When I was in first grade a teenager who rode my bus threatened, one gray winter afternoon, to kill himself. He was very handsome. He looked a lot like Leonard Whiting, but with naturally yellow hair. He dressed in black pants, white shirts and little narrow black ties and black shoes. Kids dressed back then for school, in 1967. Hippies hadn’t come to high school in Kentucky. Having said X, everyone his age on the bus said Y. In Kentucky, if you say X, everyone else screams Y. It’s what everyone does. It’s impossible to simply make an announcement. We had dropped Vickie Turner, my classmate, off at her house on that dreary afternoon. The bus lurched forward and, when we were about one bus length away from the Turner driveway, the kid said suddenly, “I’m going to go home and kill myself.” I didn’t hear anything else in the uproar that followed. They catcalling. They laughed. They roared insults. They said, “Oh, no, you WON’T” “SHUT UP. YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS,” and so forth. I was onl...