November 2007.

As of the 1st of the month, Milo began to work a rigorous full time schedule at In-N-Out. Most days, Liz would pick him up after work and head over to Ed’s. We’d smoke for awhile, most of the time accompanied by Ed’s friends that would either already be at his house or those who would roll up next to our car, knock on the window and ask if they could get a hit. However, within the first days of November, Ed’s mom went into his room and found all sort of small plastic bags, his scale and a small bit of weed he’d, for whatever reason, had hidden separately from the giant stash he had. Ed told Liz when it happened, and how his sister told him that, after finding the bags, scale and weed, his mom was walking through their house in shock saying, “My son’s a drug dealer..”, mentioning something like “That’s why cars are always pulling up and leaving here.” Ed’s mom didn’t tell his dad for awhile, but when she finally did, Ed’s dad kicked him out of the house. Ed crashed on couches provided by his friends for a little while and had to depend on other people for rides to work, as he was still without a car since the accident in July. However, Ed had a few thousand dollars saved up to buy a car, but he was having a hard time finding the exact one he wanted to spend so much on.

Around 4:45pm one Friday, after he got out of work, Milo, Liz and I drove over to the friend’s house that Ed was currently staying long term at. We parked in front of a set of bushes on a private road, and two young dogs came out from someone’s yard and started jumping around, wagging their tails as they tried to play with Liz. Milo ran, scared that the dogs might be pissed off and want to attack us. We crossed the road and walked past what looked like a garage, going to the side of the building and finding a door, listening for any voices inside. We heard a guy speaking, so Milo opened the door and peaked his head in; we heard everyone inside telling us to come in. When we walked in, Liz immediately recognized one of the guys there as being the one who had gone up to San Jose with her, Regina and Ed to get an 8ball in San Jose, and he asked her if she was interested in buying either coke or heroin off of him; with a grimace, she declined and handed Ed $40, and he handed her back weed wrapped up in several layers of plastic. In addition to us, Ed and the recognized friend, there were three other guys there, and one was currently playing Guitar Hero 3 on the TV that faced a beat up couch and bed in a room that was formally known as a separate garage to whichever guy’s house. We sat around watching people take turns playing Guitar Hero, Ed shredding up weed donated from the newly purchased sack and rolling it into a blunt. In addition to the blunt, we passed around both a pipe and a bong packed with weed from someone else as a thank you for Liz contributing the blunt that had left us pretty lit. As we smoked, the people playing Guitar Hero at the time something that they were supposed to hit came about, the players would simply hit pause, light up and passed it along, exhaling smoke as they began to play again. Someone dared Ed to play a featured The Fall of Troy song with difficult settings on Guitar Hero, and though he was high off his ass, Ed got up and played the song three times, doing surprisingly well; we were all watching with our jaws dropped. We continued to sit around here for about an hour before Milo initiated an exit and said that we had to get going; we said goodbye to Ed and gave a wave to the rest of the people there. We left the room and headed straight to Liz’s car; on the drive to the house Milo was staying at, he ranted about how much he was getting worked over at In-N-Out and how he was pulling in eight hour shifts every time he worked, six days a week. However, he was getting paid over $10 an hour, so he knew when his check came in, it’d be quite a full one, as would the next check and the next after that. Liz dropped Milo off down the road from where we were, and again before I went into my house, Liz and I hotboxed her car in my driveway.

It wasn’t too far along into the second week of the month when Liz, Milo and I would hear Anthony’s name for the first time in months. Around then, Liz was making her preparations to go up to Reno - her sister was planning on coming down to San Martin for Thanksgiving and staying a week, so Liz planned to leave her car at her house and go back up to Reno with her sister in her Jeep. It was over a week before Liz’s sister was coming down, so we were all still sneaking around, hanging out at night and when Milo was off of work. For whatever reason, we’d ventured into downtown Morgan Hill on a Saturday evening; knowing us, we were probably trying to pick up some weed. Milo started complaining about being really thirsty, so we ended up stopping at the Starbucks off of Monterey and Tennant Avenue; Liz and I sat in the car while Milo ran in, me with my window rolled down as I was smoking a cigarette. We could see Milo as he went into the store and stood in line, ordered and waited around the edge of a counter for his drink. While he was waiting for his order to come up, a skinny kid with long, black hair came up to him and the two started to talk. Milo had this look of disbelief on his face, and when Liz looked over her shoulder and asked me who I thought that guy Milo was talking to was, I couldn’t have had any less of a clue. We watched them talk for another minute, Milo at one point pointing towards the car before the two looked in our direction. When Milo was handed his drink, it looked like he waved on the guy he was talking with to come out to the car. The guy said something and pointed over towards a group of people, who we assumed he’d been with before seeing Milo; he said a few more things and gestured towards the door, then turned around and walked back to the group he’d pointed to. Milo walked out and hurriedly came up to car, sticking his head through my window because it was rolled down. Liz turned around so she could see Milo.

“Dude, did you see that guy I was talking to?!” Milo asked.

“Yeah I did, who is he?” Liz asked.

“That’s Anthony’s fucking boyfriend. Well, ex-boyfriend, to be up with the times...”

We fell dead silent. I don’t know if everyone else had known that Anthony had a boyfriend, but I never knew until this moment. I looked to the left and right, seeing the expression on Liz and Milo’s faces and realizing that we were all thinking and feeling the same thing – shit.

“Anthony had a boyfriend?” I asked.

“Yeah, he did. His name’s Kharas. They’d been dating since last November, like a month before...” Milo began to say, but abruptly stopping.

It didn’t take much effort from Liz to keep the conversation going. “Eh, yeah. Last I heard it was an off-and-on kind of thing.. shit, I didn’t even think about him,” she said quietly.

“Yeah. I figured he would forget who I am. I only met him once, when Anthony and I were at that show in December.”

I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise up. “You mean you met him on the last night Anthony was alive?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell him where you guys were going after the show?”

“No, no, we didn’t talk for that long. He was with the same group of people he’s with right now, and they were in the off dating stage. He came up to Anthony at the show and Anthony blew him off, like he just said, ‘Milo, this is Kharas’, and that was it. You guys picked us up like ten minutes later.”

“Okay… you don’t think he knows anything, do you?” Liz asked.

“No. Well… no, he really shouldn’t know anything. He would’ve said something if he had any clue if it was us.”

I remember how Milo had pointed over at our car a few seconds ago. “Did you ask him to come outside?” I asked.

“Yeah.. he said he was bored as fuck and wanted to smoke with us instead of hang out with his friends.”

“Eh, sounds familiar,” Liz said. She looked over at me. “What do you think?”

I shrugged, a sigh making it’s way out before I spoke. “I don’t think there’s any danger in hanging out with him. I think if we split it would be more damaging than helpful. And, eh, I don’t know, I don’t even know this guy but I already feel guilty.”

“Why?” Milo asked.

“We didn’t outright kill his boyfriend but we it’s not like we’re blameless in the matter.”

“Yeah, yeah. Neh, shit.” Liz said. “Well, go get him. We can head back over to my place and smoke there.”

“Okay, I’ll go back in real quick. But, just for future reference, I don’t think any of us should mention anything about Anthony.”

“What the fuck? Why would I want to bring him up with his widow? That’s the last fucking thing I ever want to do.”

“Like we’d just bring him up,” I muttered, taking the long last drag off of my cigarette before tossing the butt out the window and onto the pavement.

“I’m just saying. I’m so paranoid…” Milo said, looking over his shoulder to see inside the Starbucks. We all looked over, and we saw Kharas walking towards the door, about to push through the exit and head over to us. “You know what I mean?”

Liz nodded. “Yeah, yeah. The doors are unlocked, so tell him to get in,” she said.

Milo nodded and pulled away from the open window, taking a few steps forward before meeting with Kharas again and leading him over to the car. He got in the car, sitting across from me in the backseat.

“Hey guys, this is Kharas,” Milo said.

“Hey. Thanks for letting me come smoke with you guys, I was seriously so bored with those people,” he said, making eye contact with Liz through the rear view mirror.

“Ey, it’s no problem, the more the merrier, yeah?” Liz asked.

“Haha, hell yeah!”

“Well, I’m Liz, and he’s,” she said as she pointed her thumb in my direction –

“I’m nobody. Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand to Kharas. He laughed as he shook my hand.

“ ‘Nobody’? That’s cool!”

Liz carefully pulled out of the Starbucks parking lot, and she drove us over to her house. We went into the shop and smoked for a little while as we watched some random movie we pulled out of a stack of DVDs. Mostly we just listened to Kharas talk about himself; he was sixteen and lived in Hollister but frequently came up on the weekend to see friends. We discovered that he, like us, was quite a fan of the cough medicine that we, at this time last year, were downing at least sixteen pills a day. Milo already had Kharas’ number, but he forwarded it along to Liz.. After we were doing smoking, Liz gave us each rides home, including a lift to a friend’s house for Kharas. We all took a break that Sunday and smoked again on Monday night.

On Wednesday morning, Liz heard from Kharas; he texted her as he was in his first class. Kharas told her that on Monday, he’d been taken out of his mom’s custody and sent to a foster home. The foster home he was in was terrible; he wasn’t allowed to go outside except for going to and from school, he wasn’t supposed to have his phone (which he had to hide all day and be very careful with when he charged it at night), and he wasn’t allowed to receive any mail or have any visitors to the home. He was miserable in the home, and he wanted to run away; he knew where he could stay in Gilroy, all he needed was a lift up there. Liz called me and asked if I’d be interested in taking a ride down to a school in Hollister in the afternoon, and I agreed to go along with her. She picked me up at 1:30pm and we headed down to Hollister – we both decided it’d be best to get to Hollister early so we could scout out the area where we’d park behind Kharas’ school and find the fastest route out to the back roads and speed off to Gilroy. After we’d figured everything out, we drove down the road and got something to drink while we waited for Kharas to get out of class.

At 3:10pm, the school bell rang, and Kharas walked as fast as he could without looking suspicious from his classroom to Liz’s car; the foster home owners came to the school everyday to pick up the kids who were going to school there, and if anyone saw Kharas run out he’d be in a shitload of trouble. Kharas got into the back of the car and lay down so no one could see him, and we calmly pulled away from the curb we’d been parked at, went forward and turned right a few times before we were on the back roads. The nervousness of the drive wore off as more space was put between us and the school, and by the time we were in Gilroy, we were laughing and cheering on our success, all of us happy as fuck that Kharas was out of that foster home and even happier to know that in a few minutes, our natural high would become strengthened by the fake kind. We went back into the shop, both Liz and I noting how fucked up it was that the person here was the one out of all people who shouldn’t have been, and we smoked a few bowls as we watched the show “Friends” on public access. We didn’t want Kharas to get to his friend’s house too late, so we left Liz’s by 8pm and had him at the house in Gilroy by 8:15.

Over the next few days, Liz was constantly packing up her things. Before she was leaving for Reno, she needed to close her bank account in Gilroy and transfer the funds to her new account in San Jose, additionally needing to complete her portfolio before sending it to the School of Visual Arts. With applying to the school, she also needed to file the FAFSA, because there was no way she could just fork over more than $20,000 a year. She planned to go up to Reno and apply to the school as an Early Decision Applicant, which meant she would begin in September 2008, and in the time between now and the school would be spent earning some credits at Truckee Meadows Community College or getting a full time job; Liz wanted to take classes more because she wanted to learn how to play an instrument, something she’d never gotten to do in school before. She, Milo, Kharas and I saw each other quite a few times as Kharas was staying at his friend’s. We felt a strange compassion and guilt for Kharas, even if he and Anthony’s relationship had been shitty. We felt personally responsible for his death, no matter how many times we absolutely knew we couldn’t have ever stopped him, and in feeling responsible for his death we also felt that we had been the ones to take him away from Kharas. It’s never fair to lose a person you care about, even if the care is past tense. We were really liking Kharas, and it was good to see him happy instead of the hell he could’ve been in; he knew who Milo was and that he had been with Anthony, and he knew Milo was the last person Anthony was ever seen with, but he never brought him up. I think he knew exactly what was on our minds as we were hanging out with him, but he didn’t want to talk about it either. And it was that mutual understanding of not wanting to open old wounds that made us get along so well. Milo texted Liz as we were all hanging out one night telling her that he was up at his aunt’s house in San Jose, and he said he wanted to hang out with us the next time we did; we said we’d call him when it happened.

One evening, Kharas and I spent the night at Liz’s house after we’d been hanging out too late and got locked out from our houses, and in the morning we went into Liz’s sister’s old room so we could use the house computer to go online. As Kharas was using the computer, he looked to the side of monitor and saw an unused can of air duster.

“Oh my god, is this…” Kharas started to say, reaching back and picking up the duster can. “Have you guys ever done these?”

“No, dude! Milo and I were looking at that the other day but I went online and turns out you can fucking die,” Liz said.

“Oh, please. They just say that so kids won’t inhale it.”

“Nah man, there was a news article about some fourteen year old boy.”

“I’ve been doing all sorts of cans for years, none of them have anything but air in them so we’re fine. Here, I’ll do some right now…” Kharas said, bringing up the bottle to his mouth and pulling the trigger, sucking in the air deeply.

“Oh my god, if you fucking die right…” Liz started to say before she put her hand over her mouth. Thank god.

Kharas took the can away from his mouth and smiled, then started to speak. His voice was fucked up and distorted, like someone had recorded him and then played it back with the speed slowed down, this deep rumbling voice. It was so weird to see it from someone Kharas’ size. Kharas handed the can to Liz, and Liz put it up to her mouth.

“Are you sure it’s okay? It’s not gonna kill me? I can’ t fucking die like this!” she said.

“No dude, it’s okay,” Kharas said, his voice back to normal. “I used to be addicted to dusters for two years, if I haven’t died yet from it I never will. I swear, it’s okay. Try it. Just pull the trigger and inhale as deep as you can. Like smoking weed but way deeper.”

“Okay…” Liz said, her hands shaking a little bit as she put her finger on the trigger. “But if I fucking die, ugh, god… please try and let me go out with some dignity? If I shit my pants, please clean it up.” Kharas and I laughed.

Liz pulled down on the trigger and inhaled, sucking in for a few seconds before pulling the can away and looking forward. She looked around like nothing had happened.

“Well? Is it working?” Kharas asked.

Liz looked over at him, and she smiled and spoke; she sounded exactly the same way Kharas had just a few seconds ago, that same low, rumbling, slowed down voice. She then put the can down, and suddenly both of her hands were up at her face, holding on tight as she started to laugh. As her voice returned to normal, we could make out that she was repeating the words, “Oh holy shit, oh holy shit…”

“It’s good shit, huh?”

“It’s fucking superb. Here dude, have some,” Liz said, picking up the can and handing it to me.

“It got you all fucked up?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, man. You get fucked up in like five seconds and it’s really intense, I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to describe and make someone understand until they try. Seriously just go for it.”

“Eh, alright.” I put the can up to my mouth, as I’d seen everyone else do. As I placed my finger on the trigger, Kharas spoke again.

“Hey, wait, did that bottle get shaken when it was on the bed?” he asked.

“Uhm..” I said, pulling the can away momentarily, “I don’t think so.”

“Lemme see, I’ll check it,” Kharas said. I extended my arm and I have it to him. He took the can out of my hand and sprayed the back of his palm for a second. On his hand, there was some sort of liquid that was drying rapidly on his skin.

“Ahh, yeah. When it gets shaken up, the air becomes like, this antifreeze shit. It’ll burn your tongue if you get it in your mouth, plus it’s just gross. Anyways, here you go,” Kharas said, handing the can back to me.

I put the can up to my mouth again and I pulled the trigger, inhaling in as deep as I could and holding the trigger down for a little longer than either Kharas or Liz did. I put the can down on the floor and waited for whatever effect was going to hit me.

“Oh, shit, you’re gonna fucking trip in a second here…” Liz said.

“Why?” I asked, forgetting that my voice was going to be that familiar deep and slow sound I’d heard from everyone else. Kharas and Liz cracked up laughing, but before I could recognize the sound of their laughter, I felt like I was suddenly being snatched up out of my skin, my spine being jerked up and almost pulled out, the overwhelming feeling of wanting to scream as something like opiates was sinking in as I was becoming sedated. Such a rush, such a rush, it moved so fast the only thing I could remember being like was some of the good shit in the meth from August. But soon, it began to fade, it’s grip on me released and letting me back onto the ground.

I was shocked. My heart was pounding, the world was still spinning. It felt as if all the weight of the world was falling down on me, and like my eyelids were being pulled down over my entire face as my heartbeat slowed down. Goddamn it, this shit made me tired.

“Woah, are you okay?” Kharas asked me.

“Spectacular,” I said. “Did you take another hit yet?”

The rest of the afternoon went on like this. Kharas, Liz and I passed around the duster can in a circle, and soon we moved out from Liz’s sister’s room out into the living room; because of the fact that none of Liz’s family was home, we called this switching of rooms “V.I.P. status.” We all lay down on the couch, watching TV for about two hours before Kharas spoke up.

“We should get some cough medicine,” he said.

“Haha, you’re not down!” Liz said

“No, I’m serious. Do you wanna go get some?”

“Oh, god. I’m not old enough. No one in Morgan Hill has it over the counter, plus I don’t even have the money to buy it if it wasn’t restricted.”

“You wanna go to San Jose and steal it up there?”

“Fuck, dude. That’s big time,” I said.

“Yeah man, that might not be so good,” Liz said.

“Well why not? I’ll go in and steal it if I can get a ride up there.”

“Yeah, but if you get caught trying to steal and you get into my car, I get charged as the getaway driver and this poor fool right here,” Liz said, pointing to me, “would probably get charged as an accomplish. Plus if you get caught, you’re a runaway and we’re the ones who helped you leave your foster home, it would just get really bad. The risk is huge. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but don’t you think there’s some old stores that might not have alarms on them?”

“Isn’t the Albertsons near San Jose Skate unarmed?” I asked Liz.

“Shit, you’re right. You, me, Cynthia, Milo and…” Liz said, luckily pausing before she said anything more, “well, all of us, when we were at that show at San Jose Skate in December, we went across the road and stole that shit.” She looked over at me, then over at Kharas. “Are you really down to go?”

“Hell yeah I’m down to go.”

“You know, I bet if we could wait until my mom gets home from work, I bet I could ask her if I could get some money. So we could buy some weed off of Ed, and also have the pills to have before smoking.”

“Holy fuck, that sounds amazing!” Kharas said.

“Yeah man, DXM and THC are fucking crazy together, it feels too good for you live while taking that shit together.”

“Hey, isn’t Milo up in San Jose today?” I asked.

“YEAH. Maybe we could just buy one pack normally with some money so it doesn’t look so suspicious that a bunch of kids walked in and we didn’t buy anything.”

“Yeah, that sounds really, really good. But who’s eighteen?” Kharas asked.

“Milo’s eighteen! And, he wants to hang out. If we could steal three packets and buy one, that would mean we all get sixteen pills each and it’s better than just stealing everything. And with the leftover money, we’ll buy weed off Ed. Yeah?”

“Oh, fuck yeah. Dude, call your mom and ask when she’ll be home!”

Liz did call her mom soon after; she cited that she and Kharas were going up to a show in San Jose that night, and that she was wondering if she could borrow $20 for show admission. Her mom ended up giving her $40, and she also let Liz take her credit card so she could fill up her card for gas and take Kharas out to dinner afterwards. As soon as Liz had the card, we drove up to San Jose and got Milo from his aunt’s house. We then followed a familiar route across a few streets and arrived on the side of the road with San Jose Skate; we made a U-turn at the intersection above so we could go into the parking lot of what was an Albertson’s that was now a Lucky’s. I stayed in the car in the parking lot while Milo, Kharas and Liz went into the store. They all went into the pharmacy section, and Milo picked up a packet of our favorite cough medicine and went up to the counter. Kharas and Liz each swiped a packet and hid it in their pockets and left the store calmly; they dropped it off in the car with me, but then decided they wanted to go back into the store and steal more of the cough medicine. I tried to make them shop, but they took off running back towards the store. When they got back, they would tell us about how they went into the store and went from the back of the store up to the pharmacy, and Kharas then opened his bag and slid in the remainder of the cough medicine on the shelf. He and Liz then went through the same door smoothly without one person being suspicious; they brought back a total of seven packets of cough medicine, and we were totally fucking set. To celebrate, we drove to Gilroy and had dinner at Jeffrey’s around 8pm; we took eight pills each at the restaurant after we ate, and we headed over to Ed’s afterwards to buy $30 of weed off of him; we picked up a bluntwrap from a gas station we stopped to fill up at before going over.

At Ed’s, when we arrived, he and Jessica got into the backseat of Liz’s car with us, and we started to hotbox the car. It’d been a long time since I’d taken pills and I was starting to feel a little bit sick, so I got out of the car and sat on the hood looking up at the stars. As I was looking at the stars, the sky expanding endlessly with so many stars looking back down at me, I felt like I was going to get swallowed up by the darkness. The only comforting thing I felt was the warmth of the car’s engine under me; I rested my head against the windshield and started to fade out. I could still hear everyone talking in the car, the unanimous spouts of coughing from everyone in the car after their deep hits. Kharas talked about how he had run away to Jessica and Ed; we didn’t tell Ed that Kharas was practically Anthony’s widow, we knew it would’ve been too hard for him to get along without thinking of how we’d moved his boyfriend’s body out to the woods. We ended up smoking an additional blunt after that, and after we were done, Milo, Kharas and I headed back to Liz’s house. Like old, old times, we went into the shop and rolled out the bed in one of the couches and put the couches together again, and we put on a DVD – “Knocked Up” – and began to watch it as the cough medicine kicked in harder and harder every minute.

In the morning, I realized that I was now on my second day of ditching school, but I was so tired and still feeling the effects of the pills, I didn’t bother trying to wake up Liz to get her to drive me to class. We all tried to stay warm under the thick comforters wrapped around us, and as a homage to last year, Liz, Milo and I chose to put on “Criss Angel: Mindfreak” Season 1. We spent the morning watching the entire 1st season. After we finished, we got out of the shop and went to Taco Bell for breakfast. We had finished the can of duster yesterday, so we decided to go to Rite-Aid to buy another can of it. Liz and Kharas went in and purchased the duster without anyone so much as raising their eyebrow. We went back to Liz’s house and ate in the living room, watching TV along the way. We started up inhaling the air out of the cans again, and Liz reassured Milo that their suspicions about dying from breathing it in were wrong. Milo took one big hit, and then another big hit, and so did all of us under we felt that unbearable weight pulling on us again. We all lay down again, our thoughts buzzing out as we listened to the hum of the television in front of us. When we were all semi-conscious again, we all head eight more pills from our stash of cough medicine; unfortunately, with all four of us taking eight each, we were now out. We didn’t really give a shit though; better to get high now than sometime later with parents around.

We all got our shit together by 2pm, and we headed back out to the shop to watch the movie “Harold and Maude.” None of had ever seen it before, so we all passed around a homemade tin foil pipe that Liz had made some time ago and got high. I really, really like “Harold and Maude” – I’m not so sure about Liz or Milo, but I thought it was really fucking good. Just after the movie ended, Kharas got a call on his cell phone; it was his grandparents calling to check up on him. He’d told his grandparents the night before he ran away that he was going to leave, and his grandparents told him that if he kept in contact with them constantly that they would be okay with it, they just couldn’t house him because that was the first place that the foster home people would look, plus it could possible jeopardize the safety and his grandparents’ custodies of his little brothers. However, now the grandparents were asking Kharas to please come home; they asked him to come back from Gilroy, come to their house and eat dinner with them and his brothers, and then after dinner they would take Kharas back to the foster home and say that he’d come back and they wanted to do the right thing by taking him straight back to the home. Kharas was visibly upset as he held his phone up to his ear, a few tears making their way his cheek and his voice shaking as he talked. Kharas eventually did agree to go home, and we dropped off Milo in Morgan Hill before we went down to Hollister. We took Kharas to his grandparents’ house and said goodbye. Liz told him if he ever needed some help, he could always send a text to the right person; he laughed and smiled and thanked her. We waited to make sure he got in the house before we left, and as soon as he was in, we got out to the back roads again and headed up through Hollister and Gilroy into San Martin.

When Liz dropped me off, her car was working fine, but somewhere between my house and hers, the brakes in her car went out, and she had to pull the emergency brake and skid through a four way stop with people at three sides of the signs; the marks in the road are still visible to this day on the San Martin Avenue and Foothill Avenue stop. A cop came up very shortly after she pulled her car off to the side of the road, and he got hold of Liz’s mom and told her that he would have Liz walk home because she was literally on the other side of the road of where her street began. Liz went home, and about twenty minutes later her mom was home; she picked up Liz and took her back to her car, and from there Liz was able to drive her car home without an incident, her brakes working fine again. Confused as all living fuck, Liz called her dad to tell him about what happened and asked if he could come down. The final explanation that we all came up for this was that possibly there was an air bubble in the brake line, which surfaced when Liz was trying to brake for the stop sign, therefore making her unable to stop at all. Nevertheless, there was no accident to report and the cop didn’t give her a ticket for running the stop sign, so Liz was sent home shaken up and with a sore right foot. Her dad came by the next day to take a look at the car, and as he was looking it over, he saw that Liz’s front right tire had gotten all fucked up – the tread of the tire was damaged when it had been dragged through hard ground and rocks. Her dad had stopped by on his way to work in San Jose, so he didn’t have time to change the tire then but he said he’d come back the next afternoon and switch it out with Liz.

Over the weekend, none of us saw each other. Whenever we didn’t hang out, it really did come down to the fact that none of us had a car nor any license to get us to where we wanted to go. It wasn’t uncommon for Ed and Milo to hang out without us since Ed would get to borrow his mom’s car, so I’m sure that even though the four of us didn’t all meet up to get high, mostly likely Ed and Milo did. I stayed home the entire weekend, having to write two essays for school; Liz’s sister came down on Saturday morning, so she and Liz were busy off doing whatever over the couple of days none of us spoke. Liz eventually did switch out the busted up tire on her car and replaced it with the spare in the trunk, but her dad wanted to do a full inspection of the car before she drove it again, so on Monday he traded her his car for hers and took it down to his house in Hollister to work on it.

I had school Monday and Tuesday and Milo had work, but come Wednesday, I and everyone else in school had Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off for our Thanksgiving break; Milo was only getting Thanksgiving day off from work, but that was good enough for him. On Thanksgiving Day, Milo was planning on going down to Los Banos with his aunt so that they could eat with their family down there. Kharas had the day to spend out of the foster home and with his grandparents, and he had invited Liz and I to come down and hang out with him, so we were planning on leaving around 10am that morning and going down to Hollister and hanging out with Kharas. However, all of us were free on the night before, so Liz picked me up around 6pm and we got Milo from the house in Morgan Hill. Once we had Milo, we ended up calling Milo’s friends that he had run into at 7-11 a few weeks ago, and we went to the apartments behind 7-11 to smoke with them. We bought weed off of him (we’d called Ed before buying off of this other guy, and it turned out that Ed had been allowed home for a night and his dad stole all the weed off of him), and from there we rolled a joint and did what we could to hotbox the room we were in, blowing smoke towards the open window with a little fan on to help circulate out the air in the room. We ended up going out to 7-11 to buy a bluntwrap a little bit later, and when we returned, Milo emptied out the tobacco in the wrap and his friend packed in weed from both his own stash and Liz’s. As we smoked, we ended up getting onto the subject of tattoos, and the friend started to talk about how he’d heard that “ghetto tattoos” (tattoos done outside of a professional studio) hurt worse than all others.

“Yeah, well, they certainly do hurt,” Liz said. “I don’t know if there’s any difference between guns in a professional studio and the ones just getting carried around, but, uh, there’s probably a big difference. I’ve just never gotten one done in a studio.”

“Oh, do you have any tats?” the friend asked.

“Yeah, we both do,” Milo said. “She’s got three.”

“What! When the fuck did you get a tattoo?”

“Back in June. My friend Tony in LB hooked it up. It doesn’t look that good, though.”

“Well, it doesn’t look good ‘cause he didn’t finish it. It looks hella cool as it is, though,” Liz said.

“Hey, lemme see it, yeah?” the friend asked Milo.

“Yeah dude, show him, it looks cool.”

Milo sighed, taking off his sweater and then pulling up a sleeve on his arm to show the tattoo. His friend got up from the chair he was in and looked over Milo’s arm.

“What is this?” he asked.

“It was supposed to be this badass koi fish, but we ran out of time while doing it. Also, if it’s not obvious, we were hella lit while it was going on. We took a lot of smoke breaks and Tony worked slow, y’know?”

“Oh, god. We rolled an entire eighth into one blunt and smoked it in one sitting,” Liz said with a laugh.

None of us could really stay out late that night, so Liz dropped off Milo and I. In the morning, Liz and I headed down to Hollister to see Kharas. Kharas hadn’t anticipated us getting there so early, and when we called him he wasn’t sure if he could leave his house yet. Annoyed and feeling a little hungry, we headed from the back roads into downtown and scanned around to see if any restaurants were open today; the only restaurant with their lights on was Fosters Freeze. We pulled into the parking lot and, since we knew we’d have a little while before Kharas was ready to come out, we decided to eat inside Fosters Freeze rather than getting something through the drive-thru and eating in the parking lot. We were two out of four customers that were in the place; there were a handful of employees in the back, but there weren’t more than a total of ten people here. The two other customers were both older men, both dressed like you’d expect to see them get up from the booth they were sitting in and go out to the parking lot to hop on some giant motorcycles and speed off into the horizon. They were muttering to each other the entire time we were there, but we didn’t really try to pay attention to them. As we ate, we ended up going through a pile of newspapers that had been on our table, and we found one with a girl on the cover of it that looked like Juliette Lewis in “The Other Sister”; we started saying “I love you Daniel, she wants to kiss you Daniel!”, laughing and feeling like assholes laughing at that joke.

Around ten minutes after we’d finished eating - so around half an hour after we’d gotten here - we got a call from Kharas saying we could come over and pick him up. We tossed out our garbage and refilled our drinks before we got in the car and headed back into the residential area that Kharas’ grandparents lived in. We parked down the street from his house; he told his grandparents he was walking out to the street so a friend could pick him up, including somewhere in the excuse to go outside that he “didn’t want his friends to get lost.” We picked him up at the corner and we drove off into the back roads that we would usually take to drive towards Gilroy. However, this time, we drove in the opposite direction, following the road down for quite a long time before we turned left at a four way stop. We followed the road out until we found ourselves on a highway, driving past a sign saying that the service stop we were now passing would be the last one out here for the next seventy-five miles. A few minutes after we’d passed that sign, we pulled over into a church parking lot along the highway in Tres Pinos. There was no one there and the church was locked up, but there were large rock formations that looked like caves in front of the church with a piece of ground to kneel on. Inside the formations, there were figures of the nativity scene in three different sections of rock – on the left were a few donkeys, in the middle was Jesus and his family, and on the right side there were the three wise men. Liz and Kharas wanted so badly to climb inside the nativity scene and smoke next to the statue of Jesus, but I convinced them not to and to drive on the road across from this church, which would lead us back into the Hollister hills.

We drove around on this road, where there were barely any lines to mark the lanes and absolutely no speed limit signs. There were dozens of farmhouses around here, with over half of them surely abandoned. We drove past what looked like this giant faucet sticking out of the ground, and Liz pulled over so she and Kharas could jump out and try to turn on the faucet. It didn’t work, despite Kharas climbing up the side of it and twisting the nob all the way until something clicked. They got back into the car and we drove along. We came up to a fork in the road a little while later, and we decided to go left because the road going right looked like it was going to lead up to somebody’s house. We drove out on that road, absolutely no other cars out here, passing along the Hollister hills and acres and acres of farmland everywhere you looked. As we came up towards one certain house on the left hand side, I looked out into it’s field and I saw the form of something lying in a plot of fenced off dirt. I could see a ribcage sticking out into the air, each individual rib exposed and bleached white, emerging out of a rotting body with a giant gash on it’s stomach.

“Holy fuck…” I said, my eyes following the body as we passed it.

“What, what happened?” Liz asked.

“Did you see that shit in that field? There’s a fucking body out there.”

“Are you serious?” Kharas asked.

“Yeah, I could see it’s ribcage sticking out in the air.”

“Shit, let’s go back!”

“You read my mind!” Liz said, slowing down and then making a three-point turn in the road to come back around. As we pulled up towards the field where it was, Liz eased off of the road and parked next to the barbed wire fence that was keeping us out. Now that we were closer to it, I could see the enormous amount of flies twitching around the body. I could see a hoof, and as I squinted to see more, there was an antler that was just slightly elevated from the ground. It had to have been a deer.

“You wanna look at it?” Liz asked.

“Yeah, man, let’s go,” Kharas said, opening his door and practically leaping out of the backseat.

Kharas and Liz got out and wandered over to the barbed wire fence, and for awhile they stood there staring at the deer. I’d seen enough of that rotting body when we drove by it, so I stayed seated and watched as Kharas carefully climbed over the fence. Liz looked around the fence and tried to see if any of it was lose, but when the wires withstood her pulling them up and down, she decided to just stay on the other side and look from there. It was, in fact, a rotting buck in this field that looked and smelled like it’d recently been fertilized. As I’d seen from the road, the buck really was covered in flies; I wouldn’t be surprised if either Liz or Kharas came back yelling about worms emerging from the decaying skin. They stood around looking at the deer until we saw a Prius heading down the driveway of the house we could assume was the owner of the field’s, and as the car came closer and closer towards where we were pulled over, Kharas jumped back over the fence and he and Liz got back into the car. Liz switched on the ignition and we pulled out back into the road, going the same direction that we were before we’d turned around to come back to the field. This started literally fifteen minutes straight of this Prius following us down a bunch of random streets that didn’t lead to anyway main road or highway. We eventually ended getting back on a main road, and it lead us out onto the highway and to the church that sat on the right side of this two-lane road. We pulled into the church parking lot, the Prius passing us along finally but not without the driver giving us a dirty look.

Now back at the church, Kharas and Liz got out of the car and climbed into the rock formation housing Jesus and his family, and they saw down and took out the tiny tin-foil pipe that Liz had made and began to smoke out of it; again, I sat in the car. Luckily they were only sitting in the nativity scene for about ten minutes, but before leaving the church, they ashed the pipe onto Jesus’s forehead.

“Ash Friday, eh? More like Ash Thursday,” Liz said, forming a cross on his forehead.

“Haha, what the hell!” Kharas yelled.

“Hey, it’s a sign that we were here, this little cross on the forehead. People will come out here on Sunday and be like ‘oh my god! The savior returns!’, some crazy shit like that.”

We stayed in the church parking lot only for about twenty minutes before we headed towards town again, driving down a handful of roads before we pulled into a large parking lot and finding the majority of it completely empty, the only cars there being the three or four in front of the Starbucks that was closing in fifteen minutes. We got out of the car and went into the store, ordering three drinks but ending up with four because the workers got the order wrong and made an additional small version of the drink Liz got. We headed back to the car and, before heading back to Kharas’s grandparent’s house, we smoked two bowls in the car. After Kharas was home, Liz got a text from Milo asking if she wanted to come down to Los Banos (because we weren’t too far away). We headed down to Los Banos and got Milo from his house, but before going back up to Morgan Hill, his cousin and Liz matched funds for a blunt and we went on a burn ride that lead us down a long road and an overpass above Highway 5. We dropped off Milo’s cousin back at his house and then headed up onto Highway 156 towards Gilroy.

Despite it being the Thanksgiving holiday, the only time Liz and I had eaten was at Fosters Freeze in the morning; Milo had eaten around noon with his family, but it was now approaching 7pm. Before heading up farther into town, we stopped at Jeffrey’s for dinner. Surprisingly, the restaurant was open; we walked in, and within ten seconds we were sat at a booth in the back of the restaurant by a waitress we saw nearly every time we were there. We ordered about five minutes later, and as we did we made some small talk with the waitress about how Liz and I hadn’t done anything with our families that day because neither of our families were doing anything, however we’d picked up Milo so that he would be at work on time in the morning. After she left, holding a notebook with our orders scribbled down onto it, Milo leaned over the table towards Liz and I.

“Y’know that waitress? Her and her family came to In-N-Out’s drive-thru a few days ago. She recognized me and totally said hi, it was so random,” Milo said.

“Yeah? That’d probably scare me if it happened,” I said.

Liz didn’t say anything, though Milo and I were looking over at her now. We heard the sound of ice bumping into glass, and just as we’d recognized the sound, the waitress came up and gave us the three Cokes we’d ordered.

“Thank you,” Liz said, the waitress nodding her head in response and walking away with a smile. Liz looked down at the drink for a few seconds, then slowly reached down to pick up the drink and take a sip.

“Alright, I give up. Liz, why’ve you been so quiet?” Milo asked.

Liz shot Milo a look from across the table, then sighed. “I’ve just been thinking a lot of things over.”

“What specifically?” I asked, taking a sip of soda from my glass.

Liz sighed again. “Eh, specifically? Anthony. Being around Kharas is just weird for me. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love the kid, I get along with him so well, it’s just.. so..” Liz started say, her words mixing together and somewhat stuttering for a few seconds. “It’s just that feeling of, ‘Hi, your boyfriend died in my house’… neh, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do,” I muttered.

Milo sighed and put his elbows up on the table, lowering his head in the process. “Yeah,” he said quietly.

“It’s an entirely new state of awkward. I feel like I killed Anthony with my own hands when I’m around Kharas, and, the things I remember… well, I don’t think I need to go into detail, you guys were there. It’s just overwhelming shit.”

Neither Milo or I said anything in reply; just a nod from both of us sufficed. The three of us sat in this booth silently, the distance between us feeling like it was growing more and more with every passing second. The furniture could have pulled itself away from the walls and floors and drifted out the emergency exist right then and it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit. I don’t even want to imagine the thoughts that were going through our minds - I’d spent so long doing just that, silently surveying my peers trying to wonder if the guilt that gnawed on their thoughts everyday was lesser or more than mine. Though it wasn’t in our best interest to be feeling as such, we couldn’t help it, and it’s mostly likely that we never will be able to. The only reassuring thing in these gaps of silences we’d always find ourselves in whenever it came to the subject of Anthony, was knowing that no matter what, none of us had one thought whatsoever of going to the police, nor regret over having buried the body (though over the past ten months we faced twinges of it). We knew that there could never be a traitor in the group because, after all, every one of us was guilty – if one went down, so did the rest, because there’s no way in hell that the person confessing would lie down and take the wrap for everything. If one went down, not only would our group and what we did every single day would be exposed, but so would everyone else who even remotely knew us. An absolute fucking fiasco was waiting at an end of one extreme, at the other end sat a lifetime of secrecy, paranoia and nightmares - and as it was, none of us were willing to lose the only chance we had at living a partially decent life, even it was only acting like we were. We weren’t willing to lose all that for ourselves - nor each other - just so we could unburden our conscience about it.

So there we sat, tired and tense and sick of seeing a secret instead of a person every time we looked at each other, and we accepted in the inevitable. This ten month stretch had only showed us that despite how passive we became and how much we didn’t talk about what happened, nothing had changed. We were still the same wrecks we’d always been, and we didn’t show any progress of getting better. The over-consumption of dangerous chemicals to keep up with growing habits and theft when it came to buying “legal highs”, always looking out for police, cameras and security guards wherever we went, selling to the desperate and buying off of anyone who came along, and so much deception that we’d incorporated lies as truth in our daily lives, but still no claims of addiction. Some people claim they have “expensive hobbies” – starting a band, taking any kind of lessons, taking care of an animal, any sort of thing that seems to drain your bank account fast but you still enjoy participating in anyways. That’s what this entire year felt like to us, I think – one very expensive hobby that got hold of and drained our resources fast, but it was something we always felt was worth it in the end. I don’t have a clue whether or not it really was worth everything that it brought down on us, but somewhere along the way it was worth something, and that was a good enough answer for me. It was then I realized this was the first time I’d ever accepted such a simple answer for anything. Gaining “something” was tremendously better than nothing, especially in this case. Maybe we aren’t the exact same as we were last year, I thought. Like the unidentified something we’d gained, there was also an unidentified something that had changed in all of us, but with such experience in deceiving the people around us, I doubt we’d ever let the people around us see what it was.

Suddenly aware that I’d been dead silent for a few minutes, I looked up and saw Milo looking exactly as he was when we’d stopped speaking. I turned my head to the left, looking over to see Liz’s face, and like Milo she was staring down, the both of them lost in the same kind of deep thought that I’d just woken up from.

“We should write a book about this shit,” Milo then said.

I looked back over towards him, expecting us all to laugh and get that simple rise in our moods that comes with a joke. But, when I saw that he was looking straight at me with a serious look, I was the only one who got a laugh.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

“I’m not. We should do it. We should put it down somewhere.”

“That’s not good,” Liz said, looking over at Milo. “How the hell would we get away with writing a book with the shit we’ve done in the last year? We’ve avoided the cops this long, writing this shit down would just be a giant confession.”

“Not necessarily,” I said, the idea of it sounding less revolting as it settled in. “We could change our names. Say it’s fiction, and stick to that. You can’t get arrested for writing a story.”

We exchanged glances with each other, Liz doing so just to see if Milo and I were serious. I looked across the table at Milo, and before I could speak again, the waitress came up to our table holding the three plates of food we’d ordered. She listed off our orders before putting any of the plates down, and when she called ours, we’d raise a hand and she’d put it down in front of us. As she placed the last dish down, which happened to be Milo’s, he spoke to her.

“Hey, we’re gonna write a book,” Milo said to the waitress.

“Oh, really? That sounds cool! Is it for a college class or something?” the waitress asked.

“Nah, we’re writing it just for fun.”

“That really does sound so cool, I’d love to write a book but, it’s just so much work! So much time and dedication,” the waitress said, laughing towards the end of her sentence. I grinned as she laughed.

I then unexpectedly heard Liz speak. “Yeah, I’ve written some pretty long stories myself, but it’s so worth it in the end. Big sense of accomplishment.”

“Oh, I can only imagine what it must feel like. Well, when you guys are done writing it I’d absolutely love to read it! I see you guys come in here all the time, it’d be cool to read a new story, and especially from people I know.”

“For sure! We’ll bring you a copy of it when we’re done,” Milo said.

We spent a few more seconds on small talk before the waitress had to go back to the front of the restaurant and seat new customers, and we she left, we all gave each other a mutual look of disbelief. I felt a small smile on my face, and I shook my head and laughed; I don’t know if Milo or Liz saw me shake my head, but they definitely heard the laugh.

“What?” Liz asked, nudging me a few seconds later to get a response.

“I just can’t imagine what that lady’s going to think by the time she’s done with that book.”