The house was still, sounds indistinct and muffled, as if heard through cloth. Upstairs, in the boy's room, the clock over the desk ticked away the minutes just past midnight. In the next room, where the boy's parents slept, there was the soft rattle of an old fan, moving the thick air from outside the house to inside and over his parents' bodies. As they had done nearly every hot night that summer, they had offered the fan to the boy, but the boy, aware that summer for the first time of his parents' age, had refused to take it from them. In the house, far from town, Andy slept on his back in his bed. He slept badly, his lips lightly parted, his body smothered by the August night. A damp sheet, loose from its moorings, covered his chest. The boy's chest was bony then, without the muscles that would come later, and he had an older boy's summer growth, as if he'd sprouted too fast and had lost the grace of childhood. He was tall now, so tall that he towered over his parents, and his unfamiliar limbs, splayed under and out from the sheet, gave his body a lanky awkwardness, even in his sleep.
