Two

           Avery, I think I’m an Empath.

So like I know you’ve been down lately, but you keep on a cheery face because you think you have to. Maybe it’s better; it’s easier for me to give you care if you’re not asking it of me. I can’t do too little.

This way you can be strong, but I can still be the supportive girlfriend.

You are going about your day with your usual bird song but less of your chipper. Usually, we meet outside the art room after 3^rd period and head toward the cafeteria together. The whole way down the hall, I wear my side of your headphones and we listen to one song together that’s been stuck in your head all day before we have to part again. Today you keep one in and one hanging around your neck.

 I try not to analyze your silence. I try. There’s still a lilt to the way you walk, slow and lazy, but less of a saunter-skip.

Later today I’m meeting you guys at the park, then we’re walking to Trader Joes to get snacks, then bussing to downtown Kirkland where Aiko and Tim or Tom or I dunno,’ maybe Gavin will meet us. Then we’re going to take the 230 into Bellevue to go be mall rats because that’s what Aiko likes to do.

“We still doing shopping and a movie, later?” I ask, finally piping up half way down the hall all the way from Turner’s Drama and English class to Miller’s science room with the animal skeletons and fermenting pig fetus’s and brains in brine and microscopes tucked into odd corners.

“Today, sans soleil,” your voice is mock-wistful. If you weren’t so cute, baby, I’d want to beat you up a little bit. “What else is there to do but shopping and a movie?”

 “So I’ll just head to the park around four?”

“Maybe four thirty? I have a thing after school with the Asian Student Union. They want to use Jason’s thing as like, Asian student suicide awareness and I have mixed opinions about it, so I thought I’d go with Jason just to hear it out, see what he thinks.”

“How’d they find out about it?” I ask, feeling defensive-- like this thing, his thing, is our thing.

“Ricky Liu and his sister live at the Vista,” you remind me.  “And they were around the first time he tried.”

And that’s where we part ways:  before I can process it to ask: “Wait, the first time?” you’re starting down the hall. I could call after you, but I’m in the middle of the doorway and there are people behind me. I enter the cafeteria, baffled.

Jason is at our usual table, working on some math homework that he never lets me copy, but he lets Ian copy it and Ian has my back. When our math teacher said we got to pick our own peer partners, I thought it’d be sick because Jason could teach me everything I didn’t understand but instead he just works ahead and gets frustrated with me for falling behind.

“You don’t get it because you don’t work hard enough,” he says.

“I work harder than you, I just do it wrong.” 

I get a bagel today because it’s cheaper than the salads. Somehow school administration thinks that salads are iceberg lettuce and some skimpy carrot shreds and then some dressing and I don’t think it has any nutritional value. The lunchlady who mans the salad station is the most unpleasant of the bunch!

I put my backpack up on the bench; sit leaning against it, feet toward Jason and knees drawn up to my chest.

“So Avery said we were meeting four thirty and not four like I thought, ‘cause you guys have that Asian Student Union thing?”

“Yeah, apparently Sam He and Ron and some of the other guys from the break dancing club were hangin’ out with Ricky the day I jumped, so they brought it up to the ASU president.” Jason says. I don’t have to tell you how much of an overlap there is between the BBoys and the ASU.

I wait for him to say more.

“Man, fuck the Asian Student Union. All those guys do is complain that white girls think they have tiny penises. “

“Ricky Liu showed me his penis once. It’s miniature. I laughed, then I felt soo bad.” I pout in sympathy.

“Ricky’s penis is abnormal,” Jason tells me. “I’m grossed out when I think about it.”

“Think about it a lot?” It doesn’t even cross my mind to ask Jason when and how he saw Ricky’s penis, it doesn’t even matter. I’m sure it happened under relatively normal circumstances.

        “Eerily often.”

        “Think about it when you jumped?” I ask before I can stop myself. Thank fucking god you’re not here. I can feel the look you would give me if you’d heard. But Jason smirks, and shrugs. His teeth show.

        “It’s what drove me to it.”