At the Bottom of Everything Read Online Free PDF

sinking into a post-field-trip state of not giving a shit, a game of Truth or Dare developed. Paul Wolham rubbed his penis against the window and pretended he’d had an orgasm. Lauren Langer had to say whether she’d ever had a sex dream. John Swider had to go to the front of the bus and ask the driver if there was anywhere on board to poop.
    I could see where this was going. Being friends with Thomas was like being friends with an alcoholic; chances to creep out Michelle were his liquor stores, his bars. He and I went back to join the game just after Michelle and Rebecca did. By then Rebecca and I may have been breaking up; anyway we didn’t acknowledge each other.
    It was Alex Rozmarin, this spastic red-haired kid, who finally dared Michelle to kiss Thomas. There are no secret crushes in middle school; Thomas’s hopelessness was becoming as public a fact as his intelligence.
    It wasn’t a fact for him, though. He turned toward her andraised his eyebrows in a way that said,
Well? Here I am, and I guess we’re going to have to do this, aren’t we?
    She didn’t move and she wasn’t (it was as clear as if she’d said it) even thinking about it. “Truth,” she said. “I choose truth.”
    “You said dare!” Alex shrieked. “You can’t go back! You have to kiss Thomas!”
    But he was overruled. Thomas stayed standing but now he’d turned his face away from Michelle, down toward the floor, and he seemed to be shrinking inward, like a burning leaf. In the look that had come over her at the thought of having to kiss him, he’d finally seen the truth. If the bus’s back door had been open I think he would have flung himself out.
    Instead (and this was, I think, when I first noticed his inclination toward emotional seppuku) he looked up, as if he’d heard a whistle in the distance. In his clearest, most measured voice, he said, “Michelle, I’ve made you uncomfortable, and I apologize. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should have accepted what was obvious a long time ago. You won’t need to worry about avoiding me anymore. I’ll never bother you again.”

On a Saturday a week or so after the tea with Anna, I took Nicholas and Teddy ice-skating in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery. This was a dripping, dishrag-gray day, and I was feeling mildly poisoned not only because of the weather but because I thought I’d seen Claire in the crowd that afternoon at Metro Center. The changing room smelled like wet socks and dirty rubber. As I kneeled in front of a bench, tying Nicholas’s skates, he said, “You’re kind of like our dad now, huh?”
    For some reason this added to my gloom, and without looking up I said, “No, your dad’s your dad. I’m just your friend. Now give me your other foot.”
    Teddy, standing balanced with one hand on my head, asked if he could go get a soft pretzel (he was always in a panic about when he was going to eat next), and I knocked his arm away, stood up, told them to quit being so slow or else I was going to take them home. I spent the hour on the ice dropping their hands, telling them they needed to learn to stay up on their own, doing everything I could not to look like their father. Beatles songs played on a loop out of faraway-soundingspeakers and backward-skating show-offs zoomed around and between us.
    “Can we stop for bagels on the way home?” Teddy asked, while we were hobbling back into the locker room.
    “No.”
    “Are you mad at us?”
    “No. Not if you take your skates off and go get your shoes.”
    I must have already known that I was going to start sleeping with their mother. When I try now to pinpoint the first moment when I realized this might actually happen, it keeps getting pushed earlier. Yes, the night of the tea, the dream, but hadn’t there been weird looks, little pauses, before then? Joel used to call her my middle-aged mistress, when I’d stand talking to her on the phone at night—he’d once dated an older woman, and he talked