Marco Polo

George can hold his breath underwater for a very long time. Take for instance now, as he reaches his one hundred and fiftieth Mississippi here in Nicole Petr’s dad’s mansion’s pool. He’s been submerged long enough that he can almost pretend there’s no water at all. But he’s got his eyes open, and he can see the legs and the red and the blue-and-white polka dot bikinied bottoms of Angela Ryan and Mary Hobbes, pale through the weak gelatinous light. And he can see Brady Dodd’s cannonballed body puncture the surface and slow to a halt, his path traced by a chaotic bubbly wake for an instant before it scatters and ascends. It’s all quite blurry, and the chlorine is itching away at his eyes, and anyway the air is running out. Something is battering the walls of his chest, neck, mouth, trying to escape.

Mary is interested in George, George knows. In Ms. Teske’s trig class, third period, she sits ahead of him and to the left. George sits with the wall at his right, though usually he puts his back against the wall, given how tiny the desk is. Before Ms. Teske begins her lecture, Mary usually turns herself sideways with her legs crossed over her desk’s steel bar, and she converses with George’s friend Kevin, who sits next to her ahead of George, and who’s known her since second grade. Sometimes she’ll try to bring George into the conversation. Teasing remarks, afterthoughts: “What about you George? Why you so quiet?” “Oh real deep, Kev, real deep, like George.” She can talk about good tv and knows more about sports than even Kevin. And whenever George says something she looks at him really hard, like she’s about to laugh, and usually does laugh, and a lot of the time George doesn’t even know why. To George’s left, completing the square, is a skinny kid with an open mouth and glasses named Andrew Falk. He and George don’t speak.

George takes very thorough notes in trig, more so than in any other class. Mary makes fun of him for getting near-perfect scores. The scores are one reason Ms. Teske lets him sit with his back to the wall, rather than facing straight forward like everyone else.

At age seventeen now, George has never kissed a boy or girl. He’s honestly not sure he would know how.

This is the first night in several months—almost the whole school year—that George has done much of anything with his friends. He is not drinking. A bottle of Admiral Nelson’s sits on the bar on the lower level of Mr. Petr’s mansion. The floor is made of hand-cut octagonal slabs. There’s also a fireplace which he’s never seen lit and which he doesn’t think has a chimney. For the first hour or so after they all arrive he plays pool on a team with Mary against Brady and Nicole. The other guys are off playing basketball in the full-court indoor gym, which has leakage issues and always smells mildewy. Some girls are over there too, probably at the far end, probably kicking a soccer ball back and forth.

He focuses very closely on the array of solids and stripes. They’re losing badly; Nicole plays every weekend. He wonders if that’s all Nicole does on the weekends, out here in River Hills with her dad on the phone with investors upstairs.

Once, mostly by luck, George manages to sink three in a row and Mary gives his triceps an excited little shake. Brady scratches on his turn and drops the cue ball in Mary’s palm with a grumble. She slides the ball back and forth around the far end of the table, waggling her head in a little uncertain dance. “What do you think, Mr. Math?” she looks to George. George is fairly certain that Mary is smarter than him, and that she doesn’t need his advice on anything, really. But he...