Where do you stop?

by Eric Kraft

Meet Peter Leroy, of Babbington, Long Island, "Clam Capital of America." He's a middle-aged dreamer who sits at a computer in a room in an old hotel, revising his childhood. In Where Do You Stop? Peter writes about his eleven-year-old self, just entering adolescence and just beginning to ponder life's big questions. When young Peter begins junior high school, he meets for the first time the black kids who come from a part of Babbington where there are no sidewalks, and he must evaluate his father's opinion that having no sidewalks is the way black people like it. Peter has to deal with his consuming passion for Ariane, the sultry older sister of his best friend, and he must figure out what to make of his beautiful new science teacher, Miss Rheingold, who is entranced by quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg and intoxicated by uncertainty. Miss Rheingold's style is discontinuity.^ After showing her charges an educational film featuring a zippy little character called Quanto the Minimum, sh