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“Um, no. I’ll be asleep. Like a normal person.”
“Bo-ring.”
“You’re just jealous.”
He held up his thumb and forefinger. “A little, yeah. Goodnight, bestie.”
“You are not my best friend,” I said.
“I will be. You’ll see. Night!”
“Night, drummer boy.”
Seven
“You know the drill, Cee. Get up here and tell me my bedtime story.”
“I will not miss telling you stories at three o’clock in the morning,” I sighed, exhausted. Although I could fall asleep standing, I crawled up into Serge’s bunk and settled in. Truth was, I enjoyed talking about Eli. It helped me not miss him so damn much.
Then:
Eli and I had two speeds: best friends and worst enemies. Most of the time it was the former, but when the latter kicked in, the entire world as we knew it also knew.
There were very few things we argued over. One of them was my need to save him from himself, and his to save me from myself, which was hilarious because we were always doing the same shit.
By the end of junior year, we had graduated to harder drugs. My favorite being cocaine. Eli preferred pills. Honestly, the fact we even survived our teen years was a damn miracle. The more frequently we indulged, the more we fought. It’s blurry because we were never sober. There was some kind of substance fueling us at all times. While we could see the other needed to be reined in, we took extreme offense to being called out ourselves. As the year went on, we fought about it more often than we got along, yet neither of us stopped and neither walked away.
The winter of our senior year, shit hit the fan when one of our friends overdosed on heroin. It wasn’t enough to stop our constant drug use, but Eli and I made a pact that we’d never touch the stuff. We had established a firm line we wouldn’t cross. Together, we decided that heroin was too potent and would kill us, too. It seemed logical and mature.
If only we were smart enough to realize we were already in too deep.
For a while, I backed off the hard stuff, preferring to get drunk instead. I was depressed, though I didn’t know at the time. My friend had died, and I thought being sad was just a normal part of grief. To fill in the holes where the drugs used to be, I took up a new hobby, and Eli wasn’t a fan.
Probably because the hobby was fucking Carl.
Now, Eli had screwed damn near every girl we went to school with and all those in the surrounding towns. He had no room for being judgmental about my sex life. First, Eli accused Carl of taking advantage of me, but I argued I was a very willing participant and if anyone was being used, it was Carl. Later, the fight turned into me accusing him of being a hypocrite, and him seething because I didn’t care that he slept around.
Things got hostile between us, but even through that, he always made sure I was okay. I’d try to shut him out, but he was always there when I came crashing down. Hell, most nights he still slept beside me in my bed.
I can’t say it went both ways by that time. Our friendship was very one-sided, and I was the horrible friend. I was busy building walls so I wouldn’t get attached, and he was busy trying to pull me closer. It all came to a head that spring. We had cut class and gone to the woods to hang out. We had been on good terms for a few days, if I remember correctly. Not coincidentally, I had been laying off the booze for a week, trying to prove to him and myself that I didn’t have an issue. But I had gotten high on the way there.
That’s when it happened. For the life of me, I don’t remember what led up to it. I just remember one minute we were talking and the next his lips were on mine. It was only a brief kiss, but the surprise of it made me fall back off the log we were sitting on.
I looked at him and said, “I have no intention of being one of your conquests, Elijah.” I texted Carl to pick me up and walked away from Eli.
We didn’t speak for the month leading up to graduation. To be fair, he tried reaching out to me a few times, but I ignored him. I got into a fight with a girl he was sleeping with because she had the nerve to suggest the reason Eli and I weren’t speaking was because he loved her. A physical fight that got me suspended for three days. Still, I avoided him. I heard via the gossip mill he was being more reckless than he had been, and I did my best to ignore that he existed.
I left right after graduation for Europe. When I came back, he wasn’t around. He had moved in with a cousin out of town. I left for college that fall without reaching out to him.
I thought about him every day. Every day, I wondered if he was okay. Every day, I stubbornly refused to find out. I drank my troubles away. Took coke to stay awake in class. Three years of partying later, I didn’t know where he was, only that I hadn’t seen an obituary for him, so I was relatively sure he was alive. It was a valid concern, given our propensities for being idiots and the seven drug-related deaths of our friends from high school.
I was self-destructive and kind of slutty, and so was he. Instead of doing it together, we just did it with different friends. But I was never as close to anyone as I was to Eli.
Now:
“So, you just stopped talking to your best friend because he kissed you?” Sergio asked.
I squirmed in the dark bunk. “Yes. Like I said, we were toxic. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to cheapen our friendship with casual sex. But in reality, I think I knew that wasn’t what he wanted either. I just didn’t want him to get any closer than he already was.”
