When the phone rang I leapt across the room, a dolphin breaking the surface before my nosedive back toward the cordless telephone in my parents’ kitchen. “Hello,” I answered. I was calm. I was nonchalant. I was a boy in the middle of puberty. “Hey,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Amanda.”
Listen. I am eight years old and we are in a rural Iowa town. It is 1990. We have a pretty cool stereo; it has a double tape deck so you can dub tapes, an AM/FM radio, and a turntable that we use to listen to Yellow Submarine. Resting on the floor, attached to the record player, is a set of old speakers. They are covered in about an inch of dust. Written in the dust on the top of […]
