The Grievers Read Online Free PDF Page B

ever talked to him.”
    Neil told me again that I couldn’t have known, that our friend was in a bad place, that there was nothing I could have done, but all I could think about was Billy standing in the cold and waiting for his mother to come and pick him up while the rest of us laughed and drank and listened to loud music—while Greg Packer hit on Karen and I grabbed Madeline’s ass.

    W EARING THE dollar sign was easier than carrying it, so I climbed back inside the costume after Neil and I finished our sandwiches, and he held me steady as we crossed six lanes of traffic on our way back to the bank. If I did grab his wife’s ass, I said as drivers leaned on their horns by way of telling us to get out of the intersection, I didn’t mean it in a sexual way. I just thought it would get a few laughs.
    “That’s kind of sick,” Neil said. “Is that your reason for doing everything?”
    “Pretty much,” I said.
    “I feel sorry for Karen.”
    “You and me both,” I said. “But that’s why I need your help with this Billy Chin situation. I want to do something for him—something in his memory, anyway, but I don’t want it to turn into a joke like everything else I do.”
    Neil warned me to watch out for the curb, and soon we were squishing back across the lawn in front of the bank. Maybe we could raise some money and make a donation in his name, Neil said. He didn’t mention the Academy, but we both knew what he had in mind. He could make a few calls and get our friends together for dinner some night. We could say a few words about Billy and pass the proverbial hat.
    “Who are you thinking?” I asked.
    “The usual crew, I guess. Dwayne Coleman and Sean Sullivan. Anthony Gambacorta, if we can get a hold of him. Greg Packer, of course.”
    “Of course,” I said. “It wouldn’t be a party without him.”
    Back at the Academy, the rumors about Greg and his family sounded more like the stuff of soap operas and comic books than the lives of any teenagers I’d ever met. In some versions of the story, Greg’s father was the heir to a massive fortune, the child of a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, or a DuPont, but he had to keep his relationship with Greg’s mother a secret for fear of losing any and all rights to his legacy. In other versions, Greg had accidentally killed his father by putting the family RV in reverse and backing over him on the eve of a planned cross-country vacation to celebrate Greg’s fifth birthday. Depending on who passed the rumor along, Greg’s father could have been an artist, an inventor, a hit man, a priest, a rock star, an oil man, an embezzler, or a politician, while his mother’s roles tended to alternate between failed Olympic hopeful and disgraced nun.
    When my turn came to build on the elaborately inconsistent mythology of Greg’s life, I made him an heir to the Holy Roman Empire and said that his father had developed a formula for tires that never wore thin, which led a sinister cabal of tire manufacturers to have him eliminated before he went public with his invention. That Greg never confirmed nor denied the veracity of any of these rumors only contributed to their weight as they echoed up and down the polished halls of the Academy. What they all had in common was that Greg’s father was out of the picture and that Greg and his mother enjoyed a steady unearned income, the limits of which were anybody’s guess.
    The real trouble with Greg started after we all graduated from the Academy and he fell into the habit of sliding from one disappointment to the next. His official story when he dropped out of Princeton was that he was homesick, but that didn’t explain why it took him five years to complete a four-year degree at Saint Leonard’s University in lieu of the ivy league education he’d always aspired to. Good scores on the LSAT got him into law school a year behind Neil, but by then he was so far out of the game that it didn’t matter. Three car accidents, two of which