My eyes are closed, and I’m stroking myself. This is only the second time I’ve done it. The first time it was like I couldn’t help myself. My cock was throbbing, and I touched it, and it felt so good. It only took a few more swipes before I spilled my seed. I’d only ever rubbed against my mattress before, but I liked it a lot. So, I was doing it again.

It’s wrong, but I think about Apollo while I do it.

Her bright eyes, her smile, and the way her legs felt when she brushed them against me in the hammock.

Suddenly, the door flies open and slams against the wall so hard the plaster falls down. Everything is moving in slow motion suddenly, and I watch the shattered drywall float like snow onto the floor.

My eyes meet my stepfather’s and time stops. He looks madder than I’ve ever seen.

His eyes move to where my hand is still between my legs and they narrow, his lip curling in disgust.

I gasp and move my hand out of my shorts.

He kicks the door shut behind him and raises his hand. He’s holding my book.

I stare at it as he walks toward me. He’s walking slowly and with each step my heart threatens to combust.

Fear paralyzes me, and I don’t move when he sits at the edge of my bed and glowers down at me.

“You are a filthy sinner.” He spits in my face and slaps me with his open palm.

I slide up to the top of my bed and press myself into the wall. I was big for my age, but he’s still much bigger than me.

“You need to be punished and cleansed. When I think you are truly repentant, you need to take a wife and become a man. I’ve let your mother spoil you.”

And then he slaps me again. This time, with my book.

The blow feels like an explosion on the side of my face. I stare at my treasured possession formed into a weapon and used to hurt me, and something inside of me breaks.

Without thinking or considering the consequences, I launch myself off the bed and tackle him. He absorbs my attack easily and throws me to the ground.

He kicks me repeatedly in the stomach as he screams down at me.

“You’re going to learn once and for all that I am in charge. You will not defy me. You and that worthless mother of yours have had an easy life since I brought you here. That’s going to change.”

He stalks out of my room, the heel of his boot striking the wood floor with enough force to rattle the furniture. When the front door slammed, I hear the crash of glass and the telltale sound of wood splintering, and I knew that the picture of my grandfather that he kept on the wall in our living room had fallen.

My heart sprints in my chest. I sit on my bed, quivering. I want to run then. But, I don’t know where I’d go besides the lake.

And I can’t let him discover it. I don’t know how he found the book. I can’t let him find out about the lake.

Or Apollo.

I shudder as I think about her. I’m glad she’ll never know more than I told her. Her star is really just a trapped and forgotten boy who has no future.

Before I could even let that scenario play out in my head, the door to my bedroom opens again.

He stands there with his four most trusted friends. All of them watching me.

“You’ve gotten too big for your britches, boy. That wicked book has filled your heard with insolence and sin. This is for your own good.”

I don’t have time to react before they’re on top of me.

The four men drag me outside while my stepfather walks behind us, raving about the “weight of his responsibility.” He laments, “curse of a sinner” in his house and his “fruitless wife.” They drag me kicking and screaming to the whipping post outside. They tie me up, and then they leave.

It was just him and me. I take my punishment. I don’t make a sound while he beats me. Not even when he breaks the skin on my back. When he’s tired, he drops his belt and yanks my head by my hair.

“Your hair is a sign of your vanity. Of self-indulgence that your worthless mother has allowed to breed in my house,” he breathes as he drags a blade across my scalp. The small stings I’d feel are followed by small trails of blood that slide down my face, into my eyes, and drip from my nose. I watch the blood as it splatters into the dirt. Disappearing into the dark dirt, reminding me that no one would remember me.

Except for Apollo.

I think about her, and I know that even if he kills me today, this isn’t the end of me. She’ll always remember me. So, I still don’t cry.

Until he holds up my book. Then, I struggle against the ropes, feel them cut into the skin at my wrists as I twist and turn trying to break free.

He laughs, and it’s full of triumph. Because he knows he’s won.

“No, please.”

“Stop your sissy crying, you sinner,” he yells as he rips the first chunk of pages out.

“No, stop. Stop, please,” I say over and over as I watch him tear my book to shreds.

He drops the empty cover on the heap of paper

“I’m going to rid us of this. You will cease your covetousness. You will serve as an example today. Everyone will see what happens when they turn away from the word of God and submit to the temptations of the flesh,” he raves at me before he stalks off.

I don’t know how long he’s gone. Time is meaningless. I just stare at the carcass of my book. The carcass of my life.

When he comes back, he’s brought a crowd with him, and he’s holding a bundle of clothes in his hands.

He drops them on top of the pile of trash that was my nook and drops my compass on top of it. My compass. My mother had given it to me. She said it was my father’s.

I look up at him then with a hatred so fierce my entire being burns with it.

“That devil in you is going to be chased out. You have built idols out of worldly possessions. You have had lustful thoughts and engaged in self-pleasure. But the demon in you will not survive. We will chase it away,” he screams and looks out at the crowd.

He pours kerosene on the entire pile and sets it on fire.

At his command, his group of henchmen seize my bound arms. I want to tell them they don’t need to hold me. When he destroyed my book, I knew I would never defy him again.

I don’t have anything left worth fighting for.

He orders them to hold me still while he pulls my pants and underwear down.

I stand there unmoving while he pronounces me guilty of consorting with the devil and of courting sin.

I only flinch when I see the red-hot brand handed to him.

I search the crowd for my mother. She’s restrained. And she’s fighting like crazy, but not making any headway. Her eyes meet mine, and they are wide with fear and something else I can’t understand. I hold her gaze, and I don’t look away. I know what’s coming.

I have never witnessed one of these ceremonies. We haven’t had one since I was seven years old. But I remember the sounds of it.

I want to be brave.

I won’t show him how scared I am. I won’t make a sound.

I focus on my mother. If I keep my eyes on her, I’ll be okay.

When I smell the smoke and feel the heat, my heart races. My mother’s eyes lose some their panic. She mouths “I love you,” and gives me a small smile. I start to smile back.

Then the brand touches my skin. The searing pain destroys all of my control. I have no desire to be brave or quiet. I feel piss run down my legs, but I don’t care.

I scream a high-pitched, loud, desperate sound that draws gasps of shock and groans of horror from the crowd gathered around me.

The pain reaches its crazy, fevered pitch and the last thing I remember seeing before I passed out was my mother’s tortured face as she rushed toward me.

“Graham, wake up.” I hear my mother’s voice, and I push it away … Since the day of the branding, sleep has been my escape. My dreams are my only solace.

In the days that followed, the burn got infected. I was so sick that I was sure that I was dying. I prayed fervently for an escape from this endless hell. From the pain and loneliness.

I burned with a fever for a week, and the entire time my mother sat by my bedside. Every snatch of consciousness I got was full of the sound of her weeping and begging me to wake up.

In my delirium, I dreamed that I was standing at a fork in the road. On one side, Ellie stood smiling at me and telling me to join her. She told me how happy she was now. How pain free the place she lived was. I wanted to go be with her.

But, on the other side stood Apollo, telling me of all of the adventures we still had waiting for us. Promising me that if I woke up, she’d be there waiting. Waiting for me to come join her in that hammock and read. I don’t know anything about what it means to love someone except for what I feel for my Mama.

But even in the hazy place between wake and sleep where I hover, I know I love her. That piece of me she took, I can feel it. Like it’s calling me. Sometimes, I get this tingle in my chest, and I think maybe she’s thinking about me, too.

When I wake up from the fever I was sure would kill me, I know it’s because of her. I hate her for it. Because I woke up and she’s not here.

I wanted to scream in frustration as my mother wept and wailed as she held me to her. Her tears coated my face as she clung to me and thanked God for sparing me. She didn’t know that her God, as usual, had done nothing for anyone. Except give Jeremiah more sway over Cain’s Weeping.

He said my waking up was a sign that God had forgiven me, and since then, he’s made me stand before the congregation once a month and give testimony about how merciful he and the Lord have been.

I say whatever he asks of me. I answer his questions with the words I know he wants to hear. I pray aloud whenever he’s in earshot. I sit still when he takes his clippers to my head every two weeks and shaves my hair off.

I don’t even mind that anymore. I’m glad I don’t have any hair. It’s a constant reminder of her. When I think of her, my heart feels like it’s being wrung dry. Like every last drop of blood is draining from it.

She wasn’t just my friend. She had been my hope for something more than what my daily life promised.

Now, I have only one hope. Only one prayer. I want him to die.

I would kill him myself if I ever had the chance, but I know I never will.

They treat me like a wild animal they captured. I spend all day chained by my ankle to my bed. My window is boarded up, and my door is locked with a chain and deadbolt that only he has the key to. When I sleep, they handcuff my wrists, too.

I don’t mind. I want to be alone. The only time I’m not is when my mother comes in to bring me food once a day. And to bathe me once a week. She always cries when she looks at the scar the brand has left.

It says S for Sinner.

I’ve decided the S is for Star. Apollo’s star. Even if I never see her again, I will die with that truth on my body.

My mother talks to me now. She’s not like she used to be before Ellie died, but sometimes I even catch her smiling to herself. And sometimes she smiles at me, too. Those days give me hope, too. Maybe she’ll kill him, I think. Then I hear them, making the sounds that tell me she’s not going to kill him.

She’s more involved in running the town. She goes with him on his monthly supply runs now, too. Those are days I have come to dread.

The first time they went on their run after my public shaming, he chained me to the post in front of the house.

I’d had a blistering sunburn by the time they came back. So, next time, Mama asked if they could chain me instead to a tree with a big leafy shade. He agreed. I wish they’d left me in the sun. I couldn’t do anything but scream when ants crawled all over me and started to bite me.

Ms. Grover, the old lady who makes all of the cheese in the town, heard me.

She came and poured water on my legs to get rid of them and then drowned the anthill. I watched them wash away, and all I could think was how Apollo would be sad to see them die.

Ms. Grover begged me not to mention it to Jeremiah. Of course, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t wish his special brand of attention on anyone.

The only place I find anything worth living for is in my dreams. I get to see Apollo and relive the stories in the books that we shared. We lie in our hammock and watch the gods in the book of Greek myths act out their stories for us. My dreams have become the escape that my book had been. And thanks to Apollo, I have a lot more.

So, when I hear my mother’s voice barreling through tonight’s dream just as Zeus is about to turn his love Io into a cow, I groan and put my pillow over my head and pray I’m still dreaming.

“Graham, honey, you have to wake up now.” When her familiar tea and mint tinged breath wafts into my nostrils, I groan again—this time, in defeat.

Even though in my dreams, Apollo and I lie down facing each other, close enough for our noses to touch and I’ve never smelled her breath. Apollo’s hair always smelled like strawberries, but in my dreams … nothing.

I miss her so much.

“Graham. I need you to wake up.”

I open my eyes to find my mother’s face is inches from mine.

She’s holding a flashlight between us. The shadows give her face a ghoulish shape. Her eyes are … different. For years, they’ve just been sad. Or panicked or blank. But now, there’s something urgent in them that wakes me up.

I sit up and realize that the shackle around my wrist is gone. “What’s going on?”

She moves down to the shackle around my ankle, and with the slip of a key, she unlocks it. “We’re leaving,” she whispers as she looks over her shoulder at the closed bedroom door.

“Now.”