When Chris was sixteen, he understood his life.

It lay before him, bare, empty, working hard at dead-end jobs and paying bills and helping his mother and stepdad and sisters and maybe finding a girl and knocking her up and marrying her.

He was in the advanced classes in school, of course. And he played football. And he sang. And that was enough, wasn't it, for anyone? Four years as a clown, and a sports star and a genius and musician. Sixteen years of hunger, and cold, and patched hand-me-downs and Welfare and Workfare and four years of working afterschool and weekends to feed his sisters, and then he'd get his four years of fame and that was enough.

He sipped his whiskey from a bottle with his friends, laughing behind the bleachers, shushing each other when a teacher walked by, and he enjoyed it while he could, and he worked, always worked, and on his birthday he ogled the whores on Fourth Street, but he didn't buy one.

He never bought anything.

* * *

When Chris was eighteen, he tried to change his life.

Molly was dating already, fucking already, only fifteen. A quick study, Molly. Nearly as quick as he was, and if he gave her a year or two, she'd be running to him with children.

Chris refused to date himself. Refused to foist another child on the world he lived in. On himself.

He sat at home on Saturday nights, when he wasn't working, and he jerked off to the sounds of their neighbors screwing, and he waited for the phone call, waited to go pick Molly up, and put her back together, and beat the crap out of the guy that hit her, and tell his mother nothing. His stepdad, maybe, sometimes, but his stepdad lost his job, and then it was Chris. All Chris.

He went to school, and he studied hard, and he applied for money, and swallowed his pride and wrote his father, because Hell, when'd he had pride, anyway?

He got accepted, and he swore up and down to work, always work, and his mother kissed his cheek and his father wrote a check and his stepdad sent him off with a handshake and a promise to keep an eye on Molly, and he was sure that this was it. He was getting out, somehow, even with the three jobs and the two-year college.

He showed up at the dorm in the first set of clothes he had ever bought new, and he unpacked his backpack and his roommate had matched luggage, and nothing was ever different.

He laughed at himself for having cared, and drank at the parties when he got away, and studied hard because his father had paid and Chris was never one to waste another person's money.

* * *

When Chris was twenty-four, he left it all behind.

He called some kid, and met some more, and signed a deal, ready to make it big. He deserved it, he figured. He'd worked, and he'd studied, and he'd worked some more, and he was working now, with nephews and a two-year-old sister, but he was gonna make this happen.

They found his stepdad, dead, shot. Killed himself, they told him. "The gun was still warm in his hands," Molly said, "when Mom found him in the bedroom."

That was it for school, then. Something had to give, and it wasn't gonna be work, and it wasn't gonna be music, and it wasn't gonna be the whiskey he stored away under the floorboards, where Lance wouldn't find it.

He was twenty-four, and living with three teen-agers, mentor to a fourth, dancing in formation at night and working all day and supporting his mother, four sisters, their children, and himself.

His father disappeared again, and there was nowhere to go, nothing to do, and Germany was the same as America, only he couldn't work day jobs, anymore. But the whiskey was the same the world over, a different name, but the same cool slide down his throat, the same burning in his stomach. The same fire that he couldn't feel.

* * *

He sang, and he danced, and he smoked and smoked up. Dani fucked him in the back of his car, because Dani came from the same world he did, and it wasn't anything he hadn't seen before. He had gotten away, and ended up exactly where he started.

He watched his bandmates with their families, their suburban lives and cold marble palaces and movie theaters, grand pianos, businesses, sneakers and bikes and cars and empty lives.

He bought his mom a house, and dumped his girlfriend before she bound him forever, and drank his whiskey alone in bed, cold.

And in the morning he rolled over and went to work.