IT WAS no secret that Clive only had eyes for Sara Lycott. She was not one of the girls most of the boys were stuck on—Daphne Nelsen with her long sprinter’s legs, or Saffy Lester with her silky hair and cashew skin, or Joy Vernon who had breasts by the time they were eleven. Sara Lycott’s eyes were small and black, and they seemed to cast off bright flares of hostility. She had remained adamantly flat-chested, as if purposefully to deny any boy who looked. She and her mother had come to the island from Saint Kitts when she was a baby. Sara’s mother, Miss Agatha, claimed to be the widow of a government minister who was killed in an automobile accident just before Sara was born. Clive’s grandmother had declared this a “likely story.” Sara didn’t talk like the rest of them. She spoke properly, like a teacher, even when she was with her friends, and though she was teased for this, she didn’t stop.

His devotion to her had been sealed at the Horatio Byrd Primary Christmas Pageant when they were ten. The pageant was the culmination of a week of festivities that included calypso shows and street jams and the lighting of the mahogany trees along Investiture Boulevard. Clive was an ox. His grandmother had dyed cotton batting with tea and sewn it to an old nightshirt of his grandfather’s. (Though his grandfather had been dead for years, she still kept his clothes in a wooden bureau in the corner of her bedroom. It was the one soft thing about her, and it would be many years before he understood that this one thing was really an uncountable number of things, that it was merely the material evidence of an entire unseen world that resided within the grandmother he thought he knew completely.) Sara Lycott was Mary. She wore a flowing blue silk gown and a crown of white flowers. Her performance left him spellbound. Not because it was beautiful or heartfelt or pure, for it was none of these things. Rather, she commanded his attention with her magnificent vacancy. She spoke as if she cared not a whit that she was onstage in front of the entire town, playing the role of the Virgin Mary. How could she dare to give so little, to be so utterly elsewhere? When a fourth-grade boy dropped the porcelain dish that was supposed to be myrrh and the pageant fell for a moment into disarray as the wise men stooped to gather the shards, Sara Lycott reached into her dressing gown and pulled forth a square of coconut candy. There, in the middle of the stage, she bit. He could hear the candy crack against her teeth. Then she released the faintest of smiles, a secret smile at a secret pleasure. Was he the only one who had seen it? The other boys barely gave Sara a thought; if they did, it was only to joke and tease—where did such a funny-looking girl get off being so haughty? But in that moment, her prickly exterior had parted to reveal the truth of her. From then on, all he wanted was to be let back in.

He could not speak to her. By the time he moved from Horatio Byrd to Everett Lyle Secondary, his stutter had mostly faded, but in Sara’s presence it came rushing back and took hold of him utterly, so that not only his tongue but his limbs, his organs, the very air inside him, were twisted and bound. His friends reaped endless amusement from this.

“Gogo, ask Sara if she wants to come to Rocky Shoal with we.”

“Gogo, ask Sara if we can copy she maths.”

“Gogo, Sara left she notebook. Here. Give it back to she,” Don said one day in the schoolyard, shoving a yellow notebook against Clive’s chest.

Sara was across the yard, giggling with her friends in a bunch tight and lovely as a flower bud. When they saw him approaching they glared at him, a wall of feminine scrutiny that withered his dick to nothing.

“Why, thank you,” Sara said when he wordlessly handed her the notebook. The girls were varnishing one another’s nails. In the heat, the fumes made him woozy. “How are you doing today, Clive?”

She was the only one apart from his teachers and his grandmother who ever called him Clive. He was at once proud and terrified to be called his proper name by her, to have her attention on him in this way, though he also suspected that it had nothing to do with him; probably, she called him Clive simply because she would not deign to let so foolish a name as Gogo cross her lips.

She smiled. She was tiny as a spider. The way she looked up at him, craning her neck, emphasized his bigness until he felt as if the edges of himself may as well have been miles away, for all he could do to control them.

“I’m well, and y-y-y-you?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

She had the power to bind his tongue and she enjoyed it. She turned away from him and thrust out her hand so Saffy Lester could continue varnishing her nails.

He stumbled back across the yard to where his friends were doubled over with laughter.

“Check you out, ladies’ man,” Des said.

“Wise up, bred. Why you try to love a thing that will never love you back?” Don said.

“’Sides, I hear she mama crazy crazy,” Damien said.

Edwin patted him on the back. “Don’t listen to these fools, Goges. Someday that girl will be yours for true. And when she is, you remember it was me who knew it would be so all along.”

GOGO AND Edwin got drunk for the first time when they were fourteen. They were walking home from school one day when Edwin stopped on Mayfair Road and struck up a conversation with Jan, a Dutchman who had been on the island as long as they could remember. He wore linen tunics and leather sandals, and he could almost always be found sipping from a paper bag in the shade of one building or another in The Basin. When Jan asked if they cared for a drink, Edwin said, “Sure,” as if this were something they did all the time. Jan led them to a bar called Paulette’s Place, where he bought a bottle of Olde English. The three of them drank it together at the bar. When the liquid burned down Clive’s throat he was back in his mother’s kitchen, sitting on Vaughn’s lap, the glinting faces of strangers laughing around him. He tilted his glass back again.

“An old pro, are we?” Jan said, and patted his back.

Edwin raised his glass in the air, then took a quick sip.

“Sweet like a woman,” he said.

“Truth,” Clive replied, though neither of them had yet known a woman’s taste.

THAT SAME year, for a few weeks, Edwin and Clive and their friends were seized by boxing fever. As soon as the last bell rang, they traveled in a pack down the center of Gould Road—cars honking at them to move to the side, which they didn’t—to Don’s house, because his father was in Tortola and his mother didn’t get off work until seven. Don’s family was worse off than most of theirs. The galvanized roof of his house was badly rusted. Scrawny chickens stalked the yard, pecking at the dirt. There was a rubbish heap nearly hidden in scrub. Against the house, a few desiccated pepper plants grew out of old Nido canisters. The boys liked the roughness of this. In Don’s yard their jaws clenched. Their gaits simmered with an itchy energy.

They would stand in a circle and send two from among their ranks into the center. They placed bets. They jeered and clapped and egged each other on. When the sun began to set they squared up with one another, trading coins that were sour and warm from their pockets. Then they dispersed, each sore, bruised boy making his own way down the familiar roads to the lights of home.

When Clive thinks of his youth, it’s this brief span of afternoons that pulses most insistently in his memory. They were after something. They ought to have been men, or so they feared, and they were trying to teach themselves the things men should know. None of them expected him to be any good, and he wasn’t. Big, clumsy Gogo. He punched the air, dodged too slow, got his lip split over and over.

There was a girl from their form who liked to come around. Her name was Berline, Bery for short, and she was a solid, heavy-shouldered girl who wore her uniform loose, the maroon plaid skirt coming down to her shins. Bery had her heart set on boxing. She showed up every afternoon, lingering and begging to be included. “I been practicing with my brother,” she told them one afternoon. “He says I’m better than he.”

“We don’t want you to get hurt, Bery,” Don told her in a voice syrupy with false concern.

“What’s it to any of you if I get hurt? You all does hate me.”

“Go away, Bery,” Des said in a bored voice. “Can’t you see where you’re not wanted?”

Bery marched right up to Des. “I’m just asking for one go.”

“Sure, Bery,” Edwin chimed in. “We’ll let you have a go.”

“You will?”

“Why not? You is waiting a long time now. Gogo!”

“Me?” he whispered.

“No, my other mate Gogo. Yes, you! Get in there and give Bery she turn.”

“I don’t want to go with no Gogo! He the worst of all you.”

Don got up in her face. “You want your turn or not, Bery?”

She grabbed the gloves angrily from him and stepped into the center. Gogo followed. The worst one, good enough only for the girl. He could hear his friends sniggering as they placed their bets:

“My money’s on Bery; her face all wreck like a boxer already.”

“Put me on Gogo. Even he can beat a girl. If she even be a girl.”

They met in the center, glove to glove. He could feel the humiliation in his eyes connecting with the rage in hers, sending off heat.

Don counted down from three and stepped aside.

Gogo swung.

He felt the impact of his punch like biting into a mango and letting the flesh fill your mouth. Then he heard her scream, saw her hands fly to her face. The circle fell apart as the boys rushed in.

“Bery, you okay?”

“Let we see your face.”

When she took her hands away, Clive swooned. Blood spilled from her nose over her lips.

“Shit, Gogo. She all cut!”

Bery scrambled to her feet and ran off, hands over her face. When she was gone, the boys began to laugh.