Phil Heinz glanced up and let his phone fall gently out of his hand as the patrol car pulled even with his Jetta at the light. Had he read the message right? Almost definitely, but the more he thought about it the more imagined it felt. If only he could check it again. If only there wasn’t an officer there, hidden behind tinted windows, eyeing him suspiciously on a hunch, knowing full well that those damn millennials can’t help but check their phones at stop lights.
But he needed to check it. Did the ban on texting and driving still apply with his car at a full stop? Could he get a ticket just for looking at his phone? How would they know he wasn’t changing his music or making a call? This seemed like an unenforceable law, like fining someone for picking a bluebonnets or something. But the light would turn green in a couple of moments, so why push it? Why the hell had he gotten that text?
Suddenly, as if on cue, the traffic light changed as the familiar sound of his phone vibrating in his cup holder (perhaps the most disgusting place to ever hold $400 worth of technology) echoed softly as the screen lit up—in case he missed it the first time.
“Can you swing by my place? We need to talk.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d received a version of this message. In his twenty-six years, he had experienced—by the most generous of estimates—roughly six different instances of sustained romantic attention. Of those six, four had ultimately culminated in a similar sentiment. Twice over text, once by phone call, and one time in person at a neighborhood pool party back in middle school, in which she insisted that they dry off, leave their stuff, and walk over to her house to talk in private. Because he was still relatively new to these situations, at the time he had assumed “talk” was being delivered in parenthetical with a sly wink, leaving his mind free to imagine a vastly different outcome than the one he was later presented with. Suffice to say, it was a bit of a letdown.
But what made this newest iteration peculiar wasn’t the words, but whom they were coming from. For the first time, the message wasn’t delivered courtesy a girl with whom he’d been romantically linked for a period lasting between two weeks and seven months. It was from Bradley Neville, a close friend he’d known ever since they shared a dorm suite their freshman year. Actually, “close” may be pushing it. They were close, but in the same way that Mars is close to Earth in comparison to Pluto. Their friendship was based mostly around going to bars and watching sports together, with the occasional lunch thrown in when their work schedules allowed it. It wasn’t like Bradley knew anything that could remotely qualify as a dark and personal secret (of which there were surprisingly plenty to choose from) about him or vice versa. If by some miracle he were to get married in the next five years, Bradley would certainly be invited, but the chances that he would actually be in the wedding were slim to none. Bachelor party, maybe, but that had more to do with supply and demand. He had just never been able to make a ton of guy friends, which made it all the more concerning that this one was suddenly sending messages like someone who was tired of making out with him.
Cleared from the patrol car’s line of vision because the officer had gunned it out of the traffic light in a breathtaking display of the authoritative hypocrisy, he replied with what had become his standard response to such requests:
“what?”
The reply was instantaneous.
“We need to talk”
“Face to face”
“Come by my place”
All delivered in quick succession, reminiscent of a yorky yipping at the heels of a visitor. Bradley was in his corporate drill-sergeant “I-have-grown-man-problems-don’t-fuck-with-me” mindset that Phil had grown used to over the years, but it still had the tendency to really annoy the shit out of him, especially coming at two o’clock on a Sunday. If this talk was going to be carried out in a similar manner, he thought he’d might as well just avoid it altogether. But alas, he had already opened the messages, shifting them into “read” status and ending the possibility of a delivering a thoroughly unconvincing yet socially acceptable alibi (e.g. “Sorry, just woke up”, “Sorry, dropped my phone in the toilet” or “New phone, who dis?”) in a few hours. If only he had obeyed the sensible traffic laws against texting while driving, he might have been able to stall for time until Bradley’s mood shifted. Hell, he may have been able to avoid the conversation altogether. But in the pit of the stomach Phillip knew time wouldn’t make this go away. Not when the talk was about him.
Phil had barely raised his fist to knock when he got word from inside not to bother, the door was open, delivered in that lazy, dead air shout only possible when the speaker’s lungs have contracted from sitting couch-borne for too long. Phil followed the drone into the apartment, where he found Bradley laying prone exactly as expected, his eyes glazed over from a marathon viewing session of ‘Flipper Skipper’, a fresh new program on HGTV Aquatic about a Skipper who flips sailboats with the help of a dolphin named Flipper. On any given episode you were liable to hear some iteration of the phrase “Let’s flip ‘er Skipper!” at least ten times, which Phil found excessive considering each episode is only twenty two minutes long. To help pad the running time, Flipper also helps an orphan find new parents, who then buy said flipped boat, resulting in a win-win situation for all. It was a very stupid concept, but sometimes you just find a title that rhymes and go for it.
This veg’d out version of Bradley wasn’t what Phil had expected. Considering the texts, anything from being yelled at to an awkward heart-to-heart discussion seemed firmly within the realm of possibility, if not the most likely possible outcomes. Maybe he had misread them. Maybe Bradley was just too lazy to text in complete sentences. Maybe he just wanted someone to hang out with.
Or maybe he was in mourning.
Everything was still as they watched the Skipper discover that the boat they were flipping was, believe it or not, in much worse shape than he had thought, leaving the audience with a cliffhanger going into the first commercial break. Bradley flipped off the TV and rose from the couch. He must not have cared if the Skipper went over their target budget, because already his eyes were lighting up, steadily filling with that energy of purpose Phil had dreaded.
“Hey bud. Hey, thanks for coming. Take a seat. Or wait . . .” he stopped himself and reconsidered his approach. “Better yet—don’t. This won’t take too long. . .”
He left that thought hang in the air. After a couple of moments, it became clear that Bradley was waiting for Phil to respond. Whatever Bradley was planning to tell him, he was going to deliver it under the guise of a normal, civilized conversation. No yelling. No emotion. All carefully considered, rational thought.
Rational thought had never played to Bradley’s aptitude. All of the sudden, the gung-ho “don’t-fuck-with-me-chief” version of Bradley didn’t seem so bad.
“So, what have you been up to?”
“Not much,” Bradley replied as he leaned against the kitchen counter, his hand slipping backwards and nearly pushing an antique fruit basket—one of the many small, clearly mom-acquired flourishes that touched up the apartment’s otherwise sparse decoration—completely off the granite countertop. His mind appeared caught between worlds, in limbo between what he felt needed to be said and how to say it. This was a new side of his friend, an emotional place he had never been invited to see. Things were getting awkward.
“Listen, Phil . . .” he started. Phil knew the rest. The guillotine was raised, and there was no way to let it down gently.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
The color drained from Phil’s face as he glanced downward. He tried to prevent it, to maintain his wall of emotional stability he had worked so hard to maintain from crumbling in the relationship’s final moments. The good times flashed before him all at once: the Super Bowl party their sophomore year; eating exceptionally terrible IHop on New Year’s; throwing up in an outdoor porta potti during a Pub Crawl. But wait, weren’t all of those terrible? They all sounded better in retrospect. All moments become meaningful through that lens, regardless of what you remember.
“Wait. . .what?”
“I don’t think we should hang out anymore—“
“No,” Phil replied, his voice shaking slightly. “I understand what you just said. Why are you telling me this?”
Bradley didn’t even know how to begin to answer that question, so he just repeated what he’d said earlier, only this time made it longer.
“Look, dude, I thought about it. Really did some reevaluating, some soul searching, and I just don’t think we should be friends anymore. I mean, I’ve thought about this, and you’re not going to change my mind.”
“I didn’t say I’d try to . . . but that’s not what I’m asking. Like, we’re just friends. There’s nothing officially binding us to be friends. This isn’t a divorce or something. You could have just not asked me to hang out for a while and we would probably just drift away.”
Bradley was willing to hear Phil out, but not without returning worn out looks and exhausted murmurs of “you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.” There had been plenty of reasons to end their friendship, but this cynical, lifeless outlook to just about everything was primary, even if he had trouble grasping it as such. Of course their friendship was something, and it was true because he had once cared about it. Phil asserting otherwise, that it was just a temporary condition that would fade away naturally over time, was insulting to the idea that they were even friends in the first place. Had this always been Phil’s mindset? That even when they hung out almost daily, their frequency of contact was the only thing keeping them from where they were now; the verge of collapse? He was sick of it.
“See, that’s such a shitty attitude. If you’re a man, friendships are commitments. I’m not just going to be sketchy and indirect and just ignore you. I wanted us to be on the same page so that there’s no confusion. This thing that once was is no longer . . . not . . . fuck dude, I just don’t want to be friends anymore.”
To let those thoughts go, releasing those floodgates of pent up frustrations brought back waves of memories; back to the moments that made this tangible, the proof that they had in fact once enjoyed each other’s company. The time Phil wasn’t feeling well and took some Dayquil before a pub crawl and ended up vomiting everywhere before noon. Wasn’t that hilarious? What about all of those photos he had been forced to delete of the two of them together, due primarily to Phil’s apparent incapability to smile like a normal person, which would have only damaged his own reputation with girls if he had posted them to Instagram? They all existed at some point or another, even if there was nothing tangible to show for it now.
“And there is a commitment,” he replied, trying to stay strong, “I’ll probably unfriend you from Facebook and everything. So that there’s no going back.”
“You’re going to unfriend me? I never post anything.”
“That’s not the point. It makes it a clean break.”
“That just seems like a lot of misspent energy.”
“Dude, it doesn’t matter. I just think it would be better if you left.”
“Yeah, fine,” Phil muttered, internally fuming that Bradley had the audacity to initiate this quote-unquote “breakup” at his own fucking apartment. In fact, he was almost madder about that than anything else. How goddamn lazy and selfish can you be? If you’re going to deliver someone unnecessary news, you don’t waste their time making them drive to your place then kindly ask them to get out.
“Jesus Christ,” he thought to himself, a not so uncommon occurrence over his time spent with Bradley, “what a fucking asshole.”
Phil got halfway to the door before realizing he had forgotten something.
“Wait…” Phil stopped, pausing long enough for Bradley to hold out hope that he was in the midst of a grand epiphany, the realization that their friendship really meant something, followed up by a sincere apology that would leave the door open for a future reconciliation.
“…I think you still have my extra phone charger.”
Bradley let out a sigh. He did have his extra phone charger. As much as he wanted to get Phil out of his apartment, he also didn’t want the phone charger to be a point of contention in the future. This was a clean break, dammit. Nothing could be left behind.
“Yeah, let me go find it. I think you left your baseball glove here too . . .”
Bradley went to his room to search, leaving Phil alone in the living room. He waited in silence for a few minutes, inspecting the wall art Bradley clearly had no hand in purchasing, when out of nowhere a noise like a suppressed cough sounded from the bathroom. Phil, already fully immersed in the gravity of the moment, would have normally ignored it, chalking it up to the A/C adjusting or the dryer sounding off. But the cascade of noise following thereafter – the floorboards creaking, the ping of a text alert, a “will you motherfuckers fucking be quiet?” followed by a “goddamn dude, you’re the loudest one of all of us” delivered in a whisper-like tone but at a normal volume, common to those who grasp the concept of whispering but find themselves tripped up by the execution.
“Is someone in the bathroom?” Phil called as Bradley returned with his charger and glove.
“Uh, no dude, there isn’t. Anyways, we’re not talking about that right now. Why are you trying to deflect from the task at hand?”
“I’m not deflecting. I’m asking if there’s someone or—from the sound of it—several people hanging out in your bathroom?”
“I don’t see how that has any bearing on what we talked about,” Bradley said nervously in a pitiful attempt at deflection. “This is about you and me. Nobody else is involved.”
“Except for the people presumably hiding in the bathroom, I guess.”
Another sound came from the bathroom, this time delivered with absolutely no effort spent trying to remain hidden.
“What a faggity douchebag. Seriously though, if I wasn’t right before to say ‘fuck this guy’…”
“Dude, shut up.”
“Naw man, screw this.”
The bathroom door swung open and out stepped Dave, shoulders back and confident, his jutting gut and steadily receding hairline suggesting a maturity well beyond his years. Growing up, he had always wanted to be like his father, and at the ripe old age of twenty-six, he had already begun to fulfill that dream.
“Goddammit Dave!” Bradley yelled. “Y’all were supposed to shut up and wait until he left! That’s the only reason I let you stay!”
“Hey Dave,” Phil acknowledged him with minimal energy, a formality Dave returned with only a casual head nod before turning back to Bradley. Phil had always consider Dave to be kind of a dick. It was a slight comfort to know that the feeling was mutual.
“Dude, this shit is dragging on way too long,” Dave said. “Melissa keeps texting me and I’ve got shit to do. Tell him to get his ass out of here. We’re all getting antsy in there.”
“Who’s we?” Phil asked. He could hear through the doorway a scattershot of voices debating their next move.
“Y’all think we should go?”
“I mean, what’s the point otherwise?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually want to talk to him.”
“You don’t have to. Jeez Andrew, don’t make this all about you.”
“Fuck you, Brandon.”
Phil had trouble tracing the names behind the voices, but whoever they were, they were all terrible whisperers.
“Guys, I think he’s caught on at this point.”
“Yeah, this is stupid. Let’s go.”
And so they began trickling out one by one: Matthew, Johnathan, Chris, Mark, Paul, Andrew, Chris R, Samuel; Spitz and his girlfriend Brittani, which is a terrible way to spell Britney; Brandon, Ryan; Rachel, whom Phil had once made out with a couple of years back while in the process of discovering a mutual disinterest; another Chris; Peter and his fiancee Erica, who were always super nice but lived in Wichita of all places, so only came around for special events. Oddly enough, this seemed to qualify… Brandy, Randy, and Colette, whom Phil had never seen separated; Steve-O, a forced nickname based off of his given name “Steven”; and finally Steve, who desperately wanted to be nicknamed Steve-O but was too late.
Phil could feel a pit grow deep within his stomach. He was friendly with most of them, a few were just acquaintances, and there were one or two he truly disliked. But what they all had in common was that they liked Bradley more than him. For that there were numerous reasons, the main one being timing, or at least that’s what he told himself. They had all been Bradley’s friends first, so he never felt compelled to cut out the middle man when he wanted to befriend them individually. Sure, he and Brittani had always gotten along pretty well, but hanging out with her meant spending time with Spitz, who, if you couldn’t guess by his nickname, could be a little much. So to avoid any third wheeling or awkward one-on-one chats with Spitz, he had to make sure Bradley would tag along as well. Now that Bradley was gone, there wouldn’t be much there.
“Holy shit, how did everyone fit in there?” Phil said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Matthew replied, his lips curling into a smile that he just couldn’t contain. He considered himself the resident intellectual of the group, the “smart one” with the witticisms that more often than not were just dickish comments. Matthew operated under the belief that he was always the smartest one in the room, which Phil greatly resented, as it ran contrary to his own strongly held convictions. Phil had a lot of regrets about his time spent with these people, but his biggest was that he had never found an opportunity to punch Matthew in the face.
“I don’t really understand,” Phil said. “Why are you all here? Is this like an intervention or something?”
“No, Phil, this isn’t an intervention,” Dave said, “Interventions are for people you like and want to get better.”
“Yeah dude,” Chris R added. “We just don’t really want to hang out with you anymore.”
Phil glanced around the group gathered, figuring that if it wasn’t an intervention, then it must be a party. A celebration he wouldn’t be part of, not that he much cared at this point. If he and Bradley could have just drifted away, then where would that have left the rest of them?
“Fair enough,” Phil said as he turned towards the door. Twenty-two people, suddenly struck from his life. Maybe they would run into one another on the street or at the grocery store, but outside of a few hellos and obligatory chats and the occasional evasive glances, this was the end of their contact. It didn’t matter to any of them which way it came about. Apathy all around.
As he twisted the doorknob, he heard a voice from the back. It wasn’t sharp or self-assured; just that last, obligatory farewell you hope sticks with them for a while, like an echo in a cave.
“So…goodbye, I guess.”
Phil opened the door and left. He didn’t look back.
As Phil drove home, he felt his ears perk up at the familiar hum from the vibration of plastic against coke-soaked coins. It was that sound of anticipation, the one that reaches for you even when nothing’s there. It was a call he couldn’t ignore as he checked down at his phone, keenly unaware of the unpaved intersection rattling his tires, sending vibrations up through his suspension and into his receipt and penny-filled passenger side cup-holders. False alarm. An empty, factory default screensaver was the last thing he saw as he crashed headlong into a parked cement truck, the force of impact at forty miles per hour enough to send its contents spilling forth through the broken windshield, filling the car’s interior with gray sludge in only a matter of minutes.
When the coroner arrived on the scene a half hour later, it was determined that the cause of death was not on impact, but from ingesting several times over the .46 lbs mark the Center for Disease Control typically considers a lethal dose of concrete. The first responders on hand had a difficult time removing him from the vehicle due to the mess, and when they finally did, they found him to be extremely heavy.
His funeral was held on a Sunday afternoon. Due to the regrettable timing of the accident, word of their falling out never reached Phil’s parents, and Bradley was among those invited to attend. After much deliberation, he felt that his attendance would be the right thing to do, not only to mourn his old friend, but to finally gain closure, that clean break he had been looking for in the first place. Watching as the casket slowly descend into the Earth by way of a custom apparatus specifically designed to handle what was a significantly denser than average corpse, he felt it as their final moment slipped past. There had once been a friendship here, it was real and he remembered it. Now it was gone. He would have liked a chance to speak.
Hardly Worth Explaining 