It was as if a heavy lid had slammed shut within me. That’s how I recall it, a great lid, and beneath it a frozen darkness that was all my own. While Mark held forth on my naïveté 106for the others, I fell back into the dark and thought of things that were impervious—cement floors, plexiglass, ice packs—and that the safest way to avoid people like Mark was to seal yourself off, and then, when you were sealed off, it was about your face and getting it back in position, getting it to close over the darkness and everything you have stored inside. So when he raised his beer with the others, I said that if he thought I was so dumb we could make a bet about who’d score highest on the graduating exams, and he said, “Sure, no problem,” and I said, “All right then, no problem,” and he laughed, saying, “Fuck yeah,” and I got to my feet, and he said we’d bet a pizza, and I said, “No problem.” He wanted to shake on it. I slapped my hand against his chubby outstretched fingers and walked straight out onto the deck, and I’d like to think I stared out toward England. It was in any case ocean that I stared out over, and there isn’t much more to say about that week in London other than that I spent a week in London when I was eighteen.

It wasn’t very hard to do better on the finals than Mark. I just got up every day and took care of my schoolwork and took care of myself. I also let Henrietta think what she wanted to whenever she said that if you compared the story about the freezer chest to something like incest, I was being hypersensitive, and then she’d look self-important, while one month led to the next and in June we graduated. I got the second highest marks in the school, while Mark did well enough that he was going to go to teachers college. Henrietta told me that as we rode around on the back of the decorated flatbed truck from one set of parents to the next, little Danish flags waving in the wind, most of us drunk from all the drinks they served 107us, and it was at one of those receptions, when everyone had had enough and someone finally turned down the stereo, that Mark came over to me.