At the Bottom of Everything Read Free Page A

actually.”
    “You haven’t had a chance to practice this piece, actually?”
    “Nope, I’m afraid not.”
    “Do
not
say ‘nope’ to me. Do you know what ‘nope’ says to me? Do you know what it says? ‘
Fuck you
’!”
    You could see regret and fear taking hold of Mr. Adams like a quick-moving set of clouds blowing in. He hung his head (he was, like many teachers, deeply theatrical), and when he raised it he said, “Sweet Cheeks. Thomas. Folks. You want a lesson in losing your cool, in why it’s important to think before you speak?” He pointed at himself, at his own face. “I lost it. Shouldn’t have said it. I’m owning up to it. My bad. Now, everybody ready to play? Let’s pick up on … third line, right after the rests.” Out of sympathy, or maybe just embarrassment at realizing that, for the moment, we had power over Mr. Adams, we lifted our instruments and played whatever piece it was with the kind of stiff attention we could usually only manage when the principal was in the room.
    But Thomas was unshameable. He sat there now with his trumpet in his lap, not even pretending to play. Most of us (I, definitely) would have been trembling, and then would havegone home and practiced until our lips ached. But Thomas had actual confidence, actual contempt. What could Mr. Adams possibly do to him now? Thomas would never have to worry about being yelled at again.
    The minutes after the bell, which we all spent disassembling our instruments and chatting and loudly closing and latching our cases, were always chaotic, but now they had an extra edge, because we were all hoping for some sort of final confrontation. Either Mr. Adams would apologize again, or Thomas would tell him that he was going right up to the principal’s office. Mr. Adams, shuffling sheet music on the piano top, had the look of someone waiting for bad news.
    But Thomas, with all our eyes on him, just clicked his case shut, stood up, and, for reasons I’ve never understood, turned to me. “Well,” he said, “that could have worked out a lot worse, huh?” And he walked out into the hall.
    That was, I think, the moment when he became interesting to me. I hadn’t known there was any lightness in him, hadn’t known that, along with his brain, he was set apart from the rest of us by a sense that what happened in school wasn’t nearly so serious as we thought. I also hadn’t known that there could be forms of rebellion subtler than setting your farts on fire or drawing boobs on the back of your hand. I put my drumsticks away and walked out of the room next to Thomas. I had an inkling (which I would give a considerable amount to go back and tell myself not to heed) that I may have had him entirely wrong.

The thing I wanted most, during my months of suffering over Claire (the thing other than Claire herself), was to be distracted, and for some reason the person who was best at distracting me was an eight-year-old tutee named Nicholas.
    He lived on one of those absurdly beautiful cobblestone blocks in Georgetown, in a row house with a heavy front door that made it impossible to know whether your doorbell ring had sounded. My tutoring boss, an overcaffeinated woman named Barbara, had warned me that he’d scared off a couple of tutors before me, but by then I was accepting just about every assignment she offered, since it meant being out of the apartment.
    A housekeeper, Maria, answered the door that first time, smiling to apologize for her English, and led me up the stairs. The house inside felt like a daguerreotype. There was a parlor with a pair of dark green couches and a giant chipping mirror over the mantel; all the windows ran on rusty chains; the floorboards had nails that kept snagging my socks. I thought that Nicholas’s problem might be a kind of
Secret Garden
feebleness—withered legs, Victorian snottiness.
    My first sight of him was as a snub-nosed face barely pokingpast the edge of a stars-and-comets blanket.
“Dios