Chapter Text
Zach’s jaw is incredibly slack staring at the picture. It’s 240p, ancient, and terrifying: a candid shot of him at age seventeen in a Goku costume, for what he can only hope was for a Halloween party and not his own pleasure. He’s posing, dressed in an orange sweatshirt that seems three sizes too big, baggy black sweatpants with...pieces of orange construction paper taped on...and his hair is slicked up into jagged tendrils in some form of quasi-serious mockery.
He physically cannot find the skill to laugh at the image for a few minutes. He sits in silence calculating when he took the picture (2007), where in his room (next to the window to the left of his old bed), mouth still agape at the situation. Who the f*ck...wh-...what…. And then, once he’s done counting how many glorious arcs of thin, over-grown hair he manufactured with too much hair gel, he cackles. It’s an earth-shattering, neighbor-complaining noise, and he leans over his computer chair sideways to catch his breath.
Look at the pants!!
The box holding such relics arrived quicker than he expected, and messier than he expected. Tape folded at weird angles, Amazon box covered with its old stickers, he could only assume his mom wanted this heathen sh*t out of her house as soon as possible. It was heavy, had something shifting weight inside. Zach scooted a few loose letters and papers off of his kitchen counter and placed it down with an excited amount of care. Reading the address, a hint of nostalgia spurned him to grab his kitchen scissors and split through the tape.
Inside, it contained a card from Joann’s Fabrics followed by at least forty pounds of pastel tissue paper. The sweet comfort of Nebraska mom-core, he thought, opening a flowery card in immaculate cursive.
Dear Zach,
Here are some of your things. So many cords! I found nearly everything because you stuffed it all in one corner of the garage! Silly you ;). Me and Jim are doing well, and I hope you are too. I know you’re busy recently, but send me a call. Let’s talk! Love you so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so much my baby boy!
Love, Mom
He blushed at the saccharine emotion behind each loopy letter, the warmth of ‘baby boy’ even though it hasn’t applied in the last 23 years. It felt like getting a hug, and in that comfy high, he read it through a few more times. However, his brain got sidetracked when his hand rifled through the tissue paper, hitting something metallic. And rifling again, touched something heavier. Zach sped into his bedroom.
Everything was briskly slid off of the side of his desk when he found out what was inside. His bedroom right now is a hurricane, the way cups, papers, and wires sit discarded on the floor. In any other world, Zach would consider this a hell-like situation, and he’d immediately pull out a trash bag and go to work; yet his mind wanders elsewhere, on the box on the floor next to him and its terrifying, lovely contents. He clicks through the old Dell computer gently, cautiously. And the tiny little clicks, and stray embarrassed giggles at these archaic pictures, fill in the room’s current silence.
Zach was at Chris’ place three days prior, blankly staring at a screen presenting a Steam horror game. The menu design is simple, mostly boring. Zach fantasizes about what he’d fix about it: add highlights to the corners, change up the color palette. Those daydreams meander along as Chris frustratedly tries to connect the microphones to the recording software. The software that somehow has prevented Chris from talking to Zach at all this fine morning. The software that has made Lyle jumpstart his comedy career.
“Chris, maybe we can just film the episode on my phone,” Lyle starts, his voice booming even though Chris is two feet away, “Zach can hold it since he’s in the middle, and then he can whip the camera around to whoever’s talking for a facecam.” He leans back into the couch, proud of his cleverness. Zach probably should’ve laughed and joined in, but he sits plain. He’s too bored, too sleepy for Lyle’s jokes. He keeps his eyes trained forward and cracks an unfocused smirk. Chris, talk, Chris, talk, Chris, talk.
“Yeah, great idea Lyle,” Chris replies to fill in the silence. Zach nods along. A beat passes through the room. Chris’s couch is polyester-y on his fingertips, grey and dull. He remembers falling asleep on it a year ago, that damned stiffness near the arms of the brick-like furniture. He had to ask Chris for maybe three pillows to avoid permanently dislocating his neck. An intrusive thought in his head wants him to lay down and fall asleep – for old times’ sake, of course.
“Jesus Christ, is there a gas leak in this house? Zach, you in today, buddy?” Lyle places a hand on Zach’s upper back which only exacerbates whatever sort of hatred he was developing for Lyle. Chris laughs at that joke. The joke making fun of him. He seethes.
The truth is that Zach doesn’t hate Lyle. He likes Lyle. Lyle is cool. Lyle is a guitar master. Lyle has cool (gay) tattoos. Lyle makes people laugh. Lyle makes Chris and Tomar laugh a lot. Lyle = cool guy. But it, inexplicably, boils Zach’s blood when he tries to play the clown or shouts out at 10 AM when everyone else in the room stepped out of bed three minutes ago, or does that stupid f*cking leaning-back thing to flex his body.
Okay. So there’s some level of resentment there that exists. But it isn’t personal to Lyle because he doesn’t care when Lyle’s talking to Tomar, and it doesn’t make sense. Zach finds that to be the least logical idea ever. He wishes there was more logic to friendships, that every feeling could be hosted in a simple dialogue of “hey I want to be your friend”, “hey I don’t want to be your friend”, or “hey I would like to be married to you.” Wouldn’t the world be simpler? It rests as only a fantasy in the back of his head.
It also doesn’t help that he’s been running on four hours of sleep for the past two months. Michael Cusack, his gorgeous Australian partner in crime/the show they’re desperately trying to fly, recently convinced Zach that Smiling Friends needs about four more episodes to be lined up before they can submit it to studios. He was right and it’s fun to build out this Smiling World, but the two of them got over storyboarding very fast.
Zach can’t call him at normal Pacific times of the day either, 5 PM to 5 AM-ish only works with their time zones, and the Circadian rhythm in Zach’s body has completely disappeared. Dissolved. He eats dinner at 3 AM sometimes, cold and quiet stillness meeting his 7/11 snack as he turns on another Seinfeld rerun while the stars hide behind smog.
“Sorry, just feeling,” he selects a word carefully, “a little...prostrate.”
Lyle makes a face and responds, “What?” followed by a snort from Chris.
“What?” Zach’s head turns to Chris with an equally confused expression, “Prostrate.”
“A prostate is like…your ass..thing.” Chris realizes he’s distracted from fixing the mics and turns away from the conversation. Lyle points at Chris in agreement.
“I’m not talking about a prostate. Prostrate is like... like a prostrate plant or flower? It’s ...worn?”
Lyle places another goddamn hand on his shoulder, “Is someone wearing you, Buffalo-Bill style?” Zach rips his hand away and actually snorts, head tilted downwards. Chris glances over. The room shares one sharp laugh, and then silence echoes through again. Zach hates this. He hates everything about it.
Friendship is weird. It can be convoluted and bitter and silent and back-stabby and scary and odd. He’s known this from movies and games and history books, yet it feels so much more confusing when it’s personal, the knife of turmoil straight from his closest friend. Chris is happy right now. He’s getting his amazing game Bowlbo done like he always wanted to. He has a girlfriend, a nice house, and a cute dog. They’re both happy, and they’re both doing much better than they were five years ago on the cold floor of a Pennsylvanian flat. So why does it feel worse like this? Why silence?
They hear a click, and Chris lets out a mini-shriek of victory. After twenty minutes of fiddling, the microphone is connected and they can now record the let’s play they all dreamed of doing when they were ten-years-old. Yipee, he thinks as Chris turns on his laptop and begins recording. Zach wants to test out a joke to make sure Chris isn’t just ignoring him today, and quietly sniffles over the pros and cons of making an attempt.
“Hey everybody, today we’re playing...Sleep Halloween.”
“Truly one of the best games of our time, I’d say,” Zach mentions, and Chris chuckles! In that weird, fake, theatrical way. Motherf*cker. He wants to scream out to Chris, to immediately find out what the hell he’s thinking right now. Lyle starts a story about this one time when he met a gay man on a subway. CHRIS. DO YOU FIND THIS STORY AS BORING AS I DO? How did it get so hard to speak? To talk to a best friend?
It’s not like something switched off, some big change. Nothing did. Nothing is different. They’re both just a bit older, just a bit heavier, just a bit more annoyed, just a bit less smiley, but that’s nothing astronomically different from the people they were two years ago. Everybody morphs into fake personalities when the microphones click on, he wants to tell himself. He’s just as tired as you are. But it doesn’t fit into the grand scheme of their friendship. Do friends just dissolve like this?
One day, you and your closest friend are laughing until you snort, and walking weird in public just to replicate that glorious laugh from the other, and then the next day, you can snip that noise out of them from a joke or a voice so unqualified, so f*cking boring that it makes your stomach sick? That’s what friendship is all about? Zach hates this. It makes him feel like they’re alien to each other, odd prototypes for the supposed, the “real” Chris and Zach. The Hellbenders. Friends forever.
Zach realizes a few stray I-haven’t-slept-in-20-hours tears have leaked out and raises a hand to wipe them. “Damn Zach, I didn’t know these graphics meant so much to you!” Lyle jokes. He wants to go home.
He lulls and tries to tighten his voice, “Haha, yeah...it’s all just too many polygons for me, I didn’t know life could be this gorgeous.” And everyone passes smiles, too light to mean anything, and drops it in three seconds. A factory line of reactions. Zach’s thigh accidentally touches Chris’ but neither move. He wishes he was home right now because he would really prefer to be left alone with his obtrusively depressing thoughts, not knee-to-knee with them. Chris, however, perks up.
“Zach,” he almost forgot how Chris pronounces his name, the Z nearly an S, “do you remember that one game that you sent me a while back? The protagonist looked exactly like this dude.”
“I’ve sent you a lot of games,” Chris sucks his teeth because he needs to find out what game this is.
“No, no no...maybe...it was definitely a Newgrounds game. And I think you sent it to me like, onNewgrounds.”
“Oh. So this is while back while back?”
“Yeah.”
“Um,” As he tries to turn his memories back to that time, something in him struggles. He suddenly notices he can’t even remember the Newgrounds messaging system, something about PMs and...orange buttons. Twenty seconds of dead air pass and he jolts with, “Was it a pirate game?”
Chris explodes with joy. “YES! Yeah, it was this pirate dude, and he had a parrot friend, and the enemies were–"
“-Were those skeletons.” Zach beams at the memory of screaming over Skype about those f*cking skeletons. Their hitboxes were nonexistent. The two share an uncharacteristically warm laugh, and Lyle prods at Chris for more information about this enchanting game. Zach prods at his own thoughts.
You’re definitely in a bad mood. He’s just overreacting. Because listen to how he spoke to you! You’re still friends with him! It’s alright! Then he glances it over again. Why did it take memories from ten years back to get them to speak to each other? Maybe we were closer back then than we are now.
“So the pirate had a convoluted backstory, and it was like half of the game because you had to wait through a,” Chris laughs, “a feature-length film of an intro to start the f*ckin’ game.”
“Yeah, but it was such a beautiful intro! I was fighting back tears when his wife died.”
“That intro was sh*t, dude.”
“No it wasn’t! Did you even watch the part when he lost his mast?” Zach argues, Chris smiling but shaking his head. Passive.
There’s something bitter in it all. The way he’s known him forever and yet feels like they’ve known each other for a quick five minutes. It’s exactly like how they were when they first met over Newgrounds: teenage awkwardness, the Transatlantic gap between, the constant fight to stay up late, to work instead of chumming with some rando on the Internet. Somehow it was far simpler to type little sweet nothings on Skype, or bring up funny dreams when they lived together, instead of this odd aging-guessing game. They’re knee-to-knee but Zach drowns in the distance between them.
Yet, when Lyle falls back into a story neither of them are listening to, they smoothly meet each other’s sarcastic, hooded eyes. There’s no eruption of laughter, nor some snide comment from one of them. It’s quiet, and warm, and comfortable. They leave when Lyle screams about one of the game’s enemies approaching Chris.
Maybe he’s generalizing. He’s crazy. He idolizes neurotic weirdos, so maybe he is one. And he’s definitely moody right now, because how can any man operate on so little sleep? Zach holds on tight to that pirate game, the small glow in Chris’ eyes. Hopping back in with a new fervor, Zach leans a bit closer into the mics and starts his comedy routine; he begins by identifying a tiny polygonal rat (or hamster, he couldn’t tell) as a “precious little character.”
Fifteen episodes get recorded much faster when Zach participates, and soon they all stand up and stretch their old lady backs. It’s charming how they organize: Lyle always heads to the kitchen to make sure Chris isn’t hiding any stray BBQ chips away from him, Chris leans forward into whatever technology he has on deck (his phone, and commonly a video of monkeys or stupid babies), and Zach perennially has to use the restroom, always trying to make some joke to compensate for a small bladder.
This time, Zach clicks his heels together and sprints wildly into Chris’s bathroom. It’s a little cold even though Chris always prefers a warm toilet seat. Green and blue and white details. It has succulents hung on useless shelves that inspire a need to look at Pinterest one more time. The little towels are fuzzy, aesthetically pleasing yet unpleasant on wet hands. And as Zach pisses, he peers a bit further into one of the prints hanging above the toliet. It reads:
LIVE as if no one is watching
SING as if no one can hear
LOVE like you have never been hurt
DANCE as if no one is watching
LAUGH like no one is listening
Chris doesn’t dance, he first thinks. He reads it three times hoping that the meaning is somehow distorted and truly some elaborate joke. It’s not. And it’s not ironic, because who is paying upwards of fifteen dollars to give your friends a humorous exhale? He nearly blames this decorating decision on Veronica, but then realizes that even she would not take the extra step to get it in amaranth, a color that doesn’t work with the scheme of the bathroom.
So what is this? Is this the genesis of...Neo-Chris? The motherf*cker he has been speaking to for years has been a closet-Live-Laugh-Lover? This piece of sh*t is something he considered worthy to place above his commode? This wall art reflects the ideas of the Chris he knows? Chris doesn’t even dance!
He finds it only a little funny how much he extrapolates from one dumb wall piece, but he’s still pissed. Chris has changed. Chris is a new person, with newer jokes, and new friends, and new pieces of art that display Chris’s new values. Maybe his analysis was right all along, and that initiates a whole other feeling of desolateness. Zach scrubs his hands too harshly with the tiny bar of soap.
The conversation he walks back into is fresh and humming. Lyle’s on about yet another strange encounter, some old guy who was carrying vegetables, “The bag was hanging open, and he walked past thirty people and no one mentioned a thing. What did he think was gonna happen if the bag was vertical?”
“If you walked past him too, aren’t you just a bystander to this guy’s struggle?” Zach butts in, taking a mighty fist of the chips Lyle located.
“Well, he didn’t ask me for help.”
“Ohh. So if Old Mr. Whole Foods like, addressed you by name, that would’ve caught your attention.”
“Oh my god, are you GuitarMasterX7? Lyle McDouchebag himself?!” adds Chris. Lyle cringes at the mere sound of his old username.
Zach takes this as a slight push to change the topic. He’s curious now. “What the f*ck were people even thinking when they made up their usernames? Like, Oney makes sense because O-ney is abbreviated for O-nision, but why...why were you such a master, Lyle?”
Lyle laughs. “I just looked around my room one day and thought ‘wow I do guitar good, time to spend hours watching sexy Tom Fulp compilations.’”
“No fifteen year old ever had a competent thought on that website, I think. Just a bunch of weird-ass kids in the right place and time drawing Dragon Ball Z and p*rn.” Chris glances over at Zach, “Where did psychicpebbles come from? Or psychicpebble. Whatever.”
He thinks about it, drawing over each word, trying to pluck out where he even heard the word ‘psychic.’ “I’ve always liked the word pebbles, I guess. I don’t know, I never made it to become like, a brand.” And as the conversation continues about the warmth of being a middle schooler on Newgrounds, and Chris begins to wave off his friends with ‘we have enough recording for this week’, Zach sticks to that idea. Why is his f*cking name Psychicpebbles? What inspired it? What cosmic combination of friendship or humor or pop culture forced him into such a strange idea?
He’s still pondering it when he drives home. L.A. traffic always leaves a man at least twenty minutes of excess thinking time, a trait that probably coddles its creative industry, and Zach uses this to canvas over his playlists. He’s picky with which Spotify playlist is right for the day. Queen’s his favorite band, but it’s also everyone’s favorite band; realizing this has made him sometimes meek to play Killer Queen.
In music, Zach needs to keep some sort of possession over it, some hipstery “I knew it before it was mainstream” feeling to validate and indulge himself. He selects I Don’t Wanna Know by Fleetwood Mac – he wants to feel sad after the dryness of the afternoon, but in the badass Stevie Nicks way where he makes masterpieces out of it.
Instead of making masterpieces when he goes home, he scatters his sneakers across his apartment and takes a nap. He wakes up two hours later, resenting the nap entirely. He turns on the news, and then turns off the news, and grabs a snack, and turns on some cooking channel show to feel like he’s being comforted and learning. He does all of these little tasks, even laying his Cintiq across his lap if he’s sparked with artistic enlightenment, yet a bad feeling pokes at him incessantly. It’s the type of anxious, remorseful emotion that feels like a cannonball sits inside his stomach, pushing him down.
He can’t point to what it is, or maybe he doesn’t want to. Of course this feeling is over Chris. It always is. It’s been over Chris for the last decade. I’m just sensitive now, he thinks. I need to focus on my own sh*t. Be an independent #girlboss. But he doesn’t. And the next half-hour he wastes on Food Network doesn’t push that cannonball anywhere.
He’s laying flat on his couch, Cintiq long discarded, scrolling mindlessly up and down through his contact list to telepathically make someone text him. At one point in his life, he’d probably text these people first. No one texts him. He plays around with the “watched pot never boils” idiom by f*cking around on Twitter for five minutes, no text.
He questions himself as a human entity, as a person with arms and legs and a brain that works a million times a second to even inspire conversation with others. The existentialism of his need to talk to another human to balance his horrible mood off of the other ruminates for just a second, but he quickly pushes that idea away to wait yet again for a text. Then, Mick calls.
Zach wants to consider Mick a “good friend”, but their allegiance often blends into best friend territory. They get each other. They actually like each other. Zach’s first meeting with Mick was stilted yet kind, some drinks at Pico Day surrounded by friends; the next time they met, Zach was passed out cold on his hotel bathroom floor, minutes from choking on his own vomit and ridding the world of the fourth Hellbenders episode.
After this nearly fatal crisis, they became each other’s pick-me-up, their cheerleader: Zach giving far too much legal and interpersonal advice during Mick’s divorce when he hadn’t dated a girl longer than three years. Zach cited his knowledge as a “child of divorce” but quickly learned there’s a difference between a child of, and an active member of divorce.
Mick always pokes him for this: Zach always thinks he has a wealth of information about everything in existence. He does sometimes, about the Zimmermann Telegram or Albert Fish or anything far out, but never relationship advice. Never emotional advice, because that’s Mick’s branch of expertise.
Zach’s polite, and Mick’s polite, but Zach can be that cold-jilted-NYC’er-sarcastic, and Mick loves that energy. They talk about everything and everyone, usually the hearths of gossip about Niall’s Tinder or Chris’ friendships in L.A. Mick is jealous of Zach’s fluent intelligence, and Zach’s jealous of Mick’s appearance, so they bond in envy. Mick loves Zach’s understanding of the world around him, and Zach appreciates Mick’s compassion to improve it. They get each other.
When Zach’s phone buzzes twice with a gay anime contact picture and a nickname of “mellow yellow man”, he doesn’t hesitate to accept the call. “Hello?”
“Do you understand how iMovie works? I’m trying to make a thing for my mom, but it’s formatted for five-year-olds.”
“What are you making for your mom?” He asks in a stilted, curious tone.
“Dude.” The frustration with iMovie and now Zach is palpable.
“Dude. Are you finally coming out to her through a slideshow?” A laugh crackles the other end, “Or is it another f*ckin’ uh, a t-shirt thing? This time the fans have to do one of those TikTok dances to win a shirt from yours truly?”
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Very hilarious. No, I’m just helping her make a slideshow thing for her work,” Zach asks himself, when’s the last time I’ve talked to Mom? “You’re awfully comedic today.”
“I thought I was a natural comedian. That’s why people do the funny giggles at me.”
“No, we laugh with you, bum. You came right out of the gate with the ‘you’re gay’’s today. Anything special happen?”
He doesn’t know how to describe that it’s an anxiety coping mechanism he’s had forever in a simple way that won’t make Mick concerned, so he responds, “Nope.” Pause. “Filmed some sh*t with Lyle and Chris.”
“Oh,” he says, in that awful, saccharine mommy voice he uses when he hears something suspicious, “And anything cool, sexy, terrible happen?”
Zach’s not sure why he says it, but he knows he needs to say it to him. Mick doesn’t need to know about the entire Chris dilemma, but he’s sure that he already does. “I...I had like, a weird...anxiety? thing today, because I, uh, I felt. Jealous. I guess. It’s not jealous, it’s like distant, -cy? I was feeling distancy and it just.” He often hates silence from the other end of the call, but he knows that silence from Mick is never a threat because he knows he’s listening. “...Have you– okay, you probably haven’t seen it, but he has this new sign in his bathroom.”
“Right.”
“And the sign is just...the most white mom thing ever, I mean pshaaw.” He realizes that his comedic pauses even leak into his emotional discussions. “It’s cringy, right. And it made me feel bad because I didn’t know he would want something...like that? Y’know?”
There’s a pause from Mick as he waits for any sort of conclusion to what he’s talking about. “...Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“So you,” he exhales, “you didn’t like the sign, so you don’t like his taste? Or him, now?”
“No, well, it’s not that, it’s…” He now realizes that he shouldn’t have mentioned anything. He barely understands it himself and is throwing his tantrum onto Mick for him to figure it all out for him. I’m a sh*t friend. He combs one hand through his hair, theorizing what the best escape strategy is for this call, and decides, “I guess it’s just an age thing. Like it’s been a while since we were screaming on a couch in the cabin, but it feels so rapid and far of a change from what he used to be. I don’t know, it’s whatever,”
“I know what you’re talking about.” He responds, booming through the microphone, making him feel like he knows all of his secrets.
He inhales, “Yo-Yeah?”
“Yes. It’s something I used to feel all the f*ckin’ time with my old college friends, especially when everyone started moving,” Zach exhales in comfort, “It definitely feels different. I mean, when everything’s said and done, you are both different people five years down the road. But I think that the Internet has sped everything up in that way.”
“Mhm?” He turns down his TV.
“Back in the day,” Mick will never not highlight his age like he is approaching sixty years old, “you hung out with one person once. You went for drinks. You called each other, and if you were Benjamin Franklin, you would send someone a letter.”
“But nowadays, we send messages and call people and type every five minutes.”
“Exactly. You first saw Chris, what, ten years ago?”
He feels weird saying, “more like fifteen.”
“Right. And you first met him on Newgrounds, and you sent messages back and forth, and became friends that way. Which is far more random and open and, y’know, radical, than when you’d just meet one person five blocks away from you and have some sort of access to their number if you needed it.”
“He was across the f*ckin’ globe.”
“So, what I’m saying is maybe ruminate with that. Consider it.”
He almost rolls his eyes, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Think back to the good times, kinda. You two are ridiculously close, ingratiated in each other for a decade. I guarantee that there will be even more times where you or Chris will feel stale and weird about the other person you’ve basically grown up with.”
“I’m supposed to just...think about...being his friend? I feel like I’ve been doing that for quite some time.”
“No, man. Go back to your roots. Look at those little, starting texts you had with him. I’m sure they’re f*cking terrible and cringe and disgusting. That’s where you find how close you really are. That’s your collective... existence, the weirdness that brought you together.” He senses Zach’s interest, “just try it. Scan your Newgrounds account. Sure you’ll find some weird sh*t.”
Zach hangs up the phone hastily, not wasting a second of analytical solitude and deliberation inside himself. He’s right, you know comes to mind first, followed by does Mick really have the right experience to command research like this, then is he really commanding me or is he trying to help, concluding with we became friends because we were weird? It had to be something more than odd DBZ discussions.
He dwells on it. He thinks about the concept of friends for a while, how certain people somehow snap into your heart like Lego bricks and stay put right there for years. Eons. Zach tries to recall the first word he ever heard or read from Chris. He wrote to him first, he remembers, a true connoisseur of OneyNG’s earliest works like A Random Day and The Sicksons (which grew from deep love to later critique.) He imagines a conversation like this was probably what happened:
psychicpebble: hey dude, i’m zach, i luv ur cartoons
oneyng: thx :3
Wait. Did Chris even respond? He knows the :3 somehow plays in. Did he just end sentences with it?
psychicpebble: hey i love your cartoons
psychicpebble: hey
psychicpebble: hey
psychicpebble: hey wanna collab
psychicpebble: hey here’s that animation u should’ve collabed on
oneyng: please leave me and my family alone or i’ll have to notify the police :3
f*ck. He’s not sure whether the beginning was bleak or welcoming. He guesses how they bonded, that maybe being a closer concept.
psychicpebble: do u know anything about ww2?
Too nerdy for him to mention to Chris. Chris was a celebrity to him before they were friends; he couldn’t be f*cking up his chances with his intelligence. Yuck.
psychicpebble: do u like girls?
Weirdly gay from the start. Also, what?
psychicpebble: do u watch dbz?
oneyng: no :o but i want 2!
He puts his head in his hands, mind muddled with the idea that Mick was perhaps right about this. The random anxiety and the getting-old-sh*t, that’s natural. So maybe he shouldn’t be slumped over his couch arm casting gloomy glances at Bob Odenkirk on TV. He thinks about it, drums his fingers on his coffee table, and grasps his phone, typing.
He remembers his old area code by heart, the way it all tugs at his emotions every time he recalls his parents, the pristine Midwest winters without a car to slosh the snow up. When he calls his mom, he huddles into the corner of the couch, swaddling himself in the warm feeling that erupts from talking to Ms. Hadel.
He feels like a kid still, in some ways. He feels just as annoyed when his mom reminds him of some embarrassing story when he was ten, just as proud when she toots him up about his many animation projects, and just as comfortable listening to the way she elongates her a’s in each word. That makes him feel all the lonelier, knowing that she’s this person only accessible by phone call: this monument of the first twenty years of his life.
He tells him he’ll be home for Christmas, patiently listens to her newest gossip about the neighbors, and brushes off her mention of church. It’s only when she flips the “howzit these days?” on him that he flusters.
“I. I am doing okay. Y’know, doing a lot of videos on Chris’ channel,”
“Oh I love Chris! How is he doing?”
He bites back a full thesis over how Chris is doing terribly according to one small laugh and wall art. “He’s good, he’s working on a video game thing right now,” he pauses to move the conversation into more relatable terms for her, “The game’s set in where he used to live and it’s that kind of absurd funny style he’s got. In 3D.”
She laughs, “It seems like only yesterday you were sprinting upstairs every freakin’ dinner to Skype him. Only fair that you two are basically living together nowadays.”
“Yeah, uh,” it falls from his lips far too quickly, “doyoustillhavemystufffrombackthen?”
“Pardon? You’re breaking up.”
“Do youstillhave—“
“Zach? Hello?” He lifts his phone from his ear to see if his wifi is f*cking up. It isn’t. He feels like a pervert asking her something like this when it’s not even that terrible an ask. It’s just an experiment, he reasons. Just a little research of old-school emojis and early Internet communication.
“Hi. Mom. Do you still have my things from, like, those days? Like my old computer, that shi-stuff.”
“Umm, probably,” he exhales in relief, “I don’t think I threw that all away unless Jim touched it.”
“Jim probably took the keyboard keys off to chew on them.”
“Zach!” He heartily chuckles into the phone, that childlike mischief permanent in him. In a way, he yearns to be back at home, running downstairs after she screamed “dinner!” Beats 7/11 every other night. The phone call ends with I-love-you's peppered with millions of promises about coming to visit, coming to see her, coming to see how his apartment is, like one real hug with his mom will make all the stress fall off his bones.
Tears prick at his eyes the second she hangs up, so he studies the ceiling. He then whips his head left to search the tiny, stupidly small, mouse-house-sized, randomly-placed-in-the-uppermost-left-corner-of-his-living-room window. It lets little droplets of sunset sink through, iotas of oranges and rose bouncing off of his bookshelf. Zach keeps his mind on the window, more entertaining than the TV, drifting.
The call delivered to him in that hasty Amazon box. He now sits in front of the prehistoric Dell computer like it is the Ark of the Covenant. Running one nail across the logo garners far too much dust and way too many memories. He slides the computer around to admire the terrible plug-ins on the back. How many hours he spent trying to plug cords through the idiotic technological design. Most hours he failed.
He flips it over and there he sees the Mighty Crack of ‘11: a freak accident (dropping it on the bathroom tile) causing a thematic scar down the middle of the bottom. The Crack brought him great fear and despair that the Dell would betray him, that his animations would be lost forever, but it didn’t, and they weren’t. Kept on running at 30 frames per second like it always did.
Zach opens the laptop and immediately notices the inhumane amount of dust, hair, and general perishables inside the keyboard, embedded in the keys. He’s disgusted by himself. A run to the bathroom grants him a q-tip to salvage the chaos, but the q-tip breaks off into the guck between keys B and N. sh*t. Luckily, the mousepad sort of works (sort of means it needs to recalibrate every two minutes), and luckily, the computer turns on without having to plug it in. He considers it a beautiful omen.
He tests nine different passwords, all consisting of some vague reference to high school he thinks he’d write. But he can’t think of it. And he must’ve f*cked up the way he typed his security question, because he’s typed “beagle” into what was the breed of your first dog, but it refuses. You don’t know my f*cking dog, he sours. Yet, that dog is the catalyst of his password. Zach grins. Muscle memory carries him to the tune of “Rexdoggi3490”, and his screen opens with a pixelated screenshot of Donkey Kong Country as his background.
His eyes hurt with the fast way they dart all over the screen, remembering every folder and its place, the exact order of Google, Flash, Yahoo on the bottom of the screen, the Steam app flaunted in the middle of the screen like he’s some big gamer. He cringes at every part, yet coiled deep inside him is a joy to have the chance to see it all. Zach’s first order of business is to obviously check the folders, because what is inside? He wants to stare at the home screen for an hour but can’t wait to crack open these mysterious files. The first, entitled “coloreds only”, features hundreds of PNGs, random stills of movies or art he ripped from the Internet.
He finds a PNG, “gooddorandge3”, a screenshot of Jeff’s first Tankmen cartoon. Pride whistles around his heart as he thinks I took this before I even thought I’d ever meet Jeff. Woah. Another PNG depicts a still from Eddsworld, another a neon meet’n’f*ck game, a dozen pictures of a star or a planet. A random sunset in a neighborhood near his dad’s house that he slightly remembers. A dusty iPhone picture taken of a TV (innovative screenshot technology) playing Mad Men. A still from the Cowboy Bebop movie. A photo he took of a Goodyear sign, glowing an enigmatic red in the darkness of Nebraska at dusk.
He remembers each one, every color like a puzzle piece in his brain completing all of his memories. He doesn’t even need to look at the date of when they were saved, because he knows he was introduced to Cowboy Bebop junior year of high school, or that he was near that neighborhood that one summer before “college” because his mom was moving. It’s all a lullaby to him, a railroad of nostalgia from each historical top-text bottom-text impact-font meme to strange astronomy phases. It leaks into every folder. The next folder he clicks is one that’s called “pretty” and it’s chock full of those same planets and sunsets, colors and intrigues.
Zach almost glazes completely over the folder inside “pretty.” Um... four PNGs of mysterious names appear, and he picks “Homewerk smiley face.” It pulls up an image of a grinning, blonde Czech girl grabbing her tit*, and he frantically clicks out of it as if his parents are about to catch him. A deep exhale and a look behind his back inspires another look at the picture, and it pokes him with happiness instead of anxiety the second time. He recalls perhaps the exact day he saved this. It was a school day, maybe a Tuesday, and he came home from school itching with hormones. Like any normal boy in the ‘age of the interweb’, he looked for salvation from these emotions in the purest of locations: RedTube and Limewire.
He remembers distinctly searching up “naked blonde woman” and getting grossed out by the overtly rapey or violent content, or awkward revenge-p*rn videos and pictures. He always had a limit about that type of stuff, no matter how hard his friends would call him vanilla. That day, he protested against the system and instead searched up the same term, with “happy” at the front. He yielded much more jovial results.
He now looks back at an image that must’ve been waiting on his computer patiently for years, begging to be reopened like a backpack from sixth grade. As he had the day he received it, Zach studies each pixel and trades the past horniness for a present smile of reminiscence. Mona Lisa, he thinks, who’s she smiling at? He ponders the photo for a moment before clicking out. He peers at the folder with a million megabytes entitled “work”, and decides to open it another day, to give himself enough time to sort through all of those tiny little sketches and ball animations.
Zach fixates on the “phone pics'' folder. The images of him, awkward glasses, horrifying Goku cosplay. The joyous images of his high school friends who he can’t seem to remember all the names of. His baby photos from his grandma’s scrapbook that have a glare from the camera’s flash. The screenshots of his Skype ex-girlfriend whose lovingly cringy relationship almost slipped entirely out of his memory. The most random things clutter it, images of his first beer, a bad cut he got on his leg, a pot he made in art class, but he holds each memory so tight to his heart that he feels his stomach knotting up.
He wants to pause, but he can’t stop moving his mouse across each file name and icon. Skype pulls at him, but he leaves that alone as well. The next area of attack has to be his browser: the genesis of his adult life. The first thing that appears on Internet Explorer is a virus notification, and then a hundred bookmarks. He reads over each, and their paired name. He finds that each tab with an inconspicuous name (data,the news,weather) is a link to a certain RedTube search term or an 18+ Newgrounds drawing, while the other Newgrounds links are correctly named, with certain adjectives following it. He clicks the one that reads 'Fred Animated Series (Hilarious, Background, Expression)'.
It’s twitchy yet seamless, and carries a weird charm no matter how aged it is. He’s not sure why he mentioned the muddy background, perhaps the blurry effect on it that was new at the time. Zach grins at the hands, realizing Chris only learned how to draw hands around the time they became friends. When the movie ends with a tiny credit “Dedicated to all you Fred fans out there”, he ridiculously feels like Chris dedicated the video, the art, this journey, to him. He knows it’s time to begin whatever journey he was set upon by Mick. He scrolls to the top and clicks the orange Login button.
He forgot his password. Again. Of course he forgets his password. He panics for a moment before the sensation of,Oh you dumbass. It’s the same account you’ve been using for years. He inhales when he types in psychicpebbles followed by passwordhahaha34, and exhales when the home screen opens up. It’s that same black screen on the same laptop opened on that same account. He takes a moment to stare at every part of the screen. Maybe looking hard enough will push him back into 2008.
There’s hundreds of notifications built up from the years of not opening the tab. He scrolls through a few, some newer animations from artists he doesn’t recognize the names of, some updates on the website, et cetera. He gasps at his awful reviews near the start of his account, particularly the one where he goes feral on some dumb game right on Christmas Eve 2011. Admiring his old profile makes him want to change his even older profile picture, and he tells himself to fix it later. Right now, he needs to look at the messages. Find where it started. Where all of this horrifying friendship life partner bullsh*t began. He clicks that mail icon, the last arrow on his list of private messages, and finds it.
October 24 2008
To: Oney
Subject: Animation Buddies?
Dear God. He leans back in his chair to immerse himself.
Hi chris ! :D Im zach (as in zachary or zachariah XD) and I luv ur anim8tions, ur hilarious. I ROFLd @ sicksons for like a whole month. Im trying to be an animator, havent made that much tho as u can see :P I guess im new in town haha I do have sum stuff ive been working on if u want me 2 send! Anyway, hope we can be friends and all that gay shizzzzzz. bai !
Z.
He closes his eyes after one read, and doesn’t finish reading it the second time. The sheer anxiety in each emoji makes him squeal, knowing he could’ve easily been a part of those cringe compilations he watches nowadays. The panic at not having any work done and the neediness for Chris to notice him makes him wither. If only 18-year old Zach knew that those parts don’t leave in you. He sighs, thinking Who the hell is Z? Was this his way of acting cool to Chris? His odd signature? He looks for Chris’ response, but only sees himself replying to the original.
November 12 2008
To: Oney
Subject: Re: Animation Buddies?
Hey chris, I wrote u b4 but maybe this got buried by all ur other emails. U r super famous, lol ! 1 of my friends told me u live in ireland, that’s super kewl. I live in bumass nebraska rn. Currently making an anim 4 a like mario-halo-batman kinda thing, here’s a taste :0 maybe u could send me some tips?? Ik the background is absolute sh*t but like…how key frame?! Hahaha alrite have a good day man bai ! :D
attached: mariodiefunnyscreamfall.mp4
Z.
He can’t tell what’s worse, each painful “hahaha” and “bai”, or his weird touchiness about Chris’ popularity. This is not the last one, but the second to last reply before Chris even glanced at his emails.
November 21 2008
To: Oney
Subject: Re: Re: Animation Buddies?
Helloooo. Sry if im like super insistent I just wanna be friends ahaha. That kinda sounds like what john wayne gacy said to the kids before he brutally raped them or whatever idk. I just remember he had a cool costume. :P Hope everythings cool, still workin on my anim. Oh btw happy bday!! :3 What r u 13? Idk timezones or whatever but hopefully u see this in time. Bai !
Z.
He looks down at a much shorter message.
November 22 2008
To: Psychicpebbles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Animation Buddies?
Hi zachariah, ty for ur bday wishes. No one else noticed lol. I liked ur anim :3 just make sure to keep ur anatomy in order, like when Mario is running u have to make shure his torso is the right size. Unless thats like ur style XD sry im so bad at critique. Lmfao at when Mario fell, that was so gud :)
CHRIS. or C. WHATEVER’S COOLEST. ROFL.
He feels his heart drop into his stomach, splitting him into a million tiny pieces as his face heats up. It’s almost as if he’s reading this message for the first time. Like he’s never met Chris O’Neill ever before, this pillar of internet animation celebrity , and suddenly he responds to his dumb little messages. Laughing at his animation! The high of that feeling makes his eyes skim completely over the sarcastic remarks written in between the lines. Butterflies slip under each rib.
He doesn’t jump but he leaps onto his bed, rolling onto his back and gazing at his cracked ceiling. Mick was right. Mick was right! This is all just dumb petty sh*t, because look how great it feels to hear sh*t like this! All he needs to do is think about this one message, and he’ll zoom back to a place in time where even looking at a text from Chris was like winning gold in an Olympic bobsled competition. It’s all fixed. He’ll talk to Chris tomorrow, and we’ll be like this again. Tight.
Zach’s eyes fall back over to that old computer, focusing on that fluorescent screen illuminating the messages that follow that one email. And as he drifts asleep, he begins to realize that he needs to read a whole lot more than one little message.
