Empire Falls

always embarrassing me.”
    Mrs. Roderigue has indeed straightened up and is now glaring at Blue, as if everyone at the table were equally responsible for Candace’s outburst. Her disappointment and displeasure seem to include, for instance, Tick herself and John Voss, who still hasn’t even looked up from his egg. “I hope,” the teacher intones, “that we will have no more outbursts from the Blue table.”
    “I said I’m sorry,” Candace responds audibly, rolling her eyes as if to suggest that it’s hard for her to imagine what the woman could possibly want from her that she hasn’t already given.
    “If you require a model for acceptable behavior,” Mrs. Roderigue continues, as if she imagines that this might truly be the problem, “you need look no further than Green.”
    The Green table, Tick notes, is decimated by absenteeism today. Normally it has eight students, but four are missing; two of those present are reading their algebra books in preparation for a test next period, and another is fast asleep with his head on the table. If she didn’t know better, Tick would like to raise her hand and ask Mrs. Roderigue precisely what it is about the Green table that’s so worthy of emulation. Even Candace, using a stolen Exacto knife to carve her jailed boyfriend’s name in ornate letters, memorializing her affection for a juvenile delinquent and thereby defacing school property, comes closer to fulfilling the implied objectives of an art course.
    “So, how come you broke up with Zack Minty?” Candace asks, once Mrs. Roderigue has returned her attention to the creative efforts of the favored Red table.
    “We kind of broke up with each other,” Tick says, which is true in a way. When she’d told Zack she didn’t want to go out with him anymore, he’d said fine, that he didn’t want to go out with her anymore either. Like, who did she think she was, anyway? He’d called the next day to tell her he already had a new girlfriend, naming a girl who seemed to hate Tick, despite their never having exchanged a word.
    “I think you should get back together with him,” Candace says, apparently uninhibited by knowing virtually nothing about the relationship. “I mean, he still really loves you.”
    Tick swallows hard, tries to concentrate on her snake, which suddenly feels wrong in some way she can’t exactly put her finger on. True, it is looking less like an eel, which is good, but there’s something definitely wrong about its proportions, as if the lower part of its body were drawn to one scale and the upper, including its head, to another. She wishes she could justify this as perspective. A lot of bad art, it seems to her, gets excused as intentional.
    “I doubt it,” Tick says, resorting to the absolute, unadorned truth this time.
    The odd thing was that before she went to the Vineyard, she hadn’t known what to do about Zack. Summer was one thing, but it was much harder to be friendless during the school year when as a friendless person you were constantly on display. Losing Zack wasn’t so bad in itself. At least she didn’t have to wonder every day what kind of mood he was in, whether he’d be nice or mean, his behavior about as predictable as the wind. So being without a boyfriend was okay, even though she doubted she’d find another anytime soon. What worried her more than losing Zack was losing his friends, the whole Zack network. While they were together, his friends had been her friends, but as soon as they broke up, she discovered the truth: that they were his friends, every one of them. Not that they disliked her. She suspected that a couple of them actually liked her better than they liked Zack, or would’ve been happy to remain neutral, had the rules permitted any such thing. But they didn’t, and Zack wasn’t someone you wanted for an enemy. Right away she’d started getting calls from his friends urging her to get back together with him, hinting that she wouldn’t be welcome in their group otherwise. A couple of the boys sounded almost afraid, like they couldn’t imagine the kind of recklessness she was contemplating. One of the girls even volunteered that Zack might be willing to break up with this new girlfriend if Tick came back, maybe, though it wasn’t for sure.
    Until Martha’s Vineyard she’d seriously considered doing so, but now she was pretty sure she couldn’t. After being with a boy who actually liked her, she was willing to be friendless, at least for