Let's Be Friends

10:

      As the noise of the party faded behind the two of us I felt like I could speak to Finn again without being drowned out and my voice came out a lot louder than I expected it too, probably because I'd been too used to screaming to be heard even a little. "So where should we go? There's lots of cool things to do." Which was partially true, it was  8pm after all. Not much was open.

      Finn commented on that, voicing my own worries. "Although, we could always go to a 7-Eleven or something and get a bunch of snacks and just- I dunno hang out in the park or something."

      "Are you sure you wanna hang out in a park at night? What if there's rapists looking to prey on middle schoolers?"

      "Insult me all you want but you'd just have to be the one to fight the rapists off, since you're sooo  much taller than little old me, so I think I'd be fine. Y'know, just enjoying the fight and watching with some popcorn to see how things played out."

      I smiled, glad that his anxiety was wearing off, he wasn't shaking so bad now. Maybe because all the noise had gone away, besides the noises of fall. Well, the noises of nighttime fall (Big difference there). I wondered vaguely if Finn liked the fall too, and I asked him.

     "Yeah, it's pretty quiet and nice but I like winter more, you get presents. It's like the only time going to church pays off." That made me laugh and I saw him smile too.

      The rest of the walk to 7-Eleven we made small talk; he told me he used to live in a place, when he was little, that was snowy in the winter and that he would go out with his big sisters and build snow forts and snowmen and have snowball fights, but that he moved when he was 5. I thought that sounded lovely. I imagined him as a small child running around with two other girls who were bigger than him, but they ran slower and threw snowballs off course on purpose so he didn't feel upset that he wasn't as good or as fast or as strong.

     I asked him more about his older sisters, he told me they were twins and that they looked very different so nobody ever guessed they were siblings, let alone twins. He told me that their names were Diana and Marissa and that he couldn't pronounce their names right as a child so he grew up calling them Didi and Mari.

      Finn said they were always so nice to him and that they stuck up for him because he was always small for his age and that they let him play with their big-kid friends. Because even though they were eight years older, they treated him like one of them. He said he never felt left out when they were with him.

      He said they were the first people he came out to, when he was 10 years-old. He said they didn't care and that they said it didn't matter anyways because he would always be awesome in their eyes and that they always knew because he'd follow them around and beg them to play dress up and he'd let them put makeup on him when he was little.

      His eyes shone when he spoke of Diana and Marissa.

      I asked him where they lived now. He said Marissa moved to Chicago to go to college and Diana ended up in Georgia because she'd fallen in love with a guy and he had moved there to take over his family's business when he got out of college (he was a couple years older so she'd left after high school even though he'd already finished college). Finn said he hadn't liked it that they'd left each other, that he though they would be together forever, they were always so close. It didn't make sense to him.

      He said that Diana moved out when he was 10, only months after he came out to her and Marissa, and that Marissa had moved out when he was 11.

      Finn suddenly seemed so sad. I imagined him, as a 10 year-old, losing Diana, then losing Marissa soon after. I imagined Finn watching their cars pulling away from his driveway and leaving him all alone. Now I felt sad too.