all. Lauren and Neil. Alex and Alex. Me and a pretty but nearly mute girl named Rebecca. It was as if there were some disaster headed our way, a tidal wave or a meteor, and we all had to pair off for the sake of the human race.
Thomas was shut out of all this, mostly because he had no female equivalent. He was too strange, too impressive, too mature; dating him would have been like dating Mr. Davis, the seventy-year-old British drama teacher.
Some of this must also have had to do with the way he looked, which wasn’t bad, really, but was as much alien as boy. He was the palest person I’d ever seen, almost translucent (the one time I remember him being teased was when he took off his shirt at a pool party and revealed this nipple-less body the color of a boiled peanut). His eye sockets were enormous, delicate caves, like dented eggshells. At my old school there had been a boy with leukemia, and Thomas made somethingof the same impression; he’d been taken out of the oven too early, he needed another coat of skin. But with Thomas the effect wasn’t so much to make him seem weak (although he was definitely weak); it was to make him seem intimidating, the way a reptile can be intimidating. Why did he look so steadily at your eyes when you talked? Didn’t he ever bite his nails or tap his feet? It was impossible to picture him kissing someone (kissing was as far as any of these couples went), or even just dancing.
And he spoke, at twelve years old, so calmly, with such carefully constructed sentences, that it was hard to believe at first that he wasn’t faking it. Some people thought it was a slight British accent, but it wasn’t that—it was more of a cigarette-holder accent, the voice of a professor musing at the head of a seminar table. I used to do an impression of him that reliably brought tears to Matt Corrigan’s eyes. “If the assignment sheet is right that you’d like us to read chapters three and four tonight (and I assume that it is), then should this chapter four over the weekend actually be a chapter five?”
But there were things he wasn’t good at (mental things, I mean; at sports he was a disaster), and it was always a surprise to discover one. Spanish, for instance. I’d never taken a foreign language—they didn’t start until seventh grade at my old school—but by my third week at Dupont I was speaking as well as Thomas, who’d been studying it since third grade and still couldn’t roll his
r
’s. And music. When he picked up his trumpet in band he was like a newborn deer, so clumsy and feeble.
I played percussion, which meant that I stood right behind the brass section. I was in the perfect position to see that while Thomas sat there, his legs pressed together as if he had to go to the bathroom, his trumpet tilted toward the ceiling, he was faking it, straining his cheeks, bugging his eyes.
We played movie themes and marches, so loudly that you could feel the out-of-tune-ness as a buzz in your bones. Our teacher was a little gray-haired rooster of a man named Mr.Adams. He walked around the music room holding a coffee mug with some sort of musical joke on it ( NEVER B FLAT; SOMETIMES B SHARP; ALWAYS B NATURAL ), looking for reasons to yell. We knew he’d found one when he set his mug down on the piano.
“You incompetent twerp! Play it! Don’t come in here and insult the rest of us with this …
bwwap, bwwap, bwwap.
Play it like you mean it! Play it with some BALLS!”
Since he wasn’t a classroom teacher, Mr. Adams didn’t know or didn’t care that everyone else at Dupont revered Thomas. To him Thomas was just the sickly little seventh grader who tried to use his braces as an excuse not to play. “
Sweet Cheeks!
Everyone else shut up, I want to hear just what Sweet Cheeks is doing, I want all of you to hear it. Ready? One-and, two-and, three-and, four-and …
What? What’s that you’re saying? I can’t hear you
.”
“I haven’t had a chance to practice this piece,
Thomas was shut out of all this, mostly because he had no female equivalent. He was too strange, too impressive, too mature; dating him would have been like dating Mr. Davis, the seventy-year-old British drama teacher.
Some of this must also have had to do with the way he looked, which wasn’t bad, really, but was as much alien as boy. He was the palest person I’d ever seen, almost translucent (the one time I remember him being teased was when he took off his shirt at a pool party and revealed this nipple-less body the color of a boiled peanut). His eye sockets were enormous, delicate caves, like dented eggshells. At my old school there had been a boy with leukemia, and Thomas made somethingof the same impression; he’d been taken out of the oven too early, he needed another coat of skin. But with Thomas the effect wasn’t so much to make him seem weak (although he was definitely weak); it was to make him seem intimidating, the way a reptile can be intimidating. Why did he look so steadily at your eyes when you talked? Didn’t he ever bite his nails or tap his feet? It was impossible to picture him kissing someone (kissing was as far as any of these couples went), or even just dancing.
And he spoke, at twelve years old, so calmly, with such carefully constructed sentences, that it was hard to believe at first that he wasn’t faking it. Some people thought it was a slight British accent, but it wasn’t that—it was more of a cigarette-holder accent, the voice of a professor musing at the head of a seminar table. I used to do an impression of him that reliably brought tears to Matt Corrigan’s eyes. “If the assignment sheet is right that you’d like us to read chapters three and four tonight (and I assume that it is), then should this chapter four over the weekend actually be a chapter five?”
But there were things he wasn’t good at (mental things, I mean; at sports he was a disaster), and it was always a surprise to discover one. Spanish, for instance. I’d never taken a foreign language—they didn’t start until seventh grade at my old school—but by my third week at Dupont I was speaking as well as Thomas, who’d been studying it since third grade and still couldn’t roll his
r
’s. And music. When he picked up his trumpet in band he was like a newborn deer, so clumsy and feeble.
I played percussion, which meant that I stood right behind the brass section. I was in the perfect position to see that while Thomas sat there, his legs pressed together as if he had to go to the bathroom, his trumpet tilted toward the ceiling, he was faking it, straining his cheeks, bugging his eyes.
We played movie themes and marches, so loudly that you could feel the out-of-tune-ness as a buzz in your bones. Our teacher was a little gray-haired rooster of a man named Mr.Adams. He walked around the music room holding a coffee mug with some sort of musical joke on it ( NEVER B FLAT; SOMETIMES B SHARP; ALWAYS B NATURAL ), looking for reasons to yell. We knew he’d found one when he set his mug down on the piano.
“You incompetent twerp! Play it! Don’t come in here and insult the rest of us with this …
bwwap, bwwap, bwwap.
Play it like you mean it! Play it with some BALLS!”
Since he wasn’t a classroom teacher, Mr. Adams didn’t know or didn’t care that everyone else at Dupont revered Thomas. To him Thomas was just the sickly little seventh grader who tried to use his braces as an excuse not to play. “
Sweet Cheeks!
Everyone else shut up, I want to hear just what Sweet Cheeks is doing, I want all of you to hear it. Ready? One-and, two-and, three-and, four-and …
What? What’s that you’re saying? I can’t hear you
.”
“I haven’t had a chance to practice this piece,
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