1. ‘Cody’ was my friend’s brother and the only one who didn’t gasp as I lowered all seventy pounds of me into the crowded hot tub. “You’re disgusting,” one of the girls said, with awe, my first experience with the appropriation of insulting words as compliments. Later we spun a champagne bottle on the cold basement floor and I landed on him. My hair smelled stale from pool chemicals as it brushed wet against his face. He was my crush that whole year, until he didn’t make it into advanced math and I grinded with another boy at the seventh-grade dance.
