“So what,” I ask, shoving a model helicopter out of the way as we attempt to make room on the floor, “did you raid the mall or something?”
“I went on what you might call a shopping spree last week,” Teddy agrees, kicking aside some Bubble Wrap. “It’s possible I got a little carried away.”
“You think?”
“Hey, I’ve had enough bad luck to last me a while. So have you, by the way. The world owes us. I’m just the only one smart enough to cash in.”
I look around at the piles of screws and batteries, the tangles of cords and plugs. “I’ll bet you a million dollars you never end up putting any of this stuff together.”
“You don’t have a million dollars,” he reminds me, “which is your own fault. And the only thing I’m worried about putting together right now is our boat. So where should we start?”
“With this,” I say, pulling out the instruction sheet for the project.
He studies it for a second. “Okay, well, I don’t want to rock the boat, but—”
“Cute,” I say, making a face at him.
“If you like that one, I’ve got about a hundred more.”
As we start in on the calculations, working through a formula for buoyancy that we learned in class, Teddy’s attention keeps drifting.
“Should we do this in the other room?” I ask, watching him fiddle with what appears to be either an alarm clock or a handheld video game. “I think there are too many distractions in here.”
He sets it aside. “No, I’m with you. Floating: good. Sinking: bad.”
“Teddy,” I say with a groan. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not fall into the pool in front of everyone we know. Plus, this is fifty percent of our grade, and I’m still waiting to hear from Stanford.”
“You’ll get in,” he says, but he sounds distracted. I follow his gaze to the bookshelf, where the stack of applications I printed for him sits untouched. “Here’s what I’ve been thinking, though. If the point of college is to find a job afterward, and the point of a job is to make money…”
“No,” I say quickly, realizing where he’s going with this. “The point of college is to meet new people and learn new things and figure out who you are.”
“And to find a job.”
“Right,” I say grudgingly. “To find a job that you love.”
“But mostly to find a job where you make enough money to live. And now I have enough money to—”
“Hey,” I say, feeling a little panicky. “Come on. Don’t be an idiot. You’re obviously still going to college. I mean…you can go even sooner now. No more measuring shoe sizes or inflating basketballs. You can get your degree and go right into coaching.”
Teddy is looking at me with amusement. “I don’t need adegreeanymore.”
“Yeah, you do, if you want to coach—”
“Who knows if that’s even what I still want to do,” he says dismissively, though this is all he’s talked about ever since I’ve known him. “I can do anything now.”
I stare at him. “But you want to be a basketball coach.”
“Al,” he says, like I’m not understanding the situation. “Things are different now. You must know that. I couldbuya basketball team if I wanted. I could call them Teddy and the Terrifics and nobody could stop me from being head coach and assistant coach and ball boy all at once. What in the world would I want to sit through college for?”
“I just figured now that you don’t have to take out loans…”
“No,” he says, so starkly, so matter-of-factly, that I reel back a little. I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands, feeling the situation slipping from my grasp.
“Teddy, c’mon,” I say. “You can’t justnot go.Please don’t be that guy.”
He stiffens. “What guy?”
“The guy who fritters away his days buying meaningless things and sitting around just because he can afford to do nothing.”
