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“I did.” I offer him a small smile, moving in for a hug. “Thank you for taking care of me all the time.”
“Someone’s got to,” he teases, squeezing me back briefly before stepping away. The two of us split, heading in opposite directions to finish out our day.
With a deep sigh, I make my way toward the lecture halls for some stupid history class I’m destined to fail, but I do my best to give my all. E ven if my “all” is a sad C minus, for the sole reason I can’t be separated from my best friend again.
All my life, it was only my uncle Marcus and me…and Ben. I can’t blame Unc for allowing me here when I know damn well I only came for Ben.
I’ve never really been good at making friends. I’ve never really cared to try, to be honest. I’m more of a lone rider, happy to get lost in my imagination for hours on end, but with Ben our friendship is effortless. He’s my soulmate. The kind that I know would never run out on me.
The day he and his grandmother moved in across the street was, and continues to be, the best thing that ever happened to me. My uncle Marcus is great, kind, and attentive and the perfect father figure from what I know. He’s stern when he needs to be and does his best to understand the different stages of teenage rebellion, but being the only person running the household is taxing and time-consuming, so it left me alone a lot. I love him for it, appreciate everything he does for me, but it didn’t exactly help me in the social department to spend so much time alone at such a young age—the reason why I had the imagination of R. L. Stine when I was little, if you ask the mandated therapist my elementary school “recommended” I see after one too many complaints from the teacher that I was too intrigued with the emotions people feel and why they feel them…how to draw certain ones out of them.
It became fascinating to me. A simple hobby of people-watching quickly turned into something else. I swear, there were times where I could feel what some were feeling. Obviously, that’s atrocious, but there were times…. It was sort of the same for Ben, sans the this child is fucked up notion, being raised by his grandmother, a woman who busted her ass her entire life and raised her children, thrust back into the working world so late in life to do it all over again with the grandchild her daughter didn’t want but had.
He was alone, I was alone, and then suddenly we had each other, and that’s how it stayed over the years. At one point, I even lived with him and Grandma Betsy when my uncle Marcus was transferred for work, but it didn’t take him long to quit that job and find another because, in all the ways that mattered, I was his daughter. Splitting us apart was the last thing he wanted.
I knew it would be hard for him when I left for college. He was pretty excited when I was forced to stay back for my first year when the only place I could get into was a junior college because my grades were as shit as my attendance.
That’s probably where Ben and I differ the most. He has always been all about school and sports and overachieving academia. He knew at a young age he wanted more in life; he wanted the chance to give his grandma a more comfortable life after seeing how hard she worked and was forced to have the simplest things and sometimes not even those.
Originally, he was supposed to go to junior college with me, stay home and near his grandma, but then he got a call from the coaches here, and next thing you know he was accepted into Daragan State with a full ride.
I cried in happiness and absolute dread because I knew there was no way he could pass that up, not without a savings or penny to his name to help pay for college courses, even at a junior college. He would have had to work endlessly just to cover a couple classes each semester, not to mention play hockey in an old, rundown arena that gets rented out for kids’ birthday parties more often than not.
For a moment, as short-lived as it was, he considered turning it down, but then when Grandma Betsy passed in her sleep not long after our high school graduation, I knew. I was about to lose my best friend to a school halfway across the country.
I’d never worked so hard in school in my life, but I knew I had to get to where he was because I couldn’t do this tiresome, mundane existence without him.
