Houston walked a mile to the bus stop and there he waited, covered with dirt and made sentimental by the vision of high school punks and their happy, whorish girlfriends walking to class, heading for their own daily torment, sharing cigarettes back and forth. Houston remembered doing that, and later in the boy’s bathroom … nothing ever as sweet as those mouthfuls from rushed, overhot smokes … stolen from the whole world … In his heart—as with high school—he’d quit this job on the first day but saw nowhere else to go.
