Black Friday

I was laying in bed. Thanksgiving had been boring. I called my friend Adam but he didn't answer. My flight back to New York wasn't going to leave until Sunday. It was Friday. I walked down the street to the gas station and got a cup of coffee. I walked back towards my house and stopped at the grounds of my old elementary school. Two trees stood at the entrance. Each tree was many times larger than myself. I remembered when they had been shorter than me, and that was when I was shorter than I currently was. I walked to the playground and sat on a swing and smoked a cigarette while I finished my coffee. I finished my cup of coffee and walked back home.

When I got back home I poured myself a glass of orange juice and ate a bowl of cereal. I was staring at a sentence on the front page of the newspaper for several minutes in a daze. The sentence read: "An Ohio man has been jailed on domestic violence charges after police say he excessively paddled his 10-year-old son." The sentence made me feel that my life wasn't that bad. I had been loser as a kid, but at least I had never gotten beaten. Then I realized that my cereal was getting soggy, so I ate the rest of it.

My friend Adam called me back and we decided to meet up for lunch in a couple of hours. I met him at Taco Bell. I noticed that the prices had gone up since the last time I had gone to Taco Bell, which had been during the past summer when I had come back to Ohio. This made me angry, but I didn't really care. Adam ordered two tacos and I ordered a burrito and a quesedilla.

"This place sure is trashy," I remarked once we had sat down at a table.

"Yeah, everyone working here is high school dropouts," said Adam.

"No, you think so?"

"Yeah, for sure."

"Yeah, I guess so."

After we finished eating, Adam said he had to go home to help put up the Christmas tree and I said I probably had to do the same.

"There's going to be a party later though at John's house, you should come," he said.

"Okay, cool. Yeah, I'll call you," I said.

I drove home and helped my mom and sister put up ornaments on the Christmas tree while my dad watched football. After the tree was full of ornaments I went up to my room and stared at my laptop computer. I tried looking for porn and then I realized I didn't really care.

Later that night I met up with Adam and we went to the party. It wasn't really a party; it was more just a gathering of a bunch of the kids we went to high school with at a bar. Some of them I hadn't seen in years. I felt disgusted but I tried to get drunk so that it would be bearable. I saw my old friend Matt.

"Hey Matt, what's up?" I said.

"Hey dude, how you been?" he said.

"Pretty good, living in New York, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. That kind of stuff. What did you get a degree in?"

"Oh, finance and economics. I have been working with a marketing firm. A guy from my old fraternity hooked me up with the job."

"Wow, that's cool," I said, but I was lying. It sounded terrible. I felt awful for the guy. But then I realized it was probably his own fault and that he probably didn't even look at it as a fault.

I wished him good luck with his job and walked to the bar under the pretense of getting another drink. I went up to Adam and told him I was going to drive home because I was sober and bored. He tried to convince me to stay and I told him no thanks and I drove home and went to bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark for a long time before I fell asleep.