Painting Flowers

Chapter 6

*updating early woaaaaaaah ???????? yeah i hope you like this chapter (it was originally combined with the next chapter, too, but that was far too long so i had to split it in half yh)*

   A couple of months passed, and Alex became my closest friend. We stayed at each other’s house nearly every weekend and basically became like siblings because of how well we knew each other.

   The only downside was that I couldn’t talk to him when I was in school because I had my own group of friends there, and they’d call me weird for even associating myself with Alex. I wanted more than anything to not care about their thoughts and just talk to him anyway, but unfortunately I was an insecure piece of shit, and I latched on to any source of communication like a leech, especially if it were popular guys who had invested their time in me. I wasn’t about to go and blow my first group of friends in forever, was I?

   But today, Alex wasn’t in school, and it made me weirdly uneasy ‘cause he was always in (I was pretty sure he was the only person in the whole year with a perfect attendance record). Vinny said that I looked like I had diarrhoea in Math ‘cause Alex wasn’t sitting in front of me and I was nervous about what might have happened to him, so I was acting all jumpy and quiet for the whole day. I swore at Vinny. He shut up.

   When the bell for last period final went off, relief flooded through my veins and I shot up from my seat in History, slinging my bag over one shoulder and heading out of the building towards the buses alone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and no-one wanted to talk to me, so the world was at balance.

   “Bus, bus, slow fucking bus,”   I hummed, tapping my fingers against my thighs once I was in a seat by myself. Alex’s mom’s car wasn’t here to pick him up, so it wasn’t just like he’d been avoiding me all day; something was up. I bit on my lower lip, staring out the window as the bus engine rattled into life and we finally began to move away from the brick red building, leaving behind all the assholes and taking me back home.

   I pulled my iPod out my jacket pocket and unravelled the earphones, putting the buds in and ignoring the world around me with some Less Than Jake. I relaxed into my seat a little, smiling and mouthing the words along as I stared out the window. As the song ended, I brought my iPod up to scroll through my music and choose the next song to put on, when I suddenly noticed the date.

   “12/14/03”

   Oh shit.

   Alex’s birthday.

   My eyes narrowed and I brought the screen closer to my face to examine the pixels further. Yup, definitely the 14th of December. My iPod wasn’t kidding (also, that would explain why it had been getting colder and colder lately- I hadn’t been paying attention to the date, and I was wondering why it was suddenly too cold to go outside in just a shirt).

   I tried to think of what to get Alex for his birthday. Maybe the new Harry Potter book he’d been whining on and on about. I was pretty positive that May had a copy, so I could just take it from her when she wasn’t looking. Problem solved, right?

   I started to think that maybe Alex was off ‘cause it was his birthday and he’d gone out to celebrate with his family and not told me. The thought kinda hurt, but ‘course I had to realise that Alex had his parents who loved him, and probably a bunch of aunts and uncles and other relatives who were gonna visit him. And ‘course he wouldn’t want me there; I was always far too loud and rude. Hm.

   A few minutes later, the bus rolled to a halt outside my house, and I automatically got off without any thought, mind too caught up in humming along to Good Charlotte and worrying about Alex.