The Grievers by Marc Schuster

his neck and chin. “A few years from now, we’ll laugh you right off the lot.”
    “I’ll take my chances,” I said, pocketing his card. “Right now I have bigger things to worry about.”
    “Indeed,” Greg Packer said. “Our fallen comrade deserves our full and undivided attention.”
    “And let’s stop with this fallen comrade shit,” I said. “He was our friend, for Christ’s sake. Would it kill you to use his name?”
    “My apologies,” Greg said. “I didn’t realize you two were so close.”
    I opened my mouth but didn’t say a word, ashamed to admit that Billy and I were never close at all. Friendly, yes, especially back at the Academy, but I’d be surprised if we spoke more than three times since graduation. Always polite, always cordial, but always with the ulterior motive—on my part, anyway—of escaping the conversation. In fact, the only reason I invited him to my New Year’s Eve party was to put off meeting him for dinner the night before Thanksgiving, and the only reason we’d planned to meet up the night before Thanksgiving was that I’d been putting off invitations to have lunch with him since the previous summer. In some ways, it was my main reason for having the party—not to see Billy so much as to gather all of my acquaintances together and not have to talk to any one of them for too long.
    If nothing else, I’m a very social misanthrope.
    “Remember how he used to bring a wok to school?” Sean asked.
    “It wasn’t a wok,” I said. “It was a bucket.”
    “Some kind of Asian thing,” Sean said. “Greens and rice every day. The kid should have outlived us all.”
    “It wasn’t Asian,” I said. “And he wasn’t a kid. He was an adult like the rest of us.”
    “I’m saying then ,” Sean said. “He was a kid back then . Christ, Charley, do you have to be so goddamn difficult all the time?”
    Greg signaled the waitress for another pitcher of margaritas. Neil asked if he thought it was such a good idea, but Greg brushed Neil’s concerns aside with a flick of his wrist. He’d made arrangements for a ride, he said.
    “A cab?” Neil asked.
    “In a manner of speaking.”
    “He bit into a grub,” I said, still caught up in our previous conversation. “He was eating lunch one day, and when he looked down there was half a grub on his plate.”
    “On his plate ?” Dwayne asked. “You said it was a bucket.”
    “Fine,” I said. “His bucket.”
    “So, what?” Sean asked. “Was this some kind of Asian thing? Like eating grasshoppers in Mexico?”
    “No,” I said. “It was an accident. That’s my whole point.”
    “You’d think he’d be more careful,” Dwayne said. “Using chopsticks and all.”
    “He didn’t use chopsticks,” I said. “He used a fork.”
    “I remember chopsticks,” Greg said. “And Sean’s right. It was a wok.”
    “The point I’m trying to make is that he ate a grub one day, and I watched him do it,” I said. “I could have stopped him, but I didn’t. I saw the grub, and I saw him going for it, but I let him eat it anyway.”
    “When you say grub ?” Neil said.
    “A worm, okay? I let Billy eat a worm.”
    “Like an earthworm?” Sean asked.
    “Like a maggot,” I said. “Only bigger.”
    “And you didn’t try to stop him?”
    “What was I supposed to say?”
    “I don’t know,” Dwayne said. “How about, ‘Hey, Billy, there’s a giant goddamn maggot in your lunch.’ ”
    “You’re right,” I said. “I should’ve stopped him.”

    T HE WAITRESS brought our second pitcher of margaritas, and soon we were meandering across the same conversational terrain we’d been treading for the past decade: Anthony Gambacorta’s extensive porn collection, Brother Timothy’s fascination with donkey dicks, and the unfounded rumor that a certain modern language teacher left in the middle of a semester because she was pregnant with a certain friar’s love child. When our perverted walk down memory lane started to