“It’s actually way more of a skill than it sounds, particularly if you’ve been drinking, and those guys were at least seven or eight beers into the night at that point. I’d had maybe two at the most, because I really couldn’t handle drinking at that age. That, as they say, is an acquired skill, and as you know I am much more fond of the occasional pharmaceutical than I am a booze buzz. Gives me headaches.
“So we hit some mailboxes. We discovered early on that if you drop the rock from the front seat you are in serious danger of the rock bouncing back into the door or rear quarter panel, so Kyle and I had ended up in the back seat together, taking turns, one of us leaning out the window and dropping the rock while the other held onto you. We were trying to be careful, because you had to get a pretty good lean out the window going in order to get the right angle on the mailbox, and, you know, we didn’t want anybody to get hurt or anything.
“I’ll skip the next part, because I can see that you’re uncomfortable with the realities of teenage hormones and sexual desires, but I guess it can be summed up by saying that I was attempting to misbehave, and Kyle was attempting to not fool around with his best friend’s little sister right in front of him while on a vandalism spree. But that happened, and I can’t really tell the story without it. My hands were where they should not have been.
“Kyle asked me to stop, but I couldn’t tell how much he meant it, and, as I said, I’d had two beers. That was a lot of liquor for me. Kyle, I remember, moved my hand away from him, and shoved me across the back seat. I thought it was pretty funny and, like a kid that doesn’t know when to stop a game, which is exactly what I was, I slid right back up against him. And he shoved me back again.
“Thom yelled something at us from the front seat, but I was laughing so hard I couldn’t hear him. I sat forward—of course nobody was wearing a seat belt—and I yelled at him to mind his own business, and he yelled back at me, and I called him something awful, and it went back and forth like that for a while. We could really fight in those days. After a bit of that, I sat back, determined to continue this increasingly fun and physical shoving match with Kyle, because I knew I was safe with him, you know what I mean? It was the greatest feeling in the world—I could explore things, I could push things, I could take it too far, because I knew I was with someone who would always pull me back before I went over the edge of the cliff. Isn’t that sort of exactly the type of person you need to know when you’re a teenager?
“But when I turned back, Kyle was gone.
“Like, not in the car anymore. I was alone in the back seat, and the car was moving at fifty miles an hour, and the guy I had just been fooling around with was gone.
“I didn’t scream, because it was too confusing. One minute he’d been there, I was kissing and touching and shoving him, and the next minute I was alone, the back windows wide open and the balmy summer air whipping around inside the car.
“I shouted to Thom what had happened, but I’m sure I didn’t make much sense, I probably just kept yelling ‘He’s gone!’ over and over, and when Thom finally looked into the back seat, he saw the situation for himself. But then I saw something that made me scream and I pointed, and Thom turned, eyes wide, and he saw it too.
“It was Kyle’s face, upside down, looking in at us through the windshield. He was on the roof of the car, and he was screaming like a maniac, but there was no question that he was perfectly fine and that he thought this was all perfectly hilarious. That crazy son of a bitch, that beautiful son of a bitch, had crawled out the open window, grabbed hold of the cross-country ski rack on the top of my dad’s car, and climbed out onto the roof while we were driving at fifty miles an hour.
“I never saw the deer, myself. I was looking at Kyle. But Thom saw it and locked up the brakes. It was, you know, one of those involuntary movements, the kind of reflex your body completes before your brain has a chance to weigh in on things.
“So Thom braked, the car skidded hard, and all at once Kyle was gone again. I can see the image of his face, upside down in the windshield, and then it just kind of . . . wiped away. There was a dark blur as his body flew off the roof and landed in front of the car, then a horrible, kind of muted thud as we hit him.
“And that was it. We killed him.
“Fuck. I’m sorry. I haven’t said all that out loud before. Ever, to anyone.
“Give me a second.
“OK. So. The rest. I’ve thought a lot about why I did what I did next, and Thom and I tried to talk about it a few times after it all happened. But then we stopped bringing it up, because there didn’t seem any point in it, and I guess I could never explain it anyway.