He let me out in front of the Delta Barracks at the Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, dazed, confused, glad to be alive, keyed up, and angry—all of those. When I’d closed the truck door, I turned to ask him through the window who he was and how I could get hold of him again, but he pulled away from me, looking straight ahead through the windshield, and was gone. I didn’t exist for him anymore. He probably was beginning to think I shouldn’t have existed for him in the first place.

I don’t know why I tried getting his number. I must have been in shock—or unguarded and being honest. I sometimes wonder what he would have said, and done, if he’d heard what I asked.

The guys were still heavy into their pledge hazing party in the senior rooms of the upper-class Alpha Barracks. Hargrave provided military-discipline schooling for seventh-to-twelfth-grade boys who needed extra discipline. When you got to be a senior, had gone through all six years at Hargrave, and were star athletes, though, you were given privileges and were cocks of the walk. I was a new guy—eighth grade, fourteen-years-old, but small for my age and I’d just started at the school. Hazing was in order.

All of the lights in the senior rooms were on and I could see them cavorting inside through the windows like banshees. Probably all drunk as skunks. They weren’t allowed to drink, of course, but they were privileged, especially those in tight with Coach Johnson. They probably thought I’d been drunk when they took me out too, but I wasn’t.

They’d stripped me down to shorts, tied my hands behind my back, put a burlap sack over my head, and drove me in the trunk of Coach’s Impala. Conrad, our senior football team quarterback was fucking Coach and thus had privileges with Johnson’s car when he could get away with it.

“Where you leaving me?” I’d asked when they hauled me out of the trunk after what seemed like a half hour of driving over rough roads, and relieved me of the burlap bag and wrist restraints.

“That’s for you to find out,” Sly, another senior, big on the basketball team, said, giving me an ugly grin and getting back in the car, where three of the other senior cadets were laughing and catcalling.

And then I was alone. It was the end of the road, stopping at the shore a big lake of some sort. I was just in my briefs, bare-footed. After deciding they weren’t coming back for me, I began to walk away from the water, on the grassy verge of the gravel road to protect my feet.

I stepped off to the side as headlights approached. A Ford pickup, not new by any means, coasted past me and further toward the shore of the lake. It slowed down as it went by me and I could see there was one guy in it, giving me the twice over, but it was too dark out to get a good look at him. He did stop, continuing toward the lake, but then he did a U-turn and came back to me.

A window was cranked down and a guy—thirties maybe, a redneck, decent-looking but obviously a country guy, bare-chested, muscular—talked to me with a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth.

“Night jogging in the altogether, are we? Easier when you’re swinging free, is it?” he asked, an easy, leery smile painted on his face. “Little young to be out at night, ain’t you? About twelve, right?”

“I’m fourteen,” I answered a bit indignantly. My size was probably why the seniors liked to pick on me more than some of the other new cadets. I told him about Hargrave and the military discipline and hazing, which covered what I was doing out here just in my shorts. “And where is out here?” I asked. “And what are you doing here?”

“We’re by the Cherrystone Lake, on Cherrystone Creek Road. A hard fifteen miles northwest of Chatham. This road don’t go nowhere but to the lake. And you best be glad I’m here. I were goin’ fishin’ in the lake, but I could just as well go boy huntin’ if you need a ride home.”

“You were going to fish at night?” I asked.