As he came around to the side of the building, he looked down the lawn by the way and was taken by anxiety. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grades, all here in this building. Those years were like the struggle of some little clay figure to take form, of some small ugly creature to grow feathers and wings and gain majesty. Only four years. But such struggle in so short a time, such contortions and envies and imbalance. Teachers. Cafeteria food. Spankings. Chocolate milk and Lorna Doone cookies. The notion of high school was as far away and impossible as the idea of death or marriage or anything outside the realm of Tom Swift and the Flintstones. To Horace, now, the innocence was not so attractive, the ignorance repellent, the pains horrible. To be a child.

Yet there had been bright times, more than bright, joyous. Green, yellow, and orange-red days of field trips and sack races and science experiments and practical jokes and books, always books. John Anthony had been his best friend since kindergarten. A copper-skinned, spindly boy in elementary school, John Anthony had loved books too, in the beginning. They spoke of robots and rocket ships and monsters. They had designed a space ship and made plans to build a base on Europa, the moon of Jupiter. They had laid out plans for a city at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of its deepest trench. Together they formed a society of young scientists called the Young Wizards’ Club, with only two members, Horace and John Anthony, and fought over who would be president. Many recesses were spent speculating and fantasizing about becoming adventurous globe-trotting geologist-biologist-chemist-Egyptologists rushing here and there to save the planet from evil men. But as the years went by their conversations began to include less lofty, more immediate goals.

John Anthony got a girlfriend first—Gina Pierce, a long-legged, loose sort of tart at whom all the boys winked and who was brazen enough to wink back. At age eleven John Anthony knew everything there was to know about women, and women and men, and sex. Horace had pieced together a working knowledge of procreation that was both clinical and solemn. Though there was something mysterious and secret surrounding the whole affair, the mechanics were clear to him. But there had to be something more, something dank and sweet and forbidding, and even powerful. It had been John Anthony, with his precocious knowledge and experience—mostly secondhand from his older brother Perry’s uncensored and X-rated tales—who filled in much of the void of Horace’s precise, yet woefully lacking, knowledge of sex. First it was a matter of widening his vocabulary to include words such as—

Fucking.

What? Funking?

No, fool, “fucking.” You know what that is, don’t you?

They would be high on the monkey bars, away from the rest of the class. John Anthony would be reclining very mannishly, his elbows stuck between two bars.