The Book of Joe

cycle where Sammy’s submission served only to enrage Tallon, escalating the level of his cruelty, which in turn caused Sammy to retreat inwardly even more.
    Although I tried to be a friend to him, it wasn’t very long before Sammy’s predicament started to suffocate me. I resented him for so obstinately remaining a loser in the face of my best efforts to help him out. Besides, I had Carly now, and there was only so much time in the day, so much room in my brain. Later I would tell myself that there was nothing I could have done anyway, and that might have been true.
    Sammy seemed fatalistically determined to follow the course that was charted for him. But there was no getting away from the fact that as time went on, I deliberately saw less and less of him, simply because something in his abject misery made me feel inexplicably guilty, as if I were somehow responsible for his predicament, and I didn’t want to be guilty or responsible. Things were finally going my way, and I would be damned if I wasn’t going to enjoy myself.
    I had a girlfriend and a best friend, which might not sound like much, but it was everything I’d ever wanted. The simple act of walking the school grounds during lunch holding Carly’s hand, on display for all to see, filled me with an overwhelming sense of well-being the likes of which I’d never experienced. We would sit together in the cafeteria, stealing little kisses, occasionally sneaking into the deserted back-stage area of the auditorium when kissing just wasn’t going to cut it.
    Wayne was leading the Cougars in scoring that year, and Carly and I went to every game, home and away, where we cheered him on comically, like rabid fans. It felt so good, sitting in the stands with Carly, laughing, screaming, hugging, and throwing high fives whenever Wayne scored, that I forgot how much I’d hated Cougars games up until that point.
    They no longer felt like a glaring reminder of my failure as an athlete, but just one more place to go and enjoy being a boyfriend. After the games, we’d take Wayne out for a victory dinner, and the three of us would hang out until closing time, giddy from victory, our voices hoarse from screaming and laughing. Later, we’d drop Wayne off and then drive down to the falls, Carly’s hands already rubbing and grabbing at me as I drove, her tongue in my ear as she told me to get there already.
    I’d always been under the impression that there were nice girls and sexy girls. Carly was an honor student, the editor of the school newspaper, and a favorite among the faculty at Bush Falls High. But she was also capable of grabbing my hand and sliding it down into her opened jeans and pressing up urgently against it, moaning without a trace of self-consciousness as she bit down on my lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
    Carly spent the first half hour of homeroom every morning scribbling copiously in a worn leather-bound journal. She was terribly concerned with the general transience of things and the imperfect, random nature of memory. It was the one compulsion in her otherwise laid-back disposition, this notion that particular feelings and thoughts could be irretrievably lost to the vagaries of time and distance. “This is the age,” she explained to me once as we walked home from school, “when we’re the purest forms of ourselves we’ll ever be. We haven’t been complicated by everything yet. I want to keep a clear record of who I am, so that down the road I’ll be able to see who I was. Maybe I can avoid losing myself completely.”
    Although I admired her larger consciousness, there was something vaguely troubling about it, as if she were an oracle discerning ominous portents to which I remained oblivious. “But you’ll always be you,” I said. “Won’t you?”
    She sighed, biting her lip pensively. “Things happen,” she said. “Small things and large things, and they just keep changing you, little by little, until there’s no trace of who you used to be. If I get lost, this journal will be like a record of who I was, a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back.”
    “In that case, could you keep track of me in there too?” I said. “It would be nice to know there’s someone looking out for me if I ever get lost.”
    “But what if we’re not together anymore?” she asked, ever the practical one.
    “Then it will mean at least one of us is lost,” I said. “Just get me a copy of that journal, and it will lead me right back to