Every fibre of my being screams at me to walk over and smack the bastard. Instead, I pull out the best verbal smack I have at my disposal, the make-it-awkward card.

“I’ve got brain tumours. I’m home to die.” I add a hiss of rage to the unvarnished explanation.

“Yeah, Shirl said that, too.” His lumpy potato chin dips into an exaggerated frown. “Too bad. Always thought you had a halfways decent shot at a normal life. For a Fortune.”

“Nope. Guess not.”

“I shoulda taken the boys up on that bet that you’d be back someday,” he says, clearly amused as he slides his sunglasses back on, hooks his thumbs into his belt loops and leans back so that his crotch juts out in a pervy power stance. “Even after the . . . you know.”

Of course. How could I forget? He got me back for the nickname. And I had to get the hell out of this place after that.

Turned out that Duke was a disease bag of the sexually transmitted variety. I started pissing fire not long after prom night, and the test confirmed I had chlamydia. A course of antibiotics and everything would be fine, Dr. Gill said. But that’s only because he didn’t know what Duke the Puke was about to pull.

The highlight of the Loch Bhreagh graduation ceremony was always the yearbook committee’s slideshow. The crowd of graduates, families, and local somebodies roared at the picture of Duke and his hockey buddies wearing dresses and wigs and gargantuan balloon boobs on Halloween. They groaned at Char posing with a half-dissected fetal pig in biology. They applauded Becky Chickenshit organizing university brochures in the guidance office. But the grand finale was a close-up of a white piece of paper with sharp black type on Dr. Gill’s letterhead. My name, and the words test positive for chlamydia, circled in bright yellow. After what felt like forever, it faded to a picture of me in English class, giving a double thumbs up with my eyes crossed and popped, my mouth twisted into a lopsided grin, and my head cocked to the side. With the caption “Let’s all ‘CLAP’ for Crow Fortune!” Nobody clapped. And nobody stood up to correct the glaring error, the thing I found myself screaming inside, as if it were the most salient detail: gonorrhea is the clap, not chlamydia, you idiots!

Everyone sat in stunned silence, then the murmurs began. The principal took the mic, blathered out a perplexed apology to my forty-nine fellow graduates, their families, their friends, all our teachers, the local MLA, three members of town council, and our special guest speaker, a writer for the newspaper. But the damage was done. I was done. I fiddled nervously with the tassel on my grad cap. My hands went cold and clammy. My face reacted with a flush of humiliated heat, and my eyes began to water, the tears unable to extinguish my burning cheeks. I looked around, suddenly grateful that I didn’t have any family in the crowd that night. Everyone was staring at me. But the only face I could see through the blur of tears was Duke’s, grinning from ear to ear.