Then quick, splendor covered up again: the peculiar jock, rubbery and clinical somehow, big red shorts, shirt of slippery mesh, glasses; he’s back to being ugly and nervous Mr. Kablutis. Well, maybe not that ugly. I cannot make any connection between his body and mine, not for the life of me: I am pudgy and pale forever, I hate the hair on my body, hate my body itself and wish to hold it back from any further development, any more strange flowerings it might choose, and at the same time I can’t escape the fact that his body is a secret wonder, a troubling delight.

My investigation of cool reaches its height when I plan a party, an act of social bravura. It is to be a Paisley Party; I have conceived the notion that it will be a stylish kind of fun if everyone comes wearing an item in that newly fashionable print. I make the invitations by hand, drawing large paisleys on cardboard and cutting them out to hand to friends at school. Roger and Mike, who are never separated from each other for fifteen minutes, despite the fact that it is universally agreed that they are All Boy, make fun of my invitations, but then they are not invited, and I can tell—surprise—that they would actually like to be.

I have made friends, in part because I excel at the game of Password, which we play in class in imitation of a popular TV show; the game involves giving another person associative clues, in order to get them to guess the word you’re thinking of. I am nothing if not practiced at daydreaming associations to words, which have to me the sensory actuality of colors, the materiality of texture and of weight. The kids who are invited actually all come, including a girl named Trudy Bisbee, whom I’ve proclaimed as my girlfriend, so entirely unthreatening are her clutch of wiry blond hair, her rhinestoned cat glasses, and her homemade dresses. It is a real party. I serve punch and chips on the picnic table I have covered in butcher paper decorated with the squiggly shapes to which the event is dedicated. I have wrapped our back patio—just a slab of cement, really, with a roof supported by four redwood posts—in filmy translucent plastic, and on it I project one of my light shows, shapes drifting around while the slide projector smokes and the portable phono plays the records my friends have brought: “In a gadda-da-vida, baby, don’t you know that I luhhhv you….”