"Aaron, you haven't said a word since we sat down to eat. How's school? Do you have a girlfriend?”
My grandma can go to hell. I understand she's old, but she has no respect for other people so I don't give her mine. She doesn't even believe in tipping waitresses. And she points out when people are quiet.
"School is okay. No. Sorry."
I know how to sever a conversation. After that she just rolled her eyes and began talking politics with my aunt, uncle, and grandpa. The head of the table where my father sat has been empty since he died nine years ago. It hit me pretty heavily, but I came out of it a surprisingly positive kid. I accepted his death like I accept F's. It's terrible to compare the two, but I believe you can't dwell on awful things for too long or you'll start to come apart.
"Can I be excused?"
"Why? What's wrong?"
"I just want to go for a walk."
"Okay, fine."  She rolls her eyes so much I'm surprised they're still intact.
I enjoy walking around my grandparents' neighborhood because it's mostly nature. The trees remind me of my dad in such a nice way. To me they're all him, and it's good to think of him like he used to be. He warmly greets gangs of children on bikes and sweaty late night joggers. Moving with the flow of the world. I think that's where I learned-
"Excuse me."
I jumped around to find a boy looking at me with an innocent smile. I'm not so great in situations like these, so I just stood where I was until he spoke again.
"Hello, I'm Alex. I'm lost."
"Oh... I'll help you."
I felt bad that I couldn't think of anything more to say, but the boy seemed satisfied with my few words.
Nothing else was said for ten minutes after that. He kept looking up at me, smiling and squinting. The more he did, the warmer I felt. It was weird because I usually disliked children of his age. I assumed he was around 7 or 8 because he was so small and clean.
"How old are you, Alex?"
"I just turned nine."
That explained why I liked him. Nine is the age you truly stop being a fetus, in my opinion. He seemed so happy about being nine years old, and it made me smile.
"Well, I'm nineteen."  And I smiled too. I was glad about it. We kept walking around the neighborhood, occasionally stopping to see if a house was his. The gated community wasn't too large and I planned to walk the whole thing with Alex if I had to. Something about him grew on me. Not that we had many great conversations since we met, but his general energy plucked something familiar in my heart. It made me that kind of sleepy content you get when someone strokes your hair.
We walked in silence for I don’t know how long until the purple blur of dusk seemed to blanket our feet like a thin fog. Somehow I felt like I had known the nine year old wandering next to me for my entire life, and the strangely familiar feeling of comfort I first felt around him had multiplied by a hundred since we started down the road. I looked down the street, far, past the trees and shrubbery leaking in from the sidewalk's edges and into the glowing black ahead of us. Thoughts of my dad started to crawl back  to me slowly, and I didn't feel like I was walking anymore. Soon to wake me from my dangerous lucid dream, however, was Alex's clean little hand on my shoulder.
"This is it." He turned me to face his swiveled body as to present his home to me. It was weird though, because we were stopped in front of nothing. I couldn't tell where we were, but it reminded me somewhat of my grandma's old house before it was torn down.
"I... are you sure?"
"Positive."
I wanted to ask him what was happening, wanted him to explain everything, but I felt like I could trust in whatever strange abilities and instincts he possessed. He seemed like a strange kid, but I liked him. An empty, resonant sort of whisper echoed through me when I finally realized that we would now be parting ways.
“Thank you for helping me,” Alex remarked.
“You’re welcome,” I replied genuinely. “It was fun.”
“Yeah, it was.” He turned to go, but before walking off he turned back around to look at me once again. With one swift motion of his left wrist he flicked his thumb from behind his two front teeth and smiled. It was at this very moment that everything I had felt up until this point had started to make sense. Who else in the world gives goodbyes like that, except- ?
I turned around on a dime, shaken and confused. Alex was nowhere in sight. For some reason I expected him to be standing there still, waiting for me to wake up so he could make me two eggs over easy and toast slightly burnt, just the way I like it. And then we would go to the junkyard and look for rusty wheels to refurbish and put on objects they don’t belong to. And we would talk about Mom and how wonderful she was before she left. The thought quickly passed, however, and I started on my way home without feeling. By the time I reached the end of the first street I had convinced myself that my dad only continues to exist in browning photos in the garage and in the cracks of the pavement. But I felt like slipping through those cracks because I didn’t want to, I couldn’t make myself, believe it.