Cammy Elliot (Childhood Friend): Our geometry teacher, Mr. Wyland, the same teacher who dogs us through Algebra I and Algebra II, and drags you to stand at the board and demonstrate your limitation to the class, he folds his arms, sucking his tongue to inside one cheek of his mouth, lowers his eyes at Rant, and says, "What seems to be the problem, Mr. Casey?"

And Rant ducks his head, his chin nodding down, he tilts his hips up, points with the gun fingers of both hands at his crotch, where the zipper is tented, pointed, poked out so stiff you can see the silver teeth of the steel metal inside. "Mr. Wyland, sir," Rant says, "I've had a serious erection here for going on two hours…"

No lie. A gasp comes, but not from the A-plus rows up front. It's more the B students who believed what they heard. Back in the room a couple rows, some C-minus kid snorted a laugh, lips shut, inside a closed mouth.

"As a fellow matured male, Mr. Wyland," Rant says, "you can appreciate the painful and potentially injurious nature of this situation."

Mr. Wyland, all the air come out of him in one push. One exhale. His folded arms sunk into the collapsed chest of him. His lips peel open, sagging so you can see his bottom teeth, the color of bone shadowed with the brown of tobacco.

"You think maybe somebody should take a look at it?" Rant says on, pulling his eyebrows together, folding worry lines between his eyes.

The geometry equation chalked on the board disappeared, gone from the room. Nothing but chalk-dust chicken scratchings in the same room with the low-down, dirty miracle of a teenage hard-on. Inside his head, Mr. Wyland's supercomputing the correct answer. Him stood up to look dumb in front of folks.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Wyland's beyond trapped. If this teacher slams Rant, merely laughes and tells this punk kid to sit down and concentrate on numbers, the school's looking at a lawsuit. If the kid's got a serious medical emergency, and his dingus turns purple and drops off, the school district will be settling that claim for the next ten million dollars of budget talks. Sure, Rant has a history of disruption. Sure, Rant could've presented the situation in a less invasive manner. But none of that will count for much in a courtroom, while Wyland stands in the witness box and tells a jury why he ridiculed and humiliated a student who was possibly dying of gangrene.

Cammy Elliot: Little flicks of Mr. W's eyes, a twitch of his ear, and a gulp of his Adam's apple, only those signify his brain's at work. His face floods from pale to pink to dark red. His whole face almost tongue red. Like time's stopped.

"Mr. Wyland," a boy's voice says.

Danny Perry sticks one hand up in the air and says, "Hey, Mr. W!" He waves the hand, his fingers flickering fast, and Danny says, "I need the Health Room, too. For the same situation."

Brenda Jordan (Childhood Friend): From what I recall, Rant only had maybe two shirts. One pair of jeans. Leastways, that's all we saw. The same green-plaid shirt with long sleeves to hide the mess of teeth marks on his arms. And a long-sleeve blue chambray shirt with pearl snaps instead of buttons. You could hear when Casey got nervous, because he'd snap and unsnap the cuffs, popping little snap sounds in the back of the class.

Cammy Elliot: The outline of Rant's boner slung sideways in his jeans, almost pulsing with his heartbeat, he went to the office. His shirt cuffs snapping loud and fast as popcorn.

Silas Henderson (Childhood Friend): The oldest female excuse out of any class is claiming you have "cramps." Nothing but code for a chance to take a couple aspirin and skip the trigonometry midterm. Compared to that, a fellow's got nothing.

Lowell Richards (Teacher): A clear corollary formed between sunny weather and the number of boys suffering from painful penile erections. At issue wasn't the penises, but the failure to occlude them while in their turgid state. Furthermore, the district's legal counsel advised that a dress code requiring constraining, modest, fully binding undergarments would be impossible to enforce and serve the negative purpose of drawing increased attention to the issue.

Our chief effort intended to deal with the issue of engorged phalluses obliquely and indirectly. Legal counsel advised no direct condemnation of erections on school property. No district representative was to acknowledge or attempt to mask or resolve any obvious erections.

Cammy Elliot: The biggest secret in Rant's life was his clothes. At home, he had a closet full of shirts and pants and jeans and vests. The hangers packed together so close the closet rod sagged in the middle from the weight. The trouble was, Irene Casey couldn't not be creative. She wouldn't not express herself. She was always trying some new skill, embroidering sunflowers and ivy leaves. Smiling half-moons and stars. Trying iron-on patches or colors of glitter paint. Chrome rivets. Batik and tie-dye. Mrs. Casey would sit up half a night, hunched over and stitching herself blind in bad light, trying to make regular clothes into something special.

Wouldn't hurt Rant's pride to wear rainbow glitter and embroidery to high school, but he couldn't tolerate what kids said about his ma's work. Kids saying she was a terrible artist. Saying she had no kind of talent. He wasn't wearing his heart on his sleeve. It's more like she'd sewed her own heart on Rant's sleeve.

Logan Elliot (Childhood Friend): Casey had the crowd of us whipped into a frantic. Shouting equal rights for hard-ons, saying how we're oppressed, and burning jock straps in the school parking lot.

Leif Jordan (Childhood Friend): Rant advocating for us, our demands included a therapeutic, all-hours lunchroom, since it's a known impossibility to eat food and maintain a woody. We asked for nothing short of equal recognition of our biological…But the next word stumped us. Should we say «obstacles»? "Handicaps"? «Disabilities»? This last word, we tortured over.

We finally settled on the word "burden," asking for "full and equal recognition of the burden inherent in the male anatomy." Hearing how «burden» sounded fine and noble.

Bodie Carlyle: Not much in all his dry years of algebra had trained Mr. W to deal with a potentially life-threatening emergency boner situation. Being displayed as a geometry idiot, or sporting wood in class—either way, you were trading away your dignity. At least this way it was Rant posing the tough problem and Wyland forced to sweat out the figuring with all those eyes waiting on him.

Leif Jordan: We'd maybe talk some doctor into calling it "chronic boner syndrome."

Mary Cane Harvey (Teacher): Rant Casey told me himself: "This here's my inoculation against ever being embarrassed and humiliated in geometry, ever again."

Cammy Elliot: Had kids, politelike, raising their hand to say, "Beg pardon, Miss Harvey…" Saying, "I'd enjoy nothing more than diagramming that lovely sentence, but I'm suffering a chunk of pig iron so beet red it's starting to pain me…"

Cross my heart. Kids said, "Could be, if I got myself a breath of fresh air…" Until half the class was outside.