He listens to his and your quiet, even breaths, and listens to the comfortable silence in his bedroom. You’re both lying down on the floor, both staring up the blue ceiling, both lost on your own thoughts.
This happens from time to time. It’s natural, sometimes almost a habit for the two of you. He finds it a little funny. He wonders if it’s a best friend thing. He wonders about the whole staring up the ceiling thing—there’s nothing there, no answers, nada. But you both do it anyway. He finds that funny too. It occurs to him that he’s thinking a lot tonight, something highly unusual for him—well, males in general. Funny.
Though there’s nothing funny about your classmate offing himself.
You sigh. He turns his head to look at you. You’re still staring at the ceiling. He watches your eyes, clear and deep, reflecting light. He watches your profile silently, but you don’t need to turn or hear him speak to know his question.
“I don’t get it.” You say out loud. “I don’t get why they’re drilling us about it, as if we were the ones to blame. As if we could’ve done something to stop him. Maybe we could. I don’t know…” You shift a little. “But how are we to be blamed? We’re teenagers. We worry about exams, homework, whether we’re popular or not, whether we watched that latest movie everyone talking about. We’re shallow. We’re young, immature. He was falling into a black hole; what could we have done to pull him up? How could we have, you know, saved him?”
He covers your hand with his own, still not saying a word. You hold your intertwined hands up against the light, still lost in your track of thoughts. Your tone becomes softer, fainter without you noticing. “I always felt that only extraordinary people could have saved someone like that. Not that they had to be Ghandi or anything but just be… kind enough. Loyal enough. Stubborn enough. Even if we saw what was going on, if we were that, kind enough, loyal enough, stubborn enough; just good enough a person, we might’ve done it, maybe. Maybe I’ve just got a saviour complex, I don’t know. But to be just that, just good enough a person, then—in my opinion, that’s extraordinary. So how could they ask that of us? To be extraordinary?”
“You don’t need to be extraordinary to save someone.” He’s turned to look at the ceiling.
You turn to him this time. “Oh?” He pulls your hand, still in his, over his heart. It beats strongly, surely as always. He closes his eyes.
“If it were you, I could’ve saved you.”
You get it. You smile, turn back and close your eyes.
