just_like_always raze high_school terrified me. none of my grade school friends followed me to walkerville. they all went to st. anne's. after having a home away from home for the better part of a decade, i was forced to start over with nothing but a multi-purpose binder and a head full of half-formed songs. i spent most of my time eating lunch in the stairwells, writing lyrics for songs i would never record, and trying to make myself more invisible than i already was. mark was the first friend i made. i can't remember what got us talking. we had a few classes together. i guess we we connected because we were both aloof and alone. i started walking with him to his house during our lunch period. he had an older sister named tereska. she was always smiling. i had a crush on her the size of a small city. she looked exactly like mark with long hair. maybe he was the one i really had a crush on. no one else at walkerville liked him. and i mean no one. people i didn't know started stopping me in the hall. "you seem like a nice person," they would say. "what are you doing hanging out with that guy?" i would say, "i like him. he's a nice person too." and then they would say, "no. he's not." they were right. it just took me a while to see it. he would show me political cartoons in the newspaper knowing i wouldn't understand them. he started bragging about all the books he'd read that i'd never even heard of. he would spew random bits of useless trivia and gloat. our conversations became monologues. he swooned to the sound of his own voice. when i had something to say, he would change the subject or ignore me until i stopped talking. once, i played him a tape i made as part of the audition process for our school's version of a talent show. he sat at his kitchen table and listened without saying anything. when the music was over, he got up and walked into another room. he came back with an old shoebox tape recorder loaded with a cassette of his own. it was a classical piece he played at a violin recital. it was awful. his tone was so shrill it hurt my ears. his intonation almost didn't exist. "that's good," i lied. he just stared at me. i was better at something than he was. he didn't know how to handle that. on one of our walks, he tried out a martial arts move on me without letting me know it was coming. he could have hurt me. he almost did. he thought it was funny. his parents had money. but that wasn't it. that was too easy to be it. his father only seemed to exist in family photos. maybe he was the original asshole and it all trickled down from there. mark didn't get his mean streak from his mother. i know that much. she always went out of her way to make me feel welcome. and she made the best grilled cheese sandwich i've ever tasted in my life. at mark's fifteenth birthday party, some guy i didn't know walked through the front door with a gift he barely wrapped and left without taking his coat off. he couldn't get out of there fast enough. i was the only other person who showed up. we batted a red balloon back and forth in the living room. i told mark there was this girl i saw walking through the hall most mornings when i was sitting on the floor with my back to the door of my first period english class, waiting for the teacher to let_me_in. i didn't know her name. i didn't know anything about her. i thought she was a painter. or maybe a dancer. she had dark hair, dark eyes, and a smile that made me believe in miracles. she was worth being early for. i wanted to tell her i thought she was beautiful. i didn't know how you said a thing like that to a stranger without making them uncomfortable. "you should just say hello," mark said. "ask her what her name is. tell her yours. skim the surface and see what happens." it was good_advice. i was too skittish to take it. after a few weeks, i stopped seeing her in the hall. i never found out who she was. maybe i imagined her. mark and i shared a third period business class. i guess that was where our friendship ended. he managed to get an answer wrong on one of our tests. that never happened. i was the only one who aced it. he didn't take it very well. "you idiot," he said. "i can't believe someone as stupid as you got something like that right. what's the answer?" "i wouldn't know," i said. "i'm an idiot." "come on," he said. "tell me." "you got to roll with the punches, little black boy," i said. "you got to roll with the punches." mark was whiter than a marshmallow in a snowstorm. and i didn't have a racist bone in my body. i was just listening to a lot of randy_newman at the time, and that line from his "land of dreams" album was stuck in my head. i stopped meeting mark at his locker at lunchtime. i went back to eating alone. it took him a few months to corner me in the hall. it was awkward. he looked lost. i let him guilt me into having lunch at his house one last time. when his mother asked why she hadn't seen me in so_long, i told her i'd been eating in the park to take advantage of the spring weather. it was the best thing i could come up with off the top of my head. it was even half true. i only saw mark once after we graduated, at a yusef lateef concert. he was a few rows ahead of me. he was with a date. he didn't notice me. all he did was talk all night about nothing that meant anything to anyone, deaf to the music being made right in front of him. just like always. 250626 what's it to you? who go blather from