You’re just a boy, he whispers, slouching sideways in the back-row seat next to mine, knowing our teacher needs hearing aids and our classmates are drowsing like dogs. Just a fucking boy, stinking of peanut butter, all those shitty sandwich bits stuck in your braces. Mommy still packs your lunch, right? Trims the crusts? But she didn’t comb that rat’s nest on top of your head, did she, boy? She say anything about those stains on your jeans? On your sheets? And my blood is rushing to all the wrong places as the bell rings, then and now, forty years on.