What Boys Learn

Prologue

I never meant to see what was in his drawer.

I was never a mother who snooped.

Not even when I thought a little snooping would help me better understand my stoic son. No—I’d drawn the line. Trust was more important.

In our household of two, trust meant that drawers and doors stayed closed.

And yet, there I was on an unseasonably warm spring day, sweating through my tank top and baggy gym shorts as I packed up the apartment, alone, venturing into Benjamin’s room to take care of the chore he’d neglected while he was off at the pool attending a lifeguard-hiring information session.

It was all he talked about—when he talked.

Improving his swimming. Getting a pool job.

Saving money, most likely for a car, though any expenditure that promised greater independence would do.

I pushed the toothed edge of the tape dispenser against the newly assembled box to bite off the final piece of tape, feeling irritated by how little he’d done but also guilty that we had to move at all.

The new place was only two miles away from our old apartment, and it wasn’t a step up by any measure.

No backyard. Smaller bedrooms. One bathroom instead of one and a half. Dark.

I dragged the empty box next to Benjamin’s bureau and pulled the drawer open. The T-shirts inside were folded more neatly than my own. He’d been selectively tidy since turning fourteen, insistent on doing his own laundry, obsessive about showers.

I pulled out a stack of shirts and flopped them into the big box, grabbed the next stack . . . and then I looked down, puzzled by a satiny feel. I held up the skimpy fabric with two fingers. Sexy. Small. Barely enough to cover any woman’s private parts, front or back.

I winced, wishing I’d left this box untouched. But then the feeling shifted, from embarrassment to something even less comfortable. As far as I knew, Benjamin had never had a girlfriend.

On closer inspection, the underwear didn’t look new.

Possibly not clean, either. I didn’t think—not that it would have alarmed me—that he was curious about cross-dressing.

Maybe he’d ordered them online from some woman who wore them for five minutes and then sold them at ten times their value.

But Benjamin always laughed at people who fell for online gambits like that. Plus, he was broke. Like his mom.

The more likely answer was one I didn’t want to name. With the underwear still in my hand, I took three steps back, trying to block the picture that was forming. It was my fault for looking. My fault for thinking . . . and there was that ringing again, the edges of my vision beginning to darken.

A truck rattled past the open bedroom window and I startled, fist closing tighter around the satin souvenir, if that’s what it was.

I didn’t like that word. Souvenir. Or trophy.

Even so, I left Benjamin’s room and hurried to my own, headed for the closet and that shoebox I’d kept for years, the place for things that couldn’t be forgotten.