About a Boy

The next couple of days passed completely uneventfully. Kellin pointedly ignored Vic to the point where the boy had given up even trying to talk to him, settling on his new friends, Jaime and Tony, and his parents had readily agreed to let him spend the night at Jesse’s house, something that he frequently did anyway.
So on Friday night, his father dropped him outside Jesse’s house, promising to pick him up the next afternoon, and he walked up to the familiar white door, duffel bag clutched in his hand, and knocked.
“Kellin!” Jesse yelled and pulled the small boy into his house. He was led to his living room, where the other three boys were already sitting, and two unopened boxes of pizza sat on the dining table.
“We had to wait for you,” complained Jack, reaching for the first box.
“Sorry,” Kellin said sarcastically, falling into one of the seats and taking the slice that Gabe was reaching for.
“Fatty.” Gabe muttered, taking another slice and devouring it.
“I don’t get it.” Jesse said. “You eat like an obese person, you stay skinny.”
“Yeah,” joined in Justin. He reached for the last slice in the first box (how they had finished a box in two minutes Kellin did not know) but Kellin got to it first, grinning as his friend pouted in annoyance. “Seriously? And that slice is massive. You are so fat!”
“There’s another box, genius,” Jesse pushed the box across the table to Justin. “And you’re just as bad as Kellin.” He pointed out.
“You know who Kellin had a crush on?” Gabe said suddenly. The others looked up, interested, while Kellin blushed and glared daggers at his ‘friend’. “Vic. The new kid.”
“You do, don’t you?”Justin turned to him.
“No.” Kellin protested. “No, I don’t.”
“You always, like, stare at him and stuff.” Jack pointed out, wiping tomato sauce from his chin.
“No. No I don’t.” Kellin argued. They couldn’t find out his secret. His friends were supportive, they were completely fine when he came out to them, but they relished in making fun of each other, and this was quickly becoming a touchy subject for him.
“I think you do,” Gabe shrugged.
“Well you’re wrong. Guys, can we just drop it?”
“Whatever.” Justin shrugged. “Can we watch a movie?”
“Which movie?” Jesse asked.
“I dunno. I wanna watch something that’s meant to be good, but isn’t.”
“’Silent Hill’?” Jesse suggested.
“That film was shit.” Gabe joined in. Kellin sat in a stony silence, ignoring his friends in preference of silently ranting.
Jesse put the film in and the five boys sat in his living room in near silence for two hours, occasionally shouting obscenities at the horrendous film.
____
Kellin climbed into his father’s car at around three PM on Saturday afternoon, almost glad to escape from his friends. As soon as they had woken up they had resumed their conversation about Kellin’s apparently obvious crush on Vic, pissing him off to the point where he had called Jesse a drug addict. This resulted in the two boys angrily avoiding each other for four hours, until Justin had insisted that they were being idiots and forced them to hug.
“Hey, Kellin,” his father had greeted when he sat in the passenger seat. Until about two years ago, his father hadn’t really given Kellin or his sister a lot of attention, but when Kellin’s mother had sat him down and explained that their children wouldn’t be there forever, he had finally gotten the reality check he needed and actually interacted with the kids.
“Hi, dad.” Kellin responded. His father looked at him with a small frown, running a hand through the thinning black hair before starting the car.
“Something wrong?”
“No.” Kellin said shortly, turning to look out of the window.
“Are you sure?” Mr. Bostwick persisted.
“Yeah, dad, I’m fine.” It took all of Kellin’s self control not to snap at his father. He wasn’t a necessarily polite boy, but he knew to give his parents the respect they deserved. Most of the time.
They spent the rest of the car journey in silence, Kellin leaping out of the vehicle before his father had even parked, and sprinting up to his room before his mother could call him to talk about whatever it was that he had done at his friend’s house.
“Where’s the fire, Kells?” Heather, his thirteen year old sister asked, poking her head around her own door to look at her brother.
“Go away.” Kellin said, tugging on her dark curls and walking past her and into his own bedroom. He closed the door behind him and put his bag in a corner. He could hear his sister practicing the saxophone in her room, so he pulled out his headphones and began to play ‘Beech Like the Tree’ by Lower Than Atlantis. He didn’t quite know why, the song had nothing to do with what he was feeling, but it made him feel a little bit better. When it finished, he looked at his school bag and contemplated actually starting his homework for a second before shrugging and deciding he would copy Oli in the morning.
“Kellin.” The door swung open and his mother peered down at him. He pulled out his headphones and offered her a questioning look. “I’ve been calling you for the past five minutes,” she informed him, looking at his headphones pointedly. “Come downstairs. There’s something your father wants to tell you and Heather.”
Kellin silently followed his mother out of his bedroom, knowing that whatever his father had to say, it wouldn’t be good.
“Alright, kids,” the man started when Kellin sat next to his sister on the sofa across from their father. “So, I’m going away to Dubai for business in a couple of weeks...” He paused, watching to see their reaction. When they offered him nothing, he continued with a small sigh. “And I’ll be there for about six months-“
“You’ll miss Christmas!” Heather declared. Kellin thought for a moment and realised that his sister was right. Christmas was just over a month away, and their father wouldn’t be with them.
“Couldn’t you, like, move the trip?” Kellin asked.
“Look, I’m very sorry but that’s just not possible...”
“What are you even doing?” Kellin demanded. He was starting to get angry, because his father was always doing this, even if he was trying to salvage some form of relationship with his children ten years too late. Kellin remembered Heather crying before her tenth birthday party because he wasn’t there, and having to call him in Germany or something to tell him that he’d gotten into one of the most sought after grammar schools in the entire state, and he was getting sick of it.
“I- it’s just work for the company...”
“Okay.” Kellin said stiffly. He glanced over at his sister, whose bottom lip was trembling as he mother rubbed soothing circles on her back and looking angrily at her husband. “Can I go now?”
“I wanted to-“ Mr. Bostwick began.
“Of course you can, Kellin,” his mother interrupted, smiling slightly at her son as he climbed the stairs to his large bedroom. Kellin kicked the wicker bin sitting next to his desk in anger and glared at the wall in front of him, next to a massive Foo Fighters poster. He growled in frustration and flung himself face first onto his bed, mumbling into his pillow in an attempt to let off some steam. To no avail. And just being angry made him think about his friends, which made him think of school and, of course, Vic. Which seemed to make him even angrier, until he was climbing out of his bedroom window and onto the roof, nearly breaking his arm in the process. He sat in the early November wind, shivering as goose bumps rose on his bare arms for a good couple of hours, watching the passing traffic and trying to forget about his life for a bit. Today just hadn’t really been his day.