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her, Sissy was wearing an expression that was so serious, his heart skipped a beat. “What?’
    Her response was a broad, corn kernel–filled grin. They both exploded with laughter.
    Eyes leaking and sides splitting, the two friends fell into one another with merriment. Sissy doubled over and would have ended facedown on the ground if not for Cole’s quick reaction and strong forearm.
    “Grab on!”
    Sissy hooked her fingers around his arm and was tugged back to safety. “Thanks.”
    Her fingers were still wrapped around his forearm when the first twinkling star appeared.
    The sound of an approaching wagon shattered the magic and her hand dropped away. She hopped down to the ground. “I guess I should be getting home.”
    “I’ll walk ya.”
    “Okay.”
    Spring.
    That very night, Sissy began to think about Cole in the way she had only ever thought about Mac Gosling, a colored boy she was sweet on who lived two miles away. She found that the butterflies that invaded her stomach whenever she saw Mac also took flight when her mind stumbled on Cole. And it started stumbling on Cole often, so much so that if her mind had had ankles, those ankles would have had bruises.
    In Cole’s mind, Sissy suddenly became a fixture, similar to the crucifix that hung over his parents’ marriage bed. He yearned for her, and rather than trying to quell the desire, he fed it by visiting the fence and running his hands over the slab of wood where the two of them had sat.
    He so desperately wanted to own something that had touched her, or that she had touched, that he spent an hour in the field hunting for the corncob. He didn’t find it, and when he went home his clothes were saturated with the scent of flowers. His father coughed his annoyance and asked Cole if he’d abandoned the baseball field for a funeral home.
    Once, when Cole thought he was alone in the house, he tried to reclaim the moment by imitating the laughter Sissy had expelled on that afternoon, and his mother walked in on him in the midst of a girlishly shrill giggle. She tapped him on the shoulder, and when the startled Cole swung around, he came face to face with his mother’s perplexed gaze.
    “Boy,” she calmly asked, “are you losin’ your mind?”
    Cole blinked wildly. Yes, he believed he was.
    Spring.

Chapter Nine
    H ow they got away with it for as long as they did was a mystery to me. By the time they were found out, it was way past spring and weeks beyond their first awkward kiss. There had been hundreds of kisses by the time summer swaggered in, bringing with her days upon days of sweltering heat.
    It was summer’s heat that drove Sissy’s father, Edgar, off the road into the sparse shade of a pecan tree. If it hadn’t been so hot and Edgar had just kept walking up the road toward home, Sissy and Cole’s affair might have gone undetected for years.
    I’ll just sit here a minute and rest, Edgar told himself as he dragged the blue and white kerchief across his damp brow. Weariness crept over him and he braced his back against the bark of the tree, cocked the brim of his hat over his eyes, and soon fell fast asleep.
    Further up the road, Cole was sitting in the crook of a gnarly tree limb, working the tip of his mother’s kitchen knife into the bark.
    “What you doing up there?”
    He looked down to find Sissy squinting at him. Tiny balls of perspiration covered her face, and when she tilted her head, the sun ignited the orbs, gracing her with an undeniable shimmer.
    Cole grinned.
    With the handle of the knife clenched securely between his teeth, Cole began to make his descent with the assuredness and agility of a monkey. He hit the ground with a large thud.
    The lovers glanced warily around before leaning in and stealing a kiss. They crossed the road, climbed over the fence, and moved through the blanket of flowers to the bald spot of earth which had been scuffed talcumsoft by their lovemaking.
    She tasted like syrup.
    He tasted like his mama’s