Fee

1

 

I AUDITION FOR the Pine State Boys Chorus on an afternoon at the end of November in the year I am twelve years old. The audition, I recall, is my own idea. In a gray-stone cathedral’s practice room, somewhere near Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine, I sing, for a square-headed, owlish man, a series of scales that he plunks out on the piano, his pink fingers playful over the black and white keys.

It’s good, he says. Your voice. You’ve got a terrific range.

On a clipboard next to him, a list of names. Some have been checked off. The afternoon sunlight in the room lights stained-glass windows of Bible scenes I can’t recognize, due to inattentiveness in church. The light casts them as brilliant colors on the bare wall opposite me.

When I sing, I feel that I am like the wall is now. This is why I have come.

Do you know any songs, he asks. He looks down toward me as if I might run from the room.

Christmas songs, I say.

He unfolds some music and hands it to me.

I sing Silent Night. O Come Let Us Adore Him. Good King Wenceslas. Angels We Have Heard on High. That one’s my favorite, I say, when I am done. I’ve never heard my voice alone with a piano before. The quiet that follows, when I stop singing, seems new, too.

Rhythm, too, he says.

My science class has taught me that breathing turns the air inside you to a carbon, a little different from smoke, but a little like it. We have this in common with flames. We are just slower. I take a breath, waiting. Impatient.

I am looking for boys just like you, he says, finally, and checks my name off the list.

I leave with the folder of sheet music for the first rehearsal, given a seat in the choir right away. In the car on the way home I can’t wait to start. I remember the director’s odd soft handshake. I’m Eric, he’d said. But there’s another Eric in the choir. So I am Big Eric, and he’s the little one.

Did you hear me, my mother says right then, as she drives through the early-evening traffic on the bridge between Portland and Cape Elizabeth.

No, I tell her. I didn’t.

 

In Korea, my grandfather tells me when we get home, everyone knows all the songs. Sometimes, like in a musical, everyone starts singing. He makes Korea sound like a place made from happy families and wisdom, and it makes me wonder why he’s here, in Maine.

The next day the Korean American Friendship Association of Maine arrives for a kimchee-making party. Here in Cape Elizabeth, a town still half full of farms, we live on several acres that overlook the marsh at the town’s edge. Thirteen families arrive and fill the yard with their cars. Their dark-haired children coming running and yelling for me. Aphi-as, Aphi-as, they yell. Their parents divide, the mothers into my grandmother’s kitchen, the fathers into the garage. The mothers chop cabbage in the kitchen, mince peppers and fish. The fathers take beers and shovels and head to dig the hole where the giant barrels of kimchee will sit.

My grandfather and grandmother live in what was once a barn, converted for them into an apartment and connected to our house by a breezeway, where my father stores firewood. I’ve hidden here. My grandparents moved here from Korea a few years before. There was some turmoil, my father says of it, when people ask. He redid the farmhouse for them himself with these men who are headed to shovel the hole. My mother needs her own kitchen, my father had told my mother, who laughed. No, really.

Korea is in trouble, my grandfather will say. Every now and then, he will follow it by saying, Maine, Maine is okay. Many fat people. But okay. My grandmother will say only, I am here for my grandchildren.

The other children frighten me a little. I can’t speak Korean, my father’s decision, and so I can’t understand them much of the time. How you like funny-funny, round-eyes, they ask me and my brother and sister, whenever they play a joke on me. My brother Ted and sister Sam, both younger, find them funny. While they distract themselves with my Monopoly games, I slip out the back to where the men are digging.

Look, my grandfather says, chuckling. Here’s fox. And he picks me up. His strength surprises me, and he sets me down. Fox dig hole, look.

The other men talk in Korean around us, including my father, and I can tell they haven’t heard him. English falls off their ears. I sit and watch them and wait for the hole to appear.

 

I meet Peter in the first rehearsal I attend. The other boys and I do not talk to each other beforehand, but we set our voices side by side as if it were no matter at all. In this practice chapel, the twenty of us sit in metal chairs that ring as we sing through the first part of an early-December night. Some boys I recognize from my town, the others are unfamiliar. The one beside me looks up at me now and then as we sing, making little faces. His white-blond hair is like candle flame.

Almost all of these boys are blond. Which is to say, I am the one who isn’t.

Boys, Big Eric, the director, says. Please say hello to our newest members. Aphias Zhe, Peter O’Hanlon. And at his name, the blond boy next to me looks up at me and says, You’re new too?

Are you Chinese? another boy asks.

No, I say. Korean. Half. Saying it always makes me feel split down the middle. Like a cow diagrammed for her sides of beef.

I’m part Indian, Peter offers.

The rehearsal continues. At the end we wait on the curb for our parents to come and pick us up. Do you want some, Peter says, and holds out a can of chewing tobacco.

No, thanks, I say. He burps red spit into the street.

Come over and ride bikes, he says.

Okay, I say.

 

He walks and I feel the air come off him toward me, wherever we are. His sounds reach me wherever I am, not the only sounds I can hear, but the first ones: they trample all the others. My mother calls him a towhead blond, the word, apparently, for that kind of hair, so pale, so bright, it seems to be what sunshine reminds you of.

What do you want of him, I ask myself. I tell myself, to walk inside him and never leave. For him to be the house of me. Below, a list from my notebook at school:

 

Likes smoking and chew

Find out: What is New Model Army, Gang of Four, DOA

Peter, Peter, Fire-eater, kissed the girls, felt like a heater

Hates his sister, loves mine

Wants to never go home again, always: Why?

 

To save time for reading, I’ve taught myself to walk and read at the same time. My father doesn’t want me to learn Korean, English only, he says, and so at school I walk the halls reading from the Webster’s Dictionary for several weeks. Around me the other kids pass in a rush of winking colors and pillowed sounds. I can’t hear anything they say to me when I read. I can only hear inside me, a voice, reading to me from the book, lower than my own. This voice hints at directions, possibilities, even as it presses forward, inexorable, to the next word in line. Defect, Defection, Defective. Define. Definition. Definitive. On the next page, I peek. Demon.

What the hell is that, Zach asks, when he sees me in the cafeteria at lunch. He is a choir member in my same class, a lacrosse player with a deer’s walk who stayed back a year. He is my class but older, and he likes me for reasons I don’t yet understand.

I’m preparing for a spelling bee, I lie.

Tow, it turns out, is what is beaten off the harvested flax. Transparent. Light passes through it, barely. Tow, Towhead. Peter.

 

By the time the spring comes five months later, I am the section leader of the first sopranos. When I am given this job, Big Eric tells me how my voice is to lead the others. Now he watches me in rehearsals as I watch him. I sing and follow Big Eric’s hand as it bobs in the air, showing us the silent percussion to our songs. If I have to look at his eyes, I look at the reflections in the little rims of his gold-framed glasses. I do not think he is completely fooled by this. I feel as if he can see into my throat, to the place just below where my voice starts, where, as he says, the breath resides.

As my voice follows the scales while we warm up and we align our voices around the piano’s tone like muscles on a bone, I feel larger. As if the room belonged to the voices that filled it in the way my throat belongs to my voice. The top notes remain for only me and Peter. All the other boys cannot go up this high, high A over high C. Big Eric looks first at Peter and then at me as we hold this note. The sound wavers only when we alternate taking breaths, and then only faintly. Peter barely contains a smile at me that might distort the vowel coming out of him. He seems too small to generate the force he does. His body barely fits around his voice, his mouth a gate to another dimension made up of these pure notes.

Eric touches the next key up. B. We rise together.

Afterward, as the boys prepare to leave rehearsal, running and yelling as they put on their coats, Big Eric approaches Peter and I where we stand. You should have a solo, I think, he says to Peter, at which Peter laughs. A descant, he says.

The descant is a melody sung by a soloist in counterpoint to the melody sung by the sopranos. A single voice above all the others, stepping its way through by means of lyric and syncopation, one part song, one part refrain. The chorus sings at the same time as the descant singer. I want the descant. I know I am good enough. My voice, my range. I learn faster. But I see immediately then, what Big Eric wants. The blond hair at the top of the riser, imagine him singing. You would want to touch what you heard, hold it to your face.

In the car pool with Peter, on our way back from choir rehearsal, I try to read and not look only at him. The other boys in the car cluck and shove at each other, ask loud questions about things that have just happened at school. The mother driving us regards the traffic ahead. On the pages in front of me, the words dissolve a bit, the letters thinning until I can see, on the other side of them, like spying through a wire fence, the pictures of Peter I have collected inside me: Peter laughing as he falls on the ice at Lake Sebago, Peter walking through his dark house, his dog fluttering at his leg, Peter asleep in my basement, gripping the edge of his sleeping bag as if he were, in his dream, trying to escape it. Occasionally I look up, and the real Peter flares beside me. I try to place the smell of him. He smells of carnations and, very faintly, cigarette smoke. Like a corsage someone left in a bar. I am in love with you, I think then. That’s what this is.

Too bad you didn’t get the descant, he says.

It’s yours, I say. You’re better for it. There isn’t anyone else.

I don’t care if I have it. Big deal. Extra rehearsals.

I don’t mind, I say. And I won’t. There’s probably something for me later.

A book I had with me for one week was about Russian psychics spontaneously combusting into flame. The author thought it mysterious, the sudden acceleration of the body’s heat to a temperature that would sear bone. This did not mystify me then. The person writing had never met Peter.

 

2

 

THE SUN ON the first day of the section-leader camping trip with Big Eric is a shiny white smear in the center of a white sky. There’s four of us: me, Zach from the altos, Little Eric from the second sopranos, and Big Eric. We hike for hours that first day and then find a rock pool to swim in at some distance from the trail. We decide to camp here and pitch our tent, first. Then we take off our clothes, Big Eric first, and he removes all of his and stands, looking at us, waiting. Swimming nude, he says, is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.

Zach shrugs. I like it. His clothes come off, then Little Eric, then me.

Big Eric takes out his camera then.

Krick. The camera shutter flicks open-shut.

Little Eric perches on the edge of the rock pool, sylphlike, naked. His blond wavy hair frames his profile, an elegant twelve-year-old Swede. Big Eric holds his camera across his broad hairy chest. He aims at Little Eric and shoots. Krick. Slower, that time, his finger lingers at the sight in the frame. Zach and I stand to the side, crouch occasionally in a pool here at the stream, naked also, the summer air like a wet towel on my back.

That’s great, he says to Little Eric. You look like a faun.

I sink myself under the water and expel the air from my lungs to make myself heavy, to fall quickly to the bottom of the deep pool. It’s a diver’s trick my oceanographer father taught me. I keep enough air so I can lie flat on the smooth stones of the bottom and look up, through the glossy, pearled surface of the water, to the sky.

The currents spill softly around me. The water has the milky freshwater taste of having come through granite, which is why it is so clear here. The sun above turns flat and silver like a dropped coin.

I stand and shove and a dolphin kick brings me to the surface, where I gasp. Little Eric and Big Eric continue. Click. I dive down again, drifting.

Zach punctures the pool in a jackknife and water careens in sheets. I lift my head from the water to see the Erics disturbed. Little Eric is laughing, and Big Eric says, Don’t you worry, You’re next.

Later, we build a fire and cook dinners wrapped in tinfoil: hot dogs, potatoes, corn on the cob. I am sunburned again and Zach rubs a lotion on my back for me. There is a quiet in which I pretend I don’t know what all of this means, Big Eric’s talks on the drive up here about libertarianism, nudism, child rights. And then I don’t pretend. The mosquito-screen zipper sizzles shut.

In the tent at night his body is huge. Covered in hair. His penis looks comical, enormous, a cartoon. His age renders him like another gender, or a species apart from us. Our bodies are small, bones are small. Of the three of us boys, I am the only one with a little bit of hair swirled at the base of my penis. I feel half him, half them. Zach and Little Eric reach out fingers toward me, and touch the hair.

 

In the morning the sky lights an hour before the sun shows and we wash in the pool with Dr. Bronner’s, check our food for raccoon assaults, make a fast breakfast. Big Eric makes coffee and I ask for some. At some point I remember: the Erics huddled in a sleeping bag, like hideously mismatched twins. Zach and I. And then a switch, Little Eric slipping inside with me, Zach gone over. I didn’t think I would like kissing so much, Little Eric giggles.

And then the trees, the prismatic air presses on everything that needs it here on the earth, the sun fires itself on the stream and spreads light through the underbrush where we are camped, spangling our faces. Vertigo. The night before scatters away. I press the hot coffee to my face. I look at my face in his shaving mirror and don’t recognize myself. My hair is streaking from the sun. My pupils are huge. I want to say, Take me apart. Leave me here for dead, if you can.

Zach gets out of the tent and stands in front of me and when I meet his eyes he winks. He puts a finger on my lips and smiles. Hey, he says. Nice tan.

 

Too bad we can’t hike nude, Big Eric says to me, as he stands, his camera in hand. Zrrick. The hideous slide forward of film. He slides into his shorts and shirt reluctantly.

 

3

 

JULY. TWO WEEKS before camp, I am at Peter’s house watching television. His mother and father are gone to work. He lives in South Portland, next door to my town, Cape Elizabeth, the town of a rival swim team. We rode our bikes to the beach this morning and ran in the ocean with his dog, Peg, for hours. Now we are sunburned. I am brown and red like a rose cane and when I pull down my shorts I see a band of white skin that sits there around my hips like reflected light. Peter is red all over and now lies on the couch, covered in Milk of Magnesia that his mother applied before leaving. We are watching television now. I want to tell him, to warn him not to be alone with Big Eric. What that means. But I don’t.

Later, the sun sets. We wrestle on the couch. My mother is coming to pick me up, as I can’t ride my bicycle home in the dark. I have Peter trapped on the couch, my elbow across his chest, as he jabs his knees into my ribs repeatedly. His mother is in the kitchen, his father is still not home. I want to kiss him. I want to not want to kiss him. His face is red from laughing and his sunburn. As I pound his chest a last time, I tell myself, Not possible. When I finally let him up I move to the other side of the couch and we catch our breaths. You suck, he says, laughing. You suck so bad. I slap his hot face and he laughs harder and I pin him back to the couch again.

I leave without telling him, afraid all the way back home in my mother’s car that it leaks out of me, this desire I have, like the fungi that grow in Peter’s yard, puffing out little clouds when you crunch them with your feet.

You have freckles, my mother says at home. Angel kisses. They sure love you a lot.

 

In the bathroom I kick off my swimsuit from where I lie on my sunburned back against the cool tiles of the floor, One, two, three. The door is closed and locked and after a while my mother knocks. Aphias. Open the door.

I say nothing because that is what nothing says. I am nothing, a O, an outline around a hole.

Aphias. You are worrying me. Dinner’s going to be ready soon. If you aren’t downstairs for it, I’m going to call your grandfather and father to come and get you.

Time passes. Eventually, something passes through me and I get up and pull on my suit. I close the bathroom door behind me.

It’s still daylight and I find my mother in the yard. Hey there, she says. She is squatting over a plant. Poppies, she says. After they bloom, they die back. You can’t see them. I run a finger over the fuzzy leaves, the yard-long stems. Now I know what I want to be when I grow up.

The difference between a remainder and a reminder is an A, which stands for Aphias, my name, and the letter slips in and out like a cartridge in a rifle.

 

4

 

CAMP BEGINS. FOR two weeks we rehearse twice a day, before and after lunch. Immediately after lunch is a play period of ninety minutes, including a supervised swim. The morning rehearsals are for memorization and pronunciation, lectures on the meanings of the words. The afternoon is run-throughs and music. Our fall program is in the majority sung in Latin and Italian.

I am the designated cabin leader of Cabin 2, bed checker, referee. The first night arrives damply. We unroll sleeping bags across skinny mattresses and change into long T-shirts down to our knees. I move through the cabin, touching each mattress with my finger, saying each boy’s name as I go. Across the yard, down the hill, the other cabin glows, light pours out of it, and the moths and mosquitoes that dive in it are like fairies, holding long glowing trains. Through the tall grass, fireflies flash and in the distance, the lights of far-off cabins ring the lake’s edge. Big Eric is down in the first cabin, and even though it is minutes past lights-out, the boys sit in a group in the main area, naked or in their underwear. Big Eric, whenever possible, preaches to us the virtues of nudism. Our swim hour is clothing-optional. Today, the first day, I wore a T-shirt in the water, like the two fat boys, Jim and Paul.

The bed check done, I turn off the lights. Around me in the dark the other boys turn in their beds. A few are instantly asleep. I haul myself up into my bunk. In the bunk beneath me is yet another Eric, Eric B., as he is called, for further clarity, with all the Erics around. He whispers, Fee?

I stick my head over the edge to see him. Where Little Eric is pretty, this one is handsome. You can see the man coming on in him, like the change of a werewolf, except better. What are they doing, he asks.

Telling stories, it looks like, I say. First cabin is like a cabin of brothers, blond, Scandinavian, mild, clean-limbed. Peter is down there and I have not been able to concentrate since finding out. I want to pretend to Eric B. below me that we are just in the woods at a normal summer camp, but as I make out the trace of his eyes in the dark, I can see this will not happen.

Down the hill, the light stays on. When it goes off, I slip out of my bunk, pull on a pair of shorts, and shrug out the door. I have in my mind the idea that I need to make this end, that there should never be another place like this. I sit down on the dock instead, watch the lake heave in the dark. The waves there seem like a mockery of the ocean. The stars look fake. I sit like this until Peter finds me.

He sits down beside me. He leans against my shoulder, and I can feel the sunburn off his cheek. I make room and he slips against me. I don’t ask him why he is crying and when he stops, why he’s stopped.

He pulls his head off my shoulder and spits into the water. He lights a cigarette he has had hidden in his hand, and drops the match into the lake, where it sizzles when it lands. We watch the match float in the faint dark together.

 

5

 

YOU WERE THERE, he says. The night it happened you were there.

I was on the dock, I say. You came and found me.

You were there.

 

Wood-plank floors, dark like molasses, cool to the touch like a lake rock passed to you by someone who held it briefly. Screened windows run the length of this cabin. The low dark ceiling, almost invisible, registers on the mind more as a color and a shade both, than as a roof.

Rehearsals here go long. In the stillness between phrases, we save our voices. Some young sopranos, drunk on high notes, shrill and squeal when away from the room, or sing recklessly their favorite songs. I have practiced writing on my sheet music without looking at it, so as to communicate with Peter, who sits next to me. His pale hair blows up off his head, as if his real mother were a dandelion gone to seed. A few times, at night in my bunk, I find one of his hairs in my bed, left from him sitting there, and I run it through my teeth.

How do you mean, I write.

You were there. He points his pen to it again, what he just wrote. The gesture raises an eye from Big Eric, in the front. I look away.

You need a break, Eric says from the front. I won’t keep you here when you all want to be outside right now. Go and take a forty-minute break and be back here to finish. I want full attention for the Kyrie.

The music we are singing has been sung for hundreds of years by boys. I wonder if God expects to hear it rising off the earth, like the bloom of a perennial flower. Or if it is a standing challenge, for us to come together and sing it for Him. Eric tells us, in the old days, of the castrati, the elite Italian choristers who gelded themselves to keep their high clear voices. Some boys hold their crotches when the story is told, but I understand. I could want it that badly, to keep a voice.

Peter walks out at the break first and heads to a large rock out in the center of a field between the rehearsal hall and the canteen. At night the fireflies fill this field with sparks, as if it were ready to burn. Now, during the day, the thick grass is full of Queen Anne’s lace and daisies and a little red flower like a cut knot of red thread that my mother calls wild-fire. The rock is enormous, left behind thousands of years ago by a glacier, and a slim white seam runs diagonally through the porous gray granite. Smooth dents in a row lead to the top and Peter climbs them quickly. Sitting up there, Peter looks off to the forest that begins on the eastern edge of the field.

Peter, tell me what you mean, I say.

Go away, please.

I was on the dock. You came and found me.

You knew. How did you know.

He’s done it to me, too.

I stand beside the rock. Underneath it, moss crawls up the side. I couldn’t believe what I had just said. It wasn’t exactly right, though. I had never had a solo. I was not like the others. When Big Eric spoke to me, he knew I knew what he was. That I had always known. And then I remember, the pictures. Try to remember if any were of me.

A shadow, tossed on me, wears a halo made by sun-colored filaments. I look up. Hello, Peter.

He comes down and jumps up on my back, his chin digs between my shoulders, his legs kicked around my waist. Giddyup, he says. I carry him toward the rehearsal room. Across the way, in the room, I feel what I am sure are the eyes of Big Eric.

This horse sure is slow, Peter says.

In my head I pray. There is a saying in Korea that you know who your God is when you think you are about to die. Hello, God. I pray to be able to carry Peter, to carry him off to where he belongs, way above this earth. Well above what could ever touch him. But wherever that is, I instead set him down at the entrance to the dining hall, where we go inside and sneak a soda from the fountain.

In rehearsal again the altos falter, unsure. Most are newly altos, and slip into their old soprano or second-soprano parts, thinking no one can hear them sing falsetto for head tone. Eric calls the rehearsal to a halt then.

A head tone’s quality, he says, cannot be duplicated. There is almost nothing like it except the clarinet, for sound. Is that clear? Falsetto, falsetto sounds like this, and then he trills a terrible, reedy impression, screwing up his features. His beard bobs. The new altos are almost in tears.

Do not, I repeat, do not ever use falsetto. If your voice is changing, you will be moved to the altos, so that you may sing with us until you develop into a tenor, bass, baritone, et cetera. I will not tolerate it. At all. Don’t think I can’t hear it, because I can. I can hear it. Is that clear?

Clear, we say, in unison, as if it were another piece we would be rehearsing throughout the afternoon.

After a dinner of meat loaf and peas and soggy boiled potatoes we go into town in the van for a movie. They are showing Xanadu, starring Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly. Gene Kelly plays a clarinet. Olivia Newton-John sings in a clear high voice and roller-skates through a tepid plot, something involving love. There is laughter in the audience when several of us sopranos, including me, sing along. The songs are easy for us to pick up. Olivia plays one of several muses who descend to earth, arrayed in beautiful mortal bodies that cover their true selves, beams of colored heaven-made light. We sing the songs afterward, in the van on the way home, softly, as we have already sung all day. Some of us boys sleep as we pass through the dark quiet towns along the main road back. We are on the other side of the equation of light and sound. When we sing, we try on the robe of a muse. We wear a color of light.

 

6

 

IN THE NUMBER 2 Cabin bathroom Zach and I are pressed up against each other, Zach sitting on the sink as I push toward him. I am trying to get used to his tongue in my mouth. The first time it happened he said, This is how you French kiss, and then licked my lips with his tongue.

At the time, I wondered who it was that taught him.

I get down on my knees. I take him in my mouth. I have read that this is something that men like. It makes me nervous when Zach does it to me, but I feel in control when I do it to him, and this much I know I like. I don’t like doing it for itself.

Jesus, he whispers, and I pinch him. The other kids in the cabin are supposed to be asleep. I had finished my bed check when I heard the door open, not even the sound of the door itself but the whisper of the air moved by its opening. Days ago I had greased the hinges and oiled the spring. For him.

He jumps against me when I pinch him, knees knocking my chest. He smells like warm bread down here, if you rubbed it with salt. I take advantage of my swimming lessons, I breathe through my nose and take him in my throat. He squeezes my shoulders, starts pounding lightly and then harder. His legs shake.

What’s that on your shoulder, Eric B. asks me the next morning on my way back from the shower. I look back to see, on my skin, five purple dots in a row. I got punched, I say.

Eric B. grins. Yeah.

 

7

 

WHEN YOU SAY Excelsis, you need to land hard on all three syllables. Egg. Shell. Cease. Got it? Egg—Shell—Cease. Excelsis. Put it together. Now, Do-ho Na-ha No-beese, In-Egg-Shell-Cease Day-Oh. Ready?

The baton flicks up. And then down.

We have been working on this piece for three days. We rehearse two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. This is my first summer camp. Usually, camp means a cottage my family rents, where we drive up and swim more or less continuously. Zach’s family has one on Lake Sebago, a log cabin with a screened-in porch and a dock, built by his architect family. Here, we have the rehearsal building, the canteen where the food is served, the two cabins, with another half cabin for Eric’s wife, Leanne, and her new baby, a big-headed round ball of a boy who is so quiet he makes me afraid. Ralph, Eric’s foster son, stays in Cabin 1 with Big Eric.

Leanne is a giantess, taller than Eric, who is tall. Each of her breasts right now seems as big around as my head. She is the camp nurse, a title that fits as she is always breast-feeding her new baby. The half cabin, her tiny domain, is the last one in the row of buildings going down to the dock and the lakefront. There are no near neighbors. Watching her come and go, it seems there should be hidden compartments to accommodate her bulk.

Dona Nobis. This whole phrase, it means thank you Lord for your gift. It is sung to celebrate Jesus. Thank you Lord for your gift, all thanks be to God. Noble gift, all thanks be to God above all others. Big Eric tells us the meanings of the words, because he insists it will help us sing. I like it better when I don’t know the meanings. When the word is empty and I fill it like a glass. Knowing what they mean takes away some of my courage.

We sing for a half hour past the rehearsal end. The altos have finally adapted, the sopranos are holding themselves back, the second sopranos support us both through the gap left for them now. Big Eric sets his wand down after the end is reached for the fifth time that afternoon. He wipes sweat off his forehead and smiles at us and says, You’re done. Come back for dinner, at six.

Back in my cabin my sweat dries in the cool air coming off the lake. I think about writing to my family. I wouldn’t know what to say. Last night, Big Eric broke up a Dungeons & Dragons game I’d been leading for the Cabin 2 boys, so they wouldn’t feel so left out by the nightly naked story hour. But then Peter and Zach had wanted to play, and so Big Eric came up and shut it down and took them back to Cabin 1. I look over the interrupted game story, and then put it away. I take out a book of Greek mythology I stole from the town library. The myths are occasionally checked by a pencil, as if this were a catalog, and someone had gone along marking what they wished to buy. I read until the dinner bell, dreading what Big Eric will say. When I go to dinner with my book, Big Eric looks at it. Greeks, he says. Wise men, the Greeks. He smiles and I shut the book, slip it under my thigh on the bench. At dinner, Big Eric announces that cliques are forbidden in the choir, and that, until further notice, the D&D games would be suspended. I wonder about naked story hour.

 

After dinner, I take my sketch pad down to the edge of the water, where I can look at the late-summer sun still afternoon-bright at six-thirty in the evening. I draw two eyes there on the page. I can never decide easily whether to draw the eyes as white eyes or Asian ones. My eyes are white eyes, though slanted slightly, but with the white-boy eyelids. The irises have green centers and brown edges. Split through the middle.

I look at my two eyes there on the page. I begin to draw hair, then fill in the face shape, put in lines for the neck. I taught myself to draw by tracing comics, so I draw smooth-lined broad-shouldered men and women of enormous cleavage, supported by powerful, tiny waists and long, muscled legs. I always wait for the eyes to tell me who they are, so I can know who I am drawing. I decide I am drawing my favorite character from D&D, a sorceress I’ve named Tammamo, for my long-ago great-grandmother. I draw a heart-shaped face atop a long beautiful body, with flowing red hair past her waist that rises behind her like fire in a storm wind. I try to make her look like one of my grandfather’s missing sisters.

Who are you drawing? Behind me stands Big Eric.

A character of mine, from D&D. As I say this, I feel a change come over me, like a direction change in the wind. All my air is now coming from another direction.

You’re very good. She looks scary.

She’s not supposed to. I guess I’m not that good.

I look up at him. He is a tall man, he does carpentry. His round-rimmed gold-framed glasses gives him an owlish demeanor, though not the wise owl but the startled one. When the owl blinks around trying to see.

I’m not targeting you, he says.

All right. If you say so.

They tell me you are the Dungeon Master. What does that mean?

It means I am in charge of the game rules. I have the maps, I tell them who the enemies are, and I monitor the plays, to make sure the dice are rolled and everyone gets a turn. And I make up the stories.

I turn back to my drawing. I draw Tammamo wearing a white buckskin fringe bikini and her power gem rests on a headdress that rides atop her hair. Her boots are thigh-high.

I say, Adam’s a dungeon master too. A good one. Zach hates it. Merle or Luke can be good if they don’t get bored. It’s not just me.

Big Eric bends down. All right then, he says. Just remember, some of these boys are not as sophisticated as you. I don’t want them feeling left out, and I don’t want them complaining to their parents. If someone wants to play I want you to find them a way. All right?

Yep.

When I finish my drawing, the light is nearly gone, and Tammamo’s hands each hold a ball of fire-lightning. I see her leap into the wind’s wide arms, her hair a torch, see her laugh as she rides the night. Before she fell in love, I think, she would have been mad with grief, wanting love. How would she have fallen in love with her husband? Was she preparing to destroy him and fell for him instead?

Back in my bunk, later, I read some of a comic book a cousin sent me from Korea. He is learning English and has translated it for me, his careful, squared-off handwriting, all in capitals, tells me the story. FOX-DEMON MUST EAT THOUSAND LIVERS, YOUNG MEN VIRGINS, TO BECOME HUMAN. This fox has been drawn ugly, but she wears a beautiful mask, made from the face of a victim, to hide her ugliness. She is Korea’s most famous fox-demon.

I write him a letter. Dear Paul, Thank you so much. The comic book is very good. At the bottom of my drawing I write FOX-DEMON, and mail it to him.

 

8

 

THE NEXT NIGHT storm clouds come up quickly after lights-out. We slip from our beds, drop tarps from the eaves and tie them to the sills, to seal the cabin windows, which have no glass. The rain falls hard and lightning lights the tarps occasionally, followed quickly by thunder. I lie on my bunk, reading myths by flashlight, comforted, thinking that I am perhaps like Lady Tammamo, that I have managed to conjure a storm. I compare her to the Greek gods and goddesses. Tonight I read about Atalanta, who wanted to outrun every man. I read about Europa, carried off to sea by Zeus. I read about Ganymede. How Zeus turned into an eagle in order to carry him off. Because he was so beautiful.

Tammamo, I decide, is mightier. For the man she loves lived to die a natural death, and the Greeks always kill the mortals they love, through design or accident. None of these gods would renounce their godhood.

Do we have lightning rods on the roofs, asks Eric B.

I didn’t know he was still awake. Now wouldn’t be the time to find out, I say.

I like walking in a thunderstorm. Do you?

I do.

We walk into the front room of the cabin. Rainwater sweeps in a stream down the hill to the lake, revealing steps made from the roots of the trees. I swing the door open.

If we stay out in the open, and wear rubber shoes, we’re fine, he says.

I think of the lightning swarming over me, unable to grasp the interior circuitry of nerve because of rubber soles on my feet. I want to wear a bolt. I say, All right then, and he and I step out.

The night is the lighter for the storm, the clouds reflect light back to us. Somewhere in Cape Elizabeth, my mother’s porch light sends out a ray of light and part of it bounces off this cloud and arrows into my eye. I know my mother will keep her light on all night.

Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Eric B. asks.

Sure, a little.

Do you think this lake has a monster?

I think it might, I say.

Really?

I look at him in the dark. We are now in the woods. The rain reaches us here in little waterfalls collected off the roof of leaves and falling in through small openings. Eric B. will never be one of Big Eric’s chosen. He really doesn’t know, either. Some of these boys would never know. I say, Let’s go to the lake.

 

9

 

HE HAD HIDDEN inside one of the boats. No one knew he was there. When the storm began, he pushed out and the normally corpulent tides of the lake, now turgid with rain and wind, took him quickly out into the center, where Eric B. and I did not see him. What I remember is almost thinking there weren’t enough boats, that one was missing. I remember something about them called my eye to them, but I couldn’t have said what it was, and I said nothing at the time to Eric B. And so it wouldn’t be until the morning that Ralph, Big Eric’s eleven-year-old foster-child, was discovered to have drowned. The storm capsized the rowboat in the lake.

Breakfast is an untidy half hour of silence and gulped oatmeal, and then gradually the speculations begin, in whispers. The screen door slaps open then, and Big Eric enters.

Boys, he says. Ralph has been found. He drowned sometime last night, evidently from taking a boat out alone in the storm. I would just say that for today, Fee and Eric are in charge of rehearsal. I will excuse myself from your midst. Thank you.

And then he leaves.

The silence creases after the door closes, and then splits. Zach, sitting next to me, says, All right, Mr. Director.

I look across to Little Eric, who smiles at me. He gets up from his table of chattering sopranos and heads toward me. As he stands in front of me and Zach, I consider how we are the original three. Everything began with us. Even this.

Something feels wrong here, I say.

What do you mean, they ask at the same time.

Jinx, I say.

 

And so the rehearsal. A brief conference beforehand decided that Little Eric would sit at the piano and I would direct, as he had the piano skills and I was adept at the pronunciations and rhythms. As their gazes arrow in, I understand. If my baton had been a candle it would have lit on its own.

As the warm-up scales begin and the summer sun whitens the sky outside, the morning haze fills with light. I feel, in the cool dark of the rehearsal room, the boat. The oarlocks would have been about the level of his chin. For him to get there on his own reflected a terrible determination. Ralph had been a slip of a child, large unhappy dark eyes, curly dark hair that reminded me of an elf. He was as pale as a mushroom.

The key changes. The boys’ voices thunder through the scales, as if to call to Big Eric, wherever he was, in town with the small cold blue body. I sing alongside, use my voice as I use the baton, to guide.

I let myself know. It’s no mystery why Ralph took a boat alone into the center of the lake during a storm. My eyes fill up, as if I had walked out into a rain and turned my face to the sky. It comes to me, something covered up in what Big Eric had said about the songs. Kyrie eleison means, Lord have mercy.

 

10

 

THE DAYS AFTERWARD filled with parents calling the camp. A few insisted on a weekend visit. What they found was a more or less placid group of boys, as unrippled as the lake. The camp was not called off because technically, Ralph was not one of us. He was Eric’s foster son. The police determined the cause of death accidental, death by drowning, the state sent Ralph’s caseworker to interview Eric and his wife, and all agreed that Ralph’s had been a short life of hardship and that it was possible he had killed himself. I overheard the interview, as it was conducted inside the Nurse cabin. I stood outside, my ear up against a crack in the wood frame. I wanted to know.

. . . the whole time, asking repeatedly at nighttime if it was going to be soon. Returning to his mother.

Does she know? Isn’t she in prison?

She does know. She had to be sedated, actually, after she was told. Very sorry situation, for which she blames herself. But, I must ask, how was it he was able to push the rowboat out by himself?

I don’t think he was trying to row anywhere. I think he went out and fell asleep inside the rowboat, and that the storm tides of the lake took it off the beach and that he awoke too late.

He was always saying how warm it was here. Even with the fan. And the boats are cool. Like a cave.

How is your baby?

He’s fine, poor thing won’t remember. A blessing I suppose.

 

I switch bunks with another boy so that my bed faces the field instead of the farther cabin and the lake. I am grateful the body was found, also grateful that we will not be asked to swim today. In the afternoon I write to my mother and father and grandparents a quick postcard: Dear Folks, The rehearsals are good and the other day I was chosen to lead one with Eric. Not too bad with mosquitoes here, and I am getting a tan. I am the best swimmer, of course. Everyone is very sad about Ralph. Please tell Grandfather and Grandmother that I love them and I have some pressed flowers for their book.

I walk out to post the letter in the mailbox at the edge of the road and then walk back. The field has sprouted sunflowers, on the cabin side, and already they dwarf me. Their golden heads tower on slender green stalks rising as high as ten feet. Cleis was a girl who fell in love with Phoebus Apollo, the sun. To take pity on her the gods turned her into this flower, so that she might watch him all her life. I mistrust the myth, though certainly it seems a plausible story. All of it except for the part where the gods do this out of mercy. They do it for fun, it seems to me. In Greek mythology, loving Apollo seems to be among the most dangerous of the heart’s choices: the fields and gardens are full of his lovers, multiplied by time into millions. I think of Peter. How much more I could love him, if there was another of me. If there were millions. If I had been scattered. I go back to my bunk and flop down.

What are you writing, Peter says, coming into the cabin. He throws himself onto my bunk. The sun is shining, he says. We should be outside.

Outside, we head into the woods to find a birch tree to ride. My mother’s cousins taught me birch riding. You take a tree and bend it slowly until it touches the ground. You tie it so you can climb on and then you cut the rope. The rope we took from the cabin, and the knife, Peter brought: a child-sized deer knife. In the woods, it doesn’t take long to find a tree for us. You first, he says. We wind the rope around the tree and then under the edge of a stone for leverage and the tree lowers. I sit down across the papery trunk, dry against my thighs.

Cut, I say. And the tree swings me up harder than I expect. I go up and then as I come down, the tree bobbles and I fall. I hit the ground hard. I put my left hand out to stop the fall and when I pull it up the forearm is crooked, like a tree branch, and they hear my scream across the camp.

On the phone later, my mother is circumspect. Honey, these things happen. You always were a troublemaker and this is what comes of it. But I hear the arm is well set.

It is, I say. The camp phone is located in the mudroom of the rehearsal building. I stretch out flat on my back, my new cast a solid weight on my side.

Terrible thing, about Ralph, she says.

Yep.

But you know, this is why we always insisted you kids be good swimmers.

What?

So you could swim to shore. So in case the boat you were on was going down, you could swim to shore.

 

The lake has a monster.

How do you know, I ask.

I can feel it. It watches me.

My arm cast glows in the moonlight here on the dock. Under the plaster, the doctor said the arm would lose its hair and skin, that for a little while after the cast’s removal, it might even be smaller. Peter sits beside me, wet from a night swim. The night air feels as thick as the cast. Even the crickets sound tired.

Why didn’t it take Ralph, I ask.

Nobody wanted Ralph, Peter says, after a long quiet.

 

11

 

AS MY VOICE may change soon, I have finally been given a solo, in an a cappella song.

Well, that’s one way of keeping you out of trouble, Zach says.

What do you mean by that? I ask Zach. We have gone out of sight of the camp, and we stand now, naked, in the lake, pressed against each other lightly, face to face. I hold my cast just above the water, resting it against his back.

He laughs and looks up. Extra rehearsal time. Less time for D&D. Plus more time spent with him. He co-opts you. A very smart tactical move.

We aren’t at war, I say.

Sure. If you can’t see that, I can. I can see that easy. He wants Peter.

The trees lean out over the lakeshore above us, a green scrim hung across heaven’s summer face. The birch trees are a pale fire running slow through the summer woods and there isn’t a thing wrong. Kissing Zach now spins me, makes me feel like I want to run myself all the way through him. I understand, why people like this.

I have to go back, I say then. I have to go ride bikes with Peter.

 

Where are we.

We took a bad turn there. We need to think about going back, I guess.

Above, thunder clouds. Peter and I are on bikes the camp lets us use, having ridden down dirt roads that line the forested countryside. Above the firs that toss the air around them I can see boiling clouds, dark like duck wings and glossy from carrying their rain. The air fills with dust, pollen, twigs, and torn leaves as the winds conduct playful raids. I can smell my sweat, which alarms me. I consider that my odor has caught up to me, now that we are stopped.

How many turns, Peter asks. How many did we take. Seven, right?

I run through my memory. I have a serial memory, I remember sequences, patterns, numbers. I am finding it applies equally to sentences and mathematics, spelling words or building numbers. Seven turns, I say. A left, two rights, two lefts, two more rights.

Peter climbs up on his bike, rising out of the seat. Because of my arm cast, I lag behind, sweating until wet spots slick my shirt; a dull ache radiates from under the cast. We are now shadowed completely by clouds. Peter seems about to lift up like the pieces of the road and field lifting around him. And then he comes down again. He says, We shouldn’t ride until the storm is over. You aren’t supposed to get your cast wet.

I think of all the sweat on it. Huh. But we aren’t supposed to stay under trees during storms. Lightning.

Peter hoists himself up again. To the field then, he says, and he bobs up and down through the grass that almost covers him. I push my bike, following his new trail, my nose itching already from the grass broken by his passing.

We sit down in the middle of a field under a roof we make from our bikes and windbreakers. I guess that we are at least a mile and a half from the camp. Heat lightning passes from cloud to cloud without visible impact. The trees roll their branches around and around as the wind passes through them like a running line to some giant, lost sail. Until now, it had been a clear if sticky day.

Are you psyched, Peter says. You have a solo.

Yeah, I say. Our two coats, tied together, burp up, a wind having snuck underneath. We hold the bikes. I want this wind to continue, for us to lift into the sky, holding on. To go far away, just me and Peter.

Did you ever tell anyone, Peter asks.

I didn’t. Guys like Eric can be dangerous, for one. And then my parents would have to know, which I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t.

Dangerous how.

Violent. I read about it in the paper.

I had actually gone to the library and looked up everything I could find on pedophilia and homosexuality. I knew that Eric was a pedophile. I remember sitting in the aisle with the book, sure the librarian would find me. There in the card catalog were two neatly printed, plain-faced titles: Greek Homosexuality, Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. And then one day I opened the paper to a news feature that told of how sometimes, a pedophile, fearing discovery, will turn to murder. Little girls and boys turned into silent, bloody bits.

The grass around us rises and falls, rippling like waves coming in off an ocean that won’t move, won’t spray, and the coats pop up and down.

I want him dead, Peter says. I want it to end.

And then I feel the beginning of rain, raindrops pulverized by winds near the ground. I imagine the drops coming behind them taking the pieces in, welcoming these pieces as they make themselves heavier to speed their passage to the earth.

Don’t tell anyone, Peter, I say. Please.

He watches me as I say this. His mouth a hard flat line, he says, Okay. For now.

The field flattens in the rain, but I know by tomorrow the grass might be even three inches taller. Things grow so fast, it is amazing we don’t all lie awake at night, listening to it all happen.

 

Eric’s demeanor is nearing normal again, now that Ralph has been properly buried at a service in Lewiston. He is now intent on resuming the camp’s routine. And so after dinner, after dark, it is another naked story hour in Cabin 1.

Eric B., in the bunk beneath me, asks, Do you ever want to be down there?

Sometimes, I say.

Me too. Sometimes. I mean I like those guys. But I don’t get it.

Mm. I slide off to the floor and pad softly to the door. I am tempted to go right in and sit down. Now that I have a solo. When Eric passed out the sheet music today, I looked over the notes and lines. The solo began each section of the four sections with a complete phrase alone, and then the choir joined him: the sopranos for the next first two stanzas and then the full choir. The choir echoed him and answered him. You had to hit your notes quickly and surely and get off them to the next ones or get tangled in the verses of the others. The song was from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set to music by Ralphe Vaughn Williams, and arranged by Big Eric to create a solo for me. The song frightens me. Still, I like the way it fits my voice like a sleeve of words.

I stare at the dark distance between the cabins, the golden light filled with golden boys behind mosquito screens, like a lamp made from fireflies. I turn and get back in my bunk.

What were you going to do, Eric B. asks me.

Shhh.

 

Zach in the dark. All smooth dryness, salty. I am like a deer at a salt lick. He giggles. I am stern, and he likes it.

 

One, two, three, fou—

 

Full fathom five thy father lies;

of his bones are coral made;

these are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

but doth suffer a sea change

into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

 

Lies, Eric pauses here. Lu-Hies. Enunciate. Or you’ll sound like a Chinese laundryman saying Rice. Those soft consonants need to fire out.

Chinese laundryman, I say.

Quiet oils the room. The other boys know I am quick to avenge insults to my race and wait for a reaction.

Fee, he says, head cocked.

Chinese laundryman, I say.

Are you ready to start again?

Yeah.

Full Fathom Five my father lies, of his bones are coral made, these are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

And the choir joins me. A tear pushes out. Peter points to his sheet music. In the margin he has written, DICK.

—Full Fathom Five my fah-th-her lies, of his bu-hones are co-rhal mayd—

And the baton comes up and flat, Eric’s fingers scissoring against his neck.

What do I have to do, he says, to have your full attention? Do I have to wear a clown hat? Do I have to beg? Do I have to come around, and with that he proceeds to walk toward us, and then circle from behind. Peter turns his page.

That’s not the page, Eric says, from above him. No wonder it sounded so awful. Let me turn your page for you. His finger drops low, toward Peter’s lap.

I can turn my page, I was just looking back. Peter meets his gaze.

The finger hovers. Have I made my point? he says. And the finger hooks the paper, peels it over slightly, and then pushes it flat to the other side. Mmhmm. Love notes.

The other boys giggle, lightly.

I don’t want to separate you but I will. Am I understood? Am I?

Yes, we both say, a sigh.

All righty, then. Five minutes for water and then where we were.

The boys slip from their chairs. The late-summer heat exhausts us more than usual, and even the cool hall today stifles. By unspoken agreement, Peter and I wait with Big Eric.

When does it stop, Eric says, softly. As if I don’t have enough to deal with. Is it that you don’t feel I’m giving you enough attention? You are forcing my hand here, boys. I like both of you more than I like the rest, but you are antagonizing me now. You really are. You will have to show me your pages when I ask to see them, at any time. And they should be eminently readable.

He sweats as he says this. He reaches in his back pocket for a linen handkerchief, and wipes energetically his shiny forehead, his red cheeks. And then he grabs Peter’s music sheets, hands him a clean copy, and throws the other away.

Who’s Ariel and who’s Caliban, I ask, when he tells me this is Ariel and Caliban’s song.

Ariel’s a magical servant, he says. A wizard’s helper. Shape changer. Could ride lightning, stand at the bottom of the sea, or impersonate a storm.

A girl, I say. Inside, I think of the fox. How Ariel was perhaps a fox, far away from home and lost.

A boy, he says. He’s a boy. Funny, isn’t it, how Ariel is this girl’s name now. But it was a boy, for the play. Caliban’s a monster. They are both Prospero’s servants.

 

12

 

TONIGHT, AFTER THE lights are out, I remember. Or is it remembering?

The pale screen. A golden head, resting against a larger, darker one. The sound of pages turning. My heart pounding so hard I am sure it can be heard over the crickets and frogs. A large furry hand touches tentatively, to check to see if the golden one is asleep. And strokes down the leg.

The smaller head turns up. No.

The hand comes back the way it has gone. And Peter rolls out of his lap, turns, facing him. No.

Eric stands, a wall of pink skin. He makes no move. Peter turns his head.

Were you there, I ask myself. Around me: the damp night floats through the screen, the boys smell bitter in their sleep, as if as they slept, nightmares made them sweat. I turn my face into the pillow, the familiar scent of me still warm there. Pull the cover up higher. Were you there, did you watch that night? Had you snuck down, and watched. And done nothing. Or are you making this up.

Outside the cricket hum embroiders the lake hum and here and there, a boy sighs. I hear Luke start to mumble in his sleep and decide to watch, crawl from my covers and slip past Eric B. to the floor. Down the hill I can see that Cabin 1 is asleep, all the gold laid out on pillows, all the lights off.

I don’t know what I remember or what it is I imagine right now. I don’t know why that is. I go back to my cabin, lie down, sleep takes me in a swipe.

 

Light and thunder. I wake up and open my eyes. Above me, in the air, a ball of lightning. So this is what it looks like, I think. I apparently had been asleep in a storm and now the light and then the thunderclap follows so quick behind, the cabin shudders, is engulfed. I half expect to shatter, the bunk bed to fly up. My hair stands up. I don’t dare breathe, as if I could somehow inhale it. As if, without thinking it, I exhaled it.

And then it goes, winks out against the wall above my head. The dark falls in where it used to be.

I stand slowly, in my bed, to peer out the window. The storm lightning falls to the ground. I climb down and begin waking the boys to go out and unroll the tarps again. The rain soaks everything. The trees look cast in gunmetal and oiled. The lake, I can see in the distance, rises and the boats, tied to their mooring, tilt nose-down, end-up, the mooring now well under water. Soon they will turn over in the wind.

 

13

 

THE FALL IS almost here. We go back to our towns, to our families.

There are stories in Cape Elizabeth of seeing someone fly through the air at night. I think of them as Zach and Peter and I tie the birch trees down to ride them. We are out on a hill, across the road from a graveyard and the marsh. I wonder if one of them is out in the woods late doing this by himself. Peter and Zach tie me on, because of my cast.

You shouldn’t be out here, Zach says.

There’s always a moment when it seems like it won’t work out. Like the whole thing’s a fake. And then the tree rises up and you head for the sky. Scream as you go. And then the tree sets you down again, and then brings you back up. I scream as I go up. This time, I do not fall.

Peter leaves to go home on his bike. Bye, he says. Are you leaving, he asks Zach.

In a bit, Zach says. See you later.

Zach stays. We wander around my dark house. My parents are watching the evening news with my grandparents and my younger brother and sister. How long before dinner, I ask.

You have half an hour, my mother says.

We slip out the back door and head down the road.

The greenhouse has been deserted for years with the exception of Zach and I using it as a kind of clubhouse. Overlooking the marsh, through its many broken panes, we can see my house in the far distance, above which clouds parade, today, toward the sea. Zach and I ride our bikes out here on Route 77 and drop them in the tall grass just outside the door. We stand now, facing each other under the patchwork of light coming through the smashed roof. The floor under our feet has cracks and saplings have pushed through.

What’s wrong with you, Zach says. I have said nothing since arriving.

Above us gigantic clouds careen through the deep sky and the summer sunset bleaches the long marsh grass. The nearby sea colors the air, preparing to send us a fog later, and in my hand I hold a sea rose I have pulled off a hedge along the road.

This is for you, I say, and hand Zach the rose.

He holds the bloom lightly, the stem between his fingers.

Did you know, before? Zach twirls the flower and then puts it behind his ear. Ouch.

I did know. A wind change brings a sea wind passing through, a memory of something better. I thought I knew what Big Eric was. I thought I knew because I thought it was the same as me. We are both in love with boys. I know what Big Eric watches, now, though, in me. He sees that I know, we are not the same. I did not know before and now I do, and so he watches this knowledge in me, a light moving closer slowly through some faint dark.

I lean in and Zach does not close his eyes, even when I kiss him lightly on the mouth. The space between his lips is wet.

Back at home, after dinner, my quiet parents are now watching television comedies with my grandparents and my siblings are in bed. From where I sit on the floor, I can see, they think I am still here. They can’t see that I have a secret as big as me. A secret replaces me.

 

My solo rehearsals with Big Eric take place on Fridays. Today is the day before my birthday, and so after the rehearsal, the boys from the choir will be over for cake. My mother drives me over to his sad downstairs house on Munjoy Hill and as his wife plays outside in the yard with their big-headed baby, Baby Eddy, we sit at the upright piano. I practice my solo. My voice stays strong, clear, cooperative. The solo is the harder for being a cappella: no guide except the memory of the music in my mind. No piano music to surround me. Just me.

Full Fathom Five my father lies, of his bones are coral made, these are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange . . .

In the yard, the baby is trying to learn to walk. He bounces up and sits down, up and then sits down again, his knees not quite strong enough.

. . . Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell . . .

In the yard, the baby suddenly stands, as if tethered to the sky by a sunbeam. And then falls, as if tugging the light down with him.

Fee, Big Eric says, and turns the pages back to the beginning.

Yes, I say. On my chest now, a weight, like Big Eric standing there. His two feet, pressing into me from above.

Fee, your mother tells me she’s worried about you. She called to ask me some questions. He turns and looks at me as he says this. In his eyeglasses, my grim reflections.

My heart hammers, a frog under my ribs. I’m fine, I say.

But your mom doesn’t seem to know this. And neither do your teachers at school. They don’t know you’re fine. And if your behavior becomes more disruptive, or strange, then there will be not only questions, but people will do things. Like, for instance, you won’t be able to be a part of the choir anymore. And I know we both would regret that.

Yes, I say.

So you’re fine. He rests forward on the piano, on the lip above the keys.

I’m fine.

I’d hate to lose you, he says, setting his fingers back out, spread over the chords.

I understand, I say. I do. Outside the baby plays on peekaboo sunbeams, up and down. Clouds rush over on their way out to sea. Baby Eddy laughs. He presses a key, to give me a note to start on, and I sing again.

After the lesson concludes, Baby Eddy is returned to the crib for a nap. Leanne leaves, the screen door clapping as she goes. Big Eric takes me into a sort of music room, with books. Let me play you this, he says. It’s Holst’s The Planets. We sit there listening, and so I forget what happens to boys who have solos, up until he slides a book, hardbound, from the shelf. He sets it out in front of me. I look at it sideways, not turning in my seat. The book falls open into the middle, shiny pages of boys sliding around naked on carpets with dark-haired, bearded men who look so much like Big Eric that I can’t believe it isn’t him. It almost looks like they are helping each other to exercise, do sit-ups, leg-raises. It looks like certain athletic manuals I have seen.

I raise my head and we exchange a glance, and whether it is the deadness in me that he can see, or whether I have somehow raised the strength to repel him, I don’t know. But he pauses, unsure. The music surges. This is Saturn, he says. Do you like it.

I recall a painting I saw printed once, in a book, called Saturn Eats His Children. To prevent the new race of gods from overtaking him, Saturn ate his children whole. They cut themselves out of his stomach, and went on to rule the world. These boys on the carpet look like they are trying to escape being eaten.

I love it, I say. It’s beautiful. We both know I mean the music.

What about these, he asks.

Where are they from, I ask.

Sweden, he says. Much more liberal there. They care about human life and feeling there. I met my wife there, while hiking one summer.

And so the afternoon walks away from us, and then the other boys arrive, driven by their mothers. The book has been put back for an hour by then, all the Planets have played, and I am ready to leave, but now is my birthday party. I feel a shield around me, like the gods did for their favored ones, and so I walk to meet Peter’s mother’s car pretending I am a favorite of the sun, with a possible future as a flower, and that Apollo himself is glaring at Big Eric. The other boys arrive in groups of four and five, piled into a few cars. Hey, says Peter. Loser. Who says you’re special?

I laugh. I want to say, Get out of here. But I don’t. All the shouting in me hides in my smile.

We go into the house for cake. The birthday song is tightly sung, harmonized, even, and too loud. The boys laugh as we slip discordantly into harmony. Here I am. Thirteen at last. Someone should kill me now, I think, as I blow out the candles. Before the damage spreads. You are fools not to, you will all regret that I lived. All the boys sign HAPPY BIRTHDAY FEE on my cast.

Did you make a wish, Zach asks.

Yes, I say.

Afterward, I go into a room I don’t recognize. A rug askew here, boxes repacked in some rough manner, as if whoever searched them was not done. A quick review places the room as having been Ralph’s. His death still providing disorder.

 

14

 

THE MORNING OF my birthday my father comes and wakes me up, early. The sky outside my window is a dark door with light peeping under the crack. Son, he says. Wake up. We have dolphins in Falmouth, beaching. He is dressed in his wet suit, a snorkel against his neck.

An hour later, I eat a cheese sandwich, peeling the crusts off and dropping them in the water as our Boston Whaler skids over wave crests that slap the bottom of our boat, my father driving us across the waves at an angle, his hand firm on the outboard engine. He smiles at me as I chew. How you doing there, he asks, as spray fans in bursts behind him. He knows he looks silly there and is waiting for me to laugh. I know I don’t have to answer if everything is fine. I hold my arm cast so it doesn’t shake. Behind my father blue sky burns pink at the bottom, where the sun floats, red-orange, clearing the horizon. The waves are glassy and long, brown-blue like kelp. The wind is a cold hand against our heads. We wave at the other boats that pass, my father speaking occasionally into his portable marine radio to the other dolphin rescue members.

They’re headed this way, my father says. And he pulls us up short around to a cove where he has taken me on occasion to see seals. We wait. I shiver.

There are three dolphins here. They hang just under the water’s surface, as if they were frozen in a leap. Two more arrive and the four push the sick one to the surface again and again, where its blowhole plucks at the air. Occasionally, a belly flashes white through the dark water.

How do they know it’s sick, I ask my father.

Because she tells them, my father says.

We return home for lunch, replaced on our watch by a lobsterman and his son, a salvage diver who has worked with my father. You’ll have cake and ice cream at home later, my mother says to me as I eat a fast bagel pizza. When we return in the early evening, we go by car, because now the dolphins are trying to beach themselves. We are going to have to try to get them back in the water.

There are seven other rescuers there, including a veterinarian with a stethoscope. The four healthy ones are rolled back into the water. My father, in his wet suit, swims dolphin-style out at the edge of the cove, trying to get the dolphins to imitate him. He splashes as he breaks the surface. The other men wait in the water, in case the dolphins try to turn back.

I am on the beach, with the dying one. She is covered in wet towels and I pour seawater on her with a cup from a pail beside me, my cast wrapped in a plastic bag. Her eyes roll under her double lids, and inside, her heart beats a soft tatter. She is warm still. I turn at the sound of my father in the distance, to see his orange snorkel blow water as he clears it before going under again. No one is saying anything.

Her heart starts to beat faster, as if her blood were tightening. It amazes me how fast the seawater dries. I pour more water onto the towel. Away from the rest of the sea, the seawater joins the air, instead. How does the ocean stay together, I wonder.

You’d better come over here, I say to the vet. I think she’s going to go.

Off in the distant water her friends try to learn to swim without her, following my father’s lead.

 

Why does she want to die, I asked my father, after he returned from his successful swimming lesson. We stood over her cooling body.

I think it’s like getting buried, Aphias, my father said to me then. We put our dead underground. They lay their dead above-sea. She wanted simply the right rest for her race.

But we don’t bury ourselves, I said.

I had watched the water on the way home in the car, the sunset across every wave.

I lie awake, thinking of her, under the guard of the printed Jacks and Jills linked in repeating patterns on my bedroom wallpaper. I watch as the passing lights of cars sweep through my room, the teenagers on my road coming home from dates, businessmen returning to their families, mothers driving car pools for theater, or speech and debate. The light swings across the room in bars, shaped by passing through my window frame. Light splatters, I know, on the outside of the house. I can almost hear the impact. I watch the hall light come in under the door. Light is a force, a wave and a particle. Light can touch me, and has to, actually, in order for anyone to see me.

 

15

 

SCHOOL BEGINS IN August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die.

Help with my roses today, my mother says. We have to deadhead. She hands me a glove and the shears; this is something I can do one-handed. While she walks around the house watering, I snip off the faded blooms, spotty leaves. It is the final day of August, the sun already has its mind on its vacation, distant skies. I pause, hold up my arm cast and the shears: Look, Mom, I’m a crab.

She laughs. Blond and tan, a faint sheen from the hose gives her a glow. She squirts a pip of water my way and I yelp, dodging. You sure are, she says.

Later, inside, over lemonade and peanut butter and jelly, she tells me that Eric has called to say we have been asked to be a part of an opera this fall. A production of Tosca, she says. He’s calling the boys he wants in advance, to clear it with their parents. You’re supposed to act surprised when he announces it, because there is some small pay involved, the part is small.

Oh-kay, I say. Surprise. No problem. I push my hair out of my face. My hand as it goes by smells like the inside of the glove.

I guess he doesn’t hold grudges, huh, she says. She begins putting away the lemonade, sets the jars of jelly and nut butter away.

I guess not, I say. Not until I go up to my room to get a book do I realize, I have no idea what she means.

 

In my gifted-and-talented speed-reading class seven of us sit in a dark room with a projector that prints lines on the walls. We read stories in this way and then are tested for comprehension.

Today we begin Boccaccio’s Decameron. Jay, one of the more aggressive students, turns the machine on.

The story flashes by. The teacher opens the door, glances in. Oh, he says. All right then. And he goes back out. We sit, the story beaming on, punctuated by the projector’s loud fan.

 

And it pleased Him that this love of mine, whose warmth exceeded all others, and which had stood firm and unyielding against all the pressures of good intention, helpful advice and the risk of danger and open scandal, should in the course of time diminish in its own accord. So that now, all that is left of it in my mind is the delectable feeling which Love habitually reserves for those who refrain from venturing too far upon its deepest waters. And thus what was once a source of pain has now become, having shed all discomfort, an abiding sensation of pleasure.

 

The Decameron was a collection of love stories told by ten people running from Florence during the time of the Black Plague. They told the stories to pass the time rather than playing games, at the direction of the Queen, traveling with them. Seven women, three men. Everywhere they looked, people dying. What a pleasure it must have been, I think, as the story flies up the screen in front of me in sections. To survive.

Afterward, the comprehension quiz asks, what were the afflictions of the Black Plague? And I write, bloody noses in the East, but in Florence, egg-shaped swelling in the groin.

How many people does the narrator describe dying?

Several hundred thousand in Florence, many more through the countryside.

 

Rehearsals in the fall are tighter: the camp has done its magic. We sit in ordered rows, we sing that way as well, chords offered like gleaming chains. Cathedral ceilings are references to Noah’s ark, I have just learned. The idea being that he founded his church by upturning the boat: when we look up, it’s supposed to be like looking at the prow of a boat above us. I think of this often, as I look at the bowed ceiling. This boat, I say to myself, is turning over.

Today is warm, and our rehearsal is going well. The choir has recently auditioned new members, and now we sit, forty, in broken arcs around our director. New money has provided music stands, nice folding chairs with padded seats. You’re real pros now, Big Eric announces in one break. In another, he points to Little Eric and says, Now, and Little Eric gets up and leaves the room. I have a surprise, Big Eric says. Eric is helping me with it.

Little Eric returns, a miniature monk. Muslin tunic, burgundy overtunic. Rope belt. The shoes are obscured by the hem, which falls to the floor. He smiles at us and raises his hands palm-up in mock propriety. Big Eric walks around to stand beside my seat. If he were Friar Tuck, Big Eric says to me, Robin Hood would not be so busy rescuing Maid Marian.

This, Big Eric says to the room, gesturing to Little Eric, is the way we will dress for the Italian pieces. I’m having the costumes ordered, and you will all be fitted for them afterward. Also, please welcome Freddy Moran, a new soprano. Freddy stands from where he is seated in the row in front of me.

Unable to join us for the summer, he is a new soprano with a clear light voice and all the other details of Big Eric’s favorites: long blond hair, straight, cut in a Viking mop, with a short sturdy frame and then the surprise, brown eyes, long lashes. The sort mascara means to replicate. He doesn’t look particularly Irish except perhaps this last part, the eyelashes. Zach’s mother, Mrs. Guietz, calls them sooty eyes. Merle and Peter have them also.

Big Eric then makes his announcement about Tosca and reads off the boys to be included. Little Eric and Zach are a bit old for this and so weren’t included, Big Eric concludes, and he laughs as he says this and puts his hand on Little Eric’s shoulder.

Little Eric, mouth firm, continues to stand in the tunic beside him.

In the rehearsals that follow, we learn to wear the robes. How to stand for hours without fainting under the hot lights, and sing: breathe from the diaphragm, tilt the head forward slightly to project sound from the throat out through the forehead, keep the knees bent slightly; feet under the shoulders, and the fingers of your hands rest on your thighs, your pointer finger pointed at your foot, along the seam of your slacks. We go to Biddeford to meet the opera cast where the director tells us stories of past Toscas, past choruses: one director told the boys to follow her wherever she went on the stage, and so when she dives to her death, the boys followed her, jumping also, all landing in the orchestra pit trampoline installed for the stunt. In another, the diva dove and bounced back up. In another, she missed the pad, crashing into orchestra members and breaking a collarbone.

I combine the stories gradually over the rehearsals, until in my mind I see us all following Tosca, jumping with her and bouncing back up, all of us in the air together, broken.

My mother picks me up today from rehearsal. She has come after a teacher conference at school, where my teacher team, Mrs. Strauss and Mr. Christie, ask if everything is all right at home. My mother assures them everything is.

They say you don’t have friends, she says to me. She drives the slow rush-hour traffic across the bridge back to Cape Elizabeth, the brake lights of the cars ahead of us flashing between bright and dull red in the early night. This week my father is in Sweden. I imagine him surrounded by blond people, the overwhelming numbers, him a shiny black-haired speck at the center. My blond mother. Sweden looks like a country of my mother. When he told me he was going, I thought of Big Eric’s books. If my father had ever seen anything like them.

They parent me in a team, these two, my mother teaches me about people, my father about science. These subjects each teach me patience about the other. My mother and I sit quietly in the car as we consider this evaluation of me. All of my friends are in the choir, I say to her, finally, and she nods as she takes me home.

 

16

 

THE PLASTER SAW takes the cast off in a minute. Beneath, my arm is a scaly white thing, the dark hairs stand out starkly. How’s that feel, the doctor says. Smiling. Rose-colored fat man, big black-framed glasses.

Fine, I say. I stretch it forward. Fine. And this is not a lie. The hand looks like it belongs to a monster. I think of my mother’s rose cuttings, covered up for a month, until the branch, in desperation, grows new roots to live. This hand, it looks like it is ready to grow a whole new boy off itself.

Out in the waiting room, my mother stands as I come out the door. There’s my little tree climber, she says. In the car, on the way home, the sunlight yawns through the trees, more faraway fire. Soon the clocks will go forward, the nights shrink close like turtleneck collars.

 

17

 

YOU, AS THE chorus, Big Eric tells the opera choir, are supposed to be innocent choirboys, and yet you all are supposed to act as if you are passionately in love with Floria Tosca. And you are both.

Saturday mornings belong to Opera now: the eight of us meet in the church room alone to rehearse, and soon, we will rehearse with the rest of the cast and orchestra. While my little brother and sister watch the Smurfs, I learn songs about vengeance, love, and slow death. Today Big Eric is explaining to us the role we have in the opera. The coffee he has brought bitters the room’s air while we all drink hot tea with lemon to clear and tone our throats. Again, it reassures me less to know the history here. The story, though, is a good one: Tosca, the lover of a handsome painter, Cavaradossi, betrays him in order to protect him from his torturer. Tosca can save her lover by giving herself to the torturer, and she says she will in exchange for a mock execution. He comes to her and she instead, impulsively, stabs him to death with his dinner knife, in his chambers. She then visits her lover in prison, assures him of his safety, rushes to his side after the firing squad, only to find he really is dead. The torturer’s murder is discovered, and his police come for Tosca, who then flings herself from a parapet to her death.

Operas, Big Eric announces, as he walks the room in long paces, are mainly about betrayals in love. Squalid light surrounds him from the stained-glass windows as he says this. His round bald head gleams, recently polished, he tells us, and from above the ears, the remaining hair, vigorous, grows long, to meet his mustache and beard.

After, he comes up to me. How did you like Fire from Heaven, he asks me. He twists his hands over each other in a way I’ve never seen before and only read about. He’s the only person I know who rubs his hands.

It’s fine, I say. I liked it. Big Eric had urged me to go read this novel, and I checked it out from the library. When I got home with it, I realized why he wanted me to read it. The novel is about Alexander the Great, who has an affair with his older, adult teacher, when he is still a teenager.

He smiles. Beautiful, right? You should read the The Persian Boy, next. About his eunuch lover.

I will, I say.

 

Every now and then, I think of Ralph, dead Ralph. He wings in, hovers over the rehearsal chapel, paler than ever before because he is slowly fading away. I know it is not a proper haunting because no one else sees him. We sang for him at a memorial service, held for him in a country church up by the camp. It was a choral service, which is to say, we sang a selection of things, and then there were remembrances and a sung prayer.

Occasionally, I imagine that the ball-lightning of that night at camp was him, finally emerging from the lake, the part of him that really was lost to the depths now running loose, looking for its small body lying in its small grave. That he is now a Will-o’-the-Wisp.

Now that we wear these rope belts, I think of him often as I knot it. The boat rope, too thick for a child to loosen easily. Think of the boats, the oarlocks above him. When he turned his face in the rain to the bottom of the boat, I wonder, looking up at the cathedral ceiling, did he think of God? Did he think of Noah? What did he pray for?

And then Big Eric swings back into view. And I mutter, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, inside, in the mouth I keep in my mind, as opposed to the beautiful mouth, the real mouth, the slave that sings beautiful things. Or kisses.

 

18

 

AT SCHOOL NOW, as it has been decided that I need friends, my mother has mentioned I must go out for a sport. I am a good swimmer, so these parents of mine decide that I must join the swim team. I am somewhat angry at my parents for being duped by my teachers this way but consent, because what else am I going to do?

The Cape Elizabeth High School swimming pool: Long thin windows band the walls reaching up to triple-height ceilings. The starting blocks at the shallow end remind me of altars. The pool has six lanes, is twenty-five yards long and is forever aquamarine, stinking of the chlorine acid poured in to clean the water. Now the time that I spent in the library between class and choir is spent here, doing laps. All those words, obliterated by this: I look to the pool bottom through goggles, where there is a single stripe at the bottom of each lane in the shape of the letter I.

We do drills for distance and speed. We separate out the elements of the stroke: first, just the arms, then just the legs, then the whole stroke, reassembled. We stretch, led in visualizations: Visualize yourself winning, my coach says, a young man watching his tiny potbelly, named Dan. See yourself ahead of everyone else. Do you see what that looks like?

I do. I see myself, having outdistanced them all. I begin to win races. I give the ribbons to my grandmother, who kisses them and then kisses me. My champion, she says. My grandfather laughs and rubs them in his fingers and he says, Fox is fast swimmer too.

I see Zach occasionally in the gym, when I have to do weight training. He is filling out from lacrosse. He shrugs. Says, Hey. We see each other less now, but my knowledge of him runs through these school rooms between us, so that some days, I feel like I know where he is no matter where he is. Other days, it feels like he doesn’t even exist.

Come over, he says sometimes. Sometimes I do.

In Zach’s room, we kiss. Like in a movie, long slow kisses, I count his teeth, he bites my lips. Today we haven’t seen each other this way in over a month. When Little Eric’s mom’s car pulls up for choir car pool and honks, we separate and lie still for a moment, regarding each other: disheveled, our lips swollen. I need to put on jeans, he says. Go out and stall them. I wait a minute for him to pull off his shorts and then I get up, and pulling his penis toward me, give it a quick kiss, before heading out the door to tell Mrs. Johannsen that Zach will be right out.

 

Late October.

The concert where Peter is to sing the descant is held in St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Zach and his parents come here. Stained-glass depictions of the lives of saints. A few angels on a mission. For the occasion we wear the robes and rope belts as we stand on the choir risers, a priory-in-miniature. The audience watches. We are halfway through the program and each pair of eyes in the audience, it seems, emits a force like a breeze—we stand before a gale of attention. The organ starts and we sing. I wait. Peter is to begin his descant. As I sing, it feels suddenly airless, as if in taking his breath, Peter has swept the atmosphere clean away. We hit the air repeatedly with the chords in our throats and bellies, making our devotions.

Peter opens his mouth. The first note pierces, the next goes inside the choir’s airborne array, and then he is there, a part of us, all our tangling voices skein the air and Peter slips up, born aloft. My jealousy scrapes off as he keeps breathing, keeps sending more air through himself. Slow fire.

Love melts all our murder. As much as it makes it. Love melted me. Peter, it could only have been you.

 

Later, it is my turn in the program. I’d forgotten, in some bizarre way: the piece forced from my mind entirely. As we tuck the pages of our scores into place, Big Eric’s eyes find mine. I sweat. All the colors around me leave. I don’t remember more than the first three words. The people in the audience come into sharp focus, and I see small hats, wrinkles, tired eyes tired for years. Big Eric’s eyes have the look of the owl now, but this time it’s the owl descending. The owl who can see you from somewhere in the night sky, where the flying hides it.

Right inside my chest, a space opens. He brings to his mouth a mouth harp, and he whistles a tone for me to begin on. The tone opens in my chest, rolls over in language, opens my mouth. All along, I thought I was the one singing. I am not. He sings through me. He opens his mouth and I sing. My mouth is his.

Full Fathom Five my father lies . . .

At the entrance of the choir, as they surround me, I feel myself return. For the moment I was alone, I was gone. I vanished. I keep singing, though, for here I am, a song again.

 

Afterward, as we stand around, receiving our parents and friends, I want to walk away from here with Peter. I want the doors to St. Andrew’s to fly open at heaven’s bidding and on a plank of sunshine to walk right up to heaven with Peter, where, looking at God’s face, we explode into flame, as all mortals do, looking on His countenance.

Instead, we return to the dressing room where we change in the smell of sweat socks and old dust, hang our robes, coil the ropes around the neck of the hanger. We climb into our clothes. We look at each other.

He knows.

All this singing seals something in. And so Peter says, You were really great.

In the dark gothic closet, dust spins around us. You were great, I say. In the only way. You were the only great thing.

No, you were, he says. You were.

I hug him to me and suddenly, I kiss him. On the mouth. Briefly. When I pull back, he’s frozen in place. Looking off to the side.

Like a tap I feel Zach watching us from the door.

You both were great, he says. Now let’s go.

Outside, my grandparents stand on the sidewalk, smiling hugely. Somehow, they seem stiller and stronger than the other people around them. As if gravity hugged them a little closer. Koreans very good singer, my grandmother says.

Yes, grandfather says. Very good singer. You have good Korean voice. Very strong.

My grandfather tells me again about how in Korea, everyone knows all the Korean songs, and sometimes, they start singing. On the bus, in the street. Everyone just singing, like in a musical. And for a second it seems like maybe I only wanted to sing because I am Korean, and not over there, with all the rest of them.

My grandparents haven’t come to my concerts before now. They don’t, in fact, often leave the property. My grandmother likes her garden. My grandfather likes our kitchen. But here they are, and at the sight of them everything evil in me seems to blow away, like dust from the top of a book. They hug me between them. Around us on the cold sidewalk the people my grandfather calls the potato people walk the streets, headed home.

 

19

 

BACKSTAGE. BIDDEFORD OPERA House, opening night. We sit in our costumes, playing cards in our dressing room. Our faces are made up.

The diva slips into our dressing room, a beautiful young soprano by the name of Mare Winslow. Her hair is dyed red for the part. Her low-cut dress reveals a very full chest. She smiles at us. You’re so beautiful, she says. All of you. Your voices, so beautiful.

She doesn’t quite say it. That it’s a pity, the voice won’t stay. Some of us might end up with a contra-tenor, but that seems to me to be, at my childish vantage, wildly, unreasonably effeminate. A boy’s voice is a masculine voice not in pitch but because it does not waver. I remember a rehearsal warm-up she attended, where my voice and Peter’s remained, scaling up and up, and she said afterward, even I don’t have that note. Envious then, she was a little like a child looking at monkeys climbing and wanting a tail.

Later, on stage, in the lights, her face slick with sweat, she radiates sound out to the audience in passionate bolts and rays. Tosca is demanding her lover repaint the eyes of the Mary Magdalene to match hers, that he blot out the eyes of the Marchese Attavanti, whose portrait he has incorporated into the picture there in the church.

I see as I watch, her comparison of our voices is a false one: a woman’s voice is different, so very different, and hers, ridged by vibrato, cuts like a serrated blade, where we boys stab like swords—our voices tremble not at all. In this way, musically, innocence is represented. Knowledge, specifically knowledge of passion, makes you shake, apparently. As you answer for it before God, singing for your short, beautiful life to inch forward even by another minute. Even in the agony of loss is passion, is love, and measured against death this sort of pain is a feast, also, and requires a knife to carve it. Or so it seems, watching her run back and forth across the stage.

We have one other scene, apart from singing in the first act. In the second one, while Tosca rehearses, offstage, for her royal command performance at the Farnese Palace, we sing with her. We sing softly, to represent distance, and the composer has arranged Scarpia’s interrogation in counterpoint to what we sing. And even later, at the beginning of the third act, as the prisoners wander the yard, Freddy Moran has a brief solo offstage, where he sings, I send you as many sighs as leaves rustle in the wind.

And then later, in the prison, Tosca sings with Cavaradossi, Our love will glow like a blazing rainbow over the sea. She says good-bye to him, before his execution, I’ll close your eyes with a thousand kisses, I’ll call you by a thousand names.

Peter, somehow, shining there in the dark, all the light manages to find an excuse to go his way, to leave him the gifts of their colors. In his choirboy robes, bored by the passage of the opera, waiting for the ride home, the tucking into bed.

Peter sees me looking at him, finally. He smiles and waves, silent. I wave back. I tell myself, Not even the light should dare to love you.

After, as I sit, waiting for my mother to come and pick me up, Mare walks the empty stage, sits down beside me, adjusts the skirts in her costume, and sighs. Her powdery breasts push tightly together, like grapes pinched by fingers. I wanted to laugh tonight, she says.

I can feel the days ahead pulling her away, into other songs.

Me too, I say. Why is that?

Because love like this looks funny. People yelling for each other, shouting their jealousy, killing. Singing the whole time.

I think it’s beautiful, I say.

Of course it’s beautiful, she says. And there’s really nothing like it, when you are climbing the notes and you realize suddenly, there, right there, this, and the music opens to you. You see how you aren’t there, something else is there that belongs . . . to the music. It doesn’t belong to you at all.

 

No rehearsal that Monday. My father returns from Sweden. He has begun a consulting business. As far as I can tell, that means he gets paid to tell people how to do things and how much it will cost them. Each time he returns from a business trip he has presents for all of us, my brother, sister, and I. Teddy gets skates. Sam gets a stuffed Laplander reindeer. I get a ski sweater, of some wool from an animal so vigorous, knitted by people so powerful, I feel like I am wearing a force field and not a gray sweater. The yarn seems to add muscle to me. In the mirror, I look powerfully built, like a boy-hero. When I remember the sweater is from Sweden I never wear it again.

 

While Big Eric runs the newer altos through his spiel about head tone and falsetto, I write about How to Fill a Heart with Hate, a poem, which I title that way. I write, The Heart to become Hate removes the R, which is Rue / a witches’ brew of regret, separates the A which is Art from the E which is Eros by the T, / which was together and is now Terror. Or Time. But never loses / the H, which is Heaven, which is the way back. To the Heart.

Peter has cut all his hair off in what he calls a fade haircut. A blond frost covers his bare head. The altos finally learn, but now we are out of time. I close my music folder and cover my poem. Big Eric announces, at the rehearsal’s close, a tour for the winter. Schools and churches, throughout Maine.

After the rehearsal, I watch Freddy walk in a slow circle as he waits for his mom. Peter waits beside me, pulls out a jar of black fingernail polish and begins to paint every fingernail. My sister, he says to me, dared me to do it. Fifty bucks if I did every finger.

Really, I say. Can you do that at a Catholic school?

Mmm, no. Clashes with the uniform, he says, and giggles. But the hair is fine. I’ll just walk around with my hands in my pockets, like the rest of them do anyway. He casts a green eye my way. You want, he says, offering the bottle.

Just the pinkies, I say, thinking of a boy I saw downtown the other day, hair spiked red, black pinkies.

Tomorrow night, Peter asks, do you want to go to a hardcore all-ages show? Seven bands. My sister and I are going, and she’s driving.

Yes, I say.

On the way home, I feel like I have Peter on my fingers. I curl my hands inside my pockets, and no one sees until swim practice the next day, where the other boys only wrinkle their noses, swimmers being mild-mannered. After practice, I ride my bike over to the barbershop around the corner from the bank near the school and sit down for a five-dollar fade. Fade. Something going away slowly. Pomade? the barber asks, and I ask what is it, and after he tells me, I leave, my hair shining, straight up, like the cut end of a paintbrush. I buy the pomade. I walk out stepping on my own hair, like feathers there on the floor where someone killed a bird.

 

The next day, when I go over to Peter’s house, he says, It’s good, and traces my fade with his finger for a moment.

What’s this group’s name, I ask Peter.

We’re in his room, the door closed, his big old ugly stereo’s volume turned way up. New Order, he says. He’s smoking a Marlboro, blowing smoke into the sunbeam crossing his room. We are waiting to go into Portland with his older sister, Elizabeth. She’s in the bathroom spraying her hair straight up with Aquanet and drawing lines of eyeliner out to her hairline. Punk-rock pharaoh, she says when I ask her about her look. Liz Taylor Bad Hair Day.

I like Elizabeth. She and Peter say they hate each other. She steals my butts, Peter says. He’s a twerp, she says. Elizabeth is pretty, her blue mohawk cheers me up, like a sail or a blade, the crest of a lizard. Today we are going shopping at Goodwill and then from there to the show.

At the Goodwill, everything Peter finds he grabs one of for me, and there are patch-elbow sweaters, brand-new indigo jeans rolled high, T-shirts from rival high schools or faraway ones, their letters faded off, and then the precious black overcoats. Ten dollars. Good deals, Elizabeth says, who has found an old beaded black dress. I want to wear it now, Elizabeth says, and hops in the car. Play lookout, she orders, and starts to pull her clothes off. Peter and I sit on the sidewalk and paint our thumbs silver, because, we decide, we walk around with our thumbs in our pockets anyway. From far away, sitting down, it looks like we have a nickel out, ready to call, heads or tails.

Later, Peter and I stand together at the back of the all-ages hardcore show. Elizabeth is drunk and hitting on skinheads. The band starts to lean into their guitars and the lights blink. Everywhere around us, kids are throwing themselves into each other, banging and falling. A few, like me, pretend that nothing is happening and light cigarettes. Peter takes a straight razor from his pants and runs the razor up his forearm. A bright bead of blood follows. He does it again. And again.

Peter, I say. What the hell.

Don’t worry, he says. You cut across, so you don’t slice a vein. He begins on his other arm. And then he hands the razor to me. His arms a red crisscross. He winds himself up with a kick and throws himself into the boys.

Blood starts to come off on the other slam-dancers. I look at my arm, the skin there starts to look like it could be anything. I test the blade there but I can’t press down. Peter returns, winded. Splashed ’em, he says. God, that’s good. And he jumps back.

I try to imagine myself at swim practice, my arms marked. I wouldn’t be able to swim with open cuts. I take out a cigarette and light it. The smoke takes the image away.

Dick-face, Peter says, reappearing in front of me. Blood now dried dark on his arms, across his white T-shirt. Give me that. And he takes my Zippo. He runs fluid over his hands and closes the tank, and flicks it across one hand and then the other. His hands on fire now, blue-white, he raises them over his head and spins back into the bodies. Ha! he shouts, and goes down to the floor, and then up again, and with his hands still burning he leaps from the edge of the stage and lands across a tangle of boys. His fire-hands go out.

I am watching Elizabeth. She has been drinking, talking all night to a cute skinhead boy about four inches shorter than she is. I find myself wondering if he will grow those four inches this year. He looks almost our age.

My sister is such a slut, Peter says, as if he can see what I am watching. He sits down. She’s had every skin between here and Portsmouth between her legs, he says, and he lights a cigarette. He just moved here from Boston and he’s heard of her, I bet. He spits on the floor behind us.

According to my mother, I’m over at Peter’s. According to Peter’s mom, Elizabeth has taken us to a late movie. Somehow after the show we go to an apartment building up off Congress Street, where loud music sprays the sidewalk and seventy-odd skinheads and punk kids drink beer and try to have sex. Peter and I are hiding outside the house, in a shadow now, trying to avoid the mean skins, our coats wrapped around us. They are threatening to shave our heads. Make you a proper skin, they say. Crewcuts are for hippies. We went outside when one of them asked me what I was.

What do you mean, I said.

Are you a gook or what? Eh, Charlie? Eh?

She’s passed out for sure, Peter says, looking down the dark street. Street lamps post bleary light in rows away to either side. Lucky for us all those skins want a piece of her more than they want to shave our heads. I’m sure they’re upstairs on her. His breath clouds on the winter air, a personal weather.

Peter takes my Zippo out of his pocket, twists and pours lighter fluid onto his thumb. He closes it and running it along his jeans, lights the lighter and then his thumb. A blue candle of his hand in the dark. He holds the thumb against the trash in the can next to us and the cartons and paper in there catch. If a cop comes, he says, we can pretend we’re vagrants. He walks over to the side of the house. Wait here, he says. I need to go get my sister.

The fire gets larger. A peaceful warmth, some light for this dark corner, a bit of bitter smoke. I take a cigarette out and light it. For no reason I can account for, I am calm, searching myself for panic and not finding it. The cold is like a hand at my back, pushing me forward toward this burning can. I see Elizabeth’s car, and go over to sit on the hood, where I wait until Peter comes out, his sister and another girl with him. They are helping Elizabeth walk but it looks actually like she’s floating, carrying them with her as she flies. Wait, she says, and turns her head to the side, and dull amber vomit chokes out of her in a spurt. Steam rises where it hits the ground. Her head looks like its bleeding, but closer I see it’s actually an A for anarchy, painted there, shiny. Like it was done in lipstick. Fuck, she says. Oh, fuck me. She drops, cross-legged, onto the ground beside her vomit.

Peter fishes through his coat and comes up with his pack. He holds a cigarette out to his sister. Here, he says.

Thanks, she says. He lights it for her.

She looks into the trash fire and starts laughing.

Oh, fucking A, she says. A camp-out.

Peter taps on the shoulder of the other girl, a broad-shouldered swimmer I recognize now from meets. She swims for Falmouth, Butterfly. Her hair is cut short, almost like mine and Peter’s. She leans in and says, Yeah. I’ll drive. Peter hoists his sister up and loads her into the backseat, and I climb into the shot-gun seat.

Hang on, he says, as the girl settles behind the wheel. He runs back to the trash fire and for a second, I think he’s going to put it out, but instead he kicks it against the side of the building, where it falls over the snowy ground. He picks up a stone and hucks it through the window. FIRE, he yells after the broken glass, and he hoofs it to the car, tossing himself into my lap. The door shuts with a bang, the flames splash the other trash cans, which start to roar, and the girl beside us is cursing, quietly, flooring the pedal as the wheels grind and then catch. Soon we are on the road out to Cape Elizabeth.

Peter says, Fee. Look back. Is she passed out?

I peek back to see her staring, wide-eyed, her hands crossed in front of her, laid across the seat. One hand cradles nothing, and then on the floor, I see the cigarette, which I pluck and hand to Peter. She dropped this, I say. He raises his eyebrow and then pushes down the car-lighter. As he relights her cigarette, the orange ring lights his face. He inhales hugely and smoke pours out of his nostrils.

Why’d you do that, the girl driving us asks.

It’s one way to make sure she can’t go back, he says, and he laughs. I fucking hate those pricks, he says, and finally leans into me, and I do not move for the rest of the ride.

 

I get home late. My mother waits, a single light in the kitchen, reading a book she puts down the moment I walk through the door.

Is it rebellion, my mother asks, my hand between her hands as she rubs off the polish with a cloth, the acetone on it making me dizzy. I sit on the shut toilet seat. I want to scratch my neck.

Just tell me you aren’t sniffing it, she says, and I say, Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.

Oh great. Honey, listen. Please remember that people at school are worried about you and that this reflects on me. It’ll be hard for you to be friendly with the boys on the swim team if you do stuff like this.

Good, I say. They’re ridiculous and I hate them.

She lets my hands go and pats my hair. That word. Will this shampoo out, she asks.

I don’t know, I say, hoping that it doesn’t.

A regular little iconoclast, aren’t you. I guess I’ll stop while I’m ahead. Is this blood? She looks me over, as if I were someone else’s child, and I try to stay calm. Don’t say I didn’t try, she says.

I don’t want her to wash the blood off. It’s not like I got a mohawk, I say.

 

The next day, when Peter and I walk into rehearsal together, identical hair, identical Goodwill clothes, Big Eric asks, Are you cadets or sopranos?

Soprano cadets, I say.

We’ll learn Britten’s War Requiem someday then, he says. We’ll all get crew cuts. He taps the music stand. Tck tck tck. His promise to remove me, if I showed bizarre behavior, broken.

 

20

 

DID YOU SEE his arms, Zach asks me.

We are in his beige room, naked. The afternoon on Sunday. His parents are out, his brothers are out, and in an odd way, it feels as if this is our house. I get up to get a glass of water, and look at myself naked, with my short hair. I have a premonition then, of my future. That this is the start of what it looks like. I go back, and settle next to Zach. He has been asking me questions about Peter.

I didn’t, I say. What did they look like?

Like cigarette burns. Round, red scabs, blistered. James Dean used to do it, apparently.

I think of James Dean. Peter has the same look, at certain angles. The raised eyebrows, the beautiful eyes, the way the whole face seems to lean forward to get your confidence, and, having it, whispers something just for you. I say, He’s going to pierce his ear.

Big deal. Does he burn himself? Zach rubs my head. I like it, he said the first day. Soft.

I haven’t seen anything of it. But I’ll look for it, I say. And I have a memory of pale arms in the dark, hands burning.

I look down to see my hand on Zach’s penis, the silver nail. Soon we will get dressed, leave, we will speak as if none of this is happening. I’ll find out, I say, and unspoken in the air is, to tell you next time.

Zach turns over my forearm. Plain skin, he says.

 

21

 

FREDDY MORAN’S HOUSE takes up most of the plot it sits on, a narrow stripe of yard barely surrounds it. He lives in Cape Elizabeth not far from me, in one of the town’s newer houses, on Old Ocean House Road. This house is newly made, the carpeting new, and Freddy has an enormous upstairs room, a sunroof he can climb through to the roof deck, furnished by his telescope, on a steel tripod mounted by bolts into the wood.

Some days I feel like a perfectly normal boy, and this is one of those. Freddy and I eat pizza his mom made and watch television. We wait for the sky to be dark enough to see stars.

Do you like the X-Men, Freddy asks, during another commercial break.

I do, I say. Who’s your favorite character?

Charles Xavier, he says. I like that he can go into peoples minds and see what they’re thinking.

Phoenix is mine, I say. She can blow a hole through the world if she’s not careful.

Christmas is near and Mrs. Moran comes into the room suddenly with a box that turns out to be full of decorations: pine boughs, modeled birds with real feathers and wire feet to twine around branches, twinkling lights. She begins to put the string lights up around the edge of the ceiling. Hi boys, she asks. How’s everything?

Good, I say.

Are you excited to get away at the end of January, she asks.

I am, I say. I really am.

I thought your solo was wonderful, Fee. You have a remarkable voice.

I think of my mom, hear her say, accept all compliments with thank yous. Thank you, I say.

She taps tacks into place with a tiny ball-peen hammer. Freddy tells us he’s getting a solo soon, for the Benjamin Britten concert in April, at Easter. We’re looking forward to him singing for us.

The television chatters away, merciless. I hadn’t heard that Freddy was getting this, but it makes sense. I want to say, Take your son out of harm’s way. I want to say, Run, go on, get out of here. I want it to be like in the movies, where the dangers are ridiculous disasters no one faces regularly, like nurses who deliberately shoot air into your veins, or villains from Russia who want to fake international incidents. If a robber were to knock at the door, I would know how to respond.

We go upstairs to look at stars. There’s worlds above this one, a night sky full of separate infernos so far away they look to us like they are only tiny lights, and easily extinguished. Freddy and I try to make out the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, but the sky, clear as it looks, won’t allow it.

 

February.

I remember that this night is very dark. I remember the tour as long dark nights and short days, and starchy, sleepy food. I remember families looking at us, trying to decide what we are.

The motel we have in Bar Harbor is dark, every window shut against a cold night. Beside me, Peter smokes, the only light besides the security light comes from the tip of his cigarette, getting brighter and darker. We sit together in the oily parking lot, on a snowbank. Peter’s crying and I’m pretending not to notice, even though it is the single reason I’m keeping him company.

I’m not, he says. Fuck him. I’m not.

The school concerts had finished to uniform applause, everyone clapping thirty times, more or less. I’d started to count, to know the time it takes for your hands to get sick of each other. The church concerts were bizarre, little pale white-haired men and women emerging slowly from the pews to escort each other home, as if we were visiting a country where only the elderly prayed. We arrived in Bar Harbor, and went to the spitting rock, where the tide shoots up through a throat-shaped tunnel from an entrance just below the water, to blow a spume, accompanied by a basso whump, like a merman clearing his throat. Other such attractions followed, ending in a fish-and-chips dinner eaten in an early, unwelcome dark. After unpacking and watching television for an indeterminate period of time, Peter came to our door, knocking, and drew me out. Zach’s eyes as I left indicated he didn’t want to wait up long for me. The whole trip long, Adam and Merle fell asleep quickly and deeply, snoring loudly together and not waking each other, and so we had been having what felt to me like a busman’s honeymoon. For two busmen.

I’ll be right back, I’d said to Zach. That had been some hours ago.

Now we sit in the parking lot surrounded by what seems a slow nighttime convulsion of darkened houses and bright streets and air that tastes like cold metal between breaths of a cigarette. I’ll tell this time, Peter says to me. Fucking unbelievable.

Was anyone else there, I ask, as if it makes all the difference. As if there are details that will order what is currently resisting order. Peter came back to the room, and Big Eric had emerged from the bathroom with his fly open, partly aroused. Nothing had happened like that since the tour began, and we had all begun to pretend again that nothing happened ever, of that sort. It comes to me that there was a time when we could have said something, but I can’t think of what that time was. As if I have been sleepwalking all these years, singing through a dream, waking only occasionally. And this time out here will end and the dream pick up again.

Our breath looks like smoke. As Peter twists his cigarette, looking at it, I think of what Zach told me about cigarette burns. I turn, meet his eyes. He sees what is there a moment too late, as I lunge, knocking him into the snowbank. His cigarette bounces to wink a few feet away, and he makes a crying groan underneath me. What the fuck, he says, sobbing. What.

With my teeth, so I don’t let go of his wrists, I pull back the sleeve of his sweater, to see his wrists, crisscrossed with pale red lines, some purple, raised circles. Almost a tic-tac-toe. Knife sketches.

What are those, I ask.

What do they look like, faggot, he says. Just leave me alone. Fuck off me. Get the fuck off me. He pushes, unable to move against me, and then he manages, rolling us over so that he pops up and off. Dick, he says, kicking snow across the top of me. Dick. The snow on my face begins to melt.

Peter, I say. I love you. I sit up, to see his face, dark and wet.

What. Is. This. He yells each word. What. Shut. Up.

A light comes on in a room next to the lot. I jump up and run, hear Peter following me. As I head for the corner, and begin climbing the far snowbank there, I hear Peter’s feet dig into the crunchy snow, and it is like he is climbing my heart. In the lot on the other side of the snowbank, I head for a space between two parked cars and we sit, each facing over the other’s shoulder, assuming the automatic position that allows us to look out, each way. We are panting, and Peter pulls his pack of cigarettes out, and as he holds it up to light it, he notices that the filters were smashed off when I rolled him over. You fuck, he says, holding the pack up for me to inspect. He flicks the filter off and lights the cigarette, spitting out tobacco shreds as he exhales.

I wanted to kill you, he says, chuckling.

Peter, I say.

Shut up. Just . . . you’re my fucking best friend, okay? But be a friend. Just, uh . . .

Okay, I say, and reach for his cigarette.

 

We do not finish the tour.

According to the police report filed by Freddy Moran and his parents, Freddy returned to his room after watching television in my room with Zach and Adam and Merle, at around 9 P.M. on the night of January 27. He walked in to find Big Eric lying in bed, naked and erect and fondling himself. He appeared to be alone. Big Eric began talking to him in a casual manner, as if nothing was different, and asked if he had seen Peter. Freddy could only reply that he had been in my room, and that Peter and I had left together and not returned. At which point Big Eric, referred to in the report as Mr. Gorendt, became agitated.

Dungeons & Dragons, eh? Is that it? he apparently asked.

Freddy reported that there had been, to his knowledge, no game planned for tonight, as tomorrow was to be an early day. At which point, Freddy asked after the whereabouts of Little Eric, in the report known as Eric Johannsen. He had advanced into the room only a little.

He’s right here, Mr. Gorendt replied, and pointed to the floor by his bed. Freddy Moran approached to confirm this, to see what appeared to be either an asleep or unconscious Eric Johannsen, he couldn’t be sure. Eric Johannsen was later confirmed to have been asleep, as the result of a sleeping pill dosed to him by Mr. Gorendt so that he would not interfere with the seduction of either Peter or Freddy.

Eric Johannsen was naked. Freddy waited to see a rise in his chest, to confirm that he was still alive, and then he looked at Mr. Gorendt, sitting calmly, now pulling a sheet over himself, as if he were cold. He’s sound asleep, Mr. Gorendt said, and dropped a towel over him. Freddy Moran drew back.

I know that if Big Eric had been photographed in that hour he wouldn’t have recognized himself at all. Freddy pretended to be looking for something, and then at the door, he bolted, running, full speed. He knew Big Eric wouldn’t chase him naked. He pounded on the door for Zach to let him in, who did, and he called his mother. I’m okay, he said. I’m not injured or in pain, just scared. At this point, Big Eric was pounding the door, now locked against him, bellowing various threats. Freddy’s mother called the police, who were there in minutes, already having been called by the owners of the hotel, frightened into thinking Big Eric was a stranger. They didn’t, they said, recognize him as being the kind man who had checked in.

The police found Peter and I in the parking lot, where we had fallen asleep, beside each other, between the cars. They had feared on first seeing us that we were dead. Like Freddy thought of Little Eric.

 

22

 

I HAD ALWAYS wondered exactly how many, had tried to figure it out, but the twelve counts surprised me. Me and almost every friend I had in the choir, except for Merle and Eric B. Adam had been a surprise. He had brown hair, was stocky, was not his type as I had come to know it. He resembled me. Until recently twelve boys represented half the choir. I saw us then in a dim procession, Big Eric was Saturn, he had swallowed us, out of fear and gluttony, and now we marched out of him as out of a cave, and overhead, a now-happy Ralph, winged not like angels but with the tiny brown wings of a sparrow or a phoebe. He would perch, hold the walls tight, as if he didn’t trust his wings to hold him up. When nothing else had.

 

23

 

IT’S NOT YOUR fault, my dad tells me.

I can tell, he doesn’t understand. He can’t understand. How it really is all my fault. We are out in back of the house. I can see my grandmother, slicing at her cutting board. I can’t see what she’s cutting, but I can tell she’s cooking something for me. When the first news of the scandal came out in the papers, and Mom and Dad told her, she stayed quiet. She sighed, and it sounded like a sigh that had been learned under a different sorrow. Her face had deepened for a moment then, in a way I had never seen but would see again, many times.

It is my fault, I say.

He draws a deep breath. We love you, Aphias. And we feel terrible, that all of this happened and we weren’t able to protect you. He kneels as he says this, and now our eyes are even.

His eyes dark like the color the Atlantic takes, when there’s no land in sight.

I say it again. It is my fault. It really is all my fault. My face is running wet now. It is all my fault.

And here my grandmother comes running across the lawn. I have never seen her run. She is crying also. And she pulls me into her skirt. Aphias, she says. Aphias. Come in and see what Granmi has made for you. Come in and see.

 

Peter and I, next to the sea. On a beach in Falmouth, a sand spit. The far water ripples like smoke. It’s over, he says. He’s in jail.

He’s in prison, I say.

Peter had to change schools when the kids found out. He goes to Waynefleet Academy now, a private school in Portland. He helps pay for it by bar backing at his father’s bar. His angel-face now a study in waiting. A man coming on in him, too, there’s added sturdiness now, every month a soft edge loses to a harder one. What do you do, when the criminal goes away? Where’s the rest of the story?

The criminal is still here. Story, here.

 

The sheet music told us, what you are trying to do, boys have tried to do for five centuries. They used to castrate the boys with the most beautiful voices. We were afraid to find this out, but also, excited. This seemed, if not reasonable, understandable. To always be able to sing like this. Five hundred years of beauty. When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always open. Be like a bell, Big Eric would say. But he didn’t know. We weren’t something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air.

Fifteen. I lose my voice. My new voice sounds like a burned string rubbing. Singing is touching, you bang the air and the air moves something inside you and the thing moved registers, says, That is a sound. When we sing to each other we are touching each other through this sleeve of air between us. When my voice changes I know this new creature is capable of no significant touch, no transformations. This voice cannot erase me, take me over and set me aside. This new voice has no light. It can barely push enough air aside to tell people, Hello, Good Morning, Good Night. I stop talking as much.

I hear my recorded new voice in a tape my school music teacher makes, and it sounds like a stranger. If I called after myself in the street, with this voice, I wouldn’t hear me. I would keep walking, away.

The memory I have of my old voice, the soprano of my childhood, is a memory of desire. For the voice to unstring itself. To rise free of the vocal cords, shed the body like a cormorant sheds the sea after plucking its catch. Not to fly but to be flight, not to carry but to be the carrying.

I go to classes, swim. Swimming is good, shucks me off of me. In the water, nothing. No harm anywhere, and the repetition excites me. Everything, when I feel it, feels bad. The swim team avoids me, even when I win. Zach and I continue to see each other. Peter and I go out with his sister sometimes to “straightedge” shows where no one drinks or does drugs or smokes. Peter lights up only on the way home. He has to change schools now again. Sometimes I wonder if he knew why I always asked him to never tell. Why I helped Big Eric hide in plain sight. I didn’t have an answer for Peter then but he never asked. I have an answer, now.

Hiding him hid me.