‘Uh, what does that mean?’ Maeve asked on the phone. As soon as she’d got out of bed and got the information she needed in Mike Lewis’s e-mail, she’d started contacting Conor’s friends. ‘Yeah, I know. Say what? I think we could feel him detaching, you know, like the capsule coming off the mothership to go into descent to the alien world. He still gave his guitar hand to the band when we was practicing but not his head no more. There was a plain vanilla weird faraway shit in him. I hate to say it – he was acting like he felt he’d just totally used us up, and we weren’t worth shit anymore. It hurt.’ ‘Was he good in school?’ ‘Absolute-a-mente. But I know school was boring him to death. He was carrying around these weird French writers. Lacan?’ The boy pronounced it Lake-un. ‘I don’t know who the shit they are.’ ‘Did he have a girlfriend?’ ‘F. said Conor was getting buggy with her, too. Francine Matkinov. She’s big time in women’s beach volleyball,’ he added, almost apologetically.
