The Slide: A Novel Read Online Free

equation—resoundingly and cosmically right .
    Our assigned adventure was piling into two Ford Econoline vans and driving up the coast to pass hastily rolled joints and tepid cannons of white zin around a campfire. We each discreetly made certain to be in the same van.
    The sun was beaming and here was this new person, this softly brash Northwesterner with dirty-looking hair, and she was alternately smiling at me and at the starfish.
    “Should I treat this like your class ring, or like your varsity jacket?”
    I thought about this while the starfish spun inside her fingers. Already I’d begun to long for the reward of her mouth’s curl, its opening, the squint of eye.
    “There’s a good chance I’m just trying to get laid,” I admitted. “But I don’t think that’s all.”
    Laughter then, and I bore witness to the reward of honesty as the sun lit her cheek as if from inside.
    “Don’t assume this means you’re getting into my pants,” she said.
    “In that case give it back,” I said.
    “Never. You gave it to me and it’s mine. So just help me up, then back slowly away with that penis of yours.”
    I had never felt such rich desire to give a girl a gift. In high school there had been ridiculous little trinket bracelets wrapped around teddy-bear paws, pairs of almost weightless earrings that slid around inside their little cardboard boxes. I’d given them because I could tell it was expected by just about everyone and I was highly reverential of the emerging laws of boy–girl activity. But for Audrey, this girl with the small green eyes, I wanted to share everything the world had to share. I would take only what I needed and share the rest. In exchange, she would smile.
    Hiking back to camp, we held hands until the path narrowed and we were forced into single file. That night, several hundred yards and also a thousand miles away from the others, we zipped two sleeping bags together and I shared select details about my past, about baseball and the Midwest and my dead brother, Freddy. Then Audrey let me into her pants.
    I stood at the kitchen island with the starfish. The box held no evidence of the missing legs, just these two dreadful vacancies where they’d broken from the center. I carried the brittle thing with me to the car, set it in the passenger seat, and drove to Stuart’s.
    What remained of the Hurst family resided in Ladue Farms. Forbidden: soliciting, trespassing, and shirtless jogging. It was one of many neighborhoods in Ladue marked by one of these wooden or wrought-iron placards hanging quaintly from a painted metal pole. The street was narrow and speed-bumped, overhung by a canopy of oak and sweet gum trees—one that in winter storm would be salted and plowed hours before the city’s own. The pool house sat in the deepest corner of the Hurst compound, connected to the main house by a winding umbilical of flat-laid gray stone. Stuart was supine on a lounger by the diving board, wearing a pair of his father’s running shorts.
    “This shows up today. Shipped I guess before she left for Europe. First and best gift I ever gave her. Last time I saw it there were still five legs.”
    Stuart took the starfish, smelled it, rubbed it against his cheek, smelled it again, then tossed it into the pool. “Maybe the legs broke off between LA and Portland. You weren’t the only one with a long drive.”
    “I’m to see this as a nonstatement. I’m supposed to watch it sink to the bottom of your pool and think, no big deal. Either that or you’re gauging my reaction, making observations.”
    “Listen to me,” he said, shaking the ice around his plastic cup. “You start thinking about this and there’s no end. You will be trapped by this gift, paralyzed. You want my advice? On the house? Do not even begin trying to understand what this means.”
    Stuart spoke in big rounded words that left little room for dissent. I thought of his tree-squashed apartment and felt something like gratitude, for if