stuff he’d been busy practising and cultivating to get himself to precisely this point in his life. But back then, none of those traits had solidified yet. They wobbled like Jell-O in unguarded moments; they could still be displaced, wiped clean, by, say, a terrible act, a terrible thing. Kyle stood revealed as a kid in such a moment, a scared boy, and like a scared, helpless boy, would look around, for the first time in our acquaintanceship, for somebody else to take charge and tell us what to do. But if Kyle wasn’t going to take up that mantle, certainly nobody else would — certainly not the stammering mess of Wade, certainly not the repulsed, already retreating Adam. All the guy could do, ultimately, was resettle his helpless blue eyes into those of the perpetrator, the author of this terrible act and thing, take a calculatedly large step away from the scene and say a useless thing like: “Whoa. Whoa Rank, Jesus, man.”
Anyway, that wasn’t what Kyle was remembering that rainy day in Winners. That’s what I was remembering. Kyle was remembering something else.
“Hey!” he said, holding up the ties again as if to flag me down. “Remember Grix?”
I stopped mid-stride and pretended to think about it. “Glasses,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, with the glasses.” Kyle was back on his game now, growing more comfortable as he moved toward the cash and the distance grew between us, calling to me over his shoulder like we were old friends, like we had just seen each other the day before and might see each other again the day after.
“There’s a bookstore over by the food court,” he told me, digging around for his credit card and ignoring the cashier the way guys like Kyle always do. “Go check it out. Grix has a book in there.”
“No way,” I said, genuinely surprised. Also this: pleased.
“Seriously, he was in the paper on the weekend. I Facebooked him to say congrats.”
This new verb: to Facebook. But you’re like forty years old, I wanted to say.
“Look him up,” said Kyle. “Adam Grix.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. “I remember.”
Kyle’s ties had been rung through and bagged — he’d managed to exchange neither words nor eye contact with the cashier the whole time — and now he was on the opposite side of the counter from me. This was our goodbye. He waved a hand and smiled, and I raised a hand and smiled in return without even thinking about it. It was as if in that moment of being mutually happy for our friend we’d forgotten that none of us were friends — that we hadn’t been since 1990.
I let that feeling, that forgetting, carry me all the way to the other end of the mall and into the bookstore.
11
07/21/09, 11:24 p.m.
Hi Adam,
You have received a friend request from Rankenstein.
12
07/26/09, 11:00 p.m.
I KNOW. SORRY. Not very nice of me to write such a big set-up to the exciting Adam portion of our story and then go and leave you hanging for three weeks. Did you think I’d said to hell with it again and didn’t bother to tell you this time? Did you think it was the last you’d ever hear from me? Did you hope? Were you sorry?
I’ve been wondering, whenever I had time these past few weeks, what you might be thinking. If I would maybe get a line from you, finally, wanting to know what’s been going on, why I just cut things off all of a sudden. Gord doesn’t have a computer, needless to say, let alone internet, so whenever I got a chance this last little while I would deke over the library to check my messages. Nope — nothing. I even checked the spam folder: dick enlargers and Nigerian investment opportunities.
Aren’t you even curious? I mean after all, we’ve made it this far, you and I. Despite your early jitters and my monumental inability to get to the point.
I see that you have deleted your Facebook account. I don’t blame you — Facebook freaks me out too. I only started my account to find you after that time I ran into Kyle, but it never occurred to me (and I suppose this makes me pretty stupid) that people would use it to find me too. It’s sort of creepy how viral the thing is. The second I friended you, the entire class of ’91 starts pouring in for a reunion party. There’s Kyle: Hey Mystery Man awesome running into you downtown.