Before the sun was up she dropped him off where she’d picked him up, then headed for her friend’s house. “Sandy thinks I’m at a motel with a frat boy,” she said. “Little does she know. But she’ll let me in, and cover for me.”

His tent mate stirred when he returned, wanted to know where he’s been. The latrine, he said. The other boy went back to sleep.

He lay there and watched through the tent flap as dawn broke. He was a boy-fourteen now, he’d had a birthday since that first kissing lesson-but he felt like man. I just got laid, he told himself. I fucked my sister. A man, yes, and a sinner.

He wondered what his punishment would be.

Within hours, he found out.

Shortly after breakfast, after they’d divided into groups for morning activities, a Sheriff’s Office car pulled into the camp grounds. A tall man wearing sunglasses got out and talked to the scoutmaster. Then the two men walked to where Billy was sitting, trying to undo a bad knot in the lanyard he was making. It was kid stuff, entwining the plastic lacing to make a lanyard, and pretty tame compared to fucking your sister in a motel room, but if you were going to do it you might as well get it right.

The scoutmaster hunkered down beside him, his red face troubled, the perspiration beading on his large forehead. The Sheriff, or whoever he was, stood up straight as a ramrod. And the scoutmaster explained that there had been some trouble, that Billy was an orphan now, that both of his parents were dead.

Of course he couldn’t take it in. He was numb with shock. How could they be dead? He found out gradually, with no one eager to tell him too much too soon. They were shot, he learned, his mother three times, twice in the chest and once in the face, his father once, the bullet entering his open mouth and exiting through the back of his skull. Death for both was virtually instantaneous. They didn’t suffer, he was told.