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Once, I and a friend of ours blindfolded BJ and drove him somewhere deep in Fairfax County, the end of some generic cul-de-sac inside a nest of twisting cul-de-sacs. We set him in a car, madde him wait a few minutes for us to drive off, and then let him find his way back to a bar in Hendon. If he m…

Let's be Beage. Age forty. White. Brown hair. Six feet tall, maybe two-hundred pounds. Married twelve years to the girl we got set up with after college, who teaches history to middle school kids. Let's live in a townhome in a suburb of Washington, population 71,000, with our two sons, Oscar, nine,…

[...] Music had been his major in college. Why wasn't he trying to make it his job?

"A job is a job," he said. "It's what I do to pay my bills. Music is my life. If I made my life my job, if I relied on it for money, I think I'd come to hate my life."

It was pitch black out, the dashboard's g…

[...] As mirrors of each other, we were a success, and for a boy hung up on what shared Converse might reveal, this felt like dying. [...]

And I saw my future stretch before me like a flat, snowy expanse. I would not get to reinvent myself in college. I would not get the new life I'd been dreami…

[...] The snow would be piling up outside, we could see through the screened-in porch out back. His sister glued to her TV upstairs. [...] I pressed the record button. Our voices, tinny, seeped out into the room through his headphones and I breathed very shallow so as not to make extraneous noise. …