I want to tell you who he was before he was bad.
These memories are stuck in all of our heads. His parents, his siblings, our friend group. We only know him as this person and some of us might never accept this new person we never met for who he really was.
I remember the first time he came to my house. It was magical. We had a curfew in our town, 8:00 pm. No one our age ever really abided by it though. The patrol sucked at their jobs and people, whether they knew him or not, kept walking when they saw a tall, dark figure making its way down the sidewalk. He spent a good majority of the night there, though when I woke up early, before the sun, he was gone. This is how I think he'd always been. There and then not in the blink of an eye.
That night, he'd thrown one of his "haunted" bracelets onto my balcony. I'd known him to be an atheist, but I always sensed he believed in something. Sometimes we'd spend our whole lunch break in his car talking about the Universe and what we could believe and what we could not. Nevertheless, he had a thing for odd jewelry. I recognized the bracelet out of his many he showed me at school. After I got the news, I tore my room apart looking for it when I finally found it behind my mattress, I didn't know what to do with it. Burn it? Throw it away? Keep it? I decided to shut it in my medicine cabinet behind my mirror in the bathroom which I never opened so I still had it but never had to see it unless I willingly chose to. Most people keep things of the people they're seeing, but we weren't most people. I never had his shirts or anything like that. He never offered, and I never asked. In hindsight, that was probably for the best. It would just add to the mount on my plate and make it harder for me to process if I was able to smell his shirt. It would make it hard for me to see him for what he did. I would still want to hold on to the person I'd known him to be all along.
He was a pizza boy which I think was all around good for him, though he always told me that after 3 months of working there the smell of pepperoni made him want to hurl. He was key person at a local place, the only one in our town. He always smelled good and it payed okay (which fed his weird jewelry addiction) and also gave me a reason to convince him to have friends over. Between me and him, I always had to be the one who initiated a get together.
If I didn't bring it up, it would just be me and him hanging out. I'd always tell him, "You have so much house. Why don't you invite everyone over! It'll be fuuuuuun." He fought me about how his mom would get mad and blah blah blah but I always cracked him. Every time. He was very solitary but deep down he was a mamas boy from head to toe. Softer than a teddy bear. Don't get me wrong, us alone just enjoying each other's company wasn't necessarily a bad thing. But I'm no Yoko Ono, and I didn't want him to neglect his friends for me.
We all hung out at school together, but I was fresh meat. They'd all been friends for a few years and I had only joined the school for my junior and senior years. On days when we all got together for lunch, there was hardly ever any actual eating involved. We usually hung out in what everyone called the "smokers pit". Just a guess, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't made for that purpose. It was Oak gazebo, tall as a tower, just tall enough for him to fit without hitting his head. A meeting place for us losers to get together and talk about loser stuff while everyone looked at us and whispered about us as they passed by. It wasn't as much a place to fuel nicotine addictions as it was for us to just commune. I was the only one who didn't smoke. All I know is he could suck down a cigarette like his life depended on it. And I think for him, it did in someway. I think he hid in it. That winter of our junior year, I confronted him about his habits. He'd been smoking more than usual and he blew me off and told me he'd stop once the weather got warmer. He loved warm weather. He always talked about how he wanted to leave here and go someplace where the sun is always out during the day.
When my attempt at persuasion was no use, I brought it up to our friend group. In a vote of 5-1, they decided it would be an absolutely fantastic decision not to bother him about it. I tried to forget about it considering the fact that they knew him longer than I had. In my mind, if they weren't worried, I had no reason to be either. But all of us were starting to see a change in him, even if we didn't say it. Well all just knew it. But we were all stressed.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who begs to be able to go back and bother him about it.
Every date we went on was at Outback Steakhouse. And we got the same meal every time like some weird old couple. He always got caught up on if he should sit next to me or across from me, even though he knew he'd end up sitting across from me every time. After we ate, we went to an overlook where he said he liked going because he could "spit on this whole city". And he really did mean it. He made it his goal to spit as far as he possibly could to reach the heart of the city. I never liked going there, it was so eerie and no matter how hard I tried to focus on being in the moment, I couldn't help but pay extra close attention to my surroundings. Cause there's only two ways that teenagers hanging out at an overlook turn out: either they look at the stars and come up with new names for them or they get stabbed to death. He was so tall he could take anyone on and always said nothing bad way gonna happen. I begged him to promise but he never did. He never made any promises.
