Barricades

1025 Words3 Pages

My gut reaction was to drive the car directly into traffic. Just to end the misery and get the sleep I had been yearning for. Any other day the drive to my apartment would have taken five minutes; I made it in three. As I pulled up to the medieval Iron Gate in front of Board Walk, I called Joshua to deliver the grim news. He was still asleep and I almost didn't have the heart left to give the news in person. I skipped every step I could trying to get to the third floor. "Joshua! Wake up we got 6 minutes get the hell up!" He opens the door with the eyes of a defeated man. At that moment I know we had the same thought. "FUCK." We ran back into the living room to find out Dave already took the car to Chic-fil-a. I motioned towards Joshua’s phone my heart couldn't manage to make that call. "Hello, Mr. Brown" "Y’all are here?" "No, we don't have a car." "Do I care? Y’all got 20 minutes." "But you live 3 miles away." "Sounds like you better run." We grabbed a bike that we found at Strozier the week prior, Joshua rode handle bars for the first half mile and a half. My round on the handle bars sucked, there are a lot of speed bumps in that neighborhood. Every bump was a violent reminder that I was going through all of this to be even more uncomfortable. We arrive at what we affectionately called the castle. We called it that because of the stone brick walls outside and the fact that a moat formed in the dirt pile or front yard, he referred to it as one of those, every time it rained, there was a slight drizzle or the hose had a leak. All of the majesty owned by a tyrant, it seemed pretty fitting to me. We walk into the house and we are immediately met with hostility. Shouting about how lacksidasical our generation is and how we... ... middle of paper ... ...ded to tell. He told me how he got rid of our contact info and burned all the notes Mr. Brown had with our parent’s info on it. That was the last day we saw Mr. Brown and the last time we cried over a man. To this day I don’t drive near Tharpe Street strictly out of paranoia, he was our tormentor for over a month and clear reminder of why we didn’t like baseball. I learned that a fool is born every day and it just son happens that two of those fools became friends that summer. I have since ironically joined the same fraternity as Mr. Brown thankfully this was not his chapter. I am grateful to him for making my life so hard that nothing seems impossible nor too stressful to get accomplished. I am sill best friends with Joshua and this is a story he loves to tell to every new person we meet so I thought I would take on he carefree attitude and share it with you.

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