by Lisa Henry
It was just a short-term thing, anyway. No strings and all that. And hey, how much does Nick rock at this whole boyfriend situation? They’ve never even had an actual fight. And the sex is awesome. Jai is totally going to be that guy whom all the other guys in Nick’s life will never be able to live up to. He shall exist as perfection in Nick’s memory, with a corona of light radiating around him like a smug Byzantine saint. All Nick has to do is get past Jai and make it to those other guys, right? He needs to accept Jai is just another thing that’s going to fade at the end of summer. Circle of life and all that shit.
“Nick? Are you even listening to me?”
Nick starts. “What? Yes. Totally.”
Devon snorts and flops back down onto his bed beside Nick. “Liar.”
Nick jabs him in the ribs.
Devon jerks away from him. “Fucker!”
The mattress bounces a little, and they jostle against one another. Nick turns his face toward Devon’s window so he doesn’t have to look at the stack of boxes beside Devon’s desk, and the empty duffel bags slung on top of them.
He grabs Devon’s pillow. “Ugh.”
“Ugh what?” Devon asks.
“Just everything.” Nick jams the pillow in his face. It smells like Devon’s body spray and some sort of weird shampoo. Like apples or something? Since when has Devon used apple-scented shampoo? Oh, that’s probably Ebony. Is it weird that Nick is secondhand smelling his best friend’s girlfriend’s hair? That’s probably weird. Nick sniffs one more time and tosses the pillow aside. “Everything.”
Devon doesn’t say anything else. He just does what he’s always done: he pulls Nick into a hug.
It’s weird that more people don’t cuddle. Like usually it’s a little kid thing or, if it’s adults, it’s a significant-other thing. Nick’s not sure why that is. Who made that a rule? Why is any close contact over a few seconds suddenly laden with meaning? Cuddling is the greatest thing in the world. It doesn’t have to be weird. Although he supposes it’s not entirely innocent. If it were Jai cuddling him instead of Devon, Nick would already have his hands down his jeans. Down both their jeans, probably. But if cuddling is all that’s on offer, then Nick will happily accept.
“The last person I cuddled with on your bed was Jai,” Nick mumbles into Devon’s neck.
Devon snorts. “Don’t kill the moment, bro.”
Nick grins, but his stomach twists too.
Because yeah, all they have left now are moments.
Nick: :D R u working tonight?
Jai: Sorry, yeah. Catch up tomorrow night?
Nick: K!
Seeing Devon’s boxes and bags sitting by his desk waiting to get packed is bad enough, but when Nick gets home, he finds all his clothes laid out in serried lines on the floor in front of his closet. His mom is standing there, notebook in hand and a pen protruding from her pursed lips like a lady’s elegant cigarette holder in a black-and-white film.
“Mom!” Nick’s stab of fear shrinks in the face of his righteous indignation. “You can’t just go through my closet!”
Marnie looks surprised, and Nick really, really doesn’t want to have to explain. His mom can’t be that naive, surely. She was a teenager once. With urges and whatnot. Except Nick doesn’t really want to think about his mom’s whatnot, so he huffs out an outraged breath and thanks Baby Jeebus that all his porn is stored on his laptop. And that he no longer has a stash of weed tucked in a shoebox on the top shelf of his closet. He’s pretty sure he smoked the last of that before his SAT, half because he thought it would be funny, and half to blunt the edges of his rising panic. Probably more the second one, if Nick is honest. But since when is Nick honest?
“God!” Nick reaches down and plucks a T-shirt off the top of the stack, just because he can. He wrenches his dresser drawer open and shoves the shirt inside. “Do we seriously have to do this now?”
“What are you talking about, Nick?” It’s the look of honest-to-God confusion on her face that really pisses him off. Because he’s tried, hasn’t he? He’s tried to broach this with her, and with his dad, but they just don’t hear him. It feels like he’s trapped underwater, struggling, drowning, but whenever he gets the attention of the people on the surface by waving his arms, they just smile and wave back.
Nick slams the drawer shut with his knee. “This! You’re always on my case about packing and clothes and college! Why can’t you give me a fucking break for once?”
His mom jerks back as though he’s slapped her.
Nick’s an asshole, he knows, for taking this tone with his mom. It’s just . . . It’s easier to yell at her than it is to yell at his dad. It’s not fair on her, but it’s easier.
“Nick? What’s the matter with you?” Her tone is uncertain this time.
He’s an asshole. He’s such a fucking asshole.
He grabs his phone off his desk. “I’m going out.”
Nick is halfway down the stairs before his mom recovers her equilibrium.
“Nick?” she calls.
Nick dives into the sunlight, slamming the front door shut behind him. He picks up his bike from around the side of the garage, and races off down the road.
He doesn’t even know where he’s going.
Story of his fucking life.
Dad: Where are you?
There’s a little gully at the end of a dead-end street a few houses away from Nick’s. He and Devon used to play here when they were kids, because hello, it’s a gully, full of dirt and insects, except after rain, when it’s full of mud and insects. When they were eleven, it was kind of perfect. For fighting Sand People on Tatooine. For finding pirate treasure. For experimenting with cherry bombs and, later, with cigarettes and weed.
It’s kind of a dump, actually. It’s full of broken glass and trash, and probably snakes as well. Actually, this might have been why their parents disapproved. Not because they were the fun police, but because they didn’t want their sons to get rabies, tetanus, or abducted by villainous hobos from black-and-white movies.
Nick dumps his bike in the grass and slides into the gully.
A part of him wants to look past the glass, dead clumps of grass, and broken bits of plywood with fuck and cock sprayed on them, and see something of the magical land that he and Devon built here once in their imaginations. Another part of him knows that he never can, that if he wanted to keep that fantasy alive, he shouldn’t have come here.
Except he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
He buries his head in his knees and cries.
Devon: Are you okay?
Nick: Yeah. Just same old.
Devon: Call your mom, bro. She’s freaking out.
When Nick was eight, he ran away from home. Something to do with not being allowed to dress up as Frodo. Because he’d managed to score an invite to a popular kid’s birthday party—he thinks his mom knew her mom—and it was a themed party. It was pirates and princesses, and, well, fuck that. Why couldn’t it be pirates and princesses and hobbits? So after having a tantrum when his mom brought home his pirate costume, Nick had decided to run away. Because then they’d feel sorry they were ever mean to him, right?
He’d made it as far as the convenience store five blocks from home, where he’d spent all his money on Red Vines, had major buyer’s remorse and a panic attack, and the man behind the counter had called his mom to come and collect him.
His mom didn’t make him go to the party after that.
Nick still isn’t sure of the lesson he learned that day.
He didn’t get to be Frodo. He didn’t end up going to the party at all.
Maybe there wasn’t a lesson. Maybe there never is.
Jai: Your dad called me.
Nick: WHAT?!?!?!?
Jai: I think he got my number from Devon. He’s worried about you.
Nick: Ugh.
Jai: Where are you?
Nick: Can I come to ur place?
Jai: Ok.
Jai is ridiculously cool about it whe
n Nick turns up on his doorstep, covered in sweat and pretty much still a crying mess. It doesn’t matter, Nick supposes, because this thing between them has almost run its course, so who cares if Jai sees him like this? He never had much dignity to hold on to anyway, did he?
Jai gets him a glass of water and then leads him down into the basement. Attack on Titan is already queued up and ready to go. Jai doesn’t say anything. Just sits down with him on the couch, holds his hand, and starts the episode.
Like he knows this is exactly what Nick needs right now. Not questions, not words, just this.
Nick is in love with Jai Hazenbrook.
He’s not dumb enough to say that though. He sits with Jai and sips his water, and they watch the episode in silence. When the closing credits start playing, Nick sets his glass down on the coffee table, takes a deep breath, and says, “So, I kind of yelled at my mom like an asshole today.”
Jai nods, and still doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t want to go to college.” Nick feels something inside him break like a dam wall in a disaster movie when the pressure behind it gets to be too much, and suddenly the words are flooding out of him. “I’m scared, and it’s dumb to be scared, but I am, and I know I’m going to fuck up. I’ll be one of those kids you hear about who has no friends, and nobody knows who they are, but the other kids totally get a pass on their exams because some loser in their class slit his own wrists or whatever!”
Jai’s eyes widen. “Nick. Jesus!”
Nick groans. “No . . . I don’t mean that. I mean, I don’t think I mean that. I don’t know! I don’t know what I want to do, and I don’t know how to be what they want me to be, and I know I just sound like some whiny emo brat or something, but all of this stuff, I won’t be able to handle it. I’m not handling it.”
“Okay,” Jai says, and he sounds so calm, and not at all like his boyfriend just word vomited all over him and threw in some bonus suicidal ideation. He takes Nick’s hand and squeezes it. “You don’t have to have everything figured out. You don’t have to have anything figured out. It really is okay.”
“It’s not though,” Nick mumbles.
Jai squeezes his hand tighter. His gaze is kind of intense. “No, it is. We’re gonna make sure that it is.”
“How?” Nick asks, and hates the way he sounds like a little kid.
Also, how is it possible that Jai is only seven years older than him but it’s like he has all the answers? Or at least like the questions don’t make him want to curl up in a corner and cry? How is that possible?
Jai leans in and presses his lips against Nick’s gently. “That’s the part we’re going to figure out together.”
Devon: R u okay?
Nick: Yeah.
Devon: R u home?
Nick: Dad came and got me from Jai’s place.
Devon: Did u talk to him?
Nick: I guess. Kind of.
Devon: U need to talk to ur dad. U need to tell him what you’re feeling.
Nick: What if I don’t know what I’m feeling?
Devon: U remember in 3rd grade when we had to do those book reports and rate them on a scale of smiley face to frowny face?
Nick: You think I should just draw my dad a frowny face?
Devon: I’m trying to think outside the box here.
Nick: You are an idiot. ILY but u are an idiot. Also, don’t think I don’t know it was u on the phone to my mom tonight.
Devon: Because if u won’t tell them how bad it is, that’s when I step up, bro.
Nick: I TRIED TO TELL THEM!
Devon: Ok, but maybe you think you tried, when maybe instead you were deflecting and going off on tangents and shit like always?
Nick: Don’t
Devon: Nick, ILY, but u have a massive blind spot when it comes to some stuff.
Nick: Fuck you.
Devon: Ok. I can deal with u being angry at me for going behind ur back. But I’m not sorry for talking to ur mom.
Nick: I am so done with this conversation right now. Fuck you.
Devon: I love you.
Nick: Don’t.
Devon: I’ll talk to u later.
Nick: No.
Every year, two weeks before the kids head off to college, Pauly throws a party at Pizza Perfecto. He closes the store at 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and lets the kids basically run riot through the place.
Ebony is sitting cross-legged on the front counter.
Tyler is making streamers out of toilet paper.
Two kids are making out in one of the booths.
There’s a keg in the kitchen.
The breadsticks and olives have been broken out, and a very messy baseball match is underway.
It’s chaotic.
“Jesus,” Jai says when an olive misses his head by inches. “This place is a fucking mess!”
“I don’t care,” Pauly says with a grin and shrugs. “One night a year I pay for a keg, and for cleaners to come in tomorrow and pretty much douse this place in bleach, but you know what? These kids come back and work for me every vacation. They get their little brothers and sisters to apply for jobs here.”
Jai snorts.
“What?” Pauly asks. “You telling me that next summer you won’t be back here asking for work? You really wanna go back to construction?”
“I’m not gonna lie, Pauly. The money’s a lot better in construction.”
“Sure,” Pauly says, waving his hand at the party. “But when the hell else are you gonna get the chance to work in such a high-class establishment as this?”
He has a point.
“They don’t have a staff retention rate like mine at McDonald’s.” Pauly grins. “Fuck that place!”
“Fuck McDonald’s!” Tyler yells, trailing toilet paper after him as he dances through the restaurant.
“And when these kids have families,” Pauly adds, “may God save us all, they’re gonna bring ’em here to eat.”
Jai laughs at that.
A little while later, he catches sight of Devon leaning into Ebony’s embrace at the counter. There’s something a little too tender about that hug, given the madhouse they’re in. He heads over.
“You guys okay?”
Ebony raises her eyebrows.
“Hey,” Devon says, turning around to face him. “You talked to Nick today?”
“Yeah. Texted him earlier. He was thinking of coming but—” Jai looks around and shrugs. Then he catches Devon’s expression. “Dev?”
“They’re not talking,” Ebony says when Devon clamps his mouth shut. “Nick’s angry at Devon for telling his mom that he’s been having panic attacks about college, and Devon’s angry at Nick for not telling her, and now it’s just a big ole fucking mess because neither of them are man enough to be the first to admit they need to hug it out.”
“Wait. Nick’s been having panic attacks?”
Devon nods. “He used to get them when he was younger. Like, he couldn’t breathe and stuff. I don’t think these are that bad? But now he won’t tell me.” He juts his chin out. “And before you say that he just needs to harden up or whatever, a panic attack is a legit thing, okay? They’re not something he can just get over or whatever!”
“Yeah, that’s not what I was going to say,” Jai tells him.
Ebony pokes Devon in the ribs.
Jai grabs his helmet from beside the cash register.
“Where are you going?” Devon asks.
“To see Nick. I’ll make sure he calls you.”
Jai: Italian meatball or chicken teriyaki?
Nick: I don’t understand this question.
Jai: I’m bringing you a sub.
Nick: Why?
Jai: Because you can’t eat pizza every night.
“Hi,” Jai says when Marnie opens the door. He holds up the Subway bag, swinging from one finger. “I’m here to see Nick.”
Marnie opens the door cautiously, like she’s afraid she may be letting an ax murderer into the house. Jai hopes it’s just the m
otorcycle jacket.
“Upstairs on the right,” she says, pointing to the stairs.
“Who is it, Marnie?” Chris calls from farther inside the house.
“It’s Nick’s—” She hesitates a little. “It’s Jai.”
Jai heads upstairs.
Nick’s room looks like a disaster zone. It’s everything Jai expected. It’s crammed with comics and action figures, and there isn’t a space on the wall that’s not covered with some sort of poster. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Fall Out Boy, and a lot of stuff Jai doesn’t even recognize. The fandoms run deep in this one.
Nick is sitting on his bed with a sketch pad on his knees and his laptop open in front of him.
“Brought you a sub,” Jai says, and tosses the bag toward him.
Nick catches it against his chest. “Thanks.”
Jai sets his helmet on Nick’s desk, then sits down beside him. “Devon said you guys aren’t talking.”
“Yeah.” Nick pokes at the Subway bag. “It’s complicated.”
“He’s miserable,” Jai says. “He also said you’ve been having panic attacks.”
“Fuck,” Nick mutters. “Is there anyone he didn’t tell?”
Jai shrugs.
Nick opens the bag and unwraps his sub. He takes a bite, and lettuce rains down onto his sketch pad. “Shit.”
He flicks a few pieces off onto his comforter.
“So, I was thinking—” Jai begins.
“Right.” Nick says around a mouthful of sub. “Whatever.”
“What?”
Nick swallows. “This is the part where you tell me that we’re done in a few weeks anyhow, so we might as well call it off right now? Because I’m too weird and short and I have anxiety and I’m not very good at sex?”
“Wow.” Jai raises his eyebrows. “Apparently both you and Devon think you can read my mind and predict exactly what I’m going to say next. Do you really think I would have brought you a sub if I was going to break up with you?”
Nick looks at him with his mouth hanging half-open, and then looks down at his sub, and then back up at Jai. “Um. I’m not really sure of the etiquette?”
