He makes me laugh on a Thursday at 12:07pm in the east wing of Westfield High, and I want to be clear about the catastrophe this represents.
It is not a polite laugh. It is not the breath-through-the-nose acknowledgment I deploy when something is technically amusing but not worth fully responding to. It is a full, involuntary, I-tried-to-stop-it-and-failed laugh, the kind that arrives before you have time to negotiate, and it is gone in about two seconds but the damage is already done because Damon Pierce witnessed every millisecond of it and is now looking at me with the expression of someone who has won something they didn’t think they could ever win.
“There it is,” he says.
“There what is?”
“The real one. You’ve got like six different versions of that smile and that was the real one
