The Best Friend

Part 4

The sky was cloudy, gray and threatening rain. It matched my mood. I was hanging out in the living room with my brother watching TV and working on an essay for my English class. Suddenly my phone rang.

"Hello?" I said when I picked up the phone.

"Hey Alex. It's Jeremey. Uh, can you come over to Dylan's house right now?"

"Well I can. What's going on?"

"I'll explain when you get here." I hung up the phone and turned to my brother.

"Cole, I need to go. Will you be okay here for a little while?" I asked my brother.

"Yeah. It's cool." As I ran out of the house, I caught a glance of myself in the mirror. I had on the sweatpants Dylan had loaned me that I had never given back, a tshirt, and some flip flops. I didn't have any makeup on but since I was going to Dylan's house, I didn't really care how nice I looked. As I drove to Dylan's house, I tried to focus on the road but had a really hard time. No matter how pissed at Dylan I was, he was my best friend and something was wrong. When I heard Jeremey's voice on the phone he sounded worried and that scared the hell out of me. Dylan was really tough so I knew something must be really wrong. By the time I pulled into the driveway, the rain was coming down hard and even though I ran inside, I was still soaked when I stepped inside. As I kicked off my shoes off and rubbed my arms to warm up, I called through the house.

"We're in the kitchen!" Mrs. Corum called back to me. I walked to the kitchen where Mrs. Corum was sitting at the bar with a glass of wine talking to Mr. Corum who was sitting next to her working on his computer. When I walked in, Mr. Corum turned around and smiled.

"Alex! It's good to see you." I walked over and gave each of them a quick side hug.

"Hi, it's good to see you too. But what's going on?" I was nervous so I jumped straight to the point.

"I'm not sure. Dylan's been in kind of a slump lately and he hasn't been talking too much. Jeremey said he just broke down today." Mr. Corum explained.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"He's in the basement with Jeremey." Mrs. Corum said. I gave a quick thanks before going down to the basement. When I hit the bottom, Jeremey looked up, saw me, and went over to talk to me.

"What's going on?" I whispered to him.

"He's really depressed. We were working out and he just broke down and hasn't been talking. He even started crying. He won't tell me what's wrong." He whispered back.

"Well what do you want me to do?"

"I know he'll talk to you. I gotta go, but you got this." With that he walked up the stairs leaving me alone in the basement with Dylan. Dylan was sitting on the bench-press bench with his back to me. He had on some athletic shorts and no shirt so you could see the muscles in his back. He had his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. I stood at the bottom of the stairs for a minute, unsure of what do. Then, I walked over to him and squatted down in front of him. He looked up from the ground to look at me and I could see he had tears in his eyes, making him look extremely vulnerable. I took his hands in mine and looked him in the eyes.