The way the first Casey and I became friends was that Casey conned me into giving him my phone number. He told me he wasn’t gonna use it, so I gave it to him, because he was a clever six years old, and I was a gullible six.
Casey and his mom lived in one of those places in Maine where you just keep going down the Stephen-King-ass road through the Stephen King-ass woods until you get to this Stephen King-ass house. It was the perfect place for kids like us. Casey’s dad, before the divorce, got an old dead speedboat, dragged it up into the woods so it sat crooked, leaned against a tree. He painted all the glass windows and metal walls of the boat so thick with brown paint you could smell it for years. He built a treehouse on stilts out of old plywood that we fit half a dozen kids in one time, and a little wooden storefront that he painted pink with a little yellow flower under where the cashier would stand. We played pretended and we told stories and we spent our childhood there.
Casey’s mom kept a bunch of weird garbage there all the time, I don’t know why, they just always had weird garbage. When it started to get to be twilight Casey’s mom would start a fire in the firepit, and because it was out in the country and you could get away with these things, we would chuck the weird garbage into the fire. When we were eleven, on one of those bonfire evenings, just before night fell, we rolled a truck tire into the fire, and watched a column of black smoke rise out of the fire and into the sky, like the tire was a portal straight to hell. When I looked down, I saw the steel wire they put in there. I didn’t know there was steel in tires like that.
But it was around that time that both of our lives hit the shitter. My dad started having strokes and Casey was being shipped back and forth to a mental facility hours away. You don’t get rid of friends in hard times though, especially when you’re a kid. The day my father was airlifted away to the big hospital where he’d spend his final conscious days, Casey and I were together in the backseat of my mom’s car, while she spoke on the phone with the hospital. It wasn’t sounding good. Soon I was crying, and Casey leans over across the backseat and pulls my head into his lap. He starts playing with my hair, and tells me that it’s gonna be okay, and he comforts me and he sooths me. We were both going through a lot, but he cared for me anyway.
A year later, Casey and I are thirteen, and he comes out as trans. Mom teaches me to drive on that Stephen King-ass dirt road, and we’d have dinners and board games together, the four of us. Not long after, though, my mom’s workload gets too big, and Casey and I stop seeing each other. I don’t remember how long it was after the last time I saw Casey that the mental health counselor at our school pulled me into her tiny office, sat me down on the couch, and told me that Casey had committed suicide.
Casey had taken a few too many trips to the mental institution, and he was sent to the courts instead, who sent him to juvie, who sent him to the girls’ wing, where, on the day they took him off suicide watch, he hanged himself with his bedsheets. At his funeral I comforted his dad, who wouldn’t call him by his real name, even with rivers of tears in his eyes. Most of a decade later, I met the second Casey when he came down from the dorms to meet an old friend’s new friend: me. We were making characters for a game, and Casey decided to hang out on a whim. He’s full of sass and sarcasm, and just as I was enthralled by his humor, he was enthralled by the story I wanted us to tell together. I begged him to play with us, and every other week we’d get together in my shoddy apartment to tell stories and play pretend.
But that soon ended. And then everything else ended. I wasn’t thinking about it, but I was closing up shop, getting ready to catch up with old Casey. When I was really in the pits though, when the idle musings on death became full-blown treatises and my body started to get heavy with the weight of misery, new Casey was the only one who could drag me out of it. He’s a playful, funny, clever friend. A bottomless well of empathy who puts his full chest into making sure I was loved and cherished.
New Casey is a trans guy, just like old Case was, and I knew at some point I’d need to tell him the story of old Casey. Well, it was one of those nights where the musings had become treatises, and Casey had just spent hours getting me out of the pits and into laughter, and when he says something truly hilarious I send him back a voice message that is just me laughing my ass off because I know that makes him happy. I realized, laying in bed, laughing so hard I was crying, that it was time for new Casey to know about old Casey. So I told him the story. Sixty miles away from each other, we sat in my memories together. That night was the first night I told new Casey that I loved him, in the way friends love friends, or brothers love brothers. I hope old Casey heard it too.
~Corvus Arthur
