I Wasn't There When they murdered Charles Cunningham, my first best friend, I was five hundred miles north of The Aztec Drive-In Theatre where they found him on his knees leaning on a metal stand, face white as painted speakers dotting the acres like markers at Normandy or Arlington. Charles might have smiled a little, licked his lip. He may've thought some adolescent insult or challenge was an act until he closed with two of them, whoever they were, and a blade slide into him and twisted toward his heart. I have an alibi. I wasn't there to stand beside him as the huge screen took the colors broken from a beam of light, and painted heroes up in front of him. I would've been asleep at my cousin's house. Oaks, redwoods, pines, the great horned owl and deer rustled around me all that night as Charles' blood pooled beneath him on the asphalt where he knelt before some stupid melodrama. An usher caught him in a flashlight beam, then gently shook a shoulder, touched his throat but there was nothing anyone could do for Charles Cunningham.