WITNESS HOW IT BEGINS ONE SEPTEMBER MORNING IN Edina, Minnesota, a well-to-do suburb of Minneapolis, on a field behind a school like a thousand other schools. David Geist inches toward a chalk line in the grass where, one by one, the sophomore boys in second-hour PE throw a softball, their gym teacher, Mr. McCoy, over at the hurdles now, while here, Coach Hedberg records their distances on a clipboard.

It is a lovely morning, the temperature seventy-two, the air dry and with a hint of apples in it, and leaf smoke, and this . . . chill, autumn coming on, and the oaks not yet beginning to turn.

David, fifteen boys back from the front of the line, kicks at the grass with the toe of his tennis shoe, disinterested for the most part, but slightly anxious.

The softball throw is kid stuff. Of not much consequence. Just a little competition, throwing this softball. But here, today, Coach Hedberg has his football team out with David’s class, and some of Hedberg’s kids are in the line with David and his classmates, like senior Rick Buddy, who, weighing in at two-forty, dwarfs most of the younger boys—Buddy, who is rumored to be a terror, something David has heard already, not yet at the school a week.

But David, waiting, is paying him no attention, not yet. His mind wanders; he’s hungry, he thinks, since he missed breakfast, but he did get his sister’s, Janie’s, into her, that was good. And now, pumping his legs, he imagines running the Highland cross-country course, tells himself he won’t mess up on the hill again, which brings on all the things he’s messed up. You’re a fuck-up! his father’s told him. And it is as he’s telling himself not to listen to any of that—You’re ugly, Don’t stand there with your hands in your pockets, You’re a goldbricker (it’s just Max, his father, at his worst, talking, he tells himself)—that he hears a rough shout, in a garbled, almost unintelligible voice:

“GUF OFFA ME, YOU!”

And when David glances up from his shoes, he sees Buddy is punching a spindly kid toward the front of the line, Greg Becker, nicknamed Bucky for his protruding front teeth and his awkward, palsied way of moving. Greg has CP, and when he runs, he trips all over himself. All the sophomores know this, they’ve known Greg for years, know that he is not retarded, even though his face, when he smiles, telling a joke, always self-deprecating, to amuse others, twists grotesquely, and laugh they all do, at Greg, tease him about his spidery arms and legs, his enormous feet.

Yet they also know that they will try not to do it cruelly.

But Buddy does now, lays into him, jabbing him so hard that he tries not to cry, and when McCoy, across the field, has his back turned and is looking away, blowing his whistle to start a line of sprinters, Buddy swings Greg around his middle, hand over hand, around, and around, and around, until Greg begins to retch, but stays on his feet, and is crying finally, “Stawp, stawp please, PLEASE STAWP!” but Buddy doesn’t stop, and when he can’t stand watching it anymore, David breaks from the back of the line, heading for Buddy.

What happens now will eventually culminate in the death of one of David’s family; and, in his thinking when it is all over, perhaps worse.

What happens now will change David’s life forever, but then, one could always argue that this thing here, what will happen in the next few moments, is insignificant, is just boyhood fooling around. And for all anyone could see, were he standing back of the cyclone fence that encompasses the Hornets’ field watching, it would appear to be just that: just some minor scuffle in a line of boys throwing a softball, Coach Hedberg, ignoring Buddy’s fooling around, sizing up candidates for his football team. He needs players, a quarterback, kids he can groom.

So. Just boys, on a green field, and one coming up the line now, this boy, David, ropey-limbed, all sinew and bone, a runner, passing the others to stand in back of Buddy, who has finally released Greg, who, holding his hands out for balance, stumbles toward the line like a blind man, blinking and weaving.

“What do you want?” Buddy says, setting his hands on his hips, eyeing David.

Is it this moment, now, when David’s fate changes?

Buddy reaching out to grab Greg again, and David knocking his thick hand away, and stepping behind Greg to hold him upright, until he can do it himself?

Or does this just lead up to it? Does it make what will come possible?

Moments later, blinking, and still weaving side to side, Greg hurls the ball, though far more palsied than he would have had he not had his balance tampered with.

Across the field, a boy shouts back a distance. “One hundred twenty feet!”

Coach Hedberg marks this down, NC, No Consideration, and the line moves forward, bumping into Greg, who, shaking his head, hasn’t quite got his balance back.

All Hedberg says is, “You want to try again?”

And when Greg declines, glaring, then jogging off with the others, who play at running hurdles on the section of green track behind them, David turns to Buddy, who has gotten into line behind him.

He wants to say, The kid’s got CP. You know that, don’t you? But of course Buddy knows. Anyone can see it, the way Greg’s knees knock together and his head doesn’t sit right on his neck, how it kind of wobbles around.

“Next up,” Coach Hedberg says. “Name?”

And rather than explain why he’s out of alphabetical order— why would he, anyway, since Coach Hedberg obviously saw the whole thing and said nothing—David just gives it.

“Geist.”

Coach Hedberg glances up from his clipboard, aware of some insubordination here.

“F’in’ retard doesn’t know alphabetical!” Buddy says, so loudly everyone can hear, and Roach and Groenig, Buddy’s friends down the line, guffaw loudly.

David fixes his eyes on the fence separating the field from a park where, years before, he’d played with his father, his father happy then, his mother some seeming sprite, all before the hard times.

Don’t, this voice inside him says. Because he just feels it there, this danger in what he’s considering doing. And he struggles against it.

The morning is beautiful in that way of autumn mornings. It doesn’t matter, it’s just kid stuff, not worth getting worked up over. There’s dew on the grass, gemlike, and the smell of burning leaves in the air, and birds calling. Everything in the moment has a feeling of suspended time.

As is David’s thinking suspended—caught between a deeply buried rage and an intelligence that tells him not to let it out. He could step free of this here, and the danger he intuits in it.

But how could he know? How could anyone know what will come of this morning?

So when Coach Hedberg says, with obvious irritation, “Just take your turn,” and glances at the sheet on his clipboard, and Buddy sharply jabs David in his side, the knuckled pain almost blinding, David’s heart jacking a fistful of blood into his head, David says, as if in some voice not his own, “Hey, Buddy. Million bucks says you’re not big enough to throw the ball over that fence.”

Buddy can’t resist the challenge, the opportunity to show the others what a tough guy he is, so he steps up to the line, all the while mouthing quietly, meanly, “Fucking faggot like you, couldn’t get close to it, jackoff pansy shitheel, like I should listen to you, ya little fucking—” Posturing, and lumbering, and making a big deal of himself. And like that, he hurls the softball, and it goes a good distance all right, but falls well short of the fence.

David steps up to the line. “What did you say I was?”

“Faggot—” But he doesn’t say the rest of it. Hedberg giving him a cross look.

David can feel his heartbeat in his neck. He’s gotten that far-away feeling he knows too well, all that a gift from his father, a legacy he will not speak so much as one word of, for years, but which has brought him here.

Or so he thinks. This thought his weakness, and what will nearly kill him.

“What did you say?” David says, just to make sure the others have heard it, and to make clear what he will do now, hopes he can do.

And when Buddy repeats what he said earlier, but now, under his breath, mouths a racial epithet as well, David charges the line. But it is with a pitcher’s windup, to the surprise of them all—eight years gone into making David’s arm what it is, and all his father did to him behind it now, this the real thing, the only thing, and he releases the ball high, and with a snap, like a punch, all he has in him in it, and the ball rises higher, then higher yet, Buddy even then realizing the extent of his error, already guffaws in the line of boys, “Who’s a faggot, Buddy?” coming from Roach, as the ball not only clears the fence, but drops out of sight into the creek a distance behind it.

“Where’d you learn to throw like that?” Coach Hedberg says.

David shrugs. “Nowhere.”

It is his final stab at Buddy, but even better is Coach Hedberg’s following behind him with his clipboard, and David saying he’ll think about football, sure, he’s thrown a football, but it’s all for Buddy, because David has no intention of playing for Coach Hedberg—even after Coach Hedberg sees how he can run, and wants him for a receiver—and two weeks later, when he and Buddy meet on the field again, it is only because their practice times overlap—David on the cross-country team, Buddy playing football. But it is there, that night, David realizes the extent of his error, Buddy’s eyes on him, cold, penetrating, calculating.

Not a boy’s eyes at all—a man’s. Buddy bearded, enormous, and wishing him harm.

But there’s an everydayness to it all, this morning, the field, the light, the autumn leaves, his thoughts, and having taken his swing at Buddy, he dismisses it, what he’s done, and even later in the day, turning to a girl in calculus, who he can hardly bear to look at she is so lovely, feels only a whisper of it, uncoiling, prescient, waiting.

And here, now, in the autumn glow, David runs by Buddy, elated.

And in running, he empties his mind of one thing after another, as if casting off physical baggage, the mess at home with his mother, who is so distracted she can’t seem to remember anything, Jarvis, who’s been pressuring her to move them all in with him, pressing for marriage, Janie disappearing in her clown act, the house a mess and needing repairs they can’t afford, and Buddy’s eyes, sullen, burning, following him.

All that he jettisons, running, running lighter, running into his stride, until the time he is only breath, and motion, free, in his dream of life nothing sticking to him, even himself—no, especially himself.