Summary

In pages 128 - 160, the narrator recalls telling Rose he is gay. They went to Dunkin' Donuts and he told her he did not like girls. She worried people would kill him. He thinks about all the times he was bullied and ostracized by his peers. After he revealed his truth, Rose then reveals her own: she had another baby she aborted before him. She was only 17 and still in Vietnam. Her husband, the narrator's father, demanded she get an abortion four months into the pregnancy. The procedure went poorly, and she could remember every part of it, even what her dead baby looked like. Shortly after, while still in Saigon, she heard a man playing Chopin for the first time. His dog danced to the music. She took the image as a sign that anything was possible.

The narrator thinks about a professor...