Some Boys are Monsters

The Dove and The Crow

Craig's song of the day: If It Means A Lot To You by A Day To Remember

Snow drifted down onto the closed window. The puffy white flakes covered the world outside with a bitterly cold white blanket as my best friend and I laid silent in the warmth of his bedroom. Well, he was laying silent, anyway. I was sitting bedside, shaking like a frightened baby rabbit.

He was tucked carefully underneath his RedRacer comforter while struggling to breathe through his mouth. The skin on his face that was usually so full of color was nothing short of white, aside from how dark his bags had gotten and how red his agitated little nose had been. It just didn't seem right for him to be laying there so helpless. He was so frail and fragile looking, nothing at all like the rough-and-tumble boy I'd grown so attached to. A look of worry came onto my round face when he let out a sickly cough. His nose was dribbling and his eyes were watering as he suffered at the hands of the flu. It had been a few days since he was first stricken with the illness, but he didn't seem to be getting much better. I leaned forward and pressed my hands carefully against his forehead every time he let out a hack, just like his mother did to check his temperature, as if it would somehow alleviate his pain.

"Are you okay?" I asked weakly, both hands still pressed against the hot skin on his face.

He didn't say anything for a really long time. His pale cheeks and sunken eyes made it obvious he was far too ill to be speaking anyway, but after a while he did utter one small sorrow.

"I miss space."

I frowned at that, because the both of us shared the same pain. Our vast universe was waiting on the playground just three blocks away, but how could a spaceman get to the stars if he's too sick to even get to his ship?

That was a dilemma I became determined to solve.

"D-don't worry, Craig, I'll find some way to get us home," I promised uneasily. I sat beside him for a long while, listening to the sounds that accompanied the rise and fall of his ribs as my imagination went wild. We could have turned his house into a spaceship. We wouldn't have had to move him from bed that way, but I couldn't have found all the parts I would've needed to make a house fly. I wouldn't have known how to put it all together even if I did. Maybe it would have been easier to turn his bed into a rocket. I wouldn't have needed as much stuff then... but I don't know how I would have gotten it to space without blowing a hole in his ceiling.

A monkey wrench was thrown into the rotating gears of my mind when the voice of a woman called out my name from behind me. I jumped, and then jerked around in fright to see who the murmur belonged to.

Mrs. Tucker stood behind the crack in his doorway. Her pretty blue eyes looked down at me with the kind of worry one would expect from a mother, the caring maternal kind.

"You ought to leave Craig be for a while, hun. We don't need the both of you getting sick," she said while pushing the door open for me. I remember her body being wrapped snug in a cushy bathrobe, although she hadn't showered, looking comfortable and relaxed as I'd always known her to be.

"But what if he gets worse?" I reasoned from beside his bed, my fingers by then wrapped in his weak grip. We couldn't just leave him alone. There had to be somebody there to make sure he was getting better.

"He'll be just fine," she promised with a reassuring smile. "Come and watch T.V. for a while, then we'll come back up to check on him."

I pouted in protest, but she eventually coaxed me out to join the family in a mind-numbing session of television. I didn't watch it, though. All of my energy was spent on trying to figure out how I was going to bring Craig to outer space.