Because she wasn’t allowed to take Communion, she refused to go to confession herself. I knelt in the booth and mumbled generic offenses into the screen. The priest, sounding bored, asked if I had anything more (meaning, I thought, anything good) to confess; I said no, and we wrapped things up. When I emerged, my mother was sitting alone in the middle of the church, staring toward the altar as if waiting for a movie to start. I walked down the aisle and was standing beside her before she realized I was there and made a small, startled noise. “Joseph. Jesus, you nearly gave me a heart attack. Did you say your penance?” I nodded yes, marking the first sin on what was supposed to be my clean slate. In truth, I hadn’t bothered saying penance because I hadn’t confessed any of the actual offenses I’d committed. They were unutterable, and they were dwarfed by all the things I still wanted to do.

The next week, Karen and Seth Colby were caught cutting class and making out with lit cigarettes in their hands two days in a row, and they were suspended for the next three—a punishment they celebrated by riding around the island in Colby’s Firebird listening to homemade tapes of his band. Their first day back in school, Colby made his lunch entrance by delivering a karate kick to the cafeteria door—slamming it into the head of Mr. Salkind, the history teacher. Mr. Salkind took two stitches, Colby was immediately suspended again, and Karen skipped school in solidarity.

I was moving with the herd of students between fourth and fifth periods when I felt a sharp pain on the back of my neck. Wes Markham was walking close on my heels. He had “thumped” me—cocked his middle finger beneath the inside of his thumb and then snapped it against my neck—and he was sneering with his hand poised, ready to do it again. Our schedules overlapped for two hours a day; he slept through political science several desks away from me, then followed the same path through the halls to the chorus room. Like Colby, Markham was a “problem case” who had no actual interests and was constantly getting kicked out of one elective class after another, shuffling from art to the newspaper staff and, most recently, to chorus. He had no enthusiasm for singing and couldn’t carry a tune, but Mr. Tepper seemed satisfied with just letting him sit high up at the back of the room with his unplugged electric guitar on his lap, quietly picking out riffs.