Excerpt:

When I'm high I'm nothing and everything. I am the wind in the trees, the birds in the air, the spackled dust on the hood of my mother's Suburban. I am nothing and everything. It's kind of like losing yourself in a sea of life, you sway with the breeze and you hear the earth sigh. I think best when I'm high: that is to say, I don't think at all. I live. I breath. And I know I could die, but somehow, because I'm finally in touch with the ground beneath my feet, it doesn't matter. Not at all.

My mother doesn't say anything when she sees my dry, red eyes any more. She knows. How could she not? I smell like pot, I have red eyes, and I'm out of it. She knows. And I don't think she really cares. She has better things to worry about. Like my dad's growing addiction to morphine, her own dependency of Valium to get through the day. I am just a teenager, smoking weed behind the school. She'll worry when I get in trouble, but not until then. She flat out told me a year or so ago that I could do anything except inject and snort. So I do everything but inject and snort.

I'm a good boy when it comes down to it. I haven't caused my parents a lick of worry since I was born. That's my younger brother and my older sister. A lick of worry, each of them. Drama queen and delinquent child. I love them, but they hate me sometimes because I'm so fucking good compared to them. It's not like they set out to make trouble. Braden gets blamed for everything, and Lucy's got a reputation as a whore. So they just get in trouble on merit of their reputations. It isn't fair, that's for fucking sure, but whatever. They don't care. Mom and Dad do, but that's their job. To keep us out of trouble and on the straight and narrow. They generally fail at that. But they try, and I suppose that's all one can do.

We're a family. Stupid, prone to fits of hysteria, dramatic: but we're family. And sometimes it's not enough. Especially when there's a whole world of perfect families just outside our front door. I hate that the neighbours can hear my mom and Lucy screaming. I hate that they can see the beer cans practically falling out of the recycling bin every Wednesday morning, and I hate that they talk about us. I know they do. The kids at school talk about us too. We're not poor, but we're weird, and that's enough to get us labelled as outcasts.

--

My best friend Blair and I like to get stoned in a tree by the creek. It's not really a creek, especially in September, since it hasn't rained since March, but it's more like a trickle of really nasty water. I like sitting there, bark under my thighs, smelling the brackish scent and smoking. No one ever comes down here, except the ocassional five year old on the hunt for lizards, and they stay far enough away from us. All the kids know to stay away from Blair because he'll give them wedgies, or worse, push them into the creek. He's not afraid of anybody's parents. Not even mine. That's half of why I like him. The other half are his eyes. They're blue.

“Theo,” he says, passing me the joint. “If you could be anything, anyone in the whole world, who would you be?”

I don't know how to answer, so I stare at him for a few moments and then look at the joint. “Don't know, man. Probably Captain America. Or Batman.”

He looks at me like I've been smoking too much weed. “Yeah? Comic book hero? Dude, I'd be George Fucking Bush. All the money in the world, no responsibilities.” He leans back into the tree, smirking to himself. “Or I'd be Kiera Knightley so I could look at myself naked.”

I roll my eyes. He knows I don't have much interest in girls. But I don't talk about what really interests me, so he can pretend I'm not gay. It's a weird dichotomy. I'm his best friend, and he's mine, and we both know it'd be too much work to get to know someone else as well as we know each other. So we don't talk about it, and it's one of those unacknowledged truths that everyone must be accustomed to by now.

Everyone knows, I think. My parents know. I didn't even have to come out to them. They just gave me a book on gay sex and told me to “wrap it before I tap it,” which is a saying no one should hear coming from their father. Not to mention I have no idea where he learned it from... My sister and brother know for sure; I caught them rifling through my porn stash on my laptop. They were a little alarmed by some of the more kinky stuff, but I doubt they were very much scarred. Hell, Braden got in trouble for leaving his bondage gear in the living room after his girlfriend came over last week, so I think I'm on the tamer side compared to him. And as we said before, Lucy's known as a bit of a slut, so I really can't challenge her to a “who is more oversexed” competition. Especially since I'm a virgin.

I don't mean VIRGIN, virgin, just that I've never had anal sex. I've had blow jobs, given blow jobs, rim jobs, and made out plenty, but never gotten around to the sex part. Just haven't found the right guy, I guess.