the summer after their childhood best friend commits suicide, six estranged friends meet up in his hometown for a holiday to clear their heads and honor his life. when the only thing that connected their different lives, backgrounds, and personaliti...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
friday, june 30 day one
Bobby spent hours packing, unsure of which clothes would be appropriate to wear in the shifty Pennsylvania weather. He had not been home for years, and he was dangerously unacquainted with the climate that he used to know like the back of his hand. Now sitting in a fusty airport terminal, he regretted packing so much.
He would not feel comfortable calling Pennsylvania his home. He grew up in the Edgeworth suburbs, but he was so far removed from the comforts of his childhood that calling it home felt insincere. Whatever school he was currently matriculating to was his home; Dartmouth for his undergrad, the Sorbonne when he studied abroad, and Northwestern for his graduate program. Ostentatious campuses, bustling with the constant threat of alcohol poisoning and the collective participation of a prison cell, were just as commonplace and familiar as his former neighborhood, and cinder-blocked dormitories felt more like home than his suffocating childhood bedroom. There was nothing wrong with Edgewood or his home in particular; he had a happy, comfortable childhood, but the allure of change led him to buy into the façade of adulthood that college pushes unto you. He felt comfortable in Chicago.
He intended on spending the summer clerking for a linguistics professor that only taught in the spring and summer semesters, but he felt like he owed it to Max (and himself; he had overworked himself to a nervous breakdown earlier in the fall semester and ended up in the hospital for two days, where Max sat with him and begged him to take a vacation for his mental health—"You've been overworking and overclocking for seven years straight," he said, "go on a fucking cruise.") to attend the poorly-organized reunion. It had taken serious convincing to get Bobby to agree to the reunion. He was dissatisfied and confused by the idea of Elliott arranging the whole thing; Max and Elliott were not necessarily close at the time of his death, and Elliott did not bother to take an interest in Max's career, achievements, or well-being until it was too late to do so. It felt like a pity effort.
Bobby was never close to Elliott to begin with. Elliott was not necessarily friendly to Bobby when they first forged their friend-group in their freshman year of high school; he treated Bobby as if he was inferior to the rest of them, choosing to continuously tease him for his smallness, bookish nature, and socially-removed behavior. Bobby was quiet—he always had been. Elliott would argue that it was all in good fun, calm down, Bobby!, but the crudeness of his tone made his rationalization phony and unreliable. After Bobby came out to them in their final year, Elliott stopped speaking to him altogether, a decision that did less harm than good.
When Elliott messaged him on Facebook two months ago, the notification went unchecked for three weeks. Elliott wrote with an informal tone, playacting like he didn't purposefully drive a wedge between their friendship because of a petty, hypercritical conviction. Bobby was unsure of how to answer, his fingers hovering over his phone's keyboard for about an hour before he could think of something to say.
