Half a Life: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

he was given to wearing pullover baja shirts in his social studies class and I’d laughed behind his back many times. “Great emotion is justified in tragic events like these. But we should take a second to remember that Darin is a student in the North Shore community, too.” (Our school had about five hundred and twenty students total.) “The reports tell us he wasn’t at fault, and I am sure we can agree he’s a good person.”
    It was years before I wrote to thank him, this guyI didn’t really know, who was decent enough to perform a simple kindness, the kindness of remembering the young man whose well-being it would have been easy, at that moment, to forget. I didn’t say a word to him the rest of my high-school days.

As I waited to decipher the forming pattern of accusations and consequences, I returned to class. It was early June, about a week after the accident and a few days before the funeral.
    I was met at North Shore High’s front door with a stormy look from Melanie Urquhart, one of Celine’s friends. I had prepared for this, or something like it. What high-schooler wouldn’t glare hard at the boy who killed her friend?
    I had the hunch, as I contrited my way from class to cafeteria and back, that my day would be filled by these black glances. I was wrong. With frightened eyes, I looked everywhere, at everyone. And in the homerooms and corridors, there quickly grew around me a zone of silence and inviolability. Except when my friends would suddenly mount brief, haphazard campaigns of everything’s normal, quoting lines from Fletch and slapping my book bag or calling me a dick.
    All the same, the inescapability of what had happened—what was happening now as I showed my face in the clogged thoroughfare between classes—threw who I really was into shadow, even to myself. It felt somehow like living at the last limits of objective reality. I seemed less real than theplain, plump truth did. Because I’d driven a certain road, someone who had been alive was dead. I had killed someone. And yet, that wasn’t the end of it. Because now the daily me was back: the residue of that accident returned to school. The shambling or smiling or lurking person who’d run down the girl. I remember the first time after the accident my name was called in class, the feel of pause and hush in the room, like deer scenting something strange. Everyone’s ears and tails flicked. Speaking aloud here meant, all at once, that I was a student again. I’d have to work to be as present, as definable, as real as the accident was.
    Before lunch, Jim—the guy who’d been such a jocular monster at the movie house—apologized and tried to explain himself. This was like that surprise tribute my social studies teacher had given at the assembly, a case of spot kindness. Jim was telling me that when we’d seen each other, he’d heard only that there’d been some kind of accident. And if he’d known that a person had actually been seriously hurt , let alone died , he of course wouldn’t have ever dared or even dreamed of, etc. Who cared what he said; his hands were on my shoulder. He asked three or four times how I was, and his grip on my arm felt good. When he saw I couldn’t answer, he’d interrupt my pauses. His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren’t right even as he couldn’t stop presenting them.
    Another buddy, Eric, assured me that he and others had started in on the high-school equivalent of push-polling, ofcaucusing for votes. Come on , they’d say to anyone still on the fence, the undecideds. Wasn’t it a little suspicious how she just turned into his car? You ever think of that? To her friends they’d say quietly: We have to be there for Darin, too. We have to support him, too .
    For all that, my inviolability zone wasn’t airtight. An AP English teacher, rancorous and grim, squinted my way: I’m almost positive he shook his head and grumbled as we passed each