is death an option? / larry ✅

Intermission

The Part Where I Stop To Introduce You To Zayn

In the beginning, I promised that I'd tell you guys about Zayn Malik. Now, here's the part where I'll interrupt my entire story to give you our backstory.

Me and Zayn aren't friends, but coworkers. We're the same age, but he's three months older than I am.

We grew up on the same side of town, but there's a barrier that separates our neighborhood from 'suburb' to 'ghetto'.  Zayn grew up with his mother, whose still in a deep depression about his father, who still hasn't returned home from the "grocery store".  (I always tease him about Wal–Mart being known for their ridiculously long lines. He never thought that I was funny.) He's the youngest of three. Two of the sisters have graduated and moved on, but one still resides with them, owning a Pitbull named Spitball who I'm certain will eat me one day.

We met one day when I was trying to find Betsy. She'd wandered off inside of the Malik residence. The rest was history.

Since I was always horribly terrified of his older sister, as well as Spitball, we usually spent our time together at my house. We probably ended up getting together well because we're both human oddities, and are interested in things like foreign films due to their nonsensical and violent content, and something that everyone simply doesn't like–Math.

Due to our obsession of foreign movies, we began to create a collection of our own. We had a method: take the title of a previous movie and make it into the worst, most ridiculous title that we're able and base the plot of the new film on that. It's a recipe that only produces awful movies, but for some reason, we keep using it.

Everyone thinks we're friends, though. We're not. We're like men in the office who occasionally spend their lunch breaks with one another; like men on the construction field who need to other for hold something steady so that they can nail it down safely.

Business partners, like I said earlier.

Now, back to the story.