Land Of The Blind

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.