My mother asked me to help her lug the old magazines in her basement out to the road for recycling. Forty years of Scientific Americans and Natural Histories and Better Homes and Gardens and National Geographics and Consumer Reports all neatly stacked, all bound together by antique twine—nearly an all-day job. As the hours went by and the trips up the stairs and to the road got longer and the bundles got heavier, I wondered how many of these periodicals my parents had actually read. And whatever happened to that single copy of Playboy? It was from the days before Playboy showed pubic hair. Bare breasts were enough for me in those days. More than enough. Coral pink nipples poking bravely through coarse fishnet—those weren’t the only secrets of that long ago Miss May I’d memorized in those hurried minutes, but they were the ones that still stuck firmest in my mind. That Miss May might be a grandma by now.

“Whew!” my mother said when I’d hauled the last bundle out to the road and added it to the top of the magazine fortress. “That’s a load off my mind. I just hope it doesn’t rain.” She looked anxiously up at the sky. “The truck’s not coming until day after tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I saw that old tarp down in the basement, the one I used to use in Boy Scouts. I can cover the magazines with that.”

“Would you?” my mother said, obvious relief in her eyes.

The rolled-up tarp lay on a shelf off in the corner next to my Boy Scout canteen. I took the canteen off the shelf and shook it. Empty. One time I’d filled it with Coca-Cola. Didn’t take long for me to discover that warm Coke is not refreshing on a five-mile hike across hot farmlands. Seemed like yesterday—gurgles of Coke choking from the spout, staining the powdery roadside dirt a dreary brown. I smiled and swallowed and set the canteen back on the dusty shelf. My parents, for better or for worse, had kept everything. There in the furthest corner was my fish tank.

The glass bowl was smaller than I’d remembered it being. A gallon? Maybe less? I had no idea. Back in those junior high school days, aquariums were all the rage for the boys. Twenty gallons was standard. Some kids had thirty, thirty-five, even forty, even one hundred, with motorized aeration pumps, thermostats, heaters, beds of special bottom sand, marbles to protect the eggs, luxuriously willowy underwater plants, caves and coves and miniature castles for the fish. Ah, the fish! Gloriously colorful fish. Schools of them weaving smoothly through perfectly tuned tropical water—Ahlies and Angels, Meeki and Moorii, Tigers and Tetras and Zebras. One kid, plump Paul Shreck, even had a pair of illegal piranha. To feed them, he kept a second tank full of guppies, and fall afternoons after school, bunches of us would stop by Paul’s house to watch greedily as Paul snagged netfuls of guppies for the predators’ supper. The feast never lasted long, but in my life up to then little had been as thrilling. “A pig falls into an Amazon river,” Paul would tell us each and every time, “two second later bare bones bob to the surface.”

Occasionally, girls would come to the afternoon feeding. That made me a little nervous. It didn’t seem quite right. It didn’t seem quite right that they stared into the tank as fascinated as us. One day Barbara Cox, the smartest girl in the class, asked, “Aren’t you afraid they’ll mate?” Barbara was there that day with her pal Emma McGilles, whom I’d had the hugest secret crush on ever since the end of fourth grade. That a girl could use the word “mate” was almost inconceivable to me. It made me shiver. No one said a word. In fact, a few days before this, though on a day when no girls were present, the subject of the piranhas’ sex did come up. The fish had seemed momentarily to kiss, and Timmy Fray asked Paul, “Do you ever see them do it?” Paul assured us that the piranhas were both boys. “Maybe they’re homos,” Robbie Peters suggested. “Maybe you’re a homo,” someone told Robbie.” So while the nickel-plated killer fish drifted silently and serenely, oodles of guppies in their bellies, Barbara Cox’s question hung in hot nervous air.

“Piranha’s eat their babies,” I said. I don’t know why I’d opened my mouth. Maybe because I was nervous. Maybe because I wanted to impress Emma. Maybe because I was afraid one of the guys would say something about the fish being homos.

Everyone looked at me.

“It’s true,” I claimed. “I read it in one of my dad’s magazines.”

“Magazines don’t know everything,” someone said.

“Yeah, if you’re so smart, why don’t you stick your finger in the tank?”

“Yeah, stick your finger in the tank. I’ll give you a quarter if you do.”

I started to blush.

“What’s sticking his finger in the tank got to do with fish eating their babies?” Emma said.

Oh, I was so much in love.

I stopped going to Paul’s house.

Nevertheless, that night I began begging my parents to let me get an aquarium. “I’ll buy it with my own money,” I said. “I’ll do all the feeding and cleaning and everything. Please.”

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I don’t know where we’d put an aquarium. And what if it broke? Imagine the mess.”

“They’re very sturdy,” I said. “I can make space in my room. All the guys have one.”

“You’re not all the guys,” my dad said. That ended the discussion for that night.

But two days later my dad surprised me. A fish bowl. A goldfish inside. Not a very big bowl, not a very big goldfish. Not even a very bright one. Pale, about the size of my little finger, it wobbled and willowed slowly through the plain water. This fish was one a first-grader might own. A kindergartner. I regarded it glumly.