Walking up to the cashier stand, Ronny said, “You’re having a quiet day, looks like.”

“Hey, Ronny. It’s been a while, how you been?” His smile brightened as it used to, face lit with a friendly light. Had something happened? “You’re still in school, I guess.”

“Yes. End of junior year. Have to turn into an adult sometime next year.”

“Well, it’s no fun.”

“What, you’re not at college anymore?”

Hoagie hesitated, hand on the edge of the cashier desk, fingernails immaculately trimmed, fingers long and blunt, not the delicate hands to match his features, which were ethereal—blue eyes with long lashes, full lips, small ears. “I dropped out. I had some problems.” Waving his hand a bit. “Nothing I want to talk about, parent stuff.”

“Well, I know how that goes. My mom just married her fourth husband and dumped me here for the summer to move to Nevada.”

He giggled, studying something on the desk for a moment. “Yeah, I remember your stories about your mom. She’s a trip.”

“That’s all right. Better that than one of these moms who calls every day to see if I’m changing my underwear. My first roommate had one like that.”

“My mom was like that, too,” Hoagie said. “But not anymore.” Wistful. Ronny wanted to ask. But Hoagie went back to his work, which appeared to be checking a shipment of books against an invoice.

Ronny wandered to the literature shelves, lost himself in book covers, titles, names of writers, listening to Hoagie hum “Stop! In the Name of Love,” low and toneless. The store was quiet, no other customers. Ronny knew he should not buy a book and exercised his willpower fairly well until he found a copy of a Forster novel he had never read, The Longest Journey, cheap enough that he could manage it.

Along the front of the cashier stand, leaflets fluttered a bit as someone let a breeze into the store. A flyer for the Southeastern Gay Conference, which had been sponsored by Chapel Hill students a few weeks ago, still hung there. Hoagie had come down to the sales floor and was watching. He said, “I went to that,” watching Ronny carefully, and the weariness of his expression had increased, as though the comment weighed him down.

It was a moment that clarified many things. At Governor’s School Ronny had gravitated to a group of boys like him, who were called sissies by the other boys. He remembered the feeling of walking down the crumbling plaster hallway of Clewell Dorm at Salem College, where the summer program was held; there was a cluster of fellows, jocks and would-be jocks, who hung around his neighbor’s room, and one of them, Johnny something, had publicly invited Ronny to suck his cock a couple of times. For some reason he bore the brunt of the teasing. Hoagie had been at the edge of that group of Ronny’s friends, though he spent most of his time with the theater kids. Now, in the bookstore, Ronny understood: he and Hoagie were alike, had always been.