Read At the Bottom of Everything for Free Online Page B

and as we walked back to his house he told me, sounding almost bored with the need to explain, what he’d said. “My friend and Iwere out walking along the path and we thought we saw a fire burning, so we ran over to put it out but we couldn’t find any water.”
    And like that: resolved. I was slightly, silently mad at him for the rest of the afternoon for being so much better than me at coping in an emergency. The practical world was supposed to be my realm.
    When we weren’t in the woods, we spent most of our time at the Pells’ house, despite my mom’s pleading. I knew she’d embarrass me in front of Thomas; I knew Frank would want to take us to the country club, where he’d turn red in the sauna and fart like a silverback gorilla. The few sleepovers we had at my house felt like exhibition games; whatever fun we managed was halfhearted and conditional.
    And as I got to know his parents, I began to feel that way about my house even when I wasn’t with Thomas. When my mom and I had first moved into Frank’s, just before seventh grade, I’d felt like the kid on
Silver Spoons
—my new bedroom was the size of our old living room; the kitchen had two dishwashers and two sinks; in the backyard there was a little heated pool hidden by a hedge where Frank liked to float on Saturday afternoons. But now that I knew the Pells, now that I’d seen the look on Thomas’s face as Frank showed us how to turn on the jets, it all seemed pathetic, like a
SkyMall
catalog you could live inside. Could the Pells’ dim, golden dining room really exist just a few miles from this one with its fake fruit and stacks of
Time
magazine? My mom and Frank, the house, their whole lives, seemed now like a microwavable meal, plastic wrapped and artificially colored.
    Thomas’s mom, Sally, sometimes asked polite questions about what it was like having a mom who was a pharmacist (“She must be just wonderful when you have the flu”), but I knew that they could never be friends, that they could never even really have a conversation, and I knew that Sally knew it too. She practiced some sort of law that was the opposite of my stepdad’s; she was always talking about fraud and city agenciesand the lobbyists who actually wrote our legislation. She carried binders and tote bags. She might have been the only mom I knew with undyed gray hair. She’d taken to calling out both Thomas’s and my names as soon as she walked in the door. “Well, don’t you two look comfortable!” Her accent (she was from Georgia) made everything she said sound as if she were curtsying. “I was thinking about steak tonight—sound all right by you two?”
    “Mm-hmm.”
    “Adam, you check with your folks?”
    “They don’t mind!”
    “Why not go ahead and give ’em a call, just to be sure.”
    “OK!”
    I’d never been around an adult who seemed actually to like me; not to love me, in the smothering and depressing and animal way my mom did, and not to feign interest in me, in the professional, blank-eyed way my teachers did, but actually to want to sit down and hear what I had to say about something. Sally would pour herself a glass of white wine and, while Thomas sat at his computer in the other room, say to me, “So, did they let y’all out to watch the verdict? Everyone in my office was gathered around a portable TV like it was a campfire.” Or she might ask me what I thought about the idea of seventy-minute periods, which the high school had just decided to try out. I had no practice in sitting at a table and coming up with opinions; it felt like learning to sing.
    “Mom?” Thomas would call out without looking away from the computer. “What are you talking about?”
    “Oh, we’re just gossiping in here.” And then sometimes she’d say (I loved to hear this the way a cat loves having its back stroked), “Adam, I just love to talk to you. If Thomas was in charge I think I’d just slide his meals under the door and come get him when Richard gets