Best Friends Should Share a Milkshake — Ch. 1
I love my friend Bear!
We sat on the rooftop looking towards the ever-standing bell tower memorial in the middle of campus, one which, oddly enough, I had never heard ring before. Our college had always been lackluster compared to other preppier, richer universities. I didn’t even want to think about why I had decided to come here, yet the view from our spot brought me an odd sense of comfort and belonging. It reminded me that this was all temporary.
It was late at night in deep darkness with blotches of blazing artificial lights from the lampposts; from up here, above our regular mundanities, the quad appeared more like a black blanket with pin-sized holes held against a yellow light bulb. The silence never felt more comforting, and the noise from our conversation was so rewarding. We spoke when we desired, and if there was nothing left to be said, we star-bathed and basked in the presence of each other, arms behind our heads and gentle smiles.
We laughed when drunk people coming from fraternity parties tripped and would place bets on whether the least balanced one would throw up or not (I always took the vomiting side, but we had only seen it happen twice). Nights like these mesmerized me; those same people crippled from alcohol sometimes would cross paths with their antithesis: a student who had left their nest in the library with a backpack on and a near-empty energy drink. They walked past each other like parallel lines, both factions avoiding each other as if they should not even share the same air. Here, they are forced to for at least a couple of seconds. You could hear both of their thoughts about each other without any words spoken, so loud and precise you might think you are telepathic. What a loser, they both asserted in their minds and internally shook their heads.
“What a bunch of losers,” the deep voice sitting beside me said with a cackle. I returned an empathetic chuckle while turning my head to view him.
“Do you ever take your sunglasses off, Bear?” I inquired, putting my head down to continue laughing. “Can you even see anything at night?” He cackled again, this time throwing his head back and putting his right paw on his head. His tail wiggled–it had never been hard to read him; watching that cotton ball bouncing could tell me everything I wanted to know. He never had much to hide, and I relished that about him, though I would never tell him to his face.
“Do you ever wear anything other than that green sweatshirt?” he shot back, dropping his head so fast the inertia had left his glasses floating and catching back up to his black nose after a second. His movements were exaggerated and cartoon-like despite being a 450 kg mass of fur (and joy, but I would never tell him that to his face). He flashed his defined canines, which were somehow still whiter than his fur and perfectly aligned, and a sparkle briefly appeared from them.
How did I ever live without him?
“You’re one to talk; your entire closet is a repeat of one outfit!” I scanned him up and down mockingly. Bear always wore the same red sweater with a different letter on it (I peeked into his closet once, expecting to find the full alphabet, but to my surprise, he was missing one with the letter “i”—I never brought it up to him) and light blue cargo jeans. When it was warmer, he would replace these with identical versions in the form of shorts. He never wore shoes. No one asked about that, either.
“It’s easier that way, man.” We had this back and forth often, ever since we had been assigned as roommates in what felt like forever ago, yet in reality, around five months. He could connect with anyone. People smiled before he even entered through the door, sometimes because he couldn’t quite fit through some of them. Everyone knew Bear, and you would sooner hear someone denounce Mother Teresa before catching a remotely negative thing about that large, fuzzy creature. Most of our arguments ended because I couldn’t keep a straight face with him, and the thought of being mad at him felt as silly as his existence.
When I came to school for move-in, he had already decorated his side of the room with a striped surfboard (we went to school in a landlocked state… the only body of water near us was a measly fountain that never turned on) and a matching skateboard combo in the same hue of blue and red as his outfit. I shuddered as I walked in, not from the nerves but from the Arctic temperature the thermostat had been set to. He stomped towards me, shaking the wooden floorboards, with arms spread wide, and captured me in a warm hug so tight that my eyes nearly popped out of my head like a doll. He had lifted me off my feet with ease—I shuddered again, this time at the fear of my new roommate. This will be a long year, I thought to myself, still gripped. I had nothing to worry about, except wearing my winter coat inside our room even when the sidewalks outside could melt the soles of my shoes.
That same night, we had already found a climbing path from our room’s window up to the roof where we sat currently. It became a tradition, an almost nightly ritual, to buy a chocolate milkshake and drink it while chatting on the brick roof of our dusty building. It started with each of us having our own milkshake, then we shared one with two straws, and soon enough, we drank the same one from a single straw. Buying a milkshake often started to get expensive, so we would trade off paying each time. We would rotate flavors each time we did this, except for banana… the sole time we tried it, around the second week of college, Bear had to spit it out. An innocent bystander who, by some twisted fate, happened to be strolling below us was bombarded with a drizzle of artificial yellow droplets; had it been a warm drink, she might have thought we planned something more malevolent. When the girl screamed, we both turned slowly to look at each other. His pupils were the size of buttons, but his eyes were open as wide as an Oreo. He felt so bad that he almost fell on her from three stories above trying to apologize, all while I turned purple from pulling him back by his fur. I blame whoever decided banana ice cream would be a good flavor to manufacture. Bear blames me for wanting to try it in a milkshake. Today we went with our safe pick: peanut butter swirl.
He snatched the plastic cup from my hand with a swipe and caught the whirling striped straw between his teeth, somehow all with a smile. I had only seen Bear frown once, one of our first weeks at college at one of our first-ever parties. A girl jumped when she saw him and rushed to approach him, calling his tail cute and asking if she could grab it. “My tail is not cute,” he told her sternly while slowly removing his iconic sunglasses. His tail did not wiggle that time, but his nose scrunched, and his beady blue eyes turned slightly opaque. To claim to have seen those buttons was either an honor or a war story. I froze, and my head spun so fast that my thoughts softened into a slushie.
The girl, however, maybe too intoxicated to gauge the level of disrespect or simply too ignorant (sometimes hard to tell, usually both in these cases), let out an aggressive and very, extremely, intensely drawn out, Awwweeeee, while putting her palms on her cheeks with fingers slightly digging into her eye sockets, as if resisting a cuteness induced psychosis that made her want to claw her eyes out. Bear, like a script encountering an error in the code, robotically returned his sunglasses to home base and hesitantly put out his closed paw for a fist bump. I looked at the trembling paw, then at the girl stuck in the same position, still hyper-fixated on the snowball, then back at the trembles, then back at the statue, alternating back and forth until I couldn’t contain my laughter. I hunched over and covered my mouth to contain it, but the simultaneous diversion of attention from both of them towards me had made it worse.
When my laughter died down enough to muster a glance up, I would see the scene practically unchanged, apart from both of their heads now turned towards me. So I would laugh and put my head down again. Eventually, the girl, overwhelmed or confused, returned a fist bump for Bear and trotted away without taking her eyes off of his tail (until a crowd surrounding and cheering for a keg stand captivated her remaining brain activity, taking her interest away from us). Now, we were free to look at each other and try to figure out what had just occurred with head tilts and shrugs. Bear pointed to the keg with his thumb, still without a word, and I nodded. I never liked beer before him.
“Do you remember that one girl at that one party?” I put out my hand while beginning to ask my question, and before I could even finish, the shake had been perfectly spiraled into my hand, the centrifugal force keeping every drop of peanut and butter and swirl intact and in the cup. “And what a throw! Impeccable form from Bear, the all-star quarterback and hero of our school.” I made sure to add, using a mocking commentator’s voice before he could answer, taking a swig of mostly swirl and not enough peanut or butter. Despite my question being seemingly generic and vague, I had zero doubt Bear would catch on without the need for clarification. We were past clarification; with a simple blink, we could tell each other our life stories.
“The one who asked to touch my tail…?” He said with a nose scrunch. If you didn’t know him, you would think a bee had landed on him, and he was gently scaring it off without a sting. He just did that sometimes, usually when he was lost in thought, reminiscing, concentrating, or slightly frustrated (which did not happen very frequently). I tossed the shake back, putting slightly too much spin on it and spilling a couple of drops as it traveled. “You still can’t throw like me,” he said with a chuckle. He managed to catch it without taking his gaze away from the Big Dipper–somehow still maintaining a smile.
“Yeah, that one, that one,” I nodded aggressively, partially at the satisfaction of our unlicensed telepathy. We sighed sarcastically, shook our heads, and rubbed the tops of our heads simultaneously. We turned to each other at the mutual realization of our synchronization–we probably imagined the scene the same–and let out a laugh with a playful punch; Bear’s hit had pushed me back enough to make me windmill my arms to maintain balance. Spending so much time with each other made it a frequent occurrence, but never any less amusing. It would only take one comment, and we could talk for the next three hours, and on some nights, we let the silence be enough.
As our laughs died down, the chatter of a new crowd strolling by took over. I wanted to turn around and tell him how I felt, so I stuck out my hand and caught the milkshake without looking.
“Now THAT’s how you throw!” The group below stopped and looked up aimlessly, wondering how there was thunder with no clouds. I put my head between my knees and pretended to be embarrassed by his laugh.