On her desk was a wallet-sized photo of a child, a girl with braided hair and ribbons, and she picked it up during the conversation, running one perfect nail over the image, then setting it down again.

She took his deposit, which turned out to be smaller than he had expected, informed him that service would be turned on no earlier than Monday, and that he would have a new phone number, which she supplied to him on a piece of notepaper from a scratch pad on her desk—not a whole piece of notepaper but rather a ribbon that she sliced precisely with scissors that she removed from her drawer and then replaced. “Everything must be done just so,” she said. She handed him the new phone number with a slightly dour expression. She sounded sincerely informative and familiar, a low voice. “You can pay the bill here every month; we have a cashier window that’s open six days a week. Or you can send us a check through the mail, though in my opinion that would be a waste of a stamp.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and she nodded that he could go now, so he stood from the chair and left the building and thought, I will have a phone soon.

He walked to the Chapel Hill Newspaper offices and talked to the receptionist, who told him the composition shop needed a person to do pasteup three days a week, that he should fill out an application and come back on Monday. The receptionist had a thick head of silver hair put up in a chignon, looking stylish; the rest of her was dressed for comfort, a loose tee shirt and faded jeans. She said that the people in the composition department would probably be pleased that Ronny already had experience in page assembly, to make sure he wrote that down. The application was short. He wrote on the back, “I already know how to do pasteup; I worked for the Tar Heel and did a lot of their pages last fall.”

Walking through the light rain that had begun to fall, he sat in the student union until Tate appeared to fetch the paper on I, Claudius. Tate called him one brainheaded useful motherfucker and gave him a swat on the shoulder that all but sprung the bone out of the socket.

By evening rain was falling steadily over the parking lot and raising a mist in the pines near the football stadium. He sat in the DTH office for a long time, the space unnaturally quiet, desks clean, wire printers turned off. He had been thinking of Ben through the hours, holding the thought in his head, warming himself by the memory, by the fact of what had happened over the last semester. Finally he decided to call on the newspaper’s phone, even though he could get in trouble for it. He had access to the long-distance line in the morgue, the home of back issues of the newspaper, to which only editors had the key. Closing the door behind him, he felt like more of a criminal. In Sunday school—when his grandmother took him there—he had heard stories about people who took a first step on the path to sin, and then a second, lured ever forward by the promise of easy reward. Maybe he was on such a path himself, writing papers for Ben, then Tate, now stealing long-distance phone time. Having feelings for a boy was another sin. He stood among the volumes of old Tar Heels smelling acrid; the room held copies of the paper all the way back to the Thomas Wolfe years, but the big books were so dusty he was afraid to dial the phone until he had a good sneeze.