A home at the end of the world by Michael Cunningham

the reservoir, his new glasses still held in place by their elastic band.
    We walked together, we three, to Adam’s and my math class. He and I had planned to share as many classes as possible. I finished the story at the door.
    “Hey, man,” the stranger said. He shook his head, and said nothing more.
    “My name is Jonathan Glover,” I said.
    “I’m, um, Bobby Morrow.”
    After a moment, Adam said, “Adam Bialo?” as if uncertain whether such a name would be believed. It was the first time he had spoken.
    “Well, see you later,” I said.
    “Yeah. Yeah, man, I’ll see you later.”
    It was not until he walked away that I saw the faded blue eye stitched to the back of his jacket.
    “Weird,” Adam said.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I thought you weren’t going to tell any more lies,” he said. “I thought you took an oath.”
    In fact, we had traded oaths. I was to abandon my storytelling, and he to cease inspecting his clothes for imperfections.
    “That was a tall tale. It’s different from a lie.”
    “Weird,” he said. “You’re about as weird as he is.”
    “Well,” I answered, with a certain satisfaction. “I guess maybe I am.”
    “I believe it,” he said. “I have no doubt.”
    We stood for a moment, watching the stranger’s embroidered eye recede down the biscuit-colored hall. “ Weird ,” Adam said once again, and there was true indignation in his voice, a staunch insistence on the world’s continuing responsibility to observe the rules of cleanliness and modesty. One of Adam’s attractions had always been his exasperated—but ultimately willing—sidekick quality. His shuffling, uncurious ways made me look more exotic than I was; in his company I could be the daring one. As I chronicled our mild adventures in my own mind, I cast Adam as a hybrid of Becky Thatcher and Sancho Panza, while I was Huck, Tom, and Nancy Drew all mixed together. Adam considered a nude swim or a stolen candy bar to be broaching the limits, limits I was only too happy to exceed. He helped me realize my own romantic ideal, though lately I’d begun to suspect that our criminal escapades were pathetically small-time, and that Adam would not accompany me into waters much deeper than these.
    Bobby was waiting for us at lunch the following day. Or, rather, he managed to turn up next to us in line again. He had a particular talent for investing his actions with the quality of randomness—his life, viewed from a distance, would have appeared to be little more than a series of coincidences. He exerted no visible will. And yet, by some vague-eyed trick, he was there with us in line again.
    “Hey,” he said. Today his eyes were even redder, more rheumily unfocused.
    “Hey,” I said. Adam bent over to pull a loose thread from the cuff of his corduroys.
    “Day number two, man,” Bobby said. “Only a thousand five hundred to go. Yow.”
    “Have we really got one thousand five hundred days of school left?” I asked. “I mean, is that an actual count?”
    “Uh-huh,” he said. “Like, give or take a few.”
    “They add up, don’t they? Two years here, four in high school, and four in college. Man. A thousand five hundred days.”
    “I wasn’t counting col lege, man.” He smiled, as if the idea of college was grandiose and slightly absurd—a colonial’s vision of silver tea sets gleaming in the jungle.
    “Right, man,” I said.
    Again, the silence opened. Again, in defiance of Adam’s fierce concentration on the front of the line—where the red-faced woman ladled up some sort of brown triangles in brown sauce—I started in on a story. Today I told of a new, experimental kind of college that taught students the things they would need to know for survival in the world: how to travel inexpensively, how to play blues piano and recognize true love. It wasn’t much of a story—I was only an adequate liar, not a brilliant one. My fabricating technique had more to do with persistence than with inspiration. I told lies