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naked showers with him and tickling him every chance you get and telling him he needs work on his swing when all you really want to do is touch him.

    3. You were stoned.
    For the first fifteen minutes. What about the other three hours? At least he had the balls to kiss you back cold turkey.

    4. He’s just a buddy.
    Which is how come every third word out of your mouth is “Travis.” If they got rid of his name from the alphabet, you wouldn’t have a vocabulary left. Except for “ubiquitous.”

    5. Maybe you’re just searching for a homoerotic substitute.
    Maybe you just found one.

    6. You were only curious.
    Curious enough to do it again?

    What’s the use? I kissed him! It’s like the atom bomb—it can’t be undone.

    My father would kill me.

    Travis Puckett
    Room 214
    BECKLEY SCHOOL
    TARRYTOWN, NEW YORK

    It was right out of The Sound of Music. Rolf and Liesl in the rain. We even had a gazebo.

    These are the facts: '1( I haven’t eaten in fourteen hours but I’m not hungry; '2( I can’t sleep because my bed’s turned into the loneliest place in the world; (3) I have bruises all over my body from bumping into three doors and a carpet-cleaner; and '4( I can’t remember what
    “fluctuate” means. Do people really survive this?

    He didn’t just kiss me. He ran his fingers through my hair and he made little circles on my nose with his pinky and he tickled me under my arms, and when the sun came out we walked in the woods where nobody could see us and held hands. Then we found a tree—and for the next two hours we stretched out on some wet leaves with my head on his stomach, while I tried not to remember that in three weeks he’s going back to St. Louis. Not to mention September, when I’ll be at USC and he’ll be at Harvard. That’s 2,988.2 miles, zip code to zip code.

    But I can handle this. A month ago I was just Travis Puckett without the “Smerko.” Now I’ve got Bobby Di Cicco’s autograph and Craig. And no matter what else happens, I’m keeping them both for the rest of my life.

    My father would kill me.

    1998

    2

    Travis

    UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
    UNIVERSITY PARK • LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007

    SEMESTER: Spring 1998
    FROM: Travis Puckett

    CLASS: American History 206
    BUILDING/ROOM: VKC/223

BOOK PROPOSAL
    “Alexander Hamilton and the Designated Hitter”

    Issue : Once we’d won our independence from the Crown, how were we going to set up house?

    Objective : Proving that baseball and the United States Constitution were founded on the same set of rules, as outlined in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton.

    Argument : For some indefensible reason, George Washington had latched onto the witless notion of a British monarchy—a gentleman’s system of government that favored the elite and screwed the poor—leaving the unspoken question, “Then what the hell did we fight a revolution for?” The way he saw it, the elected president would serve as absolute ruler, with the legislative bodies beneath him hired, ostensibly, to straighten out paper clips and put people on hold. Naturally, it was to be a one-party system (after all, there was no point in defeating a self-defeating purpose), replete with patricians in wigs, belted earls, and wards in chancery. Left to his own devices, Washington was entirely capable of turning the entire United States judiciary into a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

    On a seemingly unrelated front, cricket was a gentleman’s game played in Great Britain by the aristocracy—until the working classes got their hands on it and made the contest more democratic. Calling their version
    “rounders,” “feeder,” and “base,” they brought it with them on the Mayflower in 1620 as evidence of their new moxie. Over the next century and a half, it was developed and refined across the colonies, so that by the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787—while the royalty in Philadelphia were going through the attic to find a workable