I hope you’re taking the longest, hottest shower ever as I write this. I’m sorry you didn’t have a chance to take one during the trip. It wasn’t something I thought about. But I want you to know that I do think about you, all the time. You haven’t even left for Canada yet and I’m already missing you. I hope this letter will keep you company on the trip to Ontario. I hope you’ll read it over and over. I hope it makes you miss me so bad that when you get to Lake Juliette you’ll decide to turn around and come straight back home. (Not really. Well . . . yes, maybe really.) I love you. I’ll miss you this summer. I’m already looking forward to seeing you in a month when I drive up there.

Love, love, love,

Lucas

When I go to my desk for an envelope, I notice that lying on the blotter is an article neatly clipped from the newspaper. This is my mother’s way of informing me that a government entity called the Federal Trade Commission wants to force tobacco companies to put warning labels on packs of cigarettes. Mom has underlined in red a sentence stating that smoking might lead to cancer, heart disease, and emphysema.

But it is the might that foils her argument. Cigarettes might lead to those ailments. Smoking grass might lead to reefer madness. Taking acid might lead to chromosomal damage and attempts at unaided human flight from sixth-floor windows. But according to whom? A government that insists that drugs are bad and war is good.

Bullshit.

Into the garbage goes the newspaper article. But lying under it are two additional items. One is a yellow post office change-of-address form. My name and a new address in Bay Shore have been entered in the paterfamilias’s tiny handwriting. This is puzzling. Am I being evicted? Did my parents find a new and improved replacement offspring while Robin and I were in Maine? I don’t have time to wonder long about this, because the other item is a letter from Goddard College.

I pick up the envelope and feel its thinness between my fingertips. In my chest, my heart deflates as fast as an unknotted balloon. My skeleton dissolves, leaving a puddle of protoplasm on the floor. Crap. Crap. CRAP! Blasting through the residual mind-alteredness fomented by lysergic acid diethylamide comes the stark, undeniable, very real, and very HEAVY FACT that yours truly, Lucas Baker, recent high-school graduate, future human question mark . . .

Is completely, totally, and royally screwed.

Friday, June 27

I’m in the death queue now.

I’m not behind the plow.

If I can’t get out,

I’ll be worm dirt no doubt.

I’m in the death queue now.