by Tom Perrotta
“‘Julia,’” Tom said. “That was his magic song.”
“His what?” Paul fired off his last dart. It landed with an emphatic thunk, just below the bullseye.
“That’s what he called it,” Tom explained. “If ‘Julia’ wasn’t playing, he couldn’t go to sleep.”
“Whatever.” Testa didn’t appreciate the interruption. “He tried sleeping at my house a bunch of times, but it never worked. He’d roll out his sleeping bag, change into pj’s, brush his teeth, the whole nine yards. But then, just when we were about to go to bed, he’d lose it. His bottom lip would get all quivery and he’d be like, Dude, don’t be mad, but I gotta call my mom.”
Paul glanced over his shoulder as he extracted his darts from the board.
“Why’d they move?”
“Fuck if I know,” Testa said. “His dad probably got a new job or something. It was a long time ago. You know how it is—you swear you’re gonna keep in touch, and you do for a little while, and then you never see the guy again.” He turned to Tom. “You even remember what he looked like?”
“Kinda.” Tom closed his eyes, trying to picture Verbecki. “Sorta pudgy, blond hair with bangs. Really big teeth.”
Paul laughed. “Big teeth?”
“Beavery,” Tom explained. “He probably got braces right after he moved.”
Testa raised his beer bottle.
“Verbecki,” he said.
Tom and Paul clinked their bottles against his.
“Verbecki,” they repeated.
That was how they did it. You talked about the person, you drank a toast, and then you moved on. Enough people had disappeared that you couldn’t afford to get hung up on a single individual.
For some reason, though, Tom couldn’t get Jon Verbecki out of his mind. When he got home that night, he went up to the attic and looked through several boxes of old photographs, faded prints from the days before his parents owned a digital camera, back when they used to have to ship the film off to a mail-order lab for processing. His mother had been bugging him for years to get the pictures scanned, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.
Verbecki appeared in a number of photos. There he was at a school Activities Day, balancing an egg on a teaspoon. One Halloween, he was a lobster among superheroes and didn’t look too happy about it. He and Tom had been T-ball teammates; they sat beneath a tree, grinning with almost competitive intensity, wearing identical red hats and shirts that said SHARKS. He looked more or less as Tom remembered—blond and toothy, in any case, if not quite as pudgy.
One picture made a special impression. It was a close-up, taken at night, when they were six or seven years old. It must have been around the Fourth of July, because Verbecki had a lit sparkler in his hand, an overexposed cloud of fire that looked almost like cotton candy. It would have seemed festive, except that he was staring fearfully into the camera, like he didn’t think it was a very good idea, holding a sizzling metal wand so close to his face.
Tom wasn’t sure why he found the picture so intriguing, but he decided not to put it back in the box with the others. He brought it downstairs and spent a long time studying it before he fell asleep. It almost seemed like Verbecki was sending a secret message from the past, asking a question only Tom could answer.
* * *
IT WAS right around this time that Tom received a letter from the university informing him that classes would resume on February 1st. Attendance, the letter stressed, would not be mandatory. Any student who wished to opt out of this “Special Spring Session” could do so without suffering any financial or academic penalty.
“Our goal,” the Chancellor explained, “is to continue operating on a scaled-down basis during this time of widespread uncertainty, to perform our vital missions of teaching and research without exerting undue pressure on those members of our community who are unprepared to return at the present moment.”
Tom wasn’t surprised by this announcement. Many of his friends had received similar notifications from their own schools in recent days. It was part of a nationwide effort to “Jump-Start America” that had been announced by the President a couple of weeks earlier. The economy had gone into a tailspin after October 14th, with the stock market plunging and consumer spending falling off a cliff. Worried experts were predicting “a chain reaction economic meltdown” if something wasn’t done to halt the downward spiral.
“It’s been nearly two months since we suffered a terrible and unexpected blow,” the President said in his prime-time address to the nation. “Our shock and grief, while enormous, can no longer be an excuse for pessimism or paralysis. We need to reopen our schools, return to our offices and factories and farms, and begin the process of reclaiming our lives. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick, but we need to start now. Each and every one of us has a duty to stand up and do our part to get this country moving again.”
Tom wanted to do his part, but he honestly didn’t know if he was ready to go back to school. He asked his parents, but their opinions only mirrored the split in his own thinking. His mother thought he should stay home, maybe take some classes at community college, and then return to Syracuse in September, by which time everything would presumably be a lot clearer.
“We still don’t know what’s going on,” she told him. “I’d be a lot more comfortable if you were here with us.”
“I think you should go back,” his father said. “What’s the point of hanging around here doing nothing?”
“It’s not safe,” his mother insisted. “What if something happens?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just as safe there as it is here.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.
“Look,” his father said. “All I know is that if he stays here, he’s just gonna keep going out and getting drunk with his buddies every night.” He turned to Tom. “Am I wrong?”
Tom gave a shrug of nondenial. He knew he’d been drinking way too much and was beginning to wonder if he needed some kind of professional help. But there was no way to talk about his drinking without talking about Verbecki, and that was a subject he really didn’t feel like discussing with anyone.
“You think he’s gonna drink any less in college?” his mother asked. Tom found it both troubling and interesting to listen to his parents discuss him in the third person, as if he weren’t actually there.
“He’ll have to,” his father said. “He won’t be able to get drunk every night and keep up with his work.”
His mother started to say something, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. She looked at Tom, holding his gaze for a few seconds, making a silent plea for his support.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty confused.”
In the end, his decision was influenced less by his parents than his friends. One by one over the next few days, they told him that they would be heading back to their respective schools for second semester—Paul to FIU, Matt to Gettysburg, Jason to U. of Delaware. Without his buddies around, the idea of staying home lost a lot of its appeal.
His mother reacted stoically when he informed her of his decision. His father gave him a congratulatory slap on the shoulder.
“You’ll be fine,” he said.
The drive to Syracuse felt a lot longer in January than it had in September, and not just because of the intermittent snow squalls that blew across the highway in swirling gusts, turning the other vehicles into ghostly shadows. The mood in the car was oppressive. Tom couldn’t think of much to say, and his parents were barely speaking to each other. That was how it had been since he’d come home—his mother gloomy and withdrawn, brooding about Jen Sussman and the meaning of what had happened; his father impatient, grimly cheerful, a little too insistent that the worst was over and they needed to just get on with their lives. If nothing else, he thought, it would be a relief to get away from them.
His parents didn’t stay long after dropping him off. There
was a big storm coming, and they wanted to get on the road before it hit. His mother handed him an envelope before leaving the dorm.
“It’s a bus ticket.” She hugged him with a tenacity that was almost alarming. “Just in case you change your mind.”
“I love you,” he whispered.
His father’s hug was quick, almost perfunctory, as if they’d be seeing each other again in a day or two.
“Have fun,” he said. “You only get one shot at college.”
* * *
DURING THE Special Spring Session, Tom pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Joining a frat was something he’d wanted to do for so long—in his mind, it was synonymous with college itself—that the process was well under way before he was able to admit that it no longer mattered to him in the least. When he tried to project himself into the future, to envision the life that awaited him at ATO—the big house on Walnut Place, the wild parties and nutty pranks, the late-night bull sessions with brothers who would go on to be his lifelong friends and allies—it all seemed hazy and unreal to him, images from a movie he’d seen a long time ago and whose plot he could no longer remember.
He could’ve withdrawn, of course, maybe rushed again in the fall when he felt better, but he decided to tough it out. He told himself that he didn’t want to bail out on Tyler Rucci, his floormate and pledge brother, but in his heart he knew that the stakes were higher than that. He’d pretty much stopped going to classes by the end of February—he was finding it impossible to concentrate on academics—so the pledge process was all he had left, his only real link to normal college life. Without it, he would’ve become one of those lost souls you saw all over campus that winter, pale, vampiry kids who slept all day and drifted from the dorm to the student center to Marshall Street at night, habitually checking their phones for a message that never seemed to come.
Another benefit of pledging was that it gave him something to talk about with his parents, who called almost every day to check up on him. He wasn’t a particularly good liar, so it helped to be able to say, We went on a scavenger hunt, or We had to cook breakfast in bed for the older brothers, and then serve it to them in flowery aprons, and to have details at the ready to back up these claims. It was a lot harder when his mother grilled him about his schoolwork, and he was forced to improvise about essays and exams and the brutal problem sets in Statistics.
“What’d you get on that paper?” she’d ask.
“Which paper?”
“Poli Sci. The one we talked about.”
“Oh, that one. Another B+.”
“So he liked the thesis?”
“He didn’t really say.”
“Why don’t you e-mail me the essay? I’d like to read it.”
“You don’t need to read it, Mom.”
“I’d like to.” She paused. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
Tom always insisted everything was fine—he was busy, making friends, keeping up a solid B average. Even when discussing the frat, he made sure to emphasize the positive, focusing on things like the weekday study groups and the all-night intra-frat karaoke blowout, while avoiding any mention of Chip Gleason, the only active ATO brother who’d gone missing on October 14th.
Chip loomed large around the frat house. There was a framed portrait of him in the main party room, and a scholarship fund dedicated to his memory. The pledges had been required to memorize all sorts of personal information about him: his birthday, the names of his family members, his top-ten movies and bands, and the complete list of all the girls he’d hooked up with in his sadly abbreviated life. That was the hard part—there were thirty-seven girlfriends in all, starting with Tina Wong in junior high and ending with Stacy Greenglass, the buxom Alpha Chi who’d been in bed with him on October 14th—riding him reverse cowgirl-style, if legend were to be believed—and who had to be hospitalized for several days as a result of the severe emotional trauma brought on by his sudden midcoitus departure. Some of the brothers told this story as if it were a funny anecdote, a tribute to the studliness of their beloved friend, but all Tom could think of was how awful it must have been for Stacy, the kind of thing you’d never recover from.
One night at a Tri Delt mixer, though, Tyler Rucci pointed out a hot sorority girl on the dance floor, grinding with a varsity lacrosse player. She was tanned and wearing an incredibly tight dress, leaning forward as she moved her ass in slow circles against her partner’s crotch.
“You know who that is?”
“Who?”
“Stacy Greenglass.”
Tom watched her dance for a long time—she looked happy, running her hands over her breasts and then down over her hips and thighs, making porn star faces for the benefit of her friends—trying to figure out what she knew that he didn’t. He was willing to accept the possibility that Chip hadn’t meant much to her. Maybe he was just a one-time hookup, or a casual friend with benefits. But still, he was a real person, someone who played an active and reasonably important part in her life. And yet here she was, just a few months after he’d disappeared, dancing at a party as though he’d never even existed.
It wasn’t that Tom disapproved. Far from it. He just couldn’t figure out how it was possible that Stacy could get over Chip while he remained haunted by Verbecki, a kid he hadn’t seen for years and probably wouldn’t have even recognized if they’d bumped into each other on October 13th.
But that was how it was. He thought about Verbecki all the time. If anything, his obsession had deepened since he’d returned to school. He carried that stupid picture—Little Kid with Sparkler—everywhere he went and looked at it dozens of times a day, chanting his old friend’s name in his head as though it were some kind of mantra: Verbecki, Verbecki, Verbecki. It was the reason he was flunking out, the reason he was lying to his parents, the reason he no longer painted his face blue and orange and screamed his head off at the Dome, the reason he could no longer imagine his own future.
Where the hell did you go, Verbecki?
* * *
A BIG part of the pledge process was getting to know the Older Brothers, convincing them that you were a good fit with ATO. There were poker nights and pizza lunches and marathon drinking games, a series of interviews masquerading as social events. Tom thought he was doing a decent job of hiding his obsession, impersonating a normal, well-adjusted freshman—the guy he should have been—until he was approached one night in the TV room by Trevor Hubbard, a.k.a. Hubbs, a junior who was the frat’s resident bohemian/intellectual. Tom was leaning against a wall, pretending to be interested in a Wii bowling match between two of his pledge brothers, when Hubbs suddenly appeared at his side.
“This is fucked,” he said in a low voice, nodding at the wide-screen Sony, the virtual ball knocking down the virtual pins, Josh Freidecker flipping a celebratory double bird at Mike Ishima. “All this fraternity bullshit. I don’t know how anybody stands it.”
Tom grunted ambiguously, not sure if this was a ploy designed to catch him in an act of disloyalty. Hubbs hardly seemed the type to play that sort of game, though.
“Come here,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
Tom followed him into the empty hallway. It was a weeknight, still pretty early, not much going on in the house.
“You feeling okay?” Hubbs asked him.
“Me?” Tom said. “I’m fine.”
Hubbs regarded him with a certain skeptical amusement. He was a small, wiry guy—an accomplished rock climber—with scraggly facial hair and a sour expression that was more a default mode than a reflection of his actual mood.
“You’re not depressed?”
“I don’t know.” Tom gave an evasive shrug. “A little, maybe.”
“And you really want to join this frat, live here with all these douchebags?”
“I guess. I mean, I thought I did. Everything’s just kinda fucked up right now. It’s hard to know what I want.”
“I hear you.” Hubbs nodded appreciatively. “I
used to be pretty happy here myself. Most of the brothers are pretty cool.” He glanced left and right, then lowered his voice to a near whisper. “The only one I didn’t like was Chip. He was the biggest asshole in the whole house.”
Tom nodded cautiously, trying not to look too surprised. He’d only ever heard people say nice things about Chip Gleason—great guy, good athlete, six-pack abs, ladies’ man, natural leader.
“He kept a hidden camera in his bedroom,” Hubbs said. “Used to tape the girls he fucked, then show the videos down in the TV room. One girl was so humiliated she had to leave school. Good old Chip didn’t care. Far as he was concerned, she was just a stupid whore who got what she deserved.”
“That sucks.” Tom was tempted to ask the girl’s name—it must have been among those he’d memorized—but decided to let it pass.
Hubbs stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. There was a smoke detector up there, red light glowing.
“Like I said, Chip was a dick. I should be happy he’s gone, you know?” Hubbs’s eyes locked on Tom’s. They were wide and frightened, full of a desperation Tom had no trouble recognizing, since he saw it all the time in the bathroom mirror. “But I dream about that fucker every night. I’m always trying to find him. I’ll be running through a maze, screaming his name, or tiptoeing through a forest, looking behind every tree. It’s got to the point I don’t even want to go to sleep anymore. Sometimes I write him letters, you know, just telling him what’s going on around here. Last weekend, I got so hammered, I tried to get his name tattooed on my forehead. The tattoo guy wouldn’t do it—that’s the only reason I’m not walking around with Chip Fucking Gleason written on my face.” Hubbs looked at Tom. It almost felt like he was pleading. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”
Tom nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
Hubbs’s face relaxed a little. “There’s this guy I’ve been reading about on the Web. He’s speaking at a church in Rochester on Saturday afternoon. I think he might be able to help us.”
“He’s a preacher?”
