He usually spent his afternoons in the basement of his friend Marty Russo, playing guitar badly and loudly. Marty was chubby, funny, with a permanently sweaty fringe and a rare ability to survive socially without ever truly belonging anywhere. He was the only person at school who could walk into the cafeteria in a Misfits shirt, say something stupid to the wrestling team captain, lend a tape to two goth girls, and walk out alive.

“Your problem,” he told Eli one afternoon while they were flipping a Judas Priest cassette with a pencil, “is that you’re depressed with arrogance. If you were just depression, people would pity you. If you were just arrogance, people would fear you. You’ve got the wrong combination.”

Eli threw a pillow at him.

“Your problem is that you look like a man who’s going to die from nachos.”

“Yeah, but loved.”