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feet was wet in them thin shoes I had on, but I couldn’t hardly feel it. All I knowed was Macon Lamb being close by. Every once in a while I’d ease up on him, like I was hiding another egg, and catch a whiff of his soapy-smelling skin.
    I seen him pass through the gate to the graveyard and finally he was off by hisself. The others headed around back of the church where thetrees and outhouses was, so it was just me and Macon. I went with my egg basket amongst the tombstones, some of them old enough to where the names was rubbed off. Such a quiet came over me, with the sky blue and the birds singing. There’s always something peaceful about a graveyard.
    Macon was bent over hiding an egg at the base of a stone carved like a lamb. It was a child’s grave and I’ve wondered more than once if that wasn’t the Lord warning me and Macon of things to come. I crept up behind him and said, “I didn’t know we could hide these out here.” I liked to scared him to death. He jumped sky high and both of us laughed. Then he stood there looking at me funny, eyes twinkling like they did when he was up to mischief. “I reckon we can,” he said. “Nobody told me any different.”
    “Well,” I said. “Where do you reckon would be a good place to hide this’n?” My mouth was dry as a bone. I was holding up this nice pink egg, I still remember it. That’s when Macon finally noticed me. We hid the rest of them eggs together.
    DOUG
    In the winter right before I turned twelve, Myra got chicken pox and stayed home from school for a week. At recess I sat by the chain-link fence at the back of the playground poking sticks and brown weeds through the diamonds into the churchyard grass on the other side, my fingers stiff with cold. I looked at the graves and thought of climbing over to lie on top of one where it was quiet and still, away from the thud of basketballs and the screams of my bundled up classmates lunging under the net, white bursts of breath pluming out of their hoods. Without Myra, they intimidated me a little, even though we were all the same. Before the new high school was built, in 1970, kids of all ages from across the county were bused in to Slop Creek where the red brick school building stood beside a Methodist church at the end of a dusty dirt road. We were mostly the children of farmers and I guess I should have related to them. But it wasn’t just my classmates I couldn’t get used to. Myra and I hated everything about school. In first grade, we were always in trouble for hiding. We’d slip into the janitor’s closet, eyes stinging from the bleachy mop water. Once weran into the field behind the school with the teacher calling after us. We went deep into the high weeds, laughter making us breathless. When the teacher found us she paddled us both, two licks. I was miserable without Myra, half mad at her for being sick. I drew up my knees and tried to be invisible but it didn’t work. A girl from my class named Tina Cutshaw saw me and walked over.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    I didn’t look up at her face. I already knew it, pale with slit eyes and a fuzzy ring of dun-colored hair. She sat in the desk next to mine staring at me all day. I looked at her shoes instead, mud-crusted brogans with the laces untied. They were probably hand-me-downs from her brother, a bone-thin boy who was always throwing up. There was a rumor that he needed surgery on his stomach but their parents couldn’t afford it. Tina’s father drew a disability check and her mother had run off with another man. I didn’t answer her. I waited for her to go away, but she sat down in the grass close to me. I scooted over. When she breathed through her mouth I could smell her rotten teeth.
    “Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked.
    My heart leapt to hear Myra called my girlfriend. I thought at first she was making fun of me, but I glanced at her eyes and they were serious. Maybe Tina Cutshaw wasn’t so bad. I poked a twig through