Trust Me You'll Love It!

Oh, woe is me. I am the epitome of sorrow, despair…insert sad adjective here and that is what I am. My life holds no meaning of influence or inspiration. Suck me into the vortex of darkness so that I may forever sleep undisturbed. 

My blanket is mercilessly torn off of my depressed self and I’m flicked in the forehead by my friend Marcus Williams.

“Quit feeling sorry for yourself and get up already, it’s noon-thirty!” Marcus grabs my crumbled jeans off the floor and tosses them at my head. They hit me in the face and then my arms go to catch them with the reflexes of a chameleon.

I croak in my froggy voice, “Don’t you mean twelve-thirty?”

Marcus gives me an indignant look, “I know what I said, and you know what I meant. Now get up.”

“What’s the point,” I throw myself face first back onto my bed, “I have absolutely no reason to get up today.”

Marcus plops down in the bean bag next to my bookshelf and ponders for a second. “What’s eating you dude? Your mom calls me worried sick, telling me you haven’t left your room in days. It’s starting to smell like a pig’s ass in here!”

“Well, you would know,” I cock a coy smile, but Marcus doesn’t see the humor in my joke. 

(Change of perspective)

Marcus thinks to himself, ‘what can I do for this sorry sack of potatoes?’ Then I get an idea! 

“Hey, you just need a hobby! Get your body moving and the gears in your brain turning. Maybe then you could come up with a halfway decent insult.” I look around my friends’ room till my eyes land on the bookshelf, “What about collecting books? Is there a series you haven’t finished yet?”

I wiggle my way out of the bean bag and take a look at the dusty worn-out books on the bookshelf. I also notice a lot of notebooks with strange labels on them. Kyle L, Shadrach M., Walter W., I didn’t recognize any of these names. Were they autobiographies of famous people I hadn’t heard about?

“Nah,” he says. “Books are too expensive, and I don’t read much anyway.”

I pick up one of the notebooks and flip through it. There were pages and pages of some guy doing pretty mundane things. Such as walking to school, eating spaghetti for lunch, and buying coffee before work. Just as I’m about to ask what this notebook is for, my friend is dressed and standing in front of me. He gently takes the notebook from my hands and places it back on the bookshelf. 

“I don’t care much for reading, but I like to write,” he says without looking at me. 

“Is that what all of these are,” I gesture to the notebooks. 

“I like to write about what I see.” My buddy sits down on his bed to tie his shoes. “To be honest I haven’t been inspired lately.”

“Well how can you be if you’re cooped up in here all day,” I pick up a notebook without a label and hand it to him. “Let’s get out of here, get a change of scenery.”

He takes the notebook from my hand and we walk out of the house. I’m not sure where we’re going at first, we just let our feet carry us to familiar places. First, we went to the park in the middle of the neighborhood. My friend and I sat on the swings and watched two younger boys play out an extremely dramatic scene where one was hanging off the edge of the monkey bars and the other stood over him, announcing some sort of grandiose heroic speech before trying to pull him up. He wasn’t strong enough and they both tumbled off of the monkey bars in a fit of laughter, accompanied by a few groans of pain. 

My buddy writes diligently in his notebook without even looking at the two boys. I search the playground for any other scenes of interest but see nothing else he could find noteworthy. While swinging back and forth I kick my feet in opposing directions to create a jostling effect. I hadn’t noticed how old and rusty the chains on the swings were till I slid my hand up them and practically shredded my palm. 

“God **** it!” I jump up from the swing as does my buddy. And the two little boys gawk at me, their eyes wide and a slow grin spreading across their faces. 

They leap into the air like some sort of sitcom freeze frame t.v. show and exclaim in unison, “God **** it!” 

It goes without saying, their moms did not look pleased with us as they ushered their boys to the other side of the playground. I wave and give them the most apologetic look I can muster while in pain. My buddy continues to write in his notebook all the while laughing at my blunder. 

“You got your tetanus shot right?” He tucks the notebook under his armpit so he can inspect my wound. “We better head to the drugstore.” 

We walk through the neighborhood and out of boredom I flip the flags on the mailboxes up. First the Lancaster’s then Merddle and White; I don’t know these families but for some reason their names look familiar. My friend and I talk about the boys at the playground and how funny it was when their moms heard their precious little angles curse. 

“Hey, do you think we would have been friends when we were that young,” I ask him.

“Dunno. I was kind of a loner when I was their age,” He says without looking up from his notebook. 

“So, what are you writing about,” I say while trying to take a look over his shoulder.

He half closes the notebook to obscure my vision. “Nothing special, just stuff about the neighborhood, the weather. You know, stuff like that.”

When we arrive at the drugstore, we count the money we have on us while walking in. I had twenty dollars in my wallet, but my buddy had forgotten his at home. To be fair we hadn’t planned on going anywhere and spending money. It was my fault that we were here at all due to my carelessness. I told him I could get the band aids and hydrogen peroxide. I even offered to get us some snacks, but he said he was good. While I searched the medicine isles my buddy stood by the door waiting and writing in his notebook. After grabbing the necessities, I decided to get a bag of gummy bears anyway. 

While deciding between sour or original the doorbell in the drugstore rang as a man walked in. He had a hoody on over his head and sunglasses with glittery pink rhinestones on the frame. I motioned to my buddy to look at the guys odd choice in fashion, but he was too engrossed in his writing. When I looked back at the hoody guy, he seemed to be staring straight at me. Self-conscious, I look away and down at my feet. Hoody guy walks up next to me and stands in the isle for a bit. He doesn’t look at me, but his breathing is heavy and fast and his hands fidget around in his pockets. He doesn’t grab anything off the shelf and instead makes his way back towards the door. Maybe he forgot his wallet I think to myself. But as Hoody guy passes by the checkout counter he suddenly pivots and grabs the clerk by his shirt collar over the counter. 

“G-give, m-me the money!” Hoody guy pulls out a knife from his pocket and threatens the old clerk.

I freeze and watch as the old man is forced to open the cash register and pull out the money. I look around for my friend but he’s nowhere in sight. Did he run out the door? Did he abandon me with this crazy guy in the drugstore? I’m so scared I can’t even duck behind the shelves to hide. Then, out of the corner of my eye I see movement and a bag of chips flies through the air and hits Hoody guy in the head. Startled, he lets go of the clerk and turns to look at my friend who had thrown the bag. 

“W-what do you think y-your doin?” Hoody guy points his knife at him. “Trying t-to be a hero!”

My friend doesn’t say a word, instead he throws another bag of chips and Hoody guy slashes at it with his knife. The bag explodes and BBQ chips rain down on the linoleum floor. I follow my friends’ example and hurl the gummy bear bags at him. He doesn’t expect it from where I’m standing, and he gets pelted in the face and his sunglasses fall onto the ground. He throws his hands up to guard his face and his stammering gets even worse as my friend and I continue to throw various items from the shelves at him. Eventually, Hoody guy turns back to the counter to take what money he can grab and run. But the store clerk has found his gun and has it pointed directly at him. 

“Get on out of here before I call the cops,” yells the store clerk. 

Hoody guy throws his hands in the air, dropping his knife and backs away from the counter and out the door before booking it across the street. 

I’m shaking with adrenaline and I make eye contact with my friend to see how he’s reacting. He looks back and me and smiles, not a single thing about what just happened seems to have shaken him. Then, without hesitation he starts to clean up the mess we made while throwing things at Hoody guy. I try to help too but the store clerk stops us and tell us how thankful he is that we helped him defend his store. The old man insists that we take whatever snacks we’d like and not to mind the mess. I stick with the items I was planning on buying before and leave my twenty dollars on the counter anyway while he’s not looking. My friend takes a coke but not much else. Since the old clerk won’t let us help him cleanup, we decide to leave. 

“Where on earth did that knife go,” mumbles the old clerk under his breath. 

My buddy and I walk a little ways away from the store before I exclaim, “Dude oh my god! Did you see that! That was so crazy!”

“Ya.” He nods his head in agreement. “I can’t believe that guy tried to rob that store.”

“I can’t believe you had the balls to distract him like that.” I excitedly punch him in the arm while hopping up and down with all my pent-up energy. 

“Well, I bet you got plenty to write about now!” I pat him on the back while I wind down. “Where to next Mr. scribe?”

He ponders my question for a little while. We’ve walked far away from the neighborhoods and the stores by now. The sidewalk has turned into a dirt road and the tall grass hides the gofer holes this time of year. There’s not much else to do or anywhere interesting to go. Then my buddy stops in his tracks and looks across the train tracks to our right and into the forest beyond. 

“I know a place we can go,” he says with a curious look in his eye. 

“Hey, we survived a very perilous battle at that drugstore. I don’t have any intension of getting lost today as well.” I start to walk further down the dirt road, but my friend takes his own path through the tall grass. 

“Hey now wait a second!” I wade through the tall grass after him. “Don’t go off on your own!”

“Trust me you’ll love it where we’re going,” Says my friend as he walks over the train tracks, his body disappearing into the bushes. 

I follow after him but can barely keep up for some reason. The foliage is so dense I can’t push through it fast enough. I can hear him just ahead of me, so he isn’t leaving me behind. I look up for a moment and admire the sunbeams peeking through the tops of the trees like spears of light. When I continue forward, I can’t hear or see my friend anymore. I walk a little faster and shove wayward branches away vigorously. The next step I take I can feel my foot engulfed suddenly in a mud puddle. The momentum in my stride is enough to pull it free but my shoe is left behind. I don’t bother to stop and dig for it, I need to find him, what if we get lost. I slap the branches and bushes harder and harder with every step, hoping to catch a glimpse of my friend. Blood is rushing through my veins and I can’t hear anything except for my own screaming thoughts. 

What if I can’t find him? What if he gets hurt? What if…

 I grab the branches in front of me and rip them to my sides. There’s a loud snap as they break and fall to the ground. What I see in front of me steals my breath for a moment. There’s a hole in the ground, but not just any boring normal hole. There’s a roaring, gurgling sound coming from inside of it. It echoes and moans like a mouth singing a sorrowful song. I take a few steps closer and peer into the darkness of the giant gaping maw. The sound of something moving rapidly and unendingly travels to my ears from the bottom of the hole. It reminds me of when my mom would brush her fingers through my hair and her hand would rub against my ear. A sort of rough, calming sound but continuous and steady. This must be what my buddy wanted to show me, if it wasn’t he had to come look at this. I lift my head and look around while calling out to him.

I cup my hands around my mouth to amplify my shouting. The squirrels definitely hear me because they scamper up the trees, their terrified little claws tickling the bark on their way up. I take a breath and listen for a minute, hoping to hear my friend. I don’t hear anything, instead I feel something cold and sharp dig itself into my neck. 

(Change of perspective)

I lost Marcus in the forest for a second. I was so intent on finding the underground river I forgot to check to see if he was still following me. I doubled back and tried looking for him when suddenly he walked past me, pushing branches to the side so quickly he didn’t notice me standing right next to him. Convenient, I thought, this will make it easier. Marcus, my good friend for…five years now. He walks so very fast through the forest; he must be frightened, like he was at the drugstore. I wasn’t going to suggest going to the forest today but that face frozen in fear, I had to see it again. 

Marcus finds the underground river and gapes at it dumbly. I stay hidden in the trees and watch him like a predator stalking it’s prey. He creeps closer the gaping hole and leans over to get a better look. How silly of him, he won’t be able to see anything from up here, I can help him with that. I sidestep cautiously behind Marcus, deliberately stepping around twigs and damp leaves so as not to make a sound. Marcus straightens himself and I freeze, my hand slowly makes its way to my pocket and pulls out the knife from the drugstore. The sunbeams peeking through the treetops bounce off the blade and blinds a group of squirrels in the bushes. At the same time Marcus calls out my name and the squirrels dart into the safety of the trees. I crouch low to the ground and continue my decent upon Marcus. Him calling out for me is sweet but unsolicited, no one else can hear him and I’m already right where I need to be. In an instant, Marcus stops calling for me, the knife flies through the air and imbeds itself into his neck effortlessly. 

The blade is blocking his airway but the shock of being stabbed in the neck so suddenly has frozen Marcus in fear. He barely struggles and I don’t give him the chance to. I pull the blade out and his blood oozes from the wound like a broken faucet. With a swift kick I send Marcus falling forward into the underground river, never to be found. His face looks up at me from inside the hole as his dying body falls into the darkness. His expression, wide eyed and pale, so beautiful pale. The river sweeps him away, keeping that expression for itself until the end of time. I toss the knife in after him, I don’t need it anymore. Pulling out my notebook from under my coat I label the binding ‘Marcus Williams.’

He was right, I just needed to find a hobby.