“I’m finding my biggest struggles are with love and purpose,” Thomas continues. This chart is the work of a madman who wants his happy ending; I should imitate his insanity. “It might’ve been a blow to my self-esteem after breaking up with Sara. But chilling with you kept me from falling into a black hole about it, I think.”

“You’re welcome,” I say. My phone vibrates inside my pocket and I see it’s Genevieve. I screen it. I’ll hit her up before bed.

“I’m serious. You gave me something. Whatever it is, I can’t get it from my missing father, overworked mother, or ex-girlfriend. So maybe you have to help me figure out my true potential.”

I study his room for a moment. This place belongs to someone who lives as many lives as possible. There are unfinished sheets of music, movie scripts. (Later I learn that there’s even an abandoned musical in his closet about a robot that time-travels back to the Mesozoic era to study dinosaurs while singing about surviving without technology.) There are boxes of Legos stacked in the corner, a colorful tower from when he wanted to be an architect and set designer.

It’s like when you’re a kid, and you want to be an astronaut before accepting it might be impossible—even though everyone says nothing’s impossible, and they go so far to pinpoint moments from history to make you feel stupid. But you move on anyway. You know your capabilities and circumstances, so you start thinking that maybe being a boxer would be cool even though you’re too skinny. No problem, you can bulk up. But that all changes when you want to write for the newspaper and dream of having your own column, so you start doing that. And one day when you’re writing someone advice on how to be more organized, you think about piloting a ship into space again.

This is how Thomas lives his life, one misfired dream after the other. That journey may stretch for a lifetime, but even if he doesn’t discover that spark until he’s an old man, Thomas will die with wrinkles he earned and a smile on his face.

“If you help me stay happy so I don’t end up like my dad, you got a deal,” I say.

“Deal.”

9

BEYOND DEAD ENDS

   The only thing that sucked about last night was that I never got a chance to call Genevieve back. It’s the first thing I think of when I wake up.

Thomas’s desk chair creaks—the one where he sat last night to show off his “mad origami skills.” (Except when he tried to make a seashell it just looked like crumpled paper.) I sit up and rub my eyes. I can tell it’s early because of the slant of the sunlight through the windows. I can’t believe he’s already awake, hunched over, writing something while quietly tapping his foot; it’s like he’s taking a final exam and doesn’t want me copying off of his test.

“Yo. What are you doing?”

“Journaling.”

“You journal a lot?”

“Pretty much every morning since seventh grade,” Thomas says. “I’m almost done. How’d you sleep? Are my sheets still dry?”

“Fuck you.” My back does hurt a bit, but not so much that I can’t get used to it.

“I left a new toothbrush and towel out for you in the bathroom if you want to wash up before breakfast.” His eyes are still on the page.

“You’re cooking breakfast?”

“Yeah right. I only know how to make toast and Pop-Tarts. We’ll figure something out.” Thomas smiles and returns to journaling.

I have to wait a second before I throw off the covers because of that thing that happens to guys when they first wake up. But he isn’t even looking at me. I hurry out of his room and can only assume his mother’s gone off to work already by the way he’s freely letting me walk around the place. I find the bathroom and take a piss while looking around the shelves piled with clean and fluffy towels. At home, we share the same batch, raggedy and torn, washed at best twice a month. When I’m done brushing, I go back to Thomas’s room, and he’s already gone.

I follow the sound of clattering utensils into the kitchen, stopping once to check out all the photos on the wall. There’s Thomas as a kid playing baseball—the same crazy eyebrows. The kitchen is twice the size of mine. There are red pots and pans hanging from the wall and they look so spotless. There’s a mini TV on top of the fridge, and Thomas has the news playing like a grown man, but he’s not listening because he’s on the phone.

“. . . I can mail those back to you,” he says, pouring Corn Bran into two bowls, handing me one. “No, Sara, I think it’s too soon to meet up . . . Look, I . . .” He looks at the phone before setting it on the counter. “She hung up.”

“Everything okay?”

“She wants every letter and card she wrote to me. I don’t know . . . She’s hoping I’ll reread them or something so I’ll miss her.” He sits down across from me, and shrugs. “Anyway, enough with that. Sorry to report this was the only cereal we had left. I ate all the Lucky Charms the other night, but we have cookies and marshmallows. And a leftover chocolate bunny from Easter we can use. I hope that’s cool.”

The last time I sat down for a meal in a kitchen was at my grandparents’ house, and they’re both dead now. Still, I jump out of my seat and crumble Chips Ahoy into my cereal, and Thomas gives me the biggest smile.

After breakfast, we head out, walking nowhere in particular—in fact, walking away from my block. “So who are your friends around here?” I ask him.

“You,” Thomas says. “And I think Baby Freddy and Skinny-Dave like me just fine.”

“I meant on your block.”

“I know you did. It’s embarrassing. My only friend here is Mr. Isaacs on the first floor. He’s big on cats and obsessed with factories.” He shrugs. “I had to outgrow my friends after they played me.”

I’m a little nervous asking, but I have to. “What’d they do?”

“After what my father did on my birthday, I stopped wanting to celebrate it, but last year my friend Victor kept calling. He was going to throw a party, a night of board games and drinking. I was about to go to Victor’s house, but then he called and canceled last minute to go to some concert with our friends. I thought it was part of some bigger surprise. My phone never rang after that. I was too depressed to drink alone so I just sort of sat in my room and did nothing. They didn’t even bring me back a T-shirt.”

Without knowing Victor, I know he’s an asshole. “You don’t need dickheads like that in your life anyway. They slow you down.”

Thomas stops walking, turns me toward him, and says, “This is what I like about you, Stretch. You care about what happens to you. Everyone else seems resigned to grow up and become nobodies who are stuck here. They don’t dream. They don’t think about the future.”