Chapter 1

A light rectangle in a dark room.
Of all the children spread before Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—it had to be the Oswego boy whose response to the assignment--Draw your house--had turned out, at least as best she could see, to be undrawn, blank. And oh, he’d been given nearly twenty minutes. You were always disappointed. From the child sized bucket seat in which she had pooled herself, seeing the page through the fan slowly dicing the LA heatwave, it was a blind eye, blinking madly.
Seated at the boy’s elbow, Evan Bresios, a fellow fourth-grader, could see better. On the whole--yes, 90% of the page was blank, but in the center two slim rectangles drawn in the faint, bluish graphite of a mechanical pencil floated like snow angels. Onto their lengths were tacked 6 cubes per side so that—if you were counting—in total the page held 24 squares, some of which had been labeled in the crabbed, boyish handwriting of Jareth Oswego, who now stared not at his oeuvre but out the window, which faced not to the Malibu surf but to the hills, dry with scrubbrush, tossed toys, a single Nerf gun whose neon had been bleached by the sun to bone white. It appeared that he thought he was done. For the assignment—Draw your home—such a composition was as unrevealing as an ice-cube tray; empty boxes surrounding cornrows of dead-air.
It was the best Jareth could do.
In the house in which he had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone, doors he had never opened, an entire floor, even—the loft reached by the flight of stairs that rose from his father’s studio—whose contents he could not describe. Aged eight, dark haired and slender fingered, with the shaded sills of sleeplessness that hang beneath the eyes of the bookish, Jareth was adamantly uncurious. Where others would snoop, the boy did not bother; conversations, held through paneled doors, did not draw his ear to the latch. For this, his parents called him “Wide Eye.” The name, Jareth would later learn, as he did his best to keep the Screenwriting for Dummies above the rising waters of his eldest sister’s lion-footed tub, referred not only to his tendency to stare, but to the angle of shot necessary to capture a whole picture at expense of its details. Perhaps this was the fault his parents had desired to reference; More than one teacher had written him off as a “space cadet” (a trill which evolved, in his teens, into “pothead”). Years later, onto his third lover by now, Jareth Oswego would be broken up with over the admonition, delivered in a San Francisco bagel bar, that he “Seemed to see nothing.” Looking out through the plate glass window to the street, he would note how two steps ahead of a meter maid, a civilian in cargo shorts was depositing quarters—an act of saintliness that were it not for his gaze would have died unobserved. And he kept watching, half testing himself, half attempting to prove something he knew not to be true—that he was a keen observer of the world. He catalogued the details—the city employee’s standard issue black Reebok’s, the good samaritan’s car keys which she held in her right hand by grace of a neon pink keychain (a bottle opener shaped like a shark). But he would not notice that across the restaurant, a family had entered—their faces vaguely familiar, like the faces of statues bathed in 100 years of rain. When they waved at him—the child had waved, smiling—he found he could not remember who they were.
These were the sorts of things Jareth Oswego was expected to know but that he did not. Things like the names of old friends (the family had run his mother’s yoga studio), the feelings of his lover (she had left him for his inability to be kind to her in the small ways that she was kind to him), and the layout of his house (gargantuan).
And so, when asked in the third grade (maybe it had been the fourth? He could not remember) to sketch the house where he lived—Jareth Oswego had disappointed everyone, not least of all his teacher.
A twenty-something East Coast transplant, a bored nail-biter who ensconced herself in cable-knit sweaters, Gloria had been drawn to the West by wishy-washy ideas of fame that she was just beginning to give up on. No great beauty, she hadn’t tried for acting, instead attempting a screenplay to which she had never actually devoted herself, thinking that at any time—halfway through—some agent seeing her type in a coffee shop would approach and strike up a conversation. Her script centered on a farmer who, discovering a pot of gold…and that was where it had ended, 24 pages later, on the line of dialogue delivered between his two quibbling teenaged daughters, “Let’s go to the mall!” As only the starving can be, Gloria was hungry. Overlooked in her youth—the middle child, the least beautiful—she sought the opposite. But when she made it out here, she was soothed somewhat by fame’s proximity. There was a neighboring farmer in her plot outline who, by grace of the gold finding, finds love in the form of the prospector he harbours.
And she could get even closer, she thought. The idea had hatched that morning, waiting for the bus because—she would explain later, at a dinner party, to her friends, she had felt sorry for a man wearing a sandwich board. The board read “Star Maps,” and, feeling “charitable,” she said, at just that moment, she handed him ten dollars. The bus having come just then, the wrapped map was shoved into her purse—which she happened to still be carrying at the dinner party where she relayed the story. Her host, a college friend, cleared the pits of the olives they had sucked, earlier, from the living room table. Together they unfolded the map. As his pointer finger sketched a snail-trail along the PCH up to Sunset, Tacoma, the 405tk split, and Gloria sat back—shocked into a stupor. It was like seeing your name on a gravestone in a cemetery of a town in which you had never lived.
She read out the names: “Bresios. Varner, Druberry, Realto, Oswego…” They were all there. It was a roster. Maeanne Varner, ponytailed, a little stupid, daughter of John Warner, head of yes, Varner Dreamscastle; Blake Druberry, grandson, an exhaustive IMDB search revealed, of the silent film actor of the same last name and a current star of recent romantic comedies she hadn’t at all enjoyed; and Debbie Realto, Ella Cunningham, the Madison twins, Evan Bresios—whose father was the head of development for ABC-TV, LA, and Jareth Oswego—
“Jareth Oswego,” the host, Brian, had said, smirking. “How’d ya like that.” Patrick had been serious in college, had majored in Economics, had driven out to LA only to follow a girlfriend who left him for an “LA loser.” Brian was no fanboy, no starfucker, (in local parlance) and yet it was Patrick who was the one who had asked, “What’s he like?”
What are they like. Like—Her description had been hasty—they’re perfectly normal, they’re the same, they’re picked up in over-large cars, they, they, they they learn Spanish from their maids, they don’t know (she remembered a clean-up session after a ceramics demonstration given by a volunteer mother) they don’t know how to properly use a sponge. (It must be squeezed of the dirty water before it can be used again.)
She provided the relevant details, falsified fables, all the while thinking of how she herself was not interested in what they were like. They were children. She was interested in where they lived.
Born back somewhere near oh, god, Milwaukee, she’d found escape as so many children have since the advent of the television. When she had stayed home sick (an excuse she probably feigned) she watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and later, sucked at the straws of her sodas while consuming whole marathons of Cribs, the MTV show where musicians—mostly rappers—took cameramen on private tours of their barely-furnished homes, focusing on their bedrooms (“Where the magic happens”) and on collections of souped-up sportscars they kept glistening and waxed. One show, a high-school drama, intrigued her in even its establishing shots, as the camera dollyed to a sedan, probably, traced a beachfront highway and glanced up at the hills, at the houses that grew up from the brush like teeth from the flesh of the mouth.
Gloria had ended up in La Brea--inland, five miles off the beach, where the smog hung low and dense and where the cigarette smoke of an unemployed roomate clogged the old drapes, lending her whole life a fogginess that lifted only when the bus reached the PCH with its extended, unfettered views of the sea on the left and, on the right, the pseudo-Mediterranean villas angled toward the oceans like racing sailboats on the same tack. Her heart lurched to see the houses. Though the LA she had found here was no more glamorous than the clapboard she had come from, Gloria understood that it was in these mansions that fame had hidden itself, furrowing into chenille carpets, crawling into the potted aloe veras and rising, inflamed, phoenix-like into the eyes of fame’s offspring—the unremarkable children who stared back at her from across their desks.
If she could ask them to describe their houses, she thought, the effect would be her own, personalized Cribs, smacking of an authenticity heretofore unseen. That night on the way back from Brian’s, the windows of the bus, lit from within by the green, lavatorial light, had turned to mirrors. To see out, Gloria had to put her face right to the glass. Islanded in total darkness, the small amber squares of lighted windows were the only things visible—rectangles of warmth in floating darkness. How like a constellation it was, she thought, how aptly named. You could learn to navigate if you could only learn their names.

Of all the children, Jareth Oswego had to be the one with a blank page. Evan Bresios—looking on—gave a sneer, then turned his nose down to his own paper, which he was vehemently “coloring in” a deep cobalt.
“That’s a strange color for a basement,” Gloria had said, in passing. “Is that a pool?”
These sort of questions tested Bresios’ patience—at base he was an artist, misunderstood. The pool, he explained, using a stubby finger to walk her through it, was outside, on the deck that faced the ocean (such a location allowed for an “infinity effect”). This indigo swathe was above his father’s screening room, made to stand in for what he was now labeling neatly, the “artificial sky.” There were shooting stars, and a switch at the side of the room could change the “time” to daybreak, evening. Of course. Gloria should have known. Walking from the basement up and out to a stoop flanked by two aloe vera plants sagging in their terra cotta pots, stood the Bresios father himself, burly and bowtied, his remaining family members standing shoulder-to-shoulder by his side with the ease of manner of a prison lineup. Beneath him, a placard, “Jimmy Bresios, President of ABC-TV Development Division! in the unassuming manner that below the busts of Caesars, Gloria had noted how sculptors simply allotted a number. These children—these strange children. Having been given everything, they did not yet know to hide it away.
So what a disappointment to see the Oswego boy’s sketch. She leaned over Jareth now. Yes, there at the southernmost end of the paper, a cube read, “Celia’s room”; at its opposite, “Leona’s”; and then on row labeled “Floor 1” a kitchen, dining-room and living room were as yet only half-described. Jareth had spent nearly all of the twenty minutes trying to recall how the back-parlor, in which he was never allowed, could be reached through the kitchen. His mind hopped up staircases, drained into sinks and flew through the French doors—whose panes were oiled with fingerprints—out into the back garden where a black hose lay twisted. Where did the hose begin? Where did the water come from? Best to start with the ocean that, with the crayon labeled “Azure” he spent the rest of the period coloring.
When Jareth thought down the long slim hallway on the second floor, he could only really say what was behind three of the doors—his room; his parent’s locked bedroom, and a closet stacked with towels that the maid opened and closed before bathtime. His parents’ bedroom. He had been inside only a few times—sent there on errands by Alma, or by the quaking call of his own mother’s voice when she had been sick with pneumonia for those two weeks when he was five, or one time—impelled by a door that had been left open. He had walked over, the seven year old had told himself, to close it. But when he reached the open slice of air between the frame and the knob, he entered.
The bed had been made, the sheets pulled tight to the sides and tucked into the frame. Along the right-hand side of the room, a long dresser of bleached wood held on its surface glistening minutiae: photographs in silver frames, small bottles of coloured water, a flecked comb of animal shell which he ran through his hair, looking at his face in a round mirror, before a sound at the other end of the hall—Alma opening and closing the towel closet—startled him and, laying down the comb on the bleached wood as he had found it, Jareth Oswego scrambled out, leaving the door—as he had found it—ajar.
It was a hot day for LA. The classroom was dark, the windows shaded and facing out not to the surf but to the hills, whose scrubby brush was studded by toys long tossed over the fence—tennis balls, a single rollerblade, a neon water gun bleached by the sun. Gloria ran her manicured finger down one of Jareth’s ice-cube trays.
“And where’s your room?” she asked, her voice weedy, prying.
“I haven’t fit it in yet.” He knew his room to be between Celia’s and Leona’s, across the hall from the exercise room—where the Nordic Track elicited unoiled weepings whenever his mother swept across it—but he wanted to be sure.
Exasperated, nearly laughing at the wasted effort (for why assign the class of the son of Zed Oswego to draw a blueprint if he alone could tell her nothing?), Gloria said what Jareth would recall years later—aged 16 and one half, sloughing down high-school’s halls in a pair of his dad’s old boots (steel tipped, tassled, hidden beneath the silk of luffing oversized cargo pants), and running into Bresios, now prone to hide his chiding eyes behind the mirrored shades of Aviator sunglasses.
That teacher, whoever she was, had it been Gloria? had said, “Well I guess it’s alright” or some other apology for a cutting remark he had, by now, forgotten. And then she had said, “You’re the only one here who seems to know you don’t have to show anything you don’t want to.”
It wasn’t, Jareth had wanted to say, that he didn’t want to share the life he saw, it was that he didn’t seem to see it himself. He would like, he thought then, for her to come over and sitting in the corner—the drawing pad on her lap, draw it. He would like her to show him what she saw.

At age 16, Jareth Oswego, despite all the family’s grumblings against the institution, was still at Waeburn. It had seemed to the Oswegos, when they first enrolled Leona, to be an obvious choice—and the rest of the kids simply stuck to the regimen. At Waeburn Pluralistic School, classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. Modern in design when it was conceived in 1963, the school was a cluster of low-ceilinged, hooded concrete buildings was connected over the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. The lawns between the halls had either been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched your legs if you sat down Indian-style, or had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets.
It did not rain often. The weather was dry, and the neon squirt guns of the kindergartners, left out for a week, would be brought in a different, lighter shade, having been bleached by the sun.
In a school of 512—even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by the youngest, Celia, 14 going on 15. The reputation which plagued him was neither his eldest sister’s—she had gone on to Harvard, to the chagrin of all of her former teachers when faced with the two who could not live up—nor the reputation of Celia, whose good looks had landed her on both the pages of C-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague the three Oswegos—at high-school, in their twenties, and in their life—was the reputation of their father. It was not something that could be “played down” or “lived up to”—it was like being born in another country, or of another sex, or into another creed, as ingrained into their identity as numbers planted into the ivory faces of dies.
At age twenty-three, Zed Oswego had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Zed’s VH1 backstory—his rise into fame due to cokehead bassist and high-school pal Rick Moldin, the ensuing tours with their group The Gadabouts, and his gradual fadeout to domesticity in a mansion in the Malibu hills which he shared with his groupie wife—was known to the school’s population who could trace, in the face of his dark-haired son, the father’s youthful moonface. Jareth’s pale face was round as an apple, cut into with the hard lines of a slim nose, thin lips, and the tired trails which drained from the tear ducts down into the corners of Jareth’s mouth, which hid a set of too-small, rounded teeth so perfectly aligned as to be the reason, Margerie Durnham told her friends at a sleepover in the tenth grade, as to be the reason that she loved him. Though Jareth would never know it to be love, he would sense Margerie’s strangeness. He took her quiet stares not as affection but as that other terrible hunger he had become more adept at recognizing—a starvation for fame, or for the proximity to it, which burned in the guts of even the best at pretending not to care.
Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. So how difficult it had been for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and had made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven on a cross-country tour.
Though in every academic Leona Oswego excelled, it was in music class that she gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. Her own notes, ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls, sounded like the strained, peachy notes of a cat. A stab at chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D’Ambreezio (the only boy). When called out by the frustrated conductor, worried she did not truly know the lyrics, she was asked to solo her rendition. The correct lyrics to “Little Drummer Boy,” she would learn, were not “Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo" The following quarter, she was not asked to return. She spent the period (8th) in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s rebellion could be measured as a success in that she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene. Harvard had started as a name only to be whispered, a rebellion in the utmost—the symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders that Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures, had attempted to rail against. The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope, and in the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt weighted by. That night, at a family “celebration” dinner, her father grumbled, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was—Harvard—where lawns were raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, where kids sat around circular tables naming philosophers, where black and white and asian students sat forward on the edges of futons, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs. At least, that was the part of the dream that Jareth Oswego understood. His sister had been away now for a year and a half. She’d spent the intervening summer interning at a magazine in New York, whose name he had never before heard, and despite how close they had been in high school, she rarely wrote. This fall she would come home for her first Thanksgiving—an ample four days which he looked forward to, the soddy mess of fall spreading before him otherwise without interruption.
Labelled in Waeburn’s high school hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos bought on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying a skateboard (named Legend by his Hollywood parents, a name he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the dry pile of leaves. Despite the pastoral setting the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, teenagers were forced by civil engineers to the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion. His father, really, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his bowl (a glass thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, what spoilsport. Anyway, it wasn’t really rebellion that drew Jareth to the stuff, he understood. It was simply that anyone born into the name Oswego desired escape. And that for Leona, escape came in her dreams of the stratospheric lecture halls at Harvard where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or maybe just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood his older sister.

But then there was Celia. To Leona and Jared, their younger sister’s rebellion was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The first thing was that she was beautiful—extra-terrestrially, numbingly so. In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement of the Oswego house—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would have been the one to chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother would say, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there” and their father, lovingly, would call her, in the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert, “My fawn.”
At home, Celia’s beauty was a farce. In the open halls of Waeburn, it was everything.

It is an afternoon back in September, or October maybe, when Jareth, aged 16 and one half, is out in the “alley” with Evan Bresios. The smoke has cleared their lungs and the two of them, sitting cross-legged in the moldering Eucalyptus leaves, are quiet—nothing left to say but to watch the action in the parking lot. Gloria, the fourth grade teacher, can be seen behind the dusty windshield of her Honda, sitting in the frontseat paying attention only to her sandwich, whose crunching wrapper is unhearable through the glass. Barker, the principal, only about 100 yards away, is whispering into his cellphone—probably, Bresios says, a call to a mistress. Jareth snorts a giggle. Either way, they’re both too absorbed to notice anything, or perhaps it’s an adamant unnoticing, a desire not to be the one to intervene. In either case, if they’d wanted to suspend kids like Jareth or Evan, they could have done it years ago—probably at the camping trip on Catalina when, accused of offering pot to a younger girl who’d gone running to the authorities, they’d endured a “talking to” offered by a teacher sitting on a log bench, and rebutted by simply denying. In the end, it was probably their parents that saved them. Kids like Evan and Jareth were assets to the school’s endowment; to kick them out wouldn’t be good business. So it’s Jareth’s privilege that’s brought him to the edge of this lot, in a desire to escape it, just as it’s Jareth’s privilege that allows his rebellion to sustain. He chooses not to think about the second part, especially not now, as the smoke hits his lungs, washing the world in an invisible fog, in which things move slowly enough to catch them.
And then in the parking lot, there’s Mitzy, moving too quickly, tugging Paul Dine whose worn flannel is tied around her waist in a loose knot. The two have probably been out in a music room, fucking.
“Is your stuff gone?” Mitzy says, looking at the red-eyed boys, eyeing the imprint of the glass bowl in the exterior pocket of Jareth’s cargo pants.
“We just cashed it,” Bresios says, nodding. It’s okay though, Dine says, he’s got more out in his car, and so Mitzy sits down next to Bresios, her back to the cool wall, as she waits for Dine to come back from his car—a 1957 Chevy xxx with a fold-down back seat and an interior of red velour, very retro. He keeps his stuff in not the glove compartment (too easy to find) but in the fold-out drink holder, which when not folded out provides a neat slot next to the radio. Dine, the son of single-mother Tracey Dine, a character actress in A-list films that mostly take place in the forties and fifties (she’s got that look about her, that hard-set grimace, that hair that fluffs around the head like a whirling storm) has a vaguely retro look about everything he does, which is why, Mitzy likes him. He seems not to belong not only to Waeburn, with its stomach-clenching 60’s architecture of social oppression. The three of them actually sit there not talking; Mitzy’s thankful for that, and the two stoned boys are just watching the pot hit them.
When Dine gets back, they smoke his stuff, Jareth and Evan yes, would like a little more, and the converation turns to the suck-i-tude of school in general, and in what had elapsed earlier that day. Mitzy saw the horror-show that was second-period debate—the rhetoric assignment the rest of the school’s been buzzing about—and Dine, who’d seen it too, fills in the details.
“It was harrowing,” Dine starts. “First rate classic.”
“It was your sister, man,” Bresios says, elbowing Jareth, who’s suddenly all ears, attempting to grab his eyes off the glare starring out from the waxed cars catching the sun in the parking lot. “What? Celia? What’d she do?”
A giggling silence. “I can’t believe you don’t know about this,” or some other equally dismissive comment from Dine.
“She never does anything,” Jareth says. “What is it.”
“Oh is this the thing with Celia in Debate?” Mitzy asks. She’s the type of tomboy who likes to play that she’s above this gossip. It’s funny here, to her, to hear the boys gossip in the way she pretends to hate the girls for doing. At home she’s got four sisters, which is why, she knows, she needed this niche.
“What is it?” Jareth needs to know. “You know about this—“ he says, accusing Bresios of not spilling earlier.
“I heard about it from Luckor,” Dine explains. Luckor is the dark, gossipy Russian boy always trying to get in on the ins with the smokers. He has third period with Bresios, ceramics, and while the two are spinning pots they always talk, though Bresios will claim not to enjoy it. “So she’s in Debate, right? What’s the topic again.”
“The topic,” Bresios says, now taking on the role of teller, “was International Aid.”
“Right,” Dine says, “The topic was international aid. Like, what countries to give your money to if you have extra money. So, like, you’re supposed to want to give it to the poorest countries that like, with the money, would be able to help themselves instead of just like, needing you later for more money or some other stuff.”
“You don’t teach a man to fish,” Mitzy says. “Or wait, the opposite.”
“You do teach a man to fish; you don’t give him a pole,” says Bresios.
“Right.” Mitzy says.
“GET BACK TO IT,” Jareth’s nearly screaming.
They look out at the lot. “Quiet down man,” Dine says, before restarting.
“So there’s Celia in the front of the class and this is the topic. The guy before her, Luckor says, gave some speech where he was like, ‘We should give the money to England because if we do, since their government is more competent than ours, they could like, help the countries that really need helping and we wouldn’t have to think about it anymomre. It’s like, he wants to outsource competency or some shit.’”
“Get to Celia,” Jareth says.
“Celia has the rebuttal,” Dine says. “She says you can’t give to the rich. Because, the rich, by being rich, have no idea what to do with money.”
“True,” Mitzy says, leaning over him toward the curb, to ash a cigarette he hadn’t seen her light.
“So old Rube” (Rube is the teacher of the 10th Grade Debate) “has been spending the past month telling them to use examples, like personal examples.”
“Oh god,” Jareth says, pressing his fingers to his eyes so he can see the red constellations of blood there, “I know where this is going.”
And still, Jareth listens. Like watching Nascar for the crashes. You have to know the terrible things in your own life, you want to hear them—the draw of the sublime, the draw of a cliff-edge off of which you hope you do not throw yourself. He listens to Dine recount, with fill-ins from Bresios, who’s heard it too, and Mitzy, whose accounts from the girl’s locker room after 3rd period Gym prove essential.
And Celia’s speech, as far as Jareth understands it, is like this:
SPEECH

Jareth drawing house
Celia’s presentation
Debate
Jareth hears about it
Terry comes home to Alan/Margaret’s who’ve been watching scout and tells about it