A Home at the End of the World

abandoned my second resolution. I was not only babbling, I was starting to tell lies.

“Oh yeah?” the boy said. He appeared to find the assertion interesting but unexceptional. He wore a washed-out blue work shirt and a brown leather jacket that dribbled dirty fringe from its sleeves.

“Yeah,” I said. “A new kid, a seventh-grader. It was in all the papers. He was, well, sort of fat. And a little retarded. He carried a briefcase, and he kept his glasses on with one of those black elastic bands. Anyway, he showed up here and a whole gang of eighth-graders started teasing him. At first it was just, you know, regular teasing, and they would probably have gotten tired of it and left him alone if he’d been smart enough to keep his mouth shut. But he had a bad temper, this kid. And the more they teased him, the madder he got.”

We worked our way down the line, accumulating small bowls filled with corn kernels, waxed cartons of milk, and squares of pale yellow cake with yellow icing. We sat together without having formally decided to, simply because the story of the murdered boy wasn’t finished yet. I stretched it out over most of the lunch period. I omitted no detail of the gang’s escalating tortures—the stolen glasses, the cherry bomb dropped in the locker, the dead cat slipped into the victim’s briefcase—or of the hapless boy’s mounting, impotent rage. Adam alternated between listening to me and staring at the people sitting at other tables, with the unabashed directness of one who believes his own unimportance renders him invisible. We had finished our macaroni and corn and had started on our cake before the victim took his revenge, in the form of a wire stretched all but invisibly, at neck’s height, across the trail where the older boys rode their dirt bikes. We were through with our dessert by the time he botched the job— he had not secured the wire tightly enough to the tree trunks—and were on our way to our next classes before the police found him floating in the reservoir, his new glasses still held in place by their elastic band.

We walked together, we three, to Adam’s and my math class. He and I had planned to share as many classes as possible. I finished the story at the door.

“Hey, man,” the stranger said. He shook his head, and said nothing more.

“My name is Jonathan Glover,” I said.

“I’m, um, Bobby Morrow.”

After a moment, Adam said, “Adam Bialo?” as if uncertain whether such a name would be believed. It was the first time he had spoken.

“Well, see you later,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah, man, I’ll see you later.”

It was not until he walked away that I saw the faded blue eye stitched to the back of his jacket.

“Weird,” Adam said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought you weren’t going to tell any more lies,” he said. “I thought you took an oath.”

In fact, we had traded oaths. I was to abandon my storytelling, and he to cease inspecting his clothes for imperfections.

“That was a tall tale. It’s different from a lie.”

“Weird,” he said. “You’re about as weird as he is.”

“Well,” I answered, with a certain satisfaction. “I guess maybe I am.”

“I believe it,” he said. “I have no doubt.”

We stood for a moment, watching the stranger’s embroidered eye recede down the biscuit-colored hall. “ Weird,” Adam said once again, and there was true indignation in his voice, a staunch insistence on the world’s continuing responsibility to observe the rules of cleanliness and modesty. One of Adam’s attractions had always been his exasperated—but ultimately willing—sidekick quality. His shuffling, uncurious ways made me look more exotic than I was; in his company I could be the daring one. As I chronicled our mild adventures in my own mind, I cast Adam as a hybrid of Becky Thatcher and Sancho Panza, while I was Huck, Tom, and Nancy Drew all mixed together. Adam considered a nude swim or a stolen candy bar to be broaching the limits, limits I was only too happy to exceed. He helped me realize my own romantic ideal, though lately I’d begun to suspect that our criminal escapades were pathetically small-time, and that Adam would not accompany me into waters much deeper than these.

Bobby was waiting for us at lunch the following day. Or, rather, he managed to turn up next to us in line again. He had a particular talent for investing his actions with the quality of randomness—his life, viewed from a distance, would have appeared to be little more than a series of coincidences. He exerted no visible will. And yet, by some vague-eyed trick, he was there with us in line again.

“Hey,” he said. Today his eyes were even redder, more rheumily unfocused.

“Hey,” I said. Adam bent over to pull a loose thread from the cuff of his corduroys.

“Day number two, man,” Bobby said. “Only a thousand five hundred to go. Yow.”

“Have we really got one thousand five hundred days of school left?” I asked. “I mean, is that an actual count?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Like, give or take a few.”

“They add up, don’t they? Two years here, four in high school, and four in college. Man. A thousand five hundred days.”

“I wasn’t counting col lege, man.” He smiled, as if the idea of college was grandiose and slightly absurd—a colonial’s vision of silver tea sets gleaming in the jungle.

“Right, man,” I said.

Again, the silence opened. Again, in defiance of Adam’s fierce concentration on the front of the line—where the red-faced woman ladled up some sort of brown triangles in brown sauce—I started in on a story. Today I told of a new, experimental kind of college that taught students the things they would need to know for survival in the world: how to travel inexpensively, how to play blues piano and recognize true love. It wasn’t much of a story—I was only an adequate liar, not a brilliant one. My fabricating technique had more to do with persistence than with inspiration. I told lies the way Groucho Marx told jokes, piling one atop another in the hope that my simple endurance would throw a certain light of credibility onto the whole.

Bobby listened with uncritical absorption. He did not insist on the difference between the believable and the absurd. Something in his manner suggested that all earthly manifestations—from the cafeteria peach halves floating in their individual pools of syrup to my story of a university that required its students to live for a week in New York City with no money at all—were equally bizarre and amusing. I did not at that time fully appreciate the effects of smoking more than four joints a day.

All he did was listen, smile vaguely, and offer an occasional “Yeah” or “Wow.”

Again, he sat and ate with us. Again, he walked us to our math class.

When he had gone, Adam said, “I was wrong yesterday. You’re weird er than he is.”

Adam and I took less than a month to realize that our friendship was already a childhood memory. We made certain attempts to haul it into the future with us, because we had, in our slightly peevish, mutually disapproving way, genuinely loved one another. We had told secrets; we had traded vows. Still, it was time for us to put one another aside. When I suggested one afternoon that we steal the new Neil Young album from the record store, he looked at me with a tax accountant’s contempt, based not so much on my immediate dishonesty as on the whole random, disorderly life I would make for myself. “You’ve never even listened to Neil Young,” he said. “Man,” I said, and left the sphere of his cautious, alphabetizing habits to stand near a group of long-haired high school students who were talking about Jimi Hendrix, of whom I had never heard. I stole Electric Ladyland after Adam, with a sigh of exhausted virtue, had walked out of the store.

We did not accomplish the split without rancor or recriminations. I had an immediate new friend and he didn’t. Our final conversation took place at the bus stop before school on a warm October morning. Autumn light fell from a vaulted powder-blue sky that offered, here and there, a cloud so fat and dense-looking it might have been full of milk. I motioned Adam away from the knot of other kids waiting for the bus and showed him what I’d brought: two pale yellow pills stolen from my mother’s medicine cabinet.

“What are they?” he asked.

“The bottle said Valium.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A tranquilizer, I guess. Here. Let’s take one and see what they do.”

He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “Take one of these pills?” he said. “Now?”