Empire Falls

surprised to discover herself shouldering her backpack, picking up her lunch leftovers, and making her way across the cafeteria. At the boy’s table, when she sets her backpack down with a thud on one of the plastic chairs, he looks partway up, maybe to chin level, then back at his food. He’s eating what looks like tuna fish from a plastic container; whatever it is, its odor is particularly strong. Tick herself is well on her way to becoming a vegetarian, and most meat and fish smell rancid to her.
    “I liked your egg,” she offered, an awkward opening gambit.
    “You don’t have to talk to me,” the boy says quickly and rudely, so rudely, in fact, that Tick considers herself absolved of further moral obligation. Where he gets off offering her an attitude she can’t imagine. No wonder he gets the shit kicked out of him every other day. But instead of retreating, she pulls out a plastic chair, then sits and stares until he looks up again, almost, but not quite, meeting her eye. Already she’s made progress, it occurs to her. The boy has actually spoken, which means he’s not a mute.
    “Maybe I want to,” she says, quickly swallowing the lie, Meyer-fashion, and allowing just a touch of rudeness to edge into her own tone. “Maybe I feel like telling you I liked your egg.”
    “Uh-uh,” he responds, shoveling the oily, stringy lunch substance into his mouth, causing Tick to wonder what it would be like to kiss a boy after he’d eaten something so disgusting. “He told you to.” The boy allows the pronoun to hang there in the air. It’s as if, for John Voss at least, Mr. Meyer is still in the cafeteria with them. Spooky. Also, each time the boy glances up, his eyes hesitate for a split second on Tick’s sandwich before dropping again to his own ghastly fare.
    “So how come you dream about eggs?” she finally decides to ask.
    “I don’t dream about eggs.” What a dumb thing to dream about, his tone of voice seems to suggest. Each time he speaks, the shock of hearing his voice at all takes her by surprise: it’s a perfectly normal, if somewhat angry-sounding, voice, and there’s nothing so very odd about it except that before now she’s never heard him use it. His voice, Tick concludes, is the one normal thing about this otherwise deeply weird boy.
    “Well, the assignment was to paint your most vivid dream,” she reminds him.
    “I never dream,” he says. “So I couldn’t do the assignment.”
    “Everybody dreams.”
    He meets her eye for the first time now, reminding her of something, she can’t quite think what. “You’re one person,” he says, as if to suggest that’s just as well, that he wouldn’t have wished her to replicate.
    “True,” she allows. “So?”
    “So how does that qualify you to know what everybody in the world does or doesn’t do?”
    Tick, having already had this conversation with her father, feels pretty confident of the intellectual terrain. “It’s called an inference,” she says. If she were certain she could speak with such authority in class, she wouldn’t be so quiet. “I infer that no two snowflakes are alike. I don’t have to examine every one.”
    The boy doesn’t miss a beat. “That’s not a very good example,” he says, as if he, too, may have had a similar conversation before. “When you say that I must dream because you do, you’re inferring that nobody can be different from you, not that everybody must be similar.” His eyes fall on her Picasso book. “Wasn’t he different?”
    This she’d have to think about. “In degree,” she decides, pleased to discover that this is what she actually believes, not just something she’s saying to keep from losing an argument. She’s even more pleased to see her companion shrug as if it didn’t matter. Tick herself has shrugged enough to know that this is what you do when it does matter. Or, more precisely, she infers that one of his shrugs means more or less the same thing as one of hers. “So how come you’re thinking about eggs?”
    He shrugs again, as before, so Tick pays particular attention when he says, “It’s just something my mom said once. If chickens had any idea what was in store for them, they’d stay where they were in their eggs.”
    Ah, a philosophical position.
    “She was actually frying eggs at the time,” the boy continued. “I’m not sure she understood that those particular eggs were never going to become chickens. My mom wasn’t all that smart—according