which it has to be, then it makes everything I know about him false, because I cannot imagine a reason for him to tell me this, this absolutely made-up story. Itâs like when youâre taking a standardized test with one of those bubble sheets and youâre humming along, filling in the circles the whole way like they show at the top of the sheet, and you go to fill in the answer for question 58 and you realize the next empty circle is 59, youâve been one number off for God knows how long, maybe since the teacher flipped over her one-hour egg timer. It might only be one number but now everything is wrong. I do not know him and I do not feel comfortable doing anything with him but sitting and waiting until he falls asleep, and this can all be over, our friendship probably included.
Because you canât just believe somebody, can you? I mean it: kids exaggerate how many people the party bus theyâre renting this weekend can accommodate and the length of their family vacations in Greece. The general default pose of anyone towards anyone else on any subject is a sort of âyeah, sure, okay,â a generalassumption that everyone is pretty much full of shit. Or if theyâve been honest, that this honesty is hiding some sort of deeper, far worse full-of-shitness. So if Eric seemed straight-up and genuine about everything so far then he was really only prepping me for this, the big crazy, or the big prank, or something. Some legitimately intensely delusional shit or some weird disgusting lie I canât even begin to figure out a reason for. Everybody lies a little about everything for no reason and here Iâm supposed to treat this huge, world-altering fantasy thing better, with more trust than I would treat Carter Buehl telling me the Hummer limo he rented for prom is literally a block long?
Thing is, I donât care about Carterâs block-long rape-mobile, but Ericâs thing, I would love for it to be true. And I think thatâs part of the reason Iâm pissed (because I am, among many other things, pissed right there against the wall): How dare he tell me something I want so badly to be true that so clearly isnât, and can never be?
Ericâs house is quiet. He has no brothers to lead in cackling herds of friends at two in the morning on a school night, or, if theyâre alone, turn the TV in their room on full-volume and then get on their computer and put headphones on so they forget how on and loud the TV still is. Just the sound of two parents sleeping soundly in the same bed somewhere else upstairs, which isnât a sound at all, and the occasional creak of the house settling or whoosh of the air-conditioning coming on.
âI want you to know that itâs okay if you donât believe me right away.â
âPlease shut up.â
Books are everywhere. You could make a pretty good case for this room actually being part of a larger room and having been partitioned off by walls of books. Thereâs a record player on the floor with three milk crates full of records next to it. A box full of disassembled action figures. Some electrical equipment I canât identify as part of one thing or another. The computer and the TV and the PlayStation. Stacks of magazines I havenât heard of. More books.Where there is wall that you can see, including what I have my back up against,
TimeBlaze
art is tacked up. Most of it is stuff weâve worked on together, but every so often thereâs a movie poster mocked up in Ericâs really-canât-draw style. He doesnât go stick figures, the cowardly route of most people whoâve accepted the fact that they suck at drawing; itâs just this mushy little-kid assemblage of characters with arms and legs that donât bend, just curve, big black circles for mouths, and eyes that can only convey the emotion âthese shapes represent eyes.â And more books.
For all that, itâs not messy. My room
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