1 Chapter 1

“How was your weekend?” I asked Rocco.

“I drank good whisky, played pinball with a few buddies at The Watering Hole, and got my dick sucked in the restroom by a Hooter’s girl with humungous tits.” A conspiratorial smile tweaked his puckered lips.

Rocco’s tough bravado was always a thin, sugarcoated shell of low self-esteem.

“Sounds like your typical weekend,” I said.

“It was F-U-N.” Rocco smiled with an air of dignity as if drinking and fornicating were a lifelong ambition.

I passed him a lit joint.

Taking a hit, he held it for a second or two, his eyes rolling up somewhere in his head, lost in a dream, engrossed. When he released a plume of smoke, he sighed, content. Unlike me, he was used to it, a hardcore stoner. I was a rookie, he’d say, an amateur, a novice in training pants. “How was your weekend rendezvous with your grandma?” He chuckled, and I could hear the phlegmy gurgle in his chest from years of smoking. He handed me the joint.

I took it between my forefinger and thumb, held it up to the pale milky moonlight 238,900 miles away from us and filled my lungs with a deep long breath. Annoyed at the sarcastic bite of Rocco’s comment, I answered, “My Grams is ill. Don’t joke about it.”

He laughed, coughed, and spit down onto the small patch of dry grass from where we sat stargazing thirtyfeet off the ground on my Grams’ slate garage roof in her backyard, a ten-foot high rhododendron hedge enclosing the five-acre plot. The landscape service company she had paid to trim her trees and bushes had half-assed the job last week when they were here, three men on the wrong side of sixty, and the result was abysmal. Tops of spruce trees and evergreens were hacked to incompetent existence.

My skin was damp from the June heat.

“I wasn’t joking,” I said. “Chill.” I handed him back the joint.

The intoxicating air hummed with barbeque smoke, marijuana, and Rocco’s Fish Fry Special at the diner.

We both had essays to research for history class and a presentation to work on together. Rocco always waited until the last minute to hit the books. He told me high school wasn’t his strength. He wanted to travel, see the world, and meet people less interested in academics, more free-spirited folks and daydreamers like himself.

A cold darkness swallowed us. I shivered at the likelihood of Rocco’s future spiraling downward.

As Rocco passed the hand-rolled joint my way, I caught a whiff of his body odor. Fear, caution, and hunger exploded in my nose like a firecracker.

His next words were senseless, brutal, and tragic. “I want to die in space.”

I inhaled and held my breath for a millisecond, frying my brain cells with the heavy-duty cannabis I hadgotten from Rocco three days ago. I choked out an equally dumb response, my eyes watering and burning from the smoke. “Most of my friends are already dead. What’s another one?”

“How do you want to die?” He sounded upset, his voice quivering, as if it was being taken over by an otherworldly spirit.

“I don’t know, Roc,” I said.

“That’s not an answer. It’s a cop out.”

“Have you been drinking?”

He was tetchy, wary. “Does it matter?”

“You sound anxious.”

“How can you not be anxious in this fucked up world?”

“Did something happen at work today?”

“Nope.”

“How are classes?”

“I’m failing everything but P.E.”

“Swimming and lifting weights doesn’t count.”

“The hell they don’t.” He reached for the joint, ripping it from my hand, and taking the last hit.

“What do you want to do this weekend?” I asked.

“I thought you had to take care of your grandmother.”

“I’m not her caretaker. She’s got a nurse who comes in five days a week. In the morning and afternoon. I’m here to visit. And see you.”

“You taking up babysitting the elderly?” He laughed.

I wanted to wallop him.

Then I noticed his cheek, hidden in shadows, and as he shifted and reached in his back shorts pocket for another fat doobie, a knuckle-size bruise marked the side of his face beneath the left eye. He adjusted his grungy, pale blue baseball cap backwards when he noticed me staring at him.

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

“A fight with a buddy. You want to smoke another one?” He handed me a new joint.

I nodded. “Why not? I can’t sleep anyway.”

“His name is Brian, if you should know.”

“Brian the Slugger?”

He shrugged. “We had a disagreement over a game of pool.”

“I didn’t realize you played pool?”

He held out a hand, admonishing me. “Let me finish.”

“What did the two of you argue about?”

“A girl.”

I rolled my eyes. “Original.”

“Why else would I get a shiner?”

“Is anyone really worth a black eye?”

“Can we stop talking about it? I wanna get high.”

“How’s work?” I asked.