Trying to get his legs back, his head wobbly and his internal referee still giving him the eight count, Myron followed her silently up the stairway. She led him down a darkened corridor lined with modern lithographs. She stopped, opened a door, and flipped on the lights. The room was teenage-cluttered, as if someone had put all the belongings in the center of the room and dropped a hand grenade on them. The posters on the walls-- Michael Jordan, Keith Van Horn, Greg Downing, Austin Powers, the words YEAH, BABY! across his middle in pink tie-dye lettering--had been hung askew, all tattered corners and missing pushpins. There was a Nerf basketball hoop on the closet door. There was a computer on the desk and a baseball cap dangling from a desk lamp. The corkboard had a mix of family snapshots and construction-paper crayons signed by Jeremy's sister, all held up by oversized pushpins. There were footballs and autographed baseballs and cheap trophies and a couple of blue ribbons and three basketballs, one with no air in it. There were stacks of computer-game CD-ROMs and a Game Boy on the unmade bed and a surprising amount of books, several opened and facedown. Clothes littered the floor like war wounded; the drawers were half open, shirts and underwear hanging out like they'd been shot mid-escape. The room had the slight, oddly comforting smell of kids' socks.

"He's a slob," she said. Leaving off the obvious "like you."

Myron stayed still.

"He keeps Oxy 10 in his desk drawer," Emily said. "He thinks I don't know. He's at that age where crushes keep him up all night, but he's never even kissed a girl." She walked over to the corkboard and snatched up a photograph of Jeremy. "He's beautiful, don't you think?"

"This isn't helping, Emily."

"I want you to understand."

"Understand what?"

"He's never been kissed. He is going to die and he's never even kissed a girl."

Myron held up his hands. "I don't know what you want me to say here."

"Try to understand, okay?"

"I don't need melodrama. I understand."

"No, Myron, you don't. You look back at the night and see it as some sort of Gothic blunder. We did something sinful and for that we all paid a heavy price. If we could just go back and erase that tragic mistake, well, it's all so Hamlet and Macbeth , isn't it? Your ruined basketball career, Greg's future, our marriage--all laid to waste in that one moment of lust."

"It wasn't lust."

"Let's not go through that argument again. I don't care what it was. Lust, stupidity, fear, fate. Call it whatever the hell you want to--but I would never want to go back. That 'mistake' was the best thing that ever happened to me. Jeremy, our son, came out of that mess. Do you hear what I'm saying? I'd destroy a million careers and marriages for him."

She looked at him, challenging. He said nothing.