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close together. So close they almost touched.
    I hardly even remember what happened in the locker room, except that she got me over in the little laundry cubicle in the back corner and somehow I ended up sitting on top of the dryer and she was standing in front of me and she had her hands up the skirt of my dress. I remember it was hot and dark, and Jesse felt like a smooth animal; her shirt was like a second silk skin over the hot, smooth skin of her arms and shoulders. She kissed and kissed my neck and shoulders and up just behind my ears—no onehad ever kissed my neck before that night—and I thought I was going to pass out. I could hardly see. It smelled like dryer sheets and hair gel in there.
    I knew I couldn’t be gone for too long so I made her leave after just a little bit, and when I came back into the gym and everyone was still there, dancing and laughing and drinking soft drinks and eating cheese curls, and no one knew where I had been or what I had been doing and no one even thought to
ask
, I felt this amazing new feeling come over me: not like I was all-powerful exactly, but
sort
of like I was all-powerful, like I was a little bit larger than life. For the first time, I saw that I could be in two places at once, like a superhero. At that moment in the gym, I felt like I could do anything I wanted and be anything I wanted and have everything I wanted to have in the world. And I looked around at the crappy Costco-brand snacks, and skinny sophomore Mark Salfrezi pretending to be a real DJ with his mom’s sunglasses and his iPod plugged into a pair of AV speakers, and the childish harvest-themed decorations (leaves cut out of construction paper—cute, but
please
), and I just thought, this whole event could be so much better. All of it. Everything. It could all be so much more polished and classy. All we would need would be a couple of corporate sponsors, like the ones my mom gets every year for her Struggle Against Alzheimer’s Gala at the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Stonington.
    That was the moment I first had the idea for corporatesponsors. I sat on it all year long, then this past summer when we were at the lake house I drafted a letter to send out to selected members of our local business community. If you want to appeal to a business, you have to think like a business. What does a business want? To make money. How do they make money? By getting more customers. And how do they get more customers? Two ways: Either 1) by making a better product, or 2) by making themselves look good to potential customers. And what could make a business look better to potential customers than showing that they support kids, who are our future? I made all this clear in the letter. I also said that in these troubled times, when public school budgets are getting slashed left and right, it’s harder and harder for schools to get the basic educational resources they desperately need, and Vander has some really interesting, smart, diverse students who will certainly have important roles in shaping the world of tomorrow, and don’t these businesses want to be part of all that by donating funds or services to our Fall Formal, where we raise money to improve the educational resources of the school, such as computers? (Actually, the money we raise at the Fall Formal goes to fund the senior class trip every year, but I feel like that still counts as an educational resource—last year the seniors went to Cape Cod but they stopped by Plimoth Plantation on the way, and this year they’re going to Disney World, and Epcot is a very educational destination.)
    I sent the final draft of the letter out two weeks ago and I’ve already gotten three positive responses. Betty Horn from Horn of Plenty Bakery said she would donate five hundred Death by Chocolate Brownie Bites on presentation platters (sayonara, Costco-brand cheese curls!). Laurie Meloni from Buns of Steel Boot Camp and Cross-Training Gym said she would donate a sampler of Krav