CHAPTER

5

For most of high school, Ismail and I were best friends, obsessed with the great things we would do as adults but also wanting to freeze time in a place when we could believe ourselves geniuses without having to prove it. Failure was something that might happen, but probably to other people, and death lay in a future so remote we would be long dead by the time it arrived. Once, he was driving us over the Tappan Zee Bridge when he noted that if he were a believer, now would be a time when he would have to pray. With the sunset drenching the Hudson in red, it wasn’t hard to figure out where Mecca was, so he closed his eyes, took his hands off the wheel, and started to pray in that direction, letting the car swerve toward the next lane. Every car around us honked, and Ismail interrupted his praying to remark that it sounded like the call to prayer. I grabbed the wheel and straightened the car, cursing at him. Finally, he opened his eyes, took the wheel, and laughed. “Killing us both would be one way for me not to have to become a doctor.” I was indescribably angry, but somehow I found myself laughing, too. The whole thing, I had to admit, had been a rush.

“Never forget,” Ismail said, “that there’s an infinitesimal chance that we are the first invincible people ever born, and that chance will be there until one of us dies.”

Invincible is how we felt when we were acting, which we started to do together near the end of freshman year. I was delighted when I was cast as Jim, the romantic lead in The Glass Menagerie, and he was cast as the secondary Tom, at least until I figured out that the play was actually about Tom learning to name the lies he was surrounded with, and that Jim was just a sweet but clueless catalyst for the lies to fall apart. For a few days, it looked like we were both going to fall in love with a girl named Laura, who was playing Laura, but instead we both fell in love with a girl named Leah, who was playing Laura’s mother, Amanda. Leah brought such intensity and commitment to a character who refused to admit the truth that she seemed the embodiment of truth itself. Obviously, it’s impossible for me to definitively chart the evolution of my feelings and even harder for me to chart Ismail’s, but I’m fairly certain that we thought she was the embodiment of truth before we thought she was the embodiment of beauty. In any case, it wasn’t long before she was the only thing either of us thought or talked about. The unlikelihood of her actually dating either of us—she seemed exclusively interested in the lackadaisically predatory twenty-year-old guys who worked at the coffee place or the deli—was the only thing that stopped us from openly fighting over her, and led us instead to tacitly agree to just follow her around.

Our savage servility slid by in Grease, in which Leah played Sandy and we were stuck doing tech, since neither of us could sing. When Ismail was cast as the director in A Chorus Line, I was undeniably jealous, and I was also unnerved, because this—unseen, making judgments and rationing out fates from the back of the theater—was how I imagined Adam Lyons, the man who ran the epiphany machine, and it was also how I imagined my mother. I was stuck doing tech once again for the play, and Leah sang “Tits and Ass,” changed by our drama teacher to “This and That.” After rehearsals, the three of us would often hang out and smoke behind the auditorium, twenty minutes or so that I lived for and that seemed like the greatest pleasure imaginable, even if afterward I always hated myself for not making a move on Leah. Eventually, Leah started joining us at Ismail’s house to watch The X-Files. We were also joined by Ismail’s mother, a stern scientist who made us all laugh by identifying strongly with the skeptical Dana Scully, constantly insisting that the show would be much better if it “dropped all the alien nonsense” and were actually about Dana “doing the things Dana should be doing.” Once, as we were walking to our separate cars complaining about the absence from that week’s episode of the smoking man, who seemed to have some great secret knowledge that would explain the whole world, Leah turned to me and asked, very seriously: “Do you think his mom is worried about Ismail hooking up with you or with me?”

“I mean, I don’t think she’d be happy with either one. She’s cool and everything, but I think she’s kind of conservative.”

“She just wants him to be a doctor and doesn’t want him to get distracted by us arty kids. Smart lady.”

I drove home trying to figure out whether through thick layers of sarcasm Leah had paid me a compliment by calling me an arty kid.