AI generated picture.
“Call me when you feel like crying,” Joel joked.
I watched him from the window in my room and didn't laugh. He was standing below the orange tree just outside my window, staring up at me. On the ground, scattered around him were fallen orange bulbs and dried leaves, and his face reflected the rays of the rising sun. He was passing to school that morning and decided to pass through my house to console me. We had been friends since kindergarten and knew everything about each other. I reached up and cleaned off a tear that trickled down my eye with a hand.
“Don't cry Hannah,” he said. “My last job was worse than yours, remember? I was accused of fraud and almost taken to juvenile. You were just fired, no accusations attached.”
I coaxed my head to the side and remembered how downtrodden and depressed he had been, all the legal interventions and paperwork his parents had to go through for him to be granted bail. Then realized it wasn't as bad as I was taking it to be.
“Okay,” I said calmly to him. “I won't be in school today, see you tomorrow.”
“That's fine,” he responded. “Get a lot of rest, okay?” And with that, he trotted off smiling and humming a song happily. I watched his back till he disappeared down the bend on the road, then sat down at the foot of my bed and, with a big sigh, decided it was okay for me to lose the job. I was going to find another part-time job anyway.