Note: so sorry for the delay, my computer freaked out and I just now got my lap top on line. Also, I know that by the end of senior year they will both be eighteen, and so the title won't work as well but.....oh well. I wasn't thinking about that when I started this.

Nine: Roger

Senior year, 1987-88

"It doesn't look that bad." Mark twists his head to the side and squints at the thin rectangle of plastic in my hand, "I mean, what did you expect? ID photos never look good, especially your driver's license. It's like a law of nature or something."

"Yes, well be that as it may, most people at least have eyebrows in their driver ID pictures!" I snap. Mark smirks.

"It's your own fault that you didn't have eyebrows in that picture," he says. His face is twitching from trying to hold back laughter.

"MY fault? How the hell is it my fault? YOU were the one who shaved them off!" I want to strangle him. I mean, he's my best friend and I love him to death, but I still want to beat him over the head with a blunt object.

"And YOU were the one who passed out first at that party. If you hadn't had so much to drink, you wouldn't have passed out and I wouldn't have had to shave them off."

"That makes no sense, Mark! You didn't have to do anything!"

"Don't try to reason with me, I'm mentally unstable. You'll talk yourself blue but you won't get anywhere."

The bell signaling the end of lunch cuts through the babble of talk in the cafeteria. I shove my unfortunate driver's license into my back pocket and follow Mark into the hall.

"Look at this as revenge for my camera," he says after a moment.

"That wasn't my fault!" I protest. He glares at me. "Well maybe it was.....sort of......in an indirect way. I mean, I did start the whole math class fiasco. But you contributed to it, too. It was mostly your dad's fault, anyhow."

After our little math class escapade we were banned from Algebra (or whatever it was we were taking) for the rest of the year. We had to go to summer school to make up our grades. My parents were okay about it. I mean, they told me that I did a dumb ass thing, but we all knew that I had a snow flake's chance in hell of getting into college anyway, so how I do in high school doesn't really matter. Just as long as I don't get expelled I'm A- okay. Mark's family, on the other hand, weren't so understanding. Both his parents went to Harvard, his older sister is in her second year at Columbia. They have a family history of going to extremely good schools and Mark's getting banned from math wasn't exactly going to look good on his college application (oh, I'm sorry his university application). His dad got uber pissed and started screaming about how he was letting the family down, he was stupid, he was lazy, he was sloppy, he was a disappointment, no son of mine, spends too much time with that fucking camera, blah blah BLAH blahity blahblah. Then when Mark started shouting back his dad grabbed the Nikon and chucked it across the room. Now, it was a sturdy little camera, it had survived being dropped about a gazillion times but it didn't survive the wrath of Papa Cohen.

"It wasn't your fault really." he looks thoughtful for a second "I wish I could shave my dad's eyebrows off."

"Why can't you?" I ask, rubbing my newly sprouted eyebrows ruefully.

"Because he spends all day locked in his coffin, sound asleep amongst the dirt of his homeland. During the night he's too busy drinking the blood of the innocent for me to get him."

I snort, "Been watching Dracula again, have we?"

"Maaaaybe....."

"Which one?"

"Winnona Rider, Gary Oldman."

"I like that one. It's like soft porn only with lots of blood. Do you wanna cut class?"

"Can't. I have few possessions left that my dad hasn't broken. If he finds out I've skipped class again I think he'll throw me against a wall." Mark grimaces. "Besides, I like my next class."

"What is it, film studies?" I ask.

He nods. "I get to sit around for eighty minutes watching moves. What could be better?"

"Skipping class."

"Not an option."

"Well fine then. I'll skip and you can go to nerds united."

"Will do." He salutes me and swings through the door of his class. I cut off to the science block steps to have smoke break. Life, such as it is, is good.

LATER

The problem with having a best friend who's family his obsessed with getting him into an Ivy League school at all costs is that you spend a lot of time either alone or actually doing your homework. I'm not used to this thing called homework. It is a strange and alien concept, but I do it anyway so Mark won't feel so alone (and so I won't have to go home and face my step mom, the eighth wonder of the world, our Lady Sharyl of the Bare Ass.)

I wish that she'd just put some clothes on. I like her, I really do, it's just that her nakedness is really gross. I bought her a bathrobe for Christmas but she never wears it. If she wanted walk around bare-assed, she should have joined a nudist colony or a convent like my mother did. Maybe she could join the same convent and walk around in those weird robe things picking vegetables.

My mom left dad and me when I was eight to join this cult type thing in southern California where all these people walk around in bright orange robes and plant their own food and farm and stuff. Dad and I have visited her a few times. We didn't wear the robes but we ate and picked with them. It seemed kind of boring. My dad was surprisingly mellow about the whole thing. But then, he's one of those hippie types. He's always wearing his "University of Hard Knock" sweatshirt. Because of him I've been able to role a joint since I was six. He grows pot in his closet, sells it to his friends. That's how he met Naked Sharyl (she wasn't naked when he met her, or I hope she wasn't). They've been living together for eight years now.

So you see, my family makes Mark's look almost normal. I mean, who else can say that they've got a nudist step mom, a father who is basically a white Rastafarian, and a mother who's in a cult? Let's have a show of hands, shall we?

But I digress. So we're sitting in Mark's room. I'm brooding over my driver's license photo. The thing about not having eyebrows is that it takes people a while to notice what's wrong. They sit there, looking. They know something is off, but they can't say what. Then it hits them like a tone of bricks. You have no eyebrows. This totally freaks them out. You can almost see them wondering why. Interestingly enough, you are often wondering the same thing.

In the kitchen the phone shrieks. No one else is home, and Mark's too engrossed in a trig problem to answer it so I forget the license for a minute and run down stairs to get it.

"Cohen residence," oh I'm sooo polite. Check me out, man!

"Hey, can I talk to Mark." It's a girl. She's got an amazing voice, smoky and smooth. I can almost see it swirling down the telephone line and curling out through the tiny holes in the receiver.

"Sure," I have to stop and clear my throat. Amazing that just a voice could do this to me, "Just a second." I clamp my hand over the mouth piece and shout up to Mark to come down, pronto.

"Who is it?" he asks.

"No idea. A girl." I hand him the receiver, wishing the call were for me.

"Hello?" This is the last normal sounding word that comes out of his mouth. The second the person on the other end starts talking his face goes dead white. He's pressing the phone hard against his ear, like he wants to fall right through it. "You what?.....when? I—I don't understand.....how? No.....no I.....where are you? Yes. Yes, I'm on my way." He sets the phone gently back in the cradle, like it's made of glass. At this moment, he's the one who looks as if he's made of glass, as if he could shatter at any moment. He clutches the table top for support and stares down at his ands like they belong to someone else.

"Who was that?" I ask. I want to touch him. To reach out and grab his shoulder, but I'm afraid that if I do he'll break into a million pieces like his Nikon.

"Do you remember when I told you about Laura?" he asks softly.

I nod.

"Well she's.....she's in New York. She wants me to go get her." He's speaking like a man in a dream, like he can't quite believe what he's saying.

"They let her out?"

He shakes his head slowly, "No. No I think she escaped. I think she finally fucking did it! We have to go. We have to go now and get her."

"How are we going to find her?" I ask.

"She said she's staying at the Land of Smiles motel, it's in East Village. We should be able to find it." he looks around the kitchen like he's never seen one before. "Let's go. Let's go now . We can take your car."

There are about a thousand misgivings swarming through my head, bumping into each other like heavy black bugs but I don't have time to look at them closely. Mark's already out the door and it's all I can do to catch up to him. It's only when we're already half an hour away from Mark's house that I start actually thinking clearly. What exactly are we going to do when we find her? My inclination is to take her back to Western Psyche. If she escaped like Mark thinks she did, then she should be back there. She needs to go back there. But what if she won't? What then? What will our parents do to us? Assuming she comes quietly, we're still going to have to drive all the way to Pittsburgh and who knows how long that'll take? God, there are so many holes in this plan. This is possibly the dumbest thing I have ever done in a short but packed lifetime of dumb things.

But even as I'm thinking this, I know there's no turning back. I can't abandon this now. I have to stick it out for Mark. One look at him and I can see how much of his sanity is riding on this. He has to help her. There is some debt here. Something deeper than what I can see and what he's told me. There is some tie between these two that I'll never understand, all I know is he's bound by it to help her. And although I don't want to admit it, I'm also doing this for Laura. For the smoky voice over the telephone. I'm doing it to see what's waiting at the end. I want to see this girl who is so important to Mark, to understand better what is so compelling about her.

So I shove the worries to the very back of my mind. I role down my window so the twilight air rushes in and slaps my face. I turn the radio up and blast it loud enough to make my bones rattle like maracas. Here we are, heading far away from everything quiet and vaguely normal. Laura is pulling us like some kind of magnet. Pulling us farther and farther away, down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland.

Otay!! There it is. Chapter nine. I hope you likes. Please review, please! And once again, sorry for the delay!