At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick Page B

with the cleft palate?
    Or,
Is Rosetta Stone really supposed to be good for learning Mandarin?
    Or,
Are there any good places for a solo traveler in South Dakota?
    Or,
How do you know if someone’s going to break up with you?
    Or,
How do you work out your forearms?
    Or, and this one I could never actually formulate into a searchable question, so instead the thought just worked its way through me like the caffeine from all of those free refills of coffee,
Does it feel this way for everyone else?

When friendships start to die, there’s a temptation, the same way there is with crops or civilizations, to appease the gods with sacrifices. That’s sometimes how I think about what happened—Mira was the unlucky person on the rim of the volcano at the moment when Thomas and I needed a way to make our bad luck stop.
    But that makes it sound deliberate, when of course deliberate is the one thing it wasn’t. There’s a part of me, though, the part that takes over when I’m falling asleep, say, or waiting for a plane to take off with my forehead against the window, where the distinction between deliberate and accidental seems about as formidable as rice paper. Anyway:
    Our friendship, by the time we were a year into high school, was in definite trouble. Some of this may have had to do with my having made the baseball team, which had pulled me off toward upperclassmen, guys more like my half brother than like Thomas, who took me to parties and got me drunk and turned me, for a few hours a week at least, into exactly the sort of person Thomas couldn’t stand. And some of this, or maybe just another way of looking at the same part of it, was that Thomas had started to become puritanical. It wasone thing to spend a Friday night reading about the history of railroads when you were in eighth grade and the only wildness you were missing out on had to do with who’d kissed who at a dance; it took a much stranger, harder personality to keep on claiming that your greatest pleasure in life was talking philosophy with your dad when suddenly there were
actual
pleasures to be had: girls willing to do the kinds of things that until then we’d only been able to see between static bands on channel 153; alcohol, the getting and consuming (and occasional vomiting) of which was now as important a pathway in most of our lives as the getting and consuming of sunlight in the life of a plant.
    Thomas wanted no part of any of this. I wondered, at the time, if this might be a kind of slow-motion tantrum he was throwing on account of no longer being, in any obvious or indisputable way, the smartest kid in the grade. Two or three other D.C. schools had merged with Dupont for high school, so now all of us who’d gone to middle school together were like small-town folk who move to the city; it turned out there were other best singers, other best athletes, other geniuses—maybe Thomas thought he needed to ratchet up his strangeness if he was going to hold on to any sort of perch in the grade’s collective brain.
    None of this means, of course, that I didn’t still think of Thomas as my best friend. It was just that it felt more and more like a friendship between a healthy person and a person in a home for convalescents, and I had to be careful not to bring too much of the outside world’s cheeriness and nuttiness in with me when I went to see him. Except that’s not quite right, because I don’t think Thomas thought of himself as missing out on anything, when I did make the mistake of referring to a party I’d gone to or a girl I’d hooked up with. In his mind maybe I was the one in the home for convalescents and he was the one who had to pretend not to notice how much I’d changed, how much I’d deteriorated since my good years.
    One place, anyway, where all of this dropped away and we continued to be the same close, clever young men we’d always been was around the Pells’ dinner table. With Sally and Richard we’d spend hours lost in the