There’s just one way across: you have to learn to fly. Keep your joyful thoughts to yourself, learn doublethink, and dig a trench between who you actually are and the person you think you are. Olympic athletes must use techniques like this, holding on to their dreams of glory like climbers grasping ropes in their bloody palms as they hang over the side of a mountain. They just soldier on despite their injuries, stillborn social lives, coaches committing unspeakable acts on road trips, crazy parents living out lost dreams through their children. Because giving up while you’re flying full-speed ahead would mean falling to your death in the blinding light of the camera flashes.

My list of names does bring a few stories to mind. It’s all I’ve really got, for those years.

Roy and Carol Anne

I never really learned who Roy was, just saw his name carved with an X-acto blade into the arm of the girl sitting to the right of me in class. Her name was Carol Anne — I remember because it reminded me of Poltergeist. “Do not go into the light, Carol Anne!” Aside from her name, I don’t think Carol Anne had anything in common with the pretty blond kid in the movie. Our Carol Anne had a big round face, a nose covered in blackheads, and thick black hair. She gave off that distinct odour of cigarettes and fabric softener I’ve always associated with poverty.

Carol Anne was part of a mysterious group of kids I never really talked to. Most of them had failed at least one grade. They spent recess in a corner of the schoolyard known as the Smoke Pit, an area around one hundred square feet where smoking was tolerated. This was back when anyone could buy smokes, even children, a bygone era that wasn’t actually so long ago. The school rule was that anyone who wanted to smoke could, but only in the designated area. This, of course, meant that only certain people could actually smoke at school since the Pit was contested territory. Other smokers had to slip off the school grounds or face the consequences. When Carol Anne walked by you between the rows of desks in class, it smelled as if someone had emptied an ashtray while waving a sheet of Bounce in the air. And Carol Anne had asthma. Her gentle wheezing was the soundtrack to grade nine. She was permanently congested, and kept her mouth open throughout the entire process of carving Roy’s name into her arm. I could gauge the intensity of her pain by the cadence of her wheezing, which sped up as she dug the blade deeper into her flesh.