 
The Exodus

Book One of the Ved Ludo Series

K. Austin

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or events is purely coincidental.

The Exodus

Copyright 2011 by K. Austin

Smashwords Edition

For Levi.

##### Proof that beautiful things can come from ugliness.

#####

#####

##### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

After a year and a half of work, there are many to thank.

I suppose that Pearl Jam, my old friends, should be first. Not only did they help shape my generation, they guided me, like a hand on my shoulder, through the most difficult times in my life. Some people cling to the Bible in times of difficulty. I clung to the lyrics, the pulsating rhythms of a band that played pure emotion, throughout my youth and continue to do so as an adult. I have found shelter in the recordings of live shows, listening over and over again to the lyrics that have adapted, the way I have, throughout the years.

There are a couple of other bands and musicians that helped produce the brilliant thoughts and emotions needed to write such a touching epic ... Joe Purdy, Widespread Panic, Chevelle, The Cave Singers, Armin van Buuren, Gary Go, Joshua Bell, The Features, BRMC ... thank you.

On a beautiful sunny day, I rode around with Mark Poole, telling him stories. They flowed out of me like a tireless mountain spring, having found the perfect listener. He never failed me. Mark, your persistence and encouragement meant more to me than I'll ever be able to express. You have been a friend to me, a listener, and a constant supporter. I am grateful.

My friends and employers, Glenn and Cathy (Shoe) Stroud, who have proven to me that there is goodness left in this world, how do I thank you? How do I impress upon you how grateful I am for all you have done for me? Every day I walk into an environment of respect and trust. People often have the ability to be good-hearted, but rarely seize it, whereas Glenn lives and breathes it every single day. I am profoundly thankful to you both.

To my wife, who has had the courage and fortitude to not read these pages, thank you. My life has come full circle, perhaps in ways I never could have imagined, because of your constant love and support. We wake in the mountains every morning, feeling and seeing some of our dreams already coming true ... You've learned to tolerate my bullshit, to keep me in line, and to let me breathe when you know I am without breath. I am so very proud of your pursuits, seeing you accomplish your goals that, still to this day, impress me. Thank you for recognizing the hours I withdrew into these pages as time needed to make me complete, rather than something I chose to do without you. You, my beautiful wife, have been the foundation that I have sought all my life.

My longest standing friend ever, Joe Liley, know that no one has been a more powerful force in urging me to explore my talents. You are my relentless friend. Over the years, you have refused to let me get reclusive, never giving up on me, never letting the world pull me under. No friend has ever loved me so relentlessly. Through you, I have been given the one thing I could never seem to find: validation.

Cherra Wilson, you were the one who saved me from throwing it all away. Sometimes, the perfect audience is the one who's been sitting right there all along. There would be no book without you. What is the price of honesty? A compass always points north, and Mrs. Wilson always gives it to me straight. Thank you, Wilson.

Sara Kramer, my old friend, who not only read the pages before anyone else, but who demanded I talk to her about them. You left no stone unturned, searching for inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and blatant lies. Once, you wanted to be part of something important, and now you and Jim really are. Congratulations, old friend.

Diane Kraft, Nancy Howard, Traci Schadler, Cristine Hansen, Della Wilson, Anne Mariano, Greg Montgomery, Marissa Gettman, Phil and Jen Putre, and TW Ruff ... thank you for reading when things were rough, unedited, and certainly uncensored.

Krakauer, Steinbeck, Eggers, DeMille, McCort, I tried not to plagiarize, I really did. My heroes, my idols, let's have coffee sometime? Call me when you are in town?

Even though Starbucks has still not allowed tattoos on its employees (which is archaic and ridiculous from a "progressive" company like Starbucks), I'd like to thank Starbucks on Belleview and Santa Fe, The Tattered Cover on Lucent, Wild Blue Coffee at the Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch, Starbucks on Wildcat and Red Cedar, Safeway on Mineral, Centennial Park on Federal and Decatur, and my trusty FedEx truck, 76218 ... Thank you for letting me loiter for hours at a time, occupying an enormous amount of table space, in order to write these pages. Almost the entirety of this book was written in my FedEx Ground uniform, and I would be neglecting an important part of this if I didn't thank FedEx Ground for a job that I love.

If you live in the South Denver Metro area, especially Sheridan, Englewood, Littleton or Highlands Ranch, I have delivered your package. You have looked at me and my tattoos, and made assumptions about me, but none of you guessed I was what I am.

Your FedEx, UPS, and USPS men want only three things from you:

1. Not to ask what's in the box.

2. Not to ask who it's from.

3. Not to flip the scanner around. Sign the damned thing the way we hand it to you!

Frank Radke, it's never too late to redeem yourself. Months after writing the last sentence of the story, you come along and read it with enthusiasm, reestablishing the excitement I had for this story. Had you done so originally, I would have been cheated this newfound faith. I know what you are capable of, and I am excited for you to prove it to yourself. You are a good man.

And Kathy Markley ... my editor, designer, critic, and friend, what do I say? How can I tell you that I know the burden this project has been, the countless hundreds of hours that you have spent? How can I repay you for all the things that you are? Days and nights, when I have been writing, I have thought about you, sitting alone, out of cell service (in the middle of town), correcting the countless errors ... knowing that you too were out there reading this, understanding this. Every sentence, every idea, every theme ... no matter how small, you understood.

For years, we had been passing in the mornings, a smile, some pleasantries, but nothing to link us ... I find it ironic that a book that touches on the tentative nature of friendship, on best friends turning into old friends, turning into memories, could have brought me such a powerful and selfless friend ... I found an ally in you. I found a creative and expressive woman, hiding among the faces of people I saw daily, but never had the time to know. You decided that this rambling story was worthy of the lonely hours you spent making sense of the chaos.

I know what you are Kathy. I know the endless potential that you have, and I am privileged to be worth the time you have spent. I knew that you cared from the beginning, but I understand now that you will see this through, and for that, you have my eternal commitment, though I am certain that I will never be able to repay you. No one could ever deserve the honor of turning over a manuscript into your care, but many will.

I will struggle to be the kind of friend to you that you have been to me, for the rest of my life.

Mom, don't read this ...
Chapter 1

#### In the Navy

"You Ludo?" the man asked.

I knew instantly who he was; I mean, how many people walk around this world wearing white from top to bottom? Even his fucking shoes were white. I was a little surprised to be meeting him here. We had agreed to meet today, but the meeting was supposed to be in the student parking lot after school when the crowds were at a minimum. My master plan was to delay the process of getting from my locker to the student parking lot in order to give the seniors and my classmates as much time as possible to get gone. Not that I was necessarily embarrassed to be joining the Navy—I wasn't, but I didn't want to be a walking advertisement for them either. Until this point, I'd said little or nothing to anyone close to me about the military; instead, I'd just worn a smug grin as if whatever I had planned was unexpected and prestigious. Now standing in the hall with "Casper," my plans were blatant to the few people who cared enough to spot me standing there.

I certainly had not expected to be called out of class by the principal's office during my last period in order to rendezvous with the recruiter in the middle of the hallway thirty seconds before the final bell rang. Any second the bell was going to ring, and the hall would be flooded with studen—

BEEEEEEEEEP, the bell rang.

Instantly, like the mass evacuation of a burning building, every door in the entire hall opened. Students poured into the hallway in a wave of laughter. A rumbling sound of three hundred voices blended into one steady sound of the human vocal. So much for best-laid plans, I thought.

"Yeah, I'm Ludo. You must be Mr. Triplett, sir?" I asked, eyes darting around the swelling mass of faces filling the hallway as the sound of locker doors slamming reverberated through the narrow corridor.

"Chief Petty Officer Triplett; I work for a living," he said with a self-satisfied chuckle that sounded well rehearsed.

I looked at him quizzically to let him know that I didn't get the joke.

"Sir is what they call officers," he clarified.

I still didn't get the joke, but moving on I said, "I thought you were going to meet me in the parking lot after I got out."

He looked as if he'd anticipated my response when he answered with, "Yeah, I was going to, but I thought maybe you'd want your friends to know the decision you've made. Maybe some of them would be interested in talking with me too," he said, eyebrows rising into little rainbow-like arches.

Oooooh, so that's how this was going to go? As devious as my plan had been to stall my meeting, he'd gone one step further as to anticipate my maneuver and counter with this? I'd almost felt guilty about my attempt to keep this as low key as possible; I hadn't understood until this very second that he must be used to this sort of behavior. It was now clear that this was an opportunity for him to meet some unforeseen quota, and he was planning on me being the tool he used in order to do so.

"Uh ... I don't know about all that. I mean, I don't know of anyone off hand who's waiting for a recruiter to show up at school or anything ..." My eyes shifted, announcing a topic change. "I uh ... left all my stuff in my last period class; I gotta go get it. You want to meet me by my car in five minutes?" I asked, hoping he'd take the hint but knowing he wouldn't.

Just as I'd assumed, he replied quickly with, "I'll walk with ya," and I thought he said it as if I should be honored to have the privilege.

"OK ..." I said, drawing out the "K" as far as I could get away with before sounding bluntly rude.

I had called the Navy recruiter on Monday after school and announced immediately and vigorously, "I want to join the Navy," when Chief Petty Officer Triplett had answered the phone with a monotonous-yet-forceful, "Navy Recruiter."

He'd asked me a couple of questions to see if this were a prank call. After I explained that I'd "always wanted to be in the Navy, but I wasn't graduating for another year," I added a purposeful "is there anything I can do to lock myself in now?" He was more than happy to help me fulfill my obvious lifelong wishes.

"You'll be the easiest recruit I've ever gotten through," he joked, leaving me to ponder what that was supposed to mean. Does he normally argue people into joining? Does he offer them girls and cars like a college football program? Was it a numbers game to him? Did he have to put X amount of people into the Navy every week, month, year?

I'd always assumed that people wanted to go into the service and the recruiter's job was to screen out the losers—to tell them something like, "Sorry, Lad. You aren't what we're looking for." That apparently wasn't the case. He'd told me over the phone that if I wanted to go, he'd be happy to send me on my way. All I needed to do was meet up with him and sign some informal paperwork.

"My mother isn't too keen on me signing any papers just yet; she wants me to look around before I offer up any stool samples or anything. If you try and get me to sign something, she's gonna be pissed. You'll need to talk to her."

"Oh yeah, I understand that completely. It's nothing like you're thinking. It's just a promissory note saying that if the Navy puts the next year into your development, both physically and mentally, that you'll happily ship off when it's your time. It's pretty informal, just basically assuring me that I'm not wasting my time." His eyes stayed on mine, looking for deception.

I considered that. Firstly, my mother neither got involved with decisions I made nor consequences that befell those decisions. She had not dictated these terms to me at all, but I thought it best to let the guy think that someone was watching out for me. He would be less likely to pull any bullshit if he thought I had protective parents watching his every move. She wasn't even home, nor would she be for three more days. I hoped he wouldn't call my bluff and suggest that we go talk to her immediately. Secondly, wasting his time? He'd met me five minutes ago and was already asking me to pimp myself out for him by reeling in my eligible friends. I hardly thought that the Navy was concerned with wasting his time.

CPO Triplett still had me sign that promissory note almost immediately after we'd walked down to my last class and retrieved my books. While I was still in the classroom gathering my stuff up, I noticed Mrs. Alston looking the two of us over. Then Triplett mentioned that I'd need the pen I was packing up to sign that informal note. I guess he wasn't too afraid of mommy after all. That was the second plan of mine he'd foiled in the last eight minutes. I'd need to step it up with this guy.

When we finally walked back to the parking lot, the note he presented to me looked like it'd been dictated by a ten year old. I wasn't signing anything for the courts. This was about him making me psychologically sign the line. He just wanted me to make a commitment, so I did.

The gist of the note was that I was promising to put my full effort into the training that I received; I promised to attend the biweekly meetings held at the Harrisburg Navy Recruiting Center (HNRC) when available; and finally, that I promised to represent the Navy with enthusiasm, including speaking to my peers about the opportunity that has been afforded me.

I signed the paper, thinking to myself—well, you don't have to worry too much about breaking this commitment. Not that I'm Matlock or anything, but this was certainly not a binding agreement. This thing wouldn't hold up in any court of law. For dramatic reasons (and because I could speculate that this guy took himself seriously), I sighed with a slight shake of the head, as if I had just taken a serious step toward my dreams and made a hefty promise in doing so.

Not to let me down with a lack of over-exaggerated showmanship, Chief Petty Officer Triplett snapped off a proper and most embarrassing salute right there in the student parking lot. My eyes wandered to the lot full of dilapidated cars and the kids still loitering around who drove them. Sure enough, too many of them were looking at me, smiling, and mocking Triplett's salute behind his back. He noticed my eyes wandering about and corrected me with a drill sergeant like, "Eyes front!"

Jesus, could this get any worse? When my eyes, which felt like they would melt into my hot and suddenly red face, again met his, he offered me a handshake and a boisterous, "Welcome to the Navy, Seaman Recruit Ludo."

With that over, he immediately began hounding me about trying to recollect any friends I might have who could possibly want to talk with him. I could see the disappointment flushing his face when I had no sacrificial lambs to offer up, but he recovered and did his best to act like that was OK. He was working hard at pretending he'd be satisfied with just me.

"Well, when people hear about the commitment you've made to the Navy, they may want to talk to you about it. If that's the case, I want you to tell them how excited you are and give them my number if they have any questions, any questions at all. I'd be happy to talk to anyone about his or her career in the Navy. You'll be seeing a lot of me over the next year, and they'll be seeing me with you. They'll know you're with me, and I'm with you. Don't be surprised if people start coming out of the woodwork asking you questions. You just tell them what you know and leave the rest to me. People will be treating you with more respect once they get used to seeing us together. That ... I can promise you."

This guy was kidding, right?

Before he left me in the parking lot, to face the snickers of my peers that afternoon, he instructed me to call his office next Monday and get directions to the HNRC. There was a meeting on Tuesday night, and I was expected to be there.

"It's nothing too formal, just all the guys in the Delayed Entry Program from around the area gather up there. We watch videos, have guest speakers, and practice drill and ceremony. There will be some food, plenty of guys to talk to, oh ... and some ladies." When he said that, he smiled suggestively as if that alone were enough to encourage me to go. "Tell your parents it's a two hour deal from 1730 til 1930 hours. Dress casually and be ready to participate in some good ol' Navy fun."

I wondered what I had gotten myself into this time. Was I making a mistake? I told myself to stay positive and to remember that I was using this as an escape more than anything, and as long as I got out of Blythe, Pennsylvania, it would be fine.

Tuesday night I borrowed my mother's 1983 Toyota Corolla and headed up to the recruitment center for "some good ol' Navy fun." As I drove the thirty or so miles to Harrisburg, I was nervous about what would be awaiting me when I got there. I reassured myself that it would be OK; that I would fit in just fine. Hell, maybe I'd even make some really cool friends who would end up shipping out with me, but I decided that my delayed entry was probably longer than most people's. I decided that I should have called the other branches of the military before I got to Triplett. But, oh well, it was done now. I would survive the Navy just as well as I would survive anything else ...

If nothing else, I figured that I would get a taste of what the Navy would be like. I still had to take my ASVAB—a military test taken before enlistment that highlights your strengths (more accurately eliminates positions that you are too dumb for) and gives you a list of jobs that you are eligible for. I didn't know what I wanted to do in the Navy anyway, so I figured that when the results came back and all I had was a list of three things that I was eligible to do, that would help me in making the decision. Maybe I would get some ideas at the meetings over the next year. Hell, why not? I'll try something new, like staying positive ... Maybe that would prove to be something that came naturally to me later on in life.

When I got to the recruitment center, I parked my mom's dilapidated piece of shit Corolla in the back of the parking lot. I had a one-hitter pipe in her car that I was actually bold enough to leave in there full time. It was a replica of a cigarette lighter and actually fit nicely into the outlet. Since my mother neither smoked cigarettes nor knew from firsthand experience what marijuana smelled like, I figured it unlikely that she would ever discover it. This was before cell phones and iPods, mind you, so with the exception of her Rescue Squad green light that she occasionally plugged in while hustling to an emergency situation, I had never seen her use it.

After the separation from my father, my mother was desperately looking for a hobby. She needed something to do that made her feel needed and connected. This isn't odd behavior. Most people look to busy themselves when faced with a tragedy, and my mother (the perpetual philanthropist) decided on helping people. This didn't shock us much, but what did surprise us was how serious she got about her volunteer time.

Blythe, Rockfield, and Logan, the three towns that populated the Red Oak School District with children, were all small and sparsely populated and therefore without a for-profit ambulance service. It was handled by volunteers, as was the fire department. The only police in town were state cops—the town being, again, too small for a town police department.

My mother was constantly on call and when the phone would ring at home she was ecstatic to answer it, foregoing the mandatory, "Hello, this is the Ludo residence. My name is ..." (fill in the blank with your given first name), for a hasty, "Hello, this is Cheryl." She demanded proper phone etiquette from the children, but when she was expecting a callout, she dismissed the rules.

"Hey, Ma. You didn't answer the phone properly."

"Listen, guys, there could be an emergency, and if that's the case, I need to get the message as quickly as possible. Every second counts to these people. They need me to get to them and if that means answering the phone improperly, I'm willing to accept that." I could tell by her tone that she was serious. Not only about cheating the phone rules, but also about the statement she had made.

We'd never heard her speak of herself in a meaningful way, so when she did, we shut our mouths, and we were happy for her. She'd been through the wringer with my father. She'd never had much self-esteem (he'd seen to that), and this new mom who was taking herself seriously, as her own entity, was touching to us.

Dad had moved to Castle Park, which was thirteen miles away and outside of our school district. The distance allowed him enough privacy that he could enjoy the secretive live-in situation with his new girlfriend. My mother, on the other hand, had been forced to stay right there in the house they'd shared when the marriage fell apart. She'd dropped out of college to provide the kind of home he'd expected of her, so she had no means of putting a different roof over our heads.

She'd taken a job at Eggs, a local eggs and coffee diner that was one of only two choices for breakfast in Blythe. It was definitely the more popular of the two. Eggs was a tiny joint, with cramped tables and chairs, capable of sitting maybe twenty-five people at a time. There were always people standing awkwardly near the door waiting to be seated and watching you eat your food in anticipation of taking a seat at your table when you finished eating. The small, dark building smelled of greasy bacon, coffee, and cigarettes—a combination that still makes my mouth water.

Eggs also happened to be the place where my father took us to breakfast on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, which might seem like an awkward situation with my mother working there; but it really wasn't. Not for my sister and I anyway. Mom worked the smoking section, which was only divided from the rest of the place by a four-foot wall and a sign that read Smoking. The room being maybe 600 feet square made the non-smoking section pointless; we all smoked cigarettes when eating at Eggs, either directly or otherwise.

My mother was an instant hit among the gentlemen of the diner, and before too long I think my father was nervous about going in there. In the smoking section, the construction workers gathered to drink their coffee and shit-talk each other. They were the burly, rough and tough guys who were well liked and well respected, and one thing that they all had in common was that they wanted to sleep with my mother. That sounds crazy to me now, but at the time I was not paying attention to them as individuals. Instead, I saw them as a group—the same group I had known all my life. These were regular guys who worked like men in the sunshine and in the dead of winter. They were hardened excavators, plumbers, and electricians with attractive wives and big, lifted trucks that rumbled when they accelerated. They'd smoke cigarettes and talk amongst each other while scanning Eggs for enemies and beautiful women. My mother fit the definition of the latter, and they were more than cordial to her in their pursuit of her by leaving twenties for tips and always wanting a hug before they left in a pack to go out and begin their day.

I'd known most of these guys for all my life. Some of them went to our church and others were on the school board of administrators. A few of them were so successful that my little league baseball teams had born their business name in a tacky fashion like "Miller Plumbing Tigers." To me, they were just friendly guys who seemed to like my mom (and me, for that matter). When they would gather up at the register to pay, they would blatantly ignore my father, rough up my hair, and say something like, "Hey, Shell. You have a good day now. Be a good boy, ya hear?"

"Yes, sir," I'd say, grateful for the attention.

For my mother it was obviously more complex than what I was aware of. These guys wanted her, and she had to be careful with what ideas she put in their heads. She'd always been a Christian woman, living a clean life of morals; but now she was no longer Mrs. Ludo. Instead, she was just Cheryl—the brunette whose husband was an adulterer.

I cannot swear to the fact that they were eyeballing my father from the corners of the smoking section, letting him know that they knew what he was and what he'd done; but I am fairly certain of that. When the news of his infidelity spread through town, no one was spared the details, and with my beautiful mother in their midst every morning, it wasn't something that had disappeared from their memory.

She ended up dating a few of them in a time I consider to be the weirdest time of my life. My mother was no longer listening to Christian contemporary; instead, she was listening to bands of the day like Wham and Aerosmith. That was the only period in my life when I had to try and think of my mother as a regular person, not the do-gooder-Christian woman she had always been and would return to being in a year's time.

She was dating men (four of them over the course of two years) who were wealthy, young, and handsome. I was proud of her for the caliber of man she landed, but I somehow knew that she wasn't satisfied with them. I don't know what the story was for sure, but I know that one man in particular almost got her to accept his proposal for marriage. Had it not been for my sister and me threatening mutiny by saying we would go live with our father, she might have.

She was still working mornings at Eggs when she started volunteering for the Rescue Squad. She worked from 5 a.m. until 11 a.m. at Eggs and then came home for a couple hours before she went on call for The Squad. There were few calls that warranted the use of the bright green light that plugged into the cigarette lighter (which allowed her to abandon all traffic signals and rules of driving). It just sat waiting for action on the dashboard, but when she did get the call, she wasn't afraid to drive her Corolla (affectionately named Betsy) at full bore.

The light was a hand-me-down from the guy who'd given up his position on The Squad. Family issues, or something, had caused him to have to relinquish his cherished position, and when he heard that my newly divorced mother was taking the vacant position, he was elated. He'd given her the light as a token of empathy and as a gesture of power for her to use. She'd raved to my sister and me how genuinely kind Mr. Tomlink had been in giving it to her, as she couldn't afford to buy one on her own.

The light did empower my dear mother. When it was on and her car was careening through the neighborhood on her way to an emergency, she was at her happiest. She was needed. Someone needed my mother in a way that she could understand, in the way she'd always been needed—for care and prayer. She would visit people in the hospital, make cookies and bread, let people's dogs out, and shuttle their kids to school. See, for my mother the emergency was just the beginning of what she could do. Her real efforts took place days after the emergency when everyone else had moved on and forgotten the victim. She didn't know how to take; she only knew how to give.

The hand-me-down spinning light that allowed her to plow recklessly through the one intersection in town had a small defect, but my mother never realized it. Originally, it was manufactured to be mounted to the roof of the car, but the magnetic base that secured it to the metal top of the Corolla had fallen off years ago. Roof mounted lights and dash mounted lights have only one difference in design—a polished chrome plate installed in the light providing a blocking of one fourth of the 360 degree spin cycle. When it's mounted on the roof, you want 360 degrees of spin, but when it's mounted on the dash, you want to have it shining everywhere except directly in your face.

This particular light was a roof-mount light being used as a dash light and at approximately two spins a second, my mother looked like she was moving in quick jolting segments as if under a strobe light. When her car went tearing off through the neighborhood, everyone who saw her pass watched her face with a striking curiosity as it reflected so brightly when the light crossed its path. It had to have been absolutely blinding, but she never said a word about it. It was her gift, the passing of Mike's torch, and my mother was not one to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. However, with mother's penchant for speeding when said light was employed, my sister and I were sure that she would eventually need a rescue herself from a ditch somewhere between our house and The Squad garage.

As I sat in my mom's car at the HNRC contemplating lighting up the weed in order to take the edge off, I realized that this might not be the right time and place for such mischievous activity. Eventually deciding against it, I stepped out and noticed that there were an extraordinary number of cars in the parking lot. They were all shit-boxes on wheels, mine included, with rusted panels and donuts for tires—the normal consequences of Pennsylvania state's inhumane weather. I could tell by the number of Navy bumper stickers that these were, indeed, recruit's cars. Clever slogans like Future Navy Seal and My Brother is a Seaman were just the beginning of the ridiculous paraphernalia. The more overtly embarrassing slogans were embroidered onto the back of the abundant royal blue leather Navy jackets I saw walking toward the entrance from all directions.

My nervousness came flooding back as more cars pulled into the parking lot. I was not nervous about what challenges awaited me inside, but what the people in there were like. I saw too many military boots being worn over tight, tapered, bleach-spotted jeans, and in most cases I could see cigarettes tucked into the crevice between the top of their ears and their skull. It looked like a Quiet Riot concert in bad blue leather jackets and black denim.

Oh, God, what have I done? was all I could think as I recognized the people from outside the building immediately. I did not recognize them as intimate friends or acquaintances but as the kids from Red Oak who left school after second period to go to Trade School in some unknown location. They were the kids who had been a part of our everyday school life all through the elementary years—playing on the playground, talking and joking with me as if we were from the same planet, and then mysteriously disappearing when we got into the seventh grade. They remained in our yearbooks, but rather than having a standard picture in alphabetical order like the rest of us, they were instead leaning up against a brick wall, cigarette hanging from their lips. Other than that, these people had all but disappeared from our lives, choosing welding classes or auto mechanics instead of prom night and homecoming rallies.

I immediately re-contemplated the pot/no pot dilemma and decided that maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all. I quickly got back into my car, pulled the one-hitter out of the plug, unscrewed the lid off the bowl end, and examined the weed I'd filled it with at least a month earlier. It was just swag, shitty weed even for swag, and as I stared at it, I could see that there were seeds in the bowl along with the leafy contents. I must have loaded the damn thing in the dark to have been so careless, but at this venue, I could care less. Nic, my best friend and neighbor, always got pissed when I'd load seeds into a bowl, constantly telling me, "Smoking seeds will make you sterile, bro." Sterile? Who gave a fuck about that?

I lit the bowl of seeds with the cigarette lighter I always carried around with me. I don't know how I came to carry this lighter all the time. I didn't carry anything else of importance; but my Camel Trench lighter was always in my right front pocket. I didn't even carry a wallet because, other than my driver's license, there was nothing to put in it. The lighter was special; I'd found it in a house that Nic and I had vandalized a year back. I know how immature that sounds, and the truth is, it was immature, but rest easy—justice was served. We were found out and forced to pay all damages. The lighter became an important trinket to me; it was something I felt almost destined to find. It was the first real sense of identity I'd ever had, and like most identities it came to be without any effort; I'd just happened to look down and there it was.

I'd always wanted a great knife to go with it. The lighter, being from the early eighties, was worn and tarnished; it was perfect in a broken-in sort of way. I repeatedly asked for pocket knives for birthdays, Christmas, and gift-giving holidays (in our house Easter was such a day) but was always disappointed when I'd open the box to find a Buck knockoff or a shiny new fixed blade knife boasting "China" near where the blade and handle joined. It got to be where my family assumed I was a collector of knives, as I never told them my true intention, and for years to follow, a knife became the perfect stand-by gift to me. For the same reasons, it was also the perfect standby gift to people from me. Once I discovered re-gifting, I no longer took the knife I'd received as a gift out of the box or plastic wrap. I'd just look at the knife, decide it wasn't the perfect Trench lighter companion, and toss it in my drawer to be given to another later. Oh, there were a variety of knives, from folding pocket knives to knives with pewter skulls, witches, demons or lightning bolts affixed to the handle, and blades designed to look like they came from the dark ages. What I wanted was what I couldn't find, and only later in life would I realize that what I really wanted was a circumstance, not the right purchase, to provide the right blade. The Trench lighter had found me, and with a total cost to me of $1,234.87 for my share of the damages, it was a priceless treasure.

I inhaled the smoke. Damn that's hot. The pipe was only an inch or so long, so inhaling smoke when a lighter flame is no further than a quarter inch away from my lips made for hot-fuckin'-lungs. All that stood between my mouth and the flame was a bowl of shitty weed and seeds, the screen from the bathroom sink, and a tiny piece of Taiwanese plastic. The positive side is that the bowl was so wide and loose that the thing hit like a four-foot bong, so five minutes and three pulls later, I was completely out of my face. I had sworn I'd only take one, but you know how that goes ... one turns into two ...

I pulled the Visine out of my leather man-bag filled with Navy paperwork and miscellaneous necessities, tipped my head back, and with precision and speed plopped two drops onto the pupil of each eye. I slipped the Visine back into its particular pocket in the bag without looking as I held my eyes up and open allowing the fluid to do its magic. I tossed a mint into my mouth and with that I was off across the parking lot to reconnect with those friends I'd lost in the seventh grade.

Despite finding inside exactly what I had anticipated, I found myself rather enjoying the meeting. Yeah, I had little in common with the majority of recruits, but their jovial excitement for the Navy even took effect on me.

I began to wonder if my stepdad's leather jacket would fit me, and if he'd notice it missing should I borrow it for the next meeting. I'd always looked ridiculous in a leather jacket, but so did these assholes, and they didn't seem to care about that, so why should I?

Triplett introduced me around to the gang and privately told me interesting, yet unflattering, facts about each individual I had the pleasure of meeting. These were things he shouldn't have been telling me, but he was obviously making a point of taking me into his confidence. This always concerned me about people, as you'd have to be a fool to assume that they aren't doing the same gossiping about you behind your back. However, with Triplett I didn't think so. I think he was reaching out to me. I think he saw me a little differently than those other guys; he wanted to befriend me, and to really have me to himself. I considered that for a minute while he talked quietly to me about the people surrounding us. In doing so, I completely lost his voice to my thoughts about his tactics.

Triplett moved on eventually, talking to the other recruits for a while, and I mingled around deciding that if I was going to be social, I'd better do it while I was still high. I ended up eating most, if not all, of the tiny wieners from a crockpot that one of the other recruiter's wives had prepared. I drank six Big K colas and even browsed through the Navy paraphernalia that was stacked in tiny heaps on pretty much any flat surface large enough to hold a stack.

After a bit, he called us together to sit in the makeshift classroom. Folding chairs were positioned in a large multi-row semicircle focused on a white screen and an overhead projector. He introduced himself and the other two recruiters present, and he began a talk on the wonderful benefits of being in the Navy.

I turned my attention to the faces of the people in the room with me. There were both guys and girls, though their attire was much the same. I'd never seen so much black denim gathered in a semicircle, and the redundancy and simplicity of their attire was mind blowing. Leather footwear, denim jeans, cotton T-shirts (preferably black), denim or leather jackets (must have Asian style embroidery), metallic neck chain (no precious metals, please), hair gel/hairspray, and blond, burgundy or black coloring in said locks. As I began to try and disprove my theory that they were all from the same truck driving school, I was shocked to realize that some of them looked younger than me.

I was wearing my classic "Steal Your Face" T-shirt, well-worn khakis with some almost unnoticeable stains, and a pair of Dr. Martens eight hole boots (brown of course, black is not my color); comparatively, I looked like a college student in here. I noticed another guy wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt too, and a girl who was somewhat attractive sitting on the exact opposite side of the room from me. She was wearing a well put together outfit—jean skirt slit to that perfect spot between a woman's knee and ass, and a peasant top with a wonderfully low "V" coming down and just barely touching the clasp between the cups of her bra. She was shoeless and wore shoulder length blond hair that shined like a shampoo model's locks under the Government Issue fluorescent lighting.

Once I came to notice her, I couldn't stop noticing her; and before long she'd noticed I'd been noticing her and readjusted her seat, turning slightly away from me. Bitch.

Triplett was still preaching the good word, and now more of the brown-nosers seated in the front were involved in a question and answer forum. I had no interest in the conversation, but I probably should have since this was my first introduction to the Navy. I was focused solely on the blonde who was still actively avoiding me. Being shunned is never a good feeling, but being rejected in this room was particularly rough. It just wasn't decent of her; I deserved at least a nod of approval—a nod of appreciation for my khakis and the fact that I wasn't wearing black boots—if not a quick hand-job.

Just before the meeting was to end, Triplett announced, "We have a couple of new guys here this week. I want you to make them feel at home ... over there is Tim Weaver, that's Shell Ludo, next to him is Mike Jacobo and that guy over there in the GWAR T-shirt is David DeLaruso. Make sure you guys introduce yourselves to them at some point."

That wasn't so bad. I'd feared being made to stand up and talk about hobbies and expectations, so I took solace in the quick introduction. I'd noticed that the guy he'd introduced before me was the guy in the Grateful Dead shirt. So he was new to the group too? Maybe I'd find in him what I'd hoped to find here tonight.

When the class was over, I went straight to Tim Weaver, "Hey, man, I'm Shell," and stuck out my hand. He shook it with a good man-grip and I was immediately relieved. He'd passed the first test.

My father had programmed me to shake properly, an art he thought was dying. "You need moderate amounts of strength, stiff elbow and wrist, and most importantly, solid unwavering eye contact," he'd told me time and time again.

I'd grown up assuming that the modern day custom of handshaking was the equivalent of cavemen beating on their chests, tilting back heads, and demanding animal like howls. Though we'd evolved into a civilized society, carefully observing the rules of political correctness, the handshake is still a means for men to both announce themselves and receive another's announcement. It makes me cringe when I shake a man's limp hand; his soft and un-callused fingers gently touching the center of my palm with a sloppy elbow that turns a handshake into the exact motion of pleasuring one's self. People who shake like this reveal more about themselves in that two second gesture than they do in the months or years that follow that initial shake.

"Tim Weaver. Good to meet you, man, and nice shirt," he said with a handsome smile.

"Yeah, bro, I was gonna introduce myself to you anyway, before I knew it was your first week," I said, relieved at his enthusiasm. "It's uh ... quite a crew here tonight," I continued, testing the waters to see if Tim and I were on the same page about our peers.

We were standing just left of center mass, the group was talking and milling about; and the room was a dull monotone of multiple voices saying similar things.

"Bunch of fucking retards, but that's any branch of the military, if you ask me," he said, as if he was simply talking about the weather.

The "retards" comment was loud, as if only he and I were in the room. I was immediately shocked by his blatancy. Wasn't he aware that the "fucking retards" were standing inches from us?

Tim was just short of six feet tall, skinny, with brown medium length hair and brown eyes. He could probably just manage to pull his hair into a ponytail if he wanted to. He wore well-faded jeans, Birkenstocks, and a thick hemp necklace above his Burgettstown '92 Dead shirt. He appeared to me the least likely candidate for the Navy in the room. He obviously wasn't afraid to be blunt, yet his voice was somewhat subdued, and his eyes had a tendency to point downward during lulls in conversation.

I liked Tim right from the start. We spoke for an hour in the HNRC classroom, then for another hour leaned up against my mom's car. We had somewhat similar views of the world, but Tim didn't have my theological background or come from lower-middle class parents like I did. He was the black-sheep son of a wealthy man and was off to prove to his father that he didn't need his money or help. All in all, I decided that though we were coming from different places, our objective was similar—flight.

When we parted that night, I considered him my new friend. I was definitely pleased to have met him, knowing that if I hadn't, I would be seriously concerned with the decision I'd made to join. No one joins the military for the same reasons, but having people who you identify with is a big part of joining any group. People shop for churches, coffee shops, and clubs in the same manner, ultimately deciding on the place where they feel most welcome and accepted. This process was the same thing for me. I was a social animal, and I needed to be taken in by the group. I needed somewhere to lean, if not on my family. Had Tim not befriended me, I would have seriously considered dropping out of the Navy that night.

Two weeks later, I was again making my merry way to the center, anticipating more bland subject matter and feelings of exclusion; but this time I had Weaver to look forward to. He'd called me a few nights ago after he'd called Triplett to get my number. He'd found hysterical the way I was forced to answer the phone. This was before cell phones, mind you, and before cordless phones were standard issue in homes. Our family phone was mounted on the wall in the kitchen and the receiver part was attached to the base via a curly, stretchy cord with a maximum range of maybe twenty feet. Phones still had reverence in our family, and when it rang we anticipated good news; whereas today, any unknown caller brings on stress and anxiety. We were delighted to get a call; telemarketers didn't exist in our little world yet, leaving nothing to be apprehensive about.

That said, my mother demanded protocol for phone answering the same way she demanded table etiquette at dinner. This was non-negotiable and had been engrained into our DNA while my father still lived with us by the most primal learning system in the world—pain.

These things came easy to me, like being on autopilot. I didn't think they were lame at the time; it was just what we did. Tim, however, laughed his ass off.

"Ludo residence. This is Shell speaking," I'd said brainlessly.

"Oh my God. That's hilarious," said the voice. It was a familiar voice but I couldn't place it at first.

"I'm sorry, who's calling please?" My mother's eyes flashed up at me from her seat in the living room where she sat knitting.

"Ludo? Tell me you're joking, bro ... you have to be joking," said the voice.

I mentally ran through all the male faces I could round up that might refer to me by my last name. Finally, I crossed the mental bridge to the Navy and it struck me like a slap in the face. "Weaver. What's up, bro?" I asked.

"No, bro, not that easy. Do you seriously answer the phone like that all the time?"

"Uh, well, yeah sort of. Honestly it's one of those things that you just get used to doing; I've just been doing it that way since I was—"

My mother interrupted me, her beady eyes still locked on mine, assuring me that I was exactly right to have answered the phone that way. "That's right, Shell. You were exactly right to—"

"Mom, please! I'm on the phone. It's none of your business!" I interjected.

Again, Weaver laughed hysterically. "That's your mom telling you that you're a good boy for answering the phone like Beaver Cleaver! Oh my God. I have got to come and see your house!" He was, again, laughing like a mad man.

"What can I do for you, bro?" I asked, pretending to be annoyed.

I wanted to believe that he was as sarcastic as me; I wanted to believe that I understood his joking as an advanced sense of humor, one where sarcasm ran so thick it was almost undetectable. I wanted to believe that there was another one out there, and that I was not alone in it. My sense of humor had been misunderstood all my life; I obviously thought that was due to my advanced intellect, but others would object to that conclusion.

"Whoa, bro, take her easy now. I'm just giving you shit. It's hilarious though; I've never heard anyone older than my nephew answer the phone like that. That shit's old school fo-show. The last person I was expecting to hear that from is you."

What the hell does that mean? Why is it so surprising that I answered the phone traditionally? This guy doesn't know my family. Tradition, in my stepfather's eyes, is as important as prayer and breathing. How many Christmas nights had I been forced to watch Fiddler on the Roof, and how many New Year's nights had I been forced to stay home while my friends partied, to watch our annual viewing of The Sound of Music? We were traditional if we were anything, and those traditions held me to something important, but I didn't know it then. Being seventeen years old and looking forward to the Christmas advent calendar was probably a bit childish, but I looked forward to it every year. Andy Williams is the only Christmas music that makes me feel like Christmas; the rest is all Mariah Carey pop garbage.

I walked with the phone out of the kitchen, down the hall, and down the stairs as far as it would stretch into the basement. We had recently upgraded from a rotary dial to touchtone, which I thought was on the cutting edge of technology, but I agreed that a cordless phone would be awesome. My dad, of course, had one. His was a brand new one, but the antenna that slid out the top of it was literally three feet long; and if you lowered it to less than fully extended, the sound got all fuzzy.

Tim and I made pleasant small talk for a while and as we did I paid close attention to my new friend as he spoke. This was something I was doing more and more lately—listening. It had just started to happen on its own without me understanding it altogether at first, but after a time I began to realize that the clues to people are hidden in their words.

I was beginning to formulate a process for detecting lies in people. No doubt, this was a trait passed down to me from my dad, but I think I was beginning to understand it better than he did. Certain things began to happen when I concentrated on listening to people; in particular, I heard an alarm in my head when I was being lied to.

There was some sort of process in listening to the cumulative amount of garbage people say, then applying it to what I know about their actions. When something contradicted something else, I heard the alarm.

That's all good and enlightening, but a step further in the process is identifying the lie and seeking out its motive. Every lie is a defense measure; every lie protects something and finding that secret became my specialty in time. Now, I was just awakening to it. Now, I was just beginning to realize that good conversationalists are good listeners. Guiding a conversation to what you are seeking is more easily done through a series of questions rather than a series of statements.

To what was the advantage? I didn't know yet. All I knew was that I was becoming an acute listener, and all the consequences of understanding human behavior, both good and bad, awaited me.

I explained to Tim my newfound fondness for listening closely but left it pretty much there. I didn't want to sound like I thought I had a superpower or anything, so I just took him through the process of listening and what I was listening for.

"How do you know when someone lies to you?" he asked.

"I don't know exactly; it's weird. I describe it as an alarm that goes off, but it's not a sound, it's a feeling; when it happens, it's unmistakable."

"That's cool, I guess, if it works. I'm not sure I'd want to know when I was being lied to, to tell you the truth; seems like it would suck to know that everyone is full of shit."

"Yeah, that's true enough, bud. Anyway ..." I was trying to change the subject.

He wasn't having it. "Shell, you need to see this for what it is, for what it can do. I don't know if what you're telling me is a secret power or just some kind of understanding of human nature, but it's something that I'd never even thought about before. That means it's a power you have that I don't, regardless of where it came from. Powers have benefits, and as you can already see, they also have drawbacks. That shit's gonna make you an old man, and you haven't even hit puberty yet." He laughed.

"You want to see my balls?" I asked with a laugh, hoping he wouldn't call my bluff.

He changed it up a little. "Don't spend your time kicking yourself over your friends, your family, your life ... You're leaving, bro, on a jet plane ... and it sounds to me like you really don't care if you're coming back again."

He was right about it all. Escape was now becoming so enticing that returning to this town was the last thing on my mind. I doubted I would ever be back.

"Dude, I can't go into the Navy. Did you see those people last time? I can't be on a boat with those freaks for the next four years," I said with a chuckle.

"Yeah, you can. Fuck 'em, bro. They're retards. You know what retards need? They need Annie Sullivan to take them by the hand and lead them around. You're their Annie Sullivan, Shell."

Whether or not I was Annie Sullivan, I don't know, but that conversation changed my life. I approached the next days as if I were The Prophet (a name I pompously assigned myself as I began experimenting with what my newfound understanding could do). What I found out ... was that it could do little. I was wrong half the time, and if I ever dared to announce to someone what they were really feeling, they would simply deny it with intensity. Beyond that, proof was impossible. What good is it to catch a lie if you can't call someone on it? This understanding was worthless; I knew I was right, but they would deny it, and that was all I could do. The first lesson I learned was simple—calling out people's lies in public is dangerous territory.

What that meant to me was that my power wasn't going to be a group thing; it was going to be a personal thing. I'd been conducting all my experiments in Sunday school or in the cafeteria at school, places where lots of people were listening. That wasn't working. I did notice that when I called the lie out, the face of the person I'd called out would harden into something unrecognizable before he would regain his composure and deny whatever I'd said. I wasn't a big kid; I was tiny, maybe the smallest kid in my class, so I didn't need anyone looking to kick my ass.

However, the hardening of the face was my proof; I saw the reaction. I had the distinct advantage of knowing exactly when to look for it, and every time I saw it, I knew I was right. It was something primal; it was something deep in them that they had no control over (temporarily anyway). Regardless, this wasn't a skill that worked best in a public forum. I knew that the people I called out knew I was right, and they knew that I'd seen them even if they'd been forced to deny it immediately. The group may have been convinced that I was wrong, but the person affected knew otherwise.

I'd agreed to meet Tim in the parking lot of the HNRC and smoke a bowl with him before the next meeting, but I smoked on the way there too. I listened to Eddie Vedder howling the song "WMA," and it made my blood pressure climb as I screamed along, negotiated the traffic, steered with my knee, held and lit the bowl, all simultaneously. I wasn't nervous this time about the people and their contrasting styles from what I was accustomed. I was optimistic and excited to see Tim, knowing that as long as he didn't bail out on the Navy thing, it would all be OK. I'd needed a shoulder and God had sent me one.

Tim was already there when I pulled into the lot—standing in front of his BMW 325is, smoking a cigarette, and dangling his medium length hair in front of his face to ward off any unwanted conversations. He smiled brightly when he noticed the cloud of pot smoke escaping the car as I opened the door.

"You already smoke, fag?" he asked with a smile.

I was dropping the Visine into my eyes and slowly walking to his car. Rather than answering him, I just looked at him with a quizzical look. "No, bro, I have allergies."

"Me too, I'm fucking ripped, Shell!" he replied with a boisterous smile and eyes the color of the Blythe Fire Department's only fire truck. "I knew you'd smoke without me on your way, so I blazed up a fatty, bro. Smoked the whole fuckin' thing."

"Jesus, man, your eyes are shot. You need to pop some Visine, dude. ASAP."

"I can't. I hate it. I can't stand having shit dropped into my eyes. Freaks me out," he said looking serious.

That concerned me. I stopped walking. "Tim, whether or not you like it, you need to put it in your eyes. You can't go in there looking like that. They'll know. It's not a matter of they might ... they will know," I said, looking him over.

"I don't care if they do, man. Look, I know Triplett. He isn't gonna do nothing about it. Shell, do you even know how tightly you have them by the balls? These guys are so stressed out to make their numbers every month. They need you, man; they need you more than you need them. Besides, Triplett knows I smoke. I told him the first time he talked to me. He tried to play all hard-ass at first, and I told him that wasn't gonna work. Told him I already talked to an Army recruiter and that he'd told me as long as I clean up before MEPS, he didn't give a shit. When Triplett heard that, he backed off. He did tell me not to let him see me high, but fuck him, bro. I don't care. I'm a commodity to him. He needs to appreciate that, or I'll join somewhere else."

"Really? You told him you smoked?"

"Yeah, dude, I don't pull any punches for these clowns. These guys are sheep, bro. You need to be the shepherd, or you'll be herded around like the rest of these freaks."

Tim was right about one thing, I thought as we walked into the center that night—they were sheep. As I looked again at the faces that were familiar already from the last meeting, I realized that they were also all people. Strange freaks indeed, but they were still people. I almost felt bad about the thoughts I'd had about being better and cooler than all of them. That wasn't fair. Just as Tim was a social class above me, in theory, maybe I was a class above them. I needed the Navy more than Tim did. He didn't need it at all. I needed to get out of Blythe, and he wanted to get out of Rockfield.

We took our seats in the same semi-circle as last time and while we waited for Triplett to kick it off, Tim and I bantered back and forth, having the Nirvana-Pearl Jam debate. There was no doubt about it, Pearl Jam was the more intellectual of the two; but Tim (being the litigator he claimed to be) argued otherwise.

"Lyrics, man. If the music is equal, then the debate comes down to lyrics," I argued.

"It's not equal though, that's the point. If vocals are half of the draw, than the music is still half the deciding factor," he argued, laughing hysterically at his own passionate argument. His obnoxious laughing, and his eyes for that matter, didn't help disguise his state of mind. When they watered up from laughter, they looked twice as bright red as they did when we'd come inside.

I was about to tell him to go splash some water on his face or something when some blond-haired, skinny dude walked to the front of the room and yelled at the top of his lungs, "A-ten-hut!" Everyone mingling around and those of us seated didn't know what to do at first.

"What'd he say?" Tim asked.

"Attention?" I guessed.

That was all it took. Tim broke into hysterical laughter that this time could not be stopped. My heart pounded in a guilty-by-association kind of way, remembering I was high too. I'd been smoking shitty weed that was half the strength of what Tim had inhaled. My weed made me paranoid. Tim's weed made him relaxed.

He was out of control with laughter as tears streamed down his face, and he was hunched over at the waist while still seated. I stood belatedly, hoping that the three rows of people in front of us would block Tim's episode from view. People started looking back at him. They leaned back on their heels, necks turned, and looked down to where he was seated. His entire face was red now, like he'd been hanging upside down on the monkey bars, and huge veins in his neck bulged and throbbed as he tried to regain control.

Behind the little, skinny, blond dude who yelled for our attention, Triplett noticed the ranks distracted by something, and he moved to a position to our right in order to see what was going on. When he saw that Tim was the guilty party, the look of anger disappeared, and he moved back into place behind the blond kid.

The tiny, blond sailor yelled out in an angry tone, "Hey, sailor ... something funny?"

Tim, who had made remarkable gains in his self-control, and who had almost calmed himself to where he could stand and not giggle, regressed immediately at the goofy little dude calling the shots. Blondie, whose real name was Matheson, was just another kid from our delayed entry program who happened to be leaving for basic training sometime between now and the next meeting; so we wouldn't see him again until he came back. Triplett had apparently been working with him extra to prepare him for the rigors of basic training. His reward for enduring extra drill and ceremony with Triplett was the privilege of ordering a bunch of high school kids around for the night. Matheson took seriously the opportunity to "lead" us and was not in the mood for any horseshit.

From what I knew about Tim, I was guessing that he wasn't in the mood for horseshit either. It seemed to me that Triplett didn't want Tim in the crosshairs of Matheson either, but once Matheson found a place to focus his anger, it was hard to stop him. Ethically, he had the right of way; we were, after all, in a Navy delayed entry meeting, not at a Phish show. Triplett reacted a minute too late, and before he could stop Matheson from starting the conflict, Matheson called Tim out.

"Hey! You call yourself a sailor, acting like an asshole in a Navy formation? You need to stand up straight, eyes front!" he commanded in a voice too small to be making these orders.

Tim looked at him for a long second, the smile disappearing, his head turned to an angle, like a dog's head when spoken to. Tim considered for a second as he looked at the faces of the people standing awkwardly in the group; and then he replied calmly, "Who the fuck is this guy, Triplett?"

Triplett was put into an awkward place in all this. Personally, he liked Tim better than most of the recruits. He had a special respect for Tim, something that I couldn't ever really put a finger on. They had a relationship like two brothers, and even when it got personal and ugly, it usually didn't get too personal and ugly.

On the other hand, he had a room full of recruits watching him, and two fellow (though junior) recruiters standing there as well. The last thing a recruiter needs is to lose control of the group.

These kids were here because they were joining the Navy, the United States Navy, where discipline and strength, respect and honor were the ruling characteristics. Of course, that was all fear based ideology, and bullshit at that. However, this was the tool that the Navy leaned on to keep their recruits in line, similar to the Church leaning on the idea of Hell to keep the congregation in line. Both designed to instill fear, whether true or untrue. "When you get to basic training, you're gonna wish you'd learned this ..." or "The drill sergeants at basic are gonna be kicking your ass up and down, and you'll wish to God you'd paid more attention to this ..." Simple fear-based psychological bullshit, so blatantly contradictory to me that I was astounded that anyone bought it. Their lie was simple, "We have control," and their motive was equally as clear.

Any lie, when told time and time again, becomes a part of your history (as evidenced by some of the exaggerations in this story). The reason it does so, for a good storyteller anyway, is that in order to tell a convincing lie, the author must imagine the event happening slowly and in detail. Often the lie is more vivid than the true tale, as the truth is clouded by the circumstance—be it pain, shame, anger, and/or adrenaline. The lie, when fabricated properly, is viewed and translated by the author in a clear and detailed manner. When that author retells the tale time and time again, he brands it into his long-term memory.

The problem with me stumbling onto the lie in casual conversation is in trying to expose it. That lie is embedded deeply into the psyche of that person; it is a scar protecting something very old and very deep. I know this for a fact, as I too carry these scars and lie routinely to protect them from discovery. If someone were to try and expose my painful deficiencies, I'd react with viciousness, tearing him limb from limb and feeding the torn parts to the crowd he tried to embarrass me in front of.

Triplett's eyes measured the tone of the group. He knew that Tim was a born leader and Matheson was a puppet, but Matheson was a good recruit doing his job to the best of his ability. How could Triplett come down on him?

"Weaver, this is Seaman Recruit Matheson. He's shipping out this week, and he is in charge of this formation. If you can't stomach that, you'd best be on your way home."

"He's high, Chief Petty Officer Triplett. High as a kite!" Matheson added.

"OK, Triplett. Have a good night with these ..." He turned to scrutinize the group, "... whatever the hell they are."

Triplett said quickly and with sudden sharpness, "Tim, you walk out that door and you might not get back in it." It took on tones of a lovers' fight. It had those passionate "get the hell out of here," and "baby, I need you; don't leave" sentiments. What the hell was going on here?

Tim turned to Triplett, looked at Matheson who was standing beside him and back to Triplett. "You two are so cute together. I have another Navy recruiter in York if I decide I want to go. I'm not coming back, Triplett. Don't call. Oh, and leave my mother alone; she says you're harassing her."

Matheson yelled, "Fuck off, stoner."

Tim just smiled and shook his head slowly as if he felt sorry for the guy. People laughed from the audience. Not at Tim, but at his response to Matheson. Tim walked out the door. We all sat quietly until the door slammed shut. In unison, the room breathed.

I got up, gathered my leather man-bag, and turned to go. No one had noticed my movements in all the commotion of everyone escaping a very uncomfortable situation. I sidestepped out of the row of folding chairs, which were less than neat and orderly, and turned into the walkway. Just as I did, I literally bumped into the blonde from the last meeting.

"You leaving?" she asked.

I tried to remain calm; she was better looking up close than she was from afar and because we were about the same height, her beautiful half-exposed boobs were just inches from my chin. I looked up, as casual as possible, and said, "Yeah, Tim's my friend."

Smiling, she said, "Yeah, I know. We all know. You've been talking to him all night."

Was it me or did she seem a little nervous too? Most of the time I don't even understand the process I go through in deciding truth from lies; I simply get the results. I have to retrace the steps later if I need explanation of how I knew the answer. She was nervous. She had her hand in her hair, twirling it distractedly into circles around her finger, and she was making little eye contact. I could see peripherally her breastbone above the V-neck T-shirt she was wearing. Few things are sexier to me than a well-defined breastbone.

"Yeah, we met last week and sort of hit it off," I said, more relaxed than intrigued. This was the first time I had been able to apply my new skills in a situation where I really wanted to find answers for personal gain. She was beautiful.

"Yeah, you guys were both newbies huh?" she asked, smiling.

I noticed her teeth weren't perfect, but they were at least white. I don't mind a few crooked chompers here and there as long as they are a bright shade of not ... yellow ... or brown ... or God forbid ... black.

"Yeah, the experience is still new and exciting," I said rolling my eyes.

"I'm Amanda. Amanda McCormick," she announced sticking out her hand.

I shook it, looking at her face closely, "I'm Shell Ludo. Pleasure to meet you, Amanda."

"Where are you going when you leave here, Shell? You were leaving, right?"

"Yeah, I was gonna go talk to Tim, see what's up," I said genuinely unsure.

"You have a car?" she asked.

"Well, I have my mom's car here, if that's what you mean."

"That's what I mean," she said, shooting past me holding her index finger up in the air as if to signal she'd be right back. In a second, she was. She'd grabbed her purse and a sweater and was walking in front of me. I stood there wondering if I was driving her somewhere. "Let's go check on your new BFF," she said, smiling back at me though continuing to walk toward the door.

I started walking down the hallway after her; in the background I could hear Matheson calling the group back to attention. Suddenly, there was a voice behind me in the hall; it was Triplett.

"Ludo, you leaving too?"

I stopped, as did Amanda. She replied first, "Yeah, Steve, he's leaving."

He looked at us, confused. "Guys, you don't have to go. Tim doesn't have to go. Matheson's ... He's a fucking idiot. Come on, it's not a big deal."

"Yeah, we do have to go, man," I said.

Amanda grabbed my hand and began pulling me toward the door. I turned back one last time to see Triplett standing there looking more hurt than anything else.

"And don't come to my school during hours, got it?" I asked.

He didn't have time to reply; we were out the door and into the parking lot. Tim stood where I'd expected him to be, up against the hood of my mom's car, joint hanging from his mouth.

"Damn, bro. I was starting to wonder if you were gonna come with me."

"Here I am," I said, more than a little pleased with myself for bringing along such beautiful company.

"Amanda McCormick," she said, sticking out her hand.

"Sir Tim Weaver," he replied with a goofy grin.

The three of us sat in the Corolla smoking a joint rolled from Tim's stash—a weed with bright green leaves and without seeds. Chronic, he called it. We smoked that joint down, drove over to the Exxon station for some bottles of Snapple; and only when I was driving the two blocks back to the parking lot did the weed really hit me. Stronger and more potent than anything I had ever smoked, and I barely made it into the lot before becoming almost completely paralyzed.

Tim was rolling another joint and I really had hesitations about smoking it. Can you die from smoking too much pot? I felt like if I were to smoke again I might find out. Amanda wanted to keep smoking, and not to be outdone, I agreed.

After the next joint was too small to handle without a proper pair of roach clips, we rolled down the windows and turned the radio on. "Black" by Pearl Jam came on, and I turned around from the driver's seat to look at Tim.

He smiled, understanding the implication of hearing those first few words come out of Eddie Vedder's mouth.

"God. This guy is soooooo intense," Amanda commented.

"He's this generation's Bob Dylan," I said.

"But way hotter," she said in a very serious tone.

She was right. I was in love with three people as I sat there trying to think one single sensible thought. I loved Amanda, Eddie, and Tim all at the same time and to the same degree.

Finally, a reasonable thought came to mind. Tim could potentially be my competition for this girl's affection. It was hard to think of him like that—like something I must overcome. He was better looking than I was, he came from a wealthier family than I did, and he drove a way cooler car than my mom's Corolla. He was witty, intelligent, and well spoken. If I were Amanda, and I had to decide which one of the two of us to date, I'd have picked Tim.

Even in my sedated state of ultra-contemplation, I realized that I would have to best him in other ways. I had the advantage, in theory—I had my gift of understanding, my gift of prediction, and my uncanny sense of interpretation. I would have to use this new skill to my advantage to even the odds, and simply making the cut wasn't going to be good enough. I was going to make this girl fall deeply in love with me; so deep, in fact, that she wouldn't survive an eventual break up. I wanted her to press her body against me in the coming days with a passion that begged me to both fuck and strangle her. She would fall into the trap of Shell the Super Hero; the man capable of complete transformation into the very thing she sought. I would not use her words to decide what she was seeking. I would use my intuition to anticipate it. I would surprise her with her own brutal reaction to what I presented; her own dissention into the world I would create and control.

I started to get a hard-on as I sat in the car, awake and thinking more clearly than I'd ever thought before. I watched her moving in her seat. I paid attention to her perfect stomach and breasts. When she turned to talk to Tim, I saw the small of her back—her brown skin, smooth and freckled, and widening at her hips. I imagined the rest of her, and my cock hardened the rest of the way. In my state of serious intoxication, that feat was most noteworthy.

As Eddie Vedder climbed what seemed to be an emotional rock-ledge toward the end of the song, I turned the music up. Its powerful vibrations rocked all of us in that car. All of us were feeling for the first time what it would be like to be in his presence while he sang this song, and while he poured his emotion onto the floor, casting it off his burdened back. It was a powerful moment: one of those moments that awakens you and begs you to be something better, something perfect. I wanted to dance. I wanted to scream or cry about my eternally disappointing nature. Was I out of the Navy? If I was, I wasn't going to worry about it now. Now was Eddie Vedder and his words of pain and heartbreaking sadness at his loss of something precious.

When the song ended and the DJ came back on, talking about heating and air conditioning specials, the world closed in again. I was back in reality where there was no greatness, no emotions to be touched, and no rage to control. It was like another life had ended, a vision that was wonderful was gone, and the world was quiet, dull, and fucking ugly. It was like awakening from the perfect dream only to realize that your life is still just as lame, confusing, and pointless as it was before you drifted off to perfection.

"All right, Shell, he's the better of the two," Tim said, coming from a very quiet and personal place in his head.

"That might be the best sound I have ever heard," Amanda said.

We had all felt it. The mutinous walk-out, the pot, and the Pearl Jam song collided, transforming into a sacred memory of that night.

"I know you knew it anyway," he said without a hint of lip service.

He had admitted Pearl Jam's superiority. He not only admitted it, but also attested to the fact that I was right all along. He was my first believer.

And, of course, he was right. I did know it all along.
Chapter 2

Nic and Goliath

The parking lot was already full of bystanders when I walked out the door and saw it for the first time that afternoon. I was, after all, the main event, and it seemed I was late to my own affair.

Looking at the thirsty faces watching me, with smiles and jeers, I was reminded that man has not evolved so far from the time of cave dwelling and wooden clubs. This was just about the most realistic and applicable proof I'd ever seen in favor of my "we are all still cavemen" theory. Like the gallows in a western film, everyone had gathered around to see the violence. Compelled by the promise of viciousness and blood, even women were helpless to its draw.

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many female faces in the crowd, and I thought that the softness and beauty of these wonderful girls somehow took away from the severity of the damages I may incur. Of course, they were there to cheer and rejoice in the blood just as much as any man seeking to witness gore and pain.

"Ludo, he's gonna kick your ass, kid!" Danny Wilson yelled from the first group of guys I passed. They were smoking cigarettes underneath the sign that read No Smoking On School Property. There were three of them—all guys I liked, guys I was friends with, and all guys capable of stopping the bloodbath if they wanted. The problem I was having throughout my entire day was that no one wanted to stop it; people were rather looking forward to it. This, I knew, was pack mentality.

The individual has a hard time accessing the truly evil things that lurk inside of him—something primal and raw that is stowed away, deep in the darkest and safest places in our heads where we almost forget its existence on a day-to-day basis. No one would want to witness a murder alone, but put him or her in a group setting and suddenly it's OK to be bloodthirsty and dark. We reason with ourselves that it's OK in the company of others.

When we survive and others die, we take from it a feeling of immortality, but we really understand that isn't the case. These deep and disturbing thoughts we have about murder, rape, incest, and violence are mostly limited to humankind. We dream beautiful dreams about peaceful valleys and humble ways when we are willing to kill, rape, and defile at the drop of a hat for the right rewards. We are not guilty of anything unnatural in thinking these things. They are in all of us, but so tucked away that most people don't honestly ever realize them. The evil that lurks in man is a real-life hate-making monster, but socially we are programmed to cover it up.

We humans were chosen specially by God. We were given souls because we were made in the likeness of God; therefore, you don't have to look too far to understand the cruelty of a singular sovereign God. Not that I can, in good conscience, entirely hold that against Him.

So many times during an intense and dramatic movie when, let's say, a nuclear bomb is going to go off and kill the entire population of a city of innocent civilians and all the handsome, well-paid, and well-known actors are desperately trying to stop this tragedy, have I secretly said to myself, "Come on goddamnit. Stop explaining the plot to your helpless hostage heroine and kill the bitch! You need to detonate now!" knowing that George Clooney and Jack Bauer are about to burst through the door and foil the bad-guy's plot at any second. We are trained to root for the good guy—the guy following the law to keep peace and order—but haven't you ever wanted to have a tragedy thrown into your world? Haven't you ever secretly wanted something bad to befall your best friend?

When watching a plot that involves the good guy being offered forty million dollars to do something immoral and he refuses based on some bullshit principle, don't you ever think to yourself, "I would"? What the fuck is that? We are all seeking gains in this world that seem to benefit only a select group of privileged people, and if someone offered me money, lots of money, to bend a law that I was only semi-convinced of, I'd do it. Sure, I'd try to reason that with the dirty money I'd buy my morality back somehow and maybe donate some small portion to a charitable cause or some other such nonsense ... The point is, the ability to reason with one's self, especially an argument fought over the nature of moral ground, is too easily fought in the gray area. I'd find a way to sleep at night, and if that involved hiring beautiful eighteen-year-old girls to rub my back as I slept, so fucking be it.

When tragedy befalls someone close to us, we respond with protocol. There is a preprogrammed response for every tragedy and usually a slogan to go with it. Someone dies? "I'm so sorry for your loss." A spouse leaves the other? "You'll be better off when you get through it, or ... you'll find the right person for you." You get fired from your job? "When God closes a door, He opens a window."

There is a preprogrammed reaction to almost anything, and we quickly deploy it when it's needed. Somewhere in the turmoil of another's unimaginable loss, we feel fucking empowered. This process spirals downward with the addition of more like-minded friends and before long we are exposed for the animals we are. The group, or pack, is when humans are at their most dangerous. They are unpredictable, high on the energy of each other, and capable of the most awful cruelty known to man.

I passed the bus loading zone, walked over the curb, and started across the lawn that led to the student parking lot. It was time to face Chad Brandie man-to-man for as little time as it would take for him to bleed me in front of the crowd. Chad was an animal, six-three, two hundred and forty pounds—and the guy was only a junior! He'd earned his notoriety in this particular fashion—parking lot brawls, hallway fights, drunken party fights, and of course on the soccer field where he was Red Oak's Beckham. Everyone had really turned out for the event, which was flattering if you are Chad Brandie, but daunting if you are Shell Ludo. People who had never come to any parties, people who had never gathered around for any former fight, and people who I didn't even fucking recognize were here. Hey, who the fuck are all these people?

I was standing a solid five-eight, one hundred and seventy pounds, with terror written across my face so obviously that when I looked into the eyes of people standing in the crowd, I could see pity in their reactions. Pity or not, no one was offering to stop the fight; no one was saying anything remotely positive to me at all.

"Enjoy your face for the next thirty seconds!" someone shouted.

"He's gonna fuckin' kill you," came a familiar voice. The familiar voice of a "friend," but I couldn't identify it with the stress and terrifying thoughts that were flooding my brain. I turned and looked to see who it was. I thought it was important to see who'd turned on me, but I couldn't identify it in the mass of faces. I'd have to revisit that later ... Yeah, later ... after visiting hours were over at the hospital, and I was alone with my respirator and bedpan. It made sense to me that I would end up there, and it seemed more than just dramatic to assume I'd be seeing the same hospital where I was brought into the world. Hell, maybe I'd even die there.

I had become more emboldened in my assertion of the "gift" and with what I considered to be miraculous results. I had been effective enough that now I was about to be reminded of the one aspect I'd been neglecting: the law of the jungle—pain. All people fear pain; it's programmed into our DNA. No matter how far one develops intellectually, some fucking cave dwelling brute can remind you of your shortcomings with a single beat down, especially when administered in front of your peers.

I had known from the moment he'd jumped me in the hall that this was going to be a lone battle with Chad. No one was going to stand with me for two very good reasons. One, I was guilty of the offense. Two, the difference in social positioning between us was about as vast as one could possibly imagine. With his long hair and muscle-rippled chest, his ability in soccer, and his family history of being badasses, there wasn't much room for me to even try and compete. Perhaps that was why he was making such a big deal over this issue. It wasn't that someone had successfully talked Kaitlyn into dumping him, but it was that, in his mind, it was someone as unimportant as me.

I had mindfucked his girlfriend—of that I was certain. I hadn't touched her inappropriately or gestured that I'd even wanted to; all I'd done was talk to her. I'd only begun the process of puberty six months earlier; therefore, I was certainly in no place where fucking her was even feasible.

Kaitlyn Carter had always held a position among the hottest girls in our class. In movies, the most popular female in school all but wears a crown. She's the undisputed champion; however, at Red Oak, it wasn't so well defined. We had a group of elite. That group consisted of about ten girls who were all considered local royalty. Those ten girls were divided into two groups. The first group was made up of really good-looking trailer park girls who were, no doubt, gorgeous but considered to be working against a cosmic timer. In ten years, they'd be My Name is Earl's ex-wife. Then there was the other group that included the five girls who were not quite as promiscuous, but better students, and from white-collar families. These girls were slightly harder to attract, but worth the extra effort. Kaitlyn was a hybrid of both groups. She'd grown up in Logan with the first group, but she was from a wealthy family and always remained a 4.0 student. These lines I'm describing were perhaps not as well divided as my description might make it sound. It was a very small community, and in small communities cordiality is the law of the land.

I had been in love with Kaitlyn since the fifth grade when I first martyred myself in her name. It was the first time I'd ever been in a class with her, but I'd heard plenty about her from the boys at school. It'd taken me about five minutes to fall in love with her in the way that fifth grade boys fall in love—where holding her hand was my ultimate goal.

I had a pretty impressive lawn mowing and snow shoveling business in Blythe that I'd started the previous summer, and I counted ten of the thirteen businesses in Blythe as my customers. When snow fell overnight, I would get up at four in the morning, walk the mile to town, and shovel the sidewalks and driveways of my customers. In December of that year, I had obsessed over what to buy my new love for Christmas. I was not wondering if I should get her something to formally announce my feelings but wondering what to get her. I'd decided on a bracelet with two turquoise hearts that was for sale at Wicks and Stones, a local gift and candle store. Since they were one of my show shoveling customers, I was able to put the bracelet on layaway, promising myself I'd pay it off before the Christmas party in our classroom. The price was $23.99, a hefty sum for a ten-year-old kid, but I knew that it was worth every penny if it would help me in my quest for love.

The ladies who worked at Wicks and Stones thought it was the cutest thing ever, and after I'd paid it off, they put it in a fancy black jewelry box, wrapped it in shiny silver wrapping paper, and tied a green and red ribbon around it for me.

I was so excited about giving Kaitlyn the gift that I couldn't sleep for nights before the party. I hadn't considered what would happen if the feelings weren't reciprocated, as that didn't seem possible. If I loved her so dearly, it seemed that she'd have to love me back.

It wasn't until the moment I handed it to her that I began to realize that I was a jackass. As a class we'd drawn names to see whom we would buy a single gift for—for less than five dollars. I'd drawn Dawn Reinbeck, a pudgy, curly haired girl with a face like Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and in appreciation of my misfortune, I'd bought her a balsa wood airplane for ninety-nine cents. My gift to Kaitlyn was above and beyond, and I was so filled with pride to be able to present such a beautiful girl with such a fitting gift.

I walked up to her after we'd all opened our gift from our Secret Santa, while the room was still in chaos from eating too many cupcakes and drinking too much soda, and handed it to her. "I got you something for Christmas," I said sheepishly.

"But ... you didn't pull my name," she said, accepting the beautifully wrapped box.

"No, but I really wanted to. I got Dawn. Bought her that airplane thing she opened," I said.

"Oh, yeah, I saw that. Wondered who'd gotten her that." She looked at the box carefully.

"Anyway, I hope you like it. I worked all month to buy it," I said, preparing to turn and walk away, not wanting to be present when she opened it.

Just then Jacob Linowsky and David Greeley walked up to us.

"Hey, what's up guys? What's that Kaitlyn?" Jacob asked, gesturing to the gift.

"I don't know. Shell got it for me."

"Open it. Let's see what it is," he said, his eyes shifting to mine.

Shit! This isn't fair. These assholes weren't supposed to be here for this. This was supposed to be my moment; I'd worked hard and froze my ass off for a month while these people all slept warm in their beds. Now they just come traipsing along in the most important moment of my young life? I wanted to run away, out the door of the classroom, down the hall, out the front doors of the Susquehanna Elementary School building, and into the street where I could lay down in front of a tractor-trailer, ending my miserable existence.

She looked at me. She was obviously embarrassed, but I couldn't tell if she was embarrassed for herself or for the puppy dog who'd bought her such an extravagantly wrapped gift. The box alone went well beyond any of the gifts that had been handed out in the classroom; a professional hand had undoubtedly wrapped it.

"You can wait til later to open it," I said, hoping to Jesus she would take the hint.

"No way! Open it, Kaitlyn. Let's see what Shelley bought for ya. He must be in looooooove," David Greeley said, intentionally loud enough to draw everyone's attention.

That was the moment when Mrs. Gunderson saw the three of us gathered around the girl holding the shiny silver box with the pretty Christmas colored strings bubbling over its top and sides. "What's going on guys? Kaitlyn, what is that you are holding? Didn't you already open your present?" the teacher asked, sounding annoyed and exhausted.

Before I could feel the unraveling of my control taking place beneath my skin, Kaitlyn answered, "Yes, Mrs. Gunderson, I did. Shell just gave me this, like a minute ago. I didn't know he was going to."

The entire class turned from looking at the present, to looking at me. My face reddened, my heartbeat quickened, and I suddenly felt like I might pass out. I hoped I would pass out. I hoped that I would pass out and wake up fifteen minutes ago.

"Well ..." Mrs. Gunderson said, looking at me, "since Mr. Ludo was so selective about whom he gave such an elaborately wrapped gift, I suppose it's only fair to the rest of the class that we have Miss Carter open it now. That way we can all see what's in that pretty box."

Rope. I need a piece of rope and a sturdy beam to tie one end to. I tried to protest, "Mrs. Gunderson, it's really just something for Kaitlyn. I don't think that the class needs to see—"

"Nonsense, Mr. Ludo. We are going to see what's in that box. We are going to see what it is that you have gotten that is so important that even though you didn't pull Miss Carter's name from the pot, you felt you had to give it to her on our time. Miss Carter, please open the gift over there by the blackboard so we can all see."

She walked over to the blackboard and began to pull on the ribbons, trying to slide them off the corners of the box so she could keep them intact. People stood and moved closer, as I slowly backed further into the depths of the classroom. I could no longer see Kaitlyn. She was buried in the crowd of unruly fifth graders, but I did hear the paper tear. Any second there would be ridicule from twenty-two of my classmates, the cost of such a gift would immediately be recognized, and I would be humiliated by all those nosy little bastards.

Ten seconds later, there was an "aah" followed by an eerie silence. The entire crowd turned and looked at me without saying a word.

"What is it, Miss Carter?" Mrs. Gunderson asked.

"Uh ... it's a bracelet," Kaitlyn said in a quiet voice that I couldn't identify for certain as awe or sheer humiliation. I couldn't see her face as she was still buried in the mass of kids.

"A bracelet!" Mrs. Gunderson commented with exaggerated enthusiasm. "Isn't that very nice of Mr. Ludo, class?"

They all turned around; obviously satisfied with Kaitlyn's role in this event, they were now facing me again.

"I think it's completely gay!" Greeley said.

"He's in looooove with her!" someone else said.

Everyone laughed and pointed at me. Initially, I thought the humiliation might kill me, but the truth was that I did love her, and I was still proud of my gift; I was proud that I'd earned the money myself, and if they were jealous that I had the balls to buy it for her, they could all kiss my ass. I sat in my chair and stared straight ahead, not looking at anyone. I found a place between anger and self-satisfaction, and I focused my entire attention on remaining right there in that place while the class began to return to their seats.

As they walked by me, some said things along the lines of "Nice bracelet, Shell," and others patted me on the shoulder with, "It's OK, man. I get it."

Kaitlyn never thanked me for the gift, and I never saw her wear it. I believed even then that she intended to be grateful, but the trauma had been too much. Along with the wasted gift, my chances of ever holding her hand had slipped away with a single gesture of kindness. I didn't fault her for it, nor did I hate myself for being so sappy. I was still proud of the Shell I had become: the guy who risked it all to try and get the girl. In the years to come it would pay off heartily. At ten years old, it is difficult to accept the pressures of being eccentric and romantic; however, at twenty years old, women are starting to understand it a little better; and at thirty years old, women will fuck you for being romantic and thoughtful—throw a job and a car into the mix and she'll scream your name until the police come.

Seven years after the bracelet incident, we were seniors in high school. Kaitlyn and I had drifted apart after the fifth grade and reacquainted somewhere around our sophomore year. We'd joke around and harass each other when we'd meet in a class or pass in the hallway, but we never spoke of the fifth grade. That was something that I think still embarrassed her. Not the gift, but the fact that she'd never thanked me or acknowledged the gesture in the immediate years following the event.

She had grown from a cute and intelligent girl into a beautiful and charming woman who literally could have done anything with her life. She was the president of the National Honor Society, captain of the girl's volleyball team, class president, and chairwoman of the yearbook committee. She was going to be something special one day; everyone knew it, including her. Her only drawback was her boyfriend of two years, the Neanderthal, Chad Brandie.

I was working at Bella's Pizza in Blythe as a driver after school, and Nic just so happened to be working in the kitchen. Bella's was a special job in our little town, as it was the center of the world for all kids in high school. We were right in the heart of it.

Working there during my junior and senior years was pivotal to my high school development, as it allowed me an opportunity to know what was going on, and where. If there was a party happening, I knew about it, and I was going to be there. People would call me all night long to find out what was happening. It was like being popular without all the effort that goes into such ambitions.

Among the four places we partied, three of which were outdoor venues, was The Hill. The Hill was technically owned by the state of Pennsylvania. Above the party spot were high-tension power lines on their way to the next city down the line. The Hill itself was exactly that, a grassy hill several hundred feet wide and several miles in length. The incline of this hill had to be at least thirty degrees, making it difficult for ordinary passenger cars to get in and out of the muddy and rutted roads. When you pull off of Route 5 onto the nameless county road, there is a half-mile of rather negligible passage before it rises steeply and seeming climbs into the sky itself. We lived far enough from Harrisburg that even in higher elevations it was difficult to see the city, but from The Hill it was clearly visible.

The Hill was the best of all the party spots, as it was removed far enough from the public eye that no matter what happened there, we never had police interference. The large metal cage-like base of the power line towers made for a fine jungle gym and a makeshift wooden ladder someone had built long ago served as a connection ladder between the ground and the metal ladder that was intentionally left twenty feet above the earth. With the wooden ladder we could climb daringly on the rickety wood boards until reaching the main ladder that seemed to grow skyward like Jack's beanstalk.

There were platforms on the poles themselves, every fifty feet, that served as a landing between the connecting sections of ladders, and on those platforms plenty of marijuana was smoked—the higher the platform, the more daring that venture was. Climbing up was always easy—climbing down stoned was an intense experience.

This particular night's party had been a last minute thing, and I am proud to be able to tell you that I was instrumental in its development.

I'd been working a Friday night at Bella's delivering pizzas and telling everyone who called or stopped by that I'd heard nothing of any impromptu parties. One of my deliveries was for a guy named Mike Cavanaugh. He happened to be a friend of my sister, making him significantly older than I was. When I knocked on the door to his trailer, I heard the music immediately turn down and multiple voices were talking excitedly.

Mike opened the door with a smile and said, "What's up, motherfucker?" His voice pitching upward as the sentence continued, reaching well beyond the point you might call feminine and into the zone only canines can hear. "I was hoping you were gonna deliver, bro. You got any smoke?"

I looked in the door, recognizing Kyle Baylor, Seth Farladen, Kevin Stevors, David aka "Butch" Garlander, and Mellissa Rodriguez (who looked like she'd been gang-fucked by all five dudes). These were not Red Oak's finest by any stretch of the imagination, but they knew my sister, or more importantly, my sister's boyfriend, and they weren't going to fuck with me. Had that not been the case, this would have been an intimidating crowd. Kyle Baylor was present and even though I'd broken his tibia (shinbone) with a marble shot from a ten-dollar slingshot six months ago on Halloween, he didn't appear to be holding any ill will. Well, at least as long as they still had hope that I had weed to sell to them.

I nodded to the group and gave a nervous, "What's up guys?" before turning back to Mike. "How much are you looking for?"

Smiling back at me and then turning his head to the group as if to summon up the answer to a difficult question, I noticed his shirt was open from his neck to his belly button and, holy shit, the guy looked like a Sasquatch. I'd never seen that much hair growing on a human being before; I couldn't see an inch of skin anywhere. Just when I began to examine his belly area, which appeared to be three times hairier than any other animal in the kingdom, he turned around and saw me looking at his belly button area.

"Dude, what the fuck are you looking at?" he asked with a smile, intent on embarrassing me in front of his buddies.

"You look like a fuckin' grizzly bear, Mike," I said with a smile, sure the group would laugh with me.

They didn't. Neither did he.

"You got any weed or what, Ludo?"

Deciding this wasn't the time to be a smart ass (though I really wanted to get back to the hair issue), I said again slowly, as if talking to a retarded person, "How much?"

"An oh-zer," he said, mimicking my slow dialect.

"Jesus, bro. No, I don't deliver pizzas with an ounce of pot on me. I have a quarter. You want it?"

He looked to his group again, and Kyle was the only one to shake his head no. Mike asked him, "Why not? You got someone else in mind?"

Kyle said to Mike while staring at me, "No, but I don't want to buy from this little shit." So much for Kyle not harboring any ill will.

"Yeah, we'll take it," Mike said, obviously deciding that Kyle's objection was overruled. "Kyle, pay the kid."

Kyle looked at me and reached into his pocket. When he realized that he didn't have the cash on him, he said, "It's in my car. No one else has any fuckin' money on them?"

"Go get it, asshole!" Mike demanded.

I set the pizza down, and Mike paid me for it.

"Meet me at my car," Kyle said, squeezing past me in the doorway.

"No, dude, bring it back here," I said, hoping Mike would realize why I was uncomfortable with meeting Kyle at his car. I had shot the guy with a slingshot, after all.

"Shell, he's not gonna touch you. Don't be such a pussy," Mike chided me. Melissa laughed hysterically.

Unable to resist her insulting laugh, I fired at her, "Fuck, Melissa, you look even worse than you did in high school. Let the crack pipe cool down for an hour or so."

The rest of the guys laughed at the small guy in the door insulting the only woman in the room, but she didn't think me so funny. "Fuck you, little momma's boy prick!"

Kyle showed back up in the door. "I don't have any cash. Sorry."

Neither did any of the other losers in the trailer park that night. I knew, however, that Seth Farladen worked at the Blythe Liquor Store. "Tell you what," I said, "Seth, call Finley and tell him that I am picking up a pony for you at the store. I'll pay for it; you get it cleared with him. I'll give you freaks the weed."

I expected to hear protests and groans from them collectively, but they were rather easy about it. Seth agreed and said he'd call in a minute. I told him I wanted to hear him call now. Finley was in his thirties, his father owned the liquor store, and he didn't really like selling to kids, but he did so fairly often. I didn't know the guy really, only by reputation. His reputation was that he enjoyed the company of high school girls, and he wasn't afraid or ashamed to feed them schnapps in order to have them.

"All right, Shell. Don't be fuckin' pushy," Mike said.

"Either he calls now, or I leave. Either way, I really don't give a shit," I said, staying calm. My sister's boyfriend, David Atchison, lived about one mile away. If anything happened he'd be over here, kicking all their asses, in a minute. David loved me, and he made a point of telling people I was off limits. I prayed my sister would stay with him forever, or at least until I left for the Navy, or wherever I was going.

"Call him," Mike said.

Fifteen minutes later, I was back at Bella's with a new answer to the constant "Is anyone partying?" question.

"Yes. At The Hill. Eleven o'clock."

Sometime after midnight I bumped into Kaitlyn Carter at The Hill. She was smoking a joint with a few friends and had actually noticed me first. I hadn't seen her in a few weeks and I certainly hadn't seen her without her boyfriend Chad Brandie in a long time. When she called my name, I looked around to see if Chad was with her. I didn't see him and as big as he was I would have, had he been there.

Kaitlyn was standing off to the side of the enormous bonfire in one of many tiny clusters of people. About fifty people had shown up for the party. Not bad for last minute planning. I could see her face, lit in the light of fire (which is perhaps the best lighting anyone can ever be seen under), and she was still as beautiful as she'd always been. I had never fallen out of love with her, not since the fifth grade, but I must admit I'd fallen similarly in love a thousand times since.

"Friends are just the girls you haven't fucked yet," Nic always said. He was right. I loved Kaitlyn the same way I loved every hot girl in school—in a way that I wanted her to touch my cock and let me see her tits. It's hard to see the woman you lust for beyond that. Men can't see beyond the sex; it's such a big thing that what feelings lay beyond it are impossible to determine. It's really not until you orgasm that you know how you feel. Until then, penetration is blinding. How many times have I wondered, is this the woman for me, the one I want to spend my entire life with? Only to orgasm and be completely repulsed by the same being.

"Hey, Shell ... old buddy ... What are you doing?" she asked, wrapping her right arm over my shoulder. She'd been drinking. I wasn't sure if I'd ever seen her in this state before. Usually wherever she was, her boyfriend was too, and she being the more responsible party, always had been the designated driver.

"Not much, lady. What are you doing? Drinking a little, huh?"

"Yes, that is the correct answer," she said, smiling at me in an oddly personal way.

"I would ask if you have a ride home, but a good girl like yourself wouldn't drink and drive, so I needn't ask," I said with a hint of flirtation.

"Yeah, I'm staying at Mia's tonight. We are going to drink here, go to Taco bell after, and play Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on her Nintendo later. It's not just me either—Julie, Donna and Laurie are all going too," she said matter-of-factly.

"Wow, you girls need a chaperone?" I asked with raised eyebrows and a slight turn of the head.

"As tempting as that is, Shell, I think we'll be just fine. Besides, you know how that would play out," she hinted at her massive and overprotective man-friend.

"Indeed, I believe I do. Where is Mr. Gentle tonight?"

"Mr. Gentle is playing basketball in Harrisburg with his stepbrother."

"Sounds ambitious," I said, feeling the conversation lag a bit.

"I'm glad he's gone. You know how long it's been since I have been to a party alone? A party without his watching my every move? In fact, if he were here, I would be grilled about this very conversation. That's what I get every time I go out with him. It's so mature, yes?"

I wanted to feel bad for her, but the urge to undress her and fuck her on platform number three of the power line tower was too great. There were also many other attractive young ladies out tonight—the first real spring night we'd had in a while. Kaitlyn was the perfect classy and beautiful high school girl. She could have her pick of any guy in her grade, but she'd made the bed she was lying in and even though her beauty made me possessive and longing, I liked that she was with Chad Brandie. I liked it because it ostracized her.

The fire crackled and tossed a flying chunk of hot ember directly at me. It hit me square in the forehead and burst into a million little sparks making me jump and scream like a girl for an instant before regaining my composure.

Kaitlyn said, "Oh my God! Are you all right? I can't believe that hit you in the face. What if it had hit you in the eye?" She cupped her mouth, pretending to suppress her smile.

"I would have to wear a patch. Could I do it?" I covered my left eye with my hand and turned to her so she could visualize it.

"Yes, Shell, I think you could probably do anything."

The words were heavy. I felt them stir something in me, something deep, and for a moment I felt like crying. I hadn't heard those words many times in my life, and something about hearing them from this girl, this girl who had consumed me for the last seven years, was more than I'd expected. I looked at her in the firelight; the orange light bouncing and shifting like fast moving clouds across her face. I stared at her until her face changed—long enough to see her differently. I saw her in her thirties, her fifties, and as an old woman; the structure of her bones stayed the same but the skin changed around them. She looked back at me, and for a moment I was going to kiss her. That was a very bad idea. Instead, I stared back at her, I tuned into her, and I felt her sadness, her loneliness, and her entrapment. I began to understand what it was to be Kaitlyn Carter; I began to feel what it felt like to be this extraordinary woman with the world within her grasp but afraid to close her fingers around it. There were reasons why she clung to this sort of man, reasons that were justified and reasonable two years ago.

She looked at the fire for a second and when she looked back at me I saw that her eyes were especially brilliant—they were brilliant in a way that is only possible through the magnification of tears on the pupil.

"I know," I said, taking a stab at it.

She began to weep as soon as the words spilled out of my mouth. She wanted to hold me, and she wanted me to hold her and tell her it's OK. She also knew that as much as I have waited a lifetime to feel the firm and sensuous muscles of her back in my hands, and the heat of her skin beneath my fingers, to do so would be a death sentence.

"You ever wonder what it all adds up to?" I asked, staring into her wet eyes.

"What do you mean?" she asked softly, beneath the tears.

"These tears, the pain, the isolation. Investing yourself in another, when people by nature are completely unpredictable. Yet day after day you find yourself surprised by their every action. The cycle continues until one day the world calls you. The tears you leave here on the ground dissolve and evaporate. Time dissolves and evaporates. You tolerate what you cannot stand because you were afraid of yourself once. Allow yourself the respect of seeing who you have become. You can see change in others—your friend gets a new haircut, or your dad wears a new pair of jeans on a Saturday—you notice that. The blind spot in your perception pertains to yourself. Change is usually a slow and effortless process; the change itself is alive and waiting for opportunity. Most people are too impatient to wait for the opportunity, but change is not. Two years later, you stand before a fire on the eve of the rest of your life, and still you can't see yourself for what you are.

"He is inhibiting you from the passion you so crave. I know who he was when you met; I know why you needed him then. Have you seen your face reflecting the orange flames of a fire? Probably not. It is as abstractly beautiful as anything I have ever seen. It's natural that you have not, but has your boyfriend? Has he seen the way your eyes glisten against the heat of it? Has he lain awake while you slept and watched you? Do you tell yourself that love like that isn't real? How does Kaitlyn Carter allow the savagery of what he is and all he is not climb onto you at night?"

She looked at me again and this time it sent shivers down my spine. A shadow fell across half her face and the other half was alive and moving in lighted swirls.

She squinted her eyes a little and peered into mine. "What am I supposed to do?" she asked quietly. Like the crackling of the fire, her voice was shattered by tears and the bare truth of this conversation.

"That is the question, more than any other, that we are supposed to ask ourselves."

"How is it that you can see me so clearly?" she asked as if looking for a secret.

"Because I care enough to look."

Chad was single again, and he was not happy about it. He had found me in the school hallway earlier that day. It was Tuesday, just a few days since I'd talked to Kaitlyn by the fire. The thought had crossed my mind that if Kaitlyn had been as moved as I was, she might have acted on what I'd said, leaving Mr. Gentle in need of talking to yours truly. I was, indeed, high from my success in unlocking Kaitlyn's thoughts, but not enough that I hadn't considered the possibility of physical repercussions. When Jason Dawson told me during first period that Chad had been asking around for me, it didn't come as a surprise, but it did worry me. After Jason ruined my day, by essentially stopping time and tripling my heart rate, everyone seemed to come out of the woodwork and tell me the same news.

"Chad's looking to fuck you up," I heard time and time again.

I had the dignity to not pretend to be baffled by his anger. I didn't appeal to friends with "Why? What could little ol' me have done?" Instead, I saw it as my business and Kaitlyn's business. Furthermore, if I was going to go around getting into people's heads, I should at least have the respect to keep what I saw to myself. Keeping my mouth shut and defending what I'd done became instantly important to me, as if by doing so I was accepting the responsibility of my gift. I would be airtight; I'd say nothing to anyone about what I'd said or heard.

"Look, man, all I know is that at some point in the night you must have told her to dump him or something. She dumped him Sunday and mentioned your name along the way somewhere ... I don't know all the details, all I know is he's looking for you." These were the statements being made from my closest friends. They were, what I like to call, walking the line. This is nothing more than typical friendship abandonment. Upon closer analysis of what was unfolding, I knew I was going to have to go this one alone. Chad was the popular guy, and he was twice the size of most of us, yet he was a year younger. His wrath was something best avoided. My friends, as dear as they were to me, had no horse in this race, and had no reason to ruin their potential ally in Chad by sticking up for me (who may or may not be guilty). Individually, my male friends felt inferior to Chad; therefore, the proposition of helping me slay Goliath was suicide—socially and literally.

When deciding whom to back in a fight, the decision is made by who the coolest is, not by who the strongest is. Losing a fight under noble conditions is sometimes better than winning the same fight using less than honorable methods. Losing itself doesn't bring shame; the manner in which the fight is fought and lost, or the reasons for such victories or losses, is vital to the opinion of the crowd watching.

I was not in a good place here. Everyone had heard that I had done any number of things to persuade Kaitlyn to break up with Chad, but none of those accounts included me simply talking to her for five minutes before moving on. Sure, I'd made quite an impact in five minutes, but that's still all it was. Regardless, in everybody's mind I was guilty of tampering, and poor Chad (who'd been blindsided by my meddling) now had to set this right. His honor had been savagely attacked and now he was expected to do what he was known for—fight. He was justified, as was I, for an ass kicking, and no one would be stepping in to help me escape what I so rightly deserved.

Chad caught me the first time by Mia Gateway's locker before third period. I was just standing there talking to her (trying to make her laugh, make her happy, make her undress, whatever came first) when out of nowhere I was grabbed by big, hairy, meaty hands and swung with such force that it seemed impossible that a human was behind it. It wasn't until after I crashed into the lockers on the other side of the hallway and rebounded, sprawling and sliding across the floor back toward my assailant, that I even realized what was happening. He reached down and seized me, pulled me up by my Grateful Dead shirt, and then proceeded to toss me across the hall and into the opposite lockers, again.

My face bounced off the metal doors, but not before splitting the skin above my eyebrow on the vents of the locker door. Head wounds bleed profusely, and when I landed on the floor facing skyward (once again just inches from his boots), the blood was smeared across my face making a virtually painless wound look severe. Only then did the onlookers make enough noise to alert the faculty that I was being trounced, and they quickly put a stop to it.

When Mr. Range and Mr. DeMarco gently took Chad by the arms and said, "Come on, son, let's go," I heard empathy in their voices. He was not dragged away kicking and screaming by rough men manhandling him; he simply walked away under his own volition. He didn't scream threats at me or promise to kill me later; instead he just walked away. I hated him for that. It was anticlimactic. It was just over, and I was sitting there being stared at, bleeding, and wondering what had happened.

I'd decided that it was a planned attack. He wasn't passionate or angry; he was simply calculated, expectant, and efficient. He didn't scream my name, he didn't mention avenging his love for Kaitlyn, or anything like that. He simply found me and silently tossed me across the hall like a fucking ragdoll, twice, and then walked off with the teachers to what was definitely going to be a suspension.

I would have been a better showman, had I been him. He wasn't a showman and that frightened me. He was leaving the human part out of this, and later when I learned that he was going to be looking for me in the parking lot, all I could think was that it was like having a robot or a machine trying to kill me. I'd become so good at people that understanding them was just the beginning. I was connecting with them, steering them, manipulating them ... but this guy wasn't human. I'd seen nothing from him that I could use against him; he'd shown me no signs of weakness by mentioning her name or rambling on about why I deserved to get my ass kicked. I knew I was in trouble. I knew not to expect any help from any friends. Somehow I saw it as affirmation. I was changed. I was different than I used to be and I was different from them. I understood it all—why he was acting the way he was, why the crowd wasn't getting involved—I fucking knew it all.

I'd already beaten Goliath in the only battle I cared about—Kaitlyn had listened to me. She'd felt my words and reacted, and it was not just a simple reaction; but she'd broken up with her boyfriend of two years (which in high school is the equivalent of a twenty-three-year marriage) who happened to be one of the most feared and widely respected athletes walking our halls. This was no little task by any means, and I was the movement behind it. To what degree he was aware of my involvement, I didn't know. I did know that he knew and associated my name with his newly single status, and for that he had to fear me mentally, if not physically. Chad had been proficient when he'd attacked me in the hall, but would he still be as proficient when he attacked me later? I hoped not, but I couldn't imagine that even if he were off his game later, it'd make much difference in the outcome of the fight.

The student parking lot wasn't technically on school property, so it was impossible to keep suspended kids from showing up there later. Ninety percent of all interrupted fights on school grounds—the hallway, the bathroom or the cafeteria—were fought later the same day in the student parking lot. It was a given that we'd be dealing with each other later on when teachers weren't available to try and stop it. A teacher would monitor the lot until three o'clock and then go home. On fight days everyone would get out there early (two fifteen) and tailgate until the show started at three fifteen. There would be predictions of who'd win. Forecasted enactments were usually demonstrated by boys making exaggerated kicking motions to the invisible man lying on the ground while his friends all smiled and nodded their heads. The girls stood there trying to look dismayed about being there, but they were secretly as bloodthirsty as the rest of them. This is, after all, something that no one is above. Our thirst for blood and punishment is embedded deeply in us, and we are all in that crowd at some point.

At the nurse's office a pair of butterfly bandages had been applied to the small cut above my eye, which had instantly stopped the bleeding. When the nurse had wiped my face with a warm washcloth, I was embarrassed by how small the cut had been. It looked impressive with blood running down my face, people asking me if I was OK, and me stoically whispering something to the affirmative. Now I was in the nurse's office with a tiny little cut that wouldn't even warrant stitches, with Mia Gateway at my side, who was occasionally rubbing my back as we sat on the cot. She wasn't feeling sorry for me about the eye thing; she was rubbing my back for what was coming. She understood that the afternoon would surely bring far more serious wounds than the scratch above my eye.

Just then Kaitlyn entered the nurse's office in a panic. Looking at Mia, then me, then Mia again, she said, "Oh, I'm sorry. Should I come back later?"

Thrilled with the level of pity I was getting, and from all the right people, I immediately said, "No, Kaitlyn, please come in."

She came in and looked at me seriously for a long second while the nurse wiped Mercurochrome on the cut. Mia rose and stepped back in order to let Kaitlyn get closer. Unexpectedly, Kaitlyn grabbed my hand, squeezed it, and held it to her chest—right between her breasts, letting me feel them with the back of my hand. I wanted desperately to flip it over, grab her, and feel her breasts with the inside of my hand. Fuck. I can't feel anything with the back of my hand! Besides, what would she do if I did? I remained with the back of my hand against those sweet little soft bumps that were right there, right there ...

"He's not done. He'll be looking for you later. You know how he is. I didn't mean to tell him your name. I fucked up. I'm sorry. He went crazy when I told him I wanted some space and he scared me. I had to tell him; I was afraid of what he'd do if I didn't." She wasn't lying. No alarms in my head, only honest worry on her face.

"It's all right, Kaitlyn. I understand. Besides, it hardly hurts."

Kaitlyn looked at Mia as if they understood something I wasn't getting.

Mia looked at me and said, "Shell, you need to get a ride home before school ends."

"What do you mean 'before school ends'? I'm not gonna run away from this. This is not something I can run away from. Would you really suggest me running?" I asked.

Kaitlyn said, staring me right in the eyes, "He's gonna come back for you today, Shell. He's gonna wait for you in the parking lot. You know Chad; he's like a fucking ten-year-old."

I laughed despite my realization that I was a dead man. "Yeah, like a six-foot-three fucking monster ten-year-old!"

"You have to go home now, Shell," Mia said, with similar intensity to Kaitlyn.

"Can't. This is what it's supposed to be. I'll have to suck this up and take it. Hell, maybe someone will stop him before he kills me."

Mia asked Kaitlyn, "What is this all about? What's Chad's problem?"

Kaitlyn looked at me. "Shell and I had a talk at The Hill the other night. He gave me some advice, and I took it. Chad was on the wrong side of that advice."

"Wait, this is about advice you gave her? That's why he's going to kill you? That's all? You two didn't ...?" Mia stopped.

"No," Kaitlyn and I both answered at the same instant, which made it sound rehearsed or like we were denying something true.

"Shell just told me what I should be looking for in life, that's all. It just happens to be that Chad isn't it. That was my decision. Shell never said Chad's name once. It's just how I took it. This is happening because Chad is an insecure asshole, that all," Kaitlyn said emphatically.

"I still don't get it. What kind of advice are you talking about?" Mia asked Kaitlyn.

"Talk to him sometime. You'll have to hear him for yourself. He just kind of knew something about me. I thought about it later, and it was all true ... It was all sort of exact and hard to describe," Kaitlyn said, looking at me as if questioning where that little talk of mine had come from.

"All right, Mr. Ludo. You are all set," the nurse said. She'd been listening to this entire conversation without blinking an eye.

I stood up to leave, with the girls by my side.

"I'm going to have to call your dad. He'll need to know what happened," Nurse Davis said.

"I'm pretty sure Mr. Range already called him. They're pretty good friends, and Mr. Range was the one who took Chad to the office," I argued, hoping Nurse Davis would leave it alone. Mr. Range would have definitely called my dad. I knew that for sure.

"OK. I'll check with him and see if he did. If not, I'll have to call him," she replied.

"I understand. But hey, if you do call, don't blow it out of proportion, please. It's not a big deal; I'm fine."

"Mr. Ludo, I leave here at two thirty today. Whatever happens after school will happen without having a nurse on duty. Maybe you should listen to Miss Gateway and Miss Carter here, and go home early," she said sympathetically. Even the nurse thought I was a dead man.

I crossed the bus lane and headed toward the parking lot listening to the murmurs of the gathering crowd. They were as diverse an audience as I'd ever seen at Red Oak. Even some of the marching band kids were there, and all this time I'd assumed they only came out at night. Most were commenting on my impending demise, everyone agreeing that it was going to be a bloodbath. It had been decided already. I had little, if no chance, of making it out of this alive.

"Ludo," Chad yelled from twenty feet away.

I was almost to my car, but my car was not capable of going anywhere as literally twenty people surrounded it. I have to admit, as I approached the lot I'd considered jumping into my Subaru GL hatchback and running for it, as cowardly as I knew that was.

At least a hundred people were in the parking lot waiting for the main event, and I wondered briefly how long they expected the spectacle to last. In my head, it was only going to last until Chad landed one good blow. Though maybe I could withstand one good blow, in which case it would last two. If I could avoid him for fifteen seconds, dancing about, bobbing and weaving like Mohammad Ali, then it would last sixteen seconds and so on ...

"What's the problem, Chad?" I asked, trying to sound unafraid.

"You being a crybaby little fuck. You being with my girlfriend on The Hill. You talking to her when you knew I wasn't there."

"How did I know you weren't there?" I asked, hoping maybe I could talk my way out of this.

"Because if I was there, you wouldn't have been talking to her at all, or this would have happened there instead of here."

I couldn't argue with his logic. Damn. I'd walked right into that one. "Chad, I don't know what you think I did with Kaitlyn, but all I did was talk to her for two minutes."

He started walking toward me, slowly. People were moving around him and closing the circle. The crowd went from silent to excited murmurs. This was it—it was about to happen. I saw Mia standing next to her Celica with worry in her eyes. I took three steps backward, instinctually buying myself a couple more seconds. I scanned the crowd looking for an out, looking for a rescuer. It was all so clear now; the execution was going to happen. I was powerless to stop it. I was powerless ... I had forgotten that feeling lately; I'd been so empowered of late. I'd shaped things around me. I'd made things better, and now this fucking monster was making me feel weak again.

I held up my hand in a stop gesture, but as I saw it before me, I wondered what that was supposed to do. He didn't stop; he kept coming, not fast, not slow, but at a purposeful pace. The crowd that encircled us tightened and before long I was up against them, and they were ... those motherfuckers ... they were pushing me forward, like throwing flesh to the lions.

"Cry, asshole. Cry and I won't touch you," he chided me.

It was a tempting offer. I considered it for a second. I almost wanted to; the abandonment being the worst of it. All these once friendly faces were now angry and longing for blood, like a fucking zombie movie. Who were these people? These faces were so familiar, but ... so different. Oh, I wanted to, but I'd sworn I wouldn't cry again.

That emotional weakness had ended a couple years ago, and then came the "gift." I'd regained control; I'd begun to see in others the same darkness that had haunted me for so long. I'd spent enough time diagnosing my own misery and lies that I suddenly could do it in others as well. Like any superpower, when the gift had come to me, I immediately exploited it. I'd used other's weaknesses against them, stepping on heads as I climbed the social ladder. At the top of the ladder, I found friends whom I had lost in junior high. I found friends who had forgotten my name, but I'd never forgotten theirs. Friends like Kaitlyn Carter and Mia Gateway—beautiful and normal friends who were more popular now than ever. Now a senior and on my way to the Navy (or somewhere), I wasn't going to have a breakdown, falling twenty rungs back to the pit of the condemned, the stage crew, honor guard, and band goons ... fuck no. Fuck Chad, the cave dweller. He'd have to kill me.

"Fuck you, Caveman. I know what you are," I yelled, and surprised with my own actions, I ran full speed at him.

The crowd exploded with excitement. When I reached Chad I dropped my head and plowed the top of my skull into his solar plexus. I immediately thought I'd broken my neck as my head hit his hard chest and snapped upward with the momentum from my body closing in. The first punch he threw hit me on the top of the head. I was relieved that I still had sensation (even if only sharp, hot pain), so I guessed that my neck wasn't completely severed.

The giant stumbled back for a second, but then he grabbed my shirt and turned, throwing me across the blacktop where I slid atop the hot asphalt removing most of the skin from the left side of my face, knees, hip area and left elbow. I looked at my wounds, which were a strange white for a few seconds before the blood began to flow. The crowd roared as I sat looking at my knee. They were alive, like a third fighter in the ring, chanting and screaming. I looked briefly at their faces and saw only evil expressions of lust, hate, and anger.

"Kill the motherfucker!"

"Get up, pussy!"

"You're gonna die, Shell!"

I didn't have time to process too much of this while I was agonizing over a skinned knee. This fighting thing wasn't for me, and it hadn't ended as quickly as I'd hoped. I'd hoped to be unconscious by now. The event over so I could take comfort in having survived. That mortal question was still hanging in the air as I tried to stand up, and he was on me in a second. He grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, driving a blow directly into my nose.

Explaining what a shattered nose feels like is difficult. I think it is best described as a white flashing that overcomes so many senses at one time that you cannot even really tell what's happened. However, once it has happened, it is a mortal blow; there is no rebounding back, and no fighting with dignity. At the moment your nose is shattered, you are, for all intents and purposes, finished.

I'd heard a crunch under his heavy-handed blow, saw a white and red light, and felt my head falling back against the pavement. Motherfuck, I am still conscious!

The crowd "ooohed" as the pain was properly identified by my brain, and every nerve ending in the proximity of the broken cartilage and bones resounded with an electrifying sense. Blood poured from my nose, but my eyes hurt more than the actual bridge of my nose. Tears streamed from my face without any forethought. I rolled over and tried to push up off the ground, fearing another blow. Stomach against the ground, I began to push up. I got to my knees, and I stood. Then I lost my balance and stumbled forward, sliding again onto the left side of my face, and I remembered instantly that it had already been scraped clean of any external skin.

As I lay there in a state of awareness I'd never known before, I suddenly had an epiphany. Pain is manageable. Sounds relatively generic at first, but when you consider all the things that people do, and have done, to avoid being confronted with pain; it's impressive to realize that the brain only allows so much in at a time. An ocean of pain was flooding my brain, yet I could determine what hurt the most. I could separate the intensity of the different areas throbbing and screaming for relief. It amazed me. I'd always been such a pussy, so afraid of being hit, and being put in pain by another person. Why? Chad Brandie was a caveman, and this was all he had. I wanted to get up. I wanted to walk forward and take his punches, all the while walking toward him, spitting out teeth and laughing; however, I couldn't seem to even get off the ground.

I got myself semi erect before this fuzzy dizziness took me, and I fell flat down onto my face. Everything went black. Finally, I was unconscious and Chad hadn't even knocked me out—after all that waiting for him to do so, I had knocked myself out.

In eighth period study hall, I'd looked up to see Nic standing in the hall on the other side of the glass classroom door. Melissa Jason had called my attention to the figure standing in the door hailing me. "Shell, Shell ... Nic is out there."

I looked up to see my old friend Nic Jacobsen standing on the other side of the door, waving me out there to talk to him. I grabbed the boy's room hall pass, an obnoxious piece of two-by-four with a giant key ring attached to one end. A loose key slid easily aroung the key ring which was big enough to fit around my neck. The bathrooms were not locked, so the key fit nothing. It was just there, along with the clever wording written on the two-by-four in Mrs. Martin's handwriting The Key To Success is Application without Haste which we'd roughly translated and transcribed to the other side of the board as Don't Fuck Around In The Bathroom.

Nic was leaning up against the lockers when I got out into the hallway, smiling as I closed the distance. "Man, you really did it this time," he said.

"I didn't do shit."

"Somebody thinks you did shit, and somebody is a big mean motherfucker. What are you going to do?"

"What can I do? I'm gonna have to fight him," I said.

Nic laughed. He laughed for a minute at least, trying to understand what I had in mind. "You got a pair of brass knuckles or something?" he asked, with tears in his eyes from laughing.

"No, I don't. Hey, do those things really work?" I asked.

"Yeah, Shell, I assume they do. People have been using them for centuries or something ..."

I was intrigued. I hadn't thought of this; I hadn't thought of what advantages I could sneak into my pocket. I could mace him ... I could use a club ... I could use brass knuckles. "You got brass knuckles?"

"No," he said incredulously.

"Where can I get them?" I asked, seriously.

He looked at me for a long second. "You can't. They're illegal, and this is Blythe, not Harlem."

"Goddamnit! Then what did you bring it up for?" I asked impatiently.

He laughed again. "You really have no plan do you? You're just gonna walk out there and die. This will be interesting."

"No one will stand up for me! What a bunch of fucking cowards! Not one of my friends will help me out!"

He smiled at me again. "When was the last time you fought a monster for someone?" he asked.

"Is there something you wanted? Is there a reason you pulled me out of study hall?"

"Yeah, to see if you have some plan in your head, and if not, to say goodbye."

"Fuck you," I said.

He looked at me again for a second, shook his head slowly once, turned, and walked away.

When I came to, I was in an ambulance on a gurney with two middle-age male paramedics looking down on me. They informed me that I was on my way to Harrisburg Hospital. I found out later that I had a dislocated clavicle, two broken ribs, a concussion, a shattered nose, and would need thirty-three stitches above my eye and on my left knee.

Lying there, I didn't know any of that, except the clavicle thing ... that hurt like a motherfucker, and moving my left arm was nearly impossible. There was a bump protruding from under the skin right below my throat and when I tried to move my left arm, I could feel that bone sliding and popping when I touched it with my right hand.

"Don't do that," Jeff Larson said.

I recognized him as soon as he spoke; he was a friend of my mother's from her days on The Squad. He was a wonderful sight to see—a friendly face, a person uninvolved in the bullshit at school, someone whose job it was to take care of me and to protect me. He took my right hand away from my mangled collarbone and held it in his warm hands for a second. I was overwhelmed with emotion to be in this safe place, away from all the angry voices jeering at me as I moved toward death.

What a bunch of ruthless maniacs. They weren't maniacs though; they were friends, and kids I'd grown up with who were capable of such cold maliciousness. Group mentality is a dangerous creature, a demonic possession. I decided I'd no longer pray for things like, "Feed the starving children is Zaire." Instead, I'd focus on the more clear and present danger, "Destroy the crowd. They are evil."

"You in pain?" Jeff asked.

"Are you fuckin' being a smart ass now too?" I asked him back.

"Shell, do you want something for the pain?"

"Yes goddamnit! What? Do you want me to beg you? Gimme what you got. I want to be numb. No, I want to sleep. Give me something that will make me sleep."

"Nope, they're gonna need to do tests on you and make sure you're not bleeding internally or anything. The best I can do is Demerol."

"Demerol?"

"Yes, Shell, I probably shouldn't even give you that, but given your condition ..."

"I want morphine," I demanded, sounding like an insolent bratty child. I didn't even really know what morphine was, but when Nic and I watched movies about Vietnam with his dad, they always gave them morphine. As soon as it was injected, the wounded soldier would stop screaming and slowly drift off to a happy place.

"I think you'll like Demerol, Shell," he said, as the other paramedic rolled me onto my side and Jeff stuck a needle into my ass. A minute later I could already feel the glorious effects of this wonderful, fucking magical concoction. I decided I needed to have some of this shit at home, lying around in beakers and jars ... all I had to do was pop it into my ass via a needle? No problem.

I was floating and flying, feeling absolutely flawless as the ambulance turned and slowed as we rolled through the stoplights between the school and the hospital.

At some point during the ride, I heard a call on the radio from another ambulance. The gist of what they were saying was that they were trying to follow us the whole way but we needed to slow down on route 5. They didn't have a new vehicle, like we did, and it was more difficult for them to drive at high speeds.

I mimicked the radio transmission, "Slow down guys ... You're going too faaaassst," I said with a whiney child's voice.

"Just relax. You should be comfortable now," Jeff said dismissively.

I did as he said, clearing my mind of it, when suddenly I realized that there were two ambulances. Holy shit, I'd done it. I'd deflected punches, ducking and bobbing, throwing rights and lefts like a fucking ninja. He'd taken so many blows that he couldn't stand, and when he finally fell, I was there to smash his nose the same way he'd done mine. I had no recollection of it at all though, and that worried me a bit. I'd suffered a concussion, and that was obviously why I'd forgotten my triumphant rally.

I searched my mind for a fragment of it, for the slightest affirmation of my heroism, and came up with nothing. As I reenacted the scene again, I saw something I'd missed on the first go around.

As I was lying on the blacktop after my nose was shattered, I saw a fuzzy vision. A person ... behind Chad ... someone else?

"Jeff, Jeff ... Hey, man. Did I win? Did I win the fight?"

He looked at me, obviously sure I was in no danger of slipping away, slipping into the darkness, and he smiled. "No, hell no, you got killed. It wasn't even a good fight."

He's joking with me. Why would he joke with me now in this serious time? There was another ambulance, so someone else had been hurt. Who? "Who's in the ambulance behind us then?"

"Chad Brandie," he said, trying to skirt the question.

"So why is Chad Brandie in the ambulance if he won the fight?" The guy has to be putting me on, right?

"Oh, he won the fight all right—the one with you anyway. You see your face? No, you haven't, but when you do there will be no question in your mind about who won," he said, turning away from me and looking out the rear doors.

"So ... what happened to him?"

Jeff turned and looked at me as if trying to spare me bad news—no, tragic news. "Your friend Nic just about killed him."

Driving home from the hospital later, I was full of questions and an odd sense of peace. The day was over, the fight behind me, and tomorrow offered a day at home on the couch with some Percocet to keep me warm and comfy as I watch Donahue and Air Wolf from the couch. My mother and father were in the car together, which was something that I'd never remembered happening before, or maybe it was the drugs and stress, and that really didn't happen.

"Nic was arrested," my mother said.

"What? For what?" I asked, panic in my voice. "For saving my life?"

"Don't worry. Mr. and Mrs. Brandie are not pressing charges." She continued, "Your father and I threatened them with a civil lawsuit if they didn't drop the charges. They decided they would let it go as a schoolyard fight that got out of control. You should know that Nic did go a little crazy, and what he did is still not entirely clear, but we know for certain that he intentionally fractured both of Chad's eye sockets after he'd already beaten him near unconscious. Nic was not the same person we've always known; by all accounts he was crazy, and people were afraid for Chad's life. Two of Chad's friends tried to stop Nic and one ended up with his arm being fractured when Nic repeatedly slammed it in the door of your car. The other was punched in the throat, and he almost asphyxiated in the parking lot. It was a mess. See, Chad broke your ribs with a kick after you'd blacked out, and Nic decided that was too far. From then on what happened sounds like a movie scene, but the one thing we know is that he went berserk."

When we got home and pulled into my driveway, it was about eight thirty. There were at least ten cars parked on the street in front of my house. When I got out of the car, I carried a Percocet bottle in my right hand, and I had a sling holding my left arm in place. I had stitches above my eye and in my knee; gauze and an oily antibiotic over most of the left side of my body; and an ace bandage around my chest holding a white ice pack against my ribs.

My "friends" were in the yard to greet me. They all looked so normal now. There were no more screaming and horrible faces demanding my blood; instead, they were all happy for me, sympathetic, and saying things like, "It's OK, man. It's all over now."

"He won't be doing that again anytime soon," one said.

I was hugged and congratulated on my bravery. The most potent words came from Kaitlyn Carter who hugged me and held me for a long time despite my wincing gasps of pain. "That son of a bitch will leave you alone from now on, if he recovers. He's done fighting at Red Oak, I can tell you that."

"What happened?" I asked. "I had his ass on the run, and then it all went black." I laughed at my own joke, which felt like someone pushing a hot poker into my side.

"You don't know?" she asked.

"I know that Nic—hey ... where is Nic?"

"I'm right here, motherfucker," he said smiling at me. There wasn't a scratch on him. He looked at me for a long second and finally said, "What? You thought I'd let him kill you out there?"

I went to him and hugged him. My eyes watered and real tears fell down my cheeks. I'd never hugged him before; he was always so stoic, so hardened ... He felt like myself, like I'd wrapped my arms around myself, and I wished he were my father, my brother ... my lover ... something. I'd never had a father who would fight for me, my mother had left me to my own decisions years ago, my sister ignored me wholly, and my friends at school wouldn't risk their reputations to save my life. Nic, the sophomore kid who'd lived two hundred feet from me his entire life, had single handedly become all those people to me in an act so courageous, so brutally violent that no one ever challenged him again for the rest of his days in Blythe. He was a legend now and spoken of with reverence. People feared his wrath, and it was a well-deserved fear; he was dangerous and always had been. Today he'd killed—or would have. What scared people wasn't his violence, but the way he'd hovered over Chad's lifeless body and had to be negotiated off of it, like an eagle on its prey. He'd deliberately smashed each eye socket with straight and ruthless blows until he felt the bones give way under his fists. That was scary shit. Everyone who witnessed that fight was changed ... changed forever. Parking lot brawls had a new heaviness attached to them—a new severity.

People had seen a killer going to work—breaking bones, and forcing blood out of body parts—and for it, they were awakened. They were my friends again, normal and peaceful; the people I'd been looking for all day and hadn't been able to find.

Nic had been there all along. He'd been sitting in my Subaru, with the door wide open, watching the whole thing. When he'd seen enough, he'd grabbed the twelve-inch billy club from under the driver's seat and jumped off the hood onto Chad, beating him first with the club, and then with his fists.

At some point Nic had addressed the crowd. He'd stood over Chad, having already disabled him and his two friends, and said, "I'll kill anyone who steps forward. I'll fucking kill you all." Everyone believed him, and no one moved or said a word. The mob-driven audience was in shock.

"We thought Chad was dead," Mia told me later. "People were afraid to try and stop Nic. We had to look away. The blood was awful."

My mother hugged him in front of my house after I finally let him go. She told him she loved him, and she always had. Nic had always loved my mother as well, and I knew that forever we would be a closer family because of his heroism ... or terrorism ... whatever it was.

I took something out of that lesson that I needed to remember for the rest of my life. Involving myself in people's disasters is a dangerous way to live. I needed to take precautions, I needed to anticipate bigger effects from the words I spoke, and I needed to slow down my approach. I needed to work on people over a period of time, not so I could figure them out, but so they would respond slowly and reasonably to my words. My words were dangerous and my selfish motives had already begun to show signs of larger effects. I needed to focus on what I needed, and what I needed was humility. It was time to stop doing magic tricks and use what I had more responsibly, remembering a better me.

When I became emotionally involved, I was potent, and people reacted powerfully to that by doing crazy things and making immediate and risky decisions. If I planted the information under insults, or buried it in some revealed truth, it grew into a cancer overnight. In a desperate desire to rid themselves of the hurt, they made crazy decisions that could too often be traced back to me.

Maybe I needed bodyguards. Maybe I could be as selfish as I wanted, if I was protected. Like Jesus, I could work miracles for the disciples, allowing them access, allowing them to touch me. With the miracles, they would be fervent in their mission to step between the next Goliath and me. I would help them with their lives and they would protect me with them.

I was going to need to change my objectives. If I didn't, disciples weren't going to be enough. I would need an army.
Chapter 3

Hello Vedder

"Army recruiting. Sergeant Wild," said the voice.

"I want to join the Army," I said, recalling a similar conversation I'd had with the Navy recruiter about a year ago.

"Is that right?" said the voice. It was a sarcastic voice, well placed. I thought the man on the other end of the phone was probably attractive. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe something in the mid-range tone of it? No notable accents or lisps ...

"Yes, that is correct. There is a problem though," I said.

"And what would that be?" said the voice. It was sounding more and more like John Cusack.

"I enrolled in the Navy a year ago. I was going to the delayed entry meetings, but ... uh ... well, it just didn't really work out."

"Did you sign anything official?" he asked, sounding less concerned about my confession than I thought he might.

If this guy didn't take me into the fold, I would have to choose between the Air Force and the Marines. Neither one of those sounded very promising for completely opposite reasons.

"Yes, he produced a promissory note in the student parking lot for me to sign on the first day I met him. It doesn't look too official though ... He misspelled promissory," I said with a self-satisfied chuckle.

"Wait, a promissory note? What the fuck is that?" he asked.

"It's apparently a note, uh, promising that I will be a good boy and join the Navy when the time comes ... or something to that effect. He said he needed a signature before the Navy would invest its time into me." OK, maybe I was intentionally setting up a common enemy scenario with this guy, but I really needed this guy to make it happen for me

"I've never heard of that shit. Why haven't you shipped out?"

"I haven't graduated from high school yet, and ... there was a disagreement," I said cautiously. I needed to admit to the problems I had with Triplett and Company, but I didn't want to ruin all my efforts developing the common enemy scenario. I had to dramatize it a tad to make sure Sergeant Wild remained on my side.

"Well, Mister ... uh ...?" he asked.

"Ludo, sir."

"Call me Sergeant Wild, please. That sir shit's hurting my head." He laughed at his own joke.

I vaguely recognized the set up for the joke and, once again, I had no idea what it pertained to. It was as if everyone else was in on the joke around me, but I still didn't get it. "OK, Sergeant Wild," I said obligingly.

He sighed into the phone. I was expecting to hear him ask me a series of questions about my problems with Triplett, so I began to prepare the slight embellishments I would need to have handy for when the questions inevitably came. Instead, he said, "Navy, Navy, Navy ... Why would any man want to be semen?"

I didn't know what to say, so I said absolutely nothing. I was becoming familiar with this idea of saying nothing. Its uses were already yielding miraculous results.

"Fuck the Navy. No one should be forced to join the fucking Navy ... unless he comes out of the closet while he is talking to me, then I might send him in that direction."

"I'd also like to jump out of airplanes. Is that gonna be a problem?"

"It depends, are you scared of heights?" he asked with a forced laugh that might have been a short, stubby cough.

And with that conversation, Shell A. Ludo joined the United States Army.

Sergeant Wild asked if he could come see me the very next day, stating that he wanted to go over a few things with me in person. I agreed under the condition that our meeting take place at my house—to keep the Triplett thing from happening again, and to help push the process along. I wanted to get this done as soon as I could. I wanted to be locked in, know what I would be doing in the Army, where the hell I would be going, and when I could get the fuck out of here.

Wild didn't seem to care where we met; in fact, I think he was going to suggest my house anyway, which made me feel like an ass for being so aggressive and demanding. I realized that treating everyone as if I were dealing with Triplett was the same as slamming the door in everyone's face who rang my doorbell as if they were all Jehovah's Witnesses. I needed to take the time to aim my aggression before simply pulling the trigger and firing into the crowd.

Wild hadn't asked me anything about my friends, not even in a casual beating-around-the-bush kind of way. This was something Triplett couldn't resist—the temptation of inquiring about one's friends. Triplett had annoyed the hell out of me with his persistent questions about my friends, even to the extent that he asked me to invite him to parties at The Hill, which was absurd to even ponder. I'd finally told him one day to "Shut up about my friends already!" to which he'd just laughed and said, "OK, maybe we'll just wait and talk about it tomorrow." Wild, on the other hand, simply agreed to meet me at my house without any other thought.

The next day after school I saw his late-model, charcoal-colored Jeep Grand Cherokee pull into my driveway under clear blue spring skies. I heard the radio turn off abruptly with the ignition and suddenly realized by the stark contrast in sound how loud it had been. It was classic rock, Dokken even, but I tried not to hold it against the guy.

When the door opened, I first saw a camouflaged leg hit the pavement followed by more camouflage and a face, a handsome face. Honestly, he could have done without the Oakley blades, with their matching red earpieces and nose-bridge, but still, the face beneath the glasses was a handsome one. Though he sounded like John Cusack on the phone, he looked quite similar to Val Kilmer. It was apparent, even with the red beret on his head, that he was a former jock turned Army badass, which suited me fine.

I thought about Triplett and how he was always telling me how many moms he'd fucked since he took this job, but my lie-alarm went off ninety percent of the time. I knew, however, that Triplett had done a few of the moms, as I'd seen evidence of it, but for the most part the tales were fictional. If Triplett had actually screwed twenty, then Wild, on the other hand, could have possibly been with thousands.

When he knocked on the door, I was still hiding off to the side of the picture window taking him in. Why was I acting so peculiar, you ask? I'm not entirely sure. He was a compelling guy, but more than that he had scruff on his face, which was something I knew to be looked down upon by military organizations. His uniform was so well pressed it could have been made out of cardboard. He looked to be about six-two, and maybe two hundred and ten pounds, but he walked with the grace and smoothness of a much smaller man.

I didn't want him to see me looking him over from the corner, so I did the most logical thing I could think of. I got down on my belly and low-crawled beneath the window (as to remain out of sight) toward the door I needed to answer about ten seconds ago. As I crawled across the dusty hardwood floor, I wondered if this was normal. Was I normal? No. This was definitely weird.

He knocked hard on the door when he knocked again, and this time it stirred my mother from the sewing room. When she turned the corner from the hallway into the living room and saw me nearing the end of my low-crawl, she looked at me with a puzzled expression. Her eyes darted from the door, to me, and back to the door again.

"Don't open it, Ma. I got it," I said, rising to my feet and dusting my shirt off with a severe downward brushing.

"Is that the Army guy?" she asked, assuming she was correct.

"Uh, yeah, he appears to be. I see camo, and a lot of it," I said, sassing her a bit.

She didn't have time to reply as I pulled the door open.

"Ludo?" he asked in his Cusack-ian voice.

"Yes, sir," I said, baiting him with what I'd assumed was every enlisted guy's favorite retort to that statement. I saw him swallow the comment; I saw the flicker of the quip "I work for a living" appear and disappear all before they could escape his mouth. I smiled to myself at my genius of prediction and understanding.

Stepping inside, he greeted my mother with deference and attractive military procedure; he was turning it on a little for her. I liked the form—rigid stance, plenty of "ma'ams" and "pleases," but especially the fact that he accepted her baked goods without refusing politely first. People often feel that they should reject the offer a few times first then gradually bend and accept the gift. That's completely unnecessary. When offered a cookie by someone's mother or grandmother, accepting upon inquiry is the politest thing to do regardless of whether or not you really want it.

After we'd all made introductions, my mother showed herself back to her sewing and left me there to talk to Wild alone. I'd impressed upon her earlier that afternoon that I wanted to do all the negotiating alone. She was seeing herself out of my affairs in order that she not be held liable later on should my decisions be bad ones.

When he and I were alone, he asked out of nowhere, "How tall are you, Ludo?"

"Uh, about five-nine," I said stuttering. I wasn't prepared for that question. I'd answered without even trying to figure out the relevance of such an odd inquiry. Maybe you had to be a certain size to carry all that gear and climb ropes. I'd always been one of the two smallest kids in any given classroom, especially in high school where all my friends had a distinct advantage over me—puberty.

"Hmm," he said, looking around the kitchen.

"Is there a problem with my height, sergeant? Am I too short or something?" I asked, unable to wait for him to rub his chin long enough to come up with another daunting question.

"No, Ludo." He laughed a quick, one-syllable laugh. "I was just wondering. Hey, how tall is your Dad?" he asked.

"Mmmm ... about the same as I am, I guess." Was he? He always seemed so gigantic ... I perceived my dad as eight feet tall; but now that I was considering it, I realized that we were probably about the same height.

"Grandfather?" he asked

"Yes, sir," I replied.

"No, how tall is your grandfather?" he asked with a slight shake of the head.

"Oh, uh, he's pretty tall," I ventured, "Maybe six something?"

"Six-four?" he asked

"I don't really know for sure," I said, wondering what this was all about.

Wild turned to me, peered into my eyes from his standing position (a piece of buttered homemade bread in his left hand), and said very assuredly, "Shell, you are going to be tall. I know ... that might sound a little weird coming from me, but, believe me, when you come home from the Army for Christmas, you'll be bigger than most of the guys in your graduating class."

"OK, sarge. I'm not sure about that, but it sure would be nice if it were true."

He looked at me as he stuck a magnetic picture of my sister and me back into its place on the fridge door. "It's true."

He wasn't anything like Triplett; he was someone whom you just immediately wanted to be. He wore an 82nd Airborne Division patch on his left shoulder, an Air Assault patch, a Ranger tab, and a combat patch on his chest—all of which testified to the fact that this guy was the real deal. He wasn't some paperwork schlep working in S-2; this guy was a certified killer.

I noticed that although he had scruff on his face, he was absent of the mustache I'd seen on almost every military person I'd met thus far. After an hour of small talk, I felt comfortable enough to ask him about it. "Sarge, why don't you have a mustache like every other guy I've seen with a uniform on?"

"Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do something, private," he said with a smile. I loved this man instantly.

Wild made the Army feel cool, and he made me feel good about my decision to go. The experiences I've recounted about the Navy debacle were just a couple of many incidents that'd happened there. Triplett and I had remained friends, so to speak, but once I left for the Army I never spoke to or heard from him again. I didn't miss him. I had Sergeant Wild now; the man I needed to have at that juncture. He was strong, he was direct, and he was always cooler than me.

On August 14, 1994, I was standing in my driveway in Blythe, for the last time in my life, waiting for Sergeant Wild to come pick me up and take me away. He'd been adamant about personally delivering me to the hotel I'd be spending the night in. He said he had his reasons for insisting on it, and I agreed easily enough. Whatever his reason was, mine was simply that it was easier for me to face my new world with Wild than deal with my mother's worrying and crying. I'd be seeing her later in the evening when she and Dave, my stepfather, came up to Harrisburg to take me to dinner and a movie for what would be my last night as her dependent.

The neighborhood was eerily quiet as I stood on the hot blacktop trying to smell the smells that I'd always associated with home, but all I could smell was what I was already accustomed to. None of my friends gathered around, and no fanfare was made of my pending departure. I was alone, standing in my driveway with a small bag in hand, waiting for Wild's Cherokee to come rolling into my driveway, scoop me up, and drive me away, forever ...

In the morning I would begin the processing portion of joining the Army followed by an intense physical examination, a series of preliminary shots, blood draws, briefings, a swearing in ceremony, and finally a plane ticket good for a one way trip to Alabama. By this time tomorrow afternoon, I would be sitting on a plane next to a stranger on my way to a scary land. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, I warned myself. One step at a time ... for now. My job was to hold it together and not become emotional about the trip that would eternally set me free of this town. It was time to own up to my decisions regardless of what they stemmed from.

I knew I wouldn't be to my final destination until late into the night. After I flew to Atlanta, we would be bused to Ft. McClellan, which was an additional three and a half hour ride from the airport. If I left Harrisburg at four or five, I could expect to reach McClellan at about three the next morning. Wild had warned me that I would be up the rest of the night at McClellan doing more in-processing and that I should sleep as much as possible on the plane and bus. Somehow, I figured that wasn't going to be as easy as he made it sound.

All of the details that had been shoved at me over the last week were suddenly weighing very heavily on me as I stood there trying to make sense of my life. Wild had been great, but this didn't strike him as traumatic. He was somewhat callous with me over the last forty-eight hours when I'd called him with packing questions or general itinerary queries. I was trying to plan for my mother and father to both visit me in Harrisburg the next day, at two separate times, and in order to do so, unfortunately, I had to annoy the shit out of Wild.

"Jesus, Ludo, I don't have all the answers," he'd said, obviously annoyed.

"Hey, man, I'm trying to plan for my parents to visit me ... If you don't want to give me any details, how am I supposed to do that?" I asked, equally pissed and annoyed. I wanted to ring his neck. He acted like I was going to a church picnic or something. Didn't he realize that I was leaving tomorrow? Didn't he worry about me at all?

Now in the driveway with all the planning done and all the goodbyes said, the only thing I had left to say goodbye to was the house that I loved more than anything in my life. My mother had already sold it; she was permanently joining my stepfather in Morgan (about three hours north of Blythe). I'm sure the last two years home with me and without Dave had been an eternity for her, so I couldn't blame her for being excited to go. All that was left between the Ludos (or formerly the Ludos) and the house, was the closing, which my mother had been delaying in order to time it perfectly so I would already be gone when it changed hands. It had sold after only being on the market for fourteen days. A buyer from somewhere north of the city had popped up out of nowhere, and just like that, my house belonged to another family. The last month or two in the house was strange; it was still my house but felt oddly like a stranger to me—similar to a girlfriend who smelled too much like a buddy's cologne.

I had come out to stand in front of the house intentionally early, wanting time to reflect. The house was equally as displaced as I was. We were somewhere between one world and the next—the former life and the future—and as that dawned on me, my love for it only grew stronger. The house and I were equally sad; we were going to miss each other.

Where would I come back to? How would we celebrate holidays in the future without our house to do it in? Who would be swinging from my tree swing while I was at boot camp doing push-ups? The issue seemed not to matter to the rest of my family; I felt contempt for my sister, my mother, and even my father (though technically he had nothing to do with it being sold).

I was in a strange and emotional state; I was somewhere between sad, scared, and ready to start something new. I wanted a new life and a new lifestyle—somewhere far enough away that no one could see me, report me, or hopefully even know me as anyone other than who I presented. I would reintroduce myself to this world and put my past in the garbage can. I'd invent a better past and retell the stories of my youth with embellished dramatics and truthful eyes. It was finally time to go; I couldn't believe it.

My nerves were working differently than usual. Instead of needing to take a dump, the reaction I'd always had to nerves, it felt like these feelings were being stored inside of me as a fuel. My old friend sarcasm took advantage of my emotional state, and somewhere inside of me there was a natural transformation happening. I was privy to it; I could see it, feel it, and understand it, which was something that usually never happens when experiencing self-adaptation. I was like a spectator, unemotionally watching myself move forward with these dramatic events with seemingly little impact on my psyche. I didn't want to see the neighbors, and I was glad that the neighborhood appeared to be so lifeless. I'd already made the rounds and said goodbye to all of them, and their goodbyes had been as false and tinny as anything I'd ever heard. Frankly, I could have done without ninety percent of them, but my mother had instructed me on whom I needed to go see before I left. I would have preferred to simply vanish, leave without saying a single word to anyone, disappear into the warm August day, never to be seen again.

"Well, my friend, I suppose this is it for both of us, huh?" I asked the structure.

No reply came.

"You're gonna have a new family living here soon, and the chances are slim that we will ever see each other again. I know, it sounds a little dramatic, but you know what I've been through. You know the way I've hurt and the way I've embarrassed myself. You never said a bad word about me even when everyone I ever trusted and loved did. I would have made you mine, you know. If I could, I would buy you and stay here alone for the rest of my life, but ... it's a barracks for me and a new family for you. Look on the bright side, bud. I bet the new family will fix the dining room right away; I bet it's the first thing they do when they move in here. Really! You'll have a new dining room, probably a little paint here and there, and before long you'll love them as much as you loved us."

The words I was wasting brought tears to my eyes. Being forgotten by a lifeless structure that happened to be my last and best friend on earth was far harder than anyone else potentially forgetting me.

"It's only natural; I suppose I can't hold it against you. I want you to be happy; I even want you to make them happy, but do me one favor? When I come back here, probably years from now, and I drive by real slowly looking at the trees and the yard, remember me. Know me, when I come back, friend."

As if on cue, tires made a sticky rubber sound on the road behind me and I knew it was Wild. The Jeep Cherokee turned the corner, passed Nic's house, and pulled into my oil-spotted driveway. He bounded out of the Jeep; he was obviously not in my melancholy reflective state of thought. "Ready, Ludo?" he asked with a smile and quickly moving legs.

"I suppose I am," I said blankly.

I got into the car, closed the door, and looked out the front windshield at the tan house before me. I sealed my eyes closed, imagined it, and opened them again quickly to make sure I had it right. This is the image I have of it today; the last time I saw it as my house, as we backed out of the driveway with Sergeant Wild at the wheel. As I pinched my eyes closed again, a tear fell from each eye.

They would come with the vans and trucks in a week or two; I would be oblivious to it from where I was. The neighbors would introduce themselves eventually to the new owners and a year from now it would be known as the Smith home, or whatever the fuck their names were. The Ludos would be forgotten.

"Shell, I wasn't sure you were ever gonna ship off. That foot was a real motherfucker, huh?" he asked happily.

"Yeah, it still hurts a little," I said honestly.

He turned and looked at me with a serious look, and his smile disappeared. "Shell, don't tell them that or they'll turn you around and make you wait another month. I'm serious. It's not even their decision, legally; if you have an injury that isn't healed, they will make you wait until it is."

"I know, sarge. It's cool. I know what to do," I said.

"You sure you are ready for this, bud? I don't want you coming home in a week on a medical." He said this as if there was the option to turn his Jeep around and drop me off in the driveway. The house was sold! My mother was already living in Morgan for the most part, and no one wanted to deal with me postponing the Army again—most of all me. People were tired of saying goodbye every time they saw me, thinking that would be the last time they would, only to see me a week later at Grocery World.

"It's gonna be fine, sarge. I just need to get it strong again. That cast fucked me up. I won't come home. Hell, I'll never come back here again, and I hope that you of all people would understand that."

He knew me well enough to know I was escaping something rather than simply joining something. I'm sure a recruiter finds an escapee as often as he does a pure patriot. He had known exactly how to handle me from the beginning. He knew the relationship with my dad ... and he played me perfectly because of it. He was also a strong male figure—one who stood up for me, gave it to me straight, and never ever made me feel as if I'd let him down. Yeah, Wild was awesome. He was a good friend to me when I needed him, and in that period of life I really needed him. It's almost enough proof to me that there is a God. He was a perfect fit into my life at a time when the void was great.

In May of that year we'd all been ready to graduate. Our school operated on a September through June school year, so by May we were antsy. I had a special set of problems at the time, including one of the scariest situations I've ever been in. I was not sure that I was among the graduating class of 1994, and I seriously feared for the first time in my life that I might have to repeat a grade.

One day I was planning on graduating with my class, and the next I was wondering if I was going to be left behind. Potentially, I could end up graduating with the junior class ... I'd be left in limbo for the rest of my life, belonging to ... no one. Who would invite me to a reunion so I could dazzle them with my many life successes? The juniors? Holy fuck, I might end up having my ten-year reunion with the juniors!

It was undoubtedly the worst grade to fail. Failing any other grade allows you time to make new friends and to meet and bond with the younger class. This process can happen naturally, over time, and while still maintaining a friendly relationship with your former classmates. If I failed the twelfth grade, these people would eternally erase me. My class would disappear into the summer and off into the world while I tried to fix the most costly mistake of my life.

It was enough to keep me up at night. I'd stare at my Conan O'Brien poster for hours while my heart thumped against my ribcage with anxiety, trying to understand how I'd fucked this up so badly.

My English teacher, Mr. Sands, decided to announce this news to me and the rest of the class simultaneously. This was his retaliation for my having a conversation with the lovely Mia Gateway instead of listening to his Shakespearian lecture. When he looked up and saw me with my head turned completely around, engaged in playful banter with Miss Gateway, and unaware of the sudden pause in his lecture, he became somewhat incensed. "Mr. Ludo, you realize that it's likely you are failing this year entirely, and you will undoubtedly repeat this year, next. Correct?" he said with a got-you-motherfucker look.

I was speechless. My face got hot and red. I imagined it as red as an apple, but I suppose that could have been because literally everyone in the class had turned to look at me, and they were trying to judge for themselves whether or not I was already aware of this fact. I hadn't been. Sweat beaded on my forehead, my palms and my neck were suddenly swampy, my mouth taking a different reaction went instantly dry, my temples throbbed as the adrenaline flooded my brain. "Uh, no, sir," I muttered, bewildered.

"That's right, Mr. Ludo. We can discuss it after class if you'd like," he said a little nicer.

Everyone was still turned around and looking at me; it was terrible. I could feel the energy in the room change from complete boredom to sudden excitement, at my expense, of course, as they craned their necks or looked me over from the corner of their eyes. Jason Meyerly intentionally dropped a pen on the floor in order to mouth the words, "You failed, pussy." I would have returned the insult, but my brain wasn't working properly. The damned pounding in my ears, of what I guessed was my heartbeat, was unbearable. I was panicking, breathing heavily, and trying not to have a fucking meltdown in front of my peers. I needed to go to the bathroom. No, I needed to run to my car, start it, and drive away to somewhere remote to scream and cry.

When the bell finally rang and we were standing up and packing our stuff into our backpacks, I took my time hoping that everyone would leave first so I did not have to hear the banter immediately; but that wasn't the way it went down. Some of the comments I got were sympathetic, some were derisive, but most were purely insulting.

"Hey, Shell. That's rough man. You know any juniors yet? You will."

"Shell, I'm so ... sorry. I can't believe he said that in front of the whole class. What an asshole," one commented on the teacher's end of the developments and left mine politely unspoken.

"What are you gonna do, man? Your dad's gonna shit!"

The worst part wasn't the immediate results, and it was a day or two later when it dawned on me that people were treating me differently. I'd somehow been excommunicated. All of a sudden people were slow to speak to me—as if there had been a death in my family that no one knew how to address. They fumbled with their words when they had to speak to me, and if they could avoid it altogether, they did.

A few days later, I was standing at my locker with headphones over my ears but the volume turned completely down and overheard a conversation between Julie Barkley and Michelle Smith. They were both pretty, smart girls, which is what kept them off the radar for the most part, and they were talking too loudly about me—as if I wasn't five lockers away from them at all.

"So, you think he will still be invited to the graduation parties?" Julie asked, talking out the side of her mouth. I suppose she thought I was listening to Pearl Jam loudly and that by talking out of the side of her mouth, like a stroke victim, I wouldn't have any clue the conversation was about me.

"Yeah, of course, Julie! Jesus. He's still in our class."

"Yeah, but ... won't that be weird? We're all partying and saying our goodbyes as we go off to college. We're talking about new horizons and beginning life's journey and shit, and he's facing another year at Red Oak," Julie defended her point.

"I guess I hadn't thought of it that way. Still though, Shell is friends with everyone; of course they'll want him to come to parties. Jesus. The guy personally threw most of the good parties we had during high school, Julie. He's not gonna start missing them now," Michelle said, defending me with earnestness. I wanted to drop the disguise of the headphones and run over to hug her; I wanted to thank her for saying that.

"Yeah, no ... I like Shell, don't get me wrong, but I just want to enjoy this time in my life. I'm sorry if that makes me the bitch. I don't want to have to water down the hugeness of college and how excited I am to be going."

Julie was now on my permanent shit list. It wasn't that she felt this way that bothered me so much, instead, it was a combination of two things. One, I hadn't thought of this angle and the possibility of missing parties because I was repeating the year; and two, if she felt this way then there were probably others who felt similarly, and if they spoke like this and there was no Michelle to defend me, I could be ostracized.

The last few weeks of our high school lives approached, and I still wasn't sure what was happening with me. Some of the more friendly teachers told me that they thought I would pass, and others told me I would fail. I didn't know for sure, so I began doing homework and studying for the first time in my entire life—I should say, I tried.

I have never been able to concentrate on schoolwork of any kind. As long as there are other people around me, I just tend to focus on them more than I do on work. I can't break the interest that I have in people long enough to take in new information. I simply sit in my chair looking around the room at people, noting what they are doing, and trying to figure out what they are thinking. I was now motivated to try, and I did, but it was too late. Whatever I could manage to get done now would have little to no effect on my final grade. All I could do was wait for the news, one way or the other.

My friend Scooby was the first to throw a graduation party. It had been announced with short notice. On a Wednesday afternoon, out of the blue, Scoob announced that he was throwing a massive pool party that Friday night, and everyone was invited to help celebrate his future. He was off to Juillard in the fall, as he was a talented saxaphonist, and he had always been great in the time that I'd known him. His father was a musician as well, so Scooby was expected to go places with his talent and expected to work in the music industry for the rest of his life.

His parents had a nice home with an in-ground pool, which is why his advertisements for the party included what he called a "diving board contest." The contest was described as any and all acrobatics performed from the diving board, which sounded awesome with all those little bikinis splashing hard into the water from all directions. Surely there would be a bikini mishap, and we all wanted to be there when it happened.

We had become good friends over the last couple of years, Scooby and I. We were similar in so many ways, but the most important way we related to each other was with our humor. Scoob was super sarcastic; in fact, I think he might have been unable to ever be serious.

We were both in theater (it embarrasses me to say) and because of our theatrical passions, we often made up dialogue on the fly. For example, Scoob might walk up to the coed lunch table and announce, "So it came back positive ..." wearing a saddened expression on his face, his eyes full of concern.

I would contemplate for a fraction of a second then I'd fire back, "Well, the good news is there are treatments for it these days. I even think they make a cream for it now." This would elicit loud laughter and applause from the spectators worshipping our comedic genius. We'd smile to ourselves long after the applause and attention were no longer being directed at us.

The night of the party I found myself both excited to go and concerned about my situation with the school. The conversation between Julie and Michelle that day in the hall was still weighing heavily on my mind, but I tried to remind myself that everything would work itself out in the long run. This was much easier said than done.

The issue was taxing me and leaving me lying awake at night talking to Conan about the stress I was under. I told him about my worst fear—being left behind.

There is something about high school that is so important, so larger than life ... As much as we look back on it now and scoff, few of us look forward to our twenty-year reunion. Why is that? Is it because every single person who walks those tiled hallways is traversing serious bodily changes, social changes, and curricular changes all while trying to balance and hold onto the station they'd established? It's traumatic for everyone who has ever attended high school and no matter how fond the memories you hold of those tender years are, the event itself was work.

I was tired and depressed about it; I couldn't shake the feeling of being lost in a vast wilderness. I turned in circles looking at the trees that blocked my path, and I couldn't help but wonder: why me?

The night of the party, Nic and I made our entrance intentionally late. Nic, at his delicate age of ... well, two years younger than me, was well aware of how absolutely lame it was to show up to an event like that early. He was in-tune like that, effortlessly. That was something that impacted me, and I still accredit much of who I am to the kid I then looked up to. Nic had proven, better than most people ever receive proof, that he was a dedicated friend and brother to me. There was no questioning his loyalty after the Chad thing, and I began to see him differently after that incident. Maybe I just hadn't paid close attention to him previously, but there was a new draw to him after the parking lot brawl; it was partially driven by fear but mostly by intrigue. There had to be something more to a person who would do ... what he did ... than I had noticed before, and when I began to look and see what it was more closely, I realized that Nic was a natural beacon.

He was wise, but unfortunately for him, he didn't know it. Of course, I never told him. I never tried to make him aware of his unusually cool techniques because I hated myself for having to look up to a kid two years my junior. He was so simple and so principled that what he was came easy to him, and what I am has always been such a struggle to be. Decades have passed since I have seen him and I still find myself emulating him. He was flawless in his presentation of himself without even knowing what he was doing. I paid close attention to his reactions and presentations, and I noted exactly what makes cool people cool. I have been practicing being Nic ever since.

"Dude, I'll come over at six, and we can go after we smoke a bowl," he'd said with a serious smile.

"No, the party starts at six," I repeated, trying to make him understand.

"Right, so if I get here at six, we'll be there by six forty five," he said speaking slowly and nodding his head as he spoke.

I hated when he took that condescending tone with me; it was really the icing on the cake. Wasn't my having to admire him enough? I reminded myself constantly that he wasn't doing anything on purpose. In my head I knew that he was reacting naturally without understanding how much sense he made. He was right, after all, because getting to a party early or even on time is just tasteless. You are supposed to wait long enough that the host begins to wonder if you are going to come at all and then jovially enter with tardiness draped around you like a fucking pink boa around your neck. Nic just understood that being early was bad. He didn't know why ... he didn't understand the desperation for stimuli that was implied by arriving early. He just knew like a caveman—early feel bad. I, on the other hand, was so excited to get there that the idea of waiting a few extra minutes seemed counterintuitive, and when he'd announced with his easy going tone that we'd be leaving late, I was so angry at the attitude he'd given me that I hadn't considered the logic.

When we'd smoked out of the chillum, I'd taken hit after hit trying to reduce the anxiety of entering the party. Sometimes pot is extremely consoling, sometimes it relaxes me to the point of narcolepsy, and other times it somehow intensifies the nerves to almost paranoia, but with a strange topical numbness that weakens the actual fears. Deep within, you can still feel the racing heartbeat, the dryness of the mouth, and the sweating from strange places; but identifying the actual fear or repercussions of these fears becomes impossible, leaving you with a strange feeling of both being settled and unsettled.

Walking into the pool area was as dramatic as I had expected it to be. I was glad to have Nic with me when we did walk in, as he'd become somewhat of a local legend of late. It'd started with the parking lot brawl where he'd demonstrated his willingness to literally kill people for the right causes, but he'd been working overtime lately in his "I'm fucking crazy" world. Again, this would have been pure and simple showmanship if it had been anyone other than him, but he did these things without an agenda.

There had been rumors about a senior food fight in the cafeteria. It was tradition for the seniors to have a food fight sometime in the last two weeks of the year. The faculty pushed back hard against the idea by posting threats in the hallway in the form of Xeroxed flyers warning of mandatory suspension for the parties found responsible for starting it. Last year when a tray had been thrown, along with the spaghetti dinner it carried, it had hit a girl above the right eye and split the skin. She'd needed stitches so, of course, that ended the faculty's tolerance of the tradition, and they were suddenly Gestapo-like in their monitoring of the cafeteria.

For six days we'd come to school in our grubby clothing, fearing stains from chocolate milk and/or Italian cuisine. We'd just assumed that someone was going to start the fight despite the promise of suspension, but day after day no one did. We'd eat slowly to allow as much ammunition as possible to remain on our plates until the bell would ring, and then we'd shovel food into our mouths and chew as we walked toward the garbage cans and into the hallway.

Nic, who wasn't normally in our lunch period, showed up at lunch on a Thursday afternoon and took a seat across the table from me with his lunch tray stacked up with spaghetti and meat sauce. He said nothing as he sat down and just looked at us with a funny grin. People were beginning to say hi to him when he suddenly stood up. "All right, you pussies, if you're not gonna do it, I will," he yelled at the top of his lungs, instantly silencing the entire cafeteria.

Mr. Johnson, who was posted on our side, knew immediately what was about to happen, but I must admit that I didn't get it at first. As Mr. Johnson began to run toward our table, Nic grabbed his tray with his left hand, reached into the spaghetti piled on his plate, grabbed a handful, and tossed it hard in an arching trajectory. The spaghetti spread out as it flew through the air, landing six tables away, and splattering noodles and tomato sauce all over at least ten people. There was a second of silence before a roaring laughter seemed to shake the room, and people instantly stood up and threw their plates back in our direction.

Mr. Johnson, who was closing in on Nic, was only a few steps from seizing him when Nic saw him and took the opportunity to grab the last of his spaghetti and throw it violently at Johnson's face. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was happening so fast that nothing seemed real. A split second later, Mr. Johnson was screaming about his eyes being on fire.

Once the sacrificial lamb had started the riot, there was no reason not to participate, and the room that had been waiting for its food fight suddenly had one. People were throwing their entire trays. Milk cartons spiraled crazily as they whipped through the air and splashed long lines of milk that stretched from the table they were thrown from to the table they exploded upon. Spaghetti was hanging from the ceiling tiles and falling sporadically down onto whatever lay beneath it.

I'd been taking cover under the table we'd overturned to protect ourselves from the now airborne metal silverware. Forks and spoons clanged against the hard wood and lacquered tables. They bounced off the support pillars scattered throughout the room and ricocheted in all directions. We were laughing so hysterically at the riot and at Mr. Johnson's declarations of blindness that we didn't seem to register the danger that came from throwing metallic pointed utensils. After about five minutes of chaos, the brawl began to die down. We were out of food and it was too difficult to try and pick up individual pieces of wet noodle to throw back. As suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

Teachers were pouring into the cafeteria now and screaming demands at all of us. The principal and vice principal were both on scene now and began trying to reason with us, yet all the while not mentioning any disciplinary action. Once we all began to relax, right the tables, and wipe ourselves off, two teachers and Vice Principal Merkowiz came to seize Nic by the arms.

They led him out of the room and took him down the hall toward the office. As he went, he yanked his arms out of the hands of the men and warned them not to touch him. "Get your fucking hands off me," he said with a smile.

"Mr. Jacobsen, you need to calm down and come with us," Vice Principal Merkowiz kept repeating.

"I'm not fighting you; I'm going, but if you put your hands on me again, I'll break your fucking fingers." Nic was cool; he wasn't at all flustered, and he didn't appear nervous or even worried about what might happen to him. He simply kept pulling his elbows out of their hands, looking them square in the eyes, and repeating his threat about literally breaking fingers. When we last saw him it was as the cafeteria doors closed behind them (spaghetti sticking to the frame and stainless steel door handle). He'd done it again.

Nic was glorified for starting the riot; he was also arrested for inciting a riot, which brought him more notoriety. He'd sealed himself into the hall of fame forever, and all of this had happened because he just didn't fear things the way most people did. By the time he and I showed up at Scooby's house a week and a day later, he was already a legend. The school dropped the charges against Nic, but he was given in-school suspension for the rest of the year, and he agreed to do a hundred hours of community service over the summer. He'd volunteered to run the Blythe Summer Playground Program, a camp-like program for all ages of kids, for three hours a day during July and August.

He later told me, "You know, Ludo, it was worth it. Doing it just to say I did it, just to own it." Once again, my simple and fearless friend had taught me another important lesson without even realize he was doing it.

I was still trying to convince myself that I was among the graduating class of 1994, and I knew that by the following Tuesday I would know for sure, one way or the other. This feeling brought me comfort and anxiety as the idea of standing beside a teacher or my guidance counselor while he slowly declared my fate seemed torturous. The time it would take him to say the words, "Mr. Ludo, after tallying up your grades, we've decided that you will/will not graduate," would be enough for me to fall over dead from cardiac arrest. I was excited to know for sure and to put these thoughts out of my head forever, but at the same time I'd learned to find solace in not knowing.

Psychologically, I wasn't doing so well. The impending consequences of not graduating seemed to be getting longer and wider as time went on. It was fucking up my "gift" as well as my ego, and the entire summer stretching out before me was already suffering from it. I thought I could detect condescension in my friends, but I wasn't sure if it was there or not. Time and time again I would think I heard people talking about me. When I would walk up and they would stop speaking midsentence, I knew I was right. People weren't being cruel to me by any means, as they were being quite the opposite, honestly. They were going out of their way to sound chipper, and they were avoiding asking me anything that pertained to the future. The further this went along, the more it began to fuck up my understanding of people. In order to understand people properly, I had to have myself as the control in the equation. The more I decayed into a mushy pile of matter that feared the future, the less I could assert my gift into understanding my life. I was in limbo waiting for the guillotine to fall.

"Hey, Shell ... you're just in time. We're about to fire up a blunt," Eddie Merkel announced as we walked in through the wooden gate into Scooby's pool area. There were tanned bodies, wet hair, and general chaos everywhere. A huge crowd had turned out, maybe fifty people already, and we were only an hour late. I wanted to say something to Nic along the lines of "Thanks for making us late, asshole," but before I could, I heard him saying to Alexandra Bolitia that "We had some other stuff to do before we got here," sounding incredibly relaxed and giving the impression that we'd been doing something great and important, and that it dwarfed this party in comparison. She was melting into Nic as he talked casually—this was something that women had been doing since the cafeteria riot a week ago.

I decided, once again, that Nic was right and that it was good we came when we did. It was only seven o'clock anyway, and this party would easily see one in the morning. An hour of tardiness was small beans compared to the blessed hours of frolicking in the water with these women. He'd set the precedent for us. He'd also made sure that the guy who might not graduate didn't look like a toolbox for being early.

"Nicely done. Who rolled it?" I asked, buying time as I scanned the crowd for hostiles.

"Nikki. She's got those tiny Asian fingers that are good for rolling joints and making my cock look big when she holds it in her hand." He laughed, as did a number of bystanders.

Nikki turned and punched him in the stomach jokingly, but hard. She was a tiny Asian-Spanish mix with dark skin, dark hair, and an incredibly shapely body. She was wearing Daisy Dukes and a red halter with the white straps of her bikini top showing brilliantly as they climbed over her shoulders and down her back. The white looked almost electric against her naturally brown skin—the contrast was incredible.

"Fuckin' fire that thing up," Nic said, identifying himself as a player in this group of older classmates. He had nothing to fear. Actually, my entrance had been somewhat dwarfed by entering with Nic. Everyone was used to seeing us together, but lately instead of it seeming like Nic was hanging with me, it was beginning to feel like I was hanging out with him. This upset me. I was becoming jealous of my friend, the one who had saved my life for Christ's sake, and already I was thinking that I should ditch him rather than take him to any more parties. If he was going to be so cool in the future then surely he didn't need to hang with me, reducing me to an appendage of his ... fuck that.

He could come to these parties without me, and he knew that. Being a sophomore wasn't going to keep him out of these events because people loved him, but I knew enough about Nic to know that if I didn't take him with me, he wouldn't go. He wouldn't just show up. That wasn't his way. He didn't look forward to these things the way I did; he'd just hang out in town or at home if I skipped out on him before the next party. Once again, I was completely beaten by his simple coolness. He was laughing and joking with my friends before I was, snapping bikini straps against girls' backs, drinking Molson Ice, and chatting effortlessly about why he'd started the food fight. He never said anything self-flattering; instead, he told his tales as if there was no other choice, or as if it was just the right thing to do—a technique people just ate up. He wasn't conceited at all, nor was he giving. He was simply an island; he was a man uninfluenced by opinion, who happened to subconsciously make good decisions without understanding them.

Scoob was given the honor of taking the first hit off the massive blunt. This blunt had been built to last, and it was rolled from an eighth of an ounce of Tim Weaver's now famous chronic. It was a fifty-dollar joint rolled into a Swisher Sweet and packed tight, like a cigarette. I expected it to go at least three times around the group of sixteen or so as it gradually got smaller and more potent—it was really an impressive joint. Scoob lit the end of the blunt and the embers glowed red for a second as the paper ran in all the wrong directions. He inhaled, held the joint above his head, and coughed smoke out of every hole in his head. It was like watching a marijuana explosion happen in the face of a man.

It was hilarious. His gagging and retching was accented with periods of coughing fits that looked more like seizures. It was hard to tell if he was seriously coughing and gagging, or laughing and gagging, as his middle finger was being pointed at anyone who laughed at him while he suffered. This, of course, gave us even more reason to laugh hysterically.

More than a few people made the obligatory "dumb fuck" comment. Others, like me, simply laughed and pointed at him. When the blunt finally got to me, I could tell by looking at the damn thing that it was hot-boxed. I was hesitant to hit it because I knew what bitter smoke I would have to inhale if I were to hit it now, but, oh well, there's a crowd waiting. I held it between my fingers, took a huge pull on it, and gagged. It was wet, very wet; this made me gag again.

The joint went around as more and more people showed up to the party. I was waiting to see Kaitlyn, who I'd been assured was going to come, when Mia Gateway walked through the gate and into the pool area. My initial disappointment that Kaitlyn wasn't here yet, and therefore might not be coming after all, was replaced by a moment I wasn't expecting. Mia Gateway had always been in the pretty elite, but today she looked like I'd never seen her. She was radiantly beautiful and particularly glorious in a thin white cotton robe-looking thing that was almost transparent against the red bikini she wore beneath it. The sun was just starting to set and its red tinted light reflected off of Mia's figure, making the most beautiful and feminine image of any woman I had ever seen.

Her long brown hair, which I had never noticed red highlights in before, was set afire with the red light of the sun. Her perfect complexion was soft and smooth, and I was suddenly noticing for the first time that my old friend Mia was fucking beautiful.

After the joint was out (a joint that I had given up on after the second wet hit), it was pool time. Seventy or so high school kids in a standard in-ground pool made for tight quarters, but that was something I welcomed as long as I was trapped in it somewhere near Mia. There were enough girls there to keep all of us male types entertained, and it seemed to me that the vast majority of the guys were still overlooking Mia. Most of the focus was on Nikki, with that white bikini, and Donna LeFare who'd entered the party in a light blue one-piece that had wonderful circular holes cut out of it in almost every spot, well ... other than her nipples and her mound.

To me though, there was no question that the crowned queen of the night was Mia Gateway, who was like a goddess among women.

I was in the pool (an hour or so after I gave up on the joint) minding my own business and contemplating how terrible it would be to die by drowning (something I consider at least once every time I am in the water stoned). I was now going underwater and holding my breath for as long as I could, which was an amazing twenty-four seconds, when I popped my head up for air and heard a familiar voice speak to me.

"Hey, Shell, how you feeling?" a voice asked.

I looked up, still panicking from my previous train of thought, and saw Mia standing in the water before me. Her red bathing suit clung tightly to her body, which looked browner and smoother now wet than it had been when she entered the party. That was something I wouldn't have thought possible upon her triumphant entrance. As I wiped the water from my eyes, the first thing I saw was her breasts stuffed tightly into her red suit. Maybe it was just the proximity of her body to mine, but I was hopelessly in love at that instant. I obliged them with a passing glance and then some private thoughts, but mostly I embedded the image into my long-term memory for revisiting later on when I had some lotion and a hand towel.

I knew immediately how freakish I must have looked flopping around in the pool as if I were drowning, but luckily for me Mia was too gracious to hint at it. We were in the shallow end of the pool; I was seated on the steps leading into the pool, and Mia was standing right in front of me, mere inches away. The water that hugged her so intimately around her hips was making her body below the waterline whiter in the shimmering reflections that I could see. Her hair was wet, and I noticed that when it was wet, it curled. What was normally a beautiful mix of light and dark browns now hung around her shoulders like a black mane. Her mascara had run a little bit and gave her a sultry, sad look of heartbreak. I do not ever remember seeing such a beautiful thing look so exquisite—she was like a dream. If I were so bold, I could have reached out and touched the shrine and felt the super smoothness of wet suntan lotion and the natural heat beneath it; but that was fantasyland shit ... I needed to control myself and at least look the part externally even if it wasn't true internally.

Kaitlyn had shown up about an hour after Mia made her entrance. Frankly, by then I was no longer interested in Kaitlyn. I'd been bleeding for the last seven years because of her, and if she wanted to talk to me, I wasn't hard to locate. I'd be over there, in the pool, by Mia. I'd found my goddess.

"What do ya mean?" I asked, hoping I hadn't given myself away in my dreaming of her naked.

She looked at me for a long second before reaching out to touch my face, cupping her hand around my cheek, looking directly into my eyes as mascara began to run down her cheek. "I'm sorry, Shell," she said

"About what?" I asked, willing her to feel the passion I felt for her.

She had always been right there, but she had been so close that I couldn't even see her for what she was. She was a friend, a faithful friend, who happened to be suddenly perfect enough that I forgot about the rest of the world. She'd been so close to me all along, listening to me pine for Kaitlyn like a fucking schoolgirl after the prom, all this time. She'd just been there; she was single for the most part with the occasional boyfriend for a month or so, but only to return to the fold alone and ... gorgeous. Wrapping my head around her now was proving impossible; how could it be that this ... fucking goddess ... was the one person in the world who'd asked me how I was doing with "the news"?

Without a thought, I reached out under the surface of the water and placed my hands on her bare waist. Contact in such an excited state is powerful. There is nothing else that matters and nothing else that I could want except to remain here, touching. I wanted more and more of her, and as one second passed slowly, I awaited a reaction.

I saw the shock in her eyes, and then I saw it recede. I knew what I was doing; it was a deliberate effort. It was an amazing and adrenaline-filled move so out of character for me that I too was bewildered by my bravery. I was someone sure, someone direct, and someone unafraid in that instant when the stakes were high. If she were to flinch, or, worse than that, if she were to even think one negative thought about my hands on her, I would know; and maybe, I would die right there. That didn't matter to me. I wanted this woman for myself like a drowning man longs for one more breath.

"Thank God you did that," she whispered, her eyes still locked on mine. Emotion flooded my brain. This is what life is all about, I realized, as I felt the euphoria of acceptance, which was something I'd experienced so little of in the years before this moment. My hands rested comfortably on her curvy hips.

She was close now and my thumbs were an inch from my face as I held her waist. Her pierced navel was parked directly in front of my mouth. The smell of sexual tension was so powerful that I could taste it. My heart raced, my dick throbbed, and my vision narrowed (as did my expansive and often pompous mind that was always so untameable). Now, suddenly, I was focused for the first time on something that made me feel whole.

She slid forward into me, her leg slid between mine, and she found what she was looking for, which was right about at knee level. She pressed her knee into me, hard. I inhaled, deeply. She nodded her head ever so slightly and no one would have ever seen it, but I did. The nod said so much to me; it was her verbally alerting me to her intentions. A seriousness that I hadn't known before took over the muscles in my face. Flushing, redness, and desire became tattoos that told her exactly where I was coming from.

It was as brilliant as the sun. It was permission. It was acceptance. It was the thing I had never quite found in any other form. There was no sex yet; there was only this—permission—and the sex that will eventually happen won't hold an emotional candle to this sensation. Sex wasn't my end goal. Really, all I'd ever been seeking was permission.

My inexperience was going to end, no matter how tragically, and this was the shrine I wished to worship first. This was my first real god, and for the years to follow, my only god.

"Athena," I said, devoid of any nameable emotion.

The word found its mark. There were no bullshit words for this minute; this ... series of seconds that pounded feelings so deeply into my fibers that even remembering the sequence of events brings waves of breathlessness.

"Did you ever once think of me like this before?" she asked in a whisper, as her knee grinded against me, hard, in a way that should have been painfully hard. I kept my hold on her slippery hips as she pushed against me, and I spent as much time looking into her beautiful eyes as I did looking at her deity-like body. My heart throbbed with anticipation, and my eyes blurred from the intoxication of experiencing someone else touching my dick, hands or not.

"No," I replied.

"Why?"

"I was so busy being vigilant that I didn't see you."

"Do you now?"

"Yes."

"Tell me ... say it."

"I can see you now."

She stepped closer to me and pressed the very top of her bikini bottom against my mouth and her knee literally rested now against my cock. It began to move up and down, just a little, just enough that I would notice, but the world wouldn't. My hands, desperately wanting something to do, slid down from her waist and settled below the waterline at her knees, and then they began to climb again, testing the boundaries of what they were allowed to touch. I was holding her legs like one would hold a tree to shake it, ironically, while my hands shook from the nerves. The bottom knuckle of my right index finger settled into a spot on the underside of her bikini bottom that felt softer and warmer than the rest of the area. I pushed hard against the spot and wished I were strong enough to lift her out of the water that way. I wasn't. So I pushed to just the right pressure; the amount of pressure that makes knees buckle.

Her knee kept moving. I slipped my pointer finger under the bottoms of her bikini and slid it backward so I could get my thumb under there too. In this particular situation, my thumb was going to be just the right tool for the job. I slid my thumb into her and noticed her head rock back as I entered. Then I moved my thumb in rhythm with her motions on my cock. I was going to come. I could feel it stirring in the sweatshop beneath my dick, and it was going to be monumental. Her breasts were white beneath her top; I could see the bottoms of them as I stared up at her. She was pushing down hard against my fingers, and her relentless knee finally got me. I said nothing as I ejaculated into the swimming pool so many of my good friends were swimming in. Good for the motherfuckers. I looked no one way in particular; I didn't shake, vibrate, moan, or even sigh. I just came quietly, and as I did, I hooked my thumb inside of her and held her still until I finished.

The truth is, I have no idea whether or not she climaxed. I have never really learned to completely understand the female orgasm. They are like ghosts in that you only know when you see an obvious one. They cannot be summoned every time one wishes. They are on their own agenda. My job is to vigilantly seek them out, and the results are not necessarily my fault or my doing.

"You want me to get you a drink?" she asked, after she came to understand what I'd just done.

"Please. Anything."

"I figured it would be easier for me to stand up right now." She smiled and walked to the fridge.

That beautiful brown ass that was walking away to get me a beer or a fruity fuckin' wine cooler, or whatever, was mine now, I thought. I was in possession of such a thing for the first time in my life.

A minute later, Mia was walking back to the pool, and as she came nearer to me, I was staring at her mound, or lack thereof. I was growing hard again and flushed, and I couldn't hear anyone calling my name as I watched her walk back to me. The red triangle was so thin; it rested on the skin beneath it, and as I stared at it, I could almost see it naked, completely naked. It was hairless, flawless.

A volleyball hit me on the back of the head, and suddenly there were voices again.

"Shell, goddamnit! Are you ready?" Multiple people were apparently trying to get a hold of me.

"For what? Fuck!" I yelled back, bewildered.

"The diving competition, retard!" several people yelled at me simultaneously.

"Yeah ... hell yeah," I said, realizing that my hard-on was beginning to show signs of weakening.

"All right, we'll go guy-girl-guy," Scoob announced to the crowd gathering in the deep end.

There was quite a crowd. Apparently while I had been ejaculating into the water in which we were all now swimming, they had been gathering quite a group of eager divers. The girls (who had just been eating and drinking by the grill and cooler seconds ago, and who had been wearing jean skirts and Daisy Dukes) were now scantily dressed in bikinis and pulling their hair back into tight ponytails. I was amazed at these girls, these women, I'd grown up with, and they were all so ... beautiful. Mia, however, was the hurdle I couldn't get over.

"Wow, they look good in their suits, huh?" she asked, handing me a Molson.

"I wish I could see them," I said, just before I dove under the water and began swimming toward the deep end. Mia didn't get to reply.

A second later in the deep end, I surfaced from under the water (trying not to imagine semen in my own eyes), and I turned to see her right behind me. She'd followed me.

"Tell Nic to drive your car home tonight."

"He just turned sixteen; he doesn't have his licen—"

"Shell, tell Nic to drive your car home tonight. I'll bring you home." She reached into my shorts and grabbed my cock with her hand and squeezed it.

"He's a fine driver," I said, smiling a ridiculous smile.

"Shell!" came a male voice from the other side of the pool, "It's your turn, bro."

Cheers and jeers came from the deep end where life was still apparently about doing the best back flip or fucking belly flop. I'd heard some splashing, come to think of it; I guess it just didn't dawn on me that people could actually be taking this seriously. I mean, for the first time in my life I was going to have sex, real sex, with a girl, and these idiots want me to give a shit about the diving contest?

Standing on top of the diving board on that May night looking down into the pool full of women from my youth is one of those eternal moments surely to be included in the movie that plays before my eyes as I'm dying. Life as a youth in its blissfully naïve confines is sunshine, smiling, and experiencing real emotion ... It's a fragile time really.

Since I had recently been erect, my cock looked huge in my swim trunks. That's an important thing to feel when standing on a diving board in front of everyone you know wearing board shorts and no underwear.

I prepared to dive. That is, until Nic corrected me by informing me that in order to be a contender, I needed to do a backward one and a half. If ever there was a time to be optimistic, tonight seemed like it. I turned around with my back to the crowd, I bent my knees, and with a mighty push off the rebounding board, I soared three feet above the board. High above the pool, I made the decision that this needed to be super, a showstopper if you will, figuring that if I did a double or a triple, I would live forever. When I landed on the board again, I pushed down harder this time extending the board into a full bend. The rebounding thrust was enough this time to be ample in whatever number of flips I wished to attain, but when I came off it, I felt a bit off balance. Deftly, I decided to let this awkward bounce pass. I was off, and I needed to rebound one more time to nail it. As I came down my left foot missed the bulk of the board, rather, the very corner of the board landed beneath the arch in my foot. The force I'd built was so strong that my navicular shattered in eight places and sent me backward into the pool.

I splashed into the pool with a flop. The crowd had no idea that anything had happened, so when I swam up to the surface, they booed me. That only lasted until the pool light showed the water surrounding my left leg to be a cloud of red. I didn't know what to say immediately, so I said nothing. When I reached the slant that separates the deep end from the shallow end, I put a little pressure on the injured foot. The resulting sensation felt like an electric shock. There was also a soft popping, like cracking knuckles, which sent no additional pain but somehow felt bad. "You've got to be kidding me—I broke my foot," I said in a whisper to anyone listening.

Instead of leaving Mia's house in the early morning hours with the smell of sex all about me, I was leaving Harrisburg Hospital, again, with my mother. She had come to the party, witnessed the debauchery, loaded me in her car, and spent the next four hours with me as I sobered up. It was equally unpleasant for my mother and for me, I think. I was cursing the gods for punishing me, for taunting me like that ... It was awful being stoned and broken, lying on the chair beside the pool while the party paused until I had been taken away. People were asking me what I was going to do about the Army ...

"I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do!"

"Whoa, man, take it easy, bro."

After Scoob's mom had called my mom, I'd asked for a bowl to smoke. It was like asking your executioner for a cigarette before he gunned you down. Everyone was so eager to get me high and to get rid of me so that the party could start again that they'd have given me anything. I'd gotten high, which, like always, intensified the pain. (Pot is anything but a pain reliever to me.) Anyway, once stoned out of my face with my mother on her way and Mia looking disappointed at the ending of our night, I'd come to understand that God didn't love me.

I'd felt things that I'd never felt before. I'd seen a woman that, I swear to God, I'd never seen before, and I was ready to take my clothes off and reveal the virgin body of Shell Austin Ludo to the hottest girl in the school ... fearlessly. I wanted her flesh ... like a fucking psychopath serial killer, I was impulsive and insane for her.

Now she was staying behind to party without me while I rode in my mom's piece of shit Corolla and answered questions about terrible things my mom had seen at the party.

By the time they sent me home with a cast and a surgery date scheduled for three days later, Mother and I had spent five long hours together.

"You passed with a 67.8 overall average for the year," said Mr. Norton.

"You gotta be kidding me?" I asked, afraid to hear him answer again.

"Yes, that's the best we can do. It doesn't get you into Harvard, but it ..."

"Thank you, sir," I said quietly, putting my head down and walking away.

The cast was awful. The stitches itched like hell, and as they healed the itching got worse. There were two hundred and sixty eight of them spanning the distance between my knee and ankle. The edge of the diving board had acted like a razor on the inside of my shin.

The shattered bone in my foot had been screwed together with plates and some high-tech glue, and the recovery was going to be awful. The best part of the surgery had been waking up to ten or so of my closest friends, including the lovely Mia Gateway. She was standing beside my bed when I woke up and stayed late into the night as I slept off my third dose of Demerol. I was glad that my friends were getting to see this relationship between Mia and me as I wanted complete possession and ownership of her—I wanted her all to myself.

Guiltily, my mother spent more time at our house that summer. I knew it wasn't what she wanted to do, but with me in a cast and the military postponed until after they took the hardware out of my foot, she didn't think she had much choice.

Mia came over often, watching movies with me and taking me to the places I needed to go in her comfy little red Toyota Celica. We were building something special, but I believe now that it was due to the time limit that was cosmically set. I was leaving for Alabama soon, and she was headed to Elizabethtown College (or E-town). "Summer Camp Love" was the term I made for the phenomenon. When people are forced emotionally into something like this and they know that there is a finite time allotted, emotions tend to grow stronger and faster without the fear of long-term consequences.

We had a place that became our spot, which was just a tiny little grass meadow that was hidden in an apple orchard just off Betts Road. It was tight to try and navigate with a car, but if you knew just the right number of turns between trees, it could be reached. We'd listen to music and watch the stars. I'm embarrassed to say we cuddled, but I was eager. She, for the most part, understood me and possessed a natural ability to comfort me through even the things she didn't know about. She was a presence, indeed. Her stunning beauty, which had gone unnoticed for so long, was blatant now. It wasn't only me who was noticing her; she was being hit on often, even in front of me. I had no right to get all Charles Bronson on anyone. We were leaving each other soon anyway, so I usually did what any asshole would do in that situation—I tried to ignore it. She was discovering that she had a power over men, and I knew it was just a matter of time until she perfected the art of using that skill.

"American Music" was the theme of the summer and of the nights we spent lying on the hood of her car with our eyes on the stars. The Violent Femmes sang sweetly as we passed a joint back and forth.

"Tell me something, Shell," she said.

"Anything."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"There are people who are good looking, but you are gorgeous. The beauty that you just discovered, that you just recognized like fucking yesterday ... is going to threaten to ruin your life. You will battle it for longer than you will accept it. Once you shed the skin of this town and people look at you for the first time, you will be someone else to them. You will reinvent yourself as whoever you have always wanted to be. Your power will disguise the mediocrity of your childhood, here in an apple orchard on a Tuesday night."

"Don't ever discredit our time together again, to me anyway. This isn't just something I am doing; this is what I want to be doing." She turned toward me and put her arm on my shoulder. "I'd love for the rest of this summer to last the rest of my life."

"I think I might do that ..."

"Do what?" she asked.

"I think I might reinvent myself," I said, realizing this was the perfect answer to my life.

"Like your identity?" she asked.

"Exactly."

One night Mia came over to my house with a VHS cassette in her hand. She seemed to really want to see The Crying Game. She'd come in, asked how I was doing, and walked to the TV to put the tape in. "Can we watch it?" she asked with a smile.

"Uh, yeah, sure." I didn't feel passionately about it one way or the other.

She sat beside me and pulled my casted leg up and onto her lap. "Lie down, baby," she said.

This was the first real quotable thing pertaining to our relationship I'd ever been given. She called me baby, a term of endearment directed at me. I could feel the fucking tears welling up in me again, always the tears. Whenever anyone did something nice for me, something I didn't expect, I would well up.

She held my leg with her left hand, slid her right hand under my Umbros, and grabbed my pathetically limp dick. Not that it didn't stiffen embarrassingly fast, but it was too late for she'd already felt it at its smallest. She didn't speak to me at all. She looked at the movie, which was getting more and more disturbing as it went on, while she stroked me. Turning her head to look at me, she said, "Don't come."

I assured her that I would try to do my best, but what she apparently wanted was for me to ask her why.

"Ask me why," she said with a very serious face.

I did so.

"I want you to save it and come in me."

She grabbed my hand and slid the back of my hand down her chest. I hated the back of my hand for its inadequacy and for its inability to translate every detail; it was not good enough.

I flipped my hand over and touched her. I cupped her breast in my hand while she continued to stroke me.

"You'd better cool it with that if you want me to hold it."

Mia kissed me with passion. Her hair fell over my shoulders and there was nothing but the smells of warm skin and suntan lotion, conditioner and hairspray, perfume and makeup with just enough breath to make the whole sensation very human.

She reseated herself and straddled me gently. My casted leg was still propped up on the other arm of the sofa. She wiggled and slid forward trying to take weight off of it. When she was comfortably seated, she sat up and pulled her shirt off. The light from the television highlighted the brown skin and accented the whiter skin of her breasts. The shadows moved about her canvas body with the flicker of the movie. She was a silhouette sitting there, angelic, and cruelly beautiful.

"I need you to be in me right now," she said in a whisper.

This was my first time, and I wasn't without some fears. Most of which pertained to the idea of rocking her world for longer than say ... three seconds. I was optimistically hoping for sixty seconds. In fact, I was begging the God of Abraham for sixty seconds. This is what I had been training for with my mother's hand lotion all these years ... Remember your training, I reminded myself.

Mia's little red skirt slid up easily enough; I, on the other hand, had a few more issues than that getting these fucking Umbros off over this cast. "Fuck. I can't get these shorts off," I finally admitted. Her skirt was pulled up to her belly button, and her right hand was jammed into her crotch holding her underwear off to the side, waiting for me.

She helped me out of them. "There we go. Slide back, honey," she told me. I didn't know if she was taking control of, or pity on the handicapped guy.

I did as she told me.

With one knee supporting her, she lifted the other and set it across me, again straddling my lap. Only her skirt remained, and the smell of her skin, as she grabbed my cock and held it still while she sat down on it. I felt some pressure for a second, and then I broke through to a very warm place. The enveloping warmth and softness of it was overwhelming, and I felt myself slipping over the edge. I thrust it into her and pushed as far back as I could. She moaned, loudly. That did it. I came into her. It felt like my soul was pouring out of me and into this woman, this goddess. I wanted to make her pregnant, and I wanted to keep her for the rest of my life. I was jealous of anyone who had ever touched her ... anyone who had ever seen her ... She was my home now, as I continued to try to hurt her with my dick. I pushed, she moaned. I never even went limp before I was hard again. Thirty seconds had passed and I was ready to come again. She bucked on me wildly, like a crazy woman, and the way that her breasts moved as she did so was, again, more than I could handle. I came into her again as I tried to push my dick out through her spine. She moaned and said, "I can feel you coming into me."

"So, I was ... your first, really?" she asked, sympathetically. She couldn't return the statement.

"Far more than I had ever imagined. I think I fell in love with you when you walked into the party at Scoob's. The sun was going down, so it looked red. It lit you up, and you looked like ..."

"Like what?" she demanded in a soft voice.

"Like a sunset."

I remember her today by the kiss she gave me after I said that.

"Mia, will you do me a favor before you dress?" I asked.

She stopped looking for her shirt and turned back to me. "What?" she asked with a private smile.

"Turn around and stand still. I just want to see you and to look at you for just a few seconds. This is what I want from you, to take from you, for the rest of my life. I want to carry a picture of you in my head that's sharper than any other album shot; one that cannot ever burn or ruin ... just mine. No one will remember you and glorify you like I will."

She turned around slowly, passionately, like there was a secret supermodel inside of her that she was showing me. She turned her ass toward me and her black underwear was visible only in a black-on-black way. The silhouette she produced was also a goddess: her evil dark side. From behind she was a black, curvy sunset. She was picturesque there in the picture I took of her; the one that still hurts to remember.

I pulled her back toward me so she was close and I could feel her without reaching. I ran my hands all over the brown skin, feeling it, smelling it, and kissing it. I was memorizing every detail of her perfect frame; I was worshipping her. She was my reward for the odd life and the freak decisions I'd been making all along—the decisions that lead me to her. I'd longed just to touch somebody or have somebody wish to touch me and somehow that'd become this angel.

I spun her around, her breasts perfectly balanced on her chest, and the lines from her ribs and collarbone accented the light perfectly. I began with my hands again, rubbing and running them along the outside of her body. She closed her eyes, and her head tilted back again.

"You will live forever in my mind, Mia," I said, kissing the tops of her legs. "Whatever becomes of us, all of us, I have this now and no one can take it away from me. If you ever see me again, remember that I have this when you see me. No matter who you're with at the time, this was mine before it was his."

"This is yours, Shell." She kissed the hand placed on her breast.

"Will you miss me?" I asked.

"I will never be able to replace you."

"Yeah, you will. We're all replaceable."

Twenty minutes later she was gone from my life forever. I never saw her again. I suffered the loss of her for the first few weeks of basic training. Her letters stopped coming, and life, that cold bitch, erased the feelings.

I took her with me for a while and referred to her affection as proof that I was lovable.

I'd survived my virginity.

When Wild and I pulled into the hotel I would be spending the night in, it was time for our goodbyes, or so I thought. He said, "Hey, we made it, bud. You're gonna get to make your grand escape after all."

I wanted to hug the guy. I wanted him to adopt me so I could call him Dad and introduce him to my friends. "Thanks, Wild—for everything," I said.

"Ludo, you're different than any recruit I ever put in. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but for what it's worth, I'm proud of you," he said.

I turned and began walking toward the lobby of the hotel so he wouldn't see the tears his words had produced in my eyes.

The desk clerk gave me an electronic key, and I headed up to the room. When I entered the room, I didn't see the roommate the clerk had told me had already checked in. I sat warily on the bed, trying to focus on what was going to happen in the next twenty-four hours. I wondered how Mia was doing in her first week at college, but remembering her was still painful. I wondered briefly whether she'd taken my advice and reinvented herself. I doubted it.

I considered it for a second. This was the perfect time for me to do the same; maybe I needed a reinvention.

A second later, the door opened and an oddly chicken-like man walked into the room. He was short with white transparent skin that seemed loose on his body. I could see the blood vessels immediately in his temples, which was something I'd never seen before on a living body. "Oh hey, man. How are you?" he asked, walking up to me to shake my hand.

"Good, man. How are you? Sorry, I just assumed that was your bed, didn't mean to ..."

"Oh, come on, man. Don't sweat it. We're going to basic training together! We're gonna be good friends," he said with ease.

I shook his hand.

"I'm Brian Garten," he said confidently.

I said, "Good to meet you, Brian."

"Yeah, man, you too ... What's your name again?" he asked, but I'm sure he realized I never said my name.

I turned to look at him, my heartbeat pulsing a little more rapidly ... "Ved. Ved Ludo."
Chapter 4

Corduroy Castles

I woke up early that morning, which I would like to say was of my own accord, but the truth is that my new roommate was snoring so loudly that it sounded like someone was turning a leaf blower on and off. It was the most horrible and relentless noise I could ever recall hearing. It sounded like something between a sucking, a blowing, and a liquid bubbling. Jesus, to think that human beings can just sleep peacefully without ever realizing that to others the noise they are producing sounds life threatening.

Isn't it ironic that the person doing the actual snoring has no clue? He produces a noise so obnoxious that no one else can sleep, yet he sleeps fine (arguably even better from the soothing sounds of his rumbling snores).

Brian Garten wasn't any more annoying while he slept, despite his snoring, than he was while he was awake. I'd endured all the bullshit tales he'd told me, lasting into the wee hours of the night, smiling and tossing in the obligatory "uh-huhs" occasionally to both satisfy his need to be heard and to keep myself from dozing off. I don't remember officially ending the conversation, which means that eventually sleep got the best of me, and there were no more "uh-huhs." He must have realized, if only from my silence, that his audience was no longer with him. I wonder now how long he rambled on before that dawned on him? In the two hours I half-listened, he hadn't asked me a single question, so it's feasible that he talked for that long before it dawned on him that I was asleep. Before I fell asleep, I tried to focus on being positive and being brave, but the conversationalist that was Brian Garten wasn't providing me any reassurances. Conversation, by definition, requires interaction from at least two sources, thereby making his life story more of a lecture. As I listened to him, I found it hard to believe that anyone could be so selfish to think a stranger would be so enthralled by his on-the-fly fiction for him to just keep going and almost forgo his own need for oxygen in order to release as many pent-up words as he could. My lie alarm was like a telephone at a celebrity 9-11 telethon: ringing off the fucking hook. The more I swallowed my rebuttals, the more I feared that if I ignored them like this they would eventually stop working altogether. I did the best I could to listen and to be a subtle part of the conversation—and by subtle, I really mean silent.

I had gotten back to Brian and the hotel late after spending my last evening with my mom and Dave. They'd let me pick the restaurant to eat my last meal, and I'd easily chosen Garcia's. We didn't have any Mexican places in Blythe, or Logan or Rockfield for that matter, so the opportunity to eat there was rare. Hell, it wasn't really about the food. I didn't know anything about Mexican food. It was about the fried ice cream. Garcia's fried their ice cream wrapped in Rice Krispies, dipped it in honey, and poured strawberry puree on top. That is how fried ice cream is supposed to be served as far as I am concerned. Chocolate is for many other applications, but not fried ice cream.

I'd gotten my old standby entrée: chicken chimichanga with rice and beans, and extra green chili. It was a dish I had stolen: my father's customary dish at Mexican places. Nothing can go wrong with a chicken filled burrito, deep-fried until crispy, plated, and smothered with pork green chili. It was delicious, memorably delicious, in fact.

Dinner itself was a last hurrah of sorts. It had been periodically dampened with hints of sadness in my mother's facial expressions; I'd known to expect this, but I hoped she'd pretend otherwise. Instead of becoming depressingly romantic and talking nonstop about all the things that were now final between us (e.g., this is the last time I will order a Coke with you, the last time I will eat dessert with you, the last time I will drive your car home from dinner), I focused on venting some things that had been really pissing me off for a long time.

Emotions are the only things that are genuinely human; the complexities of emotions are not easily summarized, and all emotions expressed by one can be felt by another. I am not saying that seeing people who we care about sad is an easy thing to endure. As my mother wept periodically throughout the night, I think I felt anger more than anything else. I wanted her to hide it, to swallow it down so I didn't have to see it. Wasn't it fair for me to ask a little of her? I was the one going, I was the one sad, I was the one ... I was so wrapped up in the whole "it's happening to me" thing that I didn't contemplate the effect my selfishness was having on the people who loved me the most in this world. My mother had to say goodbye to her only son, her youngest child, under stressful conditions, and my ignorance was only making the night more difficult as time went on.

Always the diplomat, Mother did her best to control the visible signs of her depression and worry. I could see the sadness inside of her, darkening the skin beneath her eyes and making her smiles not quite as wide ... things like this, and I ached to make her pain stop. I'd grown into an emotional clone of my mother and understood what each tic meant when I saw it in her face; what she felt, I usually felt. Her sadness was like the tide coming in—steadily climbing higher and higher within her, patiently, evenly, stealthily.

After dinner we went to the mall and saw the new Tom Hanks movie Forrest Gump, which I thought was excellent. I loved going to the movies with my mother, but we rarely agreed on the same film to see. She made all things seem like traditions, and when we went to the movies together, she made a point of ordering the largest popcorn the place had to offer, sodas, and candy for everyone. This was quite a departure from the thrifty mother we'd see on any other day; at the movies, she was all about throwing caution to the wind. She didn't get to escape herself very often, and I think that when she was in a setting where she could be swept away by a film, she looked forward to it fervently. Forrest Gump was that kind of film—a sweeping tale of a simple man whose simplicity enabled a charmed life, through no other means than stumbling.

Disappearing into someone else's world for a while, a place where you forget your life completely, is always worth the price of admission. Therefore, when a movie sucks, you can often tell by finding yourself contemplating your own wretched life while the story of their world unfolds before you on the screen.

Even though Gump was fantastic, the sheer size of the night made it impossible for Mother to forget herself. I found her looking at me during the basic training scenes when the drill sergeant was screaming at Forrest.

When I'd catch her eyes, I could see the slightest shake of her head; she was obviously thinking something along the lines of "Why did you have to do this, son?" or, "You really don't have to do this, son." I would do her the courtesy of looking away without trying to speak; instead, I'd squeeze her hand as a reassurance that I understood. Secretly, I was holding onto her as long as I could, and if it could be done under the guise of comforting her, that was fine with me.

I was pretty close to a freak-out, honestly, and recalling what I was using as glue to keep it together eludes me now. I was excited by the change—something uniquely Ved and something uniquely mine. Never having had to switch schools and embrace change, this was new territory to me; yet as terrifying as it was, I felt somewhat connected to the helpless nature of change. What people often view as "change" is really just losing what they hold as "safe." Change is the foundation on which confidence is constructed, and without it, we cannot evolve as people, yet we never seek it out on sunny days. It's only when it comes crashing down on us that we decide how to handle it. It's not much different than learning to change a car tire. You never learn it in your garage. You learn it on the side of the road, with traffic passing dangerously close, on uneven surfaces, and usually in extreme weather.

My mother, who'd already begun fasting for my safety, was still not the strong protective force that I'd always wanted her to be, and now the role had been reversed. I no longer wanted her to protect me; instead, I wished to protect her. There was nothing I could do to provide that for her, except to go and come back a better person. She would have to embrace the loneliness and grow from it the same way I would have to embrace the nervousness and use it to make myself more self-aware. On a positive note, I figured that half the people I ended up with at basic training would miss their mommies; I posited that would not be true in my case. Maybe I'd miss certain things like my mom's famous pizza, the smell of lilacs in the spring, the mulberry tree in the backyard, the simplistic small town that had always been a safe haven ... but I didn't think I would miss my family.

I was going to learn a hard lesson on distance and friendship, and the way that the two intermingle. Leaving home at the age of seventeen with the notion that I am never coming back (alive anyway), made me think globally. I had the best intentions of keeping up with my friends as they ventured off to college, but I think that even early on into my Army experience, I realized that they would forget me as soon as I was out of sight, and, hopefully, I them.

My mother had always loved me, and being loved unconditionally was better than being protected conditionally. I made sure not to look at her face when I squeezed her hand, as I knew that there would be tears rolling down her cheeks, and I desperately wanted to avoid seeing them.

After the movie, we went to what must have been the last Woolworth's on the planet, and we bought bathroom essentials and a shower bag. Wild had given me a list of things that I would need, and my mother had demanded that I let her buy them for me. Maybe she saw it as her last responsibility to her son and something she could do for him one last time before he went off into the world. Regardless, I let her buy them and thanked her appropriately.

Getting back to the hotel and standing in the nearly empty lobby, we forced ourselves to sit in comfortable leather seats by the gas fireplace. It seemed that it would have been easier to run a half-marathon than to sit while these nerves braced for the hardest part of the whole event, yet we managed. My mother refused to sit anywhere but right by her son; her hands were touching me on the head, shoulders, arms, and hands as if she were Helen Keller.

The conversation was strained, as we all avoided the elephant, and local conversation was just about unthinkable. I couldn't speak about things pertaining to Blythe or my life there, as they simply didn't matter anymore. With that part of pleasant conversation missing, it became apparent that it was time to do what had been looming over us all night long. This wasn't conversation time; everything that needed to be discussed already had been. This was just sitting down and pretending to relax while we uttered that awful word to each other.

My mother's life would be changing too. With a fresh case of empty nest syndrome and a camp to run with her husband, she would be busy in the weeks to come, which I felt would help her to adjust to the unknown whereabouts of her son. I knew that the next twenty-four hours would be as stressful on her as it would be on me, and I promised to write her a letter first thing when I got there; it would be the first letter I wrote. I told her that phone calls would not be permitted, but if I were wrong about that, I would definitely call her. She panicked for a second thinking that we had forgotten to buy stamps, but I reassured her that I had some in my bag.

When a silence fell on us that lasted fifteen seconds, I knew it was time. I stood, gestured for her to do the same, and wrapped my arms around her.

"Oh, son ... no. Not yet. Stay here with me a little longer," she pleaded.

"Mom, I have to go to bed." I smiled. "I do have a relatively big day tomorrow, ya know?"

"Oh, son, I am overwhelmed with pride for you. You're doing something wonderful; this is going to be wonderful for you, for who you want to be, and for who you have become. You'll be great, you'll make friends, and you'll grow up. When I see you again, I might not recognize you at all ... son ... Hug your mother; the one who has loved you so dearly; the one who understands you and is so proud of you."

I hugged her. Tears came fast to my eyes, and I felt the choking feeling of well-founded sadness. I couldn't talk to her now; I had to get out of the room as fast as possible. I tried to be consoling to her, but the truth was I needed consoling myself. I needed to walk in the Harrisburg air, get my shit together, come back into this hotel, ride the elevator up to my room, and talk to someone who would understand what I was feeling, like ... say ... a roommate who was headed to McClellan also.

"God will be with you son; He will always be with you. He will protect you, love you, and see you through. Don't forget to seek Him out when you need Him. He has given me a wonderful, caring, and thoughtful son whom I have loved and raised to be a man; and now ... I am asked to let you go. I am asked to send you faithfully into His care alone."

"Mom, you made me what I am. Your sensitivity raised me, and I am so thankful for your influence on me. I will write to you, talk fondly of you, and be back to you for Christmas as a better person. This is just me doing what I set out to do. Now, please, I have to walk out of here and go do it."

Dave pulled me in for a family hug and a family prayer that was a little too long and a little too loud, but it was par for the course with Dave. This was how he always preferred it. Anytime we ate at a restaurant, he took pride in praying loudly enough that he was sure everyone knew what we were doing, which was something that always made my cheeks redden with embarrassment and turned seconds into what felt like hours. This time, despite the loudness and the longevity of his prayer, it was OK. It was my last one as the responsibility of my parents. The next time we prayed like this, I would be responsible for myself, so I closed my eyes and listened to him without caring who heard him talking to God on my behalf. Besides, a little oversight from upstairs didn't seem like a bad idea.

After he said amen, which had to have been at least twenty minutes later, I shook Dave's hand and told him how I loved him, and how he'd been the father I never had; and also how I respected him for his character, for his love of my mother, and for his love of her children. I told him I wanted to be a man like that one day, but I doubted I had it in me. I thanked him for caring for my mom while I was gone, for getting her through the next few days, and for helping her cope with the change that was now upon all of us. With that, I hugged him and heard him tell me that he loved me. I turned, kissed my mother on the cheek, the first time either my mother or I had ever kissed the other (we were a hugging family), and I headed toward the elevator without another word.

My room was on the eighth floor, but I got off on the second. I walked the hallway, found the stairwell, and climbed my way to the third. I walked the third floor and climbed the stairs to the fourth. It went on this way until I reached the eighth floor. I was getting myself under control, preparing for the next phase of my life, and swearing to myself that I would never cry in public again, for any reason. When I found my room, I fumbled in my pockets for the key-card I'd been issued earlier when Wild and I had arrived. I swiped it, watched the red light turn green, and opened the door. Brian Garten was watching Conan O'Brien from his bed and wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and white cotton socks. The way he smiled when I entered the room was uncanny, like he was genuinely glad to see me. I remember thinking that he and I had a good chance of being friends, real friends, but that only lasted until he opened his mouth and started lying. I considered telling him about the "gift" but decided against it. I didn't just decide not to tell Brian; I decided never to mention it aloud again.

There was a continental breakfast served in the hotel lobby, which consisted of muffins, bagels, cereal, sausage, and coffee. I skipped all that other shit but drank the coffee. My stomach was in no mood for food. I was terrified that the food would mix with my wild nerves, and I would end up with a serious case of the shits. There were going to be plenty of medical evaluations today, including the one we were all dreading the most: the "finger in the ass" thing we'd heard about forever. I still cannot honestly tell you what the purpose of such an invasive procedure is, but I can tell you that I survived it.

When the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) bus pulled up in front of the hotel an hour after breakfast, I realized that a lot of the people I'd been silently eating breakfast beside (or rather, drinking coffee beside) were going to MEPS also. Oddly enough, at least ten of them were on their way to McClellan with me. Without the buzz cut, we all looked like regular civilians; but once we discovered our plans in common, we began to bond rather easily. I realized that people bond better when all parties meet in unfamiliar territory. When someone comes into another person's established place, it takes longer for the resident company to extend a hand to the newcomer; but when a hundred or so people all enter a place that is neutral, the connections form fast, almost effortlessly.

Maybe being an extrovert really means that you lack the fortitude to be an introvert and be cut off from the masses? Fuck, I don't know. I am extroverted; I do excel in situations like MEPS with a group of strangers ... I find it easy to connect with people, to listen to them, to hear their lies, and identify with why they are telling each particular lie. People who tell solid truths alone, well, they are the elite, and they are usually the ones least likely to cling to a person like myself, for I have nothing revealing to offer a secure person at all. I never have. I have always been a part of, and associated myself with, the beautiful liars. I find liars romantic, soothing ... I roll around in their insecurities like a tycoon in his cash. I enjoy the spelunking that is involved with a reasonable liar and digging through the trash they speak with the light of self-awareness and the harness of self-realization. I have said it a number of times, but I say it again now in order that you understand your author better: I am a despicable man with the unfortunate ability to understand my own folly. In interpreting my own lies and motives, I can certainly decipher yours, which I will exploit eventually for my own gain mostly because of one solid difference between most comfortable liars and myself. I present my weaknesses and hide my strengths, which takes much self-control and a vastly different theory in presentation. Most liars cannot do this. They cannot control the urge to boast, they cannot present the weak (saving the strength for personal assurances), nor do they understand the benefit of doing so.

If you are under the impression that it is easy for me to admit the disgusting nature of my psyche, I would argue rather passionately that it is not. I consider myself enlightened, charitable, and far more concerned with the emotions of those around me than of my own fragile feelings. I say that I am awful because I am, not because I want you to believe me. If you were capable of looking at yourself objectively, knowing all the horrible shit that you have done and all the worse things you would do if you had the means, then you could see yourself the way I see myself—but you cannot. This is the problem I have with trying to connect to people through the use of their lies. This is the solitude in the gift: the fact that people cannot stomach hearing things that paint them as awful, when inside, they are exactly that. I am not arguing that all people are this way; I am simply saying that issues of motive are involved in every human transaction. Looking for the motive in people is revealing. Let me rephrase that statement ... The most revealing thing about people's needs, desires, and lusts, is simply a matter of finding motive.

Once at MEPS, we filled out paperwork for hours. In a matter of hours, I went from not knowing my social security number to knowing it better than anything else I knew about myself. All of a sudden, my name didn't matter anymore; all that mattered was that number. When I had circled the place entirely, moving from one station to another, I figured I was done with the paperwork. The rest was going to be easy, but I knew I was getting closer to the anal examination and that was still bringing a very special sort of anxiety. No one had ever seen my asshole before, so this was as monumental to me as losing my virginity; but little boys don't grow up awaiting the day when the good doctor puts his finger in their ass. It was fear of exposure and fear of someone seeing me that blatantly naked. Even with Mia on our fateful day, she had not seen me naked. I'd purposely left my shirt on because I was afraid to be compared to the muscle-bound gladiator types she'd been with in the past. This was a first of firsts, and as I was instructed by the nurse at the last station to "go on and head upstairs," I knew what was coming.

What I wasn't prepared for was walking up the stairs and seeing all the same faces I'd seen all morning, but now they were dressed only in their underwear and lined up against the far wall. The line led to a wooden door with brightly polished chrome hinges and handles, which read Exam Room.

I hadn't been a jock in high school. I never once showered in the locker room at school. In fact, had I been given an ultimatum between chewing off my pinky and showering after gym class, I'd have chomped that little bastard right off. This was something that literally gave me nightmares, worst fear kind of shit here ... The idea of my peers seeing me in the tenth grade with a bald pair of nuts and a little tiny boy-dick was the absolute worst thing imaginable. Granted, now at MEPS I had begun puberty, but I was chubby from my summer without mobility. This scene in front of me was the equivalent of being asked to shower in front of the girls' tennis team. I couldn't believe my eyes.

The first thing I noticed as I topped the stairs was that now, in their undressed form, there was no more playful banter, no talking or joking, and no storytelling whatsoever. When people are made uncomfortable or embarrassed, the first thing to go is, apparently, the conversation. No one was talking, and no one was looking around. The only direction people were looking was either straight ahead or down at their feet. This is the protective stance of embarrassed men.

As I was searching for someone to give me a directive, a voice came from the far corner of the room. "Undress by the coat hangers; leave everything there. You need only underwear and your file. Questions?" the female voice asked.

A female? I couldn't believe it. Not only was it a female voice, but also the face attached to the voice was beautiful, young, and a lot closer to where I was standing than I had thought. She was no more than eight feet away from where the cubbyhole with temporary wall lockers was placed. I was being asked to undress down to my underwear in front of a beautiful twenty-something nurse? I tried to imagine my grandfather doing this in the forties when he was enlisting in the military, something I found more and more difficult to imagine as I considered his conservative nature. The more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder when it was that the term "medical professional" allowed for situations like this to happen. This had to be a relatively new thing, right?

As I pondered this path, I began to wonder if "Nurse Nancy's" twin sister was the person waiting behind the exam room door. The thought was terrifying. I tried to convince myself that it wasn't so. There was just no way ... right? I was panicking and telling myself that it would be OK even if it was a woman, and that it would make a funny story to tell my grandchildren, but this weak line of rational was no match for the stress I was feeling at the sight of "Nurse Nancy."

I swallowed, silently moved toward the cubbyhole, and tried to decide if I should run for it now or do as I was instructed. When I'd crossed the room to the cubby, I heard her repeat her instructions. Turning to see if she was repeating them to me, I saw Brian cresting the stairs, file in hand.

"Whoa, naked huh?" he asked smiling. It was as if he was thrilled to have the opportunity to undress in front of the rest of us, while my feelings could not have been any further from his.

"Yeah, I guess it's time for us to get fingered," I said dryly, making light of the seriousness I felt.

"It's fucking cold in here," Brian said, but honestly, I hadn't thought of that at all. I was sweating (a cold sweat that comes from nerves working overtime). I might have booked it right out of there if Brian hadn't showed up when he did, but somehow his being there had begrudgingly convinced me that to run would be ridiculous. I had to save face; I had to pretend that I was confident and that I was not ashamed. This was difficult when the room was full of all sorts of bodies—fat ones, thin ones, built ones. After briefly glancing at all the guys lined up like Rockettes, it hurt to see I was the fattest one of all.

Garten was stripped and standing in line before I had even taken my belt out of my pants. And why was I taking my belt out of my pants, you ask? Because I was buying time, studying the bodies in the line, and pleading with God to show me one fat fucker who was worse off than me. There was no other reason to do so; it was simply a stalling technique and, apparently, it had been observed, defined, and corrected before I even knew the good nurse was watching.

"Stay in the order that you were in when you came up here. Sir ... that means you have to be in front of him in the line." She was pointing at Brian, and talking to me. Was that a southern accent I heard? She was only getting sexier as time went on, in a moment when I would have much rather felt her getting less attractive.

My own stalling techniques had now garnered the attention of the nurse, who could work in porn if she wanted to, and everyone else in the room. With nothing else for them to look at and no words to speak, everyone was watching me as I unbuttoned my pants, slid the zipper down, and dropped my baggy jeans to the ground. My well-worn underwear, with a few cream colored stains scattered about, were as unique as my man-boobs and disgusting love handles. Everyone else had boxers on—long, concealing, and wonderfully conservative boxers. Me and these fucking tighties ... I never did like boxers. I never liked my dick flopping back and forth or my balls sticking to my legs ... Boxers weren't for me. I needed the comfort of something firm holding my gear in place. I didn't like to dangle, stick, or sway, even when it was appallingly hot outside. Maybe I should buy some cartoon character or super-hero underwear in the future to break the monotony and lameness of semi-white tighty-whities.

As I peeled off my shirt, I felt more than naked. It was as if all my secrets, all my sins, and all of my body was being exposed to anyone who bothered to look my direction, which was something that these shameless bastards found rather easy to do. I could hardly breathe; the idea of talking to Brian was absolutely impossible, but then I remembered that talking to Brian was really more about listening to Brian embellish his life than actually having to speak. I wanted to turn around and engage him in conversation, anything to take the focus off of myself, but I found myself too afraid to even face him. Maybe he didn't notice that I'd packed on a few pounds over the summer ... Maybe he didn't think I was chubby at all.

"Looks like you have a few pounds to lose at basic, huh?" Brian asked benignly, as if this was how he would ask his mother the same awful question.

"Fuck off, Garten," I said without turning around. There was little to look at except for the back of the bloke in front of me, which was pimpled and sporadically hairy ... so I closed my eyes and pretended that I was in a different place. Nothing came to my mind, nowhere to be, nothing to imagine. Fuck.

"I broke my foot in six places this summer. I was in a cast for the last eight weeks. It's not my fault," I said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded. Even if it was the truth, which it was, sort of, it wasn't believable as a stand-alone statement. I needed to follow it up with further proof or shut the hell up and take it.

I turned around to face Garten, whose eyes went from my face to my boobs and back to my face again; it was that up and down look that men use with attractive women, and I thought about attacking him right then and there for this transgression. I took a breath, hoped he was satisfied with the glance he'd already taken, lifted my scarred foot off the ground, and presented it to him.

"See the scar? I just got the hardware taken out a few days ago. I was in a cast all summer. I gained a little weight, and I'll lose it." But after I said it, I still felt somehow unfulfilled; I still felt like it was pointless, and hence, I learned a valuable lesson. I needed to learn how to handle criticism, especially if I was going to try and be a powerful force on the planet. If I hadn't been given a gift then maybe I could have just lived the life of a wall fly; but now, empowered with my sense of understanding, I was realizing that power and authority meant attention, and attention made for enemies, and enemies were always trying to knock off their enemies. I had to handle the Garten thing with coolness and not react with lame retorts. I had to admit no faults, show no weaknesses, and be unaffected by insults.

Just then there was a thump, and I shot around to see the door latch shut. I'd missed it. The exam room door had opened to allow another future soldier in, and I'd missed the opportunity to see if it was a man or a woman in there.

"You all right?" Garten asked.

"Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"

"You turned around so fast ... You think something was up or what?"

"I was just trying to see who was in there. Hey, Garten, you think it's a man or a woman in there doing the fingering?" I asked, really wanting to hear that he thought it was a man, but I was also trying to worry him a little.

"A man. They wouldn't let a chick do it, man. This is the Army, bro." He smiled, nodded once, and added, "But it sure would be sweet if it was a hot chick."

Who the hell is this guy? "Wait, you'd rather it be a chick with her finger in your ass?"

"Than a dude? Fuck yeah," he said, again with the nod.

I couldn't think of anything witty to say. I faced the pimpled back and waited for the door to open again; I had to know what was waiting for me in there.

"I used to have a girlfriend who would put her fingers in my ass all the time ... At first I didn't really dig it, but after a while it grew on me. Not that I'm a fag or anything; just like the freaky shit, I suppose." Garten was reminiscing, or lying, but I couldn't tell without seeing his face.

"I'm sure your father is proud," I countered quickly, wanting points for my obvious wittiness.

"My father is dead," he said in a somber tone, almost somber and theatrical enough that I didn't believe him. "Died on a pig farm eight years ago." It was just obscure enough that I reconsidered because I knew he couldn't have fabricated that on the fly like that.

"Oh. Well, be glad. If he heard you say that thing about fingers in your ass, he wouldn't have been thrilled."

This was the best I could do under these conditions. Maybe I should have shown a softer side, but in situations involving death, I have always been a little off balance. I intend to get into this more later, but it should be said that my fascination with death is long standing. People tend to think of themselves as the only ones experiencing the loss of a friend or a loved one. My reaction is usually based on the quickness of the passing. If someone dies quickly, I am relieved. If it is a long suffering, I am saddened.

Death in its actuality is something to look forward to, I believe, and I don't mean in a golden streets and singing choirs kind of way. I think it is a familiar place to us; a place where we want to be when we get there, not something that comes and takes us kicking and screaming into the night. We do, in fact, all have it coming, so pining and moaning over the loss of people is as insignificant as crying over every snowflake that falls. We all know that we are mortal, so why are we so surprised when people die? Why isn't our life based on being alive and celebrating each breath as if it was truly divine? Death reminds us of our mortality, and death reminds those who have forgotten that their lives are timed. These people, the ones who think and live as if they were immortal, are stricken hardest with the loss of someone close to them. Death-obsessed romantics like me are pleasantly surprised when they wake each morning because we are always expecting the end to be near.

The door to the exam room opened, and I let out a sigh of relief when I saw a fat, grey haired man, with enormous glasses atop a very red nose, sitting behind his desk and writing something in a folder as the soldier walked out. Was that guy limping?

No. I'm being ridiculous.

It'd been a long time since my mother had taken my temperature rectally, but I still remember the last time vividly—the strange sensation of something thin and cold sliding into nerves that I couldn't readily identify, seemingly going deeper and deeper into my guts—and that had come after the last time I tried to manipulate an oral thermometer. I'd seen it on a Leave it to Beaver episode. The Beave was trying to convince his mom that he was ill, and he rubbed the thermometer on his bed sheets in order to raise the mercury. I think it worked better for him than it did for me. My temperature was taken rectally after that. I'd imagined the six inch long thermometer buried in my ass, but my mother later swore it was no deeper than an inch or two. That had been enough to keep me from experimenting with my own ass and never allowing anything in there, not even my own fingers, during the year where every sensation gave me a hard-on.

Considering the exam I was about to undergo, I was distracted to the point that I hadn't heard the nurse call my name. When she repeated it, Garten slapped me on the back and said, "She's calling you."

Startled, I turned around to see her staring at me. I was stricken with fear. I wasn't next in line for the exam room, so what the hell does she want with me?

"Mr. Ludo, please come with me into the other physical exam room," she said in an uninterested voice and pointed to a large room in the opposite direction of the exam room.

"What for?"

"Mr. Ludo, please come with me. Bring your folder with you."

"What the hell for?" I asked again, with deliberate emphasis on the "hell." I wasn't some aimless sheep following blindly. If she wanted me to go, she would have to explain why first. She was not going to put her finger into my ass, no sir.

"Mr. Ludo, for your own sake, please come with me," she insisted.

"Not until you tell me—"

She interrupted, "OK, Mr. Ludo, I'll tell you. You failed the weigh in. You have to be measured manually to see if your body fat is disqualifying. Happy now?"

Blood pumped to my face and throbbed in my temples. I didn't dare look around the room to see just how many of these strange men were now looking at me—I could feel them. I didn't have to look around the room to feel the smirks and smiles from all the fit dudes waiting their moment—I could sense it.

I said nothing, walked toward the porn star nurse, and prepared for something worse than the finger test. I was too humiliated to even think about defensive technique, too embarrassed to even acknowledge how bad that had been, and too mortified to speculate about what people were thinking. I simply walked humbly into the next room.

"I'm sorry," she apologized. "I didn't want to do that. I shouldn't have said that."

"Not your fault. I thought you were going to give me the rectal thing ... I am just an idiot today."

"People get so worked up about the rectal exam; it's a one second thing. Over before you know it."

"Sometimes a second is fast; sometimes a second is an eternity," I said, thrilled with my reply.

"I have to give you the tape test. Basically, I'll take three measurements: neck, breast, and waist. This will just take a second."

She stepped behind me, reached around me with both hands, passed the cloth tape measure into the other hand, and pulled it until snug—right on the center of my massive love handles. As if that weren't bad enough, the next one was done on my man-boobs—right across the nipples. As she pulled the tape snug, my breasts squished and proved that they were entirely made of fat without a hint of muscle in either one. Finally, she took the neck measurement standing so close to me that her breasts were pushing into mine. She was standing in front of me this time; her white button up shirt stretched tightly over what must have been a white bra. She smelled like men's cologne, good men's cologne. Her eyes were brown, her lips were full, and without even trying to I imagined her in a compromising position utilizing those lips of hers for a more suitable task. The result of the close contact, my standing almost naked, and smelling and seeing her from this proximity was becoming a problem in my suddenly tightening underpants. Oh God, no.

She dropped one side of the tape and accidentally bumped her hand on my stiffening man-part. She paused, looked at it for a second, looked at me, and dismissed me abruptly. I wanted to say something to apologize. I wanted to cry, scream ... run. She walked out the door and back into the first room while I pretended to stretch my calves in hopes that my erection would dissipate before having to strut back into the line. The commotion I'd made when she called me into the room was sure to have people looking at me, and I couldn't do it in this condition. I waited, and waited.

Back in line with Garten, the pimpled back went into the exam room. I was next. I strained to hear what was going on in there, but it was impossible with the moderate chatter in the line behind me. Minutes later the door opened, an embarrassed soldier exited, walked past me without making eye contact, and disappeared into the cubby where our clothes were waiting.

I reached out, grabbed the handle, and entered the bright room lit by two halogen spotlight looking lamps and windows that encompassed the entire south side of the office. Besides the portly, elderly gentleman with what looked like fucking binoculars on his face, I noticed a few certificates framed in cheap military frames, a gray desk that screamed of monotony, and a red circular sticker stuck to the surface of the edge of the hospital style bed. I was beginning to wonder about the sticker when the doctor stood suddenly, as if he'd just discovered I was in there, and then he abruptly began to ask me questions.

"I see you just had a surgery. You still in pain?" he asked without a trace of concern.

"No, sir."

"Good. You lying?"

"No, sir."

"What's that on your chest?" he inquired, genuinely interested.

"A birthmark," I answered rigidly.

"Been there since you were born?" he asked, looking into my eyes for the first time.

"Uh ... no, sir, actually since I was about eleven."

"Nevus," he declared.

"Sorry?" I asked.

"Nevus—a dark spot that shows up with puberty, usually. Probably Becker's nevus. Usually people get them on their shoulders, but occasionally they show up on a chest or back. They're hereditary, benign ... nothing to worry about."

This spot we were now discussing was an odd looking birthmark that had not been present in any of the photographs taken of me before I was in sixth grade. I think it was in the summer after my seventh grade year that I first noticed a spot on my chest that looked like a suntan. It was subtle, but definitely there. A couple of years later, it was still darkening to the point that it remains now, like African American skin almost. The real bitch of it is that the hair that grows in that particular patch is thick, black hair unlike any other of the Anglo-hair growing on my body. It almost looks like I was shot with a brown paintball; it's splattered like that. Regardless of its intention, it looks like I have a birthmark on my chest. It is something that is noticeable and catches people's eyes, but they usually refrain from asking about it.

This was the first time that anyone (other than my mother, Nic, or my sister) had said anything to me about it. I hadn't been self-conscious about it all this time, but with his inquiries I felt the pressure now. Socially, I hadn't considered that people were even seeing it, as the rest of my body was usually pretty well tanned also. But no matter how much sun I got, the spot darkened at the same pace as the rest of the skin, which made it always a little darker than the rest.

"So what does that mean? Is it going to be there forever? Can I have it removed? I heard about this freezing spray stuff that doctors can spray on discolored skin, and it eventually falls off. Could I do something like that? Do you know what I mean?"

"Son, it's there for life. There's nothing you can do about it except have the skin removed. Doing that's gonna leave scar tissue behind that's just as noticeable as the way it is now. Better off just leaving it the way it is."

Great. I can look like a freak for the rest of my life. That figures. I considered theatrically looking heavenward and asking God, "Why do you do this kind of shit to me?" but decided that not knowing the doctor's religious beliefs made that a risky, if not stupid, idea. To some people, asking God questions while using some choice four-letter words is a bad combination and borders on blasphemy. To me, however, I always thought it was ridiculous that people who swear all day long never seem to have the stones for it when they are praying. If these people's faith in God is so strong, and if they believe God so big to know our every thought, then why try to hide something as obvious as cursing from Him?

Parents who demand that their children not swear are creating well-mannered liars, or actors. I know all about this, believe me. I started using bad language in the fifth grade when Nic began to demonstrate the usefulness of the word "fuck" by applying it to each sentence that came out of his mouth. I began to use the word "bastard" like it was going to expire in order to compensate. Just like they call marijuana a gateway drug, "bastard" led to other words, and once I experienced the joy and usefulness of the word "fuck," there was no going back. However, in our household, no form of profanity was tolerated. Even up until the point that I left for the Army, I had never heard my parents utter a single four-letter word. They simply didn't have them in their vocabulary.

The doctor let the moment pass and did his best to pretend that he didn't notice the spot for the duration of the exam, but his eyes kept looking at it and hanging up on it. I wondered if that meant there was more to the nevus than he was telling me. Maybe it was a cancerous cluster, spreading like wildfire, darkening and deepening with each second of sunlight, preparing to slowly take my life.

Fuck, that's it. I'm never exposing this thing to sunlight again and never taking off my shirt for people to gawk at me and wonder silently what sort of freakish skin that is.

He took my blood pressure; had me do a number of odd bending movements while he inquired as to whether or not these movements were causing me any pain; shone a light into my eyes, mouth and ears; and did a thorough inspection of the scar on my foot where they'd removed the hardware just days before. Finally, after a series of questions about my foot, the moment was upon us.

"You see the red dot on the table right there?" he asked me. Without a pause, "Pull down your pants, keep your hands at your sides, and touch your forehead to the dot. I will do this as quickly and painlessly as possible; it will only take a second, soldier."

Everybody keeps telling me it's only going to take a fucking second.

That was the first time I felt like being called a soldier was accurate. Up until this point, until today anyway, it had always seemed more like a motivational tool than anything else. Being called soldier while in high school was a little see-through for me, as if they were gently reminding me that I was being held to a different standard than the rest of the kids. I was supposed to take pride in being referenced like that. I was supposed to remind myself that I was not a kid anymore and was now a guardian of our country. I was expected to carry the flag of responsibility, but in those last two years of high school, waiting to ship out, I never once felt even as mature as the rest of the kids in my class. The late-start puberty had left me behind them all and left me to pretend to be one of them, but I felt separated from them as they began to have all their sexual encounters years before I was even certain about the entire process of having sex.

I thought about the doctor for a second; a sort of nice grandpa-looking guy who goes to work each day and performs a number of menial examinations on different parts of the body, but who's eternally remembered by every person who comes through his door as the "guy who fingered my ass." None of the other things he did that day mattered, but the asshole thing was a biggie. What an unfortunate legacy for any man to carry for the rest of his life.

I complied with unusual thoughtlessness. I just did what he told me. I placed my head against the sticker, felt my skin slide a bit on the grease and sweat of everyone else who had entered the door before me, and wondered why it was that he couldn't, or didn't feel it necessary to, spray some alcohol or Windex onto the dot after each person was finished. Isn't that some sort of health violation?

I could smell the fear in my own breath bouncing back from the table my head was resting on as I waited. I heard the snap of latex, which I was certain was a glove, and then I heard a squirting noise that I assumed was Vaseline, or something of equal purpose. A second later, I felt a cold hand on the small of my back, and then it came. He used his thumb and middle finger to spread my hairless ass cheeks, and then he slid his pointer finger into my ass. It really wasn't worth all the worry, but the cold hand on my lower back gave me a dirty feeling. There was something about the gentleness of its presence, some sort of romantic sentiment that was disagreeing with me rather strongly. I considered asking him why he needed it there, but I let the moment pass silently.

When it was done, I was pleasantly surprised to not smell anything foul, which was something I had been worrying about. I mean, that's logical right? Every substance in the body has an odor, some worse than others, and the particular place he was exploring now was known to have a rather pungent odor. I intentionally refused to look at his glove as he removed his finger, but it took some serious restraint. I wanted to see it; I wanted to look at it just to see what it looked like. There were things I could tell about the exam simply by looking at it, but I did not.

I just wanted to escape that office, dress myself, and forget the last twenty minutes of my life. My body insecurities were now more severe than ever. All the reasoning I had done with myself about each individual issue in the days and weeks prior to this day were out the window. If there was any possibility of dealing with them efficiently and moving beyond them, it wasn't going to be without a serious dedication to remedying them. I needed to lose weight; I knew that, but now I had been humiliated into doing it, which was producing a fire in me that I'd never experienced.

Getting fat is a slow process and, sure, there are plenty of warnings along the way. First comes the snugging of the pants and then the T-shirts begin to shorten as your mass pulls the fabric in other directions. Before long, you find yourself shopping for new clothes and trying to decide if you should buy them larger, to fit you now, or if you want to use new, smaller clothes as motivation to lose the weight you've gained. It's best to buy them to fit you in your larger state, assure yourself that this is a temporary issue, and face the depression head on rather than deal with the eventual disappointment of never fitting into them. After losing weight, there is nothing better than buying smaller clothes to show off your new body, but doing it before you lose the weight is not a good idea.

Recognizing that it's time to lose weight is always a bad feeling. There is no way to learn that you've gotten disgustingly fat in a way that makes you feel better. I remember my grandmother telling my sister one summer that it looked like she'd gained a little weight, which may have been true, but her statement certainly didn't have a positive effect on my sister. She was depressed and anti-social the entire visit. Once it's brought to your attention, you are faced with a decision. The decision you make at that moment defines you.

People's motive for not telling you that you are fat is usually selfishness. The fatter you are, the less attractive you are. The less attractive you are, the better the people around you look ... It's simple really.

Never trust the advice of a girlfriend or one of your male buddies when they tell you that packing a little weight on makes you look good. That's complete bullshit. Either they love you regardless and really don't care how the world sees you, or they are weakening you for a long game of survival of the fittest.

What really kills me is when women who are enormous make statements about how they'd never want to be a beanpole like the actresses in Hollywood. When they present such an argument, alarms ought to go off in your head too. No one wants to be at a disadvantage, period. Lying is the act of implementing motive and covering weaknesses through the use of deceitfulness. When people tell you these lies, they are really challenging you. You are supposed to swallow it from them, and you are supposed to let it go; but really what they are asking is for you to lie along with them. You must choose between being an accomplice in their lie and confronting them.

The erection I'd encountered with the naughty nurse was too shameful to even think about. I had to put that behind me and think otherwise. Imagining the impression I'd made on her was enough to make me blush. She must have been appalled at the sight of the fat kid with stains on his Fruit of the Loom's popping a boner while she taped his fat ass in hopes of bypassing the weight limit via some body fat percentage loophole. Recalling the event was awful, and it seriously darkened my mood. I didn't want to go off to the Army now; I wanted to hide somewhere. But where?

My house had been sold, my mother was completely relocated to Morgan with Dave, all my friends were off pursuing collegiate excellence, and my father was celebrating his newfound freedom from his last dependent. There was no other option; I had to go now, but I really didn't want to. I'd been so eager to go, and even up until an hour ago I was excited, but then I humiliated myself in numerous ways, which crashed my ego and dragged me back to thoughts of suicide.

I had to feel no pity for myself, which is just about fucking impossible. I had to get a hold of my emotions, stop being so fragile, and really accept that it was just the world and me. There were no lifelines for me to cling to now except the ones I'd learned from being responsible for myself all these years. This was the first time I was truly thankful for my parents neglecting to fight my battles for me, as I knew I possessed the means to adapt. I just hadn't focused on adaptation yet. I would starve and work out. That sounded like a reasonable plan, and I intended to implement it beginning immediately.

Back in the cubby, dressing as quickly as possible, I was startled to see the nurse standing behind me as I was pulling up my jeans. She'd just been standing there while I pulled on my jeans? What the fuck?

She was just as beautiful as before, but there was something ominous about her now. I thought that it could just be the feelings I had inside of me painting her in a different light, but no, there was something else ... something in her expression. She knew all my nasty secrets, or so it felt. What good were all the thoughts and philosophies I'd developed about withholding weaknesses and never letting them become exposed if all of a sudden, in the bottom of the 9th, they would come flooding out of me?

The confidence that comes from the disguises I wore were gone, and I suddenly felt like I would if I bumped into a priest, along the road somewhere, to whom I'd confessed all my worst sins. This beautiful woman, whom I can't help but be attracted to, sees me for the weak and revolting animal I am.

"Private Ludo, may I speak to you for a second?" she asked as properly and professionally as she could muster. She was leaving plenty of room between us, an obvious and direct result of her accidentally bumping my boner with her hand, like I was a sexual predator or something.

Fuckin' sue me for getting a boner when a hot nurse with perfect boobs is wrapping her arms around me and touching me while I stand there in my underwear! "Sure. What's up?" I said casually.

"I need to talk to you in private."

"Uh ..." I smiled helplessly. "I think we both learned that isn't a good idea."

"OK, I'll tell you here," she responded instantly and without a smile. "Look, I'm just going to be blunt," she paused to see if I would object and when I didn't, she continued, "Private Ludo, you are too fat to go to basic training right now. I am going to recycle you to the twenty third of September. In that time you need to lose about seventeen pounds. If you can do that, you can ship out with the next cycle." She wasn't making eye contact with me.

I assumed that she wasn't trained to use the phrase, "You are too fat," but that she had done this with some gesture of familiarity, which was really more insulting than it needed to be.

"That's not possible," I whispered.

"It's possible. With a healthy diet and regular exercise you—"

"You're not understanding me," I said, looking around at all the guys listening to the conversation and wishing they would all fall over fucking dead for being skinny and perfect. "I have no home and nowhere to go for a month and a half. If you try and keep me out now, I'll go to a different branch. I'll walk away from the Army altogether."

With a puzzled smile on her face she said, "Ludo, I don't care what branch you decide to join. I'm not your recruiter; I'm the person in charge of weeding out all the fa—uh, unqualified applicants. I'm not even in the Army, bud; I'm in the Air Force. Look, I know that you've had some medical issues that have slowed you down, and I commend you on pushing forward with your plans for the Army even though you put on some weight while you were hurt. But what you don't seem to understand is that there are specific guidelines regarding who I send to boot camp. These rules are not something written is stone, no, but they are there to keep you from facing unusual ridicule and even disfavor from your drill sergeants. It's for your sake that I'm telling you to go home, lose some weight, and come back later."

Just when I thought the last twenty minutes had revealed all the worst moments of my life, here came a decision by a beautiful Air Force officer that dictated my entire future.

I was too fat for the Army? Had she said that? Didn't she say this regulation wasn't written in stone? What did that mean? Could I still go if I demanded it? "I'm going. Call my recruiter and tell him to come here. If he tells me I can't go, then I'll go home and sell fucking pot to junior high kids. But I'm done talking to you ma'am. Wild is my recruiter. Call him."

I stormed off, leaving the nurse and a couple of bystanders by the cubby. I didn't know where to go, so I went downstairs where everyone else had gone. Nurse Nancy still had my file, so I was the only one without a folder in my hand, but I proceeded with the rest of the guys to the swearing in ceremony anyway.

Five minutes later, I was sworn into the United States Army, and I wondered all the while if I was really in or out. It seemed to me that, so far, my military career had been a series of different circumstances, which all involved me wondering if I was in or out; and knowing if I was in or out, with or without, had never mattered so much to me.

When we walked out of the small ceremony and into the hallway, the nurse and Wild were leaning up against the cinder block wall waiting for me. I thought that I'd seen his hand fall from the small of her back and down to his side the instant I'd appeared. Turns out, he'd been in the building all along.

"Ludo, how you doing, bud?" he asked.

I was so glad to see him that I almost cried. He was on my side, always, and I believed that he was there because he really cared about me.

"It's all straightened out now. I talked Rebecca here into signing your chart. You leave at seventeen hundred hours, on schedule."

I looked at Rebecca curiously. She looked at me with an "OK, but I tried to warn you" look. My eyes flashed to Wild wanting to ask, "Is she your girlfriend?" but he answered before I had the guts to inquire. The answer came in the form of a wink and a smile.

"Go on, get your shit from the hotel room, say your goodbyes, and be at the airport by three thirty. Your dad is taking you to the airport, right?"

"Roger that, sarge," I said.

"OK, go on, get ready. I'll be there at the airport to say goodbye to you, OK?"

"Yeah, sarge. Thanks again."

"No prob, buddy."

I started walking away, thankful to be leaving. Before I got ten paces he called out my name. I turned to see him looking my way, and Rebecca was smiling at me too, "You are going to be fine, bud. Don't worry about anything. You'll adapt. I know that about you, Shell. You're going to be OK. I promise."

I took his words personally. I held them with my hands, close to my heart, and refused to let them go. The one and only man in the world who'd ever defended me was about to become a distant memory and someone I would probably never see again, but for the moment I felt more connected to him than I could to myself.

In the MEPS lobby, I found my father and Janet, my stepmother, sitting in uncomfortable orange chairs while they were reading magazines. It looked like they'd been there, waiting, for a while. It dawned on me that someone might have told them why I was taking so long if they'd bothered to ask people, but I doubted they had. It was my intention to say nothing of the last hour, wanting to leave with as much dignity and respect from the two of them as possible.

"Everything OK? You all set to go?" Dad asked, standing up to stretch and tossing the Sports Illustrated back into the pile.

"Yeah, had an interesting morning," I said, hoping that it would stop there.

"We met Brian Garten ... Wait, was that his last name?" Janet asked my father.

"Think so," Dad said.

"Yeah. Garten," I said.

"He said you were having some trouble with the weigh in. Is everything OK now?" she asked in her most malignantly innocent voice.

Motherfucker, I hate that loud mouth kid already. "Yeah, it was just a big misunderstanding," I said, stepping toward the doors.

"A misunderstanding? He made it sound like they were going to send you home to lose weight, not let you go today. They tell you that?"

I contemplated her line of questioning, and I decided quickly that it didn't really matter. I didn't need to explain.

My father was visibly uncomfortable about where this was heading, and he did his best to get us moving toward the car. Once outside and walking to the parking garage, he commented on the weather, the time, and anything else that seemed benign enough to not cause an argument.

I would have loved to have spent my last hour as a civilian with my dad, and I would have loved for him to congratulate me on my determination, or my follow-through (if nothing else), but it seemed as though that wasn't on his mind at all. This was the day he'd been waiting for, and just as I had assumed, her presence there was a simple reminder that my intuition is usually right. He knew that we just had to survive the car ride to the airport; one last trip together before they were set free of me forever. Once I boarded that plane, there was no turning back, whether I wanted to or not.

Now Janet was stealing what little shred of dignity I had left. She was intentionally standing in front of me and blocking the light that was supposed to be shining on me. All I wanted was for Dad to be proud of me and to see me off as proudly as a father should—not holding his breath hoping that the Army would accept me. They were supposed to want me, to be waiting for me, and my father was supposed to hug me proudly as he sent me on my way—not be nervous and disappointed that the Army was taking me against their will. I was now just marginal again, which was where I'd been my whole life. It seemed that I was never the hero; I was always the slightly-less-than-desirable type. I was the old maid card that the Army had been stuck with when the game ended.

"It's taken care of. I need to lose some weight, yes. I failed the tape test, yes. Wild had to beg the nurse to let me go, yes. Better? Everyone clear now?"

This was a bold move for me, sassing her. I wasn't really sassing her, but I was definitely taking a tone. For the first time in my life, I didn't really care; I was gone in less than an hour. If these were the last words I ever said to either of them, I would be OK with that. He made a point of stepping between us at that moment, putting his arm around me, and telling me that he was proud of me.

"Don't worry about it, son. You have an adaptability that most people don't have. You'll be fine," he said reassuringly.

This was my father's standby compliment for me. He always dug this one out when there was little else to compliment me on, but I wished that he could have been a little more creative at such a point in our lives. Two seconds spent in thought, and he could have said something different, but apparently that was too much to ask for. I accepted his compliment half-heartedly, realizing that even a left-handed compliment was better than the alternative.

Ved was a new person. As Ved, I would avoid the pitfalls of Shell, and I would be missed the next time I left, or adapt to the point that I wouldn't notice the fact that no one missed me. Maybe by investing very little personal emotion into people in the future, and by remembering that I am unlovable and acting accordingly, I will never have to recognize how little I mattered to people. Years from now people would say that Ved Ludo was a heartless wanderer, that Ved Ludo cared little for other people; he was a self-serving and pompous asshole. If someone had thought of me that way on my last day as a civilian, as a kid, I would have been flattered. It was so far from Shell and so out of character that I probably would have fed off the insult and transformed into what I would later become, instantly.

"OK, I'm ready to go," I said, looking at my father.

"All right, let's get you there," he said.

Fifteen minutes later we were at the gate of the Harrisburg Airport looking out onto the tarmac where a little prop-job airplane waited to take me to Raleigh. There was no hallway-style gate that led to the plane entrance. There was just a door that led outside to the blacktop and two painted lines that served as a border of the path we were meant to walk. The portable staircase that led to the entry door of the plane was just being placed, and I watched as the passengers exited. I considered the small plane for a few seconds, trying to build some faith in what looked to be like a remnant WWII aircraft. Worst-case scenario, that thing would stall out, drop like a rock, and kill us instantly; a fate that seemed equal to the life I'd been living the last few hours. If there was a merciful God up there in Heaven, maybe he'd see fit to just end this life of mine as quickly as possible.

With my impending death seeming more and more imminent, I became eager to walk out that door and board the doomed plane, but instead I got to look forward to a few more minutes of quality time with my dad. I knew he felt equally awkward and wanted this to end as soon as possible; for both of our sakes, I just wanted to go.

"Wow, it's a tiny one," my dad said, nodding at the plane.

"Yeah, maybe we'll dust some crops on the way," I said, realizing that the joke missed immediately. He never got my humor; I'd given up on making him laugh about two years ago.

Standing there trying to make small talk was expected, but really, the isolation of sitting friendless on the plane seemed a much healthier option. I didn't want to sit next to Garten, that loudmouth freak, and I planned on telling him so if he fucking tried. I wasn't Shell Ludo anymore; I was Ved Ludo, and Ved Ludo spoke the fucking truth, even if it distanced people. I wanted to put my headphones on and drift away from reality, playing the ever-present imaginary music video of my life the way it'd be, not the way it was.

"Let's get this over with," I said, after a few more minutes of total awkwardness, not needing to hide what we were all feeling any longer.

"Yeah, you should probably get out there, settle in, and relax. I'm sure you have a big day ahead of you," my father said quietly, nervously.

He and I both knew that I couldn't board yet. Shit, the people were still making their way down the ladder. They wouldn't begin boarding the thing for at least another half hour, but we pretended that wasn't the case. Maybe that was some special father-son understanding; without words we could read each other and react accordingly. He was nervous for me, I could tell. Maybe the guy really did love me, and maybe he was genuinely sad that I was leaving. I wanted to hug him for twenty minutes. I wanted to tell him that he'd hurt me, that he'd taken something special, a father-son relationship, and given it cancer by leaving when I was so young. Why couldn't he take me to the airport alone so we could clear the air before I left him? Wasn't this event large enough in his mind to make some special allowances? Couldn't he, for once, just demand a little time alone with his boy? No, he didn't love me, not enough to matter anyway. I didn't care what he said to me now. There were no words to convince me otherwise. I was now sure that I'd been a burden to him for my entire lifetime. A burden he was shaking off his back for good this time.

I hugged my father. While he was close enough that a whisper would find him, I said, "This changes everything, huh?"

He didn't answer. He didn't speak a word.

I grabbed my duffle bag off the floor, silently threw it over my shoulder, and walked to the seats by the window. Garten was playing some video game device and didn't see me, so I sat as quickly as I could, hoping to remain undetected.

Half an hour later, I boarded the plane, sat in my window seat, and pulled my Discman out of my man-purse. I'd been waiting for loud music all day. I needed something to sweep me away from reality. I closed my eyes and pictured myself in the future—strong, skinny, handsome, and loved.

After a few minutes, the plane began to back up in a jerky fashion. It wasn't until then that I looked back at the terminal window; I was wondering if they'd waited from a different vantage point in order to give me one last wave.

The windows were all empty except for a few other parents who had come along to see their young soldiers off. There were signs saying Good luck Mikey and We love you David, things like this, but Dad and Janet were long gone.

The Raleigh airport was a lot like the Harrisburg airport, except it was hotter. Harrisburg in the summertime is a hot place, but Raleigh in the summertime rivals Hell. There were more black people in that airport than I had ever seen in one place, and the sight of them all milling around, speaking in ways I could hardly decipher as English, was terrifying. I had no issue with black people. I didn't really know any black people, but still, I felt like they were being hostile to me rather than the way I'd always imagined it working. I didn't have the confidence to be cruel to anyone, but it just seemed like I was invisible when I was standing beside a group of them.

By now it was evening, seven o'clock or somewhere near that, and we still had forty-five minutes before the flight left. Sometime after getting to Raleigh, I realized that most, if not all, of the people on the plane were themselves off to McClellan. Maybe the Army rented an entire flight each time they began a basic class and sent everyone from all over the country to a centralized airport and then on to their final destination together?

Since I'd been one of the first connecting flights to Raleigh, I had more time to stand around and absorb what was going on than most. Initially, it was Garten and me, and the group of black people who pretty much ignored the two of us. He was an ugly little troll, and I was the fat white kid no one wanted to associate with. I'm sure in their minds he and I were a perfect mismatch. I was a little pudgy, but I still didn't see myself as someone equivalent to the fucking talkative troll. I was a little put off by being ignored, however. I must admit to you that my initial feelings toward black folks weren't pure of heart. I'd tried to ask some questions of them by jumping into their unusually loud conversation and seeing if they knew anything more than I did about when we'd be there, what to expect, etc. ... All I got was annoyed looks out the corner of their eyes, a pause in their conversation, then nothing. They went back to gossiping and talking as if they were all best of friends for the last ten years, and I was virtually the invisible man. It didn't take long to segregate myself, realizing that I was both unwelcome in the conversation and of no interest to any of them.

As the minutes passed, more and more people were showing up at our gate, and with them came white people of all sorts. As the white people showed up, I noticed they separated themselves from the black people automatically. I wondered if this was just how it was done. Maybe I was an idiot for trying to talk to them in the first place, or maybe I'd crossed some social barrier that I was unaware of and was responded to the same way that the white people would if a black guy came up and started talking to them? No way. In a world where being white meant that you were probably bigoted, it was not a good idea to prove anyone right in that assumption.

The more people who showed up, the bigger the two groups got. The groups were divided into three: black folks in one, white guys in another, and white females as the third. Some of the more brazen white guys would occasionally join the female group, but before long they'd be back to inform the rest of us what a bunch of ugly bitches they were. They were certainly not supermodels, but I had the foresight to understand that the lonelier a man got over the next few months, the better looking they would become. Better not unnecessarily burn bridges that I might later regret. Keeping to myself, and keeping on the good side of people, was the plan. The less I imposed on people, the better off I would be later. Silence is a clever tool, an effective tool, and using it properly almost always ensures success in the long run.

When the announcement came over the loudspeaker that our flight to Atlanta was boarding, general chaos ensued. We pushed awkwardly to the hallway, lined up, and tried not to stress out about whom we'd be sitting next to. I know that it was on everyone's mind because the conversations that were the loudest were all about people sitting next to other certain people. It was as if our tickets didn't have a seating assignment on them at all, and everyone was simply deciding where they would sit.

I know people have layers, and the people who seem to be the coolest now often disappoint over the course of peeling back layers. For that reason, I didn't care whom I sat beside. I was riding the plane with Eddie Vedder and he was going to be sitting with me no matter who else was in my row. I wanted solitude; I wanted to think the entire way without having to perform for anyone. I am an onion: layered and deep. I have never been someone who reveals a lot immediately. Worthy friends are the same. I take the time, ask the questions, and wait for time to be the glue that bonds us. Today was the first day of a marathon, and I was pacing myself to not be obligated to anyone other than me, for once. I imagined it like heading off to prison; I tried to play it like that. It was the same, in a sense, going to a culture that you do not understand, with people whom you do not know ... It seemed to me that preparing myself for prison, rather than boot camp, was a good idea.

As I entered the plane, I greeted the happy captain and the flight attendants, and then I began trying to count the rows in advance to see where, and next to whom, I was seated. I was relieved to see that the three rows in front of and behind what I guessed to be my seat were still unoccupied. When I got there, I stuffed my duffle bag into the overhead compartment, kept my man-purse on me, and took my seat in the middle of the row.

A few minutes later, as I was looking out the window and trying not to look anxious, a female voice greeted me. "Hey, I think I'm in the window seat. Sorry," she said.

I turned around and was relieved to see a white female stuffing a pink backpack into the same compartment as my Morgan Lake Bible Conference Center duffle. She was about my age, taller than me, and pretty in a plain way. She wore little makeup, had her hair in a tight braid (the way Mormon girls wear their hair), and was dressed casually in a pair of well-fitting jeans and a T-shirt that said something about the Cubs.

I stood and moved into the aisle allowing her the room to get into her seat. My plan was to leave her completely alone and to not act like a fifth grader on the playground. I was serious about not being an annoyance to anyone, and I was impressed by my own sense of surviving this experience. It was as if I had already done this thing before, and as if I had already learned how to make myself invisible, but I couldn't recall ever needing to do this before. No matter how pretty she was, or wasn't, I planned on treating her like a guy, but with courteous overtones.

I put my headphones back on, took the Pearl Jam disc out, and replaced it with Pachelbel's Canon. It was time for something soothing, as I now knew my road to be complicated and lonesome. I had just hit play and the music had not yet become audible when the girl sitting next to me turned my direction.

What is it about putting headphones on that makes people decide it's time to engage you? Every time I put them on and begin to let myself fall into the music, some asshole needs to ask me a question ... Regardless, I politely pulled the headphones off my ears but left them on my head, not wanting to look too presumptuous. I assumed she had a question involving the logistics of getting to McClellan (perhaps about the three-hour bus ride we would take from the airport to McClellan).

Obviously, if my guess was correct, her recruiter wasn't as good as Wild, as he'd gone over everything one last time outside the airport. It was the first time he'd met my father. Dad hadn't been all that involved in the meetings we'd had with Wild. The whole thing had lasted maybe forty-five seconds, but seeing the two of them side by side, my father and Wild, had been enlightening. Here was a guy who embodied all the things I wished my father was, but wasn't; and then there was my father who in essence made me the person Wild had come to care for on a personal level. I knew that I would miss Wild more than anyone else I was leaving behind; I also knew that I would probably never see him again. It was his last six months as a recruiter, and, as he put it, he couldn't wait "to get the fuck out of the babysitting business," which he always reiterated didn't apply to me. Wild hugged me, a one-arm hug that was meant for my father to see, but he'd shorted me the real hug I felt like I owed him.

"Hey, you're obviously going to McClellan?" she asked without a hint of shyness.

"Yeah, sure am. I guess you are too?"

"Yeah, don't know how I ended up chemical, but here I am. Teresa Jenney," she said, sticking her hand out to shake mine.

"Ved Ludo," I said without a second thought.

"Ved?" she asked. "Like Vedder?"

I smiled helplessly. Anyone who knew the name Vedder was good in my book, but it was the early nineties, so who didn't know that name? "Yeah, that's right. I have a slight man-crush. My friends just sort of decided one day that I'd crossed the line between being a fan and being obsessed."

"I see." She nodded slowly, trying to decide if this was normal or strange. "So ... you excited?" she asked.

I smiled in return. "Yeah, I'm excited; nervous might be a better adjective. I think it'll be better when we get there," I said, hopeful.

"There's nothing to worry about now, just going to reception for three days. Basic will be hard, but you have a few days to get ready for it at reception. I did hear that we would be inprocessing all night when we get there though. No sleep tonight," she added.

"Well, I haven't slept in a while anyway. I suppose one more night won't kill me."

Some minutes later, the announcements started. The flight attendants began their mime show, lip syncing while demonstrating seat belt operation. The forced interruption broke our conversation cleanly, and while she was distracted with locating the emergency exits, I slipped my headphones back over my ears, hit play on the Discman, and drifted off into sleep before the plane left the ground. When I woke up, everyone was standing and moving around the cabin nervously, pulling on sweatshirts, and lowering bags that had been stowed away for the duration of the flight.

"Fuck, we there?" I asked Jenney.

"Yeah, bud, you slept the whole way. Even with the turbulence you snored like a logger ..."

I didn't hear any annoyance in her voice, but I wondered if that was because she was restraining herself or she really didn't mind. I was humiliated, nonetheless. Just the picture in my head of being fat, rudely ending our conversation, and falling into a peaceful sleep (on my end anyway) only to awake at the gate, was enough to make me want to dig a hole and bury myself in it.

We deboarded the plane and meandered through the hallway leading to the terminal, which dumped us out into a busy airport. There we were greeted by a couple of black men dressed in camouflage. Everyone began referring to them as drill sergeant immediately, even though they corrected us over and over again. We'd all been taught that referring to a drill as anything other than that was a very bad idea, so it was better to stay in the habit of doing so than to forget what we'd learned and pay the price later.

"We are not drill sergeants. We are just NCOs from reception sent to retrieve government property. You are the government property we were sent to receive. That said, there will be no fraternization between males and females, there will be limited talking between any of you, and when we call your name, you will reply with the last four of your social security number. Any questions?"

Of course, all the idiots had questions about where we were going, when we would get there, and what it would be like; to which the sergeants replied with, "You have nothing to worry about. Everything will be taken care of for you. You are not to think, not to make decisions ... All you have to do is what we tell you."

I could empathize with their lack of patience. The questions they were being asked had nothing to do with the instructions we had been given. I realized immediately that there were all sorts of people in the world, but right now there were two major groups: the ones who knew how to shut the fuck up and do what they were told, and the ones who thought they were above such behavior. I was secure in the knowledge that the less I said, the better off I would be. It was almost liberating to have nothing depending on me, to have zero decisions to make, and to only be accountable for understanding what I was told to do.

The sergeants herded us into buses like cattle, and the further we went into the night, the more I realized why they were so controlling. The simplest of tasks was met with hundreds of questions—some actually asked of them and the rest answered between us. For every sentence that came from their mouths, there were a hundred questions, equally as elementary. I didn't care whom I sat with, which bus I was on, or where I would put my bag. I hid behind the masses, saying absolutely nothing while the unfortunate sergeants were questioned on every order they gave us, over and over.

When I finally found a seat on the bus, it was the very front seat. I was right behind the bus driver, and I slid in against the window preparing to rest my head against the cold windowpane and fall back asleep. I intentionally didn't put my headphones on so I would be able to hear any instruction they gave, but as the bus began to creep away from the airport, I realized that the sergeants weren't even on our bus. The civilian bus driver never said a word for the entire three-hour ride, and following his example, neither did I. The guy who sat beside me was wearing his headphones, and I ended up listening to his music most of the way as they were turned up loud enough that despite them resting against his ears, I could understand about every other word. I wasn't annoyed; I was just glad that he had them on and didn't want to be bus buddies for the ride to McClellan. It seemed to me that basic would be long enough and close enough that I could decide whom I wanted to befriend later. Obviously, some of these guys would be closer to me than others, and if half of them were going to be put into a different platoon, why bother making friends with them now?

I woke up with drool on my cheek and similarly smeared all over the window. There was a loud cheering from the entire bus that jolted me from my sleep. I found out as soon as I wiped my face off that it was because we had crossed onto Ft. McClellan property. All the road signs were now brown and white instead of green and white. All the street lightbulbs cast the same orangish light down from them, which seemed to turn the humid air into an eerie glow.

I looked at my watch—1:45 a.m. I'd only slept for an hour or so, but as far as anyone could tell, I'd been sleeping the whole way. My pondering and sleeping stance had been the same in the hope that anyone who saw me would think I was out cold, and apparently it had worked. Even the guy sitting beside me hadn't awoken me when we'd arrived at McClellan. I was impressed with how anti-social I could be at a moment's notice. I'd never really intentionally put people off before.

When the buses stopped, the driver simply opened the door. He didn't speak, and for a second no one knew what to do. Should we get off, or should we wait to be told to get off? I decided to play it safe and relax. Sure enough, a second later the sergeant came onto the bus and told us to deboard. When we got off the bus, the temperature shocked me. Even in the middle of the night, it had to be in the low eighties. The humidity was so thick I coughed when I inhaled deeply. We formed up on the sidewalk and waited an ungodly amount of time before a lady from inside the massive building came out to address us.

The building itself was impressive only because of the size. Other than that, it was a simple structure. It looked to me almost exactly like the three that sat next to it; they were identical in every way except for a number and letter stenciled and spray painted on each corner.

"Welcome to Fort McClellan. My name is Staff Sergeant Arnold, and I am in charge of getting you through the reception process and off to basic training where your drill sergeants will mold you into real soldiers, not this ragtag bunch of fucking hippies standing before me now."

After she insulted us for a while, she led us into the building and had us sit in soft chairs in what looked like an auditorium. Once seated, we were told to remain silent and, again, were left for forty-five minutes. The only people we saw were the uniformed soldiers who came in occasionally to tell us to shut the hell up and wait like soldiers.

When they finally rewarded us with their presence, they gave us a run down of what to expect. They circulated paperwork and had us fill out the top portion of each page. Even the simplest paperwork confused the masses as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. The top portion of the paperwork was simply our name, social security number, address, and MOS (Military Occupation Specialty). The really confusing part, apparently, being the question: "Next of Kin." My mother was my next of kin, so I filled out her name and address thinking that surely the group can do this efficiently; however, that wasn't the case. A million questions were asked of the three staff members who were assisting us, which didn't help their moods at all. Before long, they addressed the entire group, like a room full of second graders, speaking in slow, well-pronounced sentences. It was embarrassing to even be associated with the group, and even though I asked no questions of them, they still met me with disappointed looks when they were forced to meet my eyes.

By the time our company finished the paperwork, it was four in the morning. We were shown to our temporary quarters, which consisted of a large room with bunk beds scattered about and an entire quarter of the room dedicated to bathrooms. On top of each individual mattress were a white sheet and a green wool blanket, folded neatly. These weren't new blankets. They were old and thinned out from thousands of uses, but we were in no place to argue. The wool blankets were itchy to the touch, and I knew immediately that I would have a hard time sleeping soundly with this thing wrapped around me. Eventually, after a few nights of not sleeping, I knew I would be exhausted enough that I could sleep even with this blanket. I was going to sleep on the bare mattress with the sheet between my skin and the wool, but after looking over the mattress, I decided that exposing my skin to the funk on the mattress would be suicide. There was no easy way to do it, so I remained dressed as I'd come, and I lay down.

Once I'd settled into my temporary bed, I couldn't sleep. It wasn't simply that there were no light switches in the room, therefore, making it impossible to turn off the lights, or the fact that people were talking, screaming, laughing, and acting like a bunch of lawless assholes. It was that I was there now, I was really there, I was really doing this, and the enormity of it was catching up to me. All day long I'd been jumping through hoops, one after the other, and now I was finally realizing that I was alone in a strange place with stranger people. After I'd lain there for at least a half hour—listening to the sounds of water running in the bathrooms, the constant flushing of toilets, zippers opening and closing, things dropping onto the floor, and beds squeaking—I decided that I should write my mother that letter I promised her I'd write. I sat up, dug into my duffle bag, pulled out the pad of paper we'd bought at Woolworth's and a pen, and composed a letter.

Dear Mom,

I wish I could explain the feelings that I'm dealing with, but they are more complicated than I know how to interpret. We made it here to reception at about two, but it's now after five and I am awake. I suppose it's OK though. They are waking us up at six anyway for a day of shots, paperwork, haircuts, and to be issued gear. I think we are here for just a few days, so I don't have an address yet. I'll let you know as soon as I know about that.

The plane was uninteresting, as was the bus ride. I slept most of the way here. I feel OK. I don't want you to worry about me. The government is already referring to me as their property, so I'm sure they will take care of me accordingly. People seem nice, but I decided that the world is full of retards and people incapable of following simple directions, so I really haven't engaged anyone yet. I intend to say as little as possible, which you know is a drastic change for me.

All and all, I'm going to be OK. I think the hard part is behind me, well at least for me. Goodbyes aren't my strength. Hmm, I wonder whom I got that from?

Anyway, relax. I am OK and happy to be somewhere other than the limbo I've been in for the last month or so. I'm here, I'm alive, and I'm looking forward to defining myself as mentally capable if nothing else. I love you Mom. I'll call if I am ever allowed, and I'll write regularly. I should have plenty to say in my letters because I have decided to have little to say verbally.

Tell Kell and Dave I said hi, and I love them both.

Son

With that, I folded my letter until I was sure it would fit into the half-sized envelopes I'd bought, addressed it to her new Morgan Lake address, placed a stamp in the corner, and dropped it back into my duffle to be mailed when, and if, I found an out-going box.

I lay back down on my bed, listening to the conversations happening all around me. People were bragging and embellishing their lives in a way that is expected in a new environment, but all I could hear were the lies. Solitude was working as a catalyst to my gift. Under these conditions, I could hear and understand better. I looked around at the faces of the liars, and I made a note of them and their individual lies. I wanted to remember who was who, so I could make the proper conclusions, and possibly acquaintances, tomorrow or today ... whatever the hell it was.

Sleep wasn't an option. My weight was weighing heavily on me, but I took a little comfort in seeing some other heavy people wandering around the barracks. I was still the fattest, probably, or maybe that was just how I was seeing it, but it made me relax a little to know that there were others. Maybe they'd make us work a little extra in basic and encourage us to lose more than the rest, but at least it wouldn't be just me in need of weight loss.

At six o'clock sharp, a private first class came into the bay and told us it was time for breakfast. It was his job to get us there, feed us, and have us in a formation in front of the building at seven fifteen. The young private seemed to take seriously the job he'd been given and called us "legs" and "hippies" at every opportunity. He was more abrupt than the sergeants had been, and I aptly diagnosed him with Little Man's disease. Obviously, he's always the low man on the totem pole, so this was his chance to flex, to take control, and to punish us as if we were the ones who picked on him. That meant to me that despite his low rank, he was someone to be treated carefully. I didn't need any low ranking, pissed off private making an example out of me. I would mind my manners, say very little, and even avoid making eye contact with as much of the population as possible.

To new soldiers, however, the difference between a private and a sergeant is marginal, and he got the respect that he was looking for. It made me wince when people would accidentally refer to him as drill sergeant, something he most certainly was not, but he didn't bother to correct. At the formation in front of the dining facility, he told us that we had eight minutes to eat our breakfast beginning when we were seated with our trays. After we ate, we were to go directly out of the building and make a formation close to where the buses would be picking us up. This seemed to be the theme of my first few hours in the Army: stand in a formation and wait. I used the standing time to really think things over. The Army was becoming more and more like the Forrest Gump movie, and the more I released my head to ponder the things that I thought important, the more bearable the wasted hours became.

The dining facility, or DFAC, was a bustling place. There were hundreds, if not a thousand, of people in there with lines that went in different directions. There was the short order line (which supplied the fatty foods like breakfast burritos and egg sandwiches), which I decided I should be avoiding, and then there was the main line (which had eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes, and more). Every beverage imaginable found a home in the DFAC, and the room that housed the beverages was the size of a small church. I chose coffee, to accompany my eggs and potato breakfast, with no cream and no sugar. I'd heard so many stories about how bad Army food was that I was tempted to just skip breakfast altogether, but after a bite or two I was so pleasantly surprised that I wanted to kick myself for not having gotten more. There was no second run through the line, as we'd been instructed to take all we could eat on the first go 'round and to eat every morsel that we took or we'd be doing push-ups until we vomited it all back out. It took me six minutes to eat my breakfast; the hardest part was swallowing the coffee I'd taken as its temperature didn't seem to drop a single degree in those few minutes. I was afraid to even try and sneak it into the dish room full, so I slurped it as fast as I could, trying not to burn myself.

Private "Little Man" was watching us like a fucking hawk and waiting for someone to do something out of line so he could go all ape-shit on us in front of the other soldiers who were eating. I saw him look me over a few times as he paced back and forth in the dining room. He monitored our behavior as if he were a war hardened vet rather than a snot nosed little fuck who didn't have the rank to be in charge of a single person familiar with the military hierarchy. His eyes looked me over carefully, and as I braced for him to scrutinize something trivial I had been doing, he simply walked by me without saying a word. I assumed he'd be keeping an eye on me, and I made a note to myself to play it cool with him. I didn't need any enemies, nor did I need any friends who were constantly being corrected. What I needed was to keep this pattern of isolation exactly as it was. I didn't need to get a full night's sleep and wake up so exuberant and happy that I caved in on my own philosophy of solitude. It seemed to be working thus far, so no need to fix what ain't broke.

After I swallowed the last of my coffee, I walked up to the dish room, dropped my garbage into the can, and placed my tray the same way that everyone else had done. The lady washing dishes in the sauna-like room eyed me one time and then went back to her business without saying a word. I sighed with relief at the gesture, assumed the meaning was that I'd done this menial task correctly, and turned with relief to head out the door; but as I did so, I ran directly into the PFC who had been looking me over so carefully.

"You know what the overfats are?" he asked in a southern drawl.

"Uh, no," I answered, intentionally leaving his rank out of my response. I didn't want to inflate his ego any further than it already was. Whoever put this dude in charge must be equally incompetent as his demeanor was far from the professionalism and genuine authority I'd seen at the Army meetings with Wild. This kid probably was a year or so in, certainly not five, and he barely even outranked me. To call him private seemed more insulting than anything else because that's how he was referring to us.

"You will. If I were you, I'd watch the intake," he said, patting me on the belly as he walked off.

My head was throbbing with fear and embarrassment as I watched him pace off into the dining room, and as I tried to get a grip on myself, I could feel tears welling up inside of me. I was so frustrated with myself for having gained the weight in the first place, and to have it pointed out to me (as if I didn't know I was a little chubby) by some asshole private, made it all worse. If he noticed that about me, and if that was the first thing he noticed about me, then it would be the first thing anyone noticed about me. It didn't matter how hard I tried to keep quiet, followed directions better than the rest, or minded my own business ... All these loudmouth idiots I was here with were going to draw attention to the group, and once attention was called to the group, the fat ones were going to stand out; and of the fat ones, I was going to be the fucking king.

I thought about what I could do to lose weight in a hurry, but that was pointless as we were only going to be here for three days, maybe four. I remembered the movie Gandhi from tenth grade and his hunger strike. Maybe I could do something like that? I'll just stop eating, and no matter who tried to force me to eat, I'd refuse. Only when I was skinnier than the rest of these guys would I begin eating again. Everyone would celebrate my heroic fast; they'd cheer for me for having the dedication to do it and realize that I was taking my career here seriously. Problem was, I'd just eaten breakfast and was still hungry. Starving seemed more difficult than just taking the punches for being fat. Maybe I would eat; I'd just have to work out harder than the rest of these guys. There has to be a fitness center somewhere I could use. Maybe I'd just ask the drills for permission to work out and show them that I have the drive to lose the weight myself; then they'd go easier on me than the rest of these heavier guys.

I was finally aware of the seriousness of the situation and it made me rethink the favor Wild did in getting me through MEPS and onto the plane. Maybe I should have listened to the nurse, maybe she wasn't a tyrannical bitch after all, and maybe she was trying to prevent me from this feeling, these comments, and whatever would happen to me because of it.

Reception battalion was the most nothing I have ever done. All the tasks we'd come there to do could have been done in a day if it weren't for the twenty questions my company asked about every simple task they were assigned, and the hours we spent in formations doing nothing but standing and waiting.

Before lunch on that first day, I was sitting in one of the clinic-style rooms we'd been in and out of all morning waiting for another air-injected shot when, lo and behold, Private Jenney sat down beside me. She looked worse than she did on the plane, but, of course, part of that had to do with the lack of sleep, lack of cosmetics, and my mood. Jenney was still attractive, but I had to look deeper into her to see it, and even when I found her attractive, I was so repulsed with myself and my predicament that it seemed not to matter. She had a better-than-average ass and what appeared to be suitable boobs, but her face was a testament to the lack of sleep and level of frustration she was also experiencing.

"How's it goin', Ved?" she asked softly, intimately, like we were old friends.

I was taken aback by how pleased I was to have someone talking to me. Being reclusive was still something awkward and unnatural for me, and had Jenney not engaged me, I would have continued on my lonely path. She was tired and frustrated, like me; I could read it on her face and something in identifying similarities between us made me want to connect.

"Oh ... you know ... it's going. I shouldn't be surprised about this whole thing, should I?" I asked with a weak smile. I was so tired suddenly that even holding the smile in place was making me breathe heavier. The sleepless night had caught up with me, draining me. I was without emotion altogether; I had somberly negotiated each series of immunizations with a mental numbness so powerful that even the injections were painless. "Is it possible that I'm so tired that I can't feel any pain?"

"I have never heard of that, but I'm beginning to think it's possible," she said, letting her eyelids close for a long second.

"You didn't sleep either?" I asked, deciding to drive the conversation somewhere if for no other reason than to do something.

"No. It was like a zoo in our barracks. You wouldn't believe how nasty chicks can be, and something about a place like this brings it out of them. All night long they talked about whom they wanted to fuck, as if they know anyone here. It's disgusting. I just lay there on my bed pretending to sleep so I wouldn't have to talk to anyone. All I wanted to do was scream; I was afraid to trust myself answering someone."

"I hear you. I did the same, but I must admit I was entertained by the lies I was hearing. Oh, and the wool blankets? It felt like mine was sheared off the lamb yesterday. Fucking sandpaper." I smiled at my own sudden humor.

Jenney did too. She looked at me, and I turned to look at her as she did. Behind the exhausted eyes was the unmistakable look of intelligence. She was confident enough to engage me in conversation even under these circumstances. I thought she was probably from good people and probably a high school athlete who got better than average grades, but she might have missed out on a lot of the social aspects of high school. I figured she went to the prom with a friend of the family, dressed conservatively, and was never really the object of someone's desire. Not that she wasn't attractive, she was, she was just the kind of attractive that often goes unnoticed in a setting like high school. I guessed she would bloom in the next year or two and become someone who just woke up attractive to people one morning, never really understanding what changed. The answer was that nothing but her surroundings changed; the essence of Teresa Jenney was still the same, but it was just now beginning to shine through her.

Just then I saw him; PFC Finley was walking at a quick-time pace in our direction. His eyes were locked on the two of us as we sat there mindlessly talking about nothing important. Finley was ranting about something, but from the distance he'd started at, I couldn't understand it. As he passed other soldiers, their eyes turned toward us also. This made me think that whatever he was saying was both unpleasant and something directed specifically at Jenney and me. I felt my plan of obscurity and segregation slipping away before I could fully understand PFC Finley's words. "Get away, get away from each other. Do you understand what fraternization is? What do I have to say to make you understand that what you are doing is a violation of military code? How many times do I have to explain that fraternization—"

"Dude, we're just talking," I said, hearing the "dude" come out of my mouth at the same time he did.

"Dude? What are we, back on the block?" he asked, nearing us.

"Back on the block? What does that mean—"

"Shut your goddamn mouth right now, soldier; don't say another word. You ..." he said, pointing to Jenney. "You need to go back to your platoon right now, and don't speak to another male soldier until your eighth week of basic, got it?" he snapped at her. She was already on her way out of the room before he'd addressed her, which left only the two of us in the suddenly silent room. "Look, private, I don't care what you two are talking about; it really doesn't matter. I'm not saying that you were trying to hook up with her or anything like that. All I'm telling you is that there is a zero tolerance policy for fraternization here, and if someone else saw you having a cute little conversation, sitting in here all alone, they'd be tossing your ass out of the Army right now."

I listened, but I was still too exhausted to get visibly nervous; in fact, the reprimand he was giving me was wasted on me as I didn't have the energy to even react. I just listened to him silently, expressionlessly, as I watched that beautiful ass walk down the hall, thinking that Jenney and I might be from the same planet.

Three days later, we were preparing to leave for basic. We'd been issued all of our gear, given smart haircuts that made us all look like our scalps had been painted white, prepped in the art of marching, told how to respond to drills yelling in our faces, given a crash course in rank recognition, vaccinated against every disease and virus since the beginning of time, and told to be tough and stick with it.

"It's gonna get pretty intense when you show up across base; it doesn't sound like that far away, but believe me, it's miles from what you could possibly expect. You need to stay focused, relax, and listen to instructions. You need to play it smart, make good decisions, and make the corrections that you need to make in order to do a proper job here at McClellan. You'll look back on it and smile, remembering the best time of your life, ONCE YOU ADAPT! Until then, it's gonna suck. It's supposed to suck. You are supposed to feel alienated, alone and weak, and unacceptable the way you are. There is only the team effort; you do not matter. Learn this and save yourself the frustration of feeling insignificant. You are only here to be part of the team. Those of you who think you are individuals will be the first ones sent home to your momma; you can explain to her that I tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen. Grow up. Take responsibility. Shut your mouths. Do what you are told, and you will all have a blast. Godspeed soldiers. Welcome to Ft. McClellan. Prepare for your shark attack." With that, the first sergeant raised his arms and swung them wildly in a circle. Instantly, the roar of diesel buses sounded like a swarm of bees.

The buses that would take us to basic training opened their doors and waited for us to board.

We'd been prepped for this; we'd been told that today we were joining the Army, and that everything we'd done so far was in preparation for joining, but today the real basic began. "Shark attack" was the term batted around that best explained the treatment we were to expect when the buses dropped us off. The shark attack was an hour-long routine performed by the actual drill sergeants upon our arrival. They'd board our bus, throw us off, scream and yell, slap and push us around while we tried to figure out what they wanted us to do. This hour long beating was responsible for sixty percent of the dropouts. They'd told us not to quit, no matter what, and then in the same sentence informed us that most of the people that get sent home from basic are tossed during the attack. The idea, I knew from some light summer reading on the psychology of the military, was to break us down, leave our former selves behind, and then rebuild us as a team.

No matter what anyone tells you, haunted houses and basic training work the same way. You sign up for the rush of it—the challenge that you know to expect, and you know what it will cost you emotionally. There will be actors threatening to kill you; hopefully, you will be cognizant enough to realize that they really won't. They will push you as far as you allow them to, and it behooves each man to control his reaction to these extremes. Finally, when it's all over and done with, you should be able to smile, shake hands, and laugh triumphantly at your development. You will realize that you survived, and that you endured the worst like a man.

Boarding the bus was as much of a fiasco as anything else we'd done. People were jockeying for the front seats so that when the drills boarded our bus to begin the torture, they could be the first ones off. People were afraid that if they sat too far back, they would be immediately singled out for failing to get off the bus in a fast and efficient way.

It was all happening as if in a dream. I was standing in front of the bus feeling nothing—no nerves, no worry, and no excitement whatsoever—just standing there with my new Army duffle full of everything I would need for the next few months, watching. Then I was seated about 4/5ths of the way back on the passenger side against the window with my duffle bag seated on my lap; which allowed me no view, except of my name and social that had been spray-painted via stencil onto the side. I stared at my name as the bus turned and bounced. I cleared my head of the past and focused intensely on controlling the future. I was bracing for the attack and for the screaming and yelling that I knew was coming. I reminded myself that even if I did everything right, I was still going to get ridiculed and mistreated by the drills. I knew that at this very second they were getting into the character of hard-ass, and that wasn't who they really are. They were preparing to explode all over me just as I was preparing to not let their words go any further than my ears. I was not going to let them hurt me; I was not going to take what they said to me personally. I was going to endure this like I did the beating that Chad had given me—without emotions, without regret.

After only a short drive, I heard the air brakes engage with a hiss and knew that the time had come. Looking for the first time out the window, I saw the barracks, the courtyard, and a group of camouflaged individuals (some male and some female) standing in the position of parade rest. As the bus came to a stop, the drills did not move; they were like statues in the lawn. The bus engine died, revealing only the sound of cadence being called somewhere in the distance.

The buildings behind the drills looked like concrete corduroy castles. Massive four story buildings that were shaped like a "U" with concrete floors, windowsills, and sidewalks, all done in varying shades of gray. They had no paint and nothing to differentiate one building from another except for numbers and letters stenciled to the side that faced the road. From my seat by the window, I saw the formation break. The drills split up into groups of two, and each pair was running as if to attack a different bus.

When I knew it was time, I simply reminded myself that this was a psychological game of chess. I had to react like everyone else, but without letting their words affect me like they would everyone else. I reminded myself that I was a man of intellect; I understood things, and those things even applied to drill sergeants who were really nothing more than actors.

Every war costs a certain number of lives. Some of my company was only there to fulfill that number; I was there to tell the tale. What would bring us down eventually was simply forgetting our meaning in all of this. As I left the bus that hot afternoon, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would survive this.
Chapter 5

Crusades and Ladybugs

"Private Ludo, please stand up and tell your company what you are enjoying for lunch today."

"Yes, drill sergeant! Drill sergeant, today I am having sliced ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, and carrots!"

"Private, unless you want me to kick your ass across the deefac, you'd better tell us everything that's on your plate."

"And chocolate cake, drill sergeant!"

"Chocolate cake, private?"

"Yes, drill sergeant!"

"And, Private Ludo, could you please tell your company how much you weigh?"

"Two hundred and twenty seven pounds, drill sergeant!"

"Two fucking hundred and twenty seven pounds, Private Ludo? That sounds a little heavy to me. Are you fat, Ludo?"

"Yes, drill sergeant!"

"Are you overfat?"

"Yes, drill sergeant"

Drill Sergeant Beckett turned his massive black head toward the rest of the company who were all pretending to be too busy eating; but I knew even without looking that they weren't too busy to miss this little spectacle. Whenever anyone else was called out, I always looked and inwardly giggled to myself, thinking what a dumb fuck that person was.

As I watched him scan the room, I knew this situation wasn't about to get any better. I could see it in the way his eyes were moving, not focusing on anything in particular. It was as if he was debating within himself whether he really wanted to do whatever it was he was about to do, as if one tiny part of him refused to believe that the rest of him was capable of such horrific things. The longer I watched him, the more nervous I became. "Company Attention!" he yelled unusually loud, even for a drill sergeant.

The noise of things falling, silverware mostly, was deafening. Chairs grunted as they were slid backward at light speed, cups spilled liquids onto the hard tile floor, food was swallowed without another bite as damn near three hundred people instantly stood erect. There had been very little human-noise until he'd yelled this. All that could be heard just a few seconds ago were silverware scraping plates, cups being set back down onto hard wood tables, and occasionally, if you listened hard enough, you could hear some of these animals chewing with their mouths open. Now, there was the screeching sound of chairs on the floor, the zipping sound of arms dropping straight down, and then ... absolute silence.

I ventured a look at the audience, here to witness my public humiliation, and noticed they looked a lot like every other mob I'd ever had the unfortunate pleasure of seeing. Of course, this was a little different. These guys weren't allowed to actually look at me. They were ordered to the position of attention, which meant head and eyes straight forward. Using that to my advantage, I looked at them. I knew that I too wasn't supposed to do so, but under the circumstances, with the drill showboating a little, I figured a quick glance might go unnoticed.

Three hundred soldiers, male and female, stood in their new uniforms behind tables, looking almost identical. It was hard to even differentiate them upon first glance, but after a second, some of the faces became recognizable. It was my second day at basic and my sixth day in the Army, so by now I knew a handful of names and a handful of faces to match, but I still had no one I considered a friend. We were in the process of deciding whom we wanted as friends, and, as I'd figured, people were a little standoffish about befriending me. I was considered a weak link just because of my size.

"Private Ludo is one of your weakest links. You should all know that a platoon is only as strong as its weakest link, and when that link fails you, as they always do, the enemy will kill you. This is your first real day at boot camp, and you're all worried about fitting in, surviving the next few weeks ... getting home to Jody for Christmas.

"What you ought to be worrying about are the weak ones in your squads, platoons, or companies. You know who they are already, and whether or not they fucking want it, they need your help. They need you to make sure that they put all their effort into fixing whatever's wrong with them, whatever's weakening them. For instance, Private Ludo here is in the overfat program. Y'all know what that is? It's a group of fat people who shouldn't have been allowed into the Army because they are so fat that they even failed the tape test. After they failed the tape test, the person weighing them and taping their fat bodies asked them whether or not they wanted to go home for a few weeks to try to lose the weight themselves, and then come back when they look like a regular human being with a neck, and hips, and shit like that. Shit that fat people don't have.

"These soldiers answered 'no' to that question, and when they did, they were informed that they would then be allowed into the military, but they would be placed in a program to help them get their fat bodies into fighting form. They were told that it wouldn't be easy, and that they would be worked harder than the rest of you, because the rest of you had the decency to come to the Army in a form that was indicative of human beings. These fat people did not. So here is Private Ludo, and maybe he believes that chocolate cake is calorie free, or maybe he doesn't know that calories make you fat; either way, if y'all were looking out for him, he would have known that this is not what his fat body needs. What he needs is vegetables and motherfucking physical training. I will make sure he receives the PT; I will run his fat ass all over this post in the next few weeks, but you have to be responsible to your battle buddies and inform them when they are eating things that are hindering their progress, or you will die alongside them when they fail you.

"When I came into the Army, well, that was a long time ago ... but back then, we issued soldiers like Ludo what were known as blanket parties. The Army looks down on that nowadays, but some of our best companies here in the past few years have been real go getters, and they still had blanket parties; they just kept the cadre out of it, and if we don't know that they are doing it, then there is nothing for me to have to write up at night. They just sort of worked it out themselves without any drills having to get involved.

"Anyway, the point is, when I was in basic, we'd get the shit beaten out of us for this kind of thing. Private Ludo here would be looking forward to a bar of soap stuffed inside a military issue brown sock being swung by some concerned member of his platoon while the other members held Private Ludo down. He would be reminded by the beating that the platoon will become a unit—a tightly knit unit that both rewards and disciplines its members accordingly. A unit functions together in all situations, and a unit thinks similarly, reacts equally, and succeeds efficiently. Usually in the past, by the time the swelling went down and the bruising was fading away, that soldier was a new man. Some of my best soldiers have been the target of a beating at least once; they learn fast, and they never make the same mistakes again.

"Well, they don't let you do that anymore. This is a kinder, softer Army. None of you pussies have the grit to withstand another Vietnam ... Nah, they figure that you will fight in the computerized era, a no more hand-to-hand and fixed bayonets kind of warfare. Yet, we drills choose to train you for exactly that kind of warfare. We want to know that no matter what the battlefield is like, we will have trained you to be ass-kicking chemical soldiers who take no bullshit, give no mercy, and never accept failure as the outcome. Sure, the Air Force fags will drop smart bombs onto enemy bunkers allowing you to think that you are all safe and sound, but what are you going to do when ten of Saddam's men are running at you with baseball bats and butterfly knives? They're ready to die, are you? Hell no. You aren't. But if you are well trained, taking a man's life with your bare hands won't keep you up at night, crying and complaining to your girlfriend about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You will not go through this course like a group of girl scouts. You will learn to be responsible for each other, and you will learn that you will be punished for what your fellow soldier does. If he fucks up, you can count on hurting with him. If you let the fat bodies eat chocolate cake, you will do his push-ups for him.

"It's difficult to prove a blanket party has even happened. Unless the person you beat files a complaint, we rarely ever even know it has taken place. Ludo, most people don't file that complaint because they are smart enough to wonder what would happen to them if they did. You understand that, right, Ludo? If your platoon kicked the shit out of you tonight for disrupting their lunch, what would you do?"

I understood this was, in essence, signing my own death warrant, but I said softly, "Nothing."

"Right, Ludo, you wouldn't be a fucking crybaby, would you, son? You'd just take the licks, make the corrections, and wait for someone else to fuck up, right?"

"Yes, drill sergeant!"

"Good, soldier, good," he said with a rather warm smile. "Now, with that out of the way, I want all the overfats to sit down and eat their lunches. The rest of you get in the front lean and rest position. Push-ups on my count."

"Yes, drill sergeant!" the room screamed at a tone that was beyond enthusiastic.

A second later, they began doing push-ups to the cadence that the drill sergeant was counting emphatically. "One, two three, one. One, two, three, two. One, two, three, three ... It went on like this for minutes; a sea of camouflage-clad bodies moved up and down to the rhythm—a rhythm that was getting faster rather than slower. When they'd gotten to "one, two, three, forty," only half of them were still moving up and down at all; the rest were lying on their stomachs and barely pushing their backs off the ground. They were tired, exhausted in fact, and the few who remained pushing in cadence were only the fittest of the fit. When Drill Sergeant Beckett finally allowed them to recover, he immediately announced that there was no time for them to finish their meals and if anyone had any issue with that, they could talk to Private Ludo about it tonight in the barracks.

"Private Ludo, do you think you owe your peers an apology?" he asked, turning back to me. I was seated at the table I had been eating at, but I hadn't put a morsel in my mouth since I'd sat back down. There were thirty-six of us in the overfat program. We were all seated at the tables, and the smart ones were not eating a bite; the rest were ignorantly munching away on their lunches unaware of what this would mean for them later.

"Yes, drill sergeant!"

"Go ahead and apologize," he said, gesturing to the company of strangers standing awkwardly by their tables.

I scanned the crowd. They were angry, and they were angry mostly with me. Hardly anyone looked me in the eye. Instead, they just seemed to stare past me. Their uniforms were expanding and collapsing with their attempts at catching their breaths. This was not the look of a happy and jubilant crowd, but the look of cold and silent killers. Even as I tried to look individually at them to garner some sort of emotional stare, they looked through me. My fate had already been decided.

They were scared that they would be singled out like me eventually, and that they might be the next person standing in front of the company being berated and scrutinized. They were scared that if they didn't beat the shit out of me, they would be next. It was just becoming clear to us how extensively the drills would be looking at us, watching us, knowing all of our sins, and ready to punish us; and not by means of push-ups or running, but by use of the most dangerous killer in all of history—an angry mob.

Were mobs becoming a theme in my life? It seemed to me that besides my fear of alien abduction (which in some circles is considered unlikely) my newfound fear of mob mentality was becoming very realistic. The human craving for blood sport was surfacing again, and I could taste the anger and loss of control they were dealing with. Someone had to be the example for this company of new soldiers; I just wondered why I had to be it. I was the one who listened; asked few, if any, questions; and helped the dumber ones along. Why was I now the one who everyone was imagining nailed to a cross on a hilltop somewhere while ominous clouds and vultures circled overhead? Had I deserved this? Did I even stop and think about the cake before I took it, or was I just that careless? I didn't remember the cake—taking it, or if I even planned on eating it—that was all in the past. I was in possession of it, like a stolen gun. It didn't matter where or how I'd gotten it. The jury wasn't deliberating whether or not I was guilty; instead, they were deciding on a punishment. As soon as Beckett spoke, I was guilty, and now it was just a matter of what punishment to give me.

The answer wouldn't take long to become apparent. I knew that within a few hours of now, I would be on the other side of the punishment and dealing with the physical markings and/or disabilities.

I agreed with most of what he'd said to the group. Of course, I would have rather watched the spectacle from some obscure seat elsewhere in the cafeteria, but here I was, the butt of the joke, the soon to be beaten fat guy who should have stayed at home for another month to lose the fucking weight and therefore bypass this humiliation; but, somehow it felt good to be treated this poorly. I realized there was some strength hidden in this position, and the ironic thing was that the strength lay somewhere in the act of being punished. The beating was going to be a stage, a wonderfully lit stage, with an anxious audience not wanting, but willing, to give me a standing ovation if I performed the role of martyr well enough.

I might have been selected to be the first example, but I planned on seeing this through and using this time that I had stepped into blindly, to both awaken myself and make myself a powerful force, by means of accepting my beating with fucking true-blue dignity. I wasn't going to be a career soldier. What's a career soldier anyway? Someone who recognizes that if he gets out of the Army when his time is up, they will simply replace him with another? I was here to survive, not to die namelessly in some bunker in oil country. If that all started with becoming aware of who I was and what potential I had, I don't give a shit how many people I would have to step on in order to climb that ladder toward greatness. If you want it to be recognized as honorable, defiance requires guts.

The key ingredient to being the kind of soldier they wanted you to be appeared to come from falling in line with the group, but human nature would tell us differently. Throughout mankind's history, individuals who thought outside the box are the only ones remembered. The rest are all just drops of water in a big ass ocean of monkeys ... There is no greatness in routine, no fame in regularity. For an institution as large and as important as the military, it is important for two things to happen if greatness is what you seek: you must be told to be the same as everyone else, and react otherwise. You have to know the difference between following the crowd and following your heart, and you have to decide on each individual day which one is leading you the right way. My heart, my notion of seeking better, is sometimes better served in following the crowd. There is no one way and there is no all-encompassing order to be given or accepted. Things must always be weighed and measured, looked at from objective perspectives, and then decided upon. Following orders was the easy part, in doing so you always have someone to point the finger at. Without that person to blame, following your own instincts becomes only as smart as the instincts themselves.

These laws of personality, of natural selection, are not dictated by something like a boot-camp handbook; they are human. The deviant must have one characteristic if he wishes to be respected rather than beaten back into place: integrity. Integrity is the most important feature in any living being, and also one of the rarest. Living and dying by this code of character is permeable into every society, no matter what the doctrine teaches; people can't help but respect the respectable.

Ever since I'd gone to my first Navy meeting, I'd been hearing the same thing said time and time again. Back then, I thought it unique to the Navy, but now I was beginning to think it was just a blanket policy for the military in general. Upon contemplation, this could be the single most insulting lie ever told. "If you do this ... or that ... you will get kicked out and sent back to your momma."

I heard this in reference to everything. The answer was always, "You wanna get kicked the fuck outta here?" This wasn't something I heard occasionally. This was something that was said in one form or another about a hundred times a day. Even the privates threatened each other with this farce every time they saw someone doing something they deemed incorrect. It was paranoia bottled and sold to the peasants. They carried it around with them in their pockets as a tool to be used as they saw fit, no matter how incorrect it was. It must have made the Army smile to hear one soldier threatening another with this lie, as they no longer needed to intervene in these situations. The police and the criminals were all armed with the same lie, the same philosophy, and it being used on all, by all, seemed to only make the myth stronger and the people weaker.

There was no "getting sent home" for petty crimes, and for more serious crimes there was Ft. Leavenworth. If there was a myth to be feared, Leavenworth was the real deal. Later in my career, I saw people signing sworn documents that they were homosexuals in hopes of being tossed out, honorably or otherwise, to no avail. Meanwhile, at basic training we are afraid that eating chocolate cake or being a few pounds overweight was grounds for exile? By changing the dynamics and by encouraging people to excel in order to remain, it takes the weight off of the cadre and casts it onto the soldier, but the entire thing is built on a lie.

During the Vietnam era when people were drafted into the military, do you think they were told "do this or we'll throw you out"? Everyone wanted out because being in was about the same as a death sentence, so hell no. This whole philosophy came about with the volunteer army, which was an army that came together in order to get college money, not to die in a fucking war. There is no easy way out of the U.S. Army. Once you are in, you are in. Every time they boot someone out, they have to replace that person with another, which makes it counterproductive to actually kick someone out. This kind of third grade psychology seemed to be working well on most of the monkeys, but I knew better. Tim was right in that Navy parking lot that night when he said they needed us.

Once I was sure that this was true, that my philosophy regarding their philosophy was actually grounded, I think I got the upper hand. As time marched on, I began to experiment with the rule a little to see what it would take to actually get kicked out. What I found was that it was impossible. They'll lock you up in a military prison for sure, but they won't set you free. See, to the Army, the Vietnam era taught them something. Soldiers are going to drink, fuck, and smoke no matter what. When Vietnam troops began shooting heroine and smoking pot, do you think they were drug screened and tossed? The Army has always wanted to keep people in, and they will bend over backward and move mountains in order to do so.

With that said, I was prepared for this ordeal with the cafeteria and the beating to come later. I would orchestrate my own life, no matter where or with whom I landed. No two-bit bullshit that was concocted by a military strategist was going to work on me; I was sure of that. I feared pain, I feared neglect, and I damn sure feared being forgettable, but I didn't fear threats as see-through as a white swimsuit.

Now it was time to play nice and act broken. Time to act as if I thought it wasn't too late to stop the ambush that I knew for a fact was coming. "I'm sorry I ate chocolate cake, or rather, was going to," I said with theatrical sincerity.

"I'm sorry, isn't going to make you strong, private. What are you going to do to make sure that you are strong, Ludo? That is, assuming your platoon isn't already planning on helping you remember," he said, again calling the platoon to vigilante justice.

"I'm not going to eat cake anymore, drill sergeant!" I yelled with enthusiasm and pretended to be as dumb as he wanted me to be. I knew this issue was bigger than the cake. This was about the call to arms, but he didn't have to know I understood that, not yet anyway. What he wanted was the first sacrificial lamb, and somehow, just luck I suppose, I'd become the sacrifice.

What I wanted to say was, "So legally, you aren't allowed to dictate what I do or do not eat, otherwise you would produce some military code stating I wasn't allowed to eat cake ... Instead, you rely on the ignorance of the mob. You rely on the fact that I fear the group, when in all actuality, the group is divided between its allegiance to me as a member of their crowd, with you as our common enemy, and their desire to be as comfortable as possible and reassured that they are successful soldiers by following your directive to beat me physically. I don't doubt that they will attack me tonight, but I do doubt whether any one of these soldiers will feel that they accomplished anything by doing so." This was obviously not the time to say these things, but had it been, the entire methodology used on me in the future would have to be revised. I wasn't going to be a monkey. I was going to be a leader, and this I knew to be a fact. The weight problem was, for now, hindering that; but when they came for me tonight, there would be no begging and pleading. I'd simply insult my attackers, prove I was strong enough to be an individual alone, and know that slowly they'd all join me. Of course, first I'd have to endure the beating.

"Yeah? Is that right?" he asked.

"Yes, drill sergeant," I answered a little flatly. I was getting tired of this game, and I wanted to see what he would do if I began to put up a little fight.

"Eat your cake," he said.

I looked at him questioningly. I didn't want to eat my cake. I didn't need the mob any more fired up than they already were. I looked down at my plate but made no move toward it.

"Eat your goddamn cake, private! Now! We want to see you eat it!" he screamed with renewed vigor.

"No, drill sergeant," I said firmly.

It was apparent that I was in defiance now. He wasn't going to like that, but he wasn't the one who was going to be beating the shit out of me later with stuffed socks and broom sticks. This was a matter of either going back to the barracks innocent of eating the cake, or guilty. The outcome might not be that different in either situation, but I decided that he'd have to force feed me, thereby weakening the repercussions.

I was still embarrassed by this whole thing; this show was far worse than any embarrassment I'd endured before. This was being called fat in front of a group, and having to stand there knowing that I was indeed fat, and not of my own will, made it worse. I'd broken my foot and spent two months damn near immobile with a huge cast on. If anything, I should have been commended for pushing myself into basic training as early as I did, which was only a week after taking the hardware out of my foot. I'd never been fat before; this was a first for me.

But now this guy was going to make me look like a fat slob who spent his summers playing video games and eating Funyuns? Fuck this guy. I was Ved Ludo, the gifted. I was smarter than him, more in tune than he was, and if he wanted to battle it out with me here and now, so be it. I could go back to the Navy if I had to.

He put his face in mine, his nose less than half an inch from my forehead, and as he breathed through it, I could smell cigarettes on his breath. "Private Ludo, eat your cake. You took it from the food line, it cannot be sent back, meaning that you are wasting food, and wasting food will not be tolerated." Then, in a whisper so only I could hear him, he said, "If you make the wrong move here, I will fucking bury you on this post."

There was something serious in his eyes. I was honestly terrified. Sometimes people who know very little are far more dangerous than people who know much. I looked him in the eye, searched for weakness, and decided quickly that I'd already pushed this guy further than what was safe. I saw only danger and sincerity in him, so I reached down, palmed the chocolate cake, and stuffed the entire thing into my mouth. Frosting stuck to my cheeks and lips. I chewed slowly with my mouth open, portraying the fat and repulsive slob he wanted me to be. I looked at the crowd with defiance, debating whether or not to add "Yum." I decided against it.

He wanted me to get my ass kicked, and maybe I deserved it. It had not been the smartest move of my life to take the fucking cake in the first place, but hell, I was fat and I was hungry, so from that aspect it made perfect sense. All my life, I'd just sort of done as I pleased, but in the future, I needed to be more careful. This is the moment that finds people; the moment where they decide that their actions will be accounted for. Until a moment like this, one's decisions seem unimportant. Respect never comes cheaply; it's always earned, whether or not that comes from deliberation or simply the nature of the person.

He wasn't legally allowed to tell me that I couldn't eat cake. This was the real problem we were having. He could ask me if it was a smart move to eat the cake, but he couldn't flat out tell me that it wasn't allowed.

He could tell me to eat it now since I had taken it. That had been made clear at reception battalion. "Food is paid for by the taxpayer. We owe it to them to not waste it, so what you take, you will eat. Is that understood?" the staff at reception battalion had asked.

"Yes, sergeant," we screamed. We were so fucking hungry during that talk that the idea of not eating food was out of the question.

Again, in his inaudible-to-anyone-else-but-me-whisper, "That was smart, Ludo. Take your licks and get over it." Then in a more crowd worthy drill sergeant voice, he said, "Sit your fat ass down, Private Ludo. I'm done with you."

I sat, looking at my plate, wondering what would now come my way. We weren't supposed to look at each other while we ate, and I was thankful for that mandate. I didn't want to look around. I didn't want to escape either. I just wanted to think. I wanted to understand who I was, and why I always seemed to choose the difficult way. There was no Nic there to defend me this time. I was alone. The mob would be mine to deal with.

Tears began to well up in my eyes, but I fought them back. I demanded them to go back to where they'd come from. A minute or two later, they obliged. Not a single one fell from my eyes.

When we left the dining facility, we were sent to the barracks to GI Party the entire area. This consisted mostly of waxing the tile floors and bleaching every inch of the latrines. I was fairly certain that this entire activity was decided on by the DS in order to give my platoon time to "help me understand what I'd done wrong." Better now than later.

I was a little apprehensive upon first returning to the barracks. I'd assumed that I was about to get beaten by the entire platoon, but after a few minutes of nothing but scrubbing floors and toilets, I was beginning to relax a little. That is, until I saw a few guys talking quietly and eyeballing me. It didn't shock me so much to find them discussing how to go about this ass kicking. What shocked me was that when I looked at them as they were plotting my demise, they looked away like cowards. I made a note to myself that when I was leading the next attack to be sure and look my enemy in the eye, unwavering. I'd bring hell to the first person I got the chance to correct, and I'd do it in a manner that was cold and calculated, especially if one of these pussies was the first.

About an hour after we'd been back at the barracks, two drills came strolling into the barracks after a long time without stopping by. This was unusual because since the shark attack, we'd been left alone for only moments at a time. Now all of the sudden we had an hour alone? This was it, the trigger.

They strolled into the room, looked around until they spotted me, and then looked back at the rest of the platoon. They said nothing, simply shook their heads, and walked out. Apparently my general state of well-being was not satisfactory to them.

Five minutes after they left the room, I saw a group forming, discussing things, and looking at me; their eyes fixed on me this time no matter where I looked. They were resolute and ... scared? Were they scared that I was going to give them hell? No. They were scared that the drills would come back and I would still be standing; that was far worse than me landing a few blows of my own.

When they did finally come for me, there were only about twelve participants. The rest weren't quite ready to commit to this task, but they looked on with jubilant smiles. Motherfuckers. The only people worse than the lynch mob were the cowards afraid to join in. I'd rather have had the whole platoon coming to get me, and as I saw them walking toward my bunk, I made a note to respect the ones who were actually doing something more than the rest. I also decided that my days of being the victim were over.

When I saw them coming toward my bunk, I tapped my battle buddy on the leg to alert him. It wasn't my intention to elicit help from him, but more to alert him that if he was waiting for a time to abandon me, this was it. He didn't know me all that well yet, and this wasn't his battle. However, when I did tap him on the leg, his response was immediate and without a single second of hesitation. He jumped down and was on his feet between the mob and me in a second. I didn't know or expect that he was planning on staying there, but a few seconds later he was still standing beside me.

I didn't see anyone carrying a sock loaded with a bar of soap, but I knew it had to be there. I wasn't even certain about how I felt about this justice; part of me thought I deserved it, part of me thought I didn't, and the other part thought I should act on a human level and reason with them ... make them understand that I was a victim. I could tell them about the broken foot, and make them realize that I was not just some fat kid trying to get out of a punishment I deserved ... Fuck it, they didn't deserve an explanation.

We were going to be at McClellan for eight months, and each of these guys was going to fuck something up in that time. If this beating took place, as it appeared it was going to, I was going to be sure to measure out the same justice for them when their time came; but I would be sure to motivate the guys sitting this one out to act the next time. When we came for them, we would be sixty strong.

"What do you want?" Alvarez asked the first would-be attacker.

"This doesn't involve you," Glover said, attempting to push Alvarez gently aside.

"Don't fucking touch me dude," Alvarez warned.

"Look, man. This isn't about you. Drill sergeant told us to take care of this; you heard him. We have to be here. I don't like it any more than you do, but it has to happen," Glover stated, sounding like the older and wiser brother forced to discipline his younger sibling.

He was thirty-two years old but looked about ten years older than that due to his premature balding. He was from the Bronx and in the week we had known each other, he'd only mentioned that about eighty-five times. Why is it that people from NYC always announce themselves like that, over and over again, like being from NYC made you tougher than the rest of America?

He wasn't really a bad guy; in fact, I'd liked Glover right from the start. He was a bit fatherly in the way that he spoke to us, which was annoying as hell, but the majority of us had just graduated high school, so in comparison I suppose he was more knowledgeable. I don't think that he really wanted to do what he was about to do. Yet he'd chosen to do it, so there was no other path for him to take now. He was committed, and had he backed away, he would have lost the respect we all had for him, myself included. He was certainly capable of kicking my ass; I had no questions about that. I had no illusions that I could really contend with him physically, as he had a serious height advantage. We probably weighed about the same, but I was an overfat, and he was at least five inches taller than me. His weight was muscle, and mine was blubber.

I had, however, been fighting a little better lately. Since the Chad Brandie thing had happened, I'd been in about five other fights of varying severity, losing more than I won for sure, but realizing also that being punched in a real fight usually doesn't hurt as bad as one might imagine. The form that a fight goes into is really nothing more than the wrestling I'd done in high school. The choreographed movie fights were well scripted and much longer than the real thing. The fights I'd been in were thirty second altercations, which seemed too fast for the spectators, but it feels like fifteen minutes to the fighters. The adrenaline pumps with such force that it leaves you breathless, and the stimulation from being punched fuels that adrenaline making it more and more exhausting.

I didn't measure the success of a fight by winning or losing, as that was usually left up to interpretation. I measured these battles by whether or not I got a few punches in. The first real fight of my life with Chad had been the worst-case scenario; he was a true giant with a reputation for crushing his opponents, so naturally everything since then felt a little more doable. Glover was bigger than me, sure, but I felt confident that I'd get a few shots in, and who knows, maybe one of them will be a showstopper? The benefit of meeting him here in Alabama was that I knew nothing of his reputation, so I didn't have to fear the reputation he'd earned. Later in life, I would realize that fighting strangers is a very bad thing indeed, but at eighteen, I knew I could take a few hits better than most whether or not I was actually capable of landing any punches of my own.

"I think he got the point," Alvarez said.

"I got the point, man. I'm sorry. You hear that guys? I am seriously sorry. I promise you I won't—"

"Sorry's not gonna cut it," Private Ramos chimed in. He was the other "senior citizen" in the platoon. He was from California, mid-thirties also, and had a serious Cuban or Puerto Rican accent. He'd been especially affable up to this point, and seeing him there in the mob was somewhat disappointing. He was one of those people who looked chubby with a short and stocky build, but was either not actually chubby or was allowed a little more body fat because of his age.

"Sorry is gonna cut it," Alvarez said.

Things went on this way for a few minutes. Alvarez and I did our best to calm the mob, but eventually things flared back up and the fight began.

As all this was happening, I felt like I was a stranger standing beside Ved Ludo. I weighed all the things that were happening and realized that if this had happened to someone else, I would indeed be standing with these guys, if not leading them. Why was that? Was it because I needed the strength of the mob behind me or that I had to appear to be something I wasn't? Was it more sinister than that? Was I really someone looking to avenge the victim I had always been?

Regardless, as this event unfolded, I began to change, right then and there. There was something happening to me that was as unfamiliar as it was electrifying. I was beginning to crave something I'd never craved before. I wanted to hurt people. This desire, like lust, just came over me instantly. Suddenly, as I looked these guys in the eyes, I began to think I could take them all. Maybe that was a bit over the top, but before the first person moved in to strike, I'd already decided that if I got the chance I would kill them all. God help me. If I get one of these guys on the run, I will kill him.

The first wave of the group hit me simultaneously, and there were too many moving at the same time to do anything about it. I took hits to the head, kidneys, stomach, and balls before I knew what was happening. I fell backward onto the bottom bunk of my bed and instantly curled up into a fetal position—hardly the fighting stance I'd imagined myself in. The pain was intense and relentless. It seemed unending, and with my head tucked beneath my arms, I couldn't see it happening. I could only feel it, which made it worse. I was being hit again and again by the same five guys; the only ones who could get close enough to me to hit me as the top bunk was acting as a shield preventing total access to me. The rest were on the outside of the group and unable to squeeze into the circle to throw some punches of their own. After a minute or two, the beatings stopped, but only long enough for the first group to recede and the second wave to approach. Just as they were about to begin, I slid forward on my bed and tried to escape off the other side, but good old Private Ramos came around the other side of my bunk and drilled me right above my right eye. The pain was excruciating.

I rolled onto my back, and with one last second of clarity, I kicked him with the heel of my boot in the bridge of his nose. It exploded. Before he could even land on his knees, I stood over him and drilled him with my right fist in the exact same spot I'd connected my foot to one second ago. The second blow covered my knuckles in the blood that had already started pouring from his bent appendage. With this second hit, he collapsed onto the floor. He was on his back initially, but quickly rolled over onto his stomach to provide protection for his face. It was the same pose I'd been in, in the parking lot that day with Chad.

For the first time in my life, I was the aggressor. Someone was afraid of me for once, and the sensation was erotic. Power was euphoric.

After I'd hit him the second time, I felt nothing but rage. None of my ever-present empathy came to rescue me from the darkness and anger that I was feeling; Instead, I wanted more. The startled look that had been on his face just after my boot had crushed his nose was like a cocaine high; I immediately wanted more. I felt powerful and victorious, yet at the same time there was something more primal happening inside of me. I'd been on the receiving end of these confrontations for so long that I'd earned the right to gloat, but I'd never felt so good for being evil before. Was this something happening to me that would later spiral out of control? Was this the feeling all the people who had beaten me senseless over the last twelve months felt? Does hurting people make us all feel the same? It was a power high, but it wasn't simply the fact that I'd hit him and laid him out—it was the blood. There was something magical in making another person bleed. There was something powerful and erotic in the blood itself.

The moment had stopped everyone in his tracks; the mob was bewildered by the brutality of the second hit. I'd felt like Nic, like I'd been imagining him breaking the eye sockets of a fallen man by simply repeating the same blow over and over again. It made sense really. The more you hit an area that was already softened, the more damage you'd do. By swinging wildly and landing ten shots, you had ten places with ten little bumps. Apply those same hits to the same spot multiple times, and you have one spot with ten times the damage. Suddenly, I had a strategy. I had a way to hurt people, and now I wanted to use it on the next one in line.

The pain I'd caused Ramos was being translated in my brain as a sexual pleasure. I was turned on by the brutality of it, and somewhere in the midst of desiring someone else to bleed, I licked the blood off my knuckles and swallowed it before even realizing what I'd done.

The rest of the group, however, noticed this immediately, and the quizzical looks that came from them were bizarre—until I realized what they were reacting to.

Alvarez was the first to ask, "What the fuck are you doing, man?"

Only then did I even realize what I was doing, and at the realization, I didn't immediately stop. I finished the second lick I had started and became aware of the salty metallic taste of it. It was warm on my tongue as I swallowed it down.

Alvarez, too, looked at me oddly, as if even he didn't understand what the hell I was doing by licking blood off my hand that wasn't mine.

Everyone stopped in place. It was as if the last twelve seconds had brought things that no one had considered. Well, I suppose they were all expecting me to be sprawled on the ground and bleeding from my nose. I wasn't. I'd beaten up the first person of my life and I was ecstatic.

I rushed the crowd, looking for the next face, but the moment was gone. I suppose everyone was so worried about Ramos that the natural progression of the fight had lost itself, and as I moved forward into the group, people just stepped away from me. No one said anything for a long time, and when I finally realized that no one was trying to attack me any longer, I stopped. I looked down at Ramos and smiled. "Fuck you."

He didn't reply.

A mob without leadership is just a group of sheep without a shepherd. All they had left was to say things along the lines of, "You're gonna get your ass kicked the fuck outta here for this one, Ludo," and "When Beckett finds out what you did, he's gonna fuck you up." You know, the typical things that a mob, cheated the victory they were expecting, would say to somehow even the playing field.

I didn't care. I was so happy with my performance that they meant nothing. I looked at my hand, the one with blood on it, and it turned out that some of the blood was indeed mine after all. I'd split two knuckles enough that I could see the bone underneath, and only when I saw the wound did I feel it. The pain was intense, but something was different about this pain. I liked it.

A couple guys were trying to comfort Ramos, and the rest went for help. I sat down on my bunk, quietly, and cradled my wounded hand. I knew that Beckett would be walking in the door any second now, and when he did, I had no idea what would happen to me. A second or two later, or so it seemed, Beckett entered the room. The resulting confusion was epic. His glancing around the room echoed confusion and bewilderment, but he said very little to me. He asked me about my hand in a far more caring way than I had expected, had Ramos taken to the medical building, and then had someone get ice for my knuckles. He didn't look like the drill who had humiliated me in the DFAC; instead, he looked ... worried.

"I don't know what the fuck went on in here, but this is unacceptable," he said, looking around the room and stopping to look me in the eyes. I didn't look away; I stared back at him with a forced intensity. "This is not going to be tolerated in the future," he continued, refusing to break eye contact with me.

"No, drill sergeant!" everyone else but me screamed in unison.

"From now on, you will not lay a hand on each other. If there is a problem with one of you, I expect the squad leaders to come and get me. I settle problems. This is not the block you grew up on; this is the United States Army, for God's sake, men. We have a chain of command to deal with these issues. Is that understood?"

"Yes, drill sergeant!" But the look of confusion had replaced the exuberance I'd heard so clearly from them in the DFAC. They were hurt that the drill was now turning on them. They'd expected to come back to the barracks, beat the shit out of me, demand my silence about the whole episode, and then be patted on the back by Beckett for doing their duty at "strengthening the chain." But the whole thing had become a cluster fuck; the wrong guy had been fucked up and Drill Sergeant Beckett was now turning his back on them. This wasn't what they'd wanted at all, but for me, it was glorious.

I knew that Beckett was weak; I knew that he could be beaten, and now if Ramos squealed like a pussy, I would claim self-defense. I would say that Beckett had pushed the mob into beating me; he even made special arrangements to have me in the barracks with the mob before they cooled down from his "motivational" speech, so when they came for me, I was so scared that I reacted. They'd be forced to leave me alone, as there were plenty of witnesses who'd back me up. And as far as the rest of them went, if Beckett tried to go after any of them, they'd say the same thing ... That they'd been forced into it by this brutish drill, and because of his authority, this is what happened.

Nah, I wasn't worried. I had this bastard by the balls. I'd beaten Ramos in an attack that was twelve to one, and even if I'd fucked him up permanently, or even killed him, self-defense would be easily proven. Beckett would lose his stripes if the truth got out; he'd be a private again, just like me—that is, if he didn't get his ass tossed out of the Army altogether. He had to protect me now; he had to make this go away.

He'd be after me; I knew that. I'd have to stay ahead of the guy in the future, which was something I felt pretty confident I could do. He obviously wasn't a genius. He was a monkey; a monkey playing the monkey games and teaching monkeys to be monkeys. If Beckett came for me, I'd be ready for the bastard.

"Private Alvarez and Private Ludo, I need to see you in my office, now!"

When we were in his office, he used closing the door as a reason to walk between us and shoulder us as he went. It was a forceful enough hit that I almost fell completely over after stumbling into a filing cabinet. This guy was provoking me? Was that what this was about? Now he had to get me to swing on him in order to paint me the bad guy? Simple man ... this was his only answer.

It answered for me, however, the question of whether or not he knew I had him by the balls. He obviously did, and this was what came to his mind. Jesus, if this was his answer, I wondered how far he would go with this. Would he accidentally shoot me on the M-16 range or accidentally drop a grenade when we were on the grenade range?

As badly as I wanted to see him suffer, I was afraid that if I played this the wrong way, he really would "bury me on this post." It was dangerous to threaten a man, who'd invested his whole adult life in the Army, with taking the Army away from him. People, I find, are most dangerous when they have little left to lose. As long as you keep a man with options, you can survive him. Eliminate those very options, and he has little reason to maintain.

"That was quite a show you guys put on in there," he said with a smile on his face. "I guess you think you've really taught the guys in your platoon a lesson, huh, Ludo?"

"No, drill sergeant," I said soberly.

"Really? They had a simple task to teach you a lesson ... something that everyone goes through at basic training, but you decide you are a tough guy, and that no one is going to teach you anything, huh? How do you think that will play out over the next eight weeks, Ludo?"

"Drill sergeant, I didn't—"

"Speak freely, Ludo. This conversation isn't happening right now anyway. Do you understand that, Ludo? Alvarez?"

"Yes, drill sergeant," we both said.

"So tell me freely, Ludo, how do you think this is gonna work out for you in the long run?"

"One of two ways, drill sergeant; either they will back off me, or they will come for me."

"And what are you gonna do if they decide to come for you? You gonna try and fight them all?"

"Yes, drill sergeant," I said matter-of-factly.

The bottom line was that I had to. I'd been beaten a few times, so I know what it's like. I'd only clearly won one fight in my life, and that happened about ten minutes ago ... Maybe coming to a rational conclusion wasn't possible at the moment. I was on a high. If they came back for me, they'd get me, sure. But I'd get at least one of those motherfuckers. I could still taste Ramos' blood. I could now look forward to victory, and victory is something you have to experience once in order to aim for it again and again. Until today, fighting meant getting my ass kicked; it was simply a matter of how badly. Controlling the damages wasn't what fighting was about, I now knew; it was about making people who come for you bleed—and drinking their blood afterward, apparently.

"Ludo, I hope you're tough, or that these guys don't hold grudges. See, I could make the whole platoon stay up all night doing PT and tell them it's for fighting; or I could make them do PT all night and tell them it's because they let you beat them. What do you think would happen if I told them that, private?"

"They'd come for me, drill sergeant."

"Yes, they would." He looked Alvarez up and down for a second, turned his head away, and said, as if speaking to the wall he was now staring at, "I'm sure you are a smart guy, Ludo. I bet out there in the world you fancied yourself as remarkable. Here, you're just another number; here, no one is impressed with how smart you are. All they care about is whether or not you can hold your own. Yeah, you got a few shots in on Ramos, but he's fat and old and no one gives two shits about him. You haven't proven yourself a badass; you've proven that you won't take your licks when they come to you. You will cry, and moan, and get your buddies to help you out, escaping what you deserve, until eventually ..." he paused and turned back to me, locking his cold brown eyes onto mine, "until they get a clear shot at you; and when they do, and yes, they will, who do you think will even care?"

The overfats program was simple. Whenever the rest of Charlie Company had free time to write letters, listen to music, or get ready for bed, we were outside either running or doing countless repetitions of some horribly painful exercise. We did push-ups while the rest of the company stood at parade rest; we did sit ups when we finished a meal, which in and of itself was a deterrent to overeating; we did the dying cockroach while the rest of the company was stretching; we did an extra three hours of PT a day, and it didn't take long to see results. It also didn't take long for my foot and leg to regain their original strength; well, after I had to have the wound sewn up again. The new leather boots I was issued were designed to be durable over time, not necessarily to fit comfortably right off the bat. In the first week of basic training, while jumping over some logs positioned sideways, I landed wrong and twisted my foot. The impact was enough to rip open the wound. I knew it was bleeding badly into my sock and boot, but I didn't want to say anything as I feared that if it became a big deal, they would recycle me into the next training company that would begin in thirty days. That was unacceptable.

I tried to keep it to myself, and all day long as we marched and ran, I grinned and did my best to bear it. But when my boot came off that night, just before the overfats were to begin our nightly five-mile trot, Alvarez saw the blood and demanded that I tell someone.

When I did, Drill Sergeant Harris drove me in his personal vehicle to the medic building and hung out with me until they were done sewing it back together. He didn't say too much, but complimented me on my silence throughout what he was sure was a painful day of suffering. But the truth is it really wasn't that painful. For some reason the wound itself didn't hurt upon reopening; it was only with the rubbing of those fucking boots did it become unbearable.

The idea of exercise became less intimidating into the second week. I was adjusting to it, in fact. I recall having never felt so good in my life. I was incurring some serious physical changes as the pounds began to come off, but mostly I just wanted to run. Once you can run a mile, you enjoy running a mile but dread having to run two miles. By the time we were running seven milers on what was called Transmission Hill, I knew it wasn't going to get any more difficult. I had the confidence I needed, the strength to endure the physical demands, and the lightheartedness to deal with the constant barrage of insults that were slung at us all day long. I began to appreciate the insulting and screaming as some twisted form of acknowledgement. The people who were screamed at most often were, oddly, the ones who were best liked by the drills. Three weeks into the program, I could run anything they demanded of me, do two hundred consecutive push-ups, and bang out sit-ups until I was told to stop—be it five, ten, or maybe even fifteen minutes.

The distance I'd come was mind-blowing, and to say that I was self-aware would be minimizing it a tad. I was cocky, well, in comparison to my former self. I didn't know how to handle all the things I was excelling at, and with no one around to marvel at me, or even acknowledge my accomplishments, I began a pattern of acknowledging myself. I'm not insinuating that being proud, conceited, and sometimes pompous is a good thing, by any means; but at the time, it certainly helped. The law of the jungle is that when someone boasts of self-worth, they are usually a liar; they are usually lying to compensate for weaknesses. I, on the other hand, was boasting truths, and watching Ramos' nose and eyes heal after I whacked him a couple times was a long, and visual, enough process that those closest to me believed me to be, if nothing else, slightly dangerous.

That was good enough for me then, but into my eighth week at McClellan I would solidify myself as two things: committed and slightly off balance.

In a melting pot like the military, there are more personalities and differences than there are likenesses. I mean, at first the differences are all you can see, but over time the differences seem to fade a little bit, and the similarities become highlighted. This is a very natural process that happens simply by surrounding yourself with strangers, and without much effort at all, you begin to identify with people, some more than others.

If you take a hundred people and put them in a room to befriend each other, among that one hundred people, I will find someone who I completely identify with and relate to better than the rest. I will find someone so profoundly similar to me that it goes beyond simple friendship, and it's almost like a brotherhood. I'm not going to tell you that Alvarez and I were immediately like brothers, which would just be flat out untrue. In fact, he had simply refused to be my battle buddy when Beckett had lined us all up that day and simply counted off, "one, two, one two, one, two ..." as he walked the line. Alvarez just happened to be standing by me when this happened, making us permanently together in every aspect of our lives over the next six months.

"You are responsible for your battle buddy more than you are for yourself. He will be responsible for you, so only worry about him." These were the instructions we received after we were told what the "one, two, one, two" meant. Alvarez, as new and awkward as anyone else in the barracks that afternoon, had raised his hand. This stopped Beckett mid-sentence, and Alvarez asked, "Drill sergeant, may I please have a different battle buddy?"

"No, private, you may not, but you may get down in the front lean and rest position and start knockin' them out until I am convinced that you understand that you are never to interrupt me again."

Alvarez started his push-ups, but his message reverberated around the barracks ... He didn't want to be with Ludo, anyone but Ludo. What was wrong with Ludo, they all began to wonder as Alvarez paid for his insolence. It was something he was surely aware would happen for asking such a question, so why then did he ask it? Was Ludo that bad?

Over the next few days, we began to bond pretty well. Alvarez was a Filipino kid from California who was fit, sharp witted, and fearless. That was what I needed out of a battle buddy at the time, but I later wondered if we hadn't been battle buddies, would we have scrapped it out? I'm not sure that as competing forces we would have come to the same friendly terms, but as battle buddies, we were inseparable, fearless, conniving and quick witted.

Directly across from our bunk were the odd couple of battle buddies. Estelle, a black kid from Texarkana; and Garten, the kid I'd roomed with at MEPS the night before I left Pennsylvania. They never really got to be close friends, no matter how much time they spent together. This is an odd occurrence between battle buddies and they were the only pair I can recall that remained that way. Usually, no matter how weird the pairing, over a month or two the couple will bond. It's hard not to start to like someone when you shower with them, eat with them, run with them, and sleep in the same bunk bed ... if nothing more than developing a simple understanding. Sometimes even a simple understanding can be the glue that a relationship needs.

Estelle was a cool brother, and one Alvarez and I hung out with a lot. He was always chilling on our side of the room, listening to our CDs, and talking to us about his wife and kid back home. He was one hell of a guy trying desperately to just make it through his time here at McClellan so he could get back to the reserves; the only problem was that his battle buddy was the worst performing soldier in our entire company.

Garten was a fuck up, plain and simple. Beyond all the things he couldn't seem to do—things like marching, making a bed, shining his boots—he also had problems with hygiene. He refused to shower, and until Alvarez and I organized a shower party for him (that was a festive celebration where we stripped the motherfucker down, tossed him in the shower, and proceeded to scrub him down with Simple Green and Brillo pads), he'd never voluntarily entered the shower. After the shower party, he went routinely—at first just to keep the scabs (from the scrubbing we'd given him) all over his body clean, and later to prevent us from doing it to him again.

Most attacks on soldiers by fellow soldiers happen at night. During the day, no one is going to try and attack you; at night, however, either you or your battle buddy had to sleep with one eye open, especially if you have reason to believe that someone is coming for you. Garten had begun to make threats toward Alvarez and me, but of course we heard about all these second hand from people he'd been talking to. Everyone knew two things about Garten for sure: first and most importantly, he was a compulsive liar; and second, he didn't have two people who respected him enough for us to fear any organized attack. Alvarez was feared for his hotheadedness; I was respected for my decision making and calm. Between the two of us, even the baddest pairs of battle buddies chose to make us allies rather that enemies, and there were plenty who were tougher than Alvarez and me.

One evening we came back to the barracks after spending an entire day at the gas range. Being that we were all there to be trained in the same job (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Specialists), we spent a lot of time in the gas chamber working with our masks and learning our limitations under chemical attack.

The range was fun enough, but the marching to and from was a real pain in the ass. Even though we marched virtually everywhere we went, adjusting to a six-mile march each way never really happened. By that, I mean, it wasn't that we were sore afterward or even that it was so taxing, it just sucked. An hour and a half walk is a long fucking walk, no matter who you are; and to do it twice a day for months, really sucked.

By the time we got back to the barracks, we were sweaty, tired, and free to do what we wanted until dinner. That allowed us about an hour to shower, relax, or bullshit with each other.

The barracks smelled like summertime as the windows were all left open, all day, allowing the breezes and sunshine to enter. It was relatively cool in there when the windows were all open as the air seemed to blow in one side and out the other. Few things were better than to come back to the barracks, take off your boots, and lie back on the bed imagining anything but fucking boot camp.

One day we returned to the barracks and discovered thousands of ladybugs scattered everywhere. They were literally everywhere—the floors, the stairs, the ceiling—they were alive and thriving; it was really quite a sight.

The drills told us that every year, late into the summer, state-funded ladybug farmers release them into the wild. The effects of having a ladybug army defending farmers' crops against insects of a malicious nature were supposed to be priceless.

I'd never seen so many ladybugs in one place in my life, but I'd always thought fondly of them. Everyone knows that ladybugs are thought to be almost saintly as far as insects go and absolutely harmless to humans in every possible way; however, as a testament to the cruel nature of a mob, even the known innocent are victimized by the motherless freaks of this world.

I should say that my mother was an important part of this tale. Her love of ladybugs when I was young and impressionable left an indelible mark on me, and it made me feel somehow connected to both my mother and my past that day I found them all over the barracks. It really struck a chord, like a hug from God reminding me that love exists even in horrific conditions.

Immediately, people began to comment on the ladybugs. Dumb remarks that aren't worth repeating, but as always, after the banter, immature and abusive behavior was to follow. Garten, who was walking the steps in front of me, began to stomp on them as they huddled in groups trying to stay warm on the cold steel. His sole intent was to kill as many as possible for no other reason than to try and get some laughs from the rest of the troop. Perhaps it was simply a case of the smallest, most picked on guy in our platoon acting out against whatever enemy he could find that he outweighed. Or maybe it was a demonstration of what was going on in his head. Maybe as he was stepping on those helpless bugs, he was imagining it was us with our guts and blood exploding out of our eyes and mouth; whatever it was, it was awful to watch.

Garten really didn't have any friends, but over and over I saw people trying to make nice gestures of at least acceptance in his direction, which he shunned with ignorance and contempt. After his shower party, he'd morphed into something odd and almost dark. I believe now that stripping a man, looking at and making fun of his genitals, and laughing as a group at him, is dangerous behavior. God help me, if I were to have to endure that, I'd drink the blood of my attackers, one by one.

Garten never tried to make friends with anyone after the shower; instead, he became somewhat aggressive toward us, but he lacked the strength, size, and conviction to actually swing on us. He just shit talked us a lot, acted bizarrely, and shunned any attempt at amends we might have made post shower. Sometimes, late at night, I would awaken to sounds of sobbing. At first I couldn't place the slight whimpering, but eventually realized it was Brian. He cried almost every single night that he spent in the barracks with us, as far as I could tell, but I never spoke of it.

It was as if the daytime was a performance where his role was simply to survive and annoy us to the point of recklessness, and then he would transform into the guy who cries himself to sleep because he is so isolated and desperate. He slept hugging his pillow like a dog and cried into it, and he tried to muffle the agony that was forced to escape him. It was tragically sad and sobering just to lay awake and hear it: the desperation and misery ...

I even extended myself a little to him, but always realized as soon as I had his attention that I hated the little fucker for his lies and conniving. It was impossible for me to endure him, even as a gesture of kindness. He repulsed me. He was vulgar and cold when I tried to embrace him. He was spitting words at me like "fucking fat ass, Ludo ..." things he knew would send me away. It wasn't a show; he was legitimately suffering from something inside of him, something awful, yet as much as I wanted to help him, being near him made me homicidal.

As Garten stomped up the stairwell as obnoxiously as possible, stepping on each step over and over in order to kill every ladybug he could, I was right behind him. I went fucking crazy. I grabbed the little bastard by the back of his BDU (Battle Dress Uniform) shirt and pulled him backward down the short flight of steps and over the three-step gap that separated us. It was a motion that was powerful; there is something very simple to a motion like that, pulling something toward you ... Add a little adrenaline, and factor in his weighing sixty pounds less than me, and what you have is a skipping stone with a head attached.

I stepped to my left as I pulled him violently backward. He flew past me on my right, beyond my grip, and fell backward, arms flailing, until he hit the landing five steps below me. I spun on him, jumped the distance that separated us, and saw that he just now, as I landed beside him, realized who'd grabbed him. His eyes were curious, and he searched my face for an answer, but I revealed nothing.

Realizing now that I had created quite a scene and that no one even knew why I had done this, I had to decide to let it go or to continue. If I let it go, if I walked away right now, there would be questions, but it wouldn't become an issue. I wanted to. I wanted to just apologize and let it drop, but with each step he had taken, a hundred ladybugs had died. It was as if he was stepping on Blythe, on hot summers in surreal places, on my mother's soft words ... No, I decided retreat wasn't the answer. I was going to commit to this cause; I was going to see this one through.

"What the fuck, Ludo?" he whined, somewhere between trying to pretend the pain was smaller than it was, and announcing to the bystanders that I'd hurt him for what seemed to him to be no reason at all.

"You little shit ... Why can't you act like a normal human being? Why is that such a fuckin' challenge for you? You Godless little cuss ..." I was being abstract; if I could do this without saying the word "ladybug" at all, I would.

"What the fuck are you talking about? What did I do to you?" he asked, rolling onto his side, wincing, and beginning to right himself.

I placed my boot on his ribs and pushed him over onto his back. Alvarez was suddenly standing beside me, and he was as confused as the others. Alvarez looked at me as if to ask, "How far are you going to take this, and why?" but didn't. I turned back to Garten.

"Brian, I'm only going to tell you this once. Leave the ladybugs alone."

There were some chuckles from somewhere in the room. People were now pushing past us and heading up the stairs after realizing that the action was probably over, and my reason for attacking him was as simple as little red winged bugs. Only a few hung around for the dénouement, including Marcus King. He was a big, black brother from Atlanta who had slowly and carefully befriended me in the overfats. He'd become the ringleader and official voice of the black population in the barracks, and he was someone I was thrilled to have as a buddy and an ally.

King and I had a similar sense of humor, but we were as different as night and day. When we'd first arrived on the program, we'd stayed pretty much away from each other. It wasn't until our first five-mile run that we'd both fallen out of the run (meaning that we couldn't keep up with the group), so we stopped running and walked. The group had continued on down the road, leaving King and me to walk the two miles back to the barracks. We'd laughed the whole way after discovering that we were polar opposites, but with a very similar sarcasm. From that point on, we'd become buddies, but we really only displayed it in the overfats for a long time. Only when I'd been released from the program, after reaching my goal weight, did we find the way to incorporate our friendship in the real world. He'd remained for thirteen days longer and had dropped in excess of forty pounds also.

The black and white issue was a hot one for the first month or so, but before long, King would lie in my bed while I showered, read my magazines, and talk to Alvarez. I'd then be sure to undress completely at around 8 p.m. every so often, walk down to King's bunk, and pretend to try and get under the covers with him. He'd then issue a whole bunch of white slurs, mostly in a southern black dialect that I couldn't understand, make me laugh hysterically, kicking me, naked, onto the tile floor. One night this had happened, and I'd landed directly on my ass while falling sideways, which in turn produced the feeling that my right butt cheek had been pulled so hard opposite my left that my ass had split wide open. When I was seriously asking people to tell me if I was bleeding while bending over and delicately spreading them, no one would look at me, and general hysterics ensued.

I was straddling a fence, so to speak, with this thirst to hurt people coming back. This time it seemed doable without much, if any, pain unto myself; yet similarly, my conscience was begging me to be merciful. All I could hear was my mother's words the night we'd rented To Kill a Mockingbird on VHS. She'd told me, "Never kill anything innocent, especially things that are capable of love," which may sound abstract coming from my mother, but these were the sorts of things that she meant. Ladybugs were just an insect, and they had little to do with me back then, but little did I know that what I was embarking on now, this pathological rage I was trying to temper, would become as much a part of who I am as my blue eyes or my marginally bent penis.

This newfound anger and violence was a part of me that was so weird to me that I couldn't recognize the immediate anger as mine. It was my father's anger, or Nic's on the day he almost killed Chad in order to prove a point. It was like a tumor that grows on some desolate part of your body that you never fondle; a place you can't reach in the shower, and one day you just happen to discover it. When you do, you first wonder about its intentions. Then you try and decide how long it has been there unnoticed, festering, growing, and becoming more and more a part of you. When you finally decide on a reasonable time frame, you try and embrace it despite its embarrassing appearance. This is what I was doing with my anger in these days. I had no doubt that this was, in part, due to the absolute cutoff of my marijuana intake. It had undoubtedly been chilling me out all these years, but no, there was more to this that just that; this was something that even unrecognized, I welcomed into my life. I'd been a punching bag for a long time. I'd taken insults with a self-degrading smile in order to not be hit. I'd even learned to pick on myself in order to diffuse other people's anger with me ... and all for what? Just so I could be ridiculed and hit? Fuck that. This was the Army, and I was a soldier. Lighter, taller, and way stronger than I'd ever believed possible. I welcomed my dark friend with open arms, and I longed for the day when I could test its limits. Between my gift of understanding and a new merciless penchant for hurting people who deserved it (or not), I wasn't gonna deal with this sort of juvenile idiocy from dirt bags like Garten.

"I'm going to explain this to you as simply as possible so you can understand me. Don't fuck with the ladybugs. Is that clear?"

Now, some people are easily intimidated. To some people, being tossed down a short flight of stairs, being straddled and threatened by a larger, more imposing force would be enough to elicit compliance; but, of course, with Garten that wasn't going to be enough. He was unmoved by my demands; instead, he laughed in my face, reached over with his right hand, made a fist, and dropped it on a group of ladybugs that were clinging together to stay warm on the landing beside him.

Again, I was forced to decide. Why can't this kid just be easy? Why does he have to test me? And is that really the smartest thing for him to do—to test someone who is as confused by himself as he is by the person he is attacking? Crazy people fear differently than the sane. Their fears lie in other locations not so easily discovered, and Garten's fears were well beyond my gift; I could not find them. He wasn't afraid of the mob, or being on the outside of it. He didn't fear pain. He didn't fear solitude or lack of respect ... Fuck, whatever he was afraid of was well beyond most people's fears. I didn't have time to figure it out now; I had to choose. Alvarez had already grabbed my left arm as if to gently pull me away, yet he was holding it lightly enough that if it was my intention to swing it on Garten, I wouldn't be deterred. Alvarez was good like that. In fact, I think he wanted me to hit Garten; he wanted to know that I had it in me, and that I would use it like he would. We three all knew that if this was Alvarez hovering over Garten, there would be blood splattered all over the floor and walls at this point.

The pressure was immense, and the indecision was crippling. I stood looming over the sprawled out soldier unable to decide. Alvarez finally spoke. "OK, Ved, let it go. Fuck him."

I didn't look up; I still peered into Garten's eyes, and Garten knew before I did that I wasn't going to do it.

"Pussy," he said, and started to right himself.

I stepped back and looked at Alvarez for a long second. I tried to see the disappointment in his face, but all I saw was indifference. He was not concerned one way or the other; he didn't care at all. Even Garten's prodding me didn't influence my decision. Twenty seconds later, when Garten was up in the barracks doing whatever it is that little asshole did in his free time, I still didn't know what to do. Punch him?

Alvarez and I showered, shaved (though I still had no real reason to do so), mingled with the platoon, and eventually made our way back to our beds. Alvarez jumped up into his bunk, and I took a seat on mine. When I did, I noticed two things: people were looking at me funny from over on Garten's side of the barracks, and something felt strange beneath my butt. It was squishy, almost, like sitting on a sand pile. I knew the second I felt it.

This time the anger was formidable; I had no control. I ran at Garten with full speed, but was immediately blocked by King, Davis, Jacob, Matheson, and lastly Alvarez, who'd jumped down to help control me. I was in a violent rage, swinging and swearing, but the gang that had a hold on me was impenetrable.

"I'm gonna fucking kill you. I'm going to fuck your dead body, you little cunt!" I screamed things of this nature.

When I turned around to explain what was going on, I saw Estelle pulling back my green wool blanket, which had been so neatly made before the shower and was now loosely laid on top of my bed. As he pulled it back, everyone gasped.

On top of my mattress cover were, what had to be, thousands of dead, mangled, and bloodied ladybugs. They were bleeding into my white sheets. It was the only set I had been issued.

People's eyes went to me and then to Garten, who still smiled coyly.

"You're a fucking dead man," Alvarez said with a shake of his head, as if he'd made every effort to control my temper, but now was making this fight between him and Garten.

"I'm terrified," Garten said before putting on his headphones. A second later he took the headphones off, an afterthought dawning on him. "You can't even prove it was me who did it." With that, he put his headphones back on, ending our conversation.

People were walking over to my bed to look at the carnage. The dead bugs were not limited to my bed. They filled every pair of shoes the military allowed me—running shoes, boots (two pairs), and even my civilian water shoes that I had in addition to the flip-flops that were on my feet. They were in my drawers with my underwear and socks, on top of the uppermost shelf in my metallic wall locker, and scattered about as if the last of them had been hastily tossed into the wall locker. Thousands of them lay dead or dying, bleeding, and flapping their broken wings as that little fucker listened to his latest Brian McKnight CD.

I cleaned the bugs off my bed the best I could; I swept them off the floor, out of my drawers, and off the shelves. I dumped out my boots into a five-gallon pail, then went outside and scattered the collected dead into a part of the lawn we rarely used. As I did, an unexpected tear fell from my eye; the tear was a bond, a promise to my mother, to my past, to the ladybugs, to Nic, to Alvarez, and finally to the rest of the people who knew me. No matter how they felt about me at that particular second, what I was going to do would solidify me in a number of ways. I was going to get my vengeance, regardless of consequence.

Every other night, each soldier and his battle buddy were awakened for a one hour shift of fireguard, which, as it implies, means that you are awake to make sure that the barracks don't burn down, killing your fellow soldiers. Another reason for fireguard was to make soldiers aware of how important it is to stay awake when they are on a guard duty of any kind. Falling asleep while on fireguard was an offence that was punishable with an Article 15: forty-five days of extra duty, forty-five days of restriction, and forty-five days of no pay. This was the military's version of a serious reprimand, and depending on the severity of the crime, it could also see you tossed out of the Army altogether.

We knew enough to know that staying awake was important, and whenever someone did fall asleep, it usually only took about twenty seconds for the drills to find out who was responsible. Basically, they ask the first guard if he woke up the second and so on and so forth. When they get to whoever wasn't awakened, they knew it was the shift before them that fell asleep.

Alvarez and I had the 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. shift. We both woke up with quickness—the kind of quickness that only comes from nerves and the knowledge that what you were going to do was going to cost you more than you knew you could afford. That was where I was in this; I was ready to go back to my mom and tell her that I am unfit for military service, and I was demoted, court marshaled, and kicked completely out. That was a small price to pay for what that little shit had done. I'd slid, just hours before, into sheets matted with bug parts; the blood was still wet, but all the while I'd not concerned myself with the gore; instead, I'd imagined the ladybug blood seeping through my skin and into my own bloodstream making me like The Fly, but with a more malicious intent. I was a ladybug in human form now; I had been sent by my elders to right the wrongs, and this was something that blood was going to be the only currency for. He was going to bleed, and anyone who tried to stop me was also going to bleed.

Alvarez was also excited, but his idea of justice was a little crazier than mine. When he asked me my thoughts about his idea, I realized that he was as fucked up in the head as I was. Alvarez was seriously someone to fear. "Let's throw him out the window while he's asleep," Alvarez said matter-of-factly with a dead serious look on his Filipino face.

"Throw him out the fucking window?" I asked, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

"Yeah, that will teach the little bastard."

"Uh, no, that will kill the little bastard," I argued.

We went on like this for a time as people began falling asleep in the bunks around us. Alvarez's head dangled down from his bunk, and he looked at me while talking in as quiet a voice as possible. I limited our actions to things that would cause him blood and pain without too much chance of death. But I must admit that the slightest chance that this action might turn fatal didn't concern me as much as it should have.

The problem we were having was that Estelle, Garten's battle buddy, was a cool kid. He wasn't intended to be a victim, but we had to do this at night while they were sleeping. Besides, Estelle was his battle buddy, so he was responsible for Garten. We considered waking up Estelle and giving him a heads up, but with Alvarez thinking along the lines of tossing Garten out the window, we decided that even an irresponsible and somewhat unconcerned battle buddy would intervene. It pained me to do this. My mother (whom I was somehow defending in this act of violence) had said not to hurt or kill the innocent. The problem was that the innocent slept above the guilty, and this act was going down in the wee hours of the night.

We waited until the guys on the shift before us were fast asleep before we set out for vengeance. When we were sure they were all asleep, Alvarez snuck out the door to the drill's office in order to see what he was doing at this time of night. Drill Sergeant Walker, from third platoon, was the drill on duty. He was another severe looking black man who was obviously older than the rest, but he wore less rank than the others. He was not even pretending to be struggling to stay awake; he was described to me by Alvarez as, "Ass up, out cold." With that final piece in play, we began our assault.

The barracks were really nothing more than giant concrete block buildings. The walls, ceiling, floor, and stairs were all about eighty percent concrete and twenty percent steel. The concrete floors were covered with white tiles that were not grouted in between, making them appear as linoleum. We spent three hours a day buffing and waxing them—applying five gallons of wax at a time, and then buffing that wax into a hardened shine that was so perfectly polished that one could see his reflection when looking down onto them.

The bunk beds that we slept on were nothing more than four steel tubes with beds welded to them, and they had round metal feet capped with a very hard and flat surface. When Alvarez and I had been horsing around on our bunks, we'd noticed that they slid across the floor with frictionless smoothness. One night, Alvarez had tried to push our bunk with me asleep in it into the shower, but the tile difference between the bay and the bathroom woke me. I had not, however, realized I was even moving until the bed hit the tiny one-inch tiles that the bathroom was covered in. This had given us the idea that the beds could be slid while people slept in them without as much as a single bump to awaken the sleeping parties.

We put our balaclavas on, concealing our faces, and grabbed the bunk bed that contained Estelle and Garten. We slid it ever so softly across the floor until we were an inch from the bathroom tiles. Looking out in front of us now, we effectively had a runway, which was about one hundred feet long and ten feet wide with a cinder block wall on the end and thirty something bunks lining the path on either side. I looked at Alvarez, as if to ask, "Are we sure about this?" but before I could get an answer, he took off with the bunk.

We started out pushing it softly while trying to gain speed. About ten paces down the runway, we started running. The bed slid across the floor like it was on ice; it made no sound, produced no bumps, and floated along with the smallest amount of force from us. As we neared our own bunks (where Garten's was noticeably missing from across the runway), we were at a dead sprint. A second later, we released the bed, sending it into a slight spin. We'd calculated that if it hit the wall at a forty-five degree angle, the most pain would result. As the bed careened down the runway, the last thing I saw was Estelle sit up and realize that he was moving between fifteen and twenty miles per hour on a metal bed and was just a second or so from an unforgiving concrete wall.

The bed hit with such force that it shook the barracks. The bang from the collision was almost deafening, and two seconds after the impact, everyone was awake. Alvarez and I were, of course, in our bed; however, jumping into it, as we tried to flee the scene, had made it slide way out of place. It was something that no one noticed immediately, but discovered later when the lights came on. And why did the lights come on? Estelle had a laceration that stretched from above his left eye, across his eyebrow, and one side of his nose. He was screaming at the top of his lungs while his battle buddy lay silent, on his side, on the floor, just a foot or two from his bunk. Garten had a concussion and was not presently conscious.

When Drill Sergeant Walker entered our barracks, we were not immediately given up. Even Estelle, who was now promising to kill us by name, didn't give us up. He was taken away immediately by some of the do-gooders in our barracks while Garten was handled a little more carefully. He was still unconscious three minutes later when the medics got there, and it wasn't until he was lifted onto the backboard that he came to. He had no idea what had happened.

DS Walker demanded answers, and no one gave us up, but I knew that they were going to; it was just a matter of time. I told Alvarez to let me take the hit, that this was my battle. He argued that idea with me, but I saw in him that the idea of me going down for it alone was not so terrible after all. I wasn't going to give Alvarez up, no fucking way, but I had a feeling that someone would. Besides, how were we going to explain that we were on fireguard but he was asleep?

Walker had called the company commander who was on his way in, and not happy about it. By the time Captain James got there, we'd learned that Estelle would need at least thirty stitches to close his wound. This had gone from better than tossing Garten out the window, to questionably better, but I now assumed the consequences would be the same. Maybe I'd face charges for assault, attempted murder ... I was scared now.

Walker was walking up the aisles and looking into the faces of the soldiers as he asked them repeatedly who did it. He was pretty calm, trying to coax it out of us with things like, "OK, I'm not unreasonable. We all know the kind of soldier Garten is; I'm sure there was a reason for it," which definitely began to loosen the tongues of the weaker ones.

Thank God, before Captain James got there, Beckett did. He immediately told Walker to leave, that this was his platoon, and he'd handle it. This was initially daunting, but as soon as Beckett closed the door, he turned around and looked at us with a smile. "Who did it? I'm only gonna ask you once. Who did it?"

Now I need to dictate some of my personal philosophy here. I have long understood that martyrdom requires sacrifice, and that to skip out on the sacrifice makes any justifiable action shameful. This was never as clear to me as it was in that particular second. If I wanted the respect of my peers, now was the time to ante up. What I'd done, I'd done as an answer to a problem, and if I could explain where I was coming from, perhaps I could stay in the Army. I mean, who wouldn't listen to my reasoning behind such a drastic measure. Everyone wanted to know one thing: why? If I admitted it now, before lying and weaseling my way out of it, I would be making a statement that was clear and precise. There is nothing worse to me than people who don't know when to admit what they've done. There is a time for deception and a time for the truth. If Walker's inquisition was a time for lies, then Beckett's was a time for truth. There is honor in all things if done for honorable reasons. Lying insults justification, and there was no longer room for either. Justification seemed as far from me now as Blythe, yet I wanted to make people understand that I wasn't a maniac; I was defending a principal. If I let lies cloud the reasons I carried, I was just as bad as that asshole I'd attacked.

I tried to speak, but found that I had no voice. I cleared my throat as Beckett walked the aisle toward me. He was still a ways off when my voice returned. "I did it, drill sergeant."

He looked at me as if to dismiss me, but a second later he said, "OK, Ludo, go to my office and wait for me there. Don't talk to anyone. Don't answer any questions. I need to talk to your platoon to make sure everyone remembers the same thing. You're in some serious shit, private; don't say a fucking word to anyone but me."

"Roger that, drill sergeant," I said, realizing my voice was cracking.

"Ludo, before you go, why did you do it?" he asked for the rest of the platoon.

"Ladybugs, drill sergeant."

People laughed. He looked at me to see if I was being a smart ass. When he saw that I was serious, he too smiled. "Ladybugs?"

"Yes, drill sergeant. He was killing the ladybugs."

"I'll be damned. Just when I thought I'd heard everything."

The platoon must have filled him in on the whole ladybug thing, starting off with us on the stairs and ending with the bed bugs tale because by the time he got to his office, he knew almost every detail. When he entered, I almost thought Alvarez would be with him, but he wasn't.

"Ludo, before I say anything else to you, I want to let you know that the captain is here, and he is pissed. He wants you out, like tonight ... the duffle bag drag. I don't want that to happen to you, especially over a piece of shit like Garten, but if you tell him the truth, you're as good as gone. You got that?"

"Yes, drill sergeant, but I don't know what to say other than the truth."

"And the truth is ... that your mommy told you not to kill ladybugs? You think that's gonna help? Look, Ludo, you're gonna lose rank, and you're gonna get an Article 15, of that I am positive. You won't be on a weekend pass for a long fucking time, but you can still be in the Army; that is ... if you listen to what I am going to tell you. You hear me, private?"

"Yes, drill sergeant."

"Good. Now, you are going to say nothing. You understand that? This was an altercation brought on equally by yourself and Garten. You will both be Article 15'd, but you'll stay in the Army. If you start talking about ladybugs, Captain James is gonna send you home to your momma on a medical. He'll make you sound fucking crazy; the guy is a Vietnam vet and ladybugs aren't gonna tug at his heart strings. The first thing he's gonna want to know is if all the people involved are caught, so if someone helped you, you either need to give that person up or forget about that person's involvement altogether and take this one alone. Do you understand? If you mention a Filipino helper in this, he's going with you ... to extra duty ... or home to mommy. You got me, private?"

"Yes, drill sergeant."

"You shut your fucking mouth. Don't answer anything he asks you except whether or not you were the one. He knows that Garten deserves to be kicked the fuck outta here. We all know it. That's the one thing you have going for you right now. Now shut the fu—" He stood abruptly as the door opened, "Group Atten—hut!"

As I stood at the position of attention, Captain James walked past me, turned, and looked me in the eyes. He stood three inches from my face, peering at me. I'd never seen the man from this close before, but he reminded me immediately of Sam Elliot, even more so from only inches away. The only major difference was the mustache, which on Captain James was less distinguished than Sam's but still well beyond military regulations. He was breathing through his nose, and this peculiar whistling noise escaped every time he exhaled, which he did about five times before he actually spoke. "He yours, drill sergeant?"

"Yes, sir. Ludo. Second platoon."

The Captain was staring at me but talking to Beckett, which I really wanted to tell him was rude, but I decided I'd better just forgive him. He was looking at me with disgust—real deep seated disgust that looked as deep and wide as any ocean I'd ever seen or even imagined. I wondered how many men he'd killed in Vietnam, and I thought it strange that if you kill a man in the street in America, you spend twenty years in a maximum security prison as you are now considered a dangerous person, yet if you kill ten or twenty enemies with your bare hands, or with a metal blade of sorts, you are given command of a training unit. How fucked up is that?

"Drill sergeant, did the private here reveal the reasons why he thought it OK to assault two of my soldiers?"

"Yes, sir, there was a skirmish earlier in the day which seemed to carry over into the evening, and then into the nighttime."

"Is that right?" he asked, still looking at me with that look of hatred. I didn't know if I should answer or not, so I decided that Beckett's warning to remain silent should prevail here. If I had to choose whom I wanted on my team, the drill was a far better bet. He was going to be there with me day in and day out for the next few months, while the good captain here was rarely ever seen like this (other than the Monday morning motivational speeches he made to the whole company).

"Mmhmm," Beckett said, and nodded in the affirmative.

"Who the hell do you think you are, Ludo?" the captain asked me in almost a whisper.

I didn't answer, assuming the question rhetorical.

"What would make a man act so irresponsibly to another? What would make one soldier think he is so much better than another that attacking him while he slept seemed like a good idea? I guess you'd have to be a pompous man; a man who thinks he is his only concern ... Then I wonder where the battle buddy was while his partner was attacking a sleeping soldier. Was he awake? Was he in on it with you? You might think, Private Ludo, that you are smarter than most people; but, boy, you are just a little pissant. You mean nothing to me, to the Army ... to anyone ... at least until you prove yourself worthy."

I considered what he was saying, and I didn't like the fact that what he was saying was making perfect sense, and he was right. I didn't like that I had done this while he was asleep, that was cowardly in ways, but I had never meant it to be. It would be hard to push him into the same wall while he was awake, and that would have resulted in a fistfight.

"Was this a joke, private? Were you just fucking around and not meaning for anyone to get hurt? Tell me soldier, is that what this was?" He had stepped back a step or two, and he wasn't sneering at me anymore; instead, his eyebrows were raised questioningly. He was trying to give me an out; this was his attempt at saving my military career. I was about to tell him that he was incorrect. I was going to tell him that I'd done it for the ladybugs, and that I'd done it for Nic, or for Blythe ... but on second thought, I decided to shut up and stand there. "Private? I'm asking you a question," he said, stepping closer to me again.

I looked at Beckett and only saw the same fence riding as I was undergoing. He didn't know what I was supposed to say either, but a second later, a long second at that, he nodded, telling me to agree. "Yes, sir." My fucking voice cracked again. I cleared my throat and said again with confidence, defiance, or at least certainty, "Yes, that's correct, sir."

"Do you know what an Article 15 is, private?"

"Yes, sir."

"How would you feel about having one of your very own in your record?"

"I'd be much obliged, sir," I said with the slightest of grins.

"You really do fancy yourself a smart one, huh? Look, drill sergeant, Private Ludo thinks an Article 15 is funny. You see that? I'd hate to disappoint him."

He turned to Beckett. "Start the paperwork. Have it on my desk in the morning. If I have to deal with this soldier again, he's a goner. Got it?"

Beckett nodded.

Captain James began to walk out the door, and as he did, he stepped on something. He looked down at the ground, shook his head, and muttered, "Goddamn ladybugs."
Chapter 6

Stockholm Syndrome

I have a picture of myself in my dress greens, standing in front of the corduroy castle and beside Hailey Johansen. The two of us were dressed up all nice—she looking beautiful, and me looking thin and agile. There were tears in both of our eyes. I saw that picture not too long ago, and immediately upon seeing it, I knew why we were crying ... The tears weren't those of happiness; they were genuinely sad tears of hurt, loss, and the unknown.

Hailey became a friend of mine in basic training, mostly due to some sort of bond we had forged through her relationship with Alvarez. She and Jenney were battle buddies, like Alvarez and I, and when I'd begun my relationship with Jenney, she'd met and begun to see Alvarez.

The four of us had become tight, really tight, and with the exception of Alvarez, we'd all been in the overfats together. There was something special about that group—something that makes me think if I hadn't been in the overfats, I would have missed out on the best part of basic training. The overwhelming feeling of accomplishment that we earned through that program goes beyond words. It was something so powerful and so self-satisfying that to try and define it to anyone who has never been through a transformation of equal proportion, is to waste valuable words. Simply going from fat to thin wasn't the real enduring importance of the time in the program; it was more than that. It was based on learning the most important things a person can learn about himself or herself—that losers can become winners, that the weak can become strong, and that painful insults can be made into the fuel that stokes the fires of self-discipline.

We had been the outcasts; the ones being punished for not being perfect when we arrived. To travel the distance from there to born again (while not at first believing in your own potential, and watching yourself transform both physically and emotionally) is awe inspiring to the degree that not developing a god-complex as a result is difficult. The initial countless insults from the cadre and the attitude we received from our own peers changed at the same pace as we did, making me realize that these things are all connected. Attitude was our only defense at first, and, initially, my attitude toward myself was degrading; therefore, so were the insults.

After the Ramos incident, nothing changed immediately. I was still tormented, picked on, embarrassed, and looked down upon as the weakest link; but before too long, that started to change. I accredited that change to the program, believing that the program was the reason for my transformation, but really it was a just tool to allow me to believe in myself. When you grow up thinking that you are one gene away from being mentally disabled, finding something in yourself to believe in is far more difficult than accepting the process as the god. I believed in the overfats program as a savior, making it the second god I ever believed in.

We overfats were a success story, every single one of us. We were not all friends or even friendly to each other; in fact, there were more people in the program that I dreamed of murdering than the rest of the company. But like a family that fights while standing on a foundation of love, so, too, were we.

People who have experienced dramatic weight loss understand the euphoria that comes from it as only marathoners understand why one would wish to subject themselves to such abuses. I believe now that it is better to suffer the cost of something (in this case, overeating and lack of exercise), than to have never experienced the consequences of such things. The same could be said of any number of self-imposed habits or defects. The comeback is more than just the surviving of something—it's watching with your own eyes as you endure the things you have brought onto yourself, and watching as you become what the world has refused to see you as previously. Understanding consequence, enduring it, and taking it upon yourself is, hands down, the best attribute you can obtain. Kindness and empathy follow shortly behind, but they are like stones compared to diamonds, the common versus the uncommon.

The overfat program was a place of real-life genuine support. We were united in our goal, but pitted against each other in order to push the results independently. There were no hugs, no pats on the back, not even a hand to pull you up when you were down; it was more like after suffering independently, we had our struggles to unite us, to discuss, and to have in common.

Recently, I have seen a chain of exercise places designed for women only; a place where fat women can go and exercise without feeling like they are being judged. I suppose that is a good thing, to be afforded such a venue, but isn't it really those exact eyes on you that push you to the next level? When you are exhausted and sweating, begging for the torment to stop, and in a place where there is no one watching, no one judging you, what is left to push you through? These women at these gyms are understandably sheltered from the cold eye of perfection, but they are cheated the one thing that has made people capable of things they themselves have thought impossible—anger. Anger at themselves, anger at their lives, or anger at their families—anger is the ultimate source of change.

Anger drives people to do things that they cannot, by any other means, accomplish. The anger itself is an uncomfortable emotion; it's an emotion that requires energy just to sustain it. Anger is a tool put into all living things in order to allow us to break the mold of what we have become. Anyone who has experienced self-motivated, drastic change will tell you that they woke up one day and were just sick of looking in the mirror and seeing what they had been seeing for all this time. One day they snapped and they made a statement to themselves that, at any cost, they would overcome this ailment. Harnessing the power of our anger is what allows us to step to the next level and prove to ourselves that we can change, even if the world doesn't believe. When called upon to kill, to protect, to move mountains ... without anger, we are idle.

The overfats were a group of us who started out as less than the others. We started out our military careers as owing, in debt, and our fight was to first become equal and then to push toward perfection. Through time and suffering we became equal, but while that process was happening, we were developing calluses from insults hurled at us by seemingly everyone who knew us. These calluses made us unite with each other, tying bonds between us that no one else could obtain. Lepers live in villages filled with lepers to avoid the eyes of the perfect, but each leper individually wishes for a cure so that he can move back to the world and live among his equals.

While the rest of the perfect people were gossiping and writing letters to their significant others on their free time, we had no free time. Our free time was spent with each other, pushing each other through our own individual desire for perfection. They were divided in their doings, whereas we were united in ours.

After a while even the drills had stopped harassing us. They respected our improvements, and on many occasions they would release us to go join the rest of our platoons, so we could do whatever we pleased. By then, however, what we pleased was simply self-improvement, and when released, we remained where we were. We stayed put, and even without anyone there to count our cadences or push us to the brink, we remained, pushing ourselves.

The day I was released from the overfats was tragic. It was on my fifty-third day of basic training; I'd met my goal weight and was tossed out of the program. Rather than running joyously up the stairs to the barracks, I begged the drill to let me stay in. I was told to leave, but that didn't deter me. When the overfats met for PT, I tried to join them, sneaking into the formation and hoping to go unnoticed. I was noticed and tossed out again and again. It was as if my family had divorced me, and the worst part of it was that they acted like I should be happy to be free. I wanted back in, vowing to the drill who bounced me out time and time again that I would gorge myself on cake and potatoes, gain the weight back, and rejoin.

The drill smiled politely, and said, "Anyone who makes a home out of the overfat program, anyone who loves this group is incapable of destroying what they've done to themselves. Good luck. Now get the hell out of here."

So it goes; I had Stockholm syndrome.

The rest of my platoon didn't matter to me; they were just people who I sort of knew. My people were the ones falling out of the runs, eating greens instead of cake in the DFAC, showering when they were alone, and answering emphatically when the drills yelled, "Where my overfats at?" Being forcibly sent back to "freedom" was far worse than being taken from it in the first place. I didn't want to go back to nothing. I wanted to be called names, screamed at, told I was worthless ... I wanted to be in a constant state of calloused improvement. Once I was improved, there were no more goals to achieve, and there were no more attaboys to look forward to. Going back to the barracks, instead of being in the dying cockroach, was a terrible feeling that saddened me to the core. I'd watch the overfats exercising in the courtyard from the barracks window and felt removed, hurt, even forgotten. It was I who had made the people there love the group with my enthusiasm and my constant talk about being proud of ourselves. I made the overfats proud of who they were, and the goddamn drills had to respect me for it. No other training class had ever been so happy to be a part of the program, which I admit was at first a tactic to control the insults they slung at us. If we appreciated the attention, if we craved the insults, then they were less likely to grant our wishes by giving them to us. I think the drills got a kick out of it really, but they constantly pretended to be annoyed by us. We'd chant, "If it ain't rainin', we ain't trainin'," when they'd make us exercise in the rain. We'd scream, "More PT, drill sergeant, more PT," when they'd tell us to recover. I think at first they thought they were being challenged, that our resolve would falter eventually, but after a few weeks, I think they hated to even make us exercise since we loved it so much. Clearly their goal was to give us anything but what we wanted.

Eventually, however, one by one we were all released from the program. When King was released, I was elated. I wanted my most unlikely friend back in the barracks with me, someone I knew and related to, someone I respected, and someone who knew how hard I'd worked and vice versa. I had been the ninth, out of the thirty-six of us, released. I had taken my calorie count down to about a thousand calories a day, eaten ex-lax after every meal, and been burning somewhere in the vicinity of four thousand calories a day. In my first week at basic training, I had dropped nineteen pounds; and even on my worst week, I had never lost less than six. I went from two hundred and twenty seven pounds to one hundred and sixty nine in a matter of just over a month and a half. Losing the overfat program made me wish I had paced myself, deciding that I should have controlled my weight loss to four pounds a week ... However, realizing that when I set my mind to a task, I could attain it, was priceless. It was the first real sign of success I'd ever seen in myself, and I'd finally done for myself what had been missing through my entire youth.

Christmas had come with the nostalgia that is lost with our childhood. In the civilian world, Christmas equals obligations to everyone; however, in that special year, Christmas meant letting the world see the new me. There hadn't been any reason to be excited about Christmas since my sister ruined the magic of Santa Clause for me when I was seven, the same year my father moved out. Now there was reason to anticipate the holidays again, and the excitement that goes through a training post like McClellan around the holidays was electric. We all wanted to go home and let the world see what we'd become, and, once again, the overfats had more to look forward to than the perfect people. The ones who had come in fit went home in a green suit decorated with ribbons and a new haircut. The overfats went home transformed. I'd grown five inches and dropped twenty five percent of my body weight, making me an entirely different person to look upon. As the days had drawn closer and closer to our week vacation, I became sleepless. We also had the additional benefit of being able to paint basic training any color we wanted. To our civilian families, we were enduring any number of atrocities, and I planned on portraying a very difficult version of McClellan when it was my turn to tell my family stories.

We'd been dropped off at the Atlanta Airport in tan school buses that said us army in the place where the school district name usually went, and as we unloaded that bus, people stopped and looked at us with reverence. The same ragtag gang of misfits that had been in this exact spot six months ago was now a functioning military unit capable of killing with efficiency and accuracy. I'd learned who I was over the last few months, and none of it came from who the drills told me I was; I'd learned the real truth of myself in the changes I'd endured. The sight of the flag made me tear up, and God forbid someone sing the national anthem; I would cry like a baby.

Saying goodbye to my friends as they boarded their planes was tough. Before Jenney boarded her plane, she kissed me on the mouth. It was such a sensitive and seductive kiss that it felt like the first one I'd ever had. There was a promise in her lips, a promise to reveal more of her to me later on, and I was eager to accept her gift, whatever it was. We hadn't had a chance to be alone, really, but our connection was like we'd been sleeping together for years. She was in the program too, and she went from having a great ass to having the body that models dream about. She was still sort of plain, but she was as beautiful at 5 a.m. with camo on her face as she was dressed up in her greens with makeup on. No matter where or when Jenney was around me, she looked the same. Her easy coolness was perhaps what I liked the best about her. She didn't get flustered no matter how much stress was being applied. She was a cool character, always. Sarcasm was easy for her, but her heart was definitely fragile. She protected it from the world, but in the months we'd known each other, she'd given me enough of it to hurt her, something I was going to avoid doing at all costs.

"I love you, Ved," she mouthed to me from twenty paces away.

I was going to return the words to her, but she turned and disappeared down the hallway toward her 747 bound for the Midwest.

I smiled to myself as I got on my plane. She loved me. This perhaps wasn't real love, but love similar to that founded on a traumatic experience. We'd been through hell together; we'd seen each other at our very worst and formed our relationship there. As we got better and better, that only strengthened what we had. She accredited me with her improvements, and I accredited myself with mine. Maybe she looked up to me, maybe I looked up to her ... The details of love lost are often hard to recall. All I can do for you now is paint a picture of what she feels like in my memories of her.

I wanted desperately to see my mother and father, or more so, for them to see me. I wanted them to be proud, and I wanted my father to recognize me for the first time in my life, but I wondered how that would really play out. I figured, if worse came to worst, he wouldn't want to fuck with me now. I'd tasted victory and I liked the taste. I could separate my empathy from my viciousness these days, and I was always willing to do so, given the right cause.

When my plane landed on a cold runway in Harrisburg, I was beyond nervous. There is something to seeing your mother after having been away for a long time that escapes words. It wasn't just that I had been away, or that I had been away for the first time in my life, it was that where I had been, there was no one to play the role of caring parent. I'd almost forgotten about the warmth that comes from being loved as you are, swapping that for trying to earn respect from people who were not dying to give it to you. Struggling to achieve a place at the table, so to speak, makes you realize that there is a cost to all things. My mother had never made me feel that way, and I was disappointed in myself for assuming that she didn't care about me wholly. My mother had been in love with my father, and she'd served him selflessly for a long time while he repeatedly did the very worst thing he could do to her. The suffering she had been through, while attending to her needy son and not-so-needy daughter, must have seemed overwhelming. She never batted an eye; she never once broke down and cried out for help. She'd suffered unspeakable poverty, relying on help from friends who donated often to our cause in the form of nameless envelopes stuffed with cash and left in our mailbox. My mother thanked God for each donation we received while my father and his mistress-turned-wife were buying boats and RVs.

I walked down the long hallway connecting the plane with the building, spotted my nervous mother, and walked right past her to see if I could. She didn't recognize me as she scanned the crowd. I suppose she was looking for her poor unfortunate son with the man-boobs and the blond dye in his hair. That wasn't who she saw when I came up behind her and my stepfather and said, "You looking for someone, lady?"

She almost passed out. The son she had sent off to boot camp had disappeared, and what came back was a more secure, more confident man who knew he was a success. She hadn't had the opportunity to see me that way before, and her response was to cry on my shoulder for fifteen minutes as everyone else aboard my plane wandered off into the airport. My mom just held me as tightly as she could muster, sobbing wildly, and saying, "My son, my son, my son ..."

Luckily, my mother had not involved herself too much in the meetings with Wild when he'd said, "When that boy comes home from basic training for Christmas, he'll be a private first class," as I came home the same rank I had gone off as—a straight up, buck private—courtesy of my Article 15. I'd been reduced two ranks for my stunt with Garten, and I was still certain I had done the right thing. That ladybug incident had shaped me in my own eyes, and had definitely impacted my reputation. I was thought of as eccentric, perhaps a bit off, and crazy; which, if I could have picked my own reputation, would be exactly what I would have decided for myself. I'd set a precedent for myself. I'd made it very clear that I was what I said I was, and no one ever tested me further while I was at McClellan.

There were too many stories to try and tell her over the next few days, so I told her nothing of what I had been through. Instead of playing the hero and telling wild lies about how difficult basic had been, I smoothed over the rough parts and painted it easier than it actually was. I wanted my dear mother to sleep well at night after I returned to Alabama in seven days. It was ancient history, water under the bridge, and now I realized that everything happens for a reason. One man calls the progression of his life the work of God; another just accepts that all things work out in the long run. Either way, I was glad to be home, glad to be loved and missed, and really fucking glad to be going back in a few days.

The week at home for Christmas was nice, but by day three I remembered why I'd wanted so badly to leave in the first place.

My mother let me borrow Betsy for the short drive to Castle Park to see my father. When my father and I were talking, and I was telling stories about my adventures, we were bonding. He was wrapped up in my tales, and I told him all the stories I had spared my mother. I told them slowly and with great detail, inspiring questions and laughter from him in perfect compliance with what I was seeking. He was enthralled with his son, who looked more like him than he had ever seen before, and his love for me was so genuine and real that I never wanted it to end. He'd poured me a whiskey and Coke immediately, and before long we were three or four deep. It was the best time I could ever recall having with my dad, that is, until his wife decided she'd had enough.

First she stayed out of the living room altogether. Then she entered, sat beside my father on the couch, and pretended to listen. As the minutes passed, she began to slide a little farther and farther away from him, which at first he didn't notice. I did. Before long she was at the other end of the couch, turning the volume up on the TV to rival my theatrical storytelling voice. When he turned without thinking to grab the remote, realizing that it wasn't where it normally sat beside his spot on the couch, he spotted it in her hand.

Looks were exchanged, looks I didn't immediately understand, but his reaction to her was understandable. She had moved away from him in demonstration of her connection with him, getting farther and farther away as his attention drifted from her to me. His son had come back for two more days and she couldn't stomach the time away from his undivided attention.

I felt sorry for the strong Mr. Ludo who had once been such a force of nature. He began coddling her, and I'd had enough. Love without respect is ignorant. When I realized what he'd become, I had to leave.

I drove to Blythe to hang out with whatever friends had come home for the holiday from college. I saw plenty, but not Mia Gateway, the one I had most hoped to see.

Back on the plane to McClellan, I was relieved. Here I was myself; here I was Ved, someone without anyone to answer to. Someone whose mission was to survive the elements, not walk on eggshells so that no one got their feelings hurt. It was much easier to care for myself than to try and balance the old Shell with the new Ved. Being all things to all people is a full time job, and I was more comfortable with dealing with the opposition that came straight at me. I was eager to be screamed at by drills who I respected and to be challenged into performing. I'd had enough of Shell, and was eager to get back to my new world where Ved was all there was of me.

The next several months at McClellan passed too quickly. With graduation approaching rapidly, the privates who were going to be reservists were eager to get back to their wives, kids ... jobs. Alvarez was among them, and we had talked extensively about how much we would miss each other. The difference between regular Army (those staying in full time) and those headed back to their lives, was more than just the age difference. Granted, most of the reservists and guardsmen were older than I was, but that didn't do the separation between us justice. It was more than that. We, the regular Army guys, were seeking adventure. We were ready to die here. We were looking forward to the opportunity that comes from not knowing what we had agreed to in that four to six year commitment. There would be new places, new names to remember, and new adventures to be had, whereas the reservists had their old lives to return to. Alvarez had become the closest thing to a brother that I'd ever had, and the idea of leaving him and going on without him was heartbreaking and terrifying. He hadn't been in the overfats, but he'd become closer to me than that group, even. Even the drills, who'd been so unusually cruel to me in my first few weeks in Alabama, had become father figures to me; a family that spoke nothing of love, but whose words of encouragement meant more to me than anything anyone could ever say to me. There was nothing that could make me feel as happy, as loved, as accepted as something along the lines of, "Hey, Ludo, I suppose for a pussy like you, that was a pretty good job."

Maybe I was developing some emotional issues, maybe I was wondering what love really was, or maybe I was realizing that the world is a place where only the adaptable excel. Where it used to take a hug and a pat on the back from my mom to feel loved, now a simple insult mixed with a smile seemed euphoric. With these little reassurances, I felt stronger and more world-ready; I clung to the insults and compliments alike and wrote them in my journal so I could remember them later.

One day we were gathered in a formation when Captain James announced unemotionally, "Those of you going to Airborne School at Ft. Benning will not be graduating with the rest of this class. Your departure date for Benning is three days prior to graduation here at McClellan, so if your parents were planning on coming to see you graduate, you need to contact them immediately. They may attend your Airborne School graduation if they'd like in lieu of bootcamp."

And just like that, our goodbyes were going to have to be made three days earlier than we'd expected. My mother had been planning on attending my graduation. It was an event that everyone was looking forward to, for it was really two days of showing off for your families. They were allowed to bunk with us, eat with us, and do PT with us. It was to be a fun couple of days where the rules didn't apply, and your parents could be ordered around like privates by the drills so that they could understand exactly what it was we'd gone through.

With this new itinerary, I developed a bit of stress. It was the first time I realized I was leaving McClellan and would never see most of these guys again. I'd go from McClellan, where I knew everyone, to a place I didn't know, and with a group I'd have to meet all over again. Airborne school was only a month long, and, assuming I could hang with the physical demands, I'd then be shipped off to Ft. Bragg immediately after Benning, just to do it all over again. The changes that were coming were too much to handle if considered in their entirety, so I chose to view it on a day-to-day basis.

As the days at McClellan were drawing to an end, I felt like I might be coming apart. We were to ship for Benning on a Thursday, boarding buses and driving straight through. Of the three hundred or so soldiers in my company, twenty-one of us were off to airborne school. Hailey Johansen, who was dating Alvarez, was among them, and the four of us had gotten so close that I was elated that at least she was going with me. I wasn't prepared to leave Jenney, whom I'd been infatuated with since the airplane ride from Raleigh to Atlanta.

Jenney and I had finally hooked up a few times on weekend passes, and she'd delivered what her kiss had promised. It was the first time I got to fuck the same woman more than once, and because of it, I think I got way too attached. Whenever we got weekend passes to go out and do what we wanted, Jenney and I rented a hotel room, bought some assorted bottles of booze, and ignored the requests of our fellow soldiers to come party with them. We spent the weekends talking and screwing, watching TV, and philosophizing about what was wrong with the rest of the world. Jenney revealed that she had a boyfriend at home, which I think she thought would upset me, but I knew that what we had was way more intense than what she'd ever experienced before. I didn't concern myself with the word "home," no matter what the source was. Home was McClellan, and then it would be Benning, and then Bragg ... Home was where I was when the word came out of my mouth.

Meanwhile, Alvarez and Johansen were coupling as often as they could get away with, making us one big happy foursome. It may sound ironic or coincidental that two pairs of battle buddies were fucking each other, but it wasn't so uncommon. Everyone had been displaced when they got here, everyone wanted to be touched, and since we spent most of our time with our battle buddy, his or her significant other had a battle buddy who was always around too. Before long, desire and alcohol mixed, pants were taken off, and people did what people always do. How's that for rationalization?

Now Alvarez and Jenney would graduate at McClellan without us, and Johansen and I would venture off to Georgia to learn how to safely operate a T-10C parachute. If you apply the previous rational with the last statement, the next chapter should come as no surprise to you.

On the day before I left for Benning, we were allowed the entire day to pack, be fitted one last time in our dress greens, fill out our outgoing paperwork, get more fucking shots ... things like this. We were talking and fucking around in the barracks, radios on and blaring, and people were dancing and generally acting like idiots. There weren't too many days at McClellan when this was allowed, so it was festive and fun, but sadness was still the undertone. For a bunch of grown men, at basic training of all places, we were sad to be leaving what was supposed to be the most intense and difficult time of our lives. It felt like we were in a fraternity, but that is speculation as I have never attended a single day of college. We were brothers, we'd showered together, shit together, taken turns masturbating in the stalls, drunk too much together, fought each other, insulted one another, and helped each other when things got rough. Now, the best friends I'd ever known were all just going to disappear, leaving Ved Ludo alone again, unloved and unproven. I wondered if redefining myself would be as hard the next time, or if people were all the same. I wondered if I would regress to who I had been before this experience, and if I would disappoint myself should the environment be different next time.

Before I had too long to follow my naturally depressing train of thought, the doors to the barracks busted open loud enough that it startled us over the sounds of the radios. In came all five of our drills, yelling and screaming at us to get our asses outside in a formation. They were smiling, however, giving themselves away as playing games rather than seriously being pissed off. "Get your goddamn PTs on. You're going on a run!" they were yelling.

After hustling into our sweats and trotting down the stairs, we formed up as a company. Usually our PT was done in platoons, so it was unusual we would run as an entire company. We figured as a last hurrah, they would have the company run together, esprit de corps and all that.

The first thing we noticed was that all the drills from all the platoons were in. Usually there was one from each platoon on duty, working a twelve-hour shift, and one drill there to man the desk. That was a total of five on any given day. Today, however, there were twelve dressed in black PTs, which was reserved for regular Army units, not training battalions. As we came down the stairs, they were smiling at us, which always made us nervous. Usually when a drill was smiling, we would smile, causing the following conversation to take place.

"You smiling at me, Private Ludo?"

"No, sir."

"Oh, you don't like me, Private Ludo?"

"No ... uh ... yes, sergeant. I like you, sergeant."

"Oh, you like me, soldier? We buddies now?"

"No, sergeant."

"Oh, we aren't buddies now, so you don't like me?"

This went on for as long as he wished, usually about ten more questions for which there was no proper answer, before he let you off the hook with a hundred or so push-ups.

Today, however, they were reenacting the shark attack: they were screaming at us, making us run this way and that, carry this cinder block to there, knock out a few jumping jacks, run back to here, more push-ups ... The idea was to let us see how far we'd come. I was well aware that my maximum push-up limit was twenty upon first arriving at the corduroy castles, now I was capable of well over two hundred given the right amount of pressure and encouragement.

After the shark attack, which was more about being funny than anything else, they had us form up and assume the position of parade rest. They began talking to us, recalling the funny shit that had happened during the training, each drill giving an account of the best story he had for his platoon. When it was Beckett's turn, he addressed my platoon with a, "Where are my overfats?"

We reacted with screams and hollers, the proudest group of formerly fat people this earth has ever known. Beckett loved it. He was the drill who had put more time and effort into making us fit than anyone; he'd invested plenty of his days off so he could work us out personally. He motivated us by any means possible, be it physical threats, embarrassment, or hysterics. He'd led us all to our goal weight, he'd taken us under his wing, and he'd beaten us until we craved his attention in any form. Beckett was a man who cared in a way that teachers get accommodations for. He'd changed each one of us for the better, and unanimously we held him above the others for his relentless dedication to our cause.

"There they are, there they are. Look at them. My overfats are all growed up, look at 'em. I want you all to look at these soldiers to see what they have become. They worked their asses off while the rest of you wrote letters to your mommies, to Jody ... these guys were out there sweating. I couldn't get their fat bodies to move at all when they first got here, and a few weeks later, I couldn't get them to stop. These soldiers have come further than the rest of you. These guys have proven to themselves that they are the real deal, and I'm fucking proud of all of them. Among them was one guy who I thought might break. When he first got here, he was fat and disgusting, talking about being broken over the summer." In a mocking, high-pitched voice he said, "I broke my foot drill sergeant, it ain't my fault." He laughed at his own impersonation of me. "This soldier was smart, too smart for his own good, so I had to play rough with him. I used everything I had and took plenty of criticism from my fellow drills about the way I treated him." He gestured to the pile of drills smirking from the side. "I told them he wouldn't break, that I knew this kind of guy, and that they had to trust me. A few of the drills even threatened to report me for being too aggressive, but you know what? They didn't. This soldier took everything I threw at him, and I think he was more pissed when I tossed him out of the overfats than he was when I put him in it. So ... this soldier isn't gonna get to graduate with the class. He's off to Benning, where he will probably start to get fat, fall out of the runs, and test the weight limits of his parachute. Anyway, we were going to present him with this at graduation, but since he's leaving here tomorrow, I thought we'd do it now."

My heart was beating rapidly, tears were streaming down my cheeks, and I didn't care. My tears were hot on my red face, and people were looking at me and smiling with tears in their own eyes.

"Private Ludo, please come up here."

I don't remember walking up to the front of the company; I just remember standing there. He had something behind his back, and he was holding it with his left hand. The drills were patting me on the back and saying kind things to me.

"You deserve it, Ludo."

"Hell of a soldier, Ludo ..."

Beckett cleared his throat, choking up a little at the sight of tears in my eyes. "Ludo, you are a hell of a soldier, and a hell of a guy. I've seen people come and go from here before, but you ... I'll remember you. This is from Captain James and the rest of the cadre."

From behind his back, he produced a piece of wood, stained cherry. When he spun it around and showed it to me, I wept out loud and unabashedly. Engraved in the brass colored metal were the words: Private Ludo, Defender of the Ladybugs. It was signed by Captain James and every one of the drills. They'd known the story the whole time.

Beckett shook my hand and turned back to the company. "Private Ludo, take these weak ass soldiers on a seven miler, Transmission Hill."

"Roger that, sergeant."

The next day at 10 a.m., we were lined up in the courtyard waiting to board the buses to Benning. Alvarez and I were hugging, saying goodbye. I was thanking him for his support, his confidence, and his relentless commitment to me. It was then that Jenney came up to me, Johansen in tow, and asked, "Can I take a picture of you two airborne troopers?"

"Sure," I said.

"Before I do, can I talk to you for a second?"

We walked off to the side of the castles. We were about to say goodbye. That conversation was tough; we said things to each other that will remain mine. As we hugged for the last time, I held her like I would never see her again. I didn't.

Johansen and I leaned against the corduroy building, tears dripping down our cheeks, eyes red from overwhelming sadness and fear of what was coming next. We were leaving here together, both to ache for the other's best friend. It was ironic.

"All right, on three, say... AIRBOOORRRRNNNNEEEE!"

Alvarez and Jenney stood before us. Four of the closest people at that post, lined up like opposites. The castles rough texture was against the back of my head, and Johansen was under my right arm; both of us looked anything but thrilled. Our eyes were the same shade of red, but hers caught the light of the camera better than mine.

On three, we mumbled, "Airborne."

The shutter snapped.
Chapter 7

Thirty Days

It was raining. I fucking hate the rain, and more than I hate the rain, I hate hearing from people how much they love the rain. I hate hearing people tell me how refreshing it is and how clean it feels. I don't even understand the rationale behind such thoughts.

More than I hate the rain, I hate the hours after the rain when everything is wet. I hate looking on hot asphalt and seeing steam come up from it like a ghost rising from the grave. The air hangs wet, damp, and sticky. It finds the armpits first, then the back of the neck. Pants stick to legs, shirts stick to chests.

Those hours have negative effects on me; everything becomes bleak and depressing; optimism is swallowed whole by pessimism. Optimism is such a wonderful state of being, but so unrealistic. If it can be defeated by something like the rain, it cannot be a natural state of being.

The fact that my dick was in Hailey's mouth at the very second I was looking out onto the blurring landscape, trying to see through the sheets of rain that were falling on the farmland as we sped through Alabama, wasn't really helping. Not that a blowjob wasn't a good solution to the problem of there being too little privacy on a bus for more involved activities, it really was. I mean, I have to give it to the girl, she was eager to please; however, in a sense, I thought less of her for being so easily won.

It wasn't two hours ago that she was pining over Alvarez, talking openly about her feelings as we rode through a dismal gray afternoon. She didn't mention loving him, or even missing him; she simply talked emotionally about him. I hadn't really known her well enough at McClellan to warrant such an honest conversation about the guy I felt I knew better than she did, but I tolerated it.

Why was Hailey giving me a blowjob two hours after leaving her boyfriend behind?

There are a number of reasons that come to mind, but I analyze these things too much. What people do is simply what people do; they try to find homeostasis, balance ... comfort. Deciphering the nitty-gritty details is something that I obsess over, but no one else wants to. She was doing what she had to do in order to get what she ultimately wanted. Why else would a woman put a man's genitals in her mouth? Kindness can't be the answer.

She is there, doing what she is doing, for the same reason that William Penn walked around what is now the state of Pennsylvania. She is staking off what is hers. It wasn't necessary, and I didn't even imply that I would be interested in such a thing, but there she is, trying to impress me, and trying to hold on to me—or is it my buddy, Alvarez, that she is trying to hold on to? Sometimes two different people can get blurred ... For instance, Bill and Ted. I have tried to remember so many times which one was which, that now I can associate either name with either face. I can see Keanu as Bill, but I think he was Ted ... Fuck ... See?

She is trying to buy something permanent, trying to hold on to something that she thinks is strong, but I know in my head that I am neither, emphatically neither. She also knows that in a month, if we both survive airborne school, that we will go our separate ways, making this moment a memory that was, not the beginning of what is.

I had already begun to figure out the philosophy that would guide me through the rest of my life. Along the way, I would anger many people, even be threatened with my life a number of times, but if there is one thing I swore allegiance to early on in my experiences, it was to myself.

I like myself, and I always have. I often assumed that people who didn't like me were idiots. I mean, you can't go around this world assuming that you are the asshole. Sure you fuck some things up, you make some mistakes, but at the end of the day, don't you have to believe that you are a good person?

We emulate the good, and avoid the pitfalls of what we consider to be the bad, only to end up some sort of montage of all the things and people we have seen. We have different reasons for wishing to be different things, but they are generally aimed at what we consider to be ideal. We don't attain all of these things; we fail, making us survivors ... We are what we survive.

Hailey was desperate for something, and I understood that as soon as she decided to take a seat beside me on the bus. She was an attractive girl, well mannered, and she presented herself as if she had been born into an upper middle class family. Her biggest physical downfall might have been her height, which couldn't have been more than five two. She'd been in the overfats, though she only had four pounds to lose. She wore short blond hair in a wedge, shorter at the back of her neck than in the front of her jaw, and had striking blue eyes. I'd noticed her immediately upon arriving at reception, but in those days the males and females were treated like ammonia and bleach, safe and harmless unless mixed, so I didn't get to explore her any further.

After reception, she'd miraculously ended up as Matthew's battle buddy, which I was initially excited about. I was thinking that Jenney could be my buddy, and Hailey could be my love interest in the saga that was going to play out; however, it just never ended up that way. The more I talked to Jenney, the more I liked her, and the more I talked to Johansen, the less I liked her. Not that I spoke to her often, but when I did, I always felt like she was performing.

She wasn't annoying, slow-witted, or even tiresome; but she was certainly concerned with what everyone else was thinking about her. I imagined that she was a nightmare when she was a high school student, feeding off the drama of those years, and putting on Academy Award winning, dramatic performances in the hallways of her high school.

Even at McClellan, she'd still work herself into tears if one of the drills insulted her; and my God, when she was brought into the overfats, she immediately protested, saying over and over again that she didn't deserve to be in the group.

At the second weigh in, she'd still been a couple pounds away from her goal weight. When her drill sergeant had told her this, she'd been so enraged that she stripped her shirt off, leaving only her military issue sports bra on, and asked all of us spectators, "Do I look like I need to be in this group?" She was right; she surely didn't look like it to us.

I mean, by week three of being at McClellan, the civilian cafeteria ladies had already gone from "repulsive" to "maybe," and now we had Hailey Johansen standing in front of us with her shirt off, demanding that we all look at her and decide if she belonged among us or not. The display had been stirring, to say the least.

When I'd gone back to the barracks later that night and recounted the story for Alvarez, telling him how good she'd looked to my tired and weary eyes, he'd said immediately that he had to meet her.

Johansen was, if nothing else, bold. With her kind of boldness, sexiness seemed to tag along. Some people's boldness is translated into cockiness, making what could be a respectable trait ... annoying. It's a delicate balance, being bold and being sexy for it, but to her it came easily.

I've often tried to explain to women that sexiness and beauty are so different that they are of no relation to each other. Sexiness is about power and comfort with sexuality, whereas beauty is solely about cosmetic attributes.

I don't mean to make it sound like promiscuity is the sole ingredient. There is more to it than simply that. The rest of the definition is indescribable; the rest is more about a feeling that is transmitted through the observer when he looks upon her.

When I'd gotten onto the bus that morning, I was ready to do nothing but listen to Eddie Vedder sing his songs of angst and hurt. The Vitalogy album had just come out a few months before, and I'd heard it enough that it had become the disc I craved all the time, but I hadn't played it to death yet. During this phase of learning new music, the volume seems so much louder, and the emotion of the song still stirs an emotional response in you, but you cannot sing along entirely because the words still evade you. (This could be especially true with Pearl Jam songs as the lyrics are rarely published.)

My intention was to forget everything that was now behind me. I'd decided that memories were painful things; the most painful being recent ones. I wanted to focus solely on the future. I wanted to meditate my way to Benning, ignoring all the things that were calling out to me in my head. I didn't want to think about Alvarez, as I missed him more than I missed anyone else in the world. It was as if my brother had died, and I hadn't been able to attend his funeral. Imagining him and Jenney at the graduation ceremony walking proudly on the parade field without me there was torture; and for that reason, I'd decided that I was done thinking about McClellan entirely. The future was coming quickly, and I wanted to be ready for it when it got here.

The song "Corduroy" had stricken me. It was the song I would have written if I were a song writer ... It was abstract and poignant. It was direct and angry ... All the things I'd thought about Eddie Vedder in the past were minute in comparison to where he'd taken me this time. He didn't write this song for the thousands of screaming girls at the concerts, or the guys who bought the T-shirts from the venders outside the show only to destroy them minutes later in the mosh pit; he'd written the song for me.

I didn't want anything roaming inside my head. I needed to purge all of that emotion and all the shit I'd left behind. I needed to focus on what was next. I was about to be reintroduced into this world as Ved Ludo, the Airborne Trooper, Death from Above ... and all the other shit the Army "sloganizes" in order to provide identities and motivation. I knew I was in shape, I knew that I was proud, and I knew that if I failed this course, my confidence would collapse around me like a house of cards. I'd been improved upon, sure, but it takes a long time for fat people who lose weight to present themselves and to really think of themselves as skinny people. All of my confidence was a fucking farce; it was all so thin ... so vulnerable that if anyone had really challenged it, I would have crumbled.

Now I had to do it again. Like stepping back onto the scale after a week or so off and holding your breath in hopes that the gods are good to you; and hoping that you will see success one more time before the clock strikes midnight and fantasies disappear, leaving you a lonely kid without anyone to love you, ashamed of yourself and broken from realizing that they were right about you after all.

"Can I sit here, Ved?" she asked, sitting down on the seat across the aisle from me.

It wasn't my seat; I was in my seat, and I had even been so intent on not being disturbed that I'd laid my shit out on my seat, making it look as if there was no room for anyone else. There were only twenty people going to Benning and the bus sat forty six, so you can see what an asshole move it was to present my space like that. It was passive aggressive and cowardly. I was making a statement without having the guts to actually make the statement.

We hadn't had any personal space in so long. Everything had been communal for the last eight months, so I just wanted a little space to myself, a little time to do what I wanted to do, and God knows that I couldn't do what I wanted to do while maintaining frivolous conversation. Of course, I hadn't expected Johansen to want the seat; I was thinking more along the lines of the guys from my platoon wanting to chat about the last eight months. Not that I wanted to play therapist for Johansen either, but I could at least recognize that she was attractive and female.

I noticed that her shirt was unbuttoned three buttons. That was not military standards. These were our dress greens, our Class A's, one hundred percent wool, dark green, double breasted, and covered with medals that they give every new recruit to wear, even though they haven't earned them.

She turned around, facing out the window upon grabbing the seat next to me. The bus roared to life, jerking forward, while Johansen fought to keep her balance with one hand braced against the back of the seat. She appeared to be unbuttoning her shirt further with the other hand as the bus pulled out and rumbled down the road.

I couldn't speak; I was so intrigued by this that I could think of nothing else. She waited until the bus had left the crowd that had gathered to say goodbye (Jenney and Alvarez were not among them), and then she kneeled on the top of her seat, steadying herself, and began to pull the jacket (with all the medals that were precariously hanging there) off of her shoulders.

"Help me?" she asked, tossing her jacket carelessly onto the floor by her duffel bag. Her white skin, showing from her belly to her neckline between her unbuttoned shirt, contrasted sharply with the brown sports bra that, until now, I'd thought made chicks look like guys.

"With what?" I asked, my voice cracking, my breath coming heavily.

She smiled, noticing my attention. "Hand me that shirt." She pointed at a T-shirt naming a country music band and depicting a black and white album cover.

"Uh ... sure," I said, bending across the aisle, grabbing it up from under her jacket.

"You're cute, Ved. I always thought so. Look at you now, all flustered at the sight of a girl with her shirt unbuttoned. You look like a little boy."

Something about that rubbed me the wrong way—something in it that I didn't like, but I couldn't place it immediately. What the hell was it? This was the problem with the gift; it required analysis. I didn't want to analyze anything. I wanted to just get past it ... on to the next thought; well she can't change her shirt and leave those stiff ol' pants on, right?

I took a second to think, trying to find the problem with what she had said, but nothing was coming to me. I smiled at her, not answering.

She sat down on the seat, slid her back all the way against the window, her feet pointing at me, and held her index finger to her lips. "Shhhhh," she said as she ducked down so that no one could see her from any other seats. She removed her button down oxford, laid it in her lap, and then grabbed the bottom of her bra from beneath both armpits and pulled it up and over her head. It snagged on a barrette in her hair, and she fidgeted with it for a second, blinded by her own bra, as I sat across from her, staring at her naked breasts. I couldn't think or feel anything.

I'd never walked into something like this before, not even accidentally, so as far as being a voyeur, I was a novice. My sister had some pretty hot friends who Nic and I had tried to spy on a few times, which, of course, ended up with us being caught and treated like pervy-sex-offenders until well after they graduated high school and left for college. Sure, I'd seen a few pairs of boobs along the way, but nothing was ever presented to me with so little effort from my end. I knew that this show was either a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on her train of thought.

Either she thought I was so in love with Jenney that I was impotent, or she was displaying what would be mine if I played my cards right. She thinks I'm gonna chase her on the playground at recess today.

There are methods to obtaining what you want, surefire ways to get it. The truth is most men are smart enough to understand this but not patient enough to wait it out. Rather than relying on a time proven strategy to bring a man and woman together with a mutual respect for each other, boys do tend to chase the girls, begging them first for a date, then for sex, then to marry ...

Leaving a woman with the decision to accept or decline your proposal is careless and sloppy. To blindly approach a woman and ask her out—before establishing yourself in her mind as a solid individual with at least a few of the attributes she cherishes most—is not advised. Why would a man risk his deepest desires on chance and the hope that aesthetically he is enough to persuade her?

As far as I am concerned, any time you place a decision regarding yourself in the hands of another, you're fucking up. When I get a haircut, I don't go around the next day asking people if they like it. In fact, I try to make people as uncomfortable as I can if they comment on it. I don't allow them to believe for one second that their opinion matters to me at all. It's not that I am so confident that people's opinions don't matter to me, they do, but asking someone what they think about it gives them an upper hand that is difficult to get back. Granted, most people don't realize that when they are asked these sorts of opinion based questions, the one asking is subconsciously taking an inferior stance before them. Every relationship between two people contains an inferior and superior.

Entering into a relationship on the foundation of having asked someone out is putting yourself into the slot of inferior before you even buy the first dinner. The very words, "May I buy you dinner tonight?" is backwards because in any other situation the person being pampered with this dinner should be asking, "Will you buy me dinner?" Why does the person with the means to accommodate the other ask permission?

It bothers me that men have always played the role of aggressor. It bothers me to hear men talking in conversation about having done something for their wives that got them laid for having done so. "I painted the bathroom over the weekend for Linda, so when she got home and saw what I had done, she gave me some." All I can wonder when I hear something like that is how that man lost so much respect from his wife that she no longer longs to sleep with him. Begging your wife to have sex with you? How can a man do that and not feel like he is the inferior in that relationship?

What Hailey was doing, or what she thought she was doing, by stripping off her top in front of me, was baiting the line. And just as surely as fish will come for the baited hook, so too will men for bare flesh. It was foolproof in her head; she'd probably used this technique plenty of times with stunning results. It takes guts to do something like that. There is real-life sacrifice in it.

Strength and weakness blend so closely in a situation like that. They are so close together that it becomes difficult to see the potential devastation that can come from such an act. What if—instead of reacting like a normal man as she sat there, bare breasts pointed at my face—I said something along the lines of, "Jesus Christ, Hailey. I don't want to see that. Put a fucking shirt on, or go whore yourself out for someone else"? The devastation would be irreversible.

Men are supposed to chase the women; that is the way the whole system is designed. I tell you now, friends, break that pattern and what you get are miraculous results based on mutual respect. The reason she took her shirt off was to stake me down; she was betting on my lack of control.

I could have reached out and grabbed her. I could have placed my mouth to her breast and what would she have done? Would she have "allowed" me to continue on with my tongue on her nipple? The problem was, with either allowing me to or not, I would be asking a question of her, asking her to allow or not allow ... I needed her to ask me, nothing less.

She could have gestured with words; she could have used a more subtle baiting technique, yet she didn't. Why not? Well, I know why elephant hunters don't use BB guns to hunt their prey.

I reached into my bag, before she even put her T-shirt on, and grabbed my Discman. I pulled the headphones over my ears and hit play before she could say a word. I rested my head on my seat, closed my eyes, and skipped forward to song number eight. I fought with myself not to look, to remain disciplined. My eyes remained closed as I turned the volume up with my right hand.

I considered the needle, sticking me again ... When I was eight years old, I was seeing a number of therapists who were trying to solve my emotional problems. There were a number of them who had come and gone over the years, but Mr. Larsen was special. He stuck with me until I went to high school while the others decided I was just too fucked in the head to be helped. Among the things I learned from Mr. Larsen was a relaxation technique involving imagining a swirling black hole, as if I was floating in space, and one by one I was to release my issues and watch them drift toward the hole. Initially, I thought he was dosed on some good acid, but when I actually tried it, it worked.

He had a camel colored chaise lounger in his office that was made from the softest leather I had ever touched. I would have breakdowns in class, suddenly crying hysterically for no reason. When they came upon me, I was supposed to leave class immediately and head to Mr. Larsen's office where I could lie on the couch and meditate on the black hole. Before too long, the black hole became a powerful tool in the process of visualization—a state where you simply watch the crazy images your mind produces. You have no control over these images. They are sometimes comforting and sometimes disturbing, but while you are watching this display, you are completely at peace.

One day during my visualization in his office, I dreamt that Mr. Larsen was standing at the base of the chaise lounger with a small syringe in his hand. He was whispering softly to me that I needed to relax and control my heartbeat. The sight of the syringe would have frightened me if I were awake, but here in dreamland where my mind was amazing, where brilliant colored stars swirled around regularly, I didn't mind.

He eased himself down onto one of his arthritic knees and removed the sneaker from my left foot. He pulled my filthy white sock down around my ankle, removed it, shook it violently twice, and laid it over his shoulder the way athletes sometimes set their towels. He was whispering things to me, but none of them were words, they were just feelings. He rubbed my foot delicately, grabbed my big toe with his left hand, and pushed the other toes away with his right. He stuck the needle between my big toe and the second, pushing the plunger slowly while whispering or humming something inaudible.

The golden liquid in the syringe emptied into my foot with some heat and pressure, and immediately upon entering, my toe went numb. No, numb implies loss of sensation. My toe became very warm and immobile. The liquid was paralyzing me as it seeped through my veins.

It worked its way slowly up my foot, killing all sensation and ability to control those muscles as it went. It reached my ankle, making the foot below it feel heavy and dead. Gradually it slid up my leg, the heat intensifying as it gained distance, and reached my knee. My knee became like any other stone: heavy, hard, and lifeless. I couldn't move my lower leg. It was there, and I could feel its presence, but beneath it was dead, motionless ...

As the agent reached my hips and thighs, it became a caress. I had the notion to panic but found it impossible in this trance I'd entered. The agent in my body had texture, like honey. The blood that usually ran fluid-like through the veins was now more gelatinous.

Eventually, inch-by-inch, I became a quadriplegic. When it reached my heart, there was a thump and an explosion of rapid-fire beats that felt like being hit on the chest with a pillow. After a few beats, it restored itself to its normal pace, but I was now officially limp.

The relaxation was incredible. The hour that I lay there was, to me, days on end. I slept peacefully and remember vividly the light that surrounded my slumber. I was weightless and free of anything restrictive: skin, clothes, gravity ...

I was in the presence of someone out there, someone familial, but someone I didn't know as well as he seemed to know me. I was trying to ask him questions, but I didn't have the muscular control to speak. He was coming toward me. I was trying to make out his face when suddenly I was awakened.

Mr. Larsen was slapping me on my face, trying to wake me up. He had his office door propped open and people were rushing in. They were pulling me and pushing me. A mask placed over my nose began pumping oxygen, which smelled like bubble gum, into my nostrils.

Mr. Larsen thought I had tried to kill myself on his chaise lounger. They performed toxicology tests on me to see what I had taken. Three weeks later, the results verified what I had been saying all along: I hadn't taken anything.

I never had another breakdown again. I have imagined the needle in my foot a thousand times since then. I use it as a control measure and to fall asleep. Someday I will be in the perfect environment again, and I will find the man whose face was almost revealed to me, but I realize that when I do, I won't be coming back to tell anyone about it.

I felt a tapping on my shoulder. "Ved?" she asked.

I turned, somewhat startled. "What's up?" I asked as coolly as I could, letting nothing of my former excitement show. I looked down at my pants, making sure nothing else was still showing.

"Hey, can you hold my jacket up while I change my pants?"

That annoyed me. I took a tone with her, "Why are you going to change your pants? I mean, why did you even change your uniform; don't we have to be in our class A's?"

"No," she said a little defensively. "I asked before we left. We don't even start the course til Monday; we just had to leave in Class A's ... Now we can wear whatever we want."

I hadn't heard about this most welcome free time. I had a duffle bag with all my civilian clothes that I'd shown up at McClellan in, but the problem was that they were all about eight sizes too big for me now. Honestly, I liked wearing my class A's. I thought I looked mighty handsome in them, and they constantly reminded me of how far I'd come.

What were we going to do all weekend? We had four days to do whatever we wanted. No drills to watch over us. No one to correct us for anything ... The thought was almost too much to handle. A wave of happiness came over me, a wave of realization that from now on, we were in the club. The initiation had ended when we'd boarded the bus, and now we were in the Army headed off to Airborne School where we were expected to be fully functioning soldiers.

I was so happy; I almost lost my composure and hugged her—in her Lonestar T-shirt and green wool dress slacks that she now wanted my help with getting out of—but I didn't hug her. Though, I think my optimism shone as I became suddenly affable. "Fuck yeah, give me the jacket."

She turned around and grabbed the jacket, handing it to me. She motioned to her seat. "Just hold it like this." She raised her hands, demonstrating a jacket-curtain that was to be hung from the aisle. She'd apparently be tiny enough to use the seat of a school bus as a fitting room.

"OK," I said. I held the jacket, looking at the soldiers seated in the back of the bus who were doing their best to peek without disguising it.

"Twenty bucks if you drop the jacket, Ludo," Shawn Moore said from the back of the bus.

I smiled an agreeing smile at him, mostly to satisfy him.

I heard motion and rustling coming from her seat; the sounds of fabric brushing fabric and skin against pleather. She was dressed in a shockingly short time. When she was done, she said, "OK." I dropped the jacket, intentionally looking elsewhere before I did so that my eyes weren't residually on her. It had to appear as if I was bored by my task; the last thing I needed was for her to catch me looking at her as the curtain fell.

"You should have taken the twenty bucks. You could have peeked anyway, Ved. I was kind of hoping you would."

Once she was more comfortable in her jeans and T-shirt, she sat beside me on my seat. It wasn't the first time I had seen her in her civilian clothes, but it was the first time she'd been wearing them and this close to me. There had been a couple of weekends when all four of us had planned to go out, but Jenney and I opted to be alone instead.

One weekend Jenney wanted a break from her battle buddy, so we'd done our own "thing." Go-Karting and mini-golf had been our "thing" that time, and we'd intentionally lied to Alvarez and Johansen about our plans, saying that we were going to the Anniston Library to check out books. I didn't want to lie to Alvarez, and I don't remember getting sick of him the way Jenney did with Johansen, but I figured I get every waking minute with Alvarez, so if Jenney wanted some "me" time, I could dig it.

The second time we'd all checked into the Holiday Inn. We'd promised to spend time at the bar and the pool with Alvarez and Johansen. When we got to the reservations desk, however, thirty other guys and girls from Charlie Company were there. Alvarez was making plans with everyone to go to the liquor store and buy booze, promising a drunken party at the pool. I wanted no part of the crowd of drunks, so Jenney and I watched movies, played Skip-Bo, and ordered Chinese food in. Hailey had knocked on our door countless times to try to get us to come party, but we just sat very still and silent, pretending not to be there, or asleep, until she gave up and left.

Now with her beside me, I saw just how ladylike she was, or looked at the very least. Her jeans were well fitting, electric blue, and with perfect fading. These weren't just a pair of jeans she'd slapped on. They were deliberately perfect. I didn't know anything about brand name jeans then, as my mother always bought us Lee brand, so I'd stuck to corduroys through most of high school; however, seeing the way her ass looked in those jeans, I guessed they were expensive.

Her hair, which she kept combing back with her fingers literally every ten seconds, was a million shades of blond, naturally highlighted, and thick. She still wore no makeup, and though her tan had faded a bit, I could tell that this girl was never pasty white. Even in the winter, I guessed her olive complexion would remain, no matter how little sunlight touched her body.

I was alert to her; I was watching her even when she thought I wasn't. Sometimes I am better at paying attention to someone with every other sense but my eyes; I use the other senses in unison while focusing my eyes elsewhere. When I do this, I am usually on the hunt for something, and the only thing keeping me from wanting her now was my conscience.

"So, what are we going to do for the weekend?" she asked bubbly. It was obvious that she was feeling good about herself, which could have been due to her comfortable T-shirt and perfect ass hugging jeans, or because she'd sensed some success in revealing those breasts to me. I'd torn myself away from the sight as fast as I could, but maybe she'd seen me after all. Maybe she could see through the bra, and while I thought it was acting as a blindfold, it was allowing her to measure my reaction.

"I don't know. Any ideas?" I said.

"We could stay off post somewhere. Rent a hotel room or something ... It doesn't have to be like that ... just stay somewhere else. I'm a little tired of the estrogen in the barracks."

I was a little tired of the testosterone in the male barracks as well, but the idea of shacking up with my battle buddy's lady was a little hard to swallow. I considered Alvarez at McClellan with Jenney and imagined him trying to sleep with her. That was laughable. Jenney thought Alvarez immature, juvenile, and a whole lot of brawn with very little brains, but she was good about not acting that way when he was around. She'd complained to me often about having to hang out with him, but my love for the guy was strong enough that I battled her when needed. Alvarez wasn't a deep guy by any stretch of the imagination. He was simple and honest. He spoke his mind freely, which was something I appreciated about him. He reminded me of Nic in that way, and though I don't always find it comfortable to be around people with that particular trait, with him and Nic, I loved it. I thought them hilarious when they were offensive, whereas with others, I had found it uncomfortable.

As far as staying in the barracks vs. off post, I was already leaning toward the hotel idea. I mean, by now I knew that this Johansen thing was going to get physical, and how can you help but get excited at the notion of sleeping with a beautiful and new woman? She'd been plenty forward enough already. A person didn't have to think themselves some sort of prophet to understand where this was headed. My goal at this point wasn't to avoid sleeping with her; in fact, the display she had put on had been a profoundly powerful one. It seemed a waste to not deploy myself now when I felt invincible.

What I wanted to do was reverse the roles. I wasn't going to sleep with her as long as I thought she felt chased, pursued, or even wanted. I was tired of dealing with women who felt that way. It was a leftover sensation from my experiences in high school; however, in high school, I didn't feel I had anything to offer a girl. Now I was feeling strong, handsome, and powerful. I felt like I'd learned to control my urges, even though seeing boobs a few minutes ago had just about collapsed that feeling altogether. I had done it. Maybe I stumbled for a second, but my creative visualization had rescued me.

"Yeah, I hear that. I don't know ... I mean, a few hours ago you were Alvarez's lady ... I don't know if two lonely people sleeping in the same unsupervised room is a great plan."

She smiled. "So ... the mighty Ved doesn't trust himself around little ol' me? What are you going to do, attack me while I am sleeping?" she whispered into my ear. I could feel her hot breath in my left ear. She was so close. "Alvarez was a substitute for what I really wanted, a way to get closer to what really makes me ... hot."

No one (other than my narcissist self) had ever referred to me as "the mighty Ved" before, and hearing it from another person was arousing. Combine that with her whispering, and her lips just barely brushing my ear as she spoke. I was, again, falling apart. She was still so fucking close; visualization wasn't gonna be my Jesus now. I felt the blood draining from all the unnecessary places in my body where it had been hiding out, and flowing toward my man-parts. I was sweating, like I'd just eaten a plate of boneless buffalo wings, and I'm afraid to speculate that my face was flushed. I needed air; this fucking bus was like a submarine, every window sealed tight ... What the fuck is wrong with these people? It's hot as fuck in here ...

"You know he was the best friend I've ever had, right?" was all I could muster.

My erection was causing a pinching somewhere in the folds of my underwear, and I desperately wanted to adjust it, but how? I tried to put it out of my mind, but it seemed that at least ten hairs were caught in something, and that something was pulling uncomfortably at them. I imagined them, the hairs, all stretched to their maximum length, slowly pulling the follicle out of the skin like hot needle pricks ... I adjusted.

She watched me closely. "Something wrong?" She smiled.

I smiled, feeling that I'd made the right decision. "Uh ... just needed a minor adjustment. I'm uh ... better now."

"What's the matter, Ved? You are usually so ... calculated." She had a look of theatrical questioning on her face.

"No, it's ... well ..."

She placed her hand on my lap and felt the obvious bump. When I realized what she was doing, I couldn't help but sigh. I looked at her hand, rubbing small circles on the penis shaped lump. The pants were so thin that looking down, I saw the exact shape of my dick. There was no mystery left; it was the same as getting a boner in a spandex bodysuit. The flimsy cloth shaped itself into the mold of a penis: head ... collar ... Oh my God.

"Ved, we are going to get a room. We are going to spend the weekend together," she said quietly and very seriously while looking down on the lumpy mound she was rubbing circles on. She wasn't asking me; she was telling me calmly and firmly what I was going to do.

"OK."

"Good. Oops," she said, gesturing down at the lump in my pants.

Looking down, I saw a nickel size spot forming in the wool. Something wet.

She unzipped my fly and reached her hand into my pants, grabbing me with a hand that was warm but not when compared to my inflamed man-part. The sensation of her hand wrapping around it was wide enough and powerful enough to make even the bottom of my spine shiver. Everything from my nipples to my toes was vibrating, shivering, and unable to remain still. My hips were moving, and even when I called upon them to stop, they kept her rhythm. I was sliding down the seat in some primitive desire to be horizontal while being fondled this way. My knees bumped into the back of the seat in front of me, leaving my head sticking up above the top of the seat behind me a few inches.

She was proud of herself. She stared at her hand that was moving subtly up and down, smiling at the sight of it. That was the first time anyone had ever really looked at me that closely. That thought dawned on me, but I was too wrapped up in what was going on to care as much as I might have otherwise.

"You are going to come inside of me a hundred times over the next month. Say it," she said, without taking her eyes off of my lap.

"I'll come in you a hundred times," I said, defeated.

"You will never mention your battle buddy's name to me ever again. Say it." She tightened her grip.

"I won't."

She raised her head and looked at me. "Can I kiss you?" she asked.

I thought that to be a peculiar question given the circumstances. Her face was beautiful and her hair fell over her eyes, allowing me to see only parts of her blue irises. Her skin was so clear, so flawless. Her collarbone was visible through the dipping neckline of her shirt, and when I looked deeper into her shirt, I could see the white of her left breast hanging the way an unrestrained breast hangs.

I wasn't prepared to commit to any feelings; I was opposed to the idea of this, not only because she was my battle buddy's girlfriend, but because I hadn't established the rapport I'd demanded so adamantly just moments ago. There was no future in this; there was no potential. Sex had become such an iconic thing to me in those years of suffering without it, the act of it, no ... the accessibility of it, is what turned me on.

We are taught to hide these body parts from the world, covering them up and only exposing them after much contemplation. Now they were being offered to me the way a bag of Funyuns is passed between buddies on a road trip.

I was electrified by the offer. Being forced to say the words "I promise to come in you" went well beyond simply suggestive behavior. She was demanding that I claim her body as mine, verbally. She was offering to do whatever was needed in order to achieve such a climactic ending. She was promising me days and nights filled with being twisted up in each other, alone, to share in the most sacred places a woman possesses.

I hadn't had recreational sex up to this point. I'd loved Mia, as a friend anyway, for years, and she gave me, as a parting gift, the one thing I had never had. Jenney was like a sister in so many ways that my love for her was always hard to explain. She'd given herself to me in an oddly impersonal form. Sure, we'd done things together that promised more than friendship, but at the very heart of it, Jenney wasn't sexy; instead, she was stimulating in other ways. Her protective nature reduced the sensuality of the act. She refused to be seen naked, either by demanding absolute darkness or remaining scantily dressed as we embarked upon the act of love making ... or fucking, whatever it was. She'd treated it as a favor to me, in a way, which was something that would have bothered me on principle if she weren't such a cool girl. The first time we'd slept together, she told me that she wished she knew I was going to be around a year from now, to which I'd said absolutely nothing. Not lying was being honest, and honesty is what Jenney liked the best, even when it was painful.

Now, Hailey was becoming the one element of sex I hadn't had yet. She was provocative, secure, bold, confident, and demanding. I knew when I saw her face so close, what she would feel like and what she would sound like ... later in life I would say that sex was all the same, and that the wiggling was the only thing that ever changed; this all started with Johansen. As I began to answer her question, I could see her writhing beneath me, above me ... I could see her bringing me coffee in bed and walking naked to and from the kitchenette, unabashed. She was a different animal, for sure. She was a sexual being who'd slept with uncountable numbers for the sole purpose of fulfilling her own desires. Maybe that was the difference between sexy and attractive; maybe sexy was when a woman fucked you for her own purposes, not for your sake. She wasn't touching me like I was some pity case, she wasn't handling me as if she felt sorry for me, she was working me the way a man wants to be worked, like he is desired and genuinely wanted.

She would slide around on me, mixing my sweat with hers, twisting into unthinkable positions in order to better satisfy me; I could sense it. I wanted to see her back, the small of it ... I wanted to see her muscular composition with sweat and whatever other fluids might end up there ... I wanted to kneel behind her as I undressed her, making her into the mannequin Mia had been that night, licking her, rubbing her, exposing her.

"Yeah, you can kiss me. Please kiss me," I said breathlessly.

She leaned forward to kiss me, stopped inches from my lips, put her finger against my lips and placed her head on my lap.

I stared out the window, seeing images of Alvarez in different places I could recall us having been. As I watched him in the still shots of my memory, he turned to ash, and then, blowing away in the wind, forever erased.

I would never talk to him again, I decided. I wouldn't look him up or write him letters ... I'd erase him and remember him as the friend he was back then. I could replace him and he could replace me, even if he didn't want to. He would when I dismissed him.

The landscape blurred past me; I was unable to focus on the reality of the land. I could only see my friends disappearing into clouds. Their faces were so bewildered; they looked at me with such unspeakable disappointment. I couldn't say a word to apologize. I couldn't speak.

The bus was getting dark. It was a rainy kind of dusk, the worst kind.

I turned my attention away from the window, deciding I'd held out long enough. She'd worked hard enough. I looked at her blond hair bouncing wildly as she moved. I reached through the neck of her shirt and grabbed the breast I had seen. She moaned and began a humming that lasted as long as I was holding her nipple between my index finger and thumb. I placed my right hand on the small of her back, pinning her between my hands and pushing in on her from both directions. She was warm, with sweat on the small of her back ...

"I'm going to come," I said as quietly as I could manage.

She, rather than withdrawing, picked up the pace.

When the lights stopped flashing, when the earth stopped trembling, she sat up. She looked at me, placed her hand against my chest, and said with a seriousness that confounded me, "Thank you."

Ten minutes later she was asleep beside me; her head on my shoulder, and her hand in mine. I looked at her occasionally, seeing things I hadn't seen before. Dimples. Cowlicks. Tan lines. Recreational sex wasn't going to come easy for me; I was too connected to people.

I knew that I had a partner for the next thirty days; someone to help me through the time at Benning. It was becoming a pattern, always having someone there. I was depending on the most fickle animal on earth to remain beside me, unconditionally.

She would remain faithfully beside me and be everything I had imagined her to be. She would hold me faithfully for what should have been our thirty days together, but, little did I know, we didn't have thirty days together.
Chapter 8

The House on May Street

Ft. Benning, just outside of Columbus, Georgia, compares to Ft. McClellan, Alabama, the way a 757 compares to a kite being flown by an eight-year-old boy. Driving onto the post, there is one structure in particular that gives the post its look, the way the Empire State Building defines New York, or the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris. There are towers that look almost like high-tension power poles, with four sprawling arms atop them. At night, driving for the first time into Benning, we saw the ominous red lights blinking randomly at different cadences, bright enough to see the scaffold-like metal bars that held the monsters in place. We knew immediately what they were. They were the Airborne Training towers.

Johansen had slept like a baby the entire way, well, since she'd done that wonderful thing. I tried not to ponder it too closely as it really repulsed me on many levels, and I knew that I would be expected to kiss her someday. Right now, however, that was unfathomable, and I hoped that whatever the two of us were going to do about our sleeping arrangements, it wouldn't involve making out. Maybe she would brush her teeth?

When I woke her up, she looked at me with doting eyes. I use the word doting because she was blinking rapidly, had a smirk on her face, and held my arm as if she were a ninety-year-old woman walking on ice beside her strapping young grandson. She held my arm relentlessly, as if she were afraid to let go, literally for the fifteen minutes we rode through the post, while we grabbed our belongings and unloaded off the bus, and even when we reported to the office. I was concerned about us being seen as fraternizing, but apparently in the regular Army, no one gave a shit. We were of the same rank, well, we were both privates; she was an E-2, and I was still an E-1, but I suppose we were close enough in rank that no one thought anything of it.

I was a little put off by this sudden display of affection as it seemed premature to me. I mean, when we had gotten onto the bus a few hours ago, I was losing Jenney, and she was losing Alvarez. I don't know what the two of them said as their goodbyes to each other, but I still felt like this was a little too soon.

After checking in at the reception office, we were told to be in formation on Monday morning at 0600 hours, dressed in BDUs and jump boots. They weren't all that different from regular combat boots, but they were a little taller, made with better leather, and about a hundred and fifty bucks. I didn't own jump boots at that time, so we'd made a note to go to the Army Surplus store over the weekend.

The rest of the guys who had been on the bus went into the barracks and found their assigned rooms. They kept asking me if I was coming, and I kept making excuses for not going with them while Johansen and I stood on the sidewalk waiting for them to leave. Eventually, when I'd said, "I'll be right there," for the hundredth time, they were all gone and the two of us remained alone in the dark.

"So, what do you wanna do about tonight?" she asked.

"I don't know. I mean, I have no idea what's out there. I'm sure there are hotels around, or there's got to be on-post lodging ..."

"Yeah, we could try that," she said.

I was a little excited, to be honest. If I'd really been having a hard time accepting the two of us as a couple, I would have been more hesitant, but at this point I was kind of looking forward to shacking up with her for the weekend. There were my friends from McClellan to think about too; the ones who were now in their rooms waiting for me. In fact, Jacob Hill, one of the guys I liked the most, had vowed to reserve me a room in the barracks with him. I felt bad leaving him behind, but really, more than the two of us in a hotel room seemed like a crowd.

"I'll go in and get a number for a cab. I'll have it pick us up right here. Be right back," she said with a smile.

A moment later she was back, and a moment after that the cab pulled up. We told him to take us to on-post lodging, but he informed us that we were too late to get a room on-post. In his broken English, he told us about a house that we could rent by the week for cheap. Three hundred and fifty bucks a week, and it could easily sleep eight; and if we were interested, he might be able to get us a better deal if we took it for the month.

We were excited about the idea of this, and I immediately went into the barracks and rounded up a few more people to join us, while Hailey did the same in the female barracks. By the time we got to the house, it was after 9 p.m., and when the third cabby shuttle dropped off the last load of us, there were a total of twelve of us living in a four bedroom, 3200 square foot house in the suburbs of Columbus for a grand total of $1200 for the next thirty days.

Yusuf, the cabby, lived nearby and promised to both stop in every now and again and to be our personal cabby for the duration of our stay. "I rent dees house to many soldier," he said, after seeing how happy we were with the living conditions. "It good house, good for money."

We agreed with pats on the back and a, "You're the man, Yusuf."

Johansen and I announced that we were taking the master. No one seemed to care about the room, yet there were a number of questions about the two of us sharing it. Hill, not understanding exactly what we meant by that, said he'd sleep on the floor in our room if that was OK.

I looked at Johansen, who looked at me and shook her head.

"Uh ... I don't think that's gonna work, bro," I said, looking at Hill.

"What do you mean? I said I would take the floor. What, are you and Johansen gonna sleep in the same bed?" he asked.

"Yes," Johansen chimed in.

He was startled by what that meant, then it faded and a smile crossed his face. "Goddamn Ludo, that didn't take long," he chided me.

"It wasn't Ludo's idea," she said, taking me off the hook.

I wasn't entirely off the hook; there was still the Alvarez thing to deal with. Even if I had come to grips with being a traitor, none of the other guys had yet. Not that they loved Alvarez; no one but me loved him. It was just the principle of it, I supposed.

Michaels and Tomlick winked at me and mouthed, "You motherfucker!" with smiles and looks of incredulousness, but Leon and Davis weren't so thrilled.

"You really think that's a great idea, Ved?" Davis asked me.

Davis had been in the blanket party; he'd been one of the guys to hit me repeatedly while I tried to cover my face. I never forgot that, but I never took part in any of the beatings that had come his way. I liked the kid, even though he was from the Houston area, and all the guys from the Houston area had chips on their shoulders. Looking at him now, he didn't intimidate me one bit. If push came to shove, I could make quick work out of him, but I hoped it wouldn't come to that.

Too much attention had been drawn to this situation, and too many people knew about it, including the four girls who Johansen had brought with her. One of these girls, Kittie Marsel, was a good friend of Jenney, and I knew before we'd even claimed our room that Marsel would be contacting Jenney on this ASAP.

I'd honestly decided that Jenney and Alvarez were out of my life. I still loved them both, but I knew that they would never see me again.

I was never keen on reconnecting with people from my past; it was something that was born out of shame from who I used to be, but easily carried over into the real world too. What would we have in common as the years passed? Basic training? How long would it be until that was an old story? I didn't care to hear tales of their kids going to school and getting big as the years dragged by ... Fuck, no one wants to hear stories about other people's kids. I hate that; I hate looking at pictures, asking how the youngsters are doing ... all of it. There would be nothing to draw any of us back together in the future, and no reason to see each other again, ever ... and if one of them happened to end up in a unit with me somewhere down the road, we'd have to interact, giving us something to have in common again. Friendship is geographical.

People want to believe that friends are friends for a lifetime. They want to believe that what they had was so special that no amount of time could tear it down. My philosophy is that if you ignore the Golden Gate Bridge for long enough, even it will collapse, let alone human relationships. Friendship is based on needs; it's based on that person being who you needed in that particular time, in that particular place. You cannot take a high school buddy with you into the future. Once you are apart from each other, your lives contain different elements. You have new friends and new family to lean on. All the two of you have left is what was.

Answering calls from friends I haven't seen in years is worse than talking to the IRS. I don't know what to say to them, and I don't want to ask them frivolous questions about their jobs, their marriages, etc. I don't want to talk about the old days when we did this or that, because none of it really matters anymore. They were there for me to shape me, and to help me get to where I am now. Why not just love them for what they were to me then? Why not just let them remain like a brother in my mind? Why ruin it by trying to apply them to my life now?

In my opinion, friends, best friends, are there to help us through the times we find them in. I haven't had a best friend. I've had many best friends—each of them important to me in different ways, but all of them have one thing in common: during that time, they were the best friend to me I could have imagined. In the afterlife, I hope to join them for another round of human interaction, to come back in different roles and do different things. In this lifetime, however, I prefer to place them where they belong: in my memory and in my heart. I will be forever thankful for who they were to me then.

"Look, man, I'm gonna say it to you like this; to all of you like this ... I'm going to be sleeping with Johansen. That's just the way it's gonna be. I know a few of y'all can't wait to talk to Alvarez or Jenney about this, and by all means, please do so. I am never goin' to see either of them again ... I'll probably never see any of you again after this ends. I might not even see Johansen again for that matter ... point being: kiss my ass. If you don't like it, you know where the barracks are."

I didn't care who they told or how soon they told them. I was here for a month, and then I was gone. I'd learned to meet people, live with them, bond with them, and then let them go on the wind. From now on it was going to be that way; not only by desire, but by the way this military thing was designed. People needed to come to terms with the truth now. I wasn't going to be blackmailed or rumored about. I wanted them to know that I was OK with the truth, and whether or not they were, was completely up to them.

When Johansen and I got to our room, we lay down on the bed. I was still in my class A's, and she was still in her jeans and T-shirt. The ceiling fan was on as we lay there; we both watched it spin in circles. The breeze it was blowing directly down onto us felt amazing. I wasn't dying to undress her and do all the things I'd been thinking about doing to her; I was content to just lay there and talk to her. The way she was holding onto my arm and looking at me was more than perfect, and more than I could have ever hoped for. There was something secure in having her, not just to do what two people do, but to have someone to look out for, and someone to take my side in the politics of living with twelve people under very stressful conditions. Whatever the following weeks would bring, I was content to know that I had this girl beside me.

"You think they'll tell them?" she asked whimsically.

"Probably," I said.

"Does that bother you?"

"Not in the least."

"Good."

A long minute passed us wordlessly. She slid over toward me and rolled from her back on to her stomach. She reached out and touched my neck; after a second she unbuttoned my jacket. I just lay there feeling the breeze coming down on me, thinking how far from Blythe I felt. It was more than just the miles from here to there; it was the lifetime of difference. Here, Ved was so sure of things, and so confident in his ability to decide on things. Without the burden of a past, people are limitless. All those years I'd been treading water with a cinder block tied to my feet, unable to do any better than survive. Once I'd left that town and all the people who knew me there, the cinder block had fallen off, leaving me with the ability to swim forward, backward ... any way I pleased.

As Hailey stood on the bed before me and began to undress, I thanked God, for the first time in my life, that I was alive.
Chapter 9

Forever so Far

Airborne School wasn't so different from basic training really. We were still ordered around in the same fashion, still threatened with being tossed out for this and that, and still supervised way too closely. Of course, this wasn't nearly as threatening as basic training had been because there were soldiers of all ranks, all branches, and even all countries in the program. So, while they were hard on us to a degree, there wasn't nearly as much babysitting as there had been formerly. Everyone was there for one thing, one goal, one tiny object—a pair of silver wings with a parachute in the middle. It was no larger than an inch and a half in width by maybe three quarters of an inch tall, but when it was pinned to your jacket, your name wasn't "soldier" any longer; it was simply "airborne." The word "airborne" was a noun, and a verb. You were called "airborne," your reply to any question in which the answer was affirmative was "airborne." The more you said the word, the more it sounded like "hairbone." When you were asked a question, the response was, "Hairbone, sarnt," or at least that's how it sounded.

"Can you run ten miles, airborne?"

"Hairbone."

"Are you gonna drop out of this class, airborne?"

"No, sarnt, hairbone!"

I must admit that the use of this word alone was a good thing. There was something about being airborne that the rest of the Army didn't offer. It was a club, a membership into something that implied that you are willing to risk your life for your country—or the additional $200 bucks a month in hazardous duty pay, either way—when these wings were pinned on your chest, you were no longer a fuckin' leg. The term "leg," which normally referred to any soldier who wasn't airborne, was never said without the "fuckin'" in front of it. Without it, it just wasn't insulting enough. When the jumpmasters would get pissed at you for doing something wrong, they'd call you a fuckin' leg; when you were doing well, they'd call you airborne, making it easy to distinguish your progress.

Another unfortunate difference was that we were not allowed to walk, anywhere. No matter where you were going, you were expected to be moving at a double-time pace, which I eventually realized meant twice as fast as walking, which meant you were to be at least doing the "airborne shuffle." The term "shuffle" was implemented because of the third thing that was different from regular Army; there were no PTs or sneakers. All physical training done in airborne school was done in regular BDUs with jump boots on your feet. That may not sound so tough to you, but imagine running around the town you live in wearing your father's work boots. Now imagine that same process in pants, a T-shirt, a button down shirt on top of that, and doing all this while running on hot asphalt in Georgia for up to ten miles. There was no tolerance for failure here at Benning. They'd kick a lieutenant colonel out just as fast as they would a buck private; it didn't matter who you knew or what you were outside of here. If you were weak, you were as good as gone.

There were about ten jumpmasters assigned to every running formation watching the lines of soldiers as they ran. Their job was to make sure those ranks (lines of soldiers running side by side) were sharp, in perfect cadence, and completely lined up with one another. If they saw you half a step behind, they'd call your roster number out, alerting you that you were off step. If you stepped back a full step, they'd grab you and pull you out of the formation, setting you aside with the rest of the weak. Once you were in the fallout platoon, you were warned. The next time, you were history.

Georgia is a humid place, and I never saw a day of training that wasn't at least eighty-eight percent humidity and eighty-five degrees. The climate was intolerable. Even early in the morning the air was damp, even if the temperature wasn't that bad yet. By the time we ran to the formation, we were wet and sweaty with rings around our armpits and necks, and the first signs of sweat breaking through our backs. At seven the sun came up, and the temperature instantly climbed. We didn't do PT every morning, simply because depending on where we were training that day, our run from the company area to the training area could be five miles, making our commute to the range our PT.

The school itself is three weeks long. The first week is about getting in shape, understanding your gear, and jumping out of mock doors and small towers to learn the procedural part. There's more to exiting a bird than you might think; after all, it isn't a recreational jump. Airborne operations are always done in the middle of the night; however, at Benning the training jumps are done in the daytime. Most of our first week was spent learning the harnesses, learning how to steer a damn near impossible to steer parachute, and jumping off ledges in order to learn to land properly. The first week was really just about getting everyone on the same page. It was strength training mostly, and I realized that coming here straight from basic was an advantage. Some of the older dudes who had been sitting behind a desk for the last eight years were the first to get booted, while to us, it was business as usual.

On Friday of my fist week, during one of these simple and redundant jumping exercises, I felt a pull in my groin. It was sharp and hot and felt more like I'd been whacked in the groin with a machete. I tried to control my reaction to the pain and to control the fear that came with it. I tried to convince myself that I could survive the class while gimping around with a pulled groin. No matter how I tried to favor my leg, it hurt. Any motion in any direction felt like hot knives sliding back and forth, but as I tried to convince myself that I could go on, I wondered if that was true.

Being airborne in the first place had stemmed from my great uncle who'd jumped with the 82nd on D-Day. I'd recalled that fact after the Navy thing had fallen through, and it had been one of the first questions I'd asked Wild upon meeting him. I'd been moving toward this school ever since. The Army itself didn't interest me, but I liked what I'd seen of it so far; but without wings, I'd just be a fuckin' leg ... worst of all, I'd know I was just a fuckin' leg. If I'd learned anything at Benning since I'd gotten there, it was that legs are legs. I hadn't known anything about that terminology a week ago.

I decided that no matter what, I was going to stick it out. Too much of what I was feeling in my groin was pity for myself. I figured it could be done; I just needed to stop worrying about it. Until that goddamn leg fell off, I was going to run on it, jump on it, and see if I could get Johansen to rub it for me at night.

By week two, wearing boots was beginning to take its toll on all of us. I developed shin splints a few days into our second week. I wasn't alone in that; six of the twelve of us on May Street already had them. I'd never had this condition before, and I had to admit, making fun of the people who had them before me might have been inappropriate. I now realized that shin splints are nothing to joke about. We dealt with the pain at night by applying cold and hot treatments for as long as we could tolerate, but I was never sure this was really helping. Someone in the house had said they used this sort of therapy in high school after track meets. Of course, all of this was before the internet, so there was no easy way to check out these facts. So we did what we knew to do, believing that maybe the placebo effect would help if the hot and cold bullshit didn't.

Our big house on May Street looked like a fucking medical facility when I walked into it at night. Since Yusuf's car was a piece of shit Caprice, six passengers were the maximum at one time, leaving at least six of us to wait the additional hour for him to come back. Our house rule was that the first load had to eat at home, so the second load could eat dinner on-post while they waited. That rule wasn't observed nearly as well as it should have been, but that's what you get when you have a house full of eighteen-year-olds who didn't know how to cook anything that couldn't be grilled on the barbecue.

When we'd get back to the house, last night's medical supplies were lying around the living room where they'd been left when whoever was using them had passed out from exhaustion. If you were on the second load getting back to the house, you would see guys and girls in different positions scattered about the living room, all with one part of the body in particular being nurtured—the legs. Ace bandages, ankle supporters, foot baths, ice packs, medical tape, and pain pills of all varieties were among the tools we utilized nightly in order to prepare ourselves for another hot and painful day. The air conditioner never got to take a break as long as we lived there, having agreed to keep the house as close to thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit as possible. The arctic room smelled of dirty socks and Bengay, and looked very similar to a M*A*S*H tent.

If one person got a Percocet or Flexural prescription, they were shared, along with countless over-the-counter creams, pills, and liquids. We took pills by the handful in the mornings in order to get our muscles loosened up the point where we could walk, aching and burning all the while. If they were taken at 0500 hours, by the time Yusuf dropped us off on-post they had an hour to begin working. It usually took my regimen of Percocet, Flexural, Tylenol, caffeine pills, and Dayquil the first mile of running, before they'd start working.

My groin was still the worst of my pains, well, until I jumped from a ten foot platform on Friday of week two. The instant I'd hit the ground, I thought my shins had snapped in half, but it turned out that I only had stress fractures. I was told that the natural progression from shin splints was to stress fractures, and after a one-hour visit to the medical facility, I was dropped back off at the range with a bottle of Vicodin. The house would be happy about having new drugs to pass around, I thought.

I began taking ice baths at night, which I had never been desperate enough to do before, while Johansen washed my back and pampered me as best she could. This was after first trying to apply Flexall 454 to my groin, which resulted in the sensation that my testicles were going to burn off completely, leaving a little pouch full of ash dangling between my legs.

Johansen had suggested the ice bath, which sounds terrible and feels much worse than that. She too, was having problems. Beyond her own shin splints, she had dislocated her shoulder by accidentally getting her arm stuck in the harness assembly as she jumped out of the second series of towers in the middle of the second week. Instead of the harness she was wearing catching her weight as she fell, her outstretched arm had caught her fall, pulling it completely out of socket. She was given the opportunity to recycle, which she emphatically rejected, so they set her arm back in place right there on the jump range and told her to "drive on." She did, but her arm was so badly fucked up she had to learn to do things, like brush her teeth, left-handed. Every morning when the alarm clock went off, I would help her unbutton her pajama top and apply a topical anesthetic to her shoulder. The way her shoulder looked was enough to make me gag, and after the first day, it looked progressively worse for the next five days.

She never mentioned her pains. She simply endured them. At PT when we were doing push-ups, I would try and spot her in the crowd, wondering how she managed to do them. She did them mostly one handed.

We were all looking forward to the last week, when all we'd have to do was one actual jump a day, from a real plane, with a real parachute. There was nothing to critique. No pass or fail. All you had to do was exit the aircraft and load into the buses afterward. Assuming you didn't kill yourself in the thousands of ways that were possible to do so, you were a pass and issued your Jump Wings.

My legs were getting worse, especially my shins, and I considered dropping out on a medical the Sunday before Jump Week. When I mentioned that to Johansen, waking up beside her that morning, she got tough with me, telling me to suck it up and deal with it, then pulling off her shirt to reveal the purple and green shoulder that looked like dead flesh. The black bruises were linear, as if they were following the muscles that had torn, with pale yellow and green swirls mixed in. The entire wound was wrapped in a red rash-looking oval, which was always hot to the touch. It was hard to argue with.

"You're not gonna quit, Ved. Not now. We're almost out of this place, almost done. Next week is the easy part, so you can't quit today or tomorrow ... You suck it up and deal with it, just like the rest of us." She had tears in her eyes as she told me this, and I knew that it wasn't only about getting through the week. She was feeling the end coming, just like I was. We were both trying to figure out how we would say goodbye to each other in seven days.

Time had gone so fast. Between the rigorous days that flew by and the female companionship I looked forward to coming home to every single night, I didn't have time to blink before we were having this conversation. My heart ached for her; I couldn't imagine the idea of moving on without her, and even though we'd tried with all our might to keep it casual, it was much more than that. It was much more than anything I had ever felt for a woman in my life. We had this knowledge of each other, and we knew the details of each other's lives. We laughed in bed every night, rarely disagreed about anything, and had held each other, cared for each other, and nursed each other for hours and hours at a time. I knew her body as well as I knew my own—what she liked, what she didn't like, and I made sure to do plenty of the latter just to get a rise out of her constantly. We showered together, ate together, took walks at night together, and rolled the dice by taking handfuls of pills together.

We made love nearly every day—high, sober, in pain, unable to feel pain—just to have one thing in our daily lives that felt good. When fucking wasn't possible, I gave her massages and spoke softly to her about how beautiful she was, willing her to believe in me, to believe in what I was saying to her. I didn't want to fall in love with Hailey Johansen from the beginning. I had promised myself that I wouldn't fall in love with her, but now with the end coming, the end so close, it seemed like dying would be less painful than leaving her.

"I know. I'll suck it up ... I was just kidding. I can make it," I said, pretending that was true.

"You have to, Ved. I'm not graduating without you."

"I know. I'll make it."

We'd gotten a class about jumping and the most common errors that get people killed or maimed, all of which were somewhat unavoidable depending on who was jumping before you or after you. Most of the things you can fuck up on a jump don't hurt you, but they kill the person behind you. With these sorts of consequences, everyone was extremely careful to do their best for the guy behind them.

The T-10 Charlie parachute is worn on your back, like any parachute. Above your belt buckle in the front is a reserve parachute that is shaped like a giant loaf of bread. Attached to the reserve is a circular handle, and when one pulls this handle, a giant spring pushes the reserve forward and out. The idea is that if you need to pull your reserve, then you are having a serious malfunction with your main.

Usually when a main parachute malfunctions, what you have is a streamer. It's basically nothing more than an un-inflated parachute, which looks like a streamer. The reserve is spring loaded in order to shoot out past you and your main to catch air before it deploys, preventing it from tangling up in your main and failing also.

The main parachute is attached to a yellow rope, twenty feet long, which you connect to a cable in the plane. When you jump, the connected rope pulls out your main chute as you fall away from the aircraft. The chute, when pulled out, catches the air and opens completely, bringing you to a sudden halt, then carries you downward at between twenty to twenty-five feet per second.

That yellow rope, called a static line, is the most dangerous part of any jump. If that line gets tangled on any of your equipment in the process of leaving the aircraft, it is unable to pull your main. In essence, that makes you a towed parachutist. On one end of the line, the static line is connected to a cable; on the other end of the line, it's connected to your equipment. You are then dragged behind the plane, below the plane, and subject to the impact that comes from the other jumpers crashing into you as they leave the bird.

There is a machine, a winch that is in the plane, specifically designed to pull towed parachutists back into the plane, but they rarely work. The force of a two hundred pound man being dragged through the air at two hundred knots makes that task very difficult. If the jumpmaster can determine that you are still conscious, he will cut your static line, allowing you to free fall away from the bird and pull your reserve. If you are unconscious—which most towed paratroopers become very quickly, due to the beating you get from your fellow troopers crashing boots first into your back and neck, or the punishing you take from being beaten against the bottom of the bird as it whips you around in the wind—you are often lost. They cannot cut you free, and they cannot retract you, so they are forced, more often than not, to land with you in tow.

After nine sometime on that Sunday morning, we got up, showered together, and went to Starbucks. It was only about a block and a half away from the house on May Street, so we walked. I ordered my usual: venti, hazelnut breve latte. She got her iced Americano, and we sat together at a table and relaxed. I read the paper, which involved a lot of news about surrounding towns I'd never heard of, while she read magazines about the happenings of celebrities. After a few minutes, she looked at me. She held her eyes on me for a long time. I could feel it, but I ignored it, pretending not to notice. "Ved, do you love me?"

I looked at her, beautiful as ever in her light blue spaghetti strap tank top, purple shoulder sticking out like a sore ... well, shoulder. She wore cutoff jean shorts that I know she picked out because they brought attention to her incredibly solid legs that now, after a couple weeks of airborne school, looked amazing. She was lean and muscular in the way that women who are muscular should look. She wasn't burly; she was toned to a tee, and her skin was browner and more radiant since the weather had gotten hot.

I wanted to say no, flat out, but looking at her I felt like I could see the future. She would love me forever, taking care of me and babying me the way I don't like to admit, but desperately need. She was more beautiful on that day than she had ever been, and if I'd had the stomach to say "no" any other day of the week, today it was impossible. Her eyes radiated the same Caribbean blue as her shirt, her blond hair a little longer now, but still a million shades of yellow.

"Probably," I answered.

"You realize in a week, we'll be leaving each other?"

My stomach dropped. Of course I knew this; I'd been obsessing over it for the last two weeks. But hearing her say it made it seem more real, more final. I'd always been someone who swallowed the negative stuff, never saying it aloud. Something about making bad things verbal made them more severe. She hadn't said it with any emotion, either favorable or otherwise; she simply asked if I was aware of it. Yet now, I felt like crying.

We still had a week, but I knew these days would be tainted. With the time passing, each day would bring the end closer, making the days sadder as they came and went. Today was the day furthest from the end, and already today was too close. By Wednesday it would be unbearable, by Friday we'd be sleepless, and on Saturday night of next week, we'd be without food, sleep, or rest from the relentless pains of the loss coming in the morning.

"I want to come with you to Ft. Bragg," she said.

I swallowed. Was that possible? She wasn't supposed to go to Bragg. She was going to Ft. Sill in Oklahoma; a post without a single airborne unit, which never made any sense to me. Most airborne troopers went to the 82nd Airborne, or the 101st, somewhere that they could actually jump from planes, not some artillery post in the middle of the plains. I would definitely make a long commute to see her, but Jesus, Oklahoma? How long could I do that? How long could we possibly stay together if absent from each other? We were eighteen-year-old kids with a whole life ahead of us; there was no way we could survive a distance like that.

Oh ... to see her undress for me on my bed, the way she had that first night; I wanted to believe I would have driven anywhere. I had been out of control for her since then. She'd never let me down. She'd been as sexy and as provocative as I had hoped she would be, and more, from the very first minute we'd had together.

Her confidence was unreal, almost intimidating. I forced myself not to wonder how many guys a woman had to fuck in order to be that confident, as to not scare the will out of myself.

Hailey Johansen at Bragg? That would be perfect, ideal even. Maybe I could marry her—me, looking dapper in my Class A's with my red airborne beret on my head, and Hailey, in a chaste white dress (OK, maybe a cream color) with ribbons in her hair and a garter belt exposed through a long slit in her skirt that ran to the top of her thigh—if I could take Johansen with me to Bragg, I would have everything I needed.

I could settle down with the third girl I'd slept with, right? Would that be cheating myself of some life experiences? I could do this; I could stay with her forever. She was beautiful, caring, and madly in love with me. Even if our thing had been born from betrayals and selfish lust, it was still something better than anything I'd ever had before her. I loved Johansen. I knew Johansen and loved her ... Jenney was plain and unemotional ... Mia had fucked me out of pity ... or boredom.

"How would you do that? I mean, do you even know the process to do something like that? There's got to be a ton of red tape in order to—"

"I don't care what it takes; I want to go with you. I don't even want to think about losing you," she said, making solid eye contact with me as if she were looking into me to see if I felt the same way.

"OK, do it," I said after an intentionally long pause. I wanted her to think I'd had to consider it, to not seem so easily won.

"Really? You'd want me to? That wouldn't seem like too much, too fast?"

"Not at all. Going without you feels that way." I smiled.

On the Monday of our last week at airborne school, she was going to talk to the people who could make it happen. She was going to tell them that she wanted to be airborne, really airborne, and that she was sure that the 82nd needed chemical specialists.

We'd slept together that Sunday night, talking about the idea of us being at Bragg together, going home to meet each other's families, spending vacations in exotic places, moving off post together, and maybe even getting ... well, you get the idea. Maybe things were spiraling out of control a little bit, but that's what things do when two people who like each other are facing the end of a relationship; they miraculously save it by dreaming up schemes that may or may not work.

I didn't try to have sex with her that night, guessing that this was a good night for spooning. She hadn't rejected a single attempt I'd made yet, and I desperately wanted to believe that she never would. Better to play it safe tonight.

As I fell asleep, I wondered if it could really happen. Not just Hailey coming to Bragg, but also continuing this thing the way it had been here at Benning. I know that sometimes when you transplant relationships, they never take to the new soil the way they thrived in the old, so while I was hopeful, I was cautiously so.

We woke up Monday morning feeling better, as if the end of the week wasn't going to be so terrible. I wanted to share the news with Hill, but he'd just come to terms with the two of us being a couple. I'd give him time. I'd introduce things to him slowly to avoid any freak-outs he might have. There was nothing I could say to anyone, yet I was so happy that I felt like I had to tell somebody. I considered calling my mom, but decided that telling her my new plans for living in sin wasn't the best idea I'd ever had. So ... I said nothing.

Later, I wished I had.

Johansen and I rode with Yusuf to post a little early on Monday, deciding to eat breakfast on base rather than another greasy meal at Hardees, which always caught up to me at one twenty in the afternoon, like clockwork. When we were in the car, it dawned on me that Yusuf would be someone we could tell, so we did. I told him the wonderful news, expecting his jovial laughter and wishes of happiness, but he remained stoic in the rearview mirror.

"Yusuf, you think this isn't a great idea or what?" I asked, perplexed by his sudden lack of geniality.

"I am so happy for you both," he said, without any real conviction.

Johansen asked, "Wait, Yusuf, what's the matter? You don't seem even half convincing."

"It's a difficult thing, leaving each other, I know, but you must be careful in the decisions you make. I was already married six year when I was your age. You aren't serious about love or you would marry first. No good to have house and babies without marriage," he said into the rearview mirror.

We laughed hysterically. I was relieved. For a minute there, I thought he'd come up with a really powerful argument why we shouldn't do it, something enlightening that I hadn't considered.

"Whoa, easy there fella ... Jesus, Pete, and Joseph ... y'all don't waste any time," I said.

"Best years for woman to give man a child, are young. You two already getting too old ..."

Again, we laughed hysterically. I wished we could take Yusuf with us; I'd liked to have folded him up and put him in my pocket, taking him out when I needed a good laugh. Everything about him was funny, light, and relaxing. He didn't have a mean bone is his body; he was a lover. He'd been hanging around a lot with all of us, driving us everywhere we went, at full price mind you. He didn't ever offer to give us a break on the price of his rides. He argued that he'd gotten us such a good deal on the house that we should have plenty of money for our rides. With that in mind, we always paid him, but we didn't tip the bastard.

On base, we ate breakfast together, happier than either of us had been in the last two weeks. The weight was taken off of us now, and we felt liberated by our decision to stay together, but we didn't have any clue if it would happen or not. Psychologically it made it easier to go on doing what we were doing under the notion that we were making a life together now, rather than having a fling.

After breakfast, I went to the barracks and talked to a few buddies while Johansen went to make inquiries of whom she needed to talk to in order to secure our life together. I didn't go with her, but while I mingled about in the barracks, I thought maybe I should have. She'd been adamant about doing it immediately, while I was more passive. I wanted her to come with me; I didn't want to go anywhere alone anymore, not after tasting the forbidden fruit of a married couple. The honesty, the closeness, the simplicity of being known and understood was more liberating than I had ever thought it could be. My parent's marriage was a distant memory; one I had a hard time recalling. I remembered my father being at "meetings" all the time after his school day was over. I remembered them fighting, and my mother crying ... I just never knew them when they were happy, if ever they were.

When it was time for formation, I saw her standing in her platoon, smiling away. She was happily talking to the people around her. They were talking about her shoulder; I could tell by the way people were looking at it, touching it, and smiling with shakes of the head. People were impressed with her tolerance and endurance. I realized that one of the guys joking with her was a full bird colonel, the oldest and highest ranking soldier in our training class. He was laughing with the rest of them, forgetting his station, his rank, in order to relate to the soldiers.

I was proud of her. She was a soldier, a real one. She was beautiful, a far cry from the rest of the women in this class. I was sleeping with the hottest girl at Ft. Benning, and I was thrilled to be doing so. Not only that, she loved me.

I needed to tell her I loved her, which was something I'd been too cautious about doing. Shit, I'd only slept with three women, and I'd told too many of them that I loved them. I couldn't imagine that anyone enjoyed sleeping with me; it always seemed like such a dirty act that maybe I felt like admitting love, either true or untrue, was par for the course. Maybe I felt like I owed them that, or maybe I was fucked up in the head as to what love even was.

She was in a good mood; I could tell that from the distance between us. She didn't look at me as she joked with the Colonel and the others. Maybe she'd learned something positive when she'd spoken to the S-4 lady. Maybe this was really going to happen.

I admit that I hadn't really believed it would work. I was keen enough to appreciate the gesture and loved that she wanted to come with me. I thought it would be a good crutch, a good way to leave and not ache, thinking that she would be right behind me, a week or two. In that time I would acclimate to my new surroundings, meet people, and begin to find my place. By the time I learned that she couldn't come with me, I would be strong enough to face tomorrow without her. The worst thing would be leaving under the finality of it all, headed to a destination I was yet unfamiliar with. If I could just string it along through that part, I'd be OK. And then there was the possibility that she would come. That was a happy thought too. She was beautiful enough to hold up to any woman I'd possibly meet in the future. She was a beauty, a real beauty, and whether I left here with her or not, I couldn't lose. She loved me and wanted to come with me and that was all that mattered.

I was instantly elated, and even not knowing what she was so happy about, made me happy. If Johansen was that happy, I was that happy. If she'd found out that it wasn't possible for us to leave together, she would never be that happy. She wouldn't be joking around with those guys who were fantasizing about doing all the things I'd already done to her.

I was suddenly nervous about jumping from a plane. God knows we'd trained plenty, and I was definitely aware of what I had to do and when, but it was still a little terrifying. There was a lot of hustling and bustling around, and people were talking and moving, trying to deal with their nerves while we waited and waited for something to actually start.

We'd form up here, wait for a jumpmaster to come over and tell us something, and then we'd be instructed to go over there and form up again. Eventually someone would come over and ask us if we signed this and that ... then on to the next formation. After about two hours we were assigned a bird, put into chalks, and bused out to the air base to load the C-130s. Hill was in my bird, but not in my chalk. There would be one hundred and twenty people per door (two doors to a bird), and we would go out in chalks of twenty-four. The bird would fly over the drop zone, dump twenty-four people out of each door, circle back, and then repeat the process until everyone had exited the aircraft.

We were threatened by every jumpmaster about being a jump refusal, meaning that you suddenly decide that you aren't willing to jump; it's something that rarely happens to seasoned paratroopers, but happens a lot in training. They were telling us that if we stopped in the door, they'd kick our ass right out. Being a jump refusal is similar to announcing that you are a homosexual, for really there are little repercussions that the Army can take with you, other than kick your ass out, but the soldiers may take it a step further. Things that endanger you are not liked, but tolerated; things that endanger others are met with violence.

The inside of the plane is like a hallway with a low wall down the middle cutting the cargo area into two separate, but equal, sides. The wall that spans the hallway has seats that face the outer walls, making the seating arrangement two rows of soldiers sitting facing each other. Two cables run the distance from the front of the plane to the back, and below each of the cables sit rows of opposing soldiers. When the first chalk is called, twenty-four people from each side stand, hook to the cable, and face the rear of the bird. There are a series of checks that take place, and then you wait for a red light to turn green. When the light turns green, the jumpmasters say go, staggering one soldier from each side to go on every-other-second-intervals. Left side, right side, left side, etc. The force of the wind and speed of the plane send troopers from the right door out into the air and to the left, crossing the rear of the plane and vice versa. The one-second intervals are in place to keep soldiers from colliding behind the plane. When you have a jump refusal, the timing gets thrown off, and this results in the potential for midair collisions.

I saw Johansen in her group receiving a briefing. We were all huddled around our jumpmasters in groups by plane assignment. Johansen was jumping plane number six, chalk number three, jumper number four. This was the big moment; all the training we'd done since arriving at McClellan had led us to this very instant. We were about to actually jump out of a plane, and get paid for it. It was still hard to believe that we were allowed to do this, and the excitement wasn't lost on anyone. People were smiling more than I'd ever seen an entire battalion do in unison. They were explaining the drop zone, the texture of the ground we'd land on, and where the rally points were afterward. I kept looking at Johansen, watching her excitement grow with the enthusiasm of the group she was standing in.

Finally she looked my way and saw me looking at her. She smiled at me and blew me a kiss. "I have good news," she mouthed to me, carefully. She didn't want to be spotted talking to me, not in this moment.

I understood her message and turned around quickly as to not get caught. She had good news ... I was excited; maybe she'd done it after all.

Maybe at Ft. Bragg I'd come home to hot food, all the sex a man could muster the strength for, and companionship on a post that would otherwise have a 100:1 guy to girl ratio. I was excited; I smiled at her, dying to know what her news was.

When we were loaded onto the planes and the engines roared to life, it was time. The temperature outside was perfect, mid-eighties and cloudy, with a four knot breeze. I thought it would be a good day to die, if that's what I was called to do today.

I didn't care what happened; I was going out that door, balls out, no hesitation. These are the things you come to terms with when you are a paratrooper. I had four more years in the Army where I would exit these planes often; maybe one of them would kill me, maybe not. If it was going to kill me, I'd prepared myself for the afterlife the best I could.

I'd never had any good reasons to live, nor had I ever wanted to live forever. I remember Nic asking me one time if I had one wish, what it would be. I told him I'd like the power to know where anything I was looking for was located. He'd scoffed, saying, "How about living forever?" as if I'd missed the obvious correct answer.

"No. I want to die young," I said.

I know that people fear death, fear the afterlife, or lack thereof ... but I never have. I'm more afraid of living under conditions that cramp my freedom than death itself. Learning to be ready for death was a simple meditation technique. While relaxed, you simply let go. You simply dare the universe to take you.

When I'd chosen to go airborne back in Blythe, I'd assumed it was far more dangerous than it was, and yet I'd signed up for it anyway. Now that I was more informed as to what the dangers really were, I felt like I controlled two thirds of them; the last third, well, that was up to the guy in front of me and the guy behind me. I'd made my peace with God at basic training, and I was really ready to die. The thought didn't scare me as much as it should have, and only after people had gotten pissed at me for making jokes about us dying, did I realize that I was freaking people out.

Something about this felt right to me; something about a death like this one appealed to me on many levels, and, goddamnit, I was ready.

The bird took off at an extremely sharp angle. The plane seemed like it was headed for outer space. My ears popped as the voices went silent. No one spoke as fear came to each man. On a commercial plane, everyone is asleep within ten minutes; on a military bird, people are getting right with God.

A few minutes later, the bird leveled out and began a series of sharp banking turns. The excitement was building, or the nerves.

After apparently negotiating the heavenly maze, the turns stopped, the plane gained altitude one last time, and the jump doors opened. A rumble shook the plane as air flooded in. We were all awake now, yet I still felt no terror. I was close enough to the doors that I could see the other planes flying behind and beside us. We were ten birds in two large "V" formations with the doors open on all of them. I felt like a Navy SEAL. I felt like fuckin' Clint Eastwood, and I was ready to do this.

The first chalk stood up, prepared themselves, and waited nervously. When the light turned green, they filed out without a single person missing a step. A few seconds after the light had changed color, they were all gone, drifting this very second to earth on a T-10C parachute. Air-motherfucking-borne!

The bird swung wide, banked a few more times, and straightened back out. The doors opened again, and we were told to stand.

I got up off my seat, smiling at the idea of all of this. I wished my mother could see me ... Nic, Mia ... anyone. We checked our static lines again, slapped each other on the ass, sending the "all OK" message to the jumpmaster. I waited, watching the farmland pass by from my unique perspective.

When the light turned green, we shuffled forward. As I passed the safety and the jumpmaster, I yelled it again, but it was like the first time. "Airborne!"

I stepped out the door, with enthusiasm, daring the gods to take me. As I fell away from the plane, I saw rows of parachutes floating silently in the sky.

I'd made my first exit from an aircraft.

Airborne.
Chapter 10

Never Again

Nobody knew who I was.

I wanted to tell them all that I was important, that I deserved a seat in the front row, and that these people crying and walking by should be shaking my hand and saying soft things to me. I wanted them to hug me, to hold me, but they were strangers; I didn't know them, and they didn't even know why I was here.

I wanted to say that this was false; that no one was listening to their wasted prayers ...

I hated the bastard. I'd sung enough songs of joy and praise to last the rest of my life, and I wasn't going to do it again. If I don't acknowledge Him, He won't intervene in any more of my affairs. He won't come stumbling in to find me happy in the living room, and curse at me like a drunken father. He won't steal it, won't steal anything from me anymore.

He won't turn the TV down and ask me questions.

God was dead to me.

I wanted to tell them all that it was over; that nothing remained and nothing mattered in this fucking ritual.

Who was I and why was I here? Yeah, I saw the faces asking questions of me; no one confronted their own questions; no one was brave enough to know the truth.

I wore shiny silver wings on my jacket.

The dead say nothing, and if you have ever mourned the loss of a life, you know that the silence is worst of it.

No sound from within the walls. Beyond the stained glass images of Him, rain was falling down. One cloud found me and poured it out onto me. I hate the fucking rain.

I listened to the rain, trying to hear a voice somewhere in the cold.

You don't move on when death comes this close. You move away, distancing yourself from the blood. Embrace the silence and accept that there is nothing: nothing waiting, and nothing watching. There is nothing else.

The untouched, they cling to the words, accept the hugs and shoulder rubs without wanting to tear the limbs off of the actors. Me, I just wait for the nothing.

I saw her one last time. She was made of plastic. Her olive skin was painted white and highlighted with shades of pink that I'd never seen her wear. Her closed eyes were supposed to look like she was sleeping, but it was only for the ones who never watched her sleep.

I looked at her hands; the hands that had held mine so many times, through so many things.

I wondered if they'd covered the bruising on her shoulder. They thought it was part of the ... damages. The bruises were her wings, and they painted them. Ignorant motherfuckers.

I relied on her to comfort me, to carry me, no matter how badly she hurt. She never once failed me. She wanted to stay with me and carry me through whatever came next.

I kept collapsing, so weak without her.

I wanted to lay beside her now. I wanted to crawl into that tacky white box and wipe the paint off her face. She had to be warm, had to be.

I touched her. I collapsed. I sealed myself in with her for the rest of eternity.

I wanted to undress her, to touch her, to enter into her and make her move the way she always moved. She was always so alive when we were like that, so wonderfully everything at once, there could be nothing more than her. How could anyone have missed that about her? I hadn't been her first, so others had missed that. Others had tasted her as well, so I could never be her first, but I was chosen ... her last.

How did I miss the months at McClellan I could have had with her?

I was worshipping the idol of myself, unaware, kneeling down before myself, fascinated with my change.

If I had done one fucking thing differently, I would have changed the world. Grab her hand, back. Wash her back while she bathed. Walk with her to discuss Ft. Bragg with the S-4.

They would have all known me, these nameless faces sharing red eyes and a box of Kleenex. I would have been a brother, son, uncle, and cousin to so many.

We would have had barbecues in the humid Michigan summers or cold Christmases where our breath would hang idly on each frozen dawn, wrapped in cotton and wool, drinking coffee, and surprising each other with our thoughtfulness for each other.

"A knife? The perfect knife?" I would ask her after opening her tiny gift for me, wrapped in brown paper with simple brown strings making big bows.

"I knew you'd like it," she'd say, her eyes on mine.

"It's the perfect knife. I've been looking for it all my life," I'd say, without expanding on it. I wouldn't tell her of all the knives that had come and gone over the years in my hunt for this ... one. She wouldn't believe me. She'd think I was appeasing her.

She'd have known the knife upon first glimpse of it.

These faces—so odd and cold, so similar to mine, wrecked with the devastation—weren't interested in me. I wanted a parallel life; I wanted the present and the almost was, to exist side by side. I'd make them sit down ... I'd make them watch my memories.

I'd tell them it came from odd places, love. I'd tell them it returns upon this.

I imagined these faces standing in the room around me, as magnetic photographs, in various poses, scattered about a tiny fridge in a tiny government sponsored apartment, with Christmas greetings and birthday party hats. They sent them to us every year ... every year together.

I wanted to watch her walk to the bathroom naked one last time. I wanted to see her wake up with eyes that wouldn't open all the way, stumbling into the kitchen and making coffee as if she were blind. She knew where every utensil needed was kept. She'd put two almost-heaping-spoonfuls of sugar into mine and then sigh as she opened the fridge to get the heavy whipping cream out for me, complaining that I couldn't just drink half and half like the rest of the world.

She'd keep her summer clothes in well-organized boxes, marked clearly with Sharpie pens. She'd model swimsuits for me in fitting rooms, demanding a new one every season, knowing that I couldn't resist her, despite our location.

She'd be flattered by her tireless husband who never grew bored of her, and when her friends complained about their men, she'd smile and say nothing.

I'd buy a boat, just so I could watch her muscular body floating on top of the water as she grabbed the rope and danced across the wake.

She'd drink wine and get sensitive with her buzz.

She'd ask me why I loved her the way I did every year on our anniversary, and I'd tell her the same thing I always told her. "Because you changed me."

Now, it was time to go. I'd spoken to no one, and no one had spoken to me. I was the only ghost in this room.

She died a terrible death, a painful and excruciating death. I would forever carry the scene in my head. Watching from the ground, I saw her. I saw the brutality of the wind, beating such a precious frame against the cold metallic tail. I'd seen the mist following, the red mist that dissipated before it could find me awaiting it, on the ground, just below her.

Maybe she saw me down there, so proud of myself for surviving, for doing everything right, while she breathed her last breath.

I collapsed again.

I was so proud. I had done everything so right, but never once considered the woman who I know was thinking about me.

She was so much better than me. I had never deserved her, not one time, yet I was so proud. I hadn't even thought of her.

We all saw the girl behind the plane.

We all saw them keep coming out the door, crushing her with their boots, one jumper at a time, slamming into the back of her and deflecting off of her, only to have their big green halos open up and save them. Blow after blow to the back of her neck, her shoulders, her head.

The wind was so violent. The beating she took against the tail left a flowing red line on the final fin of the plane. The red crawled back and trailed off into nothingness, into a red mist, like a contrail. The life seeping away as the plane disappeared over the trees.

It did not come back.

She thought of me; I know she did. She cried for me; I've seen it a thousand times since ...

I was afraid to sleep.

I was crowned self-loathing King in the aftermath. Now, I let sleeping dogs lie. Memory is a deep space, and safe waters are always the shallow waters.

I wondered if I had ever told her. Did I ever say it?

All that is left of her is a smile from a formation. The sky was still blue. See, it's true when I tell you that I hadn't ever deserved her.

In the last living vision I have of my beautiful Hailey, she'd mouthed the words, "I have good news."

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