A Little Light
I first met Lenny when we were in kindergarten. We were out at recess during one of the early weeks, and after I had to give up my spot on the swings, I found him under the playground casting light onto the underside of the slide with his red flashlight. He gave me his famous toothy grin when I asked what he was doing—minus a few teeth at the time—and from that point on he attached himself to me. Or maybe I attached myself to him. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, we were best friends onward.
As we got older, we spent more time together, starting with my mom calling them “play dates.” Lenny lived in a nice house, two stories and an attic. A large yard, and it was in a nice neighborhood, so the front was partially lit up at nighttime. I envied that back then, being able to play outside whenever you wanted, though we often played in the backyard when the sun was out. There was a large maple we could hide from the hot summer sun under when we felt so inclined, and when it was dark and we were tired of playing, he had that little red flashlight that we could sit under the tree and make shadow puppets with. Sometimes we’d even read, who knows? After so long, his mom would call us in for food or something. Lenny’s mom was awesome. When she saw you, she’d give you the most welcoming smile you’d ever seen—a sincere and effortless gesture that gave the impression of genuine joy in seeing me walking up to the door. Lenny inherited plenty from his mom. They had the same hair, the same eyes… but that smile was something else, man. There was something special about coming inside their house as the sun was setting to wash our hands and eat some chicken nuggets with homemade mac and cheese.
In the summer before sixth grade, we started hanging out at my house a lot more. He would bike the mile and a half to my house in the morning, and we’d start the day playing video games or watching TV before going on our little adventures. One day in mid August, we biked all the way out to the high school that was five miles away from my house, deciding we wanted to break in somehow. That plan was foiled by the simple fact that the door was locked. We spent the rest of the day in the woods until it started getting dark, then biked back to my house by the glow of his little red flashlight clipped to the handlebar. His mom was still picking him up from my house then. She was so worried about us being out past dark back then, but we were all smiles. It was infectious. It would start with him, then I’d start, then, like a disease, the next person we encountered would be infected by the same toothy grin that couldn’t hold itself back. She wanted to yell at us when she saw the light on his bike closing in, but the second she saw his face, that urge went away. We bid our farewell after that, and the next morning he was back knocking on my window with the same grin, as if he had never left. Early in July his mom wasn’t able to keep picking him up at night anymore, and his dad was always busy working, so we started driving Lenny home each night. We couldn’t let him bike alone in the dark on the busy road that connected our neighborhoods.
That November, Lenny’s mom died. Cancer, I think, though I didn’t ask for details. At the funeral, I sat towards the back; we were close, but my family wasn’t, well, family. I was only twelve then; I couldn’t see over anyone during the eulogy, but I was able to catch a glimpse of Lenny in the front row every once in a while. I thought it was really strange. When I did see him through the opening, he was looking up towards his dad with a smile on his face. Shouldn’t he have been crying? Did he even care that he was about to bury his mom, one of the most wonderful people to grace the Earth? I tried my hardest, but that day I just couldn’t figure out what was going on in his head.
At school, not long after that, we were sitting outside on the swings for recess, half-heartedly pushing ourselves back and forth. I couldn’t leave his side. It had only been three weeks since the funeral. I didn’t believe the facade. So there we sat, pushing just as far as our legs would push without leaving the ground, then dragging our feet in the mulch as we swung forward, ingraining the stain in the toes of our shoes to last forever. We spoke of nothing, but also of everything. Leaves were a topic that lasted for a while. Evergreens were nice, especially in the winter, but they didn’t have the same effect when looking at them the rest of the seasons. There was a maple tree in the schoolyard, smaller than the one at Lenny’s house, and we were talking about which season of its leaves we liked the best. That day it didn’t have any leaves left, though. I mentioned how sad it looked at the moment, wishing it still had the color of its fresh autumnal self. “It doesn’t really look sad,” Lenny had said while squinting his eyes. “When it’s naked it kind of looks like a hand, reaching up to the blue sky.” He smiled at what he said, then looked over at me, and in another second we were both laughing and smiling like idiots. He could find something to smile at in nothing.
Lenny started bringing stuff like the hand-tree up all the time. His absolute favorite thing ever was a nice blue sky. At the end of the cold winter, it was a great break from gray skies; he would always be checking it out during class with that smile on his face. I’d ask him why he was smiling like that, and it was always the simplest of responses. “The sky is blue,” as if that justified the hypnotic effect it had on him. It was enough, though. February is easily the worst month we have, with people lying to you, saying it’s the shortest every year. No, it’s not; once it arrives, it will drag its feet the entire time, trying its very hardest to ingrain its slushy, salt-stained roads and gray skies into your very soul. You begin to lose hope that anything better will come, but one day comes a blue sky. A splash of color into the entire view outside your window. It’s enough to give hope.
That became Lenny’s personality for the next few years; I began wondering if he had ever frowned in his life. Was there a possibility that he had lost the ability to do so? Did those muscles in his face atrophy after years of not being used? I mentioned it once. He laughed, then joked about how he was bitten by a radioactive Amazon box and could only emote with a smile. I didn’t know asking that question was a joke, but it was now. We did nothing but come up with his superhero identity based on unregulated positivity on that bike ride home; you wouldn’t have believed that it was the conversation of two fifteen-year-olds if you heard it. Kindergarten-level butt jokes were being used, but Captain Sunshine was born.
I got my driver’s license that summer, and I started driving us to school that fall. Sure, he was two miles in the wrong direction, costing me a little bit of time and gas each morning that I didn’t need to waste, but it was no waste for Lenny. It never even crossed my mind not to give him rides, actually. I was only a few months older; we had always been equal, but I joked that I was his big brother driving him to school. He would joke back that he was my passenger princess.
We were up late one night that fall, slowly working through making our presentation about national parks. He was sitting upside down on the couch playing with his little red flashlight while coming up with what to say on the slide, and I translated it into something that could be understood and put it into the computer. As you can probably imagine, it wasn’t the fastest process, and we were getting distracted at every possibility imaginable. At one point he even dropped his flashlight on his head, and it rolled under the couch, leaving us laughing for a solid five minutes before ever getting back to trying to write again. He got a call about curfew at 10:30, and even though I offered to drive him home, he thought I should just stay back and keep working. I gave him my bike, but without any lights on my street, he had to make it almost a mile with only the house lights nearby. I didn’t like it. “I’m a big boy now,” Lenny had told me. “I can handle a little ride in the dark.” And with one last flash of his toothy grin, he was gone into the night.
Working alone on it, I gave up on finishing it after half an hour, thinking we’d improvise the rest tomorrow. We never even presented.
Lenny was riding home alone in the dark when he was hit by a drunk driver.
I didn’t leave the hospital that night. Or the next day. I don’t know what was wrong with him exactly; I didn’t ask. It was bad, that’s all that mattered. The kind of thing you don’t walk away from. I talked to him a little when he was awake. Tried to apologize, tried taking the blame for what happened to him, but he wouldn’t take it. He wasn’t even upset in the slightest. How was he being so calm? When he woke up from his next nap, I finally asked him how he was able to stay so positive at a time like this. His moment of thinking about the question felt like a century, but when Lenny opened his mouth, he said: “I get to see my mom again soon.” I saw then that he did care; he did feel the pain of losing her, the pain of every bad thing that ever happens. Lenny just focused on the good instead. When everything else was dark, he found whatever light he could to stay happy. Just a little light. I stayed quiet, thinking about this for a while, but then he smiled at me the same way he always does. He was missing a tooth. The smile resembled the very first one he gave me over ten years before, and that realization made my heart drop into my stomach. I couldn’t say anything. I don’t know how long I stood there staring at him with my mouth gaping open, trying to form some kind of sentence, some sentiment to show him I understood, or that I cared, or anything, but he just looked behind me. He pointed his bandaged hand to the window behind me, to the blue sky behind me.
His funeral was only a few days later. I was still in shock, trying to comprehend what had happened. It was an open casket during the service, and when I was saying goodbye for the last time, he wasn’t smiling anymore. Eyes closed, mouth relaxed, for the rest of time. I was never going to see Lenny’s smile again; it was gone now. Gone forever. That’s what finally did it. I left the funeral to hide my tears. Nobody was smiling at this funeral.
That winter passed by slowly. I still drove to Lenny’s house each morning; I’m not sure whether it was out of ritual or just from missing my friend. Doesn’t matter. I was there, waiting to see him walking out the door. He never did. A few weeks into the new year, the house was put up for sale, though I never saw Lenny’s father again. No need for a house that big when living alone I guess. Fresh start. One day, I went back to the basement for the first time since… well, since then. It looked exactly as we’d left it: poster on the wall, wrappers crumpled on the table, and his flashlight lying under the couch. I fished it out with a hanger, brushed off the dust, and flipped the switch. The beam flickered weakly for a second before dying. No amount of shaking or clicking could bring it back. Still, I kept it with me.
February stretched on forever, the endless expanse of gray mirroring my soul. March was especially rainy, continuing the streak of gray skies and wet shoes as I traversed the woods each day after school, searching for something that wasn’t there to be found. One day, though, I was sitting in class staring out the window when the clouds started to break. I watched as a blue sky emerged as the gray skies rolled away. I felt a strange pull and reached into my pocket for the flashlight. It didn’t work, but holding it brought something back, a memory of Lenny sitting under the tree, smiling at nothing and everything. That smile—the same one now staring back at me in my reflection—caught me off guard. For the first time in months, I laughed. “The son of a bitch Pavloved me.”
Alex Hill is a junior at Malone University in Canton, Ohio, studying Integrated Language Arts.
A long-distance runner and film photographer, his writing is shaped by movement, endurance, and observation. Wherever he goes, he is always searching for a good story. This marks his first publication.
