couldn’t find a girl who would help you. Well, then, you’d be hopeless. Whatever else you might do in your life would be meaningless; there’d be no point in growing up at all.
He remembered how, in the period right after he got over the flu, it was as if he’d aged backward. Night terrors. Bed-wetting. Fear of the dark, fear of being kidnapped or lost—all his little-boy horrors had come back to him. He was smaller then, too, he’d lost so much weight, and it seemed to him his voice was higher—maybe the flu could do that, too. Later, studying himself in the mirror, he was dismayed at the scrawniness of his arms and legs, the thinness of his waist, and his sharply protruding ribs and shoulder blades. His butt looked like a baby’s. He had skin like a girl’s: too pink and too pale. Even at its biggest the Yearning Worm did not reach the six inches he knew was the absolute minimum requirement. And who would ever want to kiss a mouth ringed with acne?
But he had gained back all the weight he’d lost plus a few new pounds, and he was a good two inches taller. His voice wasn’t exactly deep, but it had a certain resonance now, a huskiness at times, like when he had sinusitis. And he was shaving every other day. He knew he could barely be called a teen, let alone a man—even a man as young as Mason was obviously way different from him. But you couldn’t call him a child anymore. He was not a child. He had caught up. He had moved on. And now that he was almost there, fourteen felt even older than he’d thought it would feel.
It was all set. Early on the morning of Cole’s birthday, he and PW were going on a three-day camping trip. Not to the Bible camp some kids from Salvation City went to every summer and where Cole, too, would probably go later that year, but to a site in the Kentucky hills where PW used to go when he was a boy.
Ever since he’d been promised this trip, Cole had been looking forward to it. There’d been days when he could think of little else. He was still looking forward to it, but he wasn’t jumping up and down inside like a little kid anymore. In fact, he was embarrassed to remember how overexcited he’d been. He couldn’t say exactly why things had changed, but it saddened him to have to admit that the trip had lost some of its magic. He was afraid PW might figure this out and be saddened, too.
If it ever came out that he’d seen Starlyn and Mason making out and kept quiet about it, Cole was sure PW would understand. What he wasn’t so sure about was the way he’d caught PW looking at him the day of the party. It mortified him to think PW could have read his thoughts then. How many times had PW already told him, “If there’s anything you want to talk about, anything to do with girls, any feelings or urges or questions you might have, you just let me know. I believe you’ll always find me open to that kind of chat.” But Cole had always shied away from that kind of chat. He didn’t want PW to know how he felt about Starlyn. He wanted him to look the other way. Now he worried that sometime while they were away PW himself might bring up the subject.
Sex had been a topic in Bible class (“Good Sex Is Clean, Not Seen, and Never Mean”), and Mason had explained that, in this particular case, Jesus’ example was not meant to be followed. A man cleaving to a wife and the two of them creating a family—that’s what the Lord wanted to see. (“Cleaving,” though he knew what it meant, bewildered Cole and gave him a physically uncomfortable feeling.)
Cole was thankful sex was not one of the subjects he had to tackle with Tracy—though, since the day of the radio show, his feelings toward Tracy had changed. Whenever Cole thought back to that awful day, the most awful part was remembering what he’d done to her. A knee to the chest had to be a very hard thing for a woman to forgive, he thought. He’d been told that, for a woman, being hit in the chest was like a guy being hit in the balls. Not that he’d