The girl whose name I do not remember had dirty blonde hair, a chubby face and smelled the kind of smell that only little kids smell like for some reason. At school, she was really my only friend. When we would talk, we would circle the playground’s tanbark pit and balance our feet on the edges of the tanbark’s raised bed. Whenever one of us fell off one of the edges, we would just to each other and grin. She would teach me things. One afternoon she taught me how to pull out my eyelashes. “Like this,” she whispered as she held the brown wisp on her fingertip out to me. I was astonished. Small revelations like this were what our relationship mainly consisted of. She would teach me things; I would teach her things; we would circle the playground together. A few weeks later, I presented my beautiful, bare eyelids to her. I never understood what she meant by that.

At a family gathering, my auntie noticed my completely bare eyelids: “Did you rip your eyelashes out — again?” Responding for me, my mom said, “Oh no, he was just rubbing his eyes too much.” “She’s lying,” my brother whispered in my ear. 

The dying imp pleated and groaned, crawling across the classroom floor, pushing chairs and backpacks aside as students looked on. We were in drama class — eighth grade. We sat in the back corner of the classroom where we could talk to each other freely without the teacher noticing. Mr. Rioux was a talkative elderly man, the type of guy who was divorced many times and had way too young children for his age. He liked to impart his superior film taste onto us. He played “Amadeus” and “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Woody Allen on holidays — with many interventions and amateur film analysis throughout. He bled with dissatisfaction and depressing elderly angst. Me and Alan bonded over our shared distaste for our pretentious teacher. When we could, we would sneak out of his class and walk around the halls — just talking — or when Mr. Rioux would put on a movie, we would play our own movie on our computers. While everybody else in class watched “Annie Hall,” we watched “Jennifer’s Body.”

Mr. Rioux ran the middle school’s theater department; he decided he wanted to perform Sondheim’s “Company” with a twist that he said would “meet the complex political moment of our current times.” Alan played Robert. On the night of the musical’s first performance I arrived to support him, knowing that it would most likely be a failure. The musical was performed outside since there was no theater; it was hot out, and the band was having their practice not too far away. Yet, I thought it was quite beautiful. I cried when he died.

I often wonder about substitute teachers. Where do they come from? Where do they go? What is teaching a substitute for? It’s the same way I wonder about circus performers and dogsitters. I’ve always wondered what performers at sideshows do after the lights go out, after they take off their makeup and lock the lions back in their cages. I wonder if they age like the rest of us; I wonder what they will do when they get old. I wonder if they wish to be noticed, if they plucked their eyebrows out as children. I wonder if they are an artist, or an architect. The indispensable bodies in our society. I don’t know where I’m going.

The good thing about being young is the awkward, performed gestures of well meaning and politeness don’t set in yet. Greetings were thrown out the window: if you were happy, you laughed, sad you cried, angry you’d bite. It was always cool that biting is one of the ways that children express their anger.

I keep wondering if change will ever get easier. Adults say that your teenage years are the most turbulent of your entire life, yet I don’t believe them. People say we are “coming of age” but aren’t we all aging the same? I find it hard to believe that Jack, age 32, going to his third job interview in a week, doesn’t feel that pressure in his throat. All his friends are married, and he has nothing to show for it. And Janet, her kids have all moved out of her house, and she’s all alone for what seems like the first time in her entire life. And climate change is real, and the world will be practically uninhabitable in 50 years, and I’m helpless to stop it.