightest apprehension. Like his avatar in UnderWorld, he moved weightlessly, covering the ground with his long strides. Supernatural, he glided across Broadway, ignoring traffic lights and passing cars. Lightly he hopped the low fence and dropped into the field where he’d played soccer years ago.
Except for a few patches, the snow had melted, exposing tangled old grass and spongy ground. He unzipped his jacket and crouched low, shaking his paint can. A metallic clicking like ball bearings rolling around. The can was full, and, finger to the nozzle, he scarcely had to press. A silver stream hissed straight from his hand.
Quickly now, he did his work, keeping head and shoulders down, shielding the spray can with his body as he crossed the field. Looping over the patchy field, his letters gleamed like a skater’s figure eights. He didn’t stop to watch for passersby, nor did he pause to consider his own writing. He felt, rather than saw, that he wrote elegantly, his CUs smooth.
Any second, a patrol car could expose him with white lights. He was just blocks from the police station, around the corner from City Hall, but he felt invincible, as though he drew his own luck, and painted his own rules. He carried nothing in his pockets. He had no backup plans, or explanations. All he knew was that no one could catch him; he was too fast.
He ran past basketball courts, past the children’s playground with its corkscrew slides, all the way to the Koreana restaurant, where he threw the paint can into the garbage bin in back. In the morning everyone would see what he had done, but no would find him. No one could pin it on him. He was long gone. Gloved hands in his pockets, he slipped inside the kitchen door. Athlete, artist, ghost.
“Aidan.”
He froze.
“Come here.”
Kerry was sitting with her coffee at the table.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He glanced at the apple clock above her head.
“What am I going to find out in the morning?”
“I don’t know.”
She forced herself to ask, “Were you at school tonight?”
He told the truth. “No!”
“Are you involved in this new game CU?”
“There’s no game CU.”
“UnderWorld, then. Are you playing?” He heard the dread in her voice. She might as well have asked him: Are you using?
“It’s not even out yet.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
He looked her in the eye. “I’m not.”
Aidan saw her tension ease, and knew he’d won. Exultant and forgiving all at once, he felt a wave of love for his mother. Kerry was too tired to fight on, but he would be merciful. He would protect her, even as he deceived her.
“Don’t worry. I’m fine,” he told Kerry softly. This was an understatement. He was strong, and he was young. Immortal. He feared nothing as he stood on the threshold of his other life.
—
Just before dawn, he opened his BoX and saw the river glimmering in darkness. He had already texted Daphne to tell her what he’d done. Now he waited on the bank, expecting his reward. A million stars appeared, more than he had ever seen on Earth. The night opened, unfolding and expanding all around him, a pocket universe.
The sun rose in muted colors and the stars began to fade. A milky fog obscured the water, neither day nor night. What did it mean? Gradually, Aidan realized that his closet light had burned out.
In the half-light at the glowing river’s edge, his knight dug up rocks and turned them over, looking for a clue. Some were unyielding; others shattered in his hand. One cracked slowly like an egg. Slime trickled out, and then a ragged tooth emerged, prying the rock open from inside. The hatchling looked like a tiny coiled crocodile, its thorny skin the clay color of the riverbank. Hissing, it uncurled and sprang up snapping, tearing and biting Aidan’s spectral self. The monster’s little teeth snapped right through Aidan’s ghostly form, but could not penetrate his silver arm at all; its teeth clanged instead, metal on metal.
He slashed the creature’s throat with his sword, and a red-black ooze pooled under its stony head. Carefully, Aidan laid out the body full-length on the ground. Like a dancer in front of a mirror, he watched himself as he slit the monster lengthwise and peered inside, searching entrails for some clue or sign. He found something hard, a forked rod, a wishbone. Even as he knelt on the riverbank, he felt the bone drawing him toward water with magnetic force. Then again, he really had to pee! He’d put it off as long as possible, but he had to go, and there was no way to pause.
He dropped the divining rod and dashed to the bathroom, but the door was locked. Pounding, he called to Diana, and heard her answer, “Wait.” Running down to the bathroom near the kitchen, he tripped and caught himself, cursing the narrow stairs and his own feet. It wasn’t just depressing; it was disorienting, emerging from the game to clomp down the stairs or stand at the toilet with no defense against the peeling paint, the sharp corners of the real world.
He dashed back again and saw the upstairs bathroom open and empty. He had left his own door ajar, and on reentry caught Diana standing there, gazing at his river and his sky.
“Out.”
“This is so weird,” she said. The world was beginning to work on her, the mist of particles, the strange half-light, the slow pull of the river. He closed his door and the game closed around them, the river coming into focus, moving even slower than before, like cooling glass.
“Out,” he repeated.
Diana didn’t move. She stood there staring at the barren riverbank and shattered dragon egg, and for just a moment he let the game wait. He stood there with her, and they were brother and sister, exploring the basement. They were a pair of eight-year-olds walking to the library. They were the woodcutter’s children, and their father had abandoned them.
“Who are you?” Diana asked, as she gazed at Aidan’s ghostly avatar.
“I don’t have a name yet.”
“I thought you pick a name at the beginning when you design your body and all that.”
“It’s not that kind of game.”
“What kind of…” Diana began, and then finished her own sentence. “This is UnderWorld.”
“Just the demo.”
“What do you mean? What demo? Where did you get it?”
“A gir
l I know.”
Diana folded her arms across her chest, and just like that, the spell was broken. She stood there in her black clothes, a wall of skepticism, a frown on her round face. “Daphne.”
“You’re spying!”
“I’m not! I overheard.”
He grabbed her by the shoulder. “What do you mean you overheard? You never heard anything.”
She wrenched away. “Let me go. I never said anything. I never did anything to you.” Diana didn’t care anymore about the river in his room; she didn’t look twice at Aidan’s ghost, or silver sword, or his divining rod, quivering on the bank. “There is no girl. None of this is real.”
“It’s real,” Aidan told her. “Obviously the game is real. She gave it to me.”
“You want that to be true.”
“How do you know what’s true or not?” Aidan asked his twin, his doubter.
“How do you?”
“Get out.”
“Fine.” Diana turned to leave.
“You were never here.”
Diana shot back, “Neither were you!”
At first he drew Nina from memory. After seeing her, he came back to his room and drew her on the walls, chalking her shoulders, her breasts, her slender waist. He grew so intent on capturing her that sometimes he felt he had to get away from her.
Over days and weeks, imagination yielded to experience. In February Collin began bringing her to his apartment. He stopped worrying about what she would think, and slept with her in his own bed. Now his blackboard-painted walls were covered with Nina asleep, awake, half dressed, turning her head. She was brushing her hair. She was sitting in a chair with the ribbon strap of her slip looped over her bare arm.
He hardly went to parties anymore. He had stopped drawing backdrops for Theater Without Walls. Darius said, “Who do you think you are, Edgar fucking Degas?” Noelle said—“What? Are you too good for us?” He spent all his time with Nina. Drew her and erased her, studying her every mood.
But Nina studied Collin too. She watched him focus on one aspect of her body and chalk it over and over until he could re-create it without a second glance. He learned to draw her profile, and then he used that view next time, generalizing with slight variations. He was amazing and relentless, developing a shorthand for her body and her face.
He studied shapes and colors the way poets studied words. He kept a bird’s nest in his room and a collection of old tools. He had a broken ceiling fan on the floor, a bouquet of shriveled flowers, a crumpled chrome fender, because he liked the way it reflected light. He had a whole library of curling art posters, old masters and fantasy art all mixed together. She saw no books, no tablets, no computers.
One night as he drew her, Nina asked, “How do you learn your parts when you perform?”
With his foot, Collin nudged a tangle of headphones on the floor.
“You just listen?”
“Sometimes I slow down the audio and write the lines.” As so often when he was holding chalk, he illustrated his point, writing in fluid script, We are such stuff as dreams are made on…
“How do you do that?” His words looked like calligraphy. “My printing is so bad half my students say they can’t read the homework on the board.”
“You’re very trusting.”
She said quite seriously, “I want to be.”
Then he stood back from the board and wondered at her. She was so earnest. “What were you like when you were little?”
“Sad,” she told him. “Worried.”
“Why?” He sat next to her on the bed.
“I worried I was adopted, and my father was going to give me back. Then I worried I wasn’t adopted. I was afraid suicide ran in families, so I worried I would die like my mother did.”
He was a little shocked, so he asked lightly, “Oh, is that all?”
She didn’t mention that her father had lied about her mother, substituting physical for mental illness. Nina had been almost twelve when she found out the truth. She just said, “I worried about other things too.”
She had been afraid of fire, afraid of thunderstorms, afraid of the ocean, afraid of dark, shadowy sharks that could come ripping at her through the water. She had worried about burglars. Distrusting the security system, she had double-checked the doors—all six regular doors and the French doors in her father’s house. “I was afraid of my father leaving.”
“Poor Nina!”
“Well, I was lucky too.”
Money, Collin thought.
But Nina said, “I played my dad’s games first.”
“Before release?”
“Before everything.”
“Which ones?”
“EverRest. EverSea. That’s my friend Julianne. That’s her voice when all the mermaids sing.”
“Seriously? So when you hear the mermaids you’re thinking of her.”
Nina shrugged. The memory was strange, pleasure mixed with anger. Julianne singing in the studio, Nina aware of Peter watching.
“What’s it like to be you?” Collin asked, playfully.
“This is me when I was eleven.” Nina reached for her phone and searched for the image from the game. “The girl collecting sand dollars in the sea cave.”
Collin looked at a waif of a girl in a green kelp dress. Her hair was long and shimmering, her face serious, her eyes clear gray. “You should tell your students!”
Nina looked at him in disbelief.
“You’re like a celebrity!”
“No way!”
“You’re no fun.” Then again, Collin had always preferred the teachers you could sidetrack: Mr. Dillingham, who talked about running during biology; Mrs. Giannetti, who paused while solving equations to reminisce about her summers with Earthwatch as a volunteer archaeologist. His best teachers had been the most distractible. “When we did Shakespeare, Mrs. West had us perform scenes.”
“She still does.”
“You should do that! Come dressed as something. Titania.” He scrambled to his feet and drew Nina as the fairy queen. His sketch was part Pre-Raphaelite, part 1920s Vogue, white chalk and lavender, deep purple, and long trailing wings. He drew a gossamer dress, draped over Nina’s naked body.
“I don’t think so!”
“Bring props.”
“Like ass ears?”
“Let me visit,” Collin told her. “I’m a veteran.”
“Of what?”
“Veteran dramatic educator!”
She teased. “Full tomato.”
“Hey, I played Edward Winslow for two seasons!” He knew his living history. He’d done his time as an interpreter at Plimoth Plantation. Walked up and down in wool breeches and white linen, doffing his hat, cleaning his musket, tending goats, thatching roofs, mending woven eel traps while telling the story of the Mayflower to schoolchildren, old couples, tourists from Singapore, Germany, Japan. “We used to do class visits all the time.”
Nina tried to picture Collin as a seventeenth-century colonist.
“The voyage was long and stormy,” he intoned. “Yet none but a blaspheming sailor was lost at sea…”
“But I’m not teaching Pilgrims.”
“I could do Shakespeare, no problem.”
“My kids are tough,” said Nina.
He scoffed. “I work in Harvard Square. My art’s been peed on.”
“Are you serious?”
“Twice.”
“Ohh.” She sounded so dismayed. He had to laugh. It wasn’t just that she’d never seen such a thing. She had never even thought of such a thing.
—
The last day before February vacation, he bounded into Emerson, setting off the metal detector. Framed by pulsing orange lights, Collin stood resplendent in plumed hat, brown jerkin and slashed doublet, white shirt with pointed lace collar, sweeping velvet cloak lined with tawny satin, thick brown hose.
“Good morrow, fair lady.” He doffed his hat to Nina, as security came running.
“Okay, let’s have the sword
,” the guard said.
Collin’s hand tightened on the hilt. “What, surrender my weapon?”
“Yup.”
“In death alone,” said Collin. “Else forfeit sacred honor.”
Nina was laughing. “Stop!”
“Let’s have the sword.”
“Officer,” Nina said, “it isn’t real.”
“Zero tolerance,” he replied.
Nina watched the guard march Collin into the office. “My good Lord DeLaurentis,” Collin announced himself to Mrs. Solomon, the principal’s secretary. “Is he within?”
“Collin?” Mrs. Solomon strained to recognize the young Emerson alumnus in his Jacobean clothes.
After some discussion, he surrendered his weapon to DeLaurentis himself, and signed the school guest book with a wonderful crabbed hand. Name: Wm. Shakespeare. Organization: The King’s Men.
Then Collin led the way up the stairs of his old school, striding through corridors where crowds parted before him, kids whistling, laughing, calling to one another, “Oh, my God, check this out. Check the boots!” Some thought he was from King Richard’s Faire. Others said he was doing the LGBTQ assembly, since he looked like such an amazing queen. Gawkers peeked into Nina’s room even when passing time was over. Her students loved it when she closed the door, and William Shakespeare belonged to them alone.
“Today we have a special guest,” Nina began, as Collin paced behind her, examining the poster of the old Globe Theatre, experimenting with the light switches, gazing at the ceiling, marveling at the fluorescent glow. “He is an actor, director, playwright, poet…the envy of his peers—”
“I have no peers,” Shakespeare interrupted.
“Ahem!” Nina shot him a look and the class laughed. “His peers, including…Ben Jonson—”
“Prithee,” Shakespeare asked the class, “hath anybody seen his work?”
Nobody had.
“Christopher Marlowe,” Nina continued.
None of the kids had heard of him. Shakespeare gave Marlowe the thumbs-down.