When AJ and his friends left for school that September, I was startled by the intense, lonely silence that overtook our house. I had never realized how much buzzy excitement AJ had generated just by coming and going. Noel, Davey, Bash, and Ariel had felt like my friends. (I never cared for Lynne, who in an unguarded moment told me I could be a cheerleader if I took gymnastics, as I had the right size and build. “But you’ll have to be really good because if you’re not cute, you have to do all the moves perfectly.”)
My father, sensing my melancholy, tried to help. He established the ritual of our weekly call with AJ, one that I maintained even after I went away to college. He signed me up for a gymnastics camp, where I did excel, although I decided never to try out for cheerleading. I knew I was good enough that I could make the team on merit—and then I would never know if I was cute. And I was intensely curious about whether I was cute, or going to be, when I was a teenager. Of course, I could have tanked the tryout, muddled a leg on a cartwheel, to see what would happen. But even as a ten-year-old, imagining my life as a fourteen-year-old, I could not envision failing on purpose, ever.
My father also gave me a book about two children whose older brothers and sister went off to boarding schools, their left-behind siblings desolate. We read it together at night, although I was long past the age of needing to read with him. And the book didn’t really make me feel better. First of all, someone created a scavenger hunt of sorts to amuse and distract the pair in their loneliness. I hoped this was a hint, checked the mail every day, but no one sent me on a quest. Besides they were two. I was one. Randy and I were still friends, but he had a growth spurt over the summer and now towered over me, which made me wary of him. I was worried he would bring up that kissing thing again. I was worried he wouldn’t. He found a girl named Amanda, who had no ambivalence about kissing, and they started going together, which meant we couldn’t hang out anymore. Even in fifth grade, that rule was clear.
Finally it was Thanksgiving. AJ came home, as did Noel and Ariel, but San Antonio was too far for Bash to return. As for Davey—he had never left. He had deferred his admission to Stanford because he needed a long time to recuperate from the Flood brothers’ attack. When he was finally well enough to attend school, it had seemed formidable, traveling cross-country in a wheelchair.
Ben Flood’s knife may have struck only once, but that was enough. He had sliced Davey’s vertebrae, leaving him a paraplegic. Davey never walked again. His parents bought him a car as they had promised, but it was a van equipped with hand pedals, and he used it to commute to the University of Maryland, which at the time took almost any in-state kid with a high school diploma.
“Are you going to see Davey?” my father asked AJ that Thanksgiving weekend, which felt as if it were a decade later than the previous one, given how much had happened. Our father was issuing an instruction, not asking a question: AJ was going to see Davey, whether he wanted to or not. Dutifully, he drove to Hobbit’s Glen, spent an hour in the company of his friend, Sancho Panza visiting Quixote on his deathbed, mind, body, and spirit shattered.
I was more curious about when Noel would stop by. Only he didn’t. It was a hectic three days, with AJ constantly on the move, going from party to party. Nor did we see Noel at Christmas break, but by then his mother had returned to D.C. and his father, more or less in that order. It was a hassle for Noel to get to Columbia from D.C. Summer came, but Noel didn’t come back. He landed a summer theater gig, interning in Chicago. He was paid nothing, but they liked him, invited him back the next summer, began to use him as an actor. By the age of twenty, Noel was a member of Steppenwolf. At twenty-two, he moved to New York, began landing small parts. He was six foot four then, very slender. Some say that one’s eyes appear large as a child because eyes never grow while our heads do. But the photographs I saw of Noel—the Columbia Flier was quite proprietary about his success—made them look as large as ever. And as green as ever, I assume, but the photos were black and white. Remember that, when newspapers were black and white and read all over?
And then, at age twenty-six, Noel was dead. AIDS. Remember when young men didn’t die from “viruses” at the age of twenty-six?