Land Of The Blind

1

Nobody emerges whole from childhood. I know this. And I don't pretend to think that the shattering of my left eye that day on the south bank of the Spokane River was in some way unique or was an unfair burden, that it put my suffering on a par with the suffering of someone like Eli Boyle. Truth is, I have got along fine with one eye. I can't say that it was a help in my run for the Fifth District congressional seat, or that I would knowingly choose the patches and glass eyes and dark sunglasses that I have worn since childhood, or that I have gone more than a day without shifting my gaze to the floor in the presence of the binocular, ever conscious of the fact that I am incapable of that most basic human communication – looking deep and straight in someone's eyes.

But except for the external nature of my scars, I don't imagine myself different from any other adult, limping and scuffling and scurrying along with all manner of insecurities and fears and defects, the results of bad parentage and low self-esteem, of being unprepared and unprotected in a world that seems on its surface so inviting and safe. The world is not safe. I need only continue the story of Eli Boyle's life to prove that.

But I am afraid I won't be able to offer a full accounting of Eli's indignities, for instance during our junior high years – the classroom-clearing farts, the daily capture and rolling of boogers between his fingers, the untold humiliations dreamed up by his classmates. There is simply not time.

So, Detective, in the event that I am unable to finish this statement, this story of Eli's life and death, which is also in some small way, I realize, the story of my own life and death (and the string of failures that connects them), then at least I can offer some proof of fidelity to you, to this arrangement you have made with me, to the comfort and understanding of your two eyes.

To you, Caroline, I offer this:

I did it.

I killed Eli Boyle.

If such a statement is all the court wants, then I am happy to no longer be an officer of that temple of disasters. And if such a confession is all that is required for deeper forgiveness, well… I don't look forward to the lines in heaven.

I took my friend's life, metaphorically and unintentionally when we were young, and then, two days ago, I ended it literally and with malice. And forever. And yet that is not the only crime I have to confess, and it is certainly not the most heinous, and if you think Eli Boyle is the only victim of my greed and anger, then you underestimate the heart's potential for darkness.

You told me this process usually begins with a body.

You may find Eli's at a house at the west end of Cliff Drive, not in the main house, empty and cold, with its Gatsby staircase and deco chandeliers, but in the small, dank apartment above the garage out back. He is lying on the floor, in a lake of his own blood. He is on his left side, with his left arm behind him and his right against his head, as if something important has just occurred to him. There is a long black hole in his head, from his jaw to his scalp. I put the hole there.

I will forever be haunted by the look on his face in the moments before the horrible event played itself out. I saw that look once before, a look of surrender, of disbelief, a look that asks how life can keep getting worse – a look I first saw on Eli Boyle's face twenty years ago, during a moment that now seems like the first step toward his death, the first blow.

We were in high school. (I skip the horror of junior high with the request that you pause a moment to calculate your own adolescent social pain, multiply it by a thousand, and figure that you are still well short of Eli Boyle's.)

We arrived the way every kid. has ever arrived in high school, taller but no smarter than our elementary selves, swimming in self-consciousness, wishing at once to be universally loved and left alone. I had been fitted for my first glass eye, and hated the way it sat unmoving and creepy in its drooped socket, staring straight ahead while my other eye bounded like a puppy from corner to corner of my skull. I will share a few of my old nicknames, skipping over such obvious names as Cyclops and Patch and Cap'n Hook, names insulting only in their lack of imagination. My favorite – Dead Eye – worked on two levels, in that case to describe both my injury and my free-throw shooting accuracy in basketball. I appreciated Ol' One Ball for its suggestiveness, McGoo for its canny reference to the old goggle-eyed cartoon character, Eye-nstein for its nod to my high grade point average, Glass for its jazzy simplicity, Lefty for its ironic coolness, and Lighthouse for its clean imagery.

As I said, I smoked pot nearly every day in junior high school, but then quit suddenly before my sophomore year of high school. Two things happened that summer: My former friend and supplier Everson moved to Sacramento, and I woke up one morning six feet tall and 175 pounds. With the sudden physical change I decided, the way teenagers decide, that from that moment on I wasn't who I had been. I was now an athlete, in spite of the lung damage caused by three years of pot smoking and the even more daunting disadvantage that I couldn't see a thing out of the left side of my head.

Most coaches, it turns out, will make room for the early-developed on the offensive and defensive lines in football and on the bench in basketball, so I managed to make teams and even start a few games and figure in their outcomes. But I doubt that I distinguished myself in anyone's memory of those games – except once. That moment took place during my senior year, against our hated basketball rival in their packed, raucous gym, when the player ahead of me fouled out early in the fourth quarter and the coach sent me in to kill time, hoping that I would do nothing to ruin our chances.

I didn't. Instead I had my best game ever in those six minutes of that fourth quarter, pulling down a couple of rebounds, hitting a jump shot and two free throws, until we had managed to tie the score with about a minute left, at which point our team got a steal and we began to run up the court for a three-on-one fast break. I had duly filled the left wing and was sprinting toward our basket, looking to the point guard in the center of the court, playing out all sorts of athletic fantasies in my mind, when I strayed slightly out of bounds, bearing down on a cheerleader for the opposing team who was just then kicking up one leg on my vast blindside. There was a gasp and a clap of thunder. I hit her square, with the whole left side of my body. They found her three rows deep, unconscious and bleeding from her nose. The referees blew their whistles and met at center court to see if I could be whistled for a foul for killing a cheerleader. The game stopped, the fans threw programs and Coke cans, and the coach pulled me out for my own safety. We lost by six points. The poor cheerleader, I found out from the newspaper story, had a broken collarbone. And I never scored another point in basketball. That experience, with its long rise and sudden fall, as much as I can trace it, describes the arc of my high school life.

For Eli high school was by no means perfect but was at least bearable, a drastic improvement on the earlier grades. He spent four periods in regular classes and two periods a day in special ed, and he began to outgrow a few of his afflictions, leaving his leg braces and corrective shoes behind. As we got older most of the bullies and dickheads dropped out or were arrested or they spent their days so stoned that they couldn't muster much antagonism, even toward a shit magnet like Eli Boyle. We eventually caught Matt Woodbridge in eighth grade, and left him there when we moved on to ninth. For all I know he's still in eighth grade, forty years old, firing spitwads, looking up "fornication" in the library dictionary, and demanding to fight some kid at lunch. Pete Decker turned out to be too small and skinny to be an effective bully once the rest of us hit puberty. He and I never spoke about what he did to my eye. In fact, we rarely saw each other after that except for the few occasions I saw him walking in the neighborhood and found myself amazed at how small he'd become. He'd ask about some sport I was playing, or which girl I was going out with, and then we'd go our separate ways. He became less and less real to me, and I can't even say that I hated him. It was more like I stopped believing in him. I never had any sort of confrontation with Pete; none of the kids he terrorized ever came back to wreak Hollywood vengeance. Pete just stopped coming to school and eventually faded away, into the big willow tree, into the bad dreams of children.

With the slow extinction of our classic bullies, Eli's torture in high school came from a less dangerous but far more insidious place: the culture of boys and girls and make-out parties, of dances and football games, of going out and going steady and going all the way, of the complex system of bases – first and second and third – a world ruled by sex in which few of the inhabitants were actually having it, but all of us were always daydreaming and working toward it, hoping that something we did or said would lead us to a beanbag chair with a girl in it beneath a black light, fumbling around, hands down tight pants, desperately trying to figure out what to do with the stuff we found in there.

Eli, obviously, was not getting much stuff.

On his best days in tenth and eleventh grade, he was invisible – ignored or tolerated, safely in place at the bottom of this hierarchy. On his worst days he slipped on ice and his books flew across the lawn, or he sneezed and covered his desk in snot, or he wore a black coat that was two-toned by his abiding dandruff. He had been the target of our mockery for so long that by this time the whole thing was starting to feel like nostalgia, and even with his slow improvement a true Eli moment could still be counted on to elicit waves of laughter.

But not from me.

He had saved my life. So as quietly as I could – my own social status being constructed of such fragile material – I helped Eli. I picked up his books and offered him a Kleenex. I wiped the flakes from his coat. I sort of became his sponsor in those days, and if we both understood that a kid like Eli needed a sponsor to live among the athletes and clean complexioned, we were also careful to adhere to the rules of such a relationship and the rigid caste system that meant we didn't talk much at school.

Did I feel my own stock rising during this time? I can't say. I knew I was striving for that thing we called popularity, and I doubt there was a more aggressive and eager-to-please teenager than me. I sought out the best parties and most popular girls and joined and followed and dressed and hung out and made out as if my life depended on it, as if redemption lay in becoming homecoming king. I joined every club and ran for office in every club I joined. I've heard (secondhand, actually, from a mental-health professional by way of my angry ex-wife) that my desire to belong comes from a deep sense of personal fraud – the feeling that I don't fit in – a situation I fought by joining more groups that I didn't fit, thus increasing my feelings of fraud and pushing me to join more groups, causing more fraud, and on and on until I found myself president of both the French and Spanish clubs, without speaking a word of either.

In the same way, I dated dozens of girls, not really because I liked them, but just to see if they actually would date me. I ascended a sort of social ladder, finding that if Anita Wallace would go out with me, then it was okay for Sheila Kerns and then Wendy Bellig, and as long as I didn't try to skip too many steps, it was only a matter of time before the Amanda Rankins of the world parted their pom-poms for me.

My tireless pandering and joining and self-promotion may have prepared me for my later political life, but it didn't allow much room for Eli or anyone else during high school. And yet the distance between us wasn't entirely my doing. We didn't have a single class together in high school until the beginning of our senior year, when we ended up, implausibly, in the same physical education class, during the last period of the day. It was an experiment in what was then called mainstreaming, working developmentally disabled and other special education students into "normal" classes with their "normal" peers in the slim hope they would someday pass for "normal." And so every day the loopy and infirm and blind and drooling made their way from what was euphemistically called the Resource Room to the gymnasium, because some administrator had decided their usual daily humiliation wasn't enough, and they would be well served to have footballs bounce off their faces, have golf clubs sail out of their hands, crack one another in the shins with floor hockey sticks, while the "normal" kids stood back and laughed.

I still see the terror on Eli's face that first day in class, the terror on all their faces, nine boys who'd been pushed aside and discounted and beaten up and ignored and loathed for as long as they could remember. There were fifty of us senior boys and nine of these special cases, each suffering from some manner of retardation or dwarfism or water on the brain or who knew what else – what afflictions and defects might have caused those lax mouths and blank stares. Eli existed as sort of a bridge between the two worlds. Most of his classes he took with us, but since he was in the Resource Room two periods a day, he was still, undeniably, one of them.

They dressed silently in a separate corner of the locker room, eyes on the floor. A few of my classmates lobbed insults, feeling them out, but it was halfhearted. We all emerged into the gym in the same gray sweat shorts and shirts, us joking and laughing, them staring at the ground. "Pencil! Pencil! No no no!" yelled the kid we called Repeat, who may have had a form of Tourette's before it was called that. "Go home go home go home! Please please!" he screamed as we lined up in front of the first-year PE teacher, a guy in his twenties named Mr. Leggett, who had one of those throbbing veins in his forehead and who looked on his new charges with deeper disdain than any of us felt.

"Gentlemen," he said, "looks like we're gonna have to play a lot of dodgeball."

And we did play dodgeball, or rather an even lower-skill variation called battle ball, in which two teams stood on either side of the gym, against the walls, and simply pelted each other with hard rubber balls. The rules were simple and barbaric: You threw a ball at the other team, and if you hit someone, that person was out of the game and his team had one less member. If you somehow caught a ball thrown at you, then one of the people on your team who had been put out earlier got to come back in. You threw balls at each other until one team was wiped out completely.

We had enough kids for six teams of ten. Mr. Leggett picked five "normal" kids to be captains, and then one of the special ed kids, a stuttering overweight mess of a boy named Hank. The captains picked their teams. Hank picked me first – "Cl-Cl-Cl-Clark." When Hank's second pick came around my friend Tommy Kane from the basketball team was still available and I pointed at Tommy, but Hank picked his own classmate, Louis the dwarf, instead. Then he picked Curty the blind kid, who may have been – my apologies to the other guys in the class – the worst battle ball player in the history of that cruel game. When his next pick came around, Hank took Repeat, and as we stood in the gym I did the math and realized that our team of ten was going to be me and the nine misfits. Eli was the last one taken, and he shuffled over to where our team was wheezing and muttering and smelling and he shrugged at me as if he were sorry that I had to be drawn into his nightmare.

My friends in the class doubled over in laughter to see me on the SpEd team. It could have been my friendship with Eli that got me on with the Special Eddies, or the fact that I was a class officer and therefore well known and approachable to everyone, but more likely it was the fact of my glass eye, which must have seemed familiar to them. I wonder, as a member of the football and basketball teams, as a guy who dated the occasional cheerleader and got A's, but also someone with a prosthetic eye, if I might not have seemed like something they could aspire to: one of them made good.

We divided the gym in half and the teams spread out and began drilling each other with these hard rubber balls. The first game my team lost in four minutes, all nine of my teammates thrown out on the first try, their palsied legs knocked out from under them, their thick glasses knocked off. I let a soft throw hit me in the foot and we were done. Mr. Leggett called us girls.

By the very next game I noticed something odd: even though we were getting killed, Eli loved this game. His face reddened as he concentrated, trying to dodge the balls – he rarely did – but while battle ball was a nightmare for most of the SpEds, it seemed to engage his imagination, like the tug-of-war game from elementary school, and the tanks he drew. It wasn't long before Eli was the best of the infirm and slow.

Even with Eli's improvement we played battle ball all week, and I doubt there was a more complete rout of a squad than ours in the history of war or physical education class. Pop, pop, pop. The balls would slap against the pale skin of the SpEds, and they would trudge over to the side to examine their welts. The real skill in the game wasn't hitting another player with a ball, but catching one of the other team's throws. No one on my team ever caught a ball to allow a teammate back into the game, and in the end there would always be ten grinning, bloodlusting high school kids against me. I'd jump and fall and sidestep until finally I was hit too.

Eli got progressively better, as good as his crooked legs and scoliotic back and twitchy arms would allow, and by week's end he and I stood side by side against the wall, while the rest of our team compared bruises on the sideline.

The worst and most realistic aspect of battle ball was that once your side began to lose, it was nearly impossible to come back. The other side would fling the balls, and if you didn't catch one, they'd bounce off the wall directly behind you and come back to their team, so you not only had fewer men, but your diminished ranks were without ammunition, and you spent the whole time dodging until you inevitably tried to catch a ball and were put out. That was the situation Eli and I faced. All ten balls were on the other side, where all ten of their players were still alive, shifting and stalking in their gray PE shorts and shirts. Their leader was the lanky pitcher on our baseball team, Erskine Davies, the Rommel of battle ball. He paced behind the lines of his team, staring at Eli and me, trying to figure how to get us out while inflicting the most pain and humiliation.

"Chili! Chili! Chili! Corn bread and carrots! Sunrise Jell-O!" yelled Repeat, who, when keyed up, would yell out that day's lunch menu.

And I don't know what it was, but something about standing next to Eli there, against the wall, facing down that firing squad of ten coordinated and binocular kids, led by the cannon-armed Erskine Davies, made me angry, made me want to win. Or at least not lose so badly. "We need to catch one," I said.

Eli looked over at me, a look of inspired and resolute determination on his face. Catching a single ball wouldn't win us the game, of course, but it would accomplish something we hadn't done in a week of battle ball: it would get one of our pathetic teammates back into the game. It would mean progress. And that was something.

The other team stood across from us, ten strong and preternaturally threatening, a cast photo from Lord of the Flies. They smiled and exchanged knowing glances and then Erskine said, "Now!" and they delivered a full throttle, the throwing of all ten balls at once. I ducked, and Erskine's throw hit the wall behind my head like a gunshot. We sidestepped and dropped and rolled, and when the balls had finished careening off the wall and back to their side, Eli and I were still alive. Of course this pissed them off; for the next two minutes they fired indiscriminately, and we dodged every throw.

That's when Erskine whispered to one of his teammates, and then they both smiled like dogs in a gravy parade. Erskine took the kid's ball, stepped forward, and gave us the old up-and-under.

The bastard lofted that ball in the air, as soft and as high as he could, barely over the line to our side. Before I could warn him against it, Eli left our wall and began running toward the gimme. I think of this moment in slow motion – Eli leaving the foxhole while I yelled out, "No-o-o-o!" – but such was Eli's lack of speed and coordination that I may be remembering in real time, the ball sailing up sweetly against the gymnasium lights, Eli clattering out slowly toward it, knees knocking, arms outstretched, black glasses looking straight up.

The other nine boys, of course, were cocked and loaded as Eli ran toward them, his eyes on the ball floating down from the ceiling.

"Eli, wait!" I yelled. But in battle a man's true nature emerges, and I unhappily admit that I did not leave my spot against the wall as my comrade ran bravely to his battle ball death. I suppose, in my defense, that there was nothing I could have done anyway. Eli was a goner as soon as he pulled away from the wall. Even the SpEds on the sideline could see what was going to happen. "Corn dog! Corn dog! Corn dog!" yelled Repeat. "Cottage cheese!"

Eli ran forward until he was only ten feet away from the firing squad, his eyes straight up on that ball in the air. Erskine Davies took a step forward, his back twisted and torqued, the rubber ball behind his head. The other boys followed. And the next thing I remember is a sound like popcorn. Nine hard rubber balls hit Eli in the space of a half second, knocking his legs out from under him, blowing his glasses off, pelting his arms and legs and nuts and lofting him straight into the air and onto his back, his broken glasses skidding to rest a few inches from my feet.

Eli lay on his back on the hard gym floor, eyes bleary, nose bleeding, but still concentrating on that first cruel ball – lofted up as nothing more than a trap, a lure, an insult to his intelligence and coordination falling to the ground beside him, and as an afterthought perhaps, or maybe with his last bit of strength, Eli reached out from his back with one hand and caught it, the ball settling in his hand like a bird in its nest. And while the rules were unclear on what this meant, to catch a ball after being so completely pummeled, we all stood there reverently and the gym – and maybe the whole world – went quiet for a second.

I am not overstating this. Imagine what it takes to turn a whole gymful of high school boys – however briefly – into human beings. This is what happened: the world changed. Nothing less.

And from his back, in this new world he had just then created, Eli Boyle pointed defiantly to the sideline, where Louis had already taken a tiny step onto the court.

"Louis," Eli said. "You're in."

2

The least unhappy, I once read, are those who never attempt what is beyond men. I think this must be true – what else would a failed politician say? – but I also think such an idea assumes the same boundaries for all men.

This is not the case.

So it didn't matter that as soon as Eli stood up that day, another ball took his legs out from under him and he was put out of the game. It didn't matter that as soon as Louis ran into the game, Erskine Davies threw a ball that thwacked against his little shoulder and sent him sprawling. It didn't matter that as I stood against the wall, stupefied by what I'd seen, a hard rubber ball racked my 'nads and my team was officially, brutally, put out of yet another game of battle ball.

It didn't matter because we'd all seen something amazing, seen it with our own eyes, an act of such superhuman coordination and concentration, it would have seemed unlikely in the hands of the great prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale. From a hunkering SpEd like Eli Boyle? It was a fucking miracle.

For days the story was told all over school – by the SpEddies as a kind of fable, the story of what could be accomplished with hard work and faith, and by the rest of the kids as a rich and impossible tale, a Ripley's moment, the world's largest fungus, the beard of bees, the stream of water running up a pipe, the twenty-six-foot-long tapeworm, the man who fellates himself, the dog who flies a Cessna, the turnip with a map of the world on its surface. The mildly retarded kid driven into the air in a game of battle ball, hit by nine balls at once, who still managed to reach out with one hand and catch the tenth.

In spite of everything, children know a miracle when they see one.

And so, if for the SpEds Eli's athletic moment was magically inspiring, for the rest of us – worshipers of entertainment – it was supernaturally funny, so entertaining it became meaningful. Who knew the SpEds could be so much fun! People talked about transferring into the mainstream PE class in the hopes of seeing something similar – Curty the blind kid catching a football, Louis the dwarf dunking.

I think we forget sometimes the halting sameness of high school: each day is like the day before it, six periods of class break in all the same places, lunch at the same table, the same jokes and asides and greetings from all the same kids, the same clothes and songs and dances, and if school is truly preparation for life, it is mostly in this way, gearing us for the rigid schedule, the stifling patterns, the lack of variation that an adult strives for so that he can resent it the rest of his life. How much money do we pay for an education that will allow us to loop our necktie the same way each morning, to be given a regular parking spot to park our BMW every day, to buy a summer home so that even our vacations become routine? We are drilled in this unending sameness in high school, and only the insane and the inspired ever get past it.

But for a moment during my senior year, Eli Boyle introduced an entire high school of jeans-clad lemmings to the world of the insane and the inspired, to the idea of transcendence. And again, if you think I am overstating a fluke play in battle ball, ask yourself what get passed along as miracles these days – weeping statues, brief remissions from cancer, hazy pictures of Jesus on the stumps of trees. How little it takes for people to quit their jobs and move to compounds in Montana and New Mexico, to put on robes and eat macrobiotic foods. How badly do we want a miracle of our own? How much would we like to open the front door and, just once, find God standing there? Or vintage Angie Dickinson?

No, Eli's catch that day was a miracle, plain and simple, and it grew, as miracles are known to, in the days afterward, and with each telling. Eli was knocked unconscious. He had a concussion. He flew fifteen feet in the air and a shard from his broken glasses jutted from his forehead. He rolled twice and caught the ball in his fingertips and then rifled it at the other team. He single-handedly brought the 'tards back.

It wasn't long before Eli's simple break in the monotony sparked an even more compelling and dangerous concept, an idea that came from the only teenage desire even close to our desire for sex: our need to flout authority.

Open rebellion.

The Eli Movement started slowly but spread exponentially. It was based on a simple idea that had never occurred to the school administrators who decided to combine the Special Ed class with ours. The idea was simply this: what if the SpEds won?

Clearly, the administration had decreed that Special Ed kids be mainstreamed "for their own good," so that in the powerful currents of high school normalcy and conformity, their defects and debilitations might be diluted and they would rise to meet the lowest expectations and eventually blend in. It was as if the administration saw these kids as effluents that we could wash away downstream.

But what if it worked the other way? What if we learned from them? What if they – happily slobbering and babbling their way through life – had it dicked, and the rest of us, with our vain anxieties and ambitions, were the fools? What if we not only failed to raise the SpEds to our level of mediocrity and conformity but giddily fell to theirs?

This idea caught on the way everything catches on in high school, first as a goof – one kid allows a Special Ed guy to hit him in battle ball – and then as a kind of fashion. During one battle ball game, our opponents elbowed each other out of the way to try to get hit by a ball thrown by Curty the blind kid. After battle ball we played football and Hank, our captain, picked the same group of misfits and me, and while Mr. Leggett stewed and paced and yelled, our football team rolled to victories over the other teams, whose non-Special Ed members ran the wrong way and fell to the ground and faked spasms and fits and stumbles and crashed into one another as my teammates, Repeat or Curty or Louis or Hank, ran through their lines for touchdown after touchdown. It became an art form, a contest to see who could give up the most points to the SpEds.

My team won the football league and the floor hockey league and we won the basketball championship, and Mr. Leggett fumed until I thought he'd explode. He made other kids captain and still the teams came out the same way, with the freaks and me on one team. He pulled noted athletes like my friend Tommy Kane aside and challenged their pride, but he underestimated the Eli Movement. Tommy, for instance, responded to Mr. Leggett's challenge by playing an entire game in his jock, with his shorts around his ankles. It was wonderful. The Special Ed kids were now the first ones dressed down for class and the last ones to leave, high-fiving and whooping and talking a kind of trash to their non-Special opponents. "Ha-ha-ha! Goulash goulash goulash!"

Everyone seemed to enjoy the new order except Eli, the one who'd inadvertently started it, but who knew it to be just another kind of joke. He stood off to the side, refusing to have any part of these new games and their condescending rules. Eli believed it was wrong to mess with the rules of games, any games. These were sacred to him. In fact, I don't know who liked this new world less, him or Mr. Leggett. I guess Eli would rather have a beating than this condescension. And Mr. Leggett simply wanted beatings.

Word of this extended prank spilled over the banks of our PE class and flooded the school, and for a brief month or two during the fall quarter of high school in 1981 Special Ed kids had an odd social cachet, a sort of mascot cool. Jocks and motorheads and stoners high-fived the SpEds as they walked down the hall (they low-fived Louis), signed Curty up for driver's ed, and relied on Repeat to tell them what we were having for lunch. Girls pretended to swoon when Hank, our captain, thundered down the hall. A few kids even overdid it and began wearing pocket protectors and black-framed glasses and hemming their pants three inches above their shoes.

For just that one moment Special Ed kids were cool. And they ate it up.

All but one. One Saturday afternoon in February, I was sitting in my room listening to the new Styx album when there was a knock on my door. I took off my headphones and found my mom standing at my bedroom door, looking confused. "There's someone at the door for you."

My brother Ben stood in the hallway. He shadowboxed me. "Good luck," he said. "And remember, stick and move. Use your jab."

I walked to the back door and opened it. There stood Eli Boyle, staring at his black shoes. It occurred to me that although he'd saved my life he'd never been to my house, and I hadn't mentioned him to my family since the day of our fight.

"Clark?" he said, and I realized too that he'd never called me by name.

"What is it, Eli?"

He looked up. Then he looked past me into my house, which I'd always thought of as small and modest – a one-story, three-bedroom war-era starter – but which must've seemed lavish compared with his mother's trailer. Eli pushed up his black-framed glasses and looked down at my shoes. "Do you think you could help me?"

3

Dana Brett's rack showed up one day that fall, out of the blue and at least three years late, as if it had been held up somewhere in shipping. By junior high school most of the girls who were going to have breasts had them, but Dana remained petite and girlish and generally uninterested in her own looks. So I lost track of her, as did all of the boys, until her rack just arrived one day our senior year, on picture day as a matter of fact, when Dana stepped out of her brother's car wearing a kind of tube top beneath an open button shirt and, well, I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but… Sweet Jesus. That morning, like all mornings, I stood with some of the other football players in front of our low-slung open-corridor high school, hands in the pockets of our Levi's and our lettermen's coats, trying to effect nonchalance and having as much luck as a pack of ass-sniffing puppies. We joked around and made fun of one another, scoffed at the thin tires on Benny Fennel's Javelin, rolled our eyes at the hood scoop on Eric Oliver's GTO, and fantasized about Robert Muckin's Corvette. But mostly we watched – watched young girls get off the buses, watched older girls arrive in cars, watched the two young female teachers at our school arrive for work. Minds that couldn't retain a bit of Pythagoras or Plato or the periodic table easily held a full accounting of every pair of pants owned by every cute girl in school. "Amanda Rankin is wearing her double buckles," Tommy Kane said, and we all turned, riffling our mental catalogs. Ah yes. The double buckles.

So you can imagine the commotion when on that morning David Brett's passenger side door opened and out stepped two breasts that none of us had ever seen before, attached to his sister Dana.

"Holy shit," said Tommy Kane.

This was, of course, the same Dana Brett I had fallen in grade-school love with, whose boots I had fantasized taking off. Dana was cute in grade school, but physically she'd never moved beyond that. While we began looking for "hot" and "foxy" and "stacked" she remained "cute" through junior high, and by the time we got to high school she hid herself in baggy dresses and jumpers and she fell into that strata of students we simply called brains. Most of the girls who'd exhibited grade-school brains pretended not to have them by high school and skidded into second-skin jeans and T-shirts and feathered Farrah Fawcett hair. But Dana only grew smarter as those other girls' clothes got tighter. She devoured chemistry and psychology and advanced composition and became a valedictorian candidate, all the while staying in jumpers and baggy dresses, so that I never stopped thinking of her as a precocious fifth grader under all that fabric. And since there were so many other girls to date, the Stacy Bogans and Rhonda Parsons of the world, the Mandy Landinghams, girls who looked at us in long takes that seemed to promise some eventual business involving the removal of panties, I didn't think of Dana Brett, except as my old grade-school friend. I spoke with her in class, but in the halls and at games and dances and "events" we existed in different worlds.

Even now, I diminish her by comparing her to the empty pairs of jeans that we pursued, by talking about her sudden breasts as if she were no more than them, but I am only telling the story the way it happened, telling the moronic alongside the miraculous, the mistaken as well as the inevitable. We didn't know it, but Dana Brett was the class of our class then, both beautiful and genius; and yet, because we had no measure for female intelligence and reason, we missed it in the glare of ass-splitting jeans and two-scoop halter tops. We missed the dead-level power of her eyes, which could cut right through a high school boy, size him up, and dismiss him like just another problem. We missed Dana Brett, with her straight A's and her straight hair, her baggy, frumpy jumpers, her pretty, makeupless face, and the plain sketchbook she carried around as a journal, her thoughtful conversations and incisive questions, the sadness that she seemed to own. There are many things I must atone for in this confession, but none hurts more than admitting that I went so long without seeing what was in our midst.

But if Dana Brett was nothing to us before, she was certainly something that day in front of the school-picture day, the day something finally coaxed her from her jumper into a tight shirt and new jeans, the day we saw what had developed beneath those layers of clothing, the day we saw that Dana Brett was not a girl anymore.

"Hot damn," said Tommy Kane. "Who ordered the tit sandwich?"

As she got closer, the other boys fumbled greetings but most of them didn't even know her name and she looked past them, to me, and I admit – here and now – being too stupid to realize that this transformation might be for my benefit.

"Dana," I said simply.

She smiled and said, "Hi, Clark." We all watched her walk into the school.

There aren't many opportunities for change in high school. Your peers know you too well, your habits and tics and weaknesses and strengths, and any variation is called out, pointed out as fraud. There are only two days on which real change is allowed, when a kid can remake himself. The first day of school. And picture day.

That Monday morning was picture day, and so kids sported new haircuts and clothes, entirely concocted visions of themselves. My younger brother Ben, a sophomore, began his two-week smoking phase that very day, wearing a blue blazer and carrying our grandfather's pipe in the breast pocket. "You do realize," he said through gritted teeth, "that these pictures could resurface when we are adults. Nothing wrong with looking sophisticated, Clark old man." I still see his class picture from that year above our mantel, in that blazer, the pipe clenched in his teeth, like a tiny Noel Coward.

The same morning that Ben and Dana remade themselves, amid countless other new hairstyles and clothes, Eli got off his bus and made shallow eye contact with me. I nodded imperceptibly. He wore a pair of my old jeans, a tight, secondhand T-shirt that read THE HONORABLE MAYOR OF FUNKY TOWN, and a pair of my old tennis shoes. His hair was parted down the middle and dried for the first time ever with a blow dryer that we'd bought for him at the flea market in our neighborhood (when we fired it up and leveled it at his forehead, he looked like a comet, all that dead white skin tailing his head). His black-framed glasses had been traded – despite his mother's protests ("Henry aviator lenses favored in sunglass form by navy pilots and the immensely cool California Highway Patrol. He wore an off-white jacket meant to lessen the impact of his dandruff, and about a quart of my father's English Leather, which had proved the amount necessary to mask his various odors. As a finishing touch, I put a rattail comb in his back pocket, tail up.

He didn't exactly look good, not yet, and he certainly didn't look very natural. On him my pants looked stumpy, with their cuffs rolled up, and my expensive Puma tennis shoes pointed in slightly toward each other on his pigeon toes. And while his hair looked better, it was still thin and red and covering a complexion like the surface of the moon. But there was something there, something small and significant, and I think it was this: in one weekend, with one change of clothes and glasses and a small bit of coaching, Eli had managed finally to turn the corner, from one of them to one of us.

But like everything Eli did, his timing couldn't have been worse. He chose to leave them when the Special Ed kids were on the verge of being cool, though that didn't matter to Eli, who could tell condescension from acceptance.

He descended the stairs from his bus and I nodded slightly, as nervous as he was. I moved my shoulders with his every step, mouthing to myself, Good, good, good. "Hey," he said, without making eye contact with any of us, as I'd coached, and a couple of my teammates nodded in spite of themselves. I said nothing.

He walked the way I'd coached, one hand in his pocket, head back a little, ambling – like the "Keep On Truckin'" guy, I advised – as if he had nowhere to be. Just as I'd instructed in my nonchalance lessons, he chewed gum as he walked and kept his eyes half shut, as if he might fall asleep at any time. Luckily he was well past us when he walked into the flagpole in front of the school.

If Dana Brett's newfound shelf had shocked the guys in the front of the school, they were totally unimpressed with Eli's attempt at cool. He walked past us to the school, and it was only Tommy Kane who twisted his face, looked back at Eli and then at me.

"Hey Mason," he said. "Is Boyle wearing your pants?"

In the split second after he spoke, I did the math, factored out where this would go if I confessed to spending my weekend helping Eli dress and walk and comb his hair.

"What?" I looked back at the door he'd just disappeared behind. "What the fuck you talking about, Kane?"

"Those star-back jeans. I got the same pair but yours have two stars. Boyle looked like he was wearing yours. You guys swapping clothes after PE now?"

The other guys turned. But I was ready for this. A one-eyed boy doesn't make it through school without knowing how to deflect mockery.

"You know what I think, Tommy," I said. "I think you're spending a little too much time staring at dudes' asses."

And like that, the crisis was no longer mine. The lettermen laughed – not at my relationship with Eli, but at Tommy's noticing it. Such were my political instincts, even then. But as a politician I knew that I risked making an enemy unless I finished the play and rescued Tommy from the trouble I had caused him, by diverting once more.

"You guys see Dana Brett's rack?" I asked.

Nine heads nodded and woofed and smiled and the morning continued like all mornings did then, only with a couple of small, subtle changes registered in the landscape: Dana Brett had announced her intention to be noticed, to be in play. And Eli Boyle had announced his intention – above all odds and against great obstacles – to fit in.

I was to have a role in both of these events, and of course in that awful moment when those intentions crashed together.

4

I had sex for the first time that fall, if one could call those ten or fifteen seconds of dizzying release sex, in the back of a garaged Jeep Wagoneer, with a collection of soft fleshy parts and irritating conversational tics whose first name was Susan and whose last I will keep to myself (there are legal considerations and, besides, this is my confession, not hers). Despite my short duration and ham-handed performance, it was a great relief to have finally done it, since the other football players saw virginity among our ranks as nothing less than a character flaw and possibly a sign of homosexuality. Of course no one knew I was a virgin, because before any of us actually had sex we had all lied that we had, inventing girls from other schools and friends of cousins and experienced neighbor ladies. I see those studies reporting that 72 percent of high school boys have had sex and only 12 percent of high school girls and I think I know why: the census takers' inability to track the huge population of imaginary female sex partners.

But in Susan I had a real partner, and this changed me in some way. Namely, I wanted more. I liked sex. Liked everything about it. Hoped to get better at it. And so I stayed with Susan for the rest of the school year, even though I couldn't think of a thing we had in common, except our mutual recognition that I needed practice having sex. And so we did, almost daily. We had so much sex in Susan's parents' Wagoneer that I couldn't bear to see her family driving around in it, her brothers and sisters belted into the backseat that we used like a gymnast's apparatus. I still can't see a Jeep Wagoneer on the freeway without becoming aroused, and more than once I have narrowly averted accidents after following a Wagoneer's path too far in my rearview mirror.

As I dated Susan that year I got marginally better at having sex in off-road family vehicles. The entire school, of course, knew that we were together, and knew the instant that we began "doing it." We groped in the hallways and she waited by my car after school and outside the locker room after games and we went to dances – Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins, Christmas, and Sweethearts – and groped outside the gym. We wrote notes and talked on the phone, and people combined our names into one: ClarknSue.

Looking back, I realize now that Dana Brett's rack arrived the very week I had sex with Susan. But at the time, I didn't connect those events, didn't realize that Dana would hear about it, and that she would dress that way not to impress the high school boys, but to impress me, to get me to notice her the way I'd noticed Susan.

And I did notice Dana, but I was so single-minded then – a mad scientist devoted to my work with tall, statuesque Susan, we were like a small Intercourse Research and Development firm – that it never occurred to me to go out with anyone else, especially my old grade-school friend, the eternally presexual, perpetually cute Dana.

For her part, I think Dana must have realized fairly quickly that I wasn't interested, for she was back to wearing baggy jumpers and combing her hair straight. But the rack was out of the bag, and the other football players hounded her for a few weeks, asking her out and offering her rides home, before they eventually gave up. Tommy Kane was especially smitten with Dana, and he asked me about her constantly. I even tried to fix her up with him. But she wasn't interested. So the guys called her frigid and surmised that she was a lesbian, based solely on the evidence that she had laughed when Tommy asked her to climb into the backseat of his Ford Maverick.

"I hate dykes," Tommy said, and in our base stupidity we all agreed. What possible good was there in a woman who wouldn't have sex with us? I would love to say that I didn't participate in these Cro-Magnon conversations, in this emerging male idiocy, but this is, after all, a confession. We bragged about the things we did to our girlfriends, as if they had no part in it. We banged them and humped them and screwed them and nailed them, and if they did anything to us we still took credit ("I got first snub of Eli at the bus stop to the events of… fifty-two hours ago, I offer no excuse except this: I was young and male and I was pretty sure I'd invented sex, just like I invented driving fast and making fun of people and eating french fries.

With all of this attention to sports and student government and, of course, my groundbreaking work in Susan's parents' Wagoneer, I didn't have much to do with Eli, except on those Sunday afternoons when he'd call to make sure the coast was clear and then come by the house so we could work on his appearance. He was plainly disappointed by our progress. He'd been dressing right for two months and nothing had changed. Even though they'd finally broken up our mainstreaming gym class ("They're making a mockery of physical education!" Mr. Leggett testified at the school board meeting), the SpEddies had retained a bit of their mascot cool.

But Eli lost even that measure of popularity. If anything, he was worse off. At least he had been the best of the worst. Now he was the worst of the best. If I were him, I might've choked on the irony.

One Sunday in the late part of winter, we sat on my front porch and watched my sisters skip rope on the sidewalk in front of us. It was probably February or March, one of those days that strobes between warm and cool, the sun flashing in and out of clouds.

"What am I doing wrong?"

"Nothing," I lied. "I don't even know what you mean."

"You know what I mean," he said. "Why isn't it working?"

I looked over at him. Eli was four inches shorter than me, about five feet eight, not too fat or too skinny, and while he still hadn't mastered the blow dryer, his hair didn't look awful anymore. His face was still too wide and his skin was still a problem, all pale and pimply, but it was getting better. Honestly, he didn't look that bad. The problem was deeper: context and history and a collection of problems that went to his core.

"Level with me," he said. "Be tougher on me."

"It's hard," I said. "People have thought of you one way for so long…"

"There are only a few months left in school," he said. "Please…"

I looked at him and saw those same eyes I'd seen on the bus in grade school, searching my face for something he'd missed, some rules that no one had told him. "I'm serious, Clark. I'll do whatever you say. Just please, help me.

"Well, there are other things besides clothes and hair," I said.

He pulled a pencil and pad from his pocket. "What?"

"Well, there are things that probably can't be helped."

"Tell me."

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

"Well, you're a senior and you still ride the bus."

"I don't have a car," he complained.

"I know," I said. "You asked what it was and I'm trying to tell you."

He wrote this on the small piece of paper and said, "Other kids ride the bus."

"Yeah," I admitted. "There are other things."

"Tell me."

"Well." I sighed and looked down the block. "There's… you have a bit of a lisp."

"What elth?"

"That's funny," I said.

"Come on. What else?"

"Well, your hands shake."

He wrote on his paper. "And?"

"You limp when you walk. And you twitch and make funny noises. You still pick your nose too much. And…"

"Slow down." He wrote on his paper. "Okay, what else?" he asked.

"That's it."

"What else?" he asked.

"You smell," said my sister, who had stopped skipping rope.

"Shawna!" I said, and she ran off.

Eli's chin slumped to his chest and he nodded, as if she'd confirmed what he suspected. The problem was that he and his mother didn't have a shower in their trailer, just a tub, and his mother would only let him take baths twice a week ("You'll wash the oils off your body and

So we started the second phase of the Eli reclamation the very next day. I began driving Eli to school an hour early. I used the extra hour to shoot baskets, and since it would have drawn unwelcome attention for Eli to arrive early simply to take a shower at school, he lifted weights for twenty minutes, then showered and dried his hair.

But perceptions don't break easily, and by senior year few people were likely to notice that he smelled better and that his arms and shoulders had begun to develop small buttes and gullies from the weight lifting. He was still Eli. And, in truth, any progress would have been too slow for Eli, who by April saw our impending graduation as the date of his death.

"It's not helping," he said as we sat in my backyard later that spring, throwing chestnuts over my back fence. "Everything is the same. It's never going to change."

"It's not the same," I said. "It's better."

"It's not," he said. "There's gotta be something we can do."

I felt so bad for him I began work immediately on the final stage of the Eli Project. "Let me think about it," I said.

Eli went home and I called Susan and canceled our afternoon of Wagoneer tag. Then I got out the phone book and called Dana Brett at home.

"Clark," she said breathlessly. I had never called her before.

"Dana, are you going to the prom with anyone?"

There was a brief pause. "No," she said.

I drove over to talk to her. She lived in a part of town that had been built on old apple orchards – a nice neighborhood of older houses and newer California splits. I was surprised to find her parents on the front porch when I arrived, smiling. All I knew about them was that they were both community college professors and, according to Dana, somewhat overprotective. Her mother had an Instamatic camera and she demanded to take pictures of Dana and me, leaning us against opposite sides of their porch railing. It was weird but okay with me. They told me to say cheese. I said cheese. Her father shook my hand firmly, clapped my shoulder, and asked where I was planning to go to college.

"Well, I was accepted at the University of Washington," I said. "And then I want to go to law school somewhere."

"Outstanding," he said.

"Thank you," I said.

"Dana was accepted to Stanford," her mother said.

"That's what I heard," I said. "That's really something."

"Mom," Dana said. She rolled her eyes. "Please." Her dad burst out laughing for no reason. It startled me. I had never met such nice parents.

Dana's chestnut hair was pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt. I could see those breasts again, round and straining against her shirt. I wondered why she didn't dress like that more often at school. Dana's mom brought us some lemonade and we walked around to her backyard. Her parents watched us from the kitchen window, their arms around each other's waists.

"Before I start, you can say no if you want to," I began.

Dana laughed. "You don't have to worry about that."

So I launched into the story of Eli and me, our humiliation at the hands of Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge, how Eli had saved me at the bus stop in elementary school, and saved me again the day my eye was shot out, about the moment in battle ball when Eli and I stood side by side and the day a few weeks later when he asked for my help, about my four-month project to rehabilitate him, to clean and clothe and cloak him in high school acceptability. I had told no one about Eli and me, and it felt good getting it off my chest, even if the effect on Dana was a bit confusing.

She listened for a while, smiling, then looked back at her house, then slumped against their swing set. She stared at the ground and nodded as I spoke. I told her about giving Eli my clothes and teaching him to walk and comb his hair, getting rid of his old glasses and practicing what to say to people. I told her how we met sometimes on Sundays and how hard Eli was working.

"That's nice of you," was the only thing she said, and it was so quiet I wasn't sure I'd heard her right. The whole time I talked, she never looked up at me. In retrospect, of course, I see my obtuseness as a kind of cruelty, but at the time I couldn't see past my concern for Eli, and I just kept talking. And talking.

I explained how impatient Eli had become, and how desperate he was to show people that he was more than they thought he was. But time was running out, and he needed something drastic. He needed a girl to notice what everyone else had failed to notice up to that point, someone to break the ice so that the other girls would see it was okay to date him. He needed a pretty girl, I said – Dana Brett put her hand over her mouth – a pretty girl whom the other guys wanted to date. He could ask a girl out on his own, of course, but he couldn't stand the weight of rejection. If the first girl said no to him, then no other girl would be able to say yes, even if she wanted to. He would be a lost cause, a goner.

"Why me?" she asked.

I looked back and saw her parents wave from the kitchen window. I waved back.

"Well," I said, "you're so much smarter than the other girls and, well, you're pretty and, I don't know, I guess I thought you'd understand."

"I do," she said.

"You probably don't remember this," I said. "But when we were kids, and Eli first got transferred into our class, you weren't mean to him."

"I remember," she said.

"So I thought you'd sympathize. And since you and I are friends…"

Finally she looked up at my eyes. "We are," she said, not as a question.

"You can double-date with Susan and me." I hoped she saw that by offering to double-date I was taking as much of a social chance as she was, driving to and from the dance with Eli. But of course that wasn't what she was thinking.

"Okay," Dana said, and she looked at me with down-turned eyes, and she seemed again like the smart, shy little girl from grade school. "Have him ask me. I'll say yes. But don't tell him you talked to me. It'll be better if it doesn't look like a setup."

"Thanks, Dana."

We walked back to the house and her parents came out to greet us, holding hands, her mother holding out a plate of cookies. I took four.

Dana walked right past them into the house. Her mother, seeing something was wrong, turned and watched her go inside. I took another cookie.

Her father was as clueless as I was. He stood there, still beaming at me. "What kind of law?" he asked.

"I'm sorry?"

"You said you're going to study law. I was wondering if you knew what kind?"

"Well," I said between bites of chocolate chip pecan cookies, "I don't know. Maybe contract law at first. But later I want to go into politics."

"Outstanding," said Dana Brett's father.

5

The Davenport Hotel was decked out and lit up for our prom, its once-grand second-floor ballroom littered with folding chairs and covered with green and blue streamers, shimmering paper fish, giant clamshells, and a trident that looked for all the world like a big dinner fork. At the last minute, however, the prom committee (Clark Mason, chairman) had rejected "A Night in Atlantis" as a theme, even though the decorations had already been purchased; and so a sign declaring the scene as BOOGIE WONDERLAND hung behind a foam-rubber faux grotto.

Boys stood around in little circles in their ruffled tuxedo shirts and flopping bow ties, the girls in candy-flavored lip gloss and taffeta dresses. Courage for this event was gathered outside in cars, from water bongs and ceramic pipes, from flasks and sixers. Unmufflered Chevelles and Novas pulled up in front of the grand hotel, windows shaking. Car doors opened and girls with piled hair and tight dresses emerged onto the sidewalk, shuffling feet while their dates went to park the wheels. Two girls who thought it would be "hilarious" to come to the prom in jeans and without dates sat silently in the lobby in big overstuffed chairs, the very portrait of second thoughts, while two guys in tuxedo T-shirts stood next to each other, hoping that their own bad idea could be divided in half. The rest of us strode into the hall in our shiny shoes and store-bought haircuts, parroting antiquated adult behavior, rules handed down from some point deep in the past, utterly pointless rules like the required pinning of small flowers on shuddering lapels ("That's okay," Eli said when Dana told him she'd bought him a boutonniere. "I rented my own testosterone, boys rented rooms and upgraded their wallet rubber supply. Girls, too, had their delusions, their mimicking of wedding rites, their manicures and stylings, their practicing picture smiles in front of bathroom mirrors. The night itself was a letdown for most, but there were minor intrigues – surprise breakups, throw-ups, and feel-ups. But without a doubt, no one drew more attention that night than Eli Boyle and the lovely Dana Brett.

I spent the day with Eli, picking up our tuxes (black for me, white – to hide any rogue flakes of dandruff – for Eli), helping him get dressed, even combing his hair for him. His mother stood behind us in the hallway of their trailer, which I'd never been in before, and which smelled like the clothes of old people.

"Your hair's sticking up on the sides," his mother said.

"It's supposed to do that," Eli said. "It's called feathering.

"It's called sticking up. Those pants are too tight."

"They're supposed to be tight," he said.

"Where are your glasses?"

"I'm wearing contacts."

"Oh, God. Now you're putting shards of glass in your eyes. And your chest and arms are so bloated. Is that from drugs?"

"They're muscles, Mom. From lifting weights."

"Well, it's not healthy. It's bad for your circulation."

I clipped his bow tie and straightened it and helped him into his jacket. I splashed Aqua Velva on his cheeks.

"You smell like a sailor," his mom said.

When he was dressed, she leaned on the back of a chair in their tiny kitchen – there was only room for the two chairs – and took his picture.

"My God, Eli," she said. "You're beautiful. I wish your father…" She turned away and started crying.

I drove. Eli and I picked up Susan, who looked a little too professional, and who didn't talk all the way to Dana's house, maybe for fear of cracking her makeup. At Dana's house, her parents didn't come out onto the porch this time. Eli went to the door and came back with Dana, who wore a silver dress with a deep neckline. She had a wrap pulled around her shoulders and when she shivered a little in the cold, on the way to the car, Eli offered her his coat. She took it and I sighed with relief. Her hair was swooped up on her head and spilled out on her forehead. She looked perfect, like an old movie actress. Susan hadn't been eager to double-date with two people so far removed from her social stratum, and when Dana walked out to my parents' Dodge Colt looking beautiful – and not in my date's makeup and hairspray way – Eli's coat around her shoulders, Susan mumbled something with the word "asshole" in it.

We had dinner at the Mr. Steak at the end of the mall, and at first, I have to admit, I worried about Eli's ability to pull this whole thing off. He sat next to me and echoed my every move, taking off his jacket and unfolding his napkin as I did, shooting glances at me every few seconds to pick up his next cue. He ordered the same food and drink that I did and looked at me for approval every time he spoke, which, in the first twenty minutes, was actually seemed to loosen up and even told a few good jokes at his own expense about grade school ("You probably don't remember me. I was sort of stuck up. Dana, he was polite and stood when she excused herself to go to the bathroom.

By the time our food came, Dana seemed to be having a decent time – at least in comparison to my arctic date, who chewed her thumbnail and stared off into space as we began talking about college. I was looking at state universities. Eli couldn't afford a university, and his grades weren't high enough for a scholarship. He was going to start at community college, he said, build his grades up, and then hopefully transfer to a four-year school.

When Dana admitted she was going to Stanford, Eli's fork fell to his plate. "Wow!" he said. "Stanford. Are you sure?"

Dana smiled at her sirloin. "I'm sure."

Susan excused herself to go to the bathroom.

"Aren't you nervous?" Eli asked.

Dana looked up at him, surprised. "You know, I don't think anyone has asked me that. They just keep telling me how great it is."

"It is great, but that's the first thing that popped into my head," Eli said. "I'd be scared to death. Everyone there must be so smart. And it's so far away."

"She'll do fine," I said, and waved a little plastic cup at the waiter so he'd bring me more sour cream for my baked potato.

Eli leaned back in his chair. "I just keep thinking college is going to be just like high school, but twenty-four hours a day. No escape."

"I don't know," said Dana. "I guess I've been assuming that's when life really gets going. In college."

"Really?" Eli asked. "You think so?"

"God, I hope so," said Dana. "If it doesn't…" She didn't finish.

There was a moment of quiet, and Eli took a deep breath. "I lied," he said to his plate. "My mom inherited some money that she put away for my college. I could probably afford a four-year school, at least in state. It just sounds so scary to me, I figured I should go to community college first. I'm a chicken."

"It's perfectly understandable," Dana said.

Eli laughed a little. "No, it's not," he said. He pounded his fork down into his ribeye and was about to cut it when he stood up, lifted his fork and his steak to his heart, and addressed Dana formally. "I pledge at this very moment, on this cut of meat, to take my two-point-five grade point average and enroll at Harvard."

Eli sat down and rubbed at the steak stain on his white tux as Susan returned from the bathroom, saw that she'd missed something funny, and glared at me. She mouthed that thing with the word "asshole" in it again and then sat down to finish her flank steak.

It's funny. I saw a basketball game on ESPN Classic the other day, a game I'd first seen in 1979, the NCAA championship game between Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores and Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans. At first I was startled to have come across so important a relic of my teenage years, then I was giddy to watch my memories roll across the TV screen, then I was disappointed to see what a flat version it was compared to my mental picture of the game (the players were too slow; the game was a blowout; Bird and Magic rarely guarded each other). I had taken a very ordinary game and made it a seminal moment in basketball and my own development.

And perhaps my sweet memory of the rest of the prom, of Eli's near-total transformation, is a similar trick of mental editing and mythmaking. Because it certainly wasn't perfect. For instance, we hadn't had time for dance lessons, and so Eli's dancing during fast songs resembled nothing so much as a dog trying to escape a leash. The Mr. Steak stain on his tuxedo was quickly joined by punch on his shirt and a slice of cake in his lap and two unidentifiable stains that may have come from Eli himself. He head-butted Dana at one point and nearly chipped her tooth, and his hair eventually lost its feather and fell straight on his head; he looked like a pimply, red-haired Ringo Starr.

But these are minor blemishes on an otherwise sparkling evening. From the moment he and Dana strode in ("Who is kind of box step; while the rest of us just leaned over and hung on our dates' asses, Eli and Dana actually danced) to his anticipating when to pull out her chair, when to get her punch, when to get her wrap, Eli was a gentleman, almost smooth, and I know that I am not imagining this part: more than a few girls found ways to cast looks over at the two of them. I can't say he and Dana clicked, really, but they seemed to have a fine time and I watched as Eli relaxed and began enjoying himself.

It was even his idea, after our regular dance pictures, to have one more taken, together, the four of us. Of course I see now the significance of this moment, not just for Eli, but for Dana and me and even Susan – for whom this was the penultimate indignity, the next-to-last straw, having to be photographed with the likes of Eli Boyle while our classmates stood in a queue. In the photo, Eli and I are standing behind our dates in the photographer's sea-foam grotto, lost in our tuxes, at the last minute our arms thrown over each other's shoulders and our heads dipped in, like war buddies about to ship, our dates standing at an angle in front of us, a cool distance between them, Dana smiling politely, Susan chewing glass. If you saw the picture, you would notice first this wide range of smiles: Dana polite and quite nearly believable, Susan snarling, me wary, and Eli positively buoyant standing next to me. I have a theory about pictures like that; they actually reveal more as time passes, and as the colors fade and the styles die, other things emerge, connections and motivations, and maybe even futures.

When the pictures were finished, Susan and I sneaked up to the room Tommy Kane's parents had rented for him on the ninth floor, where we guzzled TJ. Swan wine (Steppin' Out – the good stuff) and had quick, drunken, distracted sex (my tux pants at my ankles, her gunnysack dress around her neck). The wine made me sluggish and my hands felt like someone else's hands. After all the toil in her parents' Wagoneer, I wasn't as accomplished in an actual bed, and we weren't gone from the dance long.

I apologized all the way down in the elevator, but Susan was fixing herself in the mirror, as angry with me as I'd ever seen her. When we got back to the dance I couldn't see Eli and Dana right away, but then I spotted them over by the grotto. I immediately got nervous. Tommy Kane and his date, Amanda Rankin, were standing across from Eli and Dana; Tommy was too close, and I thought he must've gotten in Eli's face over something. I began to hurry across the room, ready to rescue Eli from trouble, but when I arrived I saw that everything was okay. Better than okay. Tommy was asking about the various stains on Eli's tux, and he was giving them a good-natured tour. They were all laughing. It was as if they were all friends. Eli beamed. Amanda Rankin, who had apparently gotten quite a bit of bottle courage before the prom, steadied herself on Dana's arm. And Dana didn't look unhappy either.

"There you are," said Tommy when he saw me. "Gimme the key. Eli and I are gonna take our sweet dates up to the suite and have a little sweet wine."

"Yeah boy! Fuggin' juice me!" said Amanda Rankin through eyes as uneven as my own. "I need more wine." This was a statement as untrue as any I have ever heard.

Eli looked nervously from Tommy to me and from me to Dana, whose face remained perfectly inscrutable, as if she were miles away.

"Whatever you want to do," Dana said to Eli.

"Great," said Tommy. "Let's go."

"Okay," said Eli, but the look he gave me was one of terror. We hadn't gone over this possibility in our preparation. Drinking? A hotel room? In our wildest dreams, we hadn't come up with this scenario.

"We'll come with you," I said. This was the last straw for Susan, who yanked on my arm.

"I'd like to dance once at my prom," she said through gritted teeth.

"Go dance," said Tommy. "You can't hog the room all night, Mason. Give the rest of us a chance."

So Susan and I danced, a Led Zeppelin slow-fast-slow dance, then a Steve Miller Band guitar shake, followed by some disco instrumental that neither of us managed to catch on the beat. I kept watching the doorway of the ballroom, imagining all the trouble Eli could get into with a bottle of wine and a first-rate fuckball like Tommy Kane.

"Who are you looking for?" Susan asked me.

"Nothing. I'm just… thirsty."

We danced again, to "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song I thought might not end until sophomore year of college. After each song, I turned to leave the dance floor but Susan wouldn't budge, would just begin dancing again. So I'd stay for one more.

"Ready to go upstairs now?" I asked after Cheap Trick's "Surrender."

"No!" Susan said. "I am not."

"Come on. Let's go have a little wine."

"Fuck you, Clark!" Susan said. Then she burst into tears and ran out of the ballroom. A hundred pairs of eyes watched her go and then swung slowly to me, standing alone in this world I had created, this green, underwater Boogie Wonderland.

"Susan!" I ran after her and found her in the lobby, crying on the shoulder of one of the two girls who'd come in jeans and without dates.

"Asshole," said one of the jeans sisters.

"Susan. I'm sorry."

"Why don't you just go back in there?" said the other jeans sister. "Or go see your fucking girlfriend."

"Dana, please. Can I just talk to you?"

Susan's head turned slowly.

"I mean… Susan."

The two girls in jeans stepped back, as if Susan were a radiator about to blow. "I can't believe you just called her Dana," one of them said.

"Come on. I just messed up," I said. "Come on. Can't we talk?"

"You asshole. You fucking asshole."

"Susan…"

"You have been staring at her all night."

"No I haven't."

"Yes you have."

"It's not what you think," I said. "I'm trying to help Eli."

At the same time, all three girls' heads fell to the right, as if I'd just told them a terrible lie.

I could feel the desperation boiling inside, and that and the wine I'd drunk convinced me that I could make these dubious girls understand. "See, when I was a kid we both got picked on, but I grew out of it. Eli never did. I'm trying to help him."

Susan scoffed and turned to walk away.

My desperation bubbled to the surface. "See, our neighborhood was tough and there was this accident…" And I don't know what made me do this, the wine probably, but I reached up and pushed on my eyelid until my prosthetic eye slid from its socket and I held it up to demonstrate… What? How he'd saved my life, maybe. Twenty years later, I can't really say what I hoped to achieve, but it certainly wasn't the result I got.

One of the jeans sisters – who, I later learned, had wolfed a half bottle of peach schnapps – vomited on the faded carpet of the lobby of the Davenport Hotel. The sound of her retching caused Susan to pause in the doorway and look back, at which point she saw: one of the girls in jeans covering her mouth, the other bent over, dumping a sour mixture of peach liqueur and stomach acid on the floor, while her boyfriend stood above them in a tuxedo, waving good-bye with his glass eye. And for just a second, I had the sensation that I could see with the fake eye that I waved around, the whole sad scene – me, the girls in jeans, a crying Susan, a few people lingering in the lobby, and the desk clerk, whose face betrayed nothing, as if such sights were so common here as to be dull.

I realized I could chase Susan and try to repair my own life, or I could go help Eli. It almost seems as if those two choices have been in front of me like this since elementary school, when Pete Decker first forced Eli and me to fight, when I first had the chance to rise above my own smallness and help my friend.

The door closed behind Susan. I put my magic seeing eye into my pocket and turned for the elevator. I'm coming, Eli, I said to myself, and the feel of that collapsed left eyelid reminded me of that day alongside the river, when Eli had rescued me, and I could hear the gurgle of that water and smell the smoking of my eyelashes. I can't say what I felt as I rushed to help Eli, some redemption perhaps, the emerging angels of my better nature.

The elevator stopped on every floor. My classmates got on or off and smacked me on the shoulder, asked why I was winking and said they'd heard that Susan was really mad at me. I ignored them all and got off on the ninth floor. I ran down the hallway. The door to room 916 was closed, and I couldn't hear anything inside. I took a breath, gathered myself, flattened my lapels, and patted down my hair, and then realized that with my left eye in my pocket I wasn't likely to pull off "gathered." I gave up and knocked on the door. I sensed someone looking through the eyehole and then the door opened and there was Eli, his tie removed, his hair a mess, his face ringed in sweat.

"Where have you been?" he whispered. He immediately began pacing.

I stepped inside the room and saw what looked like the results of a fierce battle. Two empty T.J. Swan wine bottles were keeled over on the coffee table. Amanda Rankin was asleep on the big double bed, her dress pulled down to reveal a padded black bra. There was no sign of Tommy or Dana.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I don't know." Eli careened around the room. "We drank a lot of wine… and Tommy turned out the lights and he and Amanda…" He pointed to Amanda Rankin's partially disrobed figure on the bed. "Dana and I just sat here. Amanda must've passed out, because after a minute Tommy turned the lights on and wanted to drink again."

I heard a sound from the bathroom like a sick person moaning. I looked over. The bathroom door was closed.

"Dana had a lot of wine. Tommy's in there with her."

I tried the door. It was locked. I pounded.

"Go away, Boyle," said Tommy. "We'll be out in a minute."

"Stop it," I heard Dana say, muffled, from the other side of the door.

My shoulder hit the door and I was surprised at how easily it opened. I suppose I hadn't hit anything that hard since I nearly killed the cheerleader during the basketball game. Inside, Dana was on her knees, bent over the bathtub, moaning and spitting, having just thrown up. Tommy was standing behind her, trying to pull her dress up.

"Hey, Mason," said Tommy, his eyes drunken slits. He smiled.

I pulled him out of the bathroom and pushed him across the room. He crashed into the bed and fell to the floor. As I stalked toward him, Eli slid past me into the bathroom.

Tommy was laughing. "Come on, Mason. She was giving me the eye, man." He looked at my collapsed lid and smiled. "Oh, sorry."

I pulled him up by his tux shirt and pressed him up against the wall. He pushed me back and I nearly lost my balance. "Come on. She don't like that fuckin' geek." He pushed me again, harder, and I staggered back, against the bed.

I grabbed him by the shirt and flung him across the room, and he knocked the television from its stand. It crashed to the floor next to him. "Jesus, Mason. What the fuck's got into you?"

Just then a key turned, the hotel room door opened, and in came the same desk clerk that I'd seen downstairs. He still had that stony look on his face, the most overwhelming case of boredom I'd ever seen. He looked around the room: One girl passed out on the bed. One boy on the floor next to the TV. The eyeball boy standing in the middle of the room. One girl getting sick in the bathroom. Another boy standing helplessly behind her. Empty wine bottles everywhere.

"Out," he said quietly. "Get out of here before I call the cops."

Tommy pulled himself up. "My dad rented…"

"I don't care if your dad owns the fuckin' hotel, kid." He said it like he was quoting us a price. "Get your things, get your girl, and get out of here."

Tommy walked to the bed. He pulled Amanda's dress back up over her bra and then shot me a glare. He wrestled with Amanda and got her to her feet. "I'm on TV!" Amanda chirped, then she slumped in his arms. Tommy staggered under her weight.

"I'll help," I said, and stepped forward.

"Don't come near me, you fuckin' one-eyed freak," Tommy said.

Eli came out of the bathroom and helped Tommy stand Amanda up. They carried her out of the room and toward the elevator.

"Get the other one and get out of here," said the desk clerk. Then he turned and followed Eli and Tommy and Amanda, who chirped, "What channel is this?"

In the bathroom, Dana had gotten to her feet and wiped her mouth on a towel. She smoothed her dress in back and turned to see me. "That's not very good wine," she said.

She fished around in the medicine cabinet until she found a small tube of toothpaste, put some on her finger, and rubbed it on her teeth.

"I was going to kick him as soon as I finished puking," she said. "But thank you."

"Sure," I said.

"Where's Eli?" she asked.

"Helping Amanda to Tommy's car."

I could hear engines growling and tires squealing on the street below. I checked my watch. It was midnight. The dance was over.

Dana looked out the window at the glittering skyline of Spokane. I've always thought it a strange city that way: a city of illusion, at night its downtown big and sparkling, but during the day small and decaying, with big gaps between the buildings. At night, you can imagine great things here. But daytime in Spokane is cold and real.

Dana reached out and touched the window. "Do you have any idea how many kids like me sit at home on Friday nights and fantasize about this, about what people like you and Susan and Amanda and Tommy are doing? Everything we want is inside rooms like this." She turned and smiled. "It's sad."

She picked up her wrap and draped it over her shoulders.

"Thank you for coming to this dance with Eli," I said. "I think it really meant a lot to him."

She got a faraway look. "You're welcome," she said.

I stepped forward and gave her a small hug and we separated.

"God," she said, and reached up to touch my face. "Your eye."

I don't remember much after that, how we ended up on the floor or when my hand found the neckline of her dress and one of her fine, new breasts, or how long we chewed on each other's tongues and ran our hands over each other's legs and sides and ribs and shoulders. What I do remember is the realization that someone was in the doorway watching us. And I remember being glad we hadn't gotten any further when I looked up from the floor and saw Eli Boyle – saw that look on his face that would remain with me forever, that look I would see again this week on his dead face, his eyes round and helpless, taking in more than they could bear.

I wish I could tell you how we all got there. Or what was said afterward. Honestly, I don't remember much beyond the look on Eli's face. I remember the carpet smelled like wine. I remember that Dana Brett's skin was a revelation. And I remember that it was just after midnight, the beginning of another cold, real day.