As he grew, he discovered more places in Willow where sin cast its shadow, which did not slide away like most shadows but had a sticky, pungent quality. On top of the equipment shed at the playground there was a triangular space, under the pavilion roof, that you could boost yourself into only by jumping and grabbing a crossbeam and swinging your feet up, dangerously hanging in midair for a second, and then leveraging your body onto the top of the shed. As Owen’s eyes adjusted, he saw there were more drawings, never painted over, and written messages and allegations involving girls and boys too old for him to have known. Ginger Bitting sometimes scrambled up here after playground hours, and it was pleasant to stretch out imagining her beside him—her wiry, energetic, fearless body—and to look down the perspective of beaded boards to the macadam pavilion floor, where a stray lost jack or red checker could be seen like a secret beside a leg of one of the heavy trestle tables.

In the seventh grade, Owen left the elementary school and went to the high-school building half a mile down the Pike toward Alton. Though girls and boys could enter any of the doors and use the grounds without the sexual division enforced on the elementary-school playground, a whiff of scandal clung to the lower windows on the side of the high school toward Alton, under the corner classroom. They were the windows of the girls’ locker room, reinforced with chicken wire and painted black on the inside. Yet cracks in the aging paint appeared, and small holes were mysteriously scratched in it, from the inside. Though there was no written prohibition, teachers shooed boys away from these windows, and the space here, with its mowed grass and narrow sidewalk, gathered such a thick patina of rumored glimpse and determined spying that Owen emerged into adult life with a memory, as luminous as an Ingres seraglio, of naked girls seen at an angle, past foregrounded asbestos-coated pipes and the dusty green tops of metal lockers—girls with shining shoulders and shower-wet flanks, Barbara Emerich and Alice Stottlemeyer and Babs Dolinski and Grace Bickta but somehow not Ginger Bitting, girls he had grown up with, moving slowly in their budding nudity, oblivious, as if underwater.