INTERLUDE VII Life with Neil: The Fist FightIt was Neil’s second year in high school, tenth grade. He was fifteen and revealing occasional embarrassment as his voice pitch tried to lower itself and often sounded like one of Gram’s old vinyl records that would skip over a scratch. And there was the ridicule from Nina. I felt like the baby, still in the fifth grade, not even in middle school yet, but that didn’t stop me from trying to deepen my vocal pitch artificially and getting ridiculed for it by—you guessed it. Nina.
For her part, Nina was eleven, just starting middle school, and although I knew how to do the math, it annoyed me that she would always be ahead of me. And she had her own growing pains to deal with, though I was thoroughly and upon-pain-of-death excluded from knowing anyt
