“It’s tacky,” he declared, wading through the boxes. For the rest of my life, I would live only in places with hardwood floors.

Arthur squatted to the ground, so that for a moment I could see only the greasy swell of his hair. “Oh my God”—then came his laugh—“look at this.” When he stood he was holding a dead deer head high in the air, like a sacrifice.

I wrinkled my nose. “Please tell me that isn’t real.”

Arthur stared into the animal’s gentle eyes for a moment, as if trying to decide. “Of course it’s real,” he concluded. “My dad hunts.”

“I don’t agree with hunting,” I said, tartly.

“But you agree with hamburgers.” Arthur dumped the deer into an open box. One sculptural antler curled into the air, a bony beanstalk that led to nowhere. “You just let other people do your dirty work.”

I folded my arms across my chest. I meant I didn’t agree with hunting for sport, but I didn’t want to argue with him and prolong this little field trip. We’d been downstairs just a few minutes, and already I felt pruney and cold, like skin that’s been resting for hours underneath a damp bathing suit. “What do you want to show me?” I pushed.

Arthur doubled over, digging through another box, examining whatever he exhumed and tossing it aside when he determined it wasn’t what he was looking for. “Aha!” He held up what looked like an encyclopedia and waved me over. I sighed and followed the path he’d forged through the junkyard, realizing once I was by his side that it was a yearbook he had in his hands.

Arthur flipped to the back inside cover, tilting the page so I could read the note next to his pink fingertip.

Art-man,

I’m not going to get all gay and shit and tell you what a good friend you are, so fuck off!

Bart-man

I read the note three times before I understood. Bart-man was Dean, a play on his last name, Barton. “What year was this?”

“Nineteen ninety-nine.” Arthur licked his fingertip and began to turn the pages. “Sixth grade.”

“And you were friends with Dean?”

“He was my best bestie friend.” Arthur giggled nastily. “Look.” He stopped on a collage of candids. Students joking around at lunch, making funny faces on Super Saturday, posing with a giant green dragon, the Bradley mascot. There was a photo in the lower-left-hand corner, fuzzy in the way all photos appear after a few years, so that our past selves seem quaint and old world, and we realize, a little disdainfully even, all we know now that we didn’t then. Arthur and Dean were winter white, their crackled smiles in desperate need of a swipe of Chap Stick. Arthur was a hefty kid, though nothing like he was hulking next to me now. But Dean. He was so puny, his arm around Arthur’s bulldog neck so slight and fragile, he could have been someone’s kid brother.

“That was right before the summer he had his growth spurt,” Arthur explained. “He got big and turned into an asshole.”

“I just can’t believe you were ever friends.” I brought my face closer to the yearbook page and squinted. I wondered if girls at Mt. St. Theresa’s upper school said that to Leah now. I just can’t believe you were ever friends with TifAni. They’d laugh their disbelief—that’s a compliment, Leah. If they weren’t saying it now, they would be soon.

Arthur snapped the yearbook shut, nearly nipping my nose. I let out a soft yelp, startled. “So don’t act like you’re the first to encounter the wrath of Dean Barton.” He thumbed the cover’s heavy gold font thoughtfully. “He will do anything to make people forget that he used sleep over at the fag’s house.”

He tucked the yearbook under his arm. I thought we would go then, but something in the corner caught his attention. He pushed deeper through the boxes and stooped, trading the yearbook for his new discovery. His back was to me so that I didn’t see what he had in his hands at first, just heard his giddy little laugh. When he turned, the body of a long, lithe rifle pointed at me. He brought the gun closer to his face, resting his fleshy cheek against the handle and hooking his finger around the trigger.

“Arthur!” I shrieked, stumbling back. I lost my balance, and my hand came down hard on an old swimming trophy. It was my bad wrist, the one I’d landed on when Dean slapped me, and I bellowed something incoherent.

“Oh my God!” Arthur doubled over with fierce, silent laughter, leaning on the rifle like a cane. “Relax”—he gasped, his face flushed a furious red—“it’s not loaded.”

“You’re really not funny.” I hobbled to my feet and squeezed my wrist, trying to blunt the pain.

Arthur wiped his eyes and sighed, exorcising the last ripples of his laughing fit. I glared at him, and he rolled his eyes mockingly. “Seriously”—he flipped his grip, holding the rifle by its muzzle and extending it to me—“it’s not loaded.”

I released my wrist reluctantly, taking the handle, a little slick from Arthur’s grasp. For a moment we were both holding it, a pair of track runners caught on camera passing the baton. Then Arthur let go and the rifle’s full weight was in one hand. It was heavier than I realized, and the barrel swung to the ground, scraping the concrete floor. I slipped my other hand under its cool belly and hoisted it upright again. “Why would your dad leave this here?”

Arthur stared at the steel nose of the gun, his glasses foggy and smudged in the trembling light. I almost snapped my fingers, yodeled, “Anyone home?” but in an instant he jutted out his hip and made his wrist go limp. “Why,” he said, his voice gone light as a feather, “to make a man out of me, silly.” He lisped the last word, “sthilly,” popped his hip more, and I laughed, not sure what the appropriate reaction was, only that laughing was what he wanted from me.

It was nearly November when the temperature turned on us, drove out the last lingering warm pockets of summer. Even so, drops of perspiration roiled beneath my sports bra as I rang Arthur’s doorbell. The assistant girls’ field hockey coach, who had been subbing for Mr. Larson for weeks, had no idea what she was doing and just told us to run five miles every day. Anything to get rid of us for an hour so she could flirt with the Bradley athletic director, who was married with two kids in the lower school. I’d taken to cutting through the woods and smoking at Arthur’s for miles three through five. Either Coach Bethany didn’t notice that I didn’t come back with the rest of the team or she didn’t care. I’m thinking the latter.

Arthur cracked open the door just enough to wedge a square of his face in the frame, a pimpled Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.

“Who else would it be?” I’d been coming by after cross-country practice for the last few weeks, ever since the day I cut class. The school caught me, no big surprise, and Mom and Dad grounded me, also no big surprise. When my parents asked why I did it, what was “so important” that I had to leave school grounds in the middle of the day, I told them I’d had a craving for the penne alla vodka slice at Peace A Pizza. “A craving?” Mom shrilled. “What are you, pregnant?” The corners of her face slouched in as she realized high schoolers get pregnant all the time and how humiliating it would be for her to have to take her fourteen-year-old daughter shopping at A Pea in the Pod.

“Mom!” I huffed, indignant even though I had no right to be. She hadn’t hit that far from the mark.

I think Bradley suspected something had happened in the lounge that day, something that had violated the Bradley code of moral excellence, but Arthur had removed my shorts before they figured out exactly what, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.

Worse than the sudden drop in my stock—Mr. Larson was gone, without explanation. “He’s left us to embrace a new opportunity” was all the administration would say. I confided in Arthur, only Arthur, about the night I spent at Mr. Larson’s house. His eyes bulged behind his filthy glasses when I told him how we’d slept in the same room. “Holy shit!” Arthur gasped. “Did you have sex with him?”