photograph by Nick Sanders

against the storefront, each of us eating one vanilla and one cherry half. As customers came and went, they looked down at us, and, if they knew one of us, they usually would say hello. The frst time this happened, Paula said, “Hi, this is Billy” while pointing to me with her left hand. So, when someone who knew me entered the store and said hello, I said, “Hi, this is Paula” while pointing to her with my right hand.

When school started in September, I walked the four blocks to school alongside my sister, Molly, who was in ffth grade. Along the way some of her friends would join us, and she would either ignore me or talk about me as if I weren’t there. One time she read my homework assignment aloud to her friend because I had misspelled much as mush. The two laughed uproariously as she read, “I like school very mush. My best friend is Paula Winston. I like her very mush.” When I grabbed at my homework paper, it ripped, so, when I turned it in to Sister Grace, I told her my sister had ruined it with hopes that she not only would forgive me but also get Molly in trouble.

Sister Grace said, “Sisters can be quite the trouble, Billy. Can’t they?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“But sisters can be good to have at times. Remember that, will you?”

I wanted to say, “No, they are never good!” But I didn’t. I just looked over at Paula, who was listening attentively with, I knew, a sympathetic ear. When we walked home together as we usually did, I told Paula the whole sad story. When I had fnished, she stopped walking, leaned over, and kissed me on my cheek. I almost dropped my books and kissed her back right there on Locust Street and probably would have, but she kept walking and started talking about the story Sister Grace had read that day in story time about the boy who always tried to take the biggest piece of pie or cake. His mother solved the problem by flling the biggest piece with horrible tasting medicine.

“Wasn’t that clever?” Paula said, as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

“Yes, it was,” I agreed.

When we got to the corner of my street, I thought maybe I would kiss her goodbye as I had seen people do in TV shows or movies. I looked at her for some sign that I should do more than say goodbye but, seeing none, just said, “See you tomorrow, Paula.”

She smiled as she usually smiled and said what she usually said, “I hope so, Billy,” and kept walking to Marlboro Street. As I watched her go, I lingered on the corner with an unexpected sorrow in my heart as if I had bid her goodbye forever.

A few months after that frst kiss, Gregory Murphy handed out birthday party invitations to the entire class. Although he was not one of the popular kids, his party would be the frst boy-girl party, so the class was abuzz with its novelty. When my mother read the invitation, she said, “What nonsense! On a Sunday and a school night!”

“Can I go? Everybody will be going. It won’t be that late,” I said in my most reasonable voice.

“If everybody was going to jump in the river, would you jump in after them?”

As I was contemplating how I could possibly answer her question, I saw a smile breaking on her face, “Yes, you can go,” she said, but then added “if you’re good.”

In those days, we lived in a three-bedroom house: the middle room for my sister, the back room for my brother alone after he convinced my parents to kick me out of my bunk bed and have a second door installed so that he could study for college, and the front room for my parents and me, where they had their big bed and I had a small bed that ft nicely into an alcove. When I was getting dressed for the party in that front room, my eyes fxed on a little black velvet box on my

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photograph by Nick Sanders

mother’s dressing table. I put it in my pocket and rushed downstairs. My mother grabbed me by my two shoulders as I was heading for the front door. “Wait!” she said. “Let me look at you. Are you presentable?”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes at such a question. She would have kept me longer if I had.

“Don’t forget this,” she said as she handed me the wrapped present that we had picked out together at Kresge’s on the Square, a puzzle of the United States with the forty-eight capitals identifed. My mother was big on educational presents. “And this,” she said, handing me my jacket. “It’ll be getting cold once the sun goes down.”

Since the Murphys lived on the upper part of my street, I walked to the party. I waited on the corner for about ten minutes in hopes that Paula would be walking as well. When I saw Jackie Dunbar, who lived on my street down by the railroad tracks, coming my way with a present in his hand, I knew I would have to abandon my plan of waiting for Paula and walk the rest of the way with Jackie. At the party, we played pin the tail on the donkey and musical chairs. I went out of the chair game early, but Paula was one of the last to lose a chair. When it was down to her and Bobby Calore, he pushed her to win the last chair. I called out, “Not fair. She got pushed.”

Paula looked at me and said, “Don’t be silly, Billy. It’s just a game.”

All of the kids started chanting, “Silly Billy! Silly Billy! Silly Billy!” until Mrs. Murphy stepped in the middle of the room and said loud enough to drown out the jeers, “Presents. Gregory’s going to open up his presents now,” so mercifully the kids stopped the chanting and followed her and Gregory into the dining room, where a hill of presents lay piled on the table in the middle of the room. The chairs had been pushed to the corners of the room, so all the kids pushed up close to see the presents and how Gregory would react when he opened theirs. Still feeling the warmth of my reddened face because of the shame of their chants, I held back. I looked over at Paula, hoping for an apologetic or a sympathetic look for what she had said, but her back was to me as she pushed close to the table of presents with everyone else.

Without being noticed, I edged backward toward the front door where our jack-