He gave variations on the same speech to the paper and letters to the editor, and every time it was a hit. Everyone knew Kelly now. He was the campus celeb, and if he weren’t already spoken for on the dating front, he’d be skimming the cream of the crop and sampling all the wares.
Occasionally Walter felt bad that he was in the way of that, but if he even hinted at that guilt, Kelly either got angry or got them both naked. The latter was more usual, especially as Kelly learned how quickly it shut Walter up.
This became Walter’s life: working to rile up the student body and alumni, strategizing with Rose, skating through on classes, making out with Kelly. Every moment he was out of his dorm room, he was working. Before break, he and Kelly had gone out to movies, gone to Moe’s, but now all they did was rally, plan and come back to the room to crash.
They’d rearranged their room, opening the futon up fully and sharing it as a bed, using the loft space as storage. They were still two sardines wedged into a sliver of space, but they made it work. Walter had wanted to try and find them a bigger space, somewhere away from Porter, because while their heightened profiles might make them the toast of Hope in most places, this was not the case on their floor. Kelly was against the move, though.
“The administration is so angry at us. If we try to get anything out of them right now, they’ll either squash it for spite or use it as leverage against us. We’re fine how we are.”
They were lying on the futon, naked and spooned together, Kelly’s head on Walter’s shoulder. Walter stroked Kelly’s hair and trailed fingers down his back. “Are things okay with our resident meatheads? No one’s giving you any shit?”
Kelly shrugged. “Sure they are. I’m not worried, though. It’s like you said. They’re just teasing me. They can’t do anything. There’s a lot of power in knowing they can only taunt me, not act. I’ve finally figured that out, and it’s changed how I deal with them and let them affect me.”
“If they so much as make you sweat—”
Kelly lifted his face to kiss Walter’s chin. “You’ll hit them with a frying pan, Flynn Rider. I know.”
Walter worried, though, about more than simply Porterhouse. He did want to keep a frying pan handy when it came to Kelly, at least metaphorically.
He hugged Kelly tighter. “Just be careful.”
You’re the only sure thing in my life right now. Everything else is going to shit, and I can’t bear to lose you too.
It made him feel raw to even think that, and he knew he couldn’t ever say it. Kelly seemed to hear it anyway, because he kissed Walter’s cheek tenderly and stroked his face with a reassuring gesture.
Then he slid his hand beneath the covers, teasing Walter’s belly, then his cock, and Walter surrendered, letting himself be distracted from his fears.
Kelly would have been the last person to peg himself as a rabble-rouser, but lately at Hope, that shoe definitely fit.
Since he barely knew Williams, being a mouthpiece for him sometimes felt odd. It helped that he’d picked up some communications classes at the semester switch. It helped even more that he liked them. The classes were smaller than his gen-ed and business courses, and the heightened intensity around the department’s consolidation with humanities made everything feel more alive. Williams led his Introduction to Communication Theory class, which was about the logic of small group and interpersonal communications. It felt like a more formal version of Philosophy Club with different textbooks. Suddenly Kelly thought he had a pretty good idea how that group had been started.
In his two communications courses—he had small group communication too—Kelly felt at home and oddly happy despite the cloud hanging over Ritche Hall. He’d shied away from education courses, wanting to explore gen-ed first to see what stuck. What he found weird, though, was that he also enjoyed the management class his advisor had made him keep. “A liberal education is good,” Dr. Lindon insisted. “I applaud the communication studies, especially the two you’ve chosen. Combined with introduction to psychology, you’re well set. Keep the Fundamentals of Management, though. You have an excellent head for business, and you’re a natural leader. Try it one more semester, and if you still feel it isn’t what you want when we sign you up for the fall, we’ll put you in whatever new direction you want to go.”
This had all been in December, before Kelly couldn’t read through an issue of The Hope Journal without seeing himself quoted. Lindon wasn’t the only one who thought Kelly had leadership potential. One of the student senators had asked him to run for office. Kelly was considering it.
He did like the management class, though. It wasn’t as boring as the econ class had been, or the math. It was kind of fun, thinking about how systems worked. It was slightly surreal to have that course, plus the comm theory course, running alongside the Williams campaign. Kelly felt like he didn’t need to write his weekly essays. He just needed to direct Lindon to YouTube.
On a dreary Tuesday morning in early February, while Kelly headed back toward Porter, his phone rang. Nodding hello to someone who recognized him and waved, he ducked into the Sandman overhang to escape the light drizzle and pulled out his cell. It was his dad, which was weird. Wasn’t his dad at work at this time of day?
The dark thought about what this call could be resonated in Kelly’s brain, and his heart sank. No. Shit, no. Except he knew, even before he answered, that he’d guessed right.
“Hey there, Dad,” he said, trying to sound bright. “Good to hear from you. What’s going on?”
The heavy sigh confirmed the truth before the words did. “Your mom got her notice today. By the first of April, she won’t have a job.”
The wind blew around Kelly, rattling the door to the dorm, but the chill Kelly felt had nothing to do with it. “Oh no.”
“She’s looking into positions in Mankato, because there’s nothing around here.”
Mankato was over an hour’s drive from Windom, and it could be hellacious in the winter. “Does she have any leads?”
“Nothing yet, unfortunately. But we’re going to keep looking until she finds something.”
Kelly clutched the phone tighter. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Don’t spend any money you don’t have to.”
“I won’t.” He already wasn’t. “Tell Mom to stop sending me meal bars. That’ll save fifty dollars a month right there.”
“I’ll try, but I bet you’ll still get them. She has to feed her boy.”
“Tell her that her boy is doing pretty well.” Kelly shifted to the side to let someone pass, and they nodded and waved at him with a smile. He smiled back.
“You still fighting for that professor? How’s it going? We keep seeing you in the online paper.”
“Pretty well, I think. They’re talking about going to the Board of Regents over spring break. They’re hoping they can get them to call a special meeting over this issue.”
“Well, we wish them luck. Just don’t get your name so muddied you get in trouble, you hear me?”
Kelly smiled, missing his dad so much. “I’m always careful, Dad.”
“Do well at school, son. I don’t want you feeling guilty about what education costs. So long as you use your time wisely and well, whatever we have to do to make it work will be worth it.”
“Okay, Dad.” He swallowed, but his throat was lumpy. “I love you.”
“Love you too, Kelly.”
Hunching into his coat and cutting across the green to Porter, Kelly felt the reality of his father’s message sink in. No job. He didn’t know how his mother would get a new one, and he hated that it might be out of town. He knew his dad did too. Despite what his father said, Kelly did feel bad, because he was a huge part of the cost. He was the expense that put the family on the edge.
As he climbed the stairs to Porter 4, gaze to the floor and ears closed to the cockroach comments, Kelly thought about the speeches he made for Walter and Rose, about how he’d questioned Hope and what it stood for. Those had be
en his words, and Rose and Walter had declared him brilliant, saying he had a career as a speech writer if he wanted it.
The thing was, Kelly did wonder if Hope was worth it. As he bore hallway insults—again—as he faced his too-small room, as he dwelled on the fact that his tuition alone was thirty-six thousand dollars, not to mention the four grand for room and five for board…he had to wonder, was Hope worth it?
No, Kelly admitted to himself. The only things he cared about at Hope were Williams, Rose and Walter.
As two football players swore and fought in the hall, slamming hard into his locked dorm door, Kelly pulled out his laptop. He opened the browser and navigated to the University of Minnesota at the Twin Cities and started to click around. He looked at the academic majors, at the colleges and the grad programs. He looked at the dorms, and he read the Equity and Diversity document he’d glimpsed last year but dismissed because it wasn’t as intensive as Hope’s.
He read the tuition and fees, which including room, board and books were less than flat tuition at Hope. There wasn’t one word about having to live on campus.
Someone slammed into his door again, but it didn’t even make Kelly jump. He closed the laptop, put on his iPod and lay in bed, listening to the soundtrack to Tangled as he tried, in vain, to think of what he should do.
Chapter Twenty-Six
By early February, the effort to save Williams’s job began to wane. The novelty of shouting on the campus lawn and getting angry at The Man got old for most of the students, especially as the unseasonably warm weather gave way to a wave of snow and ice and bitter wind. The paper posted daily rants on the web, but there were only so many ways to spin the same outrage, and people began to complain that they wanted to read something new for a change. Walter wished he could say he hadn’t seen this coming.
“I knew we should have given ourselves a name.” This complaint came from Rose as they sat up in her room one night, Walter, Kelly, Rose and Ethan Miller. Walter ran through the Facebook group on his MacBook while Kelly rested with his head on Walter’s thigh, and Rose and Ethan pored over her planning binder, which had started to look like John Nash’s bulletin board in A Beautiful Mind.
“Why a name?” Ethan asked.
“Because if we had a name, we’d have more focus.” She pursed her lips as she flipped a page. “It’s always the four of us at the core, with a few other people getting serious on occasion. We have meetings, and a few people show up, but nobody does anything. They’re always waiting for us to do everything.”
“That’s because people want leaders.” This came from Kelly, still lying on Walter’s leg. “Or so my textbook tells me.” He stretched and turned to look up at Walter with a lazy smile and reached up to stroke his face. “It’ll be okay.”
From anyone else, the platitude would annoy Walter, but since it was Kelly he smiled back and brushed a kiss against his fingers.
Ethan watched them with a vaguely guarded jealousy. “We should plan something for next weekend. Something big.”
Rose looked up from her binder, nodding. “Yeah, good idea. We need an event. Another rally?”
Kelly had gone back to daydreaming, and Walter stroked his hair. “No event, not next weekend. Wait until March—let the lull go on a bit and renew everything before the midwinter break. We need to come up with something big for when we come back.”
Rose frowned at him. “You think it’s good to let things cool down?”
“Sure. Gives the administration a false sense of security. Meanwhile, we do two things: plan something they won’t see coming, and raise the communications department profile.”
Ethan brightened. “We could do singing Valentines for people as a fundraiser!”
Walter gave him a withering look. “Please. We’re a communications department, not a high school glee club. We should make a film about Williams, like a documentary. It could have a companion format across all available media: newspaper, online mag, and so on. We could do YouTube snippets and plan a launch when we get back. Jax would do it in a heartbeat. This would be the distraction—they’d think that was what was coming, what they should brace for.”
“What would the other part be? The one they won’t see coming?” Kelly asked.
“That we have to figure out.” He nodded at Rose. “How’s your intel on Regent dirt coming?”
“Not well.” She flipped through her binder. “The best thing we can do is highlight what they’re spending their money on versus how much they charge us and what they’re cutting. Which we’ve already done, kind of.”
“Then we focus on getting more details, as much as possible, and we hammer that. The documentary goes up, but so do posters and Twitter streams about what they’re spending money on. I wish we dared have a hacker get in to the campus system and broadcast from there.”
Rose snorted. “That wouldn’t be hard to make happen. Those computer guys are always looking for a reason to fuck the system.”
“It can’t be connected to us, though. We need them to pick it up on their own.”
“I could work on that,” Ethan volunteered. When Walter gave him a long look, he held up a hand. “I know. It can’t come back to us.”
“It can’t come back to Williams.”
“I know, I know. I get what’s at stake.” He slumped against the leg of Rose’s desk. “I just hope this works. It’s not going to be Hope if they fire him.”
“If they don’t restore his position, I’m transferring,” Rose declared.
Walter lifted his head. In his lap, he felt Kelly’s body stiffen in attention as well.
Ethan out-and-out gasped. “You’d leave?”
She shrugged. “Sure. I’m only a sophomore. Perfect time to transfer. My parents are always telling me this place is too expensive anyway.”
“But leaving. God, it’s so…final.” Ethan frowned at the floor. “Wish I weren’t a fucking junior. It’s not an option for me.”
“Why not?” Rose asked. “Do you know how many colleges and universities in Chicago alone are cheaper and better accredited than Hope? You might have to put in an extra semester or two, but in the long run it’d be worth it. What’s your degree going to be worth from here now?”
“Our degrees will be fine,” Walter said, losing his patience, “because our major and our advisor will still be here.”
The subject had dropped after that, thankfully, and they’d spent the next hour making plans for both the documentary and what they’d started calling the counter-blitz. By the end of that week, they had a buzz back again, quieter than the rallies, but Walter rested easier because they looked productive, not stuck in a rut. Everyone liked the idea of being in a movie, especially because Jax, who was one of the campus’s mini-celebrities, served as official director. Meanwhile, Ethan’s computer friends were hunched over their laptops doing wicked things with code. It began to feel like they were moving forward again.
On Valentine’s Day, Walter took Kelly down to St. Louis, to an upscale bistro restaurant with a price-fix menu and a vegan option. They knew about the almond allergy too, and promised there was no chance of the evening ending in the emergency room. Kelly knew none of this, only that they were going out of town to dinner, so when they went all the way into the city and sat at a fancy booth with a moonlight view of the arch, he blushed and effused and pretty much made every minute of the wrestling Walter had done worth it.
“We could have just gone to Moe’s,” Kelly scolded him, but he played with the heavy silver spoon while he did so, watching its surface sparkle in the candlelight, looking enchanted.
“I’ve been appallingly inattentive,” Walter said as he scanned the wine list. “We’ve been so caught up in the campaign for Williams that I’ve only ever taken you out for pizza, and that I think happened twice.”
“You’re never inattentive.” Kelly looked dreamily out the window. “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.”
Walter smiled to himself, feeling very pleased.
He
ordered them a bottle of champagne, which prompted the waitress to ask for their IDs—she glanced at Kelly’s class ring as she did so. Kelly caught her glance, and he blushed as he handed over his fake ID.
“Sorry,” he murmured, still red-faced after she left. “Rose is right. I should stop wearing it.”
Walter rolled his eyes. “Forget Rose. You want to wear your class ring, you wear it. It’s kind of cute that you do, really.”
“Cute,” Kelly repeated, making a face.
Walter grinned. “Yes, dear. I’m sorry, but you’re cute.”
Kelly laughed and reached across the table to catch Walter’s hand, which Walter readily gave.
“This is nice,” Kelly said. “Thank you.”
Walter swelled with pride. “For you, anything.”
Kelly kissed their joined hands. He looked relaxed and easy, and the simple sight of him was restorative for Walter. Not for the first time, Walter wondered how he would have gotten through this hell over Williams without Kelly beside him.
He played with Kelly’s hand, loosening their grip on each other and rubbing his thumb over the stone of his class ring. “You haven’t given me a home-front update in awhile. Is that because it’s good, or bad?”
Kelly shrugged. “It’s the same. Still no new job for Mom.”
Walter had figured as much. He teased his fingers against Kelly’s palm. “She’ll find something.”
Kelly smiled, but it was a sad, tired gesture. “What will you do if Williams’s position really does get cut? Will you stay at Hope?”
Just the question made Walter go cold. “He’s not going to lose his position.”
Love Lessons Page 26
