I grab my coat and head outside. It is a clear day, warm, sunny, moderately windy, the kind of day that you wish for on rainy Mondays as you lay your head down on the school desk. Dead leaves crunch underfoot with every step: ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. I take my time; there is no use in hurrying.
John's voice had been urgent enough, but I knew him well enough to know that it was probably his typical overreaction. He had always been a passionate, excitable boy. In our freshman year of highschool, he once convinced the teacher to let the whole class outside to look at a dinosaur fossil he "discovered" on the baseball field. It turned out to be several mud-encrusted coat hangers a janitor had forgotten to clean up. His face had turned as red as his hair.
It was not an isolated incident. For as long as I could remember, ever since grade school, John had been like that. My earliest memory of him was him agreeing to eat a live earthworm for ten dollars - ten dollars had been a lot back then. In middle school his antics escalated, resulting in him almost being expelled from our school for passing around pills he told us would allow us to see aliens - it turned out to be LSD. I don't think he knew about it, for he was not a malicious person, but I suspect that even had he known he was handing out drugs, he would not have cared.
People have wondered why I was friends with such a boy. My parents lived in constant fear of me inviting him to our house, and more than once the school guidance counselor asked me if I was being coerced into hanging out with him. I myself am not sure of the reason we are friends, for I think his antics as stupid as everyone else does. If I had to pin it down to a single reason...well, if there was one thing good about John, behind his stupid recklessness, behind his desperate desire for attention, behind his disregard for the well-being of his friends, it was his tenacity. Our sun would have gone supernova by the time John learns from his mistakes. Because despite continuous streams of disappointments, he was always convinced that he was on the verge of a great discovery, that he would be the first to do it, that his next prank would garner the adoration of our highschool's girls. He blazed as brightly as a comet.
I have not seen him for several years. After highschool, I had gone on to college and he...our last conversation together, on that last night of summer with the crystal palaces of our childhood trembling before us, he had said to me, "You do well in school, man. Me? I'm bustin' outta this town. Las Vegas, LA, Hollywood, who knows? I'm gonna strike it rich. In a few years, everyone'll know my name, you'll see - and then you can tell all ya university pals: 'I knew that man. I grew up with him. We were best friends.' "
And that was that. We had each other's phone numbers and email, but it had just been too much. After a few sporadic attempts to communicate in the first semester of college, we stopped contacting each other altogether. It seemed painfully sad to me, now, how we had drifted apart, but I do not remember ever feeling so sad back then.
I glance at my watch. 3:00 p.m. The minute hand overlaps the hour hand exactly, and as I continue to stare it moves further and further away, past the four, the five, the six. Once it reaches the nine, I smile, for now it has reached the end of its journey and is now going back to the way they once were, the minute and hour hands of a clock, diverging and converging and diverging again...
I pull up into his driveway.
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