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Montpelier—the state capital—somehow developed sleek coats of mud on its miles and miles of asphalt and cement.
    But the sugaring was good and the syrup crop huge. My best friend Rollie McKenna had a horse, and although the two of us were never supposed to ride her at the same time, we did often, and that March we rode up to the Brennans’ sugarhouse after school at least three or four times so we could smell the sweet fog that enveloped the place as Gilbert and Doris slowly boiled the sap into syrup.
    Of course, there were other reasons for riding into the hills where the Brennans had hung hundreds and hundreds of buckets on maple trees. We also rode there because the roads we took to the sugarhouse would lead us past the town ball field where Tom Corts and his friends would smoke cigarettes.
    At twelve (and fast approaching thirteen), I would ride or run or walk miles out of my way to watch Tom Corts—two years older than I and therefore in the ninth grade—smoke cigarettes. I probably would have gone miles out of my way to watch Tom Corts stack wood or paint clapboards. He wore turtlenecks all the time, usually black or navy blue, and they always made him look a little dangerous. But his hair was a very light blond and his eyes a shade of green that was almost girlish, and that made the aura of delicious delinquency that surrounded him almost poetic. Tom was the first of many sensitive smokers with whom I would fall deeply in love, and while I have never taken up that habit myself, I know well the taste of smoke on my tongue.
    Tom Corts smoked Marlboros from the crushproof box, and he held his cigarettes like tough-guy criminals in movies: with his thumb and forefinger. (A few years later when I, too, was in high school, one of Tom’s younger disciples, a boy in my grade, would teach me to hold a joint in that fashion.) He didn’t inhale much, probably no more than necessary to light the cigarette and then keep it burning; most of the time, the cigarettes just slowly disappeared between his fingers, leaving ashes on the dirt or mud of the ball field, the sidewalk, or the street.
    Tom had a reputation for driving adults wild, although rarely in ways they thought they should—or could—discipline. I remember the first hunting season when he was given a gun and taken into the deep woods with the older males in his clan, he shot one of the largest bucks brought down that year in the county. The men’s pride in their young kin must have shriveled, however, when they saw how Tom mugged for the camera in the picture the owner of the general store took of the boy and the buck for his annual wall of fame. Tom wrapped one arm around the dead deer’s neck and pretended to sob, and with his other hand held aloft a sign on which he’d named the deer, “Innocence.”
    It was also widely believed in town that Tom was the ringleader behind the group that somehow acquired cans of the sizzling yellow paint the road crews used to line highways, and one Halloween coated the front wall of the new town clerk’s office with the stuff. The building, a squat little eyesore that not even the selectmen could stand, was a mistake the whole town regretted, and neither the constable nor the state police worked very hard to find the vandals.
    On any given day, Tom was as likely to be seen somewhere reading a paperback book of Greek mythology—unassigned in school—as a magazine on snowmobiling; he was the sort of wild card who would skip a class trip to the planetarium in St. Johnsbury, but then write an essay on black holes that would astonish the teacher.
    Initially, my father disliked Tom, but not so much that he ever discouraged me from trying to get the boy’s attention, or suggested that it might be a bad idea for Rollie and me to try and ingratiate ourselves into his circle. I think my father—the sort of orderly architect who would stack his change by size every single night of his adult life, so that on any given morning I