Funny how time works. It seems like yesterday that the sincere smile with protruding front teeth greeted me at school.
It was the new student. Hope for success led the father to move out of state after finding a job in our city. An outsider, from unknown lands, a different body shape, an accent that made him an easy target.
“Hi, I’m Luke! I love Berserk too!” He pointed to my shirt; the recognized curse symbol represented the similar taste.
From that day on, a friendship emerged. Or rather, the concept distorted by teenage stupidity, what it should mean. Companionship, empathy, solidarity is what friendship symbolizes. Not this time. Feeding on his fragility and trust, I sucked the newcomer’s soul pretending to be sympathetic, eating his beating heart as in a Mayan ritual, absorbing it, trying to strengthen myself with such a gesture. Showing oneself strong in a school environment meant popularity, something that everyone who has just reached puberty unconditionally craves.
The triggering stabbing occurred in the first week. We walked to school together, and in a distraction, Luke stepped on the feces on the sidewalk. He tried to clean it, but it was impossible to remove it completely without a brush, water and soap.
“I’m going home to change my sneakers.”
“And miss the test? You took off almost everything, no one will be able to smell it if they don’t put the nose on your feet.”
To this day I don’t know what made me say that. I think the initial intention was good, at least I like to console myself in this way, trying to alleviate the guilt that eats away at me. But as soon as we were in the classroom, Claire, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid eyes on, a dream come true for even senior-year big boys who already came to school on motorbikes, noticed the unusual odor.
“Is anyone else smelling this?”
My heart palpitated. Her voice alone turned my stomach with passion, a chance to interact with her then, responding directly to a sentence coming from those lips? Unmissable opportunity, maybe a chance for her to notice me.
“It’s coming from Luke!” I opened my mouth treacherously, throwing my protégé to the wolves.
The teacher checked, and asked him to go to the bathroom and wash his sneakers. The simple moment, which an adult would laugh off as a colloquial accident, was the trigger for the nickname of that boy who was still unknown:
“Walking shit.”
The nickname stuck like gum, after all, most didn’t even know the newcomer’s name yet, and it was easier to parrot the vocative used by others. Despite my betrayal and my involvement with the cruel pronoun, Luke still maintained his friendship with me, dreaming of clinging to whoever interacted with him, even if those people were not worthy of his affection. After all, loneliness is the cruelest mistress, which leaves us alone with our thoughts. I won’t mention all the times I used this feeling to humiliate him while I praised myself, I’ll skip to months later, occasions where my cruelty had already escalated beyond repair.
It was a meeting at my house, my parents had gone out for dinner and there were me, Luke, Claire, and 3 other friends drinking vodka and coke, the height of the rebellion of those stupid teenagers. The idea had come from me. As we were six people, we played Russian roulette. Luke protested: “Fuck, guys, don’t do that, one of the six will die.” The other five loved the idea, however, and called him a coward for not taking on the challenge. “You can be the last then, since you’re so scared.” Reluctantly, he accepted. It wasn’t even a case of suicide, who would want one of their friends to die at a meeting like that? Obviously he was right, but he was drowned by social pressure.
I took the gun that my father was hiding, showed a bullet to the wheel, turned the barrel and pressed the death tool against my head.
CLICK!
The dry sound showed success in the mission, victory in the game. The bullet wouldn’t decorate the walls with my gray matter. I passed the gun to Claire, who placed the barrel against her temple. She took a deep breath, the tension in the air let us even hear the sound of water passing through the pipes.
CLICK!
She wouldn’t be the “lucky” one.
One by one, the gun didn’t fire, until it reached Luke. He was the last one in the circle. Fatally, the bullet would release as soon as the trigger was pressed.
“The right thing to do was to spin the barrel after each round.” He argued.
“And you say that now? After everyone has had their turn? Too late, man.”
Trembling, he knew he had lost the argument. he should have said something sooner. Luke put the gun to his head, angled it in a way that would hit more in the face than in the skull. He lowered the gun almost to cheek level: the jaw would explode, but the brain would remain intact. No one even said anything about the “cheating”, we just watched Luke in silence and anticipation. After dozens of seconds, sighs, tremors, sweat and almost fainting; a liquid flooded the floor.
Luke had urinated in his own pants. He got up, threw the gun on the ground and ran away, crying. After hearing the front door slam, I picked up the gun, put it in my mouth and squeezed the trigger.
CLICK!
Everyone laughed at the hollow sound, and I went to get a cloth to clean the floor. In a basic magic trick, I had hidden the bullet in my sleeve, and the revolver had been empty this entire time. Everyone knew this fact, except Luke. The perfect prank.
He never knew the gun wasn’t loaded, he still thought we had asked for the trigger to be pressed with a 100% chance of a bullet hugging him. Even so, he still tried to stay in our group. So a new challenge was suggested, a compensation for the cowardice of having avoided the responsibility of completing his round in the previous game.
We went to the place where a train was passing, surrounded only by trees, just after a bend in the tracks. The proposal was as follows: for him to cross the tracks when the train approached, and we would later post it on some social network, with the goal of gaining some likes with the immoderate imprudence. But the danger would be minimal, we thought. An athletic jump and a basic calculation of speed x movement would make Luke easily escape death.
The sound of the metal colossus approached, and the other 5 in the group were filming attentively with their cell phones in hand. When the train approached, we shouted “GO” at the top of our lungs so he could hear it despite the shrill noise.
Luke hesitated for a moment, a brief sadistic moment. It was the time we had held our breath to observe the scene. When I realized that the mere seconds of uncertainty would be fatal, I screamed “NO!” and put down the cell phone. But his skull had already been hit by the machine, pulling him onto the tracks and crushing him into thousands of pieces. Flesh and blood spread everywhere and on everyone present at the scene. The train continued its normal route, probably only realizing the tragedy when it stopped at its final destination, just as a human doesn’t notice if he steps on an ant with his sneaker. The friends present made a pact: Never to talk about the subject.
The closed-coffin wake made the family mourn the suicide of the tormented young man. But I knew the truth. My cruelty had caused this terrible moment for everyone who loved Luke.
His suffering was over, but mine began that day.
The guilt for what happened solidified an insomnia in me, endlessly rehashing the scene of his body turning into paste. One of those nights, lying in bed, I heard a knock on the window. The serious, ethereal face with its eyes fixed on me, without blinking, froze me with terror. It was Luke. With his finger, he gestured for me to open the window.
I obeyed.
I apologized, saying it wasn’t my intention, that I thought he would be able to jump over the tracks easily. He just stared at me in silence, and after my outburst, he floated through the window, gesturing for me to follow him.
I obeyed again.
Maybe obeying him would make him find peace, forgive me for what I did. Sweet hope, a feeling that moves us even in the most fearful situations. After walking for a while, we reached our destination. In the same curve where Luke had died, hanging from a tree, 3 bodies with a rope around their necks. There were 3 of those who were with us on that fateful day. Luke then pointed to the tracks, and I heard the train approaching. He hugged me and walked with me to the trails. I then lay down, and he rested next to me, staring at me in silence, his expression ethereal and surreal. The tracks shook. I, crying, closed my eyes briefly accepting my punishment, the sound of the locomotive getting louder and louder.
“No!” I said as I stood up. “It was an accident, I’m not going to kill myself, Luke, you need to move on!”
The ghost standing in front of me writhed in rage, and then the 3 bodies hanging from the tree flew towards the train, bouncing on impact, but instead of falling to the ground, they flew towards the train again, until the bodies of the 3 teenagers turned into practically nothing. I remained static at the bizarre scene, but recovered after the train started to stop, this time they had noticed the impact. I ran back home.
Every night, half an hour before the train passes, Luke’s ghost knocks on my window, pointing in the direction of the train tracks.
For two months, this was the scenario of my nights. I didn’t even sleep before 2 am, after all, I knew I would wake up in time for the night train.
After an initial reclusion, shocked by the death of 3 more of my friends, I tried to move on. The shared tragedies brought me closer to Claire, and last week, we went on a date. After the cinema, I walked with her to her house. When we arrived, we talked a little about the movie, and after an awkward joke made by me, she leaned over to kiss me. It must have been “I’m going to kiss this guy to shut him up.” Before my lips found hers, however, Claire flew to the asphalt, being hit by a car. When I turned my face, Luke was standing behind me, laughing at the scene. I called the ambulance immediately when I observed Claire’s body motionless in the middle of the street, eyes open indicating head trauma, red liquid painting the street. The driver, desperate and with his hands on his head, shouted “it wasn’t my fault, she flew from the sidewalk into the middle of the street” repeatedly.
Fortunately, she had not died. An induced coma and a successful operation later, Claire spoke again. Despite her survival, she became a shadow of herself. The once brilliant girl now had difficulty forming sentences.
After this day, Luke started following me all day. With every person I talked to, there he was behind their shoulder, staring at me and pointing his finger at the person’s head, in a clear gesture that he was going to hurt everyone who came close to me.
Today, at the dinner table, Luke appeared behind my mother. He ran his hand through her hair, and she scratched her head as if she felt the gesture. The evil presence stared at me, smiling maniacally. In the middle of chewing, my mother rested her hands on the table, leaving the fork and knife up. On one of these occasions, Luke violently pushed my mother’s head down. Her eyeball found the blade of the knife. The screams of pain must have echoed throughout the neighborhood, and my father quickly grabbed my mother’s arms, preventing her from removing the knife from her eye. It was safer to do this in the hospital, removing the blade at this point would only open up the bleeding and add one less chance of survival for her. After all the commotion and confusion, they took her to the hospital.
I received the message from my father a while later, my mother would lose that eye, but she would be fine.
It was my limit.
It’s two in the morning, the train will arrive soon. I tried to bear it, I tried to talk, I tried to ignore it, I tried to seek help from mediums, nothing worked. I feel like Luke can kill me whenever he wants, but he wants to see how much I can take. True friendship is eternal, so are the consequences of betrayal. The astonishment of our mistakes slowly eats away at us, but in this case, there would be no salvation, or temporal cure. Maybe Luke knows something, maybe with my suicide I will suffer eternally somewhere after my earthly passage. Maybe that’s why he insists on taking me to this, instead of killing me like he did with the other 3. Well, I’ll know the answer soon. I’m watching the track shake as I post this, the deafening sound of the train no longer lets me reason. The only solution is in front of me, with Luke pointing at it.