There was always that one kid against the fence. How could the rest of us feel Okay if there wasn’t? If it was a guy, there was probably a trumpet case at his feet and he wore strangely scuffed shoes, because he avoided the foot traffic on sidewalks and walked instead through weedy lots with dogs yipping at him. He didn’t end up at that station only because his lunches were nightmarish in their eccentricity, but his lunches didn’t help. He almost certainly ended up being a writer.
