I Would

By Skittles. Disclaimer? I Heart Disney.

Chapter 3: "Like we're actually friends?"

Let me tell you, when I woke up at Mush's that afternoon, I had a moment of sheer panic. Where was my phone? What time was it? Where the hell was I? What happened? I remembered the day before—getting home with my mom and skipping dinner, falling asleep, and waking up...here? No—ohh. I remembered. Mush. The party.

Beer pong.

Pukey Peter.

And Mush talking to me in the bathroom.

And Jack coming to take us to bed...

I looked over my shoulder. Mush was laying there, in his shorts, only his one leg under the covers. He was laying on his back, moaning slightly with each exhaled breath.

I leapt out of the bed. The jackhammers started in on my temples but I just lunged for my hoodie. My phone was in the pocket. My keys were still hooked onto my belt loop. I took one last look at my sleeping host and left out the back slider and went around to my car.

And guess who was sitting on my bumper, smoking a cigarette, with his big ass belt buckle and red bandana?

The fuckin' Cowboy.

"Skittery," he said.

"Cowboy."

"Headin' out?"

"Yep."

"So listen," he flicked the cherry of his cigarette into the driveway. "You have fun at the party?"

I nodded, made an affirmative sound. Last night, I'd fist bumped this guy after our first beer pong win. Now I felt like he was interrogating me.

"Yeah, you did? Good. Good. Hey, so Mush ever tell you what he was on about?" Jack looked at me from under his eyebrows, his eyes pointed up, his head down.

"Naw, he passed out. So did I." There was a pause

"Good. Listen Skit, I like you. You understand. The kid was drunk."

Yeah, I thought, and I'm hungover as hell, get to the point.

"All I'm sayin is, he might have said things he might not have meant."

"He didn't say anything to me that wasn't about beer pong," I said, rubbing my eyes and shivering. The sun was out and it was icy and freezing. It was like standing in a freezer made of florescent light. "I gotta go."

I got into my car and cranked the heat. The old heater whined a bit. The Cowboy tapped a knuckle on my window. I cracked it.

"Good seein ya, Skittery."

"Yeah. You too."

He backed up, and as I backed out, he gave me a couple of taps on the hood to send me on my way.

When I got to my house, I parked in the gravel between the sidewalk and the street.

My phone buzzed in the cup holder. I looked at the screen. Incoming call: Home. "Aww, fuck that," I said, and hit ignore. 5 missed calls. 2 voicemails. And pling. Another voicemail. Three seconds long? I hit play.

"James Eugene O'Leary, you get your ass in here. NOW." I groaned. The hula girl on my dashboard grinned at me. "Aww. Come on, Candy, don't look at me that way. Come on," I said, sliding her into my hoodie pocket on a whim. "Time to face the music."

The lecture was long and futile. I didn't lie about where I'd been. I didn't see the point. They already knew I was a fuck up. It was all, I don't know what's gotten into you lately, and you used to be such a good kid, and, I know you could do so well if you would just apply yourself, and so on. I walked out when she started to get weepy. I couldn't handle my mom getting weepy, and I'll tell you why. Cause it turned me into the villain—I couldn't comfort her, and anything I did would just disappoint her anyway. I couldn't say I'd be better next time because she didn't believe me (and lately, neither did I.) And I knew that if I let her go on, we'd get to, I know I've been a bad mother, and I'm sorry! And that was just fucked up for everybody. If I got out while she was still mad, it was like she was a Mom and not some sniveling personI had to take care of.

Maybe she figured the same thing, or just ran out of steam, because she didn't follow me up to my room. I was still pretty fuckin' exhausted but even more than that, I smelled like a frat house, so I scorched myself in a hot shower for a few minutes, didn't even bother dressing, and climbed into my bed with boxers and wet hair.

I hadn't been asleep for long before there was a knock at my door. "Skit?" I froze. No one in my household called me Skittery. In fact, it was pretty much only the population at Mush's party that did, and a few stragglers like Pie who'd been brainwashed.

The door cracked open. It was Mush, looking like he'd had a restful day at the spa. "Can I come in?"

"Yeah, sure," I said, sitting up and shaking my head. I still felt a bit like someone had taken a power washer to my insides: empty and kind of raw. Mush walked in and sat on the edge of my bed, like he was going to read me a bedtime story.

"So, Jack talked to you, right? When you left this...um, afternoon?"

"Yeah, he did."

Mush fiddled with the zipper on the end of his jacket. I scanned my room for a t shirt within reach. If I could be relatively nonchalant about it, I could possibly clothe myself without Mush being suspicious...of what? I didn't know. But dammit, I wanted a t shirt.

"What did he say to you?"

"Well, he wanted me to disregard anything you said to me while you were drunk. But I don't think you said anything. Hey, do my parents know you're here?" I'd just glanced at the clock. It was 8:13 PM.

"Yeah, I told them you forgot something at my house."

"They give you a hard time?"

"Nah. Your mom's pretty nice. Just told me you're upstairs. Told me you might be asleep." I snorted. Of course my mom was nice to Mush. Mush's dad was a higher-up at the pharmacy my mom worked for. And my mom was nice to anyone who wasn't me or my older brother Jason. He'd failed her, I'd failed her...we didn't deserve her tenderness. Only Joe hadn't fucked up yet. Well. He was only 10. He'd have time.

"Anyway," Mush continued, "I did come to bring you something." He took a small, blue box with a cheap paper bow taped to the top of it out of his jacket pocket and set it on the bed next to me. "Happy birthday." I stared at it.

"Um," I said. "Dude, you didn't like—get me anything did you? Cause...you kind of did enough last night...and I mean, it's not like..."

"Like we're actually friends?" Mush completed for me.

"Well, I wasn't—," I tried to defend myself. I didn't want him to think I didn't want him as a friend...Hell, a preppy ass kid with a cowboy shaped shadow was better than Pie, who had completely deserted me for some mumbo-jumbo about God attached to a pretty girl and her tits. But yeah, I mean, we'd hung out once, and only got reacquainted in the last 24 hours. It was kinda weird.

"Yes, you were thinking it. I know we're not friends now, not really cause you can get drunk and puke with people who are not your friends. But you know. We used to be. I mean. When we were little you know, and I just..." his phone buzzed my whole bed from his back pocket, and he slid out some fancy, shiny number with a touch screen. "Shit," he mumbled, and inexplicably looked over his shoulder through the open door of my room. "Listen Skit, I gotta go, just, open it...and...don't worry about it. It's not like...I mean it's not a wedding ring. I'll see you at school. Happy birthday." And he dashed out of there like he was late for a very important date.

I eyed the blue box. We had been friends. Years ago. We'd both lived in different places then, neither of us went to school in the Oak Glen school system. We'd both lived on the same street in VanBuren and went to the city schools there. It was...a different kind of place. Well, it was urban. So, you know, it had inner city problems. We had been friends. But what did it mean to be friends when you were ten? We played with Legos and K'nex. We raced our bikes around the block. We went to Chuck E Cheese and gorged ourselves on pizza and video games. But I don't remember ever saying anything to him that wasn't about what we were doing. Ten year old boys don't know each other, not really. They barely know themselves.

Ah, what the hell, I thought. It was probably something stupid inside the box anyway. I opened it with as little ceremony as possible. Inside, on a piece of tissue paper, was a key. I knew that key. Fuck. I knew that key, and I knew where it had come from. But why...why did Mush have Spot Conlon's key? And why in the name of sweet holy Jesus had he given it to me?