I know it’s not the same—gay and asexual—but I want to tell you as someone who thought they were broken, and everyone was staring at them and knew, that you are not broken. Plus, you might not be asexual, you might just not be interested in sex now, or only be interested in sex with people once you know them and have a bond with them, or maybe you’re only turned on by a very particular kind of sex or fetish that you haven’t discovered. But as long as everyone is consenting, there’s nothing wrong with your desire, or with your not having desire. We’re all wired differently.

Were you picturing Jack as a puppy again ?

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed — not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

As a group, the instructors were a lot more sympathetic than I ever would have guessed; most bent over backwards to help us not only pass, but pass high enough to hold onto our scholarships. Only Skip's calculus teacher was completely unreceptive, and Skip was doing well enough there to skate by without any special help. Years later I realized that for many of the instructors it was a moral issue rather than an academic one: they didn't want to read their ex-students' names in a casualty list and have to wonder if they had been partially responsible; that the difference between a D and a C-minus had also been the difference between a kid who could see and hear and one sitting senseless in a VA hospital somewhere.

'What do they call this part of town?' Bobby asked. 'Does it have a name?'
'These days, who knows?' Ted said, and shrugged. 'They used to call it Greektown. Then the Italians came, the Puerto Ricans, and now the Negroes. There's a novelist named David Goodis — the kind the college teachers never read, a genius of the drugstore paperback displays — who calls it "down there." He says every city has a neighborhood like this one, where you can buy sex or marijuana or a parrot that talks dirty, where the men sit talking on stoops like those men across the street, where the women always seem to be yelling for their kids to come in unless they want a whipping, and where the wine always comes in a paper sack.' Ted pointed into the gutter, where the neck of a Thunderbird bottle did indeed poke out of a brown bag. 'It's just down there, that's what David Goodis says, the place where you don't have any use for your last name and you can buy almost anything if you have cash in your pocket.'