There were still two more weeks of classes, but everyone’s mind was already on vacation. Teachers droned in uninspired monotones and kids in classrooms sat idly staring out windows or squirming in their seats watching the wall clock. But then my friends did that all year. Half the time we’d just cut out. It was only a few months ago that we stood in the Central Terminal, shivering and talking about the Sabres, same as last winter. We’d spit on the marble floor and smoke Marlboro cigarettes like gangsters, blowing smoke rings through the broken windows and telling jokes about Polacks, Italians and blondes.

Around the end of March, we started meeting over at Tommy’s house. Tommy, whose nickname is Midget, is a freckle faced Irish elf who easily gets us laughing to tears. His mother, although not that old, looks dried up. She has bright blue eyes, but her face is sharp and boney, with skin that looks like a mass of wrinkled white wax. Tommy’s mother drinks all day and is never without a burning cigarette. Her voice is a gravelly whisper and she coughs constantly. She didn’t care if we weren’t at school and she smoked pot in front of us all the time. Sometimes she’d start talking about sex, how she never got any. Whenever she started talking about sex she’d start pouring down the Jim Beam and work herself into a bad mood, eventually looking stony-eyed at Tommy and yelling at him. “You’re just like your father. Your father was small, too, you know that don’t you? That little bastard! Small, tiny, little bastard; a fucking mouse, that’s what he was. And You! You’re just like him. You know that don’t you? And what are you doing here now? What are all you kids doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in school or something? What the hell’s going on?” We’d run out of the house and sit on the porch, but we could still hear her in there alone, yelling and coughing.

When May came we didn’t go to Tommy’s anymore, instead we started taking our bikes to school and cutting out right after lunch. One day we rode over to the old Forest Lawn graveyard on Delaware. As we came around the curves where Veterans are buried we spotted a young girl in a green summer dress sitting alone on the grass sobbing.

To be continued… (submissions: editorial@artvoice.com)