Classes proved to be easier to keep up with than I'd thought. There was significantly less homework than my old school, which apparently was more than the previous years were given at Seacoast according to Pete, who was probably taking the more difficult classes for the first time; but that's none of my business.

Brendon was continuously exhausted by the extended unit over the loneliest whale, which he had complained more than once was stupid and had gone on far too long. I wasn't complaining though, but it was probably because I hadn't taken the class before and found the overlapping units pretty cool.

"I thought you'd taken the class last year?"

"I did, but she decided to extend the discussion of the failure of a whale this year, and it's stupid because we should be about a quarter of the way through the life of an autotrophic species in the open ocean which is much more interesting in my opinion." He scowled and adjusted the backpack straps on his shoulder. There were a couple kids around us who looked back towards our direction and nearly made eye contact, obviously confused on whatever the autotrophs in the ocean were doing by themselves and why it was so interesting.

"Did you have to write an essay on it? The lonely whale, I mean." I asked and he nodded disapprovingly, wildly shaking his head so his hair ended up in a crazy position.

"It was 5 pages of nightmare fuel."

Pete seconded what had been said and so did Patrick, who was finally filling out the thesis box for the rough draft he didn't finish due to finding Brendon hiding a couple more 6-packs behind 4 year old expired potato chips. 'Disappointing', they told him, 'we told you to stop with this shit like a billion times already.' And in response, Brendon sneezed 8 consecutive times in a row and hugged his knees to his chest while pulling a blanket over himself like a cave cover. He later got sick in the bathroom, and Ryan said he'd contracted the 24 hour flu which actually lasted 72 hours. We'd thought he played it up when we were around but it turned out he actually got really really sick and he completely crushed Petes suspicions like they'd been shoved under a hydraulic press. On a side note, watching various objects being crushed under a hydraulic press is very satisfying.

"I'm gonna head back to my room and start this paper, because I actually have priorities that don't include shoving as many hot Cheetos up my nose as I possibly can. See y'all later." Patrick waved goodbye and set off back to the dorm complex. The reason he'd mentioned the Cheetos was due to walking in on Pete and I last night, where I cheered him on as he stuffed a 27th Cheeto up his nose, apparently beating the Seacoast record of 24.

"Well, I've written about 2 sentences, so I'm gonna go finish that; and Patrick, 27 has to be like a world record or something!" Pete announced and took off to catch up to Patrick, leaving Brendon and I alone in the middle of the school yard.

I turned to Brendon, who stared blankly up to me with those warm tea colored eyes. "You got any of that essay to finish up?"

"The entire thing."

"I take it you want to go start it?"

Brendon thought about it for a moment, lips pursed together in thought before nodding and stalling the walk back to his semi-apartment with me. He kept rambling on and on about how insignificant and boring it was to stretch out the monotonous unit trying to use deduction skills to figure out whether the whale was truly alone, the possible parents of it had unknowingly created a hybrid, or how it had changed its pitch to sound so low. Not that it bothered me; I could listen to him talk all day, no creep intended. I told him it was probably just looking for someone just like it, and he nodded slowly in thought before crossing his arms and stopping. And then I noticed we were back at the semi-apartments, and our glory walk was over.

"I'm tired of lonely whales," he glowered and shoved his shoulder against the door to his room so that it swung open and he collapsed on to the carpet "it can't just change its tune and reunite with normal whale beings, can it?"

..:..::..:::..::..:..

Pete triumphantly marched out from his room, laptop tucked under his arm, and into the kitchen where I sat browsing the Internet for an explanation as to how dogs drink water.

"The loneliest whale is now a lonely whale with a 5 page essay dedicated to it." He said smugly, glancing over at my computer screen and gave me a confused look when he realized I wasn't working on the paper due tomorrow.

"I finished like an hour ago." I told him and he sighed loudly, flopping down on the only lawn chair that didn't have broken armrests. The other two had been in near perfect condition when the school year started, but drunk Pete and the unexplainable urge to stand on chairs like a famous performer don't mix very well.

"I hate you."

I shrugged and he laughed mockingly, slight frustration and lining his tone. It turns out dogs tongues fold backwards and carry the water up to their snout like a cup or a little spoon.

"Patrick texted me a while ago and said he's almost done. Do you think Brendon's almost finished? I might order pizza for everyone if he is." I couldn't tell if he'd asked me for the answer to that question or just said it because he needed to. Pete picked up the remote to a video game console I didn't even know we owned before then, and switched on the tv.

"Should I go check on him?"

"Probably. Check behind his cracker stash to see if he hid anything behind those, I forgot to look there." He told me without tearing his gaze from the screen. I nodded and shut down my laptop, grabbing a pair of flip flops I'd found in the bargain bin at the store last week. The continued Internet adventure of searching why dog tongue spoons exist would have to wait until I got back.

The hallway was dead silent, which kinda creeped me out. I felt like it was a zombie apocalypse movie and I had been unanimously nominated to be the main character that gets everyone killed by accident and has a 50/50 shot to save the day. It was a role with more pressure than I could handle, and hopefully I wouldn't have to play it sincerely. I don't think I could save one person let alone the entire human race.

Brendon's sign stuck to his front door had been torn off, and left on the ground in a crumpled mess that looked like it'd been stomped on and squished like a stress ball from some insanely overpriced exercise shop with an orange spray tanned bodybuilder as the mascot. Was it weird to feel bad for a piece of paper? I hope not, because I picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket.

He didn't answer the door after the first couple minutes of waiting, so I took it upon myself to swing open the door and possibly catch him in the act of chugging down as much alcohol as his body could handle. But sadly and happily, it didn't work out that way, although it would've probably been a lot easier to deal with than what he'd done.

Shattered glass covered the middle of the floor, and the curtains usually pulled aside to display the magnificent view of campus had been half torn down from the bar it was held up by. The couch had multiple new tears in it that would need a huge amount of duct tape to fix, a spray painted green plastic chair that would've normally been seated around the kitchen table was broken in 2 pieces on opposite ends of the room. It looked like a hurricane had hit and turned all the frames on the walls either sideways or tossed carelessly on the floor. The only thing I could do was roam the semi-apartment in falling apart $1 flip flops and search for Brendon to make sure he wasn't dead.

In the left bedroom up ahead, something else smashed on the carpet. I was too terrified to see who it was, or hopefully what because a who would be more difficult to deal with. I prayed to whatever God was up there listening that it wasn't a bear, because I'd eavesdropped on a couple seniors and heard about the time last year when a black bear cub infiltrated one of the dorm buildings and trashed an entire hallways worth of rooms. The internet said black bears weren't prominent in this part of the country, but there was a zoo a couple miles away, so I guess it wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility. It would certainly explain a lot.

"It can't create sounds at a fucking normal decibel like everything else in that stupid ocean!" Brendon yelled from the other side of the door and something else was destroyed against the wall, the noise echoing throughout the rooms. The good news was it wasn't a bear.

I stood just outside for a while, listening to various object break into a thousand pieces and I desperately wanted to hold him in my arms and try to calm him down because maybe this one time it would slow his meltdown and it'd be okay.

The assault on inanimate objects stopped for a little while and I only dared to open the door a crack when I heard Brendon collapse to the floor, probably exhausted from the destruction he'd caused, intentional or not.

"Are you okay?" I whispered into the room, and realized he probably wasn't, considering nearly everything around him was either on the other side of the room or had been shattered to pieces.

"Does it fucking look like it?" Brendon snapped, trying to maintain some sort of the tough composure he'd so often projected. But we both knew he wasn't fooling anyone this time.

"I'm sorry." He whispered, the words unclear if it was directed to me or himself.

"You shouldn't be sorry."

"Sorry."

Brendon sniffed and smiled ironically as he processed the words that left his lips, wiping at his red tinted nose. He lowered his knees so they weren't holding up his chest and dropped his arms, defeated, to the floor. His icy stare glared at everything he'd damaged beyond repair, including the partially written essay papers strewn about the room. It looked like a storm had hit and purposely destroyed everything he owned. And he laughed.

"I look pretty childish, don't I?"

I shook my head no, even though he didn't glance up at me. "It just looks like a hurricane passed through."

"People always tell me I'm like a hurricane." He coughed and covered his mouth with his hand.

"And that's a good thing, because-"

"It's the antithesis of good, Dallon. They destroy and ruin everything you've ever loved and leave forgotten as quickly as they arrive." Brendon bit his bottom lip harshly to hold back the tears forming in his eyes and I wished I could do something that could make everything magically fixed instead of leaving him alone in the center of a disaster that he made.

"Do you wanna talk about it?" I asked quietly and immediately regretted it because that's the one thing I shouldn't have brought up because it's what got him in this position in the first place, surrounded by broken glass and shattered possessions.

"#55 did this essay with me last year. And yknow why he left? Because he was looking for something else. Barely a week with him and here was a guy I was terrified to let in to my life telling me that I was inadequate. See, the worst part is, that's the real meaning behind why everyone left. And I find myself relating to this stupid lonely whale who can't get its act together and think like all the other normal whales in the ocean, way too much lately." Brendon stared back up at me with tears in his eyes, waiting for a reaction I didn't have. He'd stunned me into silence once again.

"I don't even know why I told you that." He whispered to himself and frowned quizzically, sounding ashamed.

And I stood there for a solid minute, unsure what to do. Was I supposed to clean up the glass and take care of all the cuts on his hands or do I call for reinforcements? Pete and Patrick would probably have some idea of what to do, and Ryan was trained in the medical field due to his surgeon and first responder parents so he could probably bandage him up better than I would be able to. But I couldn't call others into this mess, because you're not supposed to just watch someone fall apart at the seams and pass on the responsibility

So I stepped my way around the shards poking out of the carpet and picked him up bridal style, carried him out of the room, and sat down on the couch where the mess just got worse and proved how much of a hurricane he really was. Brendon was clutching the sleeves of my shirt like if he let go he'd drop into a pit of lava, and once he caught sight of the rest of the disaster in his living room, he started shaking and cried into my chest for who knows how long.

He felt toxic in my grip, like one of the comical monsters created in a lab accident on tv programs; Cheesy and easily defeated. But his touch was nuclear, seeping poison through every finger and claiming the space as his own so he'd never be forgotten and wouldn't dare be underestimated.

He was fire, burning as bright as the sun until the end of time, and leaving behind the feeling that would never drift to the back of your mind as long as you lived.

For a while, all I had wanted was to hold him in my arms and tell him everything would turn out okay; but now here he is sobbing into my shirt and trembling like a leaf in the winter and I didn't want to hold him in my arms any more because the only way I'd get to do that was if he was being shattered into a million pieces all over again.

[2481 words, 8/28/16, I regret (everything) nothing]