I move steadily along the slip stream, leaving reality on my blurred periphery.
        I stop to look at the family.
"Excuse me son." His hair is as tan as his sun scorched face, and recedes into a combed horseshoe around his barren forehead.  "What year are you?"
David Berman stops singing Southern poetry in my right ear.  The poet is reduced to a light moan over ominous crackling, like someone dying in a distant shower.  He starts to ask again, assuming I couldn't hear him.  My words rush out to save consideration.
"I'm a senior." I forget to say sir.
"Oh."  His lips curl out of a small pink circle into a broad, toothy smile.  His skin stretches like leather.  "I was betting you were a freshman."  His voice is strong and Southern, but lacks the biting, mocking twang of his archetype.  "You look like a freshman."
"I'm sure I do," I say.  No point fighting him, or it.
The man's son steps forward, or rather lunges forward, perhaps shoved by his mother who stands meekly at the edge of the wide brick walkway with her hands folded neatly over her waist.  The kid stands close to his father's sturdy shoulder.  Baby fat and glowing pink cheeks under a thin tumbleweed of splayed orange tentacles.  His hair is easily more orange than mine, but just as long.  The cold wind blows our hair in the same direction, every strand stretched to its limit struggling toward an unreachable finish line. A race for nature's favorite shade of ginger.  His father raises his arm and envelops the soft seventeen year old.  "We were gonna ask if you could tell our son what being a freshman is like, maybe ask a few questions."
"You were?"
"Yeah, we wanted to ask you a few questions.  Do you have any time?"
"But I'm not a freshman."
The mother finally steps forward and takes her place on the other side of her son. She's short, her tight brown ponytail starting just under the sleeve of her son's beach blanket of a t-shirt.  They have the same curved, oblong nose.  They share the same eyes as well, dark seeds set deep in narrow eye sockets.  She has the humble look of Native Americans.  The three of them stand in front of me in succession from shortest to tallest. This is my past and my future, standing in front of me like a guilt ridden police line-up, each culprit waiting patiently to take the blame.  
"That's okay," the father says with a positive timbre. "You might have even more advice, since you're a senior and all."
I remain quiet and look at the mother, waiting for her to let her voice be known, but the thin beige lips stay clamped tight.
"Are you from here?" the old man asks.  He pauses after 'from,' as if consciously omitting 'around.'
"No," I lie.  But where am I from?  From the center of the suburban line-up, the boy gives a nod that asks the same question.  The North, definitely the North.  But my voice.  They seem like they might know. Virginia's still the South.  Maryland.  Why not D.C.?  Virginia. "Virginia.  I'm from Virginia."  Christ.  Everyone comes here from
Virginia.  I wince, waiting to hear it, hoping they think I'm squinting from the schizophrenic sunlight that keeps bobbing in and out through the canopy of oaks instead of facially willing my lie to hold true.
The old man seems to sense it and let's me have it. No mercy.  No lies.  "Aw hell, see that Pat?"  He nudges his son's fat shoulder. "He's from Virginia too.  What part son?"  Any restraint of his Southern dialect is now suspended.
What part?  Fuck.  Virginia.  Thomas Jefferson.  Blacksburg?  It's in the mountains but that's all I know.  Alexandria?  I think that's Maryland.  They need an answer.  I give one. "Charlottesville. Well, just outside, Charlottesville, sir."  If you're gong to lie, it's best to be polite.  "What about ya'll?"
"Blacksburg," the kid blurts.  Thank god.
"Oh," I say, drawing it out, as if I have something to segue into, but actually inviting an interjection.
The dad bites, and says, "how come you didn't go to UVA?"
"Why isn't he going to Virginia Tech?"  I almost repeat how come.  I nod at the blank faced blob in the middle.  The father doesn't move, not sure if I'm being sincere with my malice or not.  "I'm sorry, that was rude."  I pause to see if anyone needs to speak.  No one takes the opportunity, so I smile and continue with a fake list of reasons to
leave my fake hometown.  "I wanted to come further South.  The weather, I guess.  Get away from my mother. Huh huh."  If only.  I make sure to say each reason with the slight inflection of a question.  You never want lies to be too declarative, says a surprising voice inside me.
I give an even larger smile that's matched by the father who nods and leans in closer, showing me his attentiveness, like a snack hungry golden retriever.  "Yeah he wants to see what it's like down here too."  He cranes his head around the doughy flesh hill that is his son, trying to share a look with his wife.  She is vacant and inattentive, however, her gaze lost somewhere in the path's smooth pattern of brown bricks.  He turns back to me in defeat.  "Or maybe he's trying to get away from us."  He hits his son in the arm again, this time harder than any of the previous strikes, then he and I share a big smile before turning our attention to his son.
The boy gives a small smile, but doesn't manage to say anything.
The traffic of walkers increases.  Everyone's tricked by yesterday's weather. Short skirts and sandals shiver to and from class.  My new family moves toward me, all as a unit, braking a foot or so in front of me.  Fatty's extra large t-shirt drapes over his stomach like a cotton navy waterfall.
"Why don't I show you around?" someone else must have asked.  How could I allow such irrationality to escape my throat?  My conscious seems detached. Or maybe it's finally taking over.
They hear me nonetheless, and their reaction does nothing to veil their immediate interest.  Even the silent mother shuffles her clean Keds closer.  Her ears now poke out further from her loosening ponytail, seeming to have grown larger and mousier since her initial appearance.  She makes a quick glance around her tubby son's stomach to spark her husband's answer.
"Do you have the time?" he finally asks.  "The tour we signed up for doesn't start for another hour."  It feels like he should have preceded "tour" with "damn,"  There's a quick emptiness in the conversation because of it.
"No, actually, I don't," I say.  How could I toy with these sweet people? They are simply on the mission they've been assigned to.  I think about my college visits.  Two failed attempts to complete the two, one-hour tours of Clemson and College of Charleston. Both times with different carloads of friends.  Both times with plenty of weed, though.
Just because I failed to realize my mission doesn't mean I should sabotage theirs. I think of the only solution.  "But I bet you could sit in on my class. See what a real college class is like."  For some reason, I raise my eyebrows at this.  I've never done that before, but it still feels like instinct to do it.  "My professor is really cool about stuff like this," I lie.  "I promise."
"No, that's okay son," the father answers for his family.  My stomach does a free-fall into disappointment.  My heart is broken. "I'm not so sure Pat's ready for all that." He turns and looks at his son. The fat boy takes the cue and starts shaking his head.
"You, sure? My professor's great, really. I promise." I know there's nothing I can do, but I try anyway. "He would love to show off in front of some new faces, I'm sure."
"Thanks a lot son, but we better be on our way."  His wife has her hands on the boy's shoulders and is leading him backwards, toward the reflecting pool in front of the library; away from me.  I can't let them go.  They need me.
"What's that around your neck?" I ask the father.  My curiosity for the small metal pebble that hung on a strip of leather around the man's neck became too much for panicking thoughts, and turned itself into a solution, albeit temporary.
He steps closer to me, pulls on the black leather string, offering me
a closer look without having to remove the necklace outright.
"That is hunk of melted silver," he says while fondling the tiny
knotted ball. "Why do you reckon I would wear such thing?" His wall is
down now. All of his Southern breeding is displayed on a platter right
in front of me.
"I don't know," I say. He puts his hand on my shoulder and leans in
even further.  I can feel his nose's exhale against my cheek.
"This here is the melted down remains of a pistol I had during Vietnam."
"You were in Vietnam?" I ask while taking a step back.
"Of course," he says with a prideful smirk. "At my age, you didn't
have much of a choice."
He doesn't seem like he'd be older than my father, but he must be. "I
didn't know there were Army guns made of silver."
"There aren't." The mother and son and have started to wander in slow circles, each of them failing to curb their resentment for the father's story. "This was a gun I took myself. A solid silver Colt .45 my daddy gave me for my eighteenth birthday.  Just two weeks before I shipped off to basic training. They mailed it to me once I was in
Vietnam."
"I guess they didn't really check the mail back then, huh," I manage to add.
"It just wasn't a priority, son."
"Well, what happened to the gun?" I find myself asking.
"My platoon leader, Sergeant Mongrum-" he pauses and pinches the bridge of his nose to help contain the pain of the memory. "-he gathered up all the non-issued weapons, stacked them together behind the latrines, and set them on fire with gasoline and napalm."
"Were you not allowed outside weapons?" I ask, totally ignoring the agony of his bored wife and son.
"We were until I wouldn't sell the Sergeant my gun."
"Huh."
"Yeah. Not even three days after I got it in the mail, the Sergeant started throwing bids for it at me. He went up to a hundred and fifty bucks, which was a good chunk of our pay back then, plus a whole barrage of insults, like a 'shithole-Private don't need no workin' gun. Especially not a pretty one,' and 'lemme guess, that gun's as silver as the spoon you're fed with ain't it?' But I never gave him the gun."
He glances around his shoulder to make sure his family hasn't wandered out of sight. They are both walking in small, slow, circles around each other at the edge of the reflecting pool. "So one night, while the platoon was out on patrol, all the knives, guns, and carelessly left behind pocket watches were stolen out of our foot lockers and melted down into one big pile of unrecognizable scrap metal."
He pauses to let me get a word, but I have nothing to say.
"When we returned to the camp, we could all see the smoke floated up from behind the long row of latrines and showers.  Me and another fella, I don't even remember his name now-" He looks up, searching the gray sky for the forgotten soldiers name.  He returns empty handed. "But anyway," he continues. "He and I take off running to see what's going on, and as soon as we got around those out houses I knew what was going on. I don't if it was just luck or what, but as soon as I saw that bonfire, my eyes were drawn to the bottom right corner of the pile where I saw my gun resting on top of a gold bladed machete that one of the other boys had bought as a souvenir. I watched my pretty little, silver, gun melt right into that gold machete."
My heart is silver.
He shakes his head in disappointment.  I don't even want him to keep going. The memory is obviously too much for him. How could he go on with the rest of his day without thinking about this the whole time? I wish he would stop, but it's too late. He has to finish.
"When the fire started burning out, I went up to the pile to see if there was anything I could salvage. The gun's ivory butt must have been ash. Most of the silver had forged with the gold plated machete, making it a mass of melted metal topped with ashes and gold flakes. I bent down to the mess and pinched a piece of the hot silver away from the melted mass. It burned the hell out of my hand until I could get it into a basket I made out of my shirt.  I took it into my bunk and when it cooled, I strung it around this piece of leather, and it's been around my neck ever since."
I look over at his current reasons to live. They are now sitting next to each other on a wooden bench that looks over the pool.  They both have their heads in their knee-steadied hands.
"Goddamn that asshole," he says to regain my attention, but I he doesn't even care if I'm listening now. He's looking off toward the trees that line the path behind me. "So I didn't want the money?  It was more than money. It was a gift from home. No man should've taken that away from me."
I nod in agreement.
"I'll never forget seeing that. I walk behind those latrines and it's
nothing. Nothing but hot silver."
My heart is hot silver, ready to cool and form into a worthless,
knotted, ball and be strung loosely around my thin neck.

I take too long to respond. I should be crying. He would love that. It's what he wants.  Instead I stare and offer nothing.
"Well, son, it was really nice talking to you"
"Yeah."
"But we have to get going now.  We don't want to be late for our tour."
The fat boy and his mother are up and moving toward their man now. They are being summoned to something greater, and who am I to stand in their way?
Before I take off in full stride in the opposite direction, I say, "that’s okay, I'm late anyway."

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