“Why? Because if Vicky had still been too shy for a boyfriend, she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant?”

Glenna studied me with a half smile of either admiration or disdain: I couldn’t say. But her silence made me uncomfortable, so I was relieved when she said, “Something like that.”

“It’s how I’d feel. Fact is, all you did was help her.”

Glenna nodded and, leaning back, closed her eyes. I had an image of her sitting alone on a beach—a still life painted with the palette of summer, the sun streaks in her hair and her tanned face setting off the delicately sculpted symmetry of her features. It was an idyllic image, soulful, and yet unspeakably sad in its loneliness.

Glenna looked at me. “I was thinking, this interview isn’t fair. I don’t know anything about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” she replied with such seriousness that it made me nervous, since it was hard to believe Glenna would be interested in me.

“You have that much time?”

“No.” She grinned. “But you didn’t ask me that. You asked me what I wanted to know.”

“Are you high?”

Glenna burst out laughing as if she were gone on a dime of weed. “Not during working hours.”

It was heartening to hear her laugh, and the sound seemed to float, like music, on the balmy September air coming through the open windows.

I said, “I’m starting my fifth year at Brooklyn College. I have to stay enrolled for my Two-S or I’m draft bait. I have zero interest in graduate school. What I want to do is write fiction. And what I don’t want to do is bore you.”

“All med students talk about is the hospital, and that’s boring. C’mon, Gordon. If you weren’t interested in anything, you wouldn’t be writing this story.”

I took a breath. “I want to get my life down on paper and make it behave—or at least understand more of it. I think I can do that in short stories or a novel. And that would be interesting. Like traveling but you don’t have to go anywhere except inside your head.”

I had never spoken about this stuff because it sounded weird even to me, like the noise that flitted through your brain when you were peaking on a tab of sunshine. Yet, as I spoke, Glenna leaned closer, her eyes locked on mine. No one had ever listened to me so intently. There was something passionate about the keenness of her concentration as I went on, and it would be years before I understood that I’d just had the most intimate experience of my young life.

“Writing,” I said, “is the one thing that makes sense to me.”

“Anyone who can write—that’s a gift. You should do it.” Glenna glanced up at the clock over the door. “Gordon, I don’t want to, but I have to leave.”

Both of us stood, and Glenna said, “I appreciate you listening to me go on. No one’s ever—I’m glad I told you about Vicky.”