I forget how we all became friends, but we sat behind the gymnasium with the ants all of junior year. 

When Sam and Maggie and I tell this story now, Benny’s knife 

grows another ten inches. We tell this story fast now too, 

no time to laugh, cutting off each other’s 

and then!’s and then!’s with another detail, another remark

anything to paint this story right now, always in whispers like this… 

I start: Benny comes to school with a melon in the crook of his forearms

and we’re all laughing, right? And then–– 

Maggie says: We sit down at lunch and he opens his pack. We’re rocking

the melon cause it rolls on the floor. It’s all sandy, too––

Sam adds: And then Benny slips out his blue precalc folder, it’s got room

cause he copies the work in third period and then––

I end: Benny pulls out a knife, shiny saw-toothed ridges on 

its underbelly to gut the melon. We will all fall into a giggle. 

He was so mad at us then, making him use our plastic spoon donations instead.

Benny! we’d scream, Put the knife away or you’re a maniac. My mother, the only parent

who loved these kids, tells us her knife story in passing.

How, when they stole melons from

the farmers in her freshman year, she brought along

some guy they all called Blondie, who had no knife to

cut the melons with, so he used his dentures instead. He made 

everyone teeth imprinted melon balls, scraping the 

cantaloupe rinds with his canines to pulp the fruit’s orange 

guts. My mother laughs at our Benny story

the same way we laugh at hers, never questions the length of the

knife that is lost to junior year, and now calls Benny––black haired 

with dark and messy eyebrows Benny––Blondie.