Grief fills my heart. How many times have I made him feel alone?
I stay rooted, not wanting to make him scared, but I want to help. “It won’t always be like this.”
“It’s always been like this,” he retorts.
I stand there, thinking back to grade school. Manny and I got along okay until fourth grade when I…changed. But even before that he was on the periphery of whatever was happening. He was small and lanky, never picked for sports and often got in trouble for not turning in assignments. I knew then that he had it a little stressful at home, but other kids don’t understand things like that. They just judge.
“When I was little,” he goes on. “I used to be able to go home and get away from it. But now we’re older. We have Facebook, and everything they say about me during the day, I get to see online every night.”
I can hear the tears in his voice, and I want to get him some napkins to clean up the blood, but I don’t want him to stop talking, either.
“One of you assholes pushes my tray into my clothes and dumps food all over me, and the first thing everyone does is take out their phones. And then I have to relive it through pictures on my newsfeed every hour—even days and weeks later. Over and over again. I can’t get away from it anymore. Not even when I leave school.”
I never thought about it like that. When we were younger, the dynamics of friendships and fitting in were only difficult at school. When we went home, we were free, and most of us, hopefully, felt safe there. Now, the only thing we leave at school is school. The pressure, the gossiping, the bad feelings, it follows us home online. There’s no break from it.
“It’s constant. The humiliation…”
“It won’t always be like this,” I say again, moving closer.
“My family sees it, my sisters and their friends. I embarrass them.” He shakes, sobbing again. “That’s why I get high.”
He pulls a rag and spray can out of his backpack, and I move forward, a lump stretching my throat.
“As high as I can get as often as I can get,” he says, “so I can bear the fucking pain of breathing and eating and looking at people like you.”
“Manny...”
“When everything is painful…” He drops the backpack and sprays the inhalant on the rag. “You start to ask yourself ‘what’s the point?’ No one cares, and you start to care even less. You just want the pain to stop.”
He brings it to his nose, and I lunge out, knocking the cloth out of his hand and grabbing the can.
I wrap my arm around him and pull him into me, both of us starting to cry. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” I whisper.
I drop the stuff on the floor and hold his frail, shaking body as tears stream down my face. What the fuck? How did we get here? He wasn’t like this as a kid. Neither of us were like this.
He breathes hard, and I think about all the times I didn’t think of him and all the things I wasn’t seeing. All the times I ignored what was happening because of the fear of being alone, empty, and ashamed of who I was.
We were kids once, and we liked ourselves. We were happy. How did that change?
I pull away and toss the stuff into the garbage, wetting some paper towels for him to clean off his neck.
Handing them to him, I lean down on the counter and try to calm the sobs in my chest.
This is crazy. How can he hurt himself like that? He has to know it gets better. The world will open up, and we won’t feel so trapped. You just need to hang on.
But I look over at him, seeing tears coat his face, bags under his eyes, and him staring off. He absently wipes the blood off his neck, looking completely fucking empty and like he’s done hanging on.
I wipe my tears away and try to steel my tone. “It won’t always be like this.” I want him to know that.
But he just looks over at me, looking like he’s hanging on by a thread. “When does it get better?”
My heart aches. Yeah, when? How long does he have to wait?
There should always be hope—we change, our environment changes, and our communities change. It will get better.
But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless in the meantime, either. I can’t change his life, but I can do this.
I pick up his backpack and stand up, handing it to him. Taking his hand, I lead him out into the hallway, seeing him toss his wet cloth in the trash on the way out.
We walk across the hall to the lunchroom, and I relax my grip on his hand just in case he wants to let go of me.
But he doesn’t. We walk hand in hand to the lunch line, already hearing the deafening noise fade a little and murmurs drift around the room.
I give him a tray and take one myself.
“Why are you doing this?” he asks in a low voice. “You don’t like me.”
“I’ve always liked you.” I turn my eyes on him. “And I need a friend.”
My being an asshole was personal to him, but it wasn’t personal to me. I never stopped liking Manny.
We move down the line, and my back is hot. Hopefully it’s my paranoia, feeling all those stares. If not, I guess I’ve laid down the gauntlet. And without Misha here this time to protect me. Here we go.
“I always eat in the library.” He looks around nervously.
I take a Jell-O cup. “The lunchroom is where we eat.”
“Everyone’s looking at us.”
“It’s because you have a better ass than me, that’s why.”
A laugh escapes him, but he quickly diffuses it, probably because he’s not sure if he can trust me. I don’t blame him.