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he would be all we could talk about. Perhaps we had a part in our own bedevilment, for the girls could not stop obsessing about him, whether on the occasion of a casual meeting (did hespeak to you, the girls would want to know; what did he say?), or a mere sighting in town, when even a detail as trifling as the color of his waistcoat was discussed. But what we were really thinking, all of us, was: how he could look you over with an impertinent eye or the way the very corner of his mouth turned up in speculation, and how any of us would die to be in his arms, just once. And it was not just the young girls who felt this way about him; especially as he reached his teenage years, fifteen, sixteen, he already made the other men in the village seem spent, coarse, overfed, or scrawny, and the good wives started to consider Jonathan differently. You could tell by the way they’d stare at him, their feverish looks, flushed cheeks, bitten lips, and the eternal hope in a quick drawing in of breath.
    There was the aspect about him of slight danger, too, of wanting to touch him the way a mad voice in your head tells you to touch a hot iron. You know you cannot help but be hurt, but you cannot resist. You must just experience it for yourself. You ignore what you know will come next, the unbearable pain of seared flesh, the sharp bite of the burn all over again every time the wound is touched. The scar you will carry for the rest of your life. The scar that will mark your heart. Inured to love, you will never be quite so foolish in the same way again.
    In that respect, I was envied and ridiculed at the same time: envied for all the time I spent in Jonathan’s presence, ridiculed because I had made it plain that there was no romance of any sort between us. This only confirmed in the eyes of the other girls that I lacked the necessary feminine wiles to pique a man’s interest. But I was no different from them. I knew Jonathan had the ability to burn me up with the brilliance of his attention, like a flame to paper. A girl could be destroyed in an instant of divine love. The question was, was it worth it?
    You might ask if I loved Jonathan for his beauty, and I would answer: that is a pointless question, for his great, uncommon beauty was an irreducible part of the whole. It gave him his quiet confidence—which some might have called aloof arrogance—and his easy, disarming way with the fairer sex. And if his beauty drew my eye from thefirst, I’ll not apologize for it, nor will I apologize for my desire to claim Jonathan for my own. To behold such beauty is to wish to possess it; it’s desire that drives every collector. And I was hardly alone. Nearly every person who came to know Jonathan tried to possess him. This was his curse, and the curse of every person who loved him. But it was like being in love with the sun: brilliant and intoxicating to be near, but impossible to keep to oneself. It was hopeless to love him and yet it was hopeless not to.
    And so I was afflicted by Jonathan’s curse, caught up in his terrible attraction, and both of us were doomed to suffer for it.

THREE

    A friendship progressed between us—Jonathan and I—in this way through childhood. We met after services on Sundays and at social events such as weddings and even funerals, whispering together on the fringe of the mourners, or giving up on propriety altogether and wandering off to the woods so we could concentrate all our attention on each other. Heads shook in disapproval, and without a doubt, some tongues gave in to gossip, but our families did nothing to stop our friendship—at least, I was not made aware of it if they had.
    It was during this time that I realized that Jonathan was lonelier than I had imagined. The other boys sought his company far less than I’d assumed and, for Jonathan’s part, when a group approached us at a social, he often skirted them. I recall one time, at a spring church gathering, that Jonathan steered me to another path