You know people like me. I’m the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap, selling tickets to the prom, but never going—even though in the late sixties only nerds went to proms. But I would have gone. I would have happily gone; I would have been so happy. I wanted the phone call with the rough voice asking “Would you …?” I wanted to finger row after row of pastel dresses in silks and chiffons—their sweetheart necks, their wide ribbon ties. I wanted to have some shoes dyed; I thought it was a miracle they could do it. I wanted to put a wrist corsage in my refrigerator, lock the bathroom door, and bathe in perfumed water with rollers in my hair and the transistor at the edge of the sink blaring “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.” I wanted to allow an hour for the application of all my new Maybelline, suffer the flash-bulbs of my parents’ eager camera, stay out all night, and eat breakfast before I came home, bleary-eyed and in the know.

I didn’t get asked. I never once got asked. Not to proms, not to lesser dances, not to movies, not to parties, not for shopping with the girls.

I would get talked to, though. I mean beyond the “Hi!”s in the hall, beyond the preoccupied chatter in the lunchroom. I got talked to a lot. They would call me on the phone, the pretty girls. They would call and talk to me about things that were serious: their parents’ alcoholism. Their hidden scoliosis. Their possible pregnancies. They talked to me because I knew how to listen, and I gave good advice. I didn’t have a lot of personal experience, but I knew things, because I read and I watched. That is what there was for me. Those girls talked to me—and a boy, once, too—because they knew I would never betray them. Of course they betrayed me constantly. But they didn’t really mean to. Probably they didn’t know. They didn’t think about it that much.