As we sat around each other in the living room as we tended to do, all four of us together on the couch as we watched the television flickering with dulled eyes, the typical conversation sparked, beginning with the ever-cliche 'I'm bored'.
Soon it was nothing more than a toss around of moderate suggestions followed by the other three responding to the idea with a 'nah' before the next round began. After ten minutes of sitting back against the cushions, not one of us looking at each other aside from the occasional glare between the redhead and the brunette seated on either side of our black-haired counterpart, a foreign voice to our banter arose throughout the room.
"Boys?"
The raven-haired boy sighed, his arms crossed as he looked towards the entrance of the kitchen. "What, Dad?" he asked impatiently.
"Stan, instead of you four just sitting there, why don't you actually go out and do something?" the man urged, gesturing towards the door with the hand not currently preoccupied with his can of beer.
"Stuff is boring though, Dude," he replied. "We've done everything."
"Oh? Have you went to the moon?" he challenged.
We looked at each other before back at the man. "We sent a whale to the moon," the redhead answered. "Does that count?"
The man was silent for a moment before sighing and shaking his head. "Okay then, what if I give you an assignment? And I don't mean folding clothes or something like your mother would make you do."
"What kind of assignment?" I mumbled from under my heavy parka hood.
"Hang on," the man said, walking back towards the kitchen. We all looked at each other and the brunette groaned.
"Great, Stan. Now we have to do chores. Why couldn't you tell your dumb dad we were meditating or something?"
"Shut up, Cartman," Stan defended. "Maybe it won't be so bad."
"Besides, Cartman," the redhead replied thickly, "We all know that you don't have the brain power to meditate. Not to mention you'd have to dig through all those layers of fat to find your innermost self."
"Shut up, Kyle!" Cartman yelled, grabbing the couch pillow from beside him and wailing it at the boy. He pushed himself back against the cushions and it flew into my covered face behind him.
"Hey!" I shouted.
"See what you did, Kahl?" Cartman demanded. "Now Kinny has to suffer for you."
"Kenny's not suffering the migraine that you give me on a daily basis, you retard."
"Oh yeah? Well...fuck you!"
"Guys, chill," Stan pinched the bridge of his nose. "Seriously. Not necessary."
"Yeah, Kahl," Cartman drawled. "Don't hurt Stanny's feelings."
"Cartman...," he warned.
"Alrighty, boys," his dad came back out into the room, a purple box and a flat metal tool in his hand.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Cement," he answered.
"Awesome!" Cartman grinned. "I totally get you, Mr. Marsh. Make cement shoes to drown Kahl in the river, right? Oh man, you're the greatest parent ever!"
"HEY!" Kyle shouted.
"Now now, Guys," he shook his head. "No, there's some cracks in the upper square of the driveway. Will you go fill it up for me?"
They were silent a moment before Stan spoke up, "That's...something Mom told you to do today while she's at work."
"Yes but I trust you boys with everything I have. I just know that you four are the right men for the job."
"...Weak," Cartman said. "We're Stan's dad's bitches."
"No, you're not my bitches," he frowned, walking over and handing Stan the tool and Kyle the box. "However, if you don't do this, then you're going to grow up and become somebody's bitch just because you never learned that sometimes it's best to just suck it up and do something that's asked of you."
"But isn't obeying someone's order something that makes you a bitch?" Kyle questioned. "I mean...it shows a lack of dominance to just sit there and be ordered or just take it without a fight, right?"
Stan's dad blinked before shaking his head. "Stop arguing and just do it. I'll buy you four ice cream or something if you do."
"And then," Cartman said as they all hopped off the couch, "You, Mr. Marsh, will become our bitch."
The man just rolled his eyes and sat down where Stan and Cartman were sitting as the four of them walked out the door.
"Can't believe we're doing chores on a Saturday for your dad, Stan," Cartman muttered.
"Shut up and let's just do this thing," he replied. They stopped together in the driveway, looking down at the long arrays of cracks down the square of the driveway.
"The hell's with the cracks?" I questioned.
"Dad got drunk and decided to smash the driveway with his hammer awhile back," Stan muttered, his shoulders sinking slightly with a silent sigh.
"Lame."
"Yep."
Kyle scanned over the back of the box and 'hmmed' a bit. "This isn't that hard," he stated.
Cartman snorted, "That's what she sa-"
"Shut up!" Kyle interrupted with blazing green eyes. "Anyway," he looked back. "Ken, go get the hose."
"Okay," I nodded, walking up towards the side of the house and turning on the water faucet, starting to unravel the hose and bring it back towards the others.
"Says that we just need to put the powder over the surface and make it a little wet with the hose, then smooth it out. It'll dry in about twenty minutes."
"Well that's not so bad," Stan commented as Kyle tore open the top of the box with a small grunt.
He pulled out the small package of plastic and we all kneeled down beside the square of concrete. He ripped open the bag gently along to top, turning it over and slowly sprinkling it over the driveway. I had the hose in my hand, ready to fire when ordered as we all watched the dark grey specks fluttering onto the ground, a few flyaways caught in the humid air of the day. Kyle emptied the package down on the ground and then looked at me with a grin. "Go for it, Ken."
I nodded and put the hose on a gentle setting, slowly dousing the ground up and down. We watched as the powder began to clump or run down the slope of the square. The remnants stopped in the crack separating the sections, running along the line as though on a steady march down towards the street. I dampened it enough for Kyle to stop me and Stan to reach down over the square and place his tool over a larger mound of the wet powder. He moved the tool in a circular motion and we all watched, all in a bit of awe as it started to become a paste-like substance.
"Wow, this stuff works," Stan commented as he continued running the tool around the square, covering it a little sloppily, just trying to catch all the powder before it attempted to escape down the way. We watched as he smoothly covered the cracks, every one of them becoming smeared over in the thick paste.
"This is sooo exciting," Cartman rolled his eyes.
"Better than listening to you bitch," Kyle scoffed, his eyes never leaving Stan's work.
"Shut up, Jew," he muttered reflexively. Stan and I looked at each other and shook our heads subtly. We were used to it by then. Hell, we were eleven at the time. We were used to it by the time we were five. Stan continued smoothing it out, carefully outlining the edges and cautiously dabbing at the corners.
"Watch you be a carpenter when we're older," Kyle chuckled.
"Fuck no," he shook his head firmly. "I couldn't do this for a living. I'd sooner just drown someone in the cement and then take their money for my paycheck."
"Well that could work, too," I shrugged. "You'd just be caught within an hour."
"True," Stan nodded. "This stuff could leave your fingerprint for ages," he snorted. He continued working as we all fell into silence a bit before he hummed musingly.
"What?" Kyle asked.
"I think we should test that theory," he stated.
"What theory?" I blinked.
"Fingerprint...ages, that crap," he shrugged.
"What about it?" Cartman stared at him with a cocked brow.
"Lets do something to this section," he suggested. "I mean, it wouldn't be as bad as the cracks and it's my dad's fault for making us do it's chores so we wouldn't get in as much trouble."
We all looked at each other before Kyle shrugged, "I don't see why not."
"I do love some good vandalism," Cartman smirked.
"I'm game," I smiled after them.
Stan grinned at us before finishing up the square and backing up a bit, staring at it in thought. "What should we put?"
"Let's put 'Mr. Marsh is a cock munching child-labor assfuck'," Cartman suggested.
"No, Dude, then he'd cover it for sure," Kyle argued. "What about...iono, draw a cat or something."
"Nah," Stan shook his head. "What if we pretend it's a famous actor's signature?"
"Like whose? We can't forge well enough to pass that off," the redhead reminded him.
"True."
"...What about our names?" I suggested.
They looked at me before looking at each other and shrugging. "Good idea, Ken," Kyle nodded at me. I nodded back before we looked at the square again. "Hm. It's too small for all of our names," Kyle pointed out.
"Let's just put C, K, S, and K," Stan stated. "I mean...what other group in this town has that set of initials?"
"All right," we all agreed before each of us taking off our gloves and pressing our index fingers into the cement. We all exchanged glances and grinned before digging our digits through the guck and making out our individual letters. We all quickly finished, backing up and looking at our four letters covering the square.
"Sweet," Cartman hummed.
"Wait. That's lame," Stan frowned.
"What? It was your idea," Kyle looked at him questionably.
"Well yeah but...Kyle and Kenny? Dude, you both have Ks. How will we remember whose is whose?" he blinked.
Kyle and I looked at each other before inspiration struck. I ran over towards Stan's yard, grabbing a fistful of grass in my hand and shaking off the excess dirt before hurrying back over to the guys. I carefully laid out some of the blades down into the indentations of Kyle's K before backing up and looking at their confused glances.
"Green is for Kyle," I smirked, pointing at his hat. Their eyes brightened and they grinned back at me, all of us looking down at our mark over the walkway with a sense of pride and a twinge of our own little vengeance. We all stared down at it in silence for a little while before Kyle sighed.
"This is kind of cool, guys."
"Only you would find rock to be cool, Jew."
"Fatass that's not what I mean," he growled. "I mean...this is like...literally a friendship set in stone. The symbolism is fucking A. It's like...like the Scarlet Letter or something. A symbol that exudes time and becomes something in of itself that the world can recognize from just a glance, even if they don't know exactly what it means, they know that it means something."
"Yeah," Stan said in his usual agreeing tone whenever Kyle went off like that.
"...You fucking nerd," Cartman cackled.
"Fuck off!" Kyle retorted, the gentle and all-knowing tone from before completely dissipated.
I just laughed at the two of them as they stared each other down before I felt a trickle on my hand. "Hm?" I said aloud, looking up to find a gray cloud staring back at me. "Guys?" I say amongst their arguing.
"What, Ken?" Kyle looked at me, anger still lingering in his stare. I pointed up and they all followed my gesture. I watched as Kyle's nose got hit with a drop and he looked down again. "Shit. Rain," he said. "Stupid cement needs to dry!"
"What do we do then?" Cartman asked. "I'm not sitting through this gayness again."
"Hm," Kyle scratched his hat in thought. "Everyone open your jackets."
"Perv," Cartman scoffed. "Watch out everyone, the Jew's in heat."
"Shut up and do it before I shove your hat down your throat, Cartman!" he shouted. Stan and I exchanged glances, a little afraid that we'd meet the same fate. We all undid our jackets before I caught on.
"Ohh," I nodded, moving to one corner of the square.
"Oh, duh," Stan laughed. "Why didn't I think of that?" Cartman followed our lead, stepping onto the other corner diagonal from Kyle. We all kneeled down over our separate areas before spreading our jackets up and bringing our arms up to link over one another's. Our heads bowed forward, nearly touching as the rain began to fall over onto our backs as we stared down at the ground, each of us shivering slightly as the air around us attacked our less-protected torsos.
"Good plan, Kyle," Stan commented.
"This is so gay," Cartman muttered.
"You'd be the one to think of that first, wouldn't you," Kyle taunted.
Cartman grunted, pushing his head forward slightly and colliding with Kyle's. "Fuck you, Jew."
"More of the fagginess? Geez, you homo." I could just see Kyle rolling his eyes. I laughed and Stan let out a long sigh. We fell into a quiet silence then, listening to the rain falling around us, our eyes locked down on the square, on the four letters that were laid out in front of us. It was a really insignificant day, nothing really out of the ordinary. But something sealed us to that spot. We stayed attached even as the rain came to a stop for awhile, and as the cement began to change hue as it dried over the ground.
That was seven years ago.
Hard to believe it almost. Everything about it is so clear. From the four of us separating from our little cluster and not saying anything more about it, to Randy coming out and yelling at us before giving up and going back inside to watch whatever the hell he could find.
It was normal.
We became infatuated with the idea that Kyle gave us: That whole everlasting symbol thing stuck with all of us for a long, long time. We said that as long as we were friends and as long as we remained together, we'd continue what we'd started. It was a stupid little promise that we made as eleven year olds with little to think about the consequences, but damn if we didn't stick to it every year since then.
April 15th was the day. We always remembered it because it was the day that our parents would all be running around in a frenzy over getting their taxes done and wouldn't pay any attention if we ran off and set some things on fire, broke a few laws, or in our case, made another square of cement on Stan's driveway.
Every year, we did something different, each in our respective corners. The second year, it was the corners edged with a basketball for Kyle, a baseball for me, a football for Stan, and a hockey puck for Cartman. Our favorite sports and the ones that we kicked ass in.
The third was the imprints of the bottom of our shoes. All of us had Converse that year, so they all looked the same minus the different amounts of tread. But that's why we had our own corners. We would know whose was whose and no one questioned what went where at any time.
Our fourth year of our tradition was when we were fourteen. Hormones were strong. We all put the initials of our crushes in stupid hearts like kids liked to do. Stan, of course, put WT for Wendy. Still was a flimsy relationship at that point but I always gave them kudos for trying. Kyle put a RC. At that point, he still had a lingering little flame for Rebecca Cotswold. I think it was just a 'first love' kind of thing since the kid hadn't found anyone else since that whole incident. Cartman put AH for Hitler. I'm still not sure if he was serious of if he was just trying to get a rise out of Kyle.
Either way, he did.
Me? I put down nothing. I put down a heart and a question mark. I had no flings or interests at that exact moment. I didn't have someone constantly circling my mind. At least girl-wise. The three I was with, though? They were always on my mind. That was the great thing about our friendship. Always there, even if it was silent as a rock.
For our fifth year, I wasn't there. My first year missed just because of a goddamn ferris wheel deciding to drop me out of the top and kill me. The guys still went on with it though, I was watching. They all were notably sadder that day about me being gone than usual. It was good and yet depressing for me all in one fell swoop.
They went simple that year. They put their handprints in their corners and stared at mine, wondering what to do with it. Kyle suddenly turned, running off towards Stan's neighbors' yard and up towards their garden. He looked through, finding an orange wildflower in the midst of all the plants and running back over towards the others with it. He put it in my corner and smiled, "Orange is for Kenny."
That day went and passed, same as any other. That year went and passed in the same fashion.
By the next year, we were sixteen. We were finding alcohol and drugs like no others. Or, I guess, like any others our age. We had a lot of drunken nights together as we led up to our day. When we got there, we decided it'd be great to put down the labels of our drinks of choice.
Cartman put down the cheap beer that he adored. Stan had a weakness for Hard Lemonade. Kyle? He loved his Strawberry Smirnoff. And me? I liked whiskey, just like my father before me. We drank ourselves to sleep that night, waking up curled up on Stan's floor together. It wasn't gay to us, it was just...us. Nothing was meant by it and nothing ever happened from it. We'd just wake up same as always and get ready to do whatever we were going to do.
But our seventh year? That was a tough one for us. Seventeen meant looking for colleges, looking for ways to move on.
It was hard.
We decided to put the symbols of our colleges down in the spots. Kyle got into Yale. Hell, he got into every Ivy League but he'd opted for Yale just because Harvard seemed to pretentious for his tastes. They all seemed like big league ass suckers to me but what did I know? Stan was going to the University of Denver on a football scholarship. Playing for the Broncos was like a dream to him. We all said we'd be rooting for him. Cartman opted for the community college about an hour from home. He said that he didn't know what to do with his life, so he was weighing his options.
Me, I put R66 for the famous Route. I didn't want to go back to school just yet. I needed time to wade in the waters for a little while, so I decided that I was going to take my ideas on the road, see what I could see. We didn't want to leave but at the same time, we thought we were more than ready for the change.
We were wrong.
Stan's family moved to Denver right after our senior year. Day after graduation, he was gone. Graduation night was super hard for all of us, Kyle was nearly in tears the whole night with me. Cartman was quiet and Stan was angry that his family wouldn't give him the summer with us.
After he left, it was a domino effect. Kyle hurt, then I hurt, then Cartman hurt. We all hung out with each other still, but it just wasn't the same. We were uneven. A corner wasn't filled.
Eventually, both of them left for school, both of them promising to keep in touch with me. They do. They all do. But still, it's just not the same.
I sit across from Stan's house on his neighbor's lawn, staring at our driveway. I can see the markings even from where I sit and my heart feels heavy all of a sudden.
That driveway was sacred to us. It was never talked about outside of our day that we would come add another piece. Even Stan's parents got used to it after our third year, seeing that it was more than just messing up their driveway for fun. It meant the fucking world to us in a sense.
I suddenly feel cold, wrapping my arms around my knees and watching across the street as the new owners of Stan's house come out, watching a cement truck that's parked outside of their house and I take a wavering breath. I remember how after that first year and we all huddled together, we would every year after that, whether it be rain or shine. It was just...tradition. We would watch it drying as we linked arms over one another's shoulders, quiet save for the typical comment 'this is so gay'. But none of us really thought of it that way anymore. None of us really wanted to break from the circle any more than the others. It was just how it worked.
I can hear the truck beeping and I bite my lip as I look at the liners around the edges of our driveway. I hate these people that live there now. That's ours. Not theirs. They have no right to destroy six years of our history.
I watch cement seeping out through the truck onto our squares and a part of me stings so much it makes me nearly burst into tears. But I guess that's just the way that it goes.
You fill out some memories then you make clean slates for some more. A part of you is still attached to what's left behind under the fresh layer though. You can't just ignore that it's there, especially if it impacted you as much as that stupid cement affected us.
I stand up and sigh, taking out my phone and taking a picture of the damning scene. I quickly send it to Stan, Kyle, and Cartman before deleting it off my phone and shoving it down into my pocket. I glare at the homeowners, flip them off, and walk away tiredly towards my house.
I still haven't started on my own adventures yet. I'm still rooted down to this town. I guess a part of me just can't stop living in the past, but seeing the walkway destroyed so easily is convincing me of just how easy it is to start anew.
I feel my phone buzz and take it out of my pocket again, seeing I already have texts from the other three.
Stan's is a simple '...really? Fuckers.'
Cartman sends a 'Did you even TRY to stop them? Dude, go fuck them up!"
Kyle's is a bit more uplifting in a sense with a 'Dude, weak. But hey...now it all matches the eighth one, right?'
I guess that makes sense. The eighth one was going to be left blank for a long time before we could all be back here together in April. I continue walking towards my house, thinking that over. We gained and lost a lot of things when we were growing up. We lost some other friends but we gained a fucking unbreakable group between the four of us. We were always together, it would never fail. It gave us a lot of good and a lot of bad along the way. But we would always collect each other and forget all the bad because of those stupid squares. Those irreplaceable and unbreakable symbols of the time we spent together as we grew up and moved along with our lives.
A part of me always thought that we'd come back together and see them when we were fifty, and finally fill in that last square with something symbolic about our return.
But I suppose not everything is a fairy tale ending. Time passes and things happen. I just wish that it didn't have to happen so soon and abruptly.
My phone buzzes again and I look to see Kyle sent another text to the three of us. "Don't worry, Dudes. There's plenty of driveways in the sea. We'll just start over again."
I pause before smiling a bit. He's right. After all, if I'm still rooted here, who's to say I'm not meant to be just for when they come home? Maybe my adventures just lie in waiting until we actually move on. When we finally step out of our shells of who we are and burst into the new waves of life.
I continue to my house, passing over the railroad tracks and coming up to the place, standing on the cracked driveway and feeling my grin getting wider.
Looks to me like this thing needs patched up. And I know the perfect four men for the job.