“Apron,” Chad said, sounding a little nervous. “I’ve been wondering. Do you think you and me would have been friends, if, you know, we were in seventh grade together?” I thought about it for a second. I thought about Rennie and Jenny Pratt making fun of Chad, his swishy way of walking down the halls, and Johnny Berman and Sherman Howl writing faggot on the top of his desk and picking him last for dodge ball. And I thought about how, if I ignored them all and decided to be friends with Chad anyway, he would have been my only one. “Yes,” I nodded. “We’d be friends.” “Yup,” Chad said smiling as far as his cracked lips would let him. “That’s what I think, too.”