The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy Page B

taunts.
    “Do you want to play one hand open?” I asked. “We’ll lay our cards down?”
    “Oh, no, I’ll be fine.”
    “He’ll be fine,” Chat said.
    “I’ll pick it up,” said Harry.
    And he did. He was a natural card counter. I don’t think he even knew that card counting was a thing people did, playing cards—it was just the only way he could think of to stay alive: to remember every card that was played. He ate the hearts on the first hand, but it was strange the way he cursed himself. Not for misunderstanding; no, he was angry at himself for making mistakes. It was like watching a natural athlete pick up tennis. I played the same game I always did—conservative. I stayed at zero for several hands, and I was beginning to think I would pull out the win when Harry blew my defensive game away. “You little bastard—you got aggressive on us!” cried Chat, when he realized what was up. “How fucking dare you?” Harry giggled the even, low-pitched giggle; evidently it could mean anything he liked.
    When people at school would ask me if Lombardi was as smart aseveryone said, I never thought to cite the crazy computer invention he was supposedly working on or the astronomical-level math classes I heard he was acing. To me the more plebeian achievement was infinitely more impressive: he shot the moon, I used to tell them, on the third hand of hearts he ever played.
    “You realize you have to mix the drinks now,” Chat announced.
    “Oh, sure, Chat,” said Harry. Amazed, I watched him hoist himself to his feet, kneel down again in front of the mini-fridge.
    It made me nervous just to see the vodka bottle in a dorm room in daylight. I almost wanted to get up and check the hall for teachers—a reflex from Chatham. “I feel like we’re going to get busted,” I confessed.
    I felt foolish the minute I said it, but Chat cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, I know.” Then some mutual fear or indecision seemed to silence us for a moment. We both looked down at the pile of cards, then away, listening to Harry crack the ice trays and rattle cubes into the glasses. I think it was the first time either of us had tried it out on anyone else—saying “I got through it, too”; the four previous years of cold comfort—and we had to wait a moment to see if the other would let it stand. The falseness of the notion struck me at once. I thought of the appalling first nights away from home third-form year, as Chatham, fancying itself an English public school, had eschewed “grades.” But in the next moment Harry came rattling back with the drinks, and Chat and I had tacitly agreed to hold up the one thing we had in common as the greatest of connections. Chat asked me: “You went to Chatham?”
    “You went to Hotchkiss?”
    “
I
should have gone to Chatham.” He laughed a laugh so affected one suspected it might have been natural. “I could have been Chattie the Chattie! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Instead I was Chattie the Kissie!”
    Harry sat absolutely still, his hands folded in his lap. It must have been then that my host realized his roommate might have a purpose beyond the occasional bartending: he was that rare thing, the perfect audience, trapped and interested. His presence somehow lessenedthe subsequent embarrassment of our stooping so readily to play do-you-know.
    “So you know Kate Goodenow,” Chat said.
    “Of course—Kate and Nick,” I answered, for I thought of them only as a pair. And who didn’t? At Chatham they had been the couple,
the
couple that transcended other high school romances as surely as God and country, in its happily myopic motto, transcended Yale. Kate was there now; I’d had a postcard from her with the phrase on it, and had stuck on my bulletin board.
    “You talk to Nicko recently?” Chat inquired, eyes downcast, taking a last drag on the cigarette.
    “No.”
    The cards lay thrashed on the table from the last hand. Harry began to pick them up and turn them over quietly.
    Chat