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quiet and a few close friends to slowly start bringing him up to date was too much. I saw him being passed from person to person, a weak smile plastered on his face, and then I lost track of him.
    It was ten minutes later when I turned and he turned and there we were, facing each other. He had to look up, of course, but he was used to that. I was already almost my present height when he saw me last, at the age of fourteen. His eyes widened.
    “Is it … it can’t be … is it Podkayne?”
    I allowed as how it was.
    He looked me over from nose to toes, and in an instant the first genuine smile of his new day broke out all over his face.
    “Pod, you’ve … you’ve grown.”
    I could feel my face go warm. Goose bumps broke out all over my arms and icy fingers ran up and down my spine. I almost tottered off my spike heels.
    Yes, I guess my secret is out. I had a crush on Travis powerful enough to squeeze a squeezer bubble.

5

    I WAS NINE, and Travis was about the most exciting thing I’d ever seen.
    I listened in fascination as he told his stories. I’d heard the same stories from Mom and Dad, the few times I could get them to talk about them, but neither of them was the born storyteller that Travis was. He could have me helpless with laughter one moment and breathless with fear the next, to the point that I had a few nightmares and Mom had a little talk with Travis and he apologized to me but I told him please, please don’t stop, and don’t worry about me, I’m a big girl and I can take it.
    I sang for him. In fact, he told me I sang for him when I was four and that I put Shirley Temple to shame. I had to look her up (and have been drinking Shirley Temples ever since). When I was nine I was a lot better, since I’d been taking keyboard and voice lessons for five years by then and was something of a prodigy. I boned up on the music of his youth, about things called rap and hip-hop. It turned out he didn’t like that stuff, to my considerable relief. Listen to it sometime; you’ll be astonished.
    Then he was gone, and I waited another five years, like a lonely maiden in a tower. It was so incredibly romantic! I was saving myself for him.
    And one day he arrived, on a glorious white horse, to make me the happiest woman on Mars. That’s how I imagined it, anyway. I wasn’t invited to the opening, just adults, which should have told me something right there but didn’t. I was too infatuated. Plus, I was a temperamental, obnoxious, stuck-up, sarcastic, monstrously insecure bitch at the time. I know that now, of course, but at the time I thought I was sophisticated, vastly superior to my parents and all other adults in both intellect and taste, and irresistible to the opposite sex, in spite of a troubling lack of suitors. I was a sort of antianorexic, able to look in the mirror and see not the gawky beanpole with the bad complexion who was actually there but a steamy temptress oozing hot sex beneath the pancake makeup and thick mascara. Hormones had hit me over the head like Maxwell’s silver hammer, and my body had responded by growing like a weed without filling out at all (that came next year), and bursting out in enthusiastic acne that no treatment seemed able to do anything about. What the hormones had done to my brain doesn’t even bear thinking about.
    Hey, how sensibly did you behave during the storms of puberty?
    I put all my best, clumsiest moves on Travis when he got to our home, and he rebuffed them in a gentlemanly, avuncular manner until I finally wised up, after about three days. After that I was icily polite, only because Mike was with me and he worshipped the guy. Travis never spoke down to Mike, treated him like an adult, which even at the age of six Mike could almost pass for in some ways, and that’s probably the only reason I didn’t strangle Travis in his sleep.
    Then he abandoned me again, and I decided to become a tragic figure. I stopped eating. I vowed I’d never sing again. I thought