There are times when Harry can't help but wonder if his friendship with Jj is some sort of experiment set up by the universe to deduce how opposites attract and interact.
One young boy from a working class family, versus another from a far more lucrative background. The outcomes were always going to be one of two: friends or enemies.
Harry isn't sure that the experiment ever truly accounted for an in between, a limbo where he and the other are neither friend nor foe. The neutrality that exists between them is unremarkable, nothing for anyone to take note of, least themselves.
Sometimes Harry finds himself wondering what went wrong, but no matter how hard he thinks about it, he comes up blank. Nothing went wrong, per se. No animosity surrounds them, growling, hissing, gnashing at their heels. They have merely drifted apart, like most teenagers do when faced with the looming threat of secondary school.
The new environment brings with it a startling sense of clarity, a freshly polished mirror in which Harry can view the reflection of his personality when pitted against Jj's. The differences between them build atop one another, until a precariously balanced structure looms over them, one wrong move away from crumbling completely.
Jj twirls his pens between the joints of his fingers, whirling it gracefully like a prima ballerina. Harry chews the ends of his to a wrinkled, pulpy mess.
Harry loves the rain, spending hours sitting out on the porch of his home, listening to it batter against the ground. Jj hates it, refusing to leave the safety of his room lest the element accosts him.
Harry listens while in class but doesn't take notes. Jj takes notes but never really listens.
Harry brings his lunch from home in a little bento box his grandfather used to use when he worked as a mechanic in the seventies. Jj buys his from the cafeteria, producing crisp notes from the leather wallet his mother bought him for his eighth birthday.
They are opposites in almost every way, so it only makes sense when they begin to separate, tearing slowly away from one another like the segments of a tangerine.
It begins when Harry joins the football team at the start of their third year, and it ends somewhere far less certain, an untraceable point in time he can't recall for how prosaically it presents itself.
Though if Harry really tries to remember, he thinks it might be his fault.
YOU ARE READING
Needle and Thread
Fanfiction"It's a carving!" "I think it must have been left behind by a couple or something. It says H and J forever. How sweet!" The air stills. Jj stops digging. Harry stops breathing. Everything stops. ~ ~ ~ Harry is falling apart at the seams. Jj helps s...
