“You’re going to be happier than I am in high school,” Thomas said to me one day. “I don’t seem to have the courage to disappoint my parents, which seems like a crucial ingredient.”
By then he knew everything about my family: about my parents having gotten divorced when I was one; about my mom’s years of dating (which I remembered mostly as her frizz of red-dyed hair and a parade of nervous men handing me toy trucks or Nerf footballs, as if I were a baby chimp). He knew about the awkwardness of my stepdad, who I often thought I could stump by asking him my middle name, and about Frank’s son, Ian, who I knew only from a handful of trips home from Wash U, during which he drank weight-gainer shakes and showed me naked pictures of his girlfriend. I knew, of course, that when I told Thomas all this I was selling out my family, but I didn’t care. My family was like the cardboard Apollo astronauts outside Blockbuster—you could sweep them aside, fold them into the Dumpster, without thinking about it.
Halfway along the bike trail there was a homeless encampment—clotheslines and a fire pit and a few half-empty water jugs—that we liked to poke around in, imagining that we heard people coming. For some reason this was where we always had our best and frankest talks—about whether happiness was more valuable than intelligence; about whether women really cared about penis size; about the neighbor of mine with OCD who’d swum laps until the lifeguards had dragged him out of the pool. We called these talks symposiums, which was a word I’d learned from Thomas. We really thought that we might, sitting there past sunset, picking up used condoms with sticks (these were the first condoms I’d ever seen, and at first I took them for some kind of food wrapper), solve the problems that had been troubling humans since the beginning of time.
Symposiums were also often when Thomas’s version of a wild side came out—not the kind of wildness the bad kids at school had, breaking things and pulling down their pants, but the kind of wildness woods had: he turned strange, indifferent, a little dark. “I’m not sure I feel a lot of the things that you’re supposed to,” he said once. “Except for you and my parents, I’m not sure whose death I’d actually care much about.”
(My biological dad, who lived in Tucson and who I’d seen only a handful of times in the past decade, happened to die that summer. He had a heart attack while he was playing tennis with his girlfriend. My mom woke me up buzzing with the news, as if she’d been plugged into some sort of charge; she seemed to expect me to act upset, so I did. I only felt capable of figuring out how I actually felt about it—mostly annoyed that everyone thought I must be devastated—once I could talk to Thomas.)
At the homeless encampment, Thomas liked to pile leaves and garbage into the fire pit, which was just a ring of stones, and then light them with matches that he’d taken from one of the restaurants near where the bus let out on Connecticut. The fires burned blue, orange, white, gave off stinking curls of oily smoke; he’d watch and take a couple of seconds to respond to whatever I said to him. “I think I’d like to be cremated,” he said. “Fire seems like the best state that matter can aspire to.”
One afternoon a park worker (we called him a police officer when we told the story to each other afterward) stepped through the trees just as one of these fires was as its peak, and once I’d started to run, my body clanging with disaster, I looked back and saw that Thomas hadn’t followed me—he was walking calmly in the other direction. I hid behind a tree, too far to hear what Thomas and the officer were saying to each other, but I imagined that Thomas had had an inner collapse and that he was turning himself in. I’d make my way home alone.
But he came strolling over, not with the officer, and as we walked back to his house he told me, sounding almost bored with the need to explain, what he’d said. “My friend and I were out walking along the path and we thought we saw a fire burning, so we ran over to put it out but we couldn’t find any water.”
And like that: resolved. I was slightly, silently mad at him for the rest of the afternoon for being so much better than me at coping in an emergency. The practical world was supposed to be my realm.
When we weren’t in the woods, we spent most of our time at the Pells’ house, despite my mom’s pleading. I knew she’d embarrass me in front of Thomas; I knew Frank would want to take us to the country club, where he’d turn red in the sauna and fart like a silverback gorilla. The few sleepovers we had at my house felt like exhibition games; whatever fun we managed was halfhearted and conditional.