A Good Joke

Outside the windows poured a river that fell from the clouds. The brick walls that boxed me in bled a dark damp grey. All I had to do was utter one sentence to revive that frozen ambiance from the day she died. The mom was holding her face. She wasn’t crying yet, but I knew she knew this topic would reopen suppressed wounds. Then there was the dad. His black-yellow thousand-yard scowl locked me in a seat at the table. Fine by me. My sanity depended upon this. If sitting was as far as I could go, I’ll be joining her soon enough as compensation.

“So you remember it,” he asked. “You remember what they did?”

“I remember it all,” I replied. “Every single thing we did. Every single thing I never did.”

I started middle school the day I met her. I was making a big deal about turning twelve in two months. My mom and my friend’s mom were carpool buddies. Mrs. Argentina drove me and Jay to school. Mom would drive us home. I met her after the first school bell of the year. Homeroom. I was without Jay and the boys. It was uncool to not have a buddy wherever you were at school. It gave a bad image. I looked for people to talk to. I stopped gazing when I met her cat ears. She wore a hoodie that day, so I thought they were some hyper-realistic headphones. I sat in a closer seat to get a better view and saw they came from her head. Not only that, her golden eyes were slit like a cat. Whiskers protruded from her mustache lip like a cat. Black fur traced her face gently like a cat. She was a Neko. Her golden eyes met my normal ones, and I found some business elsewhere.

I liked them. Her animal traits, I mean. I thought Neko’s were cute, contrary to societal belief. Face buried in the desk, I knew solitude was her only friend. Fine by me. It’s easy to talk to a nobody. It was practice for when I’d work up a convo with a somebody. I left homeroom and saw her again in 2^nd period. I had language arts. So, I decided she’d be the first friend I made at school. After the first seven minutes, Ms. Larding hosted icebreakers with the person assigned next to you. Share your name and hobbies. What do you want to be when you grow up? What is your favorite subject in school?

“Call me Marson,” I said. “I like to skateboard at the park and play baseball. I haven’t really thought about my dream job so it’s still in the works. PE is the only subject I look forward.

“Clea,” she replied. She sounded as coy as she looked “Art is both my only hobby and my favorite subject. I’ve wanted to be an artist since I was seven.”

“Only hobby? Yarn balls don’t do it for you?” Clea’s eyes went black on me after that left my mouth.

“No.”

Icebreakers ended seconds later. No words or glances were shared again. Though racism didn’t exist to me yet, I did know of a thing called being a dick. I saw her alone in the 1^st lunch period, reading. Jay had 2^nd . The glue of our “group” was still cruising and wouldn’t be back for another two weeks. Fine by me.

“Sorry,” I said, sitting at the corner next to the door. She wasn’t buying it and wanted me to leave. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be mean when I said the yarn thing. I thought that since you’re part-cat you would like yarn.

“Right…” she replied. “It wasn’t your accusation, it was the way you said it. Like, you were vexed I didn’t resemble a feline.” I nodded, having the basic point down despite her usage of some words I’d never heard in my life. I moved on. I saw her weird books on the table. I didn’t see a food tray.

“Not hungry?”

“I fast at school. To keep attention away. The methods I eat with, they’re divergent to human standards.”

“So is your vocabulary. Might as well be speaking Greek, brah,”

“Read more. You’ll develop it.”

I moved on. “That book. The one with the girl who has those big eyes. What’s it about?

“You won’t like it…”

“I’ll hate it if I have to Google search for it. I forgot another hobby I have is listening to people talk about things. Honestly.”

She did it. She explained and then some. She talked up a tornado of exposition. I thought she didn’t like talking. God, I was a fool. Ask her about manga, and she’ll write an essay for twelve. In one month, she became my new friend, and me her only friend. And I genuinely thought of her as such. Not some nobody, nor a stepping stone, nor a substitute. Nothing manipulative or artificial. I really liked her, more than myself, more than life.  Homeroom, 2^nd period, 1^st lunch and recess was time for art. She made a drawing for every occasion, and she’d give me something new, tangible and intangible, to take home with me. Romance was a girl-only candy land until she lent me a prize called Fruits Basket to read.

Then, the boys came back together. To be more accurate, I returned to the boys. Under my nose, Diego came back with war stories from the Carnival Cruise. I saw him one afternoon at the carpool with Jay and five other dudes.

“Come here, man!” Diego and Jay dapped me up and I joined the circle again. Diego was the type of dude to be more grown than his parents. He lifted weights with the grown-ups. He told me what a virgin was. He was the first kid in school to make swearing a norm. He was absent every 3 days a week. Like an angel from the clouds, he descended upon us mortals with forbidden knowledge and stories of renown. His GOAT status came from the stories of his fights, of all the people he’d beat up in elementary school. They were entertaining, sure. However, I wouldn’t always call him the hero in all of them. In some of them, he just needed a glance or a sly insult to get active. To risk it all with a bare-knuckle beatdown or take it slow, with the routine jab behind the bleachers now and then. I still loved him though. It was popular to love him. Who didn’t love a good badass?

 Clea and I talked a fortnight after the boys got back together. I was starting to cancel meeting plans. I was starting to come to chapter discussions unprepared. I was beginning to get flaky, as she said.

“I still rock with you,” I assured her. “I just miss the dudes, y’know. I’ve been skating at the park with them and playin’ moss. I hadn’t done it in awhhile. I dunno when we’ll read again, but we will, I promise."

“Ok…” Clea replied. Her golden eyes gave me that sullen look of loneliness. She had no one else, I knew that, and unfortunately, she turned out to be a bit of a social animal.

“Y’know, why don’t I introduce y’all. You can bring your books to them too. It’ll get you out of your shell.” Clea visualized her disapproval readily. She told me Solitude wasn’t her first choice. It’s just that years of dirty looks wizened her up to the climate she brought to humans. “If I like you, they’ll like you. I’m your friend, trust me.” She did. She trusted me. She told her parents to pick her up a little later today. I introduced her to everybody. That was the beginning of the end.

Everybody was welcoming albeit with the same looks Clea spoke of. They handed her general flattery, saying that her black-gold eyes were cool-looking. They liked her bushy tail. All seemed well, and now Clea and I could read while I messed around with the boys. Until a joke circulated in school about me dating her. Diego was a natural instigator. He talked of people behind their backs. Unfortunately, his acquaintances weren’t an exception to the rule. Those dirty looks amplified ten times over, to Clea and me now. The popularity-obsessed kid I was back then backed down. I ghosted Clea. Went undercover like the soldiers in Call of Duty. Just for a bit, anyway. I needed to show my allegiance to the popular crowd again. Clea tagged along with everybody, but without me, she was an NPC.  Until one afternoon from school at the carpool. I saw Diego and Clea together alone.

“Did I say something wrong?” Clea asked.

“We just thought y’all were dating. That’s all,” Diego replied, playing with her ears.

“Were not,” Clea looked sad saying that “I’ll make sure you guys know…”

“Nah, I got it, kitty. It’s just a joke. Don’t worry about it.”  To a Neko, “kitty” was on the same level of slang as the n-word. I audibly gasped upon hearing that and briskly vacated the scene once Clea saw I was listening.  Nothing got sorted out that day. Fast forward two to three weeks, Clea still hangs around, but without her novels & manga. Without her sketchbooks & drawing pencils. Without the things that made her Clea. Parts of her body, her head, and arm to exact, looked pinkish, even swollen.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Threw them away. They were…too babyish. Not cool,” Clea was rubbing a reddish welt on her right arm. It was stripped of that signature arm hair. “Diego wants me to hang with them after school at the park. To be cool.” Clea then looked at me. “Marson, did you think the stuff we did together was too juvenile? Would you rather we not do it anymore?”

“I wouldn’t say I didn’t like it, but I do think that it’s not as cool as what we do, y’know?”

“Ok…” Clea got mute with me again. For a moment, I wanted to ask about those welts, but I dismissed it and rejoined the boys. It’ll resolve itself, I thought. It’s not something bad, I thought. Clea was popular with my friends. They’d tug her ears, pull her tail, shove her around a bit. Everybody called her kitty. They were laughing, but she wasn’t. Clea said herself she wasn’t a fan of roughhousing, but she endured it so her new friends would like her.

Despite all the evidence bearing itself naked to me, I still didn’t help her. I didn’t see far enough, no, cared enough to intervene until a school trip to Orlando, where the boys thought it was funny to throw her into the deep side of a pool to have her get over her swimming fears. It resulted in her swimwear coming off, exposing her to the entire class, and her hiding in the girl's locker room in embarrassment. The teachers gave us more than a few slaps on the rest. Clea joined us on the walk to the bus, and that’s where I tried to apologize.

“Clea…I’m sorry,” I awkwardly said. “No one’s gonna remember what you look like. It’s nothing. I…I’m sure they didn’t mean to-”

Clea faced me, laughing in tears. Her grin was unnervingly ear-to-ear.

“I get it now.  At that moment when you saw me in homeroom, outside the human spectrum, you knew didn’t you?”

“Knew what?” I asked

“That I’d be the easiest placeholder for you. The easiest person to use until you got your stupid clique back together, until you weren’t the only loner in the room, yes?” Clea laughed between each sentence. Her voice was chaotic, loud and clear for the first time. I could feel her anger. “So, my passions and the things I shared with you were transactional. Only around until you weren’t uncool anymore. Humans and Neko’s settling differences, what a severe pipe dream. My naivete must’ve been a pretty good joke to YOU, wasn’t it, Marson?”

Now, I felt it. It took Clea’s broken laughing, crooked grinning, her public humiliation for her words to finally reach me. I moved forward, and I reached my hand out for her. Too little too late. She swiped it out of sight and ran into her dorm. This happened in front of everybody. I made a fool of my friend in front of everybody. Diego and Jay looked confused, and concerned, as if they didn’t see this happy accident. Me too, I was right there along with them, except only my hand was bleeding. Clea hid herself at the back of the bus during the ride home, hissing at the few people who tried to make her feel better. Me, the loudest. A week went by without her presence at school, allowing me to clean her desk the day before Christmas break. My stomach dropped when I saw her things and her books buried in trash bins. I didn’t like how her final drawing was someone choking on the ground. That night, I ghosted my friends, I never came down. I biked for two hours to Clea’s house.

Peddling to her house, under the blanket of deep night, I felt the lowness take a hold of me. I felt the lowness begin to prepare me. A full week of absence, no replies to texts or calls, a parents-only vacation out of state. Who was checking on her? A private bin of her favorite things, her last poem about taking drugs. Diego and Jay were messaging me on my phone, but I had to ignore them now. N

No cars were in the lot. Expected since mom and dad left town. I knocked once, and the door creaked open.

No…

The house was frozen in darkness only broken by my breathing. It stinked. I went up the stairs. It’s always the stairs.

“Clea!” no response

No…

I kept going. I searched the house. The bathroom was empty, the living room was empty, the computer room empty. Her room…wasn’t empty. I found Clea, stiff as bone, eyes half-opened next to some spilled ibuprofen.

Wait a second, let me catch my breath. Remind me that my sight is a trick of the moonlight. Barely a minute ago, her lips were smiling and laughing. She was loving the company life had brought her. Until it left her.   

I threw myself against the wall, out of the room, I charged out the house to the closest river. I wanna throw up. Every day I woke, everywhere I went, all at once, I went back in time to see what I could’ve done. EVERYTHING I could’ve done. Yet like the majority, I turned from reality. My bravery got away and now I’ve got these scenarios playing in my head. An atonement for every scene. Sleep. I gotta sleep. I’ll make it right with a sleep in this river. It started with me. It’ll conclude with me. I’m the coward that got lucky, the scum that should’ve been in her place. I don’t know how to make things right other than to sleep.

Tears cascade down my face like a stream. I chase the river flow like a raving fiend. Jay and company tackle my chance to make things right out of the air. They wrestle me down, I wrestle back. I draw blood and swipe gashes on my captor’s forearms. I struggle, scratch and scream with every breath because that river is the only reciprocity I can offer for causing a true friend’s death.

“Get off! Get the fuck off me!” I shouted in tears. “Let me do it! Let me do something fucking right!”

“Marson…” Jay said grimly. “Please. It won’t…bring her back. Your dad’s called the cops. They're looking for you. We need to get you home. Please, come home, man. I was too absorbed in grief to realize Diego was there, the main one holding me in fact. He was sickly, a ghost in human form.  He never uttered a word from the moment I was caught to the moment I was taken home. I think he knew how far he went. My parents demanded the stone truth at home, and I gave it to them. I told them how we made an innocent girl kill herself. I received stares and swears. That night made me the black sheep. An example of what not to be for my younger brothers. I wasn’t disowned, but that harmless, happy-go-lucky reputation shattered that day. My parents didn’t look at us the same way for a long while.

Diego, Jay. All of us boys didn’t click together at all after that. After the funeral, after seeing the faces of Clea’s mourning parents. In time, from 6^th to 8^th grade, then to high school, we drifted. The world moved on. Diego and Jay moved on. I moved on with scars. I divested myself from the concerns of popularity. I read all of Clea’s recommendations ten times over in private. I graduated, I enrolled in high school, I sipped a dose of Clea’s reality, getting bullied with dark thoughts on the horizon. Now, 16, having told Clea’s parents everything, revisiting those mistakes, I can’t understand my asinine self. I will never understand why I traded a true friend for the approval a trust-fund kid I barely knew.  Clea’s parents understandably weren’t thrilled that one of her daughters bullies decided to show up one day & confess.

“Why now?” the dad said before I walked out in the rain. “Why after five years are you telling us this?” I had to, I said to myself. It’s the least I can say after I kept my mouth shut all those years ago.