It was a November unlike any other. There was a special magnificence about the subtle liveliness that separated it from all the other Novembers that had preceded it. The air was colder. The sunlight was brighter and more heavenly and golden. A certain ambition sparked within me when I would walk outside. One particular morning, I stretched my jacketed arms to the crisp sky and the enflamed, rustling trees, shuffled my feet through the gathering leaves in the street gutters, watched my breath sail into the wind brushing across my face and through my hair, and breathed it all in very deeply and thought to myself very excitedly with thoughts of a roaring fireplace and football games.

     “It’s turkey weather!”

     And indeed it was, for the duration of this week, the only insurmountable item in the decorated grocery store had been turkeys. Mounds of them. Heaps of all the colors of packaged meat you could ask for. In fact, the more heaps I saw, the more my stomach tightened and my throat clamped, in disgust, if such a thing could ever befall me at such a lovely time of the year. I walked home with the biggest one I could afford that morning with a proud stride, the net covering vandalizing my hands with many crosses. When I got home my mother dropped everything in her arms and caressed it into the warm kitchen and the clanging of many pots and pans prolonged a clamorous symphony throughout the gold-tinted morning. My father was nowhere to be found.

     And that is the way it had been for the entire month. The pellucid air and silent semblance of the mornings could not match the darkness and unrelenting disappointment I felt brooding in the house lately. I could see it in my mother’s eyes as she so suddenly felt the strangeness of lonesomeness plague her while she stuffed the turkey in the over-encumbered kitchen sink and let the cool water gently run over it’s girth, gazing out the window with weak, troubled eyes, wondering where he was, as I did. Thus I felt like a bad son for not alleviating that lonesomeness, and I gazed out the window too, perhaps to see him, perhaps to see something else more quelling. It was turkey weather, and I was inside. The heater was on, and the cold air was fastened out.

     The Cameron house, my house, was an old house. Though it was considered very west coast, and though it had up until this point held only a single generation, its design hinted a great deal of age and wisdom that suggested there had been many more. It stood proud upon a great hill, whose encompassing face drew the graciousness of many twines of green ivy and pompous flowers rising from the healthy heaps, which, despite their lambent semblance, bore many secrets and shadows underneath, where the black topsoil laid.  And the ivy rose to the house itself, climbing up a rusted downspout to where I was; a bay window, fashionable of the old times, looking out on the sundering deck and the city of Oakland beyond.

     An abundance of many roofs, glistening and dark like a smudged rainbow, streaked golden in the sunrise. Patches of roof shadowing poor lawns and empty flowerbeds, shadowed again by the spires of pines along the empty Sunday streets, which stretched off into a blanket of bleaching haze most common with this type of perfect morning. There were great windows and telephone poles, whose wires, warping under the pillared track not but several hundred yards from the house, where a sky train flashed around the bend in a mirage of urban graffiti and decay, painted sparsely in the glow of the track lights before vanishing with a simmering howl, fading west into the Flats.

     The last thing my father ever said to me was something very poetic in its own simple way and it had a prevalent tendency to stay with me even today.

     “The way life works is you go out and make it work the way you want it to. As long as you know what that is, the longer you are truly living. Remember that you are who you are because you come from a house that loves you, and not many people share that liberty.”

     He left after that. We never said anything more and I remained a quiet person, tossing around with impatient desperation, looking for the meaning to that statement. But as he walked out the door and his shadow left the porch, and his truck rolled out of the driveway and into my memory, I understood that there was none. I soon came to understand the affliction of such purposeless statements upon my own mother, and looking upon her, I understood that her undeniable figure represented, in its pitifully noble form, the suffering she drew from a loss more grievous than death, as her loss, in that horrifyingly altering day, was intentional to the calling of ambition, not chance.

     I watched her toil. Standing at the kitchen sink, I could see what the family had seen in her. She was strangely petit, in that her fruitful, elongated voice might had belonged to a much more engaging woman for her years. Her height was not dictated by simple shortness, as one might think at a glance, but a closer look revealed her pitifully hunched shoulders, held together on a pitifully hunched back, which pared her down a full three inches at the least to match the short simplicity of her name: Lean Cameron. Even as she stretched to retrieve her tumbling dark locks, the stress of many years was hopelessly apparent. It made me think of my father, and that made me think if his selfishness could be inheritable.

     The morning passed to midday and the midday passed to evening, and upon each succession the smell of turkey accentuated the increasingly darkened halls. By five ‘o clock the meaty fragrance was joined by others, as the stove top colonized a fleet of pots and kettles, whose delectable secrets escaped through the cracks and valves. The fires crowned the centerpiece in the oven, sweating its crackling juices. Meanwhile, my mother’s hands moved fast beyond her gaunt back that shielded me at every turn. She didn’t hum like the mothers on the television, even as she seemed in the opportune place. She was much quieter these days. I watched her stare and ponder over a great deal. Then she upheld a knife, flashed it in the light-and with an effortless whisk of her forearm- sliced into her carrots on the cutting board, and again in a prevailing metronome. In the living room, an uproar rose from the unwatched television.

     When I had received the sickly-toned phone call regarding my ill grandmother, which had suddenly stilled that distant enflamed autumn afternoon, my heart perished down somewhere darker-not that I had been stricken with grief and worry for her sake, but rather because my own life had withered to the abyss of longing for social salvation in less time it took me to send a mere smile across a classroom.

     It takes an abnormal mind and a great amount of antipathies to discredit another person so scornfully; a crime that haunts my dreams about myself to this day. The fact that my prime instinct was to incline judgment against my own family revolted me and revolutionized me to another class of people I had always steered away from. They enclosed around me then. The very thought of my conjunction with them crowded my mind even in the emptiest hallway, where I had spent the next ten minutes after the call, huddled and quiet, looking at the swaying autumn leaves, until a dark and furious lump of a man, blocking the light, had not so much asked me as he did drag me to the suspension grounds, where all the bad and troubled kids in the school were rounded up. When I was shoved into the lot of them, they gleamed at me with branding eyes from previous disimpassioned and oblivious expressions; a change I discovered most perturbing, as if my private and selfish upset had been keen to everyone.

     My abnormal mind worked painfully hard to conquer the rest of that school day, even as my friends were indifferent (but perhaps that is the consequence of my reserved attitude). No matter how much I had always enjoyed the nurtured high school life with them, the aft of my mind had been preoccupied with the constant dread of parting for my ill grandmother, who as of then held no more physical appearance of entity than her dead, unkempt bushes beside her house, wailing in unheard screams for both life and death simultaneously. Perhaps it was my parents’ ultimate deviousness to rid my life of a future, as it wasn’t the best time for me to be learning more about responsibility and familial affection, and it was strange that they had summoned me to perform the task of caring for her, rather than someone less important. All cases considered, I had limited time to tie up loose ends before my own vitality was to be terminated for the rest of the school year as well as the entire summer, instead of being with the only people I still cared about before the both opportunistic and cruel fist of college broke us apart like a glass upon a tile floor; with no exception other than complete annihilation. In desperate recollection of my memorization, I recalled their faces and all their features as a sudden practice before the time would come when that would be all I had left.

     I promised myself that my last few months with them would not be in vain, nor would I be privy to the depression I felt obligated to acknowledge.

     The days after the call (it’s dueness I had been turning in my mind for a long time) seemed fittingly colder, bitter to all ends of my life. And it was not going to stop anytime soon. The word “NOVEMBER” on the calendar had been mockingly plastered onto the back of the door to my room for what seemed like a hapless eternity; a tack-pinned sign bolstering the bars of a timeless prison. While it did seem like November was endless, inside my clockwork had already felt the carols and sleigh bells drawing nearer. The spirit of giving and colorful joy was usurped by the local poverty once again, and the sounds of carols from our old radio sitting on the sill of our fogged kitchen window could have just as easily been the choral begging for a criminal’s salvation in the ears of an angry god. I was already standing on the ledge of the comprehensible universe-so I decided to jump.

     The practical thing about that jump was the abandonment of my civility. Upon venturing into the unknown, I was confronted by unseen chaos that surprisingly sustained me. You feel strangely permanent among the rough waters of society when the duties that confine you are lifted. You feel like an explorer, and I thought that was a fitting profession for the last months of my free life. The world lost and edge or two.

     It was not until after my revelation I realized by some conspicuous gestures that I had no need to force myself to seek my newly found confidences. They came to me naturally, and from that unfortunate truth I learned some secrets that I should never had been exposed to, even if it had quivered the striking light of truth, as beautiful as people, mainly my family, claim it to be. Thus I was bound from day one.

     My family, the Camerons, has always been a very moral band-not that we are good Christians and courteous, well-to-do church goers, but we all carry the belief that someone, God, something exists above us, and my mother always said that’s what counts. Our values are for the here and now-work, school, the ordinary life. We aren’t the descendants of nobility or fame, although my great grandfather was supposed to be the greatest farmer east of the Mississippi, and I’m told that I look just like him. He was also an excellent drinker, prized perhaps in his backwards county, and I’m still not sure if that is discouraging or not. The only drinking I’ve done is at an occasional get-together with my friends from the high school’s crew team. There was also a distant uncle or grandfather of mine (I don’t know how many “greats” precede his name) who fought on both sides of the Civil War just because he liked the “traveling”, and hated everyone and every cause. I think his name was L. K. Brown. With the exception of the Camerons, our family’s entirety-the Millers, the Liottas, the Flemings, the Browns, and the Lyons was and still is tremendously large due to the many stepfathers and stepmothers, so I guess deceit and carelessness is hereditary.

     These details only enhanced my decision to not partake their annual holiday rituals, as they only caused more problems than they left behind. I had decided I wanted to go upstate to a college and learn about filmmaking. Yet despite my persistence it seemed the relations were still set upon me, of which almost all of them I despise. The only one in the family I admire besides my mother and father is my cousin Nathanial Brown, who is ironically the descendant of that lawless, unethical Civil War traitor who has come to represent all my familial hate. He is reckless too, and is held with no regard at all by his family. Even though he retains a stunning image of a less-than intelligent individual, he is defiantly the smartest one in his house.

     After a grave week, as I finally came to deal with my situation, December managed to drudge in, and the first few days of my revelation was a weekend: December eighth. One month and three days before I would force myself to relinquish my school, my friends, and my life in the dust like an old, distasteful memory. Soon I would go back across time, from the ample west coast to the rustic southwest, where my grandmother’s residence protruded as the lone provisional atoll in the yellow, wheat-bent sea, compiled with the arid wind and the shrill pasturage twang that tended to decrypt my disdain of impermanent establishment among two worlds. I had kept telling myself that my explorative ambition was valid, but the fact that my newfound less-than-serious hobby would soon promote a precarious lifestyle so quickly managed my fright in secrecy. I found myself twitching in the most relaxed instances.

     I twitched on behalf of my attachment to the community. I had lived on the west coast my whole life, raised in a tiny, two-story stucco thing of a house among the heaps of leaves of the oak trees, an eyesore in an otherwise charming, slender neighborhood of Oakland, where clans of families rivaled only over each other’s lawns and gardens, the beauty of them! Never before had I understood how such spite can give forth to such relentless pursuit, and beauty. I had grown up in the confines of the city of Oakland, otherwise choked with the sinister fragrance of smoke, clotted like the river-shore of London, except without the nobility and courtliness of the proper gentleman. Yet, while this confounding sensation filled my head and lungs in my life through a seeping wound, I was always prone to the other city next door: Berkeley, the more fashionable cousin of the two cities. It was located on a narrow strip of land next to the bay, from which you may see the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, directly westward of its colorless shore and far off in the foggy distance that seemed almost arcane to any tourists.

     Berkeley had always been my refuge among other things, both social and educational, and this is the reason how I met everyone I’ve known. All my schools have been located there. Bringing myself over there across the great highway that connects the two twin cities, through all types of weather was a ritual, a holistic process, as I felt relieved, salvaged, to step into the cleaner, safer environment (though I don’t know which city contains the crazier, more ignorant citizens). I was comforted there, unchained by my boyish reservation into the tenebrous and thrilling teenage conduct, and I finally realized in the darkest spot in my mind the subtle emotional appeal between street tags and murals of world peace. Their dissimilarity, despite their size, but in their arresting gregarious details was a phenomenon. Oakland was Berkeley’s vengeful, violent and hellish alternative, where each passing day either crumpled away like unimportance, or stayed your mind like a baleful and startling farce, urging you to coil up in utter fear for your life. My relationship between the two had always been promiscuous.

     Having often been my home away from home; my mindful and emotional transit line of all the comings and goings of my life thus far, the city of Berkeley is how I came to meet my friends, most predominantly Dina Penner, whom I had been extremely affectionate towards in my high school years. She was a national figure in my subconscious. We were never romantically involved, but romanticism has many faces. She had always been the top girl in my mind since we met by coincidence in freshman year, when we were both reborn infants from our secure, adolescent crib and transferred to the both educational and eerily hostile terrene of Berkeley High School. Although I had been spending a lot of time with her, alongside the other friends we shared, being alone with Dina (a privilege shared by many in her populous lifestyle, and not unique in my own experience) allowed me to focus, to delve into my emotions, beyond the suffocating factors of the regular teenage life, to express portraits of synchronized and relieving beauty to each other. The expressions “The best things in life are free” and “Hard work heaps great rewards” are nominal to me, but her intelligent ambience and feminine swank, even while repressed, shed new light on one saying that I had previously disbelieved: “The greatest friends in life work towards other’s benefits.” Maybe you have never heard of that, maybe it’s already been said-I don’t know. Her presence, our connective stronghold that stabilized my leverage, led me to that invention.

     Beyond my own subconscious hierarchy, and a better friend to Dina than myself, was a real national figure, the self-imposed Jacob Lancaster. He was one of those people who could be you best friend one day, and fill your next with frightening scorn; whose generous height was only surpassed by his insurmountable ego. He was a strutting senior, whose savoring excellence in all subjects, several physical capabilities, achievements as well as his promotion to captain of the crew team at seventeen years old developed within him a cocky attitude that had turned his mindful thoughts abrasive at times. But until now it was often abraded, as I was committed to his unquestionable loyalty and thrilling, competitive nature. Although in my mind, even standing next to him, watching his shiny, crooked smile loudly revere his success in multiple aspects had begun to wear me thin. My fast-paced friendship with him had steam-rolled into my discomfits for my juxtaposed failures.

     He had recently gotten back from a reunion with his heritage in Denmark, in a way that was most garrulous, talking highly about “out there”, the serene countryside, the homely feeling, and the hang-overs, like he still wished he was there despite all of us, tending to unseen friends and secret lives I can only dream about. Jacob Lancaster had impressive theory, even while being arrogant and obtrusive to his obsequious friends, mostly myself I don’t doubt. But his friendliness eased me. My dreams can laugh at me about anything.

     It so happened that my first night of reinvention was a celebratory act. I left my house in the evening, that country of wide lawns and wilted trees, and took a drive through the brisk November wind to the cold, sparkling city of economic stalagmites. I was going to have dinner at Hannah Rosenburg’s house, another friend who was having more over. Jacob and Dina were sure to be there. I sped through the palate of the western evening, patterns of golden streaks and shadow teeth in between, pulsating down the length of my car as I flashed down the highway, subtle browns and grays, black pavement, plowed underneath, parting at my will, and above-the cherry-crème scrapings of sun’s famished remains, spread thickly over the deepest autumn blue. It was a striking contrast that sparked my appreciation, and watered my orgastic mouth with hunger. My eyes were somehow drawn away from the road and to the rusted coast of San Francisco. Even in the late hours, it was still enshrouded from the pacific nimbostratus. I wondered how my friends, especially Dina, would react to the news of my leaving. I had made sure they had heard two days prior. Their first reaction had been heartfelt and satisfying. It was a shock to them. Perhaps it had now settled in, and I would leave with their tears and the realization of my affect on them.

     Until now I had felt like a crusader against time, missioning myself to find my ideal comfort before my trip, and as I rolled up into Hannah’s concrete driveway, my headlights vandalizing the newly painted garage of their old, Victorian house, swollen in the dusk light, I found myself closer than ever.

     As I took the keys from the ignition, I heard the crash of the screen door and looked up to see Dina come outside, the porch light beaconing. She pushed back her brown hair and withdrew her trademark smile from her pursed lips, and I immediately sank into my seat. Perhaps part of me wished to see her sad, her rosy cheeks to droop and become pale, something to make me feel more important and wanted in her life. I felt ungrateful of her smile. I felt like it wasn’t enough. I felt like she had shrugged my fate far off her shoulders. It was almost offending to see her with that usual sparkle of gaiety radiate across my depression. She scampered up to my swung-open car door accompanied by the tune of my jingling keys thrust in my pocket, up to my face, still with that smile, and I remained firm, the leather seat tightening around my back. She acted like I would be the only interesting person in that house. Her soft, rounded chin turned high in the air, balanced upon a green and black wool scarf she had knitted in her spare time. Other than the flickering corrugated threads that strayed apart from the bulk, it was unbelievably thick and motionless despite the wind, and looked unbearably itchy.

     “I’m so glad that you’re here!” she hurriedly exclaimed.

     She smiled, showing all of her teeth in a childish way.

     “Did you drive here to just sit in the car? Or are you going to get out and give me a hug?”

     I got out of the car and met Dina’s nourishing and glowing eyes behind her green spectacles. I wrapped my arms around her body and pressed slowly, hoping that it would last longer than I would have thought. I was comfortable standing there in the middle of the driveway. I watched beyond her soft shoulder the sun setting behind the vapid tress, and satisfied I looked back at her face, painted in sisterly warmth, or rather eclipsing the sun, but still warm from my perspective.

     “Well? Aren’t you coming in?”

      I locked the car and she led me up the wet, leaf-clotted steps to the front door, nearly holding my hand if I hadn’t shoved them into my coat pockets. I kept replaying her smile as we walked to the door, trying to decrypt some hidden message I strained to find. When I came to on the porch she softly noted:

     “I’m having a party at my house tonight. Are you coming to it?”

     Dina’s voice was both delicate and prim. There was a certain quality about her that retained her softness, and always blew her around any room like a great enthusiastic balloon, while commanding each connotation of her lengthy, ardent speech exactly. Her ability to be agog and remain dignified was something rare and graceful, which had dictated her unquestionable fame. Her maintenance of her social throne had never brought a selfish appeal either. Her speaking voice reminded me of a grand piano, fully capable of both the deepest tenor and the smallest whimper; all in between a pleasing range of notes to listen too, carefully placed and loyal to the emotions each evoked. For now she whispered low in my ear, pulled up close to my face in a near romantic way, the edges of her eyeglasses touching my face, imprinting the word “Prada” on my cheekbone.

     “Don’t tell Valerie about the party. I don’t want to start a big scene. I don’t want her friends over at my place.”

     I nodded, yet was perplexed. I don’t even remember if I had agreed to come at all. I know I said something, because she smiled again and we went inside from the cold.

     The door shut behind me and the cold air was relinquished. I was suddenly filled with the homely warmth and laughter protruding from around the corner of the hall, where Dina turned. I walked through into a yellowy, lemon-scented living room, adorned with shag carpet and wavering air rising from a heating vent, circulating around the French windows that were locked with curtains drawn high to the ceiling and were feeling around the pale walls covered in bookcases. It was an ample and comforting semblance, cloistered and unassuming from the outside, settling to the eye; two large chairs, seemingly comfortable, were buoyed upon the thick carpet, and on the other end was a glass coffee table decorated with local articles and magazines and drinks, next to a bloated, and equally pricy futon, upon which was lofted two other good friends of mine: Valerie McKinnon and Hannah Rosenburg: two petit, narrow-faced, fastidious girls in jeans and tee-shirts, amongst large pillows and relaxed femininely and illuminated in the golden lamp-light. Hannah had recently moved back here from Twentynine Palms in southern California, where she had been staying with her father, and I think she still was wary of her placement among us. I could look right through her placid eyes and see her disquieted soul as clearly as her fiery hair and freckles. The other, Valerie, had just finished giggling her fair complexion to a flush. Jacob was not there, or was strangely out of sight. Dina had taken a seat in one of the chairs, pushing her lofty hair back some more. Something inside compelled me to stand, as the union between our playful eyes danced around the home. I felt my comfort wane a little. They were all smiling at me, like they expected nothing of me but the committed laughter and pleasure I was known to bring, like my parting meant nothing to them but an excuse to sap my claimed hilarity before I was gone. I tried to ward the appalling thoughts from my head, but that night was helplessly plagued. Valerie was jabbering before she turned to me.

     “Oh! Hello Mark!” she exclaimed before settling back into her pillow. Hannah lifted her head, as if she had desired to say the same, but she was silent, a tightened smile bolted down on her face.

     They started at once to ask me questions: where I had been, what I had been doing. I answered them as best I could, and all the while their interest was piqued, as if I was their object of obsession. How I wished. Valerie was especially enthralled, in her usual, excited voice that bounced high and low at the slightest, unstable provocation that my ears stressed to follow. Nevertheless her eyes were terribly bright, set upon her small, passionate lips. I couldn’t help but smile back at her.

     I explained to her how I hadn’t been in the best mood lately, with my grandmother’s situation, and the thoughtlessness of my parents; the unfortunate happenings that had been bogging my mind. She casually rolled it off her shoulders.

     “Well I’ll set up a date so you can smoke with me then.” She answered, grinning on the edge of both laughter and seriousness. I felt her lethargic, apathetic wind slap me from across the room, and I had no time to figure out if it was intended before she resumed her alluring smile. She always smelled like smoke.

     After I had settled into my chair next to Dina, she left to the kitchen, stranding me with Valerie’s awful stories, and Hannah’s vacancy. Valerie was finishing her story about her new night-job in San Francisco, which she took unappealing pride in: a waitressing job at a bar near the piers, where she was paid her hourly wage to serve drinks and be set upon by the lustful and gluttonous eyes of “horny old business-men” who, in their minds I bet, gormandized her figure up and down as if starved, each neon-lit night after night. She said this with an odd smile that, if anything, disturbed my paternal judgment.

     “Don’t you feel so dirty over there?” I winced. “Don’t you feel uncomfortable with them grabbing you?”

     “You’d think so but no. I’ve come to deal with it. Besides, it’s good pay to be grabbed.”

     She kept on smiling, and part of me came up short. I couldn’t bring myself to crack another.

     “Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere safer? Doesn’t seem like a good place for a sixteen-year-old.”

     I tried not to sound paternal, but I could not help it. Her face dropped into a serious glare for once that evening.

     “Well, I wouldn’t tell my parents about it. They shouldn’t know about it. I think it would be in their best interest not to know…”

     Her voice trailed off, receding within her mind, where if I guessed, she contemplated her choice of words. If I were her, my focus would’ve been a reinvention of my image. However, she kept this innocent face, as she explained to me her love for the city, particularly the exceptional happenings that populated its design. They never seemed to stop, neither within the smoky, glass-tinkling bar, nor from the suggestions issued from drunken mouths, whose transitory breath she had, somehow, grown fond of. I listened to every word that passed, but my heart whimpered a little, perhaps because she had been stolen into an awful aura from my, our affable nest, or, individualistically, had strayed past us, on wings of alcohol upon platter.

     “Just this last night,” she said with creeping laughter, “Some guy who I could’ve sworn was at least forty, asked for my number, and when I didn’t give him it, he snuck it into my skirt.” Hannah giggled.

     “Do you still have it with you?” she asked.

     “Yeah, it’s right here.”

     She pulled out a crumpled corner of a bar napkin from her handbag, lined and sketched on since that night. Centered on it were seven separated digits in bright red ink, prepared to weather the damage that might befall it and to survive under any circumstance. The two girls peered down at it, but Valerie seemed to go into a trance, engrossed over the strokes of the pen. I don’t think I blinked. Time seemed to halt, save the noise Dina was making in the kitchen.

     “Why do you still have it?” questioned Hannah. Vicky broke from her self-induced hypnotism.

     “Prank calls.”

     She and Hannah busted in laughter. I joined in too.

     “You actually do that?” I asked on top of the laughing. “What do you do?”

     “Oh. All kinds of stuff.”

     She shoved it deep into her bag and never brought it up again that night.

     Dina came around from the kitchen, carrying a platter with drinks and smiling, and my thoughts became all too real. I don’t remember what drinks they were, but I downed it in my old, impolite way, and washed the glass out in the sink as quickly as I could. The girls were chatting away when I got back, and I joined in for a while, legs crossed and draped over the furniture, until Valerie’s phone rang up the house with some techno tune.

     “Hello? Hey Jack.”

     Jack was her boyfriend, had been for a few years, and although I had always heard of him but never saw him, he appeared to be a nice, caring person, with a husky tone. I could hear it through the harsh static. Vicky talked to him for a while there, and I noticed Hannah, across from me, had remained astray, as if her mind had been elsewhere the entire evening. So I decided to speak to her.

     “And how are you Hannah?”

     “Oh, I’m pretty good.” She didn’t have much to say.

     “You know I noticed the paint on the garage when I pulled up, did you do that?” This sparked her.

     “I wish. My mom was going to, but she didn’t trust me with a brush, so she just got my uncle to do it.”

     “Where does he live?” I asked, trying to carry on the conversation.

     “Just down the road.”

     “Really? How long?”

     “Since I was little. Why?”

     I laughed a little. “It’s nothing. I’ve always been so used to my relatives living far away, I’ve almost forgot what they look like. I wish I was in your position.”

     “He’s an ass.” she sighed. Dina laughed. So did I.

     “He is.” She groaned. “He gets on my nerves.”

     “What I don’t get,” I changed the topic fast, “is why doesn’t she trust you with a brush? I mean, after all, you are in that art class. I mean, what do they expect?” Hannah’s eyes flared.

     “Thank you!” She sat up straight in her chair. “I don’t get it either. In fact she convinced me once to not go into an art competition, just because she didn’t feel like filling out the paperwork. I would’ve used that piece too.”

     “The one of the tulips, at the pond? The acrylic one?” Dina asked. She nodded.

     “That was a good one. I liked it.”

     “I did too, but apparently the state of Rhode Island wouldn’t.” She said with scorn, took a sip of her drink, and dropped it on the coffee table.

     “I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t listen to your mom, Hannah.” I said to her. I’m sure Dina thought the same. “I wouldn’t trust her to have the best judgment. You should just, go with it. Don’t even think about her.”

     “I get closer to it everyday, believe me.”

     Then Dina performed her trademark act. She took hold of the situation and brought it to her own, divine perception. It was the singular act that embellished her grace above all of us.

     “Don’t Hannah. Don’t do that. I know your mom is hard on you, but I don’t think denying her is right. I mean she still loves you.”

     “Yeah, but…”

     “I think what you need to do is yes, take control of your life for yourself. You should do things for yourself, but defying your mom completely is just going to limit your allowance to have more freedom.” Hannah was still unsure, and I sat there moronically, unable to back her up with something as intelligent. Dina was a winner of all social battles.

     “Ok. Ok. Yes. I, love you too.”

     With that Valerie hung up the phone then said something that haunted me and left me ball-eyed.

     “Val, Are you ever going to get over him?” asked Hannah, fashionably displaying some unheard gossip held between them.

     “Yeah. He being at Davis has sort of put me in an awkward position. I hate it when he calls me and I have to say that “I love you” to him. I’ve been trying to get away from that, because I know I’ve been with him for two years, but there are some boys here I like, and I’ve been trying to keep the rumor down. I want to be seen as single to everyone else, so it’s always a pain when he comes over here. I’ve got to keep up my ego.”

     “You’ve cheated on him?” asked Hannah.

     Valerie laughed in a way that cooled the room like a paneless window.

     “So many times! I’m good at keeping secrets.”

     I was just staring at her, staring into her eyes, recollecting in silence. The deceit had ripped through me. It had stolen my feeling, in its place a numbness that even denied my notice of Dina inches away from my face. I didn’t know what to say, what to do, except to think to myself not to say anything at all. The silence from all of us, the elongated nothingness, was disquieting, as we all strained to recover so vehemently after realizing the painful discovery. I cleared my throat: nothing came out. They didn’t turn to me this time. Instead, the power of her awful words had been sealed around her figure forever, as gazing upon her, we drew our disbelief that beautiful minds encase around equal bodies. When my soul did find its way back, I had, beyond any lost words, tasted the bitterness of repulsion and that primal, revolutionizing instinct I had met before. My hypocrisy towards that exhibition of selfishness stunned me and made me shake, and for a single wisp of a moment, I had discovered my fate, before it left me, and disappeared forever.

    I think the moment that ruptured the haunting silence was loud knocking on the door. Dina managed to climb out of her chair to answer it, and suddenly life was brought back into the room, along with a cold gust. Dina came back and sat down smiling, alone, as if she had greeted a ghost. I then realized that it was an act of Jacob’s lavish entrance, as he rounded the corner a few seconds later. Immediately I felt the revived energy fall into his hands, and I proceeded in my usual retreat into my conscious.

     He was standing before us as he always did: legs slightly apart, planted firm to his creaking wooden floors, with his hands on his sides, modeling his aggressive dominance as he hawkishly observed his comrades. He had come home from work, an emotionally raw, spent construction worker with sawdust in his thick hair and paint on his shirt and chipping from his rough skin. He embellished the wrinkles of his smoker lips. The white and pink speckles waltzed to the floor, burying beneath the carpet. The shavings that were perceptible had landed on the floor trailed Jacob’s path. His work had been both good and bad for him. On one hand, his ability to support great leverage (coupled with rowing also), had shaped his already durable form into a muscular phenomenon. The latter was that lifting had pulled almost every tendon in his body, and obliterated the strength in his kneecaps of several accounts. Yet he both complained and bragged that “lifting more than your own weight all day can kill you, you know.”

     “You look good-healthy enough.” I said back to him.

     He already knew he was. He knew he had surpassed me long after we had met, so he rolled my unimportant words off his shoulders.

     “I know. I’m a sensation, right? Don’t think I take those words seriously. I already know I’m stronger and manlier than you are.”

     He didn’t say that, and he never would. Something in me however expected those words every time he conveyed his Herculean tone.

     Suddenly he threw himself around the room, opening the windows and letting sharp breezes to cut through the girls’ hair and initiate the curtains’ flapping, making them reach out to touch me halfway across the room-and wrapping around the lamps, fashioning shadowy arms and hands that groped across the walls and the girls’ faces. I shut my jacket and curled up in my seat. I had almost been able to reach a new interest in the company, before Jacob laughingly penetrated our conversation, quite literally, as he joked around with Dina and swiped her seat next to me in the process. When he began to arrogantly roar away, delightfully screaming some new story of success upon the snapping and twisting strands of hair and cloth, I decided to step outside for a while.

     I dialed the home on Dina’s telephone over the screaming to inform my parents that the plan had changed, that I would be attending Dina’s party. When I hung up after the message, brief at best, I opened the sliding door next to it and stepped out onto Hannah’s deck, which had been consumed by the night. The sun was now fully tucked away behind the taller houses. When I turned around I noticed the door was closed.

     When I had felt calm enough to enter that house again, Dina revealed herself from the shadows. I realized then, upon my own embarrassing flamboyance, that she had fluttered by me, and had become privy to the wares of my own. I collected and cleared myself of anything to be misconceiving, though I knew it was stained on me as noticeable as a splotch over my white heart. All I could do was accept it, and idiotically grip the splinter-filled railing of the deck, wistful to look brooding over something entirely off-subject. Every cautious step I heard behind drifted me further and further to that desire. I strained to seem normal, but I couldn’t. It was already pointless to do so. Another trait of mine had been discovered underneath my wraps, and scrutinized in the harsh light. Nothing could be recovered.

     “What’s wrong?” she asked in her famous, caring tone.

     Anything I could say would exacerbate the issue.

     “I don’t know what you must think of me.” I muttered. I couldn’t summon the courage to face her-to see the results of her scrutinization flash back to me. I was so ashamed, bereaved of any masculinity I would have hoped to secure as my final impression. Suddenly I was turned around, staring at her diligence. There was no way to hide it from her.

     “Mark, what’s the matter?” she repeated. I kept my face sturdy.

     “I just realized how much you guys mean to me.”

     She looked slightly confused. I was too. It wasn’t a lie, but I was so desperate to hear it said back to me that my subconscious invented new ways to manipulate my friends.

     “What’s this about?”

     “I thought you knew.”

     Dina suddenly realized, I think. Her face was wiped blank and her eyebrows quickened back to their level height, no creases of confusion or wandering mouth, as she turned deathly grim behind the barring rims of her glasses. After all this time, it might had offended me, or discomforted me to make her think about unhappy things, but I was too focused to regain my strength in front of her.

     “Did you think I forgot?” she asked. I was relieved a little. “Make the best out of it.” sounding more maternal than ever before.

     “Was that your mom?”

     “Yeah.”

     “Did you tell her?”

     “Yeah.”

     “What’d she say?”

     All the questions flew out of her mouth as the leaves did upon my passing along the road into Berkeley, each colorless but proclaiming a different shape. She wanted me to come, and somehow we knew this would the last place we would be together. School had otherwise wrapped her up tight.

     “Don’t worry. I said I was coming, I’ll be there.”

     “Well I hope so,” and then she said the words. “I need you there.” For what I did not know, but the whisper was comforting. I felt secretive, as if we had something that no one else could comprehend.

     “You need me?”

     The words sounded even better.

     “Well of course,” she said. “You’re so much easier to deal with than those people right now. I need some space away from them.”

     “So what does that make me, your social whore?”

     That abruption dampened her. I immediately repealed.

     “You seriously need to learn how to take compliments.”

     “Well I guess it’s been a while since I got any.”

She laughed.

     “Ouch. Way to bring yourself down.” she said sarcastically.

     “You know it’s true. You want me to count the times?”

     “No. That’s fine. You can’t even remember half of them anyway.” Jacob’s guffaw over something funny blasted out the window behind me.

     “I never knew you thought that way about me.” I said.

     “I haven’t ever really said it before. It’s no big deal.” Her cheeks rose.

     “Nobody even cares, do they?”

Dina stopped looking at me and stared off into the distance. She was thinking of an answer, but we both already knew. She was silent for a while.

     “Everyone knew it was coming. You never did anything but complain about how it might happen, and now that it is, what did you expect?”

     Suddenly a crash. Jacob stumbled out onto the deck, yelling out to us happily. If he had a tail it would be a blur.

     “Ay! Whatchu been doin’ out here!?”

     “Nothing.” I said.

     “Well get on in here!”

     Jacob suddenly fell into me, took his massive arm, still bearing the reddish imprints of shoulder pad straps, and plunged the weight across my shoulders, crushing the back of my neck in his grip. He nearly threw me back inside, huffing hotly in my face. I was gently suffocating.

     “Are you drunk already?” I asked over the burden on my back.

     “No. I’m just really excited.” He spit.

     “About what?”

     “You’ll see kid.”

     “Kid? I’m a year older than you.”

     We flew though the windswept living room and out the front door. He moved me about like a pawn on a chess board. A great pack of muscle shifted under his shirt as he nearly lifted me down the stairs.

     “Look at her. She’s a sexy thing right?” asking with what I swore might have been a hopeful tone. He forced me with a broad flat hand out into the night. It was a beat up bronze can of a car, barely visible save its outline highlighted by the warm street lamps above us.

     “Trueno. Toyota. She’s a beast in the making.” He said.

     “I know what it is. It’s ugly.”

     He clicked his tongue in the dark. “You don’t know a   damn thing about cars, driving that piece-of-shit ’77 Ford of yours. What is that a four cylinder…” He grabbed me again. “Me? I’ve been doing my research. I’m gonna race this bitch. You wanna ride? Sure you do.”

     He wrinkled my collar under his fist, leading me up to his five-thousand dollar monstrosity. Five thousand dollars. He gloated over that insignificant fact every day he mention the car. Five and three zeros. He had never told where he had got it, just not to worry. I wasn’t able to understand it, or the way things work in life.

     I was halfway inside before I told him I forgot my jacket, and when I went back inside to retrieve it I noticed Hannah and Valerie had disappeared and the house was still once again. The windows were shut, yet the curtains remained abused and tousled around empty glasses. There was more than that though. A spooky silence from everything. No glasses tinkered. No hum from the heater vent. No noise from the kitchen or any other part of the house. The rooms were immaculate. Nothing was alive. I tried to ignore it, but became bewildered and lost in the act, triumphed over by nothingness, and then I became so confused I wound up prying for the source of the nothingness over my search for my jacket. It vanished from my own blaring conscience. I attempted to raise my voice, yet feared the long powerful echo in such a deserted place. This was not the same house I once knew. Things had changed under my nose and I had not swayed until now. But there was nothing I could do but choke under the snare of silence. No cars whizzing past outside. No wind. No crickets. There was nothing to hear. Everything had been absorbed by an unseen force. I felt wounded. For the first time I had been unwillingly derived from my most important of senses. I was lost and strained for recovery, but there was no grip. After all the talking that I heard relay at such an enormous pace, silence seemed all too unfriendly. Malicious.

     I strained in that house. I strived so completely to find a sound I hurt inside. But what I did attain then bewildered me the most. It reminded me of something I had read. And ever afterwards it gave me a chilled sensation that was neither bad nor good, but burrowed down to the very core of myself to stay forever, and it has. I had read an article in some magazine I had glanced over that quietness is the best way to achieve a path to your conscious; that it always brought out your most inner thoughts and sounds from deep inside without intent. Upon that stillness surrounding me I discovered my conscious to be strange and threatening. It was a wisp of a cry. Not human. It evolved however. The voice took a form, a single shy, tender tone around my feet. It came from the floor, floating up from the floorboards. A low hum. I stared at it, at the brown wood covered with specks of dry paint. It was saddening. The tone drooped like a siren, and then there was a whimper so faint a lump in my throat grew as I examined it, for it had audacity. It contained the power and distinction of any normal voice. But it wasn’t normal. It was crying. It was a crying girl. She wept so clearly I could maintain an image of her quivering lip, the deepness of the breath she drew, the tears gliding down and mixing upon her tongue, her suffering breath.

     I whirled around and walked outside. I did not run, or perhaps I couldn’t. I knew that it was conjoined to me, attached and withdrawing my essence and courage. I couldn’t run. It too stopped short upon all other things as soon as I left the house, and when I saw Jacob’s face, the memory of that haunt had become a myth.

     I jingled my keys in his face and explained to Jacob that I had a car and that I’d drive myself. He laughed as if I had just passed on the funniest joke in the world.

     “No,” he spurted over his laughter, “I’m doing you a favor. You’re coming with me.

     “I can take myself. Really.”

     “Is your car standard shift?” Jacob coolly demanded.

     “No.”

     He turned smug, urging me onward, forcefully, but still bearing a complacent guise. He opened the door and led me inside. It smelled like Valerie: cheap cigarettes and weed hidden under a lair of male cologne. I paused under the heavy, clogging stench. I wanted to hold my nose.

     “Don’t worry I’ll take care of this kid! Seven, right!?”

     It wasn’t directed at me but to Dina, who stood there on the porch like a mere black shape, a ghostly form under the lamplight, for once carrying no facet of beauty or loveliness. She was faceless and obscure. Yet I knew she looked my way, for my heart jumped when I thought her head pivoted slightly to the left. I knew her eyes crawled across me, as if perceiving something new and interesting, and once all of Jacob’s hilarity had ceased and he jumped into the car and turned the ignition, her eyes must have bent around his eclipsing bulk to further inquire her interest. I was doing the same.

     My persona, which had been so heavily guarded over the arduous years, was now being picked apart in the last acts of our drama. Jacob and I roared away into the darkness, and the ghost on the porch haunted the rearview mirror.