A Matter of Necessity

At first it was a matter of necessity. His grades were falling, and so were mine. Even though I backed off in the hope that he would come around on his own, the thought that I may have lost my best friend was sheer torture, especially in the scratchy silence of our examinations. I could glance to the other side of the room and see him sitting at his desk, hunkered over his exam like every other student in the room. He mentally broke down from time to time; I could see it. He stopped writing and his hands shook more than enough for me to notice. I wanted to do something about it, but he was all the way across the room. I can understand why he would break down like that. If your mind isn’t thinking about the exam in front of you, then all you can hear are the little incessant scratches being made by every other student around you. It’s maddening. More than once I couldn’t take it myself and just stood up, deposited my partially-finished exam on the teacher’s desk, and walked out without a word. No one asked me about it, not the other students and not even the teachers. I’m a Digosi, tiger to the core. I’ve been known to growl at my examinations without thinking about it when the problems annoyed me. I have cone-shaped ears like any feline, and I have a short, single-coat striped down to the skin that runs from my scalp all the way down to my tail bone. I don’t have a tail, though. We aren’t that different from everyone else. We’re a separate entity within the Kairosh Aristocracy, and almost all of us are internally educated to keep our minds at their roots or whatever. I’m one of a handful of Digosi children educated at the prestigious Armnekol Academy, and that makes me an outcast within just about everything. So if at fourteen I start acting strangely, walking out of tests and not apologizing, no one will confront me.

Well, not until my grades fall almost far enough to force the administration to reassign me to the next class down for those in my grade. Even then I was never directly sat down and explained what was going to happen or why. I just walked into class one day and was interrupted by my teacher’s voice on my way to my desk in the first row, farthest from the door.

“Debek. Take your seat directly behind Seshen.”

I froze in confusion. I turned to look at Seshen, the same friend I had been banned from sitting anywhere near during classes since we were nine years old. We got into so much trouble back then that we were assigned permanent seats regardless of year or lesson to ensure that we would be at the front of the room as well as far apart from each other. The look on Seshen’s face mirrored my own. I guess no one warned him either. I shook off some of my confusion and sat down right behind him.

For the first couple of weeks there was a tangible wall of electric tension between Seshen’s desk and my own. Ever since I had been nearly killed back in the spring he had thrown up a wall around himself. He had always had walls like that; his carefully constructed walls of social rules and regulations had made him a favored child in the aristocracy from a young age. This one was different, though, because this one kept me from my best friend. After I was up and about again I had tried to get through to him, but nothing worked. Just before we turned fifteen I gave up. Sitting right behind him shot both of our attention spans to hell, and I thought the teacher was out of his theoretical, academic brain for enacting the change.

Then we had our next examination.

Neither of us could concentrate. I was on the verge of storming out again when Seshen had another breakdown. His pencil fell out of his hand and onto the floor. I looked at the back of his neck and saw the shaking start. I sighed at him, and he tensed. I still didn’t know what all he had seen of me after I was attacked. I didn’t know if he saw me when I was still bloody or if he was kept at bay until they had me cleaned up and plugged up. I didn’t want to think that whatever memories he had of me in that span of time had brought on these little breakdowns, but it seemed the most obvious cause. Seeing me nearly dead had scared the hell out of him, and he still couldn’t work up the nerve to say it.

I took a breath to calm my nerves. This had to stop sooner or later, but the examination was in full swing. Some part of me made a decision, and without consulting my reason I reached forward and just put my hand on his shoulder. I watched the back of his neck and moved my thumb back and forth across a patch of skin. For the first time in a good while the chaos was swept clear out of my mind, and when the shaking leveled out to nothing I took my hand back. I watched him lean down, pick his pencil up off the floor, and resume his work. A smile worked its way over my face. I had my Deimis back.

Our teachers never stopped me from touching Deimis like this from that first time on. They were always watching, of course; that was their nature. They had taught us and watched us and inconspicuously directed us over the years, and they had a lot invested in our success. We were the top second and third students in our grade, and we were a full year younger than our classmates. Deimis Seshen and Solen Debek, unconventional cousins birthed a week apart and eternally driving each other out of their minds. We grew up as this single item, and fourteen was chaotic enough without our temporary split. As Deimis and I mended our relationship with each reassuring touch- all in broad daylight in view of almost twenty other people- I brushed my first identity crisis further and further into oblivion. Quite a nice feeling actually. I could torment Deimis again, testing his breaking point in the silent construct of the classroom, internally laughing my ass off as he tried to retain his composure. Our old familiar game was back, though this time I had new underlying motives.

After a few months the necessity was gone. Seshen no longer broke down emotionally in the middle of a lecture or examination, and I had stopped getting those damn urges to leave the room before I hurt somebody. There was no need for me to reach forward and touch him anymore, but that didn’t mean I stopped. As sixteen came around I would still let my fingers play gently along the back of his neck from time to time. It was a simple thing, and it fueled the feelings that assaulted my brain when we were together outside of class. We never talked about it; that would have been too direct. I pretended that I did it for the same reasons that originally brought me to touch him in class, and he pretended that he believed me. If we didn’t acknowledge that there was something more behind all those caresses, then we didn’t have to stop the game. I enjoyed my delusion that there could be something between us. I knew him better than most, and my father’s long-time companion always said we were well balanced together. To think that this person I grew up with could be the one to tame me was dreamlike, but I had enough sense in me to know that nothing could change the fact that Deimis was “closed.” He had a fiancée, chosen for him as a present for his fourth birthday. It was technically illegal for me try to court him to be my husband. I could dream, I could think, I could touch him on the back of his neck in the middle of an examination, but I could not do anything more. I doubt I would have gotten through sixteen with my sanity intact if I had been denied those public touches.

I guess the necessity never went away. It just changed.