The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott

good guy,” the officer says. Just like that.
    After the wake there’s the funeral. It’s raining. A rabbi speaks while a lady in a smart suit holds an umbrella above him. We take turns shoveling dirt onto the casket. “That costs $150,” Javier says, pointing to a square of white flowers on top of a grave. He used to work in the cemetery. “Plus maintenance.” Mike’s mother is here. His home situation wasn’t as bad as most of ours. Both his parents were alive, though separated. Mike’s father invites everyone over to his house for food but we go to a bar instead.
    We don’t talk a lot about Mike, who was a nice guy and didn’t get in much trouble. We talk about Tim Strutz and his Camaro fishtailing through the alleys near Devon. I mention that I was volunteering in a homeless shelter my senior year in high school when Tim came in on the other side of the line. Someone mentions Tomlee taking the police on a high-speed chase and then, surrounded in a parking lot, refusing to get out of the car and the police punching him repeatedly in the head while he sat in the driver’s seat. Ant was out of the car and standing with his arms folded across his chest while Tomlee got his beating. “Are you scared?” the cop asked him.
    “No,” Ant said. “I’m just cold.”
    We talk about the house burglary ring Aaron started in 1986. Aaron wasn’t at Mike’s funeral today. He once told me he started robbing houses because he wanted to be like me. I had just returned from hitchhiking to California and he said he wanted to have stories to tell too. He spent years in jail. Last time I saw him he was shooting up in his apartment. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m a junky.” It didn’t bother him. He stuck the needle right in his leg. He sold me my last bundle of heroin, ten poorly mixed bags including a hotshot full of pure juice that nearly killed me.
    “Where is that guy, anyway?” Roger asks.
    Ant orders sandwiches and pitchers of beer. We talk about the kids that came in from the suburbs. They’d brought a keg down to the canal and didn’t want to share. They didn’t know they were in our space, that we had dug the fire pit and made the stairs and slept many nights there while the rats ducked in and out of the muck. There were more of them than us and the largest stood in front of Ron Fessedon and said, “It’s time for you guys to leave.” Ron got a queer look on his face then pulled a branch from the tree and punched him in the temple with it and he fell face-first in the dirt, his girlfriend screaming, “You killed him!” Everybody scattered.
    Eddie mentions Billy showing up drunk and losing his job at UPS. Roger remembers Mitch taking off his shirt at Eddie’s wedding, Pat throwing a bottle through the window of Devon Bank. Javier talks about coming home to his first apartment and seeing a trail of blood in the hallway and hoping it didn’t lead to his door, but of course it did. His roommate was covered in bandages, sitting in a straight-backed chair. He’d been fighting with his girlfriend and glass was everywhere.
    When we get together these are always the stories we tell. Stories of theft and violence. We tell the same stories over and over again and I always learn something new. This time I learn that the decision to rob Paul’s parents’ house was made in my father’s car, which Tim McKitrick had stolen that morning. My father used to attach a set of magnetic keys to the underside of the bumper. I don’t remember telling anybody about them, but I probably did.
    “There were an unusual number of sociopaths in our group,” Roger observes. “Including your father.”
    It’s true, I think. We’re proud of our stories. They make us sound tougher than we were. Actually we were weak and rarely stood up for one another. We had no group identity and no sense of loyalty. We weren’t into anything except bad heavy metal music, and a lot of us weren’t even into that, we were just faking it. We