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They meet at night, in the park that they grew up playing in - are still growing up playing in, really, and still visit to drag their feet across the mulch while their bodies sway on the swingset, or sit on the highest point of the structures in their kid-friendly, bright primary colours. They choose the latter route tonight, sneakers poking out from under the railing and smoking cigarettes that Craig got a homeless guy to purchase. Presently he’s doing smoke tricks while Kenny watches him, and it’s going bad, his smoke rings coming out like hula hoops that have been sat on. He takes a break from that and takes a deep drag, to which he ends up coughing up a storm and doubling over until Kenny slaps him on the back. He hears his spine begin to break. He still can’t breathe.
“Remember, you can’t come back like I can, dude.”
The fifteen year old blonde plucks the cigarette from his weak fingers and begins to finish it off.
“How do you supposedly do that, by the way?” His voice is rasping. There’s a tear on his face, but he’s making it work.
“Spite,” Kenny says, a series of professional, unbent hula hoops floating wispily in the air in front of him now.
Craig clears his throat. “Just in general, at life?”
“Maybe ‘cause you’re dating nervous white Naruto.”
He takes a breath in response, and then releases it slowly, looking away with a tug inside of his gut and a curl to his lip that says it was a bad response - but what did he expect? And that description is really accurate, actually.
“Come on, you’re not even gonna laugh?” He snorts at him, watching him through the corner of his eye with a crushed, jealously malicious look. When Craig looks at it directly, it doesn’t go away; it’s searing, and it renders him entirely wordless. “You really gonna go defending Wonder Twink and shoving me in the fucking trash?”
“Kenny, that’s not - You think I’d be showing up here in the fucking dark to spend time with you instead of him if I didn’t feel something?”
“That isn’t the fucking point, I’m not your side slut!”
“Why are we saying FUCK so much?”
“Don’t change the FUCKING subject!”
And with that, the rest of his fizzling cigarette floats to the ground as Kenny twists his body and swings a punch directly into Craig’s face, knuckles splitting on his cheekbone. There’s an off sort of crack that splits through the air as the fifteen year old reels back, crying now, his tears obscuring his vision and fingers aching, covering his face to try and hide the tears.
Craig is hunched over and holding his eye with a horrified look, a trickle of pain spilling out of his mouth via syllables of a whimper; his breathing is heavy. Everything is silent and still for several seconds.
“Dude, I...I didn’t - seriously, I dunno why-”
Craig’s hand slips from his face, cheek red, blue, and bleeding. He shakes his head, casting his eyes downward and taking a moment before stopping the other’s panicked stuttering with the raise of a hand. “It’s okay,” he says quietly, voice strange in a way that Kenny can’t discern the meaning of.
But it makes him hopeful. He takes his fingers away, wet with tears, and runs them through his hair in a nervous gesture, looking up at him with a sniffle and another tiny sob. “Really?”
A hand slips in between his. It pulls him away from the unruly strands of platinum and Kenny’s facial expression is broken and begging. He manages the smallest, most watery smile in all of existence. A strong squeeze of his hand, and then it slips away just as quickly as it came, the ghost of touch lingering.
“But I’m gonna have to repay you for that.”
A few things happen.
Firstly, Craig hits him with what feels like the most powerful right hook he’s ever felt before, and then he feels nothing.
He feels nothing because his head ricochetes forcefully against the railing separating his body from the rest of the playground about seven feet down.
Kenny collapses in a crumpled pile on the floor of the obnoxiously red-coloured play structure, a part of his head bleeding about the same cherry colour.
There is a sizeable gap between the railing and the very floor of the structure. Enough for one leg to fall and dangle over the edge completely, and then another, and Craig isn’t moving because his brain isn’t working properly, so the blonde boy’s body slips slowly off and lands with a solid thump, face-down, on top of the mulch of the playground.
And just like that, Kenny is so very, painfully dead.
“Oh my god oh goddamn it shit, Kenny-”
Craig sprints down the stairs and stumbles over to his friend, scooping his head into his lap and watching it roll onto its side with blank eyes staring lifelessly. “Oh, God, I’ve committed a murder.”
Wait.
“Shit, wait, aren’t you supposed to come back?”
Craig had, in all honesty, never quite listened to Kenny over the years of him telling his friends that he had died and been brought back to life via some either ever-benevolent, or ever-cruel deity. He had thought it was from sniffing too much paint. He’d read an article about somebody doing some suspicious party drugs and believing that he’d lived as a tree for seven years, so he had figured that Kenny wasn’t really the outlier in that case. It had been a good theory. And there was no way to prove or disprove it, really, so he inferred his insanity.
“How do you come back?”
It takes a while for his panic to turn into mere discomfort with having a dead body on top of his legs, so he shifts the other high schooler back onto the ground and makes a face at the fact that his eyes are still open, mouth slightly agape. O-kay. Not his best moment.
He isn’t sure what to do about this. But it’s getting late. It’s getting late, and a car just passed by with its headlights washing over his form crouched over Kenny’s lifeless body, and okay, he is leaving now.
And that is how Kenny is left in the cold early-spring night alone and deceased, in the midst of a desolate playground. Craig had attempted to close his jaw, and closed his eyes with a squeamish “ew,” before crossing his arms across his chest and covering his body in a shallow grave of mulch.
-
That is how, during the Environmental Geology class on Monday that they share together, Kenny moves to sit down and passes him a note that says:
“You fucking killed me and then buried me in worms and old chewing gum and wood chips you piece of shit.”
“Another weird dream, my dude?”
Oh fuck not again.