“Why do you write such depressing s***?”

Charlie looked across the gap between them, lit only by the glowing clock on the dashboard and a thick November moon, and grinned. He saw that Sam had made it about halfway through the story Charlie had given him, and was holding several loose pages in his hand as if they might burst into flames at any second. He adjusted his body so that he was facing Sam, legs propped on the dash and gloved hands toying with each other in his lap.  “Why do I write such depressing s***?” 

“Yeah, why does everyone have to be so consistently f***ed in all of your poems?”

“Because I think we’re all consistently f***ed. Why write anything other than the truth.”

“Fair enough.”

He considered the boy lounging in the driver’s seat, all lithe athleticism and steel blue eyes, the thickness in his voice against the silence that night—too quiet, as if the world had fallen into a whisper all at once. It did feel that way to Charlie, sometimes, as if things stopped and started like his racing heartbeat, as if the world dropped away when the blood pounded in his ears. He had forgotten to take his Prozac that morning, and the morning before, and a couple mornings before, really probably since it was prescribed. It was just glorified baby aspirin, anyway—a way for his mother to feel like she was doing something and could stop wringing her hands over the kitchen sink and saying “Charlie, Charlie, take a break from it all, Charlie.”
Besides, the world stopped and started with the boy across the car from him.
Whose eyes had glazed over at the disturbing words on the page, all broken home and bloodied hands and psychodrama worthy of a several month stay in a hospital bed.
“You think it’s too much?”
Sam paused, just briefly, and then shook his head. “It’s not too much. It’s just a lot.”
“That’s helpful.”
“Is it about your sister?”
“No.”
“Charlie.”
“Ideally this would have fifty million readers who don’t even know I have a sister so, no, Sam, it’s not about my sister.”
Sam looked up from the page and they locked eyes. “It’s beautiful.” There was something about his eyes, too, something deep and full of feeling—something aquatic, or something primordial, something strangely alive and cold all at the same time. And then Sam looked back down at the page and Charlie decided it was probably a good time to breathe, or something.
He shook his head, as if to reset. “It’s not supposed to be beautiful, anyway. People want the picket fence and the two and a half kids and the imprisoned wife until they have it and they realize it’s as broken as the rest of the world. It’s supposed to be tragic, it’s supposed to… I don’t know…” he gestured as if somehow he could pluck the words from the brisk air in front of him, “it’s supposed to make you want to feel something real, for once.”
Sam looked at him, thoughtfully. There were those eyes again, and that pounding blood in his ears, and probably a great deal of sweat in that cold-November-sweat way. “Do you think you manage to feel things?”
“Probably not,” Charlie pulled his knees up to his chest and stared out the window to his right, studying the way the water hit the rocks and was dragged by itself—or maybe something larger—out to sea again.
“I feel like you don’t.”
“Why not?”
“You talk about things instead of doing them.” Sam tugged at his sleeve, as if to compel him to turn his head. Charlie did not.
Sam gave up quickly. “You’re brilliant, Charlie, you’re brilliant and perceptive but you spend your whole life watching and observing and analyzing and I’m just wondering if… well, never mind. That’s all, I guess.”
Charlie didn’t take his eyes off the water but he could feel Sam’s eyes raking over him, taking in every inch. “You were wondering what,” he managed to croak, before falling back into himself.
“I’d like to help you, Charlie.”
“Help me what.”
“I think you know.”
Charlie studied those waves again, their aching retreat into the abyss, like fingers clawing at the edge of a cliff before being drawn backwards into nothing, falling, falling, falling. “I don’t think I know, Sam.”
Sam picked up a bag of sunflower seeds from the floor of his car, fished around for just the right one, and started picking at it. Charlie watched his reflection, his tongue flicking in and around the salted shell, until he had cracked it open and swallowed it whole. Charlie cleared his throat.
“How’s your mom.”
Sam sighed. “She’s fine. Told me today we may have to sell this car.”
“Seriously?”
“Good old Daddy didn’t leave her much in the way of economic prospects.”
“I’ll miss this car.”
“Me too. I always wanted to drive down the coast. Or to New York. I never went to New York.” Sam worked at those sunflower seeds. It was infuriating.
“You’re selling the car, you’re not dying.” 
“Something’s dying, at least. We don’t have enough time,” Sam mused.
That was certainly true. Charlie’s mom liked to use that as an excuse for her obsessive cleaning. You never know when you’re going to die, and you want to die somewhere clean and tidy. Or something equally ridiculous, to which Charlie typically responded that if you never know when you’re going to die, your last action might be scrubbing the urine stains off of a toilet bowl. He and his mother hadn’t been getting along. 
“And how have you been. Recently, I mean.”
“I have been… not good,” Sam laughed softly, rolled down his window, and tossed a few shells onto the pavement. “It’s been really good to talk to you again, though. Really good for me.”
“I’m glad I could help.” Charlie felt that blood again. It was all he could hear in the silence that stretched like hands across darkness, and suddenly Sam’s hands were around his, as if to keep them warm.  
“I don’t like November,” Sam mused. “Reminds me of my dad. He used to take me ice-fishing in November, just before Thanksgiving. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I didn’t want to be there at all… I think sometimes I brought books to read, which really pissed him off. I guess he thought we were bonding.”
“Did you ever talk?”
“Not once. That’s the beauty of ice-fishing, I guess, you just sit in absolute silence and absolute boredom and wait until nothing happens.”
A particularly formidable cloud was forming just over the horizon, thick with oncoming rain. “We just go and go and go and go until we get bored of going and then we don’t go and don’t go and don’t go and then we get bored of not going.”
Sam turned back to him. “Then let’s go, Charlie. If you’re so bored, then let’s go.”
“Go where?” Charlie could feel himself shaking.
“If you’re tired of sitting still, then let’s go. Let’s do something new.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Charlie felt those eyes seeing straight through him, except this time there was something different there, colder and rawer.
Sam rummaged in the bag by his feet, and pulled out a box of cigarettes. Charlie found himself breathing again. No, not exactly what he had in mind, but easier, and so much less real. “Try one.” Sam handed him a cigarette and fished around in his bag for a lighter.
“Why? So I can die sooner?”
“They’re my mom’s,” Sam explained, face still buried in his backpack, “and I’m trying to get her to quit. So I stole them.”
“You’re trying to get your mother to quit and yet you want me to try them?”
“I want you to try something,” Sam explained, and then produced the lighter in triumph.
“I don’t.” Charlie didn’t let go of the cigarette.
“Your call.”
And then the cigarette was in his mouth. It slid just between his lips. It was small and stiff against his tongue, and he found himself holding it awkwardly between his forefinger and thumb. “I don’t know what to do with this,” Charlie spoke through clenched teeth, hand shaking in anticipation.
“Just do what feels natural,” Sam advised, and lit the tip.
And then a burning sensation filled his lungs, caustic against the back of his throat, and he coughed violently at the first drag. Sam laughed, and then met Charlie’s watering eyes. He took the cigarette from his hands, placed it in his own mouth, and inhaled easily and calmly. Charlie watched in wonder as the cigarette sat between his fingers, delicate and sophisticated, like he had done this all his life. Those fingers held it just lightly and those lips touched it just gently enough that it appeared to be floating in the darkness of the car, and all Charlie could see were those glowing blue eyes and the glowing orange of the cigarette and Sam’s hand reaching out for his, the finger that traced over his knuckles and back down his forearm, and the smoke that wafted in gentle wisps beyond view.
“Not bad, right?” Sam asked.
“Not bad.”  
“What do you want to do, Charlie.”
“I want…”
“Mmm?”
“I want to go home.”
  “Okay.”
The car ride was silent. The passing houses blurred like clouds before Charlie’s eyes. When Sam pulled up in front of his house, Charlie unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door before the car had stopped. When he stood and shut the door behind him, he started breathing again.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then?” Sam asked.
Charlie stumbled down the walkway without answering. He raised a hand goodbye without turning around. He heard the rumble of Sam’s car down the block and out of earshot.
His mother must have been asleep, or pretending to be—the house was pitch black and silent. He hesitated by her bedroom door. He could hear her labored breathing, the sound of the radiator humming and sputtering, the ticking of her alarm clock that would wake her in a few short hours. He wanted to fall into her arms and tell her Mom, you were right, I can’t do this alone, Mom we should go for breakfast tomorrow and skip school and reminisce about the trips to New York and the oversized cupcakes we ate on the subway and the way we used to dance to Mariah Carey in the kitchen when we made dinner, Mom, wake up and see that I’m here.
He passed her bedroom door, then his sister’s, and then found the bathroom. Soon he felt the warm water, a touch too hot on his skin, and he closed his eyes and let it envelope him, railing against the back of his neck and drowning out the sounds of the quiet night, and the blood started pounding again like a drum beat, or a thunderstorm, and he is falling, falling, falling, water mixing with tears, the soap scrubbed in futility against his already-clean skin. When the water stopped falling, he exhaled.
And then the hallway felt like an eternity for Charlie, past his sister’s locked door and the piles of old photographs, magazines, graded papers, heavy with memory and nostalgia, and Charlie, soaking wet, knocked on the door in front of him.
“Mom?”