Ryan Vaughn, who passed me into the classroom and muttered, “You’re ridiculous,” and I didn’t say anything back. I didn’t let it bother me—I might have fallen in love with him but there was no way for this to happen, to actualize itself in this particular time and place, in the atmosphere at Buckley, in high school, in 1981, so fuck it, go with the counter-narrative. Who cared anyway? It was all bullshit. It felt so cleansing to look at things from this angle. I wanted to be where Susan Reynolds was. And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation,
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