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gone into this zone of his own Hutch weirdness and he’s thinking his private heavy-metal thoughts and absolutely choosing not to wash his scraggly heavy-metal hair 2 or brush his grayed-out heavy-metal teeth. He says bizarre things if you ever talk to him—as if he’s making in-jokes about stuff that only he could possibly understand.
    Like this: Nora sat next to him in Brit Lit. She came in one day wearing a black hoodie. She’s going through an all-black phase. Hutch went, “Nora Van Deusen. Back in black! I hit the sack.”
    “What?”
    “Back in black! I hit the sack.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Never mind.” Hutch shook his head like Nora was the town idiot.
    “Did you say, hit the sack?”
    “Yeah.”
    “As in, get in bed, hit the sack?”
    “That’s not what I meant,” Hutch muttered. “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “It better not be what you meant,” said Nora.
    “Whatever,” he said. “I’m just joking with you.”
    “It’s not a joke if nobody gets it,” Nora snapped, opening her notebook. 3
    Stuff like that. He’d say things that sounded creepy, but you couldn’t figure out what he meant, so if you got mad, you seemed like an idiot. He’d appear to be quoting something, or referring to something—but he’d also know that you’d have no idea what it was—so why was he even talking if he was intentionally not communicating? He was basically talking to himself. 4
    In fourth grade, Hutch was a laughing, popular boy. I didn’t know what happened, exactly, that made him change. I couldn’t remember when he switched from coolguy to leper, but in fourth he was cool and he put a huge bag of gummy bears in my mail cubby with a note. I remember feeling happy that someone so confident and golden would notice me. The note didn’t say much. Actually, all it said was “From J.H. (John Hutchinson),” and for a second I worried that he put them in the wrong cubby and they were really meant for Ariel Oliveri—who had, has and probably always will have the mail cubby next to mine. When I looked up, though, Hutch was grinning at me across the hall, so I knew they were for me. I felt weird, because we hadn’t spoken to each other very much, but I spilled some bears into my pocket and ate them very slowly over the course of the day, thinking to myself, Hutch likes me, I got a present from a boy, Hutch likes me, he gave me candy. I said it over and over and over in my mind.
    The rest of the bears I took home and hid under my pillow. They lasted a week. I’d eat them at night and think about how I sort of had a boyfriend, and how my dad would kill me if he knew I was eating candy after brushing my teeth.
    But although Hutch and I did sit by each other one day at a school assembly, and although I sent him a valentine with two extra candy hearts taped onto it on Valentine’s Day, and although we smiled at each other a bunch for several weeks in a row, we were basically too young to do anything more.
    Then one day, I noticed Ariel taking a big bag of gummy bears out of her mail cubby.
    “Are those mine?” I asked her.
    “No. See?” She showed me a card attached to the bag. It had her name on it. Hutch was smiling from the other side of the hall.
    “So he was breaking up with you?” asked Doctor Z. It was two days later, our third appointment.
    “I guess.”
    “It was hard to tell?”
    “I think he was
replacing
me.”
    “Oh. Were you angry?”
    “No. Why do you say angry?”
    “I thought you might be, from the way you described Hutch being a leper with gray heavy-metal teeth.”
    “I was just playing around with my vocabulary. I’m not angry.”
    “I don’t mean to put words in your mouth.”
    “I think I felt relieved. Like it was nice that he liked me, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to act, or talk to him, so it made me nervous whenever I was at school. When he started liking Ariel, then I didn’t have to angst about it anymore.”
    “Talking to a boy who