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was like the note you get when you rub a wet fingertip on crystal: she floated above varieties and was just sort of the thing itself.
    “Has Rebecca ever said anything about me liking Michelle? I’m worried she knows.”
    “No,” I said honestly. Rebecca had hardly ever said anything at all.
    Anyway, the caste system is strict in middle school—I was just at the edge of what my status allowed with Rebecca—and Thomas had no more chance of dating Michelle Koller than he did Michelle Pfeiffer. Still, I did my best to look serious as he showed me a Valentine’s Day card he’d made and then not given to her, and the couple of pages of surprisingly good sketches he’d made of her sitting at her desk, her hair behind her ears.
    I gave him advice, like a stock picker with a dupe for a client. It turned out not to matter after all that I couldn’t remember which side Russia had been on in World War II. Tell her you like her sweater, I said. Ask her if she needs helpwith her homework. Leave mix tapes on her desk. Try to be the last person to say good-bye to her at the end of each day.
    And each of these little dramas, although they of course weren’t going to lead anywhere, gave us something to talk over afterward at his house. I liked being the kid who’d cracked Thomas Pell; it was like having learned to communicate with an owl. First I’d go over once a week, maybe twice. By May we didn’t even have to ask what the other was doing—we’d walk out of school together and head straight for the bus stop. I’d come to like him more than I liked the people who used to laugh at my impressions of him. Soon we were having sleepovers in his bedroom with its bookshelves and slanted ceilings; we were making up names for people at school and making up words for things we didn’t want to be overheard talking about; I was eating dinner at his house so often that his mom would set a place for me without asking.
    But throughout all this, he remained gloomily obsessed with Michelle. I hadn’t read
The Great Gatsby
yet, but this was pure Gatsby and Daisy: tragic longing, obsessive planning.
    At the end of that first May of our friendship there was a grade-wide field trip to the aquarium in Baltimore. This meant signing permission slips, getting to school at seven thirty in the morning, climbing onto an old-apple-juice-smelling bus. Thomas and I had come up with a plan that Thomas was going to sidle up to Michelle at some point in the afternoon, probably in a dark exhibit, and try putting his arm around her. I knew this was hopelessly, ridiculously creepy, but Thomas and I had spent a couple of afternoons at his house, standing at his bedroom window and pretending it was an aquarium tank, practicing how he’d ease his arm up her back and around her shoulders.
    We were in the Amazon River Basin Gallery when he told me that it wasn’t working. “I tried to get near her and she used Alice to scrape me off. I think she might be upset with me. Or just in a bad mood.”
    “No, try in the next exhibit. See? In one of the little dark hallways.”
    He closed his eyes and nodded, and I watched as he spent the next five minutes slowly following her around between the jellyfish tanks, edging his way close to her, looking like someone trying to pick her pocket.
    He came back over to me and said, “Well, that was an Arc de Triomphe,” which was what we said when something had gone wrong. On the bus ride home we sat next to each other not talking, and it occurred to me, watching miles of those beige sound-blocking walls, that he might finally have realized how hopeless he was, and that now might be the time to admit that he was right. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” was all I could think to say, which was another of our words for failure (our language, it’s occurring to me now, was especially rich on this subject).
    Once it started to get dark outside, and once the teachers and chaperones had all begun either falling asleep or