Through the years of high school, Mike had become fairly friendly with Melissa, who had lived two Forrester Boulevard doors down from me during the late-elementary and junior high years. She and I weren’t friends, but not in any way antagonistic. Mostly, I felt a little guilty for living in that particular house, in her little row, as the prior occupants were some wonderful family with kids she liked. Unlike my family. That was clear.

 

    Mike drove us to the bagel spot where Melissa was working, located in one of the many neighborhood plazas. That was the biggest commonality of these otherwise disparate Gulf Coast and mid-Atlantic locales was their plaza-centric suburban landscapes.

 

    As they chatted over the counter, Melissa kept eyeing me. It was quite a different look than any she cast my way when I was a prepubescent porker. Eventually, Mike introduced me. “It’s Bill. Remember? He lived next to you.” Melissa’s eyes got wide and the blood left her face. She screeched and bolted into the back of the bagel bakery. If I wanted proof that I’d fully evolved out of my awkward tweens, this would do. I was now unrecognizable – and apparently attractive to some degree – to past peers. I admit it was gratifying. I’ve searched for a German word for the particular flavor of self-satisfaction that comes from evolving into a better version of yourself to the point of being unrecognizable, but I’ve come up empty. Selbstgefälligkeit is not it.

 

    During my visit, we would go on to meet a boy Mike had a crush on. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember a late-night excursion – moonlit stroll through a neighborhood golf course – with soundtrack by Pink Floyd and Joni Mitchell. The resurgent hippie aesthetic had not missed Springfield and the boy Mike was macking on had it down, with his bushy, curly hair and baggy wardrobe hanging on his taut, vegetarian body.

 

    This visit launched a notion for how we would spend the coming summer, our few weeks before college. We planned that Mike would visit, spending half the summer at my house, the other half at Chris’s. Chris and Mike were adequately acquainted, and her house had so much more room.

 

    As soon as Mike arrived, we three, along with several other friends from Ridgewood High School, began toiling at Suncoast Resort Vacations. We sat for hours at shared beige desktops in a beige office answering beige phones with fake names. We sold visits to time-share resorts. Legit, but shady. Granted, a huge discount on resort accommodations can be worth the hours spent listening to the onsite time-share sales pitch, even if such visits are often entirely gratis. It was our job to dress up this time-share sales visit as a big win at a great price.

 

    It was awful work. “Sell, sell, sell! Ring that bell!” We were all doing it with our clunky, electric, smoke-sucking ashtrays buzzing. Classmate John would excuse himself for extended bathroom breaks, which was the only easy way we knew of to be excused from the incoming-calls mine. John dubbed these breaks “Logs for Labor.”

 

    One of the guys running the operation, who did a little community theater on the side, pressed Mike during a work review, the little period where Mr. Resort Vacations would critique our sales pitches. But he wasn’t pressing Mike on not selling enough weekends in Estes Park. Instead, he just kept asking him indirect questions about the nature of our relationship. Maybe he wanted to give us theater tickets? It added another uncomfortable layer to an already suspect summer job. Within a month, we all quit.