She didn’t know, because I never told her, that my friends were a bit estranged. They’re sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they’re important—everybody knows that; the TV tells you so—but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another. All you have to do is talk to people, and this was back when I could talk to anybody. My friends, when I had them, pretty much just ragged on me and took my seat when I left the room anyway. Why did I need to call them up?
Except Aaron. Aaron was a real friend; I guess I’d call him my best friend. He was one of the oldest guys in my class, born on that cusp where you can be the youngest person in an older class or the oldest in a younger class, and his parents did the right thing and went with the latter. He was smart and fearless, with a flop of brown curly hair and the sort of glasses that made girls like him, square black ones. He had freckles and he talked a lot. When we got together we would start projects: an alarm clock torn apart and distributed over a wall, a stop-motion video of Lego people having sex, a Web site for pictures of toilets.
I had met him by wandering over to the table during lunch with my head buried in flash cards, sitting down, having one of his friends ask me what I was doing there, and having him come by, flush with tacos, to rescue me, ask what I was studying. It turned out that he and I were taking the same exam, but he wasn’t studying at all—didn’t believe in it. He introduced me to the table conversation about what Princess Zelda would be like in bed—I said she’d be terrible, because she’d been locked up in dungeons since puberty, but Aaron said that’d make her super hot.
Aaron called me that Friday night.
“Want to come over and watch movies?”
“Sure.” I was done with my practice test for the day.
Aaron lived in a small apartment in a big building in downtown Manhattan by City Hall. I took the subway in (my mom had to okay it with Aaron’s mom, which was horrifying), identified myself to Aaron’s paunchy doorman, and took the elevator up to his floor. Aaron’s mom greeted me and brought me into his ventilated chamber (past his dad, who wrote in a room that resembled a prison cell, occasionally beating his head against his desk, while Aaron’s mom brought him tea) and flopped on his bed, which wasn’t yet covered with the sort of stains that would define it in the future. I’m good at flopping on things.
“Hey,” Aaron was like. “You want to smoke some pot?”
Oh. So this was what watching movies meant. Quick recap of what I knew about drugs: my mom told me never to do them; my dad told me not to do them until after the SATs. Mom trumped Dad, so I vowed to never do them—but what if someone made me? I thought drugs might be something people did to you, like jabbing you with a needle while you were trying to mind your business.
“What if someone makes me, Mom?” I had asked her; we were having the drug conversation in a playground. I was ten. “What if they hold a gun to my head and force me to take the drugs?”
“That’s not really how it works, honey,” she answered. “People take drugs because they want to. You just have to not want to.”
And now here I was with Aaron, wanting to. His room smelled like certain areas of Central Park, down by the lake, where white guys with dreadlocks played bongos.
My mom hovered in my head.
“Nah,” I was like.
“No problem.” He opened a pungent bag and put a chunk of the contents of the bag in a very fascinating little device that looked like a cigarette but was made of metal. He lit it up with a butane lighter that made a flame approximately as large as my middle finger. He puffed right up against his wall.
“Don’t you have to open a window?”
“Nah, it’s my room; I can do what I want.”
“Doesn’t your mom care?”
“She has her hands full with Dad.”
The section of wall he smoked against would get discolored over the next two years. Eventually, like the rest of the room, it would get covered up with posters of rappers with gold teeth.
Aaron took three or four breaths of his metal cigarette and made the room smell musty and hot, then announced:
“Let’s motivate, son! What do you want to get?”
“Action.” Duh. I was in seventh grade.
“All right! You know what I want?” Aaron’s eyes lit up. “I want a movie with a cliff.”
“A mountain-climbing one?”
“Doesn’t have to be about mountain climbing. Just needs at least one scene where some dudes are fighting and somebody gets thrown off a cliff.”
“Did you hear about Paul Stojanovich?”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s the producer who invented World’s Scariest Police Chases and Cops.”
“No kidding? The host?”
“No, the producer. The host kicks ass, though.”
Aaron led the way out of his room and past his father—typing away, wiping sweat, for all intents and purposes a part of the computer—to his front door, where his mom, who had long dirty-blond hair and wore overalls, stopped us and gave us cookies and our coats.
“I love my life,” Aaron said. “Bye, Mom.” We entered the elevator with our mouths full of cookies.
“Okay, so what were you saying? I love World’s Scariest Police Chases.” Aaron swallowed. “I love it when the guy is like”—Aaron put on a stern over-annunciated brogue—“These two-bit bandits thought they could turn a blind eye to the law, but the Broward County Sherrif’s office showed them the light—and it led them straight to jail.’”
I cracked up, spitting cookie bits everywhere.
“I’m good at voices. You want to hear Jay Leno blowing the devil? I got it from this comedian Bill Hicks.”
“You never let me finish about Paul Stojanovich!” I said.
“Who?”
The elevator arrived in Aaron’s lobby. “The producer of World’s Scariest Police Chases.”
“Oh, right.” Aaron threw open the glass lobby door. I followed him into the street, tossed up my hood, and bundled myself in it.
“He was posing with his fiancée, for like a wedding picture? And they were doing it in Oregon, right next to this big cliff. And the photographer was like ‘Move back, move a little to the left.’ And they moved, and he fell off the cliff.”
“Oh my God!” Aaron shook his head. “How do you learn this stuff?”
“The Internet.” I smiled.
“That is too good. What happened to the girl?”
“She was fine.”
“She should sue the photographer. Did they sue him?”
“I don’t know.”
“They better. I would sue. You know, Craig”—Aaron looked at me steadily, his eyes red but so alive and bright—“I’m going to be a lawyer.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Screw my dad. He doesn’t make any money. He’s miserable. The only reason we even live where we do is because my mom’s brother is a lawyer and they got the apartment way back when. It used to be my uncle’s apartment. Now he does work for the building, so they cut Mom a deal. Everything good I have is due to lawyers.”
“I think I might want to be one too,” I said.
“Why not? You make money!”
“Yeah.” I looked up. We were on a bright, cold, gray Manhattan sidewalk. Everything cost so much money. I looked at the hot dog man, the cheapest thing around—you wouldn’t get away from him without forking over three or four bucks.