The Leftovers. Tom Perrotta

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      “We still don’t know what’s going on,” she told him. “I’d be a lot more comfortable if you were here with us.”

      “I think you should go back,” his father said. “What’s the point of hanging around here doing nothing?”

      “It’s not safe,” his mother insisted. “What if something happens?”

      “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just as safe there as it is here.”

      “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.

      “Look,” his father said. “All I know is that if he stays here, he’s just gonna keep going out and getting drunk with his buddies every night.” He turned to Tom. “Am I wrong?”

      Tom gave a shrug of nondenial. He knew he’d been drinking way too much and was beginning to wonder if he needed some kind of professional help. But there was no way to talk about his drinking without talking about Verbecki, and that was a subject he really didn’t feel like discussing with anyone.

      “You think he’s gonna drink any less in college?” his mother asked. Tom found it both troubling and interesting to listen to his parents discuss him in the third person, as if he weren’t actually there.

      “He’ll have to,” his father said. “He won’t be able to get drunk every night and keep up with his work.”

      His mother started to say something, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. She looked at Tom, holding his gaze for a few seconds, making a silent plea for his support.

      “What do you want to do?”

      “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty confused.”

      In the end, his decision was influenced less by his parents than his friends. One by one over the next few days, they told him that they would be heading back to their respective schools for second semester—Paul to FIU, Matt to Gettysburg, Jason to U. of Delaware. Without his buddies around, the idea of staying home lost a lot of its appeal.

      His mother reacted stoically when he informed her of his decision. His father gave him a congratulatory slap on the shoulder.

      “You’ll be fine,” he said.

      The drive to Syracuse felt a lot longer in January than it had in September, and not just because of the intermittent snow squalls that blew across the highway in swirling gusts, turning the other vehicles into ghostly shadows. The mood in the car was oppressive. Tom couldn’t think of much to say, and his parents were barely speaking to each other. That was how it had been since he’d come home—his mother gloomy and withdrawn, brooding about Jen Sussman and the meaning of what had happened; his father impatient, grimly cheerful, a little too insistent that the worst was over and they needed to just get on with their lives. If nothing else, he thought, it would be a relief to get away from them.

      His parents didn’t stay long after dropping him off. There was a big storm coming, and they wanted to get on the road before it hit. His mother handed him an envelope before leaving the dorm.

      “It’s a bus ticket.” She hugged him with a tenacity that was almost alarming. “Just in case you change your mind.”

      “I love you,” he whispered.

      His father’s hug was quick, almost perfunctory, as if they’d be seeing each other again in a day or two.

      “Have fun,” he said. “You only get one shot at college.”

      DURING THE Special Spring Session, Tom pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Joining a frat was something he’d wanted to do for so long—in his mind, it was synonymous with college itself—that the process was well under way before he was able to admit that it no longer mattered to him in the least. When he tried to project himself into the future, to envision the life that awaited him at ATO—the big house on Walnut Place, the wild parties and nutty pranks, the late-night bull sessions with brothers who would go on to be his lifelong friends and allies—it all seemed hazy and unreal to him, images from a movie he’d seen a long time ago and whose plot he could no longer remember.

      He could’ve withdrawn, of course, maybe rushed again in the fall when he felt better, but he decided to tough it out. He told himself that he didn’t want to bail out on Tyler Rucci, his floormate and pledge brother, but in his heart he knew that the stakes were higher than that. He’d pretty much stopped going to classes by the end of February—he was finding it impossible to concentrate on academics—so the pledge process was all he had left, his only real link to normal college life. Without it, he would’ve become one of those lost souls you saw all over campus that winter, pale, vampiry kids who slept all day and drifted from the dorm to the student center to Marshall 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.

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