The narrator, an eight-year-old boy, meets another boy a little older than him in his provincial town in May 1968. They will become buddies, then friends. Very quickly, an exclusive, insatiable, fusional, loving relationship develops between them, which will disintegrate, a few years later, following a betrayal. As time goes by, the pain becomes a phantom pain and this heartache will be lived by the narrator, now a teenager, as a rite of passage. A sentimental education.