Charlie sat in class, trying to listen to what Professor Yamamoto had to say about Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The problem was the student sitting next to him. The guy kept answering Yamamoto’s questions as soon as they left his mouth, as if he were sitting in Yamamoto’s office with him and the rest of the class didn’t exist. Charlie could see the other students rolling their eyes. The student next to him, the know-it-all, had messy black hair and a very wrinkled shirt and what looked like a coffee stain on his nose, perhaps from drinking from a thermos. He also had an adversarial relationship with his desk: one of those long-legged guys who were always shifting around in their seat, as if holding in a fart. He’d use some word Charlie had never heard before—“ontological,” say, or “ineluctable”—squirming all the while inside the prison of his desk. Even Yamamoto seemed a bit put off by him, though it was clear, too, that he was impressed. Charlie would have been more annoyed by the guy if he didn’t recognize something in his restlessness, an aspirational quality that seemed at odds with his confidence. He wasn’t one of the prep schoolers from Exeter or Andover. He was from the West, like him. Probably not California. There was a Rocky Mountain drift to his vowels. Plus he had a way about him—an eagerness, cool for not giving a shit whether it was cool or not—that suggested he’d spent his life dreaming about going to a college like Middlebury and was determined to squeeze every last drop he could out of it.
The beautiful girl sitting on the other side of the guy’s desk must have seen something in him too, because she introduced herself after class. Charlie eavesdropped while zipping up his backpack. Sabina, she introduced herself as—though Charlie already knew her name. Sabina Gonzales was one of those goddesses who, miraculously, also seem to be warm and approachable and friendly to mortals. They’d made a kind of altar to her in the bathroom on Charlie’s hall, her class picture taped to the mirror above the sink. The graffiti surrounding it was more chaste than obscene: a couple marriage proposals, a cartoon wolf with an enormous heart trampolining from his chest, the poignant You Give Me Hope to Carry On that nobody would own up to.
The know-it-all stayed to chat with Dr. Yamamoto while he erased his notes from the board, and Charlie deliberately lagged in the hall, waiting by the stairs. He couldn’t say why he wanted to meet the boy so much. It was an instinctive thing, a vague tingling promise, as if some of the boy’s galling confidence would rub off on him. In the three months he’d been at Middlebury, Charlie had met lots of fun, likable guys who enjoyed playing foosball or knew how to get a bottle cap off without an opener or maybe even whose favorite movie was A Clockwork Orange—but nobody Charlie could really talk to about things. He’d imagined college would be like it was in certain movies he’d seen, that he’d be staying up all night debating the existence of God, or at least doing inspired and memorable things, but so far it was just like high school. In some ways, in fact, it felt more like high school than high school itself. Kahlúa was humiliating enough, but Jell-O shots? Charlie had always assumed they were a hoax, like the left-handed Whopper. But no—they actually existed. Not that he didn’t like to get loaded; he just wanted to get loaded with brilliant, funny, exceptional people.
“Did you get that girl’s number?” Charlie asked the guy when he finally left class, feeling how supremely unexceptional a question this was. He’d rushed to catch up with him. The guy started a bit, as if surprised to be spoken to.
“She’s not really my type.”
“Not your type! She’s everyone’s type.”
The guy stopped to open the door. “I’m not sure that exists. Unless you’re talking about, I don’t know, Ingrid Bergman.”
Charlie followed him outside, the air numbing his face. What sort of kid made Ingrid Bergman references? Charlie had only a vague idea who she was. The December sky was flat and pitiless, so gray that looking at it felt like a kind of blindness. Recently the snow on the ground had melted a bit during a brief last gasp of fall and then frozen again overnight, turning every walkway on campus into a bobsled run. It was the season of the embarrassing injury. All over campus people were slipping and bruising their tailbones, sometimes worse. Charlie had already fallen twice, landing cartoonishly on his ass. It was so cold in the morning that he’d stopped showering before class, worried his wet hair would freeze into a helmet; he’d heard about a freshman who’d gone bald because an upperclassman had smacked his hair, shattering it clean off his head.
Now Charlie did something he hadn’t expected to do. He slipped on the ice again. Or rather, he pretended to slip, knowing that the guy from Yamamoto’s class would stop and help him up, that they’d be forced to shake hands. It was a freaky thing to do—he’d never pretended to fall before, even to meet a girl—but Charlie did it anyway.
Sure enough, the guy leaned down and helped him up, their breath merging into a single cloud. Charlie proceeded to be grateful. “You’ve got to watch out for the ice,” he said, brushing the snow off himself. “It’s a real pain in the wazoo.”
The guy smiled. “Did you just say ‘wazoo’?”
“I guess so. Why?”
“I’ve just never heard anyone say that before. In the wild.”
Charlie blushed. His mother was the one who said “wazoo” and “crumbum” and “har-dee-har”; for years Charlie had been trying to shed her influence, a kind of congenital dorkiness. But in this case it seemed to pique the know-it-all’s interest. He was suddenly looking at Charlie in a curious, attentive way. Often, years later, Charlie would credit the birth of their friendship to that fact that he’d used the word “wazoo” instead of “ass.”
“I just mean you’ve got to watch your step,” he said.
“I’m acquainted with ice. We’ve got plenty of it in Missoula.”
“You’re from Montana?”
The guy nodded.
“I go to Salish every summer,” Charlie said happily, unable to contain himself. “We’ve got a house on the lake. I mean, my parents do. My great-grandfather built it. I’ve been going there since I was a baby.” He stopped, realizing how this must sound. There’s a major trucking route in front of the house, he wanted to say, but that would only have sounded worse.
“My grandparents live near Jewel Basin. Not too far from there.”
“Amazing!” Charlie said, though his new acquaintance didn’t seem to find the connection particularly impressive. Perhaps he had deeper things on his mind. They introduced themselves, the guy presenting his name—Garrett—as if it were perfectly in tune with the Trips and Blakelys and Campbells they went to school with. Charlie hadn’t known how lost he felt on the sea of Eastern preppiness he’d been navigating for the past three months until he heard the Western homeliness of that name. It was like the sight of land on the horizon. They walked toward the dining hall, hunched together for warmth. It was so cold that you had to think about moving your lips when you talked. Garrett asked if he was planning to be a philosophy major.
“Are you kidding?” Charlie said. “I’m premed.”
“You want to be a doctor?”
“A cardiac anesthesiologist.”
Garrett laughed. “That’s very specific.”
“Well, I’m into saving people’s lives, but I don’t think I have the nerves to be a surgeon. Those guys are like the fighter pilots of medicine. It’s all about going into combat. I’m more of a, I don’t know, tactician. Plus I loved making potions as a kid.”
Garrett laughed again, perhaps assuming this was a joke. Charlie felt vaguely hurt. He asked Garrett what he wanted to major in.
“I’m thinking about a triple major, actually,” he said. “Philosophy, English, environmental studies.”
This time it was Charlie who laughed. Was he serious? Did triple majors even exist?
The trees around them had frozen into glass replicas of themselves, some of their branches glued to the ground. Charlie and Garrett passed a snowman that had been rained on overnight and then refrozen into a volcano. Just beyond it, the path slanted downhill at what was usually an inconsequential pitch, made harrowing now by a sheen of ice. The slope was long and ran all the way to the road; rather than imperil their lives, previous travelers had cut a bootleg trail through the snow.
Garrett stopped at the top of the hill for a second, as if taking in the view. Then, flashing Charlie a grin, he leapt flat-footed onto the slope, sliding down the iced-over path in his snow boots. He picked up speed, gradually at first and then more and more rapidly, managing somehow to stay upright, bending his knees and thrusting his arms behind him as if he were tucking down a ski jump. He barreled toward the road, where a line of cars had stopped at a traffic light. Charlie yelled out. He would crash! Split his head open and die! Garrett sailed toward the wall of traffic—Charlie bellowing now, sure he would smash his brains all over the road—but then Garrett sprang off the path at the last minute, arms outstretched like wings, and landed gracefully in the snow.
“Come on!” Garrett called up the hill. “It’s a blast!”
“No way!”
“It’s just like skiing!”
His face looked demented. It seemed impossible that this was the same guy just talking about Kierkegaard’s refutation of Hegelian determinism in class. Charlie was scared to do it but also knew that he’d look like a chickenshit if he didn’t. He was an accomplished skier, though only when he was on skis. Why did he want to impress Garrett so badly?
In the end, he did what he did when working up the courage to drop into a treacherous chute: he imagined that his body was on fire. Skiing downhill was the only way to put it out. He inched forward, one Sorel at a time, doing a kind of rehab shuffle until the path steepened and he found himself bending his knees and precipitously taking flight, sliding down the ice at a speed he hadn’t imagined possible without something strapped to his feet. The air froze his face, squeezing tears from his eyes even though he was laughing, savoring the pride of his own daring while realizing at the same time what a dumbass he was, that what he was doing was profoundly stupid, nothing to be proud of at all, possibly even a cry for help—I’m in college and I still say “wazoo”!—and yet he hurtled toward the road, whooping like an idiot.
Elias waited in the infirmary, subjected to death by Muzak. An instrumental version of “Afternoon Delight.” Actually, the feeling it gave him was less like death and more like birth, or rather pre-birth, as if he were floating in an amniotic sac. To entertain himself, Elias imagined the musicians recording the song in the studio, the bassist laying down a fat, righteous groove while his bandmates in the control room passed around a spliff. It was what he always did when listening to elevator music. Fuck yeah, the electric harpist would say, nodding with his eyes closed.
The nurse practitioner had disappeared some time ago. Down the hallway, Elias could only see the closed door of the room where she’d taken two freshman guys, one of them holding the other around the waist to help him walk. It seemed weird that they’d gone into the examination room together. Maybe they were lovers. Elias was cool with that. He was cool with just about everything, save for being strangled to death. That was what his roommate had tried to do to him this morning. He’d pounced on Elias while he was half-dozing in bed and gripped him by the throat with both hands, squeezing so hard Elias thought for a second he might croak. Gunnar, his roommate, had come to his senses finally and let go. The two of them did not get along—rooming together had been a disaster from day one—but Elias had not pegged the guy for a murderer.
Now his neck was turning the color of an eggplant. Plus it hurt to turn to the left. And to the right. And not to turn it at all. The girl he was seeing, Hannah, had made him promise to have it looked at.
Presently the door to the examination room opened and the nurse practitioner emerged, looking put out, trailed at some distance by the two freshmen. One was holding an ice pack to his elbow, his arm done up in a sling. They sat beside Elias in the waiting room while the nurse practitioner prepared something for them on the computer.
“Hey there,” Elias said, to be friendly. He made a point to be nice to gay people and freshmen, both common victims of bullying.
“What happened to your neck?” the unhurt one asked. Elias told them the story of almost being strangled to death.
“Jesus. That’s messed up. You should get him kicked out of school.”
“I don’t want to get him kicked out,” Elias said, feeling the bruise on his neck. “We used to be buddies. Before we moved in together, I mean.” He looked at the two boys, one of whom was carrying both of their backpacks. “Are you guys roommates?”
“Actually, we just met!” the guy with the sling said.
“What?”
“About an hour ago,” No Sling concurred.
“I fell down and he helped me up,” Sling said.
“A man falls on his wazoo, it stirs me to chivalry.”
Elias laughed. “At least you haven’t attacked each other yet.”
“Actually, he did this to my arm,” Sling said. “Talked me into sliding down a ski jump of ice. Then he tackled me and sprained my elbow.”
“I tackled him because he was about to fly into a semitruck. Also because he looked terrified. Also because he was yelling, ‘Stop me!’ ”
Elias laughed again. There was something wrong with these goofballs. But also something not wrong at all. Elias couldn’t look at them without feeling like a window somewhere had been cracked. Maybe his problem was hanging out with sophomores like himself; all they did was slump around, depressed, and complain about their midterms.
The nurse practitioner handed a prescription to Sling, then disappeared into the back again. It seemed to be a one-person operation. The two freshmen zipped up their jackets—No Sling helping Sling—then retrieved their winter hats from the coatrack. Elias introduced himself, hoping to prolong their company.
“Why did your roommate try to strangle you anyway?” the one named Charlie asked.
“Long story,” Elias said. He told them about turning Gunnar’s underwear pink because he’d failed to separate darks from lights, which led to Gunnar’s refusing to take turns doing the laundry, which led to Elias’s going on strike and refusing to wash the dishes in the sink of their suite, which led to Gunnar’s picking all of Elias’s dirty dishes out of the sink and tossing them into a pile next to the dumpster behind Gifford, where they got covered in snow (last week) and then irretrievably encased in ice (last night). Gunnar had discovered Elias eating instant ramen for breakfast out of his favorite mug, which had sent him into a homicidal rage. “What else was I supposed to do?” Elias explained. “The dishes are trapped till spring.”
“You’re not on the meal plan?”
Elias shook his head. “I haven’t eaten a real meal for a week.”
“We can sneak you into the dining hall,” Garrett said.
“How?”
“You’re speaking to an operative of Dining Services.” He checked his watch. “Proctor’s still open for a couple three minutes.”
“A couple three? What does that mean?”
“Beats me,” Charlie said happily. “He’s from Montana.”
Elias grabbed his coat from the rack.
“What about your neck?” Charlie asked.
“Screw it. I’m going to strangle myself if I have to listen to this music any longer.”
At Proctor Hall, Garrett sneaked Elias through the door where the kitchen staff took out the trash while Charlie went in the normal way, handing his ID card to the doorkeeper on duty. He didn’t like breaking rules and was nervous they’d all be caught and sent to the dean’s office. Maybe even suspended. But Elias and Garrett were already in line when he got to the taco bar, happily loading up their trays, as if they’d been friends for years. And Charlie felt that way too, that the three of them had known each other for years instead of minutes. They’d been bewitched somehow, like the trees.
Garrett helped Charlie carry his tray, since he was still icing his elbow. They sat down with a couple of friends from Charlie’s hall, Johnny and Marcus, who were playing a game of shuffleboard with the saltshaker. Johnny and Marcus were not hard to spot, given that the rest of the tables were filled with Trips and Corkys. Also, they were wearing Hawaiian shirts in the middle of winter. They’d begun to do this last week, as a form of psyops against the cold. As far as he’d thought about it, which wasn’t very far at all, Charlie assumed he’d befriended the two freshmen of color on his hall purely by chance, though it occurred to him now, introducing them to Garrett and Elias, that maybe it wasn’t as random as he thought. Just seeing them warmed the homesick Californian in his soul.
“What happened to your arm?” Johnny asked.
“I fell on the ice,” Charlie said.
“So you’re putting more ice on it.”
“Yep.”
“You’re the doctor.”
Johnny peered at the food on Elias’s tray. “Jesus. Has it been, like, a week since you’ve eaten?”
“Actually, yes.”
The four of them watched Elias attack his food. It felt like an event, something you might charge admission for. The bruise on his neck had continued to spread, darkening like a cloud. Given that Elias was so handsome—and it was clear, even with the gargantuan hickey on his neck, that he was threateningly handsome, with his brown skin and Roman nose and green eyes the color of Easter grass—it did not surprise Charlie that another guy, a competitor in the Middlebury game of musical beds, had attacked him. Sharing a room with him was probably not the easiest thing in the world. So Charlie was taken aback when the beautiful girl from philosophy class, happening to pass their table while busing her tray, paid no attention to Elias but smiled conspicuously at Garrett, revealing a speck of cilantro between her teeth. Garrett nodded back, as if greeting a stranger.
“Who was that?” Elias asked. He’d stopped eating and seemed to have forgotten about the boiled potato at the end of his fork.
“I forget her name,” Garrett said.
“Sabina Gonzales,” Charlie said.
Elias stared after her, holding his potato aloft.
“Are you all right?” Charlie asked him.
“He’s not moving,” Johnny said.
“Maybe he ate himself to death,” Marcus said.
After lunch, the five of them walked back to their dorms. The sun had magically appeared—the first they’d seen of it in weeks—and the trees were painful to look at, seeming to shine from the inside out. Elias stopped outside his dorm room to show them the mound of dirty dishes floating in a pristine dome of ice, like one of those glass weights with a tarantula inside. Not only spoons and knives and bowls, but the crust from a piece of toast and what looked like a half-eaten meatball levitating over a plate. Garrett squatted beside it and knocked on the ice.
“Wow,” he said.
“It’s like one of those Jell-O salads with the fruit inside them,” Charlie said.
“Have you tried peeing on it?” Marcus said.
“On my own dishes?” Elias said.
“I’m just thinking about survival. It’s going to be a long winter.”
Elias peered at the window of his room, where the light was on. A languid guitar solo, all roll and no rock, burbled from inside.
“Smells Phish-y,” Johnny said.
“The psycho’s home,” Elias lamented. “I can’t go inside.”
“Stay with me,” Garrett said, or perhaps demanded.
“Don’t you have a roommate?”
“Nope. The guy never showed up for school.” He did a victory thing on the ice—a moonwalk?—that was hard to interpret. “I’ve got a double to myself.”
“Okay,” Elias said. “I mean, if it’s cool with your friends.”
“What friends?”
“You don’t have friends?”
Garrett shrugged. “You’re the first people I’ve met here that I’ve liked.”
For Halloween sophomore year, the three of them—Charlie, Garrett, and Elias—dressed up as speed bumps. This involved wearing all yellow and then lying on the floor without moving. They did this at several dorm parties, stretching across the hallway so everyone had to step over them. It was a convincing costume in that it authentically congested traffic.
“We’re speed bumps,” Charlie said for the umpteenth time, because the costumes required a fair bit of explanation.
“So it’s okay if I step on your faces?” a Jedi knight asked them.
“No,” Charlie said.
“You can drive over our faces,” Elias clarified. Somehow, dressed in matching yellow sweats—which, like Charlie and Garrett’s, were stuffed with dirty laundry—he was still handsome. Elias tried to drink supinely from his cup and found that half its contents ended up on his face. “Whose idea was this anyway?”
“Garrett’s.”
Garrett shrugged. “I’m sort of a genius.”
“Is that why everyone thinks we’re ducks?”
“I don’t expect to be understood in my own time.”
Eventually someone came along dressed as a car. This seemed highly propitious. It took a moment for Charlie to recognize who it was, given that she was wearing a cardboard box pimped into a roadster, then spray-painted silver to look like the Monopoly token. The smell from the floor was narcotic. She honked at them rather than step over Charlie without his permission.
“We’re speed bumps,” he said. “This is a five-mile-per-hour zone.”
“I’m just trying to get to Vermont Avenue.”
“Greetings,” Garrett said. “You were in our philosophy class freshman year.”
“I remember,” the Monopoly token said, resting her hands on her hood as if she were pregnant. “Dr. Yamamoto. You looked pretty different.”
“We were too shy to talk to you.”
“Hmmm. I don’t remember you being too shy to talk in class.”
Garrett blushed, perhaps the first time he’d ever been embarrassed about speaking too much. “I have a speed bump that would like to meet you.”
Elias, who hadn’t said a word, nodded at her. Charlie had seen him seduce countless girls, but now he lay there with his arms clapped to his sides, refusing to break character. He roused himself eventually and tried to shake her hand, reaching up from the floor, but it was impossible for her to reciprocate, and so there was nothing for Elias to do but drop his arm and lie there again in a municipal way. Sabina Gonzales left in bemusement.
“What’s the matter with you?” Charlie asked Elias.
“I’m not sure.”
“A speed bump in love with a car,” Garrett said. “It’s like Romeo and Juliet.”
Later, the three of them staggered home beneath a blizzard of stars. Charlie and Garrett, both drunk, walked with their arms around each other, leaving a trail of dirty laundry behind them. It was late enough that the dormitories were mostly dark, a single window lit up here and there among the black ones, like a gold tooth. Elias wedged his way between Charlie and Garrett, sharing the weight of their drunkenness. How Charlie loved them, these nights when it felt like the three of them were basically one person, when everything they said was funny and perfect and also somehow nostalgically aware of itself, as if they could already hear the stories they’d tell about it the next morning, making everything they did seem larger than it was and confirming for Charlie in a lyrically poignant way that his vision for their future was correct. They would be famous, and financially okay, and would end up with beautiful, horny, brilliantly intelligent wives.
They rounded the student union in the dark and ran into the rest of their tribe: Marcus, Johnny, Brig. The six boys hugged tearfully, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. Marcus and Johnny, who’d glued a bunch of trash to their shirts, were supposed to be flotsam and jetsam. But Brig had outdone them all, dressed as a businessman caught in a storm. His umbrella had been turned inside out, exposing its ribs, and he’d shellacked his hair so that it looked like it was gusting back; even his tie was sticking up in the air, molded to seem like it was blowing over one shoulder. He staggered around, hunched and bandy-legged, as if walking into a gale. The speed bumps felt strangely exalted. Occasionally someone executed a costume so perfectly that it made you wonder whether you’d undersold what life had to offer.
Elias, at any rate, had sprung the cage to his soul. He wandered into the quad and lifted his yellow shirt up to his chin, baring his chest to the night. “Sabina!” he howled. “Where are you?” Charlie tried to shush him, forgetting that two thirty in the morning was the hour of drunken howling, that all across campus boys and girls—serious students, many of them, with excellent GPAs—were yelling names into the night. It was like a rite of affliction. Elias howled Sabina Gonzales’s name so pathetically, with such drunkenness and despair, that Charlie half-expected her to run out of her dorm room and leap, Scooby-Doo–style, into his arms. On such a beautiful night, anything seemed possible.
And in fact something did happen. One of the darkened windows squealed open. It was not Sabina Gonzales, but someone with a beard.
“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled from the third floor, and began throwing baseballs at them.
“Sorry!” Charlie said. “He’s looking for someone else.”
“Let me take a wild fucking guess. Her name’s Sabina.”
He threw another baseball. Charlie ducked and covered his head. The guy, though pitching from the third floor, had excellent aim.
“How many baseballs do you own?”
“Tell your friend, Scrooge McDuck, that she’s not interested.”
“What are you, her fucking father?” Brig said.
“He’s my boyfriend, actually,” Sabina Gonzales said, because she’d appeared at the window now as well. She was not dressed as a car anymore, which flattered her. In fact, she was wearing a knee-length jersey and possibly nothing else. The bearded guy put his arm around her, scowling half-heartedly at Charlie and his friends, as if unsure whether to bask in their envy or sprint down there and kick their asses. Charlie and Garrett tugged at Elias, who was staring at the window as if the world had collapsed.
“I need those balls back!” Sabina’s boyfriend called after them. “They’re school property!”
In front of the New Dorms, the six friends split off again, the speed bumps heading back to their suite in Atwater North. Elias wove back and forth on the grass, like a wounded duckling. Charlie and Garrett knew he’d be fine in a couple days—possibly even tomorrow—yet said scurrilous things about Sabina Gonzales, trying to buck him up. Already they were composing the story of tonight, archiving it for future retellings: the howling, the baseballs, the mystical appearance of Sabina in the window. It was the sort of story you laughed about for years, that gave birth to nicknames. Elias, from now on—for the rest of his life, probably—would be “McDuck.” He took a baseball from his sweatpants and threw it at Charlie, as if in protest, then waddled off to bed.
Charlie and Garrett sat in their favorite place to smoke, a bench outside Atwater North with a relief map of gum stuck to one armrest. Who put the first piece there, no one knew, but it was a landform in expansion. Charlie pulled a pack of Viceroys out of the kangaroo pocket of his sweatshirt and offered one to Garrett, though not before complaining that Garrett never bought packs for himself. They smoked only on special occasions, when they were drunk, which meant they smoked a lot.
“You’re my tobacco mule,” Garrett said.
“Tobacco duck,” Charlie said, lighting their cigarettes. “You could at least throw me some cash once in a while.”
Garrett reached into his own front pocket and pulled out some change and threw it at Charlie. It bounced off Charlie’s chest and landed in his lap. Some pennies, maybe a dime. Charlie leapt up from the bench.
“Don’t ever fucking do that again,” he said quietly.
Garrett stared at him. “Do what?”
“Throw pennies at me.”
“You told me to!” He looked dumbfounded, astonished by Charlie’s anger, though no more astonished than Charlie himself.
“I know they don’t have Jews in Montana, but don’t be a shithead.”
Garrett looked stricken. Of course he hadn’t meant anything. He was clueless. Clueless and drunk. Charlie’s rage evaporated. He felt suddenly like he might cry. He wanted to tell Garrett he was sorry, that he loved him like a brother, but you didn’t say these things out loud. They were nineteen-year-old men. They were dressed like ducks. Male friendship was all about rhythm. It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart, you learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time, for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel, it was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang. The rhythm itself said the important things, the non-jokey things, so you wouldn’t have to. Still, there were times like this, rare ones, when it wasn’t enough. Charlie sat down on the bench, drunkenly, and told Garrett about going to a largely Jewish elementary school when he was a kid, how he never felt like he completely fit in—he could sing the songs at Chanukah, sure, finish the sentence “Baruch atah Adonai…,” but that was about it—and how once when they scrimmaged another team in basketball, at a fancy prep school in Orange County, some kids in the bleachers had thrown pennies at them. Charlie hadn’t even known what it meant. His father had had to explain it to him, that the kids in the stand were insulting him. Weirdly, he’d been angrier at his dad than anyone. It was all a mistake! They hung stockings at Christmas! The next year, for high school, he’d gone to a fancy prep school himself, and though there were some other Jewish kids there, or at least a few, Charlie never mentioned he was Jewish, or raised that way, and did everything he humanly could to fit in. It helped that he was good at sports. He joined every team he could: soccer, squash, water polo. Head of the ski club. He had to excel at everything. “I was class president. I was in the Admirals. I was on the honor roll. Homecoming king junior year! Oh man, the glory. I soaked it up. I had to be the most popular kid in school, but also the smartest, the funniest, the best athlete. Like I always had to prove myself worthy.” Charlie flicked his cigarette to the ground, where it throbbed like a firefly. “That’s why I wanted to be your friend so badly. That day in Intro to Philosophy. People were rolling their eyes when you talked, but you didn’t care. You don’t give a fuck what people think, about fitting in.”
“They were rolling their eyes?” Garrett said.
“That’s why I admire you,” Charlie said. “You never want to be anyone but yourself!”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is.”
“I wish I was you all the time,” Garrett said casually.
Charlie looked at him. “Yeah, right. Don’t be a putz.”
“Last night, when you were on the phone with your parents.”
“What about it?” Charlie said.
“I was listening to you. How could I help it? Your family’s so fucking loud. You were talking about something really stupid, like how your dad had a flat tire on his car and the tire guy said that he might have a leaky nipple, and how funny this was, that your dad had a leaky nipple, and I kept thinking, like, when have I ever talked to either of my parents about anything like that? We’re lucky if we talk once a month. I mean my mom’s got three stepkids; she hasn’t even officially invited me for Thanksgiving. My dad’s basically AWOL. And I could hear your brothers in the background, wanting to talk to you too, joking about your dad’s leaky nipples.” Garrett crashed his cigarette butt into the mountain of gum. “And your mom. She’s always asking you how I’m doing and then saying how smart I am, because I used the word ‘schadenfreude’ in front of her one time. Sometimes, when I hear her voice on the phone, I get a boner.”
Charlie offered him another cigarette. They were both lonely. They were far from home. They got infelicitous boners. Charlie looked at his best friend, feeling a love he could barely distinguish from the source of that love (himself).
“What’s the worst thing you could do to me?”
“ ‘Worst’ as in shitty?”
“As in despicable.”
Garrett shrugged. “Have anal sex with your mother?”
Charlie nodded. “Let’s make a vow, right now, to always be best friends, even if we fuck each other’s moms in the wazoo.”
“You mean like on Parents’ Weekend?”
“Exactly!”
“I’m not sure that’s fair,” Garrett said finally. “Since you could probably fuck both my parents if you wanted to.”
“True. What else could we do to each other?”
“Try to strangle each other in our sleep?”
“Yes! Like Elias’s psycho roommate.” Charlie lifted his chin. “Here, put your hands around my throat.”
Garrett did as he was told. Then Charlie copied him, clutching Garrett’s windpipe. They sat that way on the bench, affectionately gripping each other’s throats.
“Repeat after me,” Charlie said. “ ‘I promise to stay friends even if you try to strangle me in my sleep.’ ”
“I promise to stay friends even if you try to strangle me in my sleep.”
“ ‘Forever and ever.’ ”
They let go. “I’ve never understood that. How can you have more than ‘forever’?”
They’d skinned up to an old mining hut, hauling two sleds of food and beer. The hut was so buried in snow it looked like part of the landscape until you found the front of it, and even then it looked a bit like a snow cave someone had barricaded with logs. The three of them—Charlie, Garrett, Elias—took off their skis and packs and rested to catch their breath. Even in January, the sun felt different from the one in Vermont, not just warmer but more companionable somehow, as if it were closer to the earth. It sniffed Charlie’s face, fogging his sunglasses. He cleaned them with the pulled-out pocket of his fleece. Looming all around him, buried under sixty inches of snow, were the chutes and bowls and tree-candled glades of McMillan Peak, sparkling below the great scalloped cornice that ran along its ridge. Not a soul anywhere in sight. You couldn’t even see a track. Charlie, who’d grown up skiing at Mammoth and Squaw Valley, trapped for hours in lift lines or waiting torturously on powder days for ski patrollers to howitzer the slopes, then watching those slopes get skied out in half an hour, felt almost deliriously happy.
They were on winter break—amazingly, Charlie and Garrett were juniors now, taking 400-level courses—and had come to southern Colorado to go backcountry skiing. It was the easiest place for them to meet: Garrett was in Albuquerque already, spending the holidays with his mom, so Charlie and Elias flew in from opposite coasts and he picked them up from the airport, the car loaded with supplies. The guy was like a scoutmaster. Not only did he have the sleds packed, Tetrised into the back of his mother’s Subaru, but he’d found a beacon, shovel, and probe for each of them, even drummed up some AT gear from a guy he knew in Silverton. This wasn’t telemarking—which Garrett had taught Charlie to do in Vermont—but a new genius thing where you could lock down your heels and ski alpine turns, as if you’d never left the resort. Charlie couldn’t wait to try it.
They’d had some fine times in the Breadloaf Wilderness. But this was the West, the Rockies. The Appalachians were to the Rockies as, well…what? Snorkeling was to deep-sea diving? Charlie had never been on a hut trip before, and certainly not at twelve thousand feet.
Garrett went into the hut to get the woodstove going while Charlie and Elias unpacked the sleds, following him inside with bags of groceries. The hut was small and low-ceilinged and smelled dangerously of gas from the vintage Alcazar range hooked up to a propane tank outside the window. Charlie had to stoop to keep his head from grazing the ceiling, as if the miners who’d lived here long ago were the seven dwarfs. Waiting for the stove to heat up, Charlie rubbed his gloves together, trying to get the feeling back into his fingers. His sweat-soaked thermal had frozen solid, like a bulletproof vest. He loved this. He loved all of it. He was a huge proponent of frozen underwear and nineteenth-century mining huts.
“Man, it’s fucking cold,” Elias said. “I miss the lodge.”
“What lodge?”
“Any lodge. A ski lodge. With overpriced cheeseburgers.”
“But do ski lodges have this,” Garrett said, lifting a ceramic sculpture from a shelf. The sculpture, the hut’s lone decoration, depicted a naked woman fucking a skeleton.
“Wow. That is completely disturbing.”
“What’s it even supposed to mean?” Charlie asked.
“Means if a skeleton can get laid, there’s hope for McDuck.”
Charlie laughed. This was a joke that they’d had ever since Elias started seeing Sabina Gonzales. He refused to talk about their sex life, or even if they were sleeping together, so Garrett and Charlie had begun pretending she was saving herself for marriage.
“Anyway, you can never find a table at those places,” Charlie said seriously.
“At least they have tables.”
“What do you call this?” Charlie said, patting the giant stump someone had dragged into the center of the hut.
“Is there anything you don’t enjoy?” Elias asked.
“Sure.”
“Besides going to the dentist?”
Charlie shrugged. “Actually, I like having clean teeth.”
Garrett put his hand on Elias’s shoulder. “It will all make sense once we get up there skiing.”
Elias looked at him skeptically. He’d grown up in Vermont and was probably the best skier of the three of them, having coped with eastern crud his entire life. But he’d never so much as boot-packed to a run before and had griped the whole way up to the hut, lagging behind Charlie and Garrett even though he wasn’t towing a sled. The very idea of skiing uphill, rather than down, seemed to offend him. “Just think of it as a mountaineering trip,” Charlie told him, which didn’t do much to boost his spirits.
They ate a quick lunch—peanut butter and honey sandwiches, which Charlie had forgotten existed—then filled the stockpot with snow and melted it on the woodstove while Elias popped outside to the outhouse. He came back after a minute, looking shaken. The outhouse had not been cleaned all winter.
“There’s like a stalactite of frozen shit, higher than the toilet seat.”
“Stalagmite,” Garrett corrected him.
“What the hell does it matter?”
“A stalactite would be hanging from the ceiling.”
Elias frowned. “My larger point is that you can’t sit.”
“We can’t be the first skiers to encounter this problem.”
“We’re not,” Elias said despondently. “There’s an ice pick leaning in the corner of the outhouse.”
He looked at Garrett and Charlie. Garrett and Charlie looked at him back.
“Remember when you had to dig out all your dishes that time?” Charlie said.
Garrett kneaded his shoulder. “There’s no hill for a climber.”
Elias strapped on his goggles and returned to the outhouse. Charlie didn’t feel too sorry for him. The guy was so madly in love—at school, he was basically orbiting in space—that it was hard to take his unhappiness seriously. Garrett had planned the trip partly as a way of spending some time with Elias, of extracting him for a few days from Sabina’s dorm room, so there was bound to be a bit of resentment. The three of them were best friends and supposedly housemates, and yet he never slept at the Mill anymore and Charlie and Garrett had the wounded feeling they’d been replaced, or at least that Elias had moved on to a higher plane. Not to mention that he was a senior, graduating in a few months’ time. Charlie didn’t blame him, really—the guy had been in love with Sabina Gonzales for, oh, two and a half years—but there was the niggling worry, shared by Garrett too, that he’d already begun his departure.
Later, the three of them geared up and tested their avalanche beacons, pairing off and taking turns switching them to Search, walking out of sight and then returning to make sure the beeps sped up as they approached their partner’s signal. Then they double-checked that they were all on Send and snapped into their skis and began the ascent toward McMillan Peak, skinning up single file, climbing gently through a copse of pines before eventually cresting the tree line and getting a panoramic view of the mountain for the first time, gazing upon the immaculate white bowl that seemed to trap the air in a new kind of stillness. Charlie’s heart blew open like a door. He smiled at Elias behind him, who’d lost his grumpiness in the presence of all that snow and was smiling now too, his face glowing inside the hood of his jacket.
Charlie stopped to drink some water, but his Nalgene bottle was frozen shut. He’d forgotten to pack it upside down. Ahead of him, Garrett turned his skis peakward and cut more or less straight uphill toward the ridge. Charlie kept inside Garrett’s tracks, where it was easier to skin. His head pounded from the altitude, he was dying of thirst, his toes and fingers were numb. Yet Charlie couldn’t have been happier. At some point in the last three years, cold weather had ceased to bother him. He preferred it, in fact, to the seasonless warmth of California. It reminded him that he was on a planet, ninety-three million miles from the sun, and that something had collided with it a long time ago and made it lopsided, and therefore cold as shit in the winters. Back home in LA for the holidays, walking the dog in a T-shirt, he found himself feeling strangely uneasy, glancing around aimlessly or gazing at the snowless peaks of the San Gabriels in the distance.
After what felt like an hour of climbing, they reached the ridge and then rested a bit before transitioning. The air was thin enough that it was hard to catch their breath. The cornice smoldered in the wind, powder blowing off it like smoke that stung Charlie’s lungs. They ripped their climbing skins off—Garrett did this without removing his skis, reaching back to the tail of each one and stripping the skin in a single fluid motion as if he were tearing off a Band-Aid—then folded them carefully and stuck them in their packs. Charlie snapped back into his bindings, locking his heels in place for the descent. Goggles on, they traversed in the shadow of the cornice, following the ridgeline in order to find the best pitch without losing too much vertical. Anything over thirty degrees, and you were in avalanche danger. Garrett stopped at a wind-sheltered cirque that funneled at the tree line into a beautiful glade and took out his slope meter, then rested it on the snow to see where the little ball inside it stopped. Twenty-nine degrees. Just about perfect. No other skiers anywhere to be seen; they had the mountain—the whole universe, really—to themselves.
“Okay, fellas,” Garrett said, grinning like a maniac. “Cold smoke as far as the eye can see.”
“What are you talking about?” Elias asked.
“Pow-pow! That’s what I’m talking about. Soft as a bunny’s ass.”
Elias turned to Charlie. “Why is he speaking that way?”
“It’s like a brain injury or something. It always happens when we ski.”
They let Elias get the first line, watching him push off into the knee-deep powder and then rise magically to the top of it as he picked up speed, floating in and out of the snow, bobbing up and down in a perfect gliding slalom that wasn’t skiing or flying but somehow both of them at the same time, half-lost in the snow he sent up. His tracks seemed to unspool from a cloud of smoke, like a wick burning in reverse. He stopped at the edge of some krummholz and whooped up at them. Charlie traversed a bit to find a fresh line, his throat sore with excitement, hesitating because he almost didn’t want to spoil the thrill he was about to have by having it.
But then he swallowed hard and pushed off with his poles, feeling that first lift of freedom, of leaving gravity behind, and he was floating downhill through snow light as flour, aiming straight down the fall line and shaping each turn into a perfect C, dragging one pole behind him, borne aloft by his own speed, as if a giant hand were lifting him up and down, up and down, bouncing him out of each turn, the easiest skiing in the world, one of the few things in life that were actually better than your dreams of them, which were already the best dreams Charlie had, but of course he wasn’t thinking this but only feeling that seamless swerving hand underneath him, getting face shots every time he pitted a turn, eating snow because he was laughing out loud, or maybe whooping, lost in a white room of powder, until finally his quads began to burn so badly he was glad to stop beside Elias and slump over his poles and gasp for breath, wincing, the pain seeping from his thighs.
When he looked up at last, he was met with a beaming snowman, Elias’s beard flocked with snow. They grinned like children, like idiots. They couldn’t help themselves. Garrett skied down after them, grinning stupidly as well. Charlie got that feeling he had occasionally: that life was a Christmas present, your only job to unwrap it. The three of them gazed uphill together, admiring the identical sine waves of their tracks.
They did laps for a while, trekking back up the cirque and then carving tracks again to the krummholz of the tree line instead of heading all the way down to the gully. Eventually, when there were no more fresh lines to be had, they called it a day and skied back to the hut, weak with hunger. Garrett made spaghetti for dinner while Charlie and Elias warmed themselves by the woodstove. Elias was a changed man, the morning’s grouchiness only a distant memory. They ate from plates on their laps.
“I was worried after the outhouse debacle,” Garrett said, drinking from one of the Sierra Nevadas they’d brought. It was only dusk, though it felt like the middle of the night with the windows all blocked with snow. “You looked like a broken man coming out of there.”
“Plus I was covered in shit.”
“That too.”
“By the way, this is the best spaghetti I’ve ever eaten,” Elias said. “Is it a family recipe or something?”
“Ragú,” Garrett said. “Old World Style.”
“I’m going to serve this at my wedding.”
“It’s the one that says ‘flavored with meat,’ ” Garrett said.
“May I suggest a warm-weather wedding?” Charlie said. “If you’re going to have porta potties.”
Elias stared at his plate, then peeked at them shyly. “We’re thinking not this summer but next, after Sabina graduates.”
Charlie and Garrett looked at each other.
“You haven’t actually proposed?” Garrett said.
“Of course not. I mean, not directly. We just talk about it sometimes.”
“Whoa.”
“Holy shit, McDuck.”
“You know you can’t break up with her now like you do everyone else,” Charlie said. “Only a douchebag would discuss wedding plans with someone and then dump her.”
“Do I look like a douchebag to you?”
“Yeah. A little bit.”
“I thought it was intentional,” Garrett said.
Elias laughed. Then he set his beer on the stump and looked at them mistily. Perhaps it was the exhaustion from touring all day, or the altitude, but there may have been tears in his eyes.
“Can someone have two best men?”
“Why not?”
“I want you both to be up there with me. When it happens.”
“So long as Sabina has two maids of honor,” Garrett said.
“And they look a lot like her,” Charlie said.
“Preferably her sisters.”
“And their names are Sabina too.”
That night, curled up on an old bunk in his sleeping bag, Charlie had trouble falling asleep, his head pounding from the altitude or perhaps the faint eggy smell of propane from the range. Across the room, Elias was snoring so loudly it sounded like the hut might collapse. Charlie’s heart went out to Sabina Gonzales, if they were truly getting married. He closed his eyes again and drifted into a half dream he couldn’t command or direct, though he was aware he was dreaming it, just as he was aware of Elias’s snoring and the throb of his headache and the Rembrandt-y glow of the woodstove in the corner, nursing its embers. He saw a woman, naked, sitting with her back to him in the kitchen. She was levitating somehow a few feet off the ground. Then the naked woman turned sideways, coyly, and he saw that she wasn’t levitating at all. She was having sex with something. A skeleton. Her legs were wrapped around its pelvis, head tossed back so that her hair touched the floor. The woman bucked and groaned. Charlie, still dreaming, was gripped by dread. Luckily, he didn’t wake; the feeling dissipated into the corners of his sleep. It was lost somewhere inside of him.
The next morning, the three of them got up early and skinned up the same side of McMillan Peak. Another bluebird day, but colder, Vermont cold, the wind numbing the crack of forehead between Charlie’s hat and goggles. The sun, dim as a thought, seemed to have been left in the sky by mistake. The snow had crusted over in the night, and their poles postholed through the crust. They followed their skin track from yesterday but then traversed farther along the ridge to a north-facing glade protected from the wind. Garrett thought the snow would be better. Also, Elias wanted something steeper. He was used to resort skiing, where he could schuss down the most perilous chutes.
Garrett took out his slope meter and measured the angle. Thirty-one degrees. Right on the edge. To be safe, they dug a snow pit with their shovels and Garrett cut out a tall column of snow with his saw and then did a compression test on it, something he’d learned from a ski patroller back home, laying his shovel blade on top of the column and tapping it gently at first with his fingers, then his palm, then increasing the strengths of his pats until he was using the full leverage of his elbow. No failures. He cut another column and repeated the test, just to make sure. Elias, shivering in the cold, watched in amusement.
“All this for a blue run?”
They skied it for a while, doing laps. The snow was almost as good as yesterday’s. As the day warmed a bit, and the aching stiffness in his limbs seemed to thaw, Charlie felt the exhaustion from his bad night’s sleep ebb away and leave him in the same sort of blissful daze he’d felt yesterday. Even his head had stopped hurting. Elias and Garrett seemed to feel the same way, too snow-drunk to speak. They were basically dogs, romping in the water. When the glade was skied out, they ate lunch and then skinned over the top of the ridge to the back side of McMillan Peak, where an enormous bowl funneled into a V-shaped valley with the pines all flagging to one side. It was glorious, a mist of snow ghosting across it. Garrett measured it at thirty-three.
“Rats,” Charlie said.
Elias frowned. “Why rats?”
“Too steep.”
“It’s two degrees steeper than the last one.”
“Which was already steeper than what we agreed to ski.”
They looked at Garrett, who shrugged.
“At least do another test,” Charlie said.
Elias groaned. “Another snow pit?”
Garrett knelt in the snow and dug a little hole with his glove, then probed the walls of it with his fingers, hunting for weak layers. It looked sound.
“I meant dig it out,” Charlie said. “Shouldn’t we do a real test?”
“We’ve tested it once.”
“But this is the back side. Different snow.”
“Temperature’s been consistent,” Garrett said equably, “and it hasn’t snowed since Sunday.”
Charlie looked at him. He knew this was exactly when you needed to be careful: when you’d been skiing all morning, floating through harmless powder, and began to feel invincible. How could something so fun be dangerous? Charlie felt this himself. And yet he also felt that forgotten dread from last night, that fathomless orphaned feeling, creep across his scalp. He didn’t remember the dream itself—only its presence.
But Garrett seemed so confident and relaxed, so at ease in this world of endless snow—so, well, Montanan—that Charlie second-guessed himself. The feeling faded. He remembered the way Garrett had looked the first day they’d met, before sliding down that icy path in his boots. The same invincible playground grin. And nothing had happened then. Well, Charlie had sprained his arm, yes—but he’d also made the best friends of his life.
Elias, impatient, lowered his goggles. He looked at Garrett, waiting for the okay.
And Garrett nodded back, a bit pleased with himself, magnanimous even, as if he were handing him a present.
And of course it was only a ski run, no different from the rest they’d done, Elias whooping as he dropped his line and sent up a cloud of powder, carving each turn perfectly, ornamentally, as if engraving something in the snow. Charlie was suddenly ashamed of his own cowardice. Elias wove down the mountain. So effortless were his turns that he seemed almost bored. But he wasn’t. He was whooping. He skied into the shade cast by a spur of the peak and a slab whumpfed loose from the snowpack above him, small and harmless-looking, almost pretty to watch, like something sliding off the bed of a truck. Then the slab turned into a raft of debris that found Elias and swept him off his skis so that for a moment he was floating on top of it, yelling in a different way, skis pointing at the sky, but then he managed to get halfway upright again, dragging his ass along the snow before tumbling forward onto his stomach, bodysurfing the wave of debris, which reached the shallow base of the bowl and crested into a heap and came gently to a stop. The whole ride had lasted several seconds.
Charlie looked around, thinking that Elias had managed to stand up again and ski to one side of it. But he was gone. The bowl was deserted. It was only when Charlie looked at Garrett—saw the dumb panicked stillness of his face—that he realized what had happened.
Garrett, who wasn’t really there. Who’d left his body and was watching from above. Everything looked flat, implausible, like the leaves of a pop-up book.
A sickness, inside and out.
Charlie said something to him, but he didn’t recognize the sounds Charlie was making, or even that they were meant to be different from each other. Onion onion onion, he seemed to be saying.
Rousing himself, Garrett skied down to where he thought Elias had gone under and ripped off his glove with his teeth and unzipped the beacon from his pocket, almost dropping it in the snow. His fingers stung in the cold, but the pain seemed to be happening to someone else. Fifteen minutes. Thirty at most, if Elias had made an air pocket for himself. Garrett switched his beacon to Search. Even the thoughts he was having—fifteen minutes, air pocket—failed to seem real. He was shaking. Holding the beacon in one hand, he watched it carefully and crisscrossed the slide path on his skis, following the flux line on his screen, skiing like a beginner on a bunny slope, except through blocks of uneven snow, and then when it told him he was close he popped out of his skis and knelt in the runout zone and did a fine search, checking his distance reading, holding his beacon right over the snow until he found the lowest reading he could get. He did this alone, forgetting that Charlie was with him. Then he remembered. He yelled for Charlie’s help, startled to see Charlie there beside him already, then got his probe out of his pack and assembled it shakily and plunged the probe into the snow as he’d been taught, probing in a small circle of plunges first and then moving concentrically outward, making a bit bigger circle, then a bigger one, the whole time thinking, This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real, but there were no hits, he couldn’t find him, it seemed impossible that Elias had ever been on the mountain at all, and Garrett was about to give up and do another beacon search when he hit something hard, far down, nearly two meters, the hard lifeless thunk of it clutching him in a type of fear he hadn’t known existed in the world. He got his shovel out of his pack and yelled at Charlie to dig behind him, farther downhill, and Garrett began to dig as swiftly as he could, shoveling snow so dense it felt like cement, his arms burning, tossing each bladeful as far downhill as possible, not daring to stop even for a second, the wind biting a hole into his cheek, and he dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dropped out of college and wandered between rooms and fell in love with his only friend’s fiancée and was still digging.