Folded in quarters.

In tenth grade I shared an English class with Wallace, kind of a loud, arty dreamboat. He was smart and ambitious. He wore heavy black boots and tight white band T-shirts and kept his hair shaved close.

He had a coterie of girls: artistic, scarily thin, smoking cigarettes. They were appealing women
but not a popular crowd, per se. They were distant and self-contained; appealing for their distance, like mannequins with poetry journals.

Wallace had ideas and opinions and was literate. I wasn't those things, though I had a lot of loud opinions. I read popular nonfiction and watched a lot of television. Newspapers held my interest more than class, and more often than not I had a section of newspaper folded into quarters underneath my textbooks.

And one day, Wallace called me out. I had said something, or disagreed with something he had said, or made some sort of asinine joke at our teacher's expense. As near as I can remember, he said: 

"Your opinion would mean more if you put the damn newspaper away and had actually read the book."

And he was right. He's now a successful fiction writer. He also has led, I gather, quite the adventurous life.