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shouldn’t, and a seemingly endless stream of whiskey-infused horrible gray shit comes pouring out of his mouth and over the edge of the stone balcony, down onto the grass below. The smell hits my nostrils like acid. I smoke harder.
    When he’s done puking, Casey sits up on the ledge a little ways from me and says, “Thanks. I owe you one for that.” His torso hangs like an unused marionette.
    I just nod and light my smoke. “Why do the cops hate you guys so much?”
    He shrugs. “We leave candle wax and trash everywhere. That and, y’know, the drinking and pot smoking. Mostly, it’s just our healthy disrespect for authority.”
    I nod again, still a little miffed. “I don’t think I like the police.”
    “Good job being a teenager there,” he snorts.
    My mind catches up with the rest of my system, and my train of thought comes chugging back to life. “Is that the heavy shit you were talking about?”
    His head wheels upward, face scrunched. “Pardon?”
    “You said you were dealing with ‘heavy shit.’ Organizing this get-together, the cops—that it?”
    His body shakes with lazy chuckles. “No, no, I have…sort of personal issues.”
    “What do you mean?”
    His eyes focus on some point in the air, and he opens and closes his mouth, like a fish, before he hooks onto the words he needs. “Have you ever just…have you ever gotten angry to, like, the point where it takes you over?”
    Wham . I’m interested. “Yes.”
    “Well, I have that, but not…not like, tantrums. I have this…this uncontrollable thing in me that just cuts loose when I get angry or depressed enough, like this violent…beast inside of me. Like my Mr. Hyde, only worse, only it’s not just evil, it’s me, it’s got my morals and intelligence. I don’t become someone else. I just become a perverted version of myself.” He shrugs and snorts out a shoelace of vomit-snot. “I know this doesn’t make any sense. It’s named the black…. Well, that’s what I call it, anyway. And it sort of took over my life tonight, and so I tried to drown it in booze. That normally works.” He looks at me as though he’s explained this too many times, and he’s used to the standard response. “It’s okay if you don’t get it.”
    “No,” I say softly, “no, no, wait.”
     
    My confession ends around the same time the smokes run out. I’ve told him things I realize I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t in my control. I told him about my father, about the few girls I’d tried to be with, and about the violence. The violence was the meat of it, the part full of yelling and swearing and pulling at my hair. But he listened. He heard me, and not like Randall. There wasn’t a lot of “sure” and “yuh-huh.” None of the wise, thoughtful nods that suggested he was thinking deeply on the subject. He listened to me like I was telling him about himself, and then he described his problem, his situation, which was my own. For the first time, both problems were the same. For the first time in…in forever, I guess, I was talking to somebody who thought of the venom as a reality. Imagine that. Imagine what it’s like to finally find somebody who understands not what you’re getting at, but exactly what you’re talking about , after eleven fucking years of people either not giving a shit or screwing up the message along the way. It’s like everyone on Earth has always been blind except for you, and then one day, someone walks up to you and asks you how you feel about the color blue. I couldn’t not talk.
    And now we’re sitting on the ledge and looking out at the tunnel. We’ve both gone silent now; we have been for about ten, fifteen minutes; a little embarrassed on top of all our massive relief. It’s as though we’re naked for the first time in our lives, proud of each other for facing up to ourselves. I feel more comfortable than I’ve felt with anyone else in a long time, except maybe my mom, but that’s different, because with my