~I think I'm going to start putting pictures on each of my chapters because it makes it look so cute~
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His name was Graser.
That's what everyone called him, anyways. Sometimes they would call him Gra, sometimes someone would slip up and call him Grase. He was a part of our group of friends growing up in a large town, not quite big enough to be a city but big enough that there was still privacy between neighbors.
We called ourselves the "Unbreakable Six," because there was me, Sean, Brayden, Ryan, and Jordan.
And there was Graser.
Graser started off as a practical joke by the other guys in the fourth grade. It was probably Jordan that started it. He was always playing pranks of people. In high school, he even got suspended once for going too far, and had to babysit for hours to buy that guy a new cellphone. Or maybe it was Sean, who always seemed too busy with school and work to think of such an elaborate prank. Or maybe it was Brayden and Ryan, who were best friends and could have lived without us, always conspiring together like they were twin brothers. We all kinda knew they had a thing for each other.
Either way, I bought my lunch, cold cut sandwich and carrot sticks and a pint of orange juice (I couldn't stand milk; it would account for how short I ended up being) and walked over to our lunch table. Jordan looked excited, waving me over to them.
"Liam! Look!" I wasn't sure where I was supposed to be looking. "This is Graser. He moved here from Los Angeles!" We lived far inland and into the boonies. Los Angeles was glitzy and glamorous and chic compared to the flat houses and half-rate high school football that was the only real source of entertainment in the area.
"Uh, what?"
"Los Angeles, dummy," Jordan said, rolling his eyes.
"He's not in our class, he's in Miss Lark's, but he's the same grade as us. Isn't that cool?"
I still wasn't sure where I was supposed to be looking. I sat down with my tray uneasily, wondering what I was supposed to see. "Who?"
Sean jabbed me in the side. "You're being rude," he hissed quietly. Sean was all about rules and manners. "Say hi to Graser."
I looked around our table, from Jordan to Brayden to Ryan to Sean and back to Jordan, who was waiting impatiently. I don't know. I was weak. I wanted to fit in. I didn't get it.
"Hi, Graser."
They seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief, like I was making everything awkward. "Liam's weird sometimes, but his brother has a nice computer that he lets us play minecraft on sometimes."
They kept on talking, chatting about whatever fourth grade boys chat about, and I ignored it. If they wanted to play that prank, then that was fine. I wasn't going to buy into it. I was always a precocious child; I knew that what they were looking for was a reaction.
That's how Graser became a normal part of our lives. It was crazy. We would buy him birthday presents, and they'd disappear like they were taken. I wonder how many action figures and Mancala games Jordan had piling up in his closet after all these birthdays. One year, Brayden even got Graser a really nice laptop, and that disappeared too.
We never went to his house. I asked Ryan about it when I was sure that "Graser" wasn't there. He gave me this scandalized look. "Liam, don't be rude. Graser's family doesn't have that much money, he's embarrassed to let us come over. He told Brayden that, who told me, and it makes sense. I mean, what he wears all the time... I mean, we still love him, we'll always love him, he's one of us. But don't rub in the fact that we can't go to his house. That's mean."
