At the Bottom of Everything(8)

Aside from this feeling, and a general attic kind of smell, the sound of his house’s floors is what struck me most vividly. They creaked with every step anyone took, this deep, almost cartoonish sound. And the walls of the living room were covered, absolutely covered, with books: the seven-volume complete works of Freud, the notebooks of Tolstoy, the letters of Virginia Woolf, on and on and on (none of these names meant anything to me, but I was very impressed with the sight of a real library; this, I figured, was what he did with himself while I was watching back-to-back episodes of The Fresh Prince).

And underneath all this was the fact that his parents weren’t home, that no adult was. I knew enough not to mention it, but it was as impressive and unusual as if we’d come in and there had been a pet tiger roaming around (in fact there was a pet cat, Vladimir, who wove around my legs as if he were trying to tie my shoelaces together). I was used to people’s houses in the afternoons: being drearily hovered over by mothers who wanted to relieve the loneliness of their days by making us grilled-cheese sandwiches, or by housekeepers who couldn’t pretend not to mind seeing footprints and backpacks on their just-cleaned floors. To get away you’d have to close yourself in a bedroom, where you’d look at someone’s Magic 8 Ball and wait for the sound of footsteps in the hall.

But Thomas was an adult in the way only children sometimes become adults. As soon as we walked in he went to the kitchen and made us a chicken breast in a pan with tomato sauce poured on top; we sat side by side at the high counter eating, while he sorted through a stack of mail as if there might be a bill or a magazine for him.

“Do you want to … see the backyard?” he said afterward. This led to a few minutes of wandering through the bamboo, peering through the fence at a neighbor’s dog licking himself. “Should we go up to my room?” In his room we sat on his bed and he showed me a book of old New Yorker cartoons, some of which were racy in a way I could hardly understand; I half smiled in case he wanted me to laugh. A truth was slowly making its way through me, like heat through a cold house: Thomas had no idea how to have someone over. The worry was not all mine. He must have figured that something would just happen if you put two people together in playdate conditions, but here it was, not happening.

“I hope you don’t think it’s weird,” he finally said, “that I invited you over.” By then we were downstairs in front of the TV (Thomas scanned through the channels with the arrows rather than the numbers, giving himself away as an amateur).

“No. Why would it be weird?”

“I don’t really have people over. I always think they wouldn’t have any fun.” He paused for long enough that I thought he might have been waiting for me to say that of course people would have fun. But he said, “If I ask you something, do you promise you won’t tell anyone at school?”

“OK.”

“I feel like I should ask you to swear to God. Do you believe in God?”

“No, not really.”

“Me neither. Well, I’ll just trust you then.”

Like everyone who insists on how trustworthy they are, or maybe just like everyone, I broke promises constantly, but I was determined to know Thomas’s secret. Maybe he wanted me to join him in committing the perfect murder, maybe he was actually forty-five years old.

No: he wanted to know if I thought there was any way Michelle Koller liked him.

I was lucky to have the TV to look at while I considered this. It wasn’t the thought of Michelle liking him that was absurd (although it was), but the thought of him, reader of Hamlet, expert on the Treaty of Versailles, liking Michelle; so this was what was going on all day inside that famous head.

“You went to her party a few weeks ago, didn’t you?” he said, talking faster now. “Did you see her room? What are her parents like?” A few minutes later: “I wanted to ask Rebecca about her, but I couldn’t get her alone.”

Michelle was the leader of a group of girls—a group that included my girlfriend, Rebecca—who were collectively known for their hotness. They were a kind of chorus, with a girl at every pitch (Alice, tall and muscular, was the baritone; Rebecca, tiny and dainty, was the soprano). And Michelle was like the note you get when you rub a wet fingertip on crystal: she floated above varieties and was just sort of the thing itself.

“Has Rebecca ever said anything about me liking Michelle? I’m worried she knows.”

“No,” I said honestly. Rebecca had hardly ever said anything at all.

Anyway, the caste system is strict in middle school—I was just at the edge of what my status allowed with Rebecca—and Thomas had no more chance of dating Michelle Koller than he did Michelle Pfeiffer. Still, I did my best to look serious as he showed me a Valentine’s Day card he’d made and then not given to her, and the couple of pages of surprisingly good sketches he’d made of her sitting at her desk, her hair behind her ears.