The following version of this story was used to create this guide: Rabe, David. "Things We Worried About When I Was Ten." The New Yorker, 2020.

Note that all parenthetical citations refer to the page number on which the quotation appears.

In reflecting on his childhood, an adult narrator explains that one of his biggest worries of his youth was being de-pantsed by a group of older boys. These boys would torment the younger boys in town by running their pants up the flagpole or, in some cases, beating them up. One time, while trying to fit in with the older boys during a fight, the narrator was hit with a large stick and went home covered in blood.

The narrator explains that his father once took him to the apartment of another family in their building, the Webers. His father wanted him to box the Webers' son, but he was not home, so the narrator boxed the Webers' daughter Sharon. Unsure of himself and uncomfortable with hitting a girl, the narrator lost the fight. The narrator's father was noticeably disappointed in him, and complained to the narrator's mother that something was wrong with their son.

Some other anecdotes from the narrator's childhood included: pulling night crawlers out of the earth in the dark and selling them to fishermen, watching entire families move and be replaced by new families, and being scolded and physically punished by the nuns at school. The narrator explains that, while they worried about many things happening to them, "almost everything happened to Jackie Rand. Which might have offered a degree of insurance against its ever happening to us, since so much that happened to Jackie didn’t happen to anyone else, and yet the fact that it had happened to anyone, even Jackie, and we’d all seen it, was worrisome" (5). In particular, the narrator recalls an instance in which their teacher, Sister Conrad, sat on Jackie to prevent him from leaving the classroom.

Jackie and the narrator were somewhat close, so while many other boys worried about getting into a fight with Jackie, the narrator was the only person who could calm him down. Jackie's mother had died and his father remarried his stepmom named May. The narrator recalls how one time the fathers of their apartment building once destroyed a homeless man's shack because he was allegedly peeping on a woman who lived in the building. One day, Jackie and the narrator watched a newlywed couple have sex from a window, and the narrator worried that they, too, would be punished the same way the homeless man was.

But soon after the incident, Jackie watched as his stepmom May accidentally got her thumb stuck in a meat grinder. He spent the rest of the day and night telling everyone in the apartment building what had happened. The narrator's father was annoyed by Jackie's preoccupation with his stepmother's injury. After dinner that night, the kids all met in an abandoned lot to play the "blackout game," where they squeeze each other so tightly that they briefly pass out (12). One boy squeezed Jackie and he fell and hit his head. The narrator wondered if he was dead. At the end of the story, Jackie opens his eyes and starts to cry.