Zeke smiles coyly back at him. The charged energy between them is palpable. I shouldn’t stay here too long.
I push my chair out and lie down on the balcony tiles, staring up at the sky while I puff on my smoke.
‘That can’t be comfortable,’ Zeke mutters.
I hunt for my favourite constellation, but Orion’s Belt is nowhere to be seen tonight. We’re too close to the light pollution of the CBD – only a handful of the brightest stars are struggling through, and the rest get swallowed whole. Maybe Orion was a human who made it to the heavens, but now I wonder if he even wanted that. I always imagined being a mortal among gods would make you feel chosen and superior, but what if it just made you suffocatingly lonely to never be around your own kind?
‘Poofs on a roof,’ I say. ‘Only three of us, this time.’
Both the other boys say nothing. The Dom Dolla song finishes at the same moment, leaving a pulsing beat of silence over us as thick as a blanket.
‘Sorry,’ I add. ‘Mood killer.’
Hammer clears his throat. ‘Never got a chance to say it, but I’m sorry about Matt. He was nice to me, that night after the Summer Dance. He seemed like a top bloke.’
I am too numb from Curtis’ death to feel any sadder than I already do.
‘He was nice to me, too,’ Zeke adds. ‘That night we jumped the fence to get into the school, I was too fat to get over it. Hammer, you just kept going, but Matt stopped and helped me over the fence, and he didn’t make me feel shit about it.’
I nod. That’s Matty.
We don’t say anything. A Pendulum song takes the space left by Dom Dolla. Nature abhors a vacuum.
‘I feel so fucking guilty about Matt,’ I admit, lump in my throat. ‘The last time I ever saw him, he tried to kiss me on the cheek. He knew he was saying goodbye for good. And I didn’t …’ I choke on it but I need to say it to them. ‘I didn’t kiss him back.’ My voice breaks; that sentence is poison leaving my body. ‘I was just so angry at him for breaking up with me. I shoved his face away. Matt kissed the palm of my hand instead. You have no idea how much I regret that every single time I think about it. If he was going to leave, I wish I’d let him kiss me.’
I’m crying a bit. This guilt is corrosive and nothing they say or do can ever undo it. Both the others make the noises you’d expect them to make. Zeke goes to offer to pull me up off the floor and into a hug, but I’m not in the mood to be comforted. I need to release this.
‘And I introduced him to that Green Day song,’ I say, externalising it for the first time. I’ve never told anyone this. ‘That’s why he called them letterbombs. It’s my fault.’
‘Jesus,’ Zeke says.
‘Called what letterbombs?’ Hammer asks. Forgot he doesn’t know shit.
Zeke tells him. Hammer whistles, long and low.
Zeke adds, ‘Charlie, that’s not your fault. Matt was suicidal before he ever met you. He was in so much pain he couldn’t cope. Being with you made his life better, not worse.’
‘I can hear that, but I can’t make myself believe it,’ I say. ‘I have replayed that night over and over in my head. Everything was so perfect up until that moment. Like a rollercoaster reaching its peak climb right before it plummets. If I could have frozen it there, we’d be okay. Me and Matty at the top of the world together. Instead it all went to shit, and it’s stayed shit, and it’s never gonna get better, is it? I don’t want youse to cheer me up or tell me I’m wrong. I want you to get that my life has been shit since then. My life is going nowhere. Every single day of my life, I feel so fucking lonely.’
The boys are both silent and I feel a smouldering, angry victory to have shut them up.
‘That’s exactly it,’ Hammer says eventually, nodding at me and making eye contact. ‘Fucken lonely. That’s me, too. Every day.’
‘Well,’ Zeke says. ‘Make that all of us.’
We fall silent, and when the Pendulum song finishes, Hammer presses pause, leaving us without music, too. We can hear the cum trees, if that’s what they are, rustling gently below, and the dull sound of freeway traffic on the Narrows Bridge echoing over the fat part of the river, and our own breaths. I don’t think any of us realised until now that the eyes of all our hurricanes are the same cold iris of loneliness, turning their cyclonic spines since the same night seven years ago. We’re as shattered as each other.
‘We fucked things up back then,’ Zeke says. ‘We found each other but we messed it up. But here we are again. If you mess something up once, that’s forgivable. Mess it up twice, and we’re idiots, right? I’m not saying we have to be best mates, but we owe it to each other to not mess this up again. If we’d known that the first time, there might still be four of us here. And if I don’tsay this now, I don’t want to wake up one day and find out we’re down to two.’
Hammer covers his face.
‘If any of us feels so lonely that he doesn’t wanna be on the planet anymore, he has to tell the other two,’ Zeke says. ‘We can go months or years without seeing each other, but if things ever get dark, wehaveto tell each other. Like a pact.’
I swallow the lump. ‘Okay, dude. I promise.’
‘I will, too,’ Hammer mutters hoarsely.
Zeke says we have to shake on it. I get up off the floor and sit back at the table with the other two. I hold Zeke’s vodka-cold palm in one hand and Hammer’s sweaty palm in the other, and we shake each other’s hands, hard and rough.
