Adolescent Confession No. 1

M and J and I were driving around. This was common time-passer for M and J. We were anywhere from slightly to moderately high. After a while, we ended up at a local Wal-Mart. I don’t remember if it was planned or premeditated at all – I followed them to the outdoors sporting section of the store – aisles I would never venture into on any normal trip to Wal-Mart. I lingered around, pretending to look interested in fishing lines and dart boards and others things I would never buy while J slid a bb gun off a rack and slit open the hard plastic packaging with his Swiss Army Knife. M played the lookout and I was simply extraneous. Knowing there would be no use for any voiced objection, I stayed a couple isles away in case they got caught and I needed to pretend I wasn’t with them. J quickly slid the gun into his winter Jacket. When I peered through the metal shelves into their isle and saw them on the move, I was on the move to the exit as well.

I did not yet know these new friends well and although they (we) would mature in unthinkable ways; there’s a certain recklessness and defiance that comes along with being adolescent at the ambiguous turn of the century. I was never carefree, but in surrounding myself, and feeling accepted by those who seemed to be, my 14-year-old self longed to adopt the illusion.

Go go go go go! J yelled as M kicked the beat up blue car into gear. Someone’s coming, he yelled. I don’t remember anyone actually following us, but I this exclamation functioned to heighten the adrenaline affect . They were laughing like two devils and yelling: that was so close! We almost got caught! My heart beat like a humming bird and I couldn’t think of anything to say (or I was scared to say something embarrassing and not cool) Part of me wanted to yell, you fucking assholes could have gotten me fucking arrested! My parents would kill me!

Part of me wanted to jump their bones.

M drove smooth and careful as any fugitive now. When the speed limit was thirty, he never hit thirty-one. J pulled the gun out of his jacket along with a pack of bb pellets he had also taken and began loading them in. We had no destination. We knew the city as well as we knew our oldest friends and our deepest insecurities. It was dark and we felt at least partially hidden and alone. We drove past the closed strip malls and used-car dealerships on Daniel Webster. Through quiet residential neighborhoods and up the hills to the empty middle school. Snaking through the patch of oak tree forest in back, J let fly a few pellets. The bang was soft and inoffensive. I didn’t here the pellets hit any targets. I only heard them shoot.

Every turn we made, I was sure the cops had found us. They were trailing behind like sharks, waiting for the right moment to blind us with their flashing lights and deafen us with sirens. They never came. I reclined in the back seat and the relaxed position hid well the tensions in my head.

When we drove into my neighborhood I pointed out one house. That’s were my ex-boyfriend lives, I announced. He’s an asshole. M shot a couple pellets at the direction of the garage door. Bang. Why I pointed to his home was a mystery then and it still is. I needed to break from my shell of silence. I needed a voice.

This is the way I picture it: The radio’s playing and Sublime’s singing, you look so fine when you lie it just don't show that I know which way the wind blows. Forty oz to freedom is the only chance I have to feel good, even though I feel bad. The frigid chill of New Hampshire winters is beginning to wear off and spring is manifesting through more hours of sunlight, green flower buds and a growing emergence of human life from locked houses to the streets of the city. There’s infinite road, and though we scarcely ever leave the circles of our own city, the road has no ending and goes on and on forever. It is all elevated beautifully by the high and blends into a giant marble of exploration.

M and J seemed to have figured something out I still struggle understanding: that life is not to be taken seriously and work must be sometimes forgotten. Also, that we are less likely to get found out for anything we do, think, or say wrong, than we often believe. I loveed and hated M and J because in being with them, I felt a heightened awareness of how I am nothing at all like them. It’s a front that I hoped to one day make authentic. M wore baggy khakis and the iconic hemp necklace with a large glass bead – the one I made for him – around his neck. When he was not confined inside a car, every bead of his being was acrobatic. Flips, tricks, jumps and reaches. His energy was endless and his fearlessness unchecked. I was madly in love with M. Or, I wish I could have been what he was. Both were probably true and perhaps either of these forces alone are enough to make any person abandon their better judgment. J was different. He was older, having already graduated high school. He was a maniacal jokester and would not hesitate to make anyone the target of his lines. I was in constant fear of being this target, however innocent his jokes were. It took me years to realize that no matter what, these jokes were actually directed at himself, shielding his self-deprecating mind and deep discontent.

This is a story of my lack of agency – my pre-autonomy. It’s not surprising that a person like I used to be, always searching, always evolving, would simply let these types of questionable occurrences happen to her. They filled me both with happiness and discontent, a curious yet common paradox. In my eyes, I was that cool girl that boy-girl. One of the guys. In their minds, before they got to really know me, I was probably just hot. And hot is always good to have around (even then I struggled with the fact that as a female, I am largely ornamental in the minds of the men of the mans’ world).

For the third time that night, we drove past the vacant strip malls and used-car dealerships on DW road. It’s around midnight. At this time of night, our somewhat old-fashioned New Hampshire city has been tucked in to bed and the roads are largely abandoned. M had the steering wheel in his left and the gun in his right. At this point in the night, I suspect I have already lived through the most intense of events. We were beginning to relax, chill out a bit – my heart had nearly reestablished its usual rhythm. J and M are less rowdy. The high is wearing off. Then M pointed it out the window, slows down the car and aims at the all-glass porch in front of a particular store. Click. He pulled the trigger and a bb pellet shot straight through the air before impacting the glass. What was not expected was what happened: in one movement, the sheet of glass shattered into millions of glittering pieces and fell like a waterfall . In no longer than a second, the entire front sheet of glass was gone.

Fuck! Get out of here! Drive! J yelled at M. Holy shit, I screamed. J and I ducked our heads below the windows and M got low too. I peaked out through the window to see if there were other cars around. There were a few distant cars, but I couldn’t tell if they were witnessed to our crime. We pray for green lights. Keep driving. Go! My heart. My heart was be-be-be-be-be-be-beat.

I don’t remember how long we continued to wander after the glass shattered. Wandering becomes a much different matter altogether when fear and uncertainty intensify. It couldn’t have been too long. We needed to abandon the weapon and detach mentally and physically. Let’s throw it in the river, J suggests. Yes. That’s a good idea.

The river was high that night, and alive with white tops. We stood near the damn where the water rushed like a beast. Alive, furious. In the night, with only the orange lights of parking lot to show it off, it looked as black as tar – a thick rushing oil spill. Also, it held the power to help or harm us. If it helped us, and swept the gun away without a trace and it all would be a forgettable blemish. If it rejected the gun, our act would have been something unnatural and inhuman. It was nature’s final say in all of it.

After J flicked the gun into the river, it bobbed in and out of visibility a couple times before the being swallowed up and pushed it along. Our youthful recklessness was, in fact, natural- even, perhaps, inevitable. We waited only long enough to watch it disappear. M drove me home. We said our quite goodbyes. I took long breaths and walked quietly through the dark and sleeping house. I sunk into the comfort of my home, my room, my bed – everything that was real. I must have sighed in one last act of composure, acceptance, and forgetting. It was not difficult to surrender myself to sleep.