The weird kid killed himself today. It wasn’t totally unexpected. At least if you’re me it wasn’t totally unexpected.

  From the outside, Thomas always sort of looked content. Bad things didn’t overly trouble him, but then again the good things didn’t seem to ever bring him joy. I guess I was one of those good things. That’s the narrative that seems to be getting spun. It’s weird. We weren’t particularly close, at least I don’t think. I was just one of the few people that weren’t as put off by him.

  Thomas was an oddball, but it’s not like he was exactly unpleasant. He just had a certain way of communicating that made it somewhat straining to hold a conversation with him. You see, he had this thing he did, where he always seemed to begin speaking just as you finished your sentence. Talking to him sometimes made you feel like an NPC in a video game. It felt like he was skipping through your dialogue so he could go through with the speech option he’d opted for. That was probably the strangest thing about him. It was honestly a little unnerving sometimes.

  I guess I should mention that we were friends, just not the absolute bestest of best friends the way some people want to see us. People– by which I mean social media –really wants for me and Thomas to have been platonic soulmates, or secret gay lovers (seriously I’ve seen the shipping content). They like to believe I was the only person in a sea of nasty teenagers that he could talk to. But the truth is, while Thomas was an oddball, no one really bullied him for it, and to be honest, no one was all that mean to him. Thomas kept to himself, mostly, and he was happy about that. As far as I can tell.

  He’s always been a loner like that. The only reason we talked at all was because he saved me from a badly chipped tooth. A couple years ago I was crossing the street, when I somehow managed to trip on nothing while stepping off the curb, and Thomas somehow shot his hand out in time to save my face from greeting the pavement. I could tell the fall would have been nasty just from my trajectory. I joke that he basically saved my life sometimes, because a car came speeding past us just after (it was a neighborhood crossing, so no streetlight). After that it was hard not to at least say “hello” to the guy when I ran into him, much to his total apathy I assure you. For me, saving my face from meeting street rock was a super cool display of reflexes. For Thomas, that was just Tuesday (literally, I actually checked, the cafeteria had tacos that day and they only do that on Tuesdays).

  I guess I “adopted” Thomas in a way. Like how some people on the internet say that extroverts sometimes “adopt” an introvert. That’s what I did. I saw how alone Thomas was, and figured I’d try to bring him out of his shell. That’s how he ended up on the yearbook committee. It was actually pretty easy to get him onboard. He was a prodigy photographer. Thomas somehow always knew where to be to catch the perfect shot for everything, and sometimes he would get there ahead of the shot. It was wild. “The game is going here Thomas, why are we going to the other side of the field?” “I just got a feeling,” he would say. And wouldn’t you know. He was always right.

  His time as our photographer was when I really started to understand Thomas. I started hanging out with him more, mostly after games or school events when we were already gathered together. But I still wouldn’t say that we were really all that great of friends. I think the only time I really talked to Thomas, and I mean really, really talked to the guy was at dinner after a really big football game.

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  We were at a pancake house with the school’s football team. They won our district finals, and were going on to compete against the rest of the state. It’s all very fun– if you’re a sports person –which I wasn’t really. I was there for the waffles (I prefered them over the pancakes the place was supposedly known for).

  Thomas was sitting by himself.

  “Hey,” I said, taking the seat across the booth from him.

  “You don’t have to sit with me,” he said.

  “I want to,” I told him.

  “No, I mean, you know I sit by myself on purpose.”

  “Well I don’t think that’s healthy for you loser, so what’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “C’mon,” I kicked his foot. “Give me something. What have you been thinking about?”

  “Movies I guess,” he said, staring out the window.

  “Ooh, a rare look inside Thomas’ head. What about movies?”

  He looked at me, grimly. It sent a shiver down my spine. His eyes were like little blue windows into a vast, empty, and alien ocean. I imagined a planet totally covered in water. All that water and not a single fish in the sea. That’s what looking into Thomas’s eyes was like.

  “Do you think knowing how a movie ends makes it less worth watching?”

  “One hundred percent,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. “Half the fun is seeing how things will play out.”

  “So if for some reason you knew how every movie ever was going to end, would you just stop watching them altogether?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I laughed. “Just switch to watching T.V then right?.”

  He didn’t laugh.

  After a year of being our school’s dedicated photographer, he was put in charge of being our yearbook editor. He got really into it, or at least that's how it seemed from the outside. He had this weird habit of getting stuck on certain images. While putting things together in the editor, he’d randomly stop and stare at a picture, usually a student’s. The way he looked at those pictures reminded me of our conversation at the pancake house. Those little blue windows that opened up to a lonely ocean.

  Thomas being Thomas, no one ever bothered to ask him why he would stop and stare like he did. I only tried a handful of times myself, but he never gave me a solid answer, and it was always something super metaphorical, “It’s a single frame from the reel of someone’s life” he would say, like that explained it all.

  Later that year, he took his own life. He’d sat himself down in front of the first complete yearbook, fresh off the presses, leaving a note that read: “I saw what was in store for me, and decided I’d rather not. Farewell, mother, father, and Alex.”

  Alex was me.

  That’s how I got pinned as Thomas’ best friend in the media. I wound up with the copy of the yearbook he’d left the note in. Thomas had signed it, and since it was the only one that would ever have his signature, it was given to me.

  What I found inside made me feel… weird. But I don’t know why. Underneath all of our names, Thomas had put our birth year, and then one seemingly unrelated year.

  Underneath his own name, Thomas had put “2006 - 2094” but the “2094” was crossed out with red pen, and replaced with “2024”. Underneath my own name it read “2006 - 2022”, the year he reached out and saved my face from meeting the pavement. The 2022 was crossed out with the same red pen as Thomas’, and in its place was “2026”.