Half a Life: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

grabbed its beach towel. It was nice out—that bright gush of weeks right before graduation—and your future rarely feels so present as it does in this June of your prime. The accident, to pretty much the whole school, was just one black feather in the larger scheme of things.
    I didn’t understand that everyone’s tepid emotions were reasonable. The panicky little drum that kept me goingrequired that this event, this death, be epochal. Of course, it was that: this was an incomprehensibly sad occurrence for our school, our town. But I didn’t yet know that there are some truths—that even young people die occasionally; that there’s only so much gnashing of teeth and weeping over another person’s tragedy—there are some truths that only come to us softened by beautiful stratagems of self-deception. Nobody wants to be reminded. Nobody wants to hear the sad song again.
    Melanie Urquhart, at the end of that first day, approached my locker. I braced myself: here it comes.
    As she closed in—backpack straps, yellowish hair, eyes at my face—I realized I wanted to hear it. This is what I craved, the fullest force. The worst thing. I needed it to be spoken, and by someone outside of myself, so I could determine whether it was true. Melanie was short but took long, fast steps. Here was judgment, at last. One quirk that makes life hard—for the mobile packets of truth and lies we all are—is that we’re all imprinted with a kind of bullshit meter. It’s nonpartisan. It gauges what others say, and what we say, too. It’s most active socially; it goes to sleep when we’re just thinking. I felt a magnetic pull to Melanie now. I got excited, even brimming.
    “I’m sorry, I—” she barely managed, “— support you.” She told it straight to my sneaks.
    It was insincere. Melanie had been peer-pressured into coming. “You’re okay, Darin, which is important, too.” She was talking with steep reluctance. Or maybe she meanteverything she said. I don’t know. It couldn’t have been easy for her—or for any of my still-stunned classmates.
    What I wanted to tell her was: “I’m sorry I haven’t cried. I may not look it, but I’m overcome by this, a total mess, a wreck on two feet.” I didn’t say that—not that, or much of anything I can recall.
    And so, as with the policeman in the newspaper, as with the Shrink, as with my decision to not even find out which hospital Celine had been in, I avoided the moment once again. The moment when I would be compelled to know what I felt about this.

When would the funeral be? The weekend—meaning not tomorrow, or the day after, but on the far side of the week? I mean, weren’t they always on the weekend?

My father and I went to the funeral alone. I’m not sure why my mother didn’t join us. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted her to. But as a family, we’d fallen into a set of dance steps: when calamity happened, Mom would stand off to the side, looking into her soda until someone would ask if she wanted to join in or not. 1
    When it comes to the funeral itself, my memory squints and mumbles.
    At the church door I took a shaky gulp and wrapped my palms around the handles and my heart was a live bird nailed to my chest. Selfishness was thrumming at me: Don’t open this door, just take off! Maybe it only seems like the right thing to do, showing up today, but probably mine is the last face her parents and friends and whoever wants to see, yes that’s true maybe it only appears that the more mature thingis to open this door right now, but in fact the braver thing is maybe to not face it. I mean, I am the guy who drove the car and I’m showing up to her funeral? Are you serious about this? Because no one and I mean no one would expect you to have to, even if it is the manlier thing to do, or whatever, because you’re not even a man yet really, etc.
    My father stood at the door and showed no expression of any kind: it was up to me. I opened the door.
    I bowed and