When I was in grade school, I'd go to a friend's house with some other kids and there was a babysitter who came and took care of a few of us. Her name was Betty; she was from Costa Rica, and her husband was deaf, so her two kids were growing up trilingual. I didn't like her two kids because they were younger and louder and very dionysian—but Betty was sweet, mainly because she took us to Freddy's to get penny candy. There was still penny candy in those days!

One time we were walking

back to the house from Freddy's and we met Tiffany and her family, who lived next door to our afterschool haven. Tiffany was in my class at School #16. She was shy like me so we didn't have much contact—but to her credit, she did not endlessly ridicule me, as was the habit of the other sweet children of School #16. When I was walking with Betty that day and we ran into them I walked right on by while Betty stopped to talk to them for what seemed like Forever. I was deeply bored and indicated as much, but Betty just dug in her heels and kept talking, several times waving at me to come back and talk. When she finally left them, she caught up with me and said, "You know, this is a mixed neighborhood. You have to make friends with everyone." It hadn't even occurred to me that Tiffany and her family were black and that I was white and that that might be a reason not to want to talk with them. I was just a very insular and slightly spoiled only child who didn't like stopping on the street to chit-chat with neighbors. Betty's comment set my head spinning for a few years. It seemed like I was being asked to go out of my way to make smalltalk with someone in order to demonstrate that I was willing to be friends with black folks. Making use of the art of conversation to find true connection to someone with whom I didn't have any common interests was beyond the grasp of my ten-year-old chronically-isolated childhood. (Today it remains a significant challenge.)

But I also remember having a lot of fun one afternoon when Tiffany and her brothers and sisters were home and we went over to play on their porch because there was a dead little white mouse on the porch, it's head flattened and its eyes missing, brought in by the family cat. I was completely grossed out and grotesquely fascinated; we didn't have any pets in my house, or any living things, nor was the chaotic hand of nature allowed to intrude into my desmain in any way save the green tomatoes my mother brought from her garden. I believe it was also my first time eye-to-eye with a dead animal. That was the first of two moments when I felt in any way close to Tiffany.

My desk at school was notoriously messy, and in that way I was one of the great f\/ckups of Mr. Lehman's class at School #16 (and Mrs. Kane's class, and Ms. Schulte's, and Miss Shannon's). It was all I could do to locate a required workbook or assignment sheet, or labored-over two-hundred word essay, just half the time, and grovel for a fresh photocopy or extension the rest of the time. Doing homework was a perpetual impossibility, because it seemed unimportant to me to make note of the assignments or their due dates, and my purple ditto sheets (the only tangible evidence of an assignment) tended to get mashed down in my backpack underneath the heavy textbooks. So I was one of the class's great f\/ckups, but to my advantage was the fact that I didn't have any friends amongst my peers, and therefore no corrupting influences, or for that matter any liberating influences, and so my only chance at an oxytocin release that might reinforce good social behavior came from parents and teacher; therefore I was, despite my best efforts to defy authority, a closeted teachers' pet. The deep-seated fear of negative attention from Mr. Lehman (who proudly lofted above his head my City-Wide 3rd Place Spelling Bee trophy, brandishing it to all the class, or all five of us who were left in the room when the 22 musically-talented members of our class were at chorus practice, what a sweetie) was the only thing that kept my desk from overflowing with educational paraphernalia.

One day late in the year, the year of 6th grade, our last, proud, vaunted (almost friendly!) year together as a class of inner-city antagonists, before heading off to the great cesspool of mddle school, Tiffany failed to produce an assignment when demanded. and subsequently some effluvia emerged from her desk's internal vault—consisting of gum wrappers, cast-aside notes, ripped corners of a phonics workbook, et cetera. On this day, for reasons our pre-cognitive blastulas could not access, Mr. Lehman's temper was short, and upon the emergence of the effluvia, he raged hard against Tiffany. He shouted, he mumbled, he gesticulated. And he walked to her desk and lifted it whole by one leg, casting in one volcanic eruption all the miscellany it contained into a remarkably large pile on the floor, leaving sweet, shy, shame-faced Tiffany to sift through and recollect it. Over the next few hours I quietly and unassumingly tidied my owned desk. For one full day, then, I felt a special bond with Tiffany, for she had suffered on my behalf the opprobrium of the community, in a disruption that, had it fallen upon me, would probably have sent me spinning in a downward spiral that could have ended in criminal insanity, or teenage pregnancy.