.258

By fifteen, Mike had a routine.

School. Wrestling practice. Four-hour shift at the Bucks County Coffee Company. Home by ten, maybe ten-thirty if he stayed to help close. Up to his room. Door closed. Whiskey in a water bottle he kept in the back of his closet, behind the shoe boxes and winter clothes his mother never touched.

He drank alone every night. Not to celebrate. Not to be social. Just to drink. To reach that warm, loose place where the edges of the day went soft and sleep became possible without his brain replaying every stupid thing he’d said, every mistake he’d made, every moment he’d been less than what he needed to be.

The routine worked. No one noticed. No one asked questions. His grades were fine. Wrestling was fine. Work was fine. Everything was fine as long as he kept the systems running—school, practice, work, drink, sleep, repeat.

Sometimes he’d take one of the cars to see Rachel. His sister’s Chevy Beretta, usually. She never locked it, kept the keys in the cupholder. Five times he’d driven it at night, drunk enough that the road got a little blurry but not enough to worry. Five times he’d made it there and back without incident.

So when he woke up at 1:30 AM on a Friday in June with the whiskey humming in his blood and a sudden, overwhelming need for a meatball sub from Wawa, it didn’t seem like a bad idea to take the car.

It seemed normal.

He slipped out the back door, same as always. The Beretta started quiet. He backed out of the driveway with the headlights off, only turning them on once he’d cleared the street. The rain had started an hour ago, steady and warm, the kind that made the roads slick and the streetlights halo in the dark.

He knew these roads. Grew up on them. The route to Wawa took him past his old elementary school, down the same street he’d walked as a kid, past the woods where he and his friends used to play.

There was a curve up ahead—not sharp, but noticeable. He’d been through it a hundred times.

But tonight the rain had made it slicker than he expected, or maybe he was going faster than he thought, or maybe the whiskey had slowed his reflexes just enough that when he turned the wheel, the car didn’t respond the way it should.

The Beretta skidded.

Mike felt the tires lose grip, felt the car slide sideways, felt himself grip the wheel harder like that would somehow pull the vehicle back into control.

Then impact.

The woodpile—stacked fire logs someone had left on the side of the road—exploded against the front of the car. Metal crumpled. Glass shattered. And the airbag deployed with a sound like a gunshot, a chemical smell filling the car instantly, acrid and wrong.

Pain bloomed in Mike’s face. His nose. His left hand where it had been gripping the wheel—his thumb bent at an angle that shouldn’t exist.

He sat there for a moment—seconds, maybe, or minutes, time doing something strange and liquid—staring at the deflated airbag, at the steam rising from the crumpled hood, at his thumb.

Then survival mode kicked in.

He put the car in reverse. Did a three-point turn in the rain, the Beretta groaning and scraping, something metal dragging on asphalt. Three wheels. He was driving on three wheels. The police report included the line “driving at a safe speed.” Three wheels will do that.

Back toward home. Back toward safety. If he could just get the car back in the driveway, maybe no one would notice. Maybe he could say he’d found it like this in the morning. Maybe—

He turned too soon. One street before his own. Wrong turn. Shit.

He tried to turn around, the Beretta limping through another awkward multi-point turn, and that’s when he saw them.

Red and blue lights cutting through the rain.

Mike’s brain, still trying to process the crash, the pain, the wrongness of everything, made a decision that seemed logical in the moment but would later be recorded in a police report as evidence of just how impaired he was:

He got out of the car and ran.

Straight into the woods. The same woods he’d played in as a kid, where he and his friends had built forts and pretended to be soldiers. He crashed through the brush, branches whipping his face, rain soaking through his favorite shorts and the nice shirt he’d worn to impress Rachel last week.

He made it maybe twenty feet before his legs stopped working right and the world tilted and he was on the ground, branches in his face, mud under his hands.

Footsteps behind him. A flashlight beam cutting through the rain.

“Son, you need to stop.”

Mike tried to stand. Couldn’t. Tried to run. Couldn’t.

The officer reached him, helped him up. Mike gave his name when asked. Michael. Mike. Yes, that was his car. Yes, he’d been driving. He was lucid and coherent, barely a slurred word.

After that, everything went dark.

---

The next thing Mike remembered clearly was fluorescent lights. Too bright. Wrong.

Hospital.

He was lying on a bed in the emergency room, and there was blood on his shorts. His favorite shorts—khaki cargo shorts he’d bought with his own money from the coffee shop. Ruined now. Dark with blood that had dried into stiff patches on the fabric.

His nose throbbed. His thumb screamed every time he tried to move it. He didn’t remember anything else.

A nurse came by, said something about discharge papers. Someone would need to pick him up.

Mike waited.

His parents didn’t come inside.

When the nurse wheeled him to the entrance, his father was there, standing by the car, face unreadable in the early morning light. Mike got in. His father got in. They drove home in complete silence.

Not angry silence. Not disappointed silence. Just… silence.

Mike sat on the passenger side, his broken thumb throbbing, his nose swollen, his ruined shorts sticking to his legs, and his father said nothing. Asked nothing. The radio stayed off. The only sound was the windshield wipers and the wet hiss of tires on road.

At home, Mike went straight to the couch. Lay down. Closed his eyes.

His father stood in the doorway for a moment, then walked over.

“You fucked up,” he said quietly. “But you’re NOT a fuck up.”

Then he walked away.

Mike lay there, processing that. Trying to understand what it meant.

You fucked up = the crash, the arrest, the hospital.
But you’re NOT a fuck up = this doesn’t define you, this is fixable, this can be managed.

What his father didn’t say: anything about the whiskey. Anything about the drinking. Anything about how a fifteen-year-old had blown a .258 on the breathalyzer—more than three times the legal limit for an adult, a level that should have meant unconsciousness or worse.

What his father didn’t say: we need to talk about this.

What Mike heard: don’t get caught again.

---

The closet came later.

Mike didn’t see it happen—he was still on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep, his thumb in a splint, his nose taped—but he heard it.

His mother’s voice, sharp and climbing. Coming from upstairs. From his room.

“Are you KIDDING me? Are you—how many—”

Footsteps. Fast. Coming down the stairs.

His mother appeared in the living room doorway, holding a garbage bag. Except it wasn’t garbage—it was cans. Bottles. Hundreds of them. The empties Mike had been shoving into the back of his closet for months, behind the winter coats and shoe boxes, thinking no one would ever look there.

“Do you SEE this?” She held the bag toward Mike’s father, who had appeared from the kitchen. “Do you see what he’s been doing?”

Mike’s father looked at the bag. Looked at Mike on the couch. Said nothing.

“This is the beer of the family,” his mother said, and her voice cracked. “This is YOUR problem. This is what YOU did to him.”

Mike’s father’s face changed then. Something behind his eyes went hard.

“Don’t,” he said quietly.

“Don’t what? Don’t tell the truth? Don’t say that our son is fifteen years old and has HUNDREDS of empty bottles in his closet because he learned it from YOU?”

“I said don’t.”

They stared at each other. Mike lay on the couch, invisible, watching his family split open like the airbag had split open the dashboard.

His mother dropped the bag. Cans and bottles spilled across the hardwood floor, rolling in different directions, the sound impossibly loud in the silent house.

“Get help,” she said. “Or I’m leaving.”

His father said nothing.

That night, Mike’s mother slept on the couch. And every night after that.

---

The lawyer bills came. The court dates. Juvenile charges. Probation. License suspension—delayed indefinitely, which was almost funny since Mike had never legally gotten his license in the first place.

They sent Mike to rehab. Twenty-eight days inpatient, somewhere in the Poconos with other kids who’d fucked up badly enough that their parents had run out of other options.

Mike went. Sat in the circles. Said the things they wanted him to say. Counted the days until he could leave.

No one mentioned sending his father to rehab.

The resentment was obvious, even if it wasn’t spoken. Mike had crashed the car, yes. Had gotten arrested, yes. Had forced the secret into the open.

Had made his father’s drinking into something that couldn’t be ignored anymore.

And his father hated him for it.

Not in a loud way. Not in an obvious way. But in the silence that stretched between them, in the way his father stopped looking at him directly, in the way every conversation became transactional and brief.

You exposed me, the silence said. You made this my problem.

Summer crawled forward. Mike came home from rehab with a certificate and a sponsor’s phone number he never called. The house felt different—smaller, tighter, like the walls had moved closer together while he was gone.

His mother still slept on the couch.

His father still drank.

And in late August, they told Mike they were moving.

“Fresh start,” his mother said, her voice bright and false. “New school. New people. You can be whoever you want to be.”

What she meant: we need to escape the neighbors who saw the police cars, the school that knows what happened, the community that watched our family fall apart in real time.

What she meant: we’re running.

They packed up the house in Wayne, loaded everything into a moving truck, and drove to a new town in a different school district where no one knew about the crash or the arrest or the .258 or the hundreds of bottles in the closet.

Mike never saw Rachel again. Never said goodbye to Pat or any of the guys from wrestling. Never walked past his old elementary school or the woods where he’d tried to run from the police.

He just left.

Started over.

Became whoever his parents needed him to be in this new place where no one asked questions and no one knew what he’d done.

And on his first night in the new house, in his new room with boxes still stacked against the walls, Mike found the water bottle of whiskey he’d packed carefully at the bottom of his clothes.

He opened it. Took a drink. Let the familiar warmth spread through his chest.

The routine was simple: school, wrestling practice, work, drink, sleep, repeat.

It had worked before.

It would work again.

All he had to do was not get caught.