white. It’s always more beautiful that way.”
“It’s hard enough being a goddamn criminal without a documentary crew following you around.”
“I always hear people bitching about that,” I said.
“I know, right?”
We both started laughing. The kid with the boom box met up with someone on a bench. They turned the ghetto blaster way up.
“You think I care whether anybody anywhere knows anything about me? Then you don’t know a thing about me. Look at how little I give a damn!” He started doing his crazy moves. People always gathered around to watch Nicolas dance. He suddenly got all loose and then all stiff. If you wanted to see what joy looked like, you only had to look at Nicolas dancing. He started doing a disco move, reaching his right hand down practically to his left foot and then stretching it back up into the opposite direction to the sky.
“You really shouldn’t let my brother drink espresso,” I told Adam.
“I have learned that the hard way.”
I felt less anxious all of a sudden. The worst of it was over. He had found out and here he was dancing in the street.
C HAPTER 13
The Lazy-Day Revolution
A DAM LOVED THE ATTENTION WE WERE GETTING . Adam had every intention of being on the news when he got older. He hadn’t figured out what he was going to be famous for. At one point about a year ago, when they first met, Adam and Nicolas had formed their own political party. It was called The People’s People Party. Now they crawled in the apartment window with some posters of themselves that they had made at the photocopy store and were going to put up. Nicolas had suggested that they deface them with moustaches before they put them up around town. I had finished getting dressed when they held the posters up for me to see. They had combed their hair to the side and had these fake serious looks. This amused them to no end.
“We actually look really good as politicians,” Nicolas said. “Do you think that politicians attract a lot of ladies?”
“No,” I said. “You can’t sleep with anyone or do drugs, or they do an exposé on the news.”
“That sucks. What man doesn’t like a crack pipe and acouple underage girls after a hard day of campaigning about public schools?”
“That’s the problem with the world today,” Adam stated. “You can’t reap any rewards.”
“This is the stupidest political party ever,” I said. “You’re going to add crack and whores to civil liberties.”
“Give me liberty or give me death,” Adam said.
“It’s beautiful in its simplicity,” Nicolas added, nodding.
“Let’s go campaigning for our revolutionary party today!” Adam cried. “All we ever do is talk about it.”
“All right,” said Nicolas. “Let me go take a crap and then borrow a car.”
So far, their revolutionary tactics had largely been confined to soliciting sex from women who were obviously middle-class and clearly not prostitutes. Adam had been questioned by the police a couple times, but they always let him go. They could tell from his manner that he was an upper-class kid. Rich people weren’t responsible for petty crimes. They were responsible for the great crimes that took hundreds of years to commit and were, therefore, unpunishable.
Nicolas came back twenty minutes later. He was wearing a pair of giant old-lady glasses.
“These are my counter-revolutionary glasses,” he said.
“
Counter-revolutionary
means you’re against the revolution,” I said.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Look it up in the dictionary.”
“The dictionary is obsolete,” Nicolas said. “They don’t even have the definition of
cocksucker
in it. Our first act of government will be the public execution of René Simard.”
“Why? Just because you don’t like him?”
“His music ruined my childhood.”
“I thought your first act was going to be banning soccer.”
“I have to wait a while for that one. There are some soccer fans out there.”
Nicolas was mad at