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film, which took me two days in the darkroom, Sgt. Byrd walking me through the process step by step, I took the photographs to Cindy Lorenzo’s house, even though I knew there was only a slight chance she’d appreciate them. Cindy was not actually my first choice for an audience, but since my two best friends, Liz and Pam, had moved away, and my next best friend, Jennifer, was spending the summer with her grandmother, I didn’t have much of a pool to pick from.
    There were good things and bad things aboutbeing friends with Cindy Lorenzo. The worst thing was that she was an eleven-year-old girl whose brain was still on the first-grade level. She could read and dress herself and ride her fancy bicycle in wobbly circles around her front yard, but she couldn’t think straight at all. It was like her emotions got in the way of her thoughts. She was nervous and excitable and shaky around the edges. She hit and bit.
    The good things about being friends with Cindy Lorenzo included the fact that I could tell her my secrets and she never blabbed a word of what I said. I could brag on myself, and she wouldn’t raise her eyebrows every few seconds the way regular people would to keep me from getting too puffed up with my own greatness. Some days Cindy acted like she thought I was some sort of hero, and that’s a feeling that’s hard to resist, no matter who’s having it about you.
    â€œI’m not a ballerina, but I could be one if I wanted to,” Cindy informed me the minute I walked into the Lorenzos’ front hallway. “Joey said I couldn’t ever be a ballerina, so I kicked him.”
    Joey was one of Cindy’s invisible friends. Most little kids had invisible friends who were nice and friendly, but with Cindy’s crowd it was hit-or-miss. She complained all the time about her invisible friend Suzanne, who was a pincher. “I just stuck my tongue out at her, that’s what I did,” she’d say, to let me know that Suzanne’s pinching had not gone unavenged.
    â€œBless your heart, Jamie, you don’t have a bit of tan this summer. You need to get yourself over to the swimming pool.” Mrs. Lorenzo swooped into the room in a cloud of rosy perfume. It was hard to make your eyes go from Mrs. Lorenzo to Cindy and back again and convince yourself they were related. Cindy was tall for her age, but she walked hunched over like an old lady, and her skin was splotchy and drab. Mrs. Lorenzo, on the other hand, fluttered and flittered hither and yon, high color on her cheeks, her hair piled on top of her head in one dramatic style or another. She and my mother were best friends, which is why Cindy and I got thrown together so much. That, and the fact that the Lorenzos lived across the street from us, andI could babysit Cindy when her parents wanted to go out to dinner.
    â€œLet’s go talk to Brutus,” Cindy said, tugging on my hand. “He says he misses you, even if he likes it better over here with me.”
    I followed her upstairs to her bedroom, looking as I always did at the family pictures that lined the wall above the railing. There were Cindy’s brothers, both grown, the older one, Nathan, even married with a baby. You could see that they were Mrs. Lorenzo’s children, no questions asked, with their handsome faces and pretty brown eyes.
    The picture that fascinated me the most was the one at the very top of the stairs, the family picture the Lorenzos had taken the year before, when both sons came over to visit at the same time, right before Mark, who was twenty-three, left for Vietnam. It was a “Who in this picture doesn’t belong?” picture, with the answer being Cindy. The other four Lorenzos were looking the photographer straight in the eye, their white teeth gleaming, dark hair shining, everything pressed and straight and starched, Col. Lorenzo and Markboth in uniform. Cindy sat slouched next to her mother, her nervous eyes