It meant a lot to me that the snowshoer liked my short story, and the title. I admitted to Mr. Barlow that I’d been tempted to call the story “The Scalded Nipple,” but I chose Sally’s title (as I thought of it) instead. The snowshoer assured me that I’d made the right decision.

“There’s more pity in Sally’s title,” Mr. Barlow said.

20. A LITTLE BEHIND GIRLS HER AGE, SOCIALLY; DEFINITELY AHEAD OF; DEFINITELY BEHIND

I decided the high school dances were off-limits, not wanting poor Sally to see in my eyes how she’d looked when she was wedged in the shower. Besides, who was I going to ask to dance? One of those girls who was dancing with another girl? They looked like girl jocks to me; maybe they were teammates, field hockey players or cross-country runners. Was there a protocol concerning cutting in on girls who were dancing together?

I asked Mr. Barlow, but he deferred to my mother and Molly. “Ask them—they know more about what enrages girls than I do,” the little English teacher said.

“The problem is the one you don’t ask to dance—she’ll hate you, sweetie,” my mom said.

“Eventually, if they’re teammates, both of them will hate you, Kid,” Molly told me.

I complained to the snowshoer that the hatred my mother and Molly had predicted from the dancing teammates didn’t sound logical to me. “Then it’s definitely true—hatred isn’t logical,” Mr. Barlow said. “A wallflower might be safer than a girl jock,” he advised me. I considered the word wallflower already old-fashioned, even in the fifties. Wasn’t it a word more in keeping with my grandmother’s generation than the snowshoer’s? And if a wallflower was a person who remained on the sidelines of any activity—out of shyness or unpopularity, or the lack of a partner—wasn’t Sally, who was overweight, a wallflower?

Surely I was just a different variety of wallflower—hence I felt a natural attraction to other wallflowers. As a new boy at the academy—one who was perceived as an interloper when I intruded upon the public school kids—hadn’t I become an outsider in the town I’d grown up in?

I didn’t meet Rose at a dance—“the clubfooted one,” Nora called her.

“The kinda clubfooted one,” was the way Dottie put it, which seemed no less unkind.

“Rose isn’t clubfooted,” I insisted. “She just has a right foot that goes awry.”

“It sure as shit went awry on them attic stairs!” Dottie had exclaimed.

“That’s enough, Dottie—please don’t. Poor Rose,” my grandmother always said.

“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.