Going Home Again by Dennis Bock Read Free Book Online

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sessions or explain how gasoline actually made your car run. School was too easy for him. He handed in brilliant assignments, got perfect grades in calculus and causedhis teachers (I can only imagine) to think they had a prodigy on their hands.
    At the end of the school day we’d take the streetcar down to Lake Ontario and smoke a joint sitting on the broken-up sidewalk cement and talk about getting the hell out of Toronto, which was as cold as it was boring in winter and as stifling as it was humid in summer. He wore a small diamond in his left ear, a fake, of course. The jocks left him alone because he wasn’t a direct threat and because we pretty well kept to ourselves. I tried to come up with questions that would stump him.
What exactly is a hologram? How does lightning actually happen?
No one I knew could answer questions like those. But Miles, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, could explain the mathematics of these curiosities, scribbled formulas that meant nothing to me. He was offered a full-ride scholarship to study chemistry at a prestigious university in the United States but turned it down. Having grown up without a father, he said he wasn’t going to abandon his mom like his old man had. The next province over was as far as he was willing to go. He’d be making serious money at some big research lab in five years anyway, he explained, with or without Stanford’s help.
    Miles and Holly met me at the bus station in Montreal. It was a cold, bright autumn afternoon, and a day of firsts. I’d never been to that city; nor, as I stepped off the bus, had I ever seen a woman as beautiful. I didn’t know who she was or whom she was with or waiting for. It certainly didn’t occur to me that she was with Miles, and the person she was waiting for was me.
    He was waving his hand above the crowd when I saw him. Lugging my backpack, I pushed past a group of people, still wondering who the girl beside him was and thinking up some hungry boyish comment I could share with him the moment we were out of earshot.
Imagine waking up beside that every morning
or something along those lines. Little did I know. I smiled and glanced at her as Miles and I shook hands the way we thought old college buddies might do, with more eagerness and testosterone than we might normally have summoned—though surely warranted by the occasion—and then he slapped me on the back and said, “I want you to meet Holly.” Looking as proud as I’d ever seen him, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her into him.
    “Good to meet you,” I said.
    She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. I’d never been kissed on the cheek before. It was something they did in Paris.
    “You look different from how I imagined you,” she said, tucking a strand of chestnut-colored hair behind an ear. It had come loose from her ponytail. “Miles has been talking about you for
ever
.”
    He’d been gone only five weeks and already had a girlfriend who was talking about forever. This must have been some sort of campus record. Or did that happen here all the time? Maybe it was par for the course at a university like McGill. All the schools I was looking into at the time had their own particular reputation. Some were preppy, others were party schools; there were the heavily academic ones, andthose devoted to granola and Birkenstocks. You heard about a few for the sheer number of beautiful girls who strolled between the buildings wearing tight jeans and adorable smiles. I’d heard there were a lot of pretty girls in Montreal. But this was off the charts.
    Her pale complexion made the freckles on her face stand out, and the dark brown of her eyes—large and full of life—was flecked with gold.
    “Nothing bad, I hope.”
    “Wouldn’t you like to know!” she said, smiling.
    I noticed the collection of pins on her lapel. “I guess we like the same bands,” I said.
    The left breast of her army surplus overcoat was clustered with music pins and two small flags,