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searching for Gabriella. The hot, thick air lent a hazy aspect to everything. Boys were lazily throwing a football back and forth along the sideline of the field, still off-limits on account of the new grass. Groups of girls clustered in the shade of the gym. Theblack students hung around the temporary buildings at the far end of the field, mostly keeping to themselves. No sign of Gabriella, though.
    Peter was talking about his visit to his uncle’s house in Napoleonville last weekend. He and his cousin Trent had gone hunting in the woods behind their farm, where he’d shot a rabbit with his uncle’s twenty-two. He had the skin drying back at the house if I wanted to see it, he said. He was thinking of making a hat with the fur.
    “You’re what?”
    “Making a hat.”
    “A rabbit hat?”
    “Why not? It’s a good fur.”
    “With ears?”
    “No, not with ears. Asshole.”
    Peter and I had been friends since third grade, mainly because we were the same age and we lived in the same neighborhood. We’d been Cub Scouts together. He was a runty boy, with crowded teeth, straight hair, and a high, excited voice. He hated school and was always getting into trouble with the teachers. He didn’t care much for our classmates, either, and they repaid him by teasing and shunning him. But four years earlier, I happened to know, his older brother had been killed in Vietnam when he stepped on a land mine, and soon after that his mother had left his father; and knowing all this, I couldn’t help but see him in a more sympathetic light than I might have otherwise. Besides, he was, I was reluctant to admit, my only real friend.
    Peter went on to say how his daddy had promised him a twenty-two for Christmas. While a twenty-two was fine for small game like rabbit and squirrel, he’d really prefer something more powerful. He knew plenty of boys our age who already had their own shotguns. His cousin Trent had a Remington twenty-gauge pump rifle—which was an excellent firearm, there was no denying that; the Remington was your industry standard. But personally, his ideal gun, what he really wanted, he said, would be a Winchester thirty-thirty. For deer hunting, that’d be the best. A Winchester thirty-thirty.
    “What would be your ideal gun?” he asked me.
    I wasn’t listening: I’d caught sight of Gabriella stepping out fromunder the covered walkway beside the gym. She was accompanied by a group of the prettiest, most popular girls of our class—the cheerleaders, the homeroom presidents, the girls with boyfriends. They began a slow walk along the edge of the football field. As they strolled, Gabriella smiled and turned her hair over her ear, nodding and answering the girls’ questions as though she were being interviewed for membership in their club.
    “Are you listening? You aren’t even listening to me,” Peter said. Then he saw who I was watching. “Do you know her?”
    “She just moved into that big new house behind us.”
    “Man. She is hot. She is gorgeous. She may be the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. If that girl lived behind me, I’d be swimming across the bayou every night and sneaking into her bedroom.”
    “Sure you would.”
    “I might.”
    “Please.”
    Peter was always talking about what he would do with girls, which struck me as laughable, because if anyone had less of a chance with girls than I did, it was Peter. The only thing he knew about girls was what he’d read in
Playboy
. His father owned the Conoco station in town, where he kept a stack of girlie magazines on a shelf in his office. Peter and I would bike there sometimes after school for free Cokes, and when Mr. Coot wasn’t looking, Peter would pull down the magazines to show me. “Oh, man, look at her,” he’d say, rubbing his fingers on the greasy photos. He spoke critically about each girl’s features, which girls he preferred and which he’d most like to have sex with. “This one. I love her. I’d actually marry her. Miss