I wrote this story a few years ago inspired by the Jawbreaker song with the same title. (I still listen to Jawbreaker on my headphones – a lot – and have never really stopped listening to them for the past 15 years.) The guy in the song goes to this party, older and back in his hometown, and watches the night fall apart for everyone else. But I feel like the character in it has something else going on. Like he’s experiencing a certain schadenfreude at this party, happily witnessing (and sympathizing with) everyone else’s little tragedies, because he has left something much worse back home. In this story, I take a shot at that something worse.

BJ Hollars was good enough to publish it on his You Must Be This Tall to Ride, a site where he’s collecting coming-of-age stories to complement the recent anthology (with the same name) that he edited. Lots of good stuff there, including stories by J.A. Tyler and Matt Bell.

And speaking of Jawbreaker’s legacy, for those of you who don’t know, Blake Schwarzenbach has a new band – Thorns of Life – and they’re good. Here’s a video: