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the stereos in the appliance department to the same station, and while Led Zeppelin rattles the counters, we dig bags of stale popcorn out of the snack bar. On the returns shelf in the back they find open packages of candy bars and Red Hots. The boys have all brought small coolers loaded with six-packs. Lisa and Danny start dancing in the aisle beside sporting goods, where a large empty space waits to be made into the garden center for spring. Lisa is eight months pregnant, and I stand watching her, the high, clear glow of her skin, the sway of her back. I keep bugging her to quit smoking. I remember how relieved we were after the first trimester with all its sickness and worry, how Rhonda invented cravings she did not really have just so she could send me out in the middle of the night for bean burritos or Milky Ways. This was my part of her pregnancy, helping her learn to breathe, feeding her, all the usual. We gave into it, feeling corny. A kid feeling, like playing house, like you could take a good thing and make it last forever. We believed that for a while. Stupid.
    Carlo and his girlfriend Tammy borrow a couple of bikes from sporting goods and ride in circles around the store, disappearing for minutes at a time, their whoops and laughs echoing around us. The rest of us sit in the snack bar drinking beer, watching the dancers, waiting for the bicyclers to show up again. Wilson shows us where the doctors put the pins in his arm after his motocross accident. From that we are drawn into the usual drinking habit of trading stories and scars. I show them mine from when the lawnmower sent a roofing nail into my leg.
    â€œThat hardly even counts, Curt,” Terry says, and pulls up his shirt to show us a foot-long scar across his chest from a car wreck when he was sixteen.
    â€œMy Uncle Don has a bullet in his jaw from Vietnam,” Wilson says. “You can see this little lump.”
    â€œMy roommate has a polycarbon rod in his arm,” Terry says. “Broke it operating a jackhammer.”
    â€œI went to grade school with this kid, had a metal plate in his head,” I tell them. “You could see the dent in his skull.” They all laugh at this, the girls making faces.
    â€œNo way,” Terry says. “What was his name?”
    I shake my head. “I don’t remember. Too long ago.”
    This is a lie, but I don’t feel like talking about him. It is too long, and it’s not a funny story. Joseph Turlow had been in my class since third grade, and he did have a metal plate in his head following surgery to correct a benign tumor putting pressure on his brain. But we didn’t learn anything about the plate or the tumor until the sixth grade, when Mr. Levine was our teacher. Until then, everyone had pretty much ignored Joseph, afraid of his injury, of our imaginings about that metal plate. He was a fat kid, with a constant dewy sprinkling of sweat on the skin under his eyes. His teeth protruded at odd angles. His ears were overly small. All of this—what we might otherwise have thought of as the normal, awkward differences we all had (in my case, freckles and ears that stuck out)—instead seemed connected to the metal plate, as if his ugliness had been created in him or attached to him, much like the plate itself. We stayed away, averted our eyes, stole looks at the dent on his head, the clipped hair there that seemed to grow in a different direction from the rest. He sat at the end of our lunchroom table, and at recess spent his half hour hurling rocks over the fence. I felt bad for him, as I suspect everyone did, but our whispered knowledge of the plate in his head formed a barrier through which we were not able to approach him.
    All of this Mr. Levine attempted to change. He told us one day that we all might learn from Joseph, then called him up to the front of the class and made him explain about the operation. Joseph stared at the pair of flags in their brass stands while he