It is a rainy Sunday afternoon in November, with nothing I want to watch on TV.

All of my friends are away.

My sister is at Green Acres Shopping Center.

I walk through the house.

My father is stretched out on the Lazy Boy recliner in the den, watching football. I sit down on the couch. A commercial comes on. A cute guy is in a sports car, driving a beautiful woman through a snowstorm in the mountains. When they arrive at their destination, a Victorian inn, every window is illuminated with a candelabrum.

I walk to my parents' bedroom. The door is closed. I peer in. My mother is asleep.

I wander into the kitchen. Nothing interesting in the fridge. There are Saltines, cans of tuna fish, spaghetti. I look in the breadbox and find a loaf of white bread.

I roll the white bread into little balls of dough between my palms.

I eat ten little balls.

It's 5:00 and getting dark.

I go into my room and look at the poster on the bulletin board: A tanned guy with blonde slicked back hair emerges from the waves, a surfboard balanced on his head.

I turn on the radio. No songs I like. Static.

I go back to my father in the den. He is snoring.

I go back to my room.

I take out a book, Gone With the Wind. I've read it before.

I don't want to read it again.

It is 1968. The Vietnam War is escalating. Martin Luther King has been shot. Bobby Kennedy has been shot. There's a civil rights march on Washington.

I know little of those events.

I am 13 years old, in 8th grade.

In every fiber of my being,

I am waiting not to be bored.