inevitably need to meet up with my buddies, but for my first night in our old stomping grounds, I wanted to be alone. It was impossible to ignore someone’s absence when you were surrounded by the people who loved them, so being alone was a salve to my soul tonight. We were a tight group of friends and I knew they meant well, but they didn’t know me like Will had. Will knew that I needed space. He respected that. He never pushed. He let me breathe. Which was something I was having more and more trouble with since I’d gotten the news that he’d passed away.
Discarding the forgotten pretzel into my napkin, I picked up my glass. The ice clinked, sending up with it the aroma of grapefruit. Normally, I would observe other people, taking them in as I drank, but tonight I wanted nothing more than to focus on my glass and not my surroundings. I supposed taking the drink in my room would have been smarter, but I knew I was less likely to break down if I was surrounded by strangers. And since my head had been fucking pounding for the last few days, I needed to stay away from solitude as long as I could. How odd that I felt safer in the company of strangers than the company of the friends who knew my late friend.
Will wasn’t just any friend, though. He was my best friend—the one who held my arm when I broke it after doing a trick on my bike. He was the one who gave me all of his Halloween candy when some bigger kids swiped my entire bucket. The one who lied to my mom for me when I snuck out to see a girl in high school—claiming I was at his house. The guy who gave me my first underage beer and who told me ridiculous stories to keep me upbeat as I threw up the fourth and fifth beers I’d stupidly insisted I could handle. He was the guy who dropped everything when my mom died, whose parents swooped in and took care of all the things that were too much for an orphaned young adult to handle. He stayed with me at my mom’s house, helping me pack up the things that were hers. He sat in my car as I visited my dad for the last time, hyping me up to tell my sperm donor exactly what I thought of him through the safety of thick prison glass.
Will’s family was my family—the people who watched me walk across the stage and receive my college diploma; whose cheers seemed a million decibels louder than the cheers for everyone that followed me. Will was the one who went with me to my mom’s grave immediately after, still wearing my cap and gown and sat a few dozen feet away as I talked to her. In the background, but waiting for me if I needed him. Again, letting me breathe but never leaving me alone.
I didn’t know how to not need him. How did someone move on from losing their best friend? I knew what it was like to have him by my side, but I didn’t know what it was like to go at this alone.
And his parents. Fuck.
I rubbed the heel of my palm against my watery eye. His parents, saints from above, who treated me like their own—hell, better than their own. They did more for me than most parents do for their own children. And now they were grieving the loss of their vibrant, funny, charismatic son.
I hadn’t reached out to them yet. It had been a year since I last saw them, and I didn’t know how much they knew—about the circumstances prior to Will’s death, about my own estranged friendship with Will over the last six months. I regretted much in my life, but nothing more than those six months of discomfort between Will and me.
Will was always a risk-taker—so much so that maybe he had believed himself immortal, or unsusceptible to injury. But his last trip—creeking—had proved that immortality was still out of reach for even the bravest of humans.
Done with attempting to drown my sorrows, I lifted my hand to ask for the bill, but the bartender was distracted by a group of four women that came through the door. Lowering my hand, I took them in. They were dressed in typical bachelorette party attire—with glowing pink penises hanging from their