When I first met Frank Mills late on a Saturday night, he was copying passages out of an old physics textbook. He looked at me a little startled and said with a tight smile, “Think if there was no gravity.”

I thought of a cartoon I saw once where a sailor tried to drink whisky bubbles in outer space. “Yeah?”

He looked from the floor and his eyes slowly rose up toward the ceiling. He beamed as he looked around at his furniture made of cinderblocks and plywood.

Frank Mills was born on the day I met him, out of a friend’s leftovers, in a cold, lofty apartment on the west side. He had a fresh haircut, an angular blonde thing which had lots of shaved parts and long parts, like a real science-fiction Kraftwerk kind of do. I had gone to his apartment expecting his former self, trying to avoid my housing problems. The heat wouldn’t work without sounding like a million midgets were banging on the pipes with sledgehammers, and it was too cold to fix it.

“It’s Frank, now. Frank Mills. You know like the hippie play—I know a boy named Frank Mills?” He was singing a song to get me to understand why he’d changed his name. Frank Mills was a hippie that girls fell in love with in a play made by hippies about hippies in the age of hippies. Pretty clear metaphor. Obnoxious.

Although he had invited me over and suggested we go out, he was now assembling clothing out of scrap fabric and bicycle cable. Frank Mills knew that he was not a hippie; he didn’t read the books or eat the food or any of the other telltale signs of hippiedom. Frank was just trying on the lifestyle for a few days and seeing if it suited him. He was a great faker.

Me, I didn’t know what was going on. It was like everyone else had a personality so I had adopted one I saw on TV. Mine carried around books and wore scarves and sweaters and things and tried to memorize lines he could later recite to his friends. They make fun of him but are intimidated by his immense knowledge. Men are secretly threatened and women overtly aroused. He builds bookcases to support his vast collection of unread secondhand books.

I am very bad at playing this person. I get drunk every night and misquote Moby Dick. I spent the whole summer taking acid and walking around strip malls like a confused little boy. I haven’t been home in three months and I miss everybody I used to know.

We were on bicycles with no hands and it was midnight and Frank was signaling to me like pitcher to catcher. This was a scarf night where all the stars are out but no people and your neck gets cold before your face. It was starting to snow. No cars anywhere, the giant parking lot front yards were nothing but grids and florescent lights. The air was wet leaves and the ground was a sparkle of cold blacktop with vanilla frosting. The radio said to stay inside tonight. The sky is falling tonight.

When I didn’t see him at first he gave me the finger, then he threw his left arm out to show which way we were going. He pointed toward the open supermarket.

Part of this metamorphosis into Frank came from talking less, or at least trying to. The week before Frank was born we drove to the country in his mom’s little hybrid car and camped in a field on one of the clearest nights of fall. We got drunk and left our stuff in the middle of the night, and walked into the woods and sat down and didn’t talk for an hour. We were cross-legged like Indians and we leaned against each other staring up at the trees like railroad tracks wide at the bottom joining together at the top in an explosion of flutters that weren’t quite green, gazing up like fireworks in the bright October sky. We were just deep enough that we couldn’t see out anymore, but not more than a few dozen footsteps in. We didn’t talk about music and not about living off the land or what we weren’t going to do with our lives—it was exhausting. And then we went back to the tent because neither of us knew what to feel.

The supermarket was empty. Carrying two baskets, we claimed a Frisbee, a jar of grape jelly, a bag of hot dog buns, two bags of water balloons and a humorously huge bulk package of four-ply toilet paper before we found aisle five, and the store’s only true customer.

She stood about as tall as my mother. Her bright gray hair was cut in an inverse curve at the shoulders like Diane Keaton, but younger and stronger looking. She wore a black skirt and a hairy brown turtleneck sweater. She was bent at the knees, looking at the lower shelf, inspecting cat toys with one in each hand, giving a self-conscious smile. It reminded me of my mother.

The day my sister and I left for college, the year before, no one cried. But you could see right through us. Tens of thousands of days all looking up to this one giant step, this brick wall at the end of a path. I looked at it like I looked at dying. And we couldn’t say “We have all the time in the world” anymore because it wasn’t true, which hurt the most.

I ducked into the other aisle, away from Frank and I let out what sounded like a sob from inside my head but probably came out a heavy, long, low-breathed moan.

This woman didn’t fit the part. There were people who would have been acceptable looking at cat toys in the middle of the night—a woman who wore neon tights with blonde curly hair, or a man in penny loafers and a Polish knit ski-cap—but this was someone’s mother who should be busy being a mother. Who was going to take care of her, who was telling her not to go out in the middle of the night to collect pieces of cotton with bells attached so that her feline friends could keep her entertained? Wasn’t there anybody? Dead alive.

I can’t help it if I’m like this. I cry every time I hear a Judy Collins song. When I rake leaves and hear crackly records and when I see animals dead in the road. I cry when people die in movies, I cry when people laugh in books. While pretending to read the label of a box of Cocoa Krispies, Frank sprinted past with a look on his face I didn’t recognize.

I ran after him, down the hallway where they kept the shopping carts, my legs fishtailing around corners and into the bitter unseasonable cold of the parking lot. Frank was in midair with his knees crunched to his chest, running up on the hood of a car. He was jumping up and down on the roof of a Plymouth minivan, screaming like he was riding a mechanical bull. He jumped higher and sprung his legs out when he landed back on the car, but even when he tried jumping on the windshield—nothing broke. I ran and grabbed him off the car and he fought until he was out of breath and shaking.

“Stop being crazy!” was the best I could get out before he threw me away, and for a minute looked a little like he might get up and hit me in the face, then punched his other hand.

“Goddammit,” he spit. “We have nothing. We care about nothing. No one listens to us.” He was screaming at the top of his lungs but bothering no one. A few cars maybe, the light posts that filled the parking lots with an orange glow, the orange snowflakes they created. The florescent signs on the storefronts and the traffic lights in the distance may have swung differently, but blinked the same. The sound of engine brakes in the distance got louder, but passed and changed tone. The snow that had been falling was getting harder.

“This isn’t the way it was before. You think this would be a grocery store if we were our parents? They stood in front of tanks, man, they organized and sang songs and protested until they got what they wanted. What do we do—we ride our bikes around and buy anything anybody tries to sell us.”

I could have let him keep going like this all night, and he probably wouldn’t have stopped, but I spoke on the principle that he was full of shit. “They were scared,” said a voice somewhere inside me.

“They were scared enough to do amazing things and become more scared! And they kept on doing it until it worked. This is our college town now. We get to live here.”

Maybe it was something in his face that set me off, or something about the way he was talking. It was new to me. I was starting to think I didn’t really like this new person, which set me off. I tackled him to the ground and tried to get on top of him to kill him, to get my old friend back. We kept flipping each other over trying to employ the one wrestling move we knew—the full nelson—until one of us won and we laid back with our heads in white linen.

“We don’t even have jobs…” he started, and then took out his flask. “You know how the last generation was ‘X’? They’re going to call us the…fuckin…” and he trailed off doing waves with his hand to finish his sentence. We lay back down.

Surrounding us, the snow was piling up. Our bicycles carried a thin inch of snow on their tires, our seats showed three inches. We were collecting snow on the fronts of our clothing. The snow was coming out of nowhere, coming from the lights over our heads. We left our bikes and started walking home, when the lights died.

I don’t mean the way a city loses lights, where they go off like a wave across the skyline. These lights flickered once before they went black the way the power dies in your house in the middle of the night. Everywhere, a breeze and a howl whisked, the telephone poles bent, the stoplights blew around without signals, and no one saw them. We passed a fifth of whisky and counted lampposts as we walked home through a pale moonlit field.

Peter Scheck is a senior English major and Contributing Editor for Generation.