Half a Life: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

other. But more often what happened was vague. Students in hallways passed looks back and forth, telling one another: Hey, go on tiptoes around a griever like this. Or they just shunned me—quickened their pace, hid their heads in open lockers. I got a sense of which look signified what. Grievers become connoisseurs of the averted eye. My stomach was wincing the entire week. Except now and then, on the second and third days, when a few non-friends dared talking to me. At those moments, there would be that echoed thump! everywhere in the chest.
    On the off chance I would need to chat, I’d prepared a whole, verbatim pitch. (“The entire thing happened in like an eye blink.”) When I delivered it, I’d see myself as poignantly sad, even a bit aw-shucks , with sundown lighting and uncertain piano tinkles right out of Hollywood, a scene trembling on the brink of discovery.
    Again, most people steered clear, but a few—“Hey Darin, that morning did you have any, well, accidents happen, whatever—I’m sure you weren’t, I mean, who gets drunk during the day, but I’m just asking, did you …”—afew kids did say things that demanded I address the accident. I’d chew off my monologue piece by piece, fussily clearing my throat, letting out a chunk at a time. It was the version I’d settled on, official and even true, but in a way that seemed to go against the spirit of truth: facts with edges sanded, corners rounded. (“Again, I didn’t really see her cut in front of me until pretty much, you know, impact.”)
    The kids who did talk to me usually said: Most of us understand it wasn’t your fault , or some other soft response. And I even got awarded this: in front of my locker, the football team captain face-gestured my way. (With, I should admit, infinite disinterest.) He was the physical king of the class; his nod played up his good chin, the charisma of his nose … But so what seemed to be happening to me was a surprise. I don’t mean that North Shore High accepted my return with a gentle yawn. A fatal accident will remain a trusty motor of cafeteria scuttlebutt—I could intuit that as I humped around carrying my lunch tray. I felt like a paper cutout, poised there, being snipped into conversations at every table.
    The school also had, of course, a few death fetishists. Kids who drew intricate pen-and-ink arabesques on their notebooks, who scratched BLACK SABBATH or ANTHRAX in their official fonts on the spine. These kids jostled over again and again, offering condolences but wanting accounts, details, details. I was a figure to them; to them, I may as well have been walking the halls with a black cowl and sickle. There was one girl in particular. She had mannish hair, cutin a greasy style. It was obvious, as she interrogated me—the wide eyes, the thrilled cheeks—that by talking about this, she felt close to something decayed and vibrant.
    But still, what now seemed a qualified acceptance of me at NSHS came as a relief—compared to my own serfs-with-pitchforks visions. My reception exceeded what I’d hoped for. All the same, a new unease came shyly into my heart, as if on tiptoe. I didn’t know what it was. And then I did.
    By fifth period I could pretty well catalog the variety of reactions. Some misread my tense, android gloom as some Mahatma Gandhian state of moral insight or knowledge. (As if, via something like virtue osmosis, those who brush up to death just arrive at the sense of what matters and what does not.) Other kids (friends of Celine’s and some basic misanthropes) flat-out blamed me for killing her, though this group mostly bit their tongues about it. But most people’s reactions lacked all intensity. If you were neither a close friend nor some kind of rival, it was easier to give “the tragic event” a minute of incomprehension and then go about your adolescence. “This,” I thought, “is it?”—someone has died . But the student body, stepping into summer sunlight, had