Let me tell you about my friend.
Well, we're not like bffs, he's not my best guy friend, we don't really talk like that, but I'd say we're good enough friends to just... know things about each other. We didn't even start out that way.

It was just another average day for us high schoolers.
He came into class lightheaded with bloodshot eyes and he was asking us things we could barely understand
He reeked of a twisted tornado; alcohol mixed with the skunklike smell of weed

He talked to me, specifically, and I had to be cautious, but
I met this guy who became something to me.

A friend with poor attendance. Skipping all his classes, you'd think, but he's usually at home taking care of his baby brother or he shows up late to class because he was up all night making sure his younger sister didn't kill herself while he was falling asleep.

A friend who just might be a Pothead. Oh, he just likes getting high.

Yeah, it's so fun to have to resort to drugs to distort this disgusting reality of his father beating his mother to the point of her death and not being a father figure, but he figures the vodka and heroin will create a haze in his world and his gaze will glaze over so he doesn't have to witness the days in his life until the bad ways have halted.

A friend who has bad grades, so he's going nowhere. Seriously, he can't go anywhere in this world. He's stuck in this modern dystopia where he only has himself, and he has to struggle to see, to be accepted by a society where only stuck-ups are supposed to be at the top of the temple and lowlife deadbeats like him are tied to the bottom where they'll rot.

People look at my friend with his bloodshot eyes and his twisted scent and they see destitution, failure, someone who will never live up to their standards, this stupid teenager is and forever will be nothing. I look at my friend, MY FRIEND, and I see a hardworking brother, a friend to others, a son who tried to protect his mother, a teenager who thinks bad habits will put a mask over this inopportune thing we call life.

You... You see nothing, but I see everything.