October 28, 2014 - Hell

So there I was – hating every single minute I spent in that classroom.

Even before stepping inside, I was already counting down the hours until I could escape. My bag felt heavier than usual, like it knew I was carrying something bad inside it – invisible but crushing all the same.

The day after the announcement, the whole school already knew about June and Jackie. Being the first “official” couple in our batch made them instant celebrities. People whispered their names between classes like they were campus royalty. You’d think they’d gotten married, not just held hands in front of the canteen. But that’s high school for you – a tiny, self-contained world where holding hands might as well be an international headline.

Kyle, Mike, and Joseph sat around me, forming what I liked to call The Brotherhood of Miserable Singles.

Joseph – bless his delusional optimism – didn’t care about Dota or tournaments or anything that didn’t involve the female anatomy. His entire existence revolved around one mission: find a girlfriend. Or, to be specific, find a girl willing to be naked around him at least once before graduation. The “relationship” part was, at best, a sub-quest.

“Lucky bastard,” Joseph muttered, shaking his head like June had just discovered the cure for loneliness.

We all nodded – different heads, same ache.

Kyle was still courting Minnie, who kept him on an emotional leash – close enough to hope, far enough to keep him starving. Mike didn’t have any prospects and somehow seemed zen about it, which made him the Buddha of our sad little circle. Joseph had plenty of prospects, but they rejected him with the precision of a military strike every single time.

And me? My reason didn’t need explaining.

It should’ve been me.
Not him.

“June’s cool, though,” Mike said carefully, like he was checking the floor for tripwires.

I didn’t answer.

The silence stretched, thick and familiar. They didn’t push. We’d been through enough tournaments, heartbreaks, and near-fistfights to know when to talk and when to shut up.

Kyle sighed, patted my shoulder once. “Get over it.”

Simple. Brutal. The kind of thing only a friend could say

I nodded, look like I’d already started the noble journey of moving on. They knew me enough to trust me to do the right thing. I was very mature for my age.

I still talked to June. I laughed at his jokes when they were actually funny – and even when they weren’t. I helped him with homework, gave him gameplay advice, even played chess with him. (I annihilated him, by the way. Not out of spite. Just pure skill.)

But only when he was alone.

When Jackie was with him, I wouldn’t even glance their way. I’d rather watch the ceiling fan spin and try to calculate its RPM than witness them smiling at each other. I’d rather do long division in my notebook – and I hated math.

Yep, I was very mature for my age.

When they first started getting close, I thought it felt like prison.

Turns out, that was heaven compared to this.

This was hell.

Not the dramatic kind with flames and pitchforks, but the slow, **** kind. The kind where you sit quietly and watch your own little paradise get handed to someone else.

I half-expected Dante himself to appear and start sketching me into a new circle of Inferno.

Not Dante from Devil May Cry. The other one. The one who actually wrote about suffering instead of stylishly shooting demons.

Which was my way of saying I’d started reading books.

At first, I just sat there, staring at my shoes while June and Jackie flirted in front of me. I memorized every tile crack on the classroom floor. Kyle smacked my back one day and said, “You’re gonna turn into Quasimodo if you keep hunching like that.”

Fitting, really. Quasimodo didn’t get the girl either.

One day, I hit my limit. My neck hurt from looking down, my forehead hurt from fake naps, and my chest hurt for reasons anatomy couldn’t explain.

Even when I closed my eyes, I couldn’t shut my ears. Their laughter, their whispered jokes – drip, drip, drip – like water ****.

So I turned, **** for a way out.

That’s when I saw it. Ginny, sitting right behind me, perked up - eyes wide, mouth curling into a grin.

I smiled back, automatically. But I wasn’t really looking at her. Behind her, I’d spotted something else - my real salvation.

The forgotten bookshelves.

Without another thought, I stood up. Ginny’s grin widened; she said something - maybe “hi,” maybe “finally” - but I wasn’t listening. I walked past her, an imaginary orchestra of kid angels swelling in my head as I made my way toward them. My sanctuary.

I approached the shelf like a man crawling out of a desert and finding a faucet. For the first time ever, I silently thanked our adviser for her corny “class library” idea.

The first book I grabbed: Tuesdays with Morrie.

I was hooked instantly. Devoured it in one sitting.

When I was done, I went back like a soldier reloading and pulled another: Dante’s Inferno. I actually laughed at the irony. A man walking through nine circles of hell, documenting pain? Finally, someone who got it.

That became my ritual. Every day, I buried myself in borrowed words. Books drowned out the noise. The classroom stopped feeling like a coffin and more like a hiding place. My back stopped hurting because I leaned back now, rocking my chair like a metronome. I fell over a few times, but I didn’t care. I just picked up where I left off.

Then one day, Jackie went to the bathroom – or maybe I thought she did; I was too deep into Inferno to care – and June slid into the seat next to mine.

“Hey, Al,” he said.

It took effort not to sigh. I closed the book, marked my page, and **** a smile. “What’s up?”

“Thanks for being cool about it.”

I raised an eyebrow. Mike turned in his seat nearby, eyeing us like he was ready to intervene if I decided to commit manslaughter.

“About what?” I asked. Calm. Controlled.

“Me and Jackie.”

For a second, I wondered if he was trolling me.

He stammered a little. “I just… I didn’t want things to get weird. You’re my friend. You guys are the first people who actually let me hang out.”

And somehow, I smiled. Genuinely. “It’s fine, man. No need to thank me. I told you, I don’t like her that way.”

He exhaled, relieved, just as Jackie came back.

I picked up my book again, pretending to read. Mike glanced over, mouthed, Are we the cool guys?

I gestured: Do you see any girls lining up for us?

He snorted. I went back to my book.

But I couldn’t really read after that. The words blurred, because my mind was somewhere else.

The truth was, I meant what I said – partly.

June could do what I couldn’t. Talk. Laugh. Exist near Jackie without combusting.

And worst of all – he made her happy.

And that had to be enough.

Maybe this was the lesson.

June had wanted to be friends with us long before Jackie entered the picture. I remembered how he lit up when Kyle first invited him to play. He just wanted in.

And that’s when I thought of Paulie.

That day he walked toward us – maybe that’s all he wanted too. Just to belong. Just to be part of something.

And what did I do?

I cut him down.

A small, sharp line that stuck like glass in his throat.

Now I understood.

If I could be kind to June – if I could forgive the guy who got what I wanted – maybe that was the punishment working. Maybe that was karma teaching me how to be decent.

“We’re friends, June,” I told him one afternoon. “Don’t worry about it.”

And I meant it.

I wasn’t picky. You didn’t need to pass a test to be my friend. You just had to want to, Maybe we’d never be as close as me, Kyle, Mike, and Joseph.

But he’d earned it.

He’d earned my friendship.

The lie, of course, was that I didn’t like Jackie.

But now that June was my friend, it had to be fine.

Even if it felt like hell every single day.

That evening, while walking home, I saw it again.

The dog.

Sitting in the same spot under the same flickering streetlight.

But it looked different now – healthier. Its ribs no longer showing, its black fur catching the orange glow of the lamppost. It sat there waiting, tail flicking lazily like it was expecting me.

I crouched down, unzipped my bag, pulled out a handful of kibble I’d started carrying. Scattered it on the pavement.

The dog walked forward, sniffed once, then started eating.

Didn’t look at me. Not once.

“Is it over?” I asked quietly. My voice sounded foreign in the night air. “Am I done being punished?”

The dog kept eating, tail wagging faintly.

When it finished, it turned and walked away – not limping anymore. Just gone.

No answer.
No acknowledgment.

I stood there a long while, watching the spot where it vanished, the echo of its claws fading into the night.