Have you ever read The Scarlet Letter? Do they assign that book in high school anymore? Or is it on some kind of ridiculous banned books list now?

I remembered it while I was shredding carrots. In 1970 the book was on our summer reading list for SHA sophomores. I was back at home in Zachary. My parents still wouldn’t let me see Tim, even though he lived just eight miles down the road from us. We were in the same town and yet we might have been stranded on opposite sides of the world. Keeping us apart all this time was worse than unjust: it was cruel. I was fuming over this one night the first week home from school when I pulled out The Scarlet Letter from a pile on my desk. Summer reading wasn’t due for another three months, but I was so bored and lonely and angry that I dropped down on my bed and began turning pages. And as I kept turning pages, and as my parents creaked around in the front parlor, I got drawn in by the story.

I was amazed. Hester Prynne: she was me! And this Nathaniel Hawthorne, how’d he get to know so much about women? The style was maddeningly long-winded, but the story was so true to life I could hardly believe it had been written over a hundred years ago. I kept turning to the front of the book to check the date.

The cruel New England Puritans were perfect stand-ins for my parents, of course. And poor, brave Hester Prynne, standing up on that scaffold with her baby in her arms and that horrible red letter stuck on her chest—a charity case if I ever saw one. As she was jeered at by the crowd, then scolded by the mean town elders sitting in their balcony, and then banished to a shack at the edge of the village, I couldn’t help but think of Tim’s letter stuck up on the bulletin board, and of my classmates laughing at me, and of the nuns sending me to my dorm room for a two-day suspension. And yet, even standing on the scaffolding in front of the whole town, Hester managed to hold her head up and look them all in the eye. How did she do that? That’s what I wanted to know. How in the world did she get through all that with her pride intact? And if Hester Prynne could do it, I thought, well then, maybe there was hope for me.

Our dog, Tick, barked in the front yard. The windows all around the house stood open, letting in the night air. I heard my father get up and open the front door to scold the dog. “Shush! Shush up!” My mother said something about armadillos. “Crazy mutt,” my father said, coming back into the parlor.

Then something clicked against the wall just outside my window. I jerked up in bed, startled. The curtains were parted halfway, the night black and motionless beyond the mosquito screen. I sat listening with the book in my lap. Then again, click. Our house had a tendency to creak at night, but nothing like this. Then another click, this one sounding purposeful and directed. I crawled across the bed and peered out the curtains.

Squatting in the shadow of a magnolia tree, just at the edge of the light from my window, was Tim. He held Tick, the dog furiously wagging his tail. I was so happy to see him that a shout escaped my lips. Tick yapped, and Tim signaled for me to be quiet as he tried to calm the dog.

We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, when my father had thrown Tim from the house, so to find him like this now at my window, after all those months of agonized and impassioned letter writing, seemed almost too good to be real. I even began crying a little.

Tim indicated that I should open the screen, and I tried to do so without much noise. The screen was an old one, the kind that hinged at the top and fastened at the bottom, and it hadn’t been opened in years. I had to pry the hook loose with a pen. As I was doing this, I heard my father pass through the hallway just outside my door. And seconds later the light suddenly doubled on the lawn as my father switched on the overhead lamp in my parents’ bedroom.

Tim crouched closer to the tree trunk, trying to keep to the shadows. Working quietly, he pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his top shirt pocket, unfolded it, and crumpled it into a ball. Seeing what he meant to do, I knelt on my bed and opened the screen as wide as I could, holding it up and away from the windowsill. Tick eagerly watched all of this. Then Tim took aim and lobbed the ball of paper underhanded across the yard and over the boxwood hedge at the side of the house. The ball arced smoothly through the window, bounced off my shoulder, and landed on the rug at the foot of the bed. Tick started barking again. Tim couldn’t quiet him—the dog thought we were playing.

I heard my father grousing in the next room, and then he yanked open the curtains on their window, throwing light like a spotlight onto the side yard.

Tim ducked behind the tree. I could see the shadow of his body standing out along the left side of the trunk. Tick ran back and forth at the tree, barking.

“Hey! Hey!” my father shouted from his window.

“It’s okay! I’ll get him!” I shouted back, and ran out of my room, past my mother sitting in the parlor watching TV, and down the front porch steps. “Here boy! Come on!” I called, and the dog came running. “It’s okay. I got him now!” I shouted, and my father let fall the curtains again on their bedroom window.

Holding Tick in my arms, I lingered on the porch long enough to watch Tim, my brave, clever boyfriend, steal along the edge of the yard, down the side of the gravel drive, and away into the night.

Back in my bedroom, I closed the door and unwadded the note. He knew it was impossible for me to see him because of my parents, Tim had written, but if I could somehow get out Saturday night and come to the Greenwoods Mall, he’d be waiting for me behind the A&W. “I got something important to tell you.” He signed it “Love always.”

I smoothed the crinkles out of the paper and excitedly folded it into The Scarlet Letter, where Hester Prynne sat with her daughter in the cottage at the edge of the village, working her strange and mysterious embroidery as she waited for her redemption, however it might come.

Tim stood up out of the cab of his father’s truck as I ran across the parking lot to meet him.

He had begun to grow sideburns and a mustache since his graduation from Zachary High earlier that month, and when we kissed his new hair tickled my nose. Between kisses I told him his mustache made him look like Paul McCartney. He said he didn’t like the Beatles, and could I pick someone else? In that case, I said, how about Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? He said that was better, and we went on kissing.

I had fashioned an elaborate lie in order to see Tim that night, telling my parents I was meeting some girlfriends for a movie in town, and then having one of them phone the house so she could casually mention this to my mother, and then studying a review for the movie I had found in the paper just in case I was asked about it. I even begged money from my mother for a Coke and popcorn before I borrowed their car for the night. All of this deceit didn’t come naturally to me. I had never lied to my mother before, not in any big way. Lying, I knew, was wrong, and lying to your mother was the very worst kind. It violated the trust that family members are supposed to have for one another. But as far as I was concerned, my mother had already violated that trust when she held me back in the hallway so my father could beat Tim bloody. And anyway, what would she have answered if I’d said I was going to meet Tim that night? She would’ve said, “No, you’re not.” So lying to her now, I reasoned, wasn’t like lying at all; it was like integrity, a bold act taken for the sake of a higher good.

I don’t believe there could have been a more unromantic place in Zachary for our reunion than that patch of black tar behind the A&W. Framing us were the back wall of the drive-in, a Dumpster, a gravel service road, and a weedy vacant lot. The giant neon root-beer mug in front cast a sickly yellow glow over it all. But as with our first meeting almost a year before in the school gym, it hardly seemed to matter where we were. The world was only as big as our bodies, and wrapped up in one another like a blanket around our shoulders, we felt warm and safe and far from our surroundings. Nuzzling Tim’s neck, I could smell his father’s Old Spice and a piney, earthy scent that made me think of their trailer in the woods. He pulled back and looked at me, fingering my hair and touching the collar of my blouse like there was something amazing there that he had never seen before.

Settling into the cab of the truck, I asked him about his note. “You said it was something important.”

He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “Right.” He held my left hand in his lap. “You know how I feel about you,” he began seriously, rubbing my fingers. “I’ve told you before how I see us being together for a long time.”

I nodded and watched his eyes. I had a giddy feeling about what was coming.

“I’ve thought about this a lot. You know we can’t start anything until you finish high school. You know that, don’t you? You’ve got to finish high school first.”

“I know.”

“I’m willing to wait if you are. That’s no problem for me.”

I kissed his hand. “It’s no problem for me, too.”

“I want to get myself ready,” he said. “I want to feel like I can take care of you, and that I’ve got something to offer you.”

“You do! Don’t even worry about that. I don’t need anything—”

“Wait, let me finish. You know I’ve been wondering what I was going to do once I graduated. I wrote you about that, how I’ve been looking around town and all, but, well … there’s just not a whole lot of opportunity available for me here. I mean, there’s my dad’s shop, but you know what that place is like. That’s no kind of future.

“So what I decided—and I hope you won’t object to this—what I decided to do while we wait for you to finish school is I’m going to enlist.”

“You what?”

“Let me explain. I’ve been talking to a recruiter. He came by on career day—”

“You mean like with the army?” This was not at all what I was expecting. I was picturing something involving a ring, a white veil, and a bouquet of flowers. But this—

“Laura. Listen. Wait a minute. That’s what I thought, too. But we got to talking, me and Sergeant Coombs …”

Tim laid it all out for me. It had been the last thing on his mind, he said, but if you thought about it, it made perfect sense. The pay, the benefits, the job security. The education. The army would train him—the sergeant said Tim had “officer” written all over him—and when he got out after three years they’d put him through college. I would just be finishing high school then, so it’d be perfect. Hell, even if he did end up in Vietnam, which the sergeant said was not a foregone conclusion, most of the boys there spent half their time sitting on the beach drinking Budweiser beer and eating steak and lobster. “Imagine that,” Tim said, amazed. “Budweiser.”

As Tim went on, holding my hand and repeating all the nonsense the recruiter had told him, I turned to look out the front windshield of the truck. June bugs swarmed beneath a lamp hanging from a utility pole. Shiny black cockroaches crawled up the back door of the kitchen, and from an exhaust fan a burnt, fleshy smell blew our way across the asphalt. The real world had come back, and with it all its tawdriness. We were just two teenagers sitting in a truck in a grimy back parking lot in Zachary: a skinny fifteen-year-old girl with stringy blond hair and a striped polyester blouse, together with her eighteen-year-old Cajun boyfriend with a scruffy mustache who lived in a trailer with his father and couldn’t find a job and so had done what poor boys have done for ages.

Sure, the army has a bad rep these days, Tim was saying, what with Kent State and all. But like the sergeant told him, a smart man could see which way this thing was headed. Already they were cutting back on troops. The whole shebang would probably be over before Tim even got there. He should grab this opportunity while he could because he wouldn’t get another chance. And better to enlist now than to get drafted, because then you didn’t get any choice at all where they sent you; then you were really screwed. Sign up, and any career he wanted, it’d be his. He liked radios? Fine. They had a school for that. Electrical engineering, medicine, auto mechanics—hell, playing the clarinet—you could do just about whatever you wanted with the army.

I couldn’t believe Tim had fallen for all this, and I told him so. “That’s nothing but a bunch of crapola. That guy’s giving you a line.”

“It’s true. I got it in writing,” Tim said. “It’s like a contract.”

“You signed it already?”

He nodded. I only had a year of high school, and the only thing I knew about the war in Vietnam was what I saw on TV, but even I knew it wasn’t something any sane person would want to sign up for.

“I can’t believe you went and did that!” I said. “The army? My god, Tim. What are you thinking? You can’t really be that stupid.”

Tim yanked his head back like I’d slapped him. He blinked at me, then turned away and stared out the side window, swallowing.

I felt terrible. I knew how fragile his self-esteem was, and to call him stupid was about the worst thing I could have said. I was reaching to touch his shoulder when he swung back to face me. His eyes were wet with hurt.

“I did it for you!” he cried in a hoarse voice. “Don’t you understand? It’s for you! It’s for you!”

He had done it for me. Even then the idea didn’t quite make good sense, but I was only fifteen, as hungry for affection and romance as any fifteen-year-old. I rested my hand on his knee in apology. “Tim. Sweetie. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” As we slowly began to make up I continued to protest, but feebly. “Of course I don’t want you to go,” I said. “You could get yourself killed over there!” In the end, though, it didn’t take much persuasion for me to see his enlistment as he wanted me to see it, a testament of his love.

He took my hand and kissed the scar on the inside of my left wrist—the scar I’d gotten for him—and pressed it to his heart. I did the same, kissing the palm of his hand—the hand of a soldier now—and laid it solemnly on my chest. Our actions felt weighted with something deeper and more serious than passion. We weren’t children anymore; we were adults, in the adult world of war and battle, guns and tanks in faraway foreign countries. My brave soldier boy, risking his life for me! For me!

Well. That’s what it is to be young and stupid, I suppose, isn’t it? Boy or girl, you believe anything anyone tells you as long as it’s wrapped up in noble-sounding words, and only because you’re so desperate not to feel so young and stupid anymore. And in spite of the accumulated wisdom of the ages, this never changes, apparently. I watch those poor, hapless boys on TV marching off to Iraq—because they’re nothing more than boys, really, just Tim’s age—and I wonder who put them up to this. What can they be thinking?

As for myself, I know how I would answer Tim today. I would say, “Don’t you dare do this for me. Don’t you dare do that in my name and call it love.” Do it for your own dumb ideas of bravery or heroism or patriotism, but please don’t say you’re doing it for me.

Before I left him that night, Tim stopped and held my face in his hands. As the yellow glow from the root-beer sign seeped into the cab of the truck and the June bugs swarmed beneath the streetlight overhead, he studied my features like he wanted to score them forever in his memory.

The one good thing you can say about war is that it forces you to value the present. It makes you consider last times: this could be the last time I see you. These could be the last words we speak.

“I’ll never forget you,” he told me.

“I’ll never forget you, too,” I promised.

You stupid, stupid boy, I would say today. Where did you get the idea this would make me love you more? I loved you regardless.

I’m sure you’ve seen film clips of the war in Vietnam on TV, Liz. Always alongside the footage of the soldiers fighting in the jungle, you’ll see the hippies back home protesting the war: the thousands of long-haired youth marching on the Capitol, burning flags, putting flowers in the barrels of rifles. “Make love, not war,” their banners read—a phrase that made my mother click her tongue over her knitting and my father grumble about “disgusting punks.”

Seeing those pictures, you might think that the whole country was caught up in the war. But for the girls at SHA in Baton Rouge in 1970, the war in Vietnam was a million miles away. It was no more real for us than I Dream of Jeannie or Gilligan’s Island. The good sons of the good families who sent their daughters to our school didn’t go to Vietnam. The good boys who attended Cathedral High School two blocks over didn’t go to Vietnam. There was no need to even talk about it. In probably much the same way you feel about the war today, it just wasn’t our concern. We had more important things to worry about, things like math tests and school dances and hairstyles. It was only when Tim enlisted that the war began to become real for me, involving real people with real names and actual events.

We had arranged that I would pick up his letters at his father’s repair shop in town, and I received the first one two weeks after he left. “Private Prejean now,” he wrote. “How do you like the sound of that?” Their drill sergeant at Fort Benning, Sergeant Millhouse, was a real hard-ass; he’d chew your head off for the slightest little infraction and then make you say how much you loved him. Tim had to do fifty push-ups for not having his razor clean during bunk inspection. “Can you believe that nonsense?” As far as he could tell, the sole purpose of all the rules and regulations—which were the most random bunch of BS you could ever imagine—was to turn new recruits into a pack of non-thinking, nonquestioning, standard-issue remote-control robots whose only purpose in life was to obey and kill. The army didn’t even try to disguise this fact, Tim wrote. God help the poor recruit who answered his drill sergeant with “But sir, I thought—” “Did I tell you to think? Did I?” Sergeant Millhouse would scream. “You will not think, you will not wonder, you will not question! You will love me and this army! Do you love me and this army?” “Yes, suh!”

“Craziness,” Tim wrote. But at least his company looked out for one another. They were a bunch of good ole boys from farms out west in places like Laramie and Walla Walla and Provo, and towns closer to home, like Natchez and Hattiesburg. He had aced the map-reading tests and navigation runs out in the woods. Turns out he was a pretty good shot with the M14, too. “All that squirrel hunting with my buddies back in Zachary must’ve paid off, I reckon.”

The army, for now at least, didn’t sound so bad in Tim’s letters. He seemed to enjoy it. Even when he was complaining about it, he seemed to enjoy it.

I wrote back that I was working on a surprise for him for when he came home in a year. This was a scrapbook that I had begun, with the idea that I would gather all the important events of my year together in one place so he wouldn’t miss a thing while he was away. I suppose I was too ambitious at first. By the end of the summer my scrapbook was already bulging with pressed flowers, newspaper clippings, movie ticket stubs, Life Saver wrappers. I wanted to share every detail of my life with him, but there wasn’t room for every detail.

I puzzled over this while brushing my teeth or fixing my hair in the morning. If you had to choose the moments that best represented your life, what would they be? The small actions that pass almost without our noticing them, yet that we spend most of our time doing: aren’t these in fact the real stuff of our lives? Putting on your shoes, eating breakfast, singing songs to yourself, opening and closing doors, racing the dog to the end of the driveway to bring in the newspaper …

You could fill all the scrapbooks in the world. The most mundane details of life are not mundane if they’re done with someone else in mind. When you’re in love, everything’s important.

While I wasn’t happy to be returning to Sacred Heart for the start of the new school year, I at least found consolation in the fact that I wasn’t a freshman anymore. I’d gotten through the worst of it, I figured. I knew which girls to trust, which ones to avoid, and how to please the nuns from time to time with a raised hand and an intelligent-sounding question.

The letters from Tim, though, abruptly stopped coming as soon as I returned to school. I didn’t understand it. He had promised to keep writing; he had the school address so there shouldn’t have been any problem. After four weeks into the start of the semester with still no word, I became worried for him. What if he had been injured in his training? Or what if he had somehow already shipped off to Vietnam—was even now flying over a jungle and looking down on green palms and thatched huts? Or, worse—and I could hardly bear to let myself think this—what if he was losing interest in me? Already? So soon?

I was fretting over these possibilities one Friday afternoon during study hour when Sister Mary Margaret entered the library. Half looking down at my textbook, half gazing out a window to the side lawn, I barely noticed her dark figure gliding past. She disappeared among the stacks, and two other girls at the far end of the room bent their heads together again in private conversation. I turned back to the green grass and bushes outside—green like they might have had in Vietnam—and resumed thinking about Tim, wondering where he was, hoping he was all right.

After some time there was a soft rustle at my side. I looked up, surprised to find Sister Mary Margaret there.

“Laura,” she whispered.

“Sister Mary Margaret,” I said. “Hi.”

“You’re studying?”

“Um … yeah.” I glanced down at my book. “Chemistry.”

“That’s good.” She looked across the room, then back down at me. She wore a plain wooden cross hanging at the front of her habit. Even though Sister Mary Margaret was one of the senior nuns at Sacred Heart, fifty or sixty years old at least, the wooden cross made her look, somehow, hippielike.

“Do you know this book?” she asked.

I turned my head to read the cover on the dark gray volume she suddenly presented to me. “What is it?”

“The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” she whispered. “We have both volumes. One and two.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“You should have a look,” she said, laying the book down carefully by my elbow. “I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Be sure to put it back when you’re finished.”

“I will.”

“Volume one. Back there—” She indicated the row from where the book had come.

“Right.”

“Put it back there. Then you can always find it again later when you need to.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

She smiled oddly as she moved off, her habit waving. “Enjoy.”

These nuns, I thought: too much prayer and no sex. They were all a little loony.

I had to go soon to my job in the kitchen. I began to gather my things, but just to please Sister Mary Margaret, I slid the Elizabeth Barrett Browning toward me. The book didn’t look like it got much use at SHA; it was as old and dusty as the sister herself. But then as I picked it up, the pages fell open on a letter. The envelope was addressed from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to me, care of Sacred Heart Academy.

In an instant I understood: the nuns had been keeping my mail from me. I remembered the incident with the bulletin board last spring, and the meeting my parents had in the principal’s office. They had arranged it all then, their scheme to protect me from the corrupting influence of Tim’s letters. But Sister M&M, that crafty old grammarian, had somehow managed to intercept Tim’s letter in the front office so that she could secretly pass it on to me.

I felt silly with happiness. Like a spy, I glanced around the library and snuck the letter into my satchel. I didn’t want to read it in public; I was afraid I might burst out singing. Before I left the library, I slid the volume back into its place on the shelf with a note inside for Sister Mary Margaret: “Thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

After that, every Friday, I would check the stacks. And more often than not, there in volume 1 of The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be a letter from Tim. Sister Mary Margaret and I never said a word about it. But sometimes when I passed her in the hallway, her hands tucked into the folds of her habit, the oversized wooden cross swaying on her chest, she would nod and smile at me in a sly, conspiratorial manner.

•   •   •

Do you know Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by the way? Do girls read her in high school anymore? In case you don’t, here’s a little background for you, some things I gleaned while looking from time to time through volume 1. You especially, dear Liz, might find it interesting.

When Elizabeth Barrett began her exchange of letters with the famous Scottish poet Robert Browning, she was already forty years old, an invalid living with her parents in London. Their letters led to friendship, which led to love. Elizabeth’s father was so mean and jealous, though, that he wouldn’t accept the idea of marriage for his daughter. And so she eloped, brave thing. One morning in September she stole out of the house with her maid, met Robert in a waiting carriage, and fled with him to Italy, never again to return to her home in England. While in Italy she finally showed Robert her “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” written for him during their early correspondence. I know that at least a couple of lines from one of them are familiar to you. We had to memorize the poem that year in Sister Mary Margaret’s class. It’s addressed from a woman to her lover, but I always thought it could as well be from a mother to a child. This is it, Sonnet 43:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

You could have done worse than to have been named after a nineteenth-century Romantic poet, Liz. Imagine if Sister Mary Margaret had hidden Tim’s letters in a volume of Homer. You might be named Penelope, or Athena, or Clytemnestra.

From his letters I learned that after boot camp Tim had been sent to Fort Devens for advanced training. He had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line before, so everything about New England struck him as novel: the tidy red barns and white churches, the old neighborhoods and cracked sidewalks, the way people walked their dogs on leashes and never said hello, only nodded their heads with their lips pressed shut when you passed them on the street.

At Fort Devens he was enrolled in Intelligence School. “Apparently someone thinks I’m smart,” he wrote. He was studying telecommunications, and already knew more about band waves and signal codes than he ever wanted to. “I thought I finished with books once I left high school. That appears not to have been the case.” Suddenly he found himself in a laboratory with a bunch of guys in eyeglasses trying to decipher circuit diagrams. One of his instructors said he had a real aptitude for electronics. “Like father, like son I guess.” He and his bunkmate put together the wackiest hi-fi set you could imagine using spare parts swiped from the radio lab and a chassis they made out of tin cans, forks, and a serving tray from the canteen. “Most surprising thing was, when we turned it on, it worked. We can pick up Casey Kasem on WABC from New York. How do you like that?” he wrote. And so on.

As happy as I always was to receive Tim’s letters, that semester I was also beginning to discover my own aptitudes. At the urging of Sister Mary Margaret I had joined the staff of the school newspaper, The Beacon. The first article I ever wrote was an interview with Maddy, the school cook I helped in the kitchen. Maddy was an amazingly cheerful fifty-year-old black woman who had come to work for the nuns when she was just a teenager. I titled the piece “Silent Heroes: Maddy Simms, Thirty-three Years at SHA and Still Smiling.”

My article struck everyone as being supremely principled and humane—which, as I remember, hadn’t been my intention at all, but I welcomed the praise just the same. Girls I had never spoken to, juniors and seniors, stopped me in the hallway to thank me for my bravery in exposing the hypocrisies and racial injustices occurring right here at SHA—injustices that, as far as I was concerned, were basic facts of life and had never needed exposing to anybody. But no matter. I clipped the article and set it aside, with the idea that I would add it to my scrapbook for Tim as soon as I found the time.

Because after the success of my first article, I became extremely busy with the newspaper. The editor, Kim Cortney, appointed me as special features editor, which basically meant that I was called upon to write anything, anytime. I began to spend all my free periods in the newspaper office, a cramped four-desk room in a hallway near the gym. I learned how to write a proper lead and how to estimate column length for a mock-up. I also learned that we girls from the newspaper club had a surprising degree of freedom on campus. We could come and go pretty much as we pleased. All you had to do was say, “Got a deadline, Sister,” wave a piece of paper in the air, and they’d let you pass.

“So good to see you mixing with the other girls,” Principal Evelyn said, nodding smugly as she stood watch outside her office door.

One Friday at the end of the semester, the newspaper club was excused from class to attend, unchaperoned, a daylong Scholastic Press Association conference at Louisiana State University. Since becoming a boarder at Sacred Heart I’d rarely left the school, so I was thrilled to be invited. I rode with Kim, who had her own car, a racy, sky-blue Capri with white bucket seats. As she drove she sang along to “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” puffing on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out a crack in her window. I watched from the backseat, awestruck by her cool. On the last chorus she threw her arm out, belting the song melodramatically with the other girls in the car until I had to laugh aloud.

Arriving at LSU, the club veterans took a few minutes to preen before leaving the car. I borrowed a lipstick and brush and did the same. “Boys,” Kim said, checking herself in the mirror of her compact, “don’t really care about how well you can write a lead. What they care about … are your lips. How do I look?”

We spent the day in workshop sessions moderated by passionate LSU journalism students and bearded young professors. They quoted John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, and Hunter S. Thompson, talking about the sacred power of the word, and the beauty of simple, honest prose, and the journalist’s moral duty to uphold the freedom of the press. After the conference was over, we ended the day at an Italian restaurant near LSU’s campus with a bunch of boys from the Cathedral High School paper. We all tumbled into the padded red booths, fired with a newfound sense of self-importance as newspaper writers. Who’d ever thought that what we were doing was so crucial to the well-being of civilization? Who’d ever thought something as simple as words on paper could change the world? Looking around the table at my classmates that evening under the glow of a low-hanging lamp, I imagined I could see in them, like an aura burning around their shoulders, the potential for greatness.

Sitting across from me was the photographer from the Cathedral High newspaper, a boy named Charles Benton—“Chip.” I’d seen him before at pep rallies and school functions, lurking at the edges of the scene with his camera. A fair boy with a goofy smile and tight curly hair that fitted like a bushy helmet on his head, he was almost indistinguishable from half the other boys at CHS, who were, by and large, polite, dull, middle-class Southern teenagers. Armed with his camera, though, Chip became bold and full of purpose.

I’d been so sheltered at Sacred Heart that the last boy to flirt with me was Tim, on the night we’d met at the Freshman-Senior Get Acquainted Dance in Zachary. So when Chip began making jokes at my expense, and overusing my name, and generally acting like a pest for most of the day, I hardly recognized what he was doing.

“He likes you,” Kim had said, pulling me aside during the conference.

“Who? Chip? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Oh my god. He’s nuts about you.”

Now at the restaurant, even before we ordered Cokes, he uncapped his camera and started taking pictures of me across the table. He narrated the whole time, too, as if imagining the captions that would appear under the photos in Life magazine.

“Laura Jenkins seen relaxing with her society friends at the world-famous Little Italy in Baton Rouge. Laura Jenkins sips her water through a straw.”

“You’re wasting your film,” I said.

“Laura Jenkins screws up her face in annoyance at the paparazzi who trail her every move.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Laura Jenkins—Hey!—throws a napkin at the hapless young photographer who ducks out of the way at the last minute. Missed me!”

Before the evening was over, and two large pizzas and several pitchers of Coke later, we girls from SHA had made enthusiastic promises to collaborate more frequently with the boys from the CHS newspaper. They would help us, we would help them. Sharing resources, cross-campus exchanges, regular visits to one another’s staff rooms—that kind of thing.

“I am so psyched,” Kim said back in her car. Never mind the newspaper. Visits to the CHS campus were about the most thrilling thing a SHA girl could wish for. “You walk down the hallway between their classes and, oh my god, it’s like you’re Marilyn Monroe or something. The boys positively drool.”

“I’ll send you prints!” Chip shouted from his car as he pulled away in the parking lot. “Signed!”

“You do that!” I shouted back.

“Told you,” Kim said, punching in the cigarette lighter on her dash. “He’s crazy about you.”

•   •   •

I tripped up the stairs to my room, feeling light-footed and happy, like I was drunk from too much Coke and pizza. I thought, in a flush of amazement, that maybe the way I was feeling now was the way high school girls were supposed to feel. Did girls like Kim Cortney feel this way all the time? And why shouldn’t I? Hadn’t I as much right as anybody to be happy?

Rounding the corner of the corridor, I ran into my roommate, Melissa, standing at the hallway telephone. She was holding the receiver, looking annoyed.

“Okay, never mind, here she is,” she said into the phone. She thrust it at me. “Finally. He’s been calling every half hour.”

I took the phone. “Tim?”

“Laura? Where you been? Honey. I been trying to call you all night. I got … Where you been?” He sounded upset, or drunk, or both.

“Nowhere,” I said. “I mean, a conference. A newspaper conference. With some people. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I’m leaving. Shipping out.”

“You’re leaving? To where?”

“Where do you think? Vietnam.”

Vietnam? It seemed too soon. Hadn’t he just started training? What about the intelligence school and all that? The radio classes?

But no, he was right on schedule. He’d been at basic training nine weeks, seventeen weeks at advanced. Only thing was, he told me, they weren’t giving him any leave time. His unit had special orders to ship out ASAP, direct from the base.

“I don’t want to go. I miss you so much. Honey, honey. Where you been?”

“Oh—I miss you, too. When do you have to go?”

“Tomorrow. I went out and got something for you. I did it for you.”

“What’d you do?”

“It’s right … Ouch.” There was a clunk, like he’d dropped the phone. “Got it right here,” he resumed. “‘Laura.’ It’s all bloody and shit now. Not supposed to look at it.”

“What?”

“Tattoo.”

“Oh, no. Oh, Tim. No.”

“Yep. Got it right here. Inside my rifle arm. Every time I turn it up to shoot, I can see your name.”

“What’d you go and do something like that for?”

“For you! I did it for you. You don’t like it?”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“But I love you. I love you, Laura. Do you love me?”

“Oh, honey. Of course I do. You know I do.”

“It’s permanent. Won’t ever come off. Won’t ever have to.”

“Oh, Tim.”

“I won’t ever forget you.”

“I won’t ever forget you, either.”

“Laura, Laura. You’re gonna wait for me come home?”

“Of course I will.”

“Say you’ll wait for me.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

A beeping noise sounded through the line. “Shit. I don’t have no more change. Laura!”

“I’ll write you.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. Tim—!”

And then there was silence: black silence, that in the moments as I gripped the phone seemed to grow deeper and deeper until it was black as the dark spaces between stars.