Since that morning two years earlier when Bill had awakened with semen-saturated BVDs and fading images of a naked Marco in his head, his feelings for Marco had sailed past best friendship into a swamp of confusion, desire and shame. On double dates—always arranged by Marco and his girlfriend of the moment because Bill was officially “shy” around girls—he struggled to keep his attention on Patti or Nancy or Suzy, but always it returned to Marco, to the hollow at the base of his throat, to his surprisingly slender fingers and the heavy curl of black hair that no matter how often he pushed it back, flopped to the center of his forehead. To Marco’s eyes, so dark they seemed black but were, upon closer examination, a dark warm brown and lit from a depth that seemed to be the source of the mystery of Marco Ferreira.

That there could be any mystery at all about the boy he had known all his life confounded Bill. The casual horseplay they had engaged in forever had become freighted with meaning for Bill. The briefest brush of skin against skin when they wrestled was like the striking of a match that flared into yearnings in his chest and belly both exciting and terrifying. At night, the image of Marco showering formed in his head—his thickly muscled legs and chest brushed with dark hair, heavy cock bobbing in the bushy pubic patch, and the high, round butt—and Bill’s hand groped for his cock. He jerked himself off quickly before self-loathing overcame his arousal but then lay there, his hand coated with semen, hating himself for what he wanted, but helpless against the want.

And this, more than wet dreams or jerking off to Marco’s image, was how Billy Ryan knew he was a queer. Sometime after his pubic hairs sprouted and his father had haltingly given him the talk about sex, Marco had become mysterious to him in the same way he understood girls to be mysterious to other boys. It wasn’t the mystery of sex—that had been reduced to crude talk about blowjobs and hand jobs and fucking pussy and who would or would not put out. Something more than sex held the boys in thralldom to the girls. It was as if the girls held the answer to a question the boys had not even been aware existed until puberty when the scales fell from their eyes and they saw that without a girl they were and would remain fundamentally incomplete. The question for them was: who am I? And the answer, blasted through speakers in the gym at school dances or wafting through tinny car radios or on hi-fis in teenage bedrooms all over Eden Plains, Illinois, in the pop songs they all listened to, was: I am no one without you.