There was one good thing about the uncomfortable plastic chairs I sat in all through grade school: if I rubbed my arm against the back of the chair on a dry day, I got a funny feeling as if there were a layer of warm felt between my skin and the plastic. If I held my arm the right distance away, every hair stretched straight out toward the plastic. Then if I moved it slightly further away, every hair would droop in unison. With infinitesimal movements, invisible to everyone else, I could make my hairs straighten and bow, straighten and bow.

I swam on the neighborhood swim team every day all summer long, and wound up with stars and stripes on my stomach and my butt, a faint duplicate of my swimsuit, with light and dark reversed like a photographic negative. Inspired, I snipped a cursive S out of cloth tape and stuck it to my shoulder, replacing it when necessary, and by the end of the summer when I took it off my initial was emblazoned in white on my tan shoulder. I was a little disappointed, though: in the mirror--my best view of it--it was reversed, and looked like an &.