In high school again. Sort of wandering the halls, picturing myself putting a knife in Jimmy Rosenthal’s belly if I see him, if he even thinks of hassling me. Decide I’ll just stab him in front of his friends and see what happens. As I come around a long winding corner, I see Hans coming out of a room and we greet each other warmly. There is a hint of me asking him what he’s been doing for the past eight years and I’m sure the answer is something like I’m at MIT, getting my PhD. in something entirely scientific. Then Andrew Thompson comes in and he hugs me so tightly around the neck I worry he’s going to give us both a reputation, and we leave homeroom with Hans behind and start wandering the stairs and hallways, looking in classrooms, zipping through teacher checkpoints, dodging shouts of “Hey, you boys, where are you going?” It’s clearly the first day of school and all the teachers have been freshly primed to be strong and disciplinary. Finally near the end of the period, we head back downstairs and everyone has their schedules already except for us. But the homeroom teacher, a short, husky, pimply faced Indian guy, doesn’t care and he gives us our schedules and another piece of paper which was meant to be filled out and signed by all our teachers during homeroom, but we didn\’t know.
After high school, it appears that I went straight into the army.
We were all sitting around on these rows of chairs, a good mix of boys and girls and someone had run away. I knew it was my friend because he said he was going to run away, but I couldn’t reveal any knowledge about it, so I was stretched out relaxed with my feet up and my arm around the back of the chair, pretending not to notice the commotion going on and the way that our female commander was making sure that everybody stayed put.
I turned to the very attractive dark-haired woman sitting beside me and quietly asked “Do you think we’re allowed to have sex in the army?” She said she heard that if you were caught “doing oral,” they’d let it go, as long as you weren’t two boys or two girls, or doing anything more than that.
Then we were in a building for the performing arts and I was supposed to meet Joseph, who had very long hair like when we graduated. I took the elevator up and when it got to the top floor, it went horizontally across the floor to the other elevator shaft and started moving down again. When it got to the bottom, it moved across the building again until it reached the other elevator shaft where it moved up again. It felt very shifty inside the elevator, although someone explained to us how it worked. Behind us, there were windows, and hanging over each of the windows were leather straps that you placed over your shoulders and fastened, although for what I couldn’t imagine. As I was looking at the straps and staring out the window into the desert, I heard my friend’s voice as he explained how he was going to escape. He was going to be a dog (which made me realize that the leather straps were harnesses) and he was going to get himself stationed at the farthest reaches of the base, where there was no supervision and everything in the desert jumped and screeched and skittled and the dogs there were always hysterical, always barking and rushing, and when he broke free from the pack and made a run for it across the desert, nobody would be wise to the fact that he was gone. Except of course, as I knew now, they were. They hadn’t caught him, but they were hot on his trail.
By now, the female commander was questioning us. Who knew this boy? I shrugged my shoulders and said I didn’t know him. When she got past me on the line, Sam Black and two or three other women came up to me and asked whether he told me he was going to do this. I knew I couldn’t even tell my friends, that I could never tell anyone, so I bit my tongue and lied that he had never told me a thing. They didn’t believe me and smiled and prodded and teased, but I held my ground. Eventually they left me alone.
Then the female commander came by again. She gave a speech about being gay in the army and how it was allowed, but not permitted, that they certainly didn’t encourage or condone it, that you should keep it to yourself if you are, that they didn’t want to know about it, and if they did find about it, you’d rather wish that they hadn’t, but all in all, it was okay as long as you kept it to yourself. She wanted to know if she was clear.
Then she came down the line one by one and asked us, “Are you gay?” and most people were nervously saying no or else saying it in a really aggressive macho voice, and the guy next to me said, “Yes, but not consensually, if you know what I mean,” or something really asinine like that but she just nodded her head and got to me and asked “Are you gay?”
Remember that I was all stretched out, my head resting on my bunched-up jacket and my arms around the back of my chair and my feet up. I said “no” very matter-of-factly, as if I were bored, as in truth I really was, and she moved past me. A few people later down the line, she turned and pointed to me and said, “If you’re trying to figure out how to act, act like him. He knows what he’s doing. He knows what he is.”
I was wondering about assignments and I knew I would ask if there was a newspaper or literary magazine, that I would like to work for that. If there wasn’t one, I would ask to start one. I had an idea for a story: James as a threatening boy with dark circles under his eyes.
In elementary school, the cafeteria was divided up into interesting couplings: the first graders ate with the fourth graders, the second graders with the sixth graders and the third graders with the fifth graders. I have no idea why they organized us like that. There was a snack bar at the front of the cafeteria called the “extras line” and you could line up by grade to buy cookies and cupcakes. All the troubles with James Rosenthal started when he tried to hide among the third graders for a line advantage. But he forgot the kids buying milk always went first.
everywhere tints childrening 
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