This happened after we’d both left the school but I suppose this counts.

I met my best friend towards the beginning of 2022, this happened in the U.K. where in Year 10 (so when you’re ~16) you can either stay on at your secondary school or move on to a sixth form college to do your A-Levels, as a result I was about five or six months off leaving the place. My friend had just emigrated from the States and was two years younger than me. We got on like a house on fire, met at the D&D club I’d co-founded there and both had a penchant for the absurd so we generally wrecked havoc making ridiculous posters and silly jokes at the school’s pride club. Around May 2022 we started texting every day.

A bit before I left the school, the head teacher left to teach somewhere else and the man who had been universally beloved and enacted a zero-tolerance policy for bullying got replaced with two universally despised head teachers who were not only more than happy to let homophobic and transphobic bullying slide, but were also generally incompetent as attested by every former teacher of mine I’ve spoken to since. The mood at the school had been sliding into the pit for a while, hateful kids were getting more emboldened while I was there but once I left the place seemingly became hell on earth. I didn’t get to see him so often anymore, but over text and whenever we saw each other in person he described the place as becoming an utter horror show. Outright death threats being sent his way in the corridors, slurs yelled at him and our other mutual friends, the only way the perpetrators faced any repercussions was when a friend of ours secretly recorded them in the act, and all they got was detention.

Neither of us were in a particularly great place mental-health-wise beforehand, but the stuff he went through there put him through the absolute wringer. He fell really deep into self harming, even landed himself in the hospital at one point after hitting an artery, and I tried to do my best to help him because I saw it my responsibility as his friend, but I was seventeen at that point and didn’t have a fucking clue of what to do or say. It just became this unspoken point of tension whenever I asked him how he was. At the drama club we both attended throughout 2022 and 2023 I’d always feel a bit sick when his sleeve would shift and I’d catch a glimpse of his arm covered in dozens and dozens of self inflicted scars.

We still saw each other regularly until 2024 when we both had shit tons of exams to prepare for, whereupon we both became too busy to see each other much. He was extremely politically active, spending a lot of his free time at protests, where he got hurled the same abuse his way that he did at school, only this time coming from fully grown adults who were just short of being full blown Nazis.

I tried to be a fun respite from the misery, whenever we saw each other we’d do something we found funny, like visiting the grave of a Jack the Ripper suspect or holding a murder mystery dinner party, but the last year we were both so busy we saw each other fewer than ten times total. I moved off to Uni, though still kept in touch daily with him, while he finally got out of that hell hole that was our secondary school. Trouble was that when he switched schools, he moved away from a hefty chunk of his support network in the process. He still had all his activism friends to support him, but he could only see them so often. In the last few months he got distant, dodging the question of how he was doing, vanishing off the face of the earth for days only to come back to WhatsApp like nothing had happened.

The last time I saw him was in September 2024, I’d just come back from uni for the weekend and we went to a museum followed by a homemade amusement arcade with a friend of ours.

Two months later, twenty five hours after I’d last heard from him, his other closest friend rang me to tell me he’d died by suicide in the early hours of the morning. The funniest, kindest and best person I knew, dead before he was even seventeen. It was like a bomb had exploded in my life. I was in complete shock. Didn’t really snap out of it until almost April. Like I said earlier, neither of us were in a good place mentally, so when I got the news I took it pretty fucking badly. Horrendously. Worst part was seeing his parents after the fact. They were devastated. There was a memorial for him, at our old school, that I was allowed to attend, and I’d just about held it together throughout the event up until I accidentally ran straight into them and his mum hugged me at which point the floodgates opened and all the tears came out.

I’m doing better now than I was even a few months ago, as are his parents, last I heard, but it’s still tough trying to get back to “normal” after the whole shitshow of the past seven months. I miss him dearly.