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now. Kennedy is president and everyone is feeling good and excited. When I ask these kinds of questions, the other kids seem to get angry. So I avoid the subject—which, I suppose, is what everyone else is doing too.
    Instead of asking questions, we form a club. We call ourselves the Three Musketeers, after a book we are supposed to be reading though it is a little too long. Stanley and Donnie and I are the Musketeers and Jackie Kennedy is Queen Anne. We vow that we will fight together and pay any price together and that, when the time comes, we will all go into the same branch of service at the same time, though we can’t agree on which branch that will be. We give ourselves secret names, the names from the book. Donnie is Athos, Stanley is Porthos, and I am Aramis. We start calling ourselves by these names but only when no one else is around. There is a fourth character, D’Artagnan, and I suggest that we let Rocco be D’Artagnan. Athos and Porthos agree but Rocco says the whole thing is stupid, which is upsetting for me because Rocco was the only other Brooklyn Dodgers fan. But we all know that the character who is really missing is the beautiful Constance. In the book, they all loved Constance. We do not have a Constance.

Chapter Six
    Love in the Cold War
    I have the Cold War to thank for Kathy Pedrosky. Kathy Pedrosky has eyes that are the same green as the deep ocean. Looking into them makes you confused. Her lips are thick and soft-looking and always seem like they are about to kiss someone. Why not me? All the girls in the neighborhood wear dresses, but Kathy Pedrosky wears skirts—little tight skirts.
    My relationships with girls have mostly failed. Rocco Pizzutti said I could go out with his sister, Angela. Rocco approved of me because I stood by Sal Maglie and the Dodgers. But Angela was a pretty version of her brother and that wasn’t going to work. When I looked at her, I saw Rocco.
    About then I noticed something appealing about Susan Weller. Actually, what was appealing was that she had beaten up Tony Scaratini. He came to school with a blackened right eye and the story got out that Susan had done it.
    But it soon became clear that Susan Weller was a horse—or at least she thought she was. If you spoke to her she would let out a high-pitched neigh and gallop away. I almost suffered the same fate as Tony. It turned out that if you cornered Susan Weller, in my case to ask her why she was making horse noises, she reared up and snorted and pounded you with her fists as though they were hooves.
    My mother didn’t think any of these girls deserved me. The only one who was good enough for me, according to my mother, was Myrna Levine. Myrna, my mom pointed out, was extremely beautiful. She did have nice black eyes, though really, when it came to black eyes, Angela Pizzutti’s were better. But my mother pointed out that Myrna was “extremely intelligent,” which was Mom’s way of saying she was Jewish. She may have been extremely intelligent—she got good grades—but it was hard to tell because she just giggled about everything. She clung to Kathy Pedrosky, and whenever anyone said anything she would lean over to Kathy and whisper something and then giggle. It may have been my mother always pointing out Myrna that led me to noticing Kathy Pedrosky.
    Kathy Pedrosky doesn’t giggle and she doesn’t neigh, she speaks. She speaks a lot. She ran for student council; she is in debates. And in addition to her cute little skirts, the lips, all that—this is a girl I could really talk with.
    But she doesn’t talk to me.
    If only I could talk to her. But I can’t. What can I say to someone that beautiful? Can I ask her to console me about my continuing grief that the Dodgers have moved to Los Angeles, which at first I thought was a different part of Brooklyn? California was something I could not understand. How could they move to California? Weren’t