Break Out! Break Out!

____
He sat alone in the box of sand, watching the other children chase and hide and laugh. A toy truck was settled beside him in hopes of some company to play with, but Jack Barakat was completely alone. And he liked it that way.

The wind was strong that day, tousling his hair and sending sand into his eyes, but he was content where he was. He took in his surroundings and imagined the clouds in shapes. A dragonfly was perched on his knee, serene and calm as Jack himself.

The tall boy watched a group of boys his age playing a game of tag, subconsciously spinning the wheel of the truck as he stared. He caught the eye of a boy slightly smaller than him with messy blonde hair and big brown eyes. The child kept his gaze on Jack’s as he ran before he tripped over a stick and fell to the floor.

Jack didn’t even flinch, just continued to observe as the scene erupted in slow motion before him. The clumsy boy had nearly face-planted, but his hands had braced him. Sitting up slowly, he looked at Jack and glared, a silent blame for the fall, as the other boys stopped to stand over him and laugh.

If Jack knew one thing it was that eight year old boys could be cruel. He saw the blonde’s eyes fill with tears and his dirty hands wipe them away, but smears of blood from cuts on his fingers marked his cheeks. The boys only laughed harder.

He remained on the gravel, picking small pebbles that were implanted in his palms from bracing himself. His knees were just as bad. Jack watched salty tears and blood trickle down his cheeks; the apathetic children continued to make jokes and he learned the other boy was called Alex.

Jack counted the seconds it took for the old teacher on playground duty to “run” over to this boy, Alex. Seventy-nine seconds. Alex’s bottom lip trembled the whole time, holding back tears. He faked a laugh to his friends as the elderly woman helped him up.

She then scolded the smirking group for not helping their friend, but they blew her off. She asked for one of them to volunteer to take the hurt boy to the nurse, but they all ran off. She gazed around for another student and her eyes landed on Jack.

Jack tried to hide, but the woman walked over to him, Alex following. She asked him to walk him to the nurse and Jack shook his head. He didn’t need anyone and neither did this ‘Alex’ boy. Jack took care of himself at home just fine.

Alex thought the same, protesting because he didn’t want to be seen with such a loser. But the teacher insisted with a threat to contact both their parents. They turned toward the school begrudgingly.

Jack watched the blonde boy’s expression once they were out of sight of his friends. His eyes watered again and his hands shook. Head hung in embarrassment, he trudged beside Jack through the doors.

“You can cry, you know.” Blunt and unguarded, just like Jack. He hadn’t meant to say anything but Alex was cringing in pain at every step and he just kept bleeding. The boy picked up his head to look at Jack, but looked back at his feet, giving a frustrated stomp.

“I don’t need to cry! I’m not a sissy,” he protested. Jack shook his head in disbelief at his stubbornness. Alex’s words betrayed his actions as a few tears fell.

“My mom said if I hold everything in, I’ll explode. I don’t think you want that.”

That scared the little boy into sobbing.

Jack stayed beside him as he leant against the wall and covered his face with chubby hands. He pried one hand away to entwine their fingers together. Alex looked up in surprise but Jack gave him a comforting smile and he accepted the gesture.

“I’m Jack,” he introduced after Alex calmed down.

“I’m Alex,” the boy sniffled and they headed down the stairs to finally find the nurse. It was peaceful to walk hand-in-hand with someone through halls of their large school. It felt like they were on an adventure, due to the paper trees decorating the halls.

“I know.”

And then Alex laughed for real, and the sound was beautiful to Jack. It was nothing like when the fake one he gave when his friends laughed at him. If hearts could smile, Jack’s did right then. “You’re weird, Jack. I like that.”

A few minutes later, he sat alone in the chair, waiting outside the nurse’s office. Another chair was settled beside him in hopes of some company, but Jack Barakat was completely alone. And he liked it that way.

But when Alex emerged from the room smiling and hugged him, Jack decided he liked it this way better.
____

They stood outside the house, wrapped up in an embrace. Cool September wind blew around them, leaves fell, incasing them in what used to be fantasy. Tears fell, apologies were lost to the breeze, and the boys stayed hugging.

Around them was darkness and beneath it was the park they had first met in. Tomorrow Jack was moving to New York. Five hours away from Baltimore. Five hours away from Alex. The boys, now twelve, didn’t even bother holding back emotions. Jack and Alex were each other’s only friend and now they were going to be miles away from each other. Jack promised he’d come back to visit, sneak on a bus and venture to his best friend, but they both knew he couldn’t do that. This was it, this was the end of Jack and Alex.

They’d always been a pair; one name sounded foreign without the other. They were always together, always protecting each other from the perils of middle school and bullies and homework and teachers and anxiety.

Jack didn’t have a phone either, so he couldn’t contact Alex in his new house. His parents seemed to completely disregard the fact that this move would kill him inside. The adults thought what they had was just a dispensable childhood friendship, that their son could find other friends.

Yet the boys knew they’d only ever have each other. No one else could understand Alex like Jack could and no one could make Jack feel safe like Alex could. And in a few minutes, they were about to lose that.

“Don’t forget about me,” Alex sniffled and took in the comforting scent of cheap cologne and apple shampoo that his best friend smelled of. Jack kept his grasp strong on Alex’s shirt even when he heard his parents shout his name.

“I couldn’t if I tried,” he whispered into his shoulder and slowly began to let go. Their watery eyes met as Jack whispered softly to him. “I’ll be back, I promise. We’ll get away from bad people and live together but until then remember we’re both wishing on the same stars for the same thing.”
____

Time passed slowly that year.

It was as if something had just overturned everything that meant anything to the pair and destroyed it. But the only thing that remained consistent was that wish. Every night, Jack would sit on his roof and wish on the stars for his best friend back and he knew Alex was doing the same.

Jack was completely alone. Wherever he went he felt an emptiness in the spot Alex used to be. He missed his old house, their park, the fun and games, but most of all he missed feeling important.

With Alex, he’d known the boy depended on him for everything. He knew that someone cared for him. And as much as his parents tried to cheer him up, nothing could replace the blonde boy.

The same went for Alex back in Baltimore. He sat alone at lunch, in the classroom, on the bus and on the playground. For a while he spent most of his time at their park and his parents started to worry about him.

The Gaskarth and Barakat families began to realize that their sons’ friendship had been more than a petty companionship. To ease their guilty consciences, they blamed their sadness on the move, but deep down they knew the boys needed each other.

The Barakat decided to ‘fix’ their son by sending him to therapy. Once a week, Jack sat through an hour of a psychiatrist trying to pry answers from him, but he just sat there silent. They took him out a year later, deciding they shouldn’t waste their money on something impossible. Jack’s happiness wasn’t impossible to attain, but it was difficult, considering the source lived miles away.

The Gaskarth found other ways of coping for their son; they believed that exposure to happy people made a child happy. They constantly signed him up for various activities to keep him around other children. And a year later, at the same time Jack was given up on, Alex made the football team.

And for him that was when everything turned around. He learned to suppress the sadness and loneliness inside him to make new friends. He wasn’t strong, but he was fast. He soon became star of the team and king of the school. Slowly, memories of Jack faded away and Alex was okay without him.

But as always, things went wrong for Jack.

Another two years of emptiness later, Jack was fifteen and lying in a hospital bed. In the room next to him was his brother.

The Barakat family had been aware that Huntington’s disease had ran in Joyce’s side of the family, but they thought since she hadn’t shown symptoms that they were all healthy. What she didn’t know was that the disease only affected males.

The doctor concluded that a change in their environment – they couldn’t identify exactly what it was yet – had triggered the mutant DNA to take effect in the boys’ bodies. Huntington’s alters the brain, often causing the patient to develop obsessive-compulsive disorders, loss of control of the limbs, and irritability, anxiety and anger.

The Barakat boys were fifteen and twenty; they didn’t deserve such a disease at this young an age. Their parents were devastated and so were Joe and Jack. They wouldn’t get to live their lives as normally until they either grew out of the disorder or died from it.

Huntington’s disease wasn’t something that could be surgically removed or eradicated with treatment. Years of extensive research across the globe had been devoted to the cause, but to very little avail. Since it was a genetic disorder, a mutation in DNA, it wasn’t easily fixed, but nothing had pleased the family more than to hear the Genetic Testing center was located right in Baltimore.

Jack had never heard better words.

Not even the news that they had developed a form of physical therapy to reverse the effect of his disease made him happier than the chance to see his best friend again.

A month later the Barakat’s were on a plane to their hometown, but Jack was on a plane to home – Alex.
____

Jack spent the first three weeks of his return in the hospital; the doctors decided to let him and Joe get used to the new hospital and new surroundings before they dumped him in a new place. He endured the days restlessly and anxiously.

The anticipation didn’t help assist the therapy, but it did fuel the side effects. Jack often became angry and frustrated when he was told he couldn’t leave the hospital or when he had to attend physical therapy. Although he never really felt the effect of the obsessive-compulsive symptom, Joe did.

Jack found it hard to stick around and witness his brother go insane.

He put in his effort in his treatment and tried to stay patient in hopes of an early discharge.

And finally, something worked out in his favor and he was released from the hospital in the beginning of December. His parents signed him up for the local public high school and on the first day, the teenager set out for school with high hopes.
___

The possibility had never crossed Jack’s mind that maybe Alex could have forgotten about him. So anyone could imagine what Jack felt like when he walked into that building.

He was standing by his locker when he first saw him after three years. There was no doubt that he looked a lot different.

Not only was he catching up to Jack in height, he was had matured into an attractive teen compared to what he was. His braces were off, hair styled into a soft, straight fringe and clothes stylish. He even had a little muscle on him.

His smile was bright as he laughed with a few other boys in football jerseys and jeans. But Jack could tell something was a little off immediately. His laugh seemed fake, just like the day they met.

When his group passed Jack, he smiled at his lost best friend and called out a small greeting. “Hey, Alex!” The taller boy’s stomach was nervous butterflies and excitement and his heart raced with happiness.

Until he felt every organ in his body shut down.

Alex just stared at him before shrugging at his friends, who laughed. Jack heard them muttering things like ‘who the hell does he think he is?’ and corresponding insults. The tallest one in the group slammed Jack’s locker shut to scare him, without realizing his fingers were there.

Jack just bit his lip to hold back a scream of pain, pried his fingers from between the door, and ran to the bathroom. It was then that he let himself cry.

Consequentially, he was late for his next class.

And when he walked in with puffy eyes and red cheeks, he cursed to himself, noticing Alex sitting next to one of the kids in the hallway. He didn’t miss the smirks of satisfaction the boys shared.

Jack’s head felt dizzy, and his thoughts were clouded but he took the walk of shame to a desk all the way in the back, next to an empty chair. His teacher took the opportunity to lecture the class on tardiness while Jack was able to escape with his thoughts once again.

He could not believe Alex had forgotten about him.
___

Weeks passed without any communication between the two. Jack spent each and every school day completely alone. The highlights of his days were getting home to visit his brother in the hospital.

But with each day that passed, Joe Barakat got sicker and Jack Barakat got sadder. If he were to lose his brother, he’d be losing everything. He had tricked himself to believe that everything would get better back in Maryland just because he did.

But the universe didn’t act according to the wishes and hopes of a lonely teenage boy. It was cruel and unforgiving and selfish and rude.
___

It’d been a month.

It’d been a month since he’d seen him and Alex couldn’t take his mind off him.

Alex knew it was Jack from the first glance. It was impossible to forget about someone whose image burned in the back of your brain for years without a word of communication. But Alex obviously had to play it cool; he was with his friends.

He had always told himself he had forgotten about Jack, but Alex never fully did. So when he encountered him in the hallway, he just panicked. He’d never meant for Jack to get hurt. But in the end, it was unavoidable. He was already caught up in the mess that was Alex’s life and there was no escaping unscathed.

So Alex pushed and pushed with all his might to get Jack out of his head and the plan worked for a while.

It was the middle of October when Alex’s ‘friend’, Josh, broke his ankle. He’d be out for the rest of football season, so Alex decided to pay him a visit to try to make him feel better about it – or just rub it in his face.

Alex was being led to Josh’s room when he noticed him.

Jack was just down the hall, fighting with a nurse to enter a room he was being forced out of. There were tears on his face as he clawed past the petite woman, but soon enough, there was a doctor escorting him out.

“You can’t take him away from me!” He sobbed, finally giving up and leaning heavily against the wall. His breath was ragged and he looked like a train-wreck. Alex wondered what was going on.

“Mr. Barakat, we did everything we could. I’m very sorry, but he’s gone.” The doctor’s voice was monotonous and it was obvious she had done this before. She was able to completely ignore Jack’s distress but Alex couldn’t say the same for himself. His gut withheld shooting stabs of pity.

“No! Joe’s not dead!”

Joe, Joe, Joe Barakat, Jack’s older brother. It was all starting to click for Alex. Dead? He continued to stare at the scene.

He peered down the hall as Jack’s tears didn’t stop. He backed himself against the hallway wall, slid down and curled into himself on the floor. He was shaking his head repeatedly, legs curled up to his chest.

The doctor walked back into the room, locking the door behind her. Jack remained slumped against the wall, sobbing. And Alex watched.

The right thing to do would’ve been to run up to his ex-best friend, to hug him and tell him everything would be alright. It would be to hold him close and promise to protect him from any hurt, that they’d never be separated again.

But Alex didn’t do the right thing. He kept walking.
____

Another ten minutes passed before anyone acknowledged Jack. A nurse sat down beside him and advised him to go home and get rest.

Jack was in too much pain to argue that he wouldn’t be able to sleep, and instead got up and left. He walked without thought and eventually found himself at a bar. Deep down, he knew it was a bad idea to get wasted, but Jack knew he would feel numb to the world.

Although parties had never really been his forte, Jack found himself piss drunk within the first two hours. He found a few other people who hurt as much as he did, and unwound as they brooded over their troubles together. At the point where Jack couldn’t even form coherent sentences, he noticed a young man in the corner or the bar, alone and staring at him.

Alcohol gave Jack the confidence he’d never had. Before he knew it, he and the unnamed man were kissing sloppily and heading out the door.

The man was rough and inconsiderate of what Jack would’ve preferred – slow and sensual. Regardless, he was able to forget himself for a night.
____

He woke in the morning to someone shaking his shoulder.

His hangover was intense, so this didn’t particularly help anything. His pounding head barely registered anything as the man handed him his dirty clothes and a crumpled fifty dollar bill. Jack left as quickly as he could, confused about the money but not about to question cash.

He had walked halfway back to the hospital before the realization hit him. The man he slept with thought he was a prostitute. And that’s when Jack lost it.
____

Later that night, Alex saw Jack again. This time he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what he found.

The quarterback was on his way to a party, walking because his mom took his car away. It was around ten (Alex was always a bit more that fashionably late; it was his thing) when he was crossing the bridge into the other side of town.

Alex had always loved the way the water looked in the dead of night, so he enjoyed it before he hear the faint sound. At first he couldn’t decipher what it was. The murmuring of a happy couple? Laughter of some good friends?

Nope, it was crying. Alex then noticed the thin silhouette standing on the edge of the drop, trembling in tune with the sobbing.

Alex sure was a bastard, but he wasn’t completely heartless.

“Hey! Kid, please think about this! There are people that love you and,-” Alex began, fully prepared to go into a full cliché rant to save the kid’s life. His jaw dropped when the figure turned around. It was Jack.

The lamplight was dim, but Alex could make out his features. It was a lot to take in at once, that Jack Barakat, his former best friend, was about to jump. He honestly didn’t know what to do.

And for the first time in years, Alexander Gaskarth didn’t have an answer. Out of all the excuses he made up, lies he told, explanations he embellished, this was one problem he didn’t know how to solve.

So he went with his instinct. What better way to let the boy know he was loved than show it.

But Jack wasn’t having that. He backed away instantly and Alex flinched. He knew he had been an ass, but he never thought he’d scare his best friend away. He knew it was his fault too. He felt guilt weighing down in his chest for pushing Jack toward suicide. They’d been so close, and Jack had been so happy.

But as Alex scanned his eyes over the mess that stood in front of him, it was clear it’d been a while since Jack had been truly happy.

“Jack,” he sighed, taking a step closer, to which Jack took a step back. “You can’t do this!” Convincing him would be hard, but Alex wasn’t about to leave him like this. “You gotta stay. Look, I didn’t mean to ignore you, its just-”

“Yeah you did, Alex! Don’t even fucking try with me! I’m done staying in a place I don’t belong, where no one cares! You have no idea the hell I’ve been through, and you fucking ignore me? There’s no excuse; you didn’t need me like I needed you. You saw me at that hospital! You watched me scream and cry and tear my fucking hair out, but all I watched you do was walk away.”

And it was the truth. Alex couldn’t even say anything to defend himself, just stood gaping. He had never realized how much something he did could affect someone so drastically. Living proof stood in front of him.

He wasn’t really proud of what his life had become after he lost Jack. Truly, it had deeply affected him and he’d ended up becoming someone he wasn’t. He functioned vicariously through his ego and what he made his life out to be. But he wasn’t living. He was just surviving.

Jack had always made him feel different. Jack made Alex feel like he was on top of the world. He’d felt like he could conquer anything with the younger boy by his side. Alex hadn’t ever wanted to lose that spark, and he never did. It may have been dulled and repressed by the new life Alex presented himself in, but it had never died.

Alex needed to prove to Jack it was still there.

But before he could make an attempt, Jack swayed slightly before falling to the ground. The thud echoed and brought Alex to realization. He kneeled hastily beside the boy and grabbed his hand. Jack’s eyes opened a fraction to glance at their fingers entwined before resting his back on the wet pavement and straining a sigh.

“What happened?! What’s going on?! Jack, please stay awake!”

But Jack’s eyes were drooping shut and his breathing became strenuous. The elder began to panic as he noticed this. He tried to shake Jack awake but it didn’t seem to help anything.

“I t-took some sleeping pills…” he strained, “in case the fall didn’t kill me.” Jack was choking at this point, tears still dripping down his face. His breathing was strained and his face was pale.

“Jay, please keep your eyes open. Promise me, keep ‘em open, you can do it,” Alex whispered hastily as he searched his pockets phone. He pulled it out with sigh and dialed 911.

But when he glanced back at Jack, the boy’s eyes were shut completely and his chest barely looked like it was rising or falling.
____