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“I just think- it’s so fucking stupid, man. It’s just stupid, and embarrassing. To, y’know, be like this.” Travis tugged at his earlobe nervously. The cool lake water did nothing to cool the hot embarrassment lighting him up inside.
He’d never told anyone about… Whatever that was before. It was simply too stupid to talk about even if he did have friends to talk about it with. His weird little habit of reading his Moomin books and pretending he was a little kid again. Back when his mother was still around, and Mary still smiled and he was still friends with Larry and Ash, and things were easier. They were still hard, but they were easier.
He didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t know how to talk about it, but he’d seen Sal last fourth of July, when he didn’t have his meds. No mask, vomiting on the forest floor, so disoriented he didn’t know where he was. He screamed like death and called for his momma. When his father finally found them, Sal crawled into his arms like a young child, begging for papa to save him.
Whatever was wrong with Travis, Sal must’ve had it, too. That’s why he was the first and only person Travis would ever talk to about it.
But the way Sal scoffed chilled his shame and set a cold pit in his stomach in its place. “Who fuckin’ cares man? It’s not like anything matters anyway.” Sal blew the smoke from his cigarette out through the holes in his mask.
“You’re not planning to kill yourself any time soon, are you?” Travis paused his nervous habit and side-eyed Sal. Sal would never normally say something so pessimistic, and that only made his pit worse.
“No, no, it’s not like that. I just mean…” He sighed. “This is all we get, you know? When we’re gone, we’re gone. So who cares what makes you happy?” Sal shrugged, turning to look at Travis with his head cocked to the side in that way Sal always did.
Travis didn’t know how he felt about that, being raised Christian. “I guess.” He said noncommittally.
“When my face thing happened, I coded twice. I was fully dead for a couple of minutes total. You know what I saw while I was gone?” Sal continued staring ahead at the sunset, bumping the ash off his cigarette and onto the ground.
So there was actually some weight to Sal’s whole ‘dead boy’ schtick… He grabbed his fish necklace loosely, intrigued by Sal’s experiences with the other side. Well, as long as they weren’t his bullshit ghost stories. “What?” He asked.
“A big, fat load of jack fuckin’ shit.” Travis watched his adam’s apple bobble in his throat as he swallowed. “No light, no dead grandma welcoming me to the end, no voice of God. Not even any cool ghost shit.” He paused. “But you know what? It wasn’t bad. It felt nice.” That last part felt a bit too tacked on to feel natural.
In spite of Sal’s claim, Travis couldn’t help but feel a bit harrowed by this information. What about all those people that claimed to see things on the other side? Were they just lying? How did he know who to believe now? Was Sal just saying it was nice to make him feel better about it? He didn’t know where to even begin answering any of these questions.
“So who fucking cares, man. Who cares if you like kid’s stuff, I like kid’s stuff too. I like kid’s stuff, and I dress like a girl and I’ll fuck chicks and dudes, and I still like the Spice Girls, even though they’ve really fallen off these days, and I like romcoms, and mayonnaise, and maple syrup on my scrambled eggs, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks because this is all we get. I’m not gonna spend it being embarrassed to be alive, and you shouldn’t either. You hear me?” Sal still didn’t look at him.
“I’m gonna do whatever the fuck it takes to be happy. Because I have to.” Sal’s voice was so serious it was shaking.
Sal had never gotten this intense before. Even when he was trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that ghosts were real, even when he got so angry at Travis’s father that he couldn’t think in a straight line, he never got even a modicum close to the amount of intensity that Travis was feeling right now. There was something behind those words that went deep, deeper than his DNA, deeper than the molecules that made up his body, and straight into the celestial threads that stitched his soul together.
Whatever it was, Travis wasn’t convinced he shouldn’t be worried. With a furrowed brow, he reached over the tiny gap between them and grabbed the other boy’s hand. Sal took another drag from his cigarette before squeezing his hand back, putting his head on Travis’s shoulder as they stared at the sunset.
“Promise me you’ll do whatever it takes to be happy?” Sal said.
Travis exhaled harshly out of his nose with a grin. There he was, always looking out for Travis’s happiness.
“I promise.” Travis said.