When Jack Stillwater was eleven he lost a testicle due to torsion, and when he was twelve his father shot himself with a 12-gauge rifle. On Jack's birthday. When Jack was thirteen his mother ran away with some rube she met at the truck stop at which she waited tables. After spending a hellish year in the care of foster parents more in tune with nature than nurture, a too-kind euphemism to say that they raped their ward more times than they fed him, the San Francisco Department of Child Support Services placed him in the care of his ailing aunt Claudia, a heroin junkie with a crime record longer than a roll of unspooled industrial-sized toilet paper. Surprise, surprise; a heroin overdose killed her two weeks later. Her corpse wasn't discovered until she was twelve months dead, however; the police chancing upon the burnt shipping container she and Jack lived in, previously hidden amongst a forest of redwoods, only after a wildfire had erased the landscape.
Jack was fifteen by then and hard as a criminal twice his age. He stole to survive, and he treated the world with the contempt it had continually, unmercifully, given him. He slept by the roadside and scavenged like a vulture. He slept in wayside restrooms and saloon bathrooms, always hiding his eyes from light like a blinded mutant fish dragged from the deep. Always hating, yet always hoping. And why? Because it can always get better. That's what dreams are for, aren't they?
But dreams are only dreams until they come true. And then they do, and your dreams get bigger, more grandiose, and then sometimes Icarus's wax wings melt. But the dreams never cease. Not ever.
He met Nicole Westbrook on the day of his sixteenth birthday. The restaurant's yellowing calendar said so. She two years his junior, Jack liked Nicole instantly, because she looked like his opposite in female form. The girl was drenched like a sewer rat, huddled at a booth and shaking, her sneakered feet up on the vinyl seating.
She was shivering.
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