She gave me these really bright white shoes for my birthday. She said "Avery, I'll let you figure out the colors in your life." It stuck out in my mind because my family hadn't even remembered my birthday that year. They didn't notice that I continued to wear the white shoes for a few years after that either. Every summer the sneakers would get smaller and I would get high with my cousin out by the cemetery. By the third August he could blow perfect smoke rings and they would float round the necks of the spirits who came out of their beds to watch our veiny red eyes. Adam's cutoffs and relaxed fingers suggested he had forgotten about his dad but the shadows under his eyebrows told otherwise. Still I didn't say a word about it. Things were better when Adam wasn't angry.
Once during July, I could swear his hair was blonder than usual - or maybe it was just the back lighting from the sun - he got real mad about something that I said. I don't even remember what I had been talking about but his head ducked into his chest, as if he was trying to dislodge the weight of shame from his skull. His mom told him not to slouch so much but he did it on purpose anyway. He said it "allowed for future improvement", but I'm pretty sure he just read that on a middle school report card or something. A lot of people didn't know how to wrap their heads around how to help Adam out. Sometimes it seemed like Adam and I were the only people who knew that he didn't need their help. But if I really thought about it I guess he was afraid of both success and failure. He liked being mediocre because nobody had anything to say about it. Making his own mind up about the past kept him from getting stuck in an endless slump of untwisting the knots in his stomach, tied there by what some prick in a brown suit and a notepad had to say.
I never talked about the past with Adam, never, ever the past. Not even what I had for lunch an hour ago. We always discussed what was happening right in front of us. He was the first one to see the car speeding around the corner. Later he said it was me who pointed, but I know it was him.
