Friday Friday It was the best of times--high school--and it was the suckiest of times: high school. Would I trade it, though? If I could unkill six people, not make the whole town of Lamesa, Texas gnash their teeth and tear their clothes and have to go to funeral after funeral that searing-hot July? Okay, I''m maybe exaggerating a bit about the clothes tearing. Though I''m sure some grieving brother or friend or conscripted cousin split a seam of their borrowed sports jacket, heaving a coffin up into a hearse. And I bet a dentist or two paid their golf fees with money earned spackling the yellowy molars a whole town of restless sleepers had been grinding in their sleep, not sure if it was over. Not sure if I was gone. And, yeah--"golf fees"? I don''t know. People who wear plaid pants and hit small balls aren''t exactly the crowd I run with. The crowd I do run with are.

well. We''re the ones with black hearts and red hands. Masks and machetes. And until I was seventeen, I never even knew about us. My name is Tolly Driver. Which isn''t just this grimy keyboard messing my typing up. Tolly isn''t short for "Tolliver," and Driver was just my dad''s random last name, and probably his dad before him, and I don''t know where it comes from, and even if I did, even if I had my whole family history back to some fancy-mustached dude reining mules this way and that, it wouldn''t change anything. In 1989, a thing happened in Lamesa, Texas.

No, a thing happened to Lamesa, Texas. And to me. And to six people of the graduating class, some of whom I''d known since kindergarten. It also happened to my best friend, Amber. She''s why I''m writing this all down at last. I don''t know where you are anymore, Ambs. Maybe we weren''t meant to ever see each other again, after we were seventeen? In real life, I mean. Because I still see you every night, the way you were the summer between our junior and senior years.

What was Cinderella''s big song on the radio, then? "Don''t Know What You Got Till It''s Gone"? I should have taken Kix''s advice, though, and not closed my eyes. Not even once. I know now that we never should have gone to that party at Deek Masterson''s, Amber. What I wouldn''t give to let us just make one more round up and down the drag instead. To have sat on your tailgate at the carwash and watched classmates roll in, pile into different front seats and truck beds, and then leave again. We could have eventually eased out to our big oil tank on the east side of town, done the two-straw thing with our thousandth syrupy Dr Pepper from the Town & Country, and watched the meteors scratch light into the sky then fizzle into lonelier and lonelier sparks, each of us holding our breath, not having to say anything. When I look back, that''s how I see us best: in the last moments before we turned right on Bryan Street, to slope out to Deek''s on the north side of town, the Richie Rich houses. I''m riding shotgun in your little Rabbit truck, with the bucket seat that slid forward on its rails every time you braked, conking my head on the windshield.

You stopped short a lot that summer. And me, I laughed until thin blood sheeted down my face. Until it outlined my mouth. Until it was dripping off my chin like I''d been bathing in it. Don''t look at me like that, please. That''s not who I really was. That''s just what I ended up doing. I was a teenage slasher, yeah, okay.

I said it. And it wasn''t because my career placement test told me what I was, and it wasn''t because I''d been harboring secret resentments since sixth grade, about some traumatic prank. It was because I had, and still live with, a peanut allergy. How''s that for motivation? "Tolly Driver''s rage built over the years, seeing his classmates eat trail mix with apparent impunity, until it finally simmered over, resulting in a swath of destruction four days long and six bodies deep." That''s the 60 Minutes version of me. If the world had cared enough about Lamesa, Texas to even notice. Or maybe I''m more 20/ 20 material? "An unassuming high school junior, slight of build, academically unexceptional, recently deprived of his father, woke one morning to see the world through different eyes, worse eyes, more dangerous eyes, and the people around him paid the price." That part about the people around me paying the price gets it right anyway, doesn''t it? Don''t say anything.

I know you paid for being my friend, Amber Big Plume Dennison. You stood by me when everyone else would have cut me down. You believed in me when I didn''t believe in myself. And then you saved my life. And now I don''t even know where you are. If you''re happy. If you''re not. If you also think about that party out at Deek''s.

I do wish we''d never gone. In some ways, though, I guess I''m sort of still there. It''s July 14th, 1989, and my forehead''s just bouncing back from the windshield of a seven-year-old Volkswagen pickup. You''d think that a sudden conk like that might blot out the previous few seconds, since what''s important right after impact is reeling around, dealing with the shock, assessing the damage, trying to decide whether to laugh or cry. Except, first, what I was already saying: this was nothing new for me, that summer. Any brain damage I was to suffer from repetitive whacks to the forehead, I''d probably already suffered it. Second: in retrospect, I kind of deserved it. There I was not twenty-four inches from the girl I was too stupid to even consider, and, like the idiot I was, I''d just said another girl''s name: Stace Goodkin.

Not just said-said it, either, like talking about someone I''d seen eat a chili dog in one long bite at the drive-in last weekend. No, I''d sort of intoned Stace''s name, my voice swooning and swanning, my eyes going all unfocused, my head resting back on my neck because I was slack, delirious, smitten. Okay, I''m overselling it a bit, sure. But it was all in good fun, at least until Amber couldn''t take it anymore, brought me back down to earth by hauling that trusty emergency brake up with her right hand, whipping my head forward into that windshield that hadn''t cracked before, didn''t crack then, and''s still whole and intact nearly eighteen years later, in that Great Junkyard in the Sky foreign cars get retired to. "Ha, ha, ha," I drolled out, rubbing between my eyebrows with the heel of my hand, even though the point of impact had been dead center of my forehead. "She used to babysit you," Amber said with that kind of incredulity that''s just a shade away from outrage. She wasn''t wrong. When I was four and Stace Goodkin was five, she''d evidently been so much more mature and responsible and trustworthy than me that her mom and my mom had agreed that she could look after me for an hour or two, when the two of them needed to be somewhere they could smoke cigarettes and drink coffee without either of their husbands listening in.

Can you fall in love at four years old? Probably not. Maybe with a dog, or an ice cream cone, or a cartoon. What I think I did fall in love with, though, at kind of a pre-thinking level, was being Stace''s doll to dress up, to spoon applesauce to, to play Operation with. I''m pretty sure she let me win at hide and seek back then, even. I would get better with the hiding and the seeking, of course. Like, killer good. And I suppose Operation was a sort of training for me as well, a first look into the endless wonders just under the skin of a human body. And--I should have said this earlier, right up front: this computer doesn''t know italics, so.

expect some underlines? But, Deek''s party. Deek had graduated two years before, was just home from college--A&M, if that tells you what you need to know--and his parents were in Vegas for the weekend, on their fourth or fifth honeymoon, because they were always breaking up. Mix a pony keg into this situation, and take into consideration that Deek was his parents'' golden boy, could do no wrong, would never get his truck taken away or anything, and: automatic party, right? "She''s probably not even here, Romeo," Amber said, twisting the Rabbit''s ignition back. The diesel four-banger clattered and coughed, would take thirty seconds to die all the way down, which was a thing I always respected about it, that it would try to hang on even when it was already a lost cause. Amber followed up calling me "Romeo" with batting her eyes coquettishly, and the way I got her back for slamming my head into her windshield was to grab the stick shift, tip the transmission up into gear, no clutch, which is a thing you either have to time or be lucky for. The truck lurched forward a jolt, Amber screeched, and the silver-feather earring she''d had her head tilted over to put in slipped down her palm, vaulted off the heel of her hand, and glimmered down into the floorboard, and the no man''s land under her bucket seat. Unlike on my side, her dad had wrapped some bad-idea tangle of baling wire back and forth from rail to rail, locking her seat at exactly the right place for her but also turning the space under her seat into a rat''s nest of snaggy metal. "Those are the ones my mom gave me?".