Colin Bright

My friend Ned told me that the most important part of any friendship is how you come back together after hating each other’s guts. It’d been a while since I’d seen him–the last time either of us so much as talked to each other was when he texted me in the middle of the night to say how much he valued our friendship. I remembered because I’d been at an inappropriate level of intoxication at my parent’s New Year’s Eve party, and they’d locked me in my brother’s room so as to not embarrass them any further. I wasn’t angry about it. Once you’re doing pistol squats in front of your fifth-grade teacher in order to prove to her, unprompted, just how sober you are, you aren’t even really lucid enough to do anything but roll with the punches. 

Me and Ned had been close ever since I started going to the same school as him–back in the second grade–and I asked him at Dalton Clooney’s birthday party if I could be his friend. His half-hearted “yea” had been enough for me, and I stuck with him like a fly on shit the entire time we played laser tag. At some point along the line, I must’ve finally won him over because from that moment on we were thick as thieves. It was good, too, because prior to meeting him I’d been a bit of a quiet kid. When I was six, apparently I cried about having to go play baseball instead of sitting in the car and reading. At least that’s how my mom tells it. I believe it–she doesn’t exaggerate when she tells stories like that, even though she seems like the type who would. Plus I like to think that I was whip-smart from the get-go. There’s something satisfying about not having had to work for it. 

 I was back home in June when he showed up. My dogs went ballistic as soon as Ned’s mom’s Suburban, bought of course with the money she got from divorcing his dad, was in the driveway, and it pissed me right off because I had just been in the middle of joining one of those ‘New Student’ Zoom calls. I let loose a string of curses that probably would’ve made my parents scream at me, which is especially impressive considering recently I’ve stopped filtering that kind of stuff around them–we’re all adults, they can handle it–and it sent me into a brief spiral because I was thinking that if those other students heard me that I had just blown it with a group of people I hadn’t even met. Then I realized that I hadn’t clicked on the link to join yet, and I continued with my vulgar language. I think I could’ve made a nun faint, if I really wanted to.

After a few minutes of hellish dog-wrangling–they’re cockapoos, so it really shouldn’t have been too hard, but those little bastards are smarter than they ought to be, and slippery, too–I finally pushed through the screen door to give him a piece of my mind. Of course, I didn’t know it was him yet. In my mind, I was seeing some old dude who didn’t know how to do a three-point turn. I was of the impression that my youth entitled me to be a little self-important; after all, we were the ones who got told to deal with their environmental, economic, and political screw-ups, so the least he could let me do is let me use him as a metaphorical punching bag. 

Ned must’ve seen how steamed I was because he rolled down his window and looked seriously sorry, but I let the whole deal go as soon as I saw it was him. He must’ve seen that, too. 

“Didn’t know you had dogs,” he said, with a sheepish smile. 

I could still hear them barking from outside.

“New ones,” I shrugged, tapping the roof of the car. “How’d you know I was home?”

“Your mom was talking to my mom about it. Said you were holed up in here.” 

I stamped down the swell of rage in my gut. “She’s exaggerating,” I complained.

“Doesn’t she always?” He met me halfway, smiling wider now. 

“You wanna come inside? I can grab you a drink. The dogs’ll take a little to shut up, but if we let them out by the pool with us they’ll quiet down pretty quick.” I was pretty glad he was here, honestly. As enjoyable as it was to stew in your own existential dread in the sunshine, it was even better with company. 

He huffed. “I was actually gonna go into town…if you wanted to come?” 

“Sure, yeah, of course.” I didn’t, but I felt some strange obligation to. Maybe some part of me wanted to, too. I don’t know. I’m not super in touch with my subconscious.

Ned raised an eyebrow. “You know you only have to say yes once, right?” 

I barked a laugh then crossed over to the passenger’s side. 

— 

“So, like, what’ve you been up to?” Ned asked, and I laughed. “I know that’s, like, a lame question or whatever, but seriously.” Ned spared me a glance. 

“Don’t rubberneck, dude.” I hadn’t stopped saying that since I took driver’s ed. 

“Stan, come on.” 

“I don’t know, man. I’ve been like, writing.” He snickered. “Shut up, asshole. This is why I don’t tell you stuff.” 

“No, no, that’s cool. It’s just like, I don’t know. Always pictured you doing something bigger. President, or something. Didn’t we say we were gonna go to Georgetown together in like, third grade?” 

“Psh…didn’t even apply.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

We didn’t really talk for the rest of the ride. We just listened to the Beastie Boys. I pretended to know the lyrics to ‘So What’Cha Want’ while Ned stared ahead. 

“I get so funny with the money that you want.”

— 

My dad worked right by the beach, so we took a spot beneath his law office and quietly watched families struggle to find parking with a twisted sense of enjoyment. We didn’t even say a word. Just smiled wickedly like we were business tycoons planning to rip apart rolling hills in favor of several dozen parking lots. But I was gonna be an English major, and really I had to cling onto whatever privilege I had. As far as I knew, Ned was going to major in Econ, so I thought it was good he had that mean streak in him. Bastard. 

“Did you ever end up reading that book I told you about?” I asked once we were on the beach. I was walking carefully so as to not scoop any sand into my sneakers. 

“Oh, no. I don’t like…reading isn’t my thing. You know?” 

“Yeah, I get it. Sometimes all you need is the right book, though.” I mean, it wasn’t like I had actually finished some of the books I claimed to read. ‘The Stranger’ made me feel so dumb I wanted to cry. “Albert Camus is pretty good. Super French, though.”

“That’s your thing.” He insisted with a note of finality. “Also, I’ve been meaning to ask when you’re doing the whole birthday thing this year.” He was suddenly excitable. “I meant to text you about it, but it kind of just…” He tapped his temple, then pointed at a seagull pecking at a piece of horseshoe crab. “Like that.”

I laughed through my nose. “I meant to text you too if it makes you feel better. I’m having school friends over this time.” 

“Oh. No worries, then.”

“No, I meant like, if you still want to come.” 

“For sure…Hey, what about Joey?” 

“I’ll text him, too, if you want.”

“…Uh…”

“No Joey, then.”

—

Ever since I was a kid, I’d been a sucker for Dumpster’s– despite the appetite-ruining name, the place had some of the best ice cream on the Eastern Shore. I was a fan, anyway. Nostalgia might’ve had something to do with it. The place didn’t really have an indoor seating area, so you had to sit outside, around the counter. It was supposed to make people think it had been there for ages, but it only got built ten years ago, so I wasn’t sure who they were trying to fool. Anyways, I got a rootbeer float. I felt a little embarrassed ordering it, but what the hell. Ned got a scoop of pistachio. I thought the flavor’s mere existence was pretentious. He paid, though, so whatever.

“Oh, shit, is that Mr. Belen?” 

Ned was loud enough that we didn’t have to suss it out ourselves. He came over after he picked up a milkshake.

“Watch the language, Ned,” I said, sternly, always trying to be a better influence. 

Mr. Belen laughed.

“You’re not my students anymore, Stanley. You can talk any way you want. Although, I guess you haven’t been my student for a while.” He was still smiling, but he’d raised an eyebrow like he’d asked a question.

“Ha. Yeah,” I said, nudging Ned to signal him to help me out. 

“Stan’s back in town for the summer, though.” 

I nodded slowly. He had no idea what to say, either.

“I remember how you looked just before you left, Stanley.”

“Yeah, I was tiny.” I offered, laughing to myself. Neither joined in.

“And yet you felt larger than any of us! Bound for greater heights!”

“Uh…thanks?”

“We missed you, Stan. You were always a leader.” Ned started to look kind of irritated, so I cleared my throat and patted him on the back. 

“Well, it was great to see you, Mr. Belen, but I think I gotta head home. My mom doesn’t really want me out at night.” I pointed to the rapidly fading twilight with an ‘Oh Well!’ shrug. Ned pulled out his keys without another word.

—​​ 

We wound up at the dock that led down the marsh in front of my house. My mom and dad weren’t home yet, so we’d snuck an assortment of drinks from the back of the mini-fridge with the same attitude that we had applied to making faces at each other in our fifth-grade math class; unreasonably cautious, unwittingly obvious. Ned sipped an IPA. I was throwing back a pair of hard lemonades. I had been explaining the plot of How I Met Your Mother, all so I could tell him about the concept of Edward Forty-hands. He could’ve stopped me–he didn’t really need me to explain it to him. 

“So anyways, that’s the whole thing. You can’t, like, un-duct-tape yourself.” I screwed my eyes together at the invented word, working through each syllable. Uhn. Duhk. Tayp. I sat silent. “‘Til you finish both forties, anyways.” 

“Is that even possible? It only takes like eight shots to kill you.” 

“Dude, eight shots do not kill you.” 

“I mean like, of pure alcohol.” 

“Who drinks pure alcohol?”

“You’ve never partook in rubbing alcohol?”

“Partook?” I stared blankly at him. 

He wasn’t smiling. He was always a good liar. There was a moment, then. I breathed in, and suddenly I was there, I was with him, he was the friend I had made in laser tag. He looked at me, and I looked at the sky; not because I didn’t want to look at him, and not because I did. There were only a handful of stars that I could see, a combination of light pollution and wisps of clouds blotting out swathes from my view. Every one of them was meaningless to me. I felt the only thing that did matter was the words we were about to say because they were as much me as they were…well, just that. Words. I thought maybe if I shut my eyes I could see them drifting in the air around us. It didn’t matter who said them. I didn’t know how to word that to him. I didn’t know if I could. I could hear the faraway splashes of fish surfacing. I would never figure out why they could do that, not because I didn’t have the ability to obtain the knowledge, but because I loathed the idea of not having at least something I didn’t know, didn’t want to know, didn’t pursue knowing. 

But something happened in the seconds before I looked back at him. There was some moment, some lost idea. I met his eyes and they weren’t mine anymore. 

“You’re not better than me.” 

“What?”

His face was screwed up into something I didn’t recognize, and all of a sudden I felt four years between us. 

“You’re not better than me just because you got out of here early.”

“Did I ever say that I was?”

“No. But you felt it.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, and you never let me forget it.”

I stood up. I nudged one of the bottles off of the dock with my foot. In the dark, I couldn’t tell whose it was. 

“Can you just calm down? I never thought that.”

“Don’t tell me that. You didn’t text me for, like, two years. You came home, and you still didn’t text back”

“It was just this year, Ned. Seriously, grow up. I had to apply to college. I had better things to do than make you feel all warm and fuzzy.”

“Oh, fuck off.” He stood up, then, planting one hand in my chest and pushing, not hard. I probably wasn’t too close to the edge, but I stumbled back a half-step and my heart leaped into my throat. I was angry that he had made me afraid. In just that moment he had become poison to my senses, and I couldn’t swallow the idea of another second with him. I was possessed by the need to put as much space between the two of us as possible, to remove myself from him, to cut him away, to extirpate him from me. I turned on my heel. About-face. I started to go away, consciously stepping straight. I didn’t know what he was doing behind my back. I told myself I didn’t care. March. He was definitely saying something; he didn’t sound mad anymore. I kept walking. I couldn’t hear him stepping behind me. He must not have been. Left. My parents had gotten home, at some point. I wondered if they wanted to know where I was. Left. He called out for me, from behind. But he didn’t walk after me. I was going slowly; why didn’t he?

“Left-Right-Left.” I whispered it to myself, willing it so.

Fish jump out of water for all kinds of reasons.

–

Colin Bright is an incoming freshman at Bates College. He writes short, creative fiction deriving from the experience of being an American youth.