His eyes were shiny. They moved around my room with a careful grace, an amazed smile creeping across his face. He saw it with the awe of a child seeing fireworks for the first time; all the wonder and beauty of the world encompassed in the giant, goofy smile that made Drew seem at least half his age.

His gaze wandered back to me. He looked at me like I was the most beautiful, tiny creature wrapped in my old, screamo/alternative band hoodie with smears of mascara beneath my eyes like a raccoon. He reached out slowly, so slowly I thought maybe he had forgotten he reached out his hand at all, and lightly placed the tips of his fingers against my cheek. His calluses made my skin feel especially smooth.

My eyes immediately sunk away from his. I couldn’t make myself look back up at him. Everything was just so overwhelming. Drew had taken his sister’s Valium and was acting bizarre, but I just felt so numb--an inexplicable sadness that drenched me thoroughly and wrung me out, but showed no signs of drying. I had been hoping to talk to him but there was no point in trying now. His mind was in a place far away from mine. He was floating in some manifestation of beauty, while I was drowning in the weight of all the ugly things I couldn’t escape.

My right hand was shaking. I held it lightly with my left and felt like I had reached for a stranger. That hand was so ugly. Long, skinny, shaky fingers with huge knobs for joints. It looked so pale, so skinny. A bag of bones. A fat, ugly spider hiding under a thin flesh canvas. I wished it would stop shaking.

I watched as his hand covered my own. He spun my silver ring around my finger three times before sliding it off.

“Where did you get this?”

“My mom.”

He popped the ring into his mouth and continued to look around the room. It appeared his mood had changed. A sort of serious, solemn tone had replaced his earlier wonder. He stared off with the same kind of distance that clouded his face whenever I told him something serious I had never told anyone else before. It was the expression that meant I wasn’t going to receive a response, no matter how badly I needed the satisfaction of knowing he had heard me and he understood.

I figured he had swallowed my ring. It was silver and had a diamond in the center surrounded by little diamonds. It was expensive and I had gotten it for Christmas a couple of years ago. I wore it daily. Now it was probably sliding down his esophagus, making its way towards his pit of a stomach.

I still didn’t care.

I knew I should have been angry, or at least shocked, but nothing seemed to matter. It was just a little piece of silver. It’s hard to think of anything more insignificant than jewelry. My entire arm was beginning to tremble.

My eyes felt raw and the tears were soothing. I lied down next to Drew, burying my head in the space below his chin and laying my hand on his chest. I could feel the fabric of his red hoodie growing wet against my cheek, and opened an eye to peek at the stains of my sadness. My tears had soaked him like bullets. When I pictured someone being shot, I saw red blossoming from a white blouse, quickly spreading like a beautiful painting emerging from an invisible brush.

I didn’t like the image.

I sat up Indian-style and wiped my eyes with my sleeve. That damn arm was still shaking. I spread out my fingers and observed that alien hand again. Looking at it was making me feel worse by the second, but I couldn’t make myself look away. It was something foreign, something not to be trusted. I didn’t like the way it was making me feel and I feared whatever other powers it may hold. Drew gently slipped the ring back onto my long, bony finger. I felt indifferent that he hadn’t swallowed it after all.

“I feel so fucking numb,” I said, stretching out my fingers and then gripping them back into fists, curling my fingers as hard as I could to feel my nails digging into the soft flesh of my palms. It seemed I couldn’t squeeze them tight enough. I squeezed and squeezed but still felt nothing. Little red half-moons were scattered among my palms and I had to question how they got there. Certainly I hadn’t done that. Not with my nails that didn’t seem to exist and my palms that were not my own.

I pushed my sleeves up to my elbows and stretched out my fingers again. I looked malformed. My wrists looked like they had been stolen from a doll and my hands were erupting from them like a big insect. I looked like a disgusting creation. I was constructed by a little boy who tore apart his toys to sew them back together crudely.

I turned my arms over to observe the sensitive, pale underside. Almost all of my scars were gone, and I don’t know how that made me feel. I almost told Drew that the little triangle scar was from when I purposely burnt myself with my straightner in ninth grade. I was getting ready for school one morning, ironing the short wings that flip out from behind my ears. I was about to turn it off but instead played with it in my hand for a moment, clamping it shut and then opening it again. I didn’t think about it for more than a second. Suddenly my arm was between the hot plates, the warm metal stinging my flesh between the wrist and elbow. I turned it off after that. I sat down on my bed and pulled my hair. I began to cry and thought over and over, I’m so sick, I’m so sick, I’m so sick. I felt sorry for myself for a couple of minutes, wiped my eyes, then stuffed my homework in my book bag.

“This is how I used to feel when I’d cut myself,” I said. I lightly scratched my arms with the tips of my nails, moving softly and carefully. “It started out like this. I would just scratch my arms without even realizing it, and then I’d look down and everything would be red and raw and bumpy and I wouldn’t even notice I was bleeding.”

The shaking was really getting out of control. It was spreading up my arm and seeping down my leg, my entire right side controlled by some outside source.

“Lexie…”

Drew’s voice floated in the air around me for a couple of seconds, but slowly it began to sink and settle into my core. I hadn’t heard it since I had called him on the phone thirty minutes earlier, telling him I was feeling sad and didn’t know why. As soon as he showed up I knew he wasn’t himself. The figure sitting next to me on my bed wasn’t the boy I had talked on the phone. The sudden eruption of his voice seemed to bring him to life.

He grabbed my hand and held it for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, I looked up. I wasn’t the only person who felt naked when he looked at me. I had heard from others that sometimes it seemed like Drew knew all their secrets, just from the intensity of his stare.

Was he looking at me so sadly because he felt he had to? Or was it just the Valium? Was he even aware of what I was saying?

I looked at him again. The Valium seemed to be loosening its grip. His eyes were honest. He laughed and I looked at him. What was he thinking? Maybe I was wrong about the Valium.

“You have school tomorrow.”

I felt like shit, I had spider hands, my boyfriend was just now sinking back to reality, I was cold and shaking, and I had to go to school in a matter of hours. I laughed too. Life was so exceedingly ridiculous sometimes.

“It’s getting so hard to balance life,” I said, “to have this world we’re in right now and then wake up in the morning and go to school. It’s all so meaningless. I see through the bullshit and I’m sick of pretending.”

“I don’t want to be in college anymore. I want to drop out. I could be a janitor and I’d be happy.”

“It’s so stupid. I’m supposed to go off to Boston, some fancy, artsy school…for what? To write? Am I going to be taught how to do that? You can or you can’t. And journalism, man. I don’t want to be a journalist. I hate how it’s basically my only chance if I’m ever going to make mon-”

“I’m going to run away,” he interrupted.

He stared at me. I didn’t say anything.

“What are you thinking?” He asked.

“I do too.”

“Will you run away with me?”

I could have answered with a simple nod. I certainly wanted to and saying I was going to certainly would have settled things. The thing that stopped me from saying yes, was that I really wanted to say yes. I didn’t want to turn this into some naïve dream that I would wake from by the time I was applying to colleges.

Where would we go? Would I really be okay living some life of poverty somewhere with my pothead boyfriend? I’ve been pretty convinced that both Drew and I are more insane than the average person, maybe even alarmingly so. Would it really be the best idea for the two of us to be on our own, struggling to escape society to reach the reality we both desperately hope exists?

It really would.

In complete seriousness, I could leave everything and do either the dumbest--or smartest thing-- I could ever do in my life. I could embrace the little time I have in this life to actually live.

“I want to graduate high school first.”

“When will you be eighteen? Yeah…you’ll be eighteen by then.”

“I’ll be a waitress at some crappy joint. Isn’t that beautiful? An honors student from an upper middle class family doing a job most people sink to as a last resort because I want to. And maybe I’ll even finish a book,” I laughed.

“All I need is my guitar and my van. Think about that, man. We could live in my van if we needed to. ”

We smiled at each other.

“Let’s do something crazy,” he said. I looked at the clock. I had to be up for school in six hours.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go to my house.”

“Okay.” I got up and put on some shoes.

“But I want some McDonalds first.”

I groaned but didn’t protest. I always harassed him about his love of fast food, saying that the capitalist chain restaurants were symbols of everything we hated about society. He would listen to my rants patiently, laughing when I became ardent, and then cut me off by saying, “Yeah, but it’s really fucking good.”

We pulled up to his house and he turned the car off.

“Wait here. I’m going to see if my people are up.”

I drank the rest of my water guiltily. Ronald smiled at me mockingly between the bright design and advertising propaganda that laced the cup. I reminded myself that water was free, and I wasn’t being hypocritical. If anything I was sticking it to the man, wasting his paper caps and giving nothing back in return. When nothing was left but ice I bent the straw onto itself and stuck it under the lid. I watched Drew’s figure grow larger in the right side mirror.

“They’re asleep but Angela’s up. Follow me.”

We went around the side to the back of his house. I ducked down low towards the bushes hoping the living room light wouldn’t reveal me like a searchlight. He turned and smiled at me, then held up a finger as a warning over his pursed lips.

“You make more noise than me!” I whispered, stopping to listen to the leaves crunching beneath his steps. He turned around again, scoffed, and waved me to follow. We stood beneath his window and looked up at the brick wall.

“What light is that?” I asked, pointing at the bright window.

“The bathroom.” He indicated the two windows next to it, “Those are mine.”

“How the hell am I supposed to get up there?”

“You can’t climb?”

I stared at him blankly. I haven’t been able to do a pushup since elementary school and my arms are almost entirely composed of bone, fat, and skin. He remembered this and said, “Okay, we’ll get a ladder.”

I followed him to the shed beneath his house and laughed as he waved his arms around blindly, looking for the string that would flip on the light. Suddenly a faint light flickered on, allowing enough illumination for Drew to at least look for the ladder without tripping over something.

I wondered if this was where Lee killed himself. I gazed through the plastic doors at the wide oak trees in his backyard. I pictured Drew as a young teenager, bent at the waist, puking at the foot of the tree. I figured it was a sunny day. Crazy, life changing, tragic things only happen when it’s nice outside. Rays of warm sunlight probably streaked Lee’s swinging body, darkening the shed wall with a dancing shadow. Drew probably looked up from the pool of vomit seeping into the pine straw and thought something completely inappropriate about the corpse that used to be a friend.

That’s the way it works when you find somebody dead. Your mind evades the shock and disgust that would overwhelm it if you even tried to digest what your eyes were telling you. Instead of focusing on the greasy strands of bangs half-covering the completely white eyes, instead of seeing the purple bruises indicating you’re way too late to change the course of events, you notice the strange laugh that wiggles out of your body like some kind of demon. The voice isn’t yours and there’s something exceedingly funny about something so sinister, so despite screaming in terror or fainting from disgust, you laugh.

Drew walked right past the spot where I pictured a faceless body hanging. He was muttering under his breath and scratching his head, oblivious to the horror in my mind.

“Shit,” he said, “it’s not here.” He paused for a moment. “Oh, I know.”

We left the shed and went under the porch where two ladders rested on the ground. He grabbed the small one and together we carried it back to the side of the house.

“Hold on a minute, I’ll go unlock the window.”

I sat on the grass waiting as he went back inside the house. I wondered why it always had to be so cold when we did these crazy things. I was huddled just like this outside his house, hugging my knees, struggling to stay warm a couple of months ago. It was the night I snuck out and we walked through his neighborhood for hours. The roads were dark and twisting and I felt as if we were walking into an abyss, the asphalt behind us disappearing into the night.

In some aspects we were.

I had just broken up with Donnie, but he was still dating Rebecca.

Once we reached the end of the neighborhood we turned around and headed back to his house. He placed his hand on the small of my back for a moment, gently guiding me around the bend of moon-stained road.

“They should make a movie about us,” he said.

“Who would watch it?” I laughed.

“We could.”

“And how would it end?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would have to be something random, that would make everyone in the audience mad…looking around like, ‘what the hell just happened?’ It would be like, us, walking down this road, having this conversation.”

He laughed and placed his hand on the small of my back again. That was the moment that I knew how the night would end, and of course I was right. Nothing was the same again.

“Do you remember the last time you were out here?” Drew asked. I hadn’t even noticed he returned.

“I was just thinking about that.”

“Well think about it inside the house.”

He steadied the ladder and I slowly crept up it. I fought my laughter as I slid in through the window, amused by the sudden shift from feet above the air to inches above Drew’s carpeted floor. I sat on his bed and waited. Within a matter of seconds he was there. He closed the door and smiled.