By fifteen, Mike locked into a rhythm that felt like survival. He went to school. He wrestled at practice. He worked four-hour shifts at Bucks County Coffee Company. He arrived home by ten, ten-thirty if he stayed to help close. He climbed the stairs, shut his door, and reached for the whiskey he hid in a water bottle behind shoe boxes and the winter coats his mother never touched.
Every night he drank alone. He didn’t drink to celebrate or socialize—he drank to reach that warm, loose place where the day’s sharp edges softened and sleep finally came without his mind replaying every stupid comment, every mistake, every moment he fell short.
The routine held. No one noticed. He kept his grades decent, performed solidly on the mat, handled work fine. Everything stayed “fine” as long as he kept the loop spinning: school, practice, work, drink, sleep, repeat.
Sometimes he drove his sister’s Chevy Beretta to see Rachel—she never locked it, always left the keys in the cupholder. Five times he drove at night, buzzed enough to blur the road but not enough to panic. Five times he made it there and back without trouble.
So when he woke at 1:30 a.m. on a rainy Friday in June, whiskey still humming through him and a sudden craving for a Wawa meatball sub gripping him, he decided to take the car. It felt normal.
He slipped out the back door. He started the Beretta quietly, backed down the driveway with headlights off until he cleared the street. Rain fell steady and warm, slicking the asphalt and haloing the streetlights.
He knew these roads by heart. He drove past his old elementary school, down the street he’d walked as a kid, past the woods where he and his friends had built forts and played soldiers.
He approached the curve—not sharp, but noticeable. He’d taken it hundreds of times. Tonight the rain made it slicker than he expected, or he drove faster than he realized, or the whiskey slowed his reflexes just enough. He turned the wheel. The car didn’t follow.
The tires skidded. He felt the Beretta slide sideways. He gripped the wheel harder, desperate to regain control.
Then he hit the woodpile stacked along the road. Metal crumpled. Glass shattered. The airbag exploded with a sound like a gunshot and filled the car with acrid chemical smoke.
Pain erupted in his nose and left hand—his thumb bent backward at a sickening angle.
He sat stunned, staring at the deflated airbag, the steam rising from the crushed hood, his ruined thumb.
Instinct took over. He shifted into reverse. He executed a three-point turn in the rain as the car groaned and dragged metal on asphalt—riding on three wheels. The police report later called it “driving at a safe speed.” Three wheels enforce that.
He limped toward home. If he could just park the Beretta in the driveway, maybe no one would know. Maybe he could claim he found it wrecked in the morning. Maybe—
He turned one street too early. Wrong road. Shit.
He tried another clumsy multi-point turn. Then red and blue lights cut through the rain.
His foggy brain made a terrible decision: he jumped out and ran.
He crashed into the woods he knew from childhood—the same woods of forts and soldier games. Branches whipped his face. Rain soaked his favorite khaki cargo shorts and the nice shirt he’d worn for Rachel. Twenty feet in, his legs gave out. He hit the ground, mud in his palms, twigs in his mouth.
A flashlight beam swept over him. Footsteps approached. “Son, stop.”
He tried to stand. He couldn’t. He tried to crawl. He couldn’t. The officer lifted him. Mike gave his name—Michael, Mike—admitted the car was his, admitted he’d been driving. He spoke clearly, barely slurring.
Then memory collapsed.
Next he remembered fluorescent lights—too bright, sterile. Hospital. Blood stiffened on his khaki shorts, the ones he’d bought with his own coffee-shop money. His nose throbbed. His thumb screamed in a splint.
A nurse mentioned discharge. Someone needed to pick him up. He waited.
His parents didn’t come inside. His father stood by the car in the gray dawn, face unreadable. Mike climbed in. They drove home in silence—no radio, only wipers and wet tires.
At home, Mike collapsed on the couch and closed his eyes. His father paused in the doorway, then stepped closer.
“You fucked up,” he said quietly. “But you’re not a fuck-up.”
Then he walked away.
Mike turned the words over. You fucked up = the crash, the arrest, the hospital. You’re not a fuck-up = this doesn’t define you, this can be fixed.
His father never mentioned the whiskey. Never mentioned that his fifteen-year-old son blew a .258—more than triple the adult limit. Never said they needed to talk about the drinking. Mike heard only: don’t get caught again.
Later that morning, his mother’s voice cracked from upstairs. “Are you kidding me? How many—” She stormed down the stairs.
She appeared in the doorway clutching a garbage bag that clinked. Empties—hundreds of cans and bottles Mike had hidden behind coats and boxes for months.
“Do you see this?” she demanded, thrusting the bag at his father. “Do you see what he’s been doing?” His father looked at the bag, then at Mike. He said nothing.
“This is the beer of the family,” she said, voice breaking. “This is your problem. This is what you did to him.”
His father’s eyes hardened. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t tell the truth? Don’t admit our son has hundreds of bottles in his closet because he learned it from you?”
“I said don’t.”
They stared at each other while Mike lay on the couch, invisible.
She dropped the bag. Cans and bottles rolled across the hardwood, clattering loudly in the quiet house.
“Get help,” she said. “Or I’m leaving.”
His father said nothing.
That night she slept on the couch. Every night after that.
Lawyer bills arrived. Court dates followed. Juvenile charges. Probation. License suspension—pointless since he’d never had a license legally. They sent him to rehab—twenty-eight days inpatient in the Poconos with other kids whose parents had run out of options.
He went. He sat in circles. He said the required things. He counted days. No one suggested his father go.
Resentment simmered, unspoken but heavy. Mike had crashed the car, gotten arrested, dragged the secret into daylight. He had forced his father’s drinking into the open. His father hated him for it—not loudly, but in the new distance, the refusal to meet his eyes, the clipped conversations. You exposed me. You made this my problem.
Summer dragged on. Mike returned from rehab with a certificate and a sponsor’s number he never called. The house felt smaller, the air thicker.
His mother still slept on the couch. His father still drank.
In late August they announced the move. “Fresh start,” his mother said, forcing brightness. “New school. New people. You can be whoever you want.”
They meant: escape the neighbors who saw the police cars, the school that knew, the town that watched them unravel.
They packed the Wayne house, loaded a truck, and drove to a new town in a different district where no one knew about the .258, the crash, the bottles, or the night he ran into the woods.
He never saw Rachel again. He never said goodbye to Pat or the wrestling guys. He never passed his old elementary school or those familiar woods.
He simply left one life and stepped into another, ready to become whoever his parents needed in a place where no one asked questions.
On the first night in the new house, boxes still lining his room, he unpacked the water bottle of whiskey he’d hidden at the bottom of his clothes.
He twisted the cap. He took a long drink. The familiar warmth spread through his chest.
The routine stayed 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.
Mike Hamson 