Eventually, this becomes the much-delayed report on my trip to Princeton/Manhattan. Have patience.

In my first class in 6th grade, she sat across a big rectangular table from me. At least, I think it was my very first class. It's certainly the first one I remember from that first day of middle school.

Mrs. Tatum's English class had 3 big rows of tables instead of desks, rather like a boarding-school dining room.

At our table, I was alone on my side of it. Opposite me were Chris and Leslie, strangers who would share the table with me for the next semester, until Tatum rearranged everyone at mid-year.

She laughed a lot then. I don't remember much from that year, but I remember her laughing. I remember all three of us laughing, but I think it was mostly because she was so infectiously giddy at times.

Most of my elementary school years had been spent being hyper-sensitive to everything and getting myself hurt as a result. Thus, I started middle school inherently distrustful of people. I avoided conflict, avoided contact, avoided friendship, and contented myself with being mostly a mere observer of the difficult social world swirling around me.

But I let her make me laugh.

We were in the honors program. All of us in the program shared almost all of the same classes every day for three years.

When a new student arrived in our classes, it was instantly apparent.

In 8th grade, Kyle Fischer came to Temple, Texas, and Travis Middle School.

Most of what I remember about Kyle, I remember from his first year in 8th grade. I hardly knew him at all, and I barely even crossed paths with him in the succeeding years when we were in the same high school (Temple High School, the only high school).

But I do remember that in 8th grade, he was energetic, personable, and into skateboarding. I remember him talking about some skater named Natas Kaupas (Natas spelled backwards is Satan, incidentally) on the bus during our class trip that year. I remember his wide, friendly grin.

I never really got to know him, but I was automatically inclined to like and trust him, partly because he wasn't part of my tortuous elementary history, but also simply because of who he was. A very genuine person.

In 8th grade, however, I was still the wallflower, the outside observer. So I watched, and trusted from afar.

My classmates were nice, mostly. For every one of them who still occasionally exploited my sensitivity, there were two or three who tried to help. Katie Daniel, for example, who was remarkably kind to me one day in history class when I burst into tears for no better reason than having forgotten about an assignment. And others I should remember by name, but don't.

I still kept my distance. I had learned my lesson already, like the child who touches the hot glass on the front of the oven. I was sure I would get burned.

I went to our 8th-grade graduation dance for reasons unfathomable to me now. Maybe my parents talked me into it. Maybe I talked myself into it.

Of course, I spent the evening hugging the wall and drinking punch. I danced only once, with a violin player from the orchestra who I had inadvertently insulted in class earlier that day. Feeling guilty, I actually mustered sufficient courage to apologize and ask her to dance before planting myself wall-side again.

I considered asking another girl I'd secretly had a crush on for nearly two years to dance, but absent any motivating guilt I couldn't muster the courage. So I sat and waited and watched.

And then a small, magical thing happened.

Leslie came over, walking right up to me as an entourage of friends and boys seeking dances trailed along behind her.

She said I didn't seem to be having much fun. "Why are you sitting over here? Why aren't you dancing?"

I should have said "Because all of you terrify me. Because I'm afraid of getting hurt." Instead, I made a lame excuse.

Then, I softened a bit. I remembered how she used to make me laugh. I asked her to dance.

Her face fell a little. She looked helplessly at the waiting entourage and said she was essentially promised for the rest of the night.

I reassured her that was o.k., and before she and the entourage melted back into the crowd, she looked at me somewhat curiously, in a way that seemed to say wordlessly, "I do understand."

And that was it. My Rainer Maria Rilke "You must change your life" moment. I knew in that moment that I could not live my whole life as a social hermit.

It wasn't exactly outwardly apparent. I spent the rest of the night holding the wall up, just as I had been. I spent years tearing down (and occasionally rebuilding) all the social barriers I had painstakingly put up.

But Leslie, she did a little work of magic that night, and she never even knew it.

She deliberately sought me out, noticed my quiet existence in a room full of loud personalities. She found me in a way no one had for three whole years, right where I was hiding from the world.

I obviously wasn't hiding very well. I could still be seen, and beamed at by bright girls in white dresses.

What was I hiding from, anyway?

"You must change your life."

Archaic Torso of Apollo Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.