At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick

sad.
    “I’d wondered how the whole ascetic thing was playing at school,” Richard said. “And the trouble is I know where it comes from—you see old pictures of me and I’ve got this scowl, this kind of one-pointed,
I’m-much-too-serious-for-happiness
look, and now here it all comes again and I just don’t know how somebody gets out of it except to grow up. Which seems OK until your kid’s the one suffering. Well, he’ll figure it out. Thanks for indulging me. And look, without getting too concerned-adult-putting-his-arm-around-you here, think about trying to convince him to come along to a party or something the next time you go. He’s not as set in stone about all this as he thinks he is. He could really use you.”
    I walked out and back upstairs to Thomas’s room, not quite believing that Richard was really sitting there in his office now thinking that everything would be better if only I invited Thomas to Roy Donnelly’s next party. Sally called out good-bye to me that afternoon the way she always did (asking if I was sure I wouldn’t stay for dinner, telling me to give my mom a hug), and I went along with it, singing my little part in our duet, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, but I just knew, as sure as if I’d been leaving for college the next day, that I wasn’t going to be back.
    And I wasn’t, really (there may have been another time or two, but no more than that). First I stopped going over tothe Pells’ house, then I stopped looking for Thomas between classes, then I stopped saying hi to him in the halls completely. It was weird but it was also, once we were started on it, impossible to reverse; you can’t go from ignoring someone to saying hi without some sort of conversation in between, some fight or explanation, but there was nothing I was willing to fight about, nothing I was willing to explain.
    That summer Thomas worked again for the professor friend of his dad’s; I went to a three-week baseball camp in Florida and spent the rest of my time going to the kinds of parties that I’d spent the summer before avoiding. At some point junior year Thomas seemed to accept that we weren’t friends anymore. A couple of times, on parent-teacher nights or at awards assemblies, I’d see either Sally or Richard, and Richard would just give me a tight smile, but Sally would say, “You just
have
to come see us. We miss you!” But everyone understood, or seemed to think they understood: best friendships ended all the time.
    My mom said to me sometimes (it was one of her handful of subjects, along with whether I thought it would be fun to go on a beach vacation once I graduated) that she’d always thought Thomas and I were a strange pair. And, she said, even though she never would have wanted to say it before, she always got the feeling that the Pells thought they were better than everyone else. Did I know (yes, I did) that she’d once left Sally a message asking if they’d come over for dinner and she had never even called her
back
? Oh well, she said. I’m sure he’ll go on and get very good grades somewhere.
    At the end of our senior year there was a class dinner out on the soccer field with caterers and round tables and a white tent; all the guys wore jackets and all the girls wore dresses and had their hair done up like ribbons (the end of senior year at Dupont is like the grand finale at a fireworks show: a dozen overlapping ceremonies and honors and farewells). By that time in the school year pretty much all the barriers betweenteachers and students have broken down; teachers let us call them by their first names, and they’d spend their class periods leading dreamy, what-does-it-all-mean discussions about how even though this particular group would never reassemble, we’d always have this shared experience to look back on, etc.
    By bad luck, or by some parent-teacher committee’s bad planning, Thomas and I were seated at the same table. We were a couple of chairs apart, and I