Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

OUR seventh-grade class had been moved that September from scattered elementary schools to a single centralized junior high, a colossal blond brick building with its name suspended over its main entrance in three-foot aluminum letters spare and stern as my own deepest misgivings about the life conducted within. I had heard the rumors: four hours of homework a night, certain classes held entirely in French, razor fights in the bathrooms. It was childhood’s end.

The first day at lunch, a boy with dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders stood behind my friend Adam and me in the cafeteria line. The boy was ragged and wild-looking: an emanation from the dangerous heart of the school itself.

“Hey,” he said.

I could not be certain whether he was speaking to me, to Adam, or to someone else in the vicinity. His eyes, which were pink and watery, appeared to focus on something mildly surprising that hovered near our feet.

I nodded. It seemed a decent balance between my fear of looking snobbish and my dread of seeming overeager. I had made certain resolutions regarding a new life. Adam, a businesslike barrel-shaped boy I had known since second grade, dabbed at an invisible spot on his starched plaid shirt. He was the son of a taxidermist, and possessed a precocious mistrust of the unfamiliar.

We slowly advanced in the line, holding yellow plastic trays.

“Some joint, huh?” the boy said. “I mean, like, how long you guys in for?”

This was definitely addressed to us, though his gaze had not yet meandered up to address our eyes. Now I was justified in looking at him. He had a broad handsome face with a thin nose slightly cleft at the tip, and a jaw heavy enough to suggest Indian blood. There were aureoles of blond stubble at his lips and chin.

“Life,” I said.

He nodded contemplatively, as if I had said something ambiguous and thought-provoking.

A moment passed. Adam would have gotten through the conversation by feigning well-mannered deafness. I struggled to be cool. The silence caught and held—one of those amicable, protracted silences that open up in casual conversations with strangers and allow all members to return, unharmed, to the familiarity of their own lives. Adam visibly turned his attention toward the front of the line, as if something delightful and unprecedented was taking place there.

But then, forgetting my resolution, I fell into a habit from my old life, one of the personal deficiencies I had vowed to leave behind.

I started talking.

“I mean, this is it, don’t you think?” I said. “Up till now everything’s been sort of easy, I mean we were kids. I don’t know what school you came from, but at Fillmore we had recess, I mean we had snack periods, and now, well, there are guys here who could fit my head in the palm of their hand. I haven’t been to the bathroom yet, I hear there are eighth-graders waiting in there for seventh-graders to come in and if one does they pick him up by his feet and stick his head in the toilet. Did you hear that?”

Adam impatiently plucked a speck of lint from his collar. My ears heated up.

“Naw, man,” the stranger said after a moment. “I didn’t hear anything like that. I smoked a joint in the head before third period, and I didn’t have any problems.”

His voice carried no mocking undertone. By then we had reached the steam table, where a red-faced woman parceled out macaroni casserole with an ice-cream scoop.

“Well, maybe it’s not true,” I said. “But you know, this is a rough place. A kid was murdered here last year.”

Adam looked at me impatiently, as if I were a new stain that had somehow appeared on his shirtfront. I had 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.