“Skull is close,” I say. “Give up?”
Benny crosses his arms. “Sure. What’s the answer, Jerkster?”
I grin. “A coffin!”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes, it does, if you think about it. The man who sells a coffin doesn’t need one because he’s alive, whereas the man who buys one?—”
I can no longer speak because Benny is giving me a hug around my neck using his left arm.
He’s squeezing harder than he means to and I can’t breathe, but it’s worth it to feel the warmth of human touch.
Benny is my best friend.
I love him.
University life wasn’t for me.
Mother and Father told me my test scores weren’t as high as they’d hoped.
“Christ, with how weird he is, you’d think he’d at least be smart,” Father said.
“He is smart,” Mother responded. “He just has a very…unique intelligence.”
Unique.
That’s a word I hear often.
Without a match. A child who marches to the beat of his own drummer.
No longer a child, though. I’m eighteen, marching into a life outside of my parents’ loving embrace.
Father took me aside a month before my eighteenth birthday. “Look, Chet,” he said. “I’m going to have to be frank with you.”
“And I’ll be Chet with you,” I replied with a smile.
Father’s name is Frank. It was a good joke.
“Frank as in honest, Chet.” He rubbed at his forehead, the wrinkles deeper than they were when I was a child. “Your mother and I can’t afford to take care of you after you’ve turned eighteen. Since it doesn’t look like you’ll be going to college, you’re going to have to find a job once you graduate and support yourself.”
“Of course, Father,” I said. “But I just don’t know what I want to be.”
“You’ve had eighteen years to figure it out. But right now, any job will do. You’ve got a month before you’re out. Start making arrangements now.”
I didn’t get a cake for my eighteenth birthday. Just a suitcase in my favorite color, purple.
I pack it to the brim with my suits and a few mementos—and that old book of riddles, of course; I’ve even started to write some of my own—and I head into town, looking for businesses seeking help.
I talk to a few people, but they are taken aback by the way I speak to them. Mother says I’m eloquent, Father says I need to speak more like a man.
I’m not sure what that means. I am a man, ergo the way I speak is how a man speaks.
But none of them hire me.
Father made it clear I couldn’t sleep in his house tonight. Perhaps I can spend the night with a friend.
I know Benny’s address by heart. I memorized it years ago. I make my way into his neighborhood on foot, knock at his door.
