“What’s wrong, Malone?”

“Nothing, sir.”

Dan bit his lip, lowered his eyes, and pressed the fabric in the arm of his chair smooth. He wasn’t looking ahead to the summer like he should have. Sure, he would lifeguard and stare at Emma Wesselman lying out on the deck of Glen Cove Swim Club. In the evenings, his crew would cruise Forest Lane. But something felt off. Oglesby rolled forward in his office chair and tapped Dan’s knee with Keisaku.

“Listen to me, Malone. You’re going to be fine. Remember, you’re my Norwegian rat. Okay?”

“Okay.” Dan nodded and studied the list of books. I can do this. I want to do this.

“Now get out of here, my knight errant. Read away.”

“Thank you, sir.” Dan got up to go.

And Oglesby was about to turn when he leaned back in his office chair and called after his sophomore.

“And keep writing, Malone. Your journal is your life-force.”

Dan walked out of Oglesby’s office, where he found a half-lit Father Dallanach loitering in the hall, the layouts for The Roundup initialed and okayed. And with that, sophomore year was over for Daniel Malone.

They took the Zephyr to DFW. As the Malones pulled away from the house, Pat gave a parting glance to his Cougar, parked at the top of the driveway, the dark maw of its grille like the baleen of a beached whale. The evening breeze was scalding. Early June carried on the near-triple-digit heat wave of late May. They merged onto the LBJ and zipped out past the city limits, past the Trinity, out into the boundless airspace of the prairie. The Zephyr coughed cool air at their silence. Despite his new regimen of six cups of coffee and three ginger ales a day, Pat was managing calm. Anne was looking away out the passenger side. Pat took a hand off the wheel and touched his wife’s arm, trying to draw her in. She turned and gave an absent smile, and Pat could see it there in her eyes: all of her ceaseless ingrown worry. She was holding on, making a good show for Dan, but Pat knew how unhappy she was. This wasn’t a new start. This amounted to a trial separation. This was his exile.

Pat picked up the airport road and checked on Dan in the mirror. He was also staring out the side window, trying to escape this doleful car ride. He seemed strange to Pat, a difference he couldn’t quite square, but not the boy he knew. Pat’s comfort was that Dan was too wrapped up in his own summer plans—lifeguarding, driver’s ed—to really register his departure. But it bothered him that he didn’t recognize his own son, a young man halfway through high school, and it was then that Pat knew his anguish wasn’t that he was going, but that he had already missed so much.