I Guess They Never Disappear

Chapter 7

Shit. 

The door slams behind me and I wince. It's falling off its hinges already, and Jared doesn't seem to be alleviating the problem. 

He plops down in the other rickety patio chair next to me. 

There's no talking for a moment. But that's awkward, and awkward situations are the worst, and he's probably already blamed me for everything on this planet, so why not add another thing for him to be mad about.

"Hi," I say, and it comes out quieter than it should be, which means I'm going to have to repeat what I said, and if that isn't bad I must not know the definition of bad. 

"Hey," he says. 

Now there are two very distinct options here, and one of them is wrong, or actually, both of them may be wrong because that's just how it is sometimes for me. 

The first is to acknowledge what happened in senior year and apologize and hope that he's ready for an apology and won't just shrug me off, because that would be bad and wouldn't it be nice to actually have a real friend again? Yes, yes it would. 

Wait no, family friend. 

Still, something's better than nothing, right?

And the second option is just to pretend that nothing happened and try to hop right back into our friendship of sorts, which also could totally backfire because what if he thinks I don't feel bad about what I did, because I do, and I get that what I did was totally fucked up. And if I pretend that nothing happened, how long is it before we have to deal with that and if we do is it going to be more messy and ugly and awful and bad?

Jared is the first one to speak.

"So, Hansen, you're still majorly into the trees, I see?"

And, oh, well, it looks like we're going for option two, at least for the time being. 

Hansen is new. I guess it comes with the label of I-don't-even-know-if-we're-friends that the two of us have these days. He used to call me Evan. 

The other thing is it doesn't really sound like Jared, y'know? But of course, it doesn't - he doesn't want to be here and who can blame him.

I should respond now.

"Yeah?"

"Ah."

He puts his hands behind his head and leans back in the chair. 

I look at him and notice a gay pride pin sticking out from underneath his jacket. 

That's new.

I don't mean that in a homophobic way because maybe this is him coming out to me and I'm not homophobic and if I try to say anything about it I'll just massively fuck up my words because I have the power to do that. 

Jared rotates his neck very slightly to look at me and follows the trail of my eyes to his shirt. 

"Ah," he says, which is very eloquent and also very Jared.

I have a mental keyboard smash because this is where I'm supposed to say I love you and I support you and I'm here for you, and I am all of those things except if I try to say it I won't be able to and then he'll just think I'm mocking him, which I'm not. 

"You have a problem with that, Hansen?"

And now he's glaring at me, fuck.

"No, Jared, I mean that's very nice for you... wait that sounds rude, I mean that I'm here for you and I uh... support you and um... uh... yeah?"