A chapter in which a club’s hero rises, or at the very least, raises a shaky hand.

A-House was one of three wings attached to the main building of Beverly High School and it telescoped out, as vast and empty as the cold universe. A yellow hall pass clutched in my sweaty adolescent hand granted permission to go to the AV room so I could assist with the morning announcements broadcast on our closed-circuit Panther TV. As a senior who regularly achieved honor roll, I’d earned “senior privileges,” which included the ability to traverse the campus during homeroom and free periods without need of a pass. My asking for a pass from my calculus teacher, Mr. Langan (a kind if not awkward middle-aged man who wore sweater vests and an Abraham Lincoln–style beard) represented the kind of student I was; skittish, afraid, desperate for approval of any kind.

I ghosted past rows of lockers dangling their bulbous locks. Most of me ached to turn around, to return to homeroom, to give up on this foolish idea, to forget it ever occurred to me. There was another part that realized this was a Robert Frost path-choosing moment. If I went through with my plan, this smallest AV step for humankind, my life would be irrevocably changed. By the time I swung open the creaking metal door of the AV room, my resolve leaked away, literalized as flop sweat.

Ian, one of two Panthers newscasters, he of the swimmer’s shoulders and beer-keg leer, greeted me with “Hey, it’s Artie the one-man party.”

[Note: Ian did not say that. As we’ve discussed, my name was not Art. I will not break in like this again to point out other, minor factual name discrepancies. It’s enough for you to know Ian was the kind of chud who would’ve said that if my name were Art. What he did call me wasn’t my real name either. He called me Bones. I had always been the skinniest, most slight kid in my class, and at that AV moment in time I weighed a scant one hundred and forty pounds. Most of my male classmates called me by that nickname, which I never had the option of approving when it was pinned to me at age eleven along with another kid’s fist to my big nose. (I fought back, but all that earned was another, bigger kid’s fist to the stomach.) At ages seventeen and eighteen, the nickname was uttered with tradition if not endearment, certainly with less intentional cruelty, but it was there in the name’s history, so I will not use nor refer to it again. We will stick with Art to the end.]