In the dark, my parents were up front. We drove home in the dark and they didn’t say anything. I looked out the window. Not out it but at it. Drops of rainwater clung to the glass, lighting up with colors from illuminated advertising. We drove only the one route through town, so I knew where we were without having to focus beyond the window. The droplets shone red and white from Dairy Queen. They shone red and green from Chili’s. There was nothing to see beyond that—I got everything from the colors.

The bigger drops cut zigzags through the drops that weren’t as big. The air rushing past the car drove them all backward, and the more each drop swallowed the quicker it went. My mom mumbled something, but when my dad asked, “What?” she didn’t answer him. Blue and yellow: Best Buy. I’d heard kids at school talk about shoplifting videogames from Best Buy, but I don’t know how they could have done it.

The parking lots were empty on the weeknights. The empty asphalt and the fading guidelines lay there unused, covered up by the rain that rolled across the windows. And there was more rain where that came from, and you could tell the traffic lights because the whole window changed from red to green, all at once, just like that.

Just like something can begin in the smallest way—the stupidest, most inconsequential and stupid way, that makes you want to stop before you begin, because what kind of a story would begin like this?

I hadn’t said anything at the restaurant. I hadn’t listened to whatever they’d said. I’d accidentally left a bottle of Coke in the freezer, and when it exploded it would stick to everything, dripping and freezing and leaving sugary trails of brown ice. It had happened to me before.

I’d put the Coke in the freezer that afternoon. I’d found a six-pack in the basement, and the fridge would have taken too long so I’d put one bottle in the freezer. The glass bottle looked a little like the plastic ones you can buy but it was narrower and sharper, and the glass had a greenish color instead of no color at all. And “Coca-Cola” was painted in white, so there was no plasticky paper to tear off and throw away.

I don’t know how the Coke got down there in the basement.

My parents kept on saying nothing as we got closer to home, waiting at empty intersections for nobody in the other direction. They’d probably stand there while I sponged out the freezer. They’d watch me and give me cleaning tips.

The car slid into our street like it always did. It slid softly around the corner, and the corner was the same as it always was, with the same curb holding up the same white rocks, all the same color, the same size of your palm. With the same multiplex mailbox for the entire cul-de-sac, and the same wooden sign that sort of tried to look old, that said Glenwood Park. There never was any park, unless you counted the plastic climbing toy in the neighbors’ yard—the rainbow-colored thing that nobody ever touched. The climbing toy was soft and puffy, like a padded cell, because when you saw it sitting there dirty and forlorn on somebody’s lawn you wanted to kill yourself on it first thing.

“First day of school tomorrow, eh Aleks?” My dad raised his eyebrows in the rearview mirror just before my mom opened her door and the overhead light came on.

“Yeah.” I was still hoping to catch the Coke before it froze. I hurried inside. The bottle was cold but it wasn’t frozen. It let out a little puff of vapor when I opened it, but when I tilted it up to my mouth nothing came out. I held the bottle to the light and saw that the top had frozen over. I thought I’d got there just in time.

“That’s interesting.” My dad came up behind me. “Did it just freeze?”

“I forgot about it. In the freezer.”

“You know what happened Aleks?” He took the bottle from me and held it to the light himself. “The pressure.” Sometimes it was hard to think of my dad as a teacher—of other kids calling him, “Mr. Szczygiel.” Other times it wasn’t hard at all. “Pressure is like heat. Pressure keeps it from freezing.”

I took back the bottle and jabbed at the frozen Coke with the butt of a fork.

“When you open the bottle the pressure drops, just like a drop in temperature but it’s instant, so it freezes. That’s cool.” Cool came out the way it always does with teachers, like a third-grader saying fuck. Like an extra-large t-shirt on a preteen that dresses his bony thighs. “I should do that in class.”

I don’t think my dad had changed his class once since the high school hired him. There was a pile of xeroxes in his study that he ran off once a year. There were little comics in the corners of some of the pages that were supposed to be funny, but they were all fifteen years old.

“All the water molecules are sliding around, packed so tightly they can’t slow down. When the pressure falls, the molecules want to form crystals but they don’t know how to begin. It takes a little impurity, like a speck of dust. The dust hits a water molecule and they link arms and start a new crystal. Each molecule that hits the crystal attaches itself somewhere around the outside. Then it’s that much bigger, it runs into more of the others, faster and faster, until just like that,” he snapped his fingers and the empty kitchen amplified the sound, “the whole thing’s frozen. All from just that one speck of dust.”

I was still trying to make it pour while he talked. I took it with me to my room, but everything that came out was syrupy and flat. After I drank all I could get the bottle was still full of ice, but the ice wasn’t so brown anymore.