For my part I clean the bits of firebrick off my bowl with muriatic acid and a scrub brush; the blue-green form emerges, chunky and provocative like some inventive piece of modern Finnish glass. We display it atop the stereo, under the heavy, swaying pendulum of the clock, but I haven’t counted on the inherent tensions within the different densities of glass, and in a few weeks the whole thing flies apart, all by itself, without anyone even touching it, since it had only momentarily reconciled the forces it contained.

I am myself a walking example of contradictory forces barely held within one troubled, adolescent frame. Suddenly I’m six feet tall, my boyish fat reduced to mere pudge. But I’m nowhere at home in my body, in large part because I am consumed by desire. Of course I’m bored with my crafts and my schoolwork, incapable of commitment, since inside I am seething, my lusts hotter than the kiln. That’s my body: a stiff insulating container for my desires, an armor for holding that potential conflagration in check.

I understand that my desires are unacceptable, and likewise undeniable, and therefore their forbidden nature seems to fuse with their power, the two somehow inextricable. I cannot escape the dual need to enter into my fantasies and to censor them at once, a condition which affects my sexual daydreams in this way: when I masturbate I think only of men, but I don’t let myself see their faces, just parts of bodies—chests, thighs, the swell of a bicep curving into a dusky nest of armpit. The fantastic, partial bodies blur and meld, and are reflected in a little collection I make for myself. I’ve never seen pornography, at least not involving men, but in catalogs and magazines there are sometimes pictures of men with their shirts off. The public eroticization of the male body is years away, and might as well be light-years; my budding erotic life would have flourished, given the likes of Calvin Klein underwear ads! I find scraps of male flesh in the back pages of the Sears catalog, and I cut out the bodies—losing the heads in the process—and save these bits of men in a hidden envelope, where the pectorals and bellies are both lovely and oddly remote, entirely lacking in context.

My high school’s huge, fluorescent, anonymous, and whatever promising gestures I’d taken in the direction of cool back in California have collapsed. This role’s more familiar: outsider, new kid, nerd, which here makes for a comfortable if unrewarding invisibility. Lunch is the worst: unstructured time during which you must take your cheeseburger and fries and shake from the snack bar and figure out where to sit. These safe-looking fat boys, the periphery of this group of studious girls? Over there, where there’s no one sitting? Oh, pray for an over there.