Push open the high school doors during lunch hour and breathe in the salty-sweet air of Burger King and Taco Bell and Starbucks, the delicious temptations of the franchised suburbs. Behind you, forever behind you, the cafeteria food is as appetizing as the Wednesday buffet at a strip-mall Irish pub—steamed cauliflower and yesterday’s flounder—without the booze. Who among us wouldn’t crave the bag of hot, heavily salted fries, the Nachos BellGrande, the sugary, caffeinated comfort of a Frappuccino? Who wouldn’t look at the kids with easier lives, kids with money jammed in their pockets to buy the bliss of filling, empty carbohydrates and think: I’ll do it.
And you do. You, driven only by the knife of teenage hunger and the slanted courage to make it happen, take the dare.
Holy shit, here’s the metallic cicada buzz of the emergency helicopter, here’s the ambulance pulling up on the street that separates the high school from the retention pond and the fast-food restaurants and various shops, here are students gathered in a semicircle at the edge of the retention pond. And here are confused moms walking out of Sprouts on their lunch hour, so good-hearted with their reusable canvas bags jammed full with seeded bread and stone fruit, so sad in their slack-jawed panic as they squint over toward the high school, which their children attend.
The moms are as one in their rocketing dread. What is even happening? Has everything already happened?
Later, in Facebook comments about your accident, a mom will write: PEOPLE, IT’S CALLED EVOLUTION!
Another mom will chime in: THIS IS A BIG CONSEQUENCE FOR A POOR DECISION THAT ALL OUR KIDS CAN REALLY LEARN FROM!
A sensitive mom will be outraged by the CONSEQUENCE comment, by the candy-coated—and sends it to Big Consequence Mom anonymously. Sensitive Mom tells no human being about her postal mischief! It’s a big old secret between Sensitive Mom and Jesus, who she imagines gazes down upon her with starry-eyed admiration as he raises a golden chalice.
