Troy and Joel had driven, whooping and laughing, through the wet country west of town, until mud had covered their windows and the engine started to smell. Troy parked in the shadow of a spindly tree to let the truck cool down. A tenuous silence settled between them. They looked at each other, at the patch of sky visible through the filthy windshield. An opportunity had presented itself—they both felt it, just as they both felt they were about to squander it if they didn’t move fast.

Troy abandoned subtlety. He grabbed Joel’s hand and pressed it to the hard weight in his lap.

When they were through, Troy had turned on the truck’s wipers and said, “Sorry about that,” as if he had just spilled ketchup on Joel’s shirt (years later, Joel would hear the same words coming from Wesley Mores, spoken in the exact same tone).

Joel, finding nowhere to spit, only swallowed.

He wanted to weep. He had just learned that there was nothing more debasing, more perfectly disappointing, than getting exactly what you wanted: whatever Joel might have imagined in his wildest fantasies, Troy had ultimately tasted as bland as a short, salty finger. What had Joel just spent to discover that? What black mark had he just set permanently against his manhood? Against his soul?

When he felt a faint tremble rise through the ground and quake in his seat, he knew, without question, that it was just the Lord God, turning His eye on him in shock and shame.

Troy felt it too. He went still. He pushed sweat from his forehead and started to drive. He was so jumpy the truck nearly stalled.

The two boys were silent on the way home. Joel was almost too ashamed to breathe. He sometimes forgot, ten years later, just how religious he had once been, how the sight of Bentley First Baptist’s cross had made him so fearful: the God of First Baptist was not a merciful God. Joel nearly barfed up all that Troy had spat inside him.

The guilt and the horror were all so awful Joel would have gladly let that afternoon be the end of it, would have never spoken to Troy again (imagine the shape his future might have taken), if something remarkable hadn’t happened.

Troy seemed to calm when they reached the highway. His jitters faded. And when he moved the truck up from second gear to third to fourth, Troy let his hand fall from the gearshift and come to rest on Joel’s thigh. He kept it there the entire way home.

Their arrangement went on like that all summer. Troy would make plans on some pretense every few weeks to come to town and would drive them somewhere remote or arrange a meeting in secret. When they were through they would study the ground, wipe their chins. And then they would let a thigh rest against a thigh, or an arm rest over a shoulder, and they would return to the real world like wounded soldiers, leaning against each other on the way back to their lonely trenches.