We are Lost and Found

Helene Dunbar

Contents (22)

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Books. Change. Lives.

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Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

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Front Cover

Title Page

Part One

December 1982

January 1983

February 1983

March 1983

April 1983

Part Two

May 1983

June 1983

July 1983

August 1983

Part Three

September 1983

Afterword by Ron Goldberg

Afterword by Jeremiah Johnson and Jason Walker

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

For those we lost…

And for those who found their voices.

All through the years of our youth

Neither could have known

Their own thought from the other’s,

We were so much at one.

—William Butler Yeats

We’ve got to live,

no matter how many skies have fallen.

—D. H. Lawrence

Part One

December 1982

On the last day before Christmas break, Mr. Solomon hands out a bunch of sharpened number two pencils and a stack of Xeroxed sheets. Just answer honestly, he instructs our class, It’s a career-assessment test, not a final exam.

The first question:

Which tasks would you prefer to undertake (select as many as apply):

• Arrange flowers

• Sell products

• Study the cause of diseases

• Make people laugh

• Drive a truck

I hesitate and write my own list in the margins, drawing boxes and filling them in hard until the pencil tip is ground down to nothing.

• Fall in love

• Figure out who the hell I am

• Have sex without catching something

• Repair my family

• Escape

St. Sebastian’s is glowing with candles, swirling with incense, and overrun by kids allowed to stay up way past their bedtimes to attend midnight mass. But the only thing I can focus on is my brother, Connor, drumming his fingers on the wood of the back pew, trying to pretend he doesn’t care that he’s sitting alone in our family’s church on Christmas Eve.