Monday, 17 June 2002 | Kerry

We were both unhappy there before she arrived, in that three-street town with no stoplight, no grocery store, no mayor even. Together, we would reminisce about our old towns and old friends, people and places we had transformed in our minds to be impossibly cool, always superior to our surroundings, yet always so remote. That was the secret to making it through.

But when she came, we latched on, and we complacently let our discontent inflate. She was from Boston, went to an all-girls private school up there, wore low-cut shirts and curved silver nails and hoop earrings. Naturally very pretty and irresistibly experienced, and we hung on her every word. Stephanie became better friends with her than I did, perhaps because the father that she would visit lived across the street from Stephanie and not from me, or perhaps because I was shy. Sometimes I would only hear of her second-hand, which only served to further dehumanize her. Occasionally I wouldn't know about her visit until she was standing in front of me, making me feel unprepared as I glanced down at the clothes I was wearing, which would suddenly seem remarkably un-hip.

She gave us a lesson on how to properly say the letter O, to not drag it out or flatten it or sharpen it, not to pronounce it like a southerner. I didn't think I sounded like a southerner, but I wanted to be certain, so Stephanie and I would practice tirelessly. We'd talk like choppy robots, make staccato bursts of sound that refused to slide but which were horribly obnoxious. We knew it, but we didn't care. It was our way of saying what we thought of our town and that we rejected any hue it began to color us with. We never really learned to appreciate it, and both of us moved away as soon as we graduated from high school; in fact, Stephanie left town the same night, still wearing her gown.

Yesterday I rode my bike around that town, my dad in front of me on his bike, and my mom trailing behind. We rode over the brick pathways of the university, past the old tennis courts where I spent my last summer there, down the sidewalk of the squat brick school toward the deli where I'd feed Ms. Pac-Man quarters, past the building where I had my first few sips of alcohol. Now, years later, I am stuck somewhere between a pleasant nostalgia for my hometown and the frustration I remember feeling from always wanting to be somewhere else.