She ended up, after graduating high school, attending a junior college and coming to the realization that she’d never been away from home. She lived in one of those old gothic revival houses with dozens of doors leading to the outside world, so sneaking out wasn’t a question of getting caught. She used to wonder aloud about how her father never called the police to report a missing person. Its not as if she didn’t stay in touch; she sent letters and picture post cards from every place she visited.
 
    My mother had jumped a west bound train and tried desperately to live the life of a hobo. Maybe she wanted to live one of those lost lives and become part of the greater myth and try to make her family angry and jealous at the same time. It wasn’t until her father was on his death bed that he let her know how proud was of her, the sense of pride he had in knowing he had raised her right. He told her how, when her first postcard arrived, a smile crossed his face that didn’t leave for two days.

    Mom finally landed in a truck stop sometime in 1973, got a job as a waitress at a diner there. It was one of those places that was swarming with whores and speed dealers, lonely truckers and hobos. While she was working there, she met a long haul trucker named William. She didn’t fall in love or anything, she just made a friend. There are all of these people around who say that a man and a woman can never be platonic friends. The mere fact that they are supposed to lust after each other negates everything besides direct sexual attraction. William and my Mom both knew this, William and my Mom both had sexual feelings for each other, but out of respect for their friendship they kept their relationship strictly friendly.

    Everyone has one of those friends that make your life a little bit more complete, the one friend that’s unforgettable; William and my Mom were those to each other. Whenever William had some time off, he’d go to my Mom’s little apartment with a bouquet of flowers and take her to dinner in a nice restaurant and a double feature at the movie theater. But one day a freak accident happened. A truck lost its brakes and plowed through the front of the diner. My Mom got pinned to a wall by a jukebox and broke both her legs at the knees. When the casts got cut off, she went to physical therapy and met my dad. William went on with his life.

    “Get the car running and be ready to peel out,” Marty said as he started walking across the street. I got in and started the car, kept his door open and the engine in gear. I watched him through the window as he grabbed the Lawn Jockey and started to run across the street. Behind him a Chihuahua ran, yipping and hopping, nipping at his heels. He threw the Lawn Jockey into the van and jumped through the door and we were off before it shut, leaving the Chihuahua jumping up and down in a cloud of road dust.
 
    Marty sat the Lawn Jockey up in the backseat and dusted it off, he was smiling to himself contentedly. He pulled out his Polaroid camera and snapped a picture.
 
    “Any particular reason?” I asked.

    “I've always been obsessed with these things, I don’t know why. Besides, he needs a vacation and we need a mascot.”
 
    Marty climbed into the passenger seat with a bottle of Mountain Dew and a pack of Camels. He sat the still-developing Polaroids on the dashboard. 
 
    “Everywhere we go, he goes, we take a picture, and every couple of days we send the owners a letter with some pictures in it,” he lit up a camel. “And we’ll call him Roderick.”

    I was a pimple faced first year sitting on the steps of a library on the grounds of the university when I met this pale as a sheet brunette when she tripped on a step and fell on me. I picked myself and some of her books up off the ground and, for some reason, I apologized. She said that me apologizing was cute. I soon found myself in a pit of classical romanticism and asked the girl out for a cup of coffee and she said yes, and that she’d meet me at seven thirty. I’m going to let you in on a little piece of the male psyche, sometimes a pretty face will light the candle of Byronic poetics. This is that ultimate in chivalry and courtly love, this is that daydream sparkling feeling of rightness. This is what makes us, well, at least me, ask out a girl that we don’t know. I still can’t figure out why they ever say yes. Marty thinks its because they’re horny. Her cool brown eyes glinted as she smiled her goodbye and she walked away. That is how I met Kate Andrews. 
 
    I showed up at the coffee shop an hour and a half early because, out of apprehension I found it necessary to come early, just so if she does the same she wouldn’t think me a schmuck for not being there. I didn’t know her from Adam. I sat around and read newspapers until she showed up. She was disheveled and nervous, her dark hair all curly and awry. She sat down across from me and blew a wayward strand of it out of her face.
 
    “My name is Kate, by the way.” She said.
    
    “I’m Jack.”
 
    The waitress came over, dressed in the over obvious waitress uniform (everything black), to take our orders. Coffee shops are a funny thing. This town we were in at the time, and the town that Marty and I left had over a dozen coffee shops. They seemed to sprout up all over the region like mold on wet bread around 1993. At everyone of these coffee shops, all within walking distance of the university, every employee wore all black, all the time. Most of them smoked Gauloises, le cigarette de la resistance. The waitress, who was so hip she had to be snooty, came back with two Depth Charges (a pint of iced dark roast with a shot of espresso in it). I watched her pour her cream and sugar into the glass, this was when I noticed the precision that would come to embody her; the sugar packet ripped at exactly a thirty-five degrees and the spoon stirring at two R.P.S.’s and the just enough cream to turn it a dark shade of sand that almost matched her eyes. She was almost automaton.

     “You know,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve met a single person since I got here, besides my roommate and people in my classes.”
 
    “Really?”
 
    “Yeah, I’ve done nothing social for two and a half months.”
 
    I pondered the question and came to the conclusion that, save for a party my roommate and I went to for the reason to steal their keg, I also had done nothing social for about the same amount of time. So in a move calculated to not make myself seem like a complete loser, I told a little fib.
 
    “That’s too bad. I don’t do much of anything, but I do go to parties on occasion.”
 
    “Really?”
 
    “Yeah.”

     “Cool.”
 
    “So, Kate, where’re you from?” I asked, stretching my arm over the back of the booth, trying to be nonchalant. 
 
    “Pennsylvania, a little town called Appalachia Forge.”
 
    “Sounds nice, what’s it like?”
 
    “Its an old coal town,” she said, a little embarrassed, a little broken hearted. 

    “What about you?”
 
    “Wyoming.” I said, trying to bring a little pride into an otherwise silly sounding name.
 
    “The whole state?”
 
    “A town called Collinsville.”
 
    “That sounds nice.”
 
   “Its not.”
 
    The ice was broken and melting quickly in the Gulf Stream. Children of the 1990's becoming something to each other. We ended up that night talking to each other until three in the morning. We walked all over that town when the coffee shop closed, through the university grounds, through the seedy nightlife streets and back alleys, over the railroad tracks that smelled of bums and hobos to the closed parks where the hippies smoked up under willow trees. She shone in moon light haze of early autumn. She smelled like jasmine.

    The bar in Bowling Green had a blue neon sign glowing the name of the establishment out to the streets as Halliday’s Pub. No patio, in fact, it was located in the basement of a Hotel. I was expecting low light and shifty characters, smoke filled rooms and Irish Gangsters. I was wrong, ‘cause we got the epitome of F. Scott Fitzgerald wannabes, girls in flapper dresses and guys in wingtips and seersucker suits. Bessie Smith was playing on the stereo, all scratchy and tin can and the twenty something patrons smoked unfiltered Camels and drank highballs. It was an art student gang bang of posing. The svelte girls with knee length dresses and high heels and cigarette holders waxed Dorothy Parker and the tall clean cut guys flirted like Benchley. My combat boots knocked loudly on the tile floor and people stared as Marty and I made our way across the room.
 Marty and I took seats at the bar, between the taps and the wait station. The Barkeep slapped an ashtray in front of us and we both ordered Gin and Tonics. This was the type of place were attitudes are affixed. The over posing of the students was nothing more than insecurity; fear of being banal. They all latched onto a place with an atmosphere and stories about exaggerated lifestyles. We had barely had our drinks delivered when two flapper girls that had been born in 1980 came up to us to make conversation.
 
    The first girl had green eyes and black hair, cut short at the ears. She had a pretty face, thin and pale, braced by deep blue eyes and deeper red lips. She was wearing a red crushed velvet dress with a low and square cut neckline that was disguised by rows of pearls. She smoked Camels out of a long ebony cigarette holder that has held with long, delicate fingers adorned with Tiffany glass rings. She spoke with a deep and smokey southern accent. She held out a hand to me, I stared back, uneasy, wondering how much of it was an act.
 
    “I’m going to introduce myself; my name is Shelley.”
 
    I took her hand and tried to smirk.
 
    “I’m Jack.”
 
    “Nice to make your acquaintance, Jack,” she smiled, lips parting to show her row of perfect white teeth like the bone crushing maw of a shark. “That is my good friend Anna, on the other side of your companion.” She pointed to a tall girl who was the physical opposite of her.
 
    “Hello,” She said, sitting down on a barstool next to Marty, the dark gray wool gabardine dress stretched tight across, ankle boots crossed and placed on the rails of the stool. She didn’t smoke, but had a Rum and Coke in her hand. She wasn’t as thin as Shelley, she had an ample figure and no discernable regional accent.
 
    Marty kind of sunk into his Gin.
 
    “Would you care to join us at our table over there?” Shelley asked and pointed with her cigarette to a round table booth in the darkest corner of the bar. I couldn’t resist.
 
    “Sure thing, ladies...” I said as I stood.
 
    “Jack....” Marty half whined and shot me the ‘she’s a psycho hose beast’ look. I shrugged.
 
    “Lead the way, Shelley.”
 
    The two girls led me away from the bar where Marty sat fuming. I was sitting, flirting and feeling like a dirty old man within minutes. These two girls were young, too young even for Marty, and I knew it. But I found the anonymity of it all a little freeing. Over the past few years my countenance with the opposite sex had been one of the widower, the mourner who is set upon by feelings of guilt whenever he speaks to a woman.
 
    But through the first name basis’ unconcern and informality the past was buried deep into the back of my head, an idea of my former self. You could say that the Jack Lawrence Williams of two years ago was the alcoholic and the present the recovered patient. But the disease is always there, like a Catholic at MacDonald’s on Friday, guilt ridden and feeling an inch tall. All these are contradictions that few through my head as the girls and I made conversation.
 
    Anna spoke first, after more drinks had been delivered, “What brings you here, Jack, not very many people come to Bowling Green.” She looked at me with honest eyes, eyes that couldn’t be dulled by alcohol or age.
 
    “My friend and I are taking a driving tour of the country.”
 
    “Oh, that sounds wonderful.”
 
    “So far its been, well, eye opening.”
 
    “Splendid,” Shelley grinned as she lit another cigarette. “What brought this urge for travel upon you and your friend?”
 
    “Lethargy, boredom, disenchantment.”
 
    “And why is he so antisocial?” Anna asked. I sat back and sighed, looking at Marty as if I were analyzing a painting. The two girls, all of eighteen, licked their lips with anticipation of an answer.
 
    “Marty is somewhat... complicated. Occasionally moody. You see, he spent three years in the Congo with the Peace Corps, setting up food distribution centers and schools and what not.”
 
    Shelley laughed with glee and said, “That sounds absolutely wonderful.”
 
    I leaned in as close to the center of the table as I could get.
 
    “It wasn’t, he was there when the civil war broke out.”
 
    “Dear God...”
 
    “He’s an atheist, by the way. So that experience has left him a little jaded when it comes to socializing with strangers.”
 
    “That is a shame,” Shelley exclaimed, her southern belle voice ringing, “for such a well traveled and handsome man be so troubled. 
 
    “A man must have some fun now and again.”
 
    “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” Anna said as she shifted in her seat, showing of a gartered leg, bronzed and muscular. It was like a theater of sirens, all manners of things to lust after; drinks, sex, conversation. The girls knew it, they were objects of lust that lusted for the others as well. Red rose bloom lips part with speech and tongue wetted lips, twirled hair on finger tips, all calculated, scientific, winsome and sexual, to lure us in for a mutual gratification of animal instinct.
 
    But what if the first instinct is to leave, and the only thing holding you to the table is a tall Gin that met Tonic at a party once but can’t remember his name.
 In the back of my mind, whenever one of the girls would move to show the curve of a breast or the dexterity of a thigh, there would flash a photographic image of Kate onto the back of my eyelids. 

    The beating of the door didn’t wake me at first, it just blended in with the thunder and rain static. Half awake, barely able to think, I didn’t think it odd when the light wouldn’t turn on. I didn’t acknowledge that anything was the matter.
 
    I opened the door to pitch black and half made out the silhouette of her, soaked to the bone, the smell was overwhelming, the most vivid memory. She smelled like the way you’d think the inside of a cloud would smell. She smelled like electric rain, the odor wafted into everything, burning everything clean. You couldn’t tell tear from rain and the words she spoke were broken and half formed through the convulsions of her throat and chest; emotion trapped in her mind trying to get out. She was almost scared to come inside and I was worried, I was scared now, too.

    She sat on the futon, and her head fell to her hands like a limp marionette. She calmed down and looked at me with screaming eyes.
 
    “I love you so much,” she said and then sat silent for a few minutes. I sat beside her and held her hand, still half asleep.
 
    The chronic back pain she’d been having for a few months she blamed on poorly designed back packs and the cold that wouldn’t go away she blamed on stress. When she passed out at work one day and they did tests, she thought they’d give her some antibiotics and all would be well, but a malignant Lymphatic Cancer that the doctors couldn’t treat lingered in the vines of her body. She didn’t want to die, she didn’t want to lose me, she wanted it all to be a bad dream.

    I sat in silent and shocked terror.
 
    She said she loved me so much it hurt. 
 
    She stayed in school until it hurt too much and then I took her home to Allegheny Springs. I made weekly trips up there for six months. Every week she got paler and frailer, her skin seemed like wax paper and I was afraid to touch her to hold her hand as it looked like it would peel off in my hand. Every week I loved her more. Every week I watched part of her heart break. There were good weeks, when her spirits were lifted and we managed to laugh and goof around a little bit. 
 
    But sometimes she’d be in so much pain she’d hallucinate and the morphine would just make it worse. She’d lay there, her hand in mine, eyes wide, teeth clenched, hair matted down with sweat. We’d play video games, hours and hours of video games, the hospice nurses thought it was a cute escape. It made her happy, it took her mind off things, so it was an escape, but the light faded whenever the TV was shut off. But as in all things, the inevitable occurred; despite all the love and her parents praying. I got one of those phone calls that makes your guts fall to pieces. I drove in a daze five hours to her home. I sat alone, wearing the black suit my mom bought me when Geoff died, in her room during her wake, unable to move. The suit seemed to shrink me, it hung off me like scarecrow flesh; like I was a skeleton. For twelve hours I rocked back in forth in a rocking chair, in that overlarge suit, staring at her bed.
 
    It rained when they put her in the ground, the church cemetery was on a bluff on the outside of town; opposite the old strip mines. You could barely make out the ring of mountains through the mist, all the details were hidden. You could see no hard lines or the hair like protrusions of trees. You had the impression of mountains, just like you had the impression of closure.
 
    Somehow you make yourself watch as they envelope the box that holds the person you love in dirt, like holding your hands an inch above an open flame or piercing your eyelids with safety pins.
 
    On the ride back to her childhood home her mother handed me a letter. I didn’t open it right away, or read it right away. I couldn’t. I could feel how much of her was imbued into the paper, woven into the wood pulp and cotton with ink and fear and love and hope.
 
    I learned how to swim in whiskey. It hurts like hell at first, but you eventually get numb and learn to love the dullness. I had the thought, while half-awake in a bathtub, of being just like dad. I was just like dad, full of sadness and helplessness and Johnny Powers. Just like dad, unable to control the emotions. Just like dad, no one left to love. So I called him up. I don’t remember what was said, except for screaming at him about something. I threw the telephone across the room and fell into the arms of sleep on Kate’s bed, enveloped in Jasmine.
 
    No more arms holding me, no more whispered dreams, no more quiet sundays in the park watching the sun glow and the clouds race themselves. No hands to hold in a movie or sharing a cup of coffee on a cold winter’s morning.
 
    She used to watch me sleep, I asked her about it once and she said she wanted to make sure that I was alright.

    The leaves on the trees had turned their yellowing bellies upwards to catch the rain that falls in heavy, cold sheets through the air in an incredible display of the wonder that goes on in spite of all the trappings the we put upon everything. The greyness descends from the bottoms of the smoke smear clouds to the very ground, over which we travel at seventy miles per hour in relation to whatever point happens to perceive us at that very moment. Seventy miles an hour away from Bowling Green, seventy miles an hour away from a sea of gin, seventy miles an hour towards something else entirely. Roderick smiles contentedly out the window at the dull pastures and muddy houses that pass by, ignorant of our flight away from an idea of a fear.
 
    “Do you really think going north is a good idea?” Marty asked me between drags on his Camel.
 
    “Why not?”
 
    “I don’t know... the closer you get to Canada the more I think the population becomes like Ted Nugent. Has something to do with the weather and the mixture of beer and bratwurst.”
 
    “Wasn’t Tabitha from Ohio?”
 
    “Toledo, I think; Ed would know.”
 
    “Ed is supposedly in California, right?
 
    “Last I heard.”
 
    “Maybe we should make our way out there.”
 
    “I don’t know. Do you think he’d appreciate the gesture?”
 
    “Why wouldn’t he?”
 
    “He hasn’t been exactly what I would call the stay in touch type.” 
 
    “But he must miss his friends.” 
 
    I gesture for a cigarette and I light one up with the dashboard lighter and exhale the smoke, which travels wispily out the window; I haven’t had a cigarette in a long time. There are a lot of things I haven’t had in a long time. I think about Ed as I stare out the windshield at the highway, all grey and wet. I wonder what he’d think of Roderick; but all Roderick does is smile.  I wonder if Ed had thought of us at all in the past three years, or if he had gotten over Tabitha or if he was still wallowing around in a funk, feeling sorry for himself. Marty was staring out the window into the foggy rain.
 
    “She was very nice to me, you know...” he said.
 
    “Who? Anna?”
 
    “Yeah,” he shuffled himself around, uncomfortable. He was sore, spent, a perpetual sigh.
 
    “What do you mean?” spur him on.
 
    “She, well, she was the first that was really comfortable with me. I filled with a sort of... I’m just really fucked up... coarseness, guilt. The only way I can deal with it most of the time is to thrust it on other people to make myself feel less angry with myself. I use them. They’re my shit sponges. I let them in, like I want them there, and then I give ‘em the old heave-ho. I make myself hate them for their gullibility or ignorance, or intelligence or maybe ‘cause her tits weren’t perfect. I find some sort of flaw, I focus on it ‘till that’s all I can think about. I make myself hate them so I won’t hate myself.”
 
    He was staring out the window, past the sheets of rain, perhaps into his own reflected eyes.
 
    “I didn’t want to leave her this morning.”
 
    “You sure it wasn’t the drunkenness?”
 
    “No, it was something she said last night...”
 
    He was fiddling with the Polaroid, adjusting the strap and flipping up the flash housing to turn it on.
 
    “What’d she say?”
 
    “Stop. Pull the car over.”
 
    I pulled the car over between two hills with a small grove of oak trees a hundred or so yards away, shrouded in a gray mist. Marty handed me the Polaroid and opened the door and started to walk off into the field.
 
    “Come on,” he yelled over his shoulder, “take my fucking picture!”
 
    I got out and walked around the car. It was a double helping of cold; cold wind, cold rain. He was standing thirty yards away from me, head cock-eyed, looking at me like I was the enemy, or maybe a sort of confessor. I held out the camera.
 
    “What’d she say?” voices don’t echo very well in the rain.
 
    “I’m just counting sand on the beach, Jack.... I’m swimming against the tide.”
 
    “Is that what you think?”
 
    “I don’t amount to a mound of shit, Jack. I’ve seen it. Nothing but dirt. We’re an accident, God’s little unfinished joke. A rock thrown into the ocean.”
 
    Click, whir, I shoved the photo into my pocket.
 
    “Yeah, none of us matter,” I shrugged, trying to be aloof, “not that big a statement in this day and age.”
 
    He threw his arms up in the air; click, whir, shove.

    Marty tells me a story about the day Ed left for college. It was about two months after Tabitha died in a car accident. Marty, it seems, goes over to Ed’s house to see him off but Ed wouldn’t come out of his bedroom, his mom said that he was just procrastinating. Marty said he kept saying ‘just a minute . . . ’ Then he got fed up with it and climbed out the window of the second story guest bathroom and across the roof to Ed’s window, where he manages to get him to open it with a minimum of verbiage.
 
    Marty tells the story like it happened to someone else, detached and clinical, with a little understatement. Ed was sitting like the little freaked out kid he was, in the huge fucking high-backed leather chair he had, wearing that weird question mark T-shirt he always wore to the raves. Marty walked over to him, slowly, carefully avoiding stepping on his packed bags and the boxes spread around the room, most importantly, the plethora of shoe boxes filled with photographs.
 
    Ed had always wanted to be some kind of hotshot photojournalist and he Idolized Wedgie. He always was carrying around this huge camera, called a Zenit, it was Russian and he bought for twenty dollars at an army surplus store. He took moodily composed and high contrast photos of just about everything. He even took it to the raves and those keggars the preppie kids threw and invited him to just so maybe they could score with Tabitha. Ed was holding this photo, just staring at it like it had just popped up and started talking to him. He had this sad, dead look on his face.
 
    No one had seen much of Ed in the weeks following Tabitha’s untimely demise. According to Schween, our favorite purveyor of illicit substances, Ed went to work every day and worked a double and every other Thursday he’d but a quarter bag at the nice friend discount, and the occasional bottle of quaaludes. Whenever we’d call, he wasn’t home, whenever we stopped by, he was ‘out’ or ‘asleep’. His mom seemed to be at the end of her rope.
 
    “You’re gonna miss your flight, dude . . . ” Marty said, a little under his breath, just to maybe get his attention. Ed just holds up the photograph.
 
    Marty was Ed’s best and oldest friend and he knew how much of an 
obsession the reciprocation of his feelings toward Tabitha was. Ed and Tabitha had known each other since they sat at the same table in art class during fourth grade. Ed was having trouble getting the bottle of paste open to finish a collage of trees he’d cut out of National Geographic magazines. He fell in love with her at that very moment, but she’d keep on rejecting him. They were friends on the far side of it, on the outside, she never thought he was serious about it.
 
    He looked at the photograph, it was one of Ed’s super high contrast black and white prints of Tabitha, sitting underneath a tree, holding up an apple as if it were a jewel. Ed starting muttering, blubbering, stuttering. Marty some how managed to calm him down and made him talk normally. He kept saying that he shouldn’t go, that he needed to stay. Marty said it was a load of bullshit and the best way to get over the silly cooze was to get his head out of his ass, buckle up, be a man and up and go. Marty didn’t used to stand for self pity, Ed had been given a second chance and he shouldn’t waste it. 
 
    Tabitha, however, was a tragedy waiting to happen. A pretty girl, some would say a beautiful girl; raven haired and full lipped, with an unparalleled aptitude for literature and mathematics. Unfortunately, she also suffered from an the inability to understand the vague idea of consequence and a general lack of respect for herself. By the age of sixteen she had O.D.’d twice and had an abortion. You could say, through the evidence of her party girl lifestyle and her other mentioned transgression that she was your classic fuck up, and aside from her straight A’s, she was; but it never stopped Ed from being in love with her.
 
    Ed was a sweet kid, lanky and bird chested, a kind, somewhat angular face with large brown eyes that glowed from the inside. He shaved his head once, on a dare, and decided that he liked it so much that he kept it that way. But he never really figured out that Tabitha wasn’t the one for him, and that if he wanted to, any of the girls at school would’ve gotten down with him.
 
    That was the climate of the last decade of the twentieth century; stagnation, regurgitation, and repetition. You never had the proper chance to grow up. Usually, a person would reach the age of fourteen, and they’d emotional stay there... probably because its easy.
 
    Tabitha had it just as tough as we did, because where we had no definite occurrence to the coming of our ill placed manhood; she was shoved into her adulthood whether she liked it or not. Any type of damage that comes unexpected at the age of thirteen is usually irreversible and the only thing left to do about it is to shut it off and turn up the radio. She decided that if she were forced to be adult by hormones, then she’d act the way she thought adults acted behind closed doors. You could say that her subsequent behavior amounted to either ignorance or complete cynicism. She didn’t like the idea of being well behaved, or even normal.
 There was a certain frat house at the university that threw raves to raise money for their various expenditures, and they had many, so they threw a rave once a month. She had been relatively low key for several months, her drug use, while excessive was not quite self destructive, and there had been no trips to the hospitals, or run in with the cops, for nearly a year. The yardstick for all teens, the report card, said that her marks were high, honor roll worthy, even. But all her cautious actions could be rendered asunder by her ability to be lost in a moment. We, that is, Marty and I, didn’t think wrong for her to stay up all night, pop pills, and dance for hours with horny college students, Ed sulked in the darkest corner of the place, like always, getting sloshed and paranoid, depressed and saddened that his honesty of feeling for her went unnoticed for so long.
 
    It was a four level house, huge by any standards, set in the middle of frat row down by the university. The basement had the real hard old school stuff, the main floor provided jungle and hip-hop, and the level above that was big beat, and throughout all of it, was a massive drug and sex free for all, if you were waiting in the bathroom line, you were just as likely to be waiting for a smack head to finish shooting up or some people to finish fucking as you were for someone to finish pinching a loaf.
 
    Tabitha loved these things, they were an easy, convenient way to get a few weeks worth of rebellion out of the way in one fell swoop. Drugs, sex, drink, shady people, loud obnoxious music, breaking curfew. It was like an adolescent revolt kit you could buy at the drug store... treats all symptoms.
 
    Amid the college hipsters and trend spotters, Tabitha was “dancing” wildly as Marty, Ed and I looked on. Through the thumping 4/4 beat and strobe lights any type of orgiastic extravagance could be had. If you went, you were suddenly anonymous, nothing more than a drone, you were given the ability and the opportunity to get lost in the moment with no consequences, it was a kind of freedom, bought for five dollars and a bag of weed, shared with horny guys and girls floating on hormones, breathe it, dose up and fuck, because tomorrow was tomorrow and not right now. Dance away the weightless feeling of placelessness, lift your fists to heaven and sing the praises of Dionysus, De Sade, the Lizard King. 
 
    “Eddie, my boy,” I offered, lighting a cigarette and balancing a beer on my knee, 

    “Out there are dozens of attractive women in very short skirts.”
 
    “This is a good thing, you know,” he said, barely audible above the thumping speakers spewing Future Sounds of London.
 
    “But, we’re not going to get any of the girls out of them.”
 
    “Well, sadly, there is only one girl here that Ed wants to get out of her skirt.”
 
    Ed looked pissed all of a sudden.
 
    “Shut up, dumbshit.”
 
    Tabitha writhed like a flatworm on speed in the middle of the crowded floor, shrouded in the artificial light and sandwiched between two strapping young lads, their movements staccato, frozen by the strobes, her body, prematurely mature, suspended in midair, floating on the marijuana smoke, rolling and swaying, pushing and pulling in unison to the sounds being forced from the bass bins and loudspeakers by 9,000 watts of unadulterated, blissful power. I sat, beer in hand, on a bay window sill, watching everything I could, but all I could notice was how Tabitha, spot-lit though she was by Ed’s peering, was just another stalk of wheat swaying with the other stalks of wheat as they were touched by the wind. A vacant looking girl with blonde hair walked over and introduced herself to Ed, she leaned in close to talk into his ear, he cracked a smile and they danced a little, but she was a petri dish, and Marty and I wanted to go, so we left Tabitha, who didn’t want to go behind with the strapping young lads looking like wolves. 
 
    I still had piles of Kate’s clothing piled around the old homestead. Her parents had given me most of her possessions; jewelry, books, a music box that played the Blue Danube while two porcelain figurines danced on top, her diaries. It had only been a few months since her untimely demise, so I think that any lingering melancholia should be excused, but it didn’t keep Marty from giving me shit. First thing we always did when we got back to my house after a Saturday night of letting loose was to throw on some music, then Marty’d tell me to clean my shit up and Ed would sit on the couch and chain smoke until the morning, when we were always supposed to meet up with Tabitha at a Pancake House on 8th street.
 
    This particular time Tabitha didn’t show up for breakfast, but she showed up outside Ed’s window, beaten up and bruised. She could always count of good old, Dependable Ed. Ed was her best friend, and he’d never hurt her, and he’d always be there for her, such is the nature of obsessions. She cursed the two guys who beat her, but she never really did more than that, but Ed would take care of her. Marty was staring at Ed, who was staring at the photograph of Tabitha under the tree with the lighting of fairy dust sparkles all around, holding an apple up to her cheek, smiling.
 
    “Perhaps we shouldn’t have this conversation,” Ed said.
 
    “Maybe.” was Marty’s reply.
 
    “I’ll write you?”
 
    “Sure.”
 
    “I should go, I’ll miss my flight if I don’t.”
 
    “Yeah.”
 
    They never looked each other in the eyes and they’ve yet to see each other since.
 
    “I sorta blame myself,” Marty said through a mouthful of granola bar.