Empire Falls

wooden chair she’s turned around and is sitting in the way older men sometimes do in the Empire Grill. Tick’s proximity to this dangerous-looking instrument and the use to which it is being put are making her more than a little nervous, especially when Candace stops carving and gestures with the blade for dramatic emphasis. Tick half expects her to put the knife to her throat and hiss, “Why are you really in here with the morons? Who sent you? Tell me the truth or I’ll—”
    What Candace is trying to reconcile is that Tick is a high-track kid, whereas she herself and all the rest are “Bones,” kids who take the lower-track versions of required courses like biology along with guaranteed GPA boosters like art. One reason Candace has befriended her, Tick suspects, is that she enjoys showing strangers around Bone World, an academic sphere populated by those who can’t learn grammar or solve math problems and see no reason why they should. The majority are boys, who don’t at all mind being referred to as “Boners.”
    Candace herself prefers “moron.” She confessed to Tick that it’s also her mother’s favorite word, one she applies to Candace on a wide variety of occasions, such as, “What’s up, Moron?” or “You learn anything in school today, Moron?” or “Hey, Moron, you didn’t walk off with my goddamn car keys again, did you?” or “I swear to fucking Christ, Moron, I catch you in the damn liquor cabinet again, I’m going to take you out of where you are and put you in Mount Calvary with the damn Christians, let you drink the Blood of the Lamb for a while and see how well you like that shit, and I can tell you right now you won’t, so just stay out of my fucking vodka.” As far as Tick can tell, Candace has concluded that the word is a term of endearment applied to kids like herself who happen, everyone seems to agree, to have no future.
    Still, Tick wonders if she should voice her objection to the “moron” label before explaining why she happens to be among those thus classified. But since Candace doesn’t appear to expect this, she decides not to. “I like art,” Tick says weakly, just as she has every day this week, aware, as always, that the truth isn’t much of a substitute for a good answer.
    Tick almost didn’t take art because it wouldn’t fit into her schedule, being offered only at times when the high-track kids had required courses, like chemistry and calculus, or were at lunch. When Tick proposed that she could take art if she were allowed to eat lunch in the cafeteria during sixth period, the idea was vetoed until her father went with her to see the principal, Mr. Meyer, who pointed out that the cafeteria closed after fifth period. Even if Tick brought a sandwich with her and got a soda out of the machine, she’d have to eat it all by herself in the big, empty cafeteria, which would be locked after she entered, and she’d be on her honor not to let anyone else in, because there would be no monitor.
    When Mr. Meyer asked Tick if she could live with these provisos, she wondered, as she so often did, at the strange world adults seemed to inhabit. Did they all suffer from some sort of collective amnesia? You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know that he’d been the kind of fat kid everybody made fun of and that lunch had surely been a torment to him. He’d either gravitated naturally to the leper table or sat by himself at a table designed for sixteen, a target for all the kids overcrowding the cool tables, the tables that were identified as cool by who had a right to sit at them, codes established the first day of school, the rules clear to everyone, no need for color-coding. You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know he’d spent all his high school years getting hit in the back of the head with all manner of throwable food, yet here he was worried that Tick was going to miss out on the important “socialization” aspects of a good secondary education. Some damn thing must have hit him in the back of his pointed head pretty hard during one of those lunches, Tick decided, because the man honestly seemed to have no recollection of them.
    Therefore, he had no idea how thrilled Tick was at the prospect of eating lunch by herself. She didn’t mind in the least waiting until sixth period to eat her sandwich. School twisted her stomach into knots anyhow, and this way at least she wouldn’t have to endure the humiliation of not having a place to sit. Which