“You need to start. Break it in good, so when you get your chance you don’t make a fool of yourself. My first time was with an older girl. She knew I was a virgin, so she sort of expected me to come fast. You might not get so lucky. You don’t want to be a premature ejaculator, do you, bud?”

“No.”

The room had gone dark but for the fire in the hearth. In the silence, I looked back at him and found him staring at me, grinning, his face and his eyes lit up by the firelight.

“So do you know how?” Arch asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

He stood up and stumbled around the table toward me.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

What happened after remains both vague and vivid in memory. Even the next morning, my head throbbing from too much whiskey, I recalled it all clearly but could not square what I remembered with reality. When I came out of the bedroom, Arch was already cooking eggs and bacon. He poured me a glass of tomato juice.

“Here,” he said. “That’ll help.”

We never spoke of it, ever, even after it happened again, and again. I did not allow myself to consider what it might have meant, for either of us. I knew if anyone ever found out about it that Arch and I would both be ostracized for all time by our schoolmates. But I never considered the possibility that what we were doing defined either of us in the way such a thing might, or perhaps should. Arch had slept with all of those girls, after all, and he was probably sleeping with Vanessa. As for me, I was sure I wasn’t gay. I liked girls—Vanessa first, but I wasn’t so devoted that I didn’t notice other girls, and my fantasies always only involved women. It was just Arch. He had mastered my heart almost from the first second. He was the pillar upon which my entire identity rested. After what he’d shared with me by his father’s tombstone—after he’d called me his brother—if there had been a shred of doubt before that, it was long gone. I loved him, as I had never loved anyone or anything before; as I have loved only one other since.

nine

One afternoon, Jamie and I came home and found Sunny’s mustard-yellow ’73 Cutlass Supreme parked in front of the door to the carriage house.

“Whose car is that?” Jamie said.

Nothing that ugly had come up the Haltoms’ driveway since my mother’s Cavalier, which had been replaced by a used two-door Beemer.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” Jamie said. “Is it like some angry ex-boyfriend or something?”

“Worse,” I said.