Frederic was living in Rowan County, Kentucky. He listened to Chopin and ate a pie. And it was delicious. He thought about symbols and formulas and operations and what good mathematicians do with unsolvable problems. ??

He spoke a sermon and praised Jesus and was nocturnal for a night after 32 cups of coffee and one long pee. And he thought of his friends Harry and Amanda and Isabelle and Nicholas and Hayley and that music they once listened to while reading an ad about a big car sales event in a rich kid’s backyard. They wanted to leave Rowan County, Kentucky in a bright green death trap but found themselves too lazy to get out of bed.

??In Rowan County they peered through prisms and only talked to each other and to their pregnant neighbor. They would hum a Chopin or two to her stomach in rugged falsettos as she prayed for a kid who liked Kentucky.

Sometimes Frederic and Harry and Amanda and Isabelle and Nicholas and Hayley cut down bushes and sometimes they collected mud and sometimes they stuck leaves in their hair. They picked up litter and threw it in the river then went home and took turns taking naps.

Each night that November they ate biscuits and sat by a fire. It was warm and the biscuits were hard. Maybe because they expired in 2011 and maybe because they were supposed to be hard. Harry and Amanda and Isabelle threw the chewed-up biscuits into the fire and used the enlarged flames as a crystal ball. They could not read their futures so they stuffed their faces with cotton candy and let it dissolve.

Frederic was cheap so when Hayley wanted a pet he caught a fish in the river and gave it to her in a transparent bucket. She named it Bucket because it came in a bucket and it made Frederic cringe because Bucket is a stupid name.

Bucket died because Hayley cleaned its tank with soap and their neighbor miscarried because she tripped on ice. Her thick blood stained Pittman County’s sidewalks as Frederic and Harry and Amanda and Isabelle and Nicholas and Hayley each grabbed a section of her arms and escorted her home.

Frederic and Amanda and Nicholas got pneumonia from the cold. Hayley got a pet dog and Frederic laughed and coughed and got extreme chest pain but kept laughing because there was no way in hell Hayley could keep that dog alive. She did.

In Pittman County no one got away because Brainwashing 101 was the most popular class in college. The parents taught their kids to love and they eventually came around. Frederic and Harry and Amanda and Isabelle and Nicholas and Hayley were not exceptions.