- Jack starts high school at Concrete High in the nearby town of Concrete. He gets good grades by cheating off of other students.
- Eventually, he falls in with a rough crowd and his grade starts to slip.
- Jack describes his friends at school, a troubled but gentle boy named Chuck Bolger, a career criminal in training nicknamed Psycho, a handsome cad named Jerry Huff, and Jerry's cousin Arch Cook, who is exceedingly dim.
- They hang out in the apartment of Arch's sister Veronica. Veronica drinks and wears trashy outfits.
- Jack is shy around the girls drawn to his group, until Rhea Clark moves to Concrete from North Carolina. Unfortunately, after dancing with him once, she starts dating another boy and can't even remember his name.
- Jack responds by treating other girls the same way Veronica treated him.
- Chuck likes to get Jack drunk sometimes. One time, Jack passes out on the roof of the school.
- He wakes up, but still thirsts for the opportunity to damage himself. So he steps out onto a tree branch above a gully.
- The branch breaks and he goes tumbling into the gully.
- He wakes up sometime later and hears people calling for him. He likes the feeling of people looking for him. He spends the night in the ditch (ouch!), then hitchhikes back home.
- When he tells Dwight about it, Dwight is amused. Mom isn't.