Like so many ten-year-old boys, Glen, you were all spindly arms and legs. Your parents had your blond hair cut in a severe butch haircut. You were smart, a cute boy with heavy-lidded blue eyes. A serious boy, you were fascinated by World War II and especially by the Nuremberg trials. Speaking of the Nazi war criminals who had committed suicide, you said solemnly, “It’s the coward’s way out.”

You liked me, Glen. Even after everyone else stopped. They were making fun of me. Tina Dickerson (as I was known in those days) was weird. But you thought I was pretty. You thought I was neat and wanted me for your girlfriend.

I said Yes. Yes, I would be your girlfriend. A girl on the playground said, “Maybe he’ll be like Glen Campbell someday” — after all you had the same first name — and I smiled in a mixture of embarrassment and pride. She was talking about my boyfriend.

But that was when I was the New Girl at school. Before the others found out I was weird and stopped liking me. But even then you still liked me. Even when I was walking to the bus in the rain with all the other children surrounding me, taunting and teasing and bumping me with an umbrella, you called, in a voice full of caring and gentleness, “Don’t pay any attention to them, Tina. They’re just trying to make you nervous.”

Then you changed.

“Tina’s weird, isn’t she?” you asked the boy sitting next to you in the cafeteria as I sat silently across from the two of you.

“Shut up, Glen,” the boy replied. “You used to like her.”

You didn’t like being reminded of that, Glen.

I shrieked, “Goddamit!” at the sudden, shocking pain. I was waiting for the bus and my hair had been pulled. I turned back to see you, Glen, fleeing a few feet away.

“Guuuuuuy, girl!” another girl remonstrated, stretching out “guy,” the polite, non-swearing substitute for “God,” in the usual, exasperated manner. “Do you have to talk like that?”

You told me you would beat me up on the last day of school. I was scared but I knew that would not happen. I was almost certain.

My mother picked me up on the last day of school. She came right up to the door of the classroom you and I shared and I grabbed her hand. The two of us walked to her car. I smiled at you triumphantly. You had not known I would have a rescuer.

“That kid even has a mean look about him,” Mom commented.

You did indeed. Glaring eyes, distorted by hatred.

But. I knew why. I did that to you, Glen! I didn’t mean to but I did. I filled you with hatred! But it was not like you thought.

“Do you like Glen?” someone had asked.

“No,” I said.

I said I did not like you.

Glen, oh, Glen! You never knew — because I never told you! — that the reason I said that I didn’t like you was that I didn’t want them making fun of you because of me!