I am tough for a reason and it is to fucking destroy the music. I dance hard.

My eyes are darting to all the places my magazines are hidden. I feel like an idiot sometimes for having printed evidence. My friends look at stuff on their phones like it's their job. Don't get me wrong, I've looked, and there's some alright stuff online, but I prefer the magazines. I guess I'm a retro sort of man. Call me classy.

So once the zookeeper realized it was the monkeys who stole the bananas, he knew there was only one way he'd be able to get them back."
"How?" I whispered. My throat was so sore.
"Don't talk. He had to beat them in shuffleboard, of course."
"What?"
"I said don't talk. Monkeys love shuffleboard."
He used a page from a homework assignment he'd failed and a stack of quarters to make a shuffleboard court. I watched the monkeys and the zookeepers have their showdown while I sipped the last of my applejuice.
"Need more?" Graham asked me without looking up, when my straw skidded against the dry bottom of the box.
"Uh uh."
"You're supposed to drink juice."
"I just drank some."
"More, though."
I shook my head.
"Drink more juice or the monkeys are going to kill you. The only thing they love more than shuffleboard is beating up dehydrated sick boys.

Even though Graham and I went back to arguing and stealing socks and hiding each other's toothbrushes in the litter box, I didn't forget that Graham didn't think I needed a best friend, because either it meant he thought I was cool enough to handle everything alone or—and this was what I hoped—it meant that he was my best friend, quietly, forever, no matter what.
I mean, after all, whose skates had I been wearing?

I don't want to die, but I wish waking up every morning didn't feel like such a fuck-you every single time.

If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what's okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave.
He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him.
So he wouldn't leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now.
But this isn't a fairy tale, and he doesn't appear. We stand here for a long time.
He really left.
Because it was all that we could do.