One by One. Nicholas Bush

in the scoring booth adjacent to our bench, heard me, he threw me out of the game. I made my way to the locker-room and was informed immediately that I had a two-game suspension for hitting the kid, but it didn’t matter, our season was over. My dad came into the locker-room just as I began to cry. I had been sitting in there waiting for the game to end. He told me not to worry about the suspension or losing the state title. He assured me I couldn’t have played any better and that the suspension wouldn’t carry over to the next season. He didn’t know I was worried that I had just killed another kid.

      My dad actually loves to see me hurt other kids. Sadistic, I know, but I seldom disappoint. My coach actually got me a T-shirt that had a picture of a phone on it with a line that read, “Forward all my calls to the penalty box.” I was responsible for an ambulance making its way onto the ice and being ejected from the game more times than I can count. When this happened, my dad would whistle at me and make a flexing pose.

      When I gave up hockey for football it wasn’t because of my run-­ins in the rink, but because football offers greater glory than hockey. If you want to know the truth, there ya go. This includes the ability to get girls and also some notoriety. I love making enemies with teams from other neighborhoods, even the guys on our opposite squad. This aggression rubs off on my teammates and it helps us win.

      Before each game my dad says, “Be indestructible, be versatile, and give ’em hell.” If I crush it, he says, “I really like watching you play.” These are the only times my father seems pleased with me, and I am proud when he is proud. So I like to brag about how many kids I’ve hurt without once being injured in return. I’m not even in eighth grade, but I’m six feet tall and 165 pounds. Later I’ll realize I was just a kid with a big mouth, and the guy everybody loved to hate, but right now I feel indestructible.

      When I was younger, I tried to invite other kids over so they would return the favor and help me stay the hell out of my house, but they would steer clear of me after they saw what kind of atmosphere awaited them there. When I realized this, I quit giving invites and instead only sought invites. I’d pack a backpack and stay at other people’s houses for as long as I could. If someone stopped inviting me, I’d move on to the next. As I got older, I learned to form alliances and loyalties with different groups of kids by any means possible. I decided that I had to be popular to make this work. One of the best ways I found to do this was by offering to solve other kids’ problems. If anybody was getting bullied, I thoroughly enjoyed taking care of it. Then in middle school came a distraction: girls. Girls are the one thing that conflicts with my busy sports schedule.

      At fourteen, I happily become sexually active. On weekends, I orchestrate time alone with several different girls, usually high school girls, at their houses, sometimes even more than one in a single night. As an eighth grader, I mostly hook up with ninth grade girls and a few girls in my own grade. A couple times, though, I’m lucky enough to get with one of my sister Allison’s friends, who are in eleventh or twelfth grade. On Fridays after the school bus stops up the street from my house, I head directly to see a girl. I can get around well enough on foot and they are all in walking distance.

      You could say I’m someone whose priorities revolve around physical gratification. Whether it was hitting and hurting people in hockey when I was a kid, my aggression on the football field today, or the joy of sneaking over to an older girl’s house at night. I like to think I live in the fast lane, playing by my own rules. My siblings do their own thing too, because who would want to be in the Bush household by choice? Lindsay is always at the house of one of her many boyfriends or at the barn with her stable full of quarter horses; she even owns one of them, purchased for her by my dad. Allison is so popular that it seems like she’s a celebrity known throughout Green Bay. Sometimes she lets me party with her and I flirt with her pretty friends. At one party, unbeknownst to her, I lost my virginity to one of them.

      Meanwhile, I’m basically failing school. Homework doesn’t seem like a good use of my time and the detentions just keep coming, usually for cheating on a test or homework, or stealing from the locker-room or the school store. There are many therapists my parents force me to see who work to diagnose me and give a reason why I’m such an academic disaster. The whole thing is idiotic. I hate seeing them. I hate being told something is wrong with me.

      The sessions are always skewed anyway. My parents manipulate the therapists so they don’t know what’s going on at home. They even turn into different people when we attend a family session. Everything is always made out to be my fault. I guess it’s not my behavior that’s the problem; I am the problem. The truth is that if my parents would just change, maybe offer me a few nice words here and there, everything could be so much better.

      By the end of eighth grade I have a handful of very close friends with whom I spend most of my free time. Looking back, I will think that bouncing around from friend’s house to friend’s house wasn’t a normal or healthy way for a kid to live, but right now it seems like a good idea.

      One day, Jake, Erik, Kieran, Gavin—guys who live on my block—and I decide to get some weed, some beer, and some girls, and go far out into the country, to Gav’s grandparents’ farm. Gavin has been drinking and partying with his cousin Tyler, and recently smoked some weed for the first time. Erik is a year older and has recently become a full-fledged stoner, wearing Pink Floyd shirts and stuff. I’ve been drinking, but I haven’t smoked weed before and I’m down to try it. Getting high with friends seems so simple and innocent, so freeing and fun. I get Kieran to put up $20 by having Gav tell him it’s for the beer, which is actually free from Gav’s dad, and I give the money to Erik who gives me a bag of weed on the bus to school the very next day. Gav, Jake, and Kieran decide I should invite some girls I know from the next school district, Bay Port, to go “camping” with us and Gav’s dad even speaks with some of the girls’ parents, telling them whatever they need to hear to convince them to allow their daughters to go. And so it is that on a warm, windy Friday night in late March, I find myself pitching a tent and having the time of my life on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

      While Gavin is hooking up with one girl around the corner of our huge L-shaped tent, and then hooking up with another, the rest of us tear up some low-grade weed and pack a small metal pipe that Erik made for us on a lathe machine in his shop class. We pass it around something like seventeen times before anyone starts to feel the effects. The whole thing is so slow that we even pause to call Erik on his cell phone and ask why it’s taking so long to feel anything. He assures us that it’s real weed, but that since it’s our first time it will take a while to feel high, and to just keep smoking it. After about thirty minutes, we all sort of look at one another and smile broadly at the exact same time. Kieran bellows, “This shit is like Viagra!” and we all burst out laughing. What a goofy thing to say.

      While we’re smoking, one of the girls comes around the corner of the tent and then climbs onto me, but I’m laughing so hard with Jake and Kieran that nothing sexual happens between her and me. Instead I spend the night laughing and doing ridiculous stuff with the guys, things like tearing the clothes off Kieran, throwing him outside the tent, and then zipping it shut. It’s one of the most fun nights of my life.

      By the time we return to school the following week, a rumor has spread that us “bad boys” are severely out of control and have gotten into drugs. After this, everything seems to change overnight. I love the image of myself as a party boy and run with it. It seems, however, to elicit some serious hostility from teachers and girlfriends. Many of them act as if I’ve crossed a line by smoking weed. I don’t agree with this judgment, and something about it gives me a weird, palpable feeling of impending doom, like a storm is rapidly approaching, like I’m in the thick of the calm before it will hit, but this doesn’t affect my behavior. Over the next ten years my instincts now will prove to be correct; this is the time my life starts to spin out of control and then heads straight downward, like a dive-bomb, into the desolate, derelict pits of hell itself.

      But right now I don’t know what’s to come. In fact, I’m pretty convinced that any condemnation of drug use is utterly baseless, and that drugs are meant to be enjoyed by the user at his or her discretion. Just say no? Try just say yes. Besides, the DARE officer told us point blank that weed won’t kill you.

      So now I’m off and