I ruined someone’s birthday.

Through the open doorway, I could see evidence of interior decorators infiltrating the house. Those scoundrels. Multicolored triangular flags were chained together on a strand of ribbon, taunting us with “Happy Birthday” as if it applied to everyone who happened to stop by, and not merely the one particular individual. Helium balloons just coated the ceiling. No ribbon used for those, no sir. If you wanted to get those balloons down from there, you’d need a set of throwing knives and a lot of confidence in your agility and depth perception.

Or like, a ladder. If you were boring.

Oh yeah, there were also people here.

“Hey,” said the door-answering person.

I made my lips move around for about half a sentence before noticing I wasn’t actually saying the sentence, then restarted at, “I’m uh, I’m looking for Japhet Ozeri?”

“Just ‘Jay’ is fine. Are nice-to-meet-yous in order?”

I looked away from the decorations for a second. “Jay” was attempting to initiate handshaking activities, so I touched an envelope to the palm of his hand before resuming my quest to count the number of balloons behind him.

He took the letter.

“Aw, you shouldn’t have,” Jay hummed.

“Well, I’m kinda worried that’s actually right, is the thing.”

Jay ripped open the envelope. I counted just nine balloons before anything happened, so he must’ve only skimmed it before… laughing, a bit. Huh.

“You know, if he didn’t wanna show up, he could’ve just texted about it. Points for originality, excuse-wise, though.”

I glared at him.

“So how’d Isaac put you up to this? You two a thing?”

“I’m not put up to anything, Jay. He was looking forward to this.”

Jay fanned me with the folded-up letter. “Clearly not.”

I caught his wrist, taking the paper.

“I didn’t come here to lie to you, dude. I would not be able to handle that kind of social minefield.”

“Hm.”

I held up the lightly-crumpled letter. “I don’t even know what this says. It was in my mailbox. Figured I should get it to the right person.”

“Isaac didn’t send you here?”

I nodded.

“How the hell did you know where I live, then?”

I reached into my bag. “Because you told me, dumbass.”

Jay took the invitation to his birthday party and read over it almost more attentively than he’d read Isaac’s letter. I saw something click as he flipped over the envelope to read who it had been sent to.

“Wait, you’re Erela?”

I sighed.

“Hey, no offense? I forgot I invited you.”

“You invite me to everything.”

“Well, force of habit. You don’t actually, like, show up.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Well, I’ve still got those nice-to-meet-yous from earlier, if we need ’em. But Isaac’s mentioned you a few… hundred times.”

“Huh.”

“Nothing too bad,” Jay said, settling into a grin. “So what’s up? He catch a cold or something?”

“Are you serious?”

“What? I don’t get news articles about the guy.”

“You must not get news articles at all,” I mumbled. I rummaged around in my bag once more.

“Can’t a guy have a pal without tracking him twenty-four seven?”

“How about three days, Jay?” I asked, shoving the missing poster into his chest.

He took a step back while grabbing the sheet of paper in the same motion. Dexterous. I wondered if he was on a sports team.

He leaned forward, seeming to re-read the page.

“Do you believe me now?” I asked, having already determined full well the answer was-

“Holy shit.”

Uh, that. Yeah.

Jay stepped out onto the porch with me, closing the door behind him. I started to back up, but he turned around so we were shoulder-to-shoulder.

“Let me see that letter again,” he said.

I held it in front of us.

Yo, Jay, it’s Isaac.

Sorry I had to skip out on the party. I’m sure you guys had fun. I’ll try to pick something up and send it gift-wrapped. If you’re reading this, Erela knows how to get stuff to you, and if you’re not reading this, well, I guess you don’t have a reason to look forward to a present from me, do you?

Anyway, I’m busy. I’ll be busy for a while. I don’t really know, actually, how long saving the world takes. Not exactly planning to be home for dinner, if you catch my drift. But man, if there’s not some cool stuff over here. I own a suit of armor, Jay! REAL armor. I mean it’s still in the shop, but the down payment and the custom measurements make it basically mine, right?

So yeah, that’s what I’m up to. Went on a quest. Sword and sorcery stuff, far away from home. A great place to be. This is “so long.”

-Isaac Long

“I don’t understand,” Jay said.

“You’re going to be more specific than that, right?”

“Why’s he saying away from home’s a great place to be? What’s wrong with home?”

I looked at Jay, baffled, but… judging by that closed-off posture, the hand on the chin, what I could catch of his expression in profile like this?

He… genuinely didn’t know.

“Uh, how long have you known Isaac?” I asked.

“Couple years, maybe? He’s great, just…. He always seemed like a fun dude. He wouldn’t… whatever this is, he… what’s going on?”

I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to figure out what to say.

“What’s he done, what does this mean, even?”

“I don’t,” I started. “I can’t really explain… things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Things. I don’t talk. I just sort of. I don’t talk well.”

“I don’t need Shakespeare, here, Erela, I just want to know what’s happening.”

“But what if you don’t?”

Jay turned to me, which prompted me to step back.

“So, what, you’re just gonna bring a missing poster with one of my closest friends printed on it, show me a letter that doesn’t make any sense, and leave? No. No, that’s not how this goes.”

“I’m sorry, I-“

The front door opened. Boy with a shaved head, tucked-in shirt and belt combo. Nothing could be out of place with this one.

“Oi, Jay, what’re ditching your own party for?”

“Go back inside,” Jay snapped.

“Hey now, who’s this?” The boy turned to face me. “Is there a problem?”

“Could’ya give us a minute, Simon?”

Oh, he did not look like he wanted to give us a minute.

Jay stepped toward the door and pulled it shut anyway, then turned back around, gripping the handle to keep it closed.

Jay was taller than me, but with his face angled like that, he was looking up at me. Waiting for answers, still.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Doesn’t matter. Anything I wouldn’t know.”

“That’s… uh.”

“Right,” Jay said. He shifted in place, made a very obvious thinking expression. Working out what he wouldn’t know. “Three days, that’s Thursday or Friday, then?”

“Thursday,” I answered.

“He what, ran off? Ran away from home?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Why?”

I just blinked a few times.

“Why would he want to do that?”

“I… that’s a pretty, um, complicated… he would’ve told people,” I tried to stumble through.

“Well he didn’t tell me,” Jay interrupted.

“Okay. Um, okay. He didn’t tell you…?”

“Was something wrong?”

I responded to that with… well, I cut it off early enough I wouldn’t call it laughing, just one burst of nervous breath. “Yeah, something.”

“What happened?”

“That’s the thing, Jay, nothing happened. Isaac just… that’s how he was. Things were hard for him and it doesn’t really matter why.”

“It doesn’t matter? How can it not matter?”

“It’s not a big deal, I-“

“He ran off on his own, that’s a hell of a big deal.”

“He didn’t, though. And, look, I don’t know exactly the whole story on what Isaac was going through. I didn’t ask. That was our thing. That’s what made us… safe, together. No pushing, no prying, no trying to ‘fix’ each other. We just… we were just us. And we didn’t have to not be us.”

Jay was nodding, but with a sort of frown. Not nodding in agreement. Verifying. Telling me he knew what I’d said, but he was still processing it.

I looked at the door instead of his face. When did my heart start beating so fast?

I was getting a headache, right behind the eyes.

“What did you say?” Jay asked.

I glanced at him. Quick glimpse of the face — brows knit, squinting, he was upset, he was upset about something to do with me, and I pressed my eyes shut to block it out.

“I said Isaac ran off on his own and you tried to change the subject.”

“Saying Isaac ran off was the change of subject,” I recalled. “I just kept talking about what I was already talking about.”

“No, you said something else. In direct response, you said something else.”

I took a sharp breath in. This wasn’t good. If things got too confrontational, my ability to think through what I was saying went out the window, and picking out the glass shards to even let it start healing would take all day.

“Did he not run away, or did he not run away on his own?”

I could just, like, stop talking to this guy, right? We were strangers, basically. Why didn’t I just leave?

“You know exactly what happened, don’t you?”

I nodded slightly before I realized how bad of an answer “Yes” was in this situation.

“Have you told anyone?”

Alright, too late. If I had an escape route from this conversation, it must’ve been around the time I first handed over Isaac’s letter.

“I haven’t,” I admitted.

“And why the hell not?”

“Because I saw it happen and I barely take my word for it.”

“Well, you said you weren’t here to lie to me,” Jay said. “Prove it.”

“I don’t know how. I can’t even prove that letter is from Isaac.”

Jay crossed his arms.

“So you show up here, to a stranger’s house, you hand over a letter from their missing friend, and you just admit that if I challenge you on any of this, it falls apart?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Well, I think I’ll believe you, then.”

I didn’t even close to know how to respond to that.

“Look, I can tell you don’t want to be here. So if this is somehow a scam or a prank or whatever, then you’ve got a career in acting ahead of you, because I feel like I could think at you angrily and you’d want to apologize for everything you’ve ever done.”

“Um. I don’t know what that means.”

“It means tell me the whole story. Don’t worry about how I’ll take the news. Just tell me.”

“I… hang on.”

I turned around, scanning the area for other people. Nobody around to overhear.

Without turning back to Jay, I spoke in a low voice.

“We were playing a card game, at the school. A strange man showed up. Not the closet full of cardboard cutouts of celebrities sort of strange, I mean proper, like, Merlin strange.”

“Uh, sure. What?”

“He started going on about, um, other worlds. Well, just the one.”

“Hang on, do you know someone who collects cardboard cutouts?”

“I don’t even know someone who collects stamps. It was hypothetical. Anyway, this guy says we can save the other world and he opens a sort of gateway. Isaac thought it sounded exciting, and important, and he just got up. Didn’t even really stop to question it. He just walked through. He just got up and walked into another dimension and left me here.”

I took in my best attempt at a deep breath. It didn’t help much.

I turned to face Jay anyway.

Predictably, he looked a bit taken aback. But I waited, and he gradually shifted from a shocked expression to a merely bewildered one. No attempt to dismiss the story. No follow-up questions, even.

Maybe he really would try to believe me.

And maybe I wasn’t as low on proof as I thought.

“The wizard guy,” I strained to say, “gave me this key. It opens a weird extra box in the post office.”

I thought Jay was coming closer to get a better view of the key, as I fished the necklace out of my hoodie, but I startled at the feeling of a hand on my shoulder.

Looking up, catching his expression, I realized he didn’t really care about the physical evidence my story was true. I’d given him more than enough evidence already, without even meaning to. And he finally had a follow-up question.

“Are you okay?”

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