Empire Falls

same purpose. On afternoons when he wasn’t working, he talked his friend Otto Meyer into accompanying him to the restaurant for Cokes and later coffee, which they hoped might make them look older. What confused Miles enough to keep his hopes alive when he might have been more productively engaged in trying to get some other girl to like him was that Charlene Gardiner acted genuinely fond of him, despite the fact that she always had at least one boyfriend her own age or older. Being in high school, Miles had no idea there were girls in the world who might be nice to some boy who’d suffered the misfortune of falling in love with them, even when they couldn’t return the favor. Charlene Gardiner was such a girl. Instead of seeing Miles’s crush on her as an occasion for ridicule—by far the most effective cure for a crush—she managed to convey that both Miles and his infatuation were sweet. She didn’t encourage him to persist in his folly, but neither could she bring herself to treat his devotion as something shabby or worthless. Mockery and contempt Miles would’ve understood and accepted as his due, but affection and gratitude confused him deeply. Gratitude for her kindness clouded his judgment, and the proximity she allowed him was simply too intoxicating to give up, so he convinced himself that her fondness was merely the beginning, that if given the opportunity it would metamorphose quite naturally into love. He made no connection between Charlene Gardiner’s kindness to him and his own kindness to Cindy Whiting, an analogy that might have proved instructive .
    Although his dilemma deepened with each passing day—no closer to finding a girl to ask to the prom, while inching ever nearer to having one “found” for him—Miles took some slender comfort in the fact that Otto Meyer wasn’t making much headway either. He too had family problems. His father, an angry, aggressive man, had recently suffered a stroke, and he returned home from the hospital madder than ever, except that he was no longer able to express his fury. The stroke-flattened side of his face placid and unmoving, the unaffected side red and contorted, about all he could do was shake his huge head with rage and toss strands of spit through the air like a St. Bernard. Though Otto was also smitten by the charms of the beautiful Charlene Gardiner, he was not, like Miles, prone to unrealistic fantasies. Neither was he blind to the charms of girls his own age, so one gray afternoon in early February when they were sitting across from each other in a booth at the Empire Grill, he informed Miles that he’d asked a girl from their class to go to the prom with him and she’d accepted. Miles tried hard not to appear crestfallen. The girl Otto had asked, who years later would become his wife and the mother of his son, was exactly the sort Miles himself should have been looking for. She was pretty, smart, shy and full of fun without knowing quite yet how to express this latent side of her personality. Neither popular nor unpopular, she wore unfashionable clothes at her mother’s insistence and somehow intuited, as certain remarkable young girls will, that there were worse things than not being popular, that life was long, that she would one day have perfectly adequate breasts, that in fact there was nothing wrong with her, never mind what others seemed to think. During the days that followed Otto’s bold invitation, about a dozen boys told him how lucky he was, that they’d been about to ask her themselves .
    Once he was over the shock, it was not hard for Miles to feel happy for his friend—but Otto’s unexpected announcement happened to coincide with another that same afternoon. When Charlene Gardiner stopped by their booth to refill their coffees, she accused them both of not being very observant. She then wiggled the fingers of her left hand in front of them provocatively. They were enchantingly lovely fingers and one was encircled by a tiny ring, the significance of which Miles still hadn’t grasped when a motorcycle pulled up outside with a low, throaty rumble and Charlene made a beeline for the door. The young fellow on the bike—he had longish, windblown hair, a leather jacket and a chin that required frequent shaving—barely had time to unstraddle the bike before Charlene was in his arms, and then he was twirling her in the air and they could hear her whoop through the plate-glass window. Around and around the young man spun