When rodeo season begins, the boys start skipping school. You’d skip, too, but the goal is to load up on D’s, not to get kicked out or sent into counseling. You paint your nails in class and follow the rodeo circuit on weekends. Andy rides saddle bronc, but his real event is bull riding. The bull riders have to be a little crazy, and Andy Tyler is. He’s crazy in other ways, too: two years of asking you to come home and fuck him have made him urgent about it. You dance with him at the all-night graduation party, and he catches you around the waist and says he doesn’t know a more beautiful girl. At dawn, he leaves for spring rodeo finals in Reno, driving down with his best friend, Rick Marcille, and you go to Country Kitchen for breakfast in a happy fog, order a chocolate shake and think about dancing with Andy. Then you fall asleep on Carla’s bedroom floor, watching cartoons, too tired to make it down the road to bed.

Andy calls once from Reno, at 2 A.M., and you answer the phone before it wakes your dad. Andy’s taken second place in the bull riding and won a silver belt buckle and three thousand dollars. He says he’ll take you to dinner at the Grub Stake when he gets home. Rick Marcille shouts “Ro-day-o” in the background.

There’s a call the next night, too, but it’s from Rick Marcille’s dad. Rick and Andy rolled the truck somewhere in Idaho, and the doctors don’t think Rick will make it, though Andy might. Mr. Marcille sounds angry that Andy’s the one who’s going to live, but he offers to drive you down there. You don’t wake your dad; you just go.

The doctors are wrong; it’s Andy who doesn’t make it. When you get to Idaho, he’s already dead. Rick Marcille is paralyzed from the neck down. The cops say the boys weren’t drinking, that a wheel came loose and the truck just rolled, but you guess the cops are just being nice. It’s your turn to be angry, at Mr. Marcille, because his son will live and Andy is dead. But when you leave the hospital, Mr. Marcille falls down on his knees, squeezing your hand until it hurts.

At Andy’s funeral, his uncle’s band plays, and his family sets white doves free. One won’t go, and it hops around the grass at your feet. The morning is already hot and blue, and there will be a whole summer of days like this to get through.