**TRIGGER WARNING** Depiction of severe depression, suicidal ideations, and a severe anxiety attack.

**CONTENT WARNING** Mention of underage drinking. 

I might not sleep tonight

Sometimes I look at you and I look into your eyes

I notice the way you think about death with a smile

Curved lips you just can't disguise

But you think it's the living making your life worthwhile

Why is it so hard for you to decide which you love more?

The living

Or the dead

You're not fond of the darkness

And you really hate vastness

But you just think back to the dead

And your happiness is back inside of your head

--The song Disguise, lyrics by Orion Bauwens

I look down at my ringing phone. It's Orion.

"Ori, I was just about to go to sleep."

"Sorry. I can't talk long and I have a huge favor."

He's crying. Fuck, he's crying. Why? "Orion, what's wrong?"

He gives his nervous laugh. "Um, I'm at the police station and this is my one call. Bail is seven hundred dollars."

"What the fuck..."

"I know. I couldn't call my parents because they'd just let me stay here."

"What the fuck did you do?"

"I have a minute--are you going to help me or not?"

I sigh heavily. "Holy fucking shit, dude...I'll see what I can do."

He sniffs. "Thank you..."

"Dude--I don't know if I'll be able to do anything."

"I gotta go, okay?"

"Fuck, Orion--!"

"B-bye."

For a second I don't do anything. Then I throw my phone against the wall. Then I stomp out of my room and go looking for my parents.

~

"Oh thank God." Orion scrambles to his feet.

It's really, really disturbing seeing my best friend in a jail cell. As if this year couldn't get any more surreal, then here we were. I go over to him and grip the bars angrily.

"What the fuck did you do?"

My parents are with me. I don't give a damn about my swearing, they can deal. Orion whimpers and looks at them, physically cringing.

"I...broke a window," he squeaks unintentionally.

"Why?"

His eyes are globes. "I don't--I don't know."

"Orion," my dad says gruffly, crossing his arms.

He sniffs. "It was the window of a lady I don't like."

My dad frowns.

"She lives--she lives across the street from me..."

"Why don't you like her?" my dad says in his deep, scary voice. He's not even trying to be scary--he just is sometimes.

"B-because she's always yelling at me and my friends when we hang out on m-m-my porch." He backs up until he's against the wall. "A-a-and she was y-yelling tonight s-so I threw a r-rock at her window."

"Were you being loud?" my mom asks icily.

"Y-yeah..."

"Did you ever think that maybe quieting down was an option?" I shout.

"Jake," my dad warns me. I let go of the bars and glare.

"She's always on my ass about everything!" Orion argues, "even when I'm not doing shit! She just doesn't like my existence, and I'm sick of it!"

"I'm sure she has no problem with you living," my mom replies just as cold, her eyebrows raising. "She expects you to be a delinquent, so she treats you as such. Can't say I blame her after tonight."

Orion looks down, and I can tell he's quietly crying.

"My parents don't want me hanging out with you anymore," I say quietly.

Orion's head shoots up, and he is, in fact, crying. "W-what?"

"But," my father says, "after a discussion on the way over, we decided that it's not fair to punish our son because you're a screw up."

Orion's face goes blank. It's the look he gets when he moves into himself to protect himself. I glance down, and sure enough he's balled his hands into fists.

"But," my father continues, walking to the cell, "if we ever, ever catch wind of anything like this again, we really are not letting you see him."

"We'd see each other in school," Orion sneers.

"I don't think you're in a position to be cocky," my dad replies, narrowing his eyes.

Orion makes himself smaller. "S-sorry..."

With that my mom turns and starts to leave. My dad follows suit. I give a final glare at Orion, and then begin to follow them. I hear him rush over to the bars.

"Guys! Hey, guys! Did you post my bail? Guys! Fuck, please don't leave me!"

We leave. Of course we posted his bail. But we're all so pissed at him we decide to let him squirm until he figures that out.

~

"Are you still pissed at me?"

Orion sits down next to me at lunch. I merely look away.

"I'm sorry."

I look at him. Then I gasp. "The fuck happened to your eye?"

"What the fuck do you think happened?!" he screams at me, causing a few people to look at us.

I'm guessing his dad. I don't say anything. Once people go back to minding their own business, I speak.

"You really should speak up about that."

He scoffs. "What, and get my ass kicked some more? Yeah, no thanks."

"I'm serious, Ori."

"So am I!" he screams again. This time, less people look. Once they ignore us again, Orion speaks quietly. "Thanks for posting bail..." He trails off, gnawing on his cuticles.

"You're going to pay them back, yaknow. That wasn't a small amount of money."

He looks down, still ripping at his flesh with his teeth. "Yeah, I know. I will."

"You better."

"I said I fucking will, alright?"

Silence.

"My parents were serious, you know."

He looks at me. "About what?"

"Not hanging around you. They screamed at me for an hour."

He screws up his face. "At you? Why?"

"They love you Ori, they do, but they're starting to worry you're a bad influence."

A mix of emotions pass over his face. He looks offended, he looks angry, he looks sad. Finally he looks defeated. He looks down and the fringe of his dark hair falls down, obscuring his face.

"I'm sick of life."

"Orion," I say softly, my lips parting. "You don't mean that."

"I do, though."

He sniffs and I grab his chin, lifting his head. He's crying. And not just like, a little bit.

I lurch to my feet and pull him to his. As discreetly as possibly I rush him to the door. I'm supporting most his weight and he keeps tripping. When a security guard tries to stop us, I just quickly point at Orion. They let me past.

I bring him to the nearest bathroom. As soon as we're there he collapses on the ground, curling up into a small ball. I step over him quickly and check the urinals and stalls. We're alone, so I lock us in.

I drop down on my knees. Alarms are going off in my head. It's almost like he's choking. 

"Or--Orion.. breath, dude."

He's clutching at his hair. I know both of us panicking would do nothing, so I try to keep calm. "We're going to breathe together, okay? Deep breath in--deep breath out."

After a few rounds of this and I'm the only one doing it, I feel silly. But it finally gets through to him, and we breathe together. I'm relieved; having my best friend curled up on the grimy floor in a High School bathroom, not breathing correctly, was one of the most petrifying experiences of my short life.

"I hate my life. It's a fucking mess. I'm so sick of everything. I just want to die."

I could barely understand him. "It'll get better."

"No, it won't, it fucking won't. I have a court date in a week, my dad punched me, I lost--I lost--I lost--" he stops.

I rub his back. "It will get better. I promise."

"D-don't fucking make promises you can't keep."

"I promise."

Orion weeps. I vow right then and there I'll do my damnedest to make sure his life gets better.

~

Orion manages to just get a warning at his court date since it's his first offense. His neighbor isn't thrilled, at all, and apparently her harassment of him picks up. He's smart enough, however, to walk away any time she does anything.

Occasionally I talk to Orion about seeing the school therapist. That day scared me. Him telling me--for the second time now--that he wished he was dead, frightens me. But every time it's brought up, he merely laughs and pokes fun of the fact that he's an emotional wreck. 

Orion assures me he didn't mean it. He promises they're just empty words. He promises me that he'll die when his time comes of it's own accord and not a second sooner, not pushed by his own hand. It's infuriating. I'd like to believe him but I don't.

Not for a fucking second.

I don't know what to do though, so I just drop it.

The rest of the year goes relatively smoothly. Some highlights include Orion mowing my parents grass every weekend, raking leaves whenever they fall, and in the winter shoveling and salting. They have him commit to that for a year and then they're going to call it even. I'm happy to say after about a month they even go back to treating him normally instead of following his every move with silent glares.

I actually decided to go to a Halloween party. Up until that point, I admittedly was a bit of a shut-in. If I wasn't with the band or my boyfriend, I didn't do anything. But Orion invited me, and Pete was going, so why not?

The party was...interesting. Orion showed up as a harlequin. I was a baseball player. Pete was a vampire. Even though I was with Pete, I found it...hard, to keep my eyes off Orion. The tight suit is what did me in--he really had zero shame.

Halloween also marked my first time drinking. Orion just further proved his prowess at drinking. I, however, did not know my limits, and ended up getting stupid drunk. I'm told I ended up dancing on the table with Orion, and at one point made out with Pete in front of everyone. Which, he wasn't too thrilled with. To the point that he broke up with me. C'est la vivre, I guess?

All I know is that I woke up the next day, still at the house, a trash can over my head. Orion was curled up at my side, sleeping. Pete was nowhere to be found, and once Orion was sober enough he filled me in on the details (yes, sober enough, he was still drunk). I was sad about Pete, but then again I deserved it for getting black-out drunk and making out with him in front of everyone. I outed him when he didn't want to be. It was shitty.

The night wasn't completely lost though. I mean, I got to see Orion in a skin-tight costume and ended up curled up next to him. True I was upset about Pete, and I feel so guilty to this day for doing that to him, but at the same time he was my first boyfriend. I wasn't holding my breath for wedding bells, anyway.

The only other notable thing from the remainder of the year was the band. We were really starting to gain traction. Once Orion joined, our popularity surged. Everyone loved his unique voice. Everyone could tell he was gifted, even people who knew nothing about music. 

With every passing day his confidence grew, and he started to come out of his singing shell. Looking back on it, it was near the end of Junior Year that we started to catch glimpses of his full Orion Bauwens, rockstar, potential. We just had no idea back then we had struck gold.

It was a really exciting. The only complaint was we could not get Orion to perform any of his original works. Eventually he performed them for Ben, but he refused to play them for an audience. 

He kept insisting Ben was a better lyricist, which simply was not true. Orion was different. Ben was good, yeah, sure, but Orion had a way with words. Ben wrote the expected--Orion wrote the unexpected. He wrote emotions, not words.

He also did things musically that were completely out of left field. Changing tempos mid-song. Messing with key signatures. He'd rent a synth from the local music shop with his allowance, and he'd experiment with different styles of music. When that quickly bored him he started carrying a tape recorder around with him, recording random sounds. The weirdest by far was when I walked in on him once, stirring a fresh pot of spaghetti on the stove at my house with a wooden spoon.

"Uhhhh... what're you--"

"Shh!" he stopped recording, looking at me excitedly. "Did you know that spaghetti being stirred sounds different depending on if it's cold or fresh, if it has sauce or not, and if you're using a plastic, wooden, or metal utensil to stir it?"

I had asked him if he was high. He insisted he wasn't. He also insisted that the best sound was produced with sauced pasta using a wooden spoon. It was a very Andy Warhol moment, I felt.

I hate to say it, but we actually used that very recording as a background in one of our songs years later. Only played backwards. Which, to me, pasta being stirred is pasta being stirred. It sounds the same played frontwards or backwards. According to him there's a difference.

Everything about our tone was dark. Even the songs that didn't seem dark if you were just idling listened to it. A song about a murder? It totally made sense in Orion's head to write it as a mariachi. A song about an execution that goes wrong and leaves the person crippled? Make it a happy pop-ish song (we don't do pop, so it was more pop-rock). Rock ballad? Sing it as a unsettling whisper. 

Disturbing imagery was a must--spiders, snakes, dark rooms, attics, blood, things rotting, holding dead bodies in your arms at the bottom of a lake...And it always stood for something, and it usually were things that you wouldn't be able to figure out unless you knew him. Like, really knew Orion in and out.

The scarecrow with a pumpkin head chasing someone through a cornfield? His relationship with his dad. The mouse scampering through the field as a falcon circles overhead? Him. Which, by the way, that song ends with the mouse getting eaten by a snake, so there's that. Or that song about someone at the bottom of the lake holding a dead body? His soul. Yikes.

We didn't use all of his material. Eventually he felt comfortable enough to show us everything, and, of course, not everything would end up making the cut. I don't think there physically are enough hours in a lifetime to record everything he ever wrote. It was staggering--it was too much.

Another unexpected thing regarding Orion's lyrics was they were clean. Very rarely were there any curse words and there wasn't anything blatantly sexual in them. Maybe he figured since sometimes they were on the violent side he didn't need to incorporate cursing and sex. Or maybe he just took his writing in a more serious, adult light. Regardless it was a stark contrast to his day-to-day speech.

So that's how life went. Shortly we'd be wrapping up our High School experience. It was just over the horizon, creeping upon us in less than a year. 

I knew after this year we'd all be going our separate ways. I knew it in the pit of my soul, and every day of summer I became sadder and sadder. Yeah, a lot of fucked up shit had happened, but...We were going to splinter, wooden shards thrown away from each other like what happens to a wooden ship when hit with a cannonball.

I didn't want to. So I was going to make the best out of this upcoming year or die trying.