Be Somewhere

Ricky winced and swore loudly as he pulled himself off of the floor. The few that had been smart enough to conceal themselves in the bathroom poured out the door and gaped at his bruised self. His nerves became slightly more rattled as none of them spoke, only stared.

“You guys have already seen this shit! What’s with the creepy stares?” He said in a volume that was bordering on shouting. They started to shuffle their feet and look between one another before finally daring to glance at his enraged face. Breathing out to calm the anger pounding in his veins, he attempted to speak in a more reasonable tone, but was cut off by Danny.

“Richard hasn’t ever touched you with a witness besides your mother or sister. None of us has ever seen him hit you, and then Lily sees him knock you out the second time she spends the night? It’s getting worse...”

“Luckily there won’t be any more of that.”

As soon as the words passed through his lips, Ricky knew that he had made a mistake by saying them. He closed his eyes in an attempt to shield himself from the harsh questions that he assumed would follow, and then forced them open as no words fell on his awaiting ears. Silence coated every surface in the room and made the air twice as thick as it normally would have been. He tried to force the air down into his lungs, but he found the atmosphere to be too warm and sticky; almost impossible to choke down.

Ricky attributed Brad and Lily’s watering eyes to this fact. He didn’t want to believe that what he had said affected them in such a way. If he did, he would never be able to pull off what he intended to do.

“Finally going to the police,” Danny said quietly. The sentence was meant to be asked as a question, but the way Danny stated it made it seem like any other option was preposterous. Reluctantly, Ricky shook his head.

It would have been so much easier to simply agree with him to make them all feel better, but he knew that in the end, that wouldn’t be fair. When they disappeared, they would be heartbroken if they didn’t know the truth. At least if he informed them of his plan, some of their anger would overshadow the shame and sorrow of the betrayal he intended to commit.

“This wasn’t really how I wanted to approach the subject of my leaving...”

“Leaving to where, Ricky?” Danny managed to choke out through clenched teeth. By this time, even his eyes were watering, where as Lily and Brad’s had let their tears escape and instead allowed them to take up a cluttered residence on their lashes. With a deep breath, Danny forced his eyes to stop watering and set them at a steady gaze. As Ricky continued with his refusal to answer, Danny became more and more frustrated. “God damnit, Ricky! Tell me where you’re going or I won’t let you out of my sight for as long as we live!”

“That sounds kind of like a stalkeresque wedding vow.”

“Ricky!”

He sighed and wiped his hand over his face. For a second, it looked like he thought about answering, but he changed his mind at the last moment and settled for running his fingers through his raven hair. All were avoidance techniques that his friends had watched him perfect and knew too well to allow him to get away with them. They waited patiently for a while, but started to lose their tempers as the words didn’t come to him. When he looked up at them, his eyes begged for forgiveness for the words he couldn’t say.

“Please understand that this isn’t what I wanted, but all the same, it’s what I need,” he whispered as though he wanted the words to get lost in the wind before they reached the people standing on the other side of the world. “It’s going to get worse, and I can’t do it anymore. I’m not strong enough to do it anymore...” At these final words, tears started to pour from his eyes and he couldn’t seem to make them stop no matter how hard he tried.

“So go to the police! Counselling! Your sister’s place! For God’s sake, don’t fucking kill yourself!” Danny screeched with complete disregard for the other people in the home. In his opinion, even if Richard would be violently angry about it, it was better that he knew Ricky was suicidal once again so that he could monitor him. However, he didn’t expect Ricky’s tempermental reply.

“Don’t you dare bring God into this! All those fucking people out there; bible-humping, holier-than-thou morons, don’t see it, but I fucking do! God abandoned this place, and the people in it. We are in hell! I can’t fucking kill myself because everyone here is dead already! Don’t you see it? That’s why all my suicide attempts failed! Because I’m dead already!”

At this, he started laughing hysterically. No one dared to breathe until his psychotic chuckles morphed into deranged sobs. They were used to Ricky’s lunacy, but hysteria was a realm that they were not familiar with when it came to him; it was frightening to say the very least. Danny wasn’t quite sure what to say. He thought that he had dealt with Ricky at the height of his crazy streak, but he had never seen anything that could rival this break down.

It was the first summer that Ricky and Danny would be spending together at boarding school. Danny had just turned eight, and he was exhilarated to be playing and exploring by the creek. God only knew what wonders lay down river, but the boys hoped to find out before the headmistress called them back inside for lights out.

They had been walking for a solid two hours before Danny started to worry. He had been trying to make conversation and fool around the whole way, but Ricky had only nodded and granted him a fleeting smile. Something was horribly wrong. When he turned to look at Ricky, the image he saw was frightening.

Ricky was never the type to show weakness, so the hollow shell of the boy was shocking to see. Under all the tough talk, sarcasm, and formed exterior, was something soft and broken. If he had only been slouching, or quiet, maybe Danny wouldn’t have been so concerned. The eyes were what concerned him the most. Bright jade when happy, teal-like when depressed, and almost yellow when angry; but Danny had never seen this.

Coal black.

No spark of life, no hint of a last will to fight, or desire to live. The way his eyes were roaming made Danny think that he was searching for a shallow grave to put himself in. When the sky started to show hints that the night was approaching, Danny didn’t say a word. He knew that the only way to get Ricky back was to let him go.

Danny cautiously approached the crying figure crouched on the floor in front of him. Unfortunately, he had started to giggle, and had shut his eyes to accommodate this.

“Ricky,” Danny said calmly; as though he were dealing with a wounded animal or terrified child, “I’m going to ask a favour, okay? All I want you to do right now is open your eyes and look at me. Can you manage that?”

With a bit of effort, Ricky raised his head and forced his eyelids to separate so that the clear, unsettling inky blackness of his irises could be seen. Danny sighed and then brushed some of the still falling tears off of Ricky’s flushed cheeks.

It occurred to him for a moment to just let him go without a fight like he had when they were younger, but the thought was quickly shoved out of his mind. Even if by some miracle he did get him back, it wouldn’t be Ricky. The person who returned would still be the exact same twisted form of a ghost that already lived in the walls and breezed through the rooms. He would just be going through the motions until someone let him go again, maybe someone who wouldn’t work as hard to get him back.

“Please understand that as much as you think you want, or need, to die, I can’t let you. You are my best friend, and no amount of begging or pleading will have me give that up. As awkward as this is when it’s coming from me, I love you; and I’m too selfish and immature to let that go.”

“Why do you guys always assume that I’m going to kill myself? I said leaving, not dying,” Ricky replied quietly. No one said a word, they only waited for Ricky to further elaborate. “There are plenty of places to go besides this hell or another one...”

Brad’s jaw dropped and he rushed over to embrace him. Neither one of them was sure whether they were supposed to laugh or cry, so Brad settled for both and Ricky settled for neither. Shifting his arms, He released Brad so that he could turn to look at Danny and get a clear indication of his reaction. Frustration clouded his eyes, but the rest of his face lacked a distinct emotion.

“How can we be sure that you’re not lying? How can I know for a fact that you aren’t feeding us bullshit like you did about not cutting? Or Richard getting better? Or your mom easing up on her drinking? Your father raping you? How do I know for certain that you aren’t telling us all of this to make us feel better, but really planning to jump off a bridge at the first chance you get?”

“I don’t know how to explain it properly... it eveen sounds crazy to me...” he murmured more to himself than to anyone else. The second time he spoke, however, his voice rang out loud and clear. “When Aggie died, I realized a couple of things. Life is too short to just sit there wishing that it didn’t exist. I have sat in this god forsaken house, in this god forsaken town, for the last two years. All I did was think about all of the things that were going wrong instead of what was going right. People get so many chances, so so so many chances to screw up, but then when a generally good idea comes up, they’re too scared to take that chance because they think that they’ll screw it up again. I’m not scared of that yet, and I don’t want to grow up to be.”

Ricky looked up at the others in hope that he would see an enlightened expression plastered on their face, only to have his hopes dashed at the sight of the confusion that he himself had painted across their features. Fear mingled with the confusion in Lily and Danny’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what they were frightened of, but he was positive that neither one of them would volunteer the information even if he did dare to ask.

He had almost given up hope when he saw a flash of comprehension and a glimmer of recognition in the eyes of the very last person that he expected to. Tucker’s confusion had faded to a grimace at the familiar emotion, and then morphed into a proud grin at Ricky’s resolve and courage to leave behind everything that he knew so well.

“There are too many ‘maybes’ for you to pass up, but not a single one of them exists in this shit hole,” Tucker said with a wry smile on his face. Both Ricky and Tucker glanced over to see the scepticism that was clearly written everyone else’s faces. Tucker continued, with his smile growing as Ricky verified each sentence with a nod of his head. “Maybe you’ll grow up. Maybe you’ll fall in love. Maybe you’ll have kids, a career that you love, grandkids.” He placed a fleeting glance on Brad and Danny before Ricky finished for him.

“Maybe I’ll see my best friends again and not have to worry about pretending that I’m happy, or making it the best time that I have ever spent with them because it may very well be the last time I see them. Maybe... maybe I’ll have a fighting chance at being genuinely happy.”

Danny let the tears that had been brimming in the corners of his eyes spill over and he had to sit down because he was crying so hard. Rushing across the room, Brad and Ricky had him wrapped in a hug in a matter of moments. The three sat like that for a while; the one in the middle sobbing, and the other two on either side of him just shaking with the impact of their friend’s convulsions.

“I say we head to New York,” Tucker tossed into the conversation casually. Ricky looked at him in sheer horror, undoubtedly at the use of the word ‘we’. “I know Lily and Morgan well enough to know that they won’t leave with you. Danny and Morgan are similar, so I’m guessing that Danny won’t leave either. Brad will stay with Danny. My dad’s up for parole in two weeks and I’m sure as fuck not going to be here if he gets out. Besides, I know you’re plan. You can consider my company as blackmail.”

“That way I can be sure that you’re not dead, too,” Danny said as his tears finally started to abate. A grin grew on his face as Ricky didn’t bother to put up a fight. The morning sky was overcast, but the sky on the horizon was clear. Early sunlight painted the clouds brilliant pinks, golds, and reds, but left the tiny portion of sky in the distance a bright aquamarine.

Warm, California air blew some leaves off of the tree that could be seen from Ricky’s window. It was truly a beautiful day. The light reflected off of the cliffs out of town and the brightness blinded them all and forced them to close their eyes to the outside world for a few seconds. When they opened their eyes again, the world had changed. Sunspots blotted out unpleasant sights with spots of neon purple and orange.

There were holes in the world that they got to fill in. A distinct aroma of smoke wafted through the air and made it hazy. Old was burning down so that the new could be made from it’s ashes. Ricky breathed in the bittersweet smell and genuinely smiled. Today was truly a beautiful day; one that was destined for both endings and beginnings.