“It’s a good thing you took her with you,” my father said.
“You bet.” Rudy smiled. One of his front teeth was gray, a dead tooth, so his smile had a bit of the jack-o’-lantern. And then he was missing some teeth farther back, so his mouth crumpled in some. He really wasn’t scary, I could see up close, with his paunch and his stubby fingers and the wispy gray curls on top of his head. The skin on his cheeks was red and thick, but his dark eyes were like a dog’s eyes, hopeful and sad. “Wisest thing I ever did, taking Bessie that night.” I could see him imagining the other possibility. “Not that,” he said, “I don’t think I could’ve stood it. She’s what I’ve got,” he said. “She’s my family. My wisdom.”
I thought back to that late-summer afternoon, Cassie and I hidden in the asylum, peering down at him and Bessie and the truck, and how I’d been sure that she knew we were there. “They’re smart dogs, German shepherds, aren’t they?”
“Smarter than most people,” he said. “Than most people I know, anyhow.”
Then I remembered how I’d imagined that with his loud Springsteen music, he was reliving a carefree youth; but now I could see Rudy up close, I knew that couldn’t have been the case. He’d never been that guy, sure of himself, his arm around a girl in the cab of the truck. I knew the younger versions of guys like him at school, awkward, lonely, a bit slow, gravitating toward other boys like themselves for the relief of companionship, hoping for and expecting little, and grateful, grateful, for what they got.
THE SPEECH came out well—“a near ideal combination,” according to Mr. Cartwright, of the personal and the scientific. I chose a few details from Rudy’s story—tear-jerking details, like the moment, the morning after the storm, that he found his mother’s favorite photo of her and his dad when they were young, mud-soaked in a tangle of wet branches and debris. For all that Bessie’s apparent intuition made a great story and was the most meaningful part to me, it didn’t have much to do with global warming, so I left it out. You’ve got to shape the story into an argument, Mr. Cartwright told us, and that means you choose what to put in, and what not to. I started with Rudy, expanded out to Hurricane Katrina and other, bigger, weather events, and then got going with my statistics. Mr. Cartwright always told us that we respond to the individual, not the collective—that we get more upset about one specific child’s death than about the news of 500 or 1,000 dead people—and I kept that in mind. I may have made Rudy sound more heroic and stoic than he was in real life (in real life, my father suggested, it seemed that since his mother’s death Rudy had struck up his own friendship with Johnnie Walker’s poor cousin), but it helped to get my point across and I didn’t make anything up. Mr. Cartwright said he thought the speech would stand a good chance at the tournament, which was as high praise as he gave anyone, so I was happy. In the end, I came in third, but the kids who did better were both eighth graders, so it still felt like a triumph. Jodie, who was in a totally different category, performing a monologue from The Taming of the Shrew, was even a bit jealous.
IT’S FUNNY what time does: each day a drop of water, and without you realizing it, the stone below the drops wears a smooth divot. By late spring, I didn’t think too much about Cassie. I didn’t never see her, but we didn’t hang out. Peter Oundle had become my friend rather than her boyfriend, and if their failed romance was the reason, then I was grateful to Cassie. Even though he adored her, and maybe loved her even more after they broke up, I knew she could never have been right for him: sure, he ran the 400 meters and was invited to all the parties, but at heart he was a poet, and he showed me his poems and talked to me about them, and asked my opinion about words and lines. For some, he composed music, made them into songs—these, unlike the others, usually rhymed—and he tried them out on me too. He invited me around to his house—the first time, I got nervous, as though it meant something; but it quickly became clear there wasn’t anything particularly meaningful about it, for him anyway.
Peter had a keyboard and a guitar in his room, and he’d play and sing for me, and we’d work on the lyrics together. I’m not a trained musician, but I know, somehow, how a song should go, the way I know how a story should go, the way I can anticipate the plot of a TV show before it unfolds and I’m almost always right. He said nobody else could do it the way I could, that we were collaborators. He said he kept forgetting that I was younger than he was, because I gave such good advice and seemed so wise. I tried hard not to let his praise feel like it meant something else.
I couldn’t imagine him ever doing these things with Cassie, or praising her in this way. But he carried a torch for her—for some fantasy of her anyhow—and even as I searched for a glimmer of romantic interest from him, I couldn’t find it. The way his eyes went soft, and his voice, when he spoke about Cassie, I knew he still loved her. He had a habit too of rubbing his left index finger with his right thumb when he talked about her, as if he were consoling his very hand, consoling himself, like it was hard to talk about her even though he wanted to. Otherwise, with me, he was easy and free: no long glances, no awkward silences, no fumbled gestures. Of course I looked for them—I hoped for them; I remembered how his hand, so briefly on my shoulder, had burned, that long-ago summer morning—but there was nothing.
Peter told me more than once how lucky he felt to have so close and smart a female friend. “You’re a rock,” he said. He told me all kinds of things—about how his mom drank too much, not strictly a drunk but one glass of wine too many, too often; and how she yelled at his dad, and how he hated it and felt sorry for her at the same time. He told me about his older brother’s severe dyslexia—Josh was five years older, and in college—and how he’d never done well in school and was struggling to get through UNH, “on the eight-year plan,” Peter said, quoting his dad with a rueful smile; and how disappointed his parents were in Josh, how they looked to Peter to make up for it. He told me about his insect phobia and his childhood asthma, about loving old music like Bob Dylan, and Japanese anime. He showed me tons of photos of Tokyo on the computer—he dreamed of going there. He talked to me about anything and everything, but like we were girlfriends, or old people. He was oblivious, either willfully or naturally, to my interest.
My mother said he’d figure it out in time: “Don’t be the im-patient!” she joked, although I had trouble cracking a smile at the allusion to Anders Shute, emblem of everything that had gone wrong.