The life of Sam, 16, is set in a normal world not so far from innocence, where the experience of first love finds him lost but hopeful.
Normal life... the world of about half a dozen boys in the village.
Writer’s note
The railroad tracks mark the eastern edge of the village. To the north, south, and west - it's water. You can hear the routine coupling of rail cars, minor collisions, across the neighborhood. Of course, the real sounds are on the words of the boys who live in the village.
A would-be lover boy can't tell the new boy how much he likes him - it's just easier to be unhappy. Sam skulks across the sidewalks of this hush-hush town, where he also holds out on his best friend - not a hint of the secret. The new boy flits around somewhere out there and Sam feels lost, unable to come clean - unless your best friend is the one that you're supposed to tell this stuff to.
Passage at Amazon A Very Quiet Village
The beginning of the story…
A BLUE water tower watched over everything. It was just there, was all.
And there I was in the valley, talking to Derek and a few other guys. We weren't talking about anything, or we were just some boys talking about how tall you would want to be if you could choose your height.
I said 6 foot 5, but at 16 years old I had very little chance of reaching it.
This boy came up to us and I had never seen him before. I figured he must have known somebody else even if I couldn't tell who. Nobody said hello.
The boy was not 6 feet, but his eyes took the brown of the earth and his hair did what it wanted to do.
All I knew when I saw him was, I wanted to take him to the water tower. Somehow or other I had to be with him. We would walk the earth to the water, was how I saw it. The tower was a mile or two on foot, but it was like the temple in the land of make-believe that keeps getting farther away as you get closer. I couldn't stop thinking about him standing there.
"Anybody wanna go to the water tower?" I said.
Everybody looked at me strange, including him, but he was the one who said yes. The tower didn't seem so far away anymore. The others made excuses for why they couldn't go and next thing I knew I was walking with him.
"What's at the tower?" he said, his voice like the whistle of a train gone down the line, something I had to catch up to.
I was going to lose him if I didn't say the right thing. This was my first time really talking to a guy when it meant so much. I took a short stride, then a longer one. "I never went there before," I said.
My answer was as stupid as talking about how tall you wanted to be, but his half smile cancelled it out.
"Me neither," he said.
"It's blue."
He looked at me before he took his glasses off. "Do you know all those guys?" he said.
"Are you looking for somebody?"
For my sake, he needed to put the glasses back on. I wanted something artificial in the way, something I could see through but couldn't walk through. It was either that or I was gonna lose myself to him way too fast.
He just held his glasses in his hand. "They didn't introduce you," he said.
"Sam."
"Archie."
I went to shake his hand but it wasn't free. He put the glasses on and then he laughed when we finally did shake hands. I couldn't laugh at all. Trying to make him like me was serious business.
"They painted it blue," I said, just to make sure he didn't forget how stupid I was.