"For my sixteenth birthday Mama made a big yellow sheet cake with pink frosting and even though I wasn’t into that little girl stuff anymore and what I really wanted was to kiss a boy, I made sure to smile because Mama had worked her whole afternoon on it. It was that day two weeks ago that I noticed Gus Jones had started to look at me different. He was two years older than I was and poked fun at me since we were kids. We were born in these houses. Gus had grown up to be lean and cunning. Since he had been a child he had accumulated muscles in his arms and a scar on his left cheek from an accident with a fishing hook. He always knew strange facts about animals and liked to dig insects up out of the mud in the backyard to look at them really close. When I was seven and he was nine he made a fire in his backyard and fried worms. I remember the smell of their burnt mealy flesh and how when he put them on the skillet he took from his mama’s kitchen they popped and crackled and this yellow liquid spurted out of them. Gus told his little brother Petey it was candy and made him eat one. Petey puked green into the bushes and Gus got in big trouble."