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first opened your mouth. And you’ve been loving it. So just write it all down. Write about tonight. Quick. Before you forget anything.”
    “Why?”
    “Because,” she said, turning away from the painting at last. “You could get hit in the head with a golf club tomorrow, and then it would all be gone forever.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” I said.
    “Not that ridiculous. Apparently.”
    Standing there in the silent café, I wanted to tell her that if I got hit in the head and lost every brain cell but one, that brain cell would be the one that remembered that night. But, of course, I couldn’t think of words that good, just then. So I said nothing. And silence said what my words couldn’t.
    “All right. I’ll do it. If you want,” I finally managed.
    The corners of her mouth began to shake. She bit her lower lip. Her nostrils swelled slightly as she breathed in, sharply. And then, at last, a strange and slow smile spread across her face.
    “Why are you smiling?”
    “Because,” she said. And for a moment I thought that’d be it. But then she finished: “ You’ll never forget me.”
    Then she kissed me one more time and stepped down off the table. Before I could say anything, she walked out of the café, toward her mother and her ball and her world, and I remained there in mine, sitting on the table looking up at the tiny smudge we’d made.

2
Pinkerton and McGann
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life . . . For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
    Julian McGann was the only other boy in my freshman Fiction & Poetry class, which met at 8:30 in the morning in a forgotten sub-basement of Abernathy Hall. While the balding Professor Morrissey squawked about Hawthorne and Longfellow over the clanking of Berkshire College’s infamous steam radiators, Julian sat at the far end of the conference table and, twice a week, passed the ungodly early hour watching the leaves pile up against the raised windows. The girls spent the class mostly staring at the brown freckles that bridged Julian’s nose. He always sat up perfectly straight. His reddish hair was a perfectly kept mess. I assumed Julian was a slacker, since he rarely spoke or wrote anything down, and I was certain that he would never be a real writer, like me.
    The first story of Julian’s that I ever read was in this class. His slim piece, “The Thirty-Third Winter,” had fluttered weightlessly when passed across our long table, unlike my story, “The Gravity in Durham,” which had thudded meaningfully in front of each student, clocking in at a far more impressive twenty pages. “The Gravity in Durham” was about a rich girl who invites a poor boy, at the eleventh hour, to substitute for the Homecoming king in the town parade, after the real king is hit by a truck. I’d based it on taking Betsy Littleford to her debutante ball, but I’d changed around the names and basic details. Even though I knew no one else at Berkshire College and none of them knew me, I still imagined someone might have read the newspaper stories about Billy’s accident, and they’d then despise me for mining his traumatic brain injuries for literary gold. It seemed wrong, especially when I remembered I was at Berkshire College only due to a generous scholarship from the Briar Creek Country Club, arranged by Mrs. Littleford. She’d never said anything explicitly, but still I had the feeling that it was my silence she was really buying.
    Moreover, I didn’t want anyone to know where I was from, exactly. Not that I was embarrassed per se . . . I simply had never been anywhere before where nobody knew me, knew my mother, knew of my father’s absence—knew my life story. The only other time had been when I’d masqueraded as Betsy’s blue-blood date, the Princeton-bound Walter Hartright—that same too-short night when my fictions first earned me a ticket into the inner circle. There,