Lonely Hearts

by Heidi Cullinan

Safe was great—but it was a bit boring. The most risqué thing Liz and Pastor did was watch Hot in Cleveland.

  Elijah didn’t smoke except around his work shifts. He couldn’t bear it if Pastor or Liz caught him, though he knew they wouldn’t say anything. Probably wouldn’t so much as give him a look of disappointment.

  Sometimes the blind acceptance didn’t simply make him itch. It made him nuts. Which was awful. Sleazy as hell. But it was still the truth. His tenure at Chez Schulz wasn’t doing anything for his creative writing, either. That had been flagging since his parents ramped up their censure after Christmas, but he’d thought of little else while he recovered from the shooting.

  Mina approved of his trying to write. “You should do more than post on those free fiction sites,” she kept telling him when they spoke on the phone. “Your stuff is good. You should get paid.”

  The idea of getting paid for his work had always been a dream, but now it felt like a way out. He didn’t know what he could reasonably expect from publishing short stories or a novella, but he found himself dreaming more and more often of declining his poor-me fund because he was able to pay his bills himself. Obviously not right away. But…well, if he wrote a few stories…maybe in a year he could be independent?

  Maybe two years. Enough money to replace the cafeteria job would be good. That had to be reasonable, right?

  Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t—but he did know you didn’t get paid if you didn’t actually write the goddamn words. Yet every time he attempted to work, he stared for an hour at a blank notebook. Sometimes he got out a random article or gerund phrase, and one weekend he’d written a whole page before he’d ripped it out and shredded it over the trash can.

  Sometimes his inability to write bothered him more than anything else. He’d written ever since he could remember. Poetry, short stories, journal entries. He had his fantasy novel too, but he’d decided long ago he shouldn’t take it too seriously until he was older. Every time he opened it up and read what he’d written, all he could see was his youth and inexperience.

  But online gay erotica? Come on. He was basically masturbating on the page. He’d published on Nifty for years. Naughty Nate had five thousand followers on his Archive of Our Own site, and they liked his original stories as well as his fanfic. Downshifting into writing for pay couldn’t possibly be too hard.

  Except after never suffering so much as ten minutes of writer’s block in his life, he was stopped up worse than an oxycodone addict. Elijah didn’t know if his authorial constipation was happening because he was trying to write for money, or because he was a hack unless he composed to escape hell.

  How sick was he that if it was the latter, he kind of wanted a little hell back.

  He didn’t actually, but he felt so empty not writing, like the guy in A Clockwork Orange after the Ludovico technique. Evenings spent escaping into dystopian fantasy or the erotic adventures of idealized college students were fun. Trying not to spill on Liz’s furniture and worrying when the next panic attack would creep up on him wasn’t any kind of a good time.

  So he smoked a lot in the alley one block over from Liz and Pastor’s place, he stared at a blank notebook page, and he worked. Mostly he worked.

  At food service, usually Elijah ran the dishwasher. It was a gross job, and it made his hands raw and red. He had to scrape off and rinse other people’s half-eaten food into the disposal, which was a real cosmic kick in the nose. He couldn’t stop calculating how many kids on the street the scraps would feed, and his average for an eight-hour shift covering two meals—for summer students only—was forty to fifty hungry homeless. The amount of food nibbled at or discarded completely uneaten made him angry.

  One day so many fully intact pieces of chicken breast came through he started saving them. At first it was a kind of self-torture, each barely eaten thigh and wing fueling his indignation. When he’d filled a one hundred and five ounce can, however, guilt and panic overcame anger. What was he going to do with all this food?

  He decided he’d take it out to the trash bins. He’d seen some stray cats there. He thought about putting it on ice in a cooler with a label free safe chicken and seeing if he could figure out where homeless people were staying in the area, but that felt complicated, and he didn’t know if anyone would appreciate it. Or how he’d get there. Or if it actually was safe, and what if no one found it before salmonella, and he accidentally killed someone? So he hauled the can to the alley.

  Lewis Abrahamsen was in the alley.

  Technically Elijah had known Lewis existed before they worked together. They were both sophomores, both skinny and awkward über-twinks, and as far as he could tell, they were both gay. He would have sworn he’d seen Lewis’s profile on Grindr last year, but not for long and not anymore.

  Lewis was…weird. Slightly off, different in a way that made Elijah feel the guy wasn’t fully in focus. He always seemed pissed, or moody, or pissed and moody, and he smoked more than Elijah. Several times Elijah had passed him and seen red-rimmed eyes, from crying or drugs, it wasn’t clear. Either angle meant more baggage than Louis Vuitton, so Elijah elected to pass. He had a matched set of bullshit all on his own, and his recent disaster with Baz had only driven home the need to stay away from headcases.

  The day Elijah went to the alley with his industrial-sized pizza sauce can full of discarded chicken parts, Lewis was there, smoking another cigarette. By rights Elijah should have met him before on that count alone, but the alley was technically off-limits for smoking. The whole campus was. If Elijah wanted to light up, he used the alley near The Shack, because he was all about rules now.

  Lewis didn’t seem as if he gave a fuck about the rules. He leaned against the wall across from the door to the kitchens, drawing on his cigarette with aggression, tracking Elijah warily as he hauled his can around. He pushed his messy strawberry-blond hair out of his face and frowned. “What do you have in your hands?”

  Elijah’s cheeks heated, and he vowed the next time he felt like measuring how much food the cafeteria wasted, he’d lie down until the urge passed. “Nothing.”

  “It looks like a pizza sauce can full of half-eaten chicken.”

  “Yeah.” Elijah set the can beside the Dumpster and kicked it out of the way. “It’s…for the cats.”

  “Great, so there will be more of them the next time I come out for a smoke.”

  Elijah thought about pointing out Lewis shouldn’t smoke out here anyway, but he’d sound too much like Aaron. He looked around for something to wipe his hands on and settled for his apron. Watching Lewis smoke reminded him he hadn’t had a cig in over twelve hours, and the yearning hit him upside the head. Fuck the rules anyway. “Hey—can I bum off you? I’ll pay you back inside. Mine are in my locker.”

  At first Elijah thought Lewis would say no, but Lewis pulled a pack out of his pocket and passed it over, followed by a lighter. “You’re Elijah, right? Elijah Prince?”

  The way Lewis said Elijah Prince made Elijah pause with the lighter at the tip of his borrowed cigarette. Great. He’d almost forgotten about his unwanted celebrity. He inhaled, shut his eyes while he breathed the smoke out, and nodded. “Yeah.”

  Lewis ashed his cigarette. “Sorry. I mean—I heard a little about the whole thing with your dad in the parking lot—” He winced and put his cigarette in his mouth. “I’ll shut up now.”

  Elijah shrugged. “My parents are religious nutjobs. I ran away when I was sixteen, went home because it was too rough on my own, and faked a conversion. Last year in the middle of second semester, it all caught up with me, and when my dad found out I’d made a fool of him, he came to campus with a gun. Now my mom is in the process of being committed, and my dad is awaiting trial for attempted murder and terrorism.”

  “Shit.” Lewis ground the butt of his cigarette into the dirt and pulled out a new one. “He shot the guy with the sunglasses, right? Baz Acker? The one whose
dad is a US Senator or something?”

  “Uncle. And yeah.”

  “Damn.”

  They smoked in silence for a few beats, and Elijah used the time to study Lewis at closer range. He was cuter up close. Nice bone structure. Pouty lips. A little too groomed for Elijah’s liking—lots of eyebrow plucking going on. Possibly some makeup. Lewis’s clothes were off the usual queer wardrobe as well. His jeans were wrong, to start. Clubwear should be so tight a dance move threatened to split a seam, and everyday attire should have freedom of movement but an emphasis on the package and ass. The ass was fine, but still not right, and either Lewis had nothing to declare, or he’d gone out of his way to disguise his package. Which was odd.

  But it wasn’t only the jeans. Gay guys wearing Hot Topic Maleficent tees wasn’t unusual, but this one all but had hey, this is a girl shirt stitched on the hem. Same for the shoes: a pair of Keds with flowers on the edges. When Elijah spotted two rhinestone studs in Lewis’s ears, he thought, hmm.

  “You’re Lewis, right?” Not Louise?

  Lewis cocked an eyebrow. “You know me?”

  “Of you, more like. Seen you around.” He waited for more from Lewis, got nothing. Fine. Small talk. “What’s your major?”

  Lewis flattened his lips. “I was going to do elementary ed, but…I guess I’ll do English.”

  A huge-assed story hung in the I guess, and it promised to be something Elijah didn’t want to get involved in. This was why he’d given the guy a wide berth. “I might do English too. Taking some lit courses first semester, and if it goes well, I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Who do you have, Ronson or Keil?”

  Elijah had no idea. “Is one better?”

  “Keil is the best. Get her for anything you can.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind. Thanks.”

  Elijah would have gone inside, but Lewis passed over another cigarette, and Elijah hated to turn down nicotine.

  Lewis pocketed the lighter once more after Elijah finished with it. “You do any of the music groups?”

  Elijah shuddered around an inhale. “Fuck, no. A lot of my friends are into it, though.”

  “Choir or orchestra?”

  “Both. My roommate last year was Aaron Seavers.”

  Lewis lit up. “The tenor? He’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, he’s all right. His boyfriend is in orchestra. And they both do stuff for Salvo, the girl group. My friend Mina is in it.”

  Lewis had seemed carefully vague before, but now he dropped all pretense and nearly backed Elijah into the corner in his excitement. “I want to try out. But I’m not in choir. Salvo, though. And—and the Ambassadors. They’re the best.”

  “Go for it.” Elijah did his best to skirt away from Lewis without being obvious. “The Ambassadors are hell to get into, I know.”

  “Sure.” Lewis ran a hand through his hair—hair which was noticeably not gaily tousled, just shaggy—and averted his gaze. “Salvo’s probably not as bad, right? Since it’s only in its second year?”

  “Well—yes and no. Mina says there are a zillion girls interested, but they were mostly upperclassmen last year, so they have a lot of spaces. Except they’re girls only, you know that, right?”

  “Of course. I was only…asking.”

  Elijah got a weird buzzy feeling from the tone in Lewis’s voice, making Elijah feel like he’d stepped on something wriggling and alive and desperate to grab on to his leg. He pulled out his phone to check the time. “I better get back. This wasn’t my official break. Thanks for the smokes.”

  Lewis waved this concern away, and Elijah hustled out of the alley into the relative comfort of other people’s discarded food.

  Baz’s birthday was the last night he was with Damien and Marius in the White House.

  Technically their leases were up the night before on June 30, but Aaron and Giles weren’t moving in until Friday, Mina until Saturday. Her roommate Jilly would drop off her things but not be fully moved in until August. Brian, Giles’s old roommate, wasn’t yet sure exactly when he was coming. Elijah had never been clear about when he’d arrive.

  Sid, the only other returning housemate from the year before, was there the night of Baz’s birthday too, though he was in and out, helping Karen and Marion with the last of their things from the garage apartment. While he was home for the summer, a crew would do some repairs and upgrades to turn the first-floor practice room into a bedroom for Sid, since Baz had elected to turn his room into a single now that Marius was leaving. Sid stopped to have pizza with them when it arrived, and a beer once he’d done all he could for the girls.

  “When do you leave in the morning?” Marius asked him as he passed over the bottle opener.

  “Five.” Sid cracked the cap and sank into his corner of the couch in a fluid motion Baz had seen him do a million times. “It’s four hours to Door County, and I told my mom I’d be there by noon to help man the store.”

  Damien leaned over the coffee table to pick up the opener as Sid discarded it. “I’ll be out of here shortly after you. We want to get the Saint Paul apartment scrubbed but good before Stevie comes Saturday.”

  “When does your job start?” Sid asked.

  “The fifteenth.” Damien popped his beer open but didn’t drink it right away, rolling the sweating brown bottle between his palms instead.

  Marius reached around Baz to give Damien a reassuring pat on his thigh. “You’ll be great. Stop worrying.”

  With a grunt, Damien took a deep hit of alcohol. As he set the bottle down, he raised an eyebrow at Marius. “What about you? Med school starts earlier than Saint Timothy, right?”

  Marius nodded. “Orientation is the first week in August, classes the second. But I already feel like the whole month of July is going to whiz by me. I have to get organized, plus I wanted to do some of the reading ahead of time because I know it won’t be long before I’m trying to catch up with myself.”

  Marius was the original overachiever. He’d turned his time at Saint Timothy into a five-year pre-med major because he believed there was no such thing as too prepared. The idea that he could be behind on anything, ever, was laughable.

  Nobody said this, though, only let Marius fuss as per usual. “Med school will be rough no matter what I do. There’s no escaping it. I hope this apartment works out and I can study and sleep at odd hours. I’m trying not to judge my new roommates by you guys, but man.”

  “Nobody’s gonna beat the White House, ever.” Sid raised his bottle in a toast.

  Damien and Marius raised their bottles too. Baz joined them.

  “To the White House,” Marius said.

  “To the White House,” they all echoed, and drank.

  The silence got heavy, the inevitable parting hanging before them.

  Damien punched Baz lightly in the arm. “So, old man. Twenty-five.”

  Baz spun his bottle on his knee. “Guess so.”

  “Did they call you?” Marius asked, a note of censure in his tone.

  He meant Baz’s parents. “Actually, yes—one of them, and it was the Y-chromosome, if you can believe it. Sean Acker stopped his golf game, told me he was glad I was alive and announced there was another twenty-five grand in my account to celebrate.”

  Marius wasn’t impressed. “Your mother?”

  “She was in meetings all day, but Stephan called to offer her best and let me know the predicted time of arrival of the artisanal malt beverage assortment we’re currently enjoying. My uncle’s intern sent one of those gold-edged cards and informed me more money went into my trust fund. So you know, everybody represented.”

  Marius still frowned, but Damien smoothed out the argument before it could start. “You and Sid ready to break in a new house crew?”

  Sid smiled wryly. “Fuck, I think they’ll break us in. This is a pretty tight group. Baz and I will b
e the grandpas in the corner talking about how things were in our day. Gonna be weird without you two. And Karen and Marion. Man, growing up sucks.”

  The air got heavy again.

  Damien cleared his throat, forcing out a laugh. “Remember the time we locked ourselves out with soup boiling on the stove?”

  They played remember when for an hour, and it was fun, less weighty than dwelling on the present, but it still pained Baz. This was their last chance to build up remember whens, and there wasn’t any getting away from it. When the heaviness got to be too much, Baz excused himself, saying he needed a pill, and went up the stairs. He did take a pill—a whole Xanax, and he made a landing pad for it with the last half of a joint.

  Marius came upstairs before he was halfway through. He said nothing about Baz’s smoking, simply pulled out the chair from his desk like he always did. Except his desk was empty, as was his side of the room. All his belongings would be gone when his parents came in the morning.

  Marius would go with them.

  He sighed as he slouched in his seat. “I wish you’d have let Sid move in with you.”

  They’d had this argument a million times, but not often while Baz was on drugs. He shrugged and lay back on his bed. “Less fuss. This way I can fuck who I want. And he has a crazy fall schedule. Would cramp my style.”

  “I had a crazy schedule too, and we did fine. Also, you haven’t had anybody up to the room in months.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody shot me in the shoulder. I’m off my game.”

  “They’re going to bed soon. Come downstairs. Enjoy the last of the night with us.”

  Baz took a long toke of the joint, holding it deep in his lungs. Push it away. Push it all away. He let the breath out, feeling his mind pixelating away on the drugs. “I don’t want to watch the end.”

  Marius didn’t argue, and eventually, with a sigh, he left.

  When the joint was done, Baz removed his contacts and climbed into bed, riding a haze of hipster beer, prescription medication and the last tokes of the best Chronic he could scare up in Minnesota. He drifted in and out of sleep, watching colors and shapes float above his head.