Print with me. They were all good to me, as good as they could be, under the circumstances. Juanita tried her best to tuck me into the fold like a mother hen adopting an orphaned chick. She would cover for us boys when we would do what teenage boys do.

         There was a lake with a public beach about two miles from the house. It was only an hour’s walk away, though that walk was along a busy stretch of highway. You can imagine the rush when a logging truck passes, going seventy miles an hour as you’re walking on the shoulder of the road, like being pushed by Apollo. 

         During one of these desperate attempts at alleviating the unbearable monotony of our school-less lives that summer, we were rewarded by finding a large baggie of marijuana on the side of the road. When we got home, Dennis , Michael, and I went to the small, unused garage behind the house, crushed a discarded soda-can, and eased the pain of our day.

         We ate a giant bunch of celery and an entire jar of generic peanut butter; the kind with the gray and black label. We turned on Sesame Street, Dennis threw up in the kitchen sink, and we fell asleep on the living room floor. When Juanita saw the kitchen sink and the empty peanut butter jar, she knew what had happened. My dad, probably high himself at the time, was clueless. She told him we must’ve taken allergy medication and fallen asleep.

         She did other things to help, to make me feel like part of the ‘family’. I tried out for the Willamette High School football team. It was my junior year and I’d never played organized football before, but I still made the team. It was the junior varsity, so I was playing with underclassmen, but I was happy to be playing at all. 

         My dad told me I couldn’t go to the practices on Sunday because our family was religious. He wouldn’t have been able to find the nearest church, and didn’t own a bible. We weren’t very religious. I somehow managed to be able to go anyway. I don’t remember how, but it was probably Juanita. The only caveat was that I had to find transportation to and from practice. Gas, in the summer of 1991 when it was still under a dollar a gallon, was too expensive to be driving me back and forth to football practice.

         I guess he wanted to do something nice for me because I was his real kid and the rest of them were the old lady’s, so he stole someone’s mountain bike for me. A child’s heart doesn’t want much though; I was happy my transportation problems were solved. I never asked him how he thought Jesus felt about his theft. 

         It was ten miles each way to the school, ten miles down that two-lane logging highway, ten miles being shoved by Apollo while trying to balance on two wheels. But coming home was the worst. There were fewer big trucks, but after two intense football practices in ninety degree weather, after running miles upon miles in full pads, after losing quarts of water as perspiration, pedaling another ten miles was excruciating.

         The summer ended and I was elated to be starting school, and my first real football game. Juanita and the boys were there, my dad wasn’t. It’s okay, though. I only played three before I climbed out my bedroom window with Dennis and left forever.

         Late one night, probably after eleven o’clock, a fight erupted between Dennis and my dad. I wasn’t concerned by the fight, they did it all the time. I just wanted to get some sleep, so I got out of bed and went into the living room to negotiate a truce.

         It was pitiful what my eye beheld as I walked into the living room. My dad was face to face with Dennis, face to chest really. Dennis was about six foot-one, my dad was about five-seven. Undeterred, by the size difference, my