“Sure.”

“I’m good friends with Father Ingersoll, of Saint Anne’s in Gates Falls. That is the church the Yankos attend. He told me that the Yanko boy committed suicide.”

I think I gasped. Suicide had been one of the rumors going around in the week after Kenny died, but I had never believed it. I would have said the thought of killing himself had never crossed the bullying son of a bitch’s mind.

Reverend Mooney was still leaning forward. He took one of my hands in both of his. “Craig, do you really believe that boy went home, thought to himself, ‘Oh my goodness, I beat up a kid younger and smaller than me, I guess I’ll kill myself’?”

“I guess not,” I said, and I let out a breath it felt like I’d been holding for two months. “When you put it like that. How did he do it?”

“I didn’t ask, and I wouldn’t tell you even if Pat Ingersoll had told me. You need to let this go, Craig. The boy had problems. His need to beat you up was only one symptom of those problems. You had nothing to do with it.”

“And if I’m relieved? That, you know, I don’t have to worry about him anymore?”

“I’d say that was you being human.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you feel better?”

“Yes.”

And I did.

* * *

Not long before the end of school, Ms. Hargensen stood before our earth science class with a big smile on her face. “You guys probably thought you were going to be rid of me in two weeks, but I have some bad news. Mr. de Lesseps, the high school biology teacher, is retiring, and I’ve been hired to take his place. You could say I’m graduating from middle school to high school.”

A few kids groaned theatrically, but most of us applauded, and no one clapped harder than I did. I would not be leaving my love behind. To my adolescent mind, it seemed like fate. And in a way, it was.

* * *

I also left Gates Falls Middle behind and started the ninth grade at Gates Falls High. That was where I met Mike Ueberroth, known then—as he is in his current career as a backup catcher for the Baltimore Orioles—as U-Boat.

Jocks and more scholarly types didn’t mix much at Gates (I imagine it’s true at most high schools, because jocks tend to be clannish), and if it hadn’t been for Arsenic and Old Lace, I doubt if we ever would have become friends. U-Boat was a junior and I was just a lowly freshman, which made becoming friends even more unlikely. But we did, and we remain friends to this day, although I see him far less often.

Many high schools have a Senior Play, but that wasn’t the case at Gates. We had two plays each year, and although they were put on by the Drama Club, all students could audition. I knew the story because I’d seen the movie version on TV one rainy Saturday afternoon. I enjoyed it, so I tried out. Mike’s girlfriend, a Drama Club member, talked him into trying out, and he ended up playing the homicidal Jonathan Brewster. I was cast as his scurrying sidekick, Dr. Einstein. That part was played by Peter Lorre in the film, and I tried my best to sound like him, sneering “Yas! Yas!” before every line. It wasn’t a very good imitation, but I have to tell you that the audience ate it up. Small towns, you know.

So that’s how U-Boat and I became friends, and it’s also how I found out what had really happened to Kenny Yanko. The Rev turned out to be wrong and the newspaper obituary turned out to be right. It really had been an accident.

During the break between Act 1 and Act 2 of our dress rehearsal, I was at the Coke machine, which had eaten up my seventy-five cents without giving me anything in return. U-Boat left his girlfriend, came over, and gave the machine’s upper right corner a hard whack with the palm of one hand. A can of Coke promptly fell into the retrieval tray.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No prob. You just have to remember to hit it right there, in that corner.”

I said I would do that, although I doubted I could hit it with the same force.

“Hey, listen, I heard you had some trouble with that Yanko kid. True?”

There was no sense denying it—Billy and both girls had blabbed—and really no reason to at this late date. So I said yeah, it was true.

“You want to know how he died?”

“I’ve heard about a hundred different stories. Have you got another one?”

“I’ve got the truth, little buddy. You know who my dad is, don’t you?”

“Sure.” The Gates Falls police force consisted of fewer than two dozen uniformed officers, the Chief of Police, and one detective. That was Mike’s father, George Ueberroth.

“I’ll tell you about Yanko if you let me hit your soda.”

“Okay, but don’t backwash.”

“Do I look like an animal? Give it to me, you fuckin cheesecake.”

“Yas, yas,” I said, doing Peter Lorre. He snickered, took the can, downed half of it, then belched. Down the hall, his girlfriend stuck a finger in her mouth and mimed puking. Love in high school is very sophisticated.

“My dad was the one who investigated,” U-Boat said, handing the can back to me, “and a couple of days after it happened I heard him talking to Sergeant Polk from the house. That’s what they call the cop-shop. They were out on the porch drinking beers, and the Sarge said something about Yanko doing the chokey-strokey. Dad laughed and said he’d heard it called a Beverly Hills necktie. The Sarge said it was probably the only way the poor kid could get off, with a pizza-face like that. My dad goes yeah, sad but true. Then he said what bothered him was the hair. Said it bothered the coroner, too.”

“What about his hair?” I asked. “And what’s a Beverly Hills necktie?”

“I looked it up on my phone. It’s slang for autoerotic asphyxiation.” He said the words carefully. With pride, almost. “You hang yourself and beat off while you’re passing out.” He saw my expression and shrugged. “I don’t make the news, Dr. Einstein, I just report it. I guess it’s supposed to be an extremely big thrill, but I think I’ll pass.”

I thought I would, too. “What about the hair?”

“I asked my dad about that. He didn’t want to tell me, but since I’d heard the rest, he eventually did. He said half of Yanko’s hair had turned white.”

* * *

I thought about that a lot. On the one hand, if I had ever considered the idea of Mr. Harrigan rising from his grave to extract vengeance on my behalf (and sometimes at night when I couldn’t sleep, the idea, however ridiculous, would creep into my mind), U-Boat’s story seemed to put paid to those thoughts. Thinking about Kenny Yanko in his closet, pants around his ankles and a rope around his neck, face turning purple as he did the old chokey-strokey, I could actually feel sorry for him. What a stupid, undignified way to die. “As the result of a tragic accident,” the Sun obituary had said, and that was more accurate than any of us kids could have known.

But on the other hand, there was that thing U-Boat’s dad had said about Kenny’s hair. I couldn’t help wondering what might cause such a thing to happen. What Kenny might have seen in that closet with him as he swam toward unconsciousness while pulling his poor old pudding for everything he was worth.