It was only six o’clock when I walked out of the hospital. I couldn’t believe it was that early—I thought I must have been working all night, I felt so beat. I looked aimlessly around Cottage Grove Avenue for my car, wondering if I’d forgotten to set the alarm, when I remembered it was still down at the high school—I’d ridden to Hyde Park in the ambulance.

I picked up a taxi at the stand across the street and bullied the driver into going south. All the way down Route 41, the cabbie kept hectoring me on how dangerous it was, and who was going to pay his fare back north?

I refused to take part in one more fight, leaning back in the seat with my eyes shut, hoping that would make the driver close his mouth. He may have kept up his complaint, but I did fall into a sound sleep that lasted all the way to the high school parking lot.

I made my way home more by luck than skill, and fell back down into the well of sleep as soon as I got home. My dreams weren’t restful. I was back in the gym, fifteen years old. It was dark, but I knew I was there with Sylvia, Jennie, and the rest of my old basketball team. We’d run the length of the room so many times, we automatically avoided the sharp edges of the bleachers, and the horse and hurdles leaning against the wall. We knew where the ladders were, and which one had the climbing ropes looped around it.

I was the strongest: I clambered up the narrow steel ladder and unhooked the climbing ropes. Sylvia was like a squirrel on the ropes. She clung with her thighs, hauling up the underpants and the sign. Jennie, keeping watch at the gym doors, was sweating.

Homecoming was the next night, and the dream switched to that. Even in my dream, I felt thick with grievance against Boom-Boom—he’d promised to take me and now he wouldn’t. What did he see in Sandy, anyway?

It was the exposure waiting round the bend in my mind that woke me. I wasn’t going to let myself dream to the end, to Boom-Boom’s anger and my own mortification. I sat in bed, sweating, panting, seeing Sandy Zoltak again as she’d been then, soft, plump, with a sly smile for the girls, a foxy one for the guys, her shimmery satin dress a blue that matched her eyes, going into the gym on Boom-Boom’s arm—I pushed aside the memory and thought instead how I wouldn’t have known Sandy on the street today—I certainly hadn’t known her in the hospital.