“This is what I learned while I walked Hattie home: Palmetto bugs are colossal roaches that thrive in hot climates and smell like Amaretto. They prefer the outdoors, but sometimes get lost and turn up in your house. If, as a five-year-old girl in Gainesville, Florida, you step into a steaming, oddly redolent shower, feel a light tap way up on your thigh, reflexively grab whatever just tapped you, find in your fist a roach with the heft of an operable pencil stub, fling it away, find a sharply bent leg affixed by its barbs to your middle finger’s meaty bottom phalange, repeatedly try to shake the leg off, repeatedly fail to shake the leg off, then sit in the tub and cry and cry, you’ll become a lyric poet, and your stomach will, from that day forward, repeatedly try to empty itself whenever you catch the scent of Amaretto. So, gum or no gum, no kiss good night. We dated nine months.” NewyorkerAlotofthingshavehappened Author:Adam Levin