The truth is that I don't know if Bobby ever invited me to come to his house. If he had I would not have gone, and the reasons have to do with where he lived. I'm not sure why, but I was scared to go down there, just down the long steep hill from where I lived.
And Bobby came from what my parents would call a broken home. One of the few people in the whole school who did. And that marked him as very different indeed. He may have lived with his grandparents, as I recall. Maybe I needed to learn that being a child of divorce was not to his shame. I'm not saying it very well.
He did not belong to my church, which from my earliest years was an important difference, a separator.
But no denying it. I liked him. He was lean and tan and athletic, easily the best athlete to come out of Washington School. (That seems to matter to me.) He was handsome, even in sixth grade, with blue eyes and brown hair. And he was, to my mind, quite daring and independent. He could stay up and even out later than anyone else I knew. Including me.
Besides, of all the boys I knew or who had said they liked me, he was the first who seemed to know what to do about liking someone. Like walking your girlfriend home and calling on the phone and actually paying attention to her.
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