He shook himself, rubbed his face. Chewed an Adderall. Paced the clearing. There was something important here, a vital question his intuition was struggling to ask him. Something to do with the fact that it had been Joel who had once mentioned this secret place to Dylan years ago, and Troy who had shown it to Joel.

If nothing else, Joel supposed he could only hope that Dylan had enjoyed as happy a summer this year as Joel had enjoyed a decade before. Because at this point it seemed clear that those few months Joel had spent with Troy, whatever their consequences, would go down as the happiest of his life. There had been many trips to this very clearing, long sticky hours spent parked in the cab of Troy’s truck or pressed against the shedding trunk of a cedar or standing to discover the fallen bark’s mahogany stains lingering on the knees of their jeans. Things he hadn’t been brave enough to tell Clark last night.

The night of the Bison’s first summer game, the night that he had struck Ranger Mason with the first and only punch he’d ever thrown, Joel had emerged from his toilet stall to see Troy at the urinal. Troy had grown slimmer since Joel had last seen him a year before, wiry with muscle, an unkempt patch of stubble spreading down his neck. He still had the same bony wrists a little too big for his arms, still had his sister’s brilliant emerald eyes, and those eyes had fixed on Joel that night with an attention, an interest, they’d never betrayed before. An attention that was thrilling, but not entirely kind.

Troy had said more to Joel in five minutes in the toilets than he had in the two years they’d spent on the team together. Looking back, Joel realized now that Troy had been appraising him. When Troy asked Joel if things between him and his sister were well, Joel had hesitated, and Troy had seemed relieved.

A week later, a half hour late—he was always late—Troy picked Joel up and they headed to the muddy country northwest of town. Troy’s truck smelled of spearmint gum and cheap body spray and nicotine. Troy filled the silences with clumsy small talk, telling Joel about a 7-Eleven in Rockdale that would sell you beer without asking for ID if you paid twenty percent extra—“You know how to calculate that, right?”—about how Joel should never play football if he could help it (as if Joel, soon to be a senior, hadn’t already missed that train by years), about the importance in a man’s life of one day buying property.

At Troy’s request, Joel had opened the glove box to retrieve a bottle of pills and found them resting atop a handgun. The gun’s small black mouth was aimed straight at Joel’s chest. “Bandits and thieves,” was all Troy would say in explanation, snickering, as he swallowed three tablets dry.

Pills, Joel thought now, recalling all that Clark had told him about Troy’s debt, the bottle of Oxy in Dylan’s room. Pills. Of course.