LITMIR.BIZ

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you can trust. Strangers you just met, even your friends—maybe your friends most of all, since you have to trust them more.”

      People shuffle around them, pause to stare into paintings, then move away. The skin of Terrell’s face feels hot. He does not look at Scott, but past him, over his shoulder, at a painting of a haystack.

      “Answer me this,” Scott says. “Have you made some real mistakes in the people you’ve picked as friends?”

      “No.”

      “Go ahead and trust them, then,” Scott says. “You’ll be sorry.”

      “Terrell!” Ruth says, suddenly ten feet away. “You come away from there!”

      “No reason you had to lie to me about your name.” Scott says.

      “Machine didn’t catch me,” Terrell says, moving away. “You would have known.”

      It seems Scott is following, also stepping toward Ruth, but when Terrell looks back, he is gone.

      “Mind yourself,” Ruth says. Her face is all twisted, her braids clicking. “Don’t you know better than that? Man like that, next thing I know you’ll be gone for good. Who knows what that kind of person wants with a boy like you?”

      “We were just talking,” Terrell says, enjoying himself. “He was all right.”

      “He was not all right.”

      Terrell walks ahead again, beyond the sound of her voice. Circling from room to room, he looks at the floor, then the ceiling. He is not supposed to get more than one room ahead of her; when he hears her humming grow louder, he moves on. Almost every Sunday, it is this same thing. Ruth only goes to church because she thinks it’s good for him, and because she likes to sing. Jesus set a good example, she says, wherever it was he came from. Terrell doubts that Ruth even likes it here, in the museum; she’ll tell the neighbors about it, as if it will impress them.

      Most of the rooms are empty, but floorboards creak and voices answer each other, bouncing through doorways. All the air has been sucked in and out by all the people, again and again, every day. Terrell can hardly breathe.

      Out in the foyer of the museum, things open up. The ceiling is high, and sun shines in through the row of front doors. His friends are out there, now—close by, probably; it’s safer around here than in the neighborhoods, and cooler along the river, in the fountains, on the grass under the bushes. He trusts them; he doesn’t have to test them. Terrell smiles, thinking of the man, Scott. Ruth hadn’t liked that one bit.

      He turns away from the sun and begins climbing the marble steps. At least, in here, he is safe from being laughed at, wearing this shirt with the collar, these pants with creases up the front. These brown shoes used to belong to someone else. Someone with deformed feet.

      At the top of the stairs a twenty foot tall metal woman stands, naked and green, pulling a bow back, ready to shoot an arrow. If she let go, the string would tweak her nipple. Terrell bends his neck, looking at her, until he hears Ruth at the bottom of the stairs, singing some hymn to herself; then he steps through a stone doorway, into rooms full of crosses, paintings of old people praying. He runs his fingers along the smooth sides of vases big enough to hold him, if he could fit through their necks. The rooms are darker, glass cases lit up. Little men made of pottery. Clay horses.

      *

      The whole time he was talking to the boy, Scott’s thoughts had been forking out ahead of him. Now he waits upstairs in the Asian wing, ready for Terrell to come along.

      Scott has been following him, waiting for the right moment, ever since he saw the woman the boy came in with. She had swung through the front doors, into the foyer, and filled all that space. The ceiling stretched eighty feet overhead and a mobile as big as a rowhouse hung from it, pieces of curved metal twisting from cables. She wore a blue dress, her hips thick and high. Beads in her hair—strings of long, thin braids. Her feet forced into tight white sandals. Scott liked the look of her, the shape of her, like someone you could hold onto at the end of a long day when you were tired, something solid to hold onto while everything else whirled past. He chose the boy because he wanted to meet her; he needs a handhold, an opening. Now the boy is coming closer—his light footsteps, the shuffle of shoes too big for him. Scott waits, hidden.

      “Terrell,” he says, stepping out from behind a pillar. “Now I know your name.”

      “So what?” Terrell tries to keep moving, but soon gives up. “You been following me?” he says.

      “Just thought we got kind of interrupted by your mother,” Scott says, “right when we were getting somewhere. You see, all I was saying back there, that was true, and it got me thinking of a few other things no one told me about, when I was younger. Had to learn it all myself.”

      “The only reason I talked to you,” Terrell says, “the only reason I’m talking to you, is because Ruth—that’s my sister, not my mother—doesn’t like it, me talking to you. If she sees me doing it, then maybe we’ll get to leave early. I never wanted to talk to you.”

      Scott does not respond, not right away. They stand still for a moment, silent in that space, faded paint on the huge wooden beams above, dull brass fittings on the heavy wardrobes along the wall. Through a doorway, skylights illuminate a bamboo fence, low trees. A tea house and Buddhist shrine have been taken apart piece by piece, then put back together, brought all the way from Japan. Scott has seen it before, plenty of times.

      “Well,” he says. “I think that may be true, and it’s real clever of you, but I think it’s more than that, talking to me. You’re trying to prove something to me, and that’s cool. It’s not like I need you to be afraid of me.”

      “I’m not.”

      “But, man, there are givers and there are takers, you know? I’m telling you some things here; this is beyond generosity.”

      Footsteps draw closer, and Scott waits, silent again. A guard walks into the room, his face in shadow, then goes around them, through another doorway. His footsteps fade.

      “Once you get someone talking,” Scott says, “then you get to where you know more about them than they know about you. See what I mean? You never want to show someone all the way how smart you are.” He smiles, his eyes adjusting to the faint light coming through the latticed screens along the wall.

      “You don’t know about me,” Terrell says. “It’s you doing all the talking.”

      “Exactly,” Scott says. “True. But I’m careful about what I say” He pauses, waving his hands toward all the room’s corners. “You know why it’s so dark in here? Light wears things down, that’s why. What are you thinking about?”

      “Read a book in school,” Terrell says, then stops, as if reconsidering how much he wants to say. “It was about two kids who slept in a museum,” he says. “Hid from the guards, every single night. You could do that here.”

      “I have a place to sleep,” Scott says his voice rising. “Why would I want to do that?”

      “I didn’t say that.”

      Scott likes the shape of the boy’s face in the half-light—chin jutting out, jaw set, the skull smooth and rounded. He looks into it, and questions return to him, remembered from his interview at the hospital: Before you were fifteen, did you shoplift? Were you a bully? Bullied? Did you torture or kill animals? Set fire to or destroy things that weren’t yours? Would you say you like to see what you can get away with?

      “Goodbye,” Terrell says. He turns quickly and struts away, before he can be slowed or stopped.

      “Fine,” Scott says. He walks in the other direction, not wanting to appear desperate. He does not even look over his shoulder, to see if the boy is watching him. In the next room, wooden figures line the walls, their hands missing fingers, their bodies lacking arms, their earlobes stretched out. A dragon writhes across the ceiling above, ready to fall on Scott’s head.

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