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“Yeah, yeah, I am,” I responded softly, gazing now on the floor.

“Have we reached an understanding then?” she inquired.

“Most likely,” I retorted. She didn't take my answer well. She began dissecting my appearance.

‘And if you think you can go around this school with pants hangin’ half off your ass, an’ a bad attitude, you're wrong, Mr. Digges. An’ next time I see you wearin'your pants like that I am gonna wrap a rope around your waist, and make you wear it all day. This school has a dress code an'…” Droplets of spit flew from her lips as she pronounced her s ‘s.

Tears began to blur my vision, rounding the world into one narrow tunnel. I wasn't quite sure why, but I felt like a silhouette, half human, all details fading. My life had become so foreign, an interrupted, irregular maze that bore sharp edges, the shapes becoming more and more abstract with each tick of the seconds inside of Central Standard Time.

After that exchange with the principal, I had set out on my wandering at ten-thirty in the morning. I had left silently, hiding my emotions so that the principal wouldn't detect how powerfully she had got to me.

The path found itself and I followed it. Ten miles from my father's house I stepped left after right, in a silent fury. The white, one-story houses all looked the same, distinguished by junked cars that littered the lawn, a brown sofa leaking tan innards at the arm rests, on the cushions, bed mattresses stained with rust from the springs that coiled toward the sky like useless promises.

And it was on this street that the old man in his rifle cap had scrutinized and judged me. “Someday he'll choke,” I thought, “on this Missouri air.”

As for the boy the old man shook his head at, now I recall him for you, recall the boy to let him go, and wish the past well, five years later. If I were to have met him/myself on that day of wandering, I would tell him to be patient, to love his individuality, to listen to the answers that lie within, that come in the tempos and waves of the heartbeat. Just listen and wait. Body music.

Grade: B+

Fall, 1999

Hadwen Park. I'm walking the dogs through a woods south of Worcester. It's late October, warm enough I hardly need a jacket. Most of the leaves are down, the paths along the steep hillsides lost under the eddying leaves, pine needles.

The dogs run out ahead, debris parting in their wake, and as I walk I kick aside the leaves to read the graffiti strewn across the asphalt. Names, insults, professions of love, and the names of rock and rap bands, Nirvana, The Dead, framed by marijuana leaves.

As I head down the hill I cross the blue-black outline of a huge penis and testicles, more names, apparently of a more recent era for the names of the bands, the pitched tenor of the profanities, as if the older graffiti had somehow been a draft for this great black smear like a cloud or a thought, across which is written, in white, school sucks.

“School sucks,” I say as I align myself in the old exercise of joining, which Eduardo once taught me so well. School sucks, and all its horrors of restriction. And its teachers suck, who are surely aliens sent to torture their students with rules, deadlines, information that the kids believe has so little to do with their lives.

Kids’ lives are on fire, and Mr. So-and-so says they have to do math. Their lives are burning and Ms. says that paper is due tomorrow, no hats in the house, no smoking, four minutes between classes.

School sucks that houses their days, children in the throes of adolescence that does violence to the body and soul, that is the world changing while they are not, or vice versa, the world in wrong alignment. How to navigate the chasm?

Both Trevor and Stephen made it through, each in his way. After our battling the administration as we futilely tried to see to his advancement, Trevor made the decision to drop out of high school. He successfully took his GEDs in the fall of his sixteenth year and began junior college. Taking a job at a Caribbean restaurant in Amherst, he moved out of our