He crossed the bridge over the tributary of the Chinquapin River, pausing to look at the water in the violet morning air, wondering if mermaids and river nymphs, winged toads and talking alligators gallivanted beneath its surface, cool and dim. Once across the river, the voice told him to walk into the woods, and he did. The nettles and bristles and twigs sometimes cut his bare feet, but he walked on, replacing the magical noise that had bantered in his mind last night with questions, conundrums, puzzlements, a maelstrom of doubts and worries. His mood shifted wildly: at one moment he found himself laughing, remembering the most frivolous of jokes from high school, laughing with more glee than he had then; the next moment he wept heavily, remembering some small sadness, tiny, some small hurt that never truly mattered, but that had not healed, and he wailed like a lost kitten, forlorn. He was overcome with a deep sense of futility, of uselessness and failure, deep and personal. And there was a feeling of weariness, deep and old, the way he was sure an octogenarian widower would feel, and he wished for the voice to give him answers, to provide a hope, or at least to give him some release.

The fall season after his summer of debauch had actually been fun, and he remembered the months of September through November as a rare reprieve from the anxiety. He had found his group.

There had been five of them. Four white boys and Horace. Five boys who did not fit into the archaic, close-knit, rural ways of York County. They were from elsewhere. Nolan’s mother had been a doctor in San Francisco, but when she divorced a year before she moved her two children here, back home, and set up her gynecology practice. Ian was an Army brat whose father, a retired colonel, had decided to return home. Jay’s father had been a plant manager for Du Pont in Delaware and Atlanta and was now overseeing a new plant in York. Ted’s father had been a New York lawyer before he decided to return to North Carolina, set up practice, and run for the House as soon as he could. All were bright boys—malcontents, quick to set themselves apart from the tedious banality of East York Senior High School. They had traveled, been to better schools—Horace was just smart and black.

Did he consider why he was so easily accepted into this group of illustrious outcasts? Consider that they might be condescending in their innocent way, accepting him merely as a reaction to the traditional racial bias of the area? That by showing their lack of prejudice and befriending a black as their peer, they could somehow show their superiority?