Empire Falls

certainly would have been her destiny. She’d broken up with Zack Minty over the summer, meaning she would no longer be welcome at the table dominated by his circle. And she knew better than to try to crash one of the cliques at the popular girls’ table. Far better to be alone in an empty cafeteria, Tick thought, than to be alone in a full one.
    “Did you know Craig was going to buy me The Beatles Anthology for my birthday?” Candace wants to know now. “Before I broke up with him, I mean?”
    Tick tries to ignore her. The first assignment is to paint your most vivid dream, and Tick’s is the one where she’s clutching a snake in her fist. The painting is going pretty well. The snake started out looking like an eel, but now it’s less flat, more serpentine, except it’s not as scary as the snake in her dream, which, no matter how tight her grip, manages to squirm up to where it can turn and look at her. In the dream she’s safe as long as she can hold the snake up near its head, but each time it manages to slither through her grip. When it turns to look at her, she wakes up with a start. From this dream Tick concludes that she’s learned something useful: whatever means you harm will look you over first.
    “Are you listening to me?” Candace says.
    “Who’s Craig?” Tick asks, suspecting she’s supposed to know, that he’s somebody Candace has mentioned before, probably more than once. The good news is that Candace never minds repeating boyfriend stories.
    “He’s the one I broke up with for Bobby,” she explains, preferring this subject to the task of beginning her thumbnail sketch, which she will later be required to transfer to a large piece of paper and then, finally, to paint. It doesn’t appear to bother Candace that she’s behind everybody in the class. More interesting, it doesn’t seem to bother Mrs. Roderigue, either. All week long Tick has been expecting the woman to come around to the Blue table, see that Candace has done exactly nothing, and read her the riot act, but so far she’s stayed strictly away, as if she’s already determined that Blue is trouble and therefore doesn’t exist.
    Most teachers, Tick has learned, feel no great compulsion to confront trouble. They’re never around when drugs are being bought and sold, for example. The mystery of the Exacto knife stolen after the first art class, its theft announced over the loudspeaker during homeroom, would be solved if Mrs. Roderigue ever visited Blue, where Candace openly uses it on her “Bobby” carving. Tick can’t help but wonder if Mrs. Roderigue is as afraid of the knife as she is. Fear, often irrational, of the sort that paralyzes Tick, is something she’d like to think she’ll outgrow. Adults, by and large, seem free of it. Even her Uncle David, whose car wreck nearly severed his arm at the elbow, seems almost carefree when he gets behind the wheel. No, most adults are more like her father, whose fear, if he feels any, has been replaced by a kind of melancholy. Her mother’s a different story, though. Sometimes Tick sees a fleeting look of panic on Janine’s face when she doesn’t know she’s being observed, but then she swallows hard and subdues whatever it is by sheer force of will. That’s a trick Tick would be glad to learn, because dread is her more or less constant companion.
    “So, should I wait for my boyfriend,” Candace wants to know, “or go back with Craig for a couple weeks?”
    Bobby, the one Candace may or may not wait for, is in jail. He was arrested at Fairhaven High, according to Candace, and it was not a righteous bust. Why she thinks this is not clear to Tick. Candace actually seems to believe the cops came for him because he took a dollar from his mother and only paid back seventy-five cents. Supposedly he’ll be released in a couple weeks, in time for homecoming. Tick doesn’t know how much of what Candace tells her is true. She’s not sure, for instance, if the boy is really in jail. Or if he exists at all. Or if the other boy, Craig, ever really promised to buy her The Beatles Anthology . Vagaries of this sort make it hard to give good advice.
    If she’s to be believed, Candace has a very dramatic love life, which is fine with Tick, except that when she has finally exhausted the subject of her own romances she’ll want to know about Tick’s, which are singularly lacking in drama. Or maybe just singularly lacking. On Martha’s Vineyard she’d met a shy boy from Indiana