There he is with the other boys, Mishka, Ben, and Daniel. I like to call them my boys. We're a lunchtime gang, meeting up in the computer room, at the bottom of the stairs, in front of the building where it's okay to smoke while we wait for stragglers. Lunch? is sometimes the warmest prospect of the day, less an invitation than a sigh of relief. We're off to Amir's again, because Jacob refuses to eat at Ollie's. It's Amir's or Jacob's out, and we can't have the latter. We're exhorted by him to order the chicken.

On another day, the boys and I take our Amir's outside. It's the first spring day, light jackets with scarves weather, too sunny to be inside but too cold to be shivering together on a park bench off of Riverside Drive. They forgot to give us utensils, and he jokes that we could use the leaves and small branches at our feet to scoop our food. We start talking about the young writers who inspire us. Between the four of us there, we come up with less than a handful of names. Who is the future? we wonder.

There's us, he says grinning.

Only once do we eat at the Greek place, near the end of school, the last lunch with the boys I call it even then, in that dim room with the distant kitchen clatter, where we are, again, advised to get the chicken.

What is it about the chicken?

There he is in workshop, telling Ben to lay off the big words that a reader would have to grope for a dictionary to understand (that's pretty ironic! we scream at him), butting heads with Mishka (there they go again!), and, of one of my stories, admonishing that I can do better than this. "Fuck you!" I say to him, in my head, all ninety-eight blocks down on the one/nine. Standard workshop drama; it blows over if you don't dwell on your feelings. But then an e-mail arrives later that night, as unexpected as a jewel found glittering on the sidewalk:

jen,

first of all, i wanted to say that i hope the tone of my criticism of your story didn't get too shrill. i was frustrated by ben's insistence that everything was basically fine and i care too much about good writers' writing to let that sort of false assurance pass unnoticed. whatever. anyway, none of the scrubby boys handed in their work today.

I love the "whatever." It's like he knows he cares too much and is slightly embarrassed. Of course, there's the punchline after the earnestness, the winking wit:

p.s. i hope you aren't just eager to get [my submission] so as to be able to return the bile.

It's there again and again, the startling sensitivity, the kindness slipped under the table. He commiserates with me, telling me how much that professor hated his work, too. He worries about how Mishka bolts from class after he has a tough workshop. We spend most of lunch over chicken at Amir's (what else?) talking about it, and then he calls Mishka later that day to see how he's doing. Another time, he assures me that there's nothing mysterious about Wittgenstein. It's subtly conveyed, the understanding, the empathy, rising stealthily from his commanding intellect, from the staggering authoritativeness that causes heads in a classroom to swivel in unison toward his opinion.

The rest of what I remember comes in flashes, in rootless fragments that bump into each other, out of sequence. There he is on the steps of Dodge Hall, smoking a Marlboro. There he is on one of the benches facing the building, his heavy, burdened-looking bag beside him. He knows I'm coming over to bum a cigarette. He's already reaching into his pocket. And there he is gliding through the revolving door, wearing new silver glasses. Gliding through that door with his wild hair clipped short. It's a shock to see him without those curls.

Nice haircut, I say.

Yes, but does it make me look thinner? he says, laughing.

There he is sitting in the shadows at a table with me before the end-of-the-year reading, looking over the pages I'm about to read. Uh-oh, I think, in a heightened state of anxiety, it's the story he told me I could "do better" on. He shows me how he's quadruple-spaced the lines on his own pages. A sign of his own nerves, maybe? He wishes me good luck.

And there's this other memory, this one from the night before the reading, but somehow, I keep thinking it's after. Keep insisting to myself, in fact, that it's after. The memory plays and replays itself like a trick. We're outside the Night Café, Jacob, Daniel, and I, and he's leaving early. I'm not confident that I actually see Jacob leave that night. I wonder sometimes if I've reconstructed this scene from a conversation Daniel and I have after he's left. But this is what matters:

We say: No, no, stay! The gang's got to stick together!, or something like that.

Summer's on the way, the night is young, all that sentimental stuff.

He doesn't give in to us though, and waves quickly before he's off on his motorcycle down the street, leaving me and Daniel on the sidewalk staring at our friend in wonder, awe, delight. "Can you believe Jacob has a motorcycle? It's just, it's so…" and before we can figure out what to say about that, he's gone.