My dad told me about an experiment where they raised kittens inside cylinders painted with either horizontal or vertical stripes. The floors and ceilings were mirrors that extended the stripes forever—stripes were all the kittens could see. When they grew up the scientists let them out of the boxes, but their vision was all wrong. The cats raised in boxes with horizontal stripes would knock their heads into poles because they couldn’t see them. The cats from the vertical-striped boxes couldn’t see stairs.

I don’t know what happened to the cats after that.

The walk home was a long one. I followed the road along the edge of the mall parking lots. The road turned to highway once you got out of town, so it was always jammed. There was never anybody walking there—just cars speeding forward to catch lights, or backed up behind them, or circling the lots looking for a closer spot. When you did see people they were walking from their cars to Sears or Osco or Home Depot. At the drive-throughs they didn’t even do that. Nobody walked like I did—along the edge of the lots, trailing the cars in the street. I counted the cars parked in one row, and then counted the rows and tried to estimate how many people were parked outside The Container Store. Maybe seventy.

The strip with the big lots went a couple blocks before changing over to little malls with only ten or so cars each. Each store put different plants in its medians: the bank had little reddish bushes sprouting out of rocks; the fake Chinese restaurant had saplings in mulch. The saplings couldn’t seem to take root—they put in new ones every couple years, and the old ones got thrown in dumpsters.

The oldest part of town was past the malls and over the disused train tracks. But only parts of it were old—every few months one of the buildings got replaced by a new Pearl Vision or travel agency or Starbucks.

My favorite was the animal feed manufactory that still ran sometimes. It looked like one big machine. Iron structural beams ran every which way beneath the water tank, the ducts, and the conveyor belt between the silos. The towers seemed to sag in on themselves a little. Crows would sit on the beams, and in the winter you could see the whole thing steaming.

It bristled with sharp edges like an evil jungle gym, and if there hadn’t been people around I would have climbed it. I had a plan for getting up there, from the fence to the office roof to the slanting storage roof to the struts underneath the conveyor belt. The duct at the top was treacherously curved, like I could have slipped and fallen and impaled myself on the air intake two stories down. I thought it would be fun to haunt the animal feed manufactory and scare the kids that came around the back to smoke. Maybe crows would take orders from a ghost.

The animal feed manufactory was squeezed right into the old downtown, half a block from the new twelve-screen cineplex and its mall of fancy shops. Past that were Wendy’s and Red Lobster and the first houses. Not houses but those half-houses all bound together at the edges, all painted the same light brown, all with pale blue garages and doors, the doors all with brass knockers and knobs. I’d never met anybody who lived in one of those.

After that came some older houses—one story with slanty roofs and trees around them. Real trees now, not saplings. Then the houses got newer and bigger and the trees got smaller. Cul-de-sacs sprang up with pastoral names: Lakewood Terrace, Maple Glen, Elmwood Lane, Woodgrove Farm. Sometimes I made up new ones as I went and imagined them nestled in with the rest: Cunny Glen, Cock Lake, Analrot Manor, Sodomy Park.

Our street was concrete-paved. The concrete split and cracked in the summer and they’d fill the cracks with tar, and the bubbly black veins of tar crisscrossed the white road surface. You could jab a rock into the tar and it would just stick there on end.

Most of the neighbors had bright green lawns, and trucks would come by and spray them with chemicals. The trucks never stopped at our house. Our lawn was dead as could be. It was almost orange. Sometimes Dad would get on a big lawn kick, especially in the summer. He’d stand out there pouring water onto it with the hose. The hard ground and the dead grass didn’t take up the water, and the puddles would sit there in the sun till you could almost hear the grass sizzle, and if you walked across it, it was warm on your feet and disgusting. After a two or three weeks he’d give up and stay inside for another year.

I let myself in the front door—Dad would be at the high school until four or five. I was nervous about what would happen in a year, when I had to go to the same school where he taught. But the first day of the year was over. There was nothing I needed to do, so I watched TV. When the phone rang I thought it might be someone calling to talk about the first day of school.

“Hi, my name is Cindy and I’m with the Veteran Firefighters Association, and what we are is a nonprofit organization made up of retired firefighters that do all kinds of work within the community for example if you have a child yourself you may know it’s back-to-school time and we did a program this year to provide new clothing for children of low-income families so that they’d have something to wear to school, and right now we’re doing our fall fundraiser trying to raise money that we’ll use for community programs like our back-to-school-clothes program and to buy uniforms for our members so they can participate in parades and other community events and hopefully raise awareness among members of the community for the need for this kind of involvement by these people who’ve already in their lives given so much and so many hours doing such a hard job, a job that you or I probably wouldn’t be able to do but they’re out there every day and so once a year we go around and ask that people maybe give a little back, and I was just hoping that we could count on you. Can we count on you for support this year?”

“Yeah, that sounds great.”

“Yes it is it’s just a great bunch of guys and they do great work here and for our community. It’s something you can really feel good about. What level would you like to support us at?”

“Oh, um—fully.”

She laughed. “You’re sweet. Ok. Well, one of our most popular options is a ten-dollar-a-month plan, and if you support us at that level you’ll get a genuine fire badge like the firefighters wear, with your name on it. Would you like me to put you down at that level?”

She hung up when she found out I didn’t have any money.

When I heard my parents coming in, I went up to my room to hide. They called me down to eat and Mom asked first thing, “So how was it?” Dad was staring at the sports page spread out next to his plate.

“Fine.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it good?”

“Dunno.”

“Is there somebody else who knows?”

I pretended to be saying something through a mouthful of chicken.

“Our son is always so articulate, isn’t he honey?”

Dad imitated me with the chicken and kept reading. Mom always made the same jokes about how I didn’t answer. I couldn’t have answered. What was there to say?

How did it go? Most of my teachers already made it clear that they expect nothing more than good behavior.

How did it go? I spent most of the day standing around and eavesdropping.

How did it go? I’m pretty sure the cafeteria monitor got fired for acting pervy, but the biggest difference from last year was Jenie Berman’s tits.

How did it go? It went, and now it’s gone.