Johnny Boy {ON HOLD}

Chapter 2- Yelling On The Street Corner

~Tyler~

"You ready for this, bro?" Josh asks as soon as he pulls up to my place and I've put my stuff in the back with his stuff. We decided about a week ago to drive up to our destination since plane tickets were pretty expensive, or that's what we told ourselves, anyway. Our destination? New York City. We haven't been up that direction in what feels like forever, and it'll be nice visiting again.

"Oh, yeah. This is gonna be totally sick," I answer, before giving him a high five. He's wearing his beanie again, covering up his natural hair, which he still hasn't dyed yet. Maybe he actually won't dye his hair again. Maybe he'll leave it natural. And maybe he'll even start wearing his glasses again. "I brought the movies."

"I brought a couple, too, so let's hope that I didn't bring a couple copies of what you have," Josh hopes, and I agree.

"How did your family Christmas go? Did you get some cool stuff?" I ask, and he shrugs.

"I guess. My sister was teasing me about my hair, asking me if I was gonna keep it natural this time," he says, and I laugh a little bit. Leave it to sisters to say that kind of thing. Brothers and sisters are the only people that can tease people like that and get away with it because we let them get away with it. There are a lot of things I've let my siblings say to me that nobody else would get to, but that's all part of being a sibling. I think. I guess there is a line that has to be drawn somewhere, and a lot of people don't realize that line exists. But there is a line between what is just regular sibling rivalry and one sibling outright bullying the other. I've talked to a boy, his name was Jack, whose sister fell into the latter category. She was straight up cruel to him, but his parents and the people around him didn't really do anything about it because they thought it was "normal". That's nonsense, in my opinion, considering how even I, just a man who had known him for maybe ten minutes, could see how his sister had destroyed him. And maybe that was another reason that nothing was done. The person destroying him was his sister. Maybe if it was his brother, things would have been different for Jack.

"Why don't you like your natural hair again? I know you've told me, and I really can't remember."

"I just don't. I guess I don't see what there is to like about it," Josh says, and I think for a moment.

"Well, there's the fact that if you leave it be, it's kinda nice and curly. A lot of people really like curly hair," I tell him, and he laughs.

"Yeah, but curly hair can be a menace to take care of. I guess it's not so bad when boys have curly hair because it's short, but I've talked with some curly-haired girls, and they say it's terribly hard to take care of," Josh tells me, and I shrug, not really knowing anything about that. My hair isn't curly. "Do you like my curly hair?"

"Well, yeah. Then again, I'd like your hair no matter what you decided to do with it, even if you shave it all off again," I answer.

"Oh yeah, I'll just pull a you and shave off all my hair during a music video. I'm glad we got it right the first take, or else we'd have been in trouble."

"Hey, may I remind you that YOU were the one who told me we might be breaking out the tape again for that video. You know how torturous that stuff was to take off. It hurt. I didn't want to deal with that again," I remind him, and we both stay silent for a moment, before laughing. Finally, we both notice we're still in my driveway, and we officially start on our way to New York City. The radio is playing "Champion", which I like, but I haven't really learned the words to yet, and neither has Josh, so we both settle for listening to it and singing what few lyrics we actually know. Which was basically just the chorus, but that was okay with us. I look out the window when it hits me that this is actually happening. I'm going to New York City on Christmas Eve to spend about a week with my absolute best friend in the entire world, and neither one of us really knows what's going to happen. What kind of people will we meet? What stories will we hear, what sights will we see? We've both seen several of the sights in New York, having gone there many times to play a show, but now we're going completely of our own accord, on our own schedule. We don't have anywhere to be at any certain time, and that's going to be really nice.