AMERICAN BOYFRIEND

blink

kai exists as the blackest thing in this silvery-white wedding. the only color amidst the bleached couches and the white roses and the powdered women fluttering around the hall, clinging to one another, creating noise that falls deaf on his brown ears — he is the one dark spot. he walks around them too, drifting in and out, too stark a contrast to blend in smoothly. like stains on all their perfect dresses.

this is his best friend's wedding. he is his best man, the only man that agreed to come here and witness the ruination of his young life, and he is alone.

kai sits in the back row of seats in st. matthew's cathedral church hall, drinking slow sips of ginger ale spiked with something else much stronger in the mix. his eyes swim when he looks straight ahead for longer than four seconds, and his fingers are starting to split apart and dissolve into atmosphere before him. if his mother was here, she'd squeeze his fingers tight, squeeze until he came back to life and his vision returned to normal, still blurry around the edges without his glasses to fix it. she'd squeeze his fingers until everything was normal again. but she is not — she's in her house, reading heavy pages from her ancient bible, or cracking open her students' head to fit in multiplication facts, or holding her boyfriend's hand while he slept a tumultuous, near-death sleep — because this is the right thing to do. that's where she should be, where she belonged —not here, watching some nineteen year old boy shoot his best friend with the proverbial bullet in the back that is marrying a woman you met six months ago at the college he said they'd get through together, one day at a time. she is not here to watch him bleed onto the reserved seats, or trail blood down the aisle, onto the pure white shoes of whatever random girl geo placed him with. he stretches out in his chair and lets himself liquify into a pool of red right where she would have stood, if she had picked up his call this morning, asking for her to come with him. he floods the whole hall. a new red sea. 

just as he's starting to soak the walls, a short man and his shorter wife appear by the silver chain barricading the row, nearly slipping on him and all his bloody agony.

"this is a reserved seat, kid. schumakers only," the man says, a smug look on his bulbous face. he scans kai like his eyes are lasers trying to lacerate his skin. kai hardens his gaze back.

"this is my wedding as much as it is his, okay, schumaker," he replies angrily. "and geo's only inviting all you white people so alison doesn't leave his brown ass on the alter."

the man's crooked jaw slacks open, but before he can speak, kai brushes past him and the wife, splashing them red. he leaves his technicolor fingerprints on the double doors leading out of the white church.