From Mike I learned how to smoke marijuana, how to drink beer, how to smoke cigarettes, how to cut school. Mike would drop out in the eleventh grade and work a few menial jobs for a few years before taking his GED and joining the Air Force where he was eventually dishonorably discharged for marijuana use. I hadn't talked to him in years but the last I'd heard he was still living with his parents. Could I steer Mike onto a different path? I wondered as I went to the door and bade my family farewell.

Though I was expecting it, it was still startling to see him as a sixteen-year-old again.

"Sup?" He muttered to me, his version of 'what's up?'.

"Not much." I told him, careful to give no hint of the startling change in me just yet. I closed the door behind me and we started the two-mile walk to our high school.

I was surprised at the immaturity of his conversation as we trodded to school. It centered on his phony sexual exploits with girls I'd never met, which girls at our school he'd like to fuck, and other adolescent posturing. I had to remind myself that my conversation back then had been pretty much the same and that I now had seventeen years of maturity over him. I nodded and responded to his statements with appropriateness. He noticed no change in me. I'd always been quiet anyway.

As we got close to the school feelings of unreality washed over me again. I was seeing people that I hadn't seen in years. But I was seeing them as they were then, not as my mind was telling me they should look now (I had to keep reminding myself that NOW was THEN). They were in ones, two, and even groups of six or more, heading for school. Boys and girls both. I saw Steve Johan, who would join the Army after graduation and be killed in a helicopter crash. I saw Nina Blackmore, a skinny, nerdish, friendless girl who would go to medical school and work as an emergency room doctor at Spokane's trauma center. She would also acquire good looks early in college as her body filled out and marry a rich neurosurgeon.