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that I go home for the rest of the day and contemplate the consequences of being disrespectful to my superiors.
    *
    When my mother hears of this, she drives us both to the school. She drags me into the principal’s office and insists I tell him what’s happened. Shaking his head, he rescinds my expulsion and sends me back to class.
    But Mrs. Hawke and I are now archenemies. One of her test questions asks for the definition of
perdition
. I write “damnation,” and she counts it wrong because it’s not “hell.”
    I race to the library and look up
perdition
in a dictionary. The definition given is “damnation.” I carry the dictionary to Mrs. Hawke’s classroom, lay it on her desk, and point this out.
    She says, “Well, I bet every dictionary doesn’t define perdition this way.”
    I reply that one is enough to make my case.
    Gazing at me through narrowed eyes, she agrees to give me half credit. But it’s clear she has me marked out as a troublemaker.
    In the summer of 1959, I work as a receptionist in my father’s office. I’m impressed by how much time he spends with his patients and how kind he is to them. But I’m most impressed by the fact that he charges them only $3 per visit. Some can’t afford even that, so they pay him with cakes or country hams or sacks of beans.
    One evening as he’s driving me home, we pass a poor part of town. I make a snotty-teenager remark about the people who live there.
    Very quietly he says, “Those people are my patients and my friends, and I never want to hear you talk that way again.”
    Later that summer we take a family vacation to a South Carolina beach. When we pull into our driveway upon our return, Stanley from next door greets us wearing a suit, even though it’s not Sunday.
    As I climb out, I ask Stanley, “Why are you all dressed up?”
    â€œWe’ve just been to Martha’s funeral,” he says, and explains that Martha, my best friend from childhood, has died in a wreck at church camp in a car driven by a youth minister who was showing off by racing around the mountain curves. His car veered off the road and rolled down a cliff. Martha, who was sitting by an open back window, was thrown partway out. The car landed on top of her.
    I walk upstairs to my room and lie down on my bed. I’m completely numb, as though my arm has just been lopped off. (When I think of this, even forty-five years later, I’m still numb.)
    Once we get our drivers’ licenses, my friends and I spend most of our lives in our parents’ cars, like gypsies in their pony carts. Marty and Jane are my most frequent companions because they live nearby. Marty’s father is a doctor and her mother is on the school board. She’s very well coordinated and, like me, would love to ruin her emotional health by playing organized sports. Instead, she’s dating the star of our basketball team. Jane, a popular cheerleader whose father is a businessman, is dating our quarterback.
    My boyfriend, Harold, is a good baseball player, but he doesn’t have time for sports. He works almost full-time at Sobel’s, the clothing store owned by the father of Linda, our Dobyns-Bennet High School squaw. Harold is the best-dressed boy at our school. He reminds me of my grandfather — tall and slender with beautiful clothes and a diamond pinky ring.
    Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, Jane, Marty, and I drive up Broad Street to the train station, U-turn, and descend Broad to the church circle. Teens arrive from all over southwest Virginia and East Tennessee to join us. At night, Broad Street is like a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour. Cars stop as passengers from one hop into another, or as people flirt or argue with those headed in the opposite direction.
    Constantly picking up or dropping off any of a dozen other friends, we eat fries and burgers at drive-in restaurants. We go to