The content of this book is excerpted from the previously

published novels and poetry of Jack Beltane.

Novels:

}
Am I the Matter?
Three Dances The Toyland Tales (520 pages)
In a Yellow Field
A Company of Tatters (386 pages)
Penny Harper (321 pages)

Poetry:

Nightshade & Daylight (66 pages)

Games:

Rumors: A Storytelling Card Game of High School Gossip

Available from Graveworm Press x jackofbells.com

 a sampler

Graveworm Press
Cleveland, Ohio
The Hits So Far: A Sampler
Copyright © 2021 by Jack Beltane

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be repro-

duced in any manner, including methods yet to be developed,
without the expressed written consent of the copyright
holder.

This book contains content previously published under other titles.

See frontspiece for details on the source material.

Cover art and design by Jack Beltane

Copyright © 2021 by Jack Beltane

For more information contact:

Graveworm Press—graveworm.com
Jack Beltane—jackofbells.com

ISBN 978-1-929309-26-9
202106P/fiction
I must remember these things that make me human.
In my soft rush to get ahead
for a chance to be myself
I must stop and listen
for the sound of oars in still water,
the rolling toll of thunder on the wind,
the pleasing breath of birds’ wings,
the lonely bark of a strange dog—

all these things glitter in a way

what I see cannot glimpse.
The truth of the matter betrays
the simple finds and fortunes that sparkle
yet fade away to a background noise
of darkness that leaves me
with empty hands upturned to heaven as a cup.

These are the things I catch

when the moon is watching the still earth:
The stuff of memories and dreams;
the glowing breath of life.

5
 The first thing I remember is a wet field, the color of
sodden wheat, and a blank box spring.
Someone had dumped a rusty old box spring—no cover-
ing, no mattress—in a ditch that ran along the edge of the
farmer’s field near my house. I’d tagged along with my
brother and his friend, and my brother’s friend was weighing
the chance to leap into the ditch with the promise of spring-
ing right back out. I just figured he’d die, for some reason. I
was scared, I remember that. The field was wet—it’s always
wet in my first memories—and lumpy. In hindsight, it was
probably a fallow field, demoted to the epithet of vacant lot.
I was wearing a sweater and shorts and I spent my time kick-
ing the muddy lumps in the field so as not to witness the
leaper’s demise. It was always wet and I was always wearing
a sweater and shorts, like it was early fall: gray and chilly,
but not cold.
The thing I don’t recall is how it all turned out. I assume
he didn’t die, but I can’t say for sure whether or not he tried
his jump or whether he succeeded.
There’s another memory of that wet field: A block party.
The sky is blue, but it still seems wet. We had the party on
the other side of the fence from the ditch, right by the street.
It was a small town and no cars came by because everyone
who would be out driving was at the block party. I was wear-
ing a sweater and shorts, and I can see my brother’s face
covered in cake. He’s laughing and the cake is flecked

6
around his mouth and I know there are lots of kids there and
we’re all laughing.
The memory makes me want to cry. Maybe because I
know none of us find much time to laugh anymore, or be-
cause then we thought every day would be laughter and blue
skies. Maybe I just knew then that I’d never be a kid again,
and the echo is too great for me now.
Or maybe it’s because, once you’ve buried a dog you
had to have put to sleep, you start to think about life more in-
tensely. And then you see your own kid, and you just want
her to have the same happy memories of a wet field, and you
never want her laughter to stop, but you know too well that
life is fragile. In a day, everything can change.
Just one day.
God, and to have that one day back and make the right
decisions...
But we claw like trees to heaven and move on, and
there’s nothing we can do about that.

You could tell by her eyes that she was enjoying herself.
I pushed my skateboard over to the curb and moved closer to
her. The street on that side of the hill was oddly wide—four
cars could’ve cruised it at the same time, if they didn’t mind
squeezing—but I still didn’t like the idea of standing in the
street. If the cops came by, it’d be nothing but questions and
scare tactics for the punk-ass skater, and I was trying to talk
to a pretty girl.

7
 “You always lived here?” I asked, my heart fluttering in
my chest like a caged butterfly. I hoped I sounded cool and
unconcerned—the verbal equivalent of James Dean popping
his collar.
“Yup.”
She nodded and glanced back at her house as if double
checking. Her hair was dislodged again and she had to pull it
back over her ear, her fingers weaving silent magic as she
did so. Her dog walked over to me and barked once then
licked my leg.
“Hush, Puffy!” she commanded, giving the dog’s leash a
slight tug, which alerted me to the fact that I was now only a
leash-length away from her. The animal licked its lips,
barked once more to prove a point, then snuffled off into the
grass behind her.
“Puffy?” I smirked. She caught my eye and giggled.
“I named her Powderpuff when I was, like, six… We al-
ways called her Puffy. Do you have a dog? Pets?”
“Dog,” I said. “Scamp. She’s a beagle. Barks a lot. A lot.”
“Yeah—beagles do.”
We stood looking pleasantly at each other for several
seconds. It felt like there should be something obvious I
should say or ask or do, but for the life of me, I couldn’t pin
it down. It hovered just out of reach, a word on the tip of my
tongue. With a jolt, I realized it was my turn to talk and we
were both waiting.
“Hey—so I’m Jack. My friends call me Bells. So do
you…? You go to the high school, right?”
“Yeah,” she said with a slight gasp of exasperation, but
still that smile, her lips slightly parted, not in a big-

8
fake-cheerleader sort of way. “I’m Penny. We had math to-
gether…?”
“Penny and Puffy,” I smiled. “Hi, Penny.”
“Harper,” she added. “Penny Harper.”
She held out her hand and I shook it, all very busi-
nesslike, except for the weakness in my knees and the
strange twist in my tummy as our hands touched. I panicked
that I was gripping too tightly, then feared my shake was too
loose and pathetic.
“So we had math together?” I asked.
Of course I knew that we had—I knew exactly who she
was—but I was trying to play it cool, like I’d never seen her
before. Of course I remembered her from math class—I re-
membered that she was the only reason I got to my seat be-
fore the bell rang, so I could watch her come in and sit down
in the front row, far away from the creeps like me in the
back.
She blushed for some reason and shook her head, grin-
ning down at her dog and pretending to be occupied by
whatever Puffy was doing, which was nothing except sitting
and panting.
“We did,” she agreed. “You and your friends are kind
of… hard to miss.”
I nodded sagely and pursed my lips as if she’d struck
upon something terribly serious. This was exactly the kind of
entry I needed to show off my amazing wit—or what I as-
sumed to be amazing. It crossed my mind that people were
laughing at me not my jokes, but I was too far down the path
now to turn back.
“It’s our careful attention to the rules of our learning

9
institution and how well we display our deep, abiding com-
pliance to society, isn’t it?”
“No!” she laughed. “It’s the hair.”
“What?” I gasped sarcastically. “The hair?”
“Yes! The hair!”
She reached out and sort of touched my shoulder, like
she would have given me a punch if we’d been closer
friends. My hair wasn’t too crazy—close cropped on the
sides and long on top, in a sort of neo-Outsiders mussed-up
look or something—but some of the people we hung out
with had more memorable styles.
“Did that one guy—with the red hair? and the liberty
spikes?—did he really get suspended for his hair?”
“Allen?” I checked rhetorically. “Nah. Well, I mean, he
got sent home, but he wasn’t, like, kicked out or anything.”
“But because of his hair?”
“Well yeah, that’s true. They said it was a hazard or
something.”
“Crazy.”
We nodded and smiled at each other, but it was a do-or-
die moment for continuing the conversation and it had to be
handled correctly or I’d upset the whole apple cart. She
couldn’t invite me in—we’d only just that second met—and
I couldn’t say, “Well, see ya,” then turn and leave. Tobie had
taught me that much: If a girl doesn’t find a reason to leave
the moment a conversation starts, then she wants to stay.
And if she wants to stay, then you better ask her out before
you leave. She might say no, but she’d appreciate the ges-
ture, and that beat being rude.
“So… you have big plans for summer?” I asked casually,

10
trying to worm my way in to asking her out. Penny didn’t
look like the kind of girl who dated skaters and my deepest
instinct said I should leave while I was still ahead.
She shrugged. “I play softball, so lots of practices. You?”
“Nah… I’ll probably get a job, now I can drive.”
“Oooo…you can drive already? I don’t turn sixteen until
August.”
“So you have your temps…?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I call you sometime? Maybe we can go for a drive?”
“Sure,” she said, her face breaking into a wide smile.
I felt lightheaded. My heart stopped for several beats and
my breath caught in my throat.
She pulled a fat ballpoint pen out of her back pocket—
bleached denim shorts, by the way—and reached out for my
left hand before I could say anything. She wrote her number
across my palm in huge, looping, teen-girl lettering then
folded my fingers over it and smiled at me, holding my gaze.
That was the moment I expected to wake up. I couldn’t
believe it was happening. As I looked into her perfect, wide,
American eyes I realized that this rock star had given me her
number, which couldn’t possibly be true.
“See ya,” she whispered and backed off a few steps, then
turned and jogged back to her house, her hair bouncing in
the sunlight, Puffy loping along after her as quickly as its lit-
tle legs could carry it.

11
 After nine in the summer, the darkness falls in full. Dusk
is a slow build and a sudden drop-off into night. The air did-
n’t thin any—not in summer, not in southern Ohio—but the
sun was gone, at least, and that’s when we slipped out of our
houses, after dinner and chores, when our parents were
watching sitcoms.
Before I got my drivers license it was harder to get out
after dark, but now that I could drive back home by myself,
there was no need for my parents to go out and get me, so I
didn’t need to convince them of anything. My world became
larger simply because I could drive myself. I had a shit-brown
1980 Malibu sedan that had probably never seen better days,
and it felt like a standing ticket to everywhere: The mall, the
record store, the movie theater, even to Tobie’s house, way out
in the township beyond the stretch of suburban lights.
That’s how we ended up at the police station in town,
helping Tagger with his latest project. And by helping, Niz
and I sat and watched Tagger and Sammy. Tagger’s plan was
simple: He’d made a bunch of bumper stickers with his lol-
lipops on them and he was going to stick them onto the
bumpers of any police cruisers parked in the lot. It was his
way to get back at them for harassing us, I guess. My job
was the getaway vehicle—he’d reasoned that the cops al-
ready knew his car so I’d be able to make a cleaner getaway.
“It’s cool,” he had reasoned. “If they catch us, I’m
eighteen. I’ll take the fall. But if they don’t catch us, they
won’t find me later cuzza my car.”
“Wouldn’t it be better for a minor to take the fall?”
Sammy offered. “You could go to jail, right?”
We ended up with something of a compromise: Sammy

12
would help. One minor, one adult. Niz and I would keep the
getaway car warm.
“I don’t think I could evade the police,” I admitted to
Niz, understanding both the limits of my car and my ability
to drive it.
I figured I should come clean with him in case a high-
-speed chase presented itself. We were sitting in the dimness
between two streetlights looking every bit as suspicious as
we feared. Across the street we could see Sammy and Tag-
ger dodging between cruisers, running hunched over, slap-
ping stickers onto bumpers as quickly as possible.
“This is massively stupid,” Niz decided. “No way they
don’t get caught. We don’t get caught.”
“I don’t know—it actually looks pretty dead for a police
station.”
And dark. I guess they figured no one was dumb enough
to try something at the actual station, and this was long be-
fore cameras recorded every move anyone made.
Tagger and Sammy suddenly emerged from the other
side of the building and sprinted straight to the car, grinning
ear-to-ear. They hopped into the back seat without a word
and I carefully pulled out and drove away. Totally undra-
matic. No yelling, no sirens, no chase.
“I swear if I see a cruiser driving around with that sticker
on it…!” Tagger chuckled gleefully.
He was a wiry kid with long, dark hair and his clothes
never seemed to fit right—always a bit big. He was the kind
of kid my mom would call a hoodlum, which always made
us snicker. For one thing, skaters weren’t hoods, though we
ran along similar paths and crossed lines from time to time.

13
For another thing, no one called hoods “hoodlums” anymore;
this wasn’t 1957.
“You know, they check their cars before they drive off—
taillights and all that?” Niz said.
I shrugged.
“Still…”
“Yeah—at least we did it!” Sammy enjoined, patting Niz
heavily on the shoulder. “Maybe one of ’em will let it go for
a day! Officer Oler or someone!”
“How many did you get rid of?” I wondered.
Tagger held up his empty hands. “Well we started with
ten and now we have none! Good driving, Jack,” he added,
and I got the sense he’d assumed we’d bail as soon as they
got to the cruiser pen.
I glanced at Niz. His expression said this might have
been the dumbest thing we’d ever done, and we’d done some
pretty dumb things.
“No sweat,” I said to Niz, but Tagger assumed I meant
him and snickered again.
I could tell Niz was worried in a fatherly way and I was
trying to let him know that this wasn’t the start of a slippery
slope into adolescent vandalism that would descend into
drugs and chaos. It was was just a dumb idea that ballooned
up and burst before anyone really thought about, and now it
was all over.
I hoped.
“Don’t they have closed-circuit cameras at the station,
though?”
“Nah,” Tagger said glibly.
I could fully imagine a camera pointed at my car, its lens

14
whirring and turning slowly as it zoomed in on my license
plate.
“It was a pretty dumb stunt,” I said.
I felt like I needed to have Niz’s back, but I didn’t glance
at him to make it too obvious.
“It’s cool, man. Look, if they had cameras, they
would’ve come out while we were back there creeping
around. Right? And nothing happened. They didn’t even turn
a light on.”
We drove in silence for a few minutes, each thinking of
our own possible version of a worst-case scenario.
“Look, man,” Tagger finally spoke up. “If they come and
ask you questions, you have my full permission to rat me
out. Say it was all my idea. Corrupting the youth and all that
bullshit—they’d eat it up. They’d expect it from me.”
He wasn’t wrong. It was exactly the kind of story parents
and the press would fall for, and Tagger—being from one of
the neighborhoods on the other side of the state rout e—
would be an easy scapegoat. Somehow, the solidity of this
escape plan didn’t make me feel any better—I couldn’t put it
all on Tagger, not with all the shit he already had to put up
with because of his address, and I didn’t think Niz or Sammy
would either.
“Don’t worry about it,” I decided. “I mean, you’re right,
no one even followed us, let alone chased us.”
“Look, man,” Tagger said, his tone contemplative and
honest. “I’ll take you to my favorite spot—full pops, seven
lollies. My highest rating. I don’t take anyone out there,
man.”
We were all silent again. Niz looked excited but for

15
some reason I was waiting for Tagger to burst out laughing
and admit to joking about a veritable skate Valhalla.
“Seven lollies?” I checked.
“You’re serious?” Sammy choked—he’d assumed it was
a joke, too.
“One lollie for each obstacle—there’s a wicked curb, a
steel bench with no back, an easy fucking rail, and even a
sweet little bank around a sewer grate. Plus lollies for being
dark, distant, and quiet. No one knows about it—and you
better keep it a secret.”
I was more amazed at learning how his system roughly
worked—lollies for obstacles, plus more for location—than
with the idea of being taken to some top-secret skate spot.
Niz was all ears, maybe trying to make up for coming across
like a wet end before.
“Why would you take us there?” he wondered.
“Y’all earned it! I’ve been trying to get that asshole
Timmy Toderman to take me to the police pen for months.”
I shot Niz a look because I knew what he was thinking:
If Timmy Toderman—aka The Toad—hadn’t gone along
with the plan, it really must have been stupid. The Toad was
going to be a senior and all of the skaters kind of looked to
him as their moral compass, probably because he had a job
and better things to do than skate—like, he worked hard and
got good grades but he still found time to skate with us.
My eyes darted to the rear-view mirror but it was dark
behind us, the streetlights fading to yellow blobs along an
empty road.
“Turn right after the library, then hit the first street on the
left.”

16
 His directions were easy to follow, but I’ll be damned if
we could find that spot again without him—our li’l ’burb
was actually pretty big. I guess we were only half paying at-
tention, driving around with the windows down and the mu-
sic loud, making sudden turns when Tagger commanded.
The only time I could have taken a moment to get my bear-
ings was when I’d stopped after taking a corner too fast—
there’d been a squeal of tires and a pop like a huge cork
erupting from a bottle, and I slammed on the brakes. We
were completely alone—no cars, no houses. Well, no fin-
ished houses—we were out in one of the new developments
that was still being put together, so there were a few framed-
out houses and a couple of dark, empty show homes, but
other than that it was us and the crickets.
“What the hell was that?’ I breathed, cutting the music.
We could hear a strange whirring, metallic sound nearby,
like a spinning top losing steam.
“Dude!” Sammy exclaimed. “You lost a hubcap!”
He was right, too—the turn had put enough pressure on
one of the tires that it had popped the damn hubcap off and
sent it rolling down the street ahead of us, where it now
swirled into its resting place.
“Can you grab that, Sammy?”
He did, and as soon as he was back in the car, I gunned it
and got out of there, irrationally afraid that someone had
seen us. From there, it was a blur of paranoia as Tagger di-
rected me, and when we finally got to Seven Lollies it was
indeed dark, distant, and quiet—a forgotten park on the
edge of town waiting patiently for houses to be built up
around it. The streets were unnamed and unlit; the bench

17
and rail perhaps evidence of a project that ran out of
money, or need, or both. The banked curb was the best part,
I thought: Built into the crook of a sharp left in the street,
like a mini pool around a flat storm-drain cover with a
grate. The in and out was smooth and if you were lucky—
or good—you could nab a tail slide at the top. And if you
fell, which I did, it was only a couple of feet to the pave-
ment. Traffic was nonexistent and people seemed like a dim
rumor of another world.
Seven Lollies ended up being like a mythical summer
paradise; a weird time and place I can’t forget but can’t ever
have again—one of the shining highlights of my first sum-
mer of independence. We tried to find it again on-and-off
through high school, after Tagger was gone, and we never
could. Tagger only took us there a couple of nights—he
guarded Seven Lollies with an almost jealous intensity. And
the streets, they take on a tunnel-like, featureless quality in
the dark that can’t be fathomed in daylight—it all looks dif-
ferent in the sunshine and it all looks the same later, if you
go back after sundown without directions. There were a lot
of subdivisions being built up in those days, too, constantly
changing the landmarks and visual cues.
“Why don’t you tell everyone about this place?” Sammy
wondered as we stopped to catch our breath. We must have
been hitting it for a couple of hours straight by that time, tak-
ing breathers only long enough to cheer each other on.
“Are you kidding?” Tagger asked almost angrily. “Look
man, if I tell everyone, then everyone comes out here all the
fucking time because it’s seven fucking lollies. And then the
cops find out, and then it’s all over. No way, man—this is

18
mine. And you better keep your trap shut!”
“We won’t tell,” I assured him.
He looked around suspiciously as if we’d already told
everyone, then nodded slowly to himself as if he’d arrived at
the only logical conclusion he could think of.
“I’m thirsty anyway,” he said, turning back to us. “Let’s
go get something.”
Niz and I exchanged glances—“something” could mean
anything—and Sammy, either sensing our unease or inno-
cently making an honest suggestion, blared, “Slushies!”
And so I followed Tagger’s directions out and eventually
swung my massive Malibu sedan onto the main drag into
town—it heaved itself around the last curve like a mastodon
cornering at a slow gallop.

The days of summer had boiled into a stretch of weeks

by the start of August, leaving in their wake stripes of crisp,
browned grass and cracked-earth mud plates in the beds of
dry creeks. The cicadas whirred and ticked off time in their
own rhythms, and the steady wail of the crickets became like
a ringing in my ears that had faded to a background noise.
Everything slowly grinds to a halt in the dog days: too
fat, tired, and sweaty to move. The only escape was the mall
or a friend’s basement or the soft embrace of the night, when
the sun rested and a minuscule stirring of the air, as if by ac-
cident, brought a momentary coolness that the sun’s burning
eye covered up.

19
 By August, Penny and I had eased ourselves into a sum-
mer rut of leisure. The honeymoon period of our first month
together—when we were still getting to learn each other’s
ways—had given over to a month of expectations: we knew
where each other would be, who we’d be with, what we
wanted to do, and how to make it fun. I only worked about
twenty hours a week, but my shift was typically five-to-nine
at night, and since Penny still had a curfew, I often hung out
with Niz and Sammy after work and Penny all day before I
had to leave. It worked out perfectly: Penny and I spent all
day bumming around the park or the mall or catching a mati-
nee, then I went out skating with the boys at night, after the
sunlit day-heat had been replaced by a heavy blanket of hu-
mid moonlight.
“So you called her that night? And she talked to you?”
Niz checked one night, having suddenly rediscovered how
amazed he was that Penny and I were dating—probably be-
cause we had been going out so long and he wanted to know
how that worked.
“Yeah… that’s sort of how you go about getting a date,
Niz. And if you call her again, you get another date.”
Niz was concentrating on prying a pebble from the
treads of his sneakers; I wasn’t even sure he was fully pro-
cessing what I was saying. He’d become obsessed with the
idea that pebbles in his treads were throwing off his ability to
land tricks, but it was really nothing more than a good ex-
cuse to sit on the curb and take a break.
“You got a date?”
“Niz, would ya listen to yourself? You act like you for-
got the whole fucking summer!”

20
 He stopped prodding and cut me a look. “No need to
swear, young man.”
“Fuck you.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t.”
Cooler heads prevailed—perhaps due to the hour and the
rumors that this particular skate spot was haunted by a
skinny old guy who chased people off with a rake—and Niz
didn’t respond to my slur.
“So it’s pretty serious, huh?” he asked. “I mean, it is.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
I hadn’t really thought about it in terms of seriousness;
of weeks together. Summer has a way of making time stretch
into meaningless measures. Days and months merged into a
single block of time lit by the sun. Summer was a second
long or a year long, depending on how you looked at it.
“It is,” Niz stated again. “Like, two months serious.”
“Sure.”
“No offense, dude, but it won’t last much longer.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Jesus, Bells—watch a movie! Read a book! Summers
like this are always the setup for a heartbreak. Plus, I mean,
you’re sixteen.”
“Fuck you. This isn’t some kind of math formula. And
it’s not like you’re talking from experience.”
Me, Niz, and Sammy—none of us had really had a steady
date before, not like this. Tobie was close for me, but since
we’d been hanging out for years anyway, it didn’t feel a lot
different when we were dating. But Penny—she was a
stranger, a new girl in the circle, and that held its own mystery

21
and magic. The idea that was she was becoming a regular—
maybe some day a new spoke in our crazy little wheel—
scared us all, I think, in a way I hadn’t expected. What Niz
was really saying was that he wanted us to go back to the way
we were before—before serious shit, like high school and girl-
friends. Your whole life you couldn’t wait for either of those
things, and now that it was here, I think we were scared.
“What about you and Jess?” I prodded. I didn’t want to
think about me and Penny breaking up, and I didn’t want to
fight with Niz.
“Jess?” he mumbled, intent on his shoe. He finally gave
up with a huff and slapped his foot back down. “Jess is fuck-
ing great, Bells.”
“What the hell? I thought you liked her?”
“Yeah, and that’s the problem.”
“Nah—she’s just playing it cool.”
Niz smirked wryly at me, his eyes lit with a strange or-
ange glow from the reflected streetlights.
“You think you’re so smart,” he decided, not in a mean
way. He was stating something that had suddenly occurred to
him, is all. “I mean, you’ve been there now. The hot girl-
friend. The American dream…”
“Now you sound like Sammy,” I complained, cutting
him off before he got back around to talking about the end of
the summer. “But tell me: Why is liking Jess a problem? Se-
riously—just ask her out. But, y’know, make sure she knows
you’re asking her out.”
Niz nodded sagely and stood up.
“I hear ya, Bells—I do.”
I looked up at him and my eye caught sight of a car

22
rolling toward us. I shielded my eyes against the head-
lights—slow-moving cars coming up on skaters were either
cops or jocks, and I didn’t feel like dealing with either of
them right now.
“Niz,” I stated simply; dryly.
We’d been bumming around long enough that he imme-
diately understood my tone and started to run past me, away
from the direction I was looking, without even a look back. I
jumped to my feet and grabbed my board, backing after him,
and the car fired up. I waited for the pop of the red-and-blue
lights, but the car revved and swarmed closer, the muffler
rumbling with menace—a detail that made me stop and nar-
row my eyes.
“Bells!” Niz shouted in a stage whisper.
“S’alright,” I said as the car roared up beside me and
screeched to a stop, the engine trundling. It was a yellow Ca-
maro. The driver’s side window was down and I saw Timmy
“The Toad” Toderman grinning ear-to-ear. He sported a thin,
adolescent mustache over a broad smile and he was an inch
or two shorter than average height, but built like a brick—
mostly we bonded in shop class over Mötley Crüe, Ratt, and
Ozzy.
“Scared you shitless, Jack!” he declared.
“Jesus—sorta,” I admitted.
Niz had got a good head start on me. He’d stopped run-
ning and now he flopped his board down and rolled back
over to us.
“I finally got it!” Toad said excitedly.
I knew he’d been saving for a Camaro—his uncle’s, I
believe—but it had always seemed like a typical kid fantasy,

23
the kind of thing all kids said they were going to do when
they were old enough to drive. But here we were—here the
Toad was, heading into his senior year—in a shining hunk of
American steel that proved hard work did pay off. I whistled
lightly.
“C’mon!” he said. “Get in! I’ll be your chauffeur for the
evening.”
Niz looked a bit concerned, but only because he didn’t
know Timmy that well and he didn’t know if we should trust
him to drive us around. The Toad was more of a motorhead
first and a skater second—which was unfortunate, because
he was one of the best skaters in town—so I knew him more
from the art and shop classes I took than from skating with
him. The stoners and motorheads were another stripe in my
wide prism of friends that Niz didn’t meet much on their
own turf—such as in the frame of high-octane-fueled Ameri-
can steel—and he wasn’t sure how he fit in.
“It’s cool,” I said to him. “Toad works at the hardware
store with me and Tagger—he got us the jobs.”
I whipped around to the passenger side and opened the
door, kicking the seat up so Niz could climb in the back.
“He’s worked hard for this car.”
Niz nodded once and climbed into the back seat. I
popped it back and sat down, afraid to touch anything. Niz
mumbled something about how nice it was. The interior was
cherry red leather that creaked with a sound like money—or
maybe it was pleather, I don’t know, but it smelled brand
new and everything seemed shiny in the dash lights and the
low glow of the streetlights.
“This is awesome,” I said.

24
 The Toad grinned, popped the clutch, and we sprang for-
ward into the night like a pouncing tiger, the tires chirping
once before settling into the asphalt. He headed out to Niles
Road, which ran along the western edge of the suburbs and
divided the township from the city. The speed limit was 55,
and he took every bit of it, topping 70 (maybe 80?) on the
straightaways—I think he wanted to do more, but I think he
was also afraid of breaking his new toy on the first day he
had it. The windows were down and the roaring wind was
magnificent—even Niz started laughing maniacally—and we
seemed like the only things in the universe, chasing the
white cones of his headlights on the road in front of us. I al-
most suggested we go to Tobie’s but I didn’t want the ride to
end. He took us all the way out to the county JVS and turned
around in the wide-open parking lot, his tires squealing and
filling the car with acrid smoke, then we were gone, the
smoke a memory behind us, and we were barreling back into
town, back to the stop light at the end of Niles, back down to
35 MPH, a turtle’s pace in the wide America night.
“So where to?” he asked gleefully, grinning over at me,
the engine purring at a red light.
“Let’s go get Sammy,” I said, turning and cricking my
neck to see Niz. He was staring out the window into the dark
sky and nodded slowly without a word.
“Where’s he live?”
“Right by Tagger.”
And I know he didn’t speed through town, but I swear
we got to Sammy’s house faster than we’d ever got there be-
fore. Maybe it was an illusion created by the fact that my car
could barely limp to Sammy’s without breaking down.

25
 Sammy was out piddling around in the driveway with
Tagger—they’d bonded over the bumper-sticker fiasco and
had started hanging out more. It was easier for Sammy to
hang out near his house, anyway, and he had the added
bonus of learning tricks from the world-famous Tagger.
When we pulled up, Tagger looked like he was expecting
us—or someone—and Sammy looked suspicious. Of course,
Sammy always looked suspicious—it’s why most God-fear-
ing people in school gave him a wide berth.
“Samuel!” I declared, hopping out and running over to
him, grabbing his hand and pumping it furiously. “Nice to
meet you, my good man. Now let’s go!”
“Go?”
Tagger didn’t need a second invitation. He scooted over
to the car without a thought and popped the seat.
“You three in back,” he stated.
“But…”
“Sophomores,” he observed, pulling rank—even though
we’d be juniors in September, he was still a damn graduate.
I grudgingly accepted and clambered in, Sammy getting
wise to the antics and climbing in behind me, which left me
sitting on the bump between seats, because apparently the
back seat of a Camaro is basically two more bucket seats,
not a bench.
“This is bullshit,” I decided. Tagger grinned in a decid-
edly saccharin manner, and his expression more than any-
thing shut me up.
“Does everyone know the story of Mr. Toad and the
Mythical Camaro?” I checked sarcastically. “He’s been
talking about this damn car since we were in the back of

26
German class my freshman year—”
“Frau Spahr!” the Toad cried.
“—and now it’s his, and we’re all invited to help him
break it in.”
“Take it down Niles,” Tagger suggested. He knew the
Toad about as well as I did, maybe better.
“Already did.”
“Do it again!” Tagger rebutted, and in a curl of smoke
from the tires, we were off again.
This time we stopped for a while in the JVS parking
lot—Tagger knew of a bitchin’ curb or something—and
spent some time messing around. Tagger was fun to watch—
way better than me or Niz, and a bit better than Sammy and
the Toad—and eventually we all sat on the curb watching
him. Tagger tried to show us how “easy” some variation of a
kickflip was, but I could barely see what the board was do-
ing, let alone his feet, so it was like watching a strange spec-
tral thing twirling in front of us, mesmerizing us with its rep-
etition. Then it was all of us sitting out there on the curb in
the moon-shadow of Timmy Toderman’s Camaro, shooting
the shit.
“Little Kings, man,” Tagger was explaining. “It’s soft
and has more alcohol than shitty light beer.”
“So why not just go with King Cobra?” Sammy weighed
in. “I mean, if you’re looking for the most alcohol per dollar?”
“Because it tastes like shit…?” Tagger surmised rhetori-
cally, and we nodded as if this was, indeed, a sage opinion.
When I was sixteen, skating took a certain force of will
because it outed you to everyone else as someone they hated
on principle, and that principle was almost always the ol’

27
“destruction of property” trope that often wasn’t true, or at
least was greatly exaggerated. It hasn’t changed too much
over the years, but back then there was no internet and no
celebrity—skaters were seen as nothing more than vandals,
time wasters, and unkempt noisemakers, and polite society
(everyone but the skaters and other outsiders) had no use for
us at all, not even as entertainment.
Now I’m not saying there weren’t elements of vandalism
and noisemaking in our antics, but I do take exception to the
time-waster view: Anything we can do to pry a little joy out
of life should be done, and is never a waste of time.
Sitting long hours in an office and not having time to go
out and skate is the real waste of time, and I honestly believe
that was the linchpin of all the ire levied against us: Parents
hated us for not being locked in an office, the other kids
hated us for not being locked into activities our parents de-
manded we do, and the rest of them hated us because we had
a wide view of life and living that wasn’t too concerned
about the things that they felt held society together: fashion,
money, and the almighty decree to Act Your Age. It’s okay
to skate if you’re twelve, but God forbid you still enjoy the
sport after you could drive or—horror of horrors—hit mid-
dle age. At a certain point, Joe Society says it’s time to
buckle down and act like a man—which I assume means
you start working 80-hour weeks and playing golf on the
weekends. It means you forget about all the things that
make you happy and instead try to buy the things that
don’t. It means you pop the collar of your polo shirt, tucked
neatly into khakis, and laugh the toothy laugh of insincer-
ity, all the while hating your life and anyone who reminds

28
you that there is more to it than what you’re doing.
Youth is a state of mind, not an age, I’ve come to realize,
and skateboarding seems to be the thing that keeps that fire
alive—skating and live music.
This is why Niz and Sammy came down so hard on me
about Penny Harper—she wasn’t a skate Betty, so they did-
n’t believe it. We were sixteen and no matter how much we
railed against it, we knew deep down that clichés existed
even for us. Polite Society simply didn’t mix voluntarily
with skaters, and she was part of that world, not ours. Those
people called the cops when they saw us hanging out in
groups, or crossed the street and hurried away, or both. They
certainly didn’t hang out at the top of a hill with their dog
and strike up a conversation.

Penny felt the most free when we went to the mall—you

could tell by the spring in her step and the way her hair
furled around her head, barely able to keep up with her
stride—and I loved to see her feeling so free.
I had my hot spots—the skate shop and the record store
and the dollar store and the food court and the arcade—but
for Penny, everything at the mall had merit. She flitted like a
hummingbird from storefront to storefront—she liked to
dangle those re-enforced paper sacks from her arms, and I
liked the way it made her smile. I loved how excited she got
when she found that top on sale and it happened to perfectly
match those shorts that were also, unbelievably, on sale.

29
 We held hands. We laughed. We hurried to sale racks
she’d spotted from across the way, her dragging me and
me feigning exhaustion. We ate frozen Cokes from the
hotdog stand and—God bless the mall in my hometown—
we rode a God damn carousel. That mall even had a Ferris
wheel. And mini golf—all in the food court. Penny liked
to play mini golf—it was the competitor in her. She al-
ways beat me, so she started trying to out-do her own pre -
vious score instead, like I tried to beat my own high score
on Galaga.
“I’m serious, Bells,” she said once as she lined up a shot
on one of the easier holes. “We’re going to be juniors next
year—haven’t you thought about college?”
“College? Christ, I’m not sure I’ll make it through high
school!”
“Jack!”
Her head was tilted with anger, but her face was a bright,
smiling aperture of loving bliss.
“I’m serious, Penny! I don’t know what I want to do—I
want to avoid doing anything.” I shrugged. “I like poetry.”
“That’s cool,” she agreed, nailing a hole-in-one off a
bank shot. “But you can’t get a job as a poet.”
“Is that all there is after high school?”
“What?”
“Finding a job?”
“I think so,” she laughed, and it made it seem like such a
trivial thing; she misread the horror of my expression as sar-
casm. “Seriously, Jack! What are you going to do? My dad
says you need to have it figured out before senior year so
you know what you’re working for.”

30
 “Working for…? I mean, I’m working for graduation, is-
n’t that enough?”
“Maybe…”
“What do you think I should be, Penny?”
“You’d be a good teacher.”
“A teacher?” I implored. “Are you nuts? Why would I
become a teacher? Why not just a damn cop or some high-
-powered sales douche?”
She leaned in and gave me a peck on the lips, to let
me know she wasn’t offended before she explained, “My
dad is a high-powered sales douche.”
“So you admit he’s a douche…?”
“Jack!”
And on and on.
I felt young and alive and grown up and responsible and
ridiculous and childish all at once. I had everything a teenage
boy required to make life right, and though I may not have
thought it directly, I certainly felt it, and later, as I lay in bed
drifting off to sleep, I’m sure I was grinning ear-to-ear, be-
cause everything was finally beginning—life had finally
started to happen.
Those nights blur into the sky like sunset, fading around
the edges of a cool breeze; a thousand tiny moments like
stars in the night. If I dreamed a million days I could never
touch the essence of them again: the long, drawn-out si-
lences between kisses; the fire in her eyes; the simple sense
of wholeness and being that makes the world seem new, the
sunrise fresh, and the storms like magical tinderboxes de-
scribing how your heart flies to her.
And beneath it all, the slow steady drumbeat of the days

31
since then; the soft throb of yearning for something that once
was there, yet will never be again.
We walked home hand in hand, the summer night humid
and thick around us. We didn’t want to let go of each other—
or I didn’t, anyway, and I’m pretty sure Penny felt the same
way. There was a lightness in the way she walked. There was
unbridled joy in the way she was talking fast and telling me
all about everything I’d just been with her for, with me
breaking in and going along with it, like we hadn’t thought
of that night in fifteen years and we wanted to remind each
other of how much fun it had been.
Nights like that, they get set in amber in our minds; cast
in the hot-breath breeze of a summer night, with the crickets
and cicadas droning on and on in the background; cast in the
slow, deliberate steps of youth, marching the condemned
walk of burgeoning adulthood; cast in that look in her eyes
and that smirk on her lips that said you were everything, and
this night would shine forever in the starry darkness of mem-
ory. And it was a great night—the final tether that tied that
day into a knot at the center of the biggest ripple my life had
yet produced.
We stood on her front porch, still holding hands, and
looked into each other’s eyes, the moths pinging into the yel-
low light above us and the night bugs whirring and chirping
in the bushes and trees, an unseen chorus to our closing
scene. And even though we’d kissed before, that kiss seemed
more special than all the rest. It was slow and resplendent
and the only thing that mattered to me right then—not who
may be looking out of the windows at us or who may walk
out on us or what she was thinking and if she happy with me.

32
 All that mattered was her lips on mine, the warmth of
her breath on my cheek when I kissed her neck, the precious
touch of her skin against mine.
Penny was real, and I loved her. I loved her with the pas-
sion only a sixteen-year-old boy can muster. I loved her be-
cause she existed in that time and place when I first steadied
my footing and took a few slumbering steps toward man-
hood. I loved her because she uncovered the best parts of
me—the serious parts, the thoughtful parts, the parts that
would hold me up.
I loved her for every future moment she came to repre-
sent, and I loved her because she seemed to be changing,
too; growing and becoming stronger, more independent. I
loved her because she let me help her along and because she
always turned back to me and smiled and took my hand as
she pulled me into the future.
In that way, I built a pedestal for Penny and I put her on it.
Penny became gold spun from summer sunlight, and
together we were building something memorable, some -
thing that would outlast all my other thoughts and
dreams.

33
 You have to let yourself go to it,
find the weight and pull,
never mind the years and images,
just take the step and eclipse.

Let me walk now in time with time, for I am

here where I have never been before; we are
there where they will never see us again.

The hard pop of acorns on the roof

like the problems we imagine
being swayed, shaken free
from the things we have constructed.

Let me go over to it:

the sweet solace and the lie.

34
 There are moments that act like hinges on a door to the
future—hinges you can’t recognize at the time. They hide in
plain sight, buried beneath all the other moments that make
up a lifetime, and it’s not until the door swings open and
you’ve walked through—not until you’ve walked far enough
to glance back and wonder how you ended up there—that
you can see them, shiny and bright, glowing through the fog
of years, and you wonder then how you ever missed them in
the first place.
That snow day in December my Senior year of high
school was one of those moments—three special, shining
hinges that made up a single long weekend and held up the
door to the future. I didn’t know it then and would surely
have been crushed under the weight of it if I had, but that
weekend set up everything that came after it, like the prover-
bial butterfly’s wings beating softly in a forest thousands of
miles away. This needs to be understood because the action
—the real action—always follows the hinges.
So where did this all begin? Where did the past end
and the future start? Where was the moment we seized as
if tomorrow would never come and our history was still only
yesterday? Because when those hinges squeak and you turn
back to face another closing door it’s important that you can
recognize it, else nothing will ever be learned, and there is
no lesson more wasted than one that is willfully ignored.

35
 Sammy once told us that escalators have a kill switch
hidden in the sidewall at the bottom, in case something went
wrong. It must have been designed before they started
putting those big red STOP buttons on them, and the design
was carried over, because I can verify that one swift kick
right in the sweet spot and any escalator will shut down—
stop instantly. Sammy’s dad had once been an escalator re-
pairman or something, and Sammy explained it to us as his
dad had once explained it to him, but Niz was the one who
tried it. I don’t think we’d believed him. Fortunately there
was no one else on the stairs at the time.
Niz dug his heel into the sidewall with a good, swift
kick, just like Sammy had said, and the escalator stopped
cold. No slow whirring to a close, but a sudden and absolute
end to the movement. Niz and Sammy were as shocked as
me, but when they tripped, they caught their footing on flat
ground at the bottom of the stairs. Me? I stepped onto the
edge of a stair and fell headlong. Sammy was on me in an in-
stant, barely managing to ask if I was okay between gales of
laughter. Niz actually looked scared. He was laughing a tad
maniacally, his eyes wide and nervous.
So come that December, when I looked at Niz and
growled “kill switch” the day after Sammy’s dad left and we
saved Tobie from the Wharf, he was more confident of his
escalator-killing talent.
How we’d ended up in the mall with our skateboards
was a bit more convoluted. I’d made a deal with the toy store

36
where I worked over Christmas (they paid above minimum
wage for seasonal work) that I’d work until four o’clock,
then come back in at nine, when they closed, and restock un-
til midnight. Christmas shoppers sure know how to wipe out
toy stores, despite the fact that the mall I worked in was still-
born: It was built empty and it never filled up.
Anyway, I worked until four then went home, changed,
and headed over to Sammy’s to see if we could squeeze in
some fun before I had to go back to work. Niz was already
there, watching some old H-Street videos frame by frame to
learn new tricks, and he was primed to go out and ride.
“Except for the snow,” Sammy pointed out. It’s rough
being a skater in Ohio.
“All right,” Niz said, cutting a slick deal with us. “Disc
World opened a store at the mall, right? So we go to the mall
for dinner and take our boards and cut the grip tape there.
Cuz I’m telling you, Sammy, the key to that trick” (jabbing
his finger at the TV screen) “is the grip tape.”
“The grip tape is the key?” I begged. “And cutting it’s
one thing, but unless you’re buying me a new deck, I won’t
have anything to put it on.”
Sammy nodded emphatically as if he’d already been
around this logic with Niz, but Niz just waved me off—he often
had crazy notions that somehow ended up being correct.
“Regardless,” I said. “Can’t we just cut the tape here?
You know, like normal people?”
“You have to work, Bells. We won’t have time to drive
up to mall, eat, buy grip tape, come back here, and cut it up.
If we take our boards, we can buy the tape first and cut it
into shape in the food court while we eat. It saves time.”

37
 “But my board... already has... grip tape...”
Niz waved me off again and mumbled something about
getting the old tape off later, if we could just cut the new
tape tonight.
“Okay,” I agreed, giving up—he had that look in his
eyes and I certainly wasn’t going to waste time arguing.
And so there we were, at the top of an escalator with our
skateboards, heading down to the food court for a frozen
Coke before they left me to work.
“Hey!” someone yelled out just as we got onto the stairs.
“Asshole!”
We didn’t stop or anything. I glanced around but I didn’t
see anyone I knew, so I assumed whoever was yelling was
yelling at someone else. In a way I was right. He wasn’t
yelling at me, he was yelling at Sammy: Once we were about
midway down the escalator, Greg Wilson popped up at the
top of the stairs.
“I said, ‘Hey, asshole’,” he repeated.
One of his meat-head buddies appeared behind him.
Now I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sammy may
have looked pretty tough, but he was not a fighter at all, de-
spite the shoving match at the Wharf the night before. When
he looked at me, he looked scared. Not out of fear. It was
more like a panicked look that was begging me to intervene
before we were forced to find out what would happen.
“Nice haircut, pussy!” Greg called down.
That’s when it struck me that he was riding the escalator
down. If he’d really wanted to catch up and cause a scene he
would have jogged down the steps and got right up on us,
but he was just standing there, riding it down about ten steps

38
behind us, yelling stupid things. He didn’t want to fight, he
just wanted to try and embarrass Sammy in public like he’d
been embarrassed, but without having to test Sammy’s mettle.
“Kill switch,” I growled at Niz, and a grin spread across
both his and Sammy’s faces.
Niz jostled around so that his butt was against the wall
and counted off the stairs. In the time it took him to turn
sideways and count, we reached the sweet spot and he
whacked the sidewall with an almighty kick. We even stum-
bled a bit when the stairs stopped, but Greg and his buddy
spilled just like I had back in the summer. Now remember, it
was Christmas, and even a dead mall gets busy at Christmas,
so even though it was late in the day and most everyone had
gone home, there was still extra security around, and the
whack Niz had given the sidewall would have roused even
the sleepiest security guard—Greg’s loud cry of shock only
sealed the deal.
“Hey!” some guard or other yelled, getting up from his
dinner and jogging toward us.
He looked unsure, like he felt he should yell at us be-
cause he’d heard something strange, but since he couldn’t
say what had happened he wasn’t too invested yet. In fact, he
might have stopped halfway to us and turned back to his
meal, except Niz and Sammy slapped down their skate-
boards and kicked off, in an effort to outrun Greg and his
Very Big Friend. That got the security guard running, so I
slapped down my board and followed suit.
Skating in a shopping mall is one of those things we al-
ways talked and dreamed about but never figured we’d do. It
was fucking glorious. Those floors are so damn smooth you

39
practically cut a powerslide just by nudging a bit to the one
side. It was like hitting ice with traction. Intoxicated by the
rush, Sammy tried a powerslide for real and swooped in-
stantly out of control, crashing into an empty table at the
food court. He was back on his feet before I’d even fully
parsed what was happening, then he shot past me. I glanced
back and expected to see a team of security guards chasing
us down in a golf cart or something, but we were already out
of the food court and around the corner with no one in sight.
Well, no one chasing us, at least.
Niz was the farthest along and I saw him cut to the right
suddenly and powerslide to a stop (having seen Sammy’s
wipeout, he was more prepared and managed to land grace-
fully, but still rougher than usual). Sammy and I caught up
and we all ducked into the record store where Jess worked.
“Hey, guys!” she said.
“Help!” Niz shrieked. She took a second to read his face,
take in me and Sammy’s equally panicked and flushed looks,
then pointed toward the back.
“Stock room,” she said simply, then called after us, “My
manager’s only on break, so make it snappy!”
We did. Sammy and I knew all about the delivery alleys
and hallways at that mall and we sprinted straight through
the stock room and out the back door.
“Right or left?” Sammy checked. Niz was completely
lost. As far as I know, he didn’t even get any kind of job until
he was in college. Of course, that left him more time to build
us skate ramps.
“Right goes back to the food court,” I pointed out.
“Left should head out to a loading elevator somewhere.

40
They always put those by the anchor stores.”
We bolted left. Sure enough, down the hall was a freight
elevator with a staircase beside it. Sammy slammed through
the doors into the stairwell and we bolted up them and out
onto the loading dock. It was dark and cold, but I remember
how bright the stars were. They always seem so bright in the
winter, like the air isn’t thick enough to hold them back.
We all dropped our boards and skated off down the dolly
ramp beside the concrete steps, then off up the loading ramp
to the parking lot. Either the security guard hadn’t got the
word out about us yet or they didn’t think we’d be outside al-
ready, because we didn’t see any fake police cars with those
pathetic green flashing lights. To get back around to our cars
we had to skate all the way behind the massive—massive—
grocery store that was one of the other anchors and then fi-
nally back around to the mall entrance across from it.
“I think we’re gonna book,” Niz said, looking at his
watch.
“All right,” I agreed. “I’m just gonna huck my board in
my car—hopefully they didn’t get a good look at us.”
“Turn your coat inside out,” Sammy said suddenly, start-
ing to help me out of it.
“Wha—? Why?”
“So it looks different.”
I flapped it off, then flapped some more to get Sammy to
stop helping.
“All right, all right—damn kids! Leave an old man alone!”
“D’ya think Greg’s pissed?” Sammy wondered.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Niz countered. “You knocked him
on his ass twice, man!”

41
 “Nuh-uh,” Sammy disagreed, his eyes wild like he really
thought he had to clear his name. “You did this one, Niz.”
“Maybe he’ll stop bugging us?” I said weakly. “Besides,
I’m the one who has to go back in there and work.”
Sammy smiled again, his usual mirth returning.
“Good luck,” he said as he and Niz got in Niz’s car.

Tobie kept looking at me all through the game and I tried

to smile, but she wasn’t buying it. She disappeared right be-
fore Dick Clark dropped the ball, but I was so busy goading
Jolly into shotgunning a Mountain Dew, I didn’t notice until
it was too late. By then the party had thinned out, as some of
our peripheral friends drifted off to other parties with the
people they wanted to spend New Year’s with, but nobody
minded. All it meant was it became obvious when I looked
around that Tobie wasn’t there.
“Where’s Tobie?” I asked no one. Jess and Niz were
hanging all over each other—young love—and Sammy
looked half asleep with his arm around his girl. Jolly man-
aged to motion loosely toward the front door and I didn’t ask
him to elaborate—he hadn’t felt so good after shotgunning
that Mountain Dew.
I wandered over to the front entryway, trying to look ca-
sual, my heart beating way up high in my chest, truly con-
cerned that Tobie had left the party without so much as a see
ya. I glanced at the couch with the pile of coats and saw hers
still there—the ragged paper passes from the ski slopes she

42
always went to with her parents over Christmas were poking
out under the pile.
“Tobie?” I tried, figuring she may have gone up to the
bathroom or something. I was nervous as hell for some rea-
son and my hand actually shook as I reached out and turned
the front door knob. It whooshed open with the sticky sound
of a well-sealed door, and a curl of chill January air spun into
the foyer, so I ducked my head out quickly. Tobie was stand-
ing about halfway along the porch, holding her arms tightly
to herself. I slipped out and let the door snick shut behind
me.
The house was on top of a hill that had an okay view
down into the main city center. It was all a suburb, so it was-
n’t like lover’s lane over L.A. or anything, but in those still
winter nights the streetlights and buildings sparkled like dia-
mond snowflakes against the dark valley.
“Tobie? What’s up?” I tried to make my voice not
quiver, but I couldn’t help it. I heard her sniff loudly, but she
didn’t say anything or turn around.
“Dick Clark’s balls dropped again,” I tried to joke. She
puffed out a single laugh and half looked at me over her
shoulder.
“Hey, Jack,” she whispered.
“What’s up?” I asked again.
“I called Billy to tell him happy New Year.”
“Yeah?”
“His brother’s home from college—we’ve only met
once. He said Billy was out with his girlfriend.”
“Oh, shit, Tobie—” And it was all gone. The jealousy,
the selfish loneliness, the subtle flirtations I hadn’t wanted to

43
admit were there—that was nothing compared to the
heartache I didn’t want Tobie to have to go through, and the
last thing on my mind was that Billy fucking Burns didn’t
deserve her when all I could think was that she was the one
who didn’t deserve this.
“I should’ve known!” she said way louder than she in-
tended to, but it was either say it loudly or start crying, I
could tell.
“C’mere,” I said, gently turning her to me. She accepted
the invite and hugged me. She didn’t cry, she didn’t speak,
she just held on to me, and I maintained her silence. There
was really nothing to say, after all.
“We never got very serious,” she finally said. She was
just the right height, when we hugged like that, for me to put
my chin on her head, which I did. “Are you resting your chin
on my head?” she checked.
“I’m tired.”
She broke off the hug but didn’t let go of me and looked up
into my face. “You still have that stupid Uno card in your hat.”
There was no thought. I just leaned in and kissed her,
slowly, on the mouth, giving her plenty of time to pull away,
but she didn’t. She stood on her tip toes and met me half
way, and we kissed. Her lips felt so warm against the cold air
and her skin smelled so fresh. I reached up slowly and
touched the back of her head, holding her close to me, and
she opened her mouth and drew out a longer kiss. I touch her
hair and her ear and trailed my finger down her neck to her
shoulder, then pulled away.
“So...” I said, suddenly feeling very guilty. “I mean, I
didn’t—”

44
 She smiled wryly but she looked happy again. “We’re
like Simon and Garfunkel,” she whispered. I leaned in and
rested my forehead against hers, so close to those beautiful
blue eyes that I almost fell in.
“What the fuck does does that mean?” I breathed, grin-
ning from ear to ear.
She chuckled and shook her head. “I don’t have a clue. It
just came to me.”
Right next to us a window rammed up and Jolly’s head
stuck out of it. “I just threw up that Mountain Dew and now
I feel great!” he exclaimed. “Get yer asses in here. We have
a game to finish!”

The silver on the ring looked faded. Not tarnished, but

actually faded somehow, as if the age and weight of time had
finally had its way and infused it with a dulled glow from its
core, not a simple sheen of oxidation on the surface. As I
turned it in my fingers, I studied the finely cut bones, pinched
in the middle and separated from each other by deep black
cuts, slightly rounded, to form a perfect circle. The inside
was smooth, save a maker’s mark, and a glance was all
you needed to see that it had been made well. It wasn’t a
big garish death-metal piece-of-shit like they sold at the
mall. It was subtle. It was the kind of ring that made you
take a second look and ask, “Are those little bones?” be-
cause the finery of it was such that you couldn’t be abso-
lutely sure. To be honest, I’m still not absolutely sure, but

45
to me they will always be bones, even if they aren’t.
“You can have it,” Ally said.
I immediately handed it back to her. She wore it on her
thumb, and the thought of her not having it on seemed
wrong. I’d noticed it many times but had only now plucked
up the courage to ask about it.
“No, no—that’s not why I asked about it.”
“I know. But I can tell you like it.”
“Well, yeah, but so do you. Besides, I’m sure it means
something to you?”
She shrugged. She was sitting cross-legged on the
couch backstage and I was in a wingback chair across from
her. Some teacher had been about to ditch the wingback
chairs, but Mr. K had salvaged them to give us more sitting
room. He’d even come up with a small coffee table that
was now nestled between them. Ally twirled the ring in her
fingers and looked at it. I watched how nimble her fingers
looked, only realizing then that she also coordinated her
nail polish with her hair highlights and lipstick. No won-
der she looked so well put together—that subtle unity of
color somehow made her whole, but not in a big flashy
way. It’s always the details that have the most impact.
She held the ring back out to me.
“No, I want you to have it. Really.”
I held her gaze. She nodded impatiently and urged me to
take the ring by holding it out further. I took it, if only to
stop her stretching so far.
“Where did you get it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Seriously?”

46
 “Yeah—for real. I was a kid. I used to pick old boxes out
of the trash. I bet it was in one of them. I never even wore it
until this year.”
“It’s really cool.”
I slid it onto the ring finger of my right hand but it was a
touch too big, so I moved it to the middle finger.
“It looks good,” she said quietly. “Matches your ear-
rings.”
It didn’t, not really, except for the fact that the ring was a
circle and my earrings were tiny hoops, but I liked the way
she was smiling and I didn’t feel so bad for taking it, not if it
made her happy.
“Thanks.”
“So, are you going to Sudsy’s this weekend with Jess
and Niz? My cousin’s band is playing.”
I looked down and twirled the bone ring on my finger,
trying to avoid her stare. She was really asking if Missy
would let me go because Missy had made it pretty clear to
everyone who’d listen that she didn’t like Ally McShay.
Maybe Missy saw something in the way I looked at Ally—I
don’t know. I almost told her once that I’d tried to ask Ally
out and she’d snubbed me, so there was nothing for her to
worry about, but that’s not how teenagers are wired—when
it comes to the opposite sex, there is always something to
worry about, even when there isn’t.
“Yeah, I’m trying to talk Missy into going.”
“Pah!” Ally spat joyfully. “I doubt she’d survive five
minutes!”
“Oh, she’s not that bad. She just hasn’t ever gone to a
club show.”

47
 I glanced up at Ally. She had her head cocked to the side
and an expression on her face that told me not to try and pull
anything over on her. She wasn’t buying it.
“She made it as far as the Wharf, I hear. And so did
you.”
I looked away. I’d really hoped Ally, of all people, had-
n’t known about the lame shit I did with Missy Anderson.
And the truth is, at this point I was only staying in it through
the damn King of Hearts dance, so I didn’t ruin it for Missy.
“We’ll be there,” I conceded.
“What about Sammy and the Homecoming queen?”
I shook my head. “I doubt it.”
“Tobie?”
I shook my head again. She smiled sweetly when I
looked over at her. It caught me off guard. There were no
layers to it; no sarcasm; no wit—just a nice smile.
“Please come,” she said. “For me?”
I looked down and twisted the ring on my finger, some-
thing I already knew was going to be a lifelong nervous
habit.
“You have to hear the opening band,” she added. “That’s
my cousin’s band. They don’t play out that much, but they’re
really good.”
“I’ll be there,” I assured her.
“I guess we better get up there,” she said, jabbing a
thumb over her shoulder at the stage speaker. Mr. K’s voice
was crackling over it. “Sounds like he’s wrapping up for the
night.”
“Hey, Ally?” I said as I stood up.
She froze and turned back to me.

48
 “Yeah?”
“Thanks again for the ring. It was really nice of you to
give it to me.”
She smirked ironically.
“You deserve nice things, Bells—don’t forget that.”
Then she was swallowed by the shadows in the
wings as she headed for the stage.

King of Hearts was like the middle kid of high school

dances: It wasn’t first, so it didn’t get a parade, and it wasn’t
last, so it didn’t get all the attention—it was stuck in the mid-
dle, a hinterland of teenage social life tacked halfheartedly to
Valentine’s Day (a connection so loose I didn’t even make it
until years later). But it was still one of the big three. I never
went to a single other high school dance except the big three,
and King of Hearts was as good a way as any to break up the
doldrums of winter.
I went with Tobie. Niz was with Jess, and Jolly—whose
dad had a big fucking Cadillac he let Jolly borrow—tripled
with us with Ally. Sammy was with Donna Marie, surviving
a slice of the real life with the popular set, an uncomfortable
happenstance that put him in the same carpool with Greg
Wilson and Missy Anderson. I guess Greg had been giving
him the stink-eye all night, and Missy was giving me the
silent treatment by ignoring Sammy, but they were all so en-
amored of Donna Marie Meadows that none of them wanted
to piss her off by being openly judgmental.

49
 “It’s like a fucking teen drama on fucking TV,” Sammy
admitted after cornering me at the punch bowl, away from
the dance floor. The punch—donated by McDonald’s no
doubt, with a few bags of marshmallows thrown in for good
measure—was not good, but it was wet.
“How’s your night?” Sammy wondered.
I tried to downplay it. He knew damn well how my night
was.
“Why didn’t Jolly hook up with you guys instead of us?”
I asked.
“Are you kidding?” Sammy scoffed. “There’s no way
Missy and Donna Marie would’ve been caught dead with
Ally McShay—no offense.”
I looked over at our table. Ally and Tobie were laughing
at something I can only assume Niz had said, based solely on
his expression and the fact that Jess was rolling her eyes.
Jolly stuck out like a sore thumb in his Wall Street suit, but
he looked good and he looked like he was having fun. Ally
glanced over and caught my eye, so I smiled and she smiled
back, a slightly embarrassed twist in the way she ducked my
gaze.
“What’s your problem? What’s wrong with Ally?”
“Nothing, Jack—you know that.” He looked over at her
then leaned in and whispered, “Word is, she wanted to come
to this thing with you.”
I laughed. I honestly laughed.
“I doubt that, Samuel. Jolly’s perfect for her.”
“So you and Tobie...?”
“Just friends.”
“Yeah? For how long?”

50
 I glanced over at the table again and my eyes drifted to
Ally. She’d dyed her streaks to match her dress, which was a
deep (but somehow still bright) blue. Her lipstick matched
her sleeves and tights though—black as pitch. She had on a
Victorian-looking choker and I think she’d put a very small
amount of glitter on her cheeks. She looked amazing, and I
knew I wasn’t the only guy who thought so.
“Ally McShay, huh?” I mumbled. “What about Jolly?”
“Nah—they came as friends. I think he did it to piss off
Missy for breaking up with you, and Ally did it to hang out
with you.”
“Look at you!” I declared. “Mister ‘I’m dating the
Homecoming queen so I know alls about luv.’ Jolly wouldn’t
go to a dance with a girl to piss off my ex-girlfriend.”
“True,” Sammy agreed. “And Ally is hot, as you have
pointed out to me more than once, Mr. Beltane. Maybe he’s
hoping he’ll get lucky.”
“I think your first excuse is closer to the truth, if that’s
the only other option. Jolly’s a good guy.”
“Hey, we’re all dudes.”
He shrugged and left it at that, splopping punch into a
couple of cups before he jugglingly picked them up and
headed to the other side of the gym and the table where
Donna Marie was holding court. I knew Sammy and I knew
he wasn’t having any fun, and it made me wonder if his own
motivations were closer to what he thought of Jolly’s—was
he with Donna Marie just to bone the hottest girl in school?
And was she even that hot?
“They sent me to help you,” Ally said, tapping me on the
shoulder.

51
 “What?”
I spun around and she smiled kindly at me.
“Tobie said I should come over and see what was taking
you so long.”
“Oh—I ran into Sammy.”
She nodded. She knew that, and she knew that I knew
that she knew that.
“Do you ever dance at these things?” she asked.
“Sure—slow dances. I’m not much of a fast dancer.”
“Jesus, you sound like an old man!”
“I can’t keep up with you kids!” I protested in an old-fo-
gey voice.
She stood there and smiled at my joke, turning slowly as
if trying to dance without looking like she wanted to. Man
alive, but her eyes pierced right into me, clearing my mind of
all worldly thoughts, Sammy’s whispered comments about
her wanting to come to the dance with me the only thing still
echoing in my head. I didn’t believe him, not really, and I
certainly couldn’t do that to Jolly, not right here at the dance.
“Maybe we should get the punch,” Ally decided, as if I’d
offered to do something else instead.
“Sure,” I agreed.
As I followed her back to the table I couldn’t keep my eyes
off her legs and the way she moved, and I thought about Sam-
my’s other comment, that we’re all dudes. When I sat down,
Tobie gave me a knowing smirk; I blushed and looked away.
“You know, Ally can hit that curb up in Harbin Park rid-
ing goofy foot?” Tobie said to me.
“False,” I responded. “I’ve skated that curb with her and
she can barely hit it regular foot.”

52
 “Hey!” Ally protested.
“It’s true!” Jolly chimed in. “I was there, and you
missed. A lot.”
“That was my first time goofy foot!” Ally said in her de-
fense. “But, Bells, tell ’em! I hit it all the time when it was
just me and you!”
“Woah-HO!” Niz squealed. “What have we here? You
hit what, exactly, Miz McShay?”
“Fuck you,” she replied evenly.
“Jack just likes to hang out with pretty girls,” Jolly of-
fered. “He doesn’t hit anything, though.”
We all laughed, but to be fair, it was actually true. Half
my best friends were girls who weren’t girlfriends, and they
were both pretty. Ally’s gaze lingered on me as if she was
trying to figure me out or was waiting for me to refute the
claim, but God damn Sammy had put ridiculous thoughts in
my head, and now all I could think of was kissing her, so I
shyly looked away.
“How often have you skated alone together?” Tobie
asked without an ounce of suspicion.
She looked over at Jolly and he smiled knowingly back
at her.
“Not often!” Ally said quickly, turning to Tobie with
mild shock. “Just a few times—right, Bells?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just a few times.”
“I don’t care,” Tobie said slyly—there’s really no other
word for it.
“What’s going on with you two?” I asked her, glancing
at Jolly. “You’re up to something.”
“Nope,” Tobie said, cutting off Jolly at his open mouth.

53
“We came to dance. Right, Jolly?”
“That’s right!” (He sounded like he was guessing.)
“So let’s go,” Tobie suggested, taking his hand and
standing up with him. Jolly looked at me with a shocked ex-
pression similar to Ally’s.
“We’re not dating,” I said to him in a clipped tone, pre-
tending this should be obvious to everyone.
Tobie pulled him away and Niz and Jess followed them
out to the dance floor.
“So you and Tobie really did come as friends.”
It was a statement, not a question. Ally sighed heavily
and grinned at me.
“Yeah... We always do.”

Deep winter was the pause; a time out of time.

Winter was dark and quiet and the cold air inspired hud-
dled conferences—no colors, no sounds, no games, no dis-
tractions. The crisp focus of life is always sharpest in the
darkest winter nights; the soft crunch of snow beneath your
feet like a reminder of how fragile such crystalline beauty is,
as your breath curls skyward toward the moon. It’s only in
winter that space feels so close and the end so near; that our
ties to the Earth seem loose enough to break and let us drift
away, silently, into eternity.
Ally tilted her head back more and looked up at the stars,
and I watched in slow motion as her lips—so perfectly
painted to match her hair—separated just a touch.

54
 I looked over at her and she was shaking her head
slightly, her lips curled into a bemused expression.
“And what do we have, Jack?”
I shrugged.
“This is about Missy Anderson, isn’t it? You built her up
and she dumped you right before the King of Hearts dance?”
“No,” I disagreed quietly, slightly amused to think of
Missy Anderson having had that much of an effect on me.
Ally didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. I’m not even
sure she breathed. She just waited patiently for me to finish.
“Her name was Penny Harper,” I finally said. “Missy
didn’t have a thing on her.”
“Penny Harper? Does she go to our school?”
I shook my head. “Nah. She moved.”
Ally reached over and rubbed my back slowly,
scooching closer so she could look up into my face better
and speak softly but still be heard. I hadn’t meant to bring up
Penny Harper, but there she was, still echoing in my head al-
most two years later: The perfect girl; the summer dream; the
one who stuck her nose in the air and walked off the second
she had to introduce me to her other friends. The one I built
up so high that when she left, all I could do was fall.
“So how’s that got anything to do with me?” Ally won-
dered gently.
I straightened up and looked at her fully.
“You seem like everything I’ve ever wanted in a girl,” I
admitted plainly. It felt good to finally admit it to myself, if
not to her. It felt good to finally give substance to something
that had been bugging me for months: how I drooled over
Ally and spoke to her all the time but never truly asked her

55
out. “So I figure you’ll only break my heart, like Penny
Harper did.”
“I probably will, Jack, or you’ll break mine...” She trailed
off and grinned coyly. “Unless we plan to get married...?”
I chuckled with mild embarrassment.
“I didn’t think young love was supposed to hurt,” I of-
fered.
“Who the hell said that?” she chided happily. “Young
love always hurts. You think it was easy for me to follow
you out here and tell you how I felt? I’ve seen you and To-
bie. I know you’d dump me if she asked you to—”
“Not true,” I denied vehemently.
“Funny thing is,” she deflected. “If a broken heart hurt
that much, we’d never go out with anyone again.”
“Missy was really jealous of Tobie,” I said evenly. “She
was jealous of you, too, actually.”
“Me? Seriously?”
“Anyway... You know, Tobie and I are just friends, and
I’m sure we’ll still hang out, but there’s nothing there, not
like that.”
“It doesn’t really matter, Bells,” she said. “I’m not jeal-
ous if she’s not.”
I leaned in and kissed her. Just like that, without think-
ing, as if to prove a point. Not a big sloppy kiss, I just closed
the few inches between our lips and kissed her, dimly aware
that her lipstick tasted like apples. It was a slow, perfect kiss,
the kind that said that there was really something there. And
I remember the indescribably beautiful smell of her cheek
against my nose, and the soft tinkle of her bangles sliding
down her wrist as she touched the back of my head.

56
 You would think, since three of us worked at the mall,
the last place we’d want to hang out would be the mall, but
when the weather in Ohio decides to prove to you that
spring is closer to winter than it is to July Fourth, you don’t
have much choice. Besides, the mall always seemed like
the promise of something incredible happening—a new
movie, or a new record, or an amazing find at the damn
dollar store—so we were drawn to it despite our best ef-
forts. There was something in the lights and sounds and the
smooth, polished finish of everything that was vaguely
magically—no doubt the whiff of memories from child-
hood, when malls were places where you got big cookies
and met Santa and saw your friends outside of school or
their houses. It was like, if anything happened in the world,
it certainly happened at the mall, or at least started there. So
we went. We went, we drank frozen Cokes, we ate big
cookies, and we worried security as to whether or not they
should call the cops.
“You can’t be serious?” Sammy growled.
He slurped his Coke and looked up at me, sort of
hunched over, but he was speaking to Niz. Jess shook her
head without amusement, and Ally and Tobie sat mildly grin-
ning, watching the show.
“If Jack’s there to catch me, too, I will try acid,” Niz said.
“No,” I stated definitively. “I have to draw the line there.
I am not going to be your damn babysitter.”

57
 “It wasn’t any fun,” Sammy admitted.
For reasons unknown to any of us, Niz flicked a french
fry out into the main thoroughfare, missing a mom and her
kid by inches. Jess punched him in the arm, hard, but I don’t
think he was aiming for them.
“No, Jack’s our safehouse,” Niz decided. “Jess may be
our mom, but Jack’s—”
“Fuck you, Niz,” Jess protested.
“Aw, baby, I’s just playing...”
He put his arm around her and she halfheartedly
shrugged it off.
“Why’s Jack the safehouse?” Ally wondered. “There’s
gotta be some stories there...”
She’d settled right in with the group and we already
couldn’t think of her not being there, but she was still catching
up. I mean, the rest of us had been hanging out for years—me,
Niz, Tobie, and Jess since we were in middle school—so Ally
was always trying to figure out the hidden meaning to inside
jokes or the history that had led to the present moment.
“Let me tell you about Jack Beltane,” Niz offered,
pulling his chair around as if he needed a better angle on his
audience. “He and I have a long history—friends since we
were in second or third grade or something—and we have a
habit of cooking up some pretty dumb ideas.”
“You cook up the dumb ideas,” I corrected.
“True. I carefully plan out how not to get caught getting
us into trouble, but Jack here is the one who figures out how
to lay low long enough that you can plan to get back out of
trouble, and that’s really the most important part.”
“It’s true,” Tobie interjected with a dour nod.

58
 “Seriously?” I checked. “That’s what you people think of
me? I don’t know what they’re talking about,” I added confi-
dentially to Ally.
“Even John knew it,” Sammy said. “That’s why he
brought me here.”
“Bullshit. He brought you here because he didn’t know
any of your other friends.”
Sammy shrugged.
“Well I think it’s great,” Ally cooed, slipping her arm
through mine and pulling me closer to her. “I wouldn’t mind
if people thought of me like that.”
How could I deny her face? I unthreaded my arm and
gave her a quick squeeze-hug.
“Well, well, well, ladies!” a voice suddenly boomed. It
sounded too jovial to be Greg Wilson, but that was my first
thought. We all turned in the direction it came from and saw
a stocky, buff kid walking toward us.
“Toad!” Sammy shrieked, and shot out of his chair to
greet him.
Timmy Toderman—The Toad—was definitely the best
skater around. Also the strongest. He didn’t hang out with us
too much, but enough to be on speaking terms. He was a year
ahead of us and already in college. He was carrying a piece of
pink paper and grinning from ear to ear.
“Are you the assholes responsible for this?” he won-
dered, slapping the paper down on the table. It was a crudely
drawn sign that had been Xeroxed, showing a skateboard
with a big “no” bar drawn through it. “NO SKATE-
BOARDS” it proclaimed along the top. Then under the pic-
ture it added, “NOT EVEN TO GO TO DISC WORLD.”

59
 It seems they had completely banned skateboards from
the premises, even as we sat chatting in the food court. At
least, the signs hadn’t been anywhere we saw them when we
arrived.
“How is that our fault?” I wondered.
“My records indicate you were the first dip-shits to skate
in this mall,” Toad replied casually, his grin (dare I say?) a
bit jealous.
“But not the last, apparently?”
“Apparently,” he agreed.
“Did you skate in here?” Sammy asked him.
Toad shook his head.
“Pete did, to try some new wheels right outside Disc
World. And I guess some other guys did...” He trailed off and
we followed his gaze around to a security guard hustling to-
ward our table.
“Break it up!” the guard called out, waving his hands
uselessly.
“Break what up?” Jess asked, her tone flat and snide.
“Your group is getting too big!”
He stopped a safe distance away and hoisted his belt as
if it were weighed down by more than a single pair of plastic
handcuffs.
“Are you serious?” Jess demanded, somehow even more
snidely.
“No loitering,” the guard offered.
“We’re eating.”
Jess was handling it pretty well, so no one tried to cut in.
I don’t think the guard knew what to do with her. He’d been
expecting lip, but not from a pretty girl.

60
 “No more than four,” the guard bleated.
He had obviously decided brevity was his best defense
(“Just the facts” and all that shit). His eyes shifted nervously,
planning his escape should we all stand up at once. I won-
dered what kind of kid he’d been in school. Probably the
bully who graduated into the real world and realized he was-
n’t such hot shit after all, and only slightly more skilled than
a head of lettuce. Or maybe he was working his way up, try-
ing to get into the police academy. I was about to ask him—
which no doubt would not have been well received—when
Toad broke the uneasy silence.
“Fuck it! I was going anyway. Just dropped by to give
you ladies that.”
He jabbed a stubby finger at the flier, then spun on his
heal and stalked off.
“Okay?” I asked the guard. He shook his head.
“Fuuuuuck!” Jess drawled, standing up with a huff and
pulling Niz to his feet. “We’re going down to the record
store. See you guys in a few minutes.”
Niz saluted the guard, who visibly relaxed when they
walked off, though I wasn’t sure if it was because Jess was
gone or because we were safely down to the magic number
of four hoodlums—an easily manageable number, according
to the ledgers of mall-security bookkeeping.

“Hey,” Tobie breathed.

I pulled my last book out of my locker and turned to her.

61
 “Hey, Tobe. You sound serious.”
“You can tell that from one word?”
“With you I can.”
She wiped nonexistent tears from her eyes. I waited for her
to speak again, taking my sweet time to close my locker softly.
“Still no book bag?” she checked as her way of starting
the conversation over.
“I can make it to my locker between classes.”
“Pff,” she disagreed. “What’s your next class?”
“Art—ceramics.”
I looked at her and smiled and she smiled back.
“You used to be an honors student, Jack.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
She shook her head slightly and shifted her weight.
“I like art. I need the break. I can’t stand studying all the
time.”
“You can’t stand studying anytime.”
“What the hell is this, Tobie? You’re worse than my God
damn mom. Seriously! She’d—”
“You spend all your time skating and hanging out at the
mall and going to shows!”
“Jealous?”
She actually gritted her teeth and punched me. Not hard—
nothing but a light tap on the shoulder, really, but it was the
teeth and her eyes that scared me. They said she was holding
something back, and I figured if it was that big, I should
have got a sense of it before now.
“Getting in fights, Jack? Sammy dropping acid? You
making bongs in art class!”
“Jesus, Tobie! What the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t

62
make a stupid bong—that was Ryan Jefferson.”
She cut me a look and I didn’t press the issue. Ryan and
I ate lunch sometimes, and we always partnered up in art
classes, so I was guilty by association, I guess. With anyone
else, I would’ve stormed off at that point, but not with Tobie.
She got the benefit of the doubt—and she had me curious.
“Is this about that shit Greg Wilson again? Because I am
really sick of the way he keeps coming up.”
“Everyone knows you and Sammy picked a fight with
him on the golf course with Ally the other night.”
“Not exactly.” I sighed, glad the conversation was at least
making some sense now. “He was mouthing off, as usual.”
“So you and Sammy started swinging, as usual.”
“Forget it, Tobie,” I said. I stepped angrily away and added,
“You know that’s bullshit. You know none of this shit—none of
it—happened until that asshole entered our lives.”
“So this is my fault?” she whispered, stopping me short.
I watched the big wall clock for what seemed like min-
utes, watching the bright red second hand click from pip to
pip, draining the moments until the bell rang and I would
have to run to beat the last bell.
It’s only later that we realize the deep significance of
those stolen conversations between classes, where each word
is weighted to perfection or apt to knock everything off bal-
ance. Thoughts were often left dangling in the air as we scat-
tered for classrooms; I imagine those half-formed ideas slipping
to the ground like autumn leaves, swirling with the dust and pa-
per-wads the janitor cleaned up every night. But that action—
the sudden end to conversations dictated by the bells—also
seemed to dampen the fire, and while sometimes those

63
thoughts would resurface later and well up into full-blown mis-
understandings, most often they evaporated over the course of
the next class, as if they had been born and died in those singu-
lar moments only, never to be thought of again.
So Tobie’s observations didn’t stick with me too much—
I figured she was just blowing off steam because her and
Greg Wilson still had mutual acquaintances that were getting
harder to maintain. But later... Later I realized the full mea-
sure of what she’d said, and what she really meant. It was
Ally she didn’t like me spending so much time with, but that
was a reason she couldn’t admit, even to herself, because we
all liked Ally, so she made up excuses like bongs and art
classes and not doing homework. It was all bad, in other
words, but the real bad, the big bad, was the girl who might
finally tear me away from Tobie.
“It’s not anyone’s fault, Tobie,” I finally said. I turned to
her, but she was already walking away.
“Tobie?” I called out, she stopped and turned back, smil-
ing weakly.
“I know, Jack,” she admitted. “I just miss you.”
“You miss me?”
It was real confusion. I felt like I saw her all the time.
“It’s okay.”
She smiled so honestly that I believed her.
And by the end of art, it was all history—just an -
other conversation being tossed through the halls by
whatever breezes stirred it; something to forget and
sweep away.

64
 The sky was a deep purple—the deepest purple I’d ever
seen, at least in the sky. I have no idea what strange atmo-
spheric conditions colluded to form it, but looking out the
backstage door of the auditorium where we performed the
annual variety show, I got lost in it. That, and the soft blan-
ket of humid air that descends in late May in southern Ohio,
and doesn’t let up until October, was draped over me. I miss
those long, hot summer nights with the cicadas droning in
time with the grasshoppers and the stars fuzzing out above
the moisture-filled air. Over to the west it was darker still—a
storm rolling in, pushing that purple sky in front of it.
Someone tapped my shoulder. I had my headphones on
—it was Led Zeppelin III on an endless loop for me these
days. I needed it to supplement the Cure albums I’d used to
prop up my broken heart. Ally had been gone a week. I
pulled my headphones off and turned around.
“We’re up next, Jack.”
It was Kammy. She smiled nicely and hopped on her
feet, like a little kid who has been asked to get Scary Uncle
Joe and tell him the food was ready.
Every year, right at the end of the year, the high
school did a variety show, where the cheerleaders could
revisit their best routines, the jocks could warm up for a
future of frat-boy Vaudeville antics, and the drama club
could perform a few scenes from a play no one there had
bothered to come and see the first time around. That left
me doing the set changes and props for the whole thing, a

65
job I should have been doing with Ally.
“Okay,” I agreed.
Kammy—looking slightly relieved—nodded once and
bobbed off. It was just a rehearsal—the big show was the last
weekend in May, then we graduated the weekend after that.
Only I wasn’t as excited as everyone else. These things
that seemed like such a big deal months ago—landmarks of
becoming my own man—now only seemed to reinforce
things I’d rather forget, or pointed the way toward them, at
least.
Ally was one thing, but the good thing I’d got going—all
the planning, plotting, and friend-making over the last
twelve years in school—came to a head Senior year, and
now Senior year was almost over. It suddenly felt like a lot
of work only to pick up and leave and have to start all over.
“There you are, Jack!” Mr. K beamed.
“I’m here,” I agreed.
“We aren’t going to do the full scene changes now, but I
want you to—”
“Walk through it like the performers walk through it,” I
finished for him. “I know. Stagehands need practice, too.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and met my eyes.
“Stagehands are the most important thing, Jack. Without
sets and costumes and makeup and lighting, the people on
stage are just talking in a dark, empty room. Naked.”
He chuckled and I couldn’t help but laugh with him.
“Sure, Mr. K.”
“Okay!”
He clapped me on the back and corralled me to the
wings, where he handed me a roll of blocking tape.

66
 “I’ll tell you what to block,” he explained, and then he
was off, clapping his hands and rallying the troops. He had-
n’t picked the best scenes from our play, per se; he’d picked
the scenes that guaranteed everyone in the cast had a line in
the variety show. Mr. K just wanted all his kids to be happy.
“Hey, Jack,” a girl said from behind me. I turned and
saw Donna Marie. She was doing a solo song—I think Missy
and a couple of other girls were singing backup—but I had-
n’t expected her to say anything to us, least of all to me.
“Hey, Donna. Congrats on Prom queen and all that.”
“Thanks. I guess it’s pretty dumb.”
“No, it’s not dumb. You deserved it—you earned it.”
“How’s Sammy?”
“Holding up.”
“Missy was so pissed that he went to Prom with Ally
McShay.”
It hurt to hear her name and be reminded of her, so I de-
flected my feelings to anger. Fuck Missy Anderson—who
the hell did she think she was? And she was wrong, anyway
—Sammy had only doubled with Ally, but he’d gone to
Prom with Melissa.
“He didn’t go with her,” I corrected. “He doubled with
Jolly.”
“Whatever.”
“And why the hell would Missy care who Sammy went
to Prom with?”
But even as I said it, I knew: Missy got pissed just to draw
attention to the fact that Ally hadn’t gone to Prom with me. I
know Donna Marie hadn’t come over to indirectly make that
point; it was small talk. She wanted the dirt on Sammy.

67
 “Sammy’s in the booth working the lights,” I added be-
fore she could respond. “He’d love a visit, I’m sure.”
Donna Marie shook her head and laughed nervously. “I
can’t.”
“Why not?”
She looked at me and said simply, “It would hurt too
much. Anyway...” She straightened up. “I heard about Ally
and, I don’t know... I just...” She huffed a sigh and chose her
words carefully. “I just thought you should know that you
made the right choice. I never minded Ally.”
“Thanks?” I checked.
I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, but I could tell by
her tone and the set of her head and the light smile she wore
that she was being kind and conciliatory and confessional all
at the same time.
“Mr K’s waving at you,” she added, pointing over my
shoulder.
I told Sammy about it later and he tried to shrug it off. It
had been almost three months, after all—three months of
seeing her in the halls with other guys; three months of him
dating other girls for a week at a time. He’d learned long ago
to shrug it off, but I could tell it still hit him, to know that
she still cared enough to ask. I knew exactly how he felt and
I think it made him realize how I felt. As I got into my car
after rehearsal that night and rolled the window down, an-
other car roared up beside me: Sammy’s big piece of junk.
“Hey!” he hollered and Frisbeed something across his
car, through my open window, and into my lap—it was a hell
of a shot.
“What’s this?” I squawked as I picked it up.

68
 “You need that!” he yelled. “Track three!”
Then he gunned the engine and puttered off.
It was the Smiths, The Queen is Dead. I wasn’t a huge
fan at the time, and Sammy knew it, but he also knew me. I
put it in and did as Sammy ordered, and for the first time in
weeks, as I drove home alone through the dark streets of my
hometown, I didn’t feel so very alone at all. Sammy had
done this. Robert Smith had filled whole albums with love
and loss. Morrissey had done it, too—and they’d all sur-
vived.
It didn’t make it go away, but it gave me some perspec-
tive—the kind of perspective teenagers lack until it matters.
It’s ironic that the age group who gets to run wild and fall in
love and get hurt and do stupid things is also the least capa-
ble of dealing with it. You ask me, I think it fits, though: If
we were never teenagers—always on the brink of disaster
(be it real or imagined)—we’d never gain that perspective
we need. You can’t grow up if you don’t know what it means
to be a kid; if you don’t recognize that half your wounds are
self-inflicted.
All through high school I’d dreamed about being older,
about not having curfews, about us all being on our own re-
cognizance. The most cruel irony is that when I finally
achieved that goal, we’d all moved to college, and the
friends I’d intended to share that day with were no longer
there to enjoy it with me.
That night, as I drove home, I realized that it was my
hometown, but it was most likely not where I was going to
live for the rest of my life. None of our parents had grown up
there, after all. Suddenly everything looked odd and I felt

69
like a stranger on streets I knew so well.
The part of me that lived there was over, and that
thought hurt more than anything else.

70
The clouds always seem so far away—
more distant, yet smaller, than fingertips—
somehow closer than trees.
Like clouds that puff up from riverbanks
where the highway cuts across,
oblivious in its concrete glory
to the chasms and light in the sky.

This netted life in its moment

seems relaxed among the green clouds—
the hillocks seem wistful in a way
that we are not.

Dreams come slowly—

sometimes it is not enough
to simply move on.

71
 It’s not good to turn your back on old friends. Old
friends are the only good friends—a statement you try to ar-
gue with until you realize it’s true. I've always been fortunate
enough to surround myself with lots of friends, but the good
ones—the ones who’d think nothing of you turning up on
their doorsteps unannounced—they are few and far between.
They’re the ones who always stay in touch, no matter how
difficult staying in touch becomes, because the thought of
not knowing where you are is too painful to consider and too
ridiculous a notion to even entertain.
So why did going back to her scare me so much? Was it
the fear of learning, when I did finally end up on an old
friend’s doorstep, that I didn’t actually mean as much to her
as she meant to me? Yes, I’m sure that was the weight and
measure of it, because that kind of knowledge, I knew,
would kill me; would take what was left of my heart-trodden
soul and grind it into dust. The only reason I hadn’t given up
already is because the option was still there, unexplored,
untested, and waiting.
So I spent the first couple of weeks of August hitchhiking
my way across Kentucky, trying to come to terms with moving
back to Cleveland from my country home and settling back into
the grind, and wondering how much further back I had to go, or
if I wanted to run away from it all for good instead.
On the other hand, if I was truly starting over—hitting
the proverbial reset button—then why not go back all the

72
way, to the only one who ever made me truly happy?
I ended up sitting at the West Virginia welcome center,
taking in the scenic overlook and weighing my options. By
definition, West Virginia is the foothills of the Appalachians,
and there was something distinctly comforting about the
emerald glens and steaming valleys that I looked out upon.
Back there, somewhere in Ohio, was an apartment full of
half-unpacked boxes, balanced between the symbolic stance
of leaving them packed to pretend it was only temporary, and
the slow realization that this was my life now.
Somewhere between adolescence and legitimate work, I
lost myself.
The Child died.
When I first moved into my one-room efficiency in the
city, I missed the Child terribly and would spend hours por-
ing over old pictures, remembering what he’d done. I began
trying to reconstruct the Child from memory: I wrote down
stories, acknowledged him in poems, bought things the Child
would have bought—but nothing worked. Nothing brought
the Child back.
And everybody I met was on the ground scrabbling for
something they knew must be there; praying their fingers
would find it before it was smashed to worthlessness. The
worst part is that none of us really know we’re looking for
the Child, but we need to find it anyway. That’s what getting
old means: It means you start running from your past.
I am not an old man writing, but I know this because I
have talked to many old people who are almost too eager to
tell you their life stories—about days gone by; about them-
selves. It’s that mental scrapbook called “Nostalgia,” and I

73
wonder what would happen if we didn’t keep it—or didn’t
care. Perhaps that’s what causes the bitterness in most peo-
ple, the older and further from their pasts they get. They be-
gin to open the scrapbook less and less—begin to stop scrab-
bling on the floor because they don’t know what they want
and won’t stop to ask anyone—until the pictures yellow and
fade and the pages crumble to dust. But not me—I’ll be one
of those eternally happy old folks finding joy in the youth
and rebellion around me because, through them, death is
nonexistent and we live again.
Ask anyone: The best way to deal with death is to stare it
in the face and laugh; cherish what you had before it slipped
away; cry once in a while, if you have to, as long as you un-
derstand why you cry. And why did I cry, those first few
weeks in the city? For people and things lost? For another
time and place? For things I could have done—should have
done—but never did? I cried for those things, but I sat and
created more memories. Memories about the birds that
would brave the flight to the fifteenth floor to eat the old
bread crusts I’d put on my window sill. Memories of catered
VIP parties for new club openings, where the bar was open
to the press.
Now, I cry again. The death of the Child is a long-time,
one-time cathartic affair, that’s all. I’ve learned to embrace it
with laughter, smiles, and disbelieving shakes of the head,
but I’ve never hated it. It doesn’t make sense to hate some-
thing for dying.
But we do.
I gazed over the dusky foothills and considered my
original plan again: Simply walk off and vanish. Forget the

74
past—the whole past—by never looking at it again. If I had
to give up everything to give up who I was then it just came
down to a question of whether or not I wanted to do that.
And if not that, then what? I had only one place to go back to
that I hadn’t tried yet, but I wasn’t sure that was the answer. I
could make a phone call or write a letter, but I figured if there
was rejection to be had, I’d rather have it in person. I’d rather
have the past look me in the eyes and tell me it was over.
I sighed heavily and bent down long enough to pluck
some weeds. I tossed them up, where they hung a moment in
the humid air and drifted back to the ground, untouched by
any breeze. At least it was evening and the sun was sliding
down toward night.
I groaned and shut my eyes. I could hear the trees chat-
tering amongst themselves and wondered what it felt like to
be them, rooted, yet free. I opened my eyes when I heard a
twig snap somewhere to my left.
“Thinking about walking off into them hills, aren’t
you?” a voice asked me.
“Just checking out the view,” I replied loudly, standing
up. I glanced off toward the parking lot and confirmed that
he was alone. I could only make out his rough shape. The
light was slipping from the sky and it looked like a badly
dyed sheet hung out to dry behind his silhouette, and the
night-bugs were warming up their orchestra. The sodium-arc
lamps around the parking area flicked on with a series of
clicks, pops, and hisses. It seemed fitting somehow, but I
couldn’t figure out why.
“You another cop?” I wondered. He walked over so I
could see him better.

75
 “Nope,” he said, holding up his hands. He was dressed
in military camos, and you could tell they were real, not just
the fantasy fulfillment of someone who only wished they’d
been in the armed forces. He had a slight but solid build and
a kind face with bright eyes; he looked too well bred and in-
telligent to be slumming through these hills like me.
“What are you doing, man?” he asked. “I didn’t see your
car...”
“Trying to get out of the sun—what are you doing?”
He glanced at the darkening sky, almost completely de-
void of light. “Taking a piss.”
We eyed each other carefully, then I finally turned to him
and offered him a hand to shake. “Bell.”
He shook it kind of uncertainly. “Albert.”
“Albert... Do you think it’s possible to exist in America
without a past? Without an identity?”
“Why?” he smirked. “Did you whack someone and now
you’re trying to disappear?”
“No, no, no,” I laughed. “It’s nothing like that—jeez-us,
why does everyone think that?” I told him my idea about
vanishing, about finding a good spot and starting over; about
leaving my past—my whole past—behind.
He shrugged. “I’d say, whatever you’re running from...
stop. Seriously, man—just stop. Don’t you have friends to go
home to?”
He was smart. He asked about friends—everyone has a
friend, right? But not everyone has a family, or at least a family
they want to talk about. I snuffed a laugh through my nose and
toed the dirt with my tennis shoe. “Is it that obvious?”
“You look kinda glum, yeah,” he admitted. “Like you

76
know damn well who you’d really miss if you ran off into
those hills and never looked back. So I guess you've been
hitchhiking?”
“Yeah...”
I gazed over toward the dimmed orb of the sun still
beading through the trees. Albert was right. I’m sure he had
no idea how deeply his observations cut, and I wondered
what would happen if we all went through our lives assum-
ing that any stranger or friend could teach us something at
any moment. Maybe then we wouldn’t be so hasty to do our
fellow Man harm, whether directly or by the accident of our
selfishness.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked cautiously. “Some-
times it helps to tell someone, even if it’s not the someone
you want to tell.” He sounded honestly concerned, but I was-
n’t sure if he was playing soldier and assessing the threat, or
if he really wanted to help. A bit of both, I’m sure.
“Oh... It’s just someone I haven’t seen for a long time.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “Cuz I doubt she cares.”
It was a lie and he knew it. No, not a lie so much as the
fear that I’d got it all pegged wrong, and Albert knew that,
too. He scraped at the grass with his boot, smiling wistfully.
“Bell, I once lost the girl I loved to a long deployment.”
He looked up and met my eyes briefly to make sure I was lis-
tening. “Not because of her but because I became convinced
she’d forgotten about me. Call it the war.” He looked away
and sighed. “When I got home, I didn’t even look her up.
That’s how convinced I was that she’d moved on and forgot-
ten me. Now she hates me because she thinks I forgot her.”

77
 “You must've had your reasons...?” I offered weakly.
“I thought I did, sure,” he agreed. “But I didn’t really.
She was a good friend—always was—and I didn’t give her
the benefit of the doubt. Never think you know someone
else’s mind, Bell, and never forget your oldest friends.”
There was a look in his eyes that I couldn’t quite decipher.
“It’s not them you need to run from, man. It’s you. They can
put you back where you need to be.”
Where had it all gone wrong? Was I no better than the
people I hated most, sticking my head in the sand at the first
sign of adversity, pretending nothing was wrong as long as
we all smiled and went happily about our lives, just like ev-
eryone else? Had I raised my expectations too high, then
when Life had let me down, turned and run away, trying to
live in the wrong skin? All I’d really discovered is that the
problems I’d been trying to leave behind had followed me,
and out of their element, they seemed much worse. Without
my friends they seemed insurmountable.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I’d like to think I can just
run back to her, but I think maybe I've changed too much.
I've had a bad run since we...” I trailed off.
“See?” he winked. “So it is you. There’s only one way to
find out what’s on her mind.” He hooked his thumb back at
the parking lot. “Which way you heading? I was out here on
some exercises, but I’m going east as far as Cincy.”
I didn’t answer.
“Where’s home, Bell?”
I cracked a wry grin. “I can get home from Cincy.”

78
 Somewhere in my subconscious is the echo of a perfect
Friday night: Rickety Tilt-O-Whirls; pink clouds of cotton
candy; barkers looking for gamblers; and ol’ Tobie of the
Eyes with her arm hooked through my elbow—the Sacred
Heart Festival.
There is something about community carnivals that is
autumn and childhood wrapped up in one neat perfect parcel
(brown paper with crisp edges, bound with rough twine). No
matter my age, as soon as I walk through the gates and see
all the lights and hear all the carny sounds, I’m ten years old
again. Even when I was seven or eight, holding hands with
my mom or dad, I somehow felt ten; older then, much
younger now.
Tobie seemed to have that glow in her eyes, too, as we
entered the festival; the same sparkle she must have had
when her hair was pulled back in pigtails and she was still a
tomboy. The last time we’d gone to it together we’d been
seventeen and off-again for the time. It always coincided
with Homecoming, it seemed. Either the big game was the
same weekend and we went to the carnival afterward, then to
the dance the next night, or it was the weekend after, and we
had something to look forward to; a reason to stay friends for
one more week. In my mind, the rides were always there, in
the field behind the Freshman school, where I’d stood my
own Freshman year with a pinhole camera manufactured in
Industrial Arts. The image I took—of the Tilt-O-Whirl lying
dormant, but sentient, in expectation of the screams and

79
yelps to come, and the orange and yellow glow of lights on
shining faces—I still have it somewhere. A tiny moment of
my life you can only see if you know what you’re looking at.
“Did we go to Homecoming that year?” Tobie suddenly
asked, as if reading my mind. The world seemed so very far
away, dreaming amid the scent of fried elephant ears.
“What?”
“The last time we came to this thing? Did we go to the
dance that year?”
“Of course!” I protested. She furrowed her brow in con-
centration. “Tobe, the only time we didn’t go to Homecom-
ing, Prom, or King of Hearts together was Sophomore year.”
“Yeah... I went to Prom with that big Junior who turned
out to be a little rat—Richie something.”
“Richie Dolovar,” I growled, pretending the memory
still pained me. She gave me a slight pinch and giggled.
“Oh—I bet that memory keeps you up at night!”
“No… But I do remember you at the dance,” I consid-
ered truthfully. “You looked so alone and out of place.”
“I was,” she admitted. “You, too. How’d we both man-
age to talk Juniors into taking us?”
“I don’t think you had to do much convincing, Tobe—
you were hot.”
She sashayed into me and hit me with her hip, smiling
with mild embarrassment.
“But considering I got dumped at the dance...” I added.
“Why do you think I made sure we went to every dance
after that, Bells?” She looked over at me and grinned know-
ingly, almost as if she had honestly planned it to work that
way our Junior and Senior years. “What I meant was, is that

80
the dance we went to as actual dates, not just friends?”
“Ah,” I realized. “No... That was King of Hearts, Sopho-
more year.”
We had gone to every major dance together all through
high school—save Sophomore year—but had only been on-
again once: the only dance Sophomore year that we attended
together. We always ended up going as friends, and I’m sure
that’s why our friendship lasted through multiple break-ups.
When two friends share something so easily identifiable and
memorable—albeit cheesy as hell—as the big-three high
school dances, it makes the bonds that much stronger. On the
other hand, when two lovers get those memories wrapped up
with each other, as soon as the relationship sours, the whole
dreamlife fades and dies and the dances just seemed like
tragedies. I’d seen it firsthand. But for us, it was always just
the whole gang out, all dressed up for a night on the town.
“Bells? Why did you really come back?” Tobie suddenly
asked. She pulled me out of the pedestrian thoroughfare and
sat down on a bench. I joined her and we both gazed quietly
into our own thoughts, watching the Ferris wheel laboriously
spinning about its axis. In one of the cars I could hear a kid
screaming, and I sympathized.
It should never have come to this. The thing with the kid
on the Ferris wheel is, he knew why he was screaming: He
was afraid of falling. I guess I was, too, but at least the kid
could see where he’d come from and where he was heading.
I tried to dodge her question by concentrating on an-
other boy—maybe ten years old—right across from us at
the pop-gun booth. I was afraid that anything I said would
make her feel like she was my last resort; that I hadn’t

81
come back for her but because I’d had nowhere else to go.
In some ways, that was true, but it really didn’t tell the
whole story. I knew I didn’t have anywhere else to go, but I
had come back for her. I mean, even if I had known of
somewhere else to go, I still would have come back for To-
bie. She had to know that, but she wanted to hear it any-
way. I couldn’t blame her, but I also couldn’t find the right
words.
The kid had shot down two cans already and just needed
one more for the big prize. Judging by his line of sight,
Johnny Sixshooter would be walking out of the carnival with
his own pop-gun. I found myself smiling and pulling for
him; his dad was at his side, patting him on the back and of-
fering sage advice as to which can would be most easily hit.
Looked like he was recommending a point where three of
them were still stacked—miss the one you aimed for and you
may well hit another. Damn good advice.
I didn’t hear the pop! of the gun, but I saw the boy’s
small frame jolt just a tad with the kick, then in the blink of
an eye he was jumping up and down, his dad doing all he
could to look excited for his kid, but not look ludicrous to
the rest of the crowd. But deep-down I knew Dad wanted to
jump up and down right along with his son, screeching with
glee as his very own pop-gun was handed over.
“How many times do you suppose Dad over there tried
for a pop-gun himself, but never got it?” I wondered out
loud. Tobie followed my gaze and shrugged; she wasn’t in-
terested in my question with hers still hanging in the air. I
turned to her and smiled weakly.
“Sorry, Tobe. Just got excited for him, that’s all.” I

82
glanced over again and caught a glimpse of father and son
weaving through the crowd, a spring in both their steps. “I
guess I came back for this.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. It still didn’t answer
her question. She wasn’t just asking why I came back to our
hometown, she needed to know why I came back to her,
specifically.
“I've never stopped thinking about you, Tobie. I worry
about you all the time, you know that.”
She reached out and put her hand on mine, where it
rested on my knee.
“I was afraid of going to New Orleans alone...” I started,
which was true, but it wasn’t the beating-heart truth of the
matter. I sighed and looked at her. She deserved to know
what I was really thinking. I’d made it sound before like I’d
come by on a whim, but that had been a flippant excuse in
case she turned me away, and that’s all she wanted to know:
she wanted to know it wasn’t a whim. She wanted to know it
had been planned.
“Nothing ever seemed right without you there. I’m sorry
it took me so long to realize that, and I hope it doesn’t freak
you out to hear it, but it’s the truth. I can’t do this without
you. I tried to come back in August, but I didn’t have a good
excuse then and I was afraid you’d just turn me away... This
time I could pretend I was just passing through as part of my
job, if you did.”
“Thank you,” she whispered in earnest.
“I've missed you so much, Tobie.”
She leaned over and we embraced, her nose tickling my
neck. She nodded, nestled against me, then leaned away and

83
took in a deep breath, her eyes reddened but not crying.
“Let’s go have some fun, huh, Bells?”
Tobie dragged me straight to the Ferris wheel, mumbling
something about getting over my fears—she knew I hated
rides that toyed with vertigo or gravity by requiring me to
put faith in some man-made contraption. I even hate eleva-
tors. But by the way she was dragging me, I knew I was
helpless to stop her. It was like, if she could get me over this
one fear, she could get me through anything.
Before I knew it we were strapped in and drifting over
the carnival, my old hometown spread out before us like a
three dimensional map. Somewhere out there was the corner
I’d taken too fast and popped off a hubcap; the clearing in
the woods where Tobie and I first kissed; the mall with the
cinema and arcade where me and Niz and Sammy had spent
way too much time. It was all there, and all I had to do was
look. I had spent so many years searching fruitlessly for that
old hometown feeling, looking down into myself, but never
out. And now, there it was, the whole kit-n-kaboodle, com-
plete with Tobie laughing and pointing at the funny man with
the crooked toupee and the small boy hitting his sister and
trying to take her cotton candy.
I still felt kind of queasy, especially on the downward
jaunt, but for once I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t scream to be let
down—in fact, I wanted to stay up. There was something up
there worth holding onto, and until I put my finger on it, I
didn’t want to let it go.

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 At some point in the long darkness I found myself.
Not at first. At first it was a lot of walking and cold, but
with each step through the cloying shadows, I found
something. Something like light in an empty room that’s
just bare walls and a chipped wood floor—a place now
empty, but bright.
I was like that room, though at first I hadn’t known it.
Over days stretched thin into years I came to realize that my
whole life had been nothing more than a process to fill that
room—with boxes and trunks and pictures and a new coat of
paint. Looking back, I suppose I’d known it all along, just
like I know now about the other room, the one beyond the
first, the one behind all the boxes and junk.
And so I walked on, into the slow, cold darkness of my
own withering night, and always, someone followed me.
When I turned, she was there, and she was smiling—always
smiling, her bright blue eyes like sapphires in flames.
There’s nothing to say now that can erase the memories
or polish the burred edges of my life, but why would I want
to? What purpose would it serve to deny who I am and what
formed me? There are many ways to get to a single point of
time, but only one that sticks. I have a feeling the windows
in that room are mirrors, and the light without is within. The
thing I needed to see was that constant, that touchstone, that
grounded sense of reality that never betrayed me or let me go
or vanished or died: The glimmer and promise that every-
thing that had been would be again, just turned slightly along
a new angle, glimpsed between different trees or dappled
with a different arc of sunlight, like the jewels that are rain-
drops, like the lightning that cuts sand.

85
 The trees love it, you can tell—they stand up tall against
the lightning and bathe in the rain.
There is no easy, defining point when a dog becomes a
member of the family, and you may not even realize it’s true
until the dog dies. But the old pack mentality is one thing we
do have in common with them—they still respect a pecking
order, and whether we know it or not, so do we, and they
certainly join our packs.
The earth for Abby’s grave didn’t move at first. It was
stubborn and unforgiving. The misting drizzle formed into
drops and ran along the base of my neck, smearing my
shoulders and dousing my chest. My boots creaked in
protest, but I dug anyway. Holes like graves can never be
deep enough. The dead have to be buried so they can’t resur-
face; so they can’t be dug up again. I dug the deepest box of
all, with my own hands, the same hands that had held her as
she died; the same hands that had touched so many others. It
was a death I didn’t want, no more so than I ever wanted
death, any death, but it was also a wedge against a future of
inaction.
These things don’t exist—these prayers we whisper long
nights in the darkness, with the weight of a grave in the back
yard. Yet this is the way the Universe teaches us: You under-
stand a thing more when the decision is your own. How hard
it must be to worry the weight of destinies and send good
people packing. The holes dug in the Universe are plentiful,
each one filled with tears and distress and regret.
I had to make sure she didn’t move again. I had to make
it deep enough. I pulled up paving stones from the patio to
lay over top and I planted flowers that would bloom in

86
winter so there would always be some life there. I wish I’d
thought of that before, but it’s too late now.
Em’s mom wrote me a long letter when her younger
daughter got married. Tobie hugged me while I read it, but she
never asked what it was about. I couldn’t tell her anyway—it
was about nothing. It was a hole Em’s mom was digging. Tobie
read it herself, and I could see by her face that she knew it was
the end, that I’d never hear from her again. She cried a little,
and that made it okay. Em’s mom was packing the box away,
closing the circle, throwing dirt on top and hefting a flagstone
over it to stop the animals from digging up the smell.
It makes you think of the people you’ve hurt and what
you’d give to go back and make it right, or at least not quite
so bad.
I cut through roots and turned over clay, the bitter taste
of salt in my mouth. These were just echoes; knocking on the
walls of that room, tripping over boxes, steadying myself
against the wind.
So many fucking holes. So many fucking things we have
to bury. I stayed up late so many nights, my eyes burning,
listened to the slow, soft snore of my child, and I wondered
if I could really do it; if I was really strong enough to serve
as that kind of shelter, because that’s what good parents do:
They make and tend memories; they keep the wild animals
at bay. It would be so much easier to be irresponsible, but
someone has to guide the Lost Boys or they will never make
it home.
Abby came to me the night she died. I had the most in-
tense dream I’ve ever experienced. There was a white cloud,
and as the image slowly faded to shapes, I saw a lab coat and

87
a brown paper sack, then Abby’s face poked through the
cloud and her nose touched mine, and I was filled with such
joy and such a strong sense of forgiveness. I know she vis-
ited me, just like I asked her to.
Or are these the things we have to believe in order to put
one foot in front of the other and thread through the boxes
and dreams to reach that other room, the empty room, the
one where the boxes don’t get packed because there’s noth-
ing there to put away?
I buried her deep and put her picture on the wall, and I
never wore those boots again. It took me ten years to finally
throw them away. By then I didn’t need them to remind me
what ghosts walk the Earth nor to show me the weaknesses
of hurt souls.
“Bells?” Tobie said that night. “Come to bed. It’s too
cold without you.”
People come and go, memories fade and resurface, but
those constant friends, they remain. If she was cut up, she
didn’t show me, because she knew I needed her strength. All
those fools who think you can never know what love is, and
it’s right there in front of them. Love is taking the pain even
when you have enough for yourself. Love is a brave face and
a strong heartbeat and glistening eyes like stars in the night
that never fade and never go away.
“I’m coming,” I whispered. The house was quiet: The
slow, still dust of time swirled in invisible eddies and caught
me for just a moment longer, but I went to her and held her
as she held me.
The flowers on her grave died and I never replaced
them.

88
Roots dug deep into firm ground,
looking for water—
leafless branches sway amid stars—
stony bark lifeless to the touch.

It begins with a splinter in your hand—

the dull aches of night throbbing
where once vigor kept muscles relaxed.
Arms out-stretched bend in the darkness and cold,
feet immovable by time,
like dew on grass that never fades away.

The slow fire finds fingers cracking,

bleeding sap and oozing regret
as rivers of streams propel the magic forward.
Somewhere the hawk finds purchase—
a shoulder, a foot buried in dirt, a backwards stare.

Things once of boredom now breed excitement—

the slow progress of life unfolds in an hour
when legs like stumps support a torso.

89
 Eyes like knots survey the land,
see children and snowfall and sunrise.

The arms ache no longer.

Life solidifies as we turn now to autumn.

90
 The show was at the Beachland, in the tavern—Cleve-
land’s best place. Not just best concert venue, but best place.
If there were a zombie apocalypse, I’d want to go to the
Beachland for one last drink, just to say goodbye. I some-
times go to shows there only because the show is at the
Beachland.
Gray and I ended up getting there before the doors
opened, so we sat on the front step and watched a finite
niche of Cleveland go past. The neighborhood had definitely
seen better days—or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it was one of
those neighborhoods that started out rundown. Across the
street was a pizza place—a real mom-n-pop joint—but we
couldn’t be bothered to drag our asses over there.
“So who are we seeing tonight?” Gray asked.
“The Soft Moon.”
“Punk?”
“Not exactly. I’m not sure what you’d call them. Throw-
back new-wave shoegaze?”
I honestly hadn’t expected him to come to this show
with me. He didn’t know the band and he always seemed to
have something better to do, but I was glad to be there with
him. We’d spent a lot of time on a lot of stoops in college,
watching the world go by. It felt like a thin sliver of time I’d
won back, and I smiled at the thought.
“So how’s the family?” he asked. It never sounded like
small talk coming from that guy, I swear.

91
 “Oh, fine. They’re great.”
“And Tobie?”
“Also fine.”
Me? I completely suck at small talk, even when it isn’t
small talk. Thankfully, they opened the doors and let us in,
so we settled at the bar. It turned out we hadn’t pulled the
handle hard enough—the place had been open all along, and
the usual crop of barflies was already buzzing around. It
looked like some local band was the first opener, and their
moms and dads had come out to watch. It made me feel good
that their parents supported them, but also a little bad for
them that no one else seemed to care. I knew how that felt.
My mom and dad loved everything I wrote, which made it
hard to tell if it was good or just them. I was broaching the
topic with Gray (he said I was being “surly”) when a woman
behind me said my name. I thought. Gray half turned—we
were sitting at the bar and to actually turn around and look
would take some effort.
“Jack? Jack Beltane?”
Now I couldn’t ignore her. I expected someone from
work.
“Penny?”
I choked on the word. Gray turned around on his stool so
fast I wasn’t sure he’d ever been facing the bar.
“Yes!” she smiled widely and nervously shuffled her
feet, giving Gray a bashful glance. It all seemed a bit too re-
hearsed. “I thought I saw online that you’d be here tonight.”
“You come here often?”
It was the most sarcastically delivered cliché line you
can imagine. I seriously doubted she’d ever been there in her

92
life, but I was supposed to believe this was a chance meet-
ing? Just an oh-my-gawd moment of stunned disbelief at the
massive coincidence the universe had rolled up and spat out?
“Well… no. Not really.”
She smiled again. The years had been very good to her,
and I could tell Gray had noticed, too. She hadn’t used a ten-
year-old photo for her online profile, she really did look
like she was still in her twenties. She hadn’t got fat or even
out of shape. She stood there in form-fitting jeans and a
cute blouse—untucked—with hair that ran down to her
shoulders in a sleek curtain. In the dim lighting, she almost
looked exactly like the last time I’d seen her—only the look
in her eyes revealed age and regret; the innocence of youth
was gone from them, despite the tight skin and elegant face
that said otherwise.
“Oh… uhhh… Gray? This is Penny Harper. An old…
friend from high school.”
“Hey, Penny,” Gray said very politely, with just the right
amount of I-don’t-like-you in his voice. Gray could sense
something—it’s probably what made him such a good con-
versationalist—and he obviously remembered her name
from our previous chats. My heart was pounding in my
throat—the last thing I’d expected to see at the Beachland
was a ghost of this caliber.
“Are you here alone?” I asked.
“No,” she cooed, flicking her head toward the wall op-
posite the bar, where a couple of two-top tables were hud-
dled. There was a woman at one of them who may have
smiled at us; she looked nervous and unsure, like she’d been
dragged here by a crazy-ass friend.

93
 “I gotta piss,” Gray stated gently and slid off his stool.
Penny took the hint and slid onto it in his place, still trying to
look bashful. Hell, maybe she was.
I was dimly aware that to an outsider, this all looked
completely normal: Dude at a bar talking to a girl who
looked a decade younger than him, leaving the world won-
dering what the hell he had, to be able to attract someone
like her. I also couldn’t help but register that I’d once
touched her in exactly the ways that outsider would imagine.
I’d put my hand on her flat stomach and watched the wind
disturb her hair. I’d kissed her slowly and watched her jog
over to her front door, casting a batted-eyelashes glance over
her shoulder at me. It felt like waking up from a weird dream
with a long sense of dread that evaporates when you realize
everything is still exactly as it should be.
Only it wasn’t, and like a moment punctuated with the
low swell of horror-infused keyboards, I understood that she
had no idea what she’d done to me when we were only six-
teen. She had no idea how long those years between then and
now had been, and how long it had taken for the memory of
her to echo into the distance, like a fading light on the far
shore; how hard it had been to try and reconcile wanting to
forget a summer that I never wanted to let go.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed at her, more pleas-
antly than I’d intended to. She misunderstood me.
“Will your wife be mad?”
“Tobie? Why would she be mad?”
“Nothing.”
The flip of her hair said I was supposed to buy her a
drink and this would be our little secret, but I didn’t bite.

94
 “I saw your post about this band,” she said carefully. “I
looked them up and I liked them, so I thought I’d come out.”
“From Cincy?”
“Oh no—I live in Akron now.”
She watched me watch her and smiled a somewhat
apologetic smile. It was my turn to talk, apparently.
“So are you a team doctor at the university or some-
thing?”
“No,” she giggled, reminded of the dreams of her
teenage self and slightly embarrassed by them. “I am a doc-
tor, though.”
“No shit?” I didn’t mean to sound so glib, so I quickly
added, “You have your own practice?”
“Oh no, not yet,” she corrected hastily. “I work at an ur-
gent care facility.”
“Fancy.”
I literally didn’t know what else to say; judging by her
expression, I may have said the wrong thing. If she was of-
fended, though, she got over it pretty quickly.
“What about you? Did you ever publish a horror novel?
I’ve checked from time to time, just in case.”
That stopped me. She’d checked? She’d looked me up over
the years to see if I had a novel published? It was a strange real-
ization, to know that she had cared enough to… well… care.
She smiled pleasantly at my silence, her eyes holding mine, and
I almost apologized for trying to brush her off.
“Not yet,” I finally replied. “I’m a technical writer now.
For a software company.”
“Fancy,” she said without missing a beat, grinning devi-
ously.

95
 “Look, I just wasn’t—”
“My dad died,” she blurted, and her whole expression
and attitude shifted down a notch. “I guess it got me thinking
about better days.”
“Jesus, Penny—I’m sorry to hear that.”
She hadn’t meant to blurt it so forcefully, she’d just
wanted to cut off the inevitable small talk about parents and
whatnot.
“My mom seemed relieved,” she admitted.
“Oh—was it a long…? Did he have cancer, or…?”
“Yes…”
Her eyes got misty and she sucked in a deep breath,
looking off into the bar where the opening band was rigging
the stage.
“He was strict,” she said, as if agreeing with something I
hadn’t said.
I didn’t know which way to take the conversation. An
awkward silence built up, and I still thought maybe I was be-
ing played—that maybe she’d come here to see about an old
flame because it felt like the safest way to cheat—but as she
gazed off toward the stage she took on an almost defeated
cast. She looked more like someone trying to figure shit out
than a middle-aged woman trying to hook up with an old
beau. After all, she wasn’t particularly trying to be hot—no
way-too-tight T-shirt or tiny spaghetti-strap sundress with no
bra—and I figured my interpretation of her actions had more
to do with my hormones than her desires.
“I’m sorry, Penny,” I offered, trying to start over again.
“Really. And not just about your dad. I didn’t expect… I
mean, I never thought I’d see you again, y’know?”

96
 “I know,” she admitted, turning back to me. “I didn’t
mean to make you uncomfortable. I just wanted… I needed a
reminder of… something. My son turns sixteen this summer.
I told him that was the best summer of my life.”
She gave me a watery smile. I couldn’t stand hearing her
say that, not after how that summer had ended for me. She
didn’t have the right to romanticize that summer, even if her
dad had died and her kid was suddenly…
“Sixteen?” I asked no one, probably not even meaning to
say it out loud.
“Yeah,” she giggled and cut me a dare-ya look. “I was
twenty, if you can’t do the math. Total cliché—tried to save
myself for marriage, caved, got pregnant on my first go.”
“Your parents must have loved that.”
“They actually surprised me. I couldn’t have raised him and
finished college and med school and residency without them.
You did alright, though. I think I remember your wife…?”
“Yeah, I know you guys met that summer.”
I met her eyes long enough to look away again.
To her, this was us catching up, and it hurt that she had
no idea. That summer probably had been the best of my life,
too, but when she’d broken up with me it had left a stain that
the years couldn’t fade or wash out. In my head, that summer
is a bright yellow fire with endless blue skies and a sense of
the rightness of the world. But the golden glow tarnished
suddenly into a blackness that had shadowed me for the last
twenty years. She had no idea that seeing her there, acting as
if we’d only been having our fun back then, cut like light-
ning and stung like cold rain.

97
 I sat on the patio with Tobie, sipping coffee and
watching our kids playing in the yard, our little boy taking
down his big sister with whole-armed tackles around her
legs. They’d both giggle, then she’d crawl free and run
away, stopping after a few steps and goading him to chase
her, which he did with gusto.
Those quiet summer mornings, sitting outside with To-
bie, sipping coffee and reading comic books, will be among
the moments I’ll recall when I’m lying in whatever deathbed
enjoys my final repose: The way the sun rose gold-on-green
through the summer trees and dripped from the warm air like
amber; the way the insects whirred and clicked; the way the
birds and squirrels played chase with their arcane chatters
and chirps, lost in their own concerns like our children were
lost in theirs. The world was nothing more than everything
we could see, and it all looked sun-kissed and fine.
“Five more years and Ophelia will be the age we were
when we met,” I mused out loud.
“Hmmm,” Tobie agreed, paging through her magazine.
There’s a strange tunneling of time when you pass a cer-
tain age, or maybe it happens when you have kids, no matter
how old you are. There’s a moment when you start to look
backward instead of forward, counting the years that have
passed instead of looking toward the years ahead. Life ends
at forty, the old cliché says, and sitting there watching my
kids, it seemed to ring true. “End” didn’t feel exactly right,
but the wonder certainly got sucked out of it somewhere

98
around thirty-five. There were no milestones left: Forty was
the last mark, the sign that said only, “This is the last sign.”
No more looking forward to being a double-digit age, or being
a teenager, or driving, or becoming a legal adult, or voting in
your first election, or buying alcohol legally, or leaving col-
lege, or turning thirty (the magical age that marked you as an
actual adult, not just a legal one)… No, after that, it was a lot
of looking back to all those things that had got you to the
present point—all the living, all the joys and regrets.
“Did Penny mention the show online…?” Tobie asked
with half interest, as if sensing where my thoughts were go-
ing. She flipped another page.
“Not yet.”
“What did Gray think?”
“He agreed with you.”
“Yeah?” She looked at me sidelong and smiled, flipping
another page dramatically. “And what did I think?”
“That it seemed a bit stalkery.”
Tobie nodded and looked down at her magazine, smiling
privately. She knew that it would eat at me if Penny acted
like it never happened. That’s how I’m wired: I can’t let
something like that go. It was like the frayed end of a label
on a beer bottle waiting to be picked at and peeled back.
“It is weird to think…” Tobie started.
She looked up and watched Ophelia for a few seconds,
her smile widening with that soft love only mothers have
lighting her eyes.
“We were just kids, Jack. We always seemed so old,
though.”
“I know…”

99
 It’s weird to gain the sense of perspective that comes
with parenthood—to see your kids ticking off the time like
you did, and just as sure they are the most grownup they’ll
ever be. The ruse of becoming an adult is that you always
feel grown up at every age; you always feel the most mature
you’ll ever be. Then one day you realize you completely
missed the moment when it was finally true, probably some-
where in your thirties, and you start looking back to find it;
to see if you can recognize the final turn from child to adult
and warn your children, so they can see it coming—so they
can live it up before it catches them. I felt like I’d done a de-
cent job of running away from it, but it didn’t seem to help
entirely—not when it mattered. Shit always seemed to hap-
pen, slowly eating away whatever vestiges of childhood in-
nocence remained.
I’ve never again slept as well as I did when I was
twelve—I’ve been running from something ever since.
Maybe just ghosts, but that doesn’t matter when they seem to
be gaining on you.
I also knew Tobie wasn’t talking about us being kids
when we’d met, age eleven, at some sixth-grade dance. She
was talking about the summer I’d met Penny Harper and the
fall when she’d been there to help me get over her. She’d
been there at the exact moment that what I was running from
almost caught up to me.
I watched Tobie watching our kids then turned and
watched them myself, their bare feet tickled by grass that I
could no longer stand to walk on without shoes. I’d been
barefoot and carefree once, but where Tobie smiled and saw
life and the future, I could only wince and see pending heart-

100
break. I saw beautiful children playing dangerously close to
the precipice of innocence and I wondered what would come
along and make them fall, and I wondered who would be
there for them, because parents, I knew, could only catch
their children for so long. Soon enough they had to learn to
pick themselves up or to lean on friends that were closer to
the fire and could understand more immediately how it
burned.
When we get older, our experience blinds us to the
weight and depth of the issues we suffered through as chil-
dren, and we try to pass along a wisdom that only years can
give a frame of reference to. Our kids would brush us away
not because they didn’t care or thought we didn’t understand,
but because they knew, deep down, that we’d forgotten what
it was like to live life for the first time; what it was like to
see first blood welling up over wounds you believed would
never, ever heal.
“Jack?” Tobie whispered, her hand reaching out tenta-
tively and touching mine.
“Yeah…?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I just… I don’t want them to get their hearts broken.”
Tobie laughed. Not in a mean or trivializing way, but in a
wise way; the kind of gentle grace she’s always had. I looked
at her and grinned.
“What’s so funny?”
“They will, Jack. You know that, right? The problem is,
your memory is too long and too deep.”
“No… I just remember how it felt.”
“That’s what I mean. You can’t stop everyone from getting

101
hurt, Bells. That was always your problem: you genuinely
tried. But you can’t take on everyone else’s pain, not even
for your kids.”
“Hmmm…”
I turned back and watched them again. The wrestling
game was developing rules even as we watched: tackles
were only legal if the run-up started a certain distance away,
apparently. There was some disagreement over this, but
eventually it was codified when they agreed that a second
tackle couldn’t be levied until the person tackled was safely
away—a three-second count, in fact.
“One! Two! Three!” Ophelia cried, eliciting frightened
squeals of delight from her brother.
“You know, I think you’re looking at the wrong side of
it,” Tobie said, folding her arms across her magazine. She
nodded to herself and squinted.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe Ophelia’s going to help heal broken hearts, not
suffer them.”
“Let’s hope so,” I allowed. “I was lucky to have you—to
have all of my friends.”
It was true: My friends from high school had been there
my whole life and in hindsight, I’m not sure where I would
have ended up without them, or with different friends. That
thought gave me different levels of anxiety, of course: What
if my kids made the wrong friends? What if no one was there
to hear them calling out from whatever emptiness pulled
them in?
I’ve always been a worrier, but it was so much easier
when I only had to worry about myself or my friends, who

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all had other friends to also worry about them, diluting the
concern into manageable chunks that all of us, together,
could handle. Maybe there, then, is the true meaning of rela-
tionships, this fractal web of concern that forms hubs and
ribbons and interweaves to the extent that a solid mesh is de-
fined—your group, your posse, your crew. We were the net
that caught each other; our bonds of life and the living made
it so. The fine line I have to balance now is between pushing
my kids in what I believe to be the right direction and letting
them screw up and learn from their mistakes all by them-
selves; letting their own nets catch them and spring them
back to their feet.
“Maybe you should call Niz?” Tobie suggested.
“About what?”
“You know…” she shrugged and gave me a half smile.
“Penny Harper?”
“I should just ignore her.”
“That won’t help it go away, Bells. Ignoring her won’t
make it better.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew it would fester, just
like she said. This was my one chance to finally finish scrib-
ing that circle and close the door on the one aspect of my
past that still gave me nightmares.
“It feels a lot like inviting a vampire into my home,” I
mumbled. “Shouldn’t you be telling me to ignore her? That
she was a lifetime ago and best left forgotten?”
“Is she forgotten, Bells? If it was anyone else, then yes,
you’re probably right. But you? You always have to see
problems through to a happy ending.”
“Happy?”

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 “Well, an ending, anyway.”
“I just don’t know what I can gain, other than ripping
open a lot of old wounds.”
“Peace of mind. I bet she’s not half as great as you think
you remember.”
That may well be true, but oddly it didn’t make it any
easier. In fact, the thought that Penny Harper would not end
up being worth all the importance she had once held—nor
twenty years of random thoughts popping into my head
about her—made it more frightening: I didn’t want to tarnish
that summer with her, I wanted it left the way it was, heart-
break and all, with the full measure of importance I had
given it. It was kind of perfect in its pain, a tiny testament to
the power of young love and of friends that had romance and
innocence and all the great things of literature woven into its
fabric. The thought of it crumbling away under the façade of
an annoying middle-aged woman who proved she had once
been an annoying teenage girl was too much to bear.
I sighed heavily.
“So call Niz,” she suggested again.
“Niz? I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Feels too much like high school,” I chuckled. “I can’t
call him out of the blue and ask him about girl trouble.”
Tobie snickered happily and shook her head.
“Did you ever break anyone’s heart like that?” she asked
thoughtfully.
“No…” I considered. “Well, there was one girl, right af-
ter I got to college. I think I broke her heart.”
“What was her name?”

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 “Hannah.”
“How have I never heard of her before…?”
I shrugged. How do some people, some stories, stay
buried until the right wash of time digs them back up?
“I don’t know… I felt pretty bad about breaking up with
her. When I came home for Christmas, I wanted to forget the
whole thing and just… hang out again. I guess I forgot her.”
“You don’t forget people, though, Jack.”
I imagined Hannah out there, somewhere, laughing as
she always had, completely full of humor. Hannah had been
so grounded and happy. She’d skipped along a yellow-brick
road while I’d tested my weight on a thin bridge over the
void that wobbled a bit too much.
Hunter S. Thompson always talked about doom and an
impending sense of doom, and I always assumed it was an
exaggerated comic point he was making about being para-
noid and high, and maybe that is all it was, or maybe what he
really meant by “doom” is those weird, visceral feelings you
get in the middle of the night, when you wake up from an in-
nocent dream about hiking or skateboarding, deeply con-
vinced that some big, evil, nameless fear is about to kick in
the door and murder everyone in the house.
That doom is that great, unknowable thing: the void. It’s
the future, but it has substance and personality, like it’s al-
ready written through with characters and regret. When the
empty future takes shape in those moments of crisis—or you
think it’s taking shape—that’s when you have to run and
hide. But knowledge is power and certainty is the mark of
insanity: to be certain of your knowledge of the form of the
void is a weight too great. The pylons crack; the structure

105
collapses. All you can do is pray that you make it out of the
rubble alive, looking back over your shoulder—you hear it
creaking constantly, like weak trees in the night swaying in a
hard wind.
That’s what it really is, that doom: it’s the shapeless
knowledge that out there, somewhere, is something that
could take it all away, everything I love and care about, be-
cause I’d seen it firsthand, once upon a time. I’d felt its hot
wind on my face; felt its pull; felt it the way we feel that soft
squeak in our hearts at moments of real terror.
You can’t explain that amorphous pull to someone else;
that tingling like the hackles on your neck rising because
someone across the room is staring at you.
With some of us, that doom runs deeper and flows more
constantly, into a bottomless well you know but cannot
touch; cannot explain. It’s the long silence between years,
stretched taught like a rubber band waiting to snap. It’s the
cold depths between the stars. It’s the memory that you came
too close once and that you can’t say for sure you’ll never
come that close again. It’s the low, thrumming sound of a
distant, inner voice reminding you that if something upsets
the order, you’ll fall—you’ll fall because there will be no
one there to catch you. It’s the knowledge that eventually
you’ll be all alone in the woods at night and you don’t trust
yourself enough to find out what will happen.
“So… Hannah?” Tobie prodded lightly, sensing my
thoughts heading into the wrong alley.
“Yeah,” I intoned.
“Why didn’t it work out?”
“I don’t know. She was kind, funny, pretty…”

106
 I trailed off again. Tobie had always had a way of asking
me things that made me realize something else entirely. Not in a
passive-aggressive way, not like that at all. It was almost like
she was working things out, too—trying to get to the core of the
issue. And her line of thinking so closely matched my own in-
ternal monologue that I reached her conclusions as if they had
been my own thoughts all along. I glanced at her.
“I was away from home, with absolutely none of my
friends—not even any acquaintances—and we hit it off.
Then I met other people, and she didn’t like them that much,
but they were more like my kind of people, y’know? Like
how our crew was in high school?”
“Is this Gray and Deet?”
“Yeah… Him, and Kate and Sugar. Deet wasn’t around
yet.”
Tobie nodded.
“I felt really bad about Hannah. Really bad. I haven’t
thought of her for years. She must have moved dorms or
something, because after we came back from Christmas, I
don’t remember ever seeing her again. I just wandered off
with my new friends and forgot all about her.”
We were silently for several seconds. If she’d had a point
she wasn’t going to make it explicitly; she smiled slyly, her
eyes glowing like embers in the firelight.
“What about Ally? Senior year?” she wondered, slightly
changing the subject, but I could see what she was doing now:
She was proving to me that I was no mere victim when it
came to heartbreak—I’d broken my share of hearts, too, and
maybe that should give me insight and perspective into deal-
ing with Penny. “Where does she fit on the heartbreak scale?”

107
 “She was a whole different heartbreak. We broke each
other’s hearts, so that was fair.”
“I liked Ally,” Tobie mused. “I kinda wish I’d met Han-
nah.”
I looked over and fixed my gaze on her until she could-
n’t help but look at me.
“What?”
“You do know it’s weird, right? Talking with your hus-
band about all his exes, like you wish they were still
around?”
“I don’t think we get the luxury of that cliché,” she de-
cided with a grin and a squeeze of my hand. “I was there for
most of your heartbreaks—probably caused a few of them—
and I like to hear the way you remember things.” She nar-
rowed her eyes and nodded slightly. “It actually makes me
feel good to know that you cared—that you didn’t throw
girls away, even the ones that hurt you. If you ever ditched
me, I’d like to think you still thought fondly of me, or at
least of our time together.”
There was so much static tied to the memory of Penny
Harper—a rough interference pattern created by crossed
waves of negative and positive. So I tried to think of her
fondly, for Tobie’s sake. She was summer and golden sun-
light and warmth and promise. She was freshly cut grass and
crickets at night and fireworks on the Fourth of July. She
was softball and baseball and ice cream and movies and in-
dependence. She was smart and charming and beautiful and
untouchable.
And when she broke up with me, I lost all of that. I
lost that summer and the entire world that came with it,

108
swallowed in shadows with sharp edges that hadn’t existed
when I’d been a kid.
“Maybe you should write a book about all of this?” To-
bie suggested with total clarity.
“A book…?”
“Isn’t that what therapists say? You should write it all
down, to get it off your chest and confront it or something?”
“So now you’re my therapist?”
“Well isn’t that what a good friend should be?”
“I’m not your therapist,” I denied sullenly.
“Pfft,” she disclaimed. “Who’s the one who told me to
start my own small-engine repair business?”
I shrugged. “That’s not therapy, it’s smart.”
“Who got me through the first days of motherhood?”
I looked at her.
“Who got me through high school, Jack?”
“Not me.”
“I love her dearly, Bells, but it wasn’t Jess. It was you.
You made me feel like I mattered. Like I was special. That’s
therapy. That’s all you need from your truest friends.”
She was right, of course—she was always right—and in
her calm, no-nonsense way she’d told me what I needed to
hear without saying it out loud; without cheapening it by
making it obvious. I knew how lucky I was to have her, and I
knew what would happen if I ever lost her. I’d tried to break
away from her after high school, as if to prove that I could
stand tall on my own—more so, I think, than I felt the need
to break away from my parents. I even married another girl
right out of college, but nothing ever worked until I went
back for Tobie Malloy.

109
 There is a distinct moment I recall when I saw her again
for the first time after we’d been apart for six years: I felt the
weight of that emptiness suddenly lift—I physically felt it. It
was a real sensation, and I hadn’t even fully understood what
that weight meant until it was palpably lighter. It made me
realize how far down I’d spiraled emotionally—how close to
the edge I’d been standing. Just seeing her pulled me back.
Just knowing she was in the world and happy to see me
made everything seem right.
“So this book, Doctor Malloy—”
“Doctor Beltane,” she corrected.
“Where do I begin?”
“You always told me the best stories start in the middle.”
I nodded sagely.
“But you weren’t in the middle…”
“Then you’ll have to keep writing until you find me.”
“I never lost you, Tobie, you know that. I wouldn’t be
here without you.”
She smiled with something like sorrow and pride and
looked away, lost in her own private thoughts for a moment.
“Do you mind that you married a child?” I wondered out
loud. “That the father of your children still rides a skateboard
and reads comic books?”
“What’s my choice, Jack?” she asked rhetorically, smil-
ing that same private smile again. “A business man in a
fancy suit with a mistress? No thank you.”
Her eyebrow twitched and she smiled warmly, looking
very much like a woman who shouldn’t be with me; like
the kind of woman your basic high-powered businessman
should be lavishing with gifts and spa getaways. But looks

110
can be deceiving, and I knew that, too. Tobie wasn’t trying
to make me feel better when she balked at the idea of a
more successful, more adult husband. It’s what made us
work—what had always made us work, since we first
started hanging out: We were different enough to make
strangers wonder and keep each other curious. In that
prism of friendship, we were complimentary colors.
“I know who I married, and that’s why I married him,”
she added succinctly.

I can’t fully remember these things later, no matter how

hard I try. Not the details, not the points and lines that
sketched a complete image. They’re nothing more than pic-
tures in a photo album, these memories—stills from some
time so far gone that the colors start to fade and the faces
lose shape, fuzzing out along the edges like an ink drop in
water.
Our days hang like spider webs over the dark expanse of
years, a matrix of threads crisscrossing into a net of memories
and regrets, circling taught knots that punctuate the darkness
like the first rippled drops of rain on a still pond. Those knots
are the lights in the darkness: Shining silver embers of hope
that highlight the greatest moments, the incidents and celebra-
tions upon which the whole webbed history of a life is built.
We all have them, but sometimes they can be difficult to see in
the gloom. We must strive to look harder in those slow slogs
through the bottoms of our souls. We must strive to find

111
those lights in the darkness and touch them again, no
matter how painful the sense of loss, so we can under -
stand that knots just like them are constantly being tied.
A favorite teacher, a loving parent, a best friend, a night
out with friends, a girlfriend who was once the center of
that vast web—they all played their part in forming the
future, and there will be others who play their parts in
the future to come. Grasp those stars for what they were
not for what they became because all of those tangled
threads, forming tiny hearts in the past, have a dark
twin that shows what happens when you move on: Loss,
regret, pain, static.
These memories are always tied to things: Songs,
sounds, smells, colors, locations, people. There’s a swell of
emotion every time something is unpacked from one of those
memory boxes, but pack and unpack we must; catalog, re-
catalog, exonerate, damn—these things aren’t so neatly
marked. You never know what you’ll find, given enough
time to poke around in that room, or what you’ll discover
wedged into the same box with something you had thought
completely unrelated.
But when I pile those memories up, box by box, they do
seem to coalesce, God damn it, into the point when it finally
hit home that this was forever; that Tobie and I would never
be apart again. That the on-again, off-again romance had fi-
nally settled, and we’d both won, and that my youth and life
did have purpose and meaning, after all, because all the ebbs
and flows and twists and oxbows wound back to her, the
bright shining star always at the safe center of whatever shit
surrounded me.

112
 Sometimes I lose sight of what I’m looking at. The im-
ages fold into themselves and I’m left surrounded by dark-
ness, drifting in a strange sleep of numbers and clocks and
moving hands. Kid Niz fades into older Niz fades into Josh,
and in between there are vast reaches of nothing; slow
echoes drifting down or up or over from somewhere else—
somewhere I’ve never been or will never be able to go again.
That’s just how this dream is, and when I awake, some-
times, I’m at a table in a diner with friends: Niz’s face is
there, laughing, eyes wide and twinkling, and there’s this
other, too. I see her and she seems like some stretch of time;
some recess I have yet to traverse.
The faces. I see the faces staring back at me and I
see my smile in their eyes.
My whole life is echoes, one after another fading away
into the distance of sound, chasing me around every corner I
turn, nipping at my heels like the preternatural specter of
English literature.
I see the echoes now.
I could capture them in jars, but it’s easier to let them
bounce in and out of my life, through the corners, to smile
on the other side, like cold blankets at night that can only
warm you by smothering your air.
When I was a little kid, echoes were exciting—strange
non-sounds erupting from nowhere and everywhere across
the gorge; something created by me, yet not mine. Some-
thing else: The voice of the rocks and the trees and the water
and the big blue sky overhead waving at me with leaves.
Standing there at the bottom of the valley, the walls seemed
insurmountable, but I dug in my nails and climbed.

113
 My fingers have grown weak with age. I claw now not to
lift myself up but to stop myself from sliding back. The sun
beads down on my insolence and the summers seem hotter
when you’re alone and could pass out and die and leave none
the wiser.
But lying there with Niz, age ten, in the innocent time of
the sky, watching autumn clouds drift into shapes no drugs
could ever duplicate, I’d forget myself and would never have
thought: One day, I must die. This breathing—one day it will
end and my heart will stop and my cold eyes will turn glassy
and my lips won’t move anymore. And where will I be then?
What valley will enclose the shadow of my soul?
When I stand in the darkness of that room, built of mem-
ories and regret, and look out the windows, I can see the sun-
light outside, and a vast yellow field of wheat dozing under
the soft blue of a late-summer sky. Hanging on the wall are
pictures—still images of the things I did right and the things
I did wrong. There’s a shovel in the corner, too, and a pair of
old Spanish army-surplus boots, still with Ohio clay caked
on them and long, snakelike laces curling around the soles.
Everything we do comes down to the present moment,
and that moment would have been different if even one, single
thing had gone a different way. Maybe if I’d worn a Doors T-
shirt in sixth grade, Nicole would have liked me and asked me
to go to the dance with her. But I didn’t, and she didn’t, and
that was the dance Niz and I met Tobie and her friend, Jess,
who were also there without dates, and we left the dance with
them and walked down the street and got ice cream.
Out of all the seconds of my life, I was the tiny beat of a
butterfly’s wings away from not ever knowing Tobie Malloy.

114
 And sure, it’s easy now to look around the dim corners
and shelves of that room and imagine how much simpler life
would have been without Tobie, or without Em, or without
Daria, but I assure you, it would also have been empty. Life
in general would be simpler without other people, but that’s
not how we’re wired. So the trick is to recognize the people
you’re with for what they are, while you’re with them, and
stick with the ones who make you happy.

115
 At night sometimes the lake
sounds like it’s right
outside my door,
breathing in the moonlight
like a soft cucumber condenses in the heat.

When those waves touch me

I lie back and hover in the night,
a starry darkened butterfly
caught on some current not seen.

Me here beneath the waves

holding my breath as I surface
to sparkles of sunlight on waves.

It’s like my eyes opening for the first time

on a bright landscape of color and dreams—
to breathe fresh air for the first time.

All moments cease,

lead back to this pinpoint of time—
this single moment of certainty
that time will continue.

116
The music haunts me in its slow stillness—
sometimes I try to whisper back
but the waves enclose me
and my voice fades.

117
You are dealt a character to play and draw prompts from
the game deck to help build a story with the other players.
You are all at the mall with your friends, comparing rumors
and gossip about Tobie and Jack, who may or may not be
dating. Your responses fuel the rumors and gossip that help
you decide if you think Tobie and Jack will be dating by the
end of the week.

jackofbells.com/rumors