Saturday, May 2, 1970.

In that moment, I had a vision of kids all across America crowding into
high schools, sitting at desks, checking pencil points, passing back exams,
and waiting for the proctor to say, “Ready, begin!” And then the heart-
pounding moment when you turn over the sheet and spot the forest of
empty circles.

—Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.

I was a sixteen-year-old high school junior. I had signed up for the

Scholastic Aptitude Test, the standardized multiple choice test for
college admissions. I took the exam at Cheltenham High School,
located in a neighboring suburb of Philadelphia. Before the test
began, as I stood at the edge of a group of students, one of my
peers approached me. He said, “Gary, it’s Lee Fuiman.” Lee
Fuiman and I had been friends in elementary school. In the third
grade I had attended his birthday party. He just said hello. Not
another word. That was our meeting, our conversation, and our
parting. I had last seen him in the spring of 1964, six years earlier,
when we were ten years old. We had been in the same fifth grade
class. I was mystified that he recognized me.

Lee Fuiman is now a professor of marine biology at the University

of Texas at Austin.