He unpeels a Band-Aid and places it gently over my cut. He presses it flush, and his finger traces the small of my back, doing nothing to slow my racing heartbeat. As he does, a thousand eyes surround me—judgmental, doom-filled glares. My mom, the Reverend, Ario, and countless other sneering faces. All of them sickened that I’d let another boy this close to me—all the vile things I must be thinking. The glaring eyes know what I want. They see the blueprints of my heart better than I do. Marcos applies a second Band-Aid in an “X” over the first one to hold it in place, and I face him. We’re close—closer than I expected. He’s a foot taller. Ario’s height. My recorder suddenly weighs a trillion pounds, but the boy in front of me is so much like Ario: big-bodied, black hair, soft skin.

“Thanks for the patch,” I say, a swoop of hair collapsing over my forehead.

“Sorry I couldn’t help you off the floor,” he says, chewing his lower lip.

The longer no one says anything—the longer Marcos’s candy-brown eyes stay with mine—the queasier I feel. My dick grows warmer and heavier underneath my shorts as panic crashes over me. A “not here, not now” panic, the kind a werewolf gets when he’s in public and realizes he forgot about the moon. But my pre-dick-ament is as inescapable as the Wolf Man’s. I’m one bold move away from Marcos’s lips, as pink as a rare steak. I’m terrified to glance down at the rise in my shorts that is probably as obvious as the cut on my back. The dreadful, glaring faces in my mind’s eye burn hotter. Gross, they whisper. So, so, so gross.

Kiss him, echoes a distant, friendlier voice. Ario will under­stand…

“Where’d you get those headphones?” Marcos asks, shattering the spell.

“What?” I ask, my hand absentmindedly jumping first to Ario’s recorder and then to the headset wrapped around my neck. My erection drops like a switched-off faucet as the blood rushes back to my brain on a revelation: in all the excitement and drama of the Expulsion tape, I overlooked one big surprise I learned. “Bill was listening to Ricky’s Expulsion,” I blurt at the exact moment Marcos arrives at a similar, more horrified understanding:

“You stole Bill’s Walkman?”

“I have to tell you something,” I whisper, railroading over Marcos’s baffled “Huh?” Breaking the land speed record for confessions, I bring Marcos up to date on the Reverend’s time as a camper and his relationship to Ricky. I open Bill’s Walkman to display the proof, and his puppy eyes flare open.

“What are you DOING? It’s only your first day, and you’re gonna get yourself killed.”

“Do you have any idea why Bill would be listening to Ricky’s tapes?”