Flashback: I am 12 and am in the eighth grade. My mother doesn't know this (nor does she ever find out), but I am not going to Catechism today.

The sun, dull like a soft-glo bulb, pulses through a gray Pennsylvania sky. The season vacillates between winter and spring. March, but the trees still stand wreathed in brown. The air is sharp and warm -- windbreaker weather -- and energized.

I submit to the wild abandon of the day and to my own restless nature by agreeing to slip past the nuns in their heavy black habits, and skedaddle off to the ramshackle house on the hill with some boys I hang out with.

One of the boys, Tommy, hasn't been to Catechism, I know, for a long time. One of the others, Grover, to whose house we're going, never went at all, even though we're all Catholics.

Once we get to Grover's house, with its sagging porch and bare wood siding, we go to his room. Psychedelic black-light posters cover the paint-peeled walls, and yellowed blinds hang over the windows in place of curtains. We sit on a mattress on the floor, listen to the Beatles' White Album, and smoke cigarettes.

"Forget it. She doesn't want to."

Nothing happens. But I know, deep in my gut, something really bad could have happened.

-- -- --

When I replay that tape in my head, I can't remember much of the conversation. Perhaps I blocked it out. I never skipped Catechism again. I looked toward the mustard-yellow-brick facade of St. John's and the stony faces of the nuns with a renewed sense of salvation. I was saved from the clutches of sin by either naivete or guilt.

During the next few years, Grover quit school and joined a carnival. Tommy wore a chain from his back pocket and hung out on the street corner. His name showed up a lot on the absentee list.

I slowly drifted away from the cigarette-smoking, dime-store-stealing, weekend-drinking crowd and ended up as one of those teacher's-pet types. Bright. Always on time. Eager to please. Never in trouble.

In the eleventh grade, after I had unofficially become one of the brains and Tommy one of the machine-shop lugs, the two of us ended up at the same cafeteria table for study hall.

Lunch must have just ended because I remember the yeasty smell of the warm air and the lunchroom din -- stainless steel cacophony, plastic-tray clatter, melodious dishwasher roar.

We sat directly across from each other on another of those gray, nebulous days that end without ever seeming to have begun. I spoke with trepidation. After all, how does one speak across the boundaries of high school cliques?

I didn't have to worry because Tommy spoke to me as if there were no separation between us, no time, no differences of paths chosen. In fact, he spoke to me as if I had known him always.

He began the conversation by saying that he did not like the person he had become. He wished that someone would have stopped him, told him no somewhere along the way. He said he wished his parents had never let him smoke at home. "But that means they trust you," I assured him. "They must think you're mature enough to handle it."

"You don't understand," he said. "That isn't it. They didn't care that I smoked. They let me get away with too much. They didn't care about anything I did."

As the day was surreal in its grayness, so was the conversation Tommy and I had, or more accurately, the monologue. He spoke to me slowly and deliberately as if he were unraveling the tapestry of his life. He talked about his parents, brothers, and sisters; broken pieces of memory that rose to the surface and pierced the skin.

I thought back to Tommy and Catechism and to the affected toughness he seemed to have ever since we were children. And he was right. I did not understand. But I listened to him speaking to me as if we were both in a confessional. But I could not absolve him.

About a week after we talked, Tommy took a long walk into the woods and killed himself with a single bullet to the head.

-- -- --

In the 11 years since Tommy's suicide, I often have wondered, if I had known how to recognize a person in crisis then, could I have changed anything? Probably not. And probably what he said to me that day he could have said to a stranger. He needed only to be heard. But no one heard him. Or not soon enough.

When I read about epidemics of teenage suicides, I am at a loss to suggest solutions, but I remember the horrible anxieties of adolescence. By whatever act of grace or providence, I dealt with my own teenage demons by turning to literature.

But now, in retrospect, I think the only difference between me and Tommy and the pool-hall friends I left behind on the street corner is that I probably felt more loved.