The Leavers(87)
“I kind of wanted to leave anyway.”
“Are you going to go back?”
“My parents want me to transfer to the school where they teach, upstate.”
“Do you want to go there?” The kindness in Michael’s question gave Daniel déjà vu.
“No. Though sometimes it seems like I don’t have a choice.”
Michael adjusted his watchband. “I remember what you were like after your mother left. You thought she left because of you. You blamed yourself.”
“I was a kid. I didn’t know what was going on.”
“I know it was a long time ago.” Michael laughed a little. “But I just want you to be okay. And if you’re not okay, I guess that’s fine, too.”
“I am okay.” As he said it, it he knew it was true.
“I miss her,” Michael said, “your mother. She was always real nice to me.” He picked up his cue and studied the table. “Eight ball, side pocket.” Daniel leaned against the edge, trying to distract Michael from scoring the winning shot, but Michael sank the ball and Daniel whooped, high-fiving him.
THE APARTMENT WAS QUIET, everyone asleep except Daniel, who was on the living room couch. He looked at a picture of Michael in a cap and gown at his high school graduation, framed and hung on the wall over the television, along with a large department-store studio portrait of Vivian, Michael, and Timothy posing against a blue backdrop. Peter and Kay had one like it in their living room, with Daniel in the middle, taken several Christmases ago at the JCPenney’s at the Littletown Mall. They had a framed picture of him from his high school graduation, too.
On the bottom shelf of a cabinet below the TV, Daniel found a row of photo albums. He removed one and flipped through the pages, saw pictures of Vivian and Timothy’s wedding, faded portraits of people he didn’t know, a younger Timothy with a full head of hair. He knew there wouldn’t be any photos with himself in them but he kept looking, album after album, as if the next page would be the one where he would finally see Deming.
PART THREE
Tilt
Thirteen
If we plot the supply curve and the demand curve on the same graph, we see that, in an efficient market, they intersect at an equilibrium price and quantity.” Professor Nichols pressed a button and the PowerPoint advanced, displaying a black-and-white graph. Fifty students sat at long tables arranged bleacher-style up the back of Peterson Hall, most studying their laptops, multiple chat windows dotting their screens like hungry mosquitoes. One woman in the back had headphones on, not bothering to hide her laughter as she watched a movie on her tablet.
“We call this p and q, respectively,” Professor Nichols said, twisting the end of his gray ponytail. Daniel Wilkinson sat in the next to last row, to the right of Amber Bitburger, watching the guy in front of him play online poker. The guy’s neck was pink, his back set in a hard line. He kept betting too much on terrible hands and losing, and Daniel couldn’t look away. The software that prevented him from playing was still installed on his laptop, and he hadn’t seen a game in months. Unable to stand it a moment longer—the guy’s back was so close he could almost touch it—he leaned until he was halfway over the table. The guy was wearing headphones but Daniel could hear the exact sound the cards made as they shuffled, a decisive, brassy bronze. He leaned closer. “Hey,” he whispered. Amber glanced over. “Don’t do it,” Daniel said, as the guy’s finger hovered over the bet button on an eight of clubs and a three of hearts. “Damn it!” Daniel said out loud, as the guy clicked.
The guy twisted around, his ears reddening. “What the fuck?” he hissed.
Professor Nichols said, “Gentlemen, is there a problem up there?”
Daniel slumped down. Amber looked at him and mouthed, “What was that about?”
After four months in New York City, Ridgeborough seemed smaller, shabbier, and more remote. The teenagers in the Dunkin’ Donuts appeared younger than he’d looked when he was their age, and the Food Lion, with its wide, empty aisles and piped-in Lite Oldies music, evoked gloom. There were so many cereals, so many brands of toothpaste, and yet so few people; you could practically see tumbleweeds rolling down the floor past the sodas and chips.
Summer session was a four-month semester crammed into six weeks; he was in classes weekdays from nine to five. “Good training for the working world,” Kay said. Mornings, Daniel felt like he’d been dug out of the ground and had to relearn how to walk. He would fall asleep in class, jerk awake, obsess about Psychic Hearts and the acclaim Nate was receiving that was supposed to be his.
On May 15, he had left the city at dawn, arriving in Ridgeborough in time to meet with the dean. That night, as Nate and Roland played for Hutch and Daniel’s co-workers, Daniel had apologized to Peter and Kay. “We can’t take you seriously until you take yourself seriously,” Peter said. Kay had been able to get him into two classes, in her and Peter’s departments: Comparative Politics and Microeconomics 101. Eight hours of daily lectures felt isolating, and Daniel felt aggrieved, but also committed, superior; it was good for him, like going to the dentist or holding the door for a slow-walking stranger when you were in a rush.
After Econ, Amber Bitburger, whom he used to sit behind in Mrs. Lumpkin’s sixth-grade class, walked out with him into the full heat of a June afternoon. The onslaught of sunlight made his eyes sting after a long morning inside the windowless lecture hall, where the air conditioning always seemed to be set to fifty-five degrees. He removed his sweatshirt, and, in a green Meloncholia Records T-shirt with a picture of a cantaloupe on a turntable, bared his arms for the walk across the quad.