Bill was sensitive to the difference in their height, a gap that opened when they hit puberty and had only widened since then, so that he was now four inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than his six foot, two-hundred-pound football playing friend. Marco looked old enough to buy beer without being carded. Bill was still a boy, kid brother cute, open-eyed, guileless and slender. Both his older brothers had played first string football at the high school they had all attended, but Bill was too small for the sport. He had earned his varsity jacket playing shortstop. At home games, he would scan the bleachers to see if his father had come, but more often than not, it was his mother, sitting alone, who waved at him. In Joe Ryan’s opinion, baseball was, at best, a way to kill time until football season began. Football, his dad liked to say, that’s a man’s sport. Full stop.

Marco sneered, “Suck my dick.”

Marco perched on the edge of Bill’s bed, still holding Morrison’s leg in his big hand. Bill was standing, his back to the window. It framed a freshly mowed backyard in a new housing tract at the edge of a small town that was becoming a suburb of Chicago’s suburbs.

Shirtless and sweaty, they smelled like teenage boys whose hygienic practices, casual at the best of times, steeply declined in the summer. They had been wrestling like this since they were seven years old. They were eighteen now, recent high school graduates, spending a final boyhood summer together before the autumn took them their separate ways. Marco was bound west to play football for a second-tier team at a state university in a neighboring state. Bill was headed to the University of Illinois at Springfield to study business. Bill felt their coming separation like a constant, faint ache in his chest and Marco, too, sometimes seemed to be touched by the same sadness. But, having no vocabulary except the roughhouse language of American boys, they never spoke of this feeling of impending loss.

Suck my dick.

They had first flung the taunt back and forth when their penises were little pink worms with no minds of their own and the words were nothing more than another insult they had picked up from Bill’s older brothers, like retard and spaz. But, while those words remained in their vocabulary of abuse—now supplemented by asshole and shithead—they rarely hurled suck my dick at each other and when they did, like now, the words seemed to have been infiltrated by the faintest note of questioning.