Everything on the Line by Bob Mitchell

ed, this time by Mrs. O’Donnell when she is whispering to Frieda Trutt in math class. A scowling shhhhh! is directed her way by that lady with the black suit and black hat in church after she giggles at Pastor McCain when he almost chokes on his own phlegm during a particularly boring sermon. Shhhhh! is the reward she receives from her parents when she has the audacity to ask them a question during the climactic scene of Gone with the Wind . And since her marriage to Ira, he has through the years sibilated her way hundreds, maybe thousands of staccato and mean-spirited shhhhh s to mute her words, to break her spirit, to slam the door on human communication. All these hissing shhhhh s being a far cry from her gentle, loving shhhhh s, the ones she used exclusively with infant Jack to quiet his fears, to calm his stress, to add a little kindness and sweetness to his life, to coax him gently to sleep.
    The shhhhh still reverberating in her viscera, Avis comes to just in time to watch the brutal five-second ending of the lion video. She places the tray of goodies down in front of her two men and turns her back in order to conceal the single tear that is trickling down her cheek and disappearing under her dimpled chin.
    * * *
    Fear.
    It is emanating from the eyes of fifteen-year-old Jack Spade as he lies on his king-size bed in his king-size room in his king-size house in his king-size estate, thinking about his tennis career and his lion video and his painful workouts and his father’s endless sermons and that sad look in his mom’s eyes and Odi’s ugly, twisted face and all that Darwin crap and the nonstop need to dominate and conquer and survive and destroy and win.
    Jack’s fingers grip his copy of Winning Ugly tight, so tight that he rips the volume in two, at the point of the spine. He is left holding half a book in each of his clenched fists, and his eyes are bloodshot and fierce, fierce with the panic of youth and confusion and dependency.
    Jack Spade reaches into the left pocket of his jeans and pulls out a Xanax and lets it dissolve under his tongue, slowly, and stares out his window at the lawns and the pools and the courts and eternity.

7
    Battu
    “ÇA PISSE!” IS HOW THE FRENCH PUT IT, with their typical charming linguistic gentility. In fact, it is pissing down rain in Paris, one of those misty, chilling, persistent drizzles that feels like it will continue to descend from the celestial Gallic bladder for, oh, a decade or so.
    But even when it is raining, Paris is beautiful. Like a stunning woman who has an ugly head cold complete with hacking cough and drippy nose, a rainy Paris still somehow maintains her inner splendor, her graceful charm, her elegant poise.
    It is 8 A.M. on Saturday, May 27, 2045, two days before the start of the much-anticipated Paris Open Juniors tournament at Roland Garros.
    Fifteen-year-old Ugo Bellezza, Gioconda Bellezza, and Giglio Marotti are breakfasting at Le Luxembourg, a café in the sixth arrondissement not far from their hotel, the cozy Clos Médicis on the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Sublimely located at the confluence of the wide and bustling Boulevard St. Michel and the sedate Rue de Médicis, the café sits proudly on the Place Edmond Rostand and just across this modest square from the charming Jardin du Luxembourg, the largest public park within the confines of the City of Paris.
    Outside, thousands of Parisians—having poured out of the nearby métro stops Luxembourg, Cluny/La Sorbonne, and Odéon—are scurrying to the office, dragging their feet to the lycée, slinking to a morning assignation with a lover, or entering the park for their A.M. jog.
    Inside, Giglio and Gioconda and Ugo are savoring being in Paris and being together. The two adults are also savoring their respective crêpes, his covered with apricot preserves, hers drenched in Grand Marnier.
    Ugo bites into his pain au chocolat, his teeth, like a forty-niner’s exploratory pickax, joyfully and