I moved my hand down between my legs, wanting to push the feeling further, push it all the way inside, push it further and faster, faster and further, until I was there. The ground under me was rough, harder than any boy. My hips rocked up; I heard the long sound of my soft sigh.

Then someone was in the garden; I could hear footsteps behind the rosebush.

My face was still pressed against the dirt when I saw him. My father. He stood a few feet away from me, a pair of silver scissors in his hands. He didn’t finish his cutting; he just turned and headed down the dirt path leading to our house. I knew he’d seen me because I saw his eyes and they were guilty and terrified.

Brushing the dirt off my face, I rolled onto my back. I watched as the sky turned from gray to black, and the first few stars appeared. A breeze lifted through my hair, rustled through the trees.

I wanted to go to my bedroom, but I couldn’t go into our home. How could I look at him? My poor father; he was probably only cutting flowers. Because he used to do that for me. When I came home from school, a vase of flowers would always be waiting on the worn-out white desk in my bedroom.

That night, there were no roses in my room. I threw my notebook on the floor and the pages fluttered open. The words I’d written in Ming’s were even more mocking after my disastrous little chat with Braun. Become a model. Get out of this town. I wished I had my knife so I could make an incision and cut those words away. I ripped out the page and tore it into shreds.

Lord Jim was on my desk. I was supposed to write my final English essay. Show how the novel illustrates the themes of (a) man versus nature or (b) man versus man. I thought I’d fake learning for a while, in case my dad came into my room. I wasn’t feeling very scholarly. Lord Jim—who gives a shit. I’d spent the whole year reading about the heroic adventures of Beowulf and Hamlet and Robert Plant. Swashbucklers and renegades—I’d had enough of their triumphs over life’s obstacles. I threw Lord Jim against my bedroom wall.

When I went out into the kitchen, my father didn’t even look at me.

Soup for dinner, big surprise. Seamus was the cook at Parsifal’s, this health food restaurant that served seventeen kinds of soup. Heavenly Kale and Watercress, that kind of thing. The restaurant was always packed with scrawny college kids and stoned Dutch girls from the hostel. Thursdays, the poor could eat for free.

That night, the soup tasted scorched; black chard floated in the green.