May arrives in a blur of sunshine and color. Crocus shoots thumb the grass of Roosevelt Park. After her last high school class, Klara bursts through the door with her empty diploma frame. The diploma will be sent once the calligraphy is finished, but by then she will be gone. Gertie knows that Klara is leaving, so her suitcase sits in the hallway. What she doesn’t know is that Simon – whose suitcase is jammed beneath his bed – is coming with her.

He is leaving behind most of his belongings, bringing only those that are utilitarian or precious. Two collared, striped velour T-shirts. The red drawstring bag. The brown corduroy flares he was wearing when a young Puerto Rican man caught his eye on the train and winked: his most romantic experience yet. His leather-banded gold watch, a gift from Saul. And his New Balance 320s: blue suede, the lightest running shoes he’s worn.

Klara’s bag is larger, as it includes something that Ilya Hlavacek gave Klara during her last day of work. The night before they leave, she tells Simon the story of the gift.

‘Bring me that box over there,’ Ilya told her, pointing.

The box, made of wood and painted black, accompanied Ilya from sideshows to circuses until he contracted polio in 1931 – ‘Good timing,’ he often joked, ‘because by then the pictures had killed vaudeville anyway.’ He always referred to it as that box, though Klara knew it was his most precious possession. She did as he directed, hoisting it up onto the counter so Ilya wouldn’t have to get up from his chair.

‘Now, I want you to have this,’ he said. ‘All right? It’s yours. I want you to use it and I want you to enjoy it. It’s meant to be on the road, my dear, not stuck indoors with an old cripple like me. You know how to take it apart? Here, I’ll show you.’ Klara watched as he stood with the help of his cane and turned the box into a table as he had so many times before. ‘Here’s where you put your cards. You stand behind it like so.’

Klara tried it out. ‘There you go,’ he said, smiling his old man’s leprechaun smile. ‘It looks marvelous on you.’

‘Ilya.’ Klara was embarrassed to realize she was crying. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Just use it.’ Ilya waved a hand and hobbled to the back room with his cane – ostensibly to restock the shelves, though Klara suspected he wished to mourn in private. Klara carried the box home in her arms and filled it with her tools: a trio of silk scarves; a set of solid silver rings; a coin purse full of quarters; three brass cups with an equal number of strawberry-sized red balls; and a deck of cards so worn that the paper is flexible as fabric.

Simon knows that Klara is talented, but her interest in magic unsettles him. When she was a child, it was charming; now, it’s just strange. He hopes it’ll fade once they arrive in San Francisco, where the real world will surely be more exciting than whatever’s in her black box.

That night, he lies awake for hours. With Saul’s passing, an old prohibition has lifted: Arthur can run the business, and Saul won’t have known the truth about Simon. How, though, to account for his mother? Simon builds his case. He tells himself that this is the way of the world, the child leaving the parent for adulthood – if anything, humans are pitifully slow. Frog tadpoles hatch in their fathers’ mouths, but they hop out as soon as they lose their tails. (At least, Simon thinks this is so; his mind always drifts in biology class.) Pacific salmon are born in freshwater before they migrate to oceans. When it is time to spawn and die, they journey hundreds of miles, returning to the waters where they themselves were born. Like them, he could always come back.

When he finally sleeps, he dreams he’s one of them. He floats through semen, a glowing coral egg, and lands in his mother’s nest on the streambed. Then he bursts from his shell and hides in dark pools, eating what matter comes his way. His scales darken; he travels thousands of miles. At first, he is surrounded by masses of other fish, so close they brush sleekly together, but as he swims farther away, the pack thins. By the time he realizes they started home, he can’t remember the way to the old, forgotten stream where he was born. He has gone too far to turn back.

They wake in early morning. Klara rustles Gertie awake to say goodbye, then soothes her back to sleep. She tiptoes down the stairs with both suitcases while Simon ties his sneakers. He steps into the hallway, avoiding the plank that always squeaks, and carefully makes his way toward the door.

‘Going somewhere?’

He turns, his pulse leaping. His mother stands in the doorway of her bedroom. She is swaddled in the large, pink bathrobe she’s worn since Varya’s birth, and her hair – usually set in curlers at this time of day – is loose.

‘I was just . . .’ Simon shifts from one foot to the other. ‘Going to get a sandwich.’

‘It’s six in the morning. Funny time for a sandwich.’

Gertie’s cheeks are pink, her eyes wide. A glint of light illuminates her pupils: small knots of dread, shining like black pearls.

A shock of tears springs to Simon’s eyes. Gertie’s feet – pink slabs, thick as pork chops – are squared beneath her shoulders, her body taut as a boxer’s. When Simon was a toddler, and his siblings were in school, he and Gertie played a game they called the Dancing Balloon. Gertie set the radio to Motown – something she never listened to when Saul was home – and blew up a red balloon halfway. They boogied through the apartment, bopping the balloon from the bathroom to the kitchen, their only mission to make sure it didn’t fall. Simon was nimble, Gertie thunderous: together, they could keep the balloon in the air for whole radio programs. Now, Simon remembers Gertie lunging through the dining room, a candlestick clattering to the floor – ‘Nothing broke!’ she bellowed – and stifles a hiccup of inappropriate laughter that, if released, would surely have morphed into a sob.

‘Ma,’ he says. ‘I gotta live my life.’

He hates the way it comes out, like he’s pleading. Suddenly, his body longs for his mother’s, but Gertie looks out at Clinton Street. When her gaze returns to Simon, there’s a surrender in her expression that he’s never seen before.

‘All right. Go get your sandwich.’ She inhales. ‘But go to the shop after school. Arthur’ll show you how things are done. You should be going there every day, now that your father –’

But she doesn’t finish.

‘Okay, Ma,’ says Simon. His throat burns.

Gertie nods gratefully. Before he can stop himself, Simon flies down the stairs.

Simon imagined the bus ride in romantic terms, but he spends most of the first leg asleep. He cannot bear to think any more about what happened between him and his mother, so he rests his head on Klara’s shoulder as she plays with a deck of cards and a pair of miniature steel rings: every so often, he wakes to faint clinking, or to the flapping noise of shuffling. At 6:10 the next morning, they get off at a transfer station in Missouri, where they wait for the bus that will take them to Arizona, and in Arizona they catch a bus to Los Angeles. The final leg takes nine hours. By the time they arrive in San Francisco, Simon feels like the most disgusting creature on earth. His blond hair is an oily brown, and his clothes are three days old. But when he sees the gaping blue skies and leather-clad men of Folsom Street, something inside him leaps like a dog into water, and he cannot help but laugh, just once: a bark of delight.

For three days, they stay with Teddy Winkleman, a boy from their high school who moved to San Francisco after graduation. Now Teddy hangs with a group of Sikhs and calls himself Baksheesh Khalsa. He has two roommates: Susie, who sells flowers outside Candlestick Park, and Raj, brown skinned with shoulder-length black hair, who spends weekends reading Garcia Marquez on the living room couch. The apartment is not the cobwebby Victorian Simon pictured but a dank, narrow series of rooms not unlike 72 Clinton. The décor, though, is different: tie-dyed fabric is pinned to the wall belly-up, like animal hide, and chili pepper lights wind around the perimeter of each doorway. The floor is strewn with records and empty beer bottles, and the smell of incense is so dense that Simon coughs whenever he comes inside.

On Saturday, Klara circles an apartment listing in red pen. 2 BD/1 BA, it reads. $389/mo. Sunny/spacious/hardwood fl. Historic building!! MUST LIKE NOISE. They take the J to Seventeenth and Market, and here it is: the Castro, that two-block heaven of which he has dreamed for years. Simon stares at the Castro Theatre, the brown awning of Toad Hall, and the men, sitting on fire escapes and smoking on stoops, wearing tight jeans and flannel shirts or no shirts at all. To have wanted this for so long – to have it both at last and so early – makes him feel as though he is glimpsing his future life. This is present, he tells himself, dizzy. This is now. He follows Klara to Collingwood, a quiet block lined by bulbous trees and candy-colored Edwardians. They stop in front of a wide, rectangular building. The first floor is a club, closed at this hour, with windows that stretch to the ceiling. Through the glass, Simon sees purple couches and disco balls and tall platforms like pedestals. The name of the club is painted across the glass: PURP.

The apartment sits above the club. It isn’t spacious, nor is it a two-bedroom: the first bedroom is the living room, and the second bedroom is a walk-in closet. But it is sunny, with golden wood floors and bay windows, and they can just afford the first month’s rent. Klara spreads her arms. Her ruched, orange halter top rides up, exposing the soft pink of her belly. She spins once, then twice – his sister, a teacup, a dervish in the living room of their new apartment.

They buy mismatched kitchenware from a thrift store on Church Street and furniture from a garage sale on Diamond. Klara finds two twin mattresses on Douglass, still in their plastic packaging, which they wrestle upstairs.

They go dancing to celebrate. Before they leave, Baksheesh Khalsa supplies hash and tabs. Raj strums a ukulele with Susie on his knee; Klara sits against the wall and stares at a fortune-telling fish she found in the novelty aisle at Ilya’s. Baksheesh Khalsa leans toward Simon and tries to engage him in a conversation about Anwar el-Sadat, but the windows are waving hello to Simon and he thinks he would rather kiss Baksheesh Khalsa instead. There’s not enough time: now they’re at a club, dancing in a mass of people painted blue and red by flashing lights. Baksheesh Khalsa yanks off his turban, and his hair whips through the air like a rope. One man, tall and broad and covered in beautiful green glitter, trails light like a fireball. Simon plunges through the crowd, reaching for him, and their faces crash together with startling intensity: the first kiss Simon’s ever had.

Soon they’re flying through the night in a cab, bodies straining in the backseat. The other man pays. Outside, the moon flaps like a number come loose on a door; the sidewalk unrolls for them, a carpet. They enter a tall, silver apartment building and ride an elevator to some high-up floor.

‘Where are we?’ asks Simon, following him into a unit at the end of the hall.

The man strides into the kitchen but leaves the lights off, so that the apartment is illuminated only by the street lamps outside. When Simon’s eyes adjust, he finds himself in a clean, modern living room, with a white leather couch and a chrome-legged glass table. A splattered, neon painting hangs on the opposite wall.

‘Financial district. New to town?’

Simon nods. He walks to the living room window and looks at the gleaming office buildings. Many stories down, the streets are mostly empty, save for a couple of bums and the same number of cabs.

‘Want anything?’ the man calls, his hand on the refrigerator handle. The tabs are rapidly wearing off, but he doesn’t look any less attractive: he is muscular but lean, with the tidy features of a catalog model.

‘What’s your name?’ Simon asks.

The man retrieves a bottle of white wine. ‘This all right?’

‘Sure.’ Simon pauses. ‘You don’t want to tell me your name?’

The man joins him on the couch with two glasses. ‘I try not to, in these situations. But you can call me Ian.’

‘Okay.’ Simon forces a smile, though he feels mildly sickened – sickened to be grouped with others (how many?) in these situations, and by the man’s caginess. Isn’t disclosure the reason gay men come to San Francisco? But perhaps Simon has to be patient. He imagines dating Ian: lying on a blanket in Golden Gate Park or eating sandwiches at Ocean Beach, the sky streaked orange-gray with seagulls.

Ian smiles. He is at least ten years older than Simon, maybe fifteen.

‘I’m hard as shit,’ he says.

Simon startles, and a wave of desire builds inside him. Ian is already taking his pants off, now his underwear, and there it is: boldly red, its head proudly lifted – a king of a cock. Simon’s own erection presses against his jeans; he stands to pull them down, yanking when one leg snags on his ankle. Ian kneels on the ground, facing him. There, in the narrow space between the couch and the glass table, Ian pulls Simon forward by the ass, and suddenly – shockingly – Simon’s penis is in Ian’s mouth.

Simon cries out, and his upper body bucks forward. Ian holds his chest up with one hand and sucks as Simon gasps in amazement and exquisite, long-dreamed-of pleasure. It is better than he imagined it would be – it is agonizing, mindless bliss, this mouth on him, it is as concentrated and intense as the sun. He swells. When he’s at the brink of an orgasm, Ian pulls back and grins, slick.

‘You wanna see this nice floor with cum all over it? You wanna come all over this nice hardwood floor?’

Simon pants in confusion, this being so far from any objective he had in mind. ‘Do you?’

‘Yeah,’ says Ian. ‘Yeah, I do,’ and now he is crawling on his knees, his penis – so red it’s nearly purple – extending toward Simon like a scepter. A large, meandering vein snakes along the shaft.

‘Hey,’ says Simon. ‘Let’s just slow down for a second, okay? Just really quick, for a second?’

‘Sure, man. We can do that.’ Ian turns him around to face the windows and takes Simon’s penis in one hand, pumping. Simon moans until a dull pain in his knees brings him back to the room and to Ian, whose own penis is persistently nudging Simon’s ass cheeks apart.

‘Can we just . . .’ Simon gasps, so close it takes effort to speak at all. ‘Can we, you know . . .’

Ian sits back on his heels. ‘What? You want lube?’

‘Lube.’ Simon swallows. ‘Yeah.’

Lube isn’t what he wants, but at least it buys him time. As Ian springs to his feet and disappears down a hallway, Simon catches his breath. Remember this, he tells himself, the right-before. He hears the light slap of footsteps, a bony thunk as Ian takes his place and sets a bright orange bottle to one side. There is a gloppy squirt as the lube is dispensed, then the slick sound of Ian rubbing it between his hands.

‘All good?’ asks Ian.

Simon braces himself, pressing his palms into the floor.

‘All good,’ he says.

Sun slices through the blinds. There is the sound of a shower running and the bodily, other-person smell of unfamiliar sheets. Simon is naked in a king bed beneath thick white covers. When he sits up, his legs ache, and he feels he might be sick. He squints at the room: a closed side door, which must lead to the bathroom; stock photos of urban architecture in sleek black frames; a small walk-in closet, inside which Simon sees color-coordinated rows of suit jackets and collared shirts.

He climbs out of bed and scans the ground for his clothes before he realizes that he must have left them in the living room – he remembers it vaguely, the night before, though it feels less like reality than the most intense dream he’s ever had. His jeans and polo shirt are crumpled under the coffee table, his beloved 320s by the door. He scrambles into them and looks outside. Hordes of people stride down the sidewalk with briefcases and coffee. In some alternate reality, it’s Monday morning.

The shower stops. Simon walks back into the bedroom just as Ian comes out of the bathroom, a towel slung low around his waist.

‘Hey.’ He smiles at Simon, takes the towel off and rubs it vigorously over his hair. ‘Can I get you anything? Coffee?’

‘Um,’ says Simon. ‘That’s okay.’ He stares as Ian walks to the closet and pulls on a pair of black underwear, then thin black socks. ‘Where do you work?’

‘Martel and McRae.’ Ian buttons an expensive-looking white shirt and reaches for a tie.

‘What’s that?’

‘Financial advising.’ Ian frowns into a mirror. ‘You really don’t know much of anything, do you?’

‘Hey. I told you I was new here.’

‘Relax.’ Ian has a suspiciously handsome smile, as might belong to a personal injury lawyer.

‘The people at your work,’ says Simon. ‘Do they know you like guys?’

‘Hell no.’ Ian laughs shortly. ‘And I’d like to keep it that way.’

He strides out of the closet, and Simon steps away from the doorway.

‘Listen, I gotta run. But make yourself at home, okay? Just be sure the door shuts behind you when you leave. It should lock automatically.’ Ian grabs a jacket from the hall closet and pauses at the door. ‘It’s been fun.’

Alone, Simon stands very still. Klara doesn’t know where he is. Worse, Gertie must be hysterical. It’s eight in the morning, which means it’s nearly eleven in New York – six days since he left. What kind of person is he, to do this to his mother? He finds a phone on the kitchen counter. While it rings, he pictures the one at home, a cream-colored push button. He imagines Gertie walking over to it – his mother, his dear; he must make her understand – and grasping the receiver in her strong right hand.

‘Hello?’

Simon is startled. It’s Daniel.

‘Hello?’ Daniel repeats. ‘Anybody there?’

Simon clears his throat. ‘Hey.’

‘Simon.’ Daniel releases a long, ragged breath. ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ, Simon. Where the hell are you?’

‘I’m in San Francisco.’

‘And Klara’s with you?’

‘Yeah, she’s here.’

‘Okay.’ Daniel speaks slowly and with control, as if to a volatile toddler. ‘What are you doing in San Francisco?’

‘Hang on.’ Simon rubs his forehead, which pounds with pain. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at school?’

‘Yes,’ says Daniel, with the same eerie calm. ‘Yes, Simon, I am supposed to be at school. Would you like to know why I’m not at school? I’m not at school because Ma called me in a fit on Friday night when you hadn’t come home, and being the good fucking son that I am, the only fucking reasonable person in this family, I left school to be with her. I’ll be taking incompletes this semester.’

Simon’s brain spins. He feels unable to respond to all of this at once, and so he says, ‘Varya’s reasonable.’

Daniel ignores this. ‘I’ll repeat myself. What the hell are you doing in San Francisco?’

‘We decided to leave.’

‘Yeah, I got that far. I’m sure it’s been groovy. And now that you’ve had your fun, let’s talk about what you’re going to do next.’

What is he going to do next? Outside, the sky is a clear, endless blue.

‘I’m looking at the Greyhound schedule for tomorrow,’ Daniel says. ‘There’s a train leaving from Folsom at one in the afternoon. You’ll have to transfer in Salt Lake City and again in Omaha. It’ll cost you a hundred and twenty bucks, which I hope to God you didn’t travel across the country without, but if you’re stupider than I’m giving you credit for, I’ll wire it to Klara’s bank account. In that case, you’ll have to wait and leave on Thursday. All right? Simon? Are you with me?’

‘I’m not coming back.’ Simon is crying, for he realizes that what he’s said is true: there now exists a pane of glass between him and his former home, a pane he can see through but not cross.

Daniel’s voice softens. ‘Come on, big guy. You’re dealing with a lot, I understand that. We all are. Dad’s gone – I can see why you’d get impulsive. But you have to do what’s right. Ma needs you. Gold’s needs you. We need Klara, too, but she’s more of a . . . a lost cause, you know what I mean? Listen, I get how it goes with her. She doesn’t like to take no for an answer; I’m guessing she talked you into it. But she had no right to rope you into her bullshit. I mean, Jesus – you haven’t even finished high school. You’re a kid.’

Simon is silent. He hears Gertie’s voice in the background.

‘Daniel? Who are you talking to?’

‘Hang on, Ma!’ Daniel shouts.

‘I’m staying here, Dan. I am.’

‘Simon.’ Daniel’s voice hardens. ‘Do you know what it’s been like around here? Ma has lost her godforsaken mind. She’s talking about calling the cops. I’m doing my best, I’m promising her you’ll come to your senses, but I can’t hold her off for much longer. You’re only sixteen – a minor. And technically, that makes you a runaway.’

Simon is still crying. He leans against the counter.

‘Sy?’

Simon wipes his cheeks with his palms. Gently, he hangs up.