Whatever.

by S. J. Goslee

  Omar doesn’t agree or disagree, which Mike appreciates. He just says, “Okay,” and then shoves Mike off the edge of the patio. “Come on, Mom Meckles is making sandwiches.”

  * * *

  Later that night, holed up in his room, Mike makes a list. A list to make himself feel better and to organize his thoughts, which he does sometimes. No one knows about his lists, because Cam would laugh his ass off and Jason would want to start talking about feelings, like the gigantic dork he is. Mike’s lists are private.

  So he makes a pro and con list about the breakup, and sees that the pros far outweigh the cons: 1. He can hook up with other people. 2. He still gets to hang out with Lisa. 3. He’ll save money. 4. He doesn’t have to do whatever she says (although, who is he kidding, he’ll probably do whatever she says anyway).

  The con side mainly consists of really, really, really hating asking girls out. He doesn’t actually want to date. He’s been through that already. It’s mostly psychologically painful, and the mutual groping is—okay, it’s damn well worth it, he’s a guy, but it’s still awkward as fuck sometimes. That’s why the thing with Lisa had been so convenient, but even Mike thinks that’s a lousy reason to stay together. Or, like, beg Lisa to take him back.

  Lisa would just make sad faces and then kick him in the balls.

  Mike flops back on his bed and stares at his ceiling. This all would’ve made more sense, he thinks, if Lisa’d had any actual contact with Larson before this. As far as Mike knows, they don’t even have any classes together.

  He sighs, closes his eyes, and then pops them open again when he feels a weight dip the edge of his bed. Rosie is staring at him, wearing her favorite pair of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas. The kid’s got the stealth of a ninja. She also has Godzilla’s shell in her fist, and the poor little guy has all his legs out, searching for land.

  She says, “I can’t find Professor Cheese,” and her eyes are red and watery. It’s the fifth time Professor Cheese has gotten out of the aquarium and they always find him, but Rosie has a strange and strong attachment to her hermit crabs, since Mom won’t let them get a dog. Mom’s written three books: Professor Cheese’s Great Escape, Professor Cheese and the Unhelpful House Mouse, and Professor Cheese Is Scared of the Dark! Sometimes Mike thinks the only reason she had kids was for inspiration.

  “He’ll turn up,” Mike says, but Rosie looks like she’s either going to start wailing or hitting him in the arm with her fist—she’s got some power when she’s all wound up.

  “Michael.” He glances over at his doorway where his mom is leaning tiredly against the frame. She has her ratty bathrobe pulled on over her nightgown, and a thick headband is holding her hair off her face, so Rosie must’ve gotten her out of bed, too. She’s frowning at him, like maybe she doesn’t already know he’s going to help. Like he actually wouldn’t, with both of them looking at him like that.

  He sighs and says, “Put ’Zilla away and we’ll go look around the kitchen.” Twice, they’ve found him on his way out to the back porch.

  As Mike crawls around the hard tile floor, calling for the Professor, he thinks about how all the women in his life seriously suck, and how he can’t seem to say no to any of them.

  four.

  Lisa joins drama on Monday.

  Also on Monday, Mike gets tricked into joining SMH intramural baseball. Although, not exactly tricked, but Theo Higgins asked him, and nobody ever says no to Theo Higgins. Well, Lisa does—he’s been asking her out at least once a week since freshman year—but Mike has never been able to. He’s got these huge eyes and he’s basically perfect and adorable and pocket-sized. He’s wee. He also kicks really hard and used to steal Mike’s lunch money all through elementary school, but that’s beside the point.

  Anyway, he said yes, and he expects it to all be very High School Musical 2, considering the crowd of dancers Higgins normally hangs with. Naturally, Mike expects his friends to play, too.

  And, okay, Mike does have some athletic experience. His and Cam’s Little League baseball team, the Lowell’s Hardware Cougars, went to state two years in a row, and he knows he’s still got a strong swing. He’d actually thought about trying out for the high school junior varsity team freshman year, and even made it all the way onto the practice fields, but then Wallace, former star pitcher for the Scalzetti Assorted Meats Rams—and the Cougars’ biggest rivals—had shown up, and Mike didn’t want to deal with that. He’d slipped out of tryouts without looking back.

  At least Wallace won’t be anywhere near him this time, since varsity players aren’t allowed to participate.

  There’s a farm park across the street from the high school, with a four-mile path that winds through woods and corn-fields and rented vegetable gardens. The track and field team uses it every day for practice. In the afternoon, while waiting for Cam to get out of detention, Mike and Meckles lounge in the grass by the park’s tiny gravel parking lot, giving Jason crap for whatever he’s doing that day—sprinting, long jumps, baton twirling—which he apparently has to wear these amazingly tiny shorts for.

  Jason isn’t really all that tall—he’s shorter than Mike—but he’s mostly skin and bones, with long, lean legs, so he manages to look like a freaky praying mantis, anyway.

  “Bones with sleeves!” Meckles yells as Jason runs past, and Mike stifles a laugh with the side of his wrist, because Meckles is lame, what the hell, but that’s still funny as shit.

  Jason flips them off. He’s learning. Before joining their unnamed band of awesomeness he’d been an emo loser who wrote bad poetry and listened to M83 in the dark. Probably. Mike may be assuming a little here, but he’s sure there was a terrifying amount of loneliness that Mike has since saved him from. Mike’s cool like that.

  Mike knocks his elbow into Meckles and says, “We’re playing intramural baseball. Starts next week.”

  “What?” Meckles goes pale—he has a pathological fear of organized sports.

  Mike grins at him. “I signed you up. I’m not doing that shit alone.” He’d also signed up Cam and Omar, but they won’t care.

  Meckles looks like he’s going to have a heart attack. “What?” he says again, only with his hand clutching his chest.

  Mike thinks it’s hysterical. “Don’t worry, we can get drunk first.”

  “No we can’t,” Meckles says. “I’ll throw up. We’ll all throw up, it’ll be anarchy.”

  “I don’t know, I think it’ll be pretty cool,” Mike says.

  “What’ll be cool?” Lisa says, dropping down on the grass next to Mike. Her book bag hits Mike in the shoulder, and Mike stares at her.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” he asks, ignoring her question. Lisa has some sort of butt-ugly vest on over her T-shirt. There are hideous buttons of varying shapes and sizes all down the front.

  She straightens up and smiles at him, tugging on the ends of the vest. “Larson made it for me. It’s macramé.”

  “It’s—I don’t even know, it’s like you let Meckles throw up all over you,” Mike says. He tilts his head. With the sun shining on it, it looks like it’s made out of every possible shade of puke brown imaginable.

  Lisa ignores him and narrows her eyes at Meckles. “You do look like you’re going to hurl. What’s up?”

  “Intramural baseball,” Meckles says weakly.

  Lisa continues to look confused.

  Mike says, “You realize that Meckles hasn’t participated in gym for over two years, right?”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “I had a panic attack once. Mr. Farragut thought I was dying. He lets me run laps instead of playing—” Meckles cuts off, like he can’t say the actual words out loud, and ends up miming with wiggly fingers.

  Mike says, “Is that supposed to mean organized sports? Because it looks like a puppet show about explosions and gay sex. Or jazz hands, which is basically the same thing.”

  Lisa makes a choking sound, hand over her mouth, eyes dancing.

  Mike claps M
eckles on the back. “Man up, dude.”

  Meckles says, “If I keel over and die it’ll be all your fault.”

  “No one’s ever died from a little friendly competition,” Lisa says, smiling.

  Meckles doesn’t look convinced. Mike can’t wait until he gets him out on the diamond. He knows there’s no way Meckles will actually play, but it’ll totally be funny trying to make him.

  * * *

  Mike wakes up with his face mashed into Cam’s rug. His eyes are gummy and there’s a crusty film trailing away from his mouth from dried drool. He groans as he rolls over to blink up at the ceiling. Something not good is happening inside his body.

  Then the door bangs open and Cam’s brother, Zack, says, “Rise and shine, chuckleheads,” and Mike winces and tries not to throw up all over himself.

  What the hell happened last night?

  “Come on, princess.” Zack nudges Mike with the toe of his sneaker. “You’ll be late for school.”

  There’s a crash, and then Mike hears Cam say something about his liver and death and eating Zack’s face off.

  Zack just laughs and flicks on the overhead light.

  “You’re dead to me,” Mike says, tossing an arm over his eyes. When his brain stops trying to ooze out of his skull, he thinks back to the night before. He remembers following Cam home after his detention and finding a note Cam’s dad left saying he was working late along with a twenty for pizza. He remembers—he makes a face—he remembers Natty Light and Vladimir vodka. He always forgets how truly shitty he feels after cheap alcohol. Zack is such an asshole for corrupting minors, and on a school night, too. At least he’s pretty sure he called his mom to tell her he was sleeping at Cam’s before Zack cracked open the liquor. He doesn’t have a curfew, but he can really only get away with this during the week if he’s staying with the Scotts.

  Mike practically crawls down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Cam and Zack’s dad is making bacon, because Cam and Zack’s dad is awesome.

  Mike’s dad is not a real person. Or, well, obviously he’s a real person; it’s probably more accurate to say Mike’s biological dad is not a real dad. He’s a sperm donor. And not in the derogatory, absentee father way, but in the actual anonymous sperm donor way, as in how Mike’s mom is a single, professional woman who happened to want babies. Mike is pretty okay with this.

  It helps that Cam and Zack’s dad had some sort of cosmic-sibling-slash-best-friend insta-bond with Mike’s mom after they first met, back when Cam and Mike were in preschool. Now he’s Mike’s honorary uncle “Jem,” a mangled form of James that only Mike’s allowed to use—only fair, since Cam’s called Mike’s mom Al since they were six and he had trouble with just about every syllable of Allison.

  Zack sits down at the breakfast bar with a mug of coffee, smirking at him. He looks coolly put together for someone who did at least four shots of vodka with them last night. There are no shadows under his eyes, and his back and shoulders are straight under his work polo. He looks clean-cut and handsome and not at all like someone who had dared Mike to, if he remembers correctly, down all those expired wine coolers. Yuck.

  Mike would glare at him, but he doesn’t think his head could take it. Instead, he just reaches over and swipes Zack’s coffee.

  Zack doesn’t put up much of a fight, though, because despite being a cheery, asshole morning person, he’s inherited most of the other awesome Scott genes that seem to have skipped Cam completely. He’s usually one of Mike’s very favorite people.

  Uncle Jem raises an eyebrow at Mike, but thankfully doesn’t comment on his obvious hangover. He just slides a plate of crispy, greasy, delicious bacon his way. If only he knew how much alcohol Zack had bought for them.

  Cam shuffles in, groaning like a zombie, and Uncle Jem wordlessly pours him a large glass of orange juice.

  “You’re a god among men, Pop,” Cam says. After downing the whole thing, his eyes are almost fully open.

  One corner of Uncle Jem’s mouth curves up. He says, “First bell is in fifteen minutes, and I’m not writing you a note.”

  “Shit,” Cam says.

  They’re both wearing the same clothes they wore the day before. Mike runs a hand through his scruffy, dirty-blond hair and says, “Fuck it, let’s go.”

  * * *

  Mike is almost 99 percent certain Meckles carried him to his second period class. He wakes up with a start when Mrs. Saunders slaps her copy of Hamlet on the edge of his desk, and he could have sworn Dougherty had been shoving theorems down his throat only minutes before.

  Mike presses his palms into his dry eye sockets.

  Someone chuckles, and Mike glares blearily over at Wallace. Because Meckles apparently dropped him off right in the front row next to Wallace. Awesome.

  Meckles is dead to him. He mouths You’re dead to me across the room to where Meckles is grinning smugly by the windows. Meckles, Zack, that lunch lady who refuses to save him the fresh soft pretzels from A lunch: all dead.

  “You look like shit,” Wallace says, grinning like this is making his entire day.

  Mike grunts, trying not to think about the fact that Meckles probably hefted him down the hall in a fireman’s carry. That’s only slightly less embarrassing than being cradled bridal style.

  This day just keeps getting better.

  Normally, Mike sits in the back of English with Mo Howard. Meckles never sits with him, because Meckles is in love with Mrs. Saunders, and he likes to be up front where he can raise his hand as much as possible and gaze at her with these giant moon eyes—even though he says it’s because he likes English. This could be true, given that Meckles has trouble speaking to anyone of the opposite gender besides his sister and Lisa, and even Lisa’s iffy.

  Mike twists around in his chair to search out Mo. They’ve done many an English project together—solid C work, and Mike doesn’t complain. Mo gives him a questioning look, gesturing toward Wallace, and Mike gives her a half shrug. He has no idea why Wallace isn’t complaining about him sitting there, either.

  He’s kind of waiting for Chris Leoni to kick his ass for being in his seat, too, but all that happens is Wallace thunks a bottle of water down in front of him and says, “Drink this.”

  “Why, is it poisoned?”

  Wallace looks at him funny. “No.”

  Mike isn’t convinced. “Did you spit in it?”

  “A little spit won’t kill you,” Wallace says. At Mike’s frown, he rolls his eyes. “It’s not even opened, Tate. Just drink the damn water.”

  Mike sullenly twists the cap off, breaking the seal, and takes a sip. When he tries to give the bottle back, Wallace shakes dark hair out of his eyes and says, “Keep it.”

  Mike kind of wants to peg the bottle at Wallace’s head, but the sad fact is that water is delicious, and when Wallace brandishes a tiny Advil container, Mike starts seriously considering making declarations of love and marriage. It’s pathetic, Mike’s ashamed of himself, even as he says, “Gimme,” and wrestles the Advil out of Wallace’s hands.

  “You’re welcome,” Wallace says, amused.

  Mike says, “If I die later, everyone will know it was you.”

  * * *

  “This just in,” Cam says at lunch, sitting down next to Deanna and dropping an arm across her shoulders, “I’m the coolest.”

  Mike flips him the finger. “Why does this week suck so hard?”

  “Because you think listening to Cam is a valid life choice,” Lisa says.

  Cam points at himself and says, “Coolest.”

  “Wallace keeps smirking at me,” Mike says. He’s totally not whining; he’s just frustrated. Wallace has this complete asshole-ish look that he gives Mike when nobody else is watching. Like Mike owes him all his unborn children for three measly tabs of Advil. Like Wallace is really going to enjoy collecting all his unborn children.

  “Mo Howard said you were all over Wallace in English,” Cam says. He mimes giving a blow job and Mike really wants to punch him.


  Instead, Mike goes completely red and says, “Shut up.”

  Lisa pats his arm. “It’s okay, Michael,” she says soothingly, and Mike doesn’t bother asking her what’s okay, because he’s not sure he actually wants to know.

  five.

  On the second Saturday in September, Mike wakes up to Lisa leaning over him, long dark hair sweeping forward, shading her face like some sort of death wraith, only with pretty eyes. His mom must have let her in. It’s happened before, but it’s doubly annoying now that they’re not dating anymore.

  “Two words for you, Tate,” she says, poking him in the ribs. “Student council.”

  Mike rubs both his hands over his face and yawns noisily. “What?”

  “Student council. I want to be our class president.”

  Mike knows Lisa is saying actual words, but they’re not making any coherent sense. “What? Since when do you care about our class?”

  Lisa moves to the edge of the bed as Mike struggles into a sitting position, propping his back up against the wall. “Since I looked over all my college applications,” she says. She ticks off her fingers. “St. Mary’s, NYU, Duke, Georgetown, they’re looking for well-rounded straight-A students. All I’ve got right now is Honor Society and drama.”

  Mike stares at her. She looks pretty serious. “Okay,” he says. He’s still not sure why she had to wake him up with this information at—he glances at the clock—nine thirty in the morning. He’d been up until three with Cam. This is way too early.

  Lisa says, “You need to be my running mate.”

  Mike laughs. “You’re on crack, no way am I running for vice president,” he says.

  “You have to!” she says. “We can sell you as gay, it’ll be edgy.”

  Seriously, they’re real words, he’s pretty sure of that, but it’s all gobbledygook to Mike. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “But I’m not gay. And even if I were gay, I wouldn’t be campaigning with it.”