“Ferraro? I thought I heard you back there,” said Pierce Stone, turning around in his seat. “What did you do this summer? Go to that Southern trash beach town?”
Before I could throw out a lie about my trip to Bonaire, a plump woman with hair like golden wheat spouting from volcanic ash began commencement and welcomed us to the middle school. I didn’t really listen to her; I never could just sit and listen when adults discussed boring things you couldn’t write stories about. That’s why I daydreamed so much, especially if I had a window to look out or a pencil and paper on which to draw paladins battling berserkers.
But in middle school I had new muses to clog my brain from absorbing adult borings, and those were the girls.
They were named Jamie, Julie, Jessie, and Jenna—at least half of them were, anyway. They walked in groups of six, ten, eighteen, and wore these tight black pants with the words So Low on the folded-over waists in the back. Glenwood had its own beauties (I’d put Avery Burnham up against any of them), but there was something exotic about this group, like they all belonged on an island in the Caribbean, playing volleyball and splashing in the crystal waves.
But I couldn’t possibly speak to any of them, at least not initiate a conversation.
By the second week of school there were already “hot lists” circling around Mrs. McNulty’s social studies class. “Location, location, location,” she would have us repeat, stressing the importance of civilization thriving on river valleys and sea coasts.
I sat in the back whenever we weren’t assigned seats alphabetically. Not because I thought it was cool or anything banal like that, but because back there I could drift off to worlds that offered more than my own.
As I was deep in a steel-clashing melee with a formidable orc named Grim Bloodhammer, a crumpled-up folded piece of paper slid underneath my sneaker. It was weathered and dirty from being unfolded and refolded repeatedly. I picked it up without searching for its sender and splayed it out on my desk—it was the hot list. Why the sixth-grade magnum opus had been so haphazardly shared from contributor to contributor wasn’t on my mind at that moment. I scanned the list in a frenzy, hoping all the years of aunts and grandmothers telling me how handsome I was weren’t just sweet nothings.
1. Josh Glassman, 2. Mitch Farber, 3. John Thompson, 4. Pierce Stone (the sock), 5. Alex Liebersfeld, 6. Silas Badenhorst… I continued, scanning, searching, praying for a “V”: 13. Vic Ferraro.
Thirteen? I’d take thirteen. I was thrilled for thirteen.
“Psst, Vic…”
Besides Paxton, who sat comfortably at nine, thirteen made me only the fourth Glenwood kid on the list.
“Psssst, Vic, that was meant for me,” said Jessie Levinson, seated in front of me.
“Oh, here. Sorry,” I refolded the list and dropped it on the back of her armrest.
“Thanks. Hey Vic,” she said, not turning around, surreptitiously engrossed in Mrs. McNulty’s spiel concerning the maritime might of the Phoenicians, “Jenna thinks you’re cute.”
Jenna thinks I’m cute? But it’s the “hot list,” not the “cute list.”
“Is cute like hot?” I whispered to Jessie, leaning over my desk.
“What? Yes, it’s like, the same thing.”
I couldn’t remember where Jenna ranked on the guys’ hot list. Wait, which Jenna is it?
“Which Jenna? Hey, hey Jessie, which Jenna? Tisch or Goldenberg?”
“Tisch.”
I would have to consult the list again—I believe Paxton had it—but Jenna Tisch fell anywhere between four and seven. Four and seven! What a day it had been. I smiled for the first time in middle school and suddenly found the Phoenicians enthralling.
I stopped writing once I hit the sixth grade. At first I couldn’t write because I was upset and tired all the time. I was still waking up at that godforsaken hour for school, sometimes even before my mother, and had football practice four times a week. Then I asked Jenna to be my girlfriend. Well, I asked Stephanie Hinkle to ask Jenna if she would be my girlfriend, who successful relayed the message and told me “yes.” I was in and thrusted into the fracas of middle school social life where, between going to parties in the basements of Short Hills mansions on the weekends and talking on the phone or AOL Instant Messenger during the week, there was no time to write epics of night elves and mages. I hadn’t seen Karl in three weeks—longer than when we went down the Shore; I usually had to call Karl midweek from Ocean City just to catch up.
I spent a lot of time at Freddy “Tank” DeVallo’s house. Tank was a little over five feet but was built from Italian marble and ran the football like a boulder rolling down the Dolomites. He lived in the Deerfield section even though he wasn’t Jewish. His mother was
