One thing Daddy liked to say was that travel broadened the mind. Consequently, my brother and I attended five elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools.

I knew I would be the biggest dork in the new school, no matter how many misfits already attended. In those thick plastic-framed glasses, knee socks, plaid skirts, and cheap leatherette pumps—yes, even by fifth grade—no one could out-nerd me. And none of them wanted me as a friend.

By the time I entered my second high school, I’d discovered a love of music and theater that improved my meager sense of belonging. A boy in my old geometry class unwittingly put it best.

“Nerds make their own music,” he said. “They’re all in the band.”

So I joined band, and chorus, and drama. In High School #2, I won a slot in the show choir. Its queen bee, Mary Lou, was an alto with a lust for cheeseburgers who resented my intrusion into her little world.

Mary Lou never beat me up, but used her advanced skills in exclusion to make me wish I’d never heard of singing and dancing. And I tried so hard to win her over. One day, I complimented her new haircut.

“F*** you,” she retorted. “Retarded little freak.”

During the spring musical, in which I played Maria to her Mother Abbess, she laughed uproariously the day I tripped on the long black habit and hurtled down a flight of stairs. Through her guffaws, she spat out phrases that she’d learned in health class.

“Should we stay or send?” she moaned. “Stop, drop, and roll!”

A few weeks later, the drama club held initiation into its secret society. That night, as I sat blindfolded in a practice room, waiting my turn, I heard the door open and close. A person stood there, and I smelled pickles and cheese. Chewing. Silence.

“Open your mouth,” a low voice ordered.

Within seconds, most of a can of salmon was shoved between my lips and my legs were smeared with Ben Gay. Sour breath leaned in close to my right ear.

“I will always hate you,” she said. “And you will always suck.”

I heard her voice for years, even faintly as I graduated magna cum laude with a music degree, in contact lenses and a hot little dress. But some days, when my eyes blur with tears, Mary Lou waits eagerly in the shadows.

My eighth-grade year burst into flames when my best friend Kess, whom I had known since birth, moved from Tulsa to New Orleans. I watched the explosion from the dark of my family’s living room. I couldn’t see his house from there, but I could see the moving truck driving away. I cried—howled as its red and amber and white lights disappeared behind trees and houses. I watched until the last ember faded to ash.

That Christmas, my parents sent me to New Orleans to spend a week with Kess. When he learned that I had taken up the electric guitar, he wanted me to hear something. He directed me to a chair in the den, put an off-white cassette in the home’s intercom system, cued it, and hit play. Sound echoed from the kitchen, the living room, the hallway, a bathroom. It was like hearing the Big Bang. Thunder and fire. Galaxies whirling into existence, stars bottle-rocketing. Then silence. Wind. Evolution. Frogs falling from the sky. The atomic bomb. Kess laughed when he saw the smoke billowing from my ears. He shushed me when I asked him who. He hit rewind. After another listen, he told me: “‘Eruption.’ Van Halen. From their first album,” and gave me the tape’s black case. I asked him to play it again while I stared at the superheroes on the cassette’s tiny album cover.

After celebrating New Year’s, I had to return home. At the airport, Kess and I parted ways with a high five à la 1987 and, before I disappeared onto the jetway, a wave. On the plane, and even for the next few months, I assumed one of us would always play Alex to the other’s Eddie. As we did when we pitched curveballs and fastballs. As we did when we biked to Quik Trip. As we did when we put together skits for talent shows. And as we did that week walking around Jackson Square. But everyday life ruled supreme, and the miles between New Orleans and Tulsa turned into silence the next year. When that got to be too much, I always put on Van Halen. That sound—that wild joy, that wild rage—was the star by which I steered my little Chevy through the dark nights of high school.

My heart was pounding. I realized that if my arm had been a couple of inches longer I would have spent the rest of my life telling people how a beaver trap removed my hand when I was only nine years old. I would have had to learn how to write with my left hand.

The park used to be a Boy Scout camp. The remnants of a lodge building and solitary squat stone tower had somehow managed to resist falling into the swamp that had overtaken the grounds. The wind was blowing south and it brought the stench of the slaughterhouse and the meat packing plant down the river and right to us. Whenever I go back, even after all these years, that smell paints a picture.

Normally it was just me and Josh and Jake, but that day Mike had somehow tagged along. He was a wiry kid prone to outbursts of violent rage.

Mike pointed to the tower. “Bet you I can climb it,” he said smugly.

I didn’t like him, so I bet him twenty dollars he couldn’t. It was all the money I had in the cigar box under my bed; accumulated from mowing my neighbors’ lawns.

Josh found a piece of bark and Jake scratched the terms into it with a stick. I signed the bottom, certain that my brush with amputation somehow made me invincible.

Mike grabbed the ragged stones at the base of the tower and began his ascent. He was moving fast and quickly passed the highest point any of us had ever climbed. Josh and Jake turned on me and began rooting him on, urging him to make the final push. As Mike threw his leg over the top and raised his arms in victory, I grabbed the bark contract from Jake, smashed it, and pedaled off on my bike as quickly as possible. God Damn, I thought, if the trap had only torn my hand off, I never would have made that bet.

Mark—Age 29—Portland, OR