Empire Falls

feeling her heart plummet. Nor does it cheer her to see the weight of moral responsibility lifting off Mr. Meyer’s thick, round shoulders and descending onto her own slender, bony ones. The man seems to stand straighter, having set this responsibility down, and suddenly looks as if he’d like to skip down the corridor, whistling all the way. But then his face clouds over again and Tick suspects that she’s misjudged him. “The Minty boy …,” he begins.
    “Zack?” Tick says. There’s only one Minty boy.
    “Is he a friend of yours?”
    “He used to be.”
    Mr. Meyer nods thoughtfully, then glances toward the cafeteria. “That boy’s suffering … I don’t mean to say that Zachary Minty participates directly, but I don’t think any of this could happen without his encouragement. But perhaps I’m being unfair to him.”
    “I wouldn’t worry about being unfair to Zack.” Tick regrets these words as soon as they’re out, perceiving that they amount to an implied alliance or, worse, a shared worldview between herself and the principal. She senses, too, that going into battle with Mr. Meyer at her side would be a lot like going into battle alone.
    Clearly, though, her remark has restored the man’s happiness. “How are you and Doris getting along these days?” he asks, using Mrs. Roderigue’s Christian name as the gesture of intimacy that seals their deal.
    “Great,” Tick says, swallowing hard, since she can see no advantage in telling the truth: that she’d as soon the woman were dead.
    B ACK INSIDE THE CAFETERIA , Tick decides that the most attractive of her options is to pretend the conversation with Mr. Meyer never took place. For one thing, the principal will quickly forget that he has asked this favor of her, if he hasn’t already. He’ll likely remember their agreement only if he runs into her in the next day or so, and she’s confident of her ability to steer clear of him, given her anonymity in the halls of Empire High. Unless their eyes actually meet, he won’t notice her; if their eyes should meet, the worst that can happen is that he will remember, in which case he’ll ask what kind of progress she’s made. And Tick knows how easily adults are satisfied with vagaries. A shrug of the shoulders and a “Not bad, I guess” will usually do the trick.
    Almost as attractive as this scenario, which risks little and requires less, is another. She can go over to the boy and say, “So, you want to eat lunch together?” She can make clear from the tone of her voice that she’s been put up to this by Mr. Meyer and is merely making good on a promise extracted under duress. This second option has the added advantage of being the truth, assuming that’s ever an advantage. The point is, the boy will want no part of her charity, and that will be the end of it. After all, he did select a table on the other side of the cafeteria, and if that gesture wasn’t clear enough, he chose a chair facing away from her. In all probability he wants no more to do with her than she does with him.
    By far the least attractive possibility is to make an honest effort, and at first Tick thinks that she won’t, that it’s simply too much to ask. The only problem is that while John Voss has aimed himself away from her, she, unfortunately, is facing him, and she does not relish the idea of spending the rest of her lunch period staring at the victim’s accusing back. Having eaten half the chicken salad sandwich her father made for her at the restaurant that morning, she has no interest in the rest. What she’d planned to do with the last twenty minutes of the period was read another chapter of her Picasso book, which she’d finished last week and which so inspired her that she’d immediately begun again. She simply marveled at how content the man was to be different, to go his own way, self-reliantly, as Emerson said you should in that essay they’d read back in the first week of English class. It’s a pretty neat trick, that, and Tick would like to learn how it’s done, though she knows the book doesn’t reveal the how of it, at least not on first reading. Still, just knowing that such self-confidence is possible is reassuring to her, and reading a few pages during lunch would help her make it through the afternoon.
    But in order to concentrate, she’d have to get up and change seats so that her back would be to John Voss’s back. When she gets up from her chair to do precisely this, she’s