In the unpredictable fluid dynamics of middle school, I found myself somehow floating near the top, an inoffensive everyman who was just good enough at basketball and not cripplingly afraid of girls. Neel, by contrast, sank straight to the bottom, shunned by jock and nerd alike. My cafeteria tablemates snorted that he looked funny, talked funny, smelled funny. But we bonded that spring over a shared obsession with books about singing dragons, and we ended up best friends. I stood up for him, defended him, expended prepubescent political capital on his behalf.
