Tea and Cakes

Every bloody afternoon he’d be sat there, talking to the tree stump. It was just so embarrassing. I hated walking home from school through the park, just because of him. It’s not like I wanted to have anything to do with him, it wasn’t my fault that our mums were best friends. So, our families took holidays together. I didn’t have a choice in that. It didn’t stop everyone slagging me for it though. Tree hugger Terence, they called him. We’d walk past him, the group of us, and I knew it’d start.
“Hey Laura, there’s your boyfriend talking to the tree again. Why don’t you stay and join him? We don’t mind if you leave us”
I tried everything to get them to shut up - I ignored them, I got angry with them and stormed off, I laughed at Terence with them, but none of it made any difference.
Every day, we’d walk through the park. My stomach would knot and I’d get more and more tense as we got closer to the stump. If Terence hadn’t got there yet, or had been and gone I could relax. Otherwise it’d start up again. Most times he was there though. If the weather was ok enough for us to be walking home, it was ok enough for Terence to sit and talk to himself in front of the tree.

He didn’t used to be so lame. Terence, I mean. He was pretty cool for a while, and I was happy to be seen with him, and for people to think we were friends. Then his clothes just got a bit too odd, and he started liking shouty and moany music instead of the stuff that everyone else liked. And then he started talking to the tree.

I’d never admit it to my friends, but on holidays we still hung out. We’d always known each other, and he was like my brother, except a brother that didn’t get on my nerves at home, and didn’t try to blame me when he did something wrong. On holidays he was the same smart and funny Terence that he’d always been. He didn’t talk to plants on holidays.

I never mentioned the tree stuff to him when we were alone. I wanted to. I wanted to scream at him that he was making an idiot of himself and didn’t he care?, but something stopped me. I’d seen the look on his face when I’d joined in laughing at him with the others, and I didn’t want to see it again.

After a while he started bunking off school. I didn’t blame him, really. The slagging started up there as well, but really, he brought it on himself. He could have stopped it if he’d just started acting normal. Stopped talking to the tree stump. Instead he spent more and more time there. Mum started asking me questions about him at school - had I seen him that day, asking me to pass messages to his mum through him. I covered for him for a while - I bunked off too sometimes so I could pass on any messages without my friends seeing me.

Then one day I got home from school - it was pouring rain, so I’d got the bus - and his mum was there, sat at the kitchen table with my mum, both of them holding big mugs of tea steaming in the cold air.
“We need to have a chat with you Laura. About Terence.”

The school had rung. They knew he hadn’t been going. They knew about the tree. Terence had told his mum all about how the tree spoke to him, and how he felt comfortable talking to it.
“We’ve found a nice safe place for him to stay for a while. Somewhere he can get some help.”

~~

This beginning was inspired by This picture taken by Right Index from Flickr.

Written for Flickr Fiction Friday. Other Flickr Fictioneers who may have written about the same picture are: Donal,Elimare, Tadamack, Aquafortis, Chris, Valsha, and Neil.