Each had trouble sitting still. Steve was clearly hyperactive; his energy wasn’t that surprising. He was slim, dark-haired, with regular attractive features. In a few years he’d begin to sprout so much body hair that he would fall out of the good-looking category and move into solo-browed swarthiness, but in sixth grade he was cute. He was always darting around from his desk to the window to the board to the desk again. He’d twitch in his chair and rearrange his legs every minute or so. He’d snatch papers and pencils from others and giggle maniacally. He also talked a lot. Over time, his three companions learned that most of his talk was him thinking out loud. He didn’t care if they listened. One or the other of them was occasionally frustrated by Steve’s inattention, but they all soon learned that they could usually ignore him and he wouldn’t mind.

Keith was ugly and sedentary but the remarkable thing about him was how he rocked back and forth in his desk chair most of the time. He had thick features, fat fingers, clumpy freckles, and bad breath. His vocabulary was woefully limited. He seemed always angry, and he simmered with a suggestion of danger. Melanie wasn’t scared of Keith but she didn’t want to sit near him either. He reminded her of a wary mean dog, and she soon realized that it wasn’t a good idea to look him in the eye. That seemed to make him uncomfortable. It was strange to her: how gruff and bullying he acted, and yet how he suppressed his sneezes and never really laughed.

Patrick was sweet but he had a dreadful stutter. It seemed to take him forever to complete a sentence, and most of the kids teased or prompted him when he tried. Melanie was kind to him. She somehow understood that he needed time to find the words himself and she was comfortable waiting while he issued “uh, uh” syllables. Patrick thought Melanie was his only friend. He was normally silent around others but he conversed with her a bit. So she knew he was smarter than he spoke. They shared a love of Robert Service’s poetry. His fingernails were too long but that was because he was learning to play classical guitar. He was kind of interesting. But he reminded Melanie of her old New York neighbor Barry – his was a similar thin body type, and he wore his blonde hair crew cut like Barry had – and her contempt for Barry bled a little negative into her attitude toward Patrick.

As the school year progressed through winter and into spring, the core four spent many hours together. It seemed like one or two of them were pulled out of class every day, and at least three times a week they all met in Room 6. They became a core corps, kind of the way prisoners might in the yard, or shipwrecked survivors on an island. They created a private space in the coat area (when Mr. Peterson wasn’t around), and began storing items of interest there (three keys, a fountain pen, a small knife Patrick found on the playground, a magnifying glass they lifted from Peterson’s desk). Sometimes they even cooperated on homework together. Mostly they chatted in a leisurely fashion. It got to where Patrick voiced an opinion now and then. It got to where even Steve listened. Their best conversations started with complaints about school and led to ideas about how to make it work.

They didn’t become fast friends. Their last act together was the fire in the outfield. They started it with the magnifying glass – Keith’s idea – and they didn’t expect it to spread beyond their stomp-out diameter. But the fire department was half a block distant and the field needed clearing anyway.

Keith and Steve continued to hang around together through junior high school, but any intimacy between them and Melanie or Patrick faded soon after they matriculated from sixth grade. In fact Keith and Steve didn’t hesitate to aim Steve’s BB gun at Melanie and her friend Gwennie the following Halloween, when the two girls donned big painted boxes and paraded around the neighborhood as a pair of dice (“paradise” Melanie and Gwennie kept giggling, showing their lucky number to other costumed kids. Melanie had four pips on her front panel and Gwennie had three.) Steve hit his target; Melanie experienced an impact slap on her outer right thigh and later found the bruise the pellet made.