He scowled. I got the feeling he didn’t know who Benedict Arnold was. But spy for my father? Not without feeling like a traitor to the cause.

There were five minutes left in the break. “Got that J?” I asked.

From that day on, Chris and I met at the shed every afternoon and got high. Like Cousin Barry, he’d dropped out of high school in tenth grade — not because he’d been severely beaten and had become a basket case, but because that’s what everyone in Chris’s family did. You went to school until you were sixteen and then got a job.

I miss those fifteen minutes with Chris each afternoon. He was funny, and real, and not caught up in typical middle-class striving for material success. A lot of well-educated, supposedly hip cats talk carpe diem, but Chris is the only person I know who really lives it.

But now he’s over there, just another working-class “sucka” risking his life in a senseless war while most owners’ sons like me don’t have to. Damn straight I feel turmoil about that. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be stricken by the unfairness of it.

Tuesday, July 1

When I get home from work, the mail is lying on the floor below the front-door mail slot. The mailman usually comes in the early afternoon, and now it’s close to dinnertime. Those letters and magazines have been left ungathered for hours.

Did Mom leave her room today?

Even though Robin’s only been gone for four days, I’m disappointed that there’s no perfumed lavender envelope. According to the post office, it’ll take about two weeks for the change of address to go into effect, so it’s not like a letter from her would have gone to Bay Shore already.

On my desk is the reading list Charles gave me. I need to start on that because I’m going to have to write an essay for my conscientious objector application.

But I’d much rather write to Robin.

Dear Robin,

How’s life above the Arctic Circle? Do they have electricity where you are? Have they heard of television? Here in the US, they’ve developed something called a rocket and in a couple of weeks some brave nutjobs are going to take off in one. Guess where they think they’re going? The moon! They know what the moon is up there on the frozen tundra, don’t they? It’s that big round thing that comes out at night in the sky. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, look for the thing Canadians howl at after dark. . . .