Glass Cutter

There were many circumstances that had factored into my friendship with Oliver Sykes, and the biggest one was the exact string of events that had brought us together. Everything had happened so perfectly, as if the world itself had wanted us to be. The first day of school had seemed entirely too sublime, as if it’d been planned—our schedules, the classrooms’ seating arrangements, the number of students enrolled in a chemistry course, even the way the alphabet worked. He’d managed to be in all the right places at all the right times, just enough to make our paths intertwine and hook together.

It was also Delilah’s flagrant presence, though. The first day of our senior year wouldn’t have been so perfect had my friendship with her been nonexistent. Years and years of living in her shadow—of being her shadow—had put me in a precarious situation when placed with the other circumstances. The fact that she’d had a fling with him just the year before had made me put more trust in him than I might’ve done otherwise. Had I not already known him from her past, I might’ve been more hesitant to accept his friendship.

The parts of the story that perhaps mattered most, though, were our own individual histories. His father had left him when we were all much younger, and it was something that our little town of 3,000 residents had never forgotten. It was also no secret that his mother had been fighting a severe case of bone cancer and, for all points and purposes, was nothing more than a comatose, bedridden skeleton. With my own rotted family tree added to the equation, too, I’d always found myself justifying his illicit behavior. It was my position as the daughter of a deadbeat and absentee that had kept me from too much second-guessing of his intentions and questionable morality.

Maybe our story in itself wasn’t important, but what he’d tried so hard to teach our town certainly was. He’d had a live for today kind of attitude, and it was a concept that the majority had never really adopted. There were certainly those that believed in it, but none had ever bothered voicing it because it was more than obvious that nothing could—or ever would—change the populace.

He hadn’t thought so, though, and it was why I’d rendered him a glass cutter. His attempts to cut our town down to the level it belonged on seemed futile to me—just like a glazier’s effort without proper tools—but the story about his struggles was worth knowing and learning from. His lesson, regardless of his conduct in order to teach it, should’ve been heeded long before his tale’s end.