That’s right, I said “Jerry”. My husband’s name is Phillip. More on that score later.

Jerry was my lab-mate in high school biology class. The setting was Father Brendan’s Catholic High School, a squat, brick, sizzling building in the Florida sun. There was a big parking lot out front, surrounded by chain link, where the lucky seniors could park their cars. In those days, it was OK for the seniors to drive to Taco Bell for lunch.

But Jerry and I were sophomores. Jerry was only 14 (smart kid!) and our teacher was a musclebound steroid freak and track coach who would later be arrested for stalking. A pretty nice guy, though…maybe he’d just started with the steroids. Jerry was a skinny kid, small, redheaded, freckled, unapologetic, outgoing, confident, and smart as a whip. Kind of a surprising list of adjectives, which clashes with itself. I was a dippy, dissipated, tan, and totally hot (if I do say so myself) girl without the least interest in biology, unless you count a more-than-healthy interest in the opposite sex.

Jerry and I were put together forcibly by our musclebound leader and–I liked Jerry immediately. He was fun, didn’t mind cutting a cat open just to see what was in there. If he was in love with me, he didn’t show it, and he didn’t expect me to do a thing. Which began to annoy me after a while. OK, I was dippy, but not dumb, and who can blame me for not liking the smell of formalin. So I became the chronicler of Jerry’s dissections. He was absolved of all writing, and I was absolved of all dissection.

Near the end of that sophomore year things got hairy at home when my sister eloped, at age 17, with her 21-year-old boyfriend, who worked at Taco Bell. That’s right, amigos, my sister had it all planned out. Things at the house were stressful, to say the least, and I started to skip school a lot. Things at Jerry’s house were idyllic by comparison, because Jerry had parents who actually worked, every day, thus leaving the house empty. So Jerry and I spent a few days laying around his house, playing hooky. No big deal, in retrospect, such a short amount of time. But we became close then, and I at least knew that we’d stay close forevermore.

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