Free Spin by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

himself from Lawton Industries. He resigned from the board and his shares are being administered by a blind trust. According to our lawyers he’s conflict-free.”
    “So what do you at Perihelion?”
    He smiled. “I listen attentively to my elders,” he said, “and I make polite suggestions. Tell me about med school.”
    He asked whether I found it distasteful to see so much of human weakness and disease. So I told him about my second-year anatomy class. Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility. But it was also a marker, a passage. Beyond this point there was nothing left of childhood.
    “Jesus, Tyler. You want something stronger than coffee?”
    “I’m not saying it was a big deal. That’s what’s shocking about it. It
wasn’t
a big deal. You walk away from it and you go to a movie.”
    “Long way from the Big House, though.”
    “Long way. Both of us.” I raised my cup.
    Then we started reminiscing, and the tension drained out of the conversation. We talked about old times. We fell into what I recognized as a pattern. Jason would mention a place—the basement, the mall, the creek in the woods—and I would supply a story: the time we broke into the liquor cabinet; the time we saw a Rice girl named Kelley Weems shoplift a pack of Trojans from the Pharmasave; the summer Diane insisted on reading us breathless passages from Christina Rossetti, as if she had discovered something profound.
    The big lawn
, Jason offered.
The night the stars disappeared
, I said.
    And then we were quiet for a while.
    Finally I said, “So… is she coming or not?”
    “She’s making up her mind,” Jase said neutrally. “She’s juggling some commitments. She’s supposed to call tomorrow and let me know.”
    “She’s still down south?” This was the last I’d heard, the news relayed from my mother. Diane was at some southern college, studying something I couldn’t quite remember: urban geography, oceanography, some other unlikely -ography.
    “Yeah, still,” Jason said, shifting in his chair. “You know, Ty, a lot of things have changed with Diane.”
    “I guess that’s not surprising.”
    “She’s semi-engaged. To be married.”
    I took this pretty gracefully. “Well, good for her,” I said. How could I possibly be jealous? I had no relationship with Diane anymore—had never had one, in that sense of the word “relationship.” And I had almost been engaged myself, back at Stony Brook, to a second-year student named Candice Boone. We had enjoyed saying “I love you” to each other, until we got tired of it. I think Candice got tired first.
    And yet: semi-engaged? How did that work?
    I was tempted to ask. But Jason was clearly uncomfortable with the whole drift of the conversation. It called up a memory: once, back at the Big House, Jason had brought a date home to meet his family. She was a plain but pleasant girl he’d met at the Rice chess club, too shy to say much. Carol had remained relatively sober that night, but E.D. had clearly disapproved of the girl, had been conspicuously rude to her, and when she was gone he had berated Jase for “dragging a specimen like that into the house.” With great intellect, E.D. said, comes great responsibility. He didn’t want Jason to be shanghaied into a conventional marriage. Didn’t want to see him “hanging diapers on the line” when he could be “making a mark on the world.”
    A lot of people in Jason’s position would have stopped bringing home their dates.
    Jason had just stopped dating.
     
     
    The house was empty when I woke up the next morning.
    There was a note on the kitchen table: Jase had gone out to pick up provisions for a barbecue.
Back noon or later
. It was nine-thirty. I had slept luxuriously late, summer-vacation languor creeping over