Alterity

Chapter Twenty-Four

The next few weeks are nothing but further disappointment and confusion. Leo avoids me like the plague and doesn't return a single text or FaceTime call. The worst part is that I have literally no idea what I did wrong! Obviously, I screwed something up somewhere or something happened, or—I don't know—I've just never felt so powerless and it's infuriating and so, so sad. I miss him. I miss talking to him. I miss kissing him. I miss holding him. I just feel sort of lost.

Since I don't get to see Leo after school anymore, I've been left with a lot more free time to just sit with my thoughts that are only growing darker. As of late, Marley has been texting me more and hanging out with me at school, which has actually been a really nice way to take my mind off the drama with Leo and eases the chest-tightening loneliness I've been feeling since everything unraveled. Truth be told, I initially started hanging around Marley because I wanted to get out of my head, but he's actually really cool.

As a person, Marley is vastly different than Leo or Kayla or any other friend I've had before, really. He's sort of dorky, has great taste in music and can actually make me laugh pretty hard. He introduces me to the survival-horror video game genre and we sit side-by-side on his bed as he searched for the next game to use to scare the living shit out of me.

"Oh, dude!" He says, scrolling through the game library on his PS4. "This is one of the best."

"Outlast?" I say.

Marley nods. "Outlast!" He starts it up and hands me the controller. "It's all you."

"Oh god, I'm playing it?"

"Hell yes, dude. I gotta see this. We can take turns, though."

"Uh... ok," I say.

The game is through the first-person perspective of an investigative journalist that goes to a supposedly abandoned asylum to investigate possible instances of patient abuse and overall criminal activity. I jump and let out little shrieks every time one of those jump-scares happen, which sends Marley into a laughing fit.

"Erik, you can't close your eyes!" He says, still laughing.

"Well, I'm scared!" I say.

He puts his arm around me. "You're fine. Everything's fine. I mean, not in the game. In the game you're not fine. You suck at this game."

"WOW," I say, shrugging him off but laughing myself. "Ok!"

It's funny but with Kayla having moved away and Leo having ended up becoming my boyfriend, it's weird to think that Marley is the first continuous and legitimate friend that I've had in a while. And it's nice. It's really nice.