Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss

a fist stretching a balloon.
    “I’ve thought about you sometimes, yo,” he said. “You’re the one who ran over that girl? This’ll sound weird. I’m just talking out loud here. But I worried about you. Everyone was very hard on you.”
    Really? That wasn’t how I remembered it. I remembered what had seemed to be a big wave, and once I’d pushed through it, only flat calm sea, and people wanting to make sure I was floating all right.
    “Were they hard on me?” I said.
    “I really did, man. I thought about you a lot. Like a, What’s this guy going to do with this , kind of a thing. I was hoping I’d see you here.”
    My face was burning. Or not burning, just suddenly huge and gawky. I needed to get this gawky thing away before I bumbled into somebody. So that’s what I tried to do now, with this dude: “Okay, then.” Nod, handshake, bye.
    After that, every conversation was a swerve. I’d see people I recognized, move close, my courage would conk out, so I’d walk past. Their faces would form into a greeting and then congeal a little as I glided by. Was that Darin …?
    I’d been wrong. Maybe these people could lay sprawled in their own nostalgia. But I couldn’t join them. My thoughts kept flying head-first into the pane of glass that kept me outside of everyone else.
    “Oh, I don’t associate you with that ,” a woman named Kim told me a few hours later. By now the night was huffing and puffing toward the finish line.
    She and I had stepped out onto the lawn. I had always really liked Kim in school, when she’d been the fluent, prim girl dating Jim. Kim had become a smoker—so there was that gentle distress of seeing people from high schoolpractice adult vices without calamity—and it was because she’d headed outside to burn a cigarette that we now stood here in the cold, just beyond the door, where people expelled long, sighing, dry clouds.
    “Thanks,” I said, “for saying that.” I was obliging too much. “Yeah, I remember you from a lot of different years, as well.” This was a case of my deliberately misunderstanding: and why? To make her clear it up. To make her say it again. Guilt makes you behave in ways that get you to dislike yourself, that make you go through more guilt.
    She fired up another Marlboro Gold: match crack, instant light on lips, her bunched chin. “I mean, people I think know it wasn’t your fault.”
    “Oh.”
    “—or even think about it when they first see you,” she said.
    “Well, good.” I nodded, only now recognizing the indiscretion of having brought it up.
    She waved at the cigarette smoke in front of my face until it was gone.
    At my most confident, I blush and my gaze veers. But when feeling unrecognizable, I’ll make sure to look you right in the eye.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    The whole wistful mass of us migrated to the Clark Tavern—carpooling in big noisy departures, that zip and lurch of a family van filled with high-schoolers who’d put on yearslike weight, but who remained their juvenile selves, after all: hooting out windows, greeting and upending the night. It was like rehashing graduation. We’d left a place that was only us, and entered the world’s tricky spots, where people didn’t know our stories and had to be approached with suspicion.
    But hadn’t Kim said exactly what I’d wanted her to say? Why had there been no quick-focused humidity around the eyes, no stinging grateful rush? That my ex-classmates didn’t think about Celine even when they saw me scattered other ideas in my head. It was as if I knew less than I had when I’d left Manhattan to come back out here.
    Inside the bar, everyone kept snapping photos, or they stared at one another, stares of real intensity—drawn out, blatant, ex-friend to ex-friend. They were hoarding new memories, images to last the decade until next reunion.
    Kim had gathered some friends, women. We were all leaning forward—in the way of people at bars—straining to hear over music.