There was a boy I met at secondary school. His name was Corey.
He was taller than average and effeminate. He was also a handsome thirteen, already looking like something from a Ralph Lauren commercial. I felt self-conscious in his presence, with my scarred chest and my crooked teeth.
He played the piano. It was like nothing I had seen or heard before. He had lessons from a young age, and was excellent and could converse and joke while playing complex pieces as though it were nothing.
One time, when I went to his house for what I called dinner, and what he and his family called supper, I took one of my father’s records: Even in the Quietest Moments by Supertramp, which I loved. The cover showed a piano buried in snow, and the album contained a lot of piano in the songs. I thought that Corey would like it.
After supper, we went to his room, and he put on the record. He danced to it in front of me, lacking any kind of inhibition, and he sang along to the words of the first song, "Give a Little Bit", to me.
He grabbed me hard by the wrist and sang loudly, smiling and staring straight into my eyes as he spun me round and encouraged me to dance and sing as well. I was too shy and embarrassed, unable to let go of my own inhibitions and dance and sing with him, even though I wanted to.
I must have turned bright red as I watched him spin, dance and sing. He eventually gave up, sat on the bed, and looked at the record sleeve.
He noticed the last song was over ten minutes long and decided to berate me for it, as though I were the member of the band responsible for the song’s length. He declared how absurd it was for a pop song to run for over ten minutes.
Then we went outside into his giant back garden and pushed each other on the tyre swing hanging from the big tree until the sun began to set. There was an old bridge, once an active railway line, that ran above his house, but the trains had stopped running to our part of rural England before we were born.
When my mother came to collect me, Corey declared he didn’t want me to go because we hadn’t yet listened to the ten-minute last song on the Supertramp album. I didn’t realise he was being sarcastic.
Corey had the most potential of all of us, so when he got caught smoking pot a few months later, his parents went crazy and decided that he would be sent to a private boarding school.
He came to my house to say goodbye one evening, and he had written me a letter. I took it but didn’t read it straight away. As I wanted to play video games. He didn’t like video games, so he just sat next to me and watched me play Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation.
While I was playing, he asked me if I understood what was happening. He told me he was moving to London and that there was a chance we’d never see each other again. He asked if I had anything I wanted to say to him. I didn’t know what he meant, I just wanted to play video games.
He knew exactly what he meant and was upset; he also wanted me to be upset. I didn’t fully understand why.
He was from a different world, aware of different things. We were both just kids, but he was well on his way to being an adult, profoundly more aware of the nature of life than I was. I just had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I didn’t understand.
He became annoyed with my inability to respond to the situation in any way and ended up storming out of my room and telling my mother to phone his mother to come and pick him up.
After he’d gone, I just carried on playing video games, but I felt stupid underneath. I was also upset at the prospect of never seeing Corey again and couldn’t stop thinking about his giant eyes and the various looks of sadness and anger he had given me before he left.
