"And Then There Were More"

     Here comes the part where I meet Jayson. I'm going to cut to the chase, I did not like the kid.  At all. Here I am, entering my 6th year at Hogwarts, I mean elementary school, and in comes Jayson. Word around school was that he was from another neighboring school, and quite frankly not much was known about him because he never spoke. And to be frank, I really didn't care about this new kid with the clean bowl cut and large basketball shorts who happened to sit two seats away from me in history class. I was far too content with the friends I had thus far made. But that's where the problems began, because it was nestled into my friend group that he found home.

     It started off with small things, maybe an odd invite here and there to hangouts where he would be present, but quickly it became much more. I remember showing up to multiple birthday parties and perusing the festivities only to at some point come across Jayson sitting tucked into a corner or crook, staring at everyone. And for some reason something about this infuriated me. But I never made a point to address this, or how incredulous it seemed, and I left things alone. Learned to ignore him and his presence, and over time, it became second nature. And this about sums up the relations we had for some time.

     Sixth grade was coming to a close, and a solid amount of bad incidents with this "estranged" individual had accumulated under my proverbial belt, but I had managed to survive without blowing up on him. Even through particularly embarrassing and obnoxious framing's. And that is why when he invited me to his end of the year party at his house ( yes, a shy introvert hosted a large get together), I was beyond surprised. To the point that I had to go to see what was up. Maybe even to do a little background work and see if I could reverse engineer the kid's brain with the elements of his home life etc that I discover.

    The only thing I found was a life long friend.

    The get together shifted gears into a sleep over as the numbers began to thin, and before long none other than my own "bros" were the only ones left and we were having a blast; sneaking out and binge eating McDonald's and wrestling with his dogs and shredding in Guitar Hero and creeping on facebook. It is one of the most memorable nights of my life.
   
     The following morning all of my buds left early, their parents around to pick them up etc. because they had stay-at-home moms while I did not. Even Jayson's mother had gone off to work. And in the sudden quiet that proceeded their departures we found our first similarity. Family structure. Daily routines and parental dynamics. From there conversation topics webbed out, surprising for various reasons, as we sat there and for the first time, just talked; confided.

    And talked.

    And talked.

    And talked.