Dreadful love for Mildred Bonk

pivotal · eighth grade, B.S. era

• When: UNDATED (Green's eighth American-educational grade; B.S. era)
• What: In eighth grade Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a "fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike" classmate improbably named Mildred Bonk — flaxen-haired, "[s]hy, iridescent, coltish," on whom the "fickle angel of puberty" had already lavished a womanly figure while ignoring Green entirely. Mildred is the fixed pole of Green's whole emotional life; he and she had been in school together since grade school and became, in his own later phrase, "like childhood sweethearts" (event 9). NOTE: scene 009 frames the eighth-grade love as one-sided (the angel "didn't even seem to know Bruce Green's zip code"); the reciprocation is attested later, as printed.