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There was no one right way to break bad news to Corinna Grant. When Dylan did it, he usually opted not to do it at all, which had the occasional effect of getting him into a spot of trouble later but that was neither here nor there. Today there was no avoiding it, which was why he resolved to take the battle in his own hands first -- he showed up at the Grants' front door wearing something remotely respectable and pushed the doorbell once, listening to it echo inside. Dylan's family didn't have a doorbell on their apartment, just a buzzer downstairs. They'd never had a doorbell. He had an unshakeable fascination with doorbells as a result.

Cora's mom answered the door, shortly removing Dylan from his small, blissful fantasy world of doorbells, which was situated far from any music he had to face. "Hi, Dylan," she said. "Are you looking for Cora?"

"Just so, Mrs. Grant." Dylan dimpled at her as winningly as he could manage; Mrs. Grant smiled at him uncertainly and went to fetch Cora.

For a moment he wondered whether he'd be invited up and they'd have this discussion on his girlfriend's rose-colored comforter. But Cora was already pulling on her trenchcoat when she came running downstairs, and slid her shoes on in something of a hurry; then with a brief, "Bye, Mom, love you," and a peck on her mother's cheek, she hurried outside to join him as the door clicked shut behind them.

They walked a ways down the sidewalk before Dylan offered his hand, palm-up. Cora took it. They walked that way together with their fingers interlaced.

"So," said Dylan, looking up at the sky.

Cora politely waited for him to finish. Damn.

"I failed my driving test," he said.

Cora didn't say anything. Damn damn.

"Arrestedly," he said, just to get it out there.

Dylan put his fingers to his temples like he had a headache or was attempting to divine something with his psychic powers. Well, he definitely would have a headache if this conversation was going where he thought it was going, and if he had psychic powers he would be using them to try and divine the right thing to say to his girlfriend right now. He settled on, "So, a few hours beforehand I had a gym detention with Special K. A really shitty one. For curfew-breaking." Special K was not, in this case, an indication that he was on ketamine at the time but his chosen name for the Hillworth gym teacher.

They both knew curfew-breaking was the ambiguous offense: curfew-breaking might be Dylan being irresponsible, or Dylan being rebellious, but curfew-breaking might well be Dylan living up to his noblesse oblige -- the duties of a Cavalier didn't end at Hillworth curfew. The duties of the Prince of Tartaros ended later. In this case, there was a bit of column B -- Uranophane, Scylla -- but, well, but there was a bit of column A too.

"One pill made me larger and one pill made me small," he said, flip. "I got through. I've done it a lot of times before, I thought I knew how long it'd last for."

He looked at the sidewalk. Sidewalks were always nice in Cora's neighborhood.

"I didn't."

A red Honda Accord chugged by them: the car his parents had dangled in front of him as an incentive to pass his driving test and finish out his semester. Dylan watched it halt at a stop sign and then turn right and drive out of sight and his foreseeable future. "To be fair, informing the instructor that I was under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide was, at the particular time," he said, "the responsible thing to do."

Dylan raised one finger. "I'm pretty sure if I'd gotten ******** beforehand I would've done better -- semantical, semantical, yes, I Sing The Body Semantic, I'm just noting, no, it is not relevant, you are giving me the not-relevant face, I'm a good boy, I am." The look in Cora's eyes had frozen all the humor out of that. Though technically it wasn't humor, it was a. Technically accurate pinpointing of poor word choice. At a time when the word-chooser wasn't liable to be receptive to critique. Given the circumstances.

He wondered briefly where they were going. Was there some locale that he could subtly guide them to that would work in his favor? Sadly singing the Tetris song like that one video on YouTube would probably not do the trick. He scanned through a mental list of possible locational Tetris songs anyway and alighted fruitlessly upon "Starbucks," with logic "she wouldn't scream at me in a Starbucks."

Maybe she would. Maybe she wouldn't. Starbucks ho. "You haven't had detention with Special K," he said lamely. "It's special. Also K."

What did his parents say about all this? His dad had, painfully, said nothing: when his mom had taken him home from the police station he'd gotten up and walked into his study and closed the door. His mom had been the one he'd called to pick him up, and the first thing she'd said on the phone had been, that's not funny, Dylan -- and every part of him had ached to lie, confirm it was a joke and find some other way out of jail. But there wasn't any other way. He was seventeen. He didn't have money or an excuse.

They weren't pressing charges this time: not enough evidence. As it turned out, his driving hadn't actually been that shitty. So his mom drove him home.

"They said I was disowned forever," he said, kicking a pebble, "damnatio memoriae, dishonor on my cow. I dunno. What would you say?"

He was blowing it off. He knew he was blowing it off. He was paralyzed, otherwise: sorry just didn't cut it, and he knew it and she knew it, and besides, it's not like it was her he had to be sorry to. She'd tell him so herself if he said it. She always dragged apologies out of him just so she could be unimpressed with them. Well, he could sorry until the goddamned cows came home and it wouldn't stop anything she was going to say, so he'd save his sorrys for when they made a difference. He said nothing.

What, he wondered, about remorse made it such that it had to be telegraphed? Remorse was a decidedly untelegraphable substance: a heavy metallic weight in his chest that moved around whenever he got up or breathed. Like the bomb in his nightmare. It didn't convey well at all across telegraph lines. That was always the trouble with Cora. She thought they'd entered into some kind of bared-soul covenant. For her maybe that was true; though sometimes he suspected it wasn't, either; and other times he suspected he suspected that to justify himself.

In the light some souls stood up better to the baring. "I don't know what difference it makes," he said in a voice he knew was dull, inexpressive, and which was also the only voice he had. "I am sorry."

Infinity stretched, he was fairly certain, between his statement and her reply at this very moment.

"Cocaine," Dylan answered just as matter-of-factly and walked ahead of her into the Starbucks, pausing only to hold the door. "Powder. I don't do crack. Requires smoking."

They went into the Starbucks together. It was a suburban strip mall joint attached to a Verizon store, currently peopled by a couple customers reading the paper and two bored-looking Sovereign Heights types staffing the counter.

"You know, not all drugs are created equal," he said as they stood 'in line' and waited for the bored baristas to get around to them. "Saying someone's 'on drugs' is about as specific as having the same term for sociopathy and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The stimulant that gave me the shakes that night was kind of a, a bipolar disorder, if you will, whereas the psychotropic hallucinogen that caused me to fail my driving test was more like a single traumatic episode -- well, my metaphor is falling down, but anyway. What I mean to say is, cocaine is habit-forming and affects you just as bad being off it as on it, and the symptoms are long-term, though it's no heroin; if you're going to be angry about something be angry about the heroin. LSD doesn't do a damn thing to you once it wears off."

After a moment's thought, he concluded, "Oh, and a venti iced latte. Thank you."

Signed, A Woman Who May Be Poor, But She Has Her Pride, And No One Will Ever Take That Away From Her.

There was nothing to understand. There was everything to understand, but nothing he was going to explain to her: nothing that wouldn't be the equivalent of flinging himself down on the Starbucks tiles and licking her feet, with no guaranteed result of anything but a well-deserved kick. There was Hillworth. There were the endless days, the monotony, the room checks, the endless ******** room checks. There was his lungs seizing up during gym class. There was never eating anything at school because some of them thought anaphylactic shock was for ******** whiners. There was Jesse, there had been Jesse, there had been Jesse's friends. There was the endless. ********. Room checks. The detentions, in the same white rooms. The kicks in the ribs out on the football field. The boys who bragged about raping hookers, the boys who bragged about killing a gay kid. The boys who probably lied. The boys who might not've. The food he didn't eat. The schedule. The timed math tests. The way they taught Snow Falling On Cedars. The endless. ********. Room checks.

There was nothing to understand.

"This?" he echoed. "What's 'this.'" He had a quiet voice still and waited for his drink to come up, and then retrieved it, unsweetened, from the bar. "I'm not on anything at the moment, love, so I'd like to better understand what 'this' is, if you don't mind."

Dylan didn't answer for a while, instead focusing his attentions on the incredibly complex task of opening the wrapper on his straw, poking it through and stirring his latte a couple more times before taking a sip. He got nearly all his coffees iced, at any time of the year. A Tazo latte wasn't even a ******** latte anyway. They called anything with milk in it a "latte" nowadays. "I don't know what to tell you," he said in his half-sigh, put-upon voice that indicated the other person was being unreasonably upset over something but he was reasonable enough not to let that get him upset. "Contrary to what DARE tells you, psychoactive drugs don't turn your brain into frying eggs in a skillet. I ******** up my driving test. I'll retake it in six weeks. I won't be high. I don't know what we're even discussing any more."