#treeso

Still, once the interview was over, I found myself exhausted. And then on the airbus I was trying to catch up with the group text for Treeso’s engagement, because like next month or something we’re gonna meet up on Naboo to help him propose. And I say we…but it’s more like them-plus-me.

I’m starting to suspect Treeso’s friend group secretly hates me. I used to call it our friend group, but I’ve started to question whether they were really my friends. Treeso says of course they were and still are, I just don’t feel as close with them anymore because I don’t keep in touch. But I don’t think that’s it. I have my own friends that I’m also bad at keeping in touch with, and I don’t feel any less close to them.

Treese named me “Future Best Maaaan” in the chat. And I’m honored…but I also feel so, so awkward. I’m telling you, they should bottle this feeling and use it for chemical warfare: “How It Feels To Be The Future Best Man In A Future Bridal Party Where Nobody’s Even Pretending To Like You Except The Future Groom Whom You Can’t Let Down.”

I think I got lucky with Fannie and Treeso and Poe. They’re all very normal people…by which I mean, they don’t seem to move through the galaxy feeling like they’re strangers to it. Yet somehow, they’re a certain kind of normal that’s compatible with whatever the hell I am. Everyone else in the galaxy feels like some other kind of normal that looks at me once, doesn’t get me, and decides they don’t want to try.

I never felt like I was normal, back when I was a teenager. But there was a year or two after college where I began to feel normal. And I liked it. I liked it a lot. Things generally felt easy and I generally felt happy and my life was beginning to finally look a little more like everyone else’s.

The most interesting moment occurred when I was blowing out my candles. Poe and Treeso insisted on having exactly twenty-four candles on the cake, even though Amalia called them both idiots and said they were gonna burn the place down. But Poe and Treeso together proved to be an unstoppable force of unhinged chaos, so, twenty-four candles it was.

“Let’s all wish for Ben to go on his first date before he turns twenty-five!” said Treeso, clapping his hands.

“What’re you talking about? He’s already got a girlfriend,” said Poe, lighting the last candle.

“Not anymore—they broke up,” said Amalia, tipping back a bottle of beer.

And then they all looked at me.

“Bro, you got a girlfriend?” asked Treeso, stunned.

“You broke up with her?” asked Poe, surprised.

Amalia just looked at me and dipped her finger into the side of the cake and licked the frosting off of it without breaking eye contact.

“Had a girlfriend. Don’t have one anymore. Story’s over. Cake! Now,” I said, and blew out all the candles, and grabbed the cake cutter.

“Dude, you never tell me anything!” complained Treeso.

“I live with him and he never tells me anything,” remarked Poe.

“Stalk him online. It’s the only way,” advised Amalia.

Poe took the cake cutter and started cutting two slices (one of them was for Beebee-Ate, so he would “feel included”). “Well,” he said, “if I had known you guys were broken up, I sure wouldn’t have invited her.”

I choked on my cake. “Wait—what—is she coming?”

And, for a second, I was terrified. But, two seconds later, I felt this intensely powerful ache of hope—that I might see her again, that she’d be at the door, that the daydream I’d been having over and over might come at least a little bit true.

Amalia looked at me, and then looked at Poe. Poe looked at Amalia, and then at me. Treeso looked at the slice of cake he was cutting that was almost like a whole fourth of the cake. Beebee-Ate looked at all of us, his head swiveling around.

“Uh…no,” Poe said. “She’s…she’s not coming.”

“But—are you just saying that, or is she actually not coming?” I demanded, my heart pounding. “If…if she was…already on her way, or something, I—I don’t want you to tell her not to come—”

“Ben, she’s not coming,” Amalia confirmed. “I messaged her this morning. She’s still on Ryloth.”

I turned to look at her. “Why’d you message her?” I asked.

Amalia shrugged. “Wanted to check on her. It’s your birthday. Thought it might be hard for her. Didn’t know if you two had plans together, or something, before the breakup.”

“I didn’t think you two were friends,” I said, kind of surprised.

“Why not?” Amalia shrugged. “I can be nice. Sometimes.” She started cutting her own slice of cake. “But, you’re right—it’s easier for me and her to be friends, now that you and her aren’t together.”

“Well…glad it was good for someone, at least,” I said bitterly. And, suddenly, the cake didn’t taste so great anymore.

“Uh…sorry,” I muttered. “I’ll…I’ll be right back.”

I pretended to go to the bathroom. But really, I just sat on my bed in the dark, and tried to very politely ask the sinking weight in my chest to leave, so I could do my best to enjoy my birthday and the fact that all my friends were here.

Well. Not all of them.

The sinking weight swelled up in my stomach, and reached yearningly down toward my toes.

I found myself tugging at the friendship bracelet around my left wrist, feeling the warp and weft between my forefinger and thumb. The colored threads were becoming muddy with dirt because I tugged on it a lot these days. I blinked rapidly, trying to keep my tears at bay. It wasn’t bedtime yet—the tears would have to wait. I swallowed really hard a couple of times but I couldn’t really get the lump in my throat to go away.

…What are you doing, dear?

“Thinking about you,” I whispered under my breath. “Like always.”

My. You do think about me a lot, don’t you?

“Every day.” I licked my lips, and choked out, very quietly: “Do you think about me?”

Well…ah…I’m not sure, Ben. I…assume that I would. It seems like I would. Do you think that I would?

I shrugged, and rubbed the bracelet between my fingers some more.

An imaginary hand graced my shoulder.

Love…please…you shouldn’t be sitting all alone in here, thinking of me. Your friends are here—they came all this way to see you. Truly, I’m flattered…but you know I wouldn’t want you crying in the dark. Not on your birthday. Well, not ever—but especially not on your birthday. And especially not when three of your dearest friends are all here to celebrate you.

“I wish you were here instead,” I whispered. “I know I shouldn’t. But I do.”

Well…perhaps we will celebrate another of your birthdays together. Only time will tell. But…for now…do you think you could please try to focus on the present? On the things you do have, that you are fortunate to have? And not what you don’t?

I sighed heavily and smeared the palm of my hand across my forehead.

I know, love. I know it’s very hard. But, you are very brave. You are very strong. I know that you can. Please. Don’t waste this time. Not on my account.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay.”

And I held my hands out in front of me.

And for the very first time since the end of August, I untied the bracelet of green and pink and blue.

Held the full length of it in my hands, stretched out across my palms.

Looked at it, and thought about how long it had taken to wind the strings together, and imagined her fingers working the strands.

Pressed my lips to the woven threads.

Then…rolled it up very carefully, and put it in the box on my nightstand where I keep all my earrings, and took in a deep breath, and let it go…

The others are friendly enough. They offer him drinks and they offer him things that aren’t drinks and one girl who’s maybe already had a bit too much to drink thinks he’s cute and offers him something else. But the looming threat of Leia Organa-Solo hovers over the boy, along with his own anxious inhibitions and fairly cautious nature, and he declines them all.

“I’m, uh, not twenty-one yet,” he says, naively thinking the excuse is watertight, but a rousing chorus of “neither are we!” shatters the illusion at once.

“I mean, I like following rules,” he says instead, with eyes so big you could read the humiliation in them from a lightyear away—but no one else in the room is in a state to be that observant. Nor are they in a state to spend even one of the brain cells they’re all trying to kill off on thinking about what a loser Ben is. But Ben, however, now has many brain cells that have devoted themselves entirely to this purpose, and he spends the next hour stressed-out and sober, thinking about what a loser he is, and how he can prove he’s not.

Enter the blue slug-beetles, which someone suddenly brings in a crate of, much in the same way one would bring in a six-pack of beer. There is a series of cheers from the Gungans in the room.

The slug-beetle is a bright blue insect about the size of the palm of your hand, and has the curious distinction of being native to both Naboo and Tatooine, with the ability to thrive in both wetland and desert. On Naboo, they are found in the eastern swamps, crawling in the mud amidst the roots of the pelote trees. They are a Gungan delicacy, and Gungans, with their strong teeth and long tongues, are well-suited to cracking the beetles’ hard shells and slurping up the juices. Treeso and several other Gungans begin to do so immediately, while some of the non-Gungan guests look on, some with fascination, some with disgust.

Ben Solo is not a Gungan. He is, however, an absolute freaking idiot. Through some insane inspiration, he decides that he is going to prove how cool he is by being the first human to eat a blue slug-beetle. He puts his hand in the crate.

It’s alive, first of all. These slug-beetles have been prepped for consumption by the removal of their wings, the stubs of which are clipped off in straight lines and flitter nervously as the beetles struggle vainly to survive another day. But even without flight, Ben’s beetle squirms in his hands, its several legs tickling his palms as he tries to prevent its escape.

This moron, frantic not to embarrass himself by having to chase a slug-beetle around the room, finally gives up on figuring out how to eat it. He settles for slapping his palm against his mouth, throwing back the beetle like a handful of pills. The legs tickle his tongue instead of his hands. In a panic, he champs down on it to end its life, and swallows it, the hard fragments of shell scraping the insides of his throat on the way down.

And guess what? Nobody freaking saw.

Damn.

So then. Of course. What other conclusion is there? He has to do it again. Reluctantly, he reaches once more into the crate of crawling beetles.

Mind you, this buffoon is fully sober. He has nothing and no one to blame for his stupid decisions. He’s just…like that.

He picks up the second bug. Probably, he should have stopped and waved and said something like, “Hey, guys, watch me eat this bug!” (though in retrospect, I’m kind of glad he didn’t), but this dude had pretty bad social anxiety at the time, and such a prospect was unthinkable.

So…Ben Solo eats his second slug-beetle. And again. Nobody freaking sees him do it. Although it does go down a little smoother.

Well. Now he’s committed to the bit. Committed enough to grab a t-h-i-r-d slug-beetle, but for some reason not committed enough to say “hey guys watch me eat this bug” because that would involve calling attention to himself, which is exactly what he’s attempting to do, except no, he doesn’t want to make himself noticed, he just wants to be noticed.

Third slug-beetle goes down—similarly unseen. It’s looking like Ben prayed too hard at the beginning of the party for people not to look at him, because, yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. Sure, he could just call it there and shrug it off and laugh at himself for eating three slug-beetles for nothing, but…you know? The sunk-cost fallacy is one hell of a drug.

He’s getting the hang of it. Down goes the fourth beetle. One of the Gungans looks at the crate and goes, hey, where’d all the beetles go? They went fast, huh? And Ben Solo’s like, oh, someone’s looking, now’s my chance. He grabs the fifth bug and puts it in his mouth and imagines the sweet, sweet taste of notoriety.

Well, he was getting the hang of it. But at this point, this stupid neophyte college boy is sweaty and dehydrated and has nothing in his stomach but hydrochloric acid and five blue slug-beetles and a bunch of social anxiety and his body decides, yeah, okay, show’s over, we’re done here. Pack it up, boys.

So, everyone’s watching when Ben Solo slaps his hands over his mouth and stumbles over to a conveniently-placed garbage can and keels over and…you know, un-eats all the bugs.

“Yooo, I thought you said you weren’t gonna drink!” says Treeso, pulling back my hair while I freaking die, and someone else says they can see why I don’t drink, since we’ve only been there an hour and I’m already losing my guts. And from that point on everyone thinks I’m just, like, the worst lightweight ever.

And? To this day? No one will kriffing believe me that I ate five bugs. Like…seriously?? If I was gonna lie about myself for clout, you really think that that’s what I’d be going with?? Ben Solo, the bug-eater???