Mike Delgado, Unfiltered

If you asked anyone at Roosevelt High to describe Mike Delgado in one word, you'd get a lot of different answers, and most of them would be true. Loud. Funny. A little much. The guy who got banned from the vending machine for hitting it too many times when it ate his dollar, a ban that technically only applied to him specifically, enforced by a hand-written sign taped above the coin slot that said NO MIKE. The guy who once gave a five-minute unprompted speech in the middle of gym class about why hot dogs are technically tacos, complete with visual aids drawn on the whiteboard in dry-erase marker, before the coach physically confiscated the marker.What most people wouldn't guess, unless they really knew him, was that Mike noticed things. All the time. He just didn't advertise it, because being the funny one meant people left you alone about the rest, meant nobody looked too closely at whatever might be sitting underneath the noise, including, sometimes, his own stuff, which he was even less equipped to talk about than Caspian's.Thursday's lunch period was loud in the specific way it always got before a pep rally, extra chairs dragged across tile with a sound like nails on a chalkboard, someone's speaker playing something with too much bass two tables over, a cluster of freshmen laughing at something Mike was ninety percent sure wasn't actually funny but had decided not to investigate. He slid into the seat across from Caspian with the enthusiasm of a man arriving somewhere important, tray clattering down like punctuation."Okay, hypothetical," Mike said, not bothering with hello. "You're being chased by a bear. You have exactly one item on you. It's a stapler. Go.""Staple its eyelids shut.""See, that's dark, but I respect the commitment." Mike unwrapped his sandwich like it owed him money, peeling back the foil with unnecessary drama. "Okay, new hypothetical. You're being chased by a bear, and the bear is actually your chemistry teacher, and-""Mike.""and the bear has strong feelings about your lab report""Mike.""What.""You've been doing bear hypotheticals for ten minutes.""It's a rich vein, Caspian. I'm mining it. There's gold in these hills." He grinned around a mouthful of sandwich, and Caspian felt the corner of his mouth pull up despite himself, a real one, small, but real, and for a second the noise of the cafeteria didn't feel like something he had to survive, just something happening near him, pleasantly, the way weather happens near a window you're standing safely behind.That was the thing about Mike that nobody quite got unless they'd known him a long time: underneath the bear hypotheticals and the hot dog manifestos was someone who had decided, somewhere around sixth grade, right around the time his own home life had started getting complicated in ways he never talked about, that his job, his actual, self-appointed job, more important to him than any grade or any girl or any bit, was to make sure the people he loved didn't feel alone. He didn't announce this. He probably couldn't have put it into words if you'd asked him directly; he would've deflected with a joke, actually, which was sort of the whole point of the joke in the first place, a shield that did double duty as a gift."You're coming to the game tomorrow," Mike said. Not a question."I don't really do football, man.""I don't care about football either, that's not the point. The point is there's a game, and after the game there's a thing, and the thing has pizza, and you're going to eat pizza and pretend to care about the score with me. This is not up for debate. I've already decided for both of us. It's happening. Mark it in whatever calendar you use in that big weird brain of yours.""That's very generous of you.""I'm a generous guy." Mike leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs the way the cafeteria monitor was always yelling at him not to do, a habit he'd apparently decided was worth the risk of a detention for the sheer principle of it. "Also I miss you. Which, don't make it weird, but you've been kind of a ghost lately and it's freaking me out a little."He said it fast, wrapped in the same easy tone as everything else, like it was just one more bit in the routine, but his eyes weren't doing the bit, and Caspian felt the words land somewhere they weren't supposed to reach, a small, precise hit that got past every defense he'd built without Mike even seeming to aim for it."I've been busy," Caspian said. "School stuff.""Sure." Mike let his chair drop back onto all four legs with a soft thud. He didn't push it further. That was Mike's whole strategy, Caspian was starting to realize, whether Mike himself could have articulated it that way or not, never pushing hard enough to make you run, just leaving the door open a crack and hoping, eventually, you'd walk through it yourself, on your own legs, in your own time. "Pizza tomorrow, though. Non-negotiable. I already told Danny you're coming. If you don't show up I'll have made a fool of myself in front of Danny, and Danny does not let things go, Caspian. Danny holds grudges like it's an Olympic sport.""Fine. Pizza.""See, this is why we're friends. You're easy." Mike stood, scooping his tray up, already halfway into a new bit about the lunch lady's personal vendetta against him specifically, something about how she always gave him the smallest portion of fries out of some obscure, ongoing feud neither of them could remember the origin of. Caspian watched him go, weaving through the crowded tables like he owned the room, high-fiving someone he probably didn't know particularly well, calling out a greeting to someone else across the cafeteria, and thought, not for the first time, that he had no idea what he'd done to deserve someone who kept showing up like this, over and over, without ever really being asked, without ever seeming to need a reason beyond *he's my friend and something's wrong.*He didn't know yet how much that would matter. Not really. Not the way he'd understand it in a few weeks, when showing up would stop being a small, easy thing and start being the only thing standing between him and the dark, when Mike's stubborn, relentless, unglamorous presence would turn out to be less like comic relief and more like a rope someone had tied around his waist without telling him, just in case.For now, it was just Thursday, and pizza tomorrow, and a friend who noticed more than he let on, sitting two tables down, already laughing at something someone else had said, already scanning the room without seeming to, the way he always did, the way Caspian had never quite noticed him doing until just now.