One month before I sacrificed the better part of my virginity to the god of supplicant Jewish boys, I received a t-shirt. I was fourteen years old, and with two hundred other freshman and sophomore boys, I competed in the Wisconsin Badgers Soccer Invite. For five days we played bruising, brutal games. My team placed second overall, earning me a smart, simple, short-sleeved cotton soccer jersey.

The end of that week is the beginning of this story: a t-shirt, a cardinal-red t-shirt, collarless but thickly ringed with a wide, white crew-neck. There was a white, military-stiff stripe sewn along the crown of each shoulder and a matching band around the cuffs of each sleeve. On the left breast stood a busty Bucky Badger, the proud mascot of the University of Wisconsin. I wore the jersey on Saturday. I wore it again on Sunday. And then, on Monday, I wore it to my first day of overnight camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

Olin Sang Ruby was a Jewish camp for assimilated boys and girls. Everyone was Jewish–not in a religious, faith-based sense of the word, but rather in the distancing, alienating sense that confuses many lives of non-traditional Jews. Every Olin Sang camper brought some token, some symbolic badge to affirm the nature of our secularity. Mike thought of himself as an actor, so he brought a collection of plays by David Mamet. Ben was a musician, he brought his round, hard-shell guitar. Fat Tiny was a punk, and banged on a set of drums until the trembling earth begged for mercy. And I wore my Badger soccer t-shirt.

She was different. She wore no badge or token—though she would, later, after the summer had ended. The clothes she wore were simple, neither grunged for style nor pressed for presentation. She had smart, sad eyes that never seemed to blink, always luminous and wet, but strangely silent and obedient to the emotions that passed across the rest of her face. Her lips were simple, very soft. She laughed very often. She never smiled

One afternoon when the other campers were lounging outside the tents, waiting for supper, she led me out into a field of unkempt feed corn that filled the corridor around the boundaries of the camp. There was nothing illicit about the moment, but there was a warm wind that brushed through the field, and the edges of the sun melted a little, and a secret grew inside me that I kept even from myself.

She was always waiting for me, cross-legged in the grass with her friends, or leaning back against her elbows in sand along Lac La Belle, watching the rhythmic shadows of waves. She talked a lot. And she was a terrific listener. She let me tell stories about my life–largely fabricated, mostly forgotten. Sometimes we kissed, and my fingers would negotiate for something more elusive, more ambitious. Sometimes we held hands. Other times we didn’t. On the last night of camp we cocooned ourselves away from the world into a sticky sleeping bag; and—while all of our friends watched the endings of a movie, within an awkward, endless span of nearly seven seconds—the gods accepted my childhood as a sacrifice. In the morning, I gave her my t-shirt.

She returned to Chicago and I returned to Madison. Before the year was over, she sent my t-shirt back–washed, neatly folded. Having it back inspired in me a compulsion to wear that t-shirt incessantly, in the endlessly comic–perhaps pathetic–way that boys commit to random objects and ideas. I brought the shirt with me to Colorado Springs where I attended Colorado College, and I wore it there as well. On the occasion of a rare visit to Madison, the typical joke was for my friends to ask about the shirt, to tell me how they missed the shirt, to request that next time I send the shirt and leave myself in Colorado. On the last day of my Junior year in college, someone took a photograph of an ex-girlfriend and me while we faced the stoop of our vacated house, the world behind us dwarfed by the pale, purple luminescence of Pike’s Peak. She was dressed in an emerald summer frock that clung to her belly and breasts. I stood beside her, holding a handful of her curls, wearing long jeans; and my wide-brimmed Stetson; my crooked, thickly-wired glasses; and a tired, faded, cardinal-red soccer t-shirt.

The end of this story spans the entirety of my life between graduation and now: a gulf of nearly ten years, inexplicably during which I have no memory of that shirt. Perhaps in a paroxysm of celebration I gave away all my material memories; or, perhaps, with a deadline to finish packing, I abandoned the scraps of my belongings to my friends. I don’t remember leaving it behind; nor do I remember wondering about its absence; nor, from the vantage of my current perspective, can I conceive of any reason why its loss should have passed unnoticed from my life.

One year ago I celebrated my 31^st birthday, and by chance or fate, I was living in the city where my two best college friends also lived. They were working on their relationship. She brought me a present. She handed me a white, wax-paper bag, and inside, buried within a nest of tissue paper—and smelling of naphthalene, Clorox, and an unsettling trace of lilac—was my exhausted, forgotten jersey.

She couldn’t remember how she ended up with the shirt, she said.

Perhaps she had salvaged it from the trash, I said.

Or, I said, trying to smile and remembering the arrogance with which I once drifted away from my first lover, perhaps I gave it to her so she wouldn’t forget me.

Her lips twisted in response. “Well, it’s yours again,” she said. “What’re you going to do with it?”