Empire Falls

who was visiting friends with his mother while her divorce from the boy’s father became final; if Tick were to steal an Exacto knife and carve a boy’s name in the back of her chair, the name would be “Donny.” When he told her about his father, who was moving to California, his eyes filled with tears. His father was moving right then, that very week, and Donny had been packed off to Martha’s Vineyard, he’d confided, so he wouldn’t have to watch him leave home. Donny also told her he’d have preferred to live with his dad, even though he was the one at fault, for falling in love with another woman.
    Tick told him that this had been pretty much her experience, too; after her parents split up, nobody had asked her who she wanted to live with. Of course, in her case nobody was moving to California, and although she technically was living with her mother, she spent almost as much time with her father. Donny found it hard to believe that Tick’s mother and father still lived about three blocks from each other; his father, apparently, had selected San Diego as his new home because it was as far from Indianapolis as you could get without leaving the continental United States. Tick explained that her parents probably just didn’t have enough money to put much distance between themselves.
    This intimate conversation had taken place on the beach on their last night together, and Donny had taken her hand as they watched the orange sun plunge into the ocean. They hadn’t even found the courage to kiss, and early the next morning when they’d said their good-byes, they’d shaken hands there in front of Tick’s father and Donny’s mother, unsure that anything more would be allowed them, their fingers icy-cold with disappointment.
    Anyway, it wasn’t much of a story to tell someone like Candace, even if Tick was inclined to share it. She suspects it’s mostly evidence of her own stunted emotional and romantic development, as is the fact that she can’t seem to stop thinking about how good it was to sit there on the warm sand in the gathering dusk and just hold hands with a boy she liked. Sure, she wishes now that they’d found the courage to kiss, but at the time they’d both been content. Their mutual understanding, even though it was an understanding of grief, had at first been thrilling, then quietly reassuring, though she doubts Candace would see it that way. She’s already made several references to going down on Bobby. Tick is almost sure she knows what going down on a boy means, and if she’s right, Candace won’t be impressed by an encounter that climaxed with hand-holding.
    “I mean, Craig’s not so bad, and he loves me and everything … and he really wants to buy me The Beatles Anthology , so, like, what should I do?” Candace wants to know.
    Before Tick can say anything, they’re interrupted by a boy named Justin who’s sitting at the far end of their table.
    “What, Candace?” he says, pretending she’d spoken to him. “You say you want to make out with John?”
    John Voss, also at the Blue table, never even looks up. Of all the kids at Empire High, he seems to Tick the most unknowable, and for this reason he scares her a little. It isn’t so much his strange, thrift-shop clothes or his hair cut in patches, as if he’d done the job himself. It’s his silence. So far this week, he hasn’t spoken a word. Were he not referred to every now and then by Justin, who pretends to narrate the comatose boy’s thoughts, everyone would forget he is even there. John Voss is painting something elaborately filigreed in the shape of an egg, which is also confusing and frightening Tick. Who dreams of eggs? Watching him work makes Tick think of analogies of the sort she encounters on standardized tests. This one would read: John is to Justin as BLANK is to Candace . The answer would be Tick .
    “John says you should come over to his house today after school, Candace. He says he’s got something he’d like to show you.”
    “Shut up, you asshole!” Candace shouts, startling Tick. The panic in her voice results, Tick knows, from Justin’s attempt to link her romantically with this boy who is at the very bottom of the high school’s social hierarchy. Since Candace isn’t so far from the bottom herself, she must guard against any misunderstanding of this sort. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Roderigue,” she says when everyone from Red, Green, Yellow and Brown turns to look at her, “but Justin is