Thomas wanted no part of any of this. I wondered, at the time, if this might be a kind of slow-motion tantrum he was throwing on account of no longer being, in any obvious or indisputable way, the smartest kid in the grade. Two or three other D.C. schools had merged with Dupont for high school, so now all of us who’d gone to middle school together were like small-town folk who move to the city; it turned out there were other best singers, other best athletes, other geniuses—maybe Thomas thought he needed to ratchet up his strangeness if he was going to hold on to any sort of perch in the grade’s collective brain.
None of this means, of course, that I didn’t still think of Thomas as my best friend. It was just that it felt more and more like a friendship between a healthy person and a person in a home for convalescents, and I had to be careful not to bring too much of the outside world’s cheeriness and nuttiness in with me when I went to see him. Except that’s not quite right, because I don’t think Thomas thought of himself as missing out on anything, when I did make the mistake of referring to a party I’d gone to or a girl I’d hooked up with. In his mind maybe I was the one in the home for convalescents and he was the one who had to pretend not to notice how much I’d changed, how much I’d deteriorated since my good years.
One place, anyway, where all of this dropped away and we continued to be the same close, clever young men we’d always been was around the Pells’ dinner table. With Sally and Richard we’d spend hours lost in the same kinds of intellectual/mystical seminar conversations that we always had, except I was more confident now than I had been when I’d first started spending time there—now I didn’t hesitate to interrupt with whatever half-formed thought I had, and I didn’t instantly go limping in the other direction if someone else at the table thought I was wrong.
“High school’s really agreeing with you, huh?” Sally said to me one night. “If it were the olden days I’d say that your humours are well aligned. You seem happy.”
And I was happy, most of the time. My mom and Frank seemed to have more or less accepted that they didn’t need to bother me about whether I was going to be home for dinner or whether I wanted to go with them to see Yo-Yo Ma at the Kennedy Center. I’d lost some quality of nose-drip-having, food-in-my-braces-ness that had clung to me in middle school; puberty, although it of course entailed occasional voice cracks and pimples in the middle of my chin, felt for me like being a malnourished animal finally given a balanced diet. At last I could have my height measured by the nurse without feeling like I was going to have to apologize for something. I was starting to get used to things going well for me, the way a musician can sometimes fall into a rhythm where he knows that whatever note he plays, whatever riff he tries next, is just somehow going to sound right.
That summer, between ninth and tenth grade, I worked, which is to say volunteered, at a camp in D.C. for “underprivileged children” (the phrase, which I don’t think struck me as weird at the time, came from the flyer in the Dupont guidance counselor’s office). Just about everyone in the grade was either doing this sort of community service or a more extreme kind, where you’d go off to live in Vietnam or Ecuador for the summer and then come back with a deep tan and a commemorative string bracelet and a transformed perspective that would last until Thanksgiving. Thomas had an actual job, or a semi-actual job, helping a friend of his dad’s with the research for a book on the history of the prison reform movement. A few times after a day at camp I took the Metro to meet Thomas at the Library of Congress. He’d be sitting behind a two-foot stack of books, filling notebooks with his tiny scribble. “Just wait maybe … twenty minutes? Then we can go back to my house, OK?” So I’d wander around the reading room with its sunless people lost in projects, wondering whether I should just go home.
Summer’s a dangerous time for friendships—the whole predictable rhythm of the school year, with its drumroll of the week building, over and over, to the cymbal crash of Friday afternoon, is suspended; it’s music with no time signature. Could I sleep over at the Pells’ on a weekday now, since I didn’t have to be at work until ten most mornings? His parents would have been fine with it, but no, probably not, since Thomas needed to be at the library as soon as it opened. Maybe just dinner then? But wasn’t there something weirdly formal about that, as if I were an old college friend of Richard’s, just passing through town?
Anyway, we usually ate with his parents and then, because their house never got cool in summer, even at night, we’d go walk through his neighborhood, either down along Connecticut or back in the direction of the woods, where we’d sometimes bump into other groups of kids our age drinking or one of Thomas’s neighbors out throwing a tennis ball for his huffing dog. Most nights there were thunderstorms that were like indigestion in the sky, just a sort of redness and rumbling.