Wheeler told us all about his trip to India and how everyone’s either rich or starving and practically everything they serve has coconut on it and so on. After the chicken balls, they each had a cup of some kind of cold soup. Then came a dozen cooked clams with bacon and cheese melted all over them. My stomach felt as if it would cave in if I didn’t eat soon so when S.D. offered me a clam I grabbed the biggest one and started chomping. But the more I chomped, the bigger it got. Before I knew it, I had a mouthful of clam too large to swallow and my jaw was starting to ache. I tried to break it into smaller pieces but I’ve got flat teeth I guess and I couldn’t get through it. It had the texture and taste of cardboard. All right, I thought, don’t panic. Spit it into your napkin when nobody’s looking. Unfortunately, Olga was in the midst of a ten-minute sour-grapes-iloquy about her ex-boyfriend and was looking me straight in the eye. Just when nausea started to set in, she glanced down at her plate. Pthew. The paper napkin went to my mouth, and I gripped the chaw of clam. I rolled the napkin into a ball and put it in the ashtray.

During the rest of the meal the girls kept peppering me with questions about my old high school. What were the differences between a public high and a prep school? There were many, I said, most of them simply relating to the sizes of the two. Cornwall had about six hundred students and my old high school had close to three thousand.

I told them about the time I was sleeping through an English class in tenth grade. There were about fifty kids in this room, and everybody was always going wild so I used to just lay my head on my desk and nod out. One day while I was snoozing, I suddenly heard the teacher call out my name. I snapped to attention and looked around in a stupor, figuring I was in some kind of shit. But the teacher didn’t say anything. After class someone told me that she’d actually been using me as an example of a “good” student. Everyone had been making such a racket that she’d yelled out, “Why can’t you all just be like Mr. Dunphy and leave me alone!”

All in all the lunch went pretty smoothly until Olga noticed a lipstick mark on her water glass. It was her own lipstick but she thought it looked gross and searched for something to wipe it off with. Before I could stop her, she grabbed the folded-up ball of napkin out of the ashtray and started wiping her glass. The wad of toothmarks plopped onto the table and Olga screamed.

“My God, what is it?” S.D. said.