Jay was a senior at Richard Milburn Academy, the alternative school he’d recently transferred to so he wouldn’t have to put up with the bullshit of his old high school. His grades were on a steady decline and getting into a good college was no longer an option. At this rate he’d be lucky to graduate with the rest of the class of 2008.

To make matters worse, he lived in Lubbock, our hometown in West Texas that is most famous for the country radio DJs who drove John Deere tractors over piles of Dixie Chicks CDs. It’s the second most conservative city in the country, where freedom of religion means you’re free to go to either the Baptist or Methodist church.

A skinny pale white kid with a smirk and heavy drawl oozing with sarcasm didn’t make him very popular. He been dumped by his girlfriend and his buddies had all either dropped out of high school or gone to college already. He didn’t seem to have much in common with them anyway, except for smoking pot, which he did a lot.

I didn’t think his marijuana habit was that big of a deal. I wasn’t exactly immune to its charms. Despite our age difference, Leighton, Jay and I all started smoking pot around the same time. I was intimidated by the coolness and worldliness of the artsy kids at my college near Dallas, and sharing a joint was a silent way of saying I am like you. For Leighton, marijuana was a passport to an entirely different world. It was like currency, and was probably used as such, at the Phish and String Cheese Incident concerts she watched. Jay didn’t just smoke pot with his friends, he had friends for the sole purpose of smoking pot. It allowed him to drift away from the world he didn’t like very much, and maybe, didn’t like him either. He didn’t smoke to get a little stoned, he wanted to be totally out of his mind. And he wanted to feel that way all of the time.

I was home from college for Thanksgiving break the first time the three of us smoked out as a family. We crawled into Leighton’s VW bug and passed around a glass pipe. Jay was only 13, and I was shocked that he had already been smoking for a year, but Leighton said he would smoke with or without us, so we might as well get high together and tell him the rules:

Number 1: Never buy pot, just bum it from friends.

Number 2: Never smoke at home, not even in your room.

Number 3: When you turn 16, don’t speed when you drive around with pot or paraphernalia, even rolling papers.

Number 4: If you ever have to take a drug test, take a bunch of niacin and drink a gallon of water the night before. It’ll suck, but you’ll pass.

These rules had made us peaceful pot smokers with no drug charges, and as long as he was smart about it we were sure that he would follow our bliss.

Rules are made to be broken.

During the first semester of his senior year he got drunk and high and crashed his old Buick into a tree. When the police woke him up from his passed-out position behind the wheel, he spent the night in jail. With his car totaled and girlfriend long out of the picture, he figured working wasn’t worth the hassle, so he took the liberty of walking out in the middle of his shift after his manager refused to move him up from busboy to waiter.

When he felt like talking to anyone, he called me. He said he thought his friends were talking shit about him. I understood, because the same thing happened to me. Except I knew people were talking about me, calling me a “slut,” “lesbian,” or a “snob” depending on which insult seemed more offensive to them at the time. One time they even went ahead and spelled it out in shoe polish on the windows of my car. In my homophobic high school it would have been impossible to be a slut and a lesbian, but that was beside the point. At our high schools (the one he’d been attending before he transferred to alternative school) you were a star athlete, cheerleader, or a nobody. There were no popularity points given out for listening to alternative music (me) or indie rock (him) or supporting Clinton (me) and not supporting Bush (him).

Life can suck pretty badly when you’re 17 so I didn’t think it was a big deal that Jay was lonely and depressed. If anything, it was an indication of how much potential he had. Everyone knew high school losers grew up to become the Mark Zuckerbergs and Natalie Portmans of the world. I told him to stick it out. Graduate from high school and move away for college. It would all be different then.