“P-p-p-”

He searched the ceiling desperately.

“P-p-p-present.” The word came out much too loud, like an angry shout. They were all laughing again, harder than they had when Edwin Hastie pulled his stunt.

“Enough,” Miss Forsyth said. “Thank you, Clive.” She smiled very sweetly at him, which made it worse.

They spent the morning on maths. Miss Forsyth wrote equations on the board. She had beautiful handwriting. Each numeral was like a flower. She called students up one at a time to work the problems out. If Michael has seven nails and John has twelve, how many more nails does John have than Michael? Marie has seventeen yards of fabric. If she needs four yards to make a skirt, how many skirts can she make?

Each time Miss Forsyth read a question, Clive’s mind flailed. The words tumbled together, twisting into strange shapes in his head. He tried to sort it out while praying he would not be called upon, because in addition to not understanding the questions, he also had to urinate very badly. He had drunk all of his tea at breakfast. But he could not bring himself to ask to use the toilet because he knew he would not be able to get the words out.

“Johnny has a dozen eggs. If he eats four for breakfast, what does he have left? Edwin?”

The skinny boy swaggered up to the blackboard. His trousers were too big for him—they were cinched to his waist with a belt, bunched and sagging. He took the chalk from Miss Forsyth and wrote: g-a-s.

The class doubled over with laughter. Miss Forsyth allowed herself a very brief smile.

“The corner,” she said. Edwin swaggered there, too. “You see, class, Edwin might be the smartest boy here but he treats everything as a joke so we will never know.”

In the corner, Edwin Hastie played with the collar of his polo, flipping it up and down as if he hadn’t heard Miss Forsyth. His eyes flashed as if lit by a brewing storm.

After maths, Miss Forsyth distributed copies of The Higham Brothers Reader and they went down the rows from the front of the room to the back, each student reading aloud in turn from a story about an American man who planted apple seeds wherever he went. Clive barely heard the words. He was now focused entirely on squeezing his legs together against the unbearable pressure of his bladder. He turned the page of his reader. The American, barefoot and with a tin pot on his head, lay next to a river—blue and white and foamy, full of rushing water. He could hold it no longer. As Daphne Nelsen read in the pinched, nasal voice he would hate forever after, he tentatively pressed his fingers into the air.

“Yes, Clive?” Miss Forsyth said, cutting off Daphne midsentence. The eyes were on him again.

“May I g-g-g-”

It would happen. He would wet himself right here, in front of the entire class, on his first day at his new school.

“May I go—go—go—”

Miss Forsyth saw his anguish and understood. “Yes! Hurry!”

Bent at the waist, fumbling over his feet, he dashed from the classroom. In the hall, he put both hands on his crotch and ran, and when he reached the latrine and released a torrent of urine he felt simultaneously so grateful and so humiliated that his eyes filled with tears.

WHEN PLAYTIME came, he made for a deserted corner of the yard. As the girls played marbles and the boys engaged in a rough game of tag, he sat, pulling clumps of dry grass from the dirt. He was himself all over again. In his mortification, he found a certain peace. He had his spot in the yard, and every day at playtime he would come to it and keep his own company. He thought of his mother. Where was she now? Did she know it was his first day of school? He pictured her tapping at a typewriter in a white room.

Boys were coming toward him. The troublemaker, Edwin, was leading a pack of them; he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Hey, Go-Go!”

The other boys clapped.

Don hooted. “Yes! That’s right! G-g-g-go-go!”

Clive kept his eyes on his lap.

“Gogo, man, me speaking with you,” Edwin said.

Clive forced himself to look up. To his surprise, Edwin was grinning down at him, his expression teasing but—could it be?—warmly so.

“We having a cricket match, we against they.” He gestured across the yard, where a few other boys milled about. Clive sat, uncomprehending, until Edwin exclaimed, “What you waiting for? Get up, man! We need you!”

Clive stood, wiped the dust from the seat of his trousers, and followed.

They won the game, though no thanks to Clive, who, for the most part, stood in one place and hoped not to make a mistake. From then on, he and Edwin were always together. You never saw one without the other, and if you did, it likely meant some mischief was afoot of which you would turn out to be the unfortunate recipient. They did many things, Edwin and Clive and the rest of Edwin’s band of brothers, Don and Des and Damien. They caught bait and went to Little Beach, where they fished from the pier, diving and backflipping into the sea when they were hot. They played windball cricket in the sand and had swimming races—first one to the end of the pier, or to the Atalanta moored in the shallows. (“I get you back!” Don shouted when Edwin grabbed his leg to slow him down. “I drown you! I gonna drown you!”) They built traps and caught turtledoves. They shook tamarind pods from the tree in Damien’s yard and mixed the sticky brown pulp with sugar and water. Begged a dollar off Edwin’s mother for sugar cakes. When Clive’s grandmother baked buns, they stole them right out of the oven, slathered them quickly with red butter, then ran out of the house and down the street, tossing the hot buns in the air.

In fifth grade, they rode their bikes often to the beach that would, a few years late, become Indigo Bay. It was still wild then. The land was covered by pomme-serette trees, and they would pick the fruit, though only one in ten was sweet. The beach stank from seaweed and the seaweed was full of bad things—needles and condoms, which they would lift with sticks and fling at each other. Sometimes they would find two antimen together on the sand. They would sneak and watch them and then Edwin would shout, Go! and they would stampede and chase them off.

They scaled the chain-link fence and climbed the island’s radio tower, a rickety structure flaking red paint. Clive was a quarter of the way up, far below his friends, when Edwin shouted down to him, “Look out, Goges. Why bother climbing if you don’t see nothing?” He gripped the metal rung as tightly as he could and raised his head. He never forgot it. He could follow the ribbon of Mayfair Road from Horatio Byrd past the governor-general’s pink house and the eggshell-blue prison; he could see how the water fanned out around the island in bands of deepening hues—from a pale, milky green like Claude Félix’s cataracts to a bright turquoise and finally a deep, sparkling blue. If he squinted, he could make out Bendy Harbour—hardly more than the idea of it, a loose sketch of houses, one of which had been his. He could see his whole life spread before him—past, present, future—and the solidness of this image made him want to collect it like a coin and keep it in his pocket forever.

The island’s first movie hall opened when they were thirteen, and Edwin and Clive made a habit of sneaking out of Everett Lyle Secondary to catch the matinee. They waited until five minutes after the showing time so the theater was dark, then snuck in through the side door, vigilant in case Wilmot, the old man who managed the ticket booth, should come down the aisle with his flashlight. The movie hall showed a mix of old movies—westerns and kung fu, mostly—and new releases. They’d sneak into the same movie many times, timing it to catch their favorite scenes. Clive knew Pale Rider and Way of the Dragon and Ghostbusters by heart. Occasionally he discovered that Edwin had left school without him, and he knew that Edwin was in the warm theater, which smelled of stale popcorn and sweat, watching E.T. cycle across the face of the moon for the fourth, fifth, twelfth time.

Often the movies had been out in the States a year or longer by the time they reached the island. To Clive this was unremarkable. Everything took time to reach the island. Newspapers came a week late, by way of Saint Kitts by way of Jamaica. The TV stations showed Bonanza and I Dream of Jeannie and The Beverly Hillbillies.

For Edwin, this was a source of immense frustration.

“When you getting Rocky IV?” he asked Wilmot one day on the way out.

“What are you boys doing here with no ticket?”

“I ask you first. Rocky IV out eight months already. When you getting it?”

“When the poster go up. When you think?”