When Elizabeth Stone was a young Brooklyn teacher, she encountered Vincent, a passionate student who stood out among his peers at Bensonhurst's New Utrecht High School. Over the years, Vincent maintained contact with Stone, sending her a Christmas card each year, without fail and without much information about his life.

So, when she received a box of his diaries -- all 3,500 pages of them -- she was surprised. She also knew that it meant bad news. In fact, Vincent, then living in San Francisco, had died of AIDS and wanted his diaries to form the basis of a book and he determined his former teacher was the person to do it for him.

"A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from Her Student," published in hardcover in May by Algonquin Books, is the result. It is Vincent's story, but also Stone's memoir of teaching, learning from students and a meditation on memory and mortality.

We recently caught up with Elizabeth Stone just as she was about to embark on the book tour that will bring her to Milwaukee, Wed., July 17 for a free 7 p.m. event at Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop, 4093 N. Oakland Ave. in Shorewood.

OMC: You were obviously taken by surprise that Vincent left his diaries for you. Did you come to realize why he chose you for this task?

ES: I've thought a lot about this question over the years, and the only conclusion I've come to is that Vincent thought of me as someone who saw him generously and not judgmentally. Beyond that, I think anyone who dies not only wants to be remembered but wants to be permanently memorialized. When Vincent's own friend Ronny died, he memorialized him by creating a panel for the AIDS quilt. When he saw Ronny's panel in the context of the whole quilt, he was disappointed at how small and inconsequential it looked.

I think he wanted something more for himself, a memorial where he wouldn't be lost in the crowd. That's when I think he began to think of me. In one of my Christmas cards to him, I had told him that I was a writer, and perhaps he thought I was his best shot at immortality. In his deathbed letter to me, he told me what he most feared was that his diaries would get into "the wrong hands," and I've come to believe that to Vincent that meant hands that would hide his diaries away. My decision to donate his diaries to the Gay and Lesbian Archives of the San Francisco Public Library grew out of the belief that Vincent wanted his words to reach people. And in the archives they can reach people directly, unmediated even by me.

OMC: How hard was it to do the book for you since you didn't really know him all that well? It had been years since you'd seen him and even those seemed to be fairly brief encounters.

ES: It was as hard -- or as easy -- as it is to imagine a character in a book we read. When you think about it, I had 3,500 handwritten pages from Vincent that chronicled his daily life until the very day before his death, and even his handwriting told me something about him. As he began to get really ill, for instance, his handwriting changed and became less round. Eventually, when he developed neuropathy, it became almost indecipherable. His handwriting was one of the ways I knew him.

I also knew Vincent because I lived his life with him day by day, I saw him evolve over a period of 10 years. The hardest part in getting to know him was finding a mental image to replace the 14-year-old he had been when I last saw him.

OMC: Do you think it would have been harder to deal with some of the things in his diary if you knew him better?

ES: Absolutely! I think if he were my brother or my son, I would have found it intolerable to read his diaries. Almost impossible. Even not knowing him, his life-threatening sexual behavior -- to himself and to others -- unnerved and upset me. If he had been a member of my family, I would have been so angry at him that I wouldn't have had room to feel much else.

OMC: You mention in the acknowledgements that there may be things in the book that Vincent's sisters would have liked to see omitted? Do you think they're pleased with the book anyway?

ES: They've told me that they recognize their brother as he appears in the book, that I "got" who he was which is the biggest compliment they could pay me. So for them, now he's alive forever in the pages of this book, like Keats' boy on the Grecian Urn, forever piping and forever young.

Vincent had loved Amy Tan's writings and if you've seen the book, you know Amy Tan was very complimentary about the book on the back of the jacket. In fact, my editor gave it to Amy Tan to read, only because in his diary Vincent mentioned reading one of her books. After Vincent's friend, Carol, read the book, she said, "Imagine! now even Amy Tan has heard of Vincent."

OMC: Do you think Vincent was hoping that maybe his experiences could help others in the same situation?

ES: In the last few days of Vincent's life, when he was racked with pain, he agreed to come to the hospital for a catscan, even though it was, for him, a monumental and painful effort to do so. His doctor told him that the catscan wouldn't help him personally, but what that what he could learn from it could help him help others. So at an enormous physical cost to himself, Vincent went for the catscan. I do think he wanted to help.