The letter was three pages long, written by hand on yellow legal paper with a blue, ballpoint pen. My handwriting was just beginning to change then, to shrink from the bubbly bursts of a preteen girl to the way I write now, in all capitals, a poor man’s architectural script. I was in eighth grade, twelve years old, and I had written this note to the object of my affection: David Bloodsworth, world’s most beautiful boy. He had big, round chocolaty eyes and full lips and straight, copper hair. Like all the boys I pined for, David lived over in Echo Hill, the Amherst, Massachusetts, version of the right side of the tracks, the north side. I lived in the south.

I only remember the gist of the letter, not the details that filled three pages: I loved David. That was why I didn’t go out with Chuggie (another Echo Hill boy) the week before, when his best friend, Dan, told me to stay in the library after the bell rang so Chuggie could ask me out. Soon as it clanged, I scampered out. Then I wrote this letter, and pressed it into the thin slits at the top of David’s beige-enameled locker.

The next morning, I came into school and noticed a strange sort of wallpaper adorning the hallways, and that sweet, chemical smell of fresh copies in the air: my letter. Duplicated endlessly. Pasted against painted concrete block.

It was the second time I’d ruined my life in letters.

After that, the shame shivers grew: these little pinpricks of disgrace that course from my stomach up to my solar plexus and sting me there. I remember something I did, something big or something incidental—I tripped stepping onto the school bus; I ruined a shot on a golf ball commercial by walking into it before the director said “Cut”—and I relive the painful moment. Only the shivers have blossomed, they’ve bloomed, so that now, when I’m alone in the shower or walking down the street or sitting in the subway, the shame shivers are a huge hiccup. They overcome me for a few minutes, and I exclaim, I yell out, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” Or, “So embarrassed, so embarrassed.” I tuck my chin to my chest and my face screws up and I uncontrollably utter these sounds. I know what it looks like. It looks like I’m crazy.

I have conversations with myself in which I explain that I am forgiven for the letter to David and the love letter to my second cousin, Michael, and the letter ending my friendship with Margaret; I understand that these are nothing but poisonous memories running loose inside my veins. But so many of them are on paper. There is evidence of my indiscretions, floating around out there somewhere. They’re not just memories, but words.

Later in my eighth-grade year, I wrote another letter, a confession, to a boy with whom I’d never spoken: Hamenth Swaminathan, who was in love with my friend Juliet, the prettiest girl in school. I said I was going to live with my father, in Saratoga Springs, New York, the next year, and I just wanted him to know that I loved him.

I did not, of course, go to live with my father the next fall—I could not leave my mother, nor would my father have had me—and had to see this boy on the first day of ninth grade. He just looked at me and said, “You didn’t move, huh?”

In ninth grade it was Tony Terrizi, who lived, at least, in my part of town. We rode the same bus. He played a musical instrument, clarinet, like my father; it folded up into a tiny box, which he carried like a briefcase. We had never spoken. He was cute and shy and musical, and on Thanksgiving Day, 1987, I wrote him a love letter. The first thing I told him was that my brother had made me laugh so hard that I peed in my pants. Then I told him I had a crush on him. The next day, on the bus, he said, “Nice letter”—the only words he ever spoke to me.

The letter writing made sense. The mail held so much promise (Sylvia Plath wrote in her diary, “My heart leaps when I see a mailman on the street”): boxes of hand-me-downs from the wealthy, Southern California second cousin I’d never met (I had not one pair of designer jeans, which was a source of real shame in the mid-1980s), and psychedelic drawings from my perpetually stoned father, who apparently forgot to put the child support checks in these envelopes. I had two lives: the school year and three weekends a month in Amherst, and one weekend, summers and holidays, in Saratoga. Letter writing kept me connected to the various components of my fractured life, and, yes, I was good at it. My friends, at least, seemed to cherish these letters, and I would sit in cafés (too young to be pretentious) and write on stationery I had printed myself in graphic arts class, and I’d concoct these sentences to make people like me.

I have always been of the opinion that people write because they want to be liked. But the letter writing led only to the shame shivers, so common now that the only way to curb this emotional Parkinson’s is to confront it.

David is thirty-four years old now, and married, and a communications director for a mayor in a small town in New England (the town where my step-grandmother is from). I have not seen him since January 1989, when I graduated, midyear, from high school, and I probably hadn’t talked to him for a few years before then. I Googled him, and found his father’s information (they have the same name). I left a message saying I was trying to find David the younger, I had a question to ask him, could they pass on my number.

He calls that afternoon. Immediately I am sweating, heart palpitations, unprepared for confrontation. We exchange pleasantries, basic information. He lists off the people from high school he’s kept in contact with; I can’t remember a single one of them. Except for Chuggie, married and living in Texas and a lawyer, or something.

David is in public relations now, had wanted to be a writer before he went to the “dark side.” I tell him not to underestimate the power of a full-time job. He speaks to me as if I am a reporter—friendly, but resistant. Holding back. He doesn’t know why I’ve called.

I tell him that I want to ask him about something that happened in junior high school.

“Is this about Will Kohler’s basement?” he asks.

“What happened in Will Kohler’s basement?”

“Never mind,” he says.

I ask what he remembers about me.

“That you had a crush on me, and Will Kohler’s basement.”

Does he remember the note?

Vaguely.

Does he remember the photocopies?

“What photocopies?”

I explain.

“No. I don’t. I didn’t do that.” He is unyielding on this matter, about his lack of involvement in it. He is a public figure in his town, worried I will defame him. I promise not to use his name, but it’s such a good name, I can’t bring myself to change it. I too have learned how to betray with words.

I assure him that I know he didn’t do it. I know that it was the work of David’s friend Adam Smith, whose mother worked at the school and therefore allowed him access to the copy machine. I tell him how Adam Smith was still carrying around pieces of the letter in his wallet two years later. He would pull them out in study hall and flash me with them, read a word or two before slipping the worn paper back inside.

“That’s awful,” David says. “I had nothing to do with that. I don’t even remember that.”

I tell him how the memory of this letter has followed me, and how often I’ve replicated it: an unwanted letter, leading to some sort of small demise, and sometimes a large one—I have ended many a friendship with an angry letter, or alienated plenty of men with an unsolicited love letter. David, of course, has little to say on this part of the story. He offers me some advice that his boss once gave him, the key to those who have to deal with the press: If you can say it, don’t write it. Don’t commit it to paper.

The summer before eighth grade—before the letter to David—my father took me on a trip, a little special time. My half-sister had just turned three, and she had been born with a particularly sweet disposition and my father’s lovely hazel eyes, and she was already a long and lanky girl. My father’s version of father-daughter bonding was to commiserate with me that I had inherited his weak chin, my mother’s thick thighs, that I got his feeble brain instead of my mother’s brilliance. It was clear my sister was going to be beautiful and tall, and I was full-grown by then, a whopping five-foot-two, and at the height of the awkward phase. My brother told me I ruined every family photo (he was older, and had already escaped this phase and moved on to handsome).

We traveled the first weekend of that summer to my father’s cousin’s house in rural Maine. Having grown up with my mother—an orphan, whose only brother lived across the country in San Francisco—I didn’t know my father’s family particularly well. This cousin I knew of only because both his daughters had turned out to be lesbians. I stayed in one of the lesbian’s rooms. I scoured it for traces, proof, indications of her sexuality. A greeting card was posted on the wall, with an olive branch-carrying dove water-colored across the page. I scoured through the jewelry boxes: a silver charm bracelet, a large opal and diamond ring. I stuffed all of these things in my duffle bag. Then I opened up a blank page in my red-marbled cardboard-covered Mead notebook, and wrote a letter to my friend Beth Pelky back in Amherst, bragging about my spoils.

After my parents found the letter with my admission of stealing, they declared war on me. My stepmother did a little dance around me, calling, “Thief! Thief! Thief!”

Once, they locked me in the kitchen. My stepmother screamed at me, pronouncing me the most selfish person in the world. My little sister was piling blocks into a tower on the floor. I lifted her up. The blocks tumbled. She instinctively wrapped those soft little arms around my neck. I picked up a twelve-inch Ginsu knife from the dish rack and held it to her throat, and threatenedthreatening to kill her if they did not let me out.

It was the only time my father hit me.

My sister does not remember the incident. Once a year or so, I apologize anyway.

My father swore I left the notebook on the kitchen table, open to the letter. I adamantly denied this at the time, and still I have trouble believing it. My stepmother certainly seems the type to read people’s private papers. But they insisted: I wanted them to read it. They said I wanted to get caught.

I often tell the story of the dittoed love letter, but I have never thought about the other part of the story: I refused a boy who had offered his love to me in favor of one who didn’t.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever came to junior high again after that letter was circulated throughout the school. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t go out with Chuggie. How would my life have been different had I sat there at the faux-wood Formica-laminated library table and waited for Chuggie to walk up, as Dan and probably a few other eighth graders stood sentry in the doorway, watching? My heart would have been beating so hard. Palms would have been coated with sweat. Cotton mouth, yes—like an extended version of a shame shiver, but with a happy ending. We would have been late for class, though we had most of our classes together: me and Chuggie in math, separated by two aisles and yet joined. Imagine the joy: this penniless girl with her name-brand-less clothes and single mother who lived in the crappy HUD-subsidized subdivision on the south side, chosen by this smart, sweet-faced stud. Maybe I didn’t want to sit there and wait, in case Chuggie changed his mind and just kept walking.

“I want to ask you something about the thing with your cousin when I was little.”

My father and I have barely been speaking for the last four months. I’d yelled at his wife, and now he says he won’t lend me money for health insurance until I see a therapist. I am thirty-three years old.

I don’t know what to call it, that central event of my youth. “The incident” maybe. The beginning of the end.

“Okay,” he says. “Is that something you’re having trouble getting over?”

“I don’t know,” I say. Immediately there is this rumbling in my chest, the weird, swollen feeling at the back of the throat that indicates the unwelcome arrival of tears. I have to stop, start over.

“Do you remember the letter I wrote?”

“What letter?” he asks. I am getting used to this response.

“How did you find out about the stuff I stole?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Maybe Bev found the things?”

“You don’t remember finding the letter I’d left on the kitchen table?”

“I don’t remember how we found out about it,” he says. “What letter?”

I explain: He said he found my notebook on the table, but I didn’t believe I would expose myself that way, that I wanted to get caught. We were poor, and I wanted the fancy ring and the silver bracelet and the greeting card with the dove; I thought those things would bring me peace.

“But if I did leave that letter open on the kitchen table, if I did want you to find it, then it was a cry for help, and you sure didn’t answer it.”

He pauses. “There are a lot of ways to handle a situation” is his response.

After the incident, my stepmother had me write a letter to my father’s cousin, in which I explained how I had a problem and that I’d be seeking help. “It was total bullshit,” I say to my father now. “I didn’t believe a word of it.”

He does not remember any letters. None of them. He was stoned.

There were the twelve notes to Ben Quick, the only boy who’d ever written me back (though only once). The angry e-mail to my friend Margaret, informing her, when she got pregnant, that she was having a child only because she didn’t know what to do with her life. The proposal of marriage to my second cousin penned after attending his Bar Mitzvah in Montreal. The time I scrawled the words to Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” on a retaining wall and informed my non-boyfriend Michael to go out and read it, but the rain had washed the words away by the time he got there.

This is the problem, of course: Most of these words cannot be washed away. They are indelible, even though no one seems to remember them but me. The words now translate into feelings and gestures. The letters are shame shivers now.

At no point in this epistolary journey did I stop to wonder if maybe my letters weren’t so brilliant after all.

I got a letter from a college friend in the mid-1990s. He was writing from a mental institution outside Baltimore, where he was recuperating after losing his mind somewhere near the Wailing Wall in Israel. We had lived together in a big group house during my last year of school. We fought all the time, but we were friends, too. It was a hippie school, men in skirts and women with hairy armpits, and it was unthinkable to utter any opinion that veered away from the radical left. My friend enjoyed riling folks up with his fake right-wing stances. I thought he saw me as one of the endless politically correct children of hippies, but then he told me in the letter what he saw. “You make good Chinese food by letting the mustard seeds pop in the hot oil,” he wrote. “A million crafty things spring from your hands. You have the power of sixty hurricanes.”

I carried the letter around with me everywhere. And then I lost it.

We have been writing to one another ever since.

Once, I had an epistolary love affair. The man with whom I was exchanging letters called mine “glittering jewels in the dirt,” which he informed me was a big compliment.

“You make them sounds like iridescent onions,” I said, and I was happy. I like onions. I like sparkly things.

David apologizes for not remembering this incident better.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I don’t know what I was looking for, so I’m not disappointed.”

“I’m sorry about Will Kohler’s basement,” he says.

“What was it that happened in Will Kohler’s basement?”

He mumbles something about a teenage boy’s hormones, about: making out. I remember those silver braces peaking out from between his lips, but I don’t remember kissing him. I remember crying over him into my diary, and circling the tears with a pen. I remember that moment where I walked up to the wall to inspect the photocopies more closely, finding my own words, the particular shape of my letters, those declarations pasted over cinder block. But I don’t remember the time he shined his light on me, put his lips to mine. I don’t remember the one thing that he does recall.

The shame shivers are so bad now that sometimes I’m afraid to leave the house. Sometimes I go days without having them, but other times they recur, volt after volt, walking electroshock. How does it work, kernels of shame that grow and subsume the entire memory, memories reshaped to fit my vision of myself? Why doesn’t David’s lack of recollection do anything to erase, to desaturate, the shame?

He says, “I don’t know who should be more humiliated.”

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Belly, a novel, and lots of articles about real estate, architecture, urban planning and the environment. She has written for the New York Times, Salon.com, House & Garden and many other publications, and her fiction has appeared in Swink, Hayden's Ferry Review, West Branch and The Literary Review. You can scrutinize her at www.lisaselindavis.com.