Disclaimer: S.E. Hinton owns.
It's been three months, Bob. Three months since that grease we jumped killed you, and it all seems unreal—unreal that it happened; surreal that I should be standing over your bones, staring at a lousy slab of stone with your name etched in it.
Three months.
Three damn months, and what the hell'm I supposed to say?
Not what Pastor Joe said; God didn't call you home early. Not what your parents said; this wasn't some unavoidable accident. Not what the newspapers said; you weren't murdered in cold blood. So I guess I'll say the only half-assedly reasonable thing I can think of: I told you so. Boy, if you haven't heard that before… I was the voice of reason in all our antics, and you never failed to tell me I worried too much. Always said I needed to lighten up and get my panties out of their permanent twist, and you were right sometimes. Hell, I was starting to sound like a crotchety old man, but here we are now.
Here we are now, and what can I say when the outcome speaks for itself? I told you that Johnny was a tough little shit. Told you it wasn't fair to jump a guy by their lonesome either. I guess, that's the point of jumping someone in the first place, but the point is did we really have to do that? Did we really have to take it that far? Never mind what he did to you. (Can't remember what. Swindled you out of a couple bucks or something like that. Something nowhere near worth the hell we repaid him.)
Whatever it was means nothing because you're dead, man, you're dead.
And I hope you're happy, too, and I only say that 'cause I know how miserable you were. All your life, you were miserable, and it's such a shame when all you ever wanted was so simple. One word. No. That was all you needed to hear. Not from me, from your old man, and to think I used to envy you. To think of all the hours I wasted moping around each time my father ever punished me, wishing I could be you. Wishing that just once he could look the other way and let me off the hook, but I guess I was lucky for being so unlucky.
One of these days I might swallow my pride and thank my father for his … well, diligence. He could've stood to be a little less, or a lot less, cold, but ever since I hit that realization—that you were crying for your folks to prove they care—I try not to complain, even in the privacy of my own mind.
Three months, Bob. Three months, and each day, I wake up and wonder what we'll do only to remember there is no we. Christ, these days I don't know what to do with myself anymore. It was so much easier to go along with whatever you wanted to do, and what I wouldn't give to go back to that simplicity.
Everything is chaos now. People ask me why we were friends, and sometimes I don't know.
Every reason I once thought is questionable. Every feeling arbitrary. Sometimes I don't have to know why we were friends, because the frustration someone would dare ask is enough to affirm me our friendship must've meant something, but then again, I don't know.
Some days I feel everything at the same time, blaring at me like my old man whenever I've forgotten to do whatever's so goddamned sacred, and others I feel nothing at all. I don't know which is worse, but I do know this: I want my life to mean something because I'm not sure yours did.
I don't mean that I don't miss you. I don't mean that you were worthless because you weren't.
It's just that the way you lived was a dismal kind of existence, and I think you'd agree.