Shuttle.

When school was out on holidays, the Chapel Hill YMCA had an all-day program so parents who worked could send their children to the Y rather than hire a babysitter.

On Memorial Day in ninth grade, I met Janeane. It was kismet. We had a sudden bond. We talked about basketball, and books, and our parents, and our friends, and how both of us had hair that turned blonde in the summer and how neither of us really understood why those Coca-Cola rugby shirts were suddenly so popular.

It was a swift and sudden attachment, formed as we rode next to one another in a YMCA van that was picking up and dropping off children, all of whom we ignored in favor of one another's attention.

There were two junior high schools in Chapel Hill at the time, and she went to the one that I did not. We promised to see one another again, in the fall, when school started.

I only ever saw her passing in the hallway. We never spoke again.

Retention.

Gisele lived up the street and around the corner, across the street from where our bus stopped in third and fourth grades. She was a quiet girl with perfect skin and thick brown hair.

She kept her bicycle clean to a degree that was uncommon among the third graders I knew. She had a younger sister who was something of a slob.

She wasn't a strong personality, but we loved visiting her house because her yard was closest to a small creek that snaked its way through our neighborhood, behind some houses and beside others.

We'd spend hours in her creekbed building dams with large, flat rocks. We'd move outward in increasing circles looking for more and more rocks to shore against the dam. Once rocks became too hard to find, or once the daily Florida thunderstorm happened, we'd dry off and come inside and her mother and slobby sister would make cinnamon toast.

I have tried to find Gisele on the internet, but she shares a name with a popular porn actress, making it difficult to pick out information about the real Gisele from the flood of porn Giseles.

Asymmetrical tabby.

You give love, they feel oxytocin or, in this case, epinephrine. FICKLE.

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.

Undying.

My mother has this sign in her house. She finds the sentiment reassuring. I find it vaguely menacing.

Thighs.

I've been fat forever. Only once have I ever lost a significant amount of weight.

I wanted to know what it was like to be desired, to be looked at for more than the half second it takes to see a fat person. So I ate a bowl of shredded wheat each day. I ran about 3 miles a day in the Chicago winter. I lost about 55 pounds in a month and a half or so, maybe two.

It provoked an attack of kidney stones that sent me to the hospital. I put the weight back on within eight months.

I really don't have any memory of people looking at me differently, but I remember being able to run my hands up my thighs and think: These are not offensive.

Minors.

One morning at breakfast in college, Carol breezed into the dining hall, dropped her purse on the floor, put her tray on the table and said:

"Damn if I ever smoke crack again."

Best entrance line ever. She also sometimes said, "I need to fuck En Vogue."

---

Four of us were walking down 57th Street, near the University Club, I think. Esteban, who was Spanish, suddenly doubled over and vomited into a tree planter.

"It's fine. Heroin will do this, you know?"

I didn't.

He also once told about bringing a homeless woman back to his dorm room and smoking crack and having very abusive sex. I didn't like him.