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crisp air bit into my face as I started picking up speed. The scenery was not as rich with color as I was used to, but it seemed fitting with its dusty browns and wet dirt roads. Passing houses one at a time, using telephone poles as mile markers.
    My throat burned each time I inhaled, and my chest throbbed from the cold. My skin started to prickle and I knew it would just be minutes now before I got adjusted to the cold. My ears and face were numb as I ran. I ran faster . Faster. Until my heart was pounding so hard I thought it might come out of my chest.
    Would that be so bad? Sometimes I wasn’t sure. Would death be worse than my life right now? Running helped clear my mind. I could run for hours. Constantly hoping I could outrun the misery and hate that drugged my veins. Running until it hurt to think. Running until I could feel .
    To me, “feeling” was better than the alternative. The general numbness that often overtook my natural state was deadly. It allowed me to hurt myself and that was never good. Trust me; you do not want to feel nothing .
     
     
    3
     
    “Hey, Dad. Going to Justin’s.”
    Dad was, as usual, slumped in the tattered orange recliner with a beer in his hand, watching a football game.
    “Okay. Have fun, Bud.” Bud Light being his beer of choice.
    His eyes never flinched away from the tube. Our relationship no longer was being Dad and Son but more like roommates… no, friends. He no longer kept tabs on me. I think he felt like he no longer had the right.
    I used to admire him. He loved baseball so I practiced hours a day until I loved baseball. He wore ball caps and I wore ball caps. He hated the video camera so I avoided it. He was everything I wanted to be and more. He was my hero.
    Now, all I felt was sadness when I looked at him. All hope lost. No ambition. Broken, especially his heart; and like Humpty Dumpty, I didn’t know if he’d ever be the same again.
    I put on my plaid wool-lined jacket, pulled down on Dad’s old Padres baseball cap—San Diego was where he grew up and I was raised before we moved to Tahoe—stuck my hands in my pockets and headed over to my best friend Justin’s place to hang out.
     
    Justin Knoxx and I were pretty much like brothers. We grew up together in San Diego before my family moved to Lake Tahoe when I was eight. We did everything together…well, mostly he got himself into trouble and I was right there beside him trying to help him out of it. Somehow I always managed to get us out scot-free. Except for the time he got into his dad’s new Mini Cooper and pretended he was a racecar driver, accidently started the ignition and backed into the garage door. I couldn’t get him out of that one, but I did try hiding him in my room for a few hours.
    A week ago he convinced me to steal some booze from the local drug store. Justin flirted with the cashier, twice his age, distracting her with his charm (and horrible impersonation of a French accent), while I slid a bottle or two in my backpack. He was good with the ladies, and the people that worked there were usually young, bored and ignorant. Plus, Justin always got what he wanted. He was a charmer when he wanted to be. We joined up with a few other curious (and titillated) schoolmates, sneaked the vodka and rum over to his room where we sat in a loose circle and fired up the Nintendo 64, passing the bottle around between rounds. Each time sipping cautiously, grimacing, coughing, then qualifying our reaction with some canned, masculine marketing phrase such as “yep, it sure goes down smooth.” Grunts of approval each time. All eyes glazed, all eyes on the screen. We kept this up until we were too trashed to continue the video game (it didn’t take long). We turned on some music, stretched out on the beige shag carpet, and stared at the ceiling distorting and floating above our watery pinwheel eyes. Man, we sure felt cool .
    Justin was an only child whose Mom was nearing the age of sixty. His dad was even