But Tom didn’t reply in kind or pick up the thread. He’d lost interest. “Errr—maybe not,” he said, with a half-shrug, a little smirk. “Later.”
“Right, later.” I was annoyed—what the fuck was his problem? Yet it was part of our ongoing dark-comedy act, amusing only to us, to abuse and insult each other; and I was pretty sure he’d come find me after English or that he’d catch up with me on the way home, running up behind me and bopping me on the head with his algebra workbook. But he didn’t. The next morning before first period he didn’t even look at me when I said hi, and his blanked-out expression as he shouldered past stopped me cold. Lindy Maisel and Mandy Quaife turned at their lockers to stare at each other, giggling in a half-shocked way: oh my God! Next to me my lab partner, Sam Weingarten, was shaking his head. “What a dick,” he said, in a loud voice, so loud everybody in the hall turned. “You’re a real dick, Cable, you know that?”
But I didn’t care—or, at least, I wasn’t hurt or depressed. Instead I was furious. My friendship with Tom had always had a wild, manic quality, something unhinged and hectic and a little perilous about it, and though all the same old high energy was still there, the current had reversed, voltage humming in the opposite direction so that now instead of horsing around with him in study hall I wanted to push his head in the urinal, yank his arm out of the socket, beat his face bloody on the sidewalk, make him eat dogshit and garbage off the curb. The more I thought about it, the more enraged I grew, so mad sometimes that I walked back and forth in the bathroom muttering to myself. If Cable hadn’t fingered me to Mr. Beeman (“I know, now, Theo, those cigarettes weren’t yours”)… if Cable hadn’t got me suspended… if my mom hadn’t taken the day off… if we hadn’t been at the museum at exactly the wrong time… well, even Mr. Beeman had apologized for it, sort of. Because, sure, there were issues with my grades (and plenty of other stuff Mr. Beeman didn’t know about) but the inciting incident, the thing that had got me called in, the whole business with the cigarettes in the courtyard—whose fault was that? Cable’s. It wasn’t like I expected him to apologize. In fact it wasn’t like I would have said anything to him about it, ever. Only—now I was a pariah? Persona non grata? He wouldn’t even talk to me? I was smaller than Cable but not by a lot, and whenever he cracked wise in class, as he couldn’t prevent himself from doing, or ran past me in the hall with his new best friends Billy Wagner and Thad Randolph (the way we’d once raced around together, always in overdrive, that urge to danger and craziness)—all I could think was how much I wanted to beat the shit out of him, girls laughing as he cowered from me in tears: oooh, Tom! boo hoo hoo! are you crying? (Doing my best to provoke a fight, I cracked him in the nose accidentally on purpose by swinging the bathroom door in his face, and shoved him into the drinks dispenser so he dropped his disgusting cheese fries on the floor, but instead of jumping on me—as I longed for him to do—he only smirked and walked off without a word.)
Not everyone avoided me, of course. Lots of people put notes and gifts in my locker (including Isabella Cushing and Martina Lichtblau, the most popular girls in my year) and my old enemy Win Temple from fifth grade surprised me by coming up and giving me a bear hug. But most people responded to me with a cautious, half-terrified politeness. It wasn’t as if I went around crying or even acting disturbed but still they’d stop in the middle of their conversations if I sat down with them at lunch.
Grown-ups, on the other hand, paid me an uncomfortable amount of attention. I was advised to keep a journal, talk with my friends, make a “memory collage” (crackpot advice, as far as I was concerned; other kids were uneasy around me no matter how normally I acted, and the last thing I wanted was to call attention to myself by sharing my feelings with people or doing therapeutic crafts in the Arts room). I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time standing in empty classrooms and offices (staring at the floor, nodding my head senselessly) with concerned teachers who asked me to stay after class or pulled me aside to talk. My English teacher, Mr. Neuspeil, after sitting on the side of his desk and delivering a tense account of his own mother’s horrifying death at the hands of an incompetent surgeon, had patted me on the back and given me a blank notebook to write in; Mrs. Swanson, the school counselor, showed me a couple of breathing exercises and suggested that I might find it helpful to discharge my grief by going outside and throwing ice cubes against a tree; and even Mr. Borowsky (who taught math, and was considerably less bright-eyed than most of the other teachers) took me aside out in the hall and—talking very quietly, with his face about two inches away from mine—told me how guilty he’d felt after his brother had died in a car accident. (Guilt came up a lot in these talks. Did my teachers believe, as I did, that I was guilty of causing my mother’s death? Apparently so.) Mr. Borowsky had felt so guilty for letting his brother drive home drunk from the party that night that he’d even thought for a brief while about killing himself. Maybe I’d thought about suicide too. But suicide wasn’t the answer.