A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan Page A

for me is like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms. I remember every hug I’ve given him. I learn one thing each time: how warm his skin is, how he has muscles like Scotty even though he never takes his shirt off. This time I find his heartbeat, which pushes my hand through his back.
    Jocelyn goes, Who else knows?
    Scotty, of course. Alice, too, but it’s only later that this bothers us.
    I have cousins in Los Angeles, so Jocelyn calls Lou from our apartment, where the charge won’t stand out on the phone bill. I’m two inches away on my parents’ flowered bedspread while she dials the phone with a long black fingernail. I hear a man’s voice answer, and it shocks me that he’s real, Jocelyn didn’t make him up, even though I never supposed such a thing. He doesn’t go, Hey beautiful , though. He goes, I told you to let me call you.
    Jocelyn goes, Sorry, in an empty little voice. I grab the phone and go, What kind of hello is that? Lou goes, Who the Christ am I talking to? and I tell him Rhea. Then he goes in a calmer voice, Nice to meet you, Rhea. Now, would you hand the phone back to Jocelyn?
    This time she pulls the cord away. Lou seems to be doing most of the talking. After a minute or two, Jocelyn hisses at me, You have to leave. Go!
    I walk out of my parents’ bedroom into our kitchen. There’s a fern hanging from the ceiling by a chain, dropping little brown leaves in the sink. The curtains have a pineapple pattern. My two brothers are on the balcony, grafting bean plants for my little brother’s science project. I go outside with them, the sun poking into my eyes. I try to force myself to look straight at it, like Scotty did.
    After a while, Jocelyn comes out. Happiness is floating up from her hair and skin. Ask me if I care, I think.
    Later she tells me Lou said yes: he’ll come to the Dildos gig at the Mab, and maybe he’ll give us a record contract. It’s not a promise, he warned her, but we’ll have a good time anyway, right, beautiful? Don’t we always?
    ·   ·   ·
    The night of the concert, I come with Jocelyn to meet Lou for dinner at Vanessi’s, a restaurant on Broadway next door to Enrico’s, where tourists and rich people sit outside drinking Irish coffees and gawking at us when we walk by. We could have invited Alice, but Jocelyn goes, Her parents probably take her to Vanessi’s all the time. I go, You mean her mother and stepfather.
    A man is sitting in a round corner booth, smiling teeth at us, and that man is Lou. He looks as old as my dad, meaning forty-three. He has shaggy blond hair, and his face is handsome, I guess, the way dads can sometimes be.
    C’mere, beautiful, Lou actually does say, and he lifts an arm to Jocelyn. He’s wearing a light blue denim shirt and some kind of copper bracelet. She slides around the side of the table and fits right under his arm. Rhea, Lou goes, and lifts up his other arm for me, so instead of sliding in next to Jocelyn, like I was just about to do, I end up on Lou’s other side. His arm comes down around my shoulder. And like that, we’re Lou’s girls.
    A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessi’s and saw linguine with clams. All week long I’ve been planning to order that dish. Jocelyn picks the same, and after we order, Lou hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies’ room. It’s a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. There’s a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Jocelyn heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and shuts her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table I’ve got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we did before wasn’t really coke. We sit down and tell Lou about a new band we’ve heard of called Flipper, and Lou tells us about being on a train in Africa that didn’t completely stop at