His name was Nathe. I learned it the next day when I met him on the bleachers beside the basketball court after school.
There were these guys playing, so I sat down next to him to watch. They had two teams, but it wasn’t exactly fair play because one of the teams had only four players.
One of the guys, probably their captain, called out to us, “Hey yo people, we could really use another player!” But I could tell that he was directly looking at me and trying very very hard to ignore Nathe, who was frantically flailing his arms about in the air as if they were on fire or something. I should’ve felt flattered.
“Ooh ooh me me me me me!” Nathe was saying and nearly fell off the railing trying to draw the captain’s attention.
The captain rolled his eyes, Here we go again.
“Please Georgie I’ll do anything, I promise. I’ll give you my lunch money, I’ll do your math homework, I’ll follow you everywhere you go, I’ll be the very first thing you miss in the morning, I’ll shower you with loves and kisses forever…”
Captain Georgie looked like he’d rather blow his brains out with a revolver than have Nathe shower him with loves and kisses forever. “Fine,” he snapped, still reluctant, and beckoned for Nathe to join them.
“I knew it! Ah Georgie my savior my hero my redeemer my…”
Georgie swerved him around hard so that the two are face to face with each other, Nathe’s face a pure celebration of super paradise and Georgie’s a surly tombstone of sordid deeds sworn beforehand. A taut finger poked the paradise in his face, “Now this time, no funny business. No. Funny. Business. At all. You hear?”
“Yes sir.”
So I watched them play. And man was Nathe the most fervently hell-bent, the most flat-out pursuing, and the most astoundingly lousy player in the whole field. He could blast at full speed to and fro between two hoops approximately several dozen times per minute, hooting at the top of his lungs all the while without even touching the ball once. He could dodge, swivel, feint, literally leap under people, and maneuver himself like a battery charged with energy and movement, befuddling everyone else in the field with his antics but mostly befuddling himself. And he always always cheered for the wrong team. He even whooped and hollered and did a little jig dance when his own team was sabotaged by a brilliant twenty-two points to nil half an hour later.
All his other teammates looked ready enough to feed him to the wolves. But not Georgie. Georgie looked like he’d rather eat Nathe up alive himself than have all that fiddly nuisance of having to find a wolf to feed him to.
“You!” I could see in Georgie’s eyes the hectoring promise of hell. The game was now over and Nathe’s fellow friendly teammates were closing in on him with murderous politeness which almost always precedes a lurid Gothic tragedy.
And at the very epicenter of this cataclysmic earthquake stood Nathe, still wholly innocent of the impending nuclear explosion around him and grinning like all he’d ever seen were Easter bunnies and lollipops, “Hey guys! That was a good game ain’t it? Georgie almost scored! Almost! Can you believe it?! It was… why are you guys all looking at me funny…”
And I had to save him again, apologizing profusely to everyone which included several broken noses and some flaccid, disjointed limbs, but nothing much other than that. The guys just went on playing without Nathe, and in the mere first half minute of the game, Georgie’s four-player team took six shots in a roll purely out of spite and dignity.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
After that, Nathe and I were pretty much good friends.
The days went on and we spent most of our time together after school. Nathe could always nonsensically come up with fresh and off-beat things for us to do. We clambered up the fire escape which, with frolicking, scrambling kids on it would suffer epileptic seizures, all the way to my room. We sat on the rugged roof of his ice-cream white house, relishing the seedy dash of yellow and melting saffron which were the last of an oversaturated sunset, and played monopoly with the latticed tiles. We tethered sturdy ropes to bedroom windows with an outlook of a corrugated, lackluster dawn and unflaggingly worked our way for it to be our makeshift little swing where we could just sit there and dangle our feet and make up weird stories about ourselves.
He was willing to believe anything we made up, anything. Anything but the fact that his two brothers were witches. And that the three of them were actually fosterlings of the Devil. And that his two brothers were plotting against him and looking for a chance to turn him to the heinous, abhorrently sacrilegious dark arts of witchcraft and wizardry, too.
It all made a lot of perfect sense to me.
His two brothers were evil.
One of the two locked himself up in his room asleep all day, the one time he did come out he was all in white from head to toes in his pajamas, bleary-eyed and disgruntled and dry like a moth, and seeing us gave him such a thorn in the flesh that he slammed the door shut and went back to sleep again.
The other guy was real ugly, all tooth and grins and headphones, and every time he was in the house he’d be disc jockeying and banging around with explosive music to upend the house like he was afraid that normal people wouldn’t get minor strokes and that people with strokes wouldn’t die early enough and that dead people wouldn’t stay dead enough never again to see the day.
We seldom come across them even at their own house, but you could tell they were evil anyway because their whole evil existence exuded such evilness that would make you wanna sneeze.
But Nathe just wouldn’t buy it.
“That guy!” I was gesticulating exaggeratedly to get my point across, “That brother of yours upstairs sleeping all day in his room! Jesus he looks like a bloody banshee! I bet you the reason why he’s all dog tired and washed out in the day is that he eats children’s dreams at night! Gulps them down, even yours, so there’d only be nightmares left for us kids!”
“That’s Syd,” Nathe replied, and stoutly sat down on his haunches with definitiveness, “and he’s the nicest, coolest, and hottest guy ever alive on earth. And that’s that.” He didn’t even sound like he wanted to argue with me. Boy did that drive me up the wall.
“And that guy!” Jesus I was so ticked off I was screeching with a trill like shattered champagne, “with those fucked-up headphones! Who the hell would be jamming around with a funky racket like that if not the inside man of digital virus and cyber havoc against human amenities!”
“That… that’s Diem,” this time Nathe seemed a little unsure, and kept looking around as if he expected miniature sonic receivers to be hidden in the Cocoa Krispies packet on their kitchen shelf, “Really… he’s very nice. Very awesome. And cool… and whacky. For a big brother I mean.”
“What are you even talking about?!” I was peeved, really peeved, “Jesus I bet they fed all that mindlessly crawling trash into your brain like they feed coins into vending machine slots! I bet that Syd of yours did that to you at night when you aren’t even looking the right way! That’s just the sort of thing witches would do to you when you’re asleep!”
“Syd’s not!” Nathe shot up, cheeks piping hot, “He’s a Jedi master who taught me how to swordfight with ugly veggies and a guardian of the penguins against inhuman showers and poisonous shampoo and shackle breaker of enslaved kids having to do their arithmetic homework on the volcanic planet of Mustafar!” He cut short, stared at me, and ululated, like a real savage, “Die, veggies!”
That was how we came to an agreement that we had to meet Syd to verify my point that he was a witch and to verify Nathe’s point that he was a Jedi master, a patron of penguins, a patriotic hero of the emancipation of kids, Dora the Explorer’s long-lost spouse, Nemo’s brother without his stripes, and the lollipop man whom everybody misunderstood and failed to appreciate except for his parent old Mister SpongeBob.