In the earnest 1990s, I ran with a pack of good boys who aced AP Physics and fancied themselves feral.

The sincerest member of the stable, with the straightest laces and the thinnest wrists, owned no fewer than ten NO FEAR shirts.

Geriatric millennials remember these vividly: atop the image of some apex predator with its mouth open, were the words, red in tooth and claw: NO FEAR.

These shirts were evergreen on Sam, but they overtook his stick-insect frame in January. This was when I decreed our Banish Winter Campaign, a faintly successful annual attempt to get my best friends to wear their brightest colors each Monday.

But my three best friends, as soft-spoken spokeswolf Sam explained, were boys. And boys. Didn’t. Wear. Bright. Colors.

(His argument sagged in the presence of Kevin, a buoyant, breathing bright color who reminded me of Kramer and reminded our mothers that there is good in the ninth grade.)

But Sam, being my Sam, would do his best. He could promise me no reds, but he would shelve his greys and blacks for musky greens and thoughtful blues.

I’m not sure he realized that his full spectrum shouted the absence of fright.

Little about Sam shouted, from the gel-ink notes he wrote me in code to the clarinet he mastered, to the chagrin of the climbing girls consigned to second and third chair. He was more wizard than wolf, our pensive veterinarian-to-be.

Weekends and AP exam mornings took us to Sam’s house, precisely the length of one meaningful walk from school. We played Scattergories until my win record earned me a lifelong ban, and we thundered across his trampoline until Kevin and I collapsed, Sam and Big Sam leaping mercilessly, laughing breathlessly.

On rare spare afternoons when we didn’t have Odyssey of the Mind or Youth in Government, we would bunch into a soundproof room off the auditorium. Sam and Big Sam writhed with laughter while Kevin and I crooned the Great American Songbook at each other. I could sing (I was, everyone knew, in the Select Choir, “that sorority” as Sam called it wearily). Kevin could not sing, but he wore tiaras while butchering “Ol’ Man River.” For an hour, the world was our showtune.

We were fluorescently innocent, although all four of us pretended otherwise.

Big Sam, who hated the modifier, self-styled himself our voice of reason. When the rest of us became mindlessly infatuated with a local politician described in attack ads as “foolishly liberal,” Big Sam declared himself a Reagan conservative. When I worried aloud what would happen to us when college tore up our little cotton ball, Big Sam proposed that we should consciously foreclose on each other before the end. When we whirled around the Honor Students’ Lounge to They Might Be Giants songs yet again, Big Sam advised us to listen to “something that will last, like Willie Nelson or CCR.”

When he fell in love — and I mean real love — with Mella the trumpeter, I was his therapist and wing-woman. The role lasted until he foreclosed on me halfway through senior year.

Everyone knew Sam — not Big Sam — was in love with me, and everyone who loved me wanted this badly. Sam was almost a veterinarian already. Sam had seen his mother through his father’s death. Sam had seen the unfathomable and seen what large boys can do to the thin-wristed, and still he declared that he had NO FEAR.

At times Sam was a burdened Bodhisattva, the weight of the world sending his 99-pound body careening off the seesaw. He worried about Tibet, and about the social cachet attached to worrying about Tibet. He worried about the breezy kids, smelling their sadness on the wind. He worried about my blood glucose in the library.

He worried about my spirit, following my bleeding heart around with a mop. “I don’t want you to ever be less sensitive,” he wrote in my yearbook, “but I don’t want anyone to hurt you.”

In the end, I hurt Sam. That’s never stop hurting.

From fourth grade on, I was the galoot of a girl who couldn’t wait for love. I watched Saved by the Bell like a nature documentary. I entered middle school confident that I would be chosen and cherished at the dance. I had no fear, until I did, and then I had it by the 55-gallon drum.

It never occurred to me that my “ring of archers,” as my proud father called them, formed a moat that no boy dared cross. Big Sam occasionally dropped hints that locker room louts said horrible, flattering things, but I was convinced I had been somehow blacklisted, too weird or too tall or too loud or too indoorsy to be loved.

And as much as I loved my boys, I knew I was their Wendy, and that there would be no romance in Never-Never-Land.

I knew. I said “yes” anyway, because I was afraid.

I can be reckless when I need to feel wantable. This would be the first bad decision from that ravenous void. Given sufficient insecurity, I will seek reassurance in doses large enough to kill. Sam was my first doomed pharmacist.

He spelled out his affections in a spiral notebook the four of us shared, a stream-of-consciousness prose-poem with no rules but abundance. (Yes, this was my idea.) Kevin could be counted on to make outrageous observations about substitute teachers and their presumed mental illnesses. Big Sam asked questions that not even he believed were profound.

Sam told me I could do better than any of the boys in the class, and that I should set my sights high.

Would I sit with him at the football game?

It was a rhetorical question. Of course I would. I always did, my freezing flute shivering between his clarinet and Kevin’s trumpet, while Big Sam’s sousaphone oompahed behind us. All four of us loathed football and the cold, but marching band was the highlight of our week.

Now it would be different.

Now we would leave Kevin with the clarinet girls, who thought he was precious and underestimated his colors. Now we would wander the edge of the field, holding hands and holding onto our innocence. Now we would talk about everything we always talked about.

Now I would realize that it isn’t enough to love someone.

I wanted so badly to be wanted that I underestimated the role of wanting. As much as I needed Sam to be my Sam, I could not make myself want more. Or less.

But it was too late. Sam, fearless veterinarian, 99 pounds of olive green sincerity, had seen the future, and it was glorious. He took me to his father’s grave. He found sugar-free chocolates before the internet. He folded love notes into loose-leaf footballs, which I turned over and over unopened until the ink bled blue.

He knew exactly what I did, and he denied it until he couldn’t, until the day he looked small and full of fright.

He pressed a football into my hand. I delayed it until gym, which as usual I spent on the bleachers (let us take a moment to praise the Great Mercy for gym teachers who see the athletically impaired and spare them shame).

But at last, in Sam’s tiny cursive that would someday write prescriptions for heartworm pills, were questions:

    Do you know you have never taken my hand, not once?

    Do you know you used to ask me about myself, but now you don’t?

    Do you know the color of my eyes?

Of course I did. They were maple syrup. They were a color unsuited to Banish Winter, but made for making everyone feel safe.

They would never look at me the same way.

Sam forgave me, and we had many more adventures than can fit into a book. There were unauthorized hash browns and resultant hyperglycemic scares, AP Chemistry quiz-offs and conversations about Kevin’s secret.

There was the time we won a prize for knowing what “CCR” stood for, and had the decency to share it with Big Sam.

There was “Foolishly Liberal,” our misbegotten inter-district political journal.

But the colors had gone pale, and spring never returned. The wolf closed his mouth, holding his howl until he knew it would be heard.

Big Sam married Mella. Kevin teaches meteorology at MIT. And Sam went on to be the town veterinarian, of course.

After our correspondence collapsed in college, I followed him at a respectful distance.

I believe he’s happy.

His jaunty, primary-colored website says he lives with his “beloved wife,” three dogs, and five cats, in the same town where he first had NO FEAR.

I hope he’s still fluorescently innocent.

I hope this is love — real love.

I hope my needy, greedy heart will find the same.

Fear not.

– Angela Townsend