PROLOGUE
1962
I met my first love on the Dexter bus coming home from school. The bus line ran from downtown Detroit to its northwest side. I’d been riding it my whole life. Today I was coming home from a rehearsal. I was not quite seventeen years old.
This is what I remember:
It was late winter. I know this because the play opened on March 9th—I still have the program. We were doing Medea and I was the star. I got on the bus with a crew member whose name is lost to me. I was probably flushed with excitement and the heat of the bus and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I probably possessed the beauty all young girls have at that age.
I know the seats we took. They were toward the back of the bus with our backs against the windows. The boy’s voice, when it eventually interrupted our discussion of the rehearsal, came from behind me, from the seat perpendicular to ours. I remember what I saw when I turned to face him.
He was wearing a black jacket with a cape attached. His hair was unfashionably long, threatening to steal over his forehead into his eyes and growing well below his ears. It brushed against his collar. His face was comfortable rather than handsome, and his eyes were curious and intelligent. His name was George.
He told me that he had overheard our conversation, and that he was in theatre, too. He went to Wayne State, the local university I would be attending in the fall.
I had never talked so comfortably to a boy before. Perhaps that’s why I remember this moment so clearly, because I certainly couldn’t have known then how much he would affect my life, that a sequence of events had begun that would forever change me, turning me into someone I wouldn’t recognize, someone so profoundly different from the confident, hopeful person I was that day. I would never be that confident again.