Tom watches all of this. HE has befriended both Marg and Dickie, gained their trust, offered to cover for the "whole Sylvana thing", and is even beginning to look a bit like Dickie. Gone are the dorky glasses (most of the time), his hair is also blonder from the sun but who can say, and he is dressing more like Dickie. It's a slow evolution at first, but pay close attention and you can see as he adopts mannerisms and studies them in himself bit by bit. Tom doesn't just want to be accepted by Dickie, he wants Dickie's life - all of it, past and present. The real troubles begin when Dickie's old friend Freddie Miles appears and susses out that Tom isn't really who he says he is.

It's unspoken, but clearly the bid for Dickie's attention is won and Freddie, being a true old friend from Princeton is the winner. Tom finds himself being shoved to the side time and time again. Before Freddie arrived, Dickie seemed happy for the pal he found in Tom, whether he knew him or not is irrelevant. Like everyone else in Dickie's life, Tom is mildly amusing and someone to hang out with. Who doesn't remember a kid just like that from grade or high school who hung out with you or with someone else until their "real" friend came along and you or you saw someone else relegated back to the world where "they belonged. Land of the "fags" as they were called then (the term meaning "unpopular" for anyone who takes offense, I use this in the older sense, thx.).

This whole story is highly elaborate, but every step of the way, the more in love Tom falls with not only Dickie's life, but with Dickie, Marg, really everything, the more lies he must tell. The lies culminate when he has a confrontation with Dickie when they are out house hunting on a small outboard boat. By this time, Tom has the gumption to confront Dickie, and Dickie to confront Tom who has had enough of his neediness and clinginess by now. Who can blame him? He is like a little girl with his constant desire to fit in. Haven't you ever known someone who the more they tried to get you to like them, the more they did shit for you, the less you did like them? This doesn't happen much when we grow up, at least, not for me. I like people who want to be needed and I like people who do nice things for me. But when you're still immature, it's the tagalong who isn't really a friend but tries to be. There's something genuinely pathetic about it, but I think only because it reminds us of our own capacity to do the same, and let's face it, most of us have done it to some extent. We hate most that which we see in ourselves.

A huge fight ensues and next thing we know, Tom is beating Dickie to death with an oar. It's a grisly scene, and the first of his murders. If the film escalates, it is at the moment when he kills Dickie that Tom realizes there is no going back. Now, it is not so much that he wants to lie; he has to lie. It's the only way to protect himself and not get arrested. Granted, he could go to the police and tell them the truth, but what would that be exactly? That a/ I never know Dickie Greenleaf, so I'm pretending to be Princeton friend and shine his father on for money or b./ Dickie confronted me first and hit me and I over-reacted but had to kill him with an oar (which isn't true; there were other ways, I think, for him to have protected himself; he could have knocked him unconscious and taken the boat back to town and contacted the hospital). The problem is that Tom felt such mixed feelings of love and hate that the rejection by Dickie is just too much. He pummels him again and again with the oar like he's paying back everyone who ever told him he was some "second rate chump" for his whole life. He hits him so hard because in part, he believes this and knows it to be true and at the same time, knows that he is in some ways a thousand times better than Dickie Greenleaf. That if he had a fiancé like Marg, he wouldn't cheat on her, he would treat her well and buy her expensive perfume and the like but never would he pull the kind of privileged poor-me shit that Dickie Greenleaf pulls. More, he would have been a friend and not a fuck to Sylvana.