I met Kenny before I really knew what loyalty meant.
He didn’t talk much, but when he did, it felt like someone flipping on a light you didn’t know was there. He wasn’t trying to impress anybody. He just was. Quietly funny, strangely wise, and always down to roll with me—whether it was a stupid mission to build a ramp for our bikes with two bricks and a warped piece of plywood, or just skipping stones on some ditch-water creek behind his place.

Kenny was one of those people who was popular without even trying.
He didn’t care about being cool, which is probably why everybody thought he was. People gravitated toward him—teachers liked him, kids respected him, and the older crowd never gave him any shit. He wasn’t loud, wasn’t flashy. Just had that calm confidence. Like the world couldn’t shake him.

And me? I wanted that.
I wanted to be liked like that. I used to watch how people lit up when he walked in and wonder what that felt like. I wasn’t jealous of him—it was deeper than that. I just wanted to feel seen the way he was. Wanted to belong somewhere that didn’t require me to turn myself into something else first.

That’s part of why me and Kenny got along so well.
He never made me feel like I had to act different just to be accepted. Around him, I didn’t have to be cool—I just had to be me. And somehow, that was enough. For a kid who already felt like a shadow in two different homes, that meant more than I could ever explain out loud.

His house was small. His mom was always working late and his older brother didn’t really mess with us.
We had the run of the place most days—playing video games, drawing on the backs of cereal boxes, burning the mac n cheese more times than we cooked it right. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a safe zone. It was ours.

We laughed. A lot.
Like real, stomach-aching, tears-coming-out-your-eyes kind of laughs.
He had this way of twisting up words—taking something regular and making it wild and hilarious. He would call homework “hopework” because, in his words, “you gotta hope they don’t give you none.” Stupid stuff like that stuck with me. Still does.

We had dreams, too—mostly built from video game plots, late-night cartoons, and whatever music we were obsessed with that week. I told him I wanted to rap one day, and he didn’t even flinch.
Just nodded like, “Yeah. I see that.”

That’s all I needed.

Kenny wasn’t just my friend.
He was the first person who ever saw me as something more than just a kid from a broken-up family with a smart mouth and too much energy.
He saw Caspa in me before I knew that name even existed.