For the sake of brevity (and don't laugh, because the three-part magnum opus with postscript really was brief compared to what it might have been), a few very significant people from my junior high and high school years were left out of the A Better Version Of Me story.

One of those people was T., who sat next to me in Geometry class in eighth grade when I would get driven over to the high school for my math class at the end of the day, and again in Precalculus class the following year.

We shared a tendency to be impatient with the actual class material, so we amused ourselves by exchanging notes, poems, literary fragments, and other bits of text appertaining to the life of the young self-styled writer and/or the young angst-ridden teenager. Which, in our case, were generally one and the same thing.

As much as I ever had friends at the time, T was one of them. When I bailed out of high school early, she was on the short short list of people I actually missed. My flight from Temple was mostly gleeful and untinged by regret, but in her case, I made an exception and missed her very much.

So, I was delighted to serendipitously stumble across her recently and catch up one decade later.

Now she is a teacher, and a poet, and webmaster of paper cup, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan site characterized by a perfect mix of intellectualism, whimsy, and cool music videos. And prepositions. Prepositions over, under, in, and through the whole site.

You want to go there.

That's all I have, really. Another one of those people who means much more than they know, or than one even realizes at the time.

T still rocks, one decade later. I love how people turn out!

Note: This entry has been subsequently edited for the sake of perfectly-reasonable concerns on T's part about the online personal/professional divide. No change has been made to the content other than the removal of T's full name. And removing a broken link to a poem that had her name on it, which is a pity, because it was a good one.