At the Bottom of Everything(28)

I walked out and back upstairs to Thomas’s room, not quite believing that Richard was really sitting there in his office now thinking that everything would be better if only I invited Thomas to Roy Donnelly’s next party. Sally called out good-bye to me that afternoon the way she always did (asking if I was sure I wouldn’t stay for dinner, telling me to give my mom a hug), and I went along with it, singing my little part in our duet, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, but I just knew, as sure as if I’d been leaving for college the next day, that I wasn’t going to be back.

And I wasn’t, really (there may have been another time or two, but no more than that). First I stopped going over to the Pells’ house, then I stopped looking for Thomas between classes, then I stopped saying hi to him in the halls completely. It was weird but it was also, once we were started on it, impossible to reverse; you can’t go from ignoring someone to saying hi without some sort of conversation in between, some fight or explanation, but there was nothing I was willing to fight about, nothing I was willing to explain.

That summer Thomas worked again for the professor friend of his dad’s; I went to a three-week baseball camp in Florida and spent the rest of my time going to the kinds of parties that I’d spent the summer before avoiding. At some point junior year Thomas seemed to accept that we weren’t friends anymore. A couple of times, on parent-teacher nights or at awards assemblies, I’d see either Sally or Richard, and Richard would just give me a tight smile, but Sally would say, “You just have to come see us. We miss you!” But everyone understood, or seemed to think they understood: best friendships ended all the time.

My mom said to me sometimes (it was one of her handful of subjects, along with whether I thought it would be fun to go on a beach vacation once I graduated) that she’d always thought Thomas and I were a strange pair. And, she said, even though she never would have wanted to say it before, she always got the feeling that the Pells thought they were better than everyone else. Did I know (yes, I did) that she’d once left Sally a message asking if they’d come over for dinner and she had never even called her back? Oh well, she said. I’m sure he’ll go on and get very good grades somewhere.

At the end of our senior year there was a class dinner out on the soccer field with caterers and round tables and a white tent; all the guys wore jackets and all the girls wore dresses and had their hair done up like ribbons (the end of senior year at Dupont is like the grand finale at a fireworks show: a dozen overlapping ceremonies and honors and farewells). By that time in the school year pretty much all the barriers between teachers and students have broken down; teachers let us call them by their first names, and they’d spend their class periods leading dreamy, what-does-it-all-mean discussions about how even though this particular group would never reassemble, we’d always have this shared experience to look back on, etc.

By bad luck, or by some parent-teacher committee’s bad planning, Thomas and I were seated at the same table. We were a couple of chairs apart, and I spent most of the dinner talking intently to Philip Shailes on my left, who was the most boring person in our class, and who was telling me how he was planning to buy all his lamps and blankets at Bed Bath & Beyond now because they always jacked up the prices in August.

This was the kind of dinner where people drift away from the table as soon as the food is done to sit with their actual friends or to have heartfelt conversations with people they’ll never see again. So there were a couple of minutes after the last of our table-mates had stood up, when Thomas and I were left alone. We looked at each other like a deer and a hunter, but I’m not sure who was who. Looking directly at him for the first time in a while, I could see that his skin was less delicate than it had been; now there was stubble on his chin and above his lip. He wore a light blue shirt and black pants that Sally must have bought him for graduation. “So,” he said, “how’re the wife and kids?”

“Oh, good, good. Yours?”

“Can’t complain, can’t complain. Actually,” he said, breaking into his normal voice, “can complain pretty easily.”

I nodded.

Thomas and I, who’d seen each other naked in the aquatic center locker room, who’d woken up a hundred times on side-by-side mattresses, who shared a secret more serious than any married couple … now we were awkward together. Awkwardness is like crabgrass: leave anything, anything at all, untended for long enough and it will grow until you can’t see the concrete underneath.

“I heard you got into Penn,” he said.