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how the fire had started, and without taking his eyes off the field house he mumbled something about Jeff Purcell.
    Purcell. The news rattled me because this was my friend, and because he’d invited me to spend Thanksgiving vacation with his family in Boston, and now I could look forward to nothing better than another stretch with my boring grandfather and his boring wife in a housing development outside Baltimore.
    False alarm! It wasn’t my Purcell, Little Jeff, who’d started the fire, it was his cousin. Big Jeff was a vegetarian, the only one in our class, whose love of animals extended to an ugly black rat he somehow kept hidden in his room and carried around at night in a pocket of his dressing gown. Big Jeff would’ve been a figure of fun among us if not for his great friendliness and his trust in everyone else’s goodwill. When you did tease him he didn’t get it, he just looked at you like a puppy wondering why in God’s name you’d tied a can to his tail. Big Jeff was devoted to Purcell. He haunted his room and patiently endured his abuse just to sit in the corner and watch him shave or do push-ups or dress for dinner, and listen to him pronounce his opinions and anathemas. He wasn’t stupid, Big Jeff. He did well in his science classes, and what he cared about, he knew about. He’d made himself an authority on how animals were raised and slaughtered, and as we tucked into our roast beef he spared us no detail as to how it got from the pasture to the plate.
    Big Jeff had another passion, and in pursuit of this he almost burned down the old field house. He believed that our destiny was to leave Earth behind and colonize other planets. In our fifth-form year he’d started the Rocket Club, and though he couldn’t find any members in our class—we were too busy licking our chops for a great big bite of
this
planet—he did manage to recruit a few younger boys out of the Science Fiction Club. On Sunday afternoons the Rocket Club met at the football field under the eye of the chemistry master and shot off whatever they’d cooked up in the lab that week. Big Jeff had been experimenting with a two-stage rocket, but instead of going straight up his missile cut a few loops and crashed into the field house roof, where the explosive booster detonated in a clump of old pine needles and leaves.
Whoosh!
     
    I wish they’d kicked him out, Purcell told me that night.
    I laughed. I thought he was joking.
    We were walking back to our dorm after an editorial meeting. We left the brick path and cut across the grass, which was stiff with frost and rustled under our feet.
    I know it sounds terrible, Purcell said, but I do. I wish they’d kicked him out.
    Why would they do that? He didn’t break any rules.
    Did you see him at dinner tonight? He was doing everything but taking bows, like some kind of celebrity.
    He
is
some kind of celebrity, actually.
    Big Jeff. Big Jeff. When I was a baby they actually stuck him in the same crib with me. It’s true. They say you can’t remember that far back but
I
do. That hound-dog face staring at me, you think I could forget that? Kindergarten—the desk in front of mine. Always fidgeting, always looking for something, always with his hand up. I can still see the light shining through his ears. Grade school, camp, vacations—man, you don’t know what it’s like. Big Jeff and Little Jeff. Whatever college I end up at, he’ll be there, waiting in my room. We’ll probably get buried in the same coffin. Me and Big Jeff. Big Jeff and Little Jeff,
ad
fucking
aeternum.
     
    I started a new poem that night. It was the fire that got me going, that and the firemen in their open rubber coats and high gaping boots, the looks they sneaked at us and the masters and the school itself, pretending to let their glances skate over us but taking it all in. Their curiosity had made me look around too. For a moment I saw this place as I had first seen it: how beautiful it was, and how odd. I felt its