The Leftovers

Street at night, habitually checking their phones for a message that never seemed to come.
    Another benefit of pledging was that it gave him something to talk about with his parents, who called almost every day to check up on him. He wasn’t a particularly good liar, so it helped to be able to say, We went on a scavenger hunt, or We had to cook breakfast in bed for the older brothers, and then serve it to them in flowery aprons, and to have details at the ready to back up these claims. It was a lot harder when his mother grilled him about his schoolwork, and he was forced to improvise about essays and exams and the brutal problem sets in Statistics.
    “What’d you get on that paper?” she’d ask.
    “Which paper?”
    “Poli Sci. The one we talked about.”
    “Oh, that one. Another B+.”
    “So he liked the thesis?”
    “He didn’t really say.”
    “Why don’t you e-mail me the essay? I’d like to read it.”
    “You don’t need to read it, Mom.”
    “I’d like to.” She paused. “You sure you’re okay?”
    “Yeah, everything’s fine.”
    Tom always insisted everything was fine—he was busy, making friends, keeping up a solid B average. Even when discussing the frat, he made sure to emphasize the positive, focusing on things like the weekday study groups and the all-night intra-frat karaoke blowout, while avoiding any mention of Chip Gleason, the only active ATO brother who’d gone missing on October 14th.
    Chip loomed large around the frat house. There was a framed portrait of him in the main party room, and a scholarship fund dedicated to his memory. The pledges had been required to memorize all sorts of personal information about him: his birthday, the names of his family members, his top-ten movies and bands, and the complete list of all the girls he’d hooked up with in his sadly abbreviated life. That was the hard part—there were thirty-seven girlfriends in all, starting with Tina Wong in junior high and ending with Stacy Greenglass, the buxom Alpha Chi who’d been in bed with him on October 14th—riding him reverse cowgirl-style, if legend were to be believed—and who had to be hospitalized for several days as a result of the severe emotional trauma brought on by his sudden midcoitus departure. Some of the brothers told this story as if it were a funny anecdote, a tribute to the studliness of their beloved friend, but all Tom could think of was how awful it must have been for Stacy, the kind of thing you’d never recover from.
    One night at a Tri Delt mixer, though, Tyler Rucci pointed out a hot sorority girl on the dance floor, grinding with a varsity lacrosse player. She was tanned and wearing an incredibly tight dress, leaning forward as she moved her ass in slow circles against her partner’s crotch.
    “You know who that is?”
    “Who?”
    “Stacy Greenglass.”
    Tom watched her dance for a long time—she looked happy, running her hands over her breasts and then down over her hips and thighs, making porn star faces for the benefit of her friends—trying to figure out what she knew that he didn’t. He was willing to accept the possibility that Chip hadn’t meant much to her. Maybe he was just a one-time hookup, or a casual friend with benefits. But still, he was a real person, someone who played an active and reasonably important part in her life. And yet here she was, just a few months after he’d disappeared, dancing at a party as though he’d never even existed.
    It wasn’t that Tom disapproved. Far from it. He just couldn’t figure out how it was possible that Stacy could get over Chip while he remained haunted by Verbecki, a kid he hadn’t seen for years and probably wouldn’t have even recognized if they’d bumped into each other on October 13th.
    But that was how it was. He thought about Verbecki all the time. If anything, his obsession had deepened since he’d returned to school. He carried that stupid picture—Little Kid with Sparkler—everywhere he went and looked at it dozens of times a day, chanting his old friend’s name in his head as though it were some kind of mantra: Verbecki, Verbecki, Verbecki. It was the reason he was flunking out, the reason he was lying to his parents, the reason he no longer painted his face blue and orange and screamed his head off at the Dome, the reason he could no longer imagine his own future.
    Where the hell did you go, Verbecki?
    *   *   *
    A BIG part of the pledge process was getting to know the Older