Chapter 32
The Boy in the Window
We moved to Lincoln in the summer, soon before the school year began.
I had a new home, a new room, new neighbors.
Everything was new: life in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses instead of on a farm, isolated from the rest of the world; that strange feeling of my grandmother being gone, off in Canada with my aunt and uncle because she didn’t like life in the city; the telescope Dad gave me when I turned ten, huge, complicated, the best money could buy.
He put it in my bedroom in front of the window, but I couldn’t see much because of the light pollution and because there was only a tiny patch of sky in the gap between my house and the one next it.
“What are you looking at?”
I peeked around the telescope. Just a few feet away, a sharp-eyed kid was watching me with studied curiosity.
“I’m trying to find Mars.”
“Why?”
I fumbled for an explanation. Because seeing a planet is amazing. Because everyone should be curious about the immensity that surrounds us. Because it’s perfect and it makes me feel alive.
“Uh…I don’t know.”
He smiled. “My name’s Josh. You’re the new kid, right?”
The new kid. It sounded better than the weird kid, the lonely kid, the different kid. So I smiled, forgot my telescope, and leaned out the window.
“Yeah, we just got here. My name’s Will.”
“You like baseball?”
No. I thought it was stupid. “Yeah. I’m out of practice, though.”
“You want to hit the ball around tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
We spent the whole next afternoon in his yard pitching and batting. Fortune smiled on me and I managed to hit it a few times. Josh’s mom offered us some apple pie and lemonade, and when I left, he said, “See you tomorrow, Will.”
“See you tomorrow, Josh.”
I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
We were inseparable from then on. We spent what was left of the summer hanging around the neighborhood. We went to the movies, rode our bikes, met some of his friends. I don’t know why, but Josh took me under his wing. By the time school started, we were best friends.
Josh had a big personality, and I couldn’t stay away from him. He was sarcastic, observant, always knew how to get to people. But if you were on his side, you didn’t have to worry about his barbs.
We grew up together. We left childhood behind and grew into adolescence and orbited around each other the whole time.
School, formerly hostile, was where I shined at Josh’s side.
We were on the football team; girls asked us to homecoming; we always got the best table at the cafeteria.
We were popular. That was par for the course for him, but for me, it was like emerging from a swamp, and I had to learn how to accept that new reality where everything was easier.
So much had changed. Including my body.
The year I turned fifteen, I grew so much that my mother complained about always having to buy me new clothes.
When I was sixteen, my beard grew in, my shoulders broadened, and I got the same haircut as my popular friends.
The skinny, introverted kid who used to sit in the back of the class in elementary school was no longer recognizable.
My heart changed too, with every beat.
I don’t know if you can say, exactly, when I stopped being the target of one moron’s jokes and became another one’s sidekick.
But it happened. At first, I tried not to notice when Josh picked on one of our classmates.
But it made me uncomfortable. As the months passed, I told myself it was just fun and games, and I even started finding it funny when he called this kid with a lisp Donald Duck or he hid someone else’s clothes in the locker room and made him play hot or cold to find them.
Eventually I stopped having to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.
I just became that person. And life was way easier that way.
All I had to worry about was myself and seeing things the way I was supposed to see them and not as they actually were.
Eyes ahead, always ahead. And what lay ahead, inevitably, were parties, friends, girls, and eventually one girl, Jenna.
Together, we were the couple everyone idolized.
The Christmas of my first year of college, my aunt and uncle invited us to spend the holidays at their house in the woods in Canada.
I refused at first but changed my mind when my mother called and convinced me.
There I was, in the middle of nowhere, cold as hell no matter how many layers of clothes I put on, sitting on the porch steps and watching the snow fall.
“Will, what are you doing here?”
I looked up at my grandmother, who was wearing a ridiculous Christmas sweater with a deformed reindeer with a big red nose. I sighed. “It’s the only place I can get service.”
My phone vibrated as a message came through.
“Can’t you just not worry about it for one night? It’s Christmas. We’re about to give your cousins their sweets. You’re going to miss it!”
“Grandma…” I got up and looked down at her.
I was going to say something else, something about how little I cared about sweets and all the rest of the traditions; I was going to tell her all I wanted was to leave and get back to New York; but she looked so small next to me, so wrinkled, so old, that I chose to shut my mouth.
She rested the cold palm of her hand on my cheek. “Will, honey, where are you?”
I didn’t understand the question.
I thought she was rambling, that maybe she was getting senile.
Right in front of you, I was going to say, but then the door opened, and Uncle Marcus stared at us, confused.
“We’ve been looking for you forever! Mom, go inside, you’re going to catch cold.
You too, William, your cousins are asking about you. ”
It’s taken me years to understand why my grandmother couldn’t find me then, even if I was right in front of her.
The idea of being lost is so vague and yet so precise.
You can get lost in a forest and not make it home.
But it’s almost easier to get lost in your own home.
You can lose trivial things—a pen, a wallet, a shopping list—but you can also lose your mind, lose a friend, lose your life.
My grandmother used the phone often, but she still liked to write postcards.
She told me once it had been hard for her to learn to read and write.
She was the oldest child in a poor family and didn’t have time to study, and now that she could write, she thought it was best to keep on doing it till the end of her days.
And so she’d sit there at the table by the window in my uncle’s living room—or at least, that’s how I like to imagine her—and fill up the back of those postcards she bought every month at the store around the corner.
After that Christmas, I got the strangest messages from her.
Things like: This week, I went out for my walk and I got a handful of the shiniest, juiciest blackberries.
And I thought to myself, this might well be the best day of my life.
Or: Now that I’m eighty-two, I realize love is the only thing that’s truly worth it.
Everything else is like an apple rotting out in the rain.
I didn’t listen to her the way I should have.
I was busy studying, going to forgettable parties, making friends without knowing what friendship was, pretending I was king of the world.
That was a side effect of no longer looking at the stars.
It’s easy to forget that the universe is up there above you, measureless, omnipotent, and you’re not at its center.
I kept going. With my blinders on. In a straight line. Never looking back. Everything boiled down to always moving, climbing, running.
And Lena crossed my path.
She was smart, pretty, dreamy. She’d grown up around the rich and powerful in New York, but none of that mattered to her.
Her parents transferred a small fortune into her checking account every month, which made her uncomfortable but not as much as their expectations that she’d go into politics when she was done studying law.
I liked her but not enough to stick with her, I guess.
No one seems good enough for you when you’ve decided to put a crown on your own head.
I didn’t know that at first. I told myself I’d stick to the straight and narrow, but other opportunities kept showing up.
And I wondered why I should stay with one person when I could have so much more.
More—that was what mattered to me. Always more.
Every summer I’d go on vacation and then head back to Lincoln. Josh and the guys would always say how much I’d changed. New York’s turning you into a tight-ass, they’d tell me.
They didn’t understand this wasn’t my first transformation.
That I’d changed skins before. That I wasn’t a real person, just a bunch of habits stitched together to fulfill others’ expectations.
That the mind changes first, then the heart follows.
And once it does, you’re screwed. Forever.
You really can forget the entirety of your past and it can all turn to a blur because memory is a game, a magical one, and every memory we store is a fantasy, an illusion created one brushstroke at a time until we finally find something we’re ready to hold on to.
I remember one summer night when I went home at dawn after Josh and I had spent the night shooting pool in a new bar, drinking beer and hanging out with these girls we had just met.
As I lay on the sheets, the early morning light turned everything a soft gold color.
I looked at my phone for the time, and when I laid it aside, it fell in the crack between the bed and the nightstand. “Shit.”
I thought I could just leave it there, but I was an addict, so of course I had to pick it back up.
I stood, pushed a chair aside, pulled out the bed, moved the nightstand.
The noise could have woken my parents, but that never even crossed my mind.
There it was. My phone in a pile of dust. I grabbed it and felt something else.
A glass jar. A glass jar full of glitter.
I lay back in bed and turned it. The light coming through the window made it gleam.
It was funny—it made me remember when I first arrived there and how it used to calm me down to watch the glitter tumble and shine inside it.
That was an eternity ago. Years had passed, and everything from that moment was buried now.
I didn’t even remember where the glitter had come from.
Some girl. Right, a girl. But I didn’t remember her voice, her face, her smile, or her name. I didn’t remember anything.
And I decided it didn’t matter. And I fell asleep.