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“Don’t talk about yourself like that.” My guilt was excruciating. I sat on his bed, trying to get him to look at me. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. I was just upset.”

“That’s okay. Forget it.” A moment went by, Lucessi frowning at the calculator. “Did I ever tell you I was adopted? I’m not even related to her. Not technically, anyway.”

The comment came from so far out of left field it took me a moment to realize that he was talking about Arianna.

“Everybody always thinks it’s the other way around,” he continued. “I mean, God, just look at her. But no. My parents got me out of some orphanage. They didn’t think they could have kids. Eleven months later, wouldn’t you know, along comes Miss Perfect.”

I had never heard a confession of such absolute misery. What was there to say? And why was he telling me this now?

“She really hates me, you know. I mean hates. You should hear the things she calls me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

Lucessi shrugged hopelessly. “They all do it. They think I don’t know, but I do. Okay, I’m king of the dorks. It’s not like I haven’t figured that out. But Arianna. You’ve seen her—you know what I’m talking about. Jesus, it just kills me.”

“Your sister is a total bitch. She probably treats everybody like that. Just forget about her.”

“Yeah, well. That’s not really the issue.” He lifted his gaze from the calculator and looked me dead in the eye. “You’ve been really nice to me, Tim, and I appreciate it. I mean that. Promise me we’ll stay friends, okay?”

I realized what Lucessi was doing. What I’d thought was jealousy or self-pity was actually a kind of backhanded generosity. Just as my father had done, Lucessi was severing his ties to me because he thought I’d be better off. The worst part was, I knew he was right.

“Sure,” I said. “Of course we will.”

He held out his hand. “Shake on it? So I know you’re not too mad.”

We shook, neither of us believing it meant a thing.

“So that’s it?” I said.

“I guess so, yeah.”

—

He was in love with her, of course. Though he’d told me as much, this was the part of the story that took me a long time—too long—to figure out. He loved the thing he also hated, and it was destroying him. The other thing Lucessi had told me, without actually saying it, was that he was in the process of flunking all his courses. His living arrangements were moot, because he wouldn’t be returning.

In the meantime, this left me with the problem of finding a place to live. I felt betrayed, and angry with myself for having so badly misunderstood the situation, but also resigned to my fate, which seemed somehow deserved. It was as if I’d lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be done about it. I called around to see if anybody I knew was looking for a third or a fourth to round out a suite, but no one was, and rather than dig deeper into my list of acquaintances and embarrass myself further, I stopped asking. There were no singles in any of the River Houses, but it was still possible to enter the lottery as a “floater”; I’d be placed on a waiting list for each of the three houses I chose, and if a student dropped out over the summer, the university would give me his slot. I put in for Lowell, Winthrop, and Quincy, no longer caring which one I got, and waited to hear.

The year came to an end. Carmen and I went our separate ways. One of my professors had offered me a job working in his lab. The pay was negligible, but it was an honor to be asked, and it would keep me in Cambridge for the summer. I rented a room in Allston from a woman in her eighties who favored Harvard students; except for her collection of cats, which was voluminous—I was never quite sure how many there were—and the overwhelming stink of the litter boxes, the situation was close to ideal. I left early and returned late, usually taking my meals at one of the many cheap eateries on the fringes of Cambridge, and the two of us rarely saw each other. All my friends were gone for the summer, and I expected to be lonely, but it didn’t turn out that way. The year had left me enervated and overstuffed, as if by a too-rich meal, and I was glad for the quiet. My job, which involved collating reams of data on the structural biology of plasma cells in mice, could be conducted virtually without interaction with another human being. Sometimes I barely spoke for days.

It shames me to say this, but during that silent summer, I forgot all about my parents. I do not mean that I ignored them. I mean that I forgot that they existed at all. I had told them in a letter where I would be staying and why but hadn’t given them the phone number, because I didn’t know it at the time—an omission I never got around to correcting. I did not call them and they could not call me, and as the summer wore on, this casual oversight became a psychological buffer that eradicated them from my thoughts. Doubtless, in some pocket of my mind I knew what I was doing, and I would need to contact them before the fall to file the proper paperwork for my scholarship; but at the level of conscious awareness, they simply ceased to matter.