Friday

Senn’s plan to buy boxes to get Tessa and Dean to stop whining about his boxes had sort of backfired, resulting in a huge fight on Thursday evening.

First, the fight was solely about the fact Senn simply refused to try and feel at home, but later Tessa had cried over the fact he didn’t want to feel at home, Dean became upset because nothing they had done had been good enough for Senn and Jessica had gotten involved to tell Senn to stop upsetting her parents. They then became angry over the fact Senn had been sent out of three classes in a row and skipping the other three to buy the boxes in the first place.

Eventually it had been Killian who had managed to calm things down, defending Senn in the process, telling Tessa and Dean they couldn’t push him to move faster in his process of grieving by forcing him to accept things he wasn’t ready to accept yet.

It was a complete shitshow, and when Senn was done with school on Friday, he didn’t even want to go to their house. He didn’t want to see them, possibly ending in a fight yet again, while Killian was at work until later in the evening. So, he hung out by the river with his friends, he ate at Avan’s place, and he went to the park by himself, not planning on going back to their house before he was too tired to stay up.

Maybe he would even go to the treehouse and stay out for an entire night. He didn’t care what they would think if he did. It wasn’t like they were his parents. No, his parents would’ve never let him stay away for so long without calling him to ask him if he was okay.

So far, he had received no calls.

So, he sat on the swing set in the park, facing the white house that he once used to call home, grabbing a diary from his backpack that he had been carrying around all day, every day, because his dad’s magic 8 ball had told him it was a good idea to keep it with him.

It held memories that he wrote down himself. Memories, he simply hadn’t been able to remember himself. The entries were all written during his time in hospital. The first three and a half weeks were missing, since he was either not awake and able to write, or unaware that he suffered from short memory loss.

Which is basically why they told him to keep a diary; write everything down and train his memory. But that included entries in which he described, over and over again, for days in a row, that his parents had died in the car accident that landed him in that hospital. How Liam wasn’t there to cheer him up, how Killian visibly was struggling to act tough and be there for him.

There were also shorter entries that made him smirk when he read them back; ‘this sucks’, ‘everything has gone to hell’, ‘the nurse is trying to poison me with Brussels sprouts’.

And one that caused him to tear up; ‘I can’t even remember the last time Mom and Dad told me they love me’. Which automatically led to him wondering if they would even love him still, now that he had changed so much. They didn’t even know he was struggling with his sexuality, or more so, how to come out to them.

He wiped a lost tear away, when a shadow beside him made him jump in his seat.

“What is it with you and this swing set?” Elio sounded amused, and he was smirking when he came into view. But his smirk dropped as soon as he saw Senn’s face. He sat down on the other swing, and took in a deep breath. “What happened?”

“I got in a car crash and my whole life got fucked over is what happened.”

“What’s that?” Elio asked, pointing towards the diary, further ignoring Senn’s answer to his second question. Which only seemed fair since Senn had ignored his first question too.

“Some stupid diary I kept when I was in hospital. It was supposed to help me train my memory, but I can’t remember writing any of this.”

“But your memory got better, right?”

“I guess, I mean, I don’t forget what happens within a day. But I couldn’t give you a detailed essay on what I did last Friday either. I just remember events, not details.”

“Well, the details will come when they need to come.” Elio flashed a careful smile.

“So, what’s it with you and this swing set?” Senn asked him his own question, not wanting to further discuss the accident or the result. “You always seem to show up when I hang out here.”

“I asked first.”

Senn snorted, closing the diary while shaking his head lightly. “Okay, fair enough.” He pointed at the white house, feeling his gut wrench when he spoke again. “I used to live there. The lighted window on the left was Liam’s room. The two windows in the middle was my room, and all the way on the right, that was Mom and Dad’s room.”

“Really?”

“Yup, Killian sold it with the help of our aunt and uncle. I’ve never been back in there since the accident.” Senn sighed deep, feeling depressed and lonely. “I remember a day… It’s the last memory I have in there… I got home from school with an F for Spanish, dreading my parents’ reaction. But Mom was always telling us what skills where actually useful and while she valued the ability to speak multiple languages, she told me it wasn’t the end of the world. We would just go to Spain in summer, learn some Spanish there, and do better this year. We ended up baking cookies with the flags of every Spanish country in the world and that was it. Needles to say, we never went to Spain.”

Elio even seemed to tear up over Senn’s memory, or maybe it was because it was his last memory and the plan to go to Spain had never been executed. Senn didn’t know what it was, but the air seemed too thick, to heavy to breathe.

“So, why are you always showing up here?”

“Oh, you know, I like to take a walk outside and empty my mind. That, or the universe is just constantly telling me to go here to be there for you. Pick whichever you like most.”

Senn stared at Elio for a long while, wondering what it was about him that he seemed to like so much. He didn’t really feel like he actually took interest in anything or anyone. He preferred no company at all, yet when Elio was around, it didn’t feel like a suffocating presence. It felt just fine.

“Wanna go do something fun?” Elio suddenly asked, jumping up from his swing. “Let’s go out.”

“You wanna go out? What time is it even?”

“Around ten?” Elio asked, apparently not knowing for sure.

Senn grabbed his phone and noticed, by now, he had missed about a dozen calls from his aunt, his uncle, and Killian. He ignored them all and looked at the time. “It’s ten past ten. And yes, let’s go out and get shitfaced drunk. At least that way I have a fun reason not to remember an evening.”

Elio chuckled, and helped him up. “But we need to ditch your backpack, and I suggest you drop it off at my place. But for that, I need to tell you why I’m really always here.”

“Why?”

“We… I… My father bought the house,” Elio turned to look at the white house. “So, if you want to stay over for the night, sleep in your old room… I don’t even know if that’s what you want, but… you can, okay?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah…”

“I—” Senn swallowed back the lump that was forming in his throat. “I… I really, I want…”

“You would like that?” Elio filled in the blanks, left by Senn’s inability to remember how to properly pronounce words.

So, he nodded.