Virgin Territory by James Lecesne Page B

get in a lot of trouble, but the adrenaline that’s pumping through my bloodstream is trying to convince me that this would make me a hero in everybody’s eyes, so go for it.
    Crispy and I step outside to hang on the hot pavement. I try to act as though we’re not a couple of juvenile delinquents with a plan that involves breaking and entering, but my leg is shaking like a flipped coin that won’t settle.
    “Are you sure about this?” I ask him.
    “No,” he replies as he nervously picks lint out of his pants pocket and sends the little bits of white fluff falling to the ground like fake snow at a Christmas pageant. “Are you?”
    Neither of us can say no to Angela, and we both know it.
    “Impressive, that stuff about Roman law,” I say to Crispy. “You made it up, right?”
    “No. It’s for real. My mom did her dissertation on first-century Roman law. She wrote about its impact on the New Testament. She’s kind of an expert on the subject. Now she’s doing research on a book about the Blessed Virgin appearing in places like Jupiter. I’m here because … well, she had this idea that she and I needed to do some serious mother-son bonding.”
    “How’s that going?”
    “You seen her lately?” he asks, giving the statement an ironic lift. When I don’t respond, he adds, “Right.”
    More snow from his pocket, and then …
    “And what’s your story? I mean, for real.”
    I give him the 411 on my life. I mention the fact that I once lived in Manhattan and also that my mother has been dead for years. He wants to know if I was in New York on 9/11.
    “Yeah,” I tell him. “But we weren’t allowed to go back to our house. No one was. It was weird. They said it was because of security issues and health concerns and all that. But when we finally were allowed to go home, I saw why they’d been keeping us away. It was pretty bad. All that ash had gotten into everything, every corner. I don’t remember much, but I’ll never forget the sight of my home that first day back. The whole place was covered in white dust. Looked like a ghost of itself.”
    I decide not to tell him the other part of the story, the partabout how Kat died of ovarian cancer on the night of September 10, 2001, at 8:45 p.m. He wouldn’t be able to make sense of the fact that at the moment when the first plane struck the first tower, Kat’s body was already cold, lying uptown at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, waiting to be transferred to the funeral home on 14th Street, where she would be cremated and turned into a pile of ash and poured into an urn.
    Neither of us have much to say after that. Crispy stands there chewing his lower lip, and I shift my weight from one flip-flop to the other. I can tell he’s thinking about things that have nothing to do with my mother or me. I wonder if he and I will be friends this time next year, or if he’s just one of those people who will pass through my life and not leave fingerprints.
    “By the way,” I say, in an effort to wrap up my story, “my name’s Dylan.”
    He looks at me as though he’s trying to see a Dylan where an Alex had been standing only a moment ago.
    “Cool,” he says, and then withdraws his attention from me and puts it back into his pocket, where he picks more lint.
    “My real name’s Crispy,” he says. “Actually, it’s Chris Pollard. But my folks’re both in AA. Their friends call them Molly P. and Tim P. So when I came along, I was known in the rooms as Chris P. The rest is history.”
    The girls haven’t come out of the Shack yet, so I confess to Crispy that the only reason I’m involved in this Virgin Club business is because I’m hoping to get on Angela’s good side.
    “Right,” Crispy says with a wry laugh. “And into her pants. Don’t sweat it. We’re all in love with her. And those who aren’t want to
be
her. Two days ago she kissed Desirée. On the lips.”
    “Whoa,” I say, trying to slow my mind, which immediately has gone into a