It was the summer I detasseled corn. That dreary, dead-simple job consisted solely of walking down mile-long rows of corn each morning and evening for a period of several weeks, pulling the tassels off every plant that was supposed to produce hybrid seeds. The idea was that the ears would then be fertilized by pollen from a different type of corn in the adjoining row, thus creating a hybrid. The year I was 13 my parents said that yes, I could have a horse if I earned the money to buy it, so I took on three acres, for $30 each.  But I couldn’t cover that much ground by myself, or so I said. Fortunately, I had recently become friends with a new boy in town who was short on money and willing to help. Because I would need to leave home at dawn to drive my grandmother’s hulking black 1950 Buick out to the field, and because my friend lived on a farm the opposite direction from town, this arrangement could only work if he slept at our house during detasseling. My parents saw the logic, and he moved in.  He was not particularly attractive by the standards of the day. He did not do well in school. I knew nothing at all about his family, except that they didn’t live in town. He was, in other words, a most unsuitable friend. But I felt in him a sweetness, a kind of fragility under his coarse, ready anger. On the first night he stayed with me, I looked over at him asleep in the twin bed across the room, his face peaceful, his chest rising and falling under the sheet, and actually whispered aloud, “This.” I remember it very clearly, because the word seemed to come from some other person, quite outside myself.  In a way it did, for I had been provided with no words to name what I was feeling. Even in Sunday-morning Bible class, where every possible sin was cataloged and warned against, “lying with another man” was skipped over, left lurking unexplained, out of pure revulsion.  In the afternoons, he and I would swim in the stuccoed aboveground pool, built in the 1930s by the W.P.A., then dry off by baking in the sun on the nearby tennis courts, along with all the other kids. The sight of his compact body lying a few feet away, with its hard muscles and its faint traces of chest hair, was suddenly all that I could see.  When that summer ended, I went back to junior high and he went to high school. Of course I could say nothing of my feelings. Only my sister, alert to every minute vibration in the psychic landscape, saw it. “It’s hard to have him gone, isn’t it?” she said to me one day. I left the room.  When I got to high school the next year, we would nod when we passed in the hallway, but we were never friends again. I never talked to him about what he had meant to me, never knew if he had felt anything at all. By that time, I had developed a sense of just what I had risked that summer, how close I had come to revealing something that could not be taken back.  In summers to come, I no longer detasseled corn. It was no fun by myself, and I had bought the horse. But I still went to the pool, still lay out in the sun. Now I watched the older boys, emerging from the pool dripping wet and beautiful, only with careful sidelong looks. I turned my attention instead to the other joy of this small-town summer ritual — the food from Smitty’s Drive-In right across the tennis courts. I ate hot, crunchy pork tenderloin sandwiches so huge they dwarfed the hamburger buns they were served on; long, springy French fries that Smitty made by sticking a whole potato onto a hand-cranked tool that turned it into one continuous circle, which he then dropped directly into the deep fryer; lush, fat loops of soft-serve ice cream curled into wax-paper cups.  And the boy from that summer? He eventually went into the Navy. One evening during my sophomore year at Harvard, he called, out of the blue, because his ship had docked in Boston and he knew I was in school there. I still physically wince each time I think of how I gave him directions that were purposely vague, and then walked down the stairs and out of the building. There were no tenderloin sandwiches in Cambridge in those days, but as he looked for my dorm, I was huddled in a booth in Cronin’s restaurant, eating French fries one after the other, hoping they would fill me.  John Willoughby, a writer and a former executive editor of Gourmet, is at work on a book about growing up in Iowa.  A version of this article appears in print on August 17, 2014, on page MM50 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Boy of Summer. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
I was 13 when a new friend joined me in the cornfield and in my home — and opened a door I hadn’t known was closed.