by The directions kids gave to the bonfire was “Follow the mushrooms,” as though there was a distinct route marked by the fungus. It was a semi-prank, a snipe hunt suggested by people who weren’t completely confident that there wasn’t some heretofore undiscovered creature in the woods. After all, the mushrooms did lead to the clearing where, as the nights grew longer and the air crisper, someone would back up their pickup with a keg in the back. But the mushrooms led everywhere, spread throughout the forest and the town.
The kids didn’t know they’d be the last generation to gather like this. In time, the nights would stay warmer longer and, when it was finally cold enough for a fire, it was fleetingly so, the snows so close that it made gathering moot. Not that their own children, those who would have children, would be allowed to gather like this.
These were the good kids—the preps, the jocks, the ones that could get away with drinking then driving home or to parts unknown. The kids whose imbroglios were waved away with, “Boys will be boys.” Still, the culture was shifting, and even they felt it. The hair metal bands they listened to on the radio were the same ones being railed against in the paperback books their moms would buy from the grocery store, and, of course, there was AIDS. They were the kids who shouldn’t have had to worry about any of that, but they did. Some because of what they still kept hidden, others because they sensed its omnipresence and knew, even though it wasn’t said, that the virus could touch them no matter what life they lived.
They were waking from the American Dream and trying to hold on to the memory of what that had been, remember what the walls of Xanadu were made of so they could build them again. None of them could articulate it, but the world they’d been raised to expect, the product of all the fights their parents sat out, was shrinking, receding, and the price of that abstention was finally coming due.
