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It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. Reggie was beyond used to it. He was used to being left behind.
When he was growing up, barely out of diapers and still stumbling on his tiny feet, he’d had an imaginary friend. Her name had been Lark. She’d had bright lilac hair and a smile full of gapped teeth and tongue. It had always made him feel like home.
Lark had been around for only a few years when his parents had begun to push him, push him to get rid of Lark. They acted as if she was someone he could just toss away! But they needn’t worry.
Come the first week of second grade, Lark had grown distant. She’d told Reggie he wasn’t fun anymore. It just wasn’t the same. He’d grown boring as he aged, fixating on space and stars and faraway lands that he’d never reach rather than what was staring him in the face. Reggie had begged, pleaded, promising to be better. But then Lark had left and he was alone again.
Alone was on and off for a while. Reggie got friends, for a few months, and then they’d move on. It hurt, but it stung less because they weren’t close. Reggie never minded. His mama called them fair-weather friends and he thought that sounded funny and good. It meant they’d come back when it was warmer. But they never did.
Then Reggie turned thirteen and he met Luke. Luke Patterson, the boy with a guitar twice his size and the attitude to match. It had been friendship at first sight.
They did everything together. They swung on the swings, doodled in math class instead of paying attention to Mr. Lagoya, and they spent all their free time out in the fort that Luke had built in the woods behind his house. And for once Reggie was happy. He forgot about people leaving and the pain it wrought.
And then Alex came and it was even better. Alex understood Reggie in a lot of ways that Luke didn’t and Alex always had candies shoved in his pockets. Quickly, he’d joined their circle and folded in as if he’d always belonged. Maybe he had.
Then sophomore year came and Luke and Alex were suddenly LukeandAlex and Reggie didn’t mind, because they were still around, but it was less than before. But he still had them. He still had Alex and Luke, even if they only spoke in school and through stilted, too quick phone calls.
But by winter break, Reggie couldn’t deny the truth. Luke and Alex may have ended the relationship between them, but it seemed they’d also ended their friendship with Reggie. He didn’t understand. He begged for an explanation. But Luke only shrugged, mumbling how he needed less negative in his life and Alex had patted his shoulder, apologized, and walked home.
And Reggie was alone again. He was sitting on his bedroom floor, listening to his mother cry into the phone for the hundredth time this week about the divorce, about her husband leaving her for someone better and only telling her in a hastily written note scratched onto a cocktail napkin. And Reggie felt it. The same old echo inside his chest. The hollow thump of a heart left with no reason to beat.
Reggie sighed and he went to his closet to dig out the bottle of pills. When he’d turned thirteen he’d gone to the zoo with Luke and Alex. On his way up the ramp to see the giraffes and feed them he’d slipped and fell. When he’d awoken it was to a hospital room and a fractured collarbone. They’d given him meds and he’d stored them away, loving the quietness they offered his mind.
Settling back on the bed, Reggie swallowed down a palmful, the deep ache rooting its way into his ribs, curling around them like vines and squeezing. Sighing, he laid back, allowing it all to replay.
Lark. Kyle. Stephen. Marcus. Jennifer. Luna. Willow. Carter. Luke. Alex. Dad.
A mantra of names on repeat, swallowing him up and spinning him like a washer, drowning him in the sound of abandonment and regret and hurt. And Reggie lay, letting it pull him under, letting the pills do their job and quiet his mind.
Reggie Peters was a lonely boy. He’d grown up thinking that he was meant to be abandoned, easily forgotten like a gas station receipt. Reggie had never expected anyone to remember him. But his mother did. Luke and Alex, two teenagers who only needed time to sort out their own feelings, remembered him. It wasn’t always fondly, and more often than not they envisioned the black clothes and the cherry wood of the box he was laid in barely a week from his sixteenth birthday, but they remembered.
Reggie believed his friends to all be imaginary...because in the end they all left. But he was the one who wound up abandoning them all. His mother. His siblings. Luke. Alex. And the tiny speck in the future that could’ve been his own family. In the end...Reggie left and the hurt spiraled over those he abandoned like a washer, drowning them in it.