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Manhattan in those movies takes place after you've gone to bed. At nine," he added, rubbing it in.
    "I've been up late in Manhattan," I said. "I even went to dinner at '21."'
    "When?" He clearly disbelieved me.
    "For Jennifer's birthday. My parents took us."
    Now, it was true that they'd taken my sister; I'd just slept over at Augie's that night. Still, she'd come back with so many details of the event and brought them up so often over the following days that I felt I actually had gone with them. Details, I might add, I now began to enumerate.
    "We had snails for appetizers. They looked burnt, but they tasted okay."
    "Escargots au beurre noir ," Alistair said.
    "There was a waiter whose only job was getting us wine."
    "The sommelier."
    "There were waiters everywhere, coming and going all during the meal, emptying ashtrays, filling our glasses of water. A special one brought us dessert. I had cold ice cream inside a cooked crust," I added, thinking surely this impossibility would get him.
    "Baked Alaska," Alistair murmured.
    "So I know! And it's not like it is in those movies."
    "It sounds exactly like those movies!"
    "But that's not the way people live," I argued.
    "That's the way I'm going to live. In a penthouse in Manhattan with a chauffeur and servants and wonderful, talented Social Register friends and beautiful things all around me. Quiet now, the commercial's over."
    Not five minutes later, Ronny Taskin and his gang pulled up outside the house on their bikes. There must have been ten of them, yet Kerry White was delegated to come inside and ask if Alistair wanted to go biking with them.
    To ask Alistair—not me.
    "I don't have a bike here," he said apologetically, clearly torn between watching his movie and joining an outing in which he would have a starring, or at least costarring, role.
    "What about Rog's bike?" the only recently insignificant Kerry had the temerity to ask.
    "I'm using it!" I said.
    "Well, you could borrow one of mine," Kerry told Alistair.
    Who'd ever paid enough attention to the pipsqueak to notice he had more than one bike?
    "At home," Alistair said, "I have a Schwinn Black Phantom, with three speeds."
    "Me too," Kerry said. Then, lest Alistair consider him forward, he explained, "What I mean is, you can ride that one. I'll take the other."
    Outside the others were shouting for Kerry to shake a leg.
    Alistair waffled. "Well, if you really want me to."
    "I do! We all do!"
    Alistair hopped on Kerry's Black Phantom, while its owner jumped onto Tony Duyckman's handlebars and they all took off. Ten minutes later, as I was coasting down the hill of Spring onto Watkins Avenue, headed toward Augie's, I saw the group several blocks away. Kerry was on his older bike, riding between Ronny Taskin and Alistair in the vanguard of a flock of other boys.
    That spelled an end to my peacemaking efforts.
     
    I kept telling myself that Alistair wouldn't be around much longer. But somehow that didn't seem to work. He'd usurped my place—or a place I'd been looking forward to filling—among my classmates without even going to school with them. Except for Augie Herschel, virtually none of them spoke more than a word or two to me anymore.
    At home it was just as bad. My mother would come into the family room late in the afternoon. I'd be struggling with math homework on the carpet in front of the TV. Jennifer would be on the sofa painting her toenails different colors to see which one she liked best. Alistair would be propped up on pillows in front of the coffee table, playing solitaire and humming along with my sister and her small pink plastic portable radio, to the sounds of the hit songs of the day—"Hernando's Hideaway," "Steam Heat," "They Call the Wind Maria." Mom would say, "I'm about to start dinner. You like veal cutlets, don't you?"
    I'd look up to say, sure, veal was all right. And I'd see that my mother was looking at and asking Alistair.
    Who would reply, "Are you going to try that lightly peppered