Gordie. It’s just sometimes he wants to show off — you have to understand that.
“Sometimes he wants to show off,” I repeated with complete incomprehension.
He’s just trying to impress you, said the glimmer. You’re his boy.
“Impress me,” I repeated.
Otherwise he’s fine, said the glimmer. Don’t worry.
Otherwise Gord was fine. He sneered and berated and called my mother “goddamn useless,” but only when I was around. Otherwise he was fine.
That’s when the dread began to settle around me like ash.
That was my first major hint from the universe.
5
06/06/09, 9:16 a.m.
HERE'S ADAM. LOOK, EVERYBODY!
Lope-de-dope, gangly through the quad, awkward artsy four-eyes. His body doesn’t fit him somehow. He stoops, but in the strangest way. In a backwards kind of way. His hips jut a little forward, his hands dangle a little behind. A type of guy that other types of guys, hockey-team kinds of guys for example, want badly to scrape across the pavement. It is an instinctive, gorilla sort of thing, a phenomenon Dian Fossey might have witnessed. Culling the herd. Stamping out the genetic weaklings.
Once, in first year, Adam said, in the middle of a party, the word “methinks.” He was talking to girls, clearly a pretty new experience for a guy like him, one of the girls had opined something about something else, and Adam was actually going to quote Shakespeare at her — the line from Hamlet about the lady protesting too much — but his new friend quickly wrapped a forearm about Adam’s windpipe to spirit him away before too much social carnage could be inflicted. So the quote came out kind of: “Oh ho (the oh ho being what put the friend on alert). Methinks the gwaaaa.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Adam singularly unappreciative as he rubbed his overlong neck: “What?”
“Don’t say ‘methinks.’ Don’t ever say ‘methinks.’”
“It was a quote from . . .”
“For fuck’s sake I know it’s a quote. Don’t quote!”
Adam just hadn’t found his niche. There were girls you quoted at, and girls you didn’t. And once he learned to distinguish the girls ripe for the quoting, he knew enough not to quote Shakespeare, and not to stand there with a look of anticipation on his face as if to say: Oh boy! Time to quote! No, he figured out his routine pretty quick. You lounge, you smoke. Perhaps you twirl the ice cubes in your glass of mid-range scotch that by second year you’ve decided makes a more distinctive impression than a beer bottle dangling from an index finger. You never look at them directly, the girls who like to be quoted at, because that makes it seem as if you’re deliberately quoting as opposed to just thinking out loud, following the profound and languorous train of your own thoughts. Rattling off a little Beckett here, a little Kafka there. What’s that? Neruda! Adam did extremely well with Neruda, it was all you heard out of him for a while. The thing about the blood of the children in the streets. Betraying something of a social conscience. He doesn’t just live in his head, this guy, not Adam. He’d be at the barricades soon as the first shot rang out.
None of which made the guys who wanted to scrape him against the pavement any less eager to scrape him against the pavement, you understand. If anything it stoked the evolutionary-determinist fires: Cull herd! Squash faggot! Fortunately, Adam, as previously mentioned, had a friend. The same friend who was considerate enough to crush his windpipe at such a key moment in his social development. A big, strong, popular friend, genetically blessed if cursed with a tragic past and a disastrous readiness to trust his fellow man.
Adam was afraid of fat people. He was afraid of a lot of things. Rare meat, for example, made him gag and run away, wrists a-flapping, like a high-strung little girl. His friends found this out during an outdoor barbecue one early spring day in first year. It was too soon to be barbecuing, there was still snow on the ground, but everyone at Kyle and Wade’s house decided it was time for winter to be over so they put on shorts and flip-flops, spun a few of Wade’s Beach Boy records and bought some steaks for grilling.
They grabbed either side of the horrific couch — a Sally Ann special, natch, as this is a period in a young man’s life, although the young man never knows it at the time, that is riddled with clichés. You