I soon got bored with the football game—I didn’t want to play today. I might have had some fun, but then it would have ended and so would my freedom with another chime from the speaker. I looked across the street, through the park, and onto passing cars. I walked down to the sidewalk and stared at my bike and thought of Trey, my best friend and next-door neighbor. He was one year older than me and now went to the high school in town. He was getting out of school right now because he didn’t have a class the last block of the day. He would probably zoom by any minute if I kept looking at the street. The thought of hopping on my bike and riding to his house crossed my mind. I could spend the rest of the afternoon with my best friend and miss a couple of classes. I had never skipped school, but I had a good reason to try it this one time. No one would notice.
My classmates would probably think I was going for a brief ride. I would pass from sight and they would never notice whether I came back. I untangled my bike lock and coiled it around the stem of my bike seat. I looked behind me while I was straddling the bike to make sure no one was watching and pushed off with one leg. The first pedals were hard; someone was going to see me, they were going to tell, and I was going to get in trouble. But having a great afternoon with my best friend was a lot more tempting than two more hours of school—I sped off.
The bike ride passed quickly because I was distracted. The anticipation of the afternoon’s fun was building. Trey and I didn’t have to do much of anything to have fun, so I knew we would. On the way home, I rode through a couple of intersections and couldn’t remember if the light was green or red. I pulled up to the side of my garage and leaned my bike up against the house. I walked across the gravel side yard and into the grass that neatly lined all sides of Trey’s house. Crouching down next to the basement window well I could see Trey in front of the TV. He spent all his time in the basement when he was home and sure enough he was sitting cross-legged in front of his old TV framed by cheap wooden paneling. He was playing his Nintendo and the glow from the TV danced across his face, his nose casting a pointed shadow back to his ear. I reached out over the window well, making sure I didn’t fall in, and tapped the window. The window well scared me because of the huge wolf spiders that lived in them. I had this fear of falling into the hole and being eaten alive by spiders, their hairy legs all around me. Trey didn’t turn around before he bolted up the stairs to come to the door; he always knew it was me. I was the only one who tapped on this window.
I walked around the front of his house past the great window that looked into the living room. I could hear his loud steps up the stairs. He skipped two, maybe three steps with each lunge and made a racket that his mom couldn’t stand. Trey opened the door with a startled look on his face. His hair billowed upward in uniform waves that jerked when he gave a cautious look back into the house.
“Trey!” His mom’s yell escaped the house just as Trey slid out and shut the door behind him.
“What’s that all about?” I said.
“Nothing, she wants me to do my homework now,” Trey replied.
“So…nothing serious then. Phew! Thought she was going to chase after us there for a second.”
The lawns in our neighborhood were not fenced so Trey and I began walking from his front yard to my backyard.
“Wait, aren’t you supposed to be at school?” Trey said.
“Yeah, I ditched. I don’t know what got into me today. I couldn’t take anymore classes after Algebra. Just wanted that part of my day to be over.”
“That’s fine with me,” Trey said.
“I knew it would be.”
We jumped on my trampoline and I tried to bounce Trey higher than ever. I was getting big enough that I couldn’t jump too high without hitting the ground through the trampoline—that stung a little. We jumped for an hour and then mimicked the wrestling moves we had seen on TV earlier in the week. We were pretty good at them and we should have been because Trey and I watched six hours of wrestling per week. We also had plenty of time to practice because Trey and I didn’t concern ourselves with homework. We would try homework, but we had too much energy back then and couldn’t take our minds away from our own fun for more than ten minutes.
Eventually we got bored and picked some crab apples from a tree in Trey’s yard. Our backyards faced a busy residential street that our old elementary school was on. The fence lined the backyards of the houses that faced the street. Trey and I each got a handful of crab apples. I stood at an angle to the fence so I could see, through the slats of the wooden planks, the next car that was coming up the street. We launched our handfuls over the fence. The car didn’t stop. We continued hitting car after car. There were a few boring people who kept on driving after we drilled them, but finally one car stopped right in the middle of the road.
“Run like hell,” Trey yelled.
“Good idea, dude.” I took off after him because he was the faster runner. He led the way to the front yard between our houses. From there we could hear the driver’s door slam, like he had stepped out to chase after us. We quickly caught our breath before walking to the end of the cul-de-sac. We took a few steps toward the corner of the fence and saw the car through the slats. A man was slowly driving up the street toward us.
“Go, go, go! He’s right there!” I yelled. We cut through backyards, jumping over shrubs, and rocks, and dodging through trees. The trampoline was a soft place to land. We stood up in time to see the driver turn the corner.
“That was a close call, Trey.”
“I know. He almost got us.”
We lay on the trampoline on opposite ends so we wouldn’t slide toward the middle where the trampoline would sag. When my family moved into this house we planted a small maple tree in the backyard and it had grown tremendously over the years. The maple now gave Trey and me shade from the hot afternoon sun and prevented the trampoline’s surface from being uncomfortably hot to touch. Before we hunkered down for the night with thirty blankets we made sure the trampoline rested under the maple tree so it would shade us from the streetlight. In a few years the maple was big enough to keep the light out from my parents second story bedroom.
The next five minutes passed in silence. We caught our breath. I stared at the clouds rolling across the sky and followed a rare maple leaf that had been brushed off by the rustling of the branches in the wind, fall down in-between us. Trey’s serious face caught me by surprise.
“We’re moving, Brian,” Trey said.
I took it in before I replied. He must not have known an easier way to break the news and it was impossible to break it lightly.
“Uhh…you are?” Silence.
“Yep, I would have told you sooner but I’ve been dreading this conversation with you because there’s no way to make it easy.”
“Well, no there isn’t. Where to? And why?”
“My Dad found a new job in some town about an hour south of here.” We had both returned to our backs, too afraid to face each other and the truth.
“That sucks. Well, what I mean is that sucks for you and us…good for your dad. When are you moving?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks, Trey? That’s so soon. You haven’t even put the house up for sale.”
“I know. My parents have already found renters and they closed on the new house last week.”
There was nothing I could say that would make Trey stay here, living next to me. I wanted it to be a lie, but I could see a tear sliding down his cheek. I rolled over on my stomach and elbows. My head drooped and I paid ridiculous attention to the blades of grass through the tarp of the trampoline, trying so hard to wish this away. My tears ran down my nose, falling to the trampoline. Our silence thickened the air. I sorted through my memories of Trey. I feared not having anyone to talk to. Who was I going to cause mischief with? When were we ever going to practice our new wrestling moves? When were we going to see each other again after he moved? And the years left of high school…I badly wanted to experience those with Trey. The double dates we could have gone on, the proms, and graduation parties. Those years now expanded in front of me, endless on the horizon. Each remaining year of high school was going to feel like a decade.
I wasn’t wise enough to enjoy the time we had left as neighbors and friends. To me, this news meant Trey was going to die in two weeks. Sixty miles away is just the same as a thousand miles away when you don’t have cars.
I think I’m heading inside, Brian,” Trey said as he rolled off his side of the trampoline. I expected him to break the silence with that, but I couldn’t tell if that was an open invitation for me to follow or not, so I just lay still.
“Okay, see ya later, man.” Maybe if I weaned Trey off like some bad habit it would make the move easier for the both of us.
I was foolish then. I should have spent as much time with Trey as possible over those weeks, but I didn’t.
Over the next few months Trey and I managed to see each other almost every weekend, but that was only through the summer. We got distracted from our friendship when school started. Our visits were mostly around holidays or three-day weekends when we had a lot of time on our hands.
The visits we had were less and less eventful. We always seemed to be reminiscing about what it was like when we lived next to each other. We tried wrestling on the trampoline, even threw crab apples at buses leaving the elementary school, but we weren’t into it like before. The experiences Trey and I had, the things we did, made any time apart insignificant because they could bring the closeness back, but whenever conversation shifted to the present I felt disengaged. We couldn’t achieve the comfortable level of friendship we had before by reminiscing about our experiences. We needed originality and it was not to be found by either one of us.
After one visit I realized that we would never have enough time to fully catch-up. Trey would always have friends I didn’t know, and I would always be involved in activities that he would never hear the details of, even if we had a week together. That wasn’t enough time to establish familiarity again. I thought Trey and I were living the same life. It was easy to think that because we liked the same stuff, thought the same stuff, and did the same stuff. Now it seems like they were always separate when I look back on those years.
* * *
Seven years later I find myself in a similar situation. College brought many new experiences and friends, but I didn’t expect it to bring a friend that I cherished as much as I had cherished Trey. Zvika is three years older than I and graduated a year ahead of me. I had accepted the fact that when I went to college I would have friends from all over the country, but Zvika is from Israel.
The morning before I took Zvika to the airport one last time, I lie on my bed and shuffled through the memories of my friend. For years I had confided in him all my internal struggles. The first year we lived in the same hall. I often walked down a few doors to his room to vent my frustration with life. He helped me through relationships with girls, or the lack thereof. I would lie on my floor staring at my ceiling after a girl rejected me. I busied myself with finding faces in the drywall pattern until Zvika came into my room and talked things over. He had served three years in the Israeli army before coming overseas. I always thought of him as being more experienced. I respected my elders, so I expected Zvika’s advice to be good. He had been through a long distance relationship with his girlfriend for years; I admired that, so I listened. In return, I offered up what little advice I had for him and occasionally I would correct his English.
I swung my legs over the side of my bed, waking my tired eyes for this day. On my trip to the bathroom I stopped and looked at the door Zvika slept behind.
My home was Zvika’s home away from home. He had joined us for Thanksgiving breaks and Easter breaks. He had been there when my family surprised me with a Nissan Maxima one morning. My mom took snapshots of us the first time we got in the car—smiles from ear to ear. My family took him in, welcomed and enjoyed his presence.
Before Zvika flew home to Israel this morning, he spent one last night in my parent’s house. I expected it to be a profound night, but just because someone is leaving doesn’t mean something magical is going to happen. We sat around and drank Coronas while watching Sportscenter. ESPN was a luxury we didn’t have at our apartment.
I knocked on Zvika’s door, opening it up to see him sprawled on top of the covers. “Hey, you ready?” I said.
“What time is it?”
“5:30. There’s a clock right there.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll be down shortly.”
“Alright, see you then.” I shut the door. Just like last night I had expected something great to happen, I expected our last conversations to be profound, but by now I know it is our friendships that make the everyday talks memorable.
My parents weren’t up yet, they had said goodbye to Zvika last night. I stood at the top of the stairs leaning over the banister listening to their goodbyes. I thought if I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t cry myself, but I did. Unlike my last weeks with Trey, I had spent as much time with Zvika as possible. I had known this day would come for three years. The brevity of friendships forces you to treasure them. I had learned that much from Trey, but you couldn’t learn to make these departures easy and I feared that most this morning.
“No breakfast?” I said to Zvika as he hauled his suitcase down the stairs.
“Nope, no time.”
“Okay, it’s up to you.” Zvika had always obsessed about being on time, and on time for him was early.
The drive to the airport was long; I had a lot of time to determine when I should give Zvika his letter. I had tried to write everything I felt, but it just turned out to be a jumbled mess. Finding the exact words that would encapsulate my emotion was impossible, this was a feeling that I couldn’t write about, at least not yet, maybe never.
I drove intently so it looked like I was too busy to talk. Zvika wasn’t saying anything either. The rift in our friendship was on the horizon. We silently cowered before it, afraid to take the next step on this journey.
“Man, I am glad you shipped all your other stuff home,” I said as I lifted Zvika’s suitcase out of the trunk.
“Got everything?”
“Hope so.” I could see tears in his eyes. Mine soon flooded with their own.
I hugged him tightly, trying to remind myself that I would see him again, but this was the end for this stage in our friendship. Backing off, I held out my hand to give him the letter.
He looked confused. “What’s this?”
“You’ll see,” I said.
I held out my hand for a parting handshake and Zvika firmly grasped it.
“Goodbye, my friend,” I said.
“Until next time.”
I laughed and stood on the edge of the curb leaning up against my car. Zvika turned and walked into the terminal. The tinted automatic doors shut behind him and he was gone.
It was silent in my car, absent of Zvika’s boisterous voice and joyful laugh. I thought of all the laughs we had shared then. The drive home was hard. I started to reminisce about the times with Zvika, the parties, the trips home, but mostly the conversations. We knew each other so well. I didn’t worry so much as to who would take his place like I did after Trey left. I knew no one would ever take his place, just as no one had replaced Trey. There would be another great friend down the road, but Zvika and Trey were now memories, some distant, some near.
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