The Rule of Four Read Online Free

saw in it. We’re the paint in that analogy, as I tried to explain to Charlie when I mentioned it once. Time is what disperses us.
    Maybe the best way to put it is the way Paul did, not long after we met. Even then he was a Renaissance fanatic, eighteen years old and already convinced that civilization had been in a nosedive since the death of Michelangelo. He’d read all of my father’s books on the period, and he introduced himself to me a few days into freshman year after recognizing my middle name in the freshman face-book. I have a peculiar middle name, which for parts of my childhood I carried like an albatross around my neck. My father tried to name me after his favorite composer, a slightly obscure seventeenth-century Italian without whom, he said, there could’ve been no Haydn, and therefore no Mozart. My mother, on the other hand, refused to have the birth certificate printed the way he wanted, insisting until the moment of my arrival that Arcangelo Corelli Sullivan was a horrible thing to foist on a child, like a three-headed monster of names. She was partial to Thomas, her father’s name, and whatever it lacked in imagination it made up for in subtlety.
    Thus, as the pangs of labor began, she held a delivery-bed filibuster, as she called it, keeping me out of this world until my father agreed to a compromise. In a moment less of inspiration than of desperation, I became Thomas Corelli Sullivan, and for better or worse, the name stuck. My mother hoped that I could hide my middle name between the other two, like sweeping dust beneath a rug. But my father, who believed there was much in a name, always said that Corelli without Arcangelo was like a Stradivarius without strings. He’d only given in to my mother, he claimed, because the stakes were much higher than she let on. Her filibuster, he used to say with a smile, was staged in the marriage bed, not on the delivery bed. He was the sort of man who thought a pact made in passion was the only good excuse for bad judgment.
    I told Paul all of this, several weeks after we met.
    “You’re right,” he said, when I told him my little airbrush metaphor. “Time is no da Vinci.” He thought for a moment, then smiled in that gentle way of his. “Not even a Rembrandt. Just a cheap Jackson Pollock.”
    He seemed to understand me from the beginning.
    All three of them did: Paul, Charlie, and Gil.

Chapter 2
                           
     
    Now Charlie and I are standing over a manhole at the foot of Dillon Gym, near the south of campus. The Philadelphia 76ers patch on his knit hat is hanging by a thread, fluttering in the wind. Above us, under the orange eye of a sodium lamp, snowflakes twitch in huge clouds. We are waiting. Charlie is beginning to lose patience because the two sophomores across the street are costing us time.
    “Just tell me what we’re supposed to do,” I say.
    A light pulses on his watch and he glances down. “It’s 7:07. Proctors change shifts at 7:30. We’ve got twenty-three minutes.”
    “You think twenty minutes is enough to catch them?”
    “Sure,” he says. “If we can figure out where they’ll be.” Charlie looks back over across the street. “Come
on,
girls.”
    One of them is mincing through the drifts in a spring skirt, as if the snow caught her by surprise while she was dressing. The other, a Peruvian girl I know from an intramural competition, wears the trademark orange parka of the swim and dive team.
    “I forgot to call Katie,” I say, as it dawns on me.
    Charlie turns.
    “It’s her birthday. I was supposed to tell her when I was coming over.”
    Katie Marchand, a sophomore, has slowly become the kind of girlfriend I didn’t deserve to find. Her rising importance in my life is a fact Charlie accepts by reminding himself that sharp women often have terrible taste in men.
    “Did you get her something?” he asks.
    “Yeah.” I make a rectangle with my hands. “A photo from this gallery