I want him to know that I'm here for him. I want him to do anything and not just nothing, yet he doesn't move an inch, doesn't acknowledge that I'm here. He keeps doing this and I wished I knew why. He calls me smart, but I'm an absolute failure of a friend.

Elijah blinks his eyes quickly, coming back to me. "Wha- What?" he says in a fog. "How..."

"I can't leave you broken like this," I tell him. "It breaks my heart."

"Breaks your heart?" he questions unpleasantly. "You said that you were stuck, you said that you didn't know how to get out!"

"I didn't know if-"

"What?!" he shouts, cutting me off. "You lied to me."

"I couldn't stand to see you in pain," I get in.

With no notice, he pushes me off of him and I stumble over my feet backwards and on to the ground.

"That makes no sense," he says teary-eyed.

"Every time," I tell him, looking to the horizon, "when you see something that ties you back to that shit-filled life, I lose you."

"Shit filled?" he scoffs. "My life was great, it just sucks that I have to spend eternity with you."

Loudly, I say, "An eternity of not thinking about all the horrible things we've had to survive, I would give everything up to be where we are, over and over again!"

He turns away from me no matter how much I try to get him to look at me.

"I knew we should have stayed away from this fucking school, they were always going to come by here," I let slip out."

I wanted to spite him. I wanted him to feel everything that I do.

"You knew it was my funeral today?" he asks pissed as ever.

"Everyone who's there doesn't even love you!" I yell. "All that I've heard from the mouths of those assholes is just for some stupid two-second attention!"

"You have no right," he eyes me. "I have a family and I want to be there for them. You know, just because you never had the guts to face your dad doesn't mean you can keep me away from everyone."

"My dad has nothing to do with this!" I exclaim.

"Then why did he leave?! And even when he was still here, why didn't you visit him?!"

"How do you know I didn't?" I push on.

"You never talked about him or your friends! Oh, and how's your squadron of losers doing?" he gives me the proof. "I'm sure they're all like you anyway, so it probably doesn't matter what you say. They all hate each other just like you hate yourself, but at least I know where I stand in this."

He started to walk away from me and I wanted to fight him so badly. I would have tackled him to the ground and yelled until the whole world knew that I existed. But there's nothing I could say that would make this any different.

"That fudgesicle of a guy!" I vent.

I fling myself over one of the more comfortable tombstones in the cemetery.

"Are all guys like this, Frank?"

"Yes, yes they are," I pretend like he has the capacity to keep a conversation going.

"That's good to know," I reply to my rendition of the soldier. "So... How's life? Still staring at that grave like always?"

He seemed to send me on a wild goose chase in my head every time I tried to figure out where the hell he came from and why he's still stuck here. Why would you stand in front of your own grave forever? Is your dead body that important to you? Maybe he just wants me to know what his real name is. Unfortunately, the harsh environment of the Canadian wilderness wasn't kind to the meticulously carved headstones.

"I'm glad that you're my only friend," I tell him. "You don't yell at me or call me names. You don't ask about the parents, which are complete dipshits by the way, or my squadron of losers. Can you believe that's what he called them?!"

Of course, he doesn't say anything.

"Like, yeah, obviously we would have grown apart if I were still there. I've just become different than who I was before and there's no problem with that. Rebecca was a good friend, she was someone who I could hang out with outside of school, but we definitely weren't attached at the hip. The others were great too, just not as close."

"What about your dad?" I hear in my head.

"Nope! We aren't going down that road!" I say loudly. "Oh, and contrary to Mr. Perfect Family, I did visit the old man. Drunk as always, probably worse, and then he left. Just gone! What kind of parent is that? At least mom had the decency to give me a kiss goodbye when I was four years old."

I take a second to let out all the tension I had cooped up. A useless breath in and an imaginary breath out.

"Where do you think they'll bury him?" I question, scanning the grounds.

Nothing was dug up, no six-foot hole ready to plunge a coffin into darkness. Even my plot had managed to grow a thick layer of moss in a year. The dirt had been completely untouched.

"Maybe it's because of those dead crows," I tell Frank. "It's really morbid, almost too on the nose for a three-hundred-year-old cemetery. Oh well, I guess we won't have to suffer looking at his impressively chiselled jaw."

I guess Elijah is just too precious of a relic for his parents, let alone society, to bury him with the idiots of the town. He's just another body, I don't get how that makes him any more special.

"Hey, Frank?" I call out. "Who do you think I should traumatize today? I was thinking Mrs. Grand when she goes to bed." I decide to look over in hopes of even the smallest reaction. "Frank?"

He was gone.