Six
Eli
O ne thing I had always hated was crying.
I hated the feeling of knowing that you were about to cry, so you start trying to suppress the tears that you don't want to fall.
The clenching of your jaw in hopes that somehow it will keep the tears back.
The ugly face that you start to make because you're giving it your all to not start bawling, but you aren't doing a great job at it so you just look ridiculous.
So, then you realize that you can't stop it anymore and you just let it happen, making all the previous actions pointless.
I hated the fact that being a guy and crying over small things was so frowned upon.
When girls would cry over small things, usually people would comfort them.
They would tell them that it was going to be okay, and that next time they would do better.
They would wipe the tears off of their face and smile at them in hopes that it would cheer them up.
I wanted to be able to break down when something did not go my way.
Wait—I needed to rephrase. I wanted other people to be okay with me breaking down when something did not go my way.
I was more emotional than I had liked to admit.
Honestly, that was part of the reason I had started drinking.
It replaced the bad emotions with numbness, and numbness was better than crybaby tears.
I wanted it to be accepted for me to be upset to the point of tears about the fact that in all four years of high school, I had never won the class presidency. Not freshman year, not sophomore year, not junior year, and now not senior year. And who was the reason for that every single fucking year?
Javier. It was always Javier.
So, when I involuntarily started crying in the bleachers of the gym, instead of staying there and letting my classmates watch me bawl like a big ass baby, I left.
I didn’t cause a scene like I had initially believed I would.
I simply stood up, pushed past the teachers trying to stop me from leaving, and exited without looking back.
I knew that the whole class was staring as I made my dramatic exit, but I didn't care at that point.
I also knew that I was going to be in a huge amount of trouble for leaving campus unauthorized, but I did not care about that either.
All I cared about was getting as far away from the gym as possible because staying there would have felt worse.
I wanted to feel numb. I wanted the tears and embarrassment to end.
My mind immediately went to my coping mechanism.
I started to think about how much I wanted—no, needed a drink right then.
I surely had something at home, but I already knew that my aunt did not have work that day.
That meant that she would be at home, and I wasn't ready nor in the mood for her lecture.
So, I decided to drown in my own sobs at the park about a five-minute walk from our school.
The park was empty. That made sense since it was the middle of the day on a weekday.
I was sitting on the swing and kicking my legs back and forth, but not hard enough to genuinely move it.
I wasn’t crying as hard as I had been before.
I had calmed down to mostly sniffing and a few stray tears falling here and there.
"Fucking pathetic," I mumbled to myself as I drew in the sand with my foot.
That was exactly how I felt, pathetic. I was too old to be crying in the middle of a park all because I lost. I wasn’t liked enough by my classmates to be elected as class president.
Maybe it was my fault. I always had an attitude with people and never made much of an effort to change that.
People just pissed me off too easily. Though, I wasn’t rude to absolutely everyone.
There were people who liked me, just not enough of them.
I thought that since I was the little brother of a well-liked football player and cheerleader that that would make a difference, but I honestly did not know why I thought that because it had never worked for me before.
Maybe I was simply unlikeable.
"Alex, look!" screamed a young, high-pitched voice. "I told you he was sad."
I slowly raised my head and looked at the child in front of me. It was a small girl, she looked about six or seven. Her curly pigtails bounced as she moved closer to me. She was cute, but I couldn't help but be annoyed that the child was pointing while loudly speaking about me.
"Are you okay, mister?" the girl asked softly.
I sniffed before nodding at the kid and forcing a smile. Anything to get the gremlin to go away.
I heard footsteps before I laid my eyes on the guy.
He was an average guy, maybe an inch taller than me with his brown hair cut in a taper fade and a smooth, freckled face.
Once he reached us, he grabbed the child's hand, letting out a tired sigh.
"Goodness. Millie, you cannot run up to people like this. "
"But he’s so sad."
He gave me a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry about her."
I shook my head slightly, silently assuring him that it was okay.
He turned around and began to walk away, but after two steps he stopped himself.
He looked at me for a moment before whispering something to the child.
Whatever he had said to her made her walk away, I assumed he told her to go play.
The guy then sat down on the empty swing next to me.
I turned my head away from him and stared at my foot as I dragged it around in the sand. I didn't know what he was sitting there for. Out of all the places this dude could have chosen, he chose next to me. I was already embarrassed enough as it was, and I just wanted to be alone.
He clearly did not know what to say. After a long moment of silence, he spoke. "Do you want to talk about it?"
I continued to drag my foot on the ground. I did not answer.
The brown-haired boy took a deep breath. "They say it helps to talk to a stranger."
I gave a noncommittal shrug.
"Okay," he said cautiously. "What's your name?"
I wanted to tell him to go find someone else to bother, but I didn’t have the energy. I also didn’t want to be rude to him. It was clear that he meant no harm and was trying to be helpful.
"Elias,” I mumbled, still not facing him.
"Nice to meet you. I'm Alex." When I didn't respond, he continued, "You go to the school up the street, right?”
I finally turned my head and met his eyes, though his hair was long enough that it was starting to cover them.
He was smiling at me, his attempt to comfort me.
I wanted to know how he knew what school I went to.
Did he go there as well? Was he one of the kids in the crowd that watched me run out of the building?
"Yeah. How’d you know?”
He kicked his legs back and forth, moving the swing a bit. “I recognized you. I graduated from there last year and recognized you. Easton and Emerson’s brother, right?”
I rolled my eyes. It was beginning to seem like everyone knew me only as Easton and Emerson’s little brother.
I turned my attention back to my foot on the ground, ignoring Alex’s question.
We sat in silence, and I thought that he would have gotten up and left me alone eventually, but he never moved.
"I'm sorry," he suddenly apologized. "I was trying to take your mind off of whatever happened because that's what people do for me when I'm upset and it works every time but I must not be doing it right because it isn't working for you… and I really just wanted to help you because you probably don’t deserve to be in the park crying by yourself, but I'm clearly doing a shitty job at it so I'll leave you alone if that's what you really need. "
Once Alex caught his breath after spewing out all those words, he stood up from the swing and began to walk away.
"That was one long-ass run on sentence," I blurted, a tiny smile forming.
Alex stopped and then turned around, chuckling sheepishly. "Yeah, it's a bad habit I’m trying to break."
"You aren't doing a shitty job, I'm just being a jerk," I muttered. "I'm being over emotional, like usual, and I’m taking it out on people who don’t deserve it.”
Alex hummed a response. He glanced at the little girl that was now happily sliding down the big red slide. "We're about to go meet my—uh, friend at the pizza place not far from here. You should come."
Normally I wouldn’t agree to go anywhere with a stranger, but I figured wallowing in my own self-pity was worse than eating pizza. I smiled, genuinely this time. "I'd like that."
***
We arrived at a place called Peter's Pizza.
The little girl—whom I learned was Alex's niece—had run up to a guy sitting alone at a booth.
She squealed as approached him with her arms wide, ready to hug him.
He reciprocated the hug by picking Millie up and squeezing her tight, then sitting her on his lap.
Alex and I sat down across from his friend and his niece. His friend had not looked at us yet, as he was trying to take his straw out of the paper with one hand and secure Millie from falling off of his lap with his other.
"I already told the waitress our order since we get the same thing almost every time," Alex's friend said, still focused on the straw.
There were already two lemonades sitting on the table, clearly for Alex and Millie. I wondered if Alex had told his friend that I, a random stranger from the park, would be joining them.
"Killian," Alex called.
In an instant, Killian looked up. That was when he finally noticed me sitting there, awkward and slightly uncomfortable. My eyes were most likely still red and watery, as I had only stopped crying ten minutes prior to this moment.
"Uh, hello?" Killian greeted me, if that's what you could even call it. He didn't seem upset that I was there, but he clearly was not given a heads up that I was going to be. I sheepishly waved at him.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
"This is Elias," Alex introduced me warmly. "He's my friend."