“If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.”2
- William Butler Yeats3
Alex had yellow hair. It was nothing like yours, which fell across your eyes in chunks of murky brown. Everything seemed to be yellow, though, when Alex was around. You imagined the boy as one might a great desert, where the sun would be that brilliant shade of yellow, unhindered by tree or cloud or rain. There’d be the grounds, carpeted by a ceaselessly changing myriad of yellow, sand being swept up into yellow walls and yellow wind. And as you sat there by the creek, Alex’s yellow hair danced in front of you in those waves, as unpredictable as the desert floor.4
“You’re doing it wrong,” you said, picking up the small boat in Alex’s hands and turning it the other way so that it bobbed a little before flowing down the water, hitting a rock and stopping. “See?”5
Alex shrugged, turning it back around the other way where it didn’t flow anywhere at all. “I like it better this way.” The response was meek but asserting, and it fit the nine year old boy. It’d be the same voice he’d always have. You were friends because you were neighbors, and you’d always been neighbors. You climbed your first tree together and flew your first kite on his lawn. You spent hours in the creek that ran behind both your houses, and you shared your first real tears with him too – tears that come from a first real sadness.6
It was your first year at the academy when it started to matter what the other voices sounded like. And Alex always wanted to sit in the back of the classroom so you did too, and for awhile that worked out all right. Alex started to stutter when he was called on, but it was always little Susie there in the corner that made him that way – and he’d blush a little and mix up his times tables and you’d try to whisper the right answer to him without your teacher noticing. Sometimes when it was raining outside you’d get distracted by the sounds of the water hitting the window pane, but then you’d glance over at Alex and see that he was already staring at it and sometimes you wondered what it was that he was thinking about so much. And maybe if he thought more about what was going on inside of the room he wouldn’t stutter so much and you wouldn’t have to whisper to help him.7
When it was nice out, you’d sit together on the lawn. Sometimes you’d bring out the gloves and ask if he wanted to play catch but he never did, but you still remembered when he sat with you after your mother died and you didn’t want to play anything either. He’d sat there for hours just listening to you breathe, but it was nice not to have to say anything. At last. Not have to say anything. Maybe he didn’t like the quiet but you understood it better. So you sat with him too, and once in awhile you’d point out strange shapes in the clouds and somehow he’d always see something completely different.8
“That’s definitely a rabbit.”9
He’d shaken his head, quietly adding, “It looks more like a dragon putting out a fire.”10
“Dragons don’t put out fires, Alex,” you answered, in a matter of fact voice.11
He shrugged, biting his lip. “If they can start them they can most certainly put them out.” You didn’t say anything, even if you didn’t agree.12
You were sitting with him in the music room the first time you heard him play. The chair was stiff and the sun had been pouring into the room in tempting slants. It made the hair on his head look like a halo around his forehead. But he said he wanted to be here, and so you followed. He’d sat at the grand piano (and it was the school’s most prized possession) when you heard the first hesitant sounds of fingertips pressing against ivory keys. They moved faster, then, more confidently, and soon you’d forgotten about the sun and closed your eyes and remembered what it was like to hear that rain hitting against the window pane. You decided that Alex must have been thinking of this moment when he’d been staring at the window in class. The sounds seem to sweep around you in delicate waves, and it was nice to feel this feeling of falling one way and then another. When he’d finished you could only think to say:13
“That was nice, Alex.”14
He’d simply shrugged in return.15
He must’ve been sitting at the piano again that night when you were in the dormitory with the other boys, throwing a baseball back and forth between each other. They started to talk about Alex – little pokes you’d always heard about but never witnessed.16
“He’s an odd one,” one had innocently started, before passing off the ball to another boy.17
The one that caught it had answered: “Not just odd – completely off his rocker. Does he even know how to speak real words?” He threw the ball to another boy. It seemed to circle around you.18
It was the boy with the sandy-hair who’d caught the ball that had stood up on his bed, making a rather marvelous imitation of Alex stuttering in class, which had caused the rest of the boys to break out in raucous laughter. You tried to smile along with them. “Honestly, what’s wrong with him?”19
He passed the ball off to another boy, and that’s when the attention turned to you. “Aren’t you friends with him?” The ball was thrown in your direction; you caught it in your left hand and stared down at it for what seemed a long while before answering.20
“No,” you replied, and passed off the ball to another.21
That was the first time you felt like you could hate him.22
You remembered when you got your first goldfish, and Alex was there to help you name it.24
“Willard.” That was his first suggestion and you’d stood there, elbows on the kitchen counter as you both stared into the glass bowl. You tilted your head, watching it flounder around in the water. It reminded you of how Alex looked like when he went swimming with you in the creek, just floundering around looking aimless until you caught the look in his eye that meant he was thinking about something you didn’t understand again.25
You smiled. “Willard it is.”26
You’d feed it every day, and Alex would spend a lot of time staring into the bowl. And sometimes later you’d hear the sounds of the piano next door making notes strung together in ways you wished you could see, but for some reason you’d never wanted to listen to him play. Instead you’d shut the window so that you didn’t have to. You’d sit on the stool in the kitchen, then, with your chin on your hands and watch Willard swim from one end of the glass bowl to the other.27
One morning you walked into the kitchen and Willard was floating on the surface of the water. Your dad flushed him down the toilet and Alex was there with you in the bathroom when it happened. Alex whispered in your ear: “Should we say something?” That was what they’d done at your mother’s funeral so it seemed like something you should do now.28
Shrugging, you shook your head and bit your lip. “No. It’s just a goldfish.” And perhaps if you decided it didn’t matter then it wouldn’t matter.29
You decided that nothing lasted forever.30
You stopped eating lunch with him, but once in awhile you’d catch his eye in the dining hall and it’s suffocating. You still sit in the back of the class with him though, and when no one is around you’ll sit with him out on the lawn too. But it’s different now. He doesn’t ask you what’s changed and maybe that’s because he never noticed it – because he doesn’t notice things like that. Somehow this makes you angrier. 32
Once you got caught in the rain with him. He didn’t seem to mind. You were too far away from shelter to cover yourself up and when the sprinkles on your shirt turned to sheets of water it was useless to find a place to cover up. It was windy, too, and it pushed against you while you pushed against it. There was thunder and that occasional flash of light that lit up some dark part of the sky for seconds at a time. And sometimes you’d open your mouth and taste the rain and drown in it, but it was the first time you felt like you could breathe. You’d try to keep running against it and still come up short, and you’d laughed because that was the only thing that seemed right. You ended up at the music room again, with that damned piano. And Alex took his seat on the bench because it was where he belonged and you took your seat on one of multitude of empty chairs because that’s where you belonged. For a moment you were both silent, chests heaving as you tried to catch your breath – because that was the only thing you could remember how to do, the only thing you could remember to think. You watched in mild fascination as he tapped his finger against his thigh, his foot moving almost imperceptibly alongside with it.33
He’d put a foot on the pedal and a finger to the keys and it was in short minutes that the episode that had just come to pass washed over you again, differently now – more fluidly. You felt those moments of light and the press of the rain. And it seemed to coincide with every of your movements, down to that drip of water that slid off the tip of your nose and onto the surface of the wooden desk.34
You hated that he knew those things. You wished he would see that things were different. That he was different. It’d be easier to fix that way.35
You must’ve been sitting outside one day when it happened. There, on that patch of grass next to the big oak tree next to the library because it gets the most shade and it’s nice in the spring. He was sitting with you then, too, but you could feel every stare that was thrown in your direction by the passing crowd. It’s not enough anymore, to remember that moment you cried with him and he put a small hand on your shoulder and told you it’d be all right. That’s when it comes out, when you say: “Alex – you’re a goldfish, did you know that?” He doesn’t know what you mean so he asks you and you sigh, propping yourself up on your elbows and observing him over your shoulder. The gesture almost feels genuine. “Look, Alex – you’re a great kid and all, but…” you pause, searching for the proper words. “You’d make a good pet. Not too much hassle, kind of quiet, changing your water’s a bit of a shitjob but – all in all, you’re manageable. But no one will really notice once you’re gone, Alex. You’re…” You swallow, knowing the words at the other end are bound to be as painful as inevitable. “You’re not someone people can really get attached to, Alex. I mean, not really. You’re kind of…” you manage a half-pitying smile, “dispensable.”36
That was the last thing you ever said to him.37
You’d thought that be enough, but it wasn’t. You spent all your time with the other boys now and it was easier – everything was easier. You sat with them in class; you ate lunch with them outside of class. You played catch on the lawn like you always wanted to. But you could still hear it – when the window to the music room was open and the sounds would come floating gently from inside of it and out to you again. It reminded you of what you’d done. It made you doubt yourself. You hated that.39
You were playing catch that day with some of the other boys when you heard it. The window was open again and it happened very slowly, but the notes never seemed louder than they did then when all there was to distract you from it was the silent buzz of summer in your ear. You couldn’t help but listen. You stopped catching the ball and tilted your head in the direction of the window and the sounds trickled out as though they were meant for you. And then you saw her, again, your mother and her smile and how she scooped you up sometimes even when you were too old for that. You saw the way she baked cookies and what she looked like when she was dancing with your dad in the living room for no reason.40
He made you see those things, with whatever he’d created there with fingertips pressed against ivory keys. You’d turned away and walked inside, ignoring the calls of the rest of the boys. You went to a place where you couldn’t hear his music.41
You’d been walking down the hallway after hours, and you seemed to do this a lot now. The thoughts that you ignored all day would run through your head and it was all as suffocating as it was before. And there it was, the door to the music room – unlocked, tonight, perhaps because fate had always meant for you to end up in there. You walked to the piano, cautiously, perhaps because you knew you didn’t belong there like Alex did. Sitting on the bench, the spot felt foreign to you. Your fingertips ran across the ivory keys but none of them spoke to you like they did to him. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t your world. All they did was remind you of things you didn’t want to remember. The moments flashed in front of you now, when Alex took you to the top of that hill and reached up into the sky and he’d said that if you swept your fingers across it just right it was almost like you could pluck it up for yourself. You tried then, too, but you couldn’t. You could never do the things he did, though you believed in them. 43
It must have been then that you felt that pocketknife in your jeans, that your father had given to you for your sixteenth birthday. It meant you were growing up. You reached in and pulled it out, popped out the blade as your finger tip ran down the smooth side. It came together for you then. Your arm reached over to the inside of the piano with the knife in hand, and fingertips grazed over the piano strings. The movements were quick after that, as you cut through them with all the force you could muster. You’d ruined your knife. You stood up and grabbed that pole they kept in the back of the room to pull back the curtains and swung it against the wooden surface, lunging at the ivory keys, and metal beat against any surface you could muster. And the more you scratched and carved and destroyed the better you felt about it. The less that music floated back to you to remind you of everything.44
It took those moments to realize that you hated him.45
You hated him for showing you what you were, and what you weren’t.46
You’d been caught. You were suspended for a week before your parents threw enough money in the academy’s direction to let you back in. You were a legend, in some ways. Some asked what had possessed you but most took this as your act of rebellion. 48
None of it quite measured up to the moment Alex and you came face to face again, and it was the first time you’d actually seen hurt in his eyes. You wanted to feel victorious. You felt worse than you did before. You almost apologized. Instead you justified your actions, and you almost forgot about it by the time it was time for graduation.49
Sitting here, now, you can’t seem to match with everything or anyone that was familiar anymore. They read empty words and his casket is sitting there at the front but no one knows what to say. It feels like you’re just hanging on and your fingertips might bleed the same way they bled that night you destroyed the piano. No one would recognize you. You sit and think about those same beautiful things that Alex could make and choke on them. In the days after you found out he’d died it felt like you had to run through ice to feel like things could make sense again.51
You were talking a walk afterwards, like you used to take with him. And you mixed up dreams, and reality felt like one and you realized that you’d finally made it into his world. And it was all a science to you again.52
And living was a science to you, too. 53
You’d been eleven when you were sitting in the garden behind your house together, making paper airplanes and losing them on the breeze. While he spent hours folding one you threw three at a time, but you started to notice his would always ride on the wind longer as though he must have had some sort of arcane knowledge on the air around you that you didn’t. You asked if you could throw one of his instead of yours, because yours seemed to crumble and fold a little under the sun as though they hadn’t wanted to be thrown at all. Once it was in your hands it was like handling something foreign, something you couldn’t understand. You wondered whether Alex felt like this all the time or whether it was only you that noticed it was any different. You threw the airplane, then, and it fluttered along, spiraling with the turn in the breeze until it fluttered to a gentle drop. Your hand dropped into your lap while the other one continued to pick at the grass near your knee. He must’ve noticed how long you stared after that spot it had fallen, hoping the breeze would pluck it up again and send it somewhere farther.55
“You want to send a message to her, don’t you?” he’d said, in that voice that never said too much or too little but just enough.56
You shrugged, embarrassed. You hated that he knew what you were thinking, but you liked that he knew the right thing to say. “Doesn’t matter,” you replied. “She’ll never get it.”57
He didn’t say anything, and he probably knew that you were lost in your mother’s red hair or how she used to tuck you in at night. Instead, you felt the timid brush of paper against skin as he pushed another of his paper airplanes onto your lap. You took it awkwardly in your hands and tilted your head in his direction because you didn’t know how to say thank you. You threw it as another gust of wind tucked underneath your arm and it seemed to float up and up and up until you could’ve sworn it disappeared into the sun.58
You threw him an airplane today; with the words I’m sorry. scribbled onto the inside.60
Bronze trophy winner
Honorable mention
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