People came to dread the reading of the suggestions in case they themselves were to be mentioned. They started to feel vulnerable, exposed, and eyed each other suspiciously in the streets until they spent less time socializing and more time hiding in their homes. I was furious. In the space of a few months, my suggestion box had really made our town the least desirable place to live in New South Wales, or for that matter anywhere at all.

Meanwhile, the twins had turned sixteen and celebrated the occasion by quitting school. Bruno and Dave were saving up for guns and planning a move to the city, and Terry wanted to join them. As for me, I’d finally managed to extricate myself from the gang. There was no reason for me to pretend I was doing any good watching over Terry, Bruno had finally reached the point of wanting to “vomit his whole stomach up” at the sight of me, and frankly, I’d had a gutful of the whole stinking lot of them. The benefit I derived from my association with the gang was firmly secured; I was left in peace by my schoolmates. I didn’t wake with dread every day, so now my mind was free to do other things. It’s not until it’s gone that you appreciate how time-consuming dread really is.

I spent every spare millisecond with Caroline. I was fascinated not only by her increasingly succulent body but by her idiosyncrasies. She was obsessed with the idea that people were holding out on her. She relentlessly squeezed their stories out of them; she thought that older people, having lived in many places and cities, had experienced all that life has to offer and she wanted to hear about it. She didn’t care about the children in the town; they didn’t know anything. It was easy to get the adults talking. They seemed ever watchful for a receptacle in which to pour the banked-up untreated sewage of their lives. But after she heard them, she’d incinerate them with an unimpressed look that said very clearly, “Is that all?”

She read too, only she gleaned very different things from books than I did. She obsessed over the lives of the characters, how they ate, dressed, drank, traveled, explored, smoked, fucked, partied, and loved. She longed for exoticism. She wanted to travel the world. She wanted to make love in an igloo. It was comical the way Lionel Potts encouraged his daughter. “One day I’m going to drink champagne hanging upside-down on a trapeze,” she’d say. “Good for you! I know you’ll get there! It’s important to have goals! Think big!” he’d ramble on endlessly. She really set him off.

But Caroline wasn’t as totally discontented with her surroundings as I was. She found beauty in things I just couldn’t see. Tulips in a flowerpot, old people holding hands, an obvious toupee- the littlest thing would send her squealing in delight. And the women of the town adored her. She was always adjusting their hats and picking flowers for them. But when she was alone with me, she was different. I realized that her sweetness, the way she carried on with the people of the town, was her mask. It was a good one, the best kind of mask there is: a true lie. Her mask was a weave of tattered shreds torn from all the beautiful parts of herself.

One morning I went over to Caroline’s and was surprised to see Terry standing outside her house, throwing stones so they landed in the garden bed underneath the front windows.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Terry Dean! Stop throwing stones in our garden!” Caroline shouted from the upstairs window.

“It’s a free world, Caroline Potts!”

“Not in China!”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing. I can throw stones here if I want.”

“I guess.”

Caroline watched from the window. She waved at me. I waved back. Then Terry waved too, only his was a sarcastic wave, if you can imagine it. Caroline waved ironically, which is totally different in tone. I wondered what Terry had against Caroline.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

“In a little while. I want to keep throwing stones.”

“Leave her alone,” I said, annoyed. “She’s my friend.”

“Big deal.” Terry spat, threw down the stones, and walked off. I watched him go. What was that all about? I couldn’t figure it out. Of course, back then I didn’t know anything about young love. I had no idea, for instance, that it was possible to express love by puerile aggression and spite.

Around this time I went up to see Harry, and I didn’t know it then, but it was to be my last visit. He was already in the visitors’ room, waiting and gaping at me expectantly, as if he’d put a whoopee cushion under my mattress at home and he wanted to know if it had gone off yet. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “You’ve been really stirring things up down there!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The suggestion box. They’ve gone crazy, haven’t they?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Oh, you can see quite a lot from up here,” he said, his voice waltzing in three-four time. It wasn’t true. You could see fuck all. “It’s all going to end badly, of course, but you can’t hate yourself for it. That’s why I called you here today. I wanted to tell you not to beat yourself up about it.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“I didn’t?”

“No.”

“Well, I didn’t call the clouds either, but there they are,” he said, pointing to the window. “All I’m saying, Marty, is don’t let it destroy you. Nothing chews at a man’s soul more ravenously than guilt.”

“What do I have to be guilty about?”

Harry shrugged, but it was the most loaded shrug I’d ever seen.

It turned out the shrug was right; by creating something as innocuous as an empty box, I had once again nudged my family’s destiny in a really unpleasant direction.

It started about a month later, when Terry’s name first appeared in the suggestion box.

Mr. Dean should learn to control his son. Terry Dean has fallen under the influence of young men impossible to turn around. But Terry is young. It’s not too late. All he needs is some parental guidance, and if his parents can’t do it, we’ll find some that can.

Everyone in the hall applauded. The townspeople regarded the box as a sort of oracle; because the suggestion didn’t come directly out of the mouths of our neighbors but was on paper and pulled ceremoniously from the box and read in the authoritarian tone of Jim Brock, the words were taken more seriously than they deserved, and were often followed with a frightening religious obedience.

“It’s not my fault it’s a titanic waste of effort raising sons under strict moral guidelines when children are so heavily influenced by their peers,” my father said that night over dinner. “One wrong friend and your kid could be knocked off balance for good.”

We all sat listening to him with trepidation, watching his thoughts whirl around his head like dust in the wind.

The next day he turned up at the playground at lunchtime. Both Terry and I ran for cover, but he wasn’t looking for us. Notebook in his lap, he sat on the swings and watched the children play; he was making a list of young boys he thought suitable to befriend his sons. Of course the children must have thought he was insane (these were the days before they would have simply assumed him a pedophile), but watching his fervent efforts to put me and Terry on the straight-and-narrow made me pity and admire him in equal measure. Every now and then he’d call over a boy and have a chat with him, and I remember being secretly impressed by his commitment to what was a seriously weird idea.

Who knows what they talked about during these informal interviews, but after a week my father’s list contained fifteen potentials: fine, upstanding children from good families. He presented us the results of his intensive research. “These are suitable friends,” he said. “Go out and befriend them.”