“Nice! We’re back in this.” He struck his palm with his fist, teeth clenched: a greyish flash under the helmet.

He was looking up, visualizing the game, the field, his blue-and-grey Patriots. My eyes dilated, I took him in deeper, the pale sweep of his jaw, his throat, the thin adolescent cords rising along its length. His shirt was off because it was summer. Because it didn’t matter. There were two fingers of dirt on his collarbone from earlier that afternoon, when we planted the baby apple tree in Buford’s backyard.

“Are we close?” I asked, not knowing what I meant.

The voices roared, straining through the crackle.

“Yeah. I think we got this.” He lay back, beside me, the dirt crunching under his weight. “Okay, so fourth down basically means this is our last chance—are you with me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then why you staring at the ceiling?”

“I’m with you.” I propped my head up with my palm and faced him—his torso a faint blaze in the half-dark. “I’m with you, Trev. Fourth down.”

“Don’t call me that. It’s Trevor. Full and long, alright?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Fourth down means it’s all or bust.”

On our backs, shoulders almost touching, the thin film of heat formed between our skins as the air thickened with the men’s voices, the crowd’s corrosive cheers.

“We got this. We got this,” his voice said. His lips moved, I imagined, the way they do in prayer. It seemed he could see through the roof, to the starless sky—the moon that night a gnawed bone above the field. I don’t know if it was him or me who shifted. But the space between us grew thinner and thinner as the game roared on, and our upper arms grew moist, touched so lightly neither of us noticed it happening. And maybe it was there in the barn that I first saw what I would always see when flesh is pressed against the dark. How the sharper edges of his body—shoulders, elbows, chin, and nose—poked through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface.

The Patriots soared through their winning touchdown. The crickets ignited across the low shifting grass around the barn. Turning to him, I felt their serrated legs through the floor beneath us as I said his name, full and long; I said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth. I drew closer, toward the wet salted heat of his cheek. He made a sound almost like pleasure—or maybe I just imagined that. I went on, licking his chest, his ribs, the flare of hair on his pale belly. And then the heavy clank as the helmet tipped backward, the crowd roaring.

* * *

—

In the bathroom with the pea-soup walls, the grandma rolls a freshly boiled egg over the boy’s face where, a few minutes ago, his mother had flung an empty ceramic teapot that exploded on the boy’s cheek.

The egg is warm as my insides, he thinks. It’s an old remedy. “The egg, it heals even the worst bruises,” says his grandma. She works on the violet lump shining, like a plum, on the boy’s face. As the egg circled, its smooth pressure on the bruise, the boy watched, under a puffed lid, his grandma’s lips crease with focus as she worked. Years later, as a young man, when all that remains of the grandma is a face etched in his mind, the boy will remember that crease between her lips while breaking open a hard-boiled egg on his desk on a winter night in New York. Short on rent, it would be eggs for dinner for the rest of the week. They would not be warm, but cold in his palm, having been boiled by the dozen earlier that morning.

At his desk, drifting, he’ll roll the moist egg across his cheek. Without speaking, he will say Thank you. He’ll keep saying it until the egg grows warm with himself.

“Thank you, Grandma,” says the boy, squinting.

“You fine now, Little Dog.” She lifts the pearly orb, and places it gently to his lips. “Eat,” she says. “Swallow. Your bruises are inside it now. Swallow and it won’t hurt anymore.” And so he eats. He is eating still.

* * *

—

There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words—but shades, penumbras.

We stopped the truck one time on the side of a dirt road and sat against the driver door, facing a meadow. Soon our shadows on the red exterior shifted and bloomed, like purple graffiti. Two double-cheese Whoppers were warming on the hood, their parchment wrappers crackling. Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?

His tongue tracing my ear: the green pulled through a blade of grass.

The burgers started to smoke. We let them.

* * *

—

I would work for the farm for two more summers after that first one—but my time with Trevor would stretch through all the seasons in between. And that day, it was October 16—a Thursday. Partly cloudy, the leaves crisp but still on their branches.

We had eggs sautéed in diced tomatoes and fish sauce over rice for dinner. I was wearing a grey-red plaid button-up from L.L.Bean. You were in the kitchen, washing up, humming. The TV was on, playing a rerun of Rugrats, Lan clapping to the animated show. One of the bulbs in the bathroom buzzed, the wattage too strong for the socket. You wanted to go buy new ones at the drugstore but decided to wait for your wages from the salon so we could also get a box of Ensure for Lan. You were okay that day. You even smiled twice through the cigarette smoke. I remember it. I remember it all because how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful?

I turned the shower off and, instead of toweling and dressing before the steam on the door mirror cleared, like I normally would, I waited. It was an accident, my beauty revealed to me. I was daydreaming, thinking about the day before, of Trevor and me behind the Chevy, and had stood in the tub with the water off for too long. By the time I stepped out, the boy before the mirror stunned me.

Who was he? I touched the face, its sallow cheeks. I felt my neck, the braid of muscles sloped to collarbones that jutted into stark ridges. The scraped-out ribs sunken as the skin tried to fill its irregular gaps, the sad little heart rippling underneath like a trapped fish. The eyes that wouldn’t match, one too open, the other dazed, slightly lidded, cautious of whatever light was given it. It was everything I hid from, everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow. And yet, I stayed. I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.

I got what I wanted—a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.

* * *

—

Back in the barn that first night we touched, the Patriots game at halftime through the radio, I heard him. The air was thick or thin or not there. Maybe we even drifted off for a bit. The commercials were on, crackling and buzzing through the receiver, but I heard him. We were just staring at the rafters, and then he said, casually, as if naming a country on a map, “Why was I born?” His features troubled in the waning light.

I pretended not to hear.

But he said it again. “Why was I even born, Little Dog?” The radio hissed beneath his voice. And I spoke to the air. I said, “I hate KFC,” responding to the commercial, on purpose.

“Me too,” he said without skipping a beat.

And we cracked up. We cracked open. We fell apart like that, laughing.

* * *

—

Trevor and his daddy lived alone in an Easter-yellow mobile home behind the interstate. That afternoon his old man was out laying redbrick walkways for a commercial park out in Chesterfield. The white door frames in the mobile home were stained pink with fingerprints: a house colored with work, which meant a house colored with exhaustion, disrepair. The rug uprooted “so no one gotta clean,” but the hardwood never waxed and polished, and you could feel the hammered-down nails through your socks. The cabinet doors were torn off “to make it easy.” There was a cinder block under the sink to hold the pipes. In the living room, above the couch, was a duct-taped poster of Neil Young, guitar in hand, grimacing into a song I’ve never heard.