“And the strong one on crutches, and the tall one with her arm in a cast!” Dottie declared, rolling her eyes.

“They were jocks—they just had injuries, temporarily,” I told her.

“As I recall, Adam, you only went out with ’em when they was injured—temporarily,” Dottie told me.

“Please, Dottie—that’s enough,” my grandmother repeated.

I met Rose in the library, where you might expect to encounter a wallflower. This was the town’s public library, not the academy library. Rose was such a wallflower, I didn’t even know she was a faculty brat; most faculty daughters went away to private schools. In an all-girls’ school, her parents had feared Rose would be teased, because of her limp—her lurch, Nora had labeled it. I didn’t think it was a drastic limp, though the first time you saw it, you thought Rose had tripped and was going to fall. It may not have been a congenitally misshapen deformity, but something went wrong with the right side of Rose’s body when she walked. She spent much of her time in the library doing research on limps, and reading about surgical mishaps.

The old librarian, Mrs. McNulty, who walked with a cane, always put her index finger to her lips when she looked at us—as if to shush us, although Rose and I never spoke in the library. We wrote each other notes. Mrs. McNulty must have thought that teenagers couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet in a library. Mrs. McNulty also appeared to disapprove of our writing each other notes.

“You’re always writing, usually not reading. What are you writing?” was the first note Rose wrote to me.

I had to tear several pages out of my notebook in order to explain that I was trying to be a fiction writer; I was making things up. I didn’t like to write in the academy library, because there were students (usually older boys) who grabbed my notebook to see what I was writing. Rose confided to me that faculty daughters in their teens were considered a distraction to the boys in the academy library. When the boys saw her sitting at one of the tables, they flirted with her—until she had to walk somewhere, and the boys got a look at her limp. Thus was I forewarned of the limp before I saw it. Rose and her parents were undecided about the corrective surgery proposed for her limp. “What if the surgery makes the limp worse?” was the way Rose had written it.

Mrs. McNulty was a bitch about the sound I made when I tore pages out of my notebook. I stopped writing in spiral notebooks. I began to use a loose-leaf notebook, the kind with rings. If you were careful, you could open and close the rings without making a popping sound. Mrs. McNulty had nothing better to do than watch me when I opened and closed the rings, in her hawklike anticipation of the pop. It took me a few weeks to get up the nerve to write Rose the note about the attic bedroom in my grandmother’s house. “It’s on the third floor,” I felt it was necessary to say. I’d still not seen Rose walk. I didn’t know if she could manage stairs.