It was around noon on a miserably hot July day when Draymond discovered the written confession. When he arrived at the river gorge, he had expected other kids to already be there, cooling off and hanging out, but he was surprised to find all the normal spots abandoned. Upon realizing this, Draymond himself felt abandoned, fearing the others had all conspired without him to find a new place, or—perhaps worse—that they had each individually outgrown the gorge, leaving him alone with the childish desire to splash and dive and risk cracking his head open on the shallow bottom just for the stupid thrill of it. Probably, though, a bunch of kids were just on daytrips with their families or watching their younger siblings while their parents were at work. Probably, a bunch were just still in bed. He smiled at the thought of his lazy peers sleeping the day away. Maybe, he mused, the others all got too close to the old Minkey house and Andy Minkey had nabbed and eaten them, as local rumor suggested he might. He didn’t really think so, of course; there was no way old Andy Minkey could have gotten them all.

After accepting that he was on his own for the day, Draymond considered going ahead and stripping down and jumping in, but there was something sad about it, swimming in the gorge alone. And if he did happen to hit his head or break his leg on a rock, there would be no one around to help him. That was just good common sense.

For a while, he walked from one spot to the next to see if anyone had shown up—leisurely, like he wasn’t looking for anyone at all. He swung from a few low branches and scared a bird away from an earthworm it was struggling to extract from its hole. The bird exploded into the sky and then took perch in a tree on the opposite side of the gorge, aiming its black pebble eyes at him and screaming.

“Aw, shut up!” called Draymond, but the creature, feeling wronged, persisted in letting him know. Incensed, Draymond found a stick and started digging in the hole himself. “You like this, bird? I’m going to get it. I might even eat it, too, when I do.”

He wouldn’t really have eaten the worm, of course. At most he might have flung it into the water or left it out in the sun to watch it dry into a little kilned worm sculpture.

He didn’t do either in the end. After wedging the stick as deep into the hole as he could, leaning on it until his arms and shoulders shook, he sat down in the dirt and grabbed the stick low so as not to snap it. He then began to jostle the stick, first back and forth and then in an expanding circle for no reason other than to see what happened. What happened was that a brick of mud broke free and fell down the bank all the way to the edge of the water, exposing the contents of what had once been the hole, namely the business end of Draymond’s stick and the head of the worm, which poked out only briefly to assess the damage before securing itself down some escape tunnel. Unexpectedly, Draymond also saw the short edge of a soggy and rather distressed candy box.

Even with the care he took in excavating it, Draymond ended up ripping it in two. He cursed and then looked around to make sure no one had been around to hear because that would be just his luck.

After confirming that he was alone, he looked at the portion of the box that had broken away in his hand. It was a type of candy he knew, but the design on the box was unlike what he was used to seeing on store shelves. It’s ancient, Draymond thought before crouching to peer inside the portion of the packaging that remained in the ground. There was no candy inside. Rather, it contained a single piece of folded notebook paper. He wiped the mud and the wet from his fingers and then withdrew the paper, as carefully as if it were a rare fossil or a lost religious text.

The paper was damp, and he had to shake a black pincher beetle from its underside before unfolding it. When he tried to do so, the paper split at every fold, even with his fingers working delicately. “Crap,” he said, and then laid the flimsy squares of paper on his bare leg, nudging them together to read what was handwritten across them. The message, which was in big, blocky pencil script, read: Last night I did it with Mrs. T. in the back seat of her Toyota when I got off work at the mini mart and she offered to drive me home. It was awesome. I did great. – The Love King, 1998.