When I turn on my music, it can never get loud enough, loud enough to drown out the entire world like I like it, so I have to sing along and usually Noah sings too and his voice is nice and sweetly low but mine sucks so usually his is distorted by laughter and we just sing until we’re both so tired we can’t even talk and then we laugh and then usually we fall asleep, all with the music on.

That’s just Noah, though, because he’s always laughing and smiling, at least when he’s with me, because he knows I need the smiles, especially his smiles. He’s not a generally happy person any more than I am, but he’s optimistic. I feed off his optimism.

Even his fucking name is perfect, Noah Reed. Flows really nicely when you say it. He says I make his name sound like he’s a goddamn prince or something and it annoys him and then I say well Noah you are a fucking prince and he says you should be the queen and I say that’s pretty fucked up, I’d be your mother, so he says okay, you can be the princess, like adopted or something and we kick so much ass and we like take over and stop the wars in Ireland and resurrect Kurt Cobain and I say so I guess we’re in England and he kind of laughs and goes no way, Afghanistan! And we both laugh because that’s an inside joke, one time one of the Abercrombie Nazis was in the spelling bee against me of all people and I won because the plaid-wearing dumbass spelled Afghanistan wrong so Noah always says we’re going to Afghanistan whenever he means we kick ass.

Noah is the coolest kid in the world even though he’s 18 already while I’m still only 17 and I shouldn’t call him a kid because he calls me Kiddo sometimes when he feels like I need an affectionate father figure and it’s absolutely adorable. I love Noah more than anything because he is the only person who ever really even listen to me and also because he can play Smells Like Teen Spirit on the guitar and headbang like Kurt while I yell the words because he doesn’t know those, so he plays and I sing and we’ve got a little shitass band but it’s so fucking fun sometimes I think my head is going to burst open because I’m so happy when we’re doing that.

The only time I think I’m really happy is when Noah’s around because Noah doesn’t look at me and laugh and call me Fuck Off like all of the kids at school. Noah’s as dorky as I am, and sometimes he lets me wear his flannel shirts and we match and he gives the finger to the popular girls at lunch and they all gasp and I laugh so hard I cry salt tears all over my lunch which is pretty cool because they won’t give us salt or butter or anything because they’re cheap bastards. Noah tells me jokes and listens to me when I talk and he buys me candy bars sometimes, and we share them and plan our future and how we’re going to move to Santa Monica and swim out past the breakers and watch the fucking world die until we’re the last two people left, swimming in the literally Pacific Ocean while the entire world caves in from its hypocrisy and we’re the only good pure things left, with the dolphins and the whales and even the sharks because we think that sharks were nice before humans started dumping fucking oil in their home. Who the hell wouldn’t kill someone who totally destroyed his habitat? Noah and I came up with that theory listening to Nirvana just like most of our theories, although some come from Everclear and some come from Bush and some come from Noah fucking around on his guitar because he’s my favorite musician ever and I told him that once. He looked like he might start crying but that wasn’t a big deal because we cry around each other a lot and I asked him what was wrong and he said I fucking love you so much, Cory, and I almost started to cry too and there we were, tears in our eyes, a guitar hanging from around Noah’s neck and my hands in a halted drumming position, laughing about how we were almost crying and it hit me again, the feeling of happiness so intense I could burst.

I told Noah about it then. Have you ever felt so happy you just think you’re going to explode but that’s okay as long as you can keep being this happy? I asked him. I expected him to say something like are you high, Corinna? or Can I have some of whatever you’re on? but I didn’t really because Noah always understand what I meant. He just smiled and said yeah I know whenever you’re here and I smiled again and felt like crying and it looked like he did too but we laughed instead and then I turned up the music and we shouted the words to Heart-Shaped Box about hey, wait, I’ve got a new complaint but at that minute we didn’t have any complaints at all as we sung ourselves hoarse, laughing all the way, and it’s louder than the music in my ears because our laughing, that’s what really matters, and I don’t get to laugh too much, but Noah always makes me laugh.

He air-guitars for a little bit and he looks absolutely ridiculous and I love him so much I wish sometimes that we were like conjoined twins so we could hang out even when we’re sleeping even though we do a lot of the time anyway. We both laugh really hard at that and thent he song is over and I hit the stop button and he says something like hey, man, where’d the pretty music go? in this fucked-up high stoner accent and I laugh again and this time I don’t need the music to drown up the horribly blaring monotonous corruption Noah and I escape within my bedroom’s four walls because this time my laughter, Noah’s laughter and just Noah and me are loud enough to block out everything bad, and it’s another one of those moments, intensified when I look at Noah and I see he’s thinking the same exact thing and this time we don’t even have to sing along, it’s just enough, and I start to cry and we laugh harder, and Noah says Afghanistan and we beam and we both get a little quiet but it doesn’t matter for now because the laughter’s still ringing around us like a big protective happy-bubble and he says Prince Noah and Princess Corinna and we’re tired from singing and laughing so we kinda drift off but our happy-bubble’s still protecting us, keeping the volume up the keep the bad shit out and in our dreams which might as well be the same we’re in the Pacific Ocean and everything’s on fire but us and it’s not a dream, I think, but the future, and I feel like exploding again.