Kevin’s got more CD’s than he can count, I think. Kevin’s a music-lover but above all else Kevin’s a writer. Among his CD’s, tossed carelessly around his apartment without the three-year reigning grace Clarice instilled, are pages of yellow paper with sentences half-scrawled in Kevin’s chicken-scratch handwriting. I’ve come to discover that the first line is always a song lyric. The second line is always the first line of the story, and the third line always contains the word ‘fuck’ in some context. There are never more than three lines.

I told him once that they were good, his three sentences were good, and he said that music’s the only thing he’s got left, music and me. He said he didn’t want to corrupt it with his disgusting writing. I yelled at him and told him I’d punch him in the face if he said it again.

"No, you wouldn’t," he replied.

"No, I wouldn’t." I thought for a second. "But I can get a pretty fearsome glare goin’ on."

He grinned, and dissented me, and the subject was dropped, but I still worried. I was finding some eerie story beginnings, and the day before I stole all of his pens I found something and for the first time, my best friend in the world made me, a twenty-seven year old man who’s dealt with more bull and who’s undertaken more responsibility than your average ninety-year-old, who’s never been allowed to show his emotions, cry.

Like a two-year-old girl whose Barbie was left at daycare.

Kevin was at work. He worked from 7-3 and I worked from 1-7, and his alarm always woke me. I was cleaning the apartment before I had to leave for work after making myself a grilled-cheese sandwich. I put his favorite U2 CD, the one that he’d bought a month after he moved here in a second-hand shop for five bucks because someone wrote "Fuck You" over the words "Joshua Tree." Under the CD, a yellow sheet of paper was folded into a tiny rectangle, something Kevin only did when he was nervous about what he had written. Of course, I unfolded it, worrying that it was a little bit more of all the shit Clarice had put on his psyche.

I was wrong.

At the top, as usual, was the title and artist. It said "Jude-Charlie Says." With a period after it. Kevin only used periods when he wanted something to be over, done with.

The line of the song he’d chosen was "You found me when I was first and ten against eleven men who could kick my ass." I smiled; it seemed exactly like the songs Kevin liked.

Then I read the first sentence.

"It’s nothing that’s really important for me to say. The fact that you’re my fucking best friend is all but negligible."

There was a fourth line, for once, and a fifth, and it was a year ago but I remember exactly what it said.

"It shouldn’t be. When you found me, beaten and nervous and too smart-assed for my own good, with eleven guys waiting to kill me, you shook them off and handed me an ice pack and now you’re my best friend and it’s really not negligible at all, to me."

And that was all.

And scribbled, like he always used to, before Clarice and when he claimed he still had the ability to write, was a dedication. They’d said "To Clarice" and "To Vanessa" who was his sister and once or twice they’d said "To Toby," me, his best friend.

Then, though, right then, it said, "To Tobias Jannsen." Without the period.

It was significant to me that he’d used my whole name. I can’t say why. All I can say is that when I started to bawl like a baby, I was almost glad that Kevin wasn’t home, though he wouldn’t have minded.

When my touched tears stopped, I found his Jude CD and turned to ‘Charlie Says.’ The song was about sex and a woman, but when I heard the line Kevin’s used, the slight strangeness of that didn’t matter and I cried again.

It was 12:30, and I left for work immediately, and I punched in before storming into Kevin’s office and slamming the door.

He had a pencil behind his ear and one in his mouth, typing furiously, a legal pad in his lap, reading glasses sliding quickly down the bridge of his nose. I knew he knew that I’d entered, but I knew that he was writing a rather imperative passage if his typing was that urgent, and so I waited.

He looked up at me several minutes later, spitting out his pencil and pushing his glasses up. "What’s up?" he queried me.

"Charlie says no one is really beautiful, we’re all just mediocre men of the hour," I said, and sat down.

His eyebrows rose and he took his glasses off. "Been branching out your music tastes, Tobes?"

I leveled him with a look. The briefest light of realization clicked in his eyes. I prompted him, "You found me when I was first and ten against eleven men who could kick my ass."

He looked down at his desk, at Kevin McCannon scripted in gold to make sure that everyone who entered there knew that he was a Very Important Person. "You’re worse than my mother was, Toby."

"You folded it and left it right out."

"It was under my U2 CD." His knowledge of the hurricane he lived in never ceased to amaze me.

"I was cleaning."

"Okay, mom."

"It was good," I said, and he looked me in the eye then. I almost smiled; so did he.

"It was crap," he dismissed.

"It’s nothing that’s really important for me to say. The fact that you’re my fucking best friend is all but negligible. "It shouldn’t be. When you found me, beaten and nervous and too smart-assed for my own good, with eleven guys waiting to kill me, you shook them off and handed me an ice pack and now you’re my best friend and it’s really not negligible at all, to me," I quoted to him. He looked surprised.

"I thought I was the one who was good at memorization."

"You’re not the one who had a 5.0 GPA throughout high school."

"Well." He fiddled with his glasses. He looked up. He shrugged. "What?" He grinned, almost ruefully, ducking his head slightly, and he looked twelve, he reminded me of Jake when Noah told him that he was the best eleven-year-old baseball player he’d ever seen, nevermind that Noah had seen very few eleven-year-old baseball players.

"Thank you," I said softly.

He looked up again. "You’re welcome, I mean, thank you. That-that was kind of my thank you to you, because you really don’t hear it enough from me." He smiled apologetically.

"I hear it," I said. "I hear the things you don’t say, remember?" It was a long-standing joke, but it was also the truth.

"I remember," he said. Then, "I was going to try to make it a book, or at least a short story but I can’t write any more than that."

"It’s more than you’ve been."

"That’s because it’s you. There’s nothing I know better." He shrugged again. "When my ass is about to be beat, you save me. When my ability to write is shot, you save me."

My eyes clouded with tears again. "Glad to be of service," I choked.

"I wanted you to read it, but I couldn’t just show it to you."

"I know."

"Okay," and he was a little unsure, and I worried again.

"Are you?" I ask quietly.

"Now." He stands; I follow him. "I’ll order pizza for dinner."

"And you’ll eat it all before I get home." I cuffed his shoulder once; it was something I did constantly, my own little way of discerning whether or not he was ready to fall apart.

"I’ll save you a piece if I’m not too hungry."

"Just order two pizzas," I grumble dgood-naturedly before hugging him quickly, a real hug, not a manly pat on the back. "Thank you," I said again before pulling back.

"Anytime," he replied, and I went back to work.

That night, Kevin ordered two pizzas and instead of blaring the single Ani DiFranco CD that Clarice had neglected to take, we compromised for old episodes of Sports Night we’d taped off of TV. And just as Casey informed the Cut Man that Rochester was a city in New York and Kevin and I laughed until tears rolled down our cheeks, he said, "You cried over my story. There were water marks on the paper."

"It was a very emotional day," I joked, and he grinned.

"It was, indeed."

"Let’s not have another one of those for a while."

"I bought a safe."

"Why?" The remark seemed to come from absolutely nowhere.

"So you can’t snoop at my stories anymore."

Hurt, I exclaimed, "Snoop? I was cleaning up! Don’t you trust me?"

He smiled easily. "You’re such a woman." I glared at him, and he continued. "So we can share these stories at a later date. Maybe on the one year anniversary of today, for sentimentality and all that shit. I can’t have you coming into my office and hugging me every day, because then I get teary, too, and then we’re just an inch away from ‘I love you, man,’ and everything going to hell."

I threw the newspaper at him. He simply laughed. "Oh, wait until you see some of the stuff I’ve written about you."

I rolled my eyed. "Oh, I’m waiting with bated breath."

"That made you cry, wait until you read what I wrote about the actual incident."

"Shut up or you’re paying the rent alone this month," I commanded, but I was smiling.

He laughed then, like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard, a laugh he hadn’t laughed in a while, and suddenly I realized that I’d been holding my breath in, waiting for his laugh. When I heard it, I exhaled, and I thought to myself, maybe I don’t need to worry anymore.

And even though that was not going to happen, it was a comforting thought.