Excerpt from Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

OK, stay put a minute, said Matthew, moving for the spear again, me twitching like I might break into another sprint. Hey, I said don't move, Matthew shouted, pointing his finger.

Run. Run. Stay put. Don't move.

I began to notice the sting in the hole in my leg.

Matthew took off his T-shirt and I swear I thought he was going to bend down and smear himself all over with mud or the juice of crushed berries. When he picked up the spear, I closed my eyes.

A few seconds later I heard a tearing sound. Opening my eyes, I saw that Matthew had the arm ripped off his tee and was using the tip of our spear to make a notch in the cloth. Next he tore the thing into a strip and beckoned me turn. And then Matthew spat into his hand and wiped the blood from my calf, me wincing when his spittly fingers stung the raw wound. Once my leg was clean he bandaged it with the cloth, stretching it taut, wrapping it twice and tying a firm knot at my shin. When he was done, he pulled on his lopsided tee.

Let's go find some deer, Tricky, he said.

* * *

THE SWANGUM SHOOTING, AS IT came to be known, took place almost exactly a year after Matthew stuck me with our spear. We'd spent every day of that previous summer together. But in 1982, things went a little differently.

First of all, six weeks before the shooting, there was the accident, news of which spread around Roseborn the day before July Fourth. I was bummed because for a long time after that I didn't get to see Matthew, my parents having told me that I had to give him some space, that Matthew needed time to grieve with his family. So the next time I saw him, Wednesday, August 18, it felt like we'd lost a whole summer together.

Before heading up that morning, I'd arrived at our usual meeting spot only to see a girl alongside Matthew, Hannah Jensen straddling her bike. She was in dark jeans and a pink T-shirt with a cartoon ice-cream cone on the front. I suppose I thought her being there must've had something to do with the grieving, maybe Matthew needed the emotional support of the female sex or something like that. To be fair, I wouldn't have been much help on that front. And although Hannah was also in seventh grade, she wasn't in our class, so her being there didn't exactly make sense to me. Anyway, whatever the exact reason for her presence, I felt pretty sore about Hannah's intrusion.

I assumed the plan was to show her the usual spots and do the usual things. It was the first time we'd taken anyone with us, let alone a girl, and probably we wouldn't find any deer and then we'd show her our secret fort and plunk some soda cans and maybe Matthew would try to make out with her. Because although we were just kids, Matthew was a country mile further along that snaky path toward manhood than anyone else in seventh grade. Me especially.

For several weeks after his arrival in Roseborn, the major talking point for everyone in our class was that Matthew had grown up in New York City. But it wasn't only his big city upbringing that made him seem more grown up than the rest of us, he actually was more grown up, having been held back a year before moving upstate. And so being an older kid—over a year and a half older than me—when Matthew got dropped into our class at the beginning of sixth grade, he landed with an almighty splash. It was as if a stone giant had been thrown among us, not just a street-fighting kid from Gotham but a taller, stronger, more developed creature. Matthew could easily have passed for sixteen, even eighteen maybe, and for weeks everyone was too intimidated to talk to him, this hulking brute from another world. Eventually, when I did begin to befriend him, I would realize that Matthew wasn't just factually older than me, he was light years ahead of my curve, perhaps light years ahead of everyone in Roseborn Middle School, possessed of such a single-minded fearlessness that perhaps my initial suspicion that a stone giant had been cast into sixth grade wasn't all that far off.

Excerpted from Grist Mill Road by Christopher J Yates. Copyright © 2018 by Christopher J Yates. Excerpted by permission of Picador. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.