The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

out of a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire, suspended at public school, and Pierpont Academy was the only place that would take him. He talked of fights won, beers drunk, cigarettes smoked. We doubted the truth of these claims but listened nonetheless to the stories. He often brought his BB gun to the pond, or a loud boom box he claimed to have stolen. He captured frogs and crickets and once a small green garter snake, keeping each for a spell in a shoe box. I suspected he longed to poke these animals, or hurt them, but he didn’t dare with us there.

      When Ace learned that Joe played baseball, he began to treat him with more interest and more aggression. He began to say things like, “Look, here comes Joe DiMaaaaggio,” drawing out the ah as a croak. But there was also the slightest hint of deference, of awe. Joe was one year younger than Ace but taller, stronger, with an athlete’s calm.

      Joe regarded Ace cautiously. They were friendly, but, I believed at the time, they would never be friends. Ace was an unwanted but unavoidable summer accessory, and we accepted him as we accepted the humidity and the mosquitoes, with only mild complaint.

      The six of us—me and Joe, Nathan and Ace, Caroline and Renee—formed a gang of sorts. We weren’t always together, not every day, but most days we swam at the pond or played Twenty Questions on the grass or watched TV at Nathan’s house while the Goats milled around and slammed doors and talked on the phone in loud, amused voices. In the early evening, once the sun began to drop, we would play baseball at the park. We always handicapped Joe—Only your left hand! No mitt! Close your eyes!—because otherwise the games were short and humiliating. We also wanted to see what Joe could do, and so we pushed him to perform in wilder, more ridiculous scenarios. He did so gamely, laughing, always succeeding at the trials we set. Sometimes we sat in the stands and watched as Ace pitched ball after ball and Joe hit each long and high, a dreamy, lazy smile on his face. An effortless look, as though hitting the ball like that required only the smallest piece of himself.

      “Your brother will be famous,” Nathan said to me one afternoon in his careful, considered way. “He’s already like a superstar.”

      I don’t remember replying. I might have said, Of course. I might have simply shrugged. It seemed so self-evident, there was no need for a reply. Joe was already a superstar. Back then did he know what people expected of him? At the field the look on his face was always dreamy, his movements casual, but it must have cost him to play like that. To give us the spectacle we craved.

      * * *

      IN THE LAST week of the summer of 1983, Joe and Ace fought. It was because of me, or rather what had been done to me. It was about, of all things, my rabbit, Celeste.

      “You live in that gray house, right?” Ace asked me one afternoon. We’d been at the pond all day, and my skin was itchy and sticky from swimming and drying in the sun and swimming again. I felt slightly bored, definitely hungry, wondering what Renee would make us for dinner and whether the book I’d dropped accidentally into the water would dry in time for me to finish it tonight. I was six years old, chubby, pink-faced, and never without a book in hand. Recently I had started to keep lists of words in the black-and-white composition notebooks Renee used for school. They were not poems, not yet, merely catalogs of my feelings and sensations, things I had seen, events that had transpired.

       Green, gold, fish, water, sun, grass, sisters, brother, swimming, free, warm, soft.

      Ace looked at me now with intense interest. “The gray house?” he prodded.

      I looked up from my notebook and nodded.

      “Do you have a pet rabbit?”

      I put down my pencil and closed the book. “She ran away,” I explained, “to be with her brothers and sisters.”

      Ace began to laugh, great big peals. He held his stomach for effect and rolled over onto his back.

      “Run away?” he said. “She didn’t run away. I took that rabbit.”

      “But why?” I asked. I wasn’t angry yet, only confused.

      “She was a mighty fine rabbit. Mighty. Fine.” Ace licked his lips with a slurping sound.

      “Oh, stop it, Ace,” Nathan called. He was swimming, treading water as he listened. “Don’t tease Fiona.”

      “I’m not teasing! I’m just telling the truth! ‘Don’t tease the girls, Ace. Don’t tell lies. Be a good boy like me.’” The last he said in a mocking, high voice. Nathan didn’t respond. He ducked his head beneath the water.

      “You didn’t,” I said to Ace. “You did not.”

      “I didn’t eat her, no. I’m just kidding. What I did was I took her over to the railroad tracks, down the other side of the hill, and played with her a little. I just left her there. On the tracks, I mean.”

      Brown freckles marked the high point of Ace’s cheeks. They seemed to darken as he spoke.

      “I tried to tie her to the track, put a rope around her leg,” he said. “I mean, so I could go back for her, bring her back to your house, but I think she must have gotten away. There was only a little bit of fur when I went to find her. Just a teeny scrap.”

      My face grew hot, a pressure rose behind my eyes. I believed that Ace was lying, that he wanted to see me cry, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I couldn’t help myself. I remembered Celeste and her clean fur, her twitching triangular nose.

       Soft, lovely, new, alone.

      Joe saw me crying. “What did you do to her?” he called across the grass to Ace. Joe’s voice was sharp. He was playing solitaire, the cards spread in front of him, half a deck still in his hands.

      I wanted to say, I’m fine, Joe, but the words wouldn’t come. The humid air moved thickly through my lungs. And then Ace answered for me. He repeated everything he’d told me about Celeste and the train tracks. Joe’s face went still as Ace spoke. I remembered how Joe had loved the rabbit, too.

      “You’re lying,” he said to Ace.

      “I’m not,” Ace answered. Now everyone was listening. Renee had stayed home that day to bake a pie from the raspberries that grew like weeds in the alley behind our house, but the rest of us were there: me, Caroline, Nathan, and two of the Goats. At the pond the lack of parental oversight made us wild in one way but conservative in another. We did not swear or fight with one another. We avoided conflict. Only Ace seemed intent on something more destructive. This would be true his entire life.

      Ace was shorter than Joe, but heavier and thicker. He played no sports; he seemed to exist only on cans of Orange Crush and cellophane packages of Hostess doughnuts he would eat in three bites, powdered sugar ghosting his mouth.

      “What are you going to do?” Ace said. “Huh, Joe? Big strong Joe?”

      We watched Joe: he was very tan, which made his eyes more blue and his hair more gold than brown. All the swimming and hiking up and down the hill had melted away his baby fat. You could see in Joe now the beginning of his broad, muscular shoulders, the athlete’s chest and stomach that years later he would rub with baby oil as a lifeguard at the Bexley rec center’s pool, surrounded always by a cadre of high-school girls who looked like women.

      But today he was still a boy. At his eyebrow one slender muscle twitched.

      Joe did what I remembered instantly Noni doing from before the Pause, before our father’s death, when she was still our mother and engaged in the task of taking care of us. Joe counted down.

      “If you don’t take it back in five seconds,” Joe said, “you’ll be sorry.” He swallowed and flicked his cowlick back from his eyes. “Five. Four. Three. Two—”

      Before Joe could finish, Ace turned and ran. His legs carried him up away from the bank and around to the slippery top of the dam where the water rushed over concrete gummed with green algae. He pranced along the top. “Come and get me, Joe,” he said.

      Joe