Friendship Bracelets

It was another week before John reached for a razor blade again. The memory of those piercing blue eyes was still fresh, though. He paced, tried to think about other things, tried to study. He couldn’t keep his mind off it, though. After an hour spent trying to read one page of his human geography textbook he remembered Emma’s offer. The voice in the back of his head ordered him to stay put, she was just being nice, she didn’t actually care, she was probably busy, would be annoyed if he came looking for her. But the louder voice said You have a blank check to go visit a cute girl. So John walked down the hall, to room 206 and knocked on the door. 

“Come in.” Emma yelled from inside.

John opened the door cautiously. Emma was sitting Indian style on the floor in a beam of warm afternoon sunlight, wearing a bright t-shirt and a long, flowy skirt. She looked up, and smiled, “Hey John!” 

“What are you doing?” John stepped inside a little, nervous. The floor was scattered with spools of colored string, scissors and beads. 

“Making friendship bracelets.” She explained, holding up a chord woven from pink string, yellow string and blue string. “Sit down, I’ll teach you.” 

There aren’t a lot of people who John would allow to teach him to make friendship bracelets. John would have let Emma do anything, though. The voice knew its protest would be fruitless and so resigned itself to silence. 

After about an hour the bracelets were all but done. 

“Okay, last step, most important.” She tied a knot in one end, “Tie a knot,” She slipped the chord around John’s wrist, causing him to drop the bracelet he had been working on, mid knot. “And find a friend.” She made a quick knot and tugged the ends firmly, “And tie it nice and tight.” She looked up at him, grinning. 

John felt himself blush as she released his arm and he looked down at the bracelet. It was made of three brown chords woven together. 

Emma laughed at him. He looked down at the one he had been making, it was sloppy, the ends were frayed. 

“You’ll get better with practice.” 

“Yea, I will make you a better one later.” 

She smiled, “I can’t wait.” 

***

For the next three weeks, John visited Emma periodically, sometimes just to talk, sometimes to take the edge off, de-stress. She was always smiling, always cheerful. She wanted to know how his week went, always had funny stories about her creepy math teacher and her cat back home, Cinnamon. In spite of all her kindness though, deep down John still worried that she was only pretending to care because she was a nice person. He would rather be alone than be a charity case. 

After three weeks though, he walked down to her room as he had so many times before and knocked. 

“Come in.” Emma yelled, like she always did.

But when John opened the door Emma was sitting on her bed and another girl was sitting at her desk. They both turned and looked at him when he came in.

Emma smiled the way she always did when she saw him, though, and John relaxed a little. “Hey! Terra, this is John, he lives down the hall. John, this is my friend, Terra.”

Terra was very tall, she had cocoa brown skin and dark, straight hair. She had big, dark eyes with sleek, glittery makeup around them. She looked at John like he was a funny joke she thought wasn’t worth telling. 

“Am I interrupting something?” John took a stumbling step back toward the door.

“No, you’re fine, we were just getting ready to go to a party, do you wanna’ come?”

“Uhhhhhhh. . .” John wanted to say no. He hated parties, he knew how miserable they could be and how out of place he would feel. But it was Emma, and he trusted her, even though he knew he probably shouldn’t. “Sure.” 

Terra drove them to the party, which was six miles away from campus at a big white house with an overgrown yard. They parked on the street, there was a trashcan tipped over by the curb and the windows were blazing. You could already hear the dance music pounding through the walls. 

As they stepped inside John instantly regretted his decision to come, the place was packed, wall to wall with half-naked girls and guys with plastic cups clutched in their hands. John spent the next few hours following Emma from one cluster of people to another. He often felt ignored or excluded, but not for long; Emma never let too much time go by without turning to look at him and smile or roll her eyes or ask him a question. As the night wound down Terra wandered off and the house got stuffy so John and Emma stepped out onto the back porch, then descended the steps into the dim, overgrown backyard. There was a little cement pit, maybe it had been a patio at one time, a few yards from the house. John and Emma sat together just outside the haloes of light shining from the windows with the house at their backs.

John was content just to sit on the mossy stone wall and listen to the crickets chirp and smell the damp earth and look up at the stars and know that it was two a.m. and he was sitting next to a pretty girl. Emma didn’t let the silence linger long, though. She reached out and gently turned his arm over on her lap. She traced the pink marks there with her fingertips, “When we were in eighth grade my best friend killed herself.” She choked, and John’s heart sank out of the stars down into his stomach. “I didn’t understand, I,” She choked again, shook her head, “I didn’t know how to talk to her about it, and then it was too late.” She looked at him and her eyes were full of pain, “And I told myself I would never let that happen again, I would never ignore someone’s pain or judge them for their scars.” She blinked, wiped her eyes. “I, I guess I just wanted to tell you I’m glad you came tonight, and. . . You’re not just another set of scars to me, I think you’re really great and I like spending time with you.”

Suddenly the voice inside John’s chest switched sides, and instead of saying “don’t believe her, don’t trust her, don’t fall”, it started to say “jump, kiss her, tell her how she makes you feel.”

But John couldn’t say a word, so instead he put his arm around Emma and squeezed her shaking shoulders.