Saving Chester Bennington

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

          Chester wasn’t exactly sure what to think of this whole situation. Why had Mike decided all of a sudden to be nice to him? It just didn’t make sense. He was almost afraid of this whole thing. Maybe it was all a set up. Maybe Mike was just trying to make him think he cared. Why would Mike care in the first place? As far as he knew, no one cared about him at all. Why would someone that had hated him his whole life, care about him now? He nodded. None of this was real. He was either having a crazy dream or Mike was fooling him. And as much as he hated to admit it, he had a feeling it was the second choice. He saw Mike walk into the room holding two plates with waffles on them. The other boy gave him a small smile.

“Hey you alright? I made food,” Mike said as he gave Chester the plate.

“I’m alright. Are you?”

“Yea why wouldn’t I be?” Mike asked with a confused expression. Chester realized that Mike seemed to be confused about a lot of things. He took the plate from Mike and then sat with it on his lap. Mike wouldn’t poison it would he? What the fuck? He was getting way to paranoid. He slowly took a bite of the waffle. It felt good to actually eat something that was warm. He didn’t cook much for himself at his house. Mike was watching him intently and for a second Chester was afraid that Mike had poisoned his food.

“Hey Chaz?”

“Hm?” Why was Mike giving him this weird nickname? He could get used to it though. He didn’t mind.

“I’m really sorry about yesterday evening. That was too far.”

So it wasn’t too far to make him want to kill himself? Mike needed to start thinking about what he was saying before he said it. Chester just shrugged off the apology. It didn’t make any difference what had happened. Come tomorrow, everything would go back to normal. Mike would attack him more for his personal image and he would go back to being the weirdo that no one liked.

“Hey you know I’m not going to bother you at school anymore,” Mike said as if reading Chester’s thoughts.

“What? Why not?” Chester asked before he could stop himself.

“Um. Because it’s not really nice. You have enough going on in your life right now,” Mike said not looking at him.

“That didn’t stop you before.”

“I didn’t know before.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“I can guess.”

“Well you’re guessing wrong.”

“I’m a pretty smart guy.”

“You don’t know shit about me.”

“I think I do.”

“Then say it,” Chester hissed as he pushed his plate away from him. He wanted to hear just what exactly Mike had figured out about him. He wanted to see what bullshit this kid was going to give him. Mike looked at him for a long time.

“I don’t want to.”

“Well I want you to.”

Mike stared at him for another second before finally nodding, “Fine. You don’t have a good life. Your dad’s a drunk and he hurts you all the time. Then you come to school and my friends and I give you a hard time there. We tell you everything that your dad says but it affects you more because we’re not drunk. You go home and try to write down how you feel through your lyrics but it doesn’t work and that makes it worse. After Dave told you to kill yourself, you were going to take that advice. You were going to sometime soon. You believe what we say because it’s been shoved into your head since you were little. And I’m truly sorry that it’s like that because none of those things are true.”