We are still too self-conscious to buy our own Playboys but attempt a confident strut into the 7-11 so we can buy Swisher Sweets without making eye contact with the cashier. We drive out to Mendon Ponds listening to Jesus Jones and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin while everyone passes around my latest issue of Guitar World magazine because it has the lyrics to Smells Like Teen Spirit. We are vexed to find out they are exactly the lyrics we thought they were. We lean against Adam’s car in a moonlit silence that feels louder than our mixtapes and smoke our cigarillos because that’s what Bono is doing now, so we practice being cool, being Bono, nowhere near other seniors who would remind us we are most definitely not cool. We make promises to each other between performative exhalations about writing each other, calling each other, that distance won’t snap this friendship, unaware that when I leave home for college in New Orleans, I am heading into a new season of my own TV show, with new characters to fill the roles my friends have, new locations to show me what is so small about my hometown; unaware that Adam will get lost in a forest of desks on the someteenth floor for 20 years, that Derrick will hope marrying Bethany—Bethany!—can paint over an addiction, that Michael will move to Toronto, so close, but so big, it’s not. We are unaware that connections can dissipate like the smell of these cigarillos we hoped would linger on our clothes forever, to remind us we were once inseparable, and totally, totally cool.
Timothy C Goodwin has work included in Bottle Rocket, Hotch Potch, Flash Frog, HAD, Dishsoap Quarterly (Best Small Fictions 2025), and elsewhere. (@)timothycgoodwin(.com)
