Way back when I first earned my license, my father quietly entered my bedroom in the wee hours because he'd been awoken by the sound of my car starting up and driven away. He woke me up and asked what about it.

I said, "Fuck it, they'll just park it at the lake," and promptly fell back to sleep. I wasn't really awake, but I remember my dad in his underwear asking me who drove my car away, then him peering out my bedroom window at the driveway. My car was gone but I didn't give a shit because I'd been engrossed in a dream that was a mashup of a girl I had the hots for getting undressed and a Hush Puppy shoe commercial.

The only detail that makes this incident remarkable is my car was recovered by the town cops, abandoned by 'the lake', which wasn't really a lake but an enormous hole left by the company that dug out all of the humus that had filled up with water. It was just a deep mud puddle surrounded by a weedy fringe of land where kids went to smoke pot, drink beer and make out. My stolen car is only involved because a kid delivering papers with his dog followed his mutt to the body of a classmate who had been raped, strangled and left near where my car was abandoned.

The cops determined my car wasn't involved in the murder, but they never discovered who stole my car or the person who raped and murdered my classmate.