22. Halvah

I saw the article in the Times-Herald about how they were going to be showing an original print of Lon Chaney’s silent Phantom of the Opera at Orange County Community College and immediately started insisting we had to go. My mother had a lot of good reasons not to: it was on a Friday so she’d have to ask my father to stay home from his card game, she didn’t like to drive at night, it was too late to bring my brother along. But I did what I always did, which was to keep asking until she said yes. She eventually said yes.

I was in junior high, and still a big horror movie fan, but it was something I could feel myself outgrowing. This disappointed me. I’d invested so much time in watching “Chiller Theater” and “Creature Feature,” in reading “Famous Monsters of Filmland” and “Castle of Frankenstein” and “Vault of Horror,” in writing my own stories about things like Dracula and Frankenstein joining forces to defeat the Invisible Man. I believed you couldn’t have too many monsters in one story.

These days, though, I mostly wrote science fiction, and I’d stopped begging to be allowed to stay up late to watch “Night Gallery” or movies like “The Hands of Orlac.” It just didn’t seem so important anymore. I felt like I was betraying something that had made me happy for a long time, but it wasn’t something I could control.

Phantom of the Opera, though—I could still get excited over Phantom of the Opera. I’d read about it in Carlos Clemon’s “Illustrated History of the Horror Movie,” a book that had been my bible, and not just because it had a picture near the end of a topless woman taken from Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville. I knew how rarely screened the silent Phantom was, how few copies still existed, how influential it had been on the horror movies of the thirties. All of which I’d said to mother, in my effort to persuade her to go.

“Where did they get this copy?” she asked.

“There’s this couple who live right in Middletown. They have a whole private collection of silent movies. It said in the article they used to be actors themselves.”

“Interesting,” my mother said.

The screening was in one of the classrooms. My mother and I got lost trying to find the building, which made me start to panic we’d be late, but we eventually stumbled over the right place. There wasn’t a big crowd, maybe twenty people. I’d thought that a college classroom would look different from my Junior High, but it was pretty much the same. We found seats in back, and within a few minutes of our arrival the husband of the collector couple got up to introduce the film. He was old, white-haired and frail-looking, and very boring. I already knew everything he was saying, about how long it had taken Lon Chaney to do his make-up and how they’d put special tinting on the Masque of the Red Death scenes. I wasn’t interested in listening to some white-haired old guy. I wanted to see the movie.

I loved it. There was no music, just the drone of the projector, and the screen was a little small to see well from the back, but I was thrilled anyway, completely entranced. When Lon Chaney in his skull-face makeup was sitting on top of the pole, the image all tinted red, I wanted to call Carlos Clemons at home and thank him for letting me know this film existed, for getting me here.

Then the film snapped. It was familiar sound to me, it happened all the time at school, but usually during some nature film about frogs or “The Red Balloon.” The collector quickly rose from his seat and switched on the lights, headed over to where the torn film was whipping around in the projector. I turned to my mother.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s good,” she said. “Even better than I remembered.”

“You’ve seen ‘Phantom’ before?”

I couldn’t believe this had never come up, during all my imploring of her to bring me here. But then, I’d never thought to ask.

“Oh, yes. When I was a little girl. I was scared for a week. I’m surprised it still holds up.”

“Who would take a little girl to a movie like this? Why were they showing silent movies in the Bronx?”

“It was at some school or something. Just like this. My brother dropped me there, to get rid of me, I think. I saw a lot of silent movies there. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton. You’ve never seen any of those, have you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“That’s too bad. Some of them are very good.”

“Hey, you guys want some halvah?”

My mother and I looked up. Standing in front of us was a big, misfit-looking guy, young, bearded. I’d noticed him when we came in, sitting by himself. He looked scary, in a different way than Lon Chaney on top of that pole, but scary in his own right.

I didn’t know what to answer, because I didn’t know what halvah was.

“I’d love a piece,” my mother said.

The misfit broke a section off what looked like an all-white candy bar and gave it to my mother. “I heard you talking,” he said. “I heard you mention Harold Lloyd. Did you ever see ‘Safety Last’?”

“The one on the clock,” my mother answered.

“Yes. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“I like Keaton the best. The scene in the windstorm. Where the barn blows right past him.”

The guy nodded rapturous agreement. “Great scene,” he said, and turned to me. “You want to try some? It’s good.”

I took the piece of halvah he offered. It was odd, sweet and buttery. The taste was familiar, but there was something about its texture different from anything I could remember ever eating before.

“In ‘Way Out West,’ the scene on the train…” he began, but then the lights went off and the movie came back on screen.

Lon Chaney was still amazing, all those costume changes, the scene where he pilots his boat down the black water of the sewers of Paris. I wondered if I’d ever enjoy another horror movie as much as I was enjoying this one.  I doubted it, and knew I should focus on this enjoyment, savor it.

But what I really wanted was for the film to snap again. What I really wanted was another piece of halvah, and to listen to my mother and the misfit talk some more about Harold Lloyd.

21. Jersey Shore #2

I was half-asleep when my cousin Theresa poked her head into the bedroom my brother and I were sharing and said it was too hot, she was going to drag her mattress out to porch, did we want to come? 

Jeffrey immediately said no, but I thought it sounded good. The porch was screened-in and right on the street. There would be a nice breeze. I didn’t think my parents would like it very much, but I said yes anyway.

It was that kind of vacation. There was this feeling of anything goes, of none of the usual rules being true. We were vacationing with my cousins on my father’s side, Theresa, Dani, and Anne, all of whom were older than me. Theresa was the closest to my age, two years older. Dani and Anne were in high school. They were with us because their father had died the April before. He’d been painting his house, and fallen off a ladder. He fell the worst possible way, right on his head. When we’d gone to pick up my cousins for the trip, I’d noticed the side of the house was still half-painted.

While we were here on the Jersey short, my Aunt Millie was taking a trip back to the “Other Side,” Scotland, to see some of her and my Uncle Lee’s relatives. My Uncle Lee had been born in Scotland, although he’d met my Aunt Millie after he moved to the United States.

Theresa, Dani, and Anne had been getting away with murder during this vacation. My father was usually so strict with my brother and me, but he’d let the girls pretty much whatever they pleased. If they didn’t want to come out to dinner with us, he didn’t make them. If they refused to answer direct questions or sighed when my mother asked them to use suntan lotion, he didn’t say anything. The night Anne went down to the boardwalk and didn’t come home until nearly 2 a.m., he didn’t even yell at her. 

I guess he wasn’t sure how to act around them, given what they’d been through. I felt exactly the same way, though it wasn’t like I had much of an opportunity to act any way. Dani and Anne were always going off to the beach by themselves. Theresa, who was usually friendly to my brother and me, spent most of her time in her room, writing in her diary.

A few days before, I’d done something I wasn’t very proud of. I’d looked at Theresa’s diary while she was down at the boardwalk with her sisters. I’d tried to find the exact day it happened, the day her father had fallen from the roof. But it was just blank pages for those days, and for the weeks after. Most of what Theresa had been writing since we’d been on vacation was about a boy in her class named Roger who she was hoping to get to kiss her next year, her imagining how it would be to be his girlfriend. Little pep talks to herself that she had a chance with him.

I was disappointed in Theresa, writing about something like this and not about her father dying. And I was disappointed in myself, for reading even though it wasn’t what I’d been looking for.

*         *          *

“So,” Theresa asked, “if you could pick your son or daughter from the end of a long glass tube, which would you pick?”

Out on the porch, we’d set up our mattresses side by side, wedged in between the wall and the smelly couch that none of us would dare sit on. We were lying on opposite ends, Theresa’s feet on the side where my head was. We’d been out there for about a half hour by then, and neither of us still was able to sleep. Every so often Theresa would say something that didn’t make a lot of sense, like she was letting me in on the middle of a conversation she was having in her head. 

Still, it was nice she was even talking to me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like in that song ‘Year 2525.’ Would you pick a boy or girl?”

Now I understood what she was talking, this song they kept playing on the radio about what it was going to be like in the future. The girls played the radio to rock music all the time, another thing I was surprised my father let them do. It was a nice change of pace from the country music my father would have been playing, though I also liked country music, especially Johnny Cash.

“I don’t know. Probably a boy.”

“I would pick neither. I’m never going to have any children. Even if I was able to pick them out of a glass tube, I still wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s just better not to have a family. It gets you in trouble. Like, I just finished this book about a girl, she finds out that her family isn’t even her real family.”

“Is she adopted?”

“Not even. What it turns out is, that she’s just some girl these people picked up off the street and raised as their own, because they want her to marry her brother, who really is their son. They want their family to stay together always and this way, by having her marry the brother, they think they can control it. Isn’t that the grossest?”

“Pretty gross,” I agreed.

“That happens, though,” Theresa said definitively. “That kind of stuff happens all the time. At the end, the girl kills her own mother, who of course isn’t her mother, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Because, you never know, do you? You never know who’s your family. You never know if they’re really on your side. Milliebe they’re not. Because, how can you tell? They could be anyone. You could be anyone.” 

Theresa’s voice was choked, angry. I understood there was something at stake here. But I had no idea what it was, or what I was supposed to say.

I said, “Look at our feet.”

“What?”

“Look at our feet. We jiggle them in exactly the same way. You see?”

It was true. As Theresa had been talking I’d been staring at her feet, rubbing against each other as she rocked them back and forth, and recognized it as exactly what I did when I was nervous or restless.

“Yeah, so what?” Theresa asked.

“So maybe that’s the way you can tell if someone’s in your family. If they jiggle their feet the same way you do. Maybe that’s all it is, and it’s so simple a thing and all you have to do is know about but nobody does, not even scientists.”

Theresa was quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, “Geez, Chris, where did that come from?” And then she laughed, so loud I thought it would wake up everyone we’d left inside.

20. Religious Camp

My parents went on a vacation trip to Hawaii and sent my brother and me to sleepway camp. My parents had gotten the camp’s name from the Presbyterian Church, but I don’t think they realized how religious it was going to be. At this camp, three times a day, following meals, there were prayer meetings. Sometimes you were supposed to pray alone, and sometimes the counselors led the prayers. The counselors talked about how the most important thing was to admit your sins, how if you admitted your sins and allowed Jesus into your heart then God sees you through a special kind of glasses that makes your sins disappear so you can enter the kingdom of heaven. After the dinner prayer meeting, we all read the Bible. If a counselor came by and you weren’t reading the Bible, if you were reading another book or writing a letter, they would give you a hard time. Ask if you didn’t love God, if that was the reason you were offending Him.

My brother and I were at the same camp, but he was in the younger kid’s program. I only saw him a few times, in passing at dinner or full-camp events. From what he described, his program wasn’t nearly as religious as mine.

Most of the other kids in my program were inner city kids. There was some sort of deal where they could go to this camp at no expense to them. Their churches paid for it. I would have had trouble fitting in anyway, since I was a quiet and this was my first time away from home for such a long period of time, but with these kids I was totally on the outside. When my parents called on the third day or so, long distance from Honolulu, I happened to mention that all my bunkmates were black. My father got mad at that. He must have made a few phone calls, because by that night the bunks had been switched around. A couple of the black guys had been moved out, and a white guy moved in. The other black guys weren’t happy with the changes. They’d all been getting along just fine.

“There must have been complaints from parents,” our bunk’s head counselor, whose name was Ross, explained. He was white, as were all the other counselors.

“Complaints about what?” the black guys asked. “Who complained? Who can we complain to?”

We were all sitting around, after quiet time at night, talking about this. I was right there.

“Various complaints,” Ross said. “This is the way it is. No more complaints.”

“Whose parents complained?” the black guys kept asking, but Ross wouldn’t tell them. The black guys must have suspected it was mine. I waited for one of them to say something. But they never did, that I heard.

The other white guy’s name was Fred. We became friends, mostly because we just ended up together. Fred was big on the camp candy store. The candy store was open only an hour a day, in the afternoon between two and three o’clock. Fred went every day. He described to me the different candies he bought, why one candy bar was better than another. He had various strategies for getting the best candies in the store. You had to be there at least an hour early, Fred told me, if you wanted to guarantee a good spot in line.

On Sunday night at the end of the first week, the founder of the camp gave a sermon to everyone, including the younger kids. He had a TV show, and there were cameras all over the place recording him as he spoke to us. He was a short man with silver hair, and a very dynamic speaker. He never stopped moving. We sang songs he had written, hymns that were published in a little book they had given us when we arrived at camp. The counselors had been coaching us in these songs, so we could impress the founder. We all sang our hearts out, and the founder gave us a beaming smile that must have looked great on television.

After the sermon and songs, the founder said that anyone who’d been moved by the spirit of the Lord should go outside and be saved. The counselors were waiting, and if we felt the call, they would save us. That first night, only a few people went, but on the nights that followed the counselors asked again, and more and more people went, even after sermons nowhere near as good as the one the founder had given.

A few of the campers left after a week, and others after two weeks. Those of us who stayed the third week got to go on an overnight camping trip. It was a miserable day, drizzly and cold. The black guys complained about the backpacks we had to carry, and then when we made camp about the terrible dinner the counselors made for us. I didn’t complain, but that was only because I was still feeling shy. I hated the hiking and the food, too.

The next day we went mountain climbing, and there was an accident. A guy named Red got hit in the head with a rock that was dislodged by the foot of someone up a litter higher than him. The rock had gone right over my shoulder, before it hit Red.

I knew Red, but only by sight. He was tall, and had reddish hair. It was actually closer to blonde. He was one of the three or four other white guys in the camp, besides Fred and me.

The counselors immediately stopped the trip. Two of them herded us back down the mountain, and the others clustered around Red. We practically ran down that hill. The counselors yelled at anyone who said a word. We came out on a road, and one of the counselors went to make phone calls. There was a beautiful, vast lake on the other side of the road. It seemed to go on forever, right to the edge of the horizon and beyond.

Soon the other counselors came down from the mountain, carrying Red. There was a shirt around his head, stained red with blood. An ambulance pulled up and took Red, and an hour later a bus from the camp came for us. “Red’s okay,” they told us when we were on the bus. “But you have to pray for him. He needs your prayers right now.”

The bus was silent the whole ride back.

The night, after sermon, we all got together for a special session in the main meeting room, and the counselors took turns telling us what a great guy Red was. They talked about how he never complained and always had a smile on his face. They told us Red’s parents had been notified, and they were trusting the Lord to guide them. They told us to pray for Red’s parents as we prayed for Red. Red’s counselor was the last one to speak, and began to cry as he described how he’d just witnessed for Red a day or two before. Red’s counselor was my favorite counselor in the camp. He went jogging every morning, and if you wanted to go with him, you tied a sock to your bed and he woke you up. I’d done it a couple of times.

Back in our bunk, my counselor Ross led us in some more prayers. “Lord, help us know what you mean to show us by this,” Ross said. “Help us know that it could have been any of us this happened to.” “It should have been Fred, not Red,” one of the black guys sang as he took a shower before bed, but without rancor in his voice, more because he enjoyed the rhyme.

The next morning, they told us Red had pulled through. The counselor who’d carried Red down told us the details of what had happened. He said he hadn’t wanted to until he was sure Red was going to be all right.

“Red stopped breathing,” the counselor said. “Red’s face turned color, it turned blue. And that’s when I called on the Lord for help. That’s when I asked the Lord to please, please help. And He did. The Lord was with us on that mountain.”

We took up a collection for Red’s family. Fred put all his candy money in, everything he’d been saving for the rest of the trip. It looked like around twenty dollars.

Two nights later, when they asked that people who wanted to be saved go outside, I went. I’d been wanting to go ever since the day of Red’s accident, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was going because of Red’s accident. I wanted it to seem like my own decision.

The night was warm, and there was a bright moon. Out on the lawn, there were pairs of counselors and kids. The counselors were doing most of the talking. The counselor I’d gone outside with had wire rim glasses. He asked me questions about God and my life. Yes, I answered, yes, yes, yes. He hugged me after we were done and then laughed and hugged me again. “Chris was saved tonight, praise the Lord,” Ross said, when I got back to my bunk that night. All the black guys gave me high fives.

The day before we were to leave, a group of us who’d been saved went by bus to a nearby city to proselytize. None of us knew what that meant, but they explained it to us. We split up into groups of two when we got to the city. It was Fred and me. We stopped people and asked them if they were interested in being happy. Then we asked them if they knew what it felt like to be free. The counselors had told us the questions to ask. Most people listened up until the time we showed our Bibles. Then they got an uncomfortable smiles on their faces, began edging away. One guy called us Moonies and cursed at us for wasting his time. But there was one woman who wasn’t even that much older than us, maybe high school age, who listened to everything we had to say. She didn’t let us witness for her, but she did take all our pamphlets and said she’d think hard about what we’d said.

One the way back to camp on the bus we told the counselors our experiences and sang the founder’s songs as loud as we could, until our throats ached.

The next day my parents came. I didn’t tell them about any of this. But I thought about it a lot, in the weeks afterward.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. I’d been brainwashed, I told myself. They’d hounded me until I didn’t know what I was doing and taken advantage of my feelings of being alone and my fears about Red and then they’d used them to make me go out and do something humiliating like telling people on the street about Jesus. My skin crawled whenever I thought about myself doing that.

But I knew I wasn’t blameless. I’d wanted to do it, and I’d felt good as I’d been doing it. Really good, like I was part of something so much bigger than me.

I resented the camp for that, too:  for making me feel like there was something bigger than me I could be a part of.

About two months later, I got a letter from Ross. He wrote that he’d been thinking of me, and how important it was that I keep up my Bible reading and spreading of the word of God. He encouraged me to write back, and even included his phone number if I ever wanted to talk.

I was going to tear the letter up, but then I got a better idea. I put it back in the envelope, and on the back of the envelope I wrote everything I could remember of what that guy on the street who’d called us Moonies had said to Fred and me. Then I put the letter in another envelope and mailed it to back to Ross.

It didn’t make me feel any better. But it did stop him from ever writing me again.

19. Cool Kids

We were in art class, painting political posters. I was sitting at the George McGovern table. There were three of us there. There were two kids at the Richard Nixon table. The rest of the class was at what our art teacher, Mr. Reiss, called the “Silent Majority Table.” At the start of class, Mr. Reiss had asked us who we would vote for if we could vote, and when hardly anyone raised their hands he’d gotten very angry. “All right,” he said. “You all want to be ignorant, go ahead. You can sit there and think nothing and do nothing. That’s exactly perfect for this country.”

Mr. Reiss wouldn’t even let the silent majority table people do free drawing. They just had to sit and be silent.

I didn’t know much about George McGovern, but I knew I would vote for him. I’d overheard my parents talking one night, and they’d been saying how they both voted for Nixon in 1968 and thought it was the worst mistake of their lives. My father said he didn’t like McGovern very much, but anyone, anyone, had to be better than Nixon. My mother said McGovern wasn’t so bad.

“And when he said, like, ‘squeal like a pig,’ that was so sick, I thought I would throw up,” one of the other kids at the George McGovern table said. This other kid’s name was Steven Pelton. “That was one fucking sick movie.”

“Creepy, though,” the third kid at the table, Dave Owen, answered. “That kid with banjo, he was fucking creepy.”

Steven Pelton and Dave Owen were cool kids. They dressed in the best clothes, went to parties on weekends given by their older brothers. They drew motorcycles on their notebooks and coasted by in class without doing much work. Even the teachers liked them. They were also the best looking boys in class. Dave Owen in particular had these feminine good looks, like a singer, like Bobby Sherman. All the girls were crazy about him.

Normally I wouldn’t have tried to talk to them, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You guys saw ‘Deliverance’?” I asked.

“Yeah. You see it?”

“No. But I read about it. I read the review in the Times. How did you ever get your parents to take you to that?”

Dave Owen laughed. “My fucking parents. My fucking parents wouldn’t take me to see fucking Bambi.”

Dave Owen said “fuck” a lot, but it always seemed to fit with what he was saying, and he seemed able to say it only when there were no teachers in earshot.

“Did you sneak in?”

“Nah, our friend Bob Decker took us,” Steve Pelton said. “He takes us everywhere.”

“Who’s Bob Decker? Does he go to school here?”

This time they both laughed. “Bob’s not in school,” Steve Pelton said. “He’s older. He’s got his own apartment. He’s got a great stereo, but all he ever plays are the fucking Beatles.”

“You’ve been to his apartment?”

“A few times,” Dave Owen said. I noticed his poster had Richard Nixon’s face, which he’d cut out from a magazine, with a big X through it, and then all kinds of red splotches around it.

“Where’d you meet him?”

“My father works with him,” Steve Pelton said.

“Does your father come with you when you go out with him?” I asked.

“Fuck no,” Dave Owen answered. “Old Bob Decker takes us out all on our own. He takes us any-fucking-where we want to go. All we have to do is call him up and say, ‘Hey Bob Decker, we feel like hanging out at Jamesway,” and he comes driving over and picks us up somewhere. He’ll buy us ice cream, whatever.”

“He gave us beers once,” Steve Pelton said. “At his apartment.”

“You should be…careful,” I said, carefully. I didn’t want them to make fun of me.

Both Steve Pelton and Dave Owen snorted with laughter. “Yeah, we know,” Dave Owen said. “We know that old Bob Decker probably wants to suck our fucking dicks or something. That’s why we can make him do anything we want.”

“One time Dave made him let me drive his car,” Steve Pelton said. “He told Bob Decker he’d tell my father that we’d gone to the movies with me. I don’t think my father would have minded, but Bob Decker just wigged out.”

“He’s not all bad, though,” Dave Owen said. “He says he was at Woodstock. Which may be total bullshit, but he tells some good stories about it. Drugs. Mud.”

“Does he give you drugs?” I asked. Something about the conversation made me feel like I could ask anything. I got the sense that Steve and Dave had been dying to talk to someone, someone not each other, about this. None of us were working on our political posters anymore.

“Nah,” Dave Owen said. “Just those beers that one time. And only one beer each. He wouldn’t give us any more than that.”

“We’ll probably get him to give us more sometime,” Steven Pelton said. “Or at least buy some for us.”

“Probably,” Dave Owen said. “He’s got a poster in his bathroom. Isn’t that cool? It’s like a cartoon poster, of a girl driving in a car, with her hair flying back. It takes up almost the whole wall.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have any more questions.

“He said he’d try to get us into Clockwork Orange this weekend,” Steven Pelton said.  “It’s playing in Newburgh.”

“You know Clockwork Orange, Newsome?” Dave Owen asked.

I nodded. “I’ve seen the ad. It looks awesome.”

Dave and Steve exchanged a glance. “You want to go? I’ll be Bob Decker wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“He’s really not that bad. It’s sort of cool to be around an adult you can boss around. Say anything you fucking want to.”

I nodded no again, quickly. I looked down at my poster. It wasn’t much of a poster, just words, statistics about Vietnam I was copying from a magazine. I was going to write “McGovern Can Save Us” along the bottom, as the tagline.

“No problem,” Dave Owen said, and he was making his voice a teasing voice now, as though the offer had never been real. “We probably won’t get in anyway. That movie is rated fucking X.”

18. At My Cousins’ Apartment in New York

At my cousins’ apartment in New York City, the adults were in the kitchen laughing. I was in the bedroom with my cousin Linda talking about Bobby Sherman. Linda was trying to explain to me why he was so good. She said it was part his voice, and part the good songs he sang, but mostly his personality. She played me one his songs as she showed me a picture from one of her magazines and asked, “You can see it, right? Look at him. He just looks so…nice. You know he would be nice to you, if you met him and talked to him.”

These cousins were from my mother’s side of the family. Linda was just a year older than me, and Ellen was the exact same age as my brother. My mother and my Aunt Jane, my mother’s sister, used to joke about being pregnant at the same time, trying to get around on the subways with a two-year old (me) and three-year old (Linda) also in tow.

My brother and my cousin Ellen were in the bedroom, too, watching television. Ellen yelled to turn it off when Linda played the Bobby Sherman song, even though Linda played it really low so it wouldn’t bother them. I wondered if it would have been worth having to share a bedroom with my brother if it meant we could have our own TV in there.

“I think me and my friends would beat up any boy who wore that necklace thing,” I said to Linda, as I looked at his picture in her magazine.

Linda tsked. “It’s called a choker. And it looks good on him. You’re just making fun.”

“I am,” I admitted to her.

“Yeah, well, how would you like it if I made fun of you with all your monster magazines and stuff.”

“What’s there to make fun of? Monster magazines are cool.”

“Can you guys be quieter?” Ellen called over. “We’re watching this here.”

Linda sighed. “Why don’t we go see what’s going on inside.”

In the kitchen were my mother and my sister and the woman who lived next door, whose name was Tina, and a guy named Steve and his mother who also lived in the building. Steve was about my mother and aunt’s age, but he still lived with and took care of his mother. She was very old and sickly. Steve was telling a story as we walked in, and his mother looked like she was listening but you could tell the words weren’t really registering, that she was just there in body.

I liked Steve. I’d seen him loads of times while I was over at my cousins’ apartment. He seemed to spend a lot of time over there. I actually think I saw him more often than I saw my Uncle Phil.

“So,” Steve was saying. “Jane and I were walking back from the restaurant with the kids, and there’s this guy, he’s just standing there taking a leak on the sidewalk. It’s not even that dark out! And we’re embarrassed, you know, we’re trying to walk by as quickly and quietly as possible, when what does the guy do but turn around as we’re walking by! We must have been so quiet, he didn’t even know we were there, and so he turns around and he’s still going!”

Everyone was laughing again. Linda and I were laughing, too. It felt good to be with the adults, laughing.

“What did you do?” Tina asked.

“We didn’t do anything,” Steve continued. “As soon as the guy saw us, he just froze in mid—in mid, you know, and he started tucking himself in and running away. He was embarrassed too. Only in New York, right?”

“You didn’t say anything to him, Jane?” my mother asked.

Steve answered for her. “Say anything? Jane didn’t have to say anything. It was just love at first sight.”

That got everyone laughing even harder

Just then, my Uncle Phil walked in. He nodded to everyone, pulled a chair from the kitchen table, turned it backwards and sat down. As the laughter died down, he asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, just a story,” Steve said. “How are you doing, Phil?”

“I’m doing fine. Kind of beat. Long day.”

Uncle Phil was supposed to work as a bartender. But even I knew he had strange hours for bartender. Sometimes he worked in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes the middle of the night. Whenever we visited Linda and Ellen, he was always just showing up. No one knew ever knew if he was going to be around or not. He hardly ever came to visit us up in Monroe; Aunt Jane and Linda and Ellen usually took the train. I don’t think my father and Uncle Phil liked each other very much.

“You all staying over tonight?” Uncle Phil asked my mother.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Just for the one night.”

Everyone always acted like this around Uncle Phil, kind of nervous. Which was funny, since Phil was a short, wiry guy, not someone you’d expect everyone would be scared of.

“That’s fine,” Uncle Phil said, and stood up abruptly. “You know, I think I’m going to take a shower. I really am beat.”

“We can leave…” Steve began.

“No, no, stay,” Uncle Phil said. “You know me. I can sleep through anything.”

This was true. There were some visits we’d made to Linda and Ellen where we’d been over there the whole afternoon, talking and yelling and laughing, and I’d never even known Uncle Phil was asleep in the bedroom.

 Uncle Phil walked over to the refrigerator, got himself a beer. He paused for a second in the kitchen doorway. “Okay then, enjoy it, anyway” Uncle Phil  said to everyone, and laughed. That was another thing about Uncle Phil, he was always saying weird little things that made no sense to me but he thought were really funny.

Once we all heard the shower water running, everyone calmed down and started laughing and telling stories again. I was remembering the last time I’d seen my Uncle Phil, which was about two months before, in our kitchen back at home. My brother and I were walking home from the bus stop after school and I’d seen a car I didn’t recognize parked out front. When we walked in he was there, and my brother instantly asked where Linda and Ellen were, but he said no, he’d just come up by himself for a little visit. He left almost immediately, after a few squirmy minutes where he asked us how school was going.

I found out later what had happened, from listening in on my parents when they thought I was asleep. Uncle Phil had hit my Aunt Jane, and she’d thrown him out of the house. He’d driven all the way up to Monroe to try to get my mother to convince my Aunt Jane to take him back.

“He was crying, Jack,” my mother said to my father, while I listened from my bedroom. “He was sitting right there in front of me, crying.”

“Do what you want to do,” my father answered. “But it’s not the first time, is it?”

I came back to the conversation in the kitchen. Tina, the next-door neighbor, was telling a funny story about a bum who’d lived in the lobby of her old building for over two years. Everyone, even the super, liked him so much that no one could tell him to leave. I looked around the table: everyone was smiling, shaking their heads. Even Steve’s mother seemed to be enjoying the story.

I slipped out to go to the bathroom. I’d had to go for the last half hour, but hadn’t wanted to miss any of the funny stories. But I couldn’t hold it any longer.

“Hey,” a voice called out as I was returning to the kitchen. “Hey, Chris. Come in here for a second. Sit down for a second.”

It was Uncle Phil. He was in the living room with the lights out, sipping on his beer. I came in, sat on the far end of the couch from him.

“You like music, don’t you?” he asked.

I said yes, although I didn’t know how he’d know if I liked music or anything else.

“I heard this on the radio today. I had to go out and buy it..”

He took a 45 record out of a plastic Korvette’s bag. “Just listen to this,” Uncle Phil said.

He got up and put the record on the turntable. He put the record on really low. It started out with guitars that sounded like the country music my father listened to, but then a deep, sad voice began singing words that were nothing like any country music I’d ever heard:

Yesterday when I was young 
The taste of love was sweet as rain upon my tongue
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame….

As I sat on the couch listening, I watched Uncle Phil. He was still standing at the record player, but he had his ear dipped near the speaker, and kept getting closer and closer to it as the song went on. It was like he wanted to crawl inside the speaker.

“Isn’t that great?” he asked, when it ended.

“It’s really good,” I said.

He nodded. “Let’s listen again.”

He started the record again. Again, he listened with fierce concentration. At the end, he shook his head, then looked up at me as if waking up from a dream. “You don’t want to be in here with me,” he said. “You can go. It’s okay.”

As I walked away, I heard him cueing up the record again.

In the kitchen, there was light, and Steve was telling another story. Aunt Jane was laughing, and Linda, and Tina the next door neighbor, and my mother was laughing, which wasn’t something she did very much. Steve paused in his story long enough to ask me, “Meet anyone while you were doing your business?” which made everyone laugh even harder, and then he picked right up from where he’d left off.

I sat down in my seat. I was relieved to be back here, glad to be away from Uncle Phil and that dark living room. This was where I belonged.

But that song Uncle Phil  had played for me: how to explain much better it sounded to me than Bobby Sherman, and how much I wanted to hear it again?

17. Ronny Peck’s Go-Kart

Everyone knew Ronny Peck was a geek, a feeb, a loser. He lived in the older section of the block, the ugly flat ranch houses that had been built years before the real development houses, back in the fifties or something. Ronny had a thick, chubby face with little eyes and spoke in a thick, syrupy voice. He was at least a head taller than the rest of us, but even so was terrible at basketball. He would come and hang around sometimes, during the games we played afterschool in the back of Mark Callaway's house. With his height he could practically dunk—the hoop at Mark’s wasn’t a full ten-feet high, more like seven or eight, which we liked because it was easier to score—but we still only let him play occasionally, when there weren’t enough other people. He had the weirdest shooting motion, where he sort of pushed the ball up from his chest with two hands, which meant his shots got blocked most of the time despite his being so much taller. There was no way to be nice about it, Ronny was hopeless, and we didn’t try to be nice about it.

Then his parents bought him a go-kart. It was a beautiful machine: red, with a big black seat, big wheels with bright silver spokes, a flame painted along the side. We heard it before we saw it. We were playing one of our marathon basketball games at Mark’s house, four on four, first one to get to fifty baskets wins—we rarely finished these games—and we heard this sound that was a combination winding and roaring. We asked each other what was that, but just in passing. We were only at like 30 baskets to 24 baskets. There was a lot of game left to play. Then we heard it again a few minutes later, and a few minutes later again. We called the game a draw and went up to the street to investigate.

It didn’t take long for Ronny to come ripping by again. He had probably been purposefully going back and forth in front of Mark’s house, hoping to get us to come take a look. He slowed to a stop right in front of where we were standing at the top of Mark’s driveway. He took off his helmet, which was purple and sparkly, like looking into outer space.

“Where did you get this?” someone managed to ask, while the rest of us gazed in awe.

“My father gave it to me for my birthday,” Ronny said, in the thick voice we’d often made fun of, often right to Ronny’s face.

“Are you really allowed to drive it on the road?” someone else asked.

“Yes, my father said it was okay.”

“How fast does it go?”

“I don’t know. Probably 20, 30 miles an hour. But it feels like you’re going so much faster, because you don’t have a car around you.”

“Is it hard to steer?”

“Not too hard. You just don’t go too fast at first, until you get used to it.”

“Could I take a try?”

Ronny stared over our heads for a long time, or what seemed like a long time.

“Please? Just a quick ride?”

“Okay,” Ronny said. “Just a quick ride.”

From that afternoon on, that’s what we did, instead of playing basketball. Right after school, we would gather at the top of Mark Callaway's driveway, and wait for Ronny to come by with his go-kart. Then, we’d wait our turn to take a ride.

You would have thought someone who’d been a geek, a feeb, a loser, that this person when he finally got a chance to be the center of attention would remember what it had felt like to be humiliated, pushed around, and would try not to do it to others. That this person would at least realize this was his chance to make people see he was an okay person, not the jerk we’d always treated him like.

Not Ronny. He became more of a jerk, though a different kind. He loved being the center of attention. He loved his new power. Even more, he loved abusing it. He ruled the turns on the go-kart on whim. He would ask “Who’s next?” and if too many people raised their hands he wouldn’t let anyone have a turn. Or, he’d look out over the crowd of us sheepishly raising our hands and count off five at random, and say those were the only people who could have a turn that day. If you didn’t do exactly what he asked—which was, drive halfway down the block, slow down for your turn, come right back, always remaining in sight—he wouldn’t let you take another turn, sometimes for days. Any time Ronny decided he wanted to take a ride, he would just go ahead and do it, even if he’d promised someone else a chance. He would go the whole way around the block, one, two, three times, while we sat in the grass and waited for him to get tired of riding and give us our turns.

It was worth it, though. Driving the go-kart, even to go down the road a little way and then turn around, was the coolest. Ronny was right, maybe you were only going 20 miles per hours, but being totally out in the open made it seem like it was so much faster. If you hit a bump you’d pop off the seat and come back down with a thud that rattled your teeth. We all learned, we all taught each other while we killed time sitting in the grass awaiting our turns, that what you had to do was brake really hard going into the turn, and then when you’d just about straightened out press down as hard as you could on the gas pedal. The gravel would go flying.

Donald Rogers was riding the go-kart when it exploded. It was late on a Thursday, the last ride of the day. Already some of us had been called home to dinner to by our mothers. Donald had been waiting patiently for his turn, although that guaranteed nothing. “Okay, last one,” Ronny said, his thick voice now sounding like the voice of a teacher or parent, a voice telling us what a pain in the neck we were and how much easier things would be without us.

Donald put on the purple helmet. Ronny’s father had made Ronny promise that anyone who took a ride on the go-kart had to wear the helmet. It smelled of sweat and, we all agreed though none of knew why, farts, but again it was one of those things you had to endure for the fun part. Donald was younger, Ronny’s age, and didn’t drive as fast as most of us did. We were watching him puttering along in the twilight when we heard the bang. The go-kart rolled to a stop, and Donald jumped off and started running fast up onto Mark Callaway's lawn, like he really did think it was going to explode.

Ronny had no such fear. He ran straight to the go-kart as fast as he could. Ronny ran funny, too, in great heaving steps, almost like the top part of his body went forward before his legs did.

“What did you do?” Ronny screamed, when he reached the go-kart.

Donald came forward a few steps. “I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t even going very fast.”

Ronny looked like he could kill. “Help me,” he demanded. “All of you. Help me push it home.”

We all did. The go-kart smelled like gasoline and burnt matches. We kept trying not to look at the big black hole in the engine.

The next afternoon, Ronny came down to Mark Carmody’s a little later than usual. “Where’s the go-kart?” we immediately asked.

“Getting fixed. It should be ready next Tuesday.”

But next Tuesday Ronny said it wasn’t finished, there was another part they needed and it would be on Friday instead. Then on Friday he said the part still hadn’t come in but was on the way. By midway through the next week when Ronny didn’t say anything at all we realized he was never bringing back the go-kart. The repairs must have been too expensive, or maybe there really was a part that was impossible to find.

He still kept coming around, though, hanging at Mark Callaway's while we played basketball, not talking much to anyone. I wondered what it must have been like for him, to have been the center of attention and lost it. Did it making being a feeb and retard and loser easier, or harder?

“You want to play, Ronny?” someone occasionally would ask.

“Sure,” Ronny would answer.

“Sorry. We already have enough.”

He fell for it every time.

16. Ouija Board

I didn’t even know why we’d gone to this dinner party at the Wilhelms. We weren’t really friends with them. They were new people, had just moved into the Nobles’ house a few months ago when Carolyn and her family moved away to Florida. I’d been pretty good friends with Carolyn back in kindergarten, the way all of us around the block were friends, since we lived close together and had the same teachers at school, but we’d gotten split up in third grade and I hadn’t spoken to her very much since then. I didn’t really care when she moved away.

I think my parents went to this party just because it had been such a long time since we’d been invited to a party. When we’d first moved to the neighborhood, there used to be parties all the time around the block, especially in the summer, big outdoor shindigs where everyone was invited. They were always fun, lots of kids, and there were usually hot dogs and hamburgers, something you’d want to eat.

At this party, there had been nothing that kids would want to eat, only adult food, some kind of twisty pasta with white cheese on it that smelled like socks and salad that was almost all lettuce so I couldn’t pick out just the tomatoes like I usually did. I’d eaten a few mouthfuls of the pasta just because my father had given me one of his looks. I doubted he liked the food any better than I did, although I had seen my mother go back for seconds on it.

There wasn’t even anyone to play with, since my brother and I were the oldest kids there. The Wilhelms had a baby, a two year old girl they let walk all over the place, oohing and ahhing about how cute she was. The other people they’d invited mostly had babies, too. There were a few older brothers and sisters, but I was 11, and they all seemed like little kids to me. We didn’t know any of these other people. They weren’t from around the block. 

It was strange, being in the Nobles house without the Nobles there, going to a party on the block but not seeing anybody else from the block, eating weird food and being surrounded by babies. It was like going back to a place we’d already been, but didn’t belong anymore.

After dinner, Mrs. Wilhelm brought out a ouija board. She made a big production number out of it, saying things like, “Okay, everyone, get ready to invite the spirits into our house to tell the future!”

Mrs. Wilhelm was flashy, loud: when she’d brought in the pasta she’d yelled “Okay, everyone dig in!” and then she’d totally dominated the dinner conversation talking about some foreign movie she and Mr. Wilhelm had gone to see. Mr. Wilhelm—a short, muscular man, with bushy eyebrows and a slight hunch that made him seem a little ape-like—hadn’t said much, but looked on with a look of attention and love.

All the lights were turned off in the living room, a candle lit, and the kids were herded into the kitchen with a babysitter the Wilhelms had hired. I wanted to stay with the adults, but it didn’t matter, since the babysitter let us all sneak over to the door and watch anyway. A group of five or six or the adults sat down at the table and put their hands on the ouija. Mrs. Wilhelm dared anyone to ask a question, again with lots of talk about not offending the spirits. No one said anything at first, but then one of the men asked if the Mets would win the World Series. There was total silence as the adults waited for something to happen. It was a little spooky that first time when, from where I was watching from the kitchen, the ouija began to move.

“Sorry, I think that’s a no,” Mrs. Wilhelm said, in her brassy voice.

It got silly after that, people trying to coax Eleanor Roosevelt from the spirit world and asking questions like at what age they’d become a millionaire and if they’d get lucky that night, which I figured from the way the adults all reacted had something to do with sex. They’d all had a lot to drink. I kept waiting for my father to say something silly himself. He loved parties, this type of situation was usually right up his alley. But when his turn came on the ouija board he let someone else ask the question. He also seemed to me to be more sober than he usually was at this point in a party. 

The ouija board fun only lasted a half hour or so, and then the adults began to drift off, and the party went back to becoming a regular party. But as soon as the last adult left, a few of the kids ran in and took seats around the ouija board. They kept the lights turned out, and began acting just like the adults, trying to contact spirits and ask questions. They didn’t know what they were doing, though. They didn’t realize you were supposed to let the spirits move the ouija, so they were pushing it around themselves as they asked stupid questions about whether they’d get their favorite toys. They were laughing, having a good time.

I stepped back into the shadows, just on the threshold of the kitchen. No one could see me from where I was standing. I could still hear the kids in the living giggling, moving the pointer all over the board, calling out the letters in their little kid voices. “Whooo,” I whispered into the dark.

They all got really quiet. “What was that?” one of them said.

“Whoo,” I repeated.

“It’s nothing,” one of the slightly-older girls said. “Whoever’s doing that, stop. It’s not funny.”

I did it again, lower this time, more menacingly.

One of the little kids started crying. “Stop it,” the same older girl said. But it wasn’t anger I was hearing in her voice anymore. “Just stop it.”

“Whoooo,” I said.

15. Jersey Shore #1

For summer vacations, we went to the Jersey shore. We usually stayed in Lavallette, near Seaside Heights. Seaside Heights was where the boardwalk was, with all the rides and games of skills and chance. Lavalette was quieter, really just a string of rental places and motels. There was an awesome beach, though, with great body-surfing waves and enough ice cream places to keep me happy.

Every year we did the same thing: packed up the car on a Saturday morning and made the 2 1/2 hour drive to the shore, then drove around looking for a place to stay. My parents never made any arrangements in advance and never stayed at the same place twice. My father had a theory that he got the best bargains by doing it this way.

We usually had good luck, and found a place and got down to the beach in time for a late-afternoon swim, but this year it was impossible. They were predicting a great weather week—it was in the nineties on this Saturday—and it seemed like everyone had chosen to go on vacation at once. Each time we saw a “To Let” sign, we’d stop at the curb and my mother would go ring on the doorbell. Sometimes they invited her in; mostly she just had a conversation at the door. Then she’d walk back to the car shaking her head.

We must have gone to twenty places. At about the fifteenth I made a joke to my brother about changing all the “To Let” signs to “Toilet” and my father turned around and glared at me. I hadn’t even been talking to him. My mother started talking about maybe turning around and going home and trying again next week, to which my father said something about it not being that easy to just change his vacation from one week to another, he had appointments and customers.

It was getting late. We needed a break so we went to dinner at a hamburger place. My father asked for a table near a window so he could keep an eye on our car, which was still packed up with all our stuff. It was a tense dinner, not much conversation, but at least the place was air conditioned.

“We’ll try until 7:00,” my father said, as we finished up. “If we can’t find something by 7, we’re going to have to drive back.”

It felt like a miracle. The first place we stopped after dinner, my mother came back to the car, so excited. “It’s an older lady. She says she has a basement apartment we can have, two bedrooms, 500 dollars for the week. Do you want to look at it first, or should we grab it?”

It was clear from my mother’s voice which she wanted to do. “That’s a little more than we wanted to spend,” my father said, but we all knew he was going to say yes.

It was a very cool place, probably the coolest place we’d ever stayed. Usually the apartments were so small you couldn’t walk across a room without bumping into things. This place was spacious, and the bedroom I had to share with Jeffrey had two beds. Usually, we had to sleep in the same bed, which I never liked although Jeffrey should have been the one to complain since I was famously a restless sleeper who kicked and clawed his way through the night.

Plus it was in the basement, windowless, which my mother didn’t like but I thought was excellent, like we were in a boat or something.

The weather cooperated. We spent our first few days on the beach and then at nighttime went out to eat and to the boardwalk in Seaside Heights. My mother and father many times remarked to each other what a find this apartment was, and how it had been worth it to spend a little extra.

Tuesday afternoon was when it all fell apart. At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on. We’d come back from the beach, and my brother and I were outside, washing off in the outdoor shower, when we heard arguing. I at first thought it was my mother and father arguing, but it turned out to be my father and the landlady, whose name was Mrs. Fontana.

We hadn’t seen much of Mrs. Fontana during our time in the apartment. We’d been trotted out to her apartment on Sunday evening, just to be polite. She was a small-ish Italian woman, with a tight nest of gray hair and a strong accent. Her apartment was a grandmother apartment, totally different than what you’d expect to see at the seashore. There was big yellow plaid and dark wood furniture and glass shelves holding pictures and religious items. She had a lot of religious items: crosses, pictures of Jesus, pictures of Mary. Right above her television set there was a poster with the Lord’s Prayer on it written in fancy writing.

“Look at you two sweetnessess,” she said to me and my brother as we stood in her living room. Then she gave us each a hard candy.

When we heard the arguing, my brother and I toweled off and ran inside. My mother was on the couch, crying. “What’s going on, Mom?” I asked.

“We have to leave,” she said. “Mrs. Fontana says we have to leave.”

I never got the full story. My mother was too upset, and my father too angry, to ever tell it completely. But what seemed to have happened was that Mrs. Fontana told my mother she’d “forgotten” she had some other people scheduled for the basement apartment for the next afternoon, and that we would have to leave by tomorrow morning.

My mother and father were convinced she’d tricked us: given us the room knowing full well these other people were coming, because it allowed her to get us to pay for an extra few days the room would have been vacant. She knew we never would have rented if we’d known we couldn’t have the place for the full week. It was why she’d never given us a rental agreement to sign, why she’d only asked for half the rental fee, saying we could pay the rest at the end of the week. My mother and father had trusted her, thinking she was a nice old lady.

My father came back from arguing with Mrs. Fontana and we went to dinner. It was even more tense than the dinner the Saturday before. I could see this was all eating at my father, like he felt he should have known something like this was going to happen, like he should have been able to give his family a nice week-long vacation.

I think my mother probably felt like he shouldn’t have let it happen, too. She was giving him the cold shoulder, providing one-word answers to his questions.

“Should we go to Seaside for our one last night?” my father asked at the end of dinner.

“We can’t, Jack,” my mother said with an exasperated sigh. “I have to pack everything up. It’s all all over the place.”

The next day was again gorgeous, but instead of body surfing in the waves we were dragging our stuff out to the car. We should have been grateful we’d had a few nice vacation days, but none of us was. We were all angry and resentful and feeling like we’d been gypped out of our vacation.

Mrs. Fontana came out. My father didn’t acknowledge her.

“I’m sorry, I really didn’t know…” she said.

“You knew,” my father said. “You knew. I hope it makes you happy, to have ruined this family’s vacation just so you could make a few dollars. To have robbed these kids of their vacation.”

Mrs. Fontana seemed hurt by the charge. “No, I didn’t mean to ruin the vacation. It was the book, I just hadn’t written it down in the book. It was an accident…”

“This was no accident,” my father said his most vicious voice. “God will punish you, Mrs. Fontana. God will punish you.”

We drove most of the trip back in silence. But then my mother turned to my father and said, “You got her, you know.”

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

“When you said God would punish her. I was watching her face. It just collapsed.”

My father smiled in spite of himself. “Really?”

My mother smiled back at him, a big airy smile. “It was the perfect thing to say.”

I watched all this from the back seat. My parents rarely talked to each other like this in front of my brother and me. They never smiled like that at each other. It made me feel kind of weird.

14. Car Crashes

The first time, we didn’t even hear it. There was a ring at the doorbell, after dinner. No one ever rang the doorbell after dark. My father went to the door in his pajamas and bathrobe. He used to wear these almost sheer pajamas around the house and a graying terrycloth bathrobe. I was embarrassed he’d answer the door like that.

It was Mr. Zilwich from across the street. “Jack,” he began. My brother and I were pressed against the railings at the top of the steps. My mother was still on the couch, reading a newspaper. “Jack, I hit your car. Backing out of my driveway.”

Sometimes my father parked on the street instead of the driveway, if my mother was going to be leaving early the next morning to go somewhere.

“Really?” my father asked.

“Yes. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t even see your car there. I’m sorry. I can’t even tell if I did much damage.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

My father got a flashlight. It was low on batteries, but there was still some light in it. We went out and looked at the car. It wasn’t so bad. But there was a dent.

It was all of us, me, my brother, Mr. Zilwich, my father. Staring at the side of the car.

“How did this happen again?” my father asked. It was like he couldn’t believe it was true. Like he thought it was going to be some sort of Candid Camera trick.

“I was just backing down the driveway.”

“You’ve seen my car there before, haven’t you?”

“I have. There’s no excuse for it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can give you all the insurance information.”

He did give it to us. But my father never used it. He drove around with that dent in the car until we sold it.

Mr. Zilwich avoided us after that. My father always gave him a big hello, but he wanted nothing to do with us. It was like he held a grudge against us for his own carelessness.

“Idiot Zilwich is mowing the lawn,” my mother would say, looking out the window. “Run for cover.”
At least we go some laughs out of it.

The second time, I was the one who heard it. This was a few years later. The car was parked in the same place, in front of our house at the curb, though it was a different car.

The crash was loud. I rushed up to look out my window. The car that had hit our car was backing up, driving up.

“Someone hit your car,” I yelled, running out of my room. “They’re taking off. They’re getting away.”
My father was half-asleep watching a baseball game. But he snapped his eyes open and started feeling around for the socks and shoes he’d thrown off at the foot of the couch. He didn’t even hesitate, just ran out the door and jumped into my mother’s car and took off in pursuit.

My brother and I waited there. My mother was already asleep. “Do you think he’ll catch them?” my brother asked.

“No way,” I said. “They were going about a hundred. They’re probably in the next state by now.”

My father returned about fifteen minutes later. My brother and I were excited. “What happened? Did you get them?”

“It was Kevin Reich,” my father said. “Can you believe that? Kevin Reich. He hits our car and then drives away. Doesn’t even have the courage to face us, after as long as we’d know him.”

It really upset him. He had one beer, and then another. I could see how angry it had made him. How helpless it made him feel.

I went to bed. I didn’t want to be around when he started drinking the third beer. I thought about how he’d just jumped up like that and ran out the door the instant I said our car had been hit. Protecting us. Believing me.

13. Traps

Though Lou lived on our block and was in my grade, I never had much to do with him until the summer his father moved out. Lou told me about it himself. I was out riding my bike around the block, doing the whole circle. Our block wasn’t that big but I seldom went to the other side of circle. All my friends lived on my side. Plus there was a big hill you had to climb to get to the other side. I could never make it all the way up the hill and had to stop and walk my bike, which I hated doing in case any older kids saw. But this day was June and sunny and school had let out the week before and the whole summer was stretching out in front of me and I just felt like taking a trip around the block, seeing what was going on around there.
Lou was standing on the lawn in front of his house. As I pedalled by I noticed he had some sort of weird machines laid out in front of him, two or three of them. I stopped, put up the kickstand on my bike. I stood by the side of the curb watching.

He must have noticed me, but he didn’t say anything.

“What are those?” I called out.

“Traps,” he said.

“What kind of traps?”

“For animals. You put them out in the woods and you can trap animals with them. Raccoons or squirrels.”

“Why would you want to trap a squirrel?”

“For its fur. Or to eat.”

“You can’t eat a squirrel.”

“Can. My father made me eat one once.”

“How did it taste?”

“Horrible. I cried and then I threw up.” Lou took a step back from the trap and grabbed a stick from in the hedges. “Watch this.” He poked the stick into the trap, and it snapped shut with a clang that made me jump.

“That’s dangerous,” I said.

“Dangerous for the squirrel. The only problem is, sometimes even if the squirrel gets caught in the trap, it chews off its own leg to escape. Can you imagine that, chewing off your own leg?”

“You shouldn’t be playing with those. Does your father know you’re playing with those?”

“They’re his. But he’s gone.”

“Gone at work?”

“No, gone. He left. He had some things to work out.”

“He told you that?”

“My Mom told me.”

“He’s coming back, though. He’ll find out you’ve been using his traps when he comes back.”

“My Mom’s not sure if he’s coming back. He may never use them again. Why shouldn’t I use them, if he’s not going to?”

Lou didn’t use them, though. He just played with them with them on the front lawn. I went by a few more times, over the next few weeks, in the afternoon after lunch if none of my real friends were around, and Lou would usually be out there on the lawn with his traps, setting them and then snapping them with a stick. One time he had another kind of instrument, like a square made of wires, that he said you used to dry out the skin of the squirrel. “Your father really did that?”

“All the time,” Lou said. “He used to put them right out there in the backyard in the sun, until my mother told him she didn’t want to see them anymore.”

“What did he do then?”

“He put up a tarp over the clothesline, and hid them behind it.”

“Does he come back at all?”

“No. My mother talks to him on the phone though.”

“Do you talk to him on the phone?”

“I guess. But I don’t like the phone much. I never know what to say.”

“You could tell him you’re using his traps.”

“No, I couldn’t. He’d kill me.”

I looked at the gleaming steel trap, imagined a squirrel getting its neck broken. “Have you ever put one of these traps out? Like in the woods?”

“No. We don’t have woods here.”

That was another reason why our side of the block was the more interesting side. The houses on our side had woods beyond the backyards. Up here, it was all cleared out. The only thing beyond the backyards was another development.

“You could bring them to the woods down near my house.”

Lou shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to.”

Lou and I hung out on and off for the next month. Always just the two of us, never together with my real friends. If there was nobody around I’d drive up there on my bike and see if he was home. I had this idea that one day I’d ring the doorbell and his father would answer but it was always his mother. She was a tired-looking lady with black hair and dark skin who, as soon as she saw me, would yell out, “Lou!” She never asked me my name or invited me in.

Lou wasn’t into sports or bike riding or exploring the woods. Most of the time we fooled around with his traps, or if we got bored with that played checkers or Stratego on the front stoop of his house. Lou often beat me at these games, but it didn’t bother me because I knew he didn’t have many other friends or a father who lived at home.

In late July, my father took us both to the carnival they had every summer out behind the Mombasha Firehouse. There were rides and cotton candy and those great white lightbulbs on poles that felt to me like a celebration. I don’t know why I asked Lou to come with me. My father said I could bring along one friend, and when I said I wanted to ask Lou he’d given me a look like, why that weirdo? But my father didn’t really care, he was just going to go into the firehouse and have a few beers while we wandered around by ourselves.

Lou wasn’t much fun. He didn’t want to go on the scary rides. He said he didn’t like the taste of cotton candy. I tried to convince him that no one did, it was more the cool way it felt as it dissolved in your mouth, but he still wouldn’t take a bite. He did go into the spooky house, but it wasn’t that spooky, just a bunch of mirrors and badly-amplified screams and nothing even jumped out at you, which I’d heard from the older kids sometimes happened in spooky houses.

Then, on the way back to get my father inside the firehouse, Lou stopped at one of the games of skill and chance. It was the one where there were a whole bunch of goldfish in bowls lined up on a table, and you had to throw a ping pong ball. If you got the ball to land in a bowl and you could take home the goldfish. Like most of the games of skill and chance, it was completely rigged. The distance from which you had to throw the ball meant that unless you scored a direct hit into the water the ping pong ball was going to bounce off the glass of the bowl onto the floor. They’d probably figured out a way to make the ping pong balls extra bouncy, too.

“I want to try this,” Lou said.

“Don’t bother. There’s no way to win these games.”

The guy behind the counter—he was a teenager, not a guy, with bad acne around his sideburns that he was trying to cover up with a New York Yankees baseball cap—gave me a look. He knew I was right.

“I just want to,” Lou said, and offered up a five dollar bill.

He threw three balls. Every single one of them went into a goldfish bowl. It was some kind of miracle. I’d never seen anyone else win one of those stupid goldfish, and Lou had won three in a row!

The teenager scooped out the three bowls in which Lou’s balls had landed and placed them on the counter. In each, a bright orange fish swam contentedly back and forth. If you watched them for a few seconds, it almost seemed like they were trying to swim in time with each other.

Lou dug into his pocket and came up with another five dollar bill. “No, sorry,” the teenager said. “Three’s the limit. Come back again tomorrow and try again.”

On the car ride home, Lou carried two of the goldfish bowls and I carried the extra one. I offered to help them bring them into his house, but he said he could manage, which he did by pinching two of them together between his fingers. In the few seconds of light while the car door was open, I saw a look of such pride on his face.

The next afternoon I came by to see the fish. I was going to insist on entering his house, promise I wouldn’t look anything else. I really wanted to see those fish.

I didn’t have to make this promise. Lou had all three goldfish bowls outside, on a shady part of the front stoop.

“These are so cool,” I said. “You should go back again tonight and get some more. I’ll bet I could get my father to drive us again. Wouldn’t that be so cool, to show up again and get some more?”

Lou shook his head. “I don’t want to go back again.”

“That’s okay. Three is good anyway.”

“Actually, I’m going to let these ones go.”

“No way!”

“Yes.  I hate the way they look in their bowls.”

“That’s stupid! They’re just fish! They like being in bowls.”

“Will you take me back in the woods somewhere?”

“Stupid,” I said again, but I did what he asked. I left my bike at his house and we walked down to my side of the block. I was hoping we’d see someone, because if someone else talked about how cool the goldfish looked it might change Lou’s mind. But we didn’t see anyone, and we eventually got to a little stream. Lou crouched down and dumped each one of the bowls in the water.

I wanted to punch him, I was so mad.

“They’re going to die,” I said.

“Maybe not.”

“They’re not made for out in nature. They’re made for bowls. They won’t know how to get food.”

“Then they’ll have to figure it out.”

I looked down at the stream. The fish were already gone. There wasn’t a trace of orange left in the water.

“Your father never would have done this, you know,” I said. “He never would have let these fish go. He would set those traps for real, too. He wouldn’t just play with them on the lawn.”

Lou nodded, almost like he thought he deserved being talked to like that. We didn’t hang out again that summer. By October, he’d moved away.

12. Sleepover at Eric Bobrow’s House

I was often the first friend of the new kid. I was always interested when someone new came into class, and it was like the new kids sensed this interest and sought me out. Sooner or later we would end up talking, and then occasionally hanging out together on the playground during recess. I had my own recess friends, of course, and they didn’t necessarily go out of their way to join me when I was with one of these new kids. But they didn’t give me a hard time about it, either, even if it meant I missed playing our usual games of Kill the Guy with the Ball or baseball with a ball made from lunch-sandwich tinfoil. (We used an open hand for the bat.) They’d just come to expect it of me.

Most of the time these new kids went on to find real friends after a few weeks or months, kids who were more like them, and I went back to my old friends. The one exception was Eric Bobrow, who came to our class near the end of the school year, in April. This in itself was highly unusual and piqued my curiosity: why would someone start a new school so close to the end of the year? What did he think he was going to learn in just six or seven weeks, the last few of which in June everyone knew were just waste time when the teachers did things like have us draw pictures illustrating scenes from our favorite songs, or, worse, showed the movie “The Red Balloon” for the hundredth time? What was so important that this kid’s parents couldn’t wait a few more weeks until they moved?

When I talked to Eric Bobrow, as I true-to-form ended up doing a few days after he arrived, he told me the answer. His father was a high school principal, and was going to be starting a new job in the fall. Not at Monroe-Woodbury, the high school for our town, but at another high school, not too far away. They wanted him to come early so he could spend some time with the principal who was leaving. Eric had begged his parents to let him stay back where they lived in Massachusetts and live with a friend’s family while he finished the school year, but his father said no. His father, Eric told me, said that whatever they did, they did it as a family.

I thought that was kind of cool. I also thought it was cool that Eric’s father was a high school principal. It was one of those jobs you never really thought about real people doing them.

Eric was a sort of nondescript kid, not athletic at all and not so great at school, either. I still ended up spending a lot of time with him at recess. He’d done a lot of traveling, and I thought that was unusual, to be only ten years old and have already been to London and Paris. I’d heard of these places, but I’d never known anyone who’d been to them, not even adults. Eric also knew a lot about the stars and planets, which interested me.

Mostly though what I liked about Eric Bobrow was he didn’t seem to care about anything. It didn’t bother him, being the new kid, it didn’t bother him that he didn’t have much to contribute during class and was totally useless at kickball. I couldn’t really get my mind around it. I cared so much.

My first sleepover was at Eric’s house. I arrived on a Friday just before dinner. My parents said their goodbyes, and I expected to go straight up to Eric’s room, check out his collection of monster magazines or Mads or whatever it was he collected. I just figured he collected something, like we all did.

Instead, his parents immediately made us all sit around the table. Eric had a brother, two years younger. He was there too. There were unlit candles on the table.
“This is called the Shabbat,” Eric’s mother said. “It’s a Jewish ceremony that we do on Friday nights. Jewish, that’s our religion.”

I knew this already. Eric had told me. It was no big deal.

“We’d like you to help light the candles,” Eric’s mother continued. “Would you like to do that?”

“Sure,” I said.

I was nervous. But Eric’s mother helped, struck the long match for me and held my hand steady as I touched the flare up to the candle wick.

I wasn’t crazy about the food, some kind of fish. I didn’t like fish much. But I forced myself to eat it, wanting to be a good guest, wanting to fit in. I did like the bread, which was shiny on the outside, and sweet. Challah, Eric’s mother called it.

Eric’s father was one of those adults who asked a lot of questions. I didn’t have much to say at first, but he kept after me: how did I like school? Which was my best subject? What did my father do for a living? What had my family done at this time last weekend?  I barely had time to chew my food for answering all the questions.

When Eric’s father got bored of asking me questions, he started with riddles and brain teasers. They were very hard, and I couldn’t get any of them, but I didn’t feel that bad because neither could Eric and his brother.

Eric’s mother cleared the table, and I thought I’d finally have a chance to go off alone with Eric but instead we had to sing songs. I wasn’t much for singing, but these Bobrows weren’t embarrassed at all about it, they just sang out around their kitchen table as though they were in the middle of a concert hall.

I would have figured they would sing Jewish songs, but it wasn’t anything like that. They sang songs like “You Are My Sunshine” and “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.” I mostly just mouthed along and tried to smile. There was one song where you yelled “Noah, Noah” after every verse that I enjoyed.

“Okay,” Eric’s father said. “Game time!”

There was checkers, of course, and Chinese checkers, and they taught me a card game called Cribbage and a board game named Facts in Four. Everyone had to play every game against everyone else, we just took turns pairing off. I had always thought I was pretty good at games, and often won on the rare occasions we played games as a family at home, but against the Bobrows I was terrible. The only time I won was when I played against Eric’s little brother.

They didn’t have the TV on as we played, which would have been unheard of in my house. The silence made me uncomfortable. I told myself it was part of the reason I was doing so badly at the games. I couldn’t concentrate without the TV on.

We went up to bed way past my bedtime, at nearly eleven o’clock. I slept on the floor in the sleeping bag I’d brought, right next to Eric’s bed. I was so tired I fell right asleep without saying a word to Eric.

We had barely stumbled downstairs before Eric’s mother decided we should have a breakfast cookout. Eric’s father was already gone, she told us, he had some work to do at his new school. I was glad he wasn’t around, I was too tired to answer any more questions.

"How does that sound to you, Chris?” Eric’s mother asked. “Make a fire in backyard? Have a breakfast cookout?”

“Great,” I said.

It should have been fun, but it was just too strange. Going out on a Saturday morning, making a campfire in your backyard, it didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t what you were supposed to do. Why didn’t Eric’s parents seem able to leave us alone for five minutes? Did Eric really like this attentive a love? Would I, if I was their son?

Then, in the middle of the breakfast cookout, Eric’s mother finally did leave us alone. We had run out of eggs, and she went inside to get some more.

We were all silent, Eric and Eric’s brother and me. I couldn’t think of a thing to say to Eric, although he’d always been easy to talk with while we were at school.

There was a pail of water next to the fire. It had been one of the first things Eric’s mother did when we came outside, fill the pail from the garden hose. “Always best to be safe,” she said.

“You should pour that water on the fire,” I said to Eric’s brother.

“No, don’t,” Eric said. “I’m still hungry. I want to cook some more eggs.”

I ignored him. “Go ahead,” I said to Eric’s brother. “It’ll be fun. There will be sparks.”

So he did it. He did it because I asked him to.

Eric ran to the house, returning minutes later with mother. She looked angry. “Gregg, why did you put out the fire?”

Eric’s brother immediately began crying. “He told me to.” Gregg pointed to me.

“Did you tell him to put out the fire?” Eric’s mother demanded.

“I was just kidding,” I said. “I didn’t think he really would.”

I was lying. Eric’s mother looked like she knew I was lying.

She comforted Gregg. She told him that it wasn’t his fault, Chris had just been teasing, it was okay. She told Eric she would make him some toast inside. Every word made me feel uncomfortable, but it was an uncomfortable I knew, recognized. I’m sure my parents, when they came to pick me up an hour later, must have thought the reason I was so glad to see them was because I’d missed them.

11. Death of the Vampire

It started with a full-page advertisement I happened to see in a Daily News my father brought home. Korvettes was offering a full sound movie-making package for $100. You got a movie camera, you got a microphone, you even got a projector so you could watch what you created. The ad made the package look beautiful: the equipment was black, and came in a case you could take around with you to location shoots.
I saw this ad and immediately started thinking making my own movies. I had begun writing science fiction and horror stories, and there were a couple of those I thought would make excellent films. I could see them in my head, these short films of mine, almost as if they were finished.

“We already have a camera,” my father said, when I asked him to buy this package from Korvettes.

The camera he was about was an old silver thing I remembered from Christmas mornings when I was younger, my father pointing it at us as we gazed over our always too lavish assortment of gifts. We hadn’t used it in a while. We’d fallen out of the habit of making home movies. We didn’t even take that many photographs anymore.

“That camera doesn’t work,” I answered.

“Of course it does.”

“It doesn’t have sound.”

“Start off with that one. If you think you need sound after making a few movies, we can discuss it.”

I tried a few more times to convince him, and even went behind his back to my mother, but she agreed that I should try making a few movies with the camera we had and then maybe we could buy something better.

This surprised me. My mother usually got behind whatever wildly ambitious idea I came up with, especially if it was creative.

It was fine, though. It just made me want to make a better movie. When people found out I’d shot my film using some ancient1950s camera, I told myself, they’d be even more impressed.

The movie I decided to make was a vampire movie. I loved vampires. Dracula was probably my favorite movie of all time: the old Dracula, the one with Bela Lugosi. That whole beginning part, in Dracula’s castle, I watched that every time it was on Creature Feature, reciting along with the dialogue.  “I never drink…wine.”
My movie was called Death of a Vampire. It starts with a title card, describing how the vampire must return each morning to his native soil for rest. There’s a cut to the sun coming up. I managed this effect by making a sun out of cardboard, tying a string to it, and then slowly pulling it up the wall in our living room.

Another title card appears, introducing two vampire hunters brave enough to attempt to rid the world of this evil menace. Cut to: my mother and brother, as the vampire hunters. They are wearing dark clothing, to stay unseen under the cover of night. They creep slowly across the living room, and then recoil in horror at the sight of—the vampire!

Me, of course. Lying on a cot we used when we went camping. Cape, black pants, black shoes, a white shirt. Hair slicked back, white make-up on my face, and from my fangs two trickles of blood. My eyes closed: resting, in my native soil.

It had been a hard decision for me to act in the movie, since I really wanted to be the director. But I couldn’t see either my father or brother as Dracula. I was just so much more right for the part. I’d even already gone around as Dracula the previous Halloween. I made sure my father, behind the camera, knew exactly what I wanted for each shot.

The vampire hunters kneel on the ground and lay out their tools, a wooden stake and a rock. I wasn’t able to find a rock the right size, so they were using a whiffle ball instead. I told my mother and brother to try to put their whole hand around it whenever it was on screen, so it would look more like a rock.

The vampire hunters are preparing to drive the stake through the vampire’s heart when, shockingly, the vampire rises! He licks his lips, tastes the blood on them, looks wildly around for who has disturbed his rest. Spotting the vampire hunters, his eyes sparkle: he will have another feeding tonight.

Fear animates the faces of the vampire hunters as the vampire approaches (I’d coached my mother and brother on portraying fear), but then one vampire hunter produces a cross. The vampire shields his eyes with his cape. The vampire hunters move slowly forward, the cross in front of them. The vampire backs away, until he is once again lying on the cot that serves as his coffin.

One vampire hunter produces the wooden stake, holds it to the chest of the now-prone vampire. Takes the stone and strikes down on the stake, plunging it into the vampire’s heart.

The next effect I’d read about in one of the monster magazines I collected. My father turned off the camera for a moment and I switched the full stake the vampire hunters had begun to strike with the rock to a stake I’d cut in half and painted red at the bottom. When I held it against my chest, it looked like the stake was stuck in my chest. I also put blood all over my white shirt, using a mixture of food coloring and Karo syrup.

Again, I’d gotten the recipe from one of my monster magazines.

The vampire hunters look on in awe as the vampire writhes with pain. Finally, there’s a cut back to the vampire’s grave…but the vampire is gone. Only dust (dirt I’d scraped up from the backyard, and after some pleading with my mother been allowed to bring inside) remains. One final shot of the awed vampire hunters, and then a final title card: “The King of Vampires…Is Dead.”

We had to send the film away to be developed. When it arrived back in the mail about three weeks later, it was torture to wait until my father came home to watch it, as my mother insisted. I thought we’d have to wait even longer, until my father had dinner (my mother, brother, and I ate before he got home), but he said no, no, put it on, he would warm something up later. He seemed as excited as the rest of us.

We had a movie screen somewhere in the attic, but no one wanted to wait for my father to go rummaging up there, so we just set the projector up pointing at one of the living room walls. My father threaded up the movie, and I leaned back on the couch to watch.

Right from the very first scene, I hated it. The title cards I’d created, with my explanation of the vampire’s native soil, were blurry and unreadable. Then, during the shot of the sun coming up, you could see my hand pulling on the string. “Dad,” I said angrily, “why did you do that?”

“I couldn’t tell when I was filming,” he said. “Shhh, I’m watching.”

It got worse. The vampire hunters: they didn’t look like vampire hunters, they looked like my mother and brother in raincoats. You could tell they were walking across the living room, you could see my father’s lounge chair in the background. You could tell the whiffle ball was a whiffle ball. My vampire make-up was pretty good, but the scene where I writhed to my death went on forever, and there were a few spots when I got overexcited and let the half stake lift up from my chest, totally ruining the effect. My mother and brother’s looks of fear and awe at the vampire turning to dust were completely fake.

I couldn’t wait for it to end. I wanted to crawl under the couch, run off to my room and slam the door. I felt embarrassed and angry. Not angry at my father, I knew it wasn’t his fault, although his shaky camerawork didn’t help. More at myself, for letting my expectations get so high, and for failing so miserably.

“Wow,” my father said, when it was over.

“Rewind,” my brother said. “I want to watch it again.”

“That was excellent, Chris,” my mother said. “That scene where the vampire jumps up, that was very scary.”
I thought they were just humoring me, trying to keep me from feeling bad. But as they watched it another time, and then another after that, it became clear they weren’t trying to make me feel better. They really did love it. They were getting a kick out of seeing themselves on screen, that was part of it. But they were also impressed.

 “I wonder if that sale at Korvettes is still going on,” my father said, as the movie was rewinding after the third showing.

I wanted to accept their praise with a smile, point to myself and laugh, like my mother and brother were doing. They were all enjoying this so much, and I wanted to enjoy it too. I couldn’t, though. How, I kept thinking, had what ended up on the screen gotten so far from what I’d been seeing in my head?

10. Jill Tierney's Dandruff

Jill Tierney had the worst case of dandruff I’d ever seen and was always asking me what I got on my math test. She was always asking everyone what they got on their math tests. As the teacher passed back the yellow papers with their smeared purple x’s and scribbled grades across the top to our fourth grade class Jill would bounce around the room saying to anyone who crossed her path, “What’d ya get?” “What’d ya get?”

We all knew Jill herself had straight one hundreds, although when asked she’d smile and answer, “I did all right.” She had straight blonde hair and a small mouth through which she’d call the boys “Shitheels” whenever they chased after her at lunchtime and stole her scarf. It was a curse word I’d never heard up until then. The thing about Jill was, she wasn’t just smart, she was popular. I’d watch in wonder as she galloped around the swingset after the boys, watch them slow down so she could catch them, watch her slow down so she wouldn’t.

I knew Jill and I were going to end up boyfriend and girlfriend. I just knew it. To begin with, there was the fact that we were the smartest girl and smartest boy in Mrs. Wortmann’s fourth grade class. My math tests too were straight one hundreds. And there were other signs. For example: when we trooped down in October to get our yearly photos taken, I was put in line behind Jill. The picture came back a few weeks later and there we were, our faces side by side on the bottom of the full class sheet, Jill with her blonde hair (the photos were in black and white, but when I looked at the picture I saw blonde) and me making a squinched face smile. We looked so good there together!

After Christmas break, Mrs. Wortmann rearranged the classroom tables into a boy-girl pattern, and of course put Jill and I side by side. I was still too shy and intimidated to say anything to her. Instead I took every chance to study the side of her face and structure of her inner ear. I found myself fascinated by the white specks of dandruff she’d leave behind on her desk when she went to the bathroom or to talk to our teacher Mrs. Wortmann during free times. I’d pick the flakes up on the tips of my finger, crumble them against my thumb.

Jill, I discovered from sitting next to her, left little to chance when it came to those one hundreds of hers. During tests she’d drop her pencil, dip to get it, and then on her way up lift the top of her desk. After a glance at her notes she’d return to furious writing. She caught me catching her at this one time, but her reaction wasn’t what I expected. “Pretty good, huh?” she asked. “Wortmann is so busy making sure nobody else cheats she never even bothers to look at us.”

Another time during a math test Mrs. Wortmann turned her back to us and Jill started jabbing into my arm with one of the gray number 2 pencils she always wrote with. (Her father worked for IBM and brought the pencils home for her.) When I looked up she started gesturing frantically at me to move my arm. She either wanted to look at my answers or copy them outright, I wasn’t sure. I gave her a serious look—I knew this wasn’t right, and besides, Mrs. Wortmann could turn around at any moment, she had to be more careful—but she smiled a tight smile (the most her lips would allow) and I melted. I moved not just my arm but my whole chair, so Jill could look on as much as she wanted, and continued to do the same for every test we had after that.

For the Valentine’s Party, I volunteered to bring in cupcakes. Usually I did something easy, napkins or paper cups, but Jill had already said she was bringing in cupcakes and I loved the way our names looked up there together on the blackboard, “Patty and Chris” underneath “Cupcakes.” But then I forgot to tell my mother about volunteering, and didn’t remember until eight o’clock of the night before the party. We had no batter, no icing, and I was near tears thinking about coming into class the next day without what I’d signed up for. So my mother grumbled and improvised and managed to make a batch of from-scratch cupcakes.

I appreciated the effort, but the cupcakes were not good. The icing was sugar and water with red food coloring, only not enough red food coloring, so they looked more pink. The insides were a grainy yellow. I brought the eleven of them that looked the best in a shoebox I placed next to the twine-wrapped cake boxes that held Jill’s two dozen cupcakes. Jill’s were devil’s food, with real red icing into which those Valentine heart candies had been pressed. “Be Mine.” “Sweetheart.”

People passed right over my cupcakes and went straight for Jill’s. I knew they were all laughing at me. If someone did take a cupcake of mine, they’d have one bite and put it down on a windowsill.

I knew it wasn’t Jill’s fault, exactly, but I couldn’t stop feeling like she had tried to show me up on purpose.

When Mrs. Wortmann put on our favorite record—“Rockin’ Robin”—and all the boys in the class went up to the front of the room to sing along, I sulked in back. No amount of Hi-C could cheer me up. In this nothing-left-to-lose frame of mind, I decided to accept my fate.

I cornered Jill near the food table, where she was throwing away her empty cupcake boxes. “Looks like you’re going to have to drag those home with you,” she said, pointing to the pathetic contents of my shoebox.

I nodded, took a deep breath. “Hey, Jill. Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”

She flipped her hair, considered it, perhaps weighed my lack of popularity against all the math test answers this would guarantee. “Nah, I don’t think so,” she finally said.

I grabbed one of my own cupcakes and dug in. They didn’t taste that bad. “Oh yeah?” I said. “Good.”