You’re standing by the side of the highway in a cold, needle-fine rain, staring in through the open window at the driver of the big black pickup who saw your stalled car and stopped to give you a lift. At the wheel is the guy who made you give him a blowjob that summer after senior year.

“Hey, look who the fuck it is. You remember me?”

You’d pretend ignorance, but the look on your face is total recognition. He couldn’t possibly have missed it.

“Been a shit load of years, right? Good thing I came along.”

It’s a long, miserable walk for miles in either direction to reach an exit, and senior year is a long time ago. Still, you hesitate.

Come on. Don’t want to be getting into a stranger’s truck, right? Hey, it’s me. Get in before you freeze your ass off.

You would rather freeze your ass off, and tell him to go fuck himself. But you don’t. Instead, you say thanks and tell him you’ve got someone coming, and how you thought it was them when he pulled over. You hesitate a moment, then with a laugh you agree you’re freezing your ass off and should probably go wait for them in your car, instead of walking. You straighten up and look back, gauging the distance to where your clunker sits.

Come on, he says, leaning across to pop open the door, it’ll give us a chance to catch up. What’s it been?

Not long enough you say, but laugh away any sting. Why, you don’t know. He laughs back, saying you got that right.

Thanks anyway, you tell him as you start to close the door for him.

Come on, he says, it’s cold and wet and you are fucking miles from anywhere, and you say, right, as you try to think if there’s anything nearby—like a house or roadside fruit stand or any chance of a cruising state police car, and how you’d have to make it across about thirty yards of broken ground before you reached the trees, if you had to outrun him, an ingrained reaction which is both feral and stupid because this isn’t high school anymore.

Come on, he says, you’re letting the cold in.

No, that’s cool, you say. I appreciate it. Hey, you add, maybe we can catch up in town.

But he says, please. Just get in the fucking truck.

It’s not the brittle, belligerent voice you remember. It’s wheedling, needy, exhausted. Different. It’s not high school and you’re not the skinny guy in gym class. You’ve got size and reach on him you didn’t have then, when it would have done you some good.

So. You get in.

Like always, he’ll have his way.

Once you’re in and settled, he steers back onto the highway. The vehicle’s smell is tangy and alien, a smell the primitive quadrants of your brain are analyzing for danger.

Isn’t this better than standing in the rain? I almost didn’t recognize you. Jeez, you got bigger’n shit. Eating good, right?

You say you barely recognized him, either, more to give yourself enough room to pretend indifference to the recollections pushing through the scabby crust of badly healed wounds.

But he goes through his goofy, impatient schtick, like how could you forget me, which you blame on drugs and alcohol, but you make a show of dredging up a memory as if all was forgiven and forgotten long ago, and entirely evaporated from your recollection, leaving no mark worth noticing.

Never thought either of us’d make it this far, right? he says leaning to check his blind side as he steers into the left lane.

You snort a short laugh in agreement. Because you didn’t think he’d live past high school. As long as you’ve known Garrison Moody he’s been a cut-rate bully. Middle school. High school. Working at the trailer plant. A shallow ferocity when he could get away with it. A craven shiftiness when he couldn’t. You lost track of him, or rather, tried to lose track of him, after he quit the trailer plant. Or got himself fired. Depending on whose story you get. You were sure he’d slip up and try pulling his act on some guy who was an authentic hard ass, and that would be the end of him.

But there he sat, not much changed from back then, same size, same tight-fitting jeans, dark tee-shirt, the logo worn away, a jacket, and ball cap, a little more scraggle of a beard on the chin line. Never much to boast of, but he always seemed to cherish it, leading with his chin.

Where’ve you been keeping yourself. I don’t see you around. You ever get out to the Horseman? A few of the guys from the old days still turn up there. Those that aren’t already dead, right? And he laughs.

Not my thing, you say, because you never had a desire to hang out where any of the guys from the old days might turn up.

You don’t go out to the Alphonse, do you? I mean, it’s okay if you do. Hey. Whatever jangles the dangle, right, ha!

No.

Those guys’d really get off with someone your size hanging around out there. Hey, you know who goes out there? Don DeWine. Remember him?

You can’t say no. You and Don worked fast food together the first year out of high school.

You still hang out with him?

Not since Burger Pete’s.

Right. But he’s still flipping the meat. From what I hear.

You don’t answer, just give back that short snort of a laugh.

You’re looking good. You been working out?

No. Couple of years hauling steel around at the trailer plant will do that.

You’re still there?

Yeah.

So. You never got out of this shithole town? How do you keep from going crazy? You gotta tell me your secret.

Working and fishing. Keeps me sane, I guess.

Never could get into that.

Fishing?

Working. Ha! Not much for fishing either.

Gets me outdoors.

Love the great outdoors. First time I saw mom blowing a guy from work was outdoors.

Whatever the topic, Garrison would always steer the conversation around to sex. Reducing family—neighbors—you—to sexual basics. You dread having to listen through it again.

Behind the shop, he goes on, that guy perched on the picnic table like he’s lunch and mom sitting on the bench having a dick sandwich. He’s leaning back, watching her, making her work for it. Still gives me a hard-on thinking about it. Just fresh air, sunshine, and primo sucking—like mother used to make.

You watch for the signs to the exit ramp, counting off the green mileage markers.

Can’t blame her though, he says. Dad’s over at the auto parts store, doing Fonetta—remember Fonetta, behind the counter? He’s doing her in the ass. She’s leaning on the counter, skirt up over her back, those jugs of hers rolling all over the countertop and Dad banging away. To be fair, it wasn’t just him. Bunch of guys would show up for some action. Carl? That little squirt of an assistant gym teacher? Even he’d stop by for some of that. Have to stand on his toes to reach her. I don’t know. Must be the smell of brand new auto parts and pussy. Does something to the chemicals in your brain. Know what I mean? A guy’s two favorite things. Cars and pussy. Some guys’d fuck a Ferrari in the tailpipe if they could. Know what I mean?

When you were younger, Garrison’s streaming riff on all things sexual was incomprehensible, your grasp of reproductive anatomy unequal to the task of translation. Age didn’t make him any easier to take.

Or, he went on, he’d be getting blowjobs out at the Horseman—Dad, not Carl. But, maybe he was, too. Shit, the women out there would do anybody. It was like a contest. But Dad? The way girls lined up for him? Guys had to keep telling him, leave some for the rest of us! Right? Who could blame them? His looks? Only thing he every gave me worth a shit, am I right? Ha. Hey, speaking of Carl, you remember that kid with the bent dick?

It’s all kind of a blur, you say, wishing it were so.

Come on. That kid. With the bent pecker? What’s his name? He’d cry if you called him Candy Cane Dick, asking him is that for Santa? You waiting for Santa to suck on that candy cane? What a pussy. Whatever happened to him, what was his name?

Not one I kept up with, you say.

We’d make him take his pants down, and there it’d be. Like Christmas.

It can’t be that Garrison has forgotten which side of the power divide you were on. Maybe he figures the acidic memories have lost their burn, neutralized by a hopeless nostalgia for the perverse delight sifted from the chaos of adolescence.

What’d’ya bet he’s married with ten kids, right? Girls in this town are so fucking bored, weird shit like that gets them off, let me tell you. Did you ever hear about Angela Allenby. Albee. Alden. Whatever the hell her name was?

At least half a dozen times, but you don’t say it.

The other girls dared her to squat her snatch down on the trailer hitch of Nolan’s truck. A fucking trailer hitch. I’m telling you. Some weird shit. This town? If I could hook up a camera and beam it out to the internet, I could make a fortune. I’d be a natural, right? Remember how you guys would crowd me in the boys’ toilet back at school? Me telling you the shit I’d seen, who was doing who, and you all jacking off. Felt like the pied piper, know what I mean?

Hard to keep up with you, is all you can think to say. He laughs at that, repeating the word hard, like he spots the joke you meant to make.

You keep watching the road, as if not quite listening, a twitch of a smile fixed in place to pretend you’re tracking with him. Maybe he doesn’t remember how you and guys like you did your best to avoid the boys’ restroom when he forced the easiest marks among his classmates to kiss each other, or take down their pants, recreating what he’d seen. Don DeWine called it acting out, sharing his fascination with the bare dicks and naked asses of the adults he was always encountering. You had to go along or get beat up. No one snitched, but guys did stop going to the toilet. School nurse wondered if it was the cafeteria food.

The way they pestered me, he went on, you’d think I was a walking porno mag. You know. I made half that shit up. I did.

Really. It slipped out before you thought.

Not all of it. I mean, there was a ton of shit going on. But you guys acted like I was fuck central, and this shit town was one big whorehouse.

Maybe it was.

I’m telling you. Out of all us guys? Not a single cherry left between us by senior year. Nobody made it out of high school a virgin. Bet money on it.

I’m not the guy to ask, you say, hoping humble ignorance will keep him from prying up the floorboards nailed down over what you’d buried.

I’m mean, nobody I know, he goes on.

All you can do is give him another grunted laugh.

He’s acting like he doesn’t remember. Like the summer after graduation never happened. Him and his guys finding you and Don catching a smoke out behind Burger Pete’s after closing. Like he doesn’t remember you and Don, cut off, having to squat on the asphalt, as Garrison gave you the usual choice—give everyone a blowjob or explain bruised faces or missing teeth tomorrow at work. He invited everyone standing with him to unzip and get in line. They all laughed, and pulled out their puds to intimidate you, watching you squat there, but no one seemed keen to join in.

More for me, he said, unzipping his pants.

He pushed his pecker at Don, who hesitated, then took the tip between his teeth.

No teeth, asshole. All the way.

Don frowned, opening his mouth up to Garrison as he pushed his half-flaccid pecker at Don’s lips.

Take it, said Garrison, suck it, as he tried to feed his saggy pecker into Don’s mouth. Don opened up and let Garrison start to feed it in. Whether taste or texture of the sliding foreskin or imagining a jizz wad on his tongue, Don got no further before he gagged and pulled away, coughing.

Satisfied he’d proved whatever point he was trying to make, Garrison stepped back and side-stepped in close to you.

Waving his dick, he tapped your mouth. You weren’t going to grimace. You weren’t going to argue. You weren’t going to tell him to go fuck himself. You took it, letting him push it in all the way, and didn’t move as he held it there. You rolled it around on your tongue trying to get air around it. You could feel him swell.

That’s what I’m talking about he said, but it was quiet, no kind of a boast.

You would not gag. He pulled back and push it in again, reaching for the back of your throat. You would not gag. He pulled back and pushed in hard again. Still, you would not gag. He gripped the back of your head and began probing, reaching for that spot, determined to hear that gargling cough of resistance, still probing, until he was sawing his dick over your teeth and tongue. You felt yourself in the grip of a perverse and impromptu contest of wills. You’d make him quit first. You stretched open your throat. He seemed to become lost as he stroked faster, his breath coming in tight little chuffs, even as you breathed hard through your nose, your tongue fighting to keep yourself open for air.