Credit.Michael Turek
“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12,” Stephen King writes at the end of his novella “The Body.” “Jesus, did you?”
When I was 12, my world revolved around piano lessons, model rockets, a tank of pet seahorses and a boy named Jim Wilson. We spent long hours together, Jim and I, acting like goofballs: engaging in hot-sauce eating contests at a place called Tippy’s tacos, listening to the Rolling Stones, feeding my Venus flytraps bits of cheeseburger. Once I made him laugh so hard that milk came out of his nose.