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right the wrong. Still, when I think about everythingthat happened, I can come up with no better story to explain how my friendship with Chris began.
    The neighbourhood was called Manor Park, a name that was strictly aspirational. It was a new subdivision and there were still houses going up when I first moved there. We played guns or hide-and-seek in the half-built structures, hanging from rafters, huddling in dank, gravel-floored basements, shuffling along the narrow ledges outside second-storey windows high above the ground, or crawling across tar-papered roofs and leaping into the piles of pink fibreglass insulation stacked below. Most of the neighbourhood kids were twelve to fourteen, with a few brutish fifteen-or sixteen-year-olds thrown in. When school was out, we all played together. There was Derek, who was a little manic and clumsy, but who knew how to throw a knife so that it stuck in a tree, and could tie impressive knots. There was Geoff, who had a slapshot you could barely see and who could spit between his teeth a squirt of saliva that was marvelled at for distance and accuracy. There was Hughey, who was so tall and big-haired that we called him Franky, for Frankenstein. There was Jay, Robin, Paul, Sheldon, and Tom.
    We played games of street hockey or baseball in an undeveloped cul-de-sac called the Horseshoe. We went swimming in a lake called Oathill, which was long and narrow and surrounded by forest. Sometimes we cut through a different forest to Penhorn Mall and played games of Asteroids or Space Invaders in the arcade, bought an Orange Julius or a bag of bulk broken chocolate bars if we had extra scratch, or just wandered the widecorridors past all the stores without any good reason or objective. If it was only me and Chris, we often ended up in the bookstore. We spent a lot of time in the fantasy and science fiction aisle judging books by their covers. We particularly liked covers with half-naked women or muscular swordsmen. I also judged books by how closely they adhered to stories I had in mind. I tested some of those story ideas out on Chris, and, through his grunts and supportive laughs, I understood he believed every one to be worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
    I remained in a sling all summer. I broke the arm two more times, once falling from the rafters of a half-built house, once tripping violently during a game of hide-and-seek. I was still a new kid, but I now had special status as some kind of fallen soldier. My status had been lifted by Chris, who was respected and yet treated me like an equal. This, undoubtedly, puzzled many since it flew in the face of my obvious deficiencies. A true friend is someone who hangs with you no matter what everyone else thinks.
    At first, I did not walk to the new school with Chris but with the neighbourhood boys who were my own age, like Franky and Derek. We collected at the base of Somerset Hill and moved forth together, a troop of weary soldiers, and gained a little levity as the distance got covered and the curse words became more inventive and amusing. We wore blazing white Stan Smith sneakers in the fall, and we clomped and scuffed in Kodiak workboots in the winter, the laces always untied. Downy vests of enormous bulk were popular, and preferable to full-sleevedwinter coats. Nobody wore a hat or gloves unless their mother was in sight. To carry our books and lunches, we used vinyl brown Adidas bags that looked like dachshunds without legs. Inevitably, the bags got so full over the course of the year that the straps could no longer take the strain and snapped. When one strap broke, you tied the loose end to the other strap, and you could loop it over your shoulder and carry the bag like a backpack, the weighty contents bulging out the bottom. If both straps broke, you were fucked. When there was ice on the ground, we flung our Adidas bags along the road like curling rocks.
    I was unsatisfied with the boys in my own grade. They didn’t cut it and I