They felt proud to be the kind of boys they were—boys who spat in public, boys who kept their gaze on the floor or fixed on a space above your head, boys who looked you in the eye only to size you up or scare you off. When they bit the chapped skin from their lower lips, when they chewed up the web between thumb and pointer, when they scratched inside their ears with house keys, they were looking at memories, proud memories, blood memories, or else they were dreaming about their wild futures.
