Relative Fiction | ✓

05

The sun beat down ferociously on my head, and sweat trickled down my bare shoulders and chest in little rivers. My skin was hot to the touch, and I thought swinging on the tire swing that hung from the willow tree in our backyard would cool me down a little bit, but even the breeze was hot. I took another drag of my cigarette as Hunter sat in a lounge chair next to me and droned on about my poor life choices. Sweat glistened on the curls of black hair clumped on his forehead, but Hunter could have made sitting in hell look comfortable.

"So you're really not going back to school?" He eyed me over the tops of his sunglasses, taking a loud slurp of his blue slushee.

I groaned and rubbed at my sticky face. "You know my mom, she's trying to subtly nudge me to community college just so I have some kind of degree. Personally I don't see the point."

"Right." He nodded purposefully. "I mean since you're probably just going to marry into a rich family and be miserable, why bother?" The blunt sarcasm stung, but I still missed it all the same. He didn't treat me like a total fuck-up, or like I was made of glass. He was just honest.

I scoffed. "Listen, Sage and I-"

"I'm really not interested in hearing about your latest endeavors with Sage the Mage." Hunter adjusted his sunglasses and took another large slurp of his blue slushee. It seemed like such a trivial thing, but he was addicted to them and perpetually had a blue-stained tongue. Of course, nobody judged him for that. An old Hootie and the Blowfish song thrummed in the background, but it didn't drown out the clicking of Hunter's keyboard on his iPad, and it made me twitchy.

I had this weird desire to defend Sage, maybe because in the back of my mind I thought she did the same for me, despite what we said to each other's faces. "Why does everybody have a nickname for her?"

"You do know what a mage is right?" he chuckled and shook his head.

I scoffed in response. "No, I don't speak nerd."

Hunter was, in simple terms, a computer genius. He was an engineering student at Stanford and won some kind of international robotics competition last year. We'd been best friends since middle school, but Hunter and I couldn't have been more different, and there were times I wondered when he would finally have enough of me and cut me out of his life.

But he never did.

He ignored my nerd jab and went on to bore me with actual semantics. "A mage is a high level spellcaster in Dungeons and Dragons. And dude, she has you under every evil spell in the goddamn book."

"That still doesn't change the fact that I don't speak nerd." I shot him a stony glance over the tops of my sunglasses.

"Yeah, well you're about to be speaking lobster if you don't put more sunscreen on." He started digging out the chunks of blue, sugared ice in his drink and pointed his straw at me. "We've only been out here 20 minutes and you're burning already."

"Okay Mom," I rolled my eyes at him from behind the lenses of my sunglasses. My skin stung to touch, but I was really just hoping some sun would hide even a little of the bruises and discoloration all over my arms. Even though they were all starting to fade with age, they'd never truly be gone, and people who stared didn't care.

"You know what? Fuck it," I shrugged as I lit another cigarette. "Burn me to a crisp."

"So you want to die of lung cancer and skin cancer?"

"Simultaneously," I replied with a casual shrug. "I bet nobody's ever done it before."

Hunter shook his head and went back to clacking away on his iPad. "You've got serious issues, dude."

"At least I have legit issues," I drawled. "Everything in your life is perfectly normal, but you create issues and drama for yourself because otherwise everything bores you. Like that time you stopped going out with that guy you met at the bar at Vendue because his second toe was longer than his first toe. I mean, he was chill and he shared a blunt with me, but you didn't like his feet, so..."

"Morton's Toe is a genetic anomaly." Hunter kept his eyes on his iPad when he spoke, his voice monotone and calculating. "It can cause long term foot problems, and you know if we ever had children or anything, there would be a serious possibility that they would end up with the same thing, like if his genes-"

I threw my hands up in the air. "Point proven, thank you."

Hunter sighed and continued to slurp on his slushee even though there was nothing left. "Look Kai, all I'm saying is you and Sage will quite literally be the death of each other, and we're pretty much each other's only friend since you and I enjoy alienating other people, so I'd really like you to stay alive. Purely for my own selfish reasons, of course."

"Of course," I echoed.

He paused for a moment, then shut his iPad down. "Don't you think it's time to move on? Like that girl from the flower shop? She seemed nice."

I hadn't even considered moving on a viable option. It was easy to drown myself in bad choices, like being with Sage and smoking dope, that way nobody ever expected anything out of me. I sure as hell didn't.

But one look from AJ made me rethink all of that, even if all that human sun seemed worlds and universes out of my reach.

"Do you ever feel like when someone looks at you, they can see right through you?" I lit another cigarette and crushed the now empty pack in my fist.

"No." Hunter shook his head. "No, that's definitely just a you thing."

I scoffed but continued. "There's no way that girl AJ sees anything in me. But I can't help it. I just...I want to know her."

"So get to know her. Anything's better than Sage."

"Come on, leave her alone."

"Look, I get it, okay." Hunter took his sunglasses off and gave me an unusual somber glance. "Sage was your first everything. It's hard to let go of that shit. She's pretty, and she's got rich parents and a trust fund. Seems like a no brainer. But dude...she's a terror. She threw a freaking hairdryer at you last year, do you not remember that? All you guys used to do is alternate between arguing and sitting around in her room smoking god knows what. I thought the whole point of rehab was to move past all of that. She doesn't give a shit about you staying clean."

She didn't give a shit about me staying clean because I didn't give a shit. I was just better at hiding it from everyone else. If anyone knew I went back to doing coke and smoking pot the second day I had gotten back from rehab...well, they didn't show it. Either that, or they cared even less than I did.