I fix my eyes on the family-photo wall. Mom and Dad at senior prom, wedding at St. Matt’s, me and Nat mugging in pirate hats, the four of us on Sunset Beach in matching white shirts and chinos.

“How’ve you been, bud?” he asks me.

“Fine.”

“Still miss you on Sunday.”

I nod.

“I see those great parents of yours in the pew all by themselves.”

I look at the floor.

“It’s been what‌—‌four, five months?”

“I guess.”

“That’s a long time.” He holds up a hand. “I’m not judging. I just think you must feel lonely. We miss that guitar of yours in folk group.”

My face burns. He steps up to me and puts his hands on my shoulders. He’s wearing a blue polo shirt tucked into khakis and he gives off a childish smell, like Wonder bread and school antiseptic.

“Brandon, I want to tell you something, okay? Something I maybe didn’t make clear enough when we talked. Can you look at me?” I can’t meet his eyes. I settle on his left nostril. “The Big Guy upstairs still loves you. He understands what it’s like to be a young boy, these swarms of strange feelings filling up your heart‌…‌” He knocks a fist into his chest. “He’s on your side, you know? And as long as you pray for the strength to live life the way he asks, he will give you that gift. I know he will. I kinda have an ‘in’ with him.”

He grins and nudges me, and when I don’t do anything he nods until I nod back. I hate giving in. I want to be casually profane like Nat is when she comes home from Bennington and tries to shock us with stuff from her Theology of The Simpsons class. I want to say I left church for a reason, and I’m not coming back. But when Father Mike walks in a room I’m ten years old again. I’m traveling the altar midway through Mass, lowering my brass candle snuffer over one, two, three flames while he watches from his big chair with a gentle smile, making sure I’ve got everything right.

“Can I give you a quick blessing?” he asks me.

“Okay.”

He thumbs a cross on my forehead and starts in with this intense Lord, defend Brandon prayer. I wonder if this is a stealth exorcism. Plaid flashes in the kitchen doorway and I know Mom and Dad are listening in, hoping to God it does the trick but ready to set their jaws and keep loving me if it doesn’t. I don’t know which makes me feel worse.

“Amen?” he says.

“Amen,” I whisper.

“That was really nice, Mike.” My parents slip back in the room reverently, like he’s just made me a saint. Mom hands him a short stack of pancakes on my favorite blue plate.

“My pleasure.”

“You just worry so much. His first trip without us,” says Dad.

“Well, he’s a man now. He needs independence. He’ll make good decisions, I know it.”

He winks at me.

“I have to go,” I say.

Mom and Dad descend on me. Hug from Mom, shoulder pat from Dad, desperate last-minute directives from both:

“Call us every night.”

“Always lock the door.”

“Be good to Becky.”

“Don’t let her drive on back roads. She’s not as experienced as you.”

“Remember what we practiced: slow down for trucks, conservative on turns‌—‌”

“He knows, Greg.”

“And don’t blow your savings on food, all right? Mom stocked the RV for a reason.”

“Okay.”

“And can you do me a favor, sweetie?” says Mom.

“Sure.”

Please rewire your brain circuitry so we can go back to normal.

Mom doesn’t say that, not out loud. Instead she goes to the lampstand and pulls out an old TV Guide. David Darras smolders on the cover in his Sim costume, the same picture I used to keep under my mattress and take out at night for inspirational purposes. Iconic white suit, pale silvery skin, ice-blue hair. Mom gives the cover a shy smile and tucks a blonde curl behind her ear. It weirds me out. I never thought she paid attention to Castaway Planet.

“If you do meet David Darras,” she says, “can you get this signed for me?”

“Oh, the perfect man.” My father does a dreamy sigh.

“Will you shush!”

“Brandon, it’s time you knew. Your mother has a crush on an android.”

They all crack up, Mom and Dad and Father Mike the loudest of all. Coffee sours in my stomach. If a nice little anxiety disorder wasn’t programmed into my motherboard, I’d say So do I and watch them implode. Instead I take handshakes and back-slaps, one more ten-dollar bill from Dad in case of emergency.

“Brandon?” says Father Mike.

“Yep.”

“Remember everything I said.”

“I will.”

The Sunseeker’s parked at the end of the driveway, gassed up and gleaming like it’s waiting for Dad’s hiking gear and field guides, Mom’s plastic bin of nonperishable snacks, Nat’s heavy black boots and graphic novels. I lug my stuff down the walk and shove it all in. My suitcase, my guitar, the pouch with my savings and graduation cash, the Phillies duffel bag I’ve had since I was nine. When the RV door clangs shut, I hurry to the bushes at the edge of our yard, kneel down in the dirt, and throw up as quietly as possible under the lowest branches. Then I pop two mints and slip Plastic Sim in my shirt pocket, where I can see him. I have a twenty-minute drive to turn back into the person Abel thinks I am, and I need all the help I can get.

Chapter Two

Abel McNaughton lives in a house that’s like ninety percent glass. It’s across the river on the west shore, halfway up a mountain in a development where you can’t see houses from the road, just pine trees and gated driveways. The McNaughtons have custom-made redwood gates that are never closed; the one time my parents picked me up here, my mother said the gates were an awful waste of money and weren’t redwoods an endangered species? She had a lot to say about the house, too: so much glass, too hard to keep clean, and any lunatic could walk right up to it and see into all your business.

I spot Abel as soon as the house comes into view. The fourth wall of his bedroom is one big window, so it’s like I’m seeing him on a giant TV. Black silk robe, pajama bottoms with neon squiggles, white hair a spider-plant mess. When we did our season finale recap three weeks ago he’d just re-bleached it; he used too much gentian violet and loved the surprise purplish tinge. “It’ll fade in a day, but whatever,” he’d said, shrugging on his vintage Purple Rain shirt to match.

I shift the Sunseeker into park by his mom’s neglected petunia bed. Abel doesn’t notice me. He’s standing in the doorway of his walk-in closet tossing clothes at a huge black bag, and the fact that this is probably the first and only packing he’s done all week makes me want to deliver an athletic kick to the seat of his pajamas. He’s talking to himself. At least I think he is. Then I see this big tanned hand shoot out from the closet, wagging Abel’s acid-yellow Jesus vs. Mothra tee. Abel grins and yanks the guy into view‌—‌tan and tousled, shiny green shorts, a bad bicep tat I guarantee says something stupid in Chinese. Of course they start kissing, because even though Abel and I are just business partners I know exactly the kind of business he gets up to when I’m not around, and now they collapse on the closet floor and all I see are four feet nuzzling and I know they’re whispering sexy things I can’t imagine without feeling unzipped and turned inside out.

HHREEEEAAOONNNNK. Crap. I lift my elbow off the horn, but it’s too late.

Here comes Abel. He’s creeping up to his window like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits, shading his eyes in the late-morning sun. He points down at me, and then he rips his robe open and does a goofball shimmy, pale belly pressed to the glass. My eyes squinch shut. I see the cover of the book Father Mike gave me, the clean blond boy thrusting a fist in the air: Put on the Brakes! The Cool Kid’s Guide to Mastering Sexual Temptation.