“Why don’t we check out The Fort?” Lane said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Billy agreed, though he was not at all sure that he was ready to see what his friend wanted to share with him. He walked outside and around the side of the house, where his dad was sitting on the porch, reading. “We’re going,” he announced.

His father looked up from his book. “Who’s ‘we?’ And where are you going?”

Billy reddened a little, embarrassed by this verbal recognition of his not-yet independent status. “Me and Lane,” he said. “We’re going out to The Fort.”

“Okay.”

“See you later, Mr. Albin,” Lane said.

The two boys walked across the slatted and recently stained two-by-fours to the front of the house, stepping off the porch and moving past the garden. They followed the path through the green belt, into the trees, and the house was lost from sight. Small branches and dried pine needles crackled beneath their feet. “So what is it?” Billy asked. “What do you want to show me?”

Lane smiled enigmatically. “You’ll see.”

They reached The Fort, hopping easily up on the roof and shimmying down through the trapdoor into the Big Room. Lane strolled casually into the HQ, sat down, picked up a Playboy, and began thumbing through it. Billy grew angry. He knew that his friend was drawing out the tension, making him wait, wanting him to beg to see whatever it was he wanted to show him, but he refused to give Lane the satisfaction. He remained in the Big Room, pretending to straighten one of the posters on the wall.

Lane tired of the charade first, and he put down the magazine, standing up. “I got a letter back,” he said simply.

“From that woman?” Billy was surprised.

Lane smiled, a cunning, knowing smile that should have been conspiratorial but was not. “Want to see it?”

Billy knew he should say no. The smug self-satisfied expression on his friend’s face was so unlike Lane that it seemed almost frightening, particularly in the dim half-light of the clubhouse. That smile had awakened within him a growing feeling of dread, but he found himself nodding assent.

Grinning, Lane handed over the envelope.

Billy took out the letter, unfolding it slowly. Lane’s eyes were on him, hungrily taking in every move, studying his face as if waiting for a reaction. He pulled open the final fold and felt his stomach contract as if it had been hit with a softball.

His mother, completely naked, sitting in a chair with her legs in the air and her pubic area thrust outward, was grinning up at him from the Polaroid photo attached to the letter. He could clearly see, even through the blurred focus, the glistening folds of her wet vagina, the tiny puckered hole of her anus.