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there and stared at me. The table got quiet. Billy squinted his eyes in the theatrical way that children do when they’re pretending to be tough, like they’ve seen on TV, and he dramatically stabbed his plastic spork into his Salisbury steak, splashing the gravy on the table.
    It was on. But I had this one won before it started. Instead of a verbal assault, I diversified by kicking him square on the knee under the table and then tucking back my legs and opening them astride the chair, pulling them back without moving my upper torso so Billy didn’t see what I’d done, and he tried to kick me back, and hard, but instead his kick went high and he kicked the underside of the table, scraped his shin hard on an under-support. Dyslexic he may have been, but gullible he certainly was.
    The blow was clearly quite painful, and he began yelling loudly. The new female principal came up and grabbed him by the arm, said, “Now what are you yelling about, Billy?”
    Billy pointed at me and said, “He kicked me under the table!” That was partially true. Mostly true.
    The female principal, whose name is lost to history, pointed to me and said, “This is the nicest and smartest boy at this school. This boy would not have kicked you.” She pulled him out of his chair and he began screaming. As he was being led away, he managed to pull back his jeans and reveal a huge scarlet scrape, bleeding from where the skin on his shin had been peeled back from kicking the underside of the table.
    I felt the weight of the world there, the cross-over consequence of my dual personality, and I wanted to chase the kid down, apologize, and tell the principal the truth, but instead, Arthur said, “Damn, Dom; you got rid of him quick.” But I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for Billy, as my own rue was already in the cosmic mail.

    Dan and Mare were also at Vermillion for their sixth-grade year, but it was as if they were already in junior high, at another school. We never overlapped, never saw one another. My reputation as a gutter-mouthed vulgarian would inevitably show up on their radar, I understood. It was too small a school, and kids, they liked to talk. For the record, I wasn’t comfortable being a hoodlum-in-training. I preferred to be the Nancy-boy academic, but the suction of appealing to the neglected element, of having their respect and keeping them quieted, keeping them from looking at me like a target, like someone they’d like to have a go at, that sense of . . . well, survival . . . that was more powerful, and I felt I could walk that line like Johnny Cash. This was a question of survival: I was a soft kid, thin for my age, and fairer and smarter than the rest of them. They felt I was not one of them, not one of the Mexican kids, nor was I one of the others, the white kids, and so I adapted. This was adaptation for the border town.
    But I didn’t think anyone was capable of understanding, so instead I parceled it out, compartmentalized, and I dreaded the day my family would find me out.
    It was Mare who got the word first. One of the girls in my grade found out Mare was my sister, and I must have pissed off that girl at some point because she told Mare everything, in great delicious detail.
    I remember that afternoon. I am sent on an errand with this kid named Juan. Juan is scary. He must have been fourteen or so, but was passing off as a ten-year-old. He wore thin cotton shirts that were hardly ever buttoned, a black comb in his back pocket, didn’t speak a word of English. You could very easily see Juan having lived in some ramshackle hut out in the Mexican frontiers, a horseman, cattleman, something, and already having been fully realized. There was something elegant about him, something sinister and beautiful, like he was already a man very clearly defined. He scared me and most of the teachers, too. So this afternoon, we’re asked to get the projector from the