I didn't really mean to drop out of school. When I started at the university I thought learning how to name and explain things might bring me purpose, lucidity. I attended lectures and turned in my papers on time. I stood dead in the centre of the swirl and storm of theory. I applied myself. But then I started going to the student-operated pub between, and sometimes during, classes. The pub was difficult to find; it was located in a catacomb next to the cafeteria, and if a person wasn’t careful she could end up in the boiler room or the yearbook office. Still, it was worth it once I arrived. I spent whole days sitting in one of the vinyl chairs, their shiny purple backs stapled like patchwork beetles. I went into the pub with every intention of leaving, my time parcelled out efficiently, a half-pint of beer resting modestly on the rickety wooden table in front of me. But when the time came for me to get up and walk the short distance up the stairs, out the door and across the quadrangle, I stayed sitting, less paralyzed than somehow anchored to my surroundings. And then it always seemed too late. Too late to do things properly. Too late to do anything but wait for the next song to come on the radio. Sometimes a voice less disapproving than bewildered would intrude on my whiling away of the hours. What are you doing here, it would ask, then wait patiently. I’m biding my time, I’d reply softly, humbly, I’m biding my time.

It doesn’t feel as if I’ve dropped out, really. I still have library ­privileges, and the seventy-five-dollar cheques from Mum (for sundries, she actually wrote in one of her cards) keep coming every month, or more often if she can manage it. Now I’m taking this evening course, a writing workshop, so that one day, if I have what it takes, I will be a real writer. My instructor has the best posture I have ever seen. Every day I watch her riding her bike away from the recreation centre, and am convinced that there is nothing but willpower and gravity anchoring her bum to the broad, black reupholstered seat. She scares me a bit, like helium balloons. Our last assignment was to choose a clear, quirky, luminous incident from our pasts and to build a story from there.

I got a letter from Mum the other day, and in it she enclosed this clipping from the newspaper about your buddy Richie. The article wasn’t very long. There wasn’t much to tell – a bit about the murder, the arrests, how it shocked the community. And then the punchline, like something from a TV movie: Richie, two months short of a chance at parole, six years into his sentence, had hanged himself in his cell. So sad, Mum wrote. And she asked me the questions she could not ask you: Remember his mother, Mrs. Henley? Did you ever discuss with Jeremy what happened with Richie? Such a tragedy, wasn’t it? I wanted to call Mum to talk to her about it, but I didn’t because she doesn’t know I dropped out. I wanted to call you to talk about it, but we don’t really talk.

So I started thinking maybe this was a story.

It happened in High Park, at nighttime, and there were three of them with baseball bats. When you think about it, you might think of a crack, wood on bone, something clear and conclusive. But I know it was a thud, soft and stupid. Spiro was kicking him and yelling something about one less faggot, and looking at Richie like he was chicken shit, so Richie took the bat and brought it down on the guy’s chest, and then he couldn’t stop himself; he just kept swinging until he stopped the ouf noise. It was then he noticed the lines of blood streaming out of the ears like two solemn ant processions. But Joey still went at it, even after Richie and Spiro had backed off. When Joey finally stopped, it was like the guy on the ground wasn’t even a person anymore. He was just this mess of rags and blood and arms and legs all quiet like sleeping animals, so they ran back to the car and they drove away. On the back seat was a two-four of empties Richie meant to return for the deposit money the night before, and on the dashboard an old air freshener Lori had bought him. Spring Rain. Fucking hell, said Spiro. That thing smells like shit.

Richie’s life had always run alongside ours, like a wild horse next to a train. We were steady, on schedule, simply because he was not.