He died on the third of October, thousand-900 and eighty-7 A.D—he was buried the next Saturday, the tenth, at Chapel Hill Cemetery, here west of Salem. I know because I attended, we attended, it was the least thing we could do being his closest friends of the past eleven months. We tried to be the ones that stayed the longest but his family silently insisted that they’d rather take that title, going so far to force us out of their presence by the shortened remark, “We’d like some time alone with Lucas”. I wondered what he’d have said if he was still alive, maybe he would’ve defended us and let us stay.

Three in the morning, driving down Second Street, we weren’t there, but we should’ve been; I should’ve, she would’ve made it worse. Instead, he was with some other boy, he knew him for a few years already, he was on the football team as well. That’s how we met Lucas—she was on the cheerleading team for quite some time, a few seasons, until “some whore” made the executive decision to kick her off. I knew exactly who she was talking about as she rambled on to me, as I sat amongst her blankets, stuffed animals, beanie babies, and pillows stacked on her bed all the while I stared out the window to watch autumn leaves fall on wet concrete; she didn’t even need to say the girl’s name.

After his burial we ate an early dinner at about four o’clock, and then returned to his grave the first time that night at six. She smoked, I wept, she almost started to as well but the cigarette’s draw held her tears back. Maybe that made me less of a man, but I didn’t care, I still don’t care. Left his grave at six-30 to try and ease our minds from the loss in the confines of her bedroom—her mom was never home and her dad was long gone so parental supervision was null and void. I called my dad from her place, I was staying the night, no doubt about it, he didn’t care. He thought we were dating.

The second time we went to the cemetery that night I almost pissed on a tree at nine o’clock but the snapping of a twig sent me running back to his grave where she stood, with my pants down. She was smoking again. I didn’t cry this time. Lucas’s dirt mound was already covered in dead leaves by this point and his stone was at an odd angle—they didn’t set it right.

If I was still staying with my mother I would have had to leave Amber’s house at an ungodly hour that morning so I could get home in time for her to drag me off to church with my nails full of dirt, but ever since I got a knife pulled out on me when I spoke in a tone she didn’t like I’d been shacked up at dad’s. One year by December, and though she would’ve loved to have me around during Thanksgiving or especially Christmas so she could baptize me in her bathtub, it'd be the first year her holiday dinner table was empty. Of course I miss her, but I don’t really miss her. That’s all to say we were up late with our own affairs that night.

By midnight we were back in her bedroom, from twelve to two-30; we reminisced about him, how he talked, how he walked, how he had about a foot on both of us—a foot on me, eleven inches on her. How, somehow, he had become friends with two people like us, we who considered ourselves to be the outcasts. I always thought that maybe he found her pretty and that he was only friends with me by association, he was only nice to me because he had to be since I was her best friend. Still, the much quieter part of me said it wasn’t her he wanted, and that he was only nice to her because he had to be.

“That’s not true.”

“Of course it isn’t,” I said, sunken into her bed. “I was joking.”

“Didn't sound like it. I thought I was great when I cheered.” She probably was lying to herself.

“I didn’t go to the football games to see you, that’s for sure.”

She threw a pillow across the room at me. “I know, you just went because you wanted to see someone.” Standing up, she checked her mascara in the full length mirror. “Didn’t smear.”

“You barely cried.”

“You balled your eyes out like a little bitch.” A twirl from her as she admired her reflection, her red hair flying about. “I don’t normally wear skirts, but this one suits me.”

“Nothing suits you, other than a broom and a black, pointy hat.”

“Look at what your ass is wearing.” She fixed her lipstick, I didn’t see the need for her to reapply.

“Dad said I need a haircut.”

She disagreed. “You always look ugly but a haircut would make it worse. Don’t grow it out like a girl of course, but since you don’t have straight hair the crazy look is fine.”

I crossed my arms and shrugged it off. “It’s not that crazy.”

“You look like you came out of the drying machine.”

Now I crossed my legs, indian-style. We talked for about an hour, focused on him for some time; it was natural, I would think, to be able to talk our feelings out. 

It was a chance encounter, really, when I met him. Chance in the sense that, if it weren’t for Amber, I would have never spoken to him, I would never have been able to have a genuine relationship with him. He was a football boy, he had practice almost everyday, he didn’t have the best of grades but at the same time he wasn’t a nonce. He knew Amber because, like I said, she used to be a cheerleader and they had got to talking one night under blindlight floodlights; she played cutesy, she pushed him in the shoulder as he held his helmet off to the side. Everyone that was once in the stadiums were dispersing, I was cleaning up the concessions that I ran that night—I was her ride home, too. Her mom was working late and she didn’t have her license yet even though we both were juniors; all three of us were juniors. If it wasn’t for me she would have had to walk twenty minutes home on a cold November night.

I shuffled over to the two of them, squeezed in my puffer jacket, her forcing our introduction.

“Mark,” I said, with my hand outstretched.

He smiled—I couldn’t tell if it was genuine. “Lucas.”

“Yeah, I know.” Maybe I was off putting. Maybe I looked stupid at the time, maybe I sounded like a dick with all the remarks I made back and how I was begging for Amber to come along so that we could just get to her house and hang out that night. And maybe that gave him the wrong impression about me.

That entire concept was shattered before my very eyes when he spoke to me that coming Monday at school—I had to piss, I went to the bathroom, came out into the hallway and wandered over to the drinking fountain to practically instantly refill my bladder once again. He was behind me, I had no idea, I thought he was a ghost, a zombie maybe. Lucas shadowed me, leaned his arm against the wall to utter under his breath and only to me, “Mark.” Even though I had already gone to the bathroom I almost did it a second time right there and then.

“You scared the—.” I thought it was some creep, so I was about to do my best at reprimanding the bastard only to then cover my mouth when I realized it was the guy from Friday-Night-Football. “Lucas, it’s—.”

“It’s only me?”

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I nodded, my hand still partially covering my mouth as I almost sat on the water fountain behind me. “Yeah, it’s only you.”

I’m not saying that I don’t have any friends, no. I have Amber, and there’s a handful of people that I talk to on a daily basis—I’m not the most famous, most popular person. I still have reason to thank God for Amber though. Still, maybe he was only doing it because he remembered my name and just so happened to see me in the hallway, he wasn’t trying to seek me out. 

But then he asked me if I wanted to do something after school.

“Don’t you have football practice?”

“It got canceled.”

“Don’t you have homework?”

“I wasn’t planning on doing it in the first place.”

This wasn’t normal. No, it wasn’t normal at all. I entertained it though, of course, as I’m only human—we were only human.

I suggested that we could go and get ice cream, just for him to tell me that it was late September and that didn’t really make any sense, far too cold for that—I told him that it didn’t make any sense at all for football practice to be canceled relatively close to the beginning of the season and he didn’t have a response to that. He, instead, suggested that we hang out at one of our houses, causing me to instantly interject him and propose my house. Though I felt bad having to cancel the plans that I had made with Amber for that night, we hung out all the time and, even more so, I didn’t think I would be able to have a chance like that ever again.

Other than banter and plans to “do it again sometime”, nothing else came of what happened after school. He followed me to my house, he left before dinner (as if my father was planning on making something in the first place), and he returned home at a most reasonable time. Yet I found myself clutching the side of the door frame as I watched him walk to his car, open his door and get inside, fiddle with the gear-shift for a second because apparently he had some sort of issue shifting gears, and speed off down my street. I almost ripped the wood off. I thought he would have stayed longer, so when I wasn’t able to see his car anymore I rushed back inside and to the safety of my room, slamming the door behind me and dialing Amber’s number.

“Mark.”

“He left earlier than I thought, we can still do something tonight.”

She didn’t respond at first—a pause. “He? Who?”

That was right—I didn’t tell her what I was doing, I only told her that I had to cancel our plans. “Lucas.”

I didn’t know if she was upset or unsurprised, or perhaps that she didn’t care in the first place; and it didn’t matter to me at all, this was my chance. Sure, he was her friend first, but he asked me to hang out with him, not her. And yes, Amber and I did spend the rest of that night together, sat on her back porch as she dragged a cigarette and I held loosely with my right hand a bottle, staring up into the dark-lit sky in that metal wicker chair. I hated nicotine. The first time she offered it to me she attempted to fit it in my hand—I ended up burning myself, dropping the cigarette onto the ground, and in my anger towards her I squashed it beneath my foot. But she knows now that if she offered it to me again, even if I probably was weaker than her, I’d raise hell.

“He’ll come to you. Or he’ll come to me—at the end of the day, one of us will get him, I know that for sure.”

I glared at her; maybe I hated the fact that she would even suggest that. Maybe I hated the fact that she would leave it all up to chance, implying that it was all based on luck and that “at the end of the day” we couldn’t do anything about it except wait. Yeah—I didn’t like that at all.

“And if he doesn’t…” she trailed off.

That’s what I wanted. She shouldn’t think of “if he doesn’t”.

I learned about his death the day after it happened. It would have been two days after it happened if it wasn’t for Amber; again, she was my saving grace that time. She learned it before me, from her neighbor who heard it from his girlfriend. And I thought that when she called me that afternoon we would just have our normal talks, where we would go on and on about whatever came to our minds and where we refused to filter out those things that would have gotten a volley of questions if any other person overheard our conversation.

“He’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

“He is. He’s dead.”

Dad wasn’t home when I learned, so I slammed the receiver down on my desk and put a dent in the wood, put a split in the plastic too. 

She had a boyfriend before we met Lucas. He was part of the reason why she got kicked off the cheerleading team; he slept with the captain of the team, the girl whose name she wrote in her diary ad infinitum. That girl. Everyday that I went to school I wondered if she was going to do something that day, if she was going to act on her raw emotions and put an end to the girl. She didn’t, of course, but she should have. But she did get in a fight with her at a party that I attended; the second party I’ve gone to, about the thirtieth she’s gone to. Could be more, actually. I’ve always thought that I should go to more of those, meet more people, and maybe I will—maybe that’d be good for me. Lucas and her used to go together and he would invite me everytime. The first party I went to was when he called my house at around midnight from the host's phone to ask if I could come pick him up because he and Amber both had been drinking and he wanted to get out of there, he didn’t want to risk driving back intoxicated. Good on him. Amber ended up staying at that party until four in the morning, and she did end up walking back home that night since I couldn’t be bothered to pick her up—Lucas had come back to my place anyway, he was spending the night. And dad wasn’t home that night either, he was off doing God knows what, it didn’t concern me. Sure, she called multiple times but I just let the thing ring itself off the wall practically, it wasn’t my fault that she had made such a terrible decision. And I knew that she could make her way back by herself, wasn’t the first time she had done that sort of thing. That all happened two months after we met him.

And the second party I went to, like I mentioned, was the one where Amber and the cheer captain got into it; Amber was accused of harlotry—that wasn’t the word that Heather used, it’s the word I like to use. Amber didn’t stand for that at all, Kirk Matthews stepped between them trying to act as a wall between the two of them. All I did was stand there, sipping from my SOLO cup, watching the two girls pull each other's hair out. Kirk Matthews was on the football team like Lucas, he was a big guy, he could maybe stop them. Still, Amber wasn’t having it; she reached around him, grabbed Heather’s dyed blonde hair with her right hand (it was fake, everyone knew), grabbed one of those phones that’s supposed to look like a pair of lips with her left, and cracked it over her head like a piece of candy. She bled a bit, not too much though, put a few drops on the floor—wasn't a hard stain to clean up at all. Definitely made her stop talking. And that was the first phone broken between the two of us.

Nobody called an ambulance, nobody thought it was that bad of an injury, and it wasn’t. Maybe a minor-grade concussion, though no one even dared to talk about it the next day, a Wednesday. Lucas was there, standing next to me, talking with a group of people I had seen him talking to a handful of times after some of his games. And I didn’t involve myself.

I, instead, watched. I observed. Just like how, later, I watched the funeral. I observed. I watched as they buried him, as his family cried, as Amber stood next to me and didn’t say a single word until they were done piling all the dirt on him, just to turn to me and say, “Well, that’s that,” with her hands tucked in her pockets and the smell of smoke on her breath. And I’m sure she could smell that sickly sour smell on mine too.

“No it isn’t.” I responded to her statement hours later, after we held between us so many conversations that there was no chance that she understood what I was referring to.

“‘No it isn’t’ what?”

I didn’t respond to her—either I was trying to piss her off or I just didn’t see the need to give her an answer, I don’t really know. Yes, of course, I was the one who said it, but it didn’t really matter.

“It isn’t what?”

That night was terribly cold, utterly awful. It would have been a great idea to bring gloves of some sort but too bad we didn’t think of that. Yet it was fall and we should have known better. We saw the dead leaves, we felt the weather getting more and more crisp, the gray skies and the rainy weather, but we somehow didn’t think to wear gloves. I wore my jacket, she wore her sweater, and I put on rain boots just in case a storm came in during our third visit to the cemetery.

I buried my dog. I’ve dug a grave before. Lucky. Hit by a car, he got stuck in the wheel well. And I had to bury him. It’s not that hard. It takes a while, that’s for sure, but it’s not the hardest thing in the world, even for someone my size.

It did start to rain, dirt turned to wet dirt, wet dirt turned to mud, mud turned to me slipping a few times, my grip on the shovel getting more and more loose. She took a few turns, she made a little bit of progress. I straightened out the stone, did the groundskeeper's job. They should’ve put it in place right the first time. Apparently I didn’t even notice that it was right next to a massive tree, with roots that spread to a ridiculous degree—why would they have him be neighboring a tree? He’d end up getting a pile of leaves on him every fall.