The end of my joint burnt bright red where it met the paper and then devoured it into ash. I watched this transformation as I lay on my bed blowing smoke towards the ceiling. This time last year I had been in a state of utter shock, inconsolable, but nowadays I was simply numb. Numb to everything. As my thoughts became less linear and more abstract, I shifted my focus from the ceiling to the world outside my window. The view hadn't changed. In fact you could have taken a photograph of the little street outside this time last year and it would have been pretty much indistinguishable. It hadn't changed at all, but it wasn't the same. Nothing had ever been the same since Skeeter killed himself.

Killed himself, that was how I phrased it these days. When it first happened, I used to say " passed away" or " isn't around anymore".Tthen about a month later I'd say " died" and then after that I got mad. I'd say stuff like " took the easy way out" or " threw his life away". Then when I got tired of being mad I tried to be casual about it to provoke people by saying things like that he had " kicked the bucket " or that he had " croaked " . For the most part that worked. It did provoke people around here and it did upset them. Beebe Bluff for example still refused to acknowledge my existence after hearing me speak this way at a party. Needless to say, I didn't often get invited to parties by my old friends these days, but nor did I have any interest in being around them either.

Hanging out with them really began to get on my nerves to the point where, as mentioned before, I would engage in behavior designed to provoke them. In the weeks immediately following Skeeter killing himself they would say things like "we're all in this together!", Blah blah blah, most of the girls cried publicly and some of the guys too. I never did. I was so shocked that I never talked about it with anyone. I barely even spoke about it with my parents. Everyone kept asking me and kept wanting to know if I was "OK". Whatever that meant. When I say everyone was asking me, I mean EVERYONE, People I barely even knew would try to hug me and shit and ask how I was doing, I became " that kid who was friends with that kid who killed himself". I just told them that I was fine and that I didn't want to talk about it.

I really didn't know which I preferred, or to be more accurate, which was worse. How things were just after he had killed himself or what came after that. When it first happened we would all hangout every night in someone's house and people would talk about it. Without fail whoever's parents were present would edge their way into the conversation and it would all end in the usual " if you're depressed, it's OK to talk to somebody , you know we love you kids!" Speech. I came along to these gatherings because I figured that it was better than being alone with my thoughts and at first, I accepted that this was the particular way in which my friends had chosen to deal with their grief. It was only after a while that I began to notice things about the situation that pissed me off.

I observed that when any of my former associates would talk about skeeter they would briefly mention how much they missed him before swiftly moving on to how the situation affected them. Everything just seemed to be about them when you got to the bottom of it, How depressed they were, how bad they felt, how guilty they felt about not doing anything even though skeeter showed no signs of wanting to kill himself. Even worse was any mention of Skeeter's family, they would go on and on about how bad they felt for them, His mother , his father and how hard it must be for them... It all had this undercurrent of Skeeter being an asshole for doing what he did. That he had just done it to piss off his parents

It made me sick that they would even attempt to make it all about themselves. What came after that however was just as bad. About a month after everything had gone down they all just simply stopped talking about it. It wasn't even just like it had never happened, it was like skeeter had never even existed. They all just moved on to talking about the same old trivial shit they always did, bitching about the same stupid meaningless " problems" that they had. This was when I began to speak about it. Not out of any particular desire to do so but to make them uncomfortable and watch them worm their way out of the topic of conversation. Doing that and watching them squirm was the most fun I'd had with them after Skeeter's death.

There were a few of them that I felt that I could carry a conversation with if we happened to cross paths, but by and large them and I didn't see a whole lot of each other. I had different interests nowadays, different priorities. I also didn't feel like I truly respected any of them so what was the point in hanging out with them in Honker burger waiting for something to happen? I could feel my eyes becoming heavier in my sockets. I had been thinking all of these thoughts intently while staring out the window. What felt like an hour of deep reflection was in reality only Five minutes. This was interrupted by my phone going off and half scaring the shit out of me. As I picked up the phone I could hear a car rolling on the gravel outside pulling up outside my house. It was Roger.