Where I came from, no one was held back; on the contrary, the mothers were eager to get us into school as early as possible; reaching school age meant nine months of free childcare and lunch.

“So do you want to come or what?”

“My mom has to work tomorrow night.”

“I can give you a ride home,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of far away.”

“It’s not that far.”

“You know where I live?”

“Yeah,” he said. “East Nashville.”

Overhearing conversations about summer camps and beach vacations and country clubs, I had dreaded the moment when everyone would discover that I lived in a cheap apartment off Gallatin Pike. But I wanted to know him—to be near him—badly enough to risk the shame.

“Okay,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Meet me in the quad after school tomorrow.”

Like many of the Yeatman boys, Arch drove a truck. Arch’s was a black Ford F-150 with oversized tires and a white fiberglass camper top on the bed, a Grateful Dead steal your face sticker placed in the center of the rear window.

We drove out of the lot, down the long, dark driveway, and out into Belle Meade.

“You live alone with your mom?” he asked.

“My aunt lives with us,” I said, as if my mother had taken in Sunny and not the other way around.

“What about your dad?” he asked. “Where does he live?”

“He died.”

“Oh, man,” Arch said. “What happened?”

“Vietnam.”

“Man, that’s tough,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“He was a hero.”

“I don’t know if he was a hero.”

“Sure, he was.”

Arch asked me more questions—about where my parents were from, how we’d arrived in Nashville, and so forth. I shaped my answers to hide the seedier aspects of my history. Instead of a runaway, my mother became an orphan, and Sunny, her only living relative. My mother had left college to get married. We’d once lived in a house. With each half-truth and outright lie, I realized how easy it was. Just as my mother always presented herself at Yeatman in what seemed to me a costume, I could write myself a role and act it out. I couldn’t hide where I lived or what sort of life I’d come from. But I could recast my story in a manner that made me seem less inferior than I felt. I was sure my mother would have no problem with Arch and the rest of the Yeatman people believing her to be a forlorn war widow, scratching and clawing to give her only child a leg up in the world. And I could be the son of a fallen hero instead of a bastard whose father had never known he existed.