Like the sounds hidden in a record’s grooves, smoke hung heavy and thick. It obscured the light from above as if the smog from his California childhood had followed him across the country. His dad still lived there, in Southern California. He’d been in Virginia for three years, since the summer of 1988. Now it was 1991. Not that the year made any difference. He was in ninth grade. Childhood—along with the Pacific Ocean breeze—was a distant dream.

He took a drag off his cigarette, exhaled, and added another layer to the smoke already choking them in that packed room. They were in the church’s outbuilding. The smoke’s scent was buried deep in the cheap carpet. Its remnants discolored the walls. He said, “My name is Josh, and I guess I’m an alcoholic.”

Beneath the haze, the room remained quiet and still. The scattered adults who had raised their hands to share dropped them back into their laps. All the eyes—young and old—turned to Josh. He looked down to avoid their gazes, even that of the girl in the corner who was about his age. She reminded him of his friend, Melody Fisher. Like Melody, she was thin, in a short jean skirt, rainbow tights, and a black tee shirt. Her stringy blond hair lay limp across her shoulders. Melody’s hair was curly. Josh didn’t know the girl in the corner. He didn’t know any of these people.

“I’m sure you all remember what happened the last time I came here,” Josh said. “Well, this past weekend was no different.”

That past weekend, Josh had told his mom he was spending the night with Todd Campbell. Todd had told his mom he was spending the night at Josh’s. They both wound up sleeping alone, one of them in the cab of a truck and the other in the backseat of a car, in Melody’s father’s backyard. The night had grown too cold to sleep in the woods across from Carrie’s, Josh’s girlfriend’s, place. But in only their leather jackets, the night wasn’t much warmer in those broken down automobiles. Melody woke them before 5:00 am, before her father looked out the kitchen window and spotted them there. Her breath made a mist in the chilly morning air.

She said, “You look defiant even in your sleep, Josh.” He’d been sleeping on his back with his head tilted back and his hands clasped in his lap.

Josh and Todd each dropped a hit of acid they’d purchased the night before, and they walked down the road to figure out where they might find some breakfast. But they were broke. Every dime they’d scrounged together had gone to buy the drugs they were on, the liquor they drank the night before, and the beer in the duffel bag Todd was carrying. A local biker gang ran an acid lab one more county south of the city of Richmond from where Todd and Josh were in Potterfield County. All the kids—the metalheads, the skaters, and the deadheads—had been eating acid regularly for almost a year by then. Josh and Todd were no different.

Todd’s uncle was a member of that biker gang. Todd had grown up down on Route One, Jeff Davis Highway, the Petersburg Pike, across from the Stonewall Park housing projects. He and his mom had moved to Josh’s town, the town of Louthain, only a year before. They were fleeing Todd’s abusive father.

When Josh saw Todd walking through their middle school hallway on the first day of eighth grade, he knew they had to be friends. Todd was wearing a tee shirt for the thrash metal band Megadeth and a black leather jacket with tassels dangling off its sleeves. The tee shirt had the band’s logo printed over a skull with its mouth clamped shut and metal blinders over its eyes and ears. When Josh later discovered Todd played the guitar, he introduced himself in the lunchroom. “I want to start a band,” he said.

Todd was a year older than Josh. He’d been held back in fifth grade. His hair was longer than Josh’s too, which dangled in front of Josh’s eyes in the front and came down to the base of his neck in the back. Todd would make the perfect lead guitarist for Josh’s imaginary band. They became friends. They exchanged song lyrics and guitar riffs. They huffed freon out of Josh’s parents’ air conditioner.

“I’m going to turn you into the thief I should have become,” Todd said to Josh one day. They’d just stolen a pack of cigarettes from the local 7-11. Todd had bumped into the counter and knocked a pack of generic smokes back into the arcade room where Josh was already waiting. Josh pocketed the cigarettes, and they left separately.

Josh liked Todd’s plan about teaching him to become a thief. It might help him get back to California, but not to his dad’s place in Orange County. Josh wanted to run away to Hollywood when he turned 16. Todd agreed to go with him. Josh had a knack for drawing people into his fantasies. None of those ideas kept Josh from making out with Todd’s girlfriend though when Todd got locked up at the end of the school year for breaking probation.

Todd’s girlfriend, Tina, wasn’t allowed to have boys in her room, but that never kept Todd out of there. And she still took a long walk with Josh while Todd was locked up. The two of them weaved through back streets and trails to a wide open field. They couldn’t see the road in any direction. The grass grew tall all around them. It swayed beneath the springtime breeze.

“Are you ready?” Tina asked. Josh nodded. The sky was as blue as the ocean Josh remembered from Southern California. The clouds were blots on the endless expanse. Josh made up meanings for their various contortions.

Tina and Josh had already known one another for a couple years. They’d dated briefly in seventh grade, before Josh had even met Todd, but they’d never been as close as they were that afternoon. And they never were again. Both of them kept their mouths shut about it. Todd never found out.

Before Todd got out of the detention center, Josh started dating Carrie Condrey. Carrie was a year younger than Josh. But with her hair hanging almost to her waist, she’d matured early. And when Carrie revealed to Josh what her 17-year-old brother had already done to her, Josh was shaken.

“I’ve never told anybody about that before,” Carrie said.

Josh sat still in his chair in his mother’s den, his mouth agape, the telephone in his hand, the receiver to his ear.

“Are you okay?” Carrie asked.

The night outside the window to Josh’s right was black. He said, “Yeah. I guess I am.”

“Do you hate me?”

Josh’s face contorted. “No, I don’t hate you. I hate your brother,” he said. He couldn’t understand how one person could visit that kind of suffering upon another person. It opened up a brand new wound in Josh’s mind.

That summer, Josh lost his virginity to Carrie beside the television on the carpet upstairs in Josh’s home. The TV set was tuned into some cartoon, but neither of them were paying attention. Josh’s mother was downstairs cooking dinner. His stepdad was still at work.

That past weekend, Josh had convinced Carrie to let Tina sleep over at her place. Carrie and Tina weren’t friends. They weren’t enemies though either. Carrie agreed for Josh’s sake. He and Todd would sleep in the woods across the street. They could sneak in through Carrie’s bedroom window and visit the two girls in the middle of the night. It made Josh feel like he was in some old, youth rebellion movie from the 1970s, the kind of movie he would have watched on the floor of his mother’s den after his father first left them alone.

The four teenagers spent the afternoon listening to thrash metal albums Josh had copied Carrie from his own tapes and CDs on a boombox in the shed in Carrie’s backyard. That shed was where Carrie and Josh had often retreated during the summer. It was hot and sticky. It smelled of sweat, but it was the one place neither her older brothers nor her mother would discover them.

That afternoon, the four of them were all in there, smoking cigarettes and drinking a bottle of cheap wine. That evening, they all went to the mall together. That’s where Josh and Todd each bought a hit of acid. Then the four of them walked over to Dave’s, a pool hall across the street. Carrie and Tina convinced an older man to buy them a bottle of Everclear—190 proof grain alcohol—and a case of beer.

They drank the bottle that night. Carrie and Tina mixed it with soda. Josh and Todd drank it straight. As if ripping the flesh from their esophaguses, the Everclear burned their throats. With every sip, they closed their eyes and shook their heads. They put the acid—folded up in a little strip of paper—into a pack of cigarettes, which they forgot about until the next day. The remnants of that case of beer was what Todd was carrying in a duffel bag when he and Josh left Melody’s backyard the following morning.

“When we snuck in through my girlfriend’s window, we were already drunk.” Josh wasn’t looking at anybody in the meeting as he spoke, not the blond girl in the corner, not the preppy guy in a Polo shirt across from him, not even the tall gangly kid, sitting next to the preppy kid and smiling at Josh like he could relate. “We made too much noise and woke her mom up. Todd and I had to hide in the closet. When she came in, Carrie’s mom started screaming at her. As soon as her mom went back to bed, Carrie said we had to go. She was going to get in trouble.

“We went back out the window, and we were just wandering around the neighborhood, drinking beers, when this cop shined his light on us. The cop said something, but we didn’t listen. We took off running. We ditched the beer somewhere in the woods. We figured we could dig it back up once we were safe—”

A gruff voice broke into Josh’s monologue. “That’s enough,” some gray-haired old man said. “If we want to learn how to get drunk, we’ll call on you.”

Josh sat still. He narrowed his eyes. His cheeks burned red. His hands started trembling.

Everybody was staring at him. He’d had enough. He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t care if his mom wanted him to go to that AA meeting. He didn’t care if he wound up in a psych ward that night. He stood up. He grabbed his leather motorcycle jacket off the back of his chair. The snaps and buckles on it jingled and jangled. Everybody—the gray-haired old man, the blond girl, the preppy guy, the gangly kid, and the rest—stared at him. Josh grabbed his cigarettes and his Harley-Davidson zippo lighter off the floor. He stormed out the meeting into the night.

To read more of my novel, Here’s How You Fly, click here.