Star Witness

6

TOMÁS

By the time January's slipped away, Jesse and I are friends. I mean, I asked him if we were, and he said yes.

"I just want to know," I'd said, in math one day with him. "I like having a word. I figure there's no point agonizing when I can just ask."

"Yeah," he answered. "I guess we're friends. I just still don't get why you wanna hang around me."

"I refuse to dignify your self-hatred with words. Moving on: I have rules if we're going to be friends."

He put his elbows up on the desk, leaning closer.

"I don't do drugs," I told him.

"Okay."

"I don't do pills. Except the ones I have to."

"Alright."

"I don't do psychedelics. Or shrooms or molly or cocaine or Xanax or... whatever. Drugs! I don't do them."

"Sure."

"I don't smoke."

"Yeah."

"And if you're doing heroin or meth we can't be friends."

Jesse showed me his teeth.

I asked what he was doing.

"I wouldn't have them if I was doing meth," he said.

He's hard to keep track of. Sometimes I won't hear from him for a couple days. But he always returns, slinking, purposefully easy to miss. For me, that's the key: he keeps coming back.

He'll come by our table at lunch to say hello to me, which a couple of my friends detest. We skip seventh period together a few times, once I get the courage. Jesse is a good person to rebel with, because he's experienced, but he doesn't make me feel like I have to pretend to be all cool about it. We pool together change at McDonald's, try on costumes at Party City and see who laughs first, steal lemons off trees that hang over fences, push each other around in the many shopping carts that get abandoned along the roads. We can be weird together; I like that.

Usually, he's a little high.

"That man is on a rainbow," Alice said one day after he visited me at lunch.

Jesse's pills, I don't know what to make of them. It isn't like he's secretive, so I forget that it's dangerous. I think I need to learn more about the situation before I act on it. That's what Mom would tell me to do. So I'm going to learn more.

It isn't like I've never had friends. But that's because Mia has always shared hers with me, Alice a prime example. And the rest of my school friends, they have other people more important than me. They have to; I'm not bitter about that. You can't put all your eggs into a basket that goes to the hospital for months at a time.

Jesse is different, because, for now, he's just mine.

-

My birthday is February 14th. It's fitting. Valentine's Day is one of mankind's greater inventions and in my opinion, love is the core of everything. As is chocolate.

I should adore my birthday.

It's a day dedicated completely to me, and being the center of attention is everything to me. But it can sometimes feel like everyone is holding their breath. I noticed even when I was little that the celebration was always rimmed with relief.

Take that usual weirdness and multiply it by infinity, and that's the feeling on my birthday this time around.

I don't want to do anything. I don't want to acknowledge it at all; I want to turn seventeen in secret. I don't want to listen to my relatives telling me what a miracle I am. I don't want to celebrate not dying.