Fix You ~Completed~

Act Fifty

When Kyla first met his new friends, their contact was small. They'd gotten pushed together for group-work in freshman English, which the elder children had failed two times in a row. It took Kyla maybe five minutes to charm them with his quote-on-quote maturity. (I imagine it had something to do with the Pixie Stick debacle.) "They think I'm cool, Clem! Nobody here thinks I'm cool," he said while we hung out in the back of his car during lunch that day.

I'd frowned at him, offended he'd say that. "I think you're cool, Kyla. I've always thought you were cool."

It took a few weeks for him to start bailing on lunches or weekend plans, admitting his new friends wanted to hang. I didn't know how to handle it at first. In all honesty, I freaked the hell out so badly that my mom actually kept me home from school for two days. (She'd been on a week-long vacation from work during that bad time due to some renovations at work, lucky for me.)

Kyla came searching for me while I was out 'sick.'

"You don't really look like you're sick. Are you playing hooky?" he'd teased, gliding across my bedroom and eyeing the Coldplay posters and old fashioned coffee signs hanging on the wall. My mom had given me a whole collection of the café and coffee signs for my birthday that year, claiming that they just fit my personality so well. In all honesty, I loved them, even if Kyla thought they were weird.

I shook my head. "I feel sick in the head."

My only friend sat down beside me on the bed, his eyes narrowed. "What do you mean? You aren't losing it, are you?" Kyla mumbled, looking as though he wanted to touch me somehow but thought better of it.

I would have allowed the touch. "I miss you. I-I just don't know what to do without you," I stammered, quickly tugging my bed sheets over my bed. I was curled up under there, hiding from Kyla's probably irritated face, and was trying desperately to force down those darn tears. "Sorry, Kyla."

The sheets rose again, making room for a second person in my tiny fort down here. "Clem," he whispered, as though this were a secret, "don't be sorry. I'm the one who has been ditching you."

In my room, the lighting had always been really dim, and underneath the sheets it was almost pitch black but I could still somehow make out his perfect features. The dark eyes and scruff hair and those cracked lips...

Oh dang it, I had weird thoughts.

"My mom thinks there's something wrong with me, Kyla." I didn't mean to tell him that, but it just sort of came out. It hurt to have it passed between me and somebody who wasn't my mother. So far, she was the only person who'd brought it up to me and I had intended to keep it that way. Kyla was my best friend, though, and he deserved to know what was going on with me. "I'm scared. I don't know a lot about mental stuff but-"

"You are fine," he interrupted me. I relaxed into the bed, smiling a little. He thought I was okay. "You've been dealt a real shitty deck but you handle it well, Clem. Sometimes you get really down and sometimes you're up so high I can't even follow you. That is normal, man."

"I don't feel normal, Kyla."

"Neither do I."

"Will you please hang out with me a little more? I miss this. Us. I miss us," I corrected.

Kyla reached out and took my hand, his face easy, open. "Anything you need."

He didn't make good on that semi-promise.

I spent the next week entirely alone at school. Kyla would show up to our classes acting funny and, when I asked, he told me he was flying high. At the time, being nothing but an innocent freshman, I didn't get what he was saying. When I asked Google, it informed me that meant he was on drugs.