Continued from Part 1.

The students of three different middle schools converged in Temple's one high school. All of us who had shared the same classes for three years were scattered to the four corners of the sprawling campus.

My freshman year was my year of experimental social interaction, with as many setbacks as steps forward, but I finished the year with a decent set of acquaintances and a renewed sense of both the cruelty and congeniality of other human beings.

What I was still completely oblivious to was reality. The reality of our town, of Temple, TX.

Until my sophomore year, I was living in a city of dreams.

I never had another class with Leslie, but Kyle was in one or two of my classes each year, as were many of her other friends.

I was a bit more cautious that year, though. Mostly I kept to my small circle of acquaintances from Biology class. My senior friends with cars (a major asset during our open-campus lunch periods) had all graduated, so out of necessity more than anything I banded together with a few people from Biology because it was the class immediately preceding lunch. I kept my distance from everyone else, still mindful of some of the harsher setbacks of the previous year.

Our daily routine consisted of lunch, immediately followed by an escape from the crowded lunchroom to the library, where we would read, or occasionally program fractals on the library computer. I also wrote poetry a lot, having begun my first period of prolific output in freshman year.

That sophomore year, Leslie was working as a librarian's assistant during the same period I had lunch. She always half-smiled and said hello and made a small effort at conversation when I came to the librarian's desk to check out or return a book.

If there's anything I regret, it's that I never gave more than a cursory response. I don't pretend to believe it would have changed anything other than the quality of the time we had. But that in itself would have been something.

She terrified me, though. For a completely different reason now. She had seen right into me that one night in 8th grade, but now she was a stranger because I had no idea who she was becoming. Everyone was changing in high school, all of us, and I had watched from a distance as her wardrobe grew darker and her hair became lighter and she didn't seem to laugh so much anymore.

I suppose I was afraid of being known by someone I really didn't know, of trusting the one person I probably trusted most implicitly of all my sophomore classmates. And I was afraid of not knowing just why I trusted her so implicitly.

I should have looked at her with the same look she once gave me, the one that said, "I do understand," but I never did more than mumble a few words and take my book.

A lot of things happened, and I have no idea in what order they happened anymore. All I know is that the dream version of Temple, the Temple of quiet suburbia and people who are good, kind, honest, upright, church-going and law-abiding fell apart that year.

A friend lost three fingers in a shop class accident. An automotive accident claimed three sophomores and a freshman on their way to or from a party. Temple started to show its dark underbelly, the side of it that eats people, that chews them up and spits out little pieces.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, she took her own life.

I never went to the funeral. I told myself she'd had real friends, people who knew her, like Kyle, and the funeral was for them. I think really it was because I didn't want to look at her if she couldn't see my eyes saying "I do understand."

I submitted a poem to the school literary journal that year. It was awfully mediocre, but it was about the way I wished the world was. Not the city of dreams, just the small ways people support each other and that being enough.

Kyle had one published, too, and a passing reference in it to "Bela Lugosi's Dead" would be the reason I would eventually buy a Bauhaus album without ever having heard them before. So many tiny ways we all affect one another.

I thought his poem might have been about Leslie, but I never felt the need to be sure. On the same page, though, they published one of hers, posthumously. It reminded me very much of the person she was in 6th grade, across the big rectangular table from me, giddy and laughing.

I got out of Temple as soon as possible. After sophomore year, I escaped to an early-entrance college program. I took with me the hard lesson of that year, though. People were going to get hurt, no matter what, so I might as well open up to them and make the most of what we had.

At a summer program that year I made one of my most constant friends and repeated housmates, Shanna. When I started at the Texas Academy of Math and Science that fall, I made more of the truest friends I've ever had, like Alice, with whom I had a very tempestuous but rewarding friendship.

I was finally what I considered a better version of myself. I was certainly nowhere near finished learning all the social skills I had neglected, but I was a better, happier version of me, even when it hurt like hell.

Kyle finished high school in Temple. He became friends with my younger brother to a degree I was never really friends with him myself. He and my brother and Josh Bandy and a whole bunch of other kids were in th epicenter of a nascent punk/indie scene in Temple.

When I came back to Temple four years later, I had spent two years getting into punk and indie (and yes, Bauhaus) while at university in Washington, DC. I was surprised and delighted to see a thriving scene in Temple.

Kyle had just left, moving on to Wisconsin, but behind him was an active music scene. Living in Temple, and with nothing better to do, I went to a lot of their impromptu concerts.

I saw Temple with new eyes this time around, saw the city behind the curtain of dreams. I saw the drug-dealing kids, the long-sleeve kids in summer who cut themselves in the bathroom when they thought no one was looking, the bored kids going around the building looking for a place to have a half-hearted screw.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Kyle was forming a band called Rainer Maria. They made an EP.

Again, I got out of Temple as quickly as possible.

I moved to Austin, and a few years went by.

I lived happily, mostly, and found a good group of friends. I'm still changing to this day, but the version of me that lives here in Austin is really the best version of myself I've had so far.

It's not so much because of where I am as it is because of where I came from.

Kyle's band made some albums. I saw them play live in Austin a couple of times, and once I gave him a sheaf of poetry I had written, many of them poems about those years in junior high and high school. Being on the road at the time, he probably lost them, but mostly I just needed the feeling of passing them on to someone who knew, anyway.

Eventually, he made a solo album, and on it was a song called "Temple, TX". I heard it, and it was if I could see him looking at me with those eyes that say "I do understand."

Temple, TX

We need something to eat — it should come as no surprise. We'll pickle the feet, the tongue and the eyes.

Temple, why have you sold your children for food?

Temple, your mother's your sister. You kill your young — you're young — yr young — firstborn sons: Redhead boys selling nosebleeds and sleepless nights. And your daughters hang themselves with sheets and die of AIDS.

There's a barbeque — you're invited — we'll eat them whole.

Every word of this song is true. I don't know all of the characters in the song, but I know in my heart every one of them is true. Every one of them is someone Kyle knew. I've been bowled over by Rainer Maria albums before, but this song finally opened my eyes to what a consummate artist Kyle Fischer has become. He paints the bleakness and lurking horror of our mutual hometown with the pigment of truth.

And it makes me wonder, what was he like back then when I was merely trusting him from afar? What sort of person was he? Is this a better version of him, or was he always this brilliant?

All I know for certain is that I am glad he escaped, that he wasn't chewed up and eaten by Temple, or worse, simply trapped there in the dream.

He lives in Brooklyn now, and the band is going strong on the heels of their last album A Better Version Of Me, and I am going to see them on the first day of my trip to Princeton.