Chapter 9

   I hop off my motorcycle and look around until I see Ash standing in front of a man and woman I guess possibly his parents. I walk up closer to them, I notice that they’re yelling but Ash is yelling and crying. I walk closer to hear what they’re saying, the woman is yelling that it’s Ash’s fault, and Ash is yelling that it's the woman’s fault, and the man is yelling at them to stop. I walk up to them and wrap my arm around Ash. 

   “And who is this? A friend?” the woman asks.

   “Close,” I say with a smirk and Ash looks up at me with a look I can read perfectly, the ‘what are you doing? Are you crazy? ‘I’m going to kick your ass later’ look, but I ignore it.

   “Boyfriend?” the woman chokes on her words as if she’s disgusted to say it.

   “Yup,” I said with a nod and looked back down at Ash smiling but he looked back at me with the ‘you're a complete moron’ look and then he looked down at his feet. The woman grabs him by the wrist and slaps him. 

   “Karen!” The man yells at the woman, perfect name for her. Ash pulls his arm away and runs off and I follow. I find him sitting against a tree and I sit next to him. He grabs a small frame out of his pocket-the frame says ‘siblings by birth, friends by choice’ and it has a picture of him and his sister-he stares at the picture and starts crying so I hugged him and he hugs me back. I see Eli, Elly, and Ming start walking toward us but I shake my head ‘no’ and they nod and walk away.

   When Ash finally calms down we go and finish the funeral and Ash sets his picture on Sakura’s grave. I look at the dates and try to do the math to figure out how old she is. Ash catches me counting on my fingers and laughs. “She’s 19, 4 years older than me,” he says, making me do some subtraction to guess his age and when I got the answer I was surprised.

   “You’re 15!?” I ask.

   “No, I just turned 16, I meant only years, she was turning 20 soon.”

   “But I'm almost 17.”

   “I skipped a year.”

   “Oh” we both start laughing and walk down to the park. Ash keeps getting snow in his shoes so I carried him most of the way. 

   “Ash, is that really you?” a girl from behind us said and Ash jumped off of my back.

   “Blossom!” Ash yells and hugs her, she looks around Sakura’s age. 

   “Waylen, this is Blossom, she’s my sister's close friend, Blossom this is Waylen he’s my boyfriend,” Ash says, his sunshine smile on full show.

   “Boyfriend eh?” She walks up to me, her eyes piercing. 

   “If you ever do anything bad or mean to him I’ll make sure you can’t even walk.” after she says that I get an idea and smirk.

   “So in other words I can’t even lay a finger on him?”

   “Yes,”

   “Ok, then so I can’t even do this?..,” I grab Ash by the waist and pull him close so his body is pressed to mine, I kiss him making a tomato like Eli, I feel a hand claw into my shoulder and I turn around to see Blossom glaring at me so I take off running.  I look at Ash still running and notice that he’s laughing which makes me smile.  

   The next week went slow, like extremely slow, slow enough that I could count and keep track of the days, so I did but not because it went slow but because I had a feeling something was going to happen good or bad.

Monday, January 1, ????

   When Ash and I got on the bus, everyone was glaring at him and it made him and I confused, even Eli and Elly were glaring. “What's going on?” Ash asks, looking up at me.

   “I don’t know,” I say, grabbing his hand and walking to the back of the bus.

   “Eli, what's going on?” I say making him turn around and hand me his phone.

    So there are quite a few new kids here and all became close to Ashen, but what if they knew what we know? Well that’s what I’m here for. First off, you all remember what happened in middle school right?  Well if you don’t, let me tell you, my older brother used to be friends with dear little Ashen, but obviously Ashen wanted more, my brother declined so Ashen did questionable things to my poor brother, I hope you know what I mean by that. Second off, Ashen says things behind all of our backs, even his “friends” for example, he says Eli is still a girl even though he’s trans, says that Elly is annoying, says that Ming's dyed hair makes her look bad. Third and lastly, he cheats,

 he’s cheating on our lovely German boy, Waylen. That’s all. 

your truth giver- Subree.

    All I could do was laugh a little, there's no way any of this is true, but I still looked over at Ash to ask, “Is this true?” I say handing him Eli’s phone, he reads it and looks disgusted.

   “Absolutely not” he looks uncomfortable and mumbles to himself.

  “Can’t believe they still believe him, I didn’t attack him” he mumbles but I could still hear him say it. Tears fill his eyes slightly.

   “Starboy?” As I say it he already gets off the bus but he doesn’t head into the school, he goes around back, I follow him under the bleachers of the football field. I grab his hand and he stops, his hand is cold and he’s shaking. 

   “It was the other way around wasn’t it?” I ask it quietly as if the words were deadly. Ash tenses up and starts crying, I pull him into a hug and he relaxes against me, I’m glad he feels safe and comfortable with me.

   “What the fuck did he do to you?” I mumble it, not really asking it directly, not knowing if I want him to answer or not, he takes a shaky breath and I know he heard me.

   “Ms. Haren was the one to find me, that’s probably why she’s the only one who believes me, believes that he-“ I just held him tighter, I knew what he was going to say and he didn’t want to say it and I didn’t want to hear it.

   Eli and Elly started to be extremely rude to Ash and I didn’t like it, but the only time I got mad was when Eli hit Ash, I slapped him pretty hard and told him to leave Ash alone and that he didn’t know the truth. I was back to being Ash’s only friend even though I was more than his friend, I was the only one he had.

   We went throughout the day normally, except I kept having to calm Ash down.