Chapter Text
Everything in the Fernwood Hall dormitory building looks like it was designed so that someone could just hose the whole thing down after a food fight or a paintball war or a bloodbath. The floors are wood-grained but obviously vinyl; the walls are a muted gray-blue that Andrew supposes is homey enough, even if the industrial bulbs in the lights illuminate everything in a way that reminds Andrew of hospitals. There’s nowhere for even a single shadow to hide.
He looks down at the piece of paper in his hand for about the hundredth time, even though there’s no chance at all that he’s going to forget the number written on it: 116. Just like his birthday.
His room will be on the right—the even numbers marching in evenly spaced rows, regimented amidst the chaos of move-in day. He looks to the door beside him; it’s dark blue steel, dinged and dented from years of who even knows what. To its right, a little white board that says, Welcome Cody & Rahim! Room 108.
Andrew can almost see his own door a little in the distance. Almost. He can count through the ones between: 110, eerily quiet in the furor of the rest of the hall; 112, the door replaced by a tall, lean guy being poked in the chest teasingly by a woman who’s probably his mom-type person; 114, with a leaning tower of toilet paper and boxes and a bed-in-a-bag balanced precariously on top.
His door, 116, is open. On the white board: Welcome Andrew & Kevin! Andrew hadn’t bothered reaching out to this Kevin with the contact info they’d sent him a few weeks ago. Kevin will be whatever Kevin is. Andrew will deal with it. He hikes his backpack up higher on his shoulder, firms up his grip on his rolling suitcase, and steps into the room. It’s empty other than one guy—the Kevin, Andrew assumes—who is very tall and very tan. His back is to Andrew, his phone to his ear.
“Uh huh,” Kevin says. “It would be cool, but I think you’re underestimating the volume you’d need.” A pause. “I don’t doubt that you have the work ethic, but I don’t think you’d have the time to get them all blown up in one night. Buying that many balloons would be traceable, too, and then you’d have to rent machines to inflate them all.”
Andrew slips in quietly.
“I don’t know, Neil,” Kevin says warningly. “I think you should stay away from setting things on fire in general. I know you know what you’re doing, but the others… Uh huh. Yeah. Right, I got that part.”
Kevin finally looks up and spots Andrew. He smiles, absently, and holds up one finger: wait.
Andrew does not wait. He tosses his backpack on the bed that Kevin has left for him; it’s the one on the right side of the room, tucked away from sight by the bumped-out wall that fills the space between the door and his footboard. Kevin has taken the one on the left, which looks right out the door. Andrew is grateful, a little, that he doesn’t have to fight Kevin for the privacy.
“…wildflowers?” Kevin asks, interested. “Tell me more.”
Andrew lifts his suitcase onto his bed and drops it there, then starts poking his head into closed doors and cupboards. The two doors on the bumped-out wall turn out to lead to closets. Neither of these have been claimed, which Andrew also appreciates.
“So just, like, fuck?” Kevin asks. “Or…yeah. No, I like this idea. I don’t think it would legally qualify as property damage.” A pause. “And no fires, which Dad will appreciate.” Another pause. “Okay, I gotta go, Andrew is here.” Another pause; Kevin turns around and gives Andrew a once-over. Drily, he says, “I don’t know. I’ll ask him. But if you’re thinking about explosives…” Another pause. “People die from fucking around with fireworks, Neil.” Kevin holds up his ‘wait’ finger again, smiling apologetically at Andrew. “My vote is for the flowers. Talk to Jeremy, I’d put money on him agreeing.” A pause. “Neil, if you blow Jeremy’s beautiful face off, I will literally kill you. Okay. Uh huh. Bye. Talk to you later.”
“My brother,” Kevin explains as he folds his phone shut. “He wants to know if you have any experience with explosives.”
“Some,” Andrew says.
“I’m Kevin,” Kevin says, sticking out his hand to shake. Andrew spares it a glance and then ignores it, looking back up at Kevin and wondering what the fuck his brother is doing that involves wildflowers, explosives, and balloons.
“What does he want to blow up?” Andrew asks.
“What doesn’t he want to blow up?” Kevin answers, grinning. “You’re Andrew, right?”
“Right,” Andrew says. He points at the closet on the left and says, “I’m taking that one.”
—
Andrew expects his tall, polished, good-looking roommate to splash on some Axe and go out to meet his tall, good-looking friends, but that’s not what happens. Instead, after they’ve unpacked and spent a truly amateur amount of time lying on their beds staring silently at the ceiling, Kevin blurts, “Want to go get some dinner?”
Which is why, when Andrew pushes through the glass front doors of their dormitory five minutes later, he looks over his shoulder and finds Kevin there, trailing him like a well-trained dog, his eyes bright and excited.
And that’s that. The bond is forged in that moment, Andrew thinks: the two of them, the oddest of pairs, tackling this university shit together.
They meet Aaron at the crowded dining hall. He’s already ditched his roommate, a white guy with dreadlocks who Aaron claims smells like patchouli and randomly drops made-up sounding foreign words into every sentence.
“He probably doesn’t even shower,” Aaron grumbles.
“I shower every day,” Kevin assures Andrew.
“I don’t think he’s using namaste right,” Aaron says.
“I speak French,” Kevin tells Andrew, “But I speak it correctly.”
“He’s already talking about a sock system,” Aaron whines, pained. “He wants different colors to have different messages. Are that many people really going to fuck this guy?”
“Should we do the sock thing?” Kevin asks. “Do you have a lot of sex? Wait, don’t answer that. That’s an invasive question.”
“Purple,” Aaron says with disgust, “is supposed to mean ‘knock if it’s quiet because I don’t want this one to spend the night.’”
“Can we just make a rule about that?” Kevin asks Andrew. “No one spends the night?”
“Anyway,” Aaron says loudly. “I hate him.”
“Please don’t hate me,” Kevin says to Andrew.
“Both of you shut up,” Andrew says. “I am trying to eat my meatloaf in peace.”
There’s a beat of silence, and then Aaron turns to Kevin and says, “There are all these parties tonight. What do you think? Should we go?”
“Maybe?” Kevin says hesitantly. “That’s…the thing to do, right?”
They both look to Andrew like he’s the boss of them. The decider. Fair enough—he’d rather it was him than them. “College parties,” he says, disgusted.
“Yeah, but,” Aaron ventures, “We’re in college now?”
“Fine,” Andrew says. “If it sucks, I am leaving.”
Aaron lights up, bonfire-bright, excitement saturating his eyes and expression. Even Kevin glows a little, hopeful, not nearly the polished jock he appears to be at first glance. “Do not look at me like that,” Andrew tells them both. “I am not your chaperone. I will leave without you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Aaron says. “Got it. But we’re going, right?”
—
It turns out that Kevin’s dad is the coach of PSU’s nascent gymnastics team. It also turns out that Kevin Day, disciplined lifelong gymnast, has never had more than half a glass of wine in his life. Three shots and one shitty beer into the night, he’s earnestly spilling his guts to Andrew in the corner of some random student lounge. The whole floor of this building is chaos, dozens of bodies packed in together, a psychic ton of anxious energy ricocheting off of every hard surface. Their own dorm had been silent enough to hear the air conditioning whir; the athletes are all under too much scrutiny to have wannabe ragers like this one or to turn jack-and-jill bathrooms into little speakeasies.
Aaron bobs around them long enough to finish half of a cheap beer, then peels off in search of girlfriend candidates. He has generally shitty taste in women but, thankfully, he’s not usually good enough at charming them that it becomes a big problem. Anyway, they have an arrangement. Andrew will hold his tongue as long as Aaron’s choices don’t stray to the dark side, and Aaron won’t ask any questions about Andrew’s personal life.
His “personal life.” It’s a fever dream at best. Finding a single person he can tolerate here feels almost impossible. A once in a lifetime event. A miracle at the intersection of hard work and incredible luck.
Being paired with Kevin will probably turn out to be some kind of luck, Andrew just doesn’t know if it’s the bad kind or the good kind yet.
“We moved here from Maryland a few years ago,” Kevin tipsily tells him. “Dad’s had a few students go to the Olympics, so he leveraged that to get them to start a program here. There aren’t many college teams, so we have something to prove.”
“We?” Andrew asks.
“The whole team, I guess,” Kevin says. “But Dad, mostly. Neil and I will have five years here to win as much shit for him as we can.”
“Your brother,” Andrew says.
“Yeah. He’ll be here next year. He’s really good,” Kevin says, his voice wistful.
“Better than you?”
Kevin makes a face. He’s flushed from the drink and the heat of all the bodies pressed into the room. He is very tall and very damp. “He’s 5’3,” Kevin says. “My height works against me. But I work against it harder.”
“Interesting genetics,” Andrew observes.
“Oh, no, Neil is adopted,” Kevin explains easily. “He looks nothing like me or Dad. We just got lucky that he’s so good.”
Andrew’s ears perk up at that. He’d almost been adopted once—not a story he wants to volunteer, but one that makes him marginally more interested in Kevin’s brother’s history. This boy with his wildflowers and his explosives.
“How old were you?”
He expects Kevin to light up further, the way he always does when he talks about his brother, but instead he shutters. The blinds come down in his glassy green eyes, the little smile at the corner of his mouth drops, and he lifts his red plastic cup to take another generous sip. He mutters, “Long story.”
Andrew is familiar with that genre. He gives Kevin a minute to glare at the liquid in his cup and then says, “My height works against me, too.”
“Yeah?” Kevin says, perking back up. “What position do you play?”
“Defenseman,” Andrew tells him grudgingly.
“I’ll come to your games,” Kevin announces. “Whenever I can.”
“Don’t.”
“I want to.”
“Really don’t.”
—
At first, Andrew thinks the headphones in Kevin’s ears are spitting music at him. At first, he thinks Kevin’s quiet muttering is him thinking out loud, puzzling out the answers to the math problems spread out before him. Over the last couple of weeks he’s learned that Kevin talks to himself pretty often. It’s always quiet, barely more than a breath, a sporadic, muted commentary that’s half pep talk and half verbal engineering diagrams.
This time, though, Kevin says, “Four?” with a tone of such skepticism that it catches Andrew’s attention. Kevin has a lot of self-doubt for a guy who turns heads everywhere he goes and qualified for both athletic and academic scholarships, but usually even he doesn’t regard his own answers with quite that much disbelief.
“No,” Kevin mutters after a moment. “It’s just that four seems like a really small number for that much math.”
So, Andrew’s roommate is either losing his mind, or he’s on the phone with someone.
The smart bet is the second option. From there, it’s an easy half-step to the person on the other end of the line: Kevin’s little brother, Neil.
Neil, about whom Andrew has heard twenty times a day, every day, for the last three weeks. Neil, who is apparently good at everything he tries. Neil, for whom Kevin has a special tone of voice, affectionate and bemused and almost awed. Neil, who plays with explosives and thimbleweed and looks, in Andrew’s mind, like the skinny, sunburned, red-headed nine-year-old beaming next to Kevin in the framed photo kept lovingly tucked into the corner of Kevin’s desk.
Andrew has heard a lot of stories about Neil by now, ludicrous stories of a kid with apparently no regard for his own life and a streak of mischief about a mile wide. For each and every one of them, the mental image Andrew has is of that nine-year-old: a grinning face with sunburned cheeks that got in trouble in tenth grade for swapping clothes with a girl who’d been pulled aside for dress code violation. Kevin tells him Neil had walked into the cafeteria in short shorts and a crop top, his head held high, and strolled right past three administrators before one of them figured out what the fuck was happening. That same kid, in his light-rinse jeans and red vans, trying some gymnastics trick called a Fabrichnova over and over again until his hands were bruised from the attempt, until he split his nose open on the bar, until he finally landed it on what Kevin somehow knows was the seventy-third try. That scrawny thing, his hair a mess of cowlicks, telling Kevin to tell Andrew that his knowledge of how to build a Molotov cocktail is useless and practically a summer camp arts and crafts project.
The snap of a book closing jerks Andrew back to attention. He blinks the room into focus to find Kevin shoving his now closed math book to the side and swiveling in his chair, propping his feet up on his bed and sliding down in his seat until his head is tipped back and up.
“Okay, now we get to the good stuff,” Kevin says. “Let’s talk about the Black Plague.”
Will Andrew and Aaron ever have a relationship like that? There’s probably too much history between them—too much heavy baggage—for them to slip into the ease and rapport that Kevin and Neil have. There’s the twin thing, too, which makes the roles harder. Kevin and Neil are different, explicitly. Kevin is older, Neil younger. Kevin is a history nerd, Neil some kind of math whiz. Kevin specializes in the rings and pommel horse, Neil in the horizontal bar and vault. The differences work for them. It’s harder for Andrew and Aaron, as twins, as brothers whose differences have caused them nothing but pain. There’s a whole mountain of shit between them and the promised land.
But Andrew knows there’s pain somewhere in Kevin’s history, too. He’s seen the way Kevin’s face boards up if the subject of his family’s origins comes up. Andrew doesn’t speculate, as a matter of course, but his speculations are wild: best case, Neil is a tragic orphan; worst case, Wymack stole him and Kevin was his underaged accomplice.
On an impulse, Andrew digs out his phone and sends Aaron a text: which of us is Kevin and which is Neil?
The reply comes quickly: I’m good looking, youre nuts, seems pretty obvious.
—
Kevin and Aaron both get sloppy at a party Andrew didn’t even want to go to. It’s a Thursday night. He has a group presentation to do at ten the next morning. The stupid fucking party is at a stupid fucking sorority house full of stupid fucking frat boys who have some kind of stupid fucked up view of freshmen as serfs or house boys. Three separate such idiots assume Andrew is actually still in high school and offer him drinks and advice on how to get college girls to put out.
Andrew punches the third one in the dick and slips away through the crowd, which is all morons in their early twenties drinking and carousing like this is a party at Gatsby’s house and not just a mediocre house full of mediocre people and mediocre booze.
He lost track of Aaron almost immediately, catching only a brief glimpse of his twin’s back as he melted into the crowd. Andrew wonders if any of the douchebag frat guys offered Aaron drinks and advice on how to motorboat a sorority sister. Probably. He’s probably happily motorboating as Andrew seethes in annoyance.
Losing track of Kevin had taken longer, probably because he’s taller, but also probably because he isn’t actively trying to avoid Andrew. Kevin still wanders off, though—Andrew turns back around from encouraging the guy behind him to stand the fuck still to find that Kevin has disappeared. It’s right after that that the third frat guy tries to mentor Andrew in the fine arts of seduction. Then, aforementioned punch to the dick; then, Andrew goes the fuck outside to breathe some air and hopefully drop the number of ‘fucks’ in his internal monologue down to less than 75%. He pushes his way through people in the house and on the porch until he’s finally clear of other bodies. They’re wedged onto the corner of two streets with limited green space, so Andrew goes to the tiny parking area and makes a seat out of the trunk of some guy’s Civic RS.
Someone had the forethought to soundproof the house, at least; the raucous party is nothing more than a dull thud of bass and the occasional burst of laughter. Andrew’s ears ring in the relative silence, a hollow roar that makes the process of pulling his crumpled pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and striking his latter nearly silent. He should quit smoking. He doesn’t even really remember why he started, but it’s the habit that soothes him more than the nicotine. At least, that’s what he likes to tell himself. He’s never actually tried to quit—and the chemical pleasure racing around in his bloodstream after his first few drags probably has a tighter grip on him than the ritual and rhythm of smoking.
Andrew focuses on measured drags and slow, even exhales. He gets through a cigarette and a half before he feels less on edge, enough that he digs his phone out of his pocket and opens up Grindr. This is a ritual, too: swiping left through the various headless body parts and pretending like he might actually swipe right on one of them. In theory, the hookup apps should make all of this a lot easier. No expectations. Terms and conditions agreed upon up front. In practice, Andrew’s rotation of sexual partners includes his right hand, with his left hand thrown in occasionally to spice shit up. He hasn’t been here long enough to feel stable on any kind of ground. He shares a bedroom and, despite his general apathy, he’d really prefer that Kevin Day not walk in on him in the middle of blowing some guy he has handcuffed to the shitty dorm headboard. Back home there’d been a guy with whom he’d had an arrangement: mutual silence, separate orgasms. Probably he’ll find a guy here, too, at some point. Until then, he swipes. Left past a beefy, hairy chest. Left past a tattooed hand cupped over a bashful cock. Left past someone deep-throating a dildo, the top half of their face hidden by a sweep of dark bangs.
He’s swiping past an obvious catfish when a new message from Kevin pops up at the top of his screen: Where are you?
Andrew taps his thumb on the message and types back: outside
He waits, then switches back to Grindr when a response isn’t forthcoming. He only swipes through a few more guys before he hears his name floating towards him from the distance.
“Andrew?”
Andrew looks around, but doesn’t see Kevin—he’s not anywhere in the small, gravel-scattered parking area, he’s not coming around the corner of the house towards Andrew.
“Andrew??”
Andrew turns and looks the other way. There’s a long line of wood fence stretching behind the stretch of cars, separating the house’s backyard from the parking. He squints at it, like he’ll be able to see the source of the sound if he’s just looking in the right direction.
“Andrew Minyard?”
Yep. Andrew sighs and switches back to his messaging app: side of the house by the cars
The reply comes through quickly: Okay
Andrew switches back to Grindr. It will take Kevin a few minutes to work his way back through the house, outside, and around to the lot. Except that he barely has the app re-opened before a thudding noise bounces around the space. Andrew jerks his head back to the fence in time to see Kevin’s head pop up over the top of it—he uses the hands he has wrapped over planks to heft himself up. The sound of his shoes gaining purchase against the wood adds to the general clatter, and then Kevin launches himself gracefully over the top and lands on the ground with a gymnast’s precision.
“Hey!” Kevin says, beaming at Andrew. “I found you.”
Kevin, Andrew can already tell, has spent their time apart swiping right on some not insignificant number of shots of vodka. Despite his general clean living approach to life, Kevin has taken to drinking like a fish to water. It’s not often. If Andrew thought the parties were incubating a new baby alcoholic, he’d do something about it, but Kevin seems to enjoy something about getting just a little bit wasted once every couple of weeks. Drinking makes him more expansive, somehow. For all of his athleticism and rugged good looks, Kevin is a little shy. Reserved. More of a quiet watcher than the life of the party. Put a little alcohol in him and he gets bigger. Louder. Brighter.
“You could have broken your neck,” Andrew observes mildly.
“Nah,” Kevin says. “I’m a gymnast. If I was going to break my neck, I would have already done it.”
“Pretty sure that’s not how that works.”
Kevin waves this off as sober nonsense and jogs over to heft himself up onto the trunk next to Andrew. The car heaves and groans beneath the added weight. Somewhere in the house, some very basic guy is probably wincing without knowing why.
“What are you doing out here?” Kevin asks.
Andrew takes another drag of his cigarette and shrugs. “Not being in there.”
Kevin nods solemnly. “It’s loud.”
As if on cue, a burst of high-pitched screaming and hysterical laughter floats over the fence.
“What are you doing out here?” Andrew asks.
“I got bored,” Kevin says, shrugging. “These girls gave me drinks but then they just kept talking about who in their sorority was mad at whom and why, so I told them I needed an extra private bathroom, and suddenly they were all gone.”
“Smooth,” Andrew observes.
Kevin grins brightly at him. “Can I have one?” he asks, nodding towards Andrew’s dwindling second cigarette.
“Will it be your first?” Andrew asks.
Kevin nods a yes. Andrew pulls a last drag off of the one in his hand and flicks it into the gravel where it can burn out harmlessly. He taps another one out of the pack—just one, because he doesn’t think Kevin is going to like it and he has no intention of wasting a perfectly good cigarette.
“Here,” he says, offering it to Kevin, who puts it awkwardly between his lips. Andrew lifts the lighter and thumbs it on, cupping his hand around the flame to protect it from the balmy evening breeze. “Inhale,” he instructs as the tip burns red. Kevin obediently breathes in deeply, and then immediately breaks into harsh, hacking coughs. Andrew manages to pluck the cigarette away before Kevin can drop it into his lap and burn himself.
“Not that much,” Andrew tells him, but Kevin can’t answer through sharp complaints of his lungs.
When Kevin finally gets his breath back, he makes a face at Andrew and asks, hoarsely, “Why do you like that?”
Andrew shrugs, watching as Kevin wipes wetness away from his eyes. “It’s a habit.”
“It’s a nasty habit,” Kevin tells him. “You should quit.”
“Yeah,” Andrew agrees. He slips the cigarette between his own lips and takes an easy drag, doubling the length of Kevin’s disastrous inhale just to prove to himself that he can do it.
The silence that stretches is companionable. Andrew stays hunched forward over his knees, but Kevin braces his hands behind him and leans back onto them, tipping his head up towards the stars. They settle into the occasional burst of noise from the house, the low drone of crickets, and the hushed ebb and flow of traffic from the busier street that lies on the other side of the neighboring houses.
After a few minutes, Kevin says, “I saw Aaron.”
“Any luck?” Andrew asks.
“I think so. He was talking to someone.”
Andrew makes a disgusted face. He and Aaron’s agreement has been going pretty well. He stays out of Aaron’s love life, and Aaron stays out of Andrew’s business entirely. Not that Aaron has had a love life or Andrew has had any business to stay out of, but in theory, it works.
“Someone?” Andrew prompts.
“Girl,” Kevin clarifies. “Cute. He was making her laugh.”
“At him or with him?” Andrew asks.
“Give him some credit,” Kevin says sagely. “He’s a good one.”
Andrew snorts in response. But he knows, of course, that Kevin is right. Aaron has come a long way since the mess he’d been when they’d meet a few years ago. Andrew had been terrified to let Aaron out of his sight, then, afraid that this precious, impossible thing that had found him would disappear in a puff of smoke if he’d let down his vigilance for even a moment. He’d allowed the fear to rule him at first, before Aaron had become real to him, when he’d been nothing but the sharpest, best honed leverage that could be used against Andrew. When Andrew was terrified that the things that haunted his nightmares would be contagious.
He’d tried turning his back, but Aaron had just hitched his wagon to him and refused to be left behind. Then there’d been Tilda, and the drugs, and Aaron’s awful girlfriend who kept giving him the drugs and left fingerprint bruises and long, fake nail scratches on him. Andrew had done the only thing he knew how to do: he’d locked them both down, closed off all the entrances and exits, opened his hand just enough to wrap Aaron up in its iron grip and tighten it again.
Aaron had gotten claustrophobic quickly in the small space Andrew allowed them. They’d been together all the time. All the time. Andrew didn’t trust Aaron’s friends and he let them know it, so they’d mostly peeled off, intimidated by Andrew’s glower, rumors about Tilda’s car accident, and a new, sober Aaron who wouldn’t get high and be their punchline anymore. The rest of the soccer team gave them a wide berth, too, disgusted by Aaron’s drug habit and Andrew’s deafening apathy towards the sport.
All of that free time had given Aaron plenty of space to work on his grades, though. He took AP classes. He sat in their living room studying instead of going out to party. When he’d gotten an academic scholarship to PSU that matched Andrew’s athletic one, he’d sat Andrew down and outlined new terms: same place, different dorms; no secrets, but no details; space, but not separation. There’s still a tiny flutter of panic in Andrew’s chest when he wakes up in the morning and doesn’t know where Aaron is, what he’s doing, where he’s been, who he’s with—but it’s been lessening as the weeks go by. There’s always a 9:30 am text from Aaron when he finally rolls out of bed for his 10:00 am class. It’s usually a complaint about his weirdo roommate. They meet for lunch most days. They’re in the same English and Philosophy classes. There’s a goodnight text before Aaron crashes. It’s also usually a complaint about his weird roommate. But he’s good, Aaron is. Thriving. More discriminating about his friends and girlfriends—or, at least, Andrew assumes he is, since the hunt for a girlfriend is ongoing and Kevin seems to be their only friend so far.
Andrew looks down to see that this cigarette is mostly gone, too. He’s not sure how much of it he smoked and how much of it burned away while he stared into the middle distance and thought. Whatever.
“I know,” Andrew says belatedly. He knows that Aaron is a good one. That he’s good. He shakes that off and asks, “What about you?”
“What about me?” Kevin shoots back.
“Girlfriends?” Andrew asks. “Boyfriends.”
Kevin’s eyes skitter off to the side like a startled prey animal, wild in his drink-flushed face.
“Nope,” Kevin says. “None of the above.”
“Currently?” Andrew asks. “Or ever?”
“Currently,” Kevin says.
Andrew taps the length of ash off the neglected end of his cigarette and waits him out.
“There’s—” Kevin starts, then clears his throat, then tries again. “I guess there’s someone I’m not un-interested in. From high school.”
“Do they go here?”
“No,” Kevin says, then amends, “not yet.”
“Next year?” Andrew guesses.
“Maybe,” Kevin sighs. He lets his head fall back further, pointing his cleft chin up to the sky at a steep angle. “If he—if they get in.”
“Gymnast?” Andrew guesses, but Kevin shakes his head no.
“What about you?” Kevin asks, his voice sharpening as he goes on the offensive.
Andrew snorts and flicks the sad-looking cigarette after its predecessors. The red tip of it nestles in among the shadows of gravel and scattered, stubborn grass.
“Oh, no,” Kevin says. “You don’t get to poke your nose in our business and then be all mysterious man of mystery.”
“Mysterious man of mystery,” Andrew parrots drily.
“Nope,” Kevin says. “I’m not that drunk. Spill.”
“There is nothing to spill.”
“Do you want there to be?”
Andrew raises a discouraging eyebrow, but Kevin is undaunted. His face is set and stubborn. Apparently they are going to do the sharing is caring thing whether Andrew likes it or not. He thinks back to his agreement with Aaron: honesty, but details at their own discretion. Very flatly, he says, “In theory, no.”
“And in practice?” Kevin asks.
“Also no.”
Kevin hmmms up towards the stars, conferring with something in their silent depths, and then says, “Because it isn’t something you want? Or because it isn’t something you think is possible?”
“Fuck you,” Andrew answers without any heat.
Kevin rolls his head to the side, aiming a self-satisfied grin at Andrew. He says, “Gotcha.”
Andrew pushes Kevin’s smiling face away roughly, glaring when the first notes of Kevin’s laugh buzz wetly against his palm.
—
“It’s my dad’s birthday in November,” Kevin tells Andrew and Aaron across the pocked expanse of their favorite table outside of the student union. They’re seven weeks into the semester, already halfway through—it’s weird to Andrew, sometimes, how quickly they’d all fallen into these dynamics. The friendships. The routines. Two months ago, Andrew had never met Kevin Day. He’d barely met his own twin. And now, here they are—a usual table, a usual time. Casual conversation. Family birthdays. It’s fucking bizarre, how easily you slip into things.
“Good for him,” Andrew says, more hostile than he means to be in the face of all this familiarity.
“We usually do something big,” Kevin continues, ignoring Andrew’s rudeness, “because of all the stuff he does for us.”
“Hmm,” Andrew hums. “And who pays for it?”
“Anyway,” Kevin says loudly. “I need to come to the meeting prepared with suggestions.”
“What meeting?” Aaron asks.
“The Wymack sibling meeting, of course,” Andrew answers, lightly mocking. “My advice is to go big. Get out ahead of Neil. You can climb Everest. You can swim nude with great white sharks. You can ceremonially hang your bodies from hooks.”
Kevin and Aaron both turn bland faces on him. They blink in surprising unison.
“You’re being a dick,” Aaron says. He turns back to Kevin. “What did you do last year?”
“We rented an RV and went to the Capulin volcano in New Mexico. They don’t allow any light pollution there, so the stars were incredible.”
Andrew almost feels badly about being a dick. Almost. He tries again. “So you are looking for that kind of touchy feely family bonding shit?”
Aaron throws him another disgusted look.
Apparently, that was still too dickish.
“Ignore him,” Aaron instructs Kevin sternly. “He hates joy.”
“I suggested sharks,” Andrew says, tipping his chair onto its back legs and stretching his arms above his head. “Plenty of joy there. Haven’t you seen Jaws?”
Kevin shakes his head. “No good. Neil hates deep water.”
“Does he?” Andrew asks. He stores that tidbit away in the mental file labelled “Neil Wymack” that sits in pride of place in Andrew’s mind. He has a hodge-podge collection of facts and stories already stashed tidily inside; at thirteen, Neil had coaxed a squirrel inside and kept it as a pet until their dad found out and forced him to release it. At twelve, Neil had talked Kevin into getting matching buzzcuts. At fifteen, Neil had shimmied up the school’s football field home goal post and tried to do part of his horizontal bar routine on it. Kevin had been there to watch him fall, watch him hit the wet grass with a thump. There’d been something thick and solid blocking Kevin’s words in his throat when he’d been telling Andrew the story one night, when they were both up past midnight, sweating in the too-warm air of the dorm. Neil had been fine, had popped back up laughing, but Kevin had quietly confessed to Andrew that he’d thought Neil was dead there, for a minute, that he’d felt the whole world crack and start to crumble apart.
There are other things, too. Things other than the stories. Things like: Neil is allergic to penicillin. Like: Neil is afraid of dogs. Like: Neil hates deep water.
Andrew tries to tell himself that he’s keeping this file because Neil is important to Kevin, and Kevin is becoming important to Andrew, and if Kevin stays important to Andrew, then Neil will also be around. Next year. Next year, when Neil joins them at PSU. And maybe it will come in handy, someday, when they’re trapped on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a big dog and a selection of antibiotics.
But mostly, Neil is interesting. Neil is Andrew’s very own urban legend. Neil is a skinny, freckle-faced kid with braces and red knees, a menace in miniature, twisting the world around his fingers until it’s shaped the way he wants it to be.
Or maybe, that’s just the way Kevin describes him. He’s far from an impartial narrator. Andrew doesn’t think it’s that, though—he doesn’t think Kevin is exaggerating or building him up. And he’s heard something, some kind of spark, something in the cadence of the way Neil talks to Kevin on the phone, something in the way the tone of his voice lifts and falls, teasing and serious, wry and sincere, even if Andrew is far enough away from the phone that it’s all just a wordless instrumental.
Probably it’s just the brother thing. Andrew has one of those. It’s complicated. It seems simpler for Kevin. That’s probably what it is.
“Andrew,” Aaron calls sharply. Andrew blinks the courtyard back into clarity in time to catch Aaron’s snapping fingers withdrawing from in front of his face. “Earth to Andrew.”
“What?” Andrew asks.
“Are you listening at all?” Aaron asks, sounding exasperated.
Andrew tells the truth. “Nope.”
The sigh Aaron lets out seems to have been structural—he releases it with such a dramatic collapse of his chest that Andrew imagines he can see Aaron’s bottom ribs grinding against his hip bones.
“What do you think about rock climbing?” Kevin asks.
“Are you always this athletic?” Andrew asks with some disgust.
“Yeah,” Kevin says. “Pretty much.”
“Disgusting.”
He wonders if this means Neil isn’t afraid of heights.
—
Andrew listens to Kevin’s abandoned phone buzz-clatter-pulse on his desk all the way through three rings, one voicemail message, and two text messages. When the ringing starts again, he rolls himself out of bed and scoops it up. As expected, the caller ID says ‘Neil.’
Andrew answers it. “He’s not here.”
At the other end of the line, a pause, and then, “Andrew?”
“I am assuming you have some kind of emergency,” Andrew tells him dryly. “If you are calling this much.”
“Oh,” Neil says. “Not an emergency-emergency. Where is he?”
“Study group,” Andrew tells him. “For at least an hour.”
“Cool. I’ll try him later, then. Thanks.”
“Neil,” Andrew blurts suddenly. He’s so surprised by himself that he fumbles the last syllable. Gritting his teeth together, Andrew says, “What did you decide on?”
“Huh?”
“Your senior prank,” Andrew clarifies. “Will I be seeing it on the evening news?”
“I don’t know,” Neil says. There’s a low buzz of amusement in his voice that soothes Andrew’s discombobulation like a balm. “Do you watch the evening news?”
“Point,” Andrew allows. “Tell me anyway.”
“Uh, the wildflowers,” Neil hedges. Andrew hears rustling on the other end. Movement. And then a door closing. He waits through the rest of the rustling, the footsteps, and then the whoomp of Neil collapsing onto his bed. “What has Kevin told you?”
“Nothing.”
Neil tsks fondly. “Of course not. He’s no snitch.”
“Neil,” Andrew says again, forcing patience into his voice. “What about the wildflowers?”
“We’re going to write giant words on the lawns in wildflower seeds. Thousands of them. They’ll get watered and fertilized when the grass does. And then, come spring…”
Come spring, they’ll shoot up past the grass, proudly displaying their messages. It would be impossible to weed them out individually. If Neil gets the right kind—and Andrew has no doubt that Neil will get exactly the right kind—they’ll grow fast and thick, well outpacing the rest of the lawn. It’s maniacal genius. Andrew can see that skinny nine-year-old kid grinning at him, dimples shining.
“Evil,” Andrew says. When Neil laughs, it’s low and husky. The nine-year-old wobbles and then evaporates in a puff of smoke. Andrew asks, “What will you write?”
“Haven’t decided. That’s the hard part.”
“Are you too highbrow for ‘boobs’?” Andrew asks.
“Not necessarily,” Neil says, “but we don’t want to make anyone feel, you know. Uncomfortable. Sexualized.”
“And breasts are not funny,” Andrew says.
“They really aren’t,” Neil agrees. “Soft, though.”
This is probably the natural end point to the conversation. Andrew should say something like, ‘I’ll let Kevin know you called,’ and then Neil will say, ‘thanks’ and Andrew will hang up his roommate’s phone and go back to reading the rest of this bullshit chapter on Multiliteracy. It’s just that Andrew doesn’t want to. One so rarely gets a chance to be a part of nefarious plots.
So, instead of goodbye, Andrew says, “Have you considered the classics?”
At the other end of the line, Neil pauses for half a second; Andrew wonders if Neil is doing the same math he just did. After that half second, Neil says, “You might have to be more specific.”
Andrew sits back onto his bed, lets himself fall sideways, and suggests, “Eat my shorts?”
By the time Kevin comes home from his study group, Andrew has had to plug his stolen phone into the longest wall charger he has. He and Neil have worked their way through every ridiculous early-2000s media reference they could think of, debated the benefits of sriracha vs. tabasco, argued over the relative merits of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, and Andrew has heard a number of exquisitely humiliating stories about Kevin—but they’re no closer to finding the right words to write in flowers on the school’s lawn than they were when they first got on the phone.
“It might just be ‘we were here,’” Neil muses. “Is that too lame?”
The sharp snick of a key sliding into a lock and then turning catches Andrew’s attention. He looks up in time to see Kevin tumble, wind-swept, into the room.
“I forgot my phone!” Kevin says.
“Yeah, no shit,” Andrew says drily.
Kevin’s gaze drops to Andrew’s chest, where his wide-screened phone sits in its obnoxiously orange case. “Oh,” Kevin says. Then he brightens, straightening as he tosses the door shut behind him. “Is that Neil?”
Andrew glances down at the screen. It says they’ve been on the phone for an hour and two minutes. It’s the longest conversation Andrew’s ever had that wasn’t with a therapist. Or a cop.
“Yes,” Andrew answers.
“Neil,” Kevin calls, raising his voice to be caught by the speakerphone. “Are you corrupting Andrew?”
“Trying,” Neil says blithely. “Is it working?”
“No,” Andrew tells him. “My soul is already pitch-black.”
Somewhere on the other side of town, Neil laughs. Andrew imagines he can feel it through the phone, a buzz against his chest, and then Kevin scoops the phone off of Andrew and lifts it to his mouth.
“Enough of your bad influence,” Kevin tells Neil sternly. “We’re going to get dinner.”
Kevin’s thumb moves to the ‘end call’ button, but Neil says, hastily, “Wait! Dad wants to know if you remember where we put the snowshoes last year.”
‘Not an emergency-emergency,’ Neil had said earlier. Much earlier. An hour ago—when he’d called to ask Kevin that very question and they’d ended up staying on the phone so long that Andrew can still feel the blocky imprint of it on his chest, the phantom heat and weight not yet faded.
“Yes,” Kevin says. “In the trash. They were shit.”
There’s a pause, and then, “Cool. I’ll tell him. Later. Thanks, Andrew.” And then he’s gone. Kevin tucks the phone into his back pocket and starts talking about dinner options, and Andrew lies on his bed feeling a little off balance even though he’s not moving at all. Kevin switches on a lamp, banishing the gloom Andrew hadn’t even realized had fallen over the room while he was on the phone. It’s the loss of time that’s throwing him, he thinks—or, not loss, exactly, but his lack of awareness of it. That usually only happens in the dark, with headphones and loud music, or on the soccer field when the battle gets bitter.
“Andrew?” Kevin calls insistently. Andrew jerks his head to the side to look and finds his roommate standing next to the bed, keys in his hand, frowning down at him with exasperation. Kevin says, “It’s fajita night at the cantina. What do you think?”
“Fine,” Andrew says.
“Great,” Kevin says. “I’ll text Aaron.”
—
Andrew and Aaron’s Tuesday coffee date is more of a coffee pause than anything else. There’s a small cart around the corner from their shared Philosophy class that makes a decent cup, so they route themselves that way and split up after to head to buildings on opposite sides of the campus.
“So,” Aaron says carefully as they step into the short queue at the cart.
“Uh oh,” Andrew sing-songs lightly.
“No uh-oh,” Aaron says, sounding defensive. “I just wanted to talk about Thanksgiving.”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah, so,” Aaron says. “Kevin invited us.”
“I am aware.”
“But, uh. You know I’ve been talking to this girl.”
“Katelyn,” Andrew confirms, nodding shortly.
“Yeah, Katelyn. Um.”
“She invited you to hers,” Andrew guesses.
“Would you be mad?” Aaron asks.
The line moves up one spot. They shuffle forward. Andrew takes his time considering the question. Family holidays are complicated for them, for obvious reasons. They’d never been a constant in Andrew’s life; celebrations had depended on the where of his life at the time. Some foster homes had gotten really into it, others hadn’t. Andrew’s most vivid memories of Thanksgiving are of being asked to tell the table something he was grateful for. It had been an impossible task, but one he’d been forced to perform nonetheless. Every time he’d told Cass he was grateful for her, the words had come out shredded by the sharp edges of everything it had cost him to make that statement true. With Tilda and the Hemmicks, the biologicals, there’d been a hideously oppressive religious cast to the whole thing. Andrew wouldn’t say Thanksgiving is just another day. It’s worse than that. It’s an awful day, always has been. With Nicky gone to Germany, Andrew and Aaron are at loose ends, holiday orphans. He’s not sure how it will be with Kevin’s family, but the best he’s hoping for is good food and an absence of drama.
“No,” Andrew says once he’s poked at every corner of his mind and come back with the same answer. “I would not be mad.”
“You could come—” Aaron starts, but Andrew shakes his head in a quick no. Aaron stops himself, nods, takes a deep breath, and then says, hesitantly, “Do you think Kevin would be mad?”
Kevin. Their only friend, who generously opened his home and family to them after only knowing them a couple of months. Andrew gives this question as much thought as he gave the last one. Will Kevin be mad?
“No,” Andrew answers, far more quickly than he’d been able to give his own answer. “He knows you like her.”
“You’re sure?” Aaron asks anxiously. “He was excited for us to meet his family.”
“His father works here,” Andrew points out. “His brother is coming next year. You will definitely meet his family.”
“And you don’t mind going alone? You don’t need… backup?”
Andrew takes a step to the side and body checks Aaron right out of line with one strategic application of his shoulder. Aaron stumbles off into the grass and recovers, bouncing back with performative annoyance that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Asshole,” Aaron mutters without conviction.
“I think I can handle the Wymack-Days for a weekend,” Andrew tells him drily. “Terrifying though they may be.”
“Call me if…” Aaron starts. He trails off, lifting his hands helplessly, but Andrew knows what he’s saying. Call me if you need an out. Call me if you want me to come after all. Call me if you change your mind.
“I will,” Andrew promises.
They shuffle forward another place in line, standing silently side-by-side. The wait isn’t usually this long. They’re both going to have to hustle if they want to make it to their next classes on time, but they stay put, oddly together even though they’ve just agreed to be apart.