That was the year we stopped being kids. We threw our bikes into garages and sheds, went looking at second-hand cars with our dads. We put on too-big suits and borrowed ties and went to interviews for shelf stacking and burger flipping jobs. We watched our girlfriends go off to college with their slick new hairdos and push-up bras. They promised to call us their first love, but we’d already packed away our broken hearts with our board games and childhood bears. We’d already packed away our Big Dreams for ourselves, our futures. They were shattered as metal and bone in a box marked Goodwill.

Spring

That was the season we stopped being kids. We’d hang out at weekends, in the beginning. Wages blown on microwave dinners, cheap beer and rent. We’ll talk about sports and pimple-face managers and the price of gas. We dated women from the typing pool and the diner where we got lunch on Thursdays. We dated women with kids and mortgage payments and tired eyes. We lingered with the ones who constantly asked questions about That Day, about our feelings and whether we thought we drank too much. Then we’d picture their kids, all scuffed knees and cola-stained smiles, broken and bent, screaming Mommy and figure we didn’t drink nearly enough.

March

That was the month we stopped being kids. We got promotions and station wagons and starched white collars. We grumbled over breakfast about Big Stores ruining downtown, the cost of school trips and how that stretch of Laramie was still a goddamn deathtrap. We coached basketball and girls’ soccer and made it home for meatloaf Mondays and family movie night. Mostly. We saw each other at the County Fair and the Christmas parade and the liquor store. Our faces had changed but we still saw the ghosts of heedless, stupid boys out after curfew, drifting under the skin. Our eyes were still stretched wide and full of spinning blue lights.

Tuesday the 14th

That was the day we stopped being kids. We took our daughters to the prom and our sons to the Army recruitment drive. We drip fed our 401Ks. We cheated on our wives with the sad girls at the bar—all lip-glossed hope, bleach jobs and shapewear. We hid from our wives who still asked so many questions, asked why we turned pain to anger, why we never just talked about it. Like they thought they could change it with words. With their exhausted kindness. We turned our anger on handsy boyfriends in muscle cars and the guy tailgated us on that quarter mile of road where we had to slow down, where we had to crawl, so we could feel it. So, we could feel something.

9:47pm

That was the time we stopped being kids.

We dropped our bikes, bent double and breathless, laughed at how close that was. How fucking badass that was. How the truck’s brakes squealed like playground girls. Then we heard him screaming Mommy and we looked back over the road, that crazy stretch of Laramie our dads had always complained about, and he was bike and boy forever entangled and later, when we were wrapped in silver blankets and given warm milk by the woman who lived across the way, we were grown up so we left the milk spilled and cooling in the weeds with those final moments of our childhoods.