The sun slowly began to crash down upon the city. I found comfort in the dark clouds above. Carson ran off to a nearby liquor store, but I chose to stay behind to have another smoke and a thought. The light was having difficulty breaking through the window since Carson preferred darkness, so I offered it my assistance and opened the blinds.

Carson and I met in a small New England preparatory school off the coast in the ninth grade. It’s a miracle we found each other amongst the hundreds of other identical white kids clad in Northface jackets and light blue boat shoes. He was a snobbish prick in class but a sincere loner in his dorm, and I found his charismatic charm subtle to the point of nonexistent, yet it was still there and drew me in. His father forced him to play for the football team, an act of desperation stemming from his own petite stature and various other inadequacies. Day after day, Carson would come back to our dorm, bloodied and silent. He found no joy in the mindless ways of his teammates, so they handled this difference of opinion with blows to the face. He did not mind the fight. He never minded the fight. What bothered him was the lack of control, an immeasurable and very prevalent facet of his confused existence. So he searched endlessly for the passage of power in which he would have a clenched fist over his misplaced authority. Tireless nights consisting of angst and anger led Carson to finding a pure and unadulterated joy in theater after falling hopelessly in lust with a late night viewing of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. We were approaching the end of sophomore year and auditions for the spring musical were taking place. His brazen aversion towards his father was coming more and more to the surface, and he thought if he could be Danny Zuko on stage then he could be the same rebel in life. He got the part in Grease and gave a wonderful performance. I sat three rows from the front, and as he was singing about summer love he must have seen a cheesy smile plastered upon my face because he was staring directly at me. It might have been for comfort or for approval possibly, but for whatever reason, after that play him and I were the best of friends. The transition from jock to actor was abrupt and maybe too much for this slightly disturbed rich brat to handle. All the kids at this school were experimenting, but I suppose one could consider our personalities a bit more addictive than the rest. He became accustomed to doing powder after the shows, a little grass beforehand. Carson lived fast and hard, even at that age, and ever since, wherever he went he would burst across the sullen night sky in drugged out fits of rage or happiness with uncontrollable fits of desire for sex and violence and drugs. I hated being the voice of reason then, and I loathe it now, but I did not want to see my dear friend die. I would have become fatally bored.