The Less Miserables Lose a Friend (1)

The bottle was in the truck when Wesley woke up.

He didn't remember putting it there. Didn't remember much of last night at all, actually—just fragments, like a movie with scenes missing. His dad's voice, loud and mean, the particular slur that came after the eighth or ninth beer. The kitchen table, something broken—a plate, maybe, or a glass, the sound of ceramic shattering against linoleum. The smell of Jim Beam and old sweat and the sour tang of rage.

The sound of the front door slamming. The cold outside, December cold, the kind that bit through his jacket and settled into his bones. The truck, parked where he always left it, at the end of the driveway where his dad couldn't block it in.

And then nothing.

The bottle was Jim Beam. Half empty. His dad's brand—the same brand his dad had been drinking since before Wesley was born, the same brand his grandfather had drunk before that, passed down like a family heirloom nobody wanted but everyone inherited anyway.

Wesley sat in the driver's seat, his breath fogging in the December cold, and stared at it. His head was pounding, a dull throb behind his eyes that synced with his heartbeat. His mouth tasted like something had died in it. His hands were shaking—not from the cold, though the cold didn't help. The shaking was something else. Something that happened when he went too long without a drink.

The sun was coming up over the Cone Mills building, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that seemed too beautiful for how he felt. The park was empty, the concrete still wet with overnight frost, the bowl a gray crater in the early morning light.

The truck was a 1987 Ford Ranger, rust-brown, one headlight permanently dim from a fender-bender two years ago that Wesley had never bothered to fix. He'd bought it with two summers of construction work—hauling lumber, mixing concrete, digging trenches, doing whatever they told him to do in exchange for cash under the table. Eighteen hundred dollars, paid in crumpled twenties, counted out in the bed of the truck while the previous owner—a guy named Carl who smelled like diesel and cigarettes—watched him like he expected Wesley to run.

It wasn't much. But it was his. The one thing his dad couldn't take away.

He should pour the whiskey out. That was what you were supposed to do, right? Pour it out. Walk away. Be strong. That's what they said in the after-school specials, what the guidance counselors promised when they handed out pamphlets about "making good choices" and "saying no to peer pressure." Just say no. Walk away. Be strong. Like strength was something you could summon just by wanting it, like willpower was a muscle you could flex whenever you needed it.

They never mentioned what happened when walking away meant walking back to a house where walking was dangerous. When being strong meant being strong enough to survive another day, not strong enough to be perfect.

Instead, he unscrewed the cap and took a drink.

The whiskey burned going down, tracing a line of fire from his throat to his stomach. But it settled something in his chest. Quieted the noise—the memories, the fear, the constant vigilance that came from living with someone who could turn violent without warning. Made the fragments of last night feel further away, like they'd happened to someone else. Someone he didn't have to be anymore.

He took another drink. Then another.

By the time the first skaters started showing up at Deadwood, the bottle was empty and Wesley felt almost human again.

---

"You look like s***," Zara said.

She was standing by the bowl, her board under her arm, her breath visible in the cold. The December sun was higher now, weak and pale, doing nothing to warm the concrete. The others were scattered around the park—Dusty working on something at the ramp with his new obsession with systems and checklists, Hector drilling kickflips on the flatground with the same patient intensity he brought to everything, Nova sketching in her usual spot by the fence with her sketchbook propped against her knees.

"Thanks," Wesley said. "Always nice to hear."

"I'm serious. When's the last time you slept? Like, actually slept? In a bed, not passed out in your truck?"

"I slept last night."

"In your truck?"

Wesley didn't answer. He'd been sleeping in his truck a lot lately. It was easier than going home, easier than dealing with his dad, easier than lying awake in his bedroom listening for footsteps in the hallway, waiting for the door to open, waiting for the next explosion. The truck was his—bought with his own money, registered in his own name—and nobody could tell him to leave it.

"You can't keep doing this," Zara said.

"Doing what?"

"Whatever this is." She gestured at him—at his wrinkled clothes, the same hoodie he'd been wearing for three days, his unwashed hair matted against his skull. At the bruise on his jaw that he didn't remember getting, purple and yellow at the edges where it was starting to heal. "Disappearing for days at a time. Showing up looking like you lost a fight with a dumpster. Smelling like—"

She stopped. Her nose wrinkled.

"Like what?"

"Like my stepdad," she said quietly. "Before my mom kicked him out."

Wesley felt something cold move through him. Not the whiskey—the whiskey was warm, always warm, that was the point. This was something else. Something that felt like shame, or maybe fear.

"I'm fine," he said. "I just need some coffee."

"You need more than coffee."

"Then I'll get more than coffee." He pushed past her, headed for the Quik-Mart across the lot. "Leave me alone, Zara."

She didn't follow. But he could feel her watching him all the way across the parking lot, her eyes on his back like a weight.

---

The thing about drinking was that it worked.

Not in the long run—Wesley knew that. He wasn't stupid, wasn't naive, wasn't pretending that this was a sustainable way to live. He'd watched his dad drink away a marriage, a job, any chance at being a decent human being. He'd watched the progression: the casual beers that became nightly binges, the nightly binges that became all-day affairs, the all-day affairs that became a way of life so total that sobriety felt like an intrusion.

He knew where the road led. He'd seen the destination up close, lived in it, wore the bruises from it.

But in the moment—right now, when the noise in his head was too loud and the memories were too sharp and everything felt like it was pressing down on him until he couldn't breathe—in that moment, the whiskey helped. It turned down the volume. Made things manageable. Gave him enough space to function, to get through the day, to pretend he was okay until he actually felt okay.

People who didn't drink like him never understood that part. They thought it was about fun, about parties, about being reckless. They thought he was choosing to be a burnout, choosing to waste his life, choosing to become his father. They didn't understand that sometimes you drank because the alternative was feeling everything at full volume, and full volume was unbearable.

Wesley had tried other things first. He wasn't lazy about it, wasn't taking the easy way out—the drinking was hard, actually, expensive and time-consuming and guaranteed to make everything worse eventually. He'd tried skating until his legs gave out, pushing himself until his muscles screamed and his lungs burned and there was no room in his body for anything but exhaustion. He'd tried listening to music so loud it drowned everything else out, metal and punk and anything with enough noise to fill the silence. He'd tried punching walls and screaming into pillows and all the things the guidance counselor had suggested in that one meeting where she'd asked why he seemed "disconnected" and he'd made up some lie about not getting enough sleep.

None of it worked. Not really. The feelings always came back—sharper, louder, more insistent. Like something living inside him that demanded to be fed.

The whiskey fed it. That was the truth. The whiskey gave the thing inside him what it wanted, at least for a while, and in exchange Wesley got a few hours of peace.

It was a bad trade. He knew it was a bad trade. But it was the only trade he knew how to make.

---

He'd started drinking seriously about six months ago, after the night his dad had put him through the drywall.

Not the first time his dad had hit him—that honor went to age eight, maybe nine, some argument about a broken window that Wesley still didn't think was his fault. A baseball, thrown wrong, caroming off the bat and through the kitchen window while his dad was watching the game inside. The crack of the glass. The silence that followed. Then his dad's hand, open-palmed, across Wesley's face, hard enough to leave a mark that took a week to fade.

"You'll learn to be more careful," his dad had said. Like hitting was teaching. Like pain was a lesson.

But the drywall had been different. The drywall had been bad—bad enough for the hospital, bad enough for questions, bad enough that Wesley had spent a night in the ER with a concussion and two cracked ribs while his dad sat in the waiting room pretending to be worried.

The nurses had asked questions. They always asked questions—had learned to look for the signs, the bruises that didn't match the stories, the kids who flinched when their parents moved too fast. But Wesley's dad had lied smoothly, confidently, the way he lied about everything: a fall down the stairs, so clumsy, so unfortunate, we're just glad he's okay.

And Wesley had backed up the lies. Because what else was he supposed to do? Tell the truth and go home to worse? Tell the truth and end up in foster care, another kid in the system, another case file gathering dust on some social worker's desk? Tell the truth and watch his dad talk his way out of it anyway, the way he always talked his way out of everything?

Better to lie. Better to survive. Better to wait until he turned eighteen and could leave for good.

His mom had left when Wesley was twelve.

Not abandoned—she'd tried to take him with her. Had packed bags in secret, made plans to disappear, begged Wesley to come with her the night she finally worked up the courage to go. Her hands had been shaking. Her voice had been shaking. Everything about her had been shaking, like she was held together by fear and nothing else.

But his dad had found out. Had caught them in the driveway at 2 a.m., bags in the trunk, Wesley already in the passenger seat with his heart pounding so hard he thought it might explode.

"If you take my son," his dad had said, calm as anything, "I'll kill you."

He'd said it the way other people talked about the weather. Matter-of-fact. Certain. Like he was describing something that had already happened instead of something he was threatening.

And Wesley had believed him. So had she.

She'd left alone. Drove away crying, tail lights disappearing into the dark, and Wesley had watched her go from the window of his bedroom where his dad had locked him in. He'd waited all night for her to come back. She never did.

She sent money sometimes. Birthday cards with cash tucked inside, mailed from addresses that changed every few months. Wesley never wrote back. Wasn't sure what he'd say if he did. Thanks for leaving me behind. Thanks for choosing yourself. Thanks for being smart enough to run when I was too scared to.

The whiskey had appeared that night after the hospital. Stolen from his dad's stash, the bottles he kept in the cabinet above the refrigerator, drunk in the truck behind the abandoned Kmart on Battleground. Wesley had thrown up most of it, spent the next day feeling like death warmed over, and sworn he'd never do it again.

He'd done it again three days later.

The second time was easier. He knew where his dad kept the bottles, knew how to pour just enough that the level wouldn't be noticed, knew how to hide the evidence. He'd done it in the truck again, parked behind the church on Randolph Road where nobody went after dark, and this time he'd paced himself. Didn't throw up. Didn't feel like death the next day.

That was the dangerous part, he realized later. The first time had been awful enough to scare him. The second time had been manageable enough to make him think he could control it.

A week after that, he drank again. Then twice a week. Then whenever things got bad at home, which was almost every day. His dad had started drinking earlier—noon, sometimes morning, the way unemployed people drank when they had nowhere to be and nothing to do. Which meant Wesley had started drinking earlier too, stealing swigs from the bottle before school, numbing himself for whatever was waiting when he got home.

The stealing stopped eventually. Not because Wesley developed a conscience, but because his dad started noticing the missing whiskey. Started getting angry about it. Started looking at Wesley with a suspicion that felt like accusation.

So Wesley started buying his own. The guy at the gas station on Market Street didn't card—didn't care, really, as long as you had cash and didn't cause trouble. Wesley started spending his construction money on Jim Beam instead of saving it. Started keeping a bottle in the truck at all times. Started measuring his days not by hours but by drinks: how many he'd had, how many he needed, how long until he could have more.

And now—now he wasn't sure how often, because the days blurred together when you were drinking. The weeks blurred. Whole months disappeared into a haze of whiskey and hangovers and the desperate, constant need for more.

He knew it was a problem. He wasn't in denial, wasn't pretending everything was fine, wasn't telling himself he could stop anytime he wanted. He just didn't know what else to do. The drinking was the only thing that made the feelings stop. And the feelings were unbearable.

So he drank.

---

Two days before Christmas, Wesley's dad kicked him out.

Not officially—there was no dramatic scene, no throwing clothes onto the lawn like in the movies. Just his dad, drunk at noon, sitting in his recliner with a beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other, telling Wesley not to bother coming home.

"You're useless anyway," he'd said. His eyes were red, unfocused, the way they got when he'd been drinking since breakfast. "Just like your mother. Same weak eyes. Same weak chin. Look at you—can't even look me in the face."

Wesley had been standing in the doorway, his jacket half-on, his keys in his hand. He'd been about to leave anyway—had been planning to spend the day at the park, away from the house, away from the smell of beer and old cigarettes and the particular tension that lived in every room.

"I'm going out," he'd said. "I'll be back later."

"Don't bother." His dad had taken a long pull from his beer. "Find somewhere else to sleep. I'm done paying for a roof over your head."

"Dad—"

"I said I'm done." The words were a slur, but the meaning was clear. "Get out."

Wesley had nodded. Grabbed his jacket. Walked out the door without looking back.

He'd been sleeping in his truck for three days now.

It was cold—December in North Carolina wasn't as bad as some places, but it still dropped into the twenties at night. Sometimes lower. He had a sleeping bag in the back seat, an old army-surplus thing he'd found at Goodwill for six dollars. A blanket he'd stolen from a donation bin behind the Salvation Army, wool and scratchy but warm enough. And a bottle of whiskey that kept him warm when nothing else did—the false warmth, the dangerous warmth, the warmth that felt like help but was really just another way of dying slowly.

The others didn't know. He made sure of that—showed up at the park during the day, acted normal (or as normal as he could manage), disappeared before anyone asked too many questions. When Dusty had invited him to Christmas dinner with his family, Wesley had made up an excuse about visiting relatives. "My aunt in Raleigh," he'd said. "It's a tradition." The lie had come easily. Lies always did.

When Garrett had offered to let him crash at his place—"My parents won't care, man, they're never home anyway"—Wesley had said he was fine, everything was fine, he just needed some space.

He wasn't fine. But admitting that felt impossible. Admitting that meant admitting he'd failed—failed to handle his dad, failed to keep a roof over his head, failed to be the person everyone thought he was. The guy who had it together. The guy who didn't need help.

So he lied. And drank. And waited for something to change.
 

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