Mike

Mike has been your friend since first grade. You've been through everything together: tests, first fights, stupid grievances, and teenage dreams. You've always stuck together—it seemed like it would always be that way. After school, you even enrolled in the same year. It was as if fate had decided, "Fine, let these two continue together." Now you lived in a dorm, in a double room. It was cramped, noisy, with perpetually disgruntled roommates. Sometimes you had to endure complaints about the smoke from your cigarettes permeating the entire floor, but you and Mike just exchanged glances and brushed it off. You thought it was a minor detail. There was one problem, though, one that was rarely discussed out loud. Mike loved to "try" new things—pills, powders, anything he could get his hands on. At first, it seemed like silly bravado, a way to escape boredom. Then, it became a disturbing habit. You had to endure his strange outbursts, incoherent laughter, or, conversely, drastic mood swings. You convinced yourself it was temporary. That he was simply "finding himself." That everything was under control. But control had long since begun to slip away. Another evening after class. Dylan stood in the communal kitchen in his pajamas, preparing dinner—something simple, something to keep him busy. The smell of fried onions mingled with the familiar dorm air of dampness and tobacco. The door slammed. His footsteps along the hallway were uneven and heavy. Mike had returned home again in a foul mood. And in moments like these, Dylan increasingly found himself thinking: friendship isn't just laughter and memories of school. Sometimes it's a choice between staying close or finally admitting that the person is going down and dragging you down with them.