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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 97%u201cDeserved it!%u201d I yelled. %u201cYour father%u2019s ego and your mother%u2019s humiliation?%u201d%u201cHe%u2019s crazy like a fox and she loves it. They sort of have this act. Besides, they stood your family up on your vacation last year. They didn%u2019t have to go away to a funeral. They%u2019re insecure. Julia thinks my family isn%u2019t holy enough for your family. She thinks you%u2019re great, because your poems show you have a true vocation.%u201d He rose and started for the front porch. %u201cYou coming?%u201dWe tried to shoot a little basketball in the driveway. I beat him at a lazy game of %u201cHorse,%u201d and he put a half-nelson on me and we wrestled around and then pulled free of each other.Off down the block, roman candles shot through the twilight.%u201cThe season%u2019s all wrong and it%u2019s too hot to wrestle,%u201d I said.%u201cYou want to go out to the park or the lake?%u201d%u201cWhat%u2019s the use? Tag-teaming Kenny and Rip? Seminarians on parade. We don%u2019t fit.%u201dHe led me upstairs to the screened porch outside his bedroom. For a long while we sat in silence, with the one little ship%u2019s lamp burning, listening to the evening sounds of the town beginning to ignite the sky. I rocked in a glider. Rockets whistled and flares went up and fathers lit fountains on the sidewalk across the street. At the Point, he had said he wanted to talk. I wanted to listen to him, but I sensed a danger, a chance of reaching out to him and getting hurt in the process.He reached the lamp from his chair and turned it out.I tried drawing a line between safety and charity.Aerial displays exploded all across the night sky.I was still looking for myself.From way down at the park, some band played sweet patriotic music.In all charity, I wanted to help him, but without losing the little self I had found. Confessions, especially late night ones, made me nervous. Boys always wanted to confess to me. That made me feel priestly, but I never really knew what to say. In the sudden dark of the extinguished lamp came a moment more of silence while the bugs that had been fighting the screens so fiercely stood back stunned that their bright goal had been snuffed. The moon made blue-white tracings on the floor.%u201cThis is the time,%u201d he said, %u201cfor telling you.%u201dOut in the night of the Fourth, bombs were bursting in air.I immediately sensed the huge substance of his Confession and prayed nothing Mike said would drag me from my vocation.