"It's okay, whenever you're ready," Snow said to Casey calmly.

Casey rubbed his knee anxiously in a circle with his hand. He didn't want to go talking about things that should have never been talked about.

It was his least favorite thing, and it'd be better to keep them in private just along with everything else he knew, but it eventually came down to this.

Snow stared at him, eyes that looked on slightly curious but probing. She waited, wanting to hear everything he had to say and ready for it.

The two of them were sitting on the bench, and it was a quiet campus area with barely anyone around. The leaves rustled in the breeze and the sun gave light to a few trees, which were flourishing in yellow-green and red.

The prompt in today's challenge was about opening up things about themselves. Casey also kind of owed her in talking about that tragic ending of the night he hated.

The one where he saw his ex-friend, Ty.

Since Casey and Ty separated from each other, they were complete strangers. Casey never had to talk about his ugly past to anyone, especially not in thorough details. He was a complete loner after him.

He remained quiet, not knowing what's the first thing to say to her. Thoughts were rushing in his head. Should he start off with the main issue, the last time he heard of him, or the relationship between them before things had changed. Any of them could be crucial. His mouth wouldn't part open for words, and he felt his hold on his knee tightening stronger.

Snow put her hand on his arm and caressed lightly. Her mouth didn't move a muscle, but her facial expression was calm. It's as though she's telling him mentally, I'm here. 

His muscles relaxed, and he breathed it in deeply. He nodded to himself and looked at her seriously. "So I'll start with who Ty is. Do you remember when I said before that I had a friend who wasn't a friend anymore... that's him."

Her eyes widened with a little bit of shock. But she didn't say anything and she waited to hear more.

"He was a guy that was a thrill seeker and big-headed, but he has a sense of humor and tells it like how it is. He was cool when I first met him. We both had disliked the same teacher."

It was a start of an unlikely friendship, but they were getting well along.

"He's also the one I went to the movies with, but I purposely left out his name." He referred to him as "this friend" when he told her.

"We hung out a lot. We were each other lunch, passing period, and after-school friends. He was a solid bro." Ty noticed Casey and whenever he saw him, he made his way over to him and he could be talking about comic book characters, gaming, cars, or just anything. He'd be the one to always say something.

"Sounds like you two had a lot in common," Snow commented.

"We did. It was a good year, but then came around junior year, he started to act more big-headed than usual but I didn't say anything." He didn't want to think anything of it at first.

"How come? Did anything happen?" 

"He started hanging out with this new group of kids and getting involved with them. I had to hang around with him and some others. They like to smoke and drink," Casey said uncomfortably.

Drugs, but he didn't want to get into that.

"Oh... so they're those types of people," she said slowly.

He nodded understandingly. "Yeah. He started to do those stuff since he met them."

She pondered for a moment. As though she didn't know if she should ask, but she brought herself to hesitantly ask. "So, have you done it too?"

"No, but I thought about it before."

"Then what made you didn't?"

It would be weird to say it out loud, but it was the truth. "Raquel. We weren't together yet, but she absolutely couldn't stand people who smoke."

"I see. You made a good choice then," Snow said.

"You know those days of partying? He wanted to always go to them, and because he hung around with those people, I got to go with them. The one who sat next to him last time that you saw that night and said something to me. That guy was one of those people," Casey pointed out.

"He got thrills from those parties. Each one he went, he lived it up. The others are always drinking, and he followed what they did."

Casey delved into the details about what went on at the parties. As high school parties went, it was those typical parties that were followed by no adult supervision or an irresponsible adult who didn't care what teenagers were getting themselves into. They had beers, bottles of Jim Bean, tequilas, vodkas; they were loaded with alcoholic drinks. Some parties were more crowded than others. The biggest one he went to had over 250 high school students.

In some instances, he had let loose and talked to strangers, playing silly games and charades just to blend along. They were distractions, but regularly, he was looking out for Ty. He didn't trust the people he had been hanging out with.

Ty's friends were pretty much drunk throughout the time and so was he. Casey was the only one who didn't drink because he was his chauffeur. Every night when the parties ended, he took him and a couple of his friends home. And a few of his other friends called someone else. Most of their parents didn't know they were out partying or they didn't care.

One night he heard one of his friends talking smack about him. They remarked on how much of a loser Casey was and that he'd only dragged them down. Before, Ty would've said that Casey was harmless. It was a pity that he had been influenced by them so much lately that he laughed along to their words.

Casey jumped in and pulled away Ty from them to ask what he was doing, but he told him to just chill out. Ty thought that they weren't wrong and agreed that he was a sort of a buzzkill. Whenever Ty invited Casey to join him and the others for nights out that weren't just parties, he turned him down.

"It broke into a huge argument, and it caused a scene that everyone was watching. I told him that he should stop doing all this, but he wouldn't listen. I tried to give subtle hints before that he was acting strange, but he denied it. I tried to walk away before it escalated, but when he called out that I'm proving his point further. Saying I was all sensitive and was the only one feeling that way." He remembered how much anger spiked into him, and at that point, he was done acting reasonably. "So I threw a punch, and there was a fight. It was a commotion the next day. The whispers, the stares, the silent judgment in their eyes. And not a good one."

"Oh my god, did you feel hurt the next day?" Snow gasped.

How funny. Just the etch of concern on her face looked amusing. "It's alright. I had some bruises to the face and a little bit around the body, but it's nothing that bad."

"I'm sorry you have to go through that," she said quietly. Her face silently screamed 'I didn't know you had to go through that.'

"Shit happens. We pretty much didn't talk after that. He'd glare at me for a couple of weeks but then he moved on."

Casey didn't know whether he should mention it or not. It was a very unimportant detail to him, but he thought he should let her know anyway. "Although, there was one incident when I bumped into him and his friends who tried stirring the pot with what a loser I was. Ty reminded me that I was a nobody and I had only my mom. Even then, he knew my mom had it rough and still brought her up. We kinda fought again, went through detention, and the principal let us off with a warning."

Ty was a collection in Casey's book of records about one of the things he lost. Trusting people didn't come that easy as it was a lesson to learn for him that people were quick to disappear from his life. People didn't care enough to hold a relationship they once had and let it slip through their fingers. Moving on quickly that they didn't remember yesterday.

"Oh... you never try to bother talking it out away from the crowd?" she asked.

"Through our eyes speak a lot, that things weren't the same between us. He chose to live a different life," he replied nonchalantly.

"That's pretty unfortunate. I wonder why that is, but you may be right. Things can be unpredictable and we don't choose what happens with what others decide to do."

Words couldn't have been more true. How would people know what others could pull and do something different than what you'd expect?

"You know... one good thing came out of being his friend," Snow said, and her eyes raised interestingly.

"And what's that?" Casey challenged.

"You met someone you like."

How did she manage to find a flip side to all these cursing storms that happened to him? She found a ray of peeking sunshine.

"I guess that's something to look at." He couldn't imagine how different things would be if he didn't meet Raquel.

Because he didn't have anyone else to depend on, Raquel was one to save him. She was there through it all in his early years. 

He didn't know what he could do without her if he was honest.

"I never got to ask.. what's your family like?" she asked curiously.

"Well, I just have my mom. She's... great and caring. She is good at listening and is fair. She has a high level of patience. When we would eat dinner together, it is just silence, but it's okay because that's just normal for us. But at the same time, she's also emotionally distant and bottled up. She's not really good at talking or opening up her feelings. There are days where she would lie in bed after work and just do nothing. There are days where we don't talk at all, and we just live our separate lives."

His mother had a face of restless and tired as a default mood. She was tired of living life, but because she has him as her son, she kept going to make sure he was going to live better.

"So, it's just you and your mom? What's making your mom distant?" Snow said.

"She wasn't always like that. She used to be more opened up and balanced with everything. It's when... my dad died that her world fell apart. He was her first love. It had a huge effect on her. She didn't want to accept that he wasn't living anymore... It was difficult for her. She grieved for so long," he revealed, remembering the process that happened.

His father was eleven years older than his mother. He was a chemist, so naturally, he focused on chemical analyses or experiments. Even outside of work, he still thought about them and used his creativity to think about novel solutions. He enjoyed new challenges and problem-solving methods. He kept track by noting it down in his notebook. Knowledge was power for him that he stayed up late nights to work on formulas.

His mother acted like it hadn't bothered her but worried deeply about his health.

"She thought she could have prevented it from happening, knowing what she knows, but ignored it for so long. She cried a lot on the day of his death. And days after that. She spent being cooped up in the house, never really gone out except for occasional groceries and necessities. She started to lose interest in everything she used to enjoy."

It went on for months when she'd forget she had Casey to take care of until he had to remind her.

It would be a lie to not say that he thought something was going on with his father, but he hadn't thought much about it.

"How did he die?" Snow wondered.

"His eyesight was worsening. Naturally, it was from old age, but he didn't say anything about it until mom figured it out. She told him that he should've gotten checked out by an eye doctor about it. The day he was on his way to an eye doctor, some drunk idiot decided it'd be a good idea to speed up, and well... you get the story," Casey said, not bothering to fill in the blanks for her.

"That must have been so hard." She instinctively put a hand up to her chest. "I hope I don't mean to sound I'm pitying you, but that's just really sad."

"You should appreciate what you have then. You're lucky you don't have my life," he joked, lessening the load.

"Is your mom doing okay now?" she asked.

"She's... pushing through her days," he replied.

His mother was plodding back to one of her hobbies, reading classic literary fiction. Occasionally she made an effort to watch action drama movies with all the guns and violence to help her, forgetting the slow heaving pain deep in her. She never has forgotten his father no matter how much time passes. She wished to be filled in with work rather than staying at home.

Snow pursed her lips in thought. It appeared she was trying hard to dig something into her mind, like something she needed him to know. When it made sense to her, she was secondhand guessing if she should tell it, but she did anyway. "When I was five years old, I thought that the coins in the water fountain were thrown in by ghosts. My dad told me that the ghosts wanted to make a wish for someone alive. So, for a short while, every time I went near a water fountain and heard something being thrown into the water, I thought ghosts were near me. I couldn't see them, so I waved in thin air trying to say hi."

Casey stifled a chuckle. He imagined how funny it was she fell for the lie. "Then what happened?"

"Some people laughed at me because I was waving at literally no one. I didn't get it at first, but later, my dad told me it was just a funny lie to see how I would take it." She made a cute sullen expression. "I was disappointed, to say the least."

"Did you not see anyone throwing coins in?" he asked and raised a brow.

"No, I was too astonished by hearing that I didn't really look."

"You didn't think otherwise?"

"I believed him. I didn't think it was really him that was throwing coins behind my back."

He promptly laughed at her. It was the obliviousness of believing something like that was real. Snow sat there without saying anything and gazed at him like she's relieved she had told the little secret of hers.

"Something tells me you're funny even though you don't think you are," Casey said sincerely.

"I'm not funny. I'm strange." Snow shrugged her shoulder.

"You're more than that, alright? There's a guy out there who's going to appreciate the parts of you." He rested a hand on her shoulder, giving her a consoling smile.

"As a girl who thinks there's no way that's going to happen, I hope you're right on that," she said, looking at him for a moment.

He didn't know why anybody hadn't picked up this girl yet and swept her up off her feet, but she was a girl who deserved to be worthy of that.

"There will be." He was certain of it.

"I have a secret technique that I want to share with you," Snow said. She dug into her backpack, searching past her notebooks and other things. She set down the pencil case right beside her and picked up a black marker. "Let me borrow your hand."

He gave his hand to her as she held it carefully. With the black marker, she drew on the back of his hand. It was a smiley face.

"Ta-da. It's your reward. Think of it as a little guy smiling for you when you sometimes can't." Her tone was lighthearted when she looked at him.

Casey glanced at the smiling face of her drawing, then back to her, his eyes turning with an inquisitive look. "You're something..."

"I learned it from someone." Snow smiled mysteriously to herself.

There was a look in her eyes like she recalled of that someone who made an impact on her. He didn't know who it was, but he just let it go.

"Thanks for that," Casey said.

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Hello! Upload on a Saturday, but it's still a good weekend. I hope you're all living okay. I don't have much of a fun update to tell you other than is it really about to be July? Oh my gosh, I can't believe it.

I also can't believe my short story Shy Boy is growing more and more. Lol. I'm at 73k views right now??? Gosh, I can't believe my eyes. I never thought it would be something. I've seen a lot keep adding to their reading list, and that's so great. It's literally my first short story, and I didn't think it would even go that far. It's such a simple plot, but a lot of people are liking it is just making me feel warm, lol.

I do want to make another short story sometime in the later future, but my priority is finishing this story! We are getting closer to the end, but there's still stuff left to go over and even stuff you won't expect! Next one or two chapters will hit you with feels. 

Please vote and comment as it means the world to me.