then as now, i hated most everyone and high school was another dark cloth held tightly over my eyes. though there was one boy that sat alone and took no umbrage at the pejorative chips of speech flung low into our ears during the lunch hour. he would tilt his unaturally delicate neck forward to let the slide of dark hair drop over his face; speak to no one and never remove the coat of contempt draped over his thin frame. after a winter passed wherein i sat by his side every day and shadowed him through hallways and memorized the lines of fragile bone within his hands that bore startling resemblance to cunning shrikes, he finally spoke to me of riding in his car with him. and so it came to be that inside of a witching hour stood he under pale street light and i crept past parents dreaming of god with the straps of unsuitable shoes clenched in my fist and then there, parked at the couch of a curb, he asked me to braid his hair and when i came to the end which hung below his waist, he cut from my head a piece of fair colored hair which he wound tighly around and as the world through glass began to lose definition and the lights of the city night poured in faster and faster, my hair tied 'round his braid shone brightly tangled around the smallest and saddest boy i have ever known.