Ben tried to maintain eye contact with the floor until he had walked far enough away from the man, but he looked up at the overhead screen to see when the next train would arrive, and unluckily met the speaker’s gaze as he posed a question to the crowd.
“Are you prepared to face the end?”
He meant, of course, the end of the world, the end of days. But his words struck Ben with an uncomfortable force. Ben was here in this station, after all, because he was heading to the first session of his new support group on the very topic of preparing to face the end.
“Living with Your Short String” was what the group’s flyer had said. A title that appeared more ironic than promising, Ben thought wryly, since the very fact of possessing a short string meant that there wasn’t much living left to do.
A variety of support groups for short-stringers and their families were swiftly formed in the wake of the boxes’ arrival, and Ben found one that met every Sunday night from eight to nine p.m. in a classroom at the Connelly Academy, a private school on the Upper East Side.
He arrived early on his first night, while the hallways were still eerily quiet.
Raised by two high school teachers, Ben felt a strong nostalgia toward schools, and it only took a quick glance at a colorful bulletin board—this one happened to be space-themed, with each of the students’ photos glued inside a yellow star—to bring him back to the days when he was little, accompanying his parents to the school where they both taught, gawking at the teenage students who towered above him like giants.
It was always odd for Ben to watch his parents command a classroom, to see that there were all these other children who also had to listen to them, to learn from them, and he sometimes felt jealous or defensive, not wanting to share his mom and dad with these strangers. But the highlight of his visits came when he would sit in the back of a classroom, scribbling messy drawings of tiny, oddly proportioned houses on the sketch pad he carried with him everywhere, and a few of the older girls would fawn over him.
“Who lives inside that little house?” the girls cooed at him. “An elf, or a fairy?”
Ben was tempted, in his juvenile bravado, to explain that he was far too old to still believe in elves or fairies, but he enjoyed their attention too much to risk losing it.
The memories from his own classrooms were less comforting. Walking past the walls of lockers on his way to the support group that night, Ben wondered if any had been left open with a sliver of tape covering the lock, the preferred method of students who didn’t care to memorize their combinations. Ben had taped his locker door only once, in ninth grade, after he saw a group of football players doing it and asked them for a piece of their tape in what he now understood was his pathetic attempt at infiltrating their fraternity of the broad-shouldered. It took less than an hour for Ben’s cell phone and jacket to be pilfered from his unlocked locker.
He reached the threshold of Room 204, where the plastic chairs had been pulled out from their desks and rearranged in a circle, but only one man was inside.
Embarrassed by his early arrival, Ben stepped back into the hallway.
“Too late! I’ve already seen you.”
Ben reemerged and forced a grin that could rival the cheeriness of the voice he just heard.
“Hey, there, I’m Sean, the group facilitator,” the man said. “You must be one of the newbies tonight.”
Shaking Sean’s hand, Ben tried to appraise the man who would ostensibly be guiding him on his path toward peace and acceptance. He was somewhere in his late thirties, with a thick beard, and wearing loose-fitting jeans. He was seated in a wheelchair but still projected an impressive height.
“Nice to meet you, I’m Ben. And yeah, it’s my first time,” he said. “Does that mean there are other new people coming, too?”
“Yup, you and a young woman both signed up this week.”
“Sounds great,” Ben said, his damp hands seeking shelter in his pockets. He could feel his natural shyness threatening to take over, and he hoped that he hadn’t made a mistake by joining this group.
Damon, a friend from college and one of the few people whom Ben had told about his short string, had convinced him to try the support group. （Though Damon was a lucky long-stringer himself, his father was a recovered addict who relied upon AA meetings, and Damon was a true believer in the virtues of group therapy.）
Ben wished he could have brought Damon along with him, at least for the first session. Ben had never been good at opening up to new people, and after the recent disaster with his now-ex-girlfriend, Claire, Ben feared his sense of trust had been permanently severed.