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Stuart, Andrew’s first boyfriend, who was also his coach in high school. His aunt Clara was the only one who knew about Stuart, and she hadn’t really approved because he was older, and because he chose to live in Avalon Hills and was therefore either dumb or “self-loathing,” a term Andrew didn’t understand at the time. But she understood that he wasn’t being harmed, and that their feelings for each other were real.
    Andrew hadn’t spoken to Stuart since his second year of college, when their phone conversations included a lot of long pauses while Andrew tried to think of excuses to hang up. Andrew had been surprised to realize that once he left Avalon Hills, and ceased to be the only gay guy he knew, he and Stuart actually had very different interests, and weren’t very compatible at all. Andrew broke up with him over the telephone one night in his dorm room after he drank too many beers with his best friend, Lindy, who convinced him to let her give him a blow job that he felt guilty about the next day when she wouldn’t speak to him.
    Stuart showed up at his dorm room two days later, drunk and begging him to reconcile. Andrew had reacted with cruelty, although cruelty when you’re that young and newly free from your parents feels like your right. Andrew opened the door and handed him the sweater Stuart had given him as a going-away present. He shook his head and said, “Please go home, Stuart.” He shut the door, whispering another unconvincing “Sorry,”and waited until he heard security escorting him out. They hadn’t spoken since.
    Months later he felt terrible about that moment, though he knew it had been the right decision.
    Andrew hadn’t thought about Stuart for years, and really only mentioned him when anyone asked him for his “coming out” story, which rarely happened anymore. Younger guys didn’t seem to have that ritual of exchanging stories of revelation, denial, acceptance, estrangement. These days they seemed to say , “What? I’ve always been gay. Here I am in day care in my Glad to Be Gay! onesie. What are you harping about, old guy?”
    He’d never run into Stuart on visits to his parents over the years, probably because he rarely left Woodbury Lake when he came home. He preferred to lounge on the dock, sequestered in silence.
    Andrew put on a pair of his old jeans. They were too loose for him now. He wrote buy a belt on his phone’s notepad. He left his room and peered down the hallway towards the master bedroom. He heard his mother’s shower running. Downstairs he discovered a pot of coffee, still warm, and poured himself a cup. He looked out the back window and saw Sadie and her boyfriend running down to the lake wrapped in old swim towels. How could they act as though nothing was happening? He felt a twinge of annoyance that Sadie wasn’t helping take care of their mother. He took a sip and knew where he had to go.
    When he drove past the Coffee Hut by the beach, Pat was outside watering the petunias. The newspaper box had a photo of his father on the front. He lifted one hand from the wheel in a partial wave, and Pat offered a tepid nod in return.
    He continued to drive too fast, the way he had as a teenager, through the bucolic Avalon Hills Main Street with its carefully tended foliage, passing every store where he could potentially buy a belt. He turned right at the public library, going up the Mason Street hill, feeling both repelled by and drawn to the nostalgia he felt when he approached the school, which was set back from the road in a shroud of trees. He pulled in by a side lane, into the staff parking lot, and was waved through by a security guard who noted the staff parking sticker on his parents’ Volvo. He watched a student leave through a side door, loosening his school tie and throwing off his blazer, jumping on a bike he’d stashed by the cedar bushes that encircled the janitor’s house.
    Media trucks lined the parking lot, antennas popped. Reporters