Driven

Friends

Photo by Tomek Baginski on Unsplash

I swear to whatever God you believe in that I was the only person who was nice to Liddell.

When we moved to Fox Hedge I didn’t know you were supposed to be mean to him.

Seemed that way, anyway.

Week we moved in, I was playing army men, by myself, in our shed and I had to pee, so I went outside the shed, next to an old rosebush my mom tried to make nice, but never could, and started whizzin.

And there was Liddell, lookin’ at my dick.

He didn’t say nothin’ mean, so I figured we were kinda automatically friends.

He played army men with me in the shed, and he used to kinda rub this old Volkswagen engine my mom’s boyfriend had. 

He’d say “One day I’m gonna be a drag racer.”

I’d kinda tease him, tell him he wasn’t ever gonna be a drag racer by pettin’ an old VW engine.

But I was never mean.

He warned me when we started school that fall to not act like we were friends.

I thought it was maybe because he didn’t wanna be seen with the new kid, kid from up north who talked sorta different.

“Naw, it ain’t you,” Liddell told me. “You’ll see.”

I saw.

Jesus Christmas with a singin’ angel on the tree were they mean to that kid.