Ultimately, though, these types are not as different as they seem. Both those who ignore him and those who entrust him with their most precious secrets do so because, in the end, he is no one to them.

It used to be that when he came home after his shift he could leave these people behind, but the neighborhood is changing. Last year, a white family moved into his building, a couple with a green-eyed, black-haired little girl, Maeve. It won’t be long before somebody opens a wine bar nearby. Before too long, one of those food halls might open in Flatbush, and maybe the Little Sweet will have a stall there. The white family in the building are polite and very friendly and at first it seemed there were some advantages to their arrival. When the boiler broke last winter, it was fixed within forty-eight hours; the white family, it turned out, had called 311 about it, he’d overheard them chatting with a neighbor in the vestibule, the neighbor explaining that in the past they’d gone as long as two weeks without heat, the white couple expressing outrage at the landlord’s tenant treatment. But now his roommate Cecil calls the family the 311s, because they have also called on more than one occasion to lodge noise complaints, leading to police visits. “Why can’t they just knock on a door?” Cecil grumbles, though he must know the answer to this question, as Clive does. They are afraid. Not afraid that their black, foreign neighbors pose a threat to their safety, but afraid that a confrontation will mean losing the approval they feel they’ve earned with their “Good morning”s and their “Let me get that for you”s. He remembers something Edwin used to say: Nice is some real fuckery.

So he knows what this girl, Emily, is doing at the Little Sweet. After all, she’s not the only white kid who’s become a regular recently. There is also the man with the sketch pad. (What is he drawing? Clive wonders. Scenes of locals in their natural habitat?) It’s not enough for them to live here, to overrun every last space—they need everyone else to be happy about it, too. Every time he catches himself enjoying her company, he reminds himself that’s what he is to her. Her local friend. Her badge of approval.

But the more time he spends with her, the more he forgets to remind himself. She is such an odd girl, so young to be so alone in the world. Some evenings, looking across the table at her pale hair, skin, lips, a disquieting notion washes over him: She is not real. She materializes each night so that they may speak, then melts back into the city, dissolving into the salt-whitened streets.

She may be trouble. Funny—from the time he was a child, he has always thought of himself as a person who avoids trouble and complication at all costs. Yet the facts of his life tell a different story. Sometimes he wonders if it is his fate to be controlled by people with the tug of stars, to let himself be pulled into their trouble again and again and learn nothing from it.

WHEN THEY were sixteen and seventeen, Edwin and Clive and the rest of their class graduated from Everett Lyle Secondary School, all of them except Arthur, who had dropped out a year prior and who, as everybody save his sweet father knew, was into some serious shit by then. He could be found many nights loitering outside the bars and discos around Hibiscus Harbour, sometimes dealing to the tourists, sometimes looking to score. Damien, always the most diligent among their friends, continued his schooling; he would do well on his A-levels, receive a local scholarship, and go on to study biology at the University of the Virgin Islands. His picture would appear in the island newspaper, along with those of the other students from their form who would be attending college off-island, bound for Saint Thomas, Barbados, Miami, Washington, D.C.

“You better not come back all assified,” Don would tell Damien when they gathered to see him off.

“I’m right behind you outta here, Doc,” Edwin would say.

The rest of them found work. Don got a job in his uncle’s auto repair shop. Des, good with boats like his brother Keithley, scored a gig aboard a party boat that took tourists—mostly American college students on spring break—for all-you-can-drink tours up and down the island’s south coast. The boat had a dance floor, and the nightly tour included a dance competition in which a dozen or so girls vied for the prize of coupons for five free drinks at Papa Mango’s. Often as they danced, the girls shed their clothes—flinging their tank tops into the crowd, sliding their panties down their legs. Des had been at the job a month when he confessed to his friends that there might be such a thing as too much pum pum. After four months, a naked woman was nothing to him. He would look at the girls flaunting their hips and breasts and feel an emptiness like water.

Despite his grandmother’s disapproval, Clive joined Edwin in pursuing what Edwin referred to as his “business ventures.” It was not uncommon for them to have four or five such ventures going at any one time. They started an agency doing paperwork for charter boats on the cheap. They went to Philipsburg, on the Dutch side of Saint Martin, stocked up on Guess jeans, and resold them in the Basin. They went out into the shallows of Britannia Bay at midnight and hunted sea crayfish, which they sold by the pound to the restaurant at the Oasis. “Nobody ever got rich working for somebody else,” Edwin was fond of saying, as they hefted enormous trash bags filled with jeans through the streets of Philipsburg, or when Clive got his hand snipped by a crayfish at two A.M. They were earning a pittance, less than any of their friends, but Edwin was certain it was just a matter of time before they stumbled on the right idea, at which point they would finally have the cash to “make a big move,” which Clive understood meant leaving—for the States, for New York, someplace with a stage grand enough for his friend’s ambitions.

His life took on a familiar shape. He worked during the day. At night, he and his friends drove to wherever they were liming that night. (Officer Roy pulling them over with some regularity and tossing them in jail for the night to sober up.) When he arrived home, he stumbled into bed and slept until his grandmother swatted him awake, and then the whole thing began again.

He was nineteen the day Edwin did something that would change his life forever. It was Carnival. They had spent the afternoon at the Grand Parade along Investiture Boulevard, watching the revelers and passing a bottle of rum among themselves, cheering when their favorite local band went by on a truck with speakers blaring, catcalling Miss Island Queen with her silly crown. As the festivities wound down, they spotted Sara and her friend across the parade route.

“Your girl’s looking fine today!” Des said.

“Check she out, dressed like a sket,” added Don.

Sara Lycott was wearing a yellow dress that ended just below her ass, a thing that was altogether unlike the proper, innocent girl Clive had known all his life.

“You going to ask to walk she home or what?” Edwin said.

“Stop fooling,” Clive mumbled.

“Who’s fooling? This is your moment! She dressed like a sket because she’s hungry for it.”

Clive took a swig from the bottle of rum.

“Look at he, too puss to even try!” Don said.

Then Edwin grabbed him by the shoulders and looked at him with such conviction it shook Clive to his core. “You want to live your life or what, man?” He didn’t wait for Clive to reply. “Go!” With that, he shoved Clive, who stumbled out into the parade. He hurried across the street and found himself standing before the tight female circle of Sara and her friends.

IT WAS over a mile from Investiture Boulevard to Sara’s house. They walked along the side of the road. Sara wore peach pumps, her ankles wobbling on the uneven ground, stopping periodically to brush the dust from her shoes. For some time, they walked in a silence that seemed to concern Sara not in the least, while Clive was desperate to break it but could come up with nothing to say, his mind at turns swirling and blank. He didn’t understand how it had happened. She’d stood there surrounded by her friends, arms crossed, as he stuttered his invitation. “M-m-mmmay I walk you home?” Once he’d gotten the words out, he looked up at her, awaiting her rejection. But something had changed in her. It wasn’t just the dress. Her eyes, usually so sharp and flashing, held a dull detachment, as if she were watching herself in this moment from some great distance. She opened her mouth and said, “You may.”

“How did you enjoy the parade?” he tried finally.

“The parade is the parade.”

They walked on.

“You look nice today,” he said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You always do. You’re beautiful, Sara.” He had wanted to say this to her for years, but had never believed he really would.