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Just One Bandaid Between Us

Just a story about making a friend.

By AdrienPublished 4 years ago 11 min read
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I’ve only been here for about seven years.

Oh, sure, for you, that might not seem like a particularly short period of time, and for any other seven-year-old human boy, it’s quite literally their entire life. However, despite my appearance, I was not a seven-year-old human boy.

Well… I suppose that, technically, the body I’m occupying is a human one, and I’ve occupied it and grown in it for seven years, and at the moment, this body is conforming to this society’s average stipulations for what it means to be a boy, so in that sense, yes, I am a seven-year-old human boy. But I - my Self, my consciousness - has existed for eons longer than this body has. I am a Kind - a race of creatures that this world might call “extraterrestrial” or “alien.” We are less born and more… manufactured without a physical body, and we dedicate our existences to studying other forms of life by building a form just like theirs at its earliest stage of life and then inhabiting it until death. Then, we move onto another planet, another species.

I’ve been, more or less, around for longer than the human mind can comprehend.

I don’t do much to hide my true nature. My primary goal is to study what it’s like to live a human life - I don’t have to be discreet, unless I believe my experiment is in danger. Nonetheless, even if I haven’t exactly tried to act like a human - beyond just doing “normal” human things - I still get held to the same standards as any other seven-year-old human boy. That means that when I want to experiment with this society’s concept of “gender” - every world, every species has a different one - I receive more or less… negative feedback from my “peers.”

It’s been enlightening.

Today, I’d chosen to wear my shoulder-length mousy-brown hair up in a pair of buns on the top of my head - traditionally a “girl’s” hairstyle - and tried lip gloss. The girls in my class seemed to like the change. They thought it was “weird,” but they liked how I wore it with “confidence,” and I was very popular among the female students anyway. However, the boys… were not quite so receptive.

I had expected this. They’d been particularly harsh not long ago when I’d worn overalls embroidered with flowers to school, so I figured it would only get worse, and I was correct. It was fascinating… the girls seemed to be permitted to wear their hair and dress however they liked, as long as it wasn’t explicit or too revealing, but the boys had different expectations, stricter expectations, and they bit back hard when one of them didn’t meet the bar. How odd it was that, for this species, a first-grader’s hairstyle and cosmetic decisions could incite such… violence.

The bruise on my cheek ached, and the scrapes on my palms stung from where the asphalt had torn up the skin there. My teacher had given me three band-aids for the cuts on my jaw and the scratch on my knee. I didn’t mind the pain, and I actually liked the aesthetic. I thought I looked quite rough-and-tumble this way. I wasn’t angry at the boys, either. I didn’t usually feel “anger.” It was all just so intriguing to me. However, my teacher said she was growing “concerned.” My human caretakers were “concerned,” too. This was my third fight this week.

They all want me to “lay low for a bit.”

I don’t understand why - or even really what they mean by that.

I was going to try to decipher it now, on my walk home - it was sunny, and I had my backpack on my shoulder and my skateboard tucked under my arm. Good thinking weather. A few planets I’d lived on had similar weather mechanics, and I’d always liked warm and bright best. Unfortunately, I was apparently not permitted to do any thinking today.

There was a little girl, sitting against the brick wall of some old apartment building, near the alley. About my age… in a similar physical state.

I knew this girl. She wasn’t in my class, but she attended my school, and we were in the same soccer league. From what I’d seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if her bruises were… self-inflicted. Not in an intentional way, but… she did seem to have a knack for getting herself into trouble.

Her peachy ginger hair was down behind her shoulders in a pair of messy twin braids, and she was bleeding from multiple scrapes just like mine. Her denim overalls skirt had these sweet little heart-shaped pockets, and one was ripped almost cleanly off, hanging by a thread, as if someone had grabbed it and yanked on it. The injuries all seemed fresh, and she appeared to be catching her breath, but she didn’t seem particularly “scared” or “sad.” “Solemn,” maybe.

“Hey, kid -” I greeted, popping my bubblegum, “- what are you doing on the ground like that?”

She looked up at me, a streak of dirt on her cheek.

“Oh,” she shoved her bangs out of her face, “it’s… Collin, right?”

...she knew my name?

I’d never even heard hers before.

“Well… that’s the name my caretakers gave me, yea,” I replied, adjusting my grip on the skateboard.

“Caretakers…? Oh - that’s right, you’re adopted, aren’t you? My brother told me about it. You eat with him at lunch,” she explains, and it’s at that moment that I realize who she is. Yes, I’d seen her around, but it never clicked with me until just now that Adam - one of my friends, one of the only boys who could stand me - was her older brother. He’d talked about her before. They seemed quite close, but I’d never seen Adam outside of school, and so I’d never met her personally.

“Oh… so you’re Eden.”

“That’s me.”

“What are you doing on the ground?”

I wasn’t one to stay off my original topic for long. My caretakers hated that. They couldn’t distract me from tough questions by changing the subject; I’d always jump right back into it.

“I got beat up.”

“I can see that, but what are you doing on the ground?”

Eden raised an eyebrow, a confused, goofy grin overtaking her face. She was missing one of her front teeth. It was hard to tell if it had just fallen out, or if someone had knocked it out of her mouth in this latest scuffle.

“You’re really focused on that question, aren’t you?” She mumbled, sounding amused. I didn’t know what was so funny about it.

“The kids just left, so I thought I’d stop and breathe and let them get far away before standing up again… I used to get up right away, but I learned the hard way - three times - that they’ll just turn around and push me over again, so it’s kind of pointless to try and get up while they’re still here.”

“I suppose that’s rational,” I reply, seriously, and she giggles at my phrasing. I’ve been told I have a large vocabulary for my age. Personally, I think it’s rather small. I’ve been learning the English language for seven whole Earth years and there are still words I don’t know.

“I have an extra band-aid,” I offer, “Mrs. Markette gave me one more than I needed.”

She chuckles, “I think I’m going to need more than one.”

“I only have one.”

She smiled at me, and I got the distinct impression that she was trying to solve me, like a puzzle, “Well… if I could have it, it’s better than nothing.”

I set down my skateboard and crouched beside Eden, digging around in the pockets of my backpack before finding the bandaid and helping her stretch it over one of the cuts on her knees. They were more severe than mine, like she’d been shoved down on the sidewalk many times.

“Why did they beat you up?” I ask while I work.

Eden shrugged, “I dunno. Adam had to stay after school for drama club, so I was walking home alone. I guess they just did it because they could.”

“Humans are strange. You’d think they’d have adapted a natural desire to protect their own kind, for the sake of defending the species, and yet, they’ll turn on each other for the slightest difference, sometimes hurting others just for the entertainment of it,” I muse, “It doesn’t make sense. You’re all on the same side.”

Eden seemed to struggle with following my sentence structure, but she still appeared interested in what I had to say. When I was done, both with speaking and with bandaging her knee, she said, “Do all aliens talk like you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t met all aliens yet.”

“If you do, will you come back and tell me if they talk like you?”

“You’ll probably be long dead by then.”

“But if I’m not?”

I didn’t know what to say to this. She was a human - a normal human. By the time I had met every species there was to meet in this universe, she would be no more than dust, in fact, she may not even be that much. There was absolutely no chance whatsoever of her surviving that long, so why make a promise to her that was based on a pointless, impossible hypothetical such as this?

“...On the… off chance that you are still alive, yes.”

This seemed to please her. She smiled again.

The Kind aren’t created with our own emotions. They can make it tricky to move from life to life. But our bodies sometimes come with feelings. We typically ignore them, but I’ve found it especially difficult to suppress them in this particular form. Human emotions must be remarkably complex and powerful. One “feeling” I noticed was this… warmth in my chest when someone smiled at me. It made me want to smile back. My female caretaker explained that this was called happiness, and when our friends are happy, it makes us happy too. This is how I knew that Adam was my friend.

When Eden smiled, I smiled back.

She must be my friend, too.

“Thanks. Adam told me all about you, you know. He said you have cool powers, like shape-shifting. And he said you can’t die like we do. He said your job is to go everywhere and see everything,” Eden rambles, excitedly, and I found I didn’t mind listening to her chatter as much as I did some other humans’, “I wish I could do that. I wish that when I died, I’d just get to go someplace else and do something new. I want to see all of it, too. But I can’t… so I hope at least you’ll tell me about what it’s like.”

“I think I can manage that,” I say, not sure I’d be able to fully quantify how it feels to exist this long, how confusing it can be to try and operate a body that wasn’t truly your own, how disorienting it can be to die and then wake up as an entirely new person. How incredible it is to know how truly infinite the universe is, how freeing it is to be allowed and encouraged to explore it. I never have to live a perfect life - I don’t even have to live a “good” one. I just have to live one. And if I’m unsatisfied with it, I can try again in the next one.

I didn’t know how I’d be able to explain that to someone who would never really experience it.

But she seemed so passionate, and the idea of trying to tell her, trying to show it to her, made me… happy.

“So, what about you?” She asks me, “Why are you hurt? Those don’t look like they feel so good.”

“Some boys seemed to dislike my hair today.”

“I think it looks nice.”

“Most girls did.”

“I’m sorry you got hurt over it,” She says, her head tilting to the side, and she made an expression that I’d seen on my caretakers’ faces many times, “Some people don’t know how to ‘mind their own damn business.’ That’s what Adam said once, anyway.”

“Do you think enough time has passed for you to stand up now?” I ask, clinically.

“Yea,” she giggles, “I think I’ll be okay. Could you help me up?”

I straighten from my kneeling position, resting my foot on my skateboard, and extend a hand.

When she grasped my fingers, I experienced a new, strange feeling. At the time, I couldn’t put a name to it. If I had to describe it, it was like that same warmth you get when you’re “happy,” but... all over. It didn’t make me want to smile, exactly, but it did make me want to hold her hand forever. I told my caretakers about it later, and they laughed, exchanged knowing looks, and said it was “love.” Now, looking back, I disagree. Maybe later on, I loved Eden, but back then, I wouldn’t have called that “love.” I’d instead call it “peace.”

I felt… at peace.

No one had ever made me feel so safe, so quickly. No one had ever taught me a new emotion within minutes of meeting. And when I say no one, I mean no one - in any of my many lives where the form came with feelings, I’d never experienced anything like this. Not once.

Maybe Eden wasn’t just a normal human, after all… but… more importantly…

…I knew she was my friend.

science fiction
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About the Creator

Adrien

I write short stories with the intent of spreading positivity and bringing people from different backgrounds together through the humanity (and inhumanity) of my characters. Please enjoy!

🍑If you’re feeling generous, tips are appreciated🍑

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