I gave him advice, like a stock picker with a dupe for a client. It turned out not to matter after all that I couldn’t remember which side Russia had been on in World War II. Tell her you like her sweater, I said. Ask her if she needs help with her homework. Leave mix tapes on her desk. Try to be the last person to say good-bye to her at the end of each day.
And each of these little dramas, although they of course weren’t going to lead anywhere, gave us something to talk over afterward at his house. I liked being the kid who’d cracked Thomas Pell; it was like having learned to communicate with an owl. First I’d go over once a week, maybe twice. By May we didn’t even have to ask what the other was doing—we’d walk out of school together and head straight for the bus stop. I’d come to like him more than I liked the people who used to laugh at my impressions of him. Soon we were having sleepovers in his bedroom with its bookshelves and slanted ceilings; we were making up names for people at school and making up words for things we didn’t want to be overheard talking about; I was eating dinner at his house so often that his mom would set a place for me without asking.
But throughout all this, he remained gloomily obsessed with Michelle. I hadn’t read The Great Gatsby yet, but this was pure Gatsby and Daisy: tragic longing, obsessive planning.
At the end of that first May of our friendship there was a grade-wide field trip to the aquarium in Baltimore. This meant signing permission slips, getting to school at seven thirty in the morning, climbing onto an old-apple-juice-smelling bus. Thomas and I had come up with a plan that Thomas was going to sidle up to Michelle at some point in the afternoon, probably in a dark exhibit, and try putting his arm around her. I knew this was hopelessly, ridiculously creepy, but Thomas and I had spent a couple of afternoons at his house, standing at his bedroom window and pretending it was an aquarium tank, practicing how he’d ease his arm up her back and around her shoulders.
We were in the Amazon River Basin Gallery when he told me that it wasn’t working. “I tried to get near her and she used Alice to scrape me off. I think she might be upset with me. Or just in a bad mood.”
“No, try in the next exhibit. See? In one of the little dark hallways.”
He closed his eyes and nodded, and I watched as he spent the next five minutes slowly following her around between the jellyfish tanks, edging his way close to her, looking like someone trying to pick her pocket.
He came back over to me and said, “Well, that was an Arc de Triomphe,” which was what we said when something had gone wrong. On the bus ride home we sat next to each other not talking, and it occurred to me, watching miles of those beige sound-blocking walls, that he might finally have realized how hopeless he was, and that now might be the time to admit that he was right. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” was all I could think to say, which was another of our words for failure (our language, it’s occurring to me now, was especially rich on this subject).
Once it started to get dark outside, and once the teachers and chaperones had all begun either falling asleep or sinking into a post-field-trip state of not giving a shit, a game of Truth or Dare developed. Paul Wolham rubbed his penis against the window and pretended he’d had an orgasm. Lauren Langer had to say whether she’d ever had a sex dream. John Swider had to go to the front of the bus and ask the driver if there was anywhere on board to poop.
I could see where this was going. Being friends with Thomas was like being friends with an alcoholic; chances to creep out Michelle were his liquor stores, his bars. He and I went back to join the game just after Michelle and Rebecca did. By then Rebecca and I may have been breaking up; anyway we didn’t acknowledge each other.
It was Alex Rozmarin, this spastic red-haired kid, who finally dared Michelle to kiss Thomas. There are no secret crushes in middle school; Thomas’s hopelessness was becoming as public a fact as his intelligence.
It wasn’t a fact for him, though. He turned toward her and raised his eyebrows in a way that said, Well? Here I am, and I guess we’re going to have to do this, aren’t we?
She didn’t move and she wasn’t (it was as clear as if she’d said it) even thinking about it. “Truth,” she said. “I choose truth.”
“You said dare!” Alex shrieked. “You can’t go back! You have to kiss Thomas!”
But he was overruled. Thomas stayed standing but now he’d turned his face away from Michelle, down toward the floor, and he seemed to be shrinking inward, like a burning leaf. In the look that had come over her at the thought of having to kiss him, he’d finally seen the truth. If the bus’s back door had been open I think he would have flung himself out.