Trout and Me by Susan Shreve

sideways. Close up in daylight I could see the cracks in his tattoo, little bits of skin showing through the red. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe nothing at all, maybe about the tattoo.
    “I’m going to wash it off,” Trout said.
    “I thought it was permanent. A tattoo. That’s what I thought it was.”
    “I lied,” he said. He licked his finger and rubbed the red question mark just at the bottom so the red came off on his finger. “See?”
    I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. There was suddenly something different about Trout, something old. As if he’d grown up while he was sleeping last night. He seemed quiet and silent, not unfriendly but not particularly friendly either. Not stuck to me like Velcro as he had been.
    “Do you want to come over to my house?” I asked.
    “Your parents hate me.”
    “My parents don’t hate you.”
    “They will. Pretty soon they’ll hate me like the other parents do because I’m disturbing your work like Mr. O’Dell says and getting you in trouble. I know all about that because Mr. O’Dell had a meeting with me and my father this morning.”
    “My parents have no reason to hate you. They love me and I’m in as much trouble as you are.”
    Trout shrugged. “That’s the way it is,” he said.
    We stayed there until I could feel that it was starting to get dark, and it wasn’t until I checked my watch and saw it was five o’clock and knew I’d better get home that Trout began to talk.
    He told me about his mother first. How his mother had gotten a boyfriend and moved to Hawaii and left Trout with his father when he was seven years old.
    “Do you visit Hawaii?” I asked.
    “Once when I was eight,” he said. “It wasn’t fun.”
    “Hawaii wasn’t fun?”
    “My mom really didn’t want me there. She wanted to hang out with her boyfriend, so she kept saying didn’t I want to go home early and I said no and so I stayed. But she didn’t ask me the next year. She comes to visit on Christmas, but that’s all. And now she has a new baby.”
    He told me about his father and how his father is a salesman and travels a lot and changes jobs and moves to different towns. Every time Trout moves to a new school, it’s okay for exactly a week and then he’s in trouble again.
    “So I don’t have friends because kids are afraid they’ll be in trouble if they hang out with me,” he said. “Or,” he went on, “maybe they don’t even like me.”
    “And since you move all the time, you don’t have time to make friends.”
    “Right.” But he was thinking of something else. “It’s not just that we move all the time because my father gets a newjob. We move because I get in some kind of trouble at school and my father gets embarrassed because I’m not perfect or the school says I have to go to a special school and then my father looks for another job in another place. So it’s my fault, sort of,” he said. “At least, that’s what my dad says.”
    The end of my cigarette was getting too wet, so I turned it around and pretended to smoke the other end. I didn’t know what to say to Trout. His story was the saddest story I’d ever heard. I began to think that here he was, my best friend, and I hadn’t known anything at all about him, not about his mother or his father, and worst of all, not about the terrible life he’d had.
    “I think you should come with Meg and me to dinner tonight,” I said. “It’s my parents’ anniversary, so they’re going out together.”
    Trout didn’t answer right away. He thought about it and then he decided that it’d be okay since Meg wasn’t my parents and so we walked to the corner of Euclid and Main and he used the pay phone to call his father. His father must have said no because Trout said it didn’t make any sense for him to go home unless his father was going to be there for dinner, too, and why should he stay home alone. And that he’d be home by eight or his father could pick him up at