He knew she was right.

All they had was each other, and they loved each other. Socially, they withdrew further into themselves. For a year or two, this was unremarkable, a natural consequence of the family tragedy they had endured. Then, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she announced that a boy had asked her on a date and she had agreed to go with him.

“ People get suspicious. ‘What’s wrong with her that she never goes out with anybody?’ They think I’m pretty, I ought to be interested in boys.”

“ Let them think you’re a lesbian.”

“ Believe me, some of them already think that. I’ve had some long looks from a couple members of the sisterhood, and one of them asked me if I’d like to come over and watch the last round of the LPGA at her house. Why would anyone want to watch golf, whether it was men or women playing? And why would I want to go over to her house anyway?”

“ I wish you didn’t have to go out with some guy,” he said.

“ You’re jealous?”

“ I guess so.”

“ I’m not going to let him do anything, Billy. But I think it makes sense to go out with him. And you’re going to have to start going out with girls.”

“ Or they’ll think I’m a fag?”

“ Or a retard.”

“ I don’t care what they think,” he said, but of course he did. Later he told her he wished they could be where nobody knew anything about them.

“ I’ve been thinking about that,” she said.

They put the house on the market and sold it, rented an apartment in a college town a few hundred miles away. She’d been given her mother’s maiden name as a middle name, and now she dropped her surname, and they lived together as William Thompson and Carolyn Peyton. She built up a collection of identification in that name, and enrolled at the college, and a year later so did he. The money from the house, supplemented by their earnings from part-time jobs, covered their tuition and expenses, and they had both always been good students. He took an accelerated program and they graduated together, four years after they’d sold the house.