March 16

Is it weird that I actually miss him more now than I have in the whole past two months?

I thought that losing one of my best friends to suicide and another to expulsion would break me. But, to be honest, I'm the one that's holding the rest of these guys together. That takes a lot of willpower, a lot of strength that I didn't know I had. It's so much responsibility that I've hardly had the time to just stand around and think about things, to just miss them and mourn them.

You'd think that I would've missed Charlie more just after he left. I still haven't seen him since then. I still haven't spoken to him face to face. And, yes, I certainly miss him and I have the whole time, but exchanging these strange conversations with him recently had made me miss him even more than I did at the beginning.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that he's changed so much. He seems just as broken as the other guys do, as I'm pretty sure I am inside here somewhere. I miss the old Charlie—I miss Nuwanda. He never goes by that anymore.

At least the last couple calls I've gotten him to laugh. And he got me to laugh. That's an improvement, at least. Not this time, apparently.

"So the bars in this town are shit," he says nonchalantly, as if he were explaining the weather.

"Why? What happened?" I inquire.

He did this last time. He brings up the subject he really wants to talk about by making a simple statement that barely has anything to do with the actual subject. A little childish, but that's Charlie. How could I expect anything else from him?

"I was out with the guys again," he explains—you know, in the way where his explanation really isn't an explanation at all.

"Yeah."

"So I was getting a little drunk. None of it tasted any good."

"Drunk isn't exactly what you need to be right now."

He snorts. And why exactly do I even try anymore? Nothing I could say would ever change his mind. Probably. He, otherwise, ignores the statement, though.

"So there was this girl there," he continues. "She had to be at least twenty. She was flirting with everybody. Total slut."

He's slowly getting to what he wants to tell me.

"She smiled at me."

Big deal.

"Not just a normal smile. You know, the smile that a girl gives you when she wants to… you know." He hesitates. "On second thought, you probably don't. It's not like Chris would ever really… do that, or at least lead up to it that way."

I know exactly what he's talking about. Is he actually getting his sexual appetite back or something? God I hope so, because Charlie without the constant sex-talk is like English class without Mr. Keating. It's just wrong.

"So, anyway, that's not the point."

Yeah, my sex life with Chris is definitely not the point.

"The point is, she was smiling at me that way, and…"

He's got me curious now. "And what?"

He heaves a deep sigh before responding. "And I just couldn't do it."

"Do what? Have sex with her?"

"Ugh," he groans, "I don't know why I'm even telling you this. It's not like you've got much experience on the matter." He's bitter. But he's actually trying to change the subject.

Ignoring his rudeness, I continue to press the matter. Maybe I'll actually get an answer out of him one of these days. "Yeah, that's nice and all, but you couldn't do what?" I say, brushing away his cold words. Then, a thought strikes me. "You couldn't have sex with her," I accuse. "You weren't able to, you know, get it up."

He doesn't say anything, so I know I'm right. If it weren't the truth, he would've been defending it like I had insulted his mother's honor or something. Well, except for the fact that he really doesn't care about his mother's honor.

"Oh my God," I murmur into the telephone in shock.

It's a difficult concept to wrap your head around. Charlie Dalton without sexual urges or arousals is so weird. I think Hell might have broken loose or frozen over or something must've happened. The world is upside-down. The earth is actually flat. Cats and dogs are mating. Pigs are flying. The world must be coming to an end. That's the only way that this could possibly be happening. Or maybe I'm just dead.

I can feel him roll his eyes. "Oh, shut up, will you?"

I feel like I should be teasing him or something like that, but I just can't. It's too weird.