Ira Glass

Virginia had blonde hair, and she was the only girl in the fifth grade with pierced ears and painted fingernails.

And Timothy Stokes was in love with her.

I knew this because the Stokeses lived next door to us, and I was privy to all kinds of secrets about Timothy that I had absolutely no desire to know.

I forbade myself with an almost religious severity to show Timothy any kindness or regard.

I would never let him sit beside me at lunch or in class, and if he tried to talk to me on the playground, I ignored him.

It was bad enough that I had to live next door to him.

It was toward Virginia that Timothy now advanced, a rattling growl in his throat.

She drew back behind her girlfriends, and their screaming now grew less melodious, less purely formal.

Timothy crouched down on all fours.

He rolled his wild white eyes and took a last look around him.

That was when he saw me, halfway across the yellow distance of the soccer field.

He was looking at me, I thought, as though he hoped I might have something I wanted to tell him.

Instantly, I dropped flat on my belly, my heart pounding the way it did when I was spotted trying to spy on a baseball game or a birthday party.

I slid down into the ravine backward.

At first, I could hear the girls shouting for Mrs. Gladfelter, and then I heard Mrs. Gladfelter herself sounding very angry, and the bell sounded the end of recess, and everything got very quiet.

But I just stayed there in the ravine.

I told myself that I didn't feel sorry at all for stupid old Timothy Stokes.

But then I would remember the confused look in his eyes as I had abandoned him to his fate, to all the unimaginable things that would be done to him in the fabulous corridors of the special school.

I kept recalling something that I had heard Timothy's mother say to mine just a couple of days earlier.

You know, Althea Stokes had told my mother in that big, sad, donkey voice of hers.