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chow mein surprise casserole (the surprise was several hot dogs cut into matchstick-size strips, which, when cooked, would curl up into little pink rubber bands). No matter the recipe, a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, the all-American binding agent of disparate foodstuff, was mixed in. The Great Assimilator, as I call it now, was responsible for the uniform taste of all of DeAnne’s casseroles. Whether à la king, tuna, or beefy (different from beef itself), these casseroles also shared the same texture, as if all their ingredients had been made to wear a sweater. I have since learned that foods named for the pot or pan that they were cooked in probably had little else going for them. Meat loaf or a Bundt cake, for example.
    As I grew older and as my affection for DeAnne didn’t, I began to throw her words back at her in the form of a question. “No grapejelly dessert for the selfish cornonthecob ?” I would ask her, as if she had admonished me in a foreign language that I couldn’t quite understand. The act of repeating her words, of course, served multiple purposes.
    According to DeAnne, I was being selfish because I hadn’t finished my dinner; there were starving children in Africa (which she thought of as one big country); and my serving of casserole could have been sent to feed them. At the dinner table, I was being selfish to save my life and, though they didn’t know it, also the lives of my African counterparts, and it felt good.
    In letter #395, I was being selfish and it felt bad. A wasp sting, a blow to the face, a skinned knee. In the four years that Kelly and I had been writing to each other, I had never kept a thought from her. We were the twins, conjoined at the foreheads, our thoughts silently traveling back and forth through hidden circuitries. Until Kelly claimed Wade in letter #394, he had never made an appearance in my letters because he was a part of my life in the way that a neighbor’s dog or a mailman was. Wade was a constant, dependable, and not-unpleasant presence. He first came around to the blue and gray ranch house because of the slide in the backyard, but after he chipped his tooth he kept to the swing set. He then came around for the newly installed jungle gym. If I was playing on it, he would join me with no more than a “Hi” spoken to the lawn. If I was inside the blue and gray ranch house, he would climb onto the bars and hang upside down by his knees from the highest rung, his hair a suspended crown of hay. He was unremarkable, except for the taste of his name. In letter #395, I could have told Kelly that “Wade” was orange sherbet in my mouth. I didn’t. I wanted that part of him for myself. I was the wasp, the fist, the gravel road.
    Before the summer of Dill and Wade, Kelly and I had traded letters about another boy, her cousin Bobby, but he didn’t count. Bobby was older than us. He was in high school when we were still in the fifth grade. His hair was parted down the middle, and the feathered sides were held in place with hairspray. He had a permanent shadow above his upper lip. It looked to us like he hadn’t washed his face properly.
    In letter #329, Kelly wrote that Bobby had made her touch his privates. Kelly and her cousin were in the basement of the red brick house. He sat down next to her on the couch. He picked up her hand and placed it in between his legs. She wrote that it felt warm and then hard. Bobby closed his eyes, and his head fell backward, an invisible pair of hands pulling on the wings in his hair. Bobby told her not to tell anyone. I began letter #330 with “Gross!” written over and over again. Each time the word meant something different. I should have just written, “Tell your father!”
    Bobby continued to cut the grass for the Powells all through that spring and summer of ’79. Kelly’s mother, Beth Anne, disliked the sound of the riding mower and made her appointments at Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium on the afternoons when her