Now he was a legitimate jock and could hang out with the football players and the basketball players and not be put down for his lack of hip and cool. The tall basketball players and the large football players joked around him and considered him one of the fellows. An okay dude. And most importantly he finally began to think about getting a real girl friend, knowing that now it was more than a possibility.

Had the sinful thoughts left him? Had he become normal? Had he changed? There was nothing to change . . . his mind said. You’re normal. Of this he had become convinced.

He went to parties. He began dating girls. Gracie Mae Mayfield became his steady. He even had sex with her a few times. When she told him she just could not do it anymore and she hoped he understood, he was relieved. But he didn’t think anything of it.

Then one day he had stayed very late after school and had run an extra mile, walking back to the gym to change. One of the members of the football team, Rick Peters, a huge blond boy whose father was a lawyer, had invited Horace and Gracie Mae to his birthday party that Sunday. Horace was pondering his feeling about Rick, telling himself that the sensation he felt in his stomach was camaraderie not attraction, admiration not lust, that Gracie Mae excited him, Rick merely, merely . . .

“Hey, Horace. How’s it hanging?”

The gym, a low-ceilinged space, was empty, echoing mutedly against the tiles and cinderblock walls, and only Gideon stood at the end of the corridor by the boys’ locker room. He stood there smiling, devilish, and cunning. His neck, the neck Horace knew all too well, curved in its brown and seductive way; Gideon’s very stance smelled of sex to Horace.

He wanted to yell at Gideon to go away. “Hi,” he said coolly, and walked swiftly toward the locker room without looking at Gideon. Gideon followed him in. Horace wanted to say something about this being a men’s locker room, but decided just to dress and go. Dress and go. And ignore him.

“Horace, what is the matter with you? Why have you been avoiding me? Man, I don’t want any trouble. I just want to know.”

Suddenly a part of Horace became aware of the locker room, of the musky, funky, sweaty, pissy, sweatsocky, jockstrappy-smelling room, and he knew that he was lying and that made him angrier. “I want you to leave me alone, Gideon.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I said . . . I’m saying . . . Gideon, what we did. What you do. It’s wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Yeah. Wrong.” He thought of holding Gideon, warm and smooth in his arms; he remembered the heat, the taste of his mouth, the feel of his hair, his scent. And he thought, Which is more wrong, sex with a man, or lying? “Yeah, wrong.”