Page 2 of Indigo Sky

But I didn’t believe them becausetheydidn’t treat it like it was nothing. Dad could hardly look at me—which, by the way, I understand now was more out of guilt than disgust, but you gotta realize, at the time, I thought he saw what everyone else did: A freak. Ayo-ho-yo-hofuckin’ pirate. Amonster.

So, anyway, that second Monday, my mom dropped me off at school with zero regard to how much I’d begged to stay home. And I muddled my way through the first half of the day, painfully aware of the stares and giggles and whispers, until I made it to the cafeteria, where I found the table occupied only by this one kid with the worst case of BO you’d ever gotten a whiff of in your life and this girl who insisted on eating tuna-fish-and-jelly sandwiches. I took my new place at the farthest corner from the girl with the nasty sandwich, wished I’d lost my nose and sense of smell instead of my eye, and opened my lunch box.

Enter Nathan Manning.

This kid waltzed into the cafeteria the way he did every other day—with the presence of a pit bull and the attitude of a pissed-off gorilla. Every day, he was mad at the world—why, I didn’t know at the time, but … well, we’ll get there—and he took it out on anyone who crossed his path. It seemed like he picked someone new to torment depending on his mood, and on this particular day, he set his sights on me.

He started to walk over, barreling through like a bulldozer, not giving a single fuck about whatever got in his way, and I could only begin to imagine what he was about to say or do or … I didn’t even fucking know. But before he could make it to my little table of misfit toys, some dick of a kid tossed an empty juice box at my blind eye.

The kid—not Nathan, the little shit who had thrown something—snickered and said, “Nice catch,Revan,” like my name itself was an insult.

I squeezed my fist around my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich to keep from crying.

“Hey!” Nathan barked, and I thought he’d been talking to me. But when I looked up, he was standing over the kid who’d thrown his trash at my face. “The next time I see you throw something at him, I’m gonna snap your stupid glasses in half—you got that?”

I dropped my gaze to the sticky mess in my hand.What?No way was Nathan Manning defending me. Nathan Manning didn’t defend anyone but himself.

“Hey.”

I looked up slowly, carefully. Terrified that if I made one false move, he’d bite me, shove my head in a toilet, throw my backpack in the trash—some fucked-up shit that would give me no choice but to cry, and I did not want to cry in front ofhim. Abso-fuckin’-lutely not.

But what stood over me shocked the shit out of me because I wasn’t looking into the eyes of a kid who wanted to make my life a living hell. No, I was looking at a kid whogot it. I mean, okay, he never had kids throwing shit at him ‘cause they wouldn’t dare, but kids avoided him like the plague. And whether that was his doing—for reasons I didn’t know at that time—or not, the dude was lonely as hell, and no kid should ever feel that alone. The world was big and freaky enough as it was, but for a little fuckin’ kid? Shit … you might as well throw a little guppy into an ocean full of great white sharks.

And just like that, Nathan Manning didn’t scare me anymore, and I could see very clearly through my one eye that he wasn’t scared of me either.

“Come sit with me,” he demanded before walking away.

I didn’t know it at the time but …

You could say that my first mistake was following him.

But, you know, I guess that all depends on how you look at it, right?

***

Long story short, Nathan and I became friends.

Well, initially, I hung around him to keep him happy and to keep the other kids from fucking with me. But eventually, I grew to kinda like him.

Nah, scratch that. I liked Nate a lot.

As luck would have it, his house was only a couple of blocks over from mine, and soon after that first incident in the cafeteria, he was coming over every single day until it got dark and my parents were warning me about bedtime. On the weekends, he slept over.

It was one of those friendships where we never seemed to get tired of each other, and if we started to get on each other’s nerves, he’d go hang out with my dad or watch TV with my mom, like he was one of us. And I thought, after a while, my parents even started to see our friendship as a bright and shiny silver lining to The Accident. I had finally made a real friend, one who wanted to know me, not one who had been forced to out of social obligation or something. Like Joe Weston, who never again thought it was funny to pick on the half-blind kid.

Nate was funny, too, which had surprised me at first ‘cause he wouldn’t have been caught dead laughing or even smiling at school. But, yeah, the kid was quick, really witty.

There was this one time on the Fourth of July—exactly a year to the day after Dad nearly killed me. Nate had come over—because he wasalwaysover—and he asked my parents if they’d gotten any fireworks this time. Man, everyone got so quiet, you could’ve heard a mouse fart.

After a moment, Mom finally said, “No, we thought we’d skip them this year.”

Nate quickly replied, “Oh, thank God, ‘cause my next question was gonna be if you had the ambulance on speed dial.”

And, okay, looking back, it was probably way out of line and insensitive or whatever, but, man, he lightened the mood. We all laughed, and even though Dad never could talk about The Accident without hanging his head in shame, he was still able to relax a little once we started joking around about it.

Natedid that.

He used to say, “If you can’t laugh about shit, you’re just giving it permission to kill you,” and for a long time, I agreed with him.

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