Roots

For a long, long time, I had thought him dead.

This was the only reasonable explanation I could conjure in my mind; that he had been lost in the tides of time, reduced to ashes and gone forever, not out of his own will but of God’s. 

For a long, long time, I had considered death less painful than being alone.

No matter how many times I’d been on the roof of the high-school, it never ceased to amaze me. Not the view; we sat on the side facing away from the front to avoid being seen, and so our only view was of the parking lot. It was the rush of adrenaline, of skipping class, of being so high up. Up there, we talked of nothing and everything. We were there all the time, and this included the night of our high-school graduation. After the ceremony we snuck up, watching as everyone else went home one by one. I think we both knew this would be the last time we would sit on the roof together.

“These damn mosquitoes.” I swatted the air around us, though it did nothing to deter the insects.

“That’s what you get for wearing shorts, dumbass,” He told me. Keats always got cold easily; though the warm summer nights never dropped below sixty degrees, he had on a sweatshirt, jeans, and his Pa’s old boots, while I was in a T-shirt and shorts. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. Wordlessly, he tugged off his sweatshirt and handed it to me, so we’d both be protected from the breeze and the bugs.

“Thanks man,” I huffed. “Would’ve been eaten alive.” He shivered and tucked his knees to his chest, pulling the bottom of his shirt over his legs. I laughed under my breath. Keats was always doing funny things like that, even in school. He pulled pranks on the janitors, he did handstands in the hallways. He debated course material with the teachers for fun; everyone got a good kick out of it, since it took time out of class, but I knew better. Keats was smarter than most people gave him credit for. He was passionate, he believed in everything and everyone.

We became buddies in our freshman year. The year of new beginnings and new worries. We were collectively shoved from the pedestal of middle school to the bottom of a new, unfamiliar pit. We were all, I think, uncertain about whether or not to keep our old friends, or if we were supposed to start over. If we weren’t uncertain freshman I don’t think I would have accepted his invitation to be friends.

It was on the way back from the bathroom, rounding the corner of the east wing that I saw him, some kid in ratty clothes. He was taking a key out from his back pocket, then unlocking the janitor’s closet.

“What are you doing?” I asked him, feeling uncharacteristically bold.

“Want to see something cool?” He said back.

Somehow he had swiped the key from the main office, made a copy of it in his own time, then secretly returned the original, all without getting caught. At least, this is what he told me. Pushing aside a few wooden-handled mops, he revealed to me a steel ladder going up and up. Smirking, he scrambled up, disappearing through a hatch-door in the ceiling and what the heck, I thought, it’s only French class I’ll be missing.

“God, I want a beer,” He said suddenly. “Let’s have a beer.”

“Okay,” I was saying, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyways because he was already breaking two cans out from the pack he had brought with him.

Keats raised his can in the air, toward the starless sky. Below us, the gloomy little parking lot lay as silent as a graveyard. “To us.”

“Come on,” I said. “You can come up with something better than that.” I said that because Keats was always talking, about anything and everything. Keats would ramble on and on about how high-school was a useless dictatorship, and how the majority of our world was made up of assholes and misogynists, and the whole general unfairness of life all day and I would listen. The whole depressing negativity of it all surprised me, at first. I’m not sure why, but I had always thought him an optimist of sorts. I guess those were the only times he could really say what he felt, out there on the roof with me.

“Fine. I’ll amuse you,” He said. “To us, and to this shitty hell-hole, and to the last four years we’ve spent in it. To cold cafeteria pizza and French teachers whose blood ran of pure bitch,” I snickered at this. “To society, who places their values in a piece of paper above those of their children,” and to prove this point he flung his diploma off to the side, “to this roof, which has done a damn good job giving us a false sense of rebellion since freshman year.” Keats paused, and I waited with bated breath. “Oh yeah, and to my best pal, James,” He added, “Who will probably forget all about this the second he steps into some pretentious Ivy League next year.” My smile fell a fraction.

“You have that little faith in me? I’m not gonna forget you. Not in a million years.”

He laughed a little, but it was dipped in something bitter. “Of course you won’t.”

“What? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know it, too. Once the summer’s over, you’ll be gone, off to- to Harvard or some shit, I don’t know. Your parents will pay for the tuition while you’ll be getting drunk with your other preppy friends every weekend, thanking god you don’t have to sit out here with that pathetic wretch anymore.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Although deep down, I knew he had been waiting to say these things all along, kept it bottled up all this time under his smiles and his laughs. We never really talked about our differences; my family made a lot of money, his didn’t. It was a known fact between us, and that was that. He never cared; this was what I had always thought, and what I now knew to be false. I guess I never really realized how much this simple difference had bothered him.

“Keats, look-”

“Whatever, man. It’s not like you ever gave a shit about this, anyway.”

“Of course I did!” He gave me a wry smile.

“All those times I tried to talk to you. To tell you something that was important to me. You were probably worrying about all the stuff you were missing in class, right?”

I was suddenly glad of the darkness, because I felt my face flood in red-hot shame. Because it was true, all of it, and I hated him for it. I hated myself for it. And so I couldn’t say anything to retaliate other than a quiet,

“Fuck you.”

He gave another smile, a sadder one, then stood up silently. He crossed over to the edge of the roof, and for a crazy moment I thought he would jump and was about to shout for him. But no, he carefully climbed down the pipes, and I could hear him landing on the grass with a soft thud. I breathed a sigh of relief, then wondered at this concern for him. The silence took over, which was when I think I began to understand he was gone, and all that had once been connecting us gone too. And then, for the second time that night I was grateful for darkness, because by then I was silently weeping. I finished off both of our beers, then fell asleep on the roof. It wasn’t until I woke up that I realized I was still wearing his sweatshirt, and that he hadn’t asked for it back.