8. Chocolate and Battle Cries
Mina
In the seven years of our friendship, Aldo and I had discussed his home life exactly once.
It was a little more than six months after we’d joined forces on the playground. Our mothers had had a disagreement, Mrs. Kessler contending that Aldo had never talked back to her before he met me, Mom countering that I had never been violent before I met him, that any child so emotionally stunted as to never talk back would never make it in the real world and should be so lucky as to have a friend like me, and that if Mrs. Kessler needed any pointers on how to control a healthily independent-minded child, she would be only too happy to oblige. Mrs. Kessler had rather crudely called me the antithesis of a healthy child, and Aldo and I had been f*******n to speak
