Got a quiz coming up in math? Best friend acting like a jerk? Chicken burgers in the school cafeteria for the twelfth day in a row? Parents giving you a hard time over your so-so grades? Lost another library book so there goes this week’s allowance? Late for your after-school job again and for sure your boss is going to chew you out? Boring, boring, annoying, boring, and you’d do anything if someone would set you free, right? And then everything shifts. The whole landscape. When my mother died, I had to adjust my thinking about almost everything—from what kind of place I would live in and what would appear (or not appear) on the table at mealtime, to what was expected of me and who expected it. Now Billy was gone and I had to adjust again. Only this time I was completely alone. Now there was no one—absolutely no one—whose job it was to make sure that I was alive and breathing, forget fed and clothed and educated. All of a sudden, everything was up to me. And now this. There I was, standing in Dan’s garage, absorbing the look in Dan’s eyes and thinking, This is it.
