These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

A Literary Hub Best Book of Year • A Crime Reads Best Debut of the Year • A Newsweek 25 Best Fall Books • A Philadelphia Inquirer 10 Big Books for the Fall • An O Magazine.com LGBTQ Books That Are Changing the Literary Landscape • An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut • A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books To Read This Year Selection • A Passport Best Book of the Month

The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel—a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.

When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm.

Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.

As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence.

Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.

Release date: September 15, 2020

Publisher: Harper

Print pages: 480

Sample

Prologue

By the time Charlie punches out it’s well after midnight, and everyone else has long since gone home. He switches off the lights and watches the long aisles cascade into darkness, then pulls the roll-up door shut behind him. When he steps out from under the awning the rain drapes over his umbrella like a shroud.

The air clots around his breath. At the far side of the warehouse a train wails past. Charlie thinks about knitted blankets and hot chocolate, half-forgotten childhood comforts he’s a few years too old now to admit to missing. The others all have families and wives and happy plans for the holiday; Charlie just has matinee tickets and Lucy begging for scraps of his TV dinner. He’s exhausted, he thinks, because it’s easier to remedy than being lonely.

As he turns onto the side street he fumbles, thick-fingered, for his keys. When he opens his car door a crown of rainwater disperses from the roof and scatters. The air inside is even colder than outside—Charlie blows into his cupped hands and hopes the chill hasn’t seeped between his bedsheets.

He starts the ignition. The engine screams. The rasp of tearing metal is followed by a heavy death rattle. Charlie quickly shuts off the engine and holds the wheel in white-knuckled hands. He’s accustomed to dead batteries, flat tires, engines too stubborn to start in the cold, but whatever just happened was far worse.

He’s drenched by the time he remembers his umbrella. He lifts the hood with a squeal, hoping there’s a miracle waiting in the unreadable mess of his engine. But Charlie has never been much of a mechanic. There’s nothing in there for him to see.

He steps back and heads toward the phone booth, but stops in the middle of the street—he squints through the rain and sees the receiver swinging from its cord. For the first time Charlie lets his dismay tip upward into anger.

“Fucking—teenagers.”

He will have to return to the telephone in the warehouse break room. He exhales hard and stalks back to the car, leaning inside to grab his umbrella. There’s the germ of a headache now, just behind his eyes.

Charlie slams the door and straightens. When he looks out into the street again, he is no longer alone.

“Are you okay?”

A battered black car has appeared in the street beside him. Rain slicks down the windows and roof, but the passenger door hangs open. A boy is leaning toward him, one arm braced above the doorframe. His dark hair is artfully untrimmed, but he’s dressed well. Argyle pullover, toffee-brown jodhpur boots; a suburban choirboy in halfhearted revolt.

Charlie stares at him, and he smiles.

“That looks like fun.” The boy nods toward the steaming hood of Charlie’s car. “Have a wrecker on the way?”

Charlie slowly shakes his head. “Phone booth’s out of order.”

The boy gives a sympathetic wince and turns toward the unseen driver. Then he nods and turns back to Charlie.

“We can give you a lift home if you want,” he says. “Car’s not going anywhere—you might as well call the tow from someplace warm.”

Charlie lifts the hood again to take one last, hopeless look into his engine. He sighs and slams it shut.

“I’m in Polish Hill,” he says. “Is that out of your way?”

“Not at all.”

The boy slides to the middle seat, and Charlie shakes off his umbrella before he gets inside.

The driver is a kid, too, copper-haired and slim. His clothes are as well cared for as his friend’s, but they’re conspicuously cheaper; his plaid flannel shirt has a generic plainness to it that makes it look as if it had been sewn at home from a pattern. Behind the boy’s Malcolm X glasses his dark eyes are solemn, and when he greets Charlie he does not smile.

He stares just a second longer than he should, then catches his friend’s prompting glance, chews his lip, and looks away into the road.

“He’s shy,” says the dark-haired boy. “Don’t mind him.”

Charlie nods, unoffended. The boys are younger than he’d thought, maybe even still in high school. He wonders what these two were doing, driving around all by themselves. Honor-roll types, clean-cut, out for a midnight joyride. It’s a poignant thought, almost charming. Charlie was a different kind of teenager—lousy grades, on the football team but never great at it, a lumbering straight man to the class clowns. But he knows what it is to wonder what everyone else is doing differently in order to be happy; he knows what it is to skirt at the outermost edges of friendship. He can still remember the companionable quiet, the fleeting warmth, of the moments teenage boys spend being lonely together.

The wipers click and the vents breathe hot. The redhead steers with his hands at ten and two on the wheel, as if he hasn’t been driving for very long. The other boy reaches across Charlie’s knees and takes a thermos from the glove box. The contents smell of hot broth and rosemary, something Charlie’s grandmother might have made when he was sick as a child.

“Want some?” the boy asks. “It’s chicken and rice.”

“Nice of you,” Charlie agrees.

He holds the metal thermos mug steady while the boy carefully fills it. The first mouthful burns Charlie’s tongue, but it shocks the cold from his bones, and it tastes all right. At first there’s the barest tang of soap, as if the mug wasn’t rinsed properly, but after a moment he can’t even taste it.

The dark-haired boy takes a sip from the thermos and offers it to his friend, but the driver shakes his head curtly and keeps his eyes fixed on the empty street.

It’s quiet for a while. Charlie finishes his soup and rolls the mug between his hands. His scalded taste buds are starting to itch.

“What are your names?” he asks. He’ll forget the answer as soon as he hears it, but he’s grateful for the promise of home and the weight of hot food in his belly, and he wants to be courteous.

The boy beside him thinks before he answers, like he’s deciding whether or not to tell the truth. He looks apprehensive, but doesn’t appear to know it.

“I’m Julian,” he answers finally. He gives his friend a pointed look. The

 other boy is silent for a moment, as though summoning the will to speak. His jaw is a nervous taut line. This one gets on Charlie’s nerves a little, as anxious people often do. Shyness he can forgive; cringing dread is harder to stomach.

“Paul,” the driver says, blank-faced, so quietly Charlie almost can’t hear him.

Charlie looks between them, at how differently they are dressed and how Paul avoids meeting Julian’s eyes—how little they look or behave like friends. Once again, more insistently now, he is curious what they were up to before they found him. But there’s no reason for him to be uneasy. They’re just kids, and he’s on the verge of reaching home. Once he’s there, it won’t matter anymore.

His fingers are too warm around his empty cup. The heat from the vent suddenly clings like his childhood Ohio summers. He fumbles with the zipper of his parka, but his fingers are rubbery and fever-fat. The thermos cup is rocking on its side between his ankles before he even knows he’s dropped it.

Julian grins suddenly and elbows his friend’s arm, as if to include him in a joke.

“Where exactly are you in Polish Hill, Charlie?” The sudden clarity of Paul’s voice is startling. There’s an echo of Murray Avenue in his vowels, but he overenunciates as if he learned to speak by reading—in the middle of exactly, where Charlie has never heard it before, there’s the precise, conspicuous click of the t.

“Uh, north of Immaculate Heart,” Charlie answers, “if you turn right on—”

The numbing heat is trickling through his hands and up his arms, from his burnt tongue outward to his lips. He brings a hand to his face and smears his fingertips across the line of his mouth. He feels nothing.

The car is idling at a railway crossing, waiting out the clang of the bell. The boys watch him with unblinking eyes. Julian is still smiling; Paul looks as if he never has.

They’re both wearing gloves. They’ve shed their coats in the stifling warmth, but they’re still wearing their gloves.

“My name.” His tongue is so thick he could choke. “I never told you my name.”

In the moment before he manages to smother it, Julian dissolves into sharp, jittery laughter. But Paul doesn’t flinch. His eyes are bright and pitiless. His every word is tight and mannered, as if he’s practiced in front of the mirror.

“Do you think the neighbors will notice that you’re gone, Mr. Stepanek?”

Charlie tries to will his unfeeling hands to the door latch. His arm lands hard against the door, and his body slumps uselessly in the corner of his seat.

“You don’t want to do that,” says Julian. It isn’t a threat. He speaks as if he’s trying to coax a reluctant child. “Could I see your wrists, Charlie? Behind your back, if you don’t 

mind, it’ll only take a few seconds.”

He tries again to wrest his body back under control, but he lurches forward and falls against the dashboard. After that his limbs will no longer obey him. He can’t even hold still.

What’s going to happen to Lucy? It’s his only intelligible thought.

At Julian’s request, Charlie’s arms move as automatically as if he still controls them. He can just barely feel the loops of rope around his wrists and the tug of a tightening knot—a nagging, distant feeling, like someone gently pulling on his clothes. The car trembles from the passing weight of the train.

“Thank you,” Julian says. “See, that wasn’t so bad. You like following orders, don’t you? No matter what they tell you to do.”

“We’ve read all about you.” Paul’s voice is soft. “We know exactly what you are.”

But Charlie doesn’t know what he is, not anymore. Maybe he never has. Fear makes you forget everything—turns you into something that only knows it can die.

He’s felt it before, and seen other people feeling it. He knows what it looks like from the outside, and from the boys’ faces he knows they see it too. In this cloying heat, smothering as the Vietnamese sun, he remembers the relief of deciding not to see.

When the train is gone, it leaves a ringing emptiness in its wake. Julian coaxes Charlie to sit upright and refastens his seat belt for him. Paul watches, stone-faced, then draws a deep breath and shifts the car into drive.

The numbness bleeds into Charlie’s vision. He sees everything through the veil of a dream. The widening black between the streetlights; the silent strangers alongside him looking out into the dark. They’re kids—just kids. He doesn’t understand, and he never will.

The boys still won’t meet each other’s eyes. They’re afraid, both of them, of what they might see.

 

Part I

 

1.

The pills let his mother sleep, but they didn’t help her do it well. They left her lower eyelids dark and thick, as if she hadn’t slept at all. Paul could tell when she was taking them because she became sluggish instead of jittery. Most sounds still startled her, but they reached her at a delay, enough that she could brace herself first. She moved languidly, low-shouldered, as if through water.

It wasn’t much of an improvement, at least not for the rest of them, but Paul wasn’t the only one who had given up on that.

She was sitting by the living-room window, where she had always claimed the light was best. The winter light cast her face in the same creamy gray as her dressing gown. Paul watched her sweep her fingertips under her eyes; the shadows vanished beneath a film of concealer.

“There’s nothing wrong with your present,” his mother was saying. Her eyes were turned toward the compact mirror but not really watching it, as if she had surrendered her movements to muscle memory. “It’s beautiful. Bubbe Sonia’s always loved your artwork.”

Paul was already dressed for the party, in the brown corduroy suit and knit blue tie he wore to every party. The blazer had grown too tight across his shoulders, little folds of fabric biting into the flesh whenever he lifted his arms. The sleeves were too short by an inch. Paul hated the look of his own bare wrists, with their shining blue veins and the skin stretched too thin to hold them in place. They reminded him that his body was a thing that could be taken apart.

“She won’t love this,” he said. “If I were her I’d hate it. It’s a slap in the face.”

“Who puts these awful ideas in your head?” His mother had the doleful dark gaze of a calf. When he forced himself to keep looking at her he felt a dull, insistent ache. “You’re forever assuming the worst. I don’t know how I feel about those books they’re making you read.”

“No one puts ideas in my head,” said Paul. His voice was sharp, but it took a moment for her to wince. “It’s an objective assessment. She’ll despise it, and she’ll be right to do it.”

His mother slowly clicked her compact shut. She smiled at him, but with a weary finality designed to end the conversation.

It was snowing, large wet flakes that were stained gray before they even hit the ground. Outside the window, the family Buick hydroplaned in the slush before pulling to a stop. Audrey ducked out of the driver’s side, shaking her long strawberry-blond hair out of her face, and sauntered up the walk with a paper bag swinging from one hand.

“Well, it’s the fanciest I could find for the money,” Audrey said by way of a greeting. She shook the wine bottle free of its bag and inspected it. “Whether it’s fancy enough for Mount Lebanon people is a whole other matter—Ma, Jesus, are you ever planning to actually get dressed for this thing?”

It had once been the job of Paul’s mother to play the sheepdog, to chase everyone into place and keep an eye on the clock. Now it had fallen to Audrey, who up till a year ago had always been the one stumbling from the basement in half-tied shoes while their mother fretted at the head of the stairs. Audrey was ready in time today, bootlaces pulled tight, but she was still so skeptical of the idea of punctuality that she struggled to convince anyone else of its necessity. By the time she’d coaxed their mother upstairs to get dressed it was clear that they were going to be late.

The three of them waited in the front hallway in their party clothes and winter

 coats. Paul stood very still, elbows tucked in, trying not to fidget with his cuffs. Audrey kept lifting her sleeve to look at her watch; Laurie, ignoring them both, leaned against the railing and listened to her transistor radio.

“I’m going to go see if I can give her a nudge,” said Audrey after a while. “Paul, what’s that face? You look like you’re going to cry.”

Paul glared at her back as she made her way up the stairs. Laurie took out one of her earphones and heaved a sigh. She was doll-like and scrubbed pink, wearing T-strap shoes and a flowered pinafore dress their grandmother had sewn for her. She looked much younger than her twelve years, but she had already adopted an air of adolescent lofty irritation.

They exchanged a long, wordless look. Paul summoned a wry smile; Laurie deliberately didn’t return it. When a door finally swung shut above their heads, she tensed almost imperceptibly.

“God,” she said. “This thing is going to be a drag and a half.”

Audrey drove, a little too fast. His mother rode shotgun, gloved hands folded in her lap, watching the window. She didn’t complain about Audrey’s driving, or her decision to take the interstate; she didn’t even mention the unseen tangle behind Audrey’s right ear. Whenever the car entered an underpass, the reflection of his mother’s face became visible in the shaded glass. Paul took measure of her—the blankness of her eyes and the fine lines at their corners, the way her lavender knit hat cinched into her dark auburn hair. It was easy for him to hate her; it was almost primal.

They were late enough that the rest of the fleet of cars outside their aunt Hazel’s house were already dusted with snow. After Audrey parked she drew a deep breath, then turned to give Paul and Laurie a sardonic grin.

“Okay, gang,” she said. “Let’s go pretend to be normal.”

It was just like every other family gathering—filled with well-meaning, exhausting people, eager to pull Paul’s scars open and uniquely qualified to do so efficiently. Hazel’s husband, Harvey, who adored Paul without reservation, had a way of behaving as if Paul’s every interest and gesture was outlandishly wrong for a boy. Today he rattled Paul’s shoulders and asked, as if even the premise of the question were a laugh riot, “So when’s your next butterfly-hunting expedition?”

“They’re all dead at the moment,” Paul answered, forcing a smile, “but thanks for checking in.”

The family treated all four of them with conspicuous delicacy. His mother was pillowed on all sides by his aunts’ soft voices and gentle pats on the arm, so that nothing too sharp stood a chance of reaching her. When Paul and his sisters drifted too close to any group, conversations became artificially light. Younger cousins, who had clearly been instructed to be careful, fell silent altogether rather than cause offense; they exchanged panicked glances, then retreated in a flurry of

whispers.

There was something different about the way the family dealt with Paul; there always had been. But now it had distilled—the fascination, the wariness, the anxious undercurrent of worry. He tried to be polite, which was the nearest he could get to making himself too small to see. He forgot conversations as soon as they ended; all he could remember was what people said as he was walking away. Ruth says college isn’t doing any better for him as far as friends go. No surprise—it’s not his fault, but he’s a little intense, isn’t he? Oh, it must be so hard for her, he looks more like his father every day . . .

His grandfather caught him creeping into the pantry, where he’d been hoping to gather his thoughts. He gave Paul a knowing smile, which Paul couldn’t find the energy to return. Just past his grandfather’s shoulder Paul could see Hazel, resplendent in her first-generation suburban finery, trying to convince Laurie to taste a spatula of frosting.

“It’s a bit much, isn’t it?” his grandfather said. “All this fuss.”

Paul pressed his shoulders against the dry-goods shelves and shut his eyes. He didn’t need to nod. He and his grandfather had repeated this exchange at every family party since he was five.

“Holding up all right? You’ve got no sort of poker face, Paulie.”

“Everyone’s treating me like a time bomb,” Paul said, more frankly than he would have dared with anyone else. “So there’s that.”

His grandfather made an amiable, dismissive noise at the back of his throat.

“It’s in your head,” he said, as if this would be a great comfort. “What, you think anyone’s still upset about that business with the Costello kid? Boy stuff, the whole thing. That was nothing—ancient history. Your mother might feel a little different,” he added, “but she wouldn’t know, would she? A boy has to defend himself.”

He was deflecting and they both knew it, but Paul let him believe he hadn’t noticed. After a moment his grandfather gave his arm a quick shake.

“Come on,” he said, “why don’t we go show Mamaleh what you’ve painted for her?”

He’d put it off as long as he could, but there was no avoiding it now. His great-grandmother had been placed in the den, her wheelchair folded and set aside to give her a place of honor in one of the good armchairs. She looked like a baby parrot, kindly faced and vulnerable, tiny beneath her blankets. The air around her had a sweet, powdery smell of decay.

When Paul leaned down to kiss the rice-paper skin of her forehead, she clasped a hand around his fingers. She looked toward Paul’s mother and nodded, so feebly that the gesture was almost invisible.

“You and Jakob had such beautiful children, Ruthie,” she said, and Paul felt a rare

moment of kinship with his mother when he noticed the falter in her smile.

An awkward hush fell over the room as his great-grandmother struggled with the wrappings. When the paper fell away, the silence didn’t lift.

Paul had based the painting on the sole photograph to survive his great-grandmother’s adolescence in Lithuania. He had invented from it a proud, handsome girl with long black hair, and a smile—not unlike Laurie’s—that had a trace of mischief in it. He had meant to make the painting happy and gentle for her, something to brighten her dimming days. He watched her adjust her thick glasses to look at it more closely, little hands shaking like thorny branches. He knew, even before she spoke, that it was the cruelest thing he could have given her.

“It is very strange,” she said, accent distilled by memory. “Strange to think that I am the only person who remembers me this way.” She smiled at Paul, peaceful and resigned, and Paul wished he could fade into the air. “It is always the same, you know, in my mind. No matter how old, when I look into a mirror, this face is what I expect to see.”

He couldn’t hide his dismay, but she was too nearsighted to see it. She reached for his hand again and squeezed it; her skin was feverishly warm.

“It is a beautiful memory,” she said. “Thank you.”

He retreated as soon as he could without drawing notice. He found himself in his aunt’s bedroom, where the dwindling sunlight was blotted to a thin stripe by the curtains. It was cold; Hazel still wasn’t middle-class enough to leave the heat running in an empty room. Paul sat in the window seat, stretching out his thin legs and trying to forget that he existed. His only companions were the shadows of family photographs and the quiet, snuffling snores of the cat at the foot of the bed.

The door slivered open, and Laurie edged inside. She put a finger to her lips, grinning, and installed herself beside him on the window seat.

“This is so fucking boring,” she said, reveling in a word that hadn’t yet lost its novelty. She swung her stockinged legs up to drape over his; Paul only gave her a halfhearted shove before yielding to the intrusion. “Hazel wanted me to find you and tell you there’s cake in a few minutes. It’s gross, though, the frosting is full of coconut.”

“You’re the only one who doesn’t like it, weirdo,” said Paul automatically, but he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm to tease her.

Laurie rolled her head to one side and touched her temple to the curtains. The family always noticed Paul’s likeness to his father, but no one remarked on how much stronger a resemblance there was in Laurie. Alone among the Fleischer children, she had missed out on their grandfather’s red hair. Her face was fuller than Paul’s and far more kind. But the others didn’t expect her to take after their father—it was something only Paul noticed, something that now and then 

could strike him breathless with grief.

“Are you okay?” Her eyes met his, and she made a quick, matter-of-fact assessment, nothing like the rest of the family’s self-interested concern. “You look really sad.”

Paul was tired of being asked, but he was also tired of pretending the answer was what everyone wanted it to be.

“Aren’t you sad, too?”

Laurie made a noise that was a shade too angry to be a laugh.

“I miss Dad,” she said. “He messed everything up.”

“Well.” Paul tucked his glasses into his breast pocket and shut his eyes. “You’re not wrong.”

 

2.

He remembered the boy from freshman orientation—months ago now, but the memory still lingered. Paul had only seen him from a distance, then; he was a laughing dark-haired blur with a straight spine, perpetually surrounded by people as if he took for granted that he ought to be. He’d reminded Paul of the golden boys he knew in high school, the state-champion track teammates and stars of school plays. Paul remembered writing an elaborate life story for the boy in his head while he picked at the label on his soda bottle and spoke to no one. He couldn’t remember any details of the story now, but he hadn’t chosen them to be memorable. Paul assumed such people had the luxury of leading uneventful lives.

The boy had come to class alone, which looked unnatural on him. He sat a row back from Paul, carefully draping his satchel and wool winter coat over the back of his seat. He wore his sleeves folded back from his forearms, which he leaned on as he listened, attentive to the point of impatience. His hands were very like Paul’s, long-fingered and lean, blue delicate shadows of vein just visible. There was a winter-faded smear of freckles beneath his skin, and his watch (burgundy leather) was a shade too large for his wrist.

The professor was making a list, ETHICAL ISSUES IN THE SCIENCES. Paul turned forward again at the squeal of the chalk. He thought he felt the other boy glance toward him, as if he’d finally noticed that he was being watched, but Paul didn’t dare look back.

“So many eager volunteers,” said Professor Strauss. He picked up the class roster again, holding the chalk between his fingers. He wore a film of eraser dust on his hand like a white laboratory glove. “Let’s see, how about—Paul Fleischer, Biology. Perhaps you can think of a pertinent problem in experimental ethics?”

His classmates were looking at him, not staring, but in that moment the distinction felt very fine.

“Well,” he said, “there’s the fact that doctors keep medically torturing people in the name of science whenever they feel like they can get away with it.”

All the air left the room. Strauss took a moment to shake himself.

“Human subject experimentation,” Strauss said to the class, “is an excellent example of what we’ll be talking about in this class. The places where the demands of scientific inquiry come up against the boundaries of human need—”

“Pardon me for interrupting,” said the boy behind him suddenly, “but I don’t think that’s what he was saying.”

Paul turned, slowly, to look at him. The boy sat at attention, turning his pen between his fingers. When the other students’ eyes landed on him, he hardly seemed to notice.

“Of course it’s an example,” the boy said, “but it’s not his example. I think what Fleischer is actually getting at is a widespread failure of the scientific conscience to consider the humanity of its subjects at all.”

“Yes,” said Paul, “yes, that’s it exactly,” but he was speaking so quietly and the words felt so thick that he didn’t think anyone heard him.

“I think that’s sort of a melodramatic way of putting it,” said a voice from the front. Paul knew the speaker slightly—Brady, an upperclassman in Chemistry who had been the student assistant in Paul’s laboratory section the semester before. There couldn’t have been more than five years between them, but he was decisively a man rather than a boy; his hands were broad and thick-fingered, nails wider than they were long. “This isn’t the Third Reich,” Brady said. “Scientists here operate

under ethical standards.”

“Yes, and those standards work so well,” said Paul acidly. “That’s how we get, what, only a few decades of letting innocent people die of syphilis in Tuskegee before anybody thinks to complain—”

“Sure, there are problematic studies, conducted by a few bad apples who manage to avoid notice, but we’re doing something about it. With institutional review boards and the like, we’re imposing—”

“But you can’t impose morality from the outside.” Paul knew anger had seeped into his voice, but he didn’t care. “The whole idea of an infrastructure of ethical oversight is a symptom of the—the ‘failure of the scientific conscience.’ I’m saying there’s something about the way we conduct scientific inquiry that’s actually appealing to people who want to slice people up just to see what happens. Because they sure seem to do it the second they think the infrastructure won’t notice.”

“A review board is just a hedge on liability,” said the boy behind him. “We can’t and shouldn’t pretend it functions as a conscience. Let’s not delude ourselves that we can send Mengele on his way with a stack of consent forms and pretend that solves the problem.”

“Spirited debate!” said Strauss with a clap of his chalk-streaked hands. “Highly preferable to dull-eyed terror. Hold that thought, gentlemen, because the readings for week seven in particular will prove pertinent . . .”

Paul sank back into his chair and exhaled slowly. As the conversation shifted, he felt a stir of movement at his side. The dark-haired boy had gathered his belongings and settled at the desk beside him. Paul watched him, but the boy’s eyes were trained on the professor. They were the same shade of green as sea glass—a soft and striking color but very cold, an eerie contrast with the dark of his lashes.

Strauss had moved on to a girl from the Physics department, who suggested nuclear weapons research. Paul only half listened to the discussion as he sketched a skeleton with Brady’s barrel chest and wide jaw. He blackened the bones and haloed them from behind with the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Further achievements in American ethics, he wrote underneath. A superior system.

Something tapped at his ankle—the toe of a jodhpur boot, stained with a faint crust of sidewalk salt. The dark-haired boy was looking over at his notebook, leaning forward so he could see past Paul’s arm.

Paul felt his face flush. At first he considered turning the page, or tucking his arms around the notebook to conceal it as he’d done countless times, protecting his sketchbooks from the singsong girls who liked to pester him in the cafeteria.

Instead, scarcely

recognizing himself, he pulled the page free and placed it in the boy’s hand.

“We haven’t had an example from you, yet.”

Paul jumped, but Strauss was talking to the boy beside him, with a teacher’s well-worn glee at catching a student unawares. The boy hid the drawing under his desk and smiled, unabashed.

“Just two names to go, and I have to doubt you’re Ramona,” said Strauss serenely. “So you must be—”

“Julian,” answered the boy. “Julian Fromme.”

“I see.” Strauss glanced down at his roster again. “And I see I have you down as ‘undeclared’—surely the lives of the indecisive are beset with ethical quandary.”

A polite titter made its way around the room. In his place Paul would have wanted to melt into the floor, but Julian Fromme endured it without a trace of distress.

“It’s Psychology, actually, as of yesterday,” Julian said. “And I’m interested in social psychology in particular, which is inherently problematic. Every method of social research does some kind of harm. If you observe social phenomena from a distance, you often only see evidence that conforms to your hypothesis—‘objectivity’ is a lie scientists tell themselves, even in the hard sciences, and with qualitative research, forget it. But if you observe from up close, then your presence alters the nature of the data. And social experiments in controlled environments have certainly been conducted, but they all require some degree of deception to get untainted results—which may or may not cross ethical lines,” he added with a glance at Brady, “depending on the particular conscience your IRB has imposed on you.”

“Am I to understand, Mr. Fromme,” said Strauss, “that you want ‘social psychology in general’ listed as an ethical debate in the sciences?”

“Just put me down for ‘confirmation bias,’ ‘observer’s paradox,’ and ‘informed consent,’ please,” said Julian briskly. “I believe that’s the order I cited them in.”

Strauss raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Very well, Mr. Fromme,” he said. “I suppose we won’t throw you to the wolves just yet.”

Strauss turned toward the blackboard again, and Paul watched with alarm as Julian casually set the drawing on his own desk. He looked down at it for a moment, stone-faced and calm. Then he wrote something in the margins with a lazy flourish.

By the time the drawing arrived back in Paul’s hands, Julian’s scarlet ink had bled straight through the cheap paper.

Crime rate reduced to 0%, Red Menace permanently defeated—an apocalypse for the greater good.

(Sign this. I want to keep it.)

 

It didn’t occur to Paul to wait. At the end of class he pushed his books into

his knapsack and zipped his army parka up to the throat. Beyond the second-story windows a soft snow was falling. With the stain of soot blurred by distance, flakes paler than the dark sky, it almost looked white.

He lingered at the top of the stairs to uncurl the ball of his knit wool gloves. Brady pushed past him. When Paul heard someone call out behind him—“Hey, wait a second”—he thought at first that Brady was the one being pursued. It took the sound of his own last name for him to turn and look back.

Julian Fromme smiled when he caught Paul’s eye. His gait was brisk but unhurried; he slung his scarf around his neck as he approached, a single languid movement that betrayed an unthinking sureness in his body.

“In a hurry?”

“Not really.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

Julian joined him at the head of the staircase, fastening the last button on his double-breasted coat. He looked meticulously cared for, like a rare plant in a conservatory; Paul felt abruptly shabby beside him in his anorak and snow boots, too careworn and practical to be worthy of attention.

“You look familiar,” Julian said. “Did we see each other at orientation?”

Paul had forced himself to forget, the memory too humiliating to dwell on. They were supposed to remain strangers—the other boy had been meant to forget him, because Paul couldn’t be the first or last person he’d ever caught watching him. He remembered Julian’s faint smile, the slight rise of his left eyebrow. That eyebrow was sliced through by a thin scar near its outer edge, an incongruous imperfection Paul had noticed with sudden ardor and then stowed away.

He’d spent the rest of the mixer on a bench outside, waiting out the ninety minutes he had promised his mother. He remembered wanting the strange boy to follow him, but of course he hadn’t. They never did. That was how it was always supposed to end.

“I don’t really remember,” he replied, and reflected in Julian’s face he immediately saw the weakness of the lie. “I didn’t stay very long, those things give me a headache.”

Julian smiled, ...