Whatever.

by S. J. Goslee

  “I’m not going to kill you,” Omar says.

  “Ha. Ha.”

  “How high are you?” Omar asks.

  This is a valid question, since Mike hardly ever calls Omar unless he’s high. “I’m so stone-cold sober, it’s not even funny.”

  Omar makes a sound of disbelief, but Mike doesn’t blame him for his skepticism—it’s hard to remember the last time Mike’s called Omar without the help of recreational drugs.

  “I need you to kill Chris Leoni. Or just make him hurt a lot.” Mike would do it himself, except Leoni would probably just sit on him again, which is really uncomfortable.

  Omar grunts.

  “No, for real! He’s a pain in my ass, Omar, and your dad has that whole machete collection in the basement.” Omar’s dad is badass. He used to take Omar and his two older sisters on wilderness survival trips every year, until Omar got soft and decided he wanted to be a vegetarian. And, okay, Mike knows he’s acting a little crazy, but he doesn’t actually know what Leoni’s beef is. It’s just frustrating, and Omar should totally be humoring him here, ugh.

  Omar hmmms.

  Mike had forgotten how useless Omar is on the phone. He hardly says anything, and Mike can hear faint typing, which means Omar is probably doing homework that Mike should also be doing.

  Mike asks, “Did you do the worksheet for chemistry?”

  “Sure,” Omar says. “It’s easy. Most of the answers are straight out of chapter five.”

  Mike sighs. Omar always thinks chemistry is easy, but the good thing about that is he’ll help Mike with it in the morning. “And English?”

  “Writing my essay,” Omar says.

  “Right. Instead of doing my bidding or talking me down from my homicidal rage,” Mike says. He’s cool with either, honestly.

  “You don’t sound like you’re in a homicidal rage,” Omar says.

  “I’m—huh.” Consider Mike talked down. Omar has magical powers, even when he isn’t trying. “Thanks. I guess.”

  “I aim to please.”

  “Chris Leoni is still a dickface, though,” Mike says.

  “Amen.”

  Omar might be a miracle worker, but he’s still really unsatisfying to talk to. Plus, now Mike’s kind of depressed instead of mad.

  “I’m calling Jason.”

  “You do that.” Mike can hear the smile in Omar’s voice.

  Mike says, “I will,” even though he definitely isn’t going to call Jason.

  Omar says, “Let me know how that turns out for you.”

  “Fuck you,” Mike says without any heat and thumbs off the cell. He drops it on the floor and rolls over onto his back.

  He pulls his guitar over and strums the beginning chords to “Confetti,” humming absently, but the lyrics make him think about Lisa and J. J. and how dicks have been featured in his last couple jerk-off sessions, and he really doesn’t want to dwell on that.

  It makes his palms sweat and his head hurt.

  He groans and gropes over the edge of his bed for the phone again and calls Jay. He needs a distraction, and Jason’s the only one of his friends that he’s pretty sure won’t be doing anything else.

  “Jay, man,” he says. “I’m bored, come over and we’ll listen to Nick Drake and be emo and shit, you’ll love it.”

  Jason says, “Okay? Should I, um, bring … anything?”

  Anything is code for weed, and Jason always asks this, because Jason still thinks he needs to bribe them all to be seen with him. But after eight months of hanging out, Jason’s actually kind of grown on Mike. He says, “You don’t have to bring party favors every time I invite you somewhere.”

  “But I—”

  “Come on, we’ll navel gaze and talk about how much we hate our moms.”

  “I don’t—” Jason stops himself, thank god. Sometimes Jason just doesn’t get it. Instead, he says, “I think it’s shoe gaze.”

  “You would know,” Mike says. “Get your ass over here.”

  “It’s a school night,” Jason says, a pathetic last-ditch effort to not come entertain Mike, and what kind of friend is that? Jason apparently knows all his deep, dark secrets now; he has a sacred duty to come over and make sure things aren’t weird between them.

  “Twenty minutes,” Mike says. “I’ll make popcorn.”

  * * *

  Jason’s had the same lame buzz cut for as long as Mike’s known him, and it highlights the way his ears stick out like mug handles. And after the month of revelations Mike’s just had, he’s happy to realize that Jason—and, when he thinks about it, Omar, Meckles, and Cam, also—does nothing for him in the pants department. He supposes they’re all objectively handsome. Omar has some sweet arm muscles from playing his bass. Meckles has very large, capable hands; Mike can admit that to himself. Cam has all the appeal of a sack of potatoes, more for the fact that they’re practically brothers than any physical lacking. So Mike is saved from the cliché and embarrassment of crushing on his straight friends. Small comfort, but it’s something.

  Mike leads Jason into the kitchen and hops up onto a stool. “Popcorn,” he says, waving the microwave bag in front of Jason’s face.

  “No, thanks,” Jason says, standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets. “Do you have any Diet Coke?”

  “Dude.” Mike’s mind is boggled. Jason needs to consume as many calories as possible just to retain his current human form. “I offer you popcorn, you take popcorn, and you don’t ask for diet anything. It’s like listening to Dishwalla instead of Ash.”

  Jason has a slight smile on his face. He shrugs a shoulder and says, “Aren’t they practically the same thing?”

  “I don’t think you can be in my band anymore,” Mike says, but inside he’s secretly proud, because that’s exactly something Omar or Meckles would say. Not Cam, though—that’s one of the things Mike respects most about him. Despite Cam’s lamentable fetish for Jimmy Buffett, Mike and Cam were both musically reared by Zack, cutting their baby teeth on the underrated awesome of Ash and Nada Surf, mortal enemies with the likes of Dishwalla, the scourge of alt rock. Important lessons were learned.

  Mike sets the popcorn bag down and goes to the fridge. He pulls out two bottles of Pepsi and tosses one to Jason. “Come on, let’s go to my lair, we can—” He cuts himself off, because lair-haunting usually involves pot, and Mike currently isn’t imbibing, and he’s got nothing for them to do, otherwise, since Meckles stomped on his PS3 and Mike’s mom refuses to replace it.

  Crap. They’re totally going to end up talking about their feelings.

  Upstairs, Jason drops down onto the floor, back against Mike’s bed, and Mike turns on the TV, sprawling out on his mattress. He stares at the ceiling and thinks about all the possible things they could talk about that are not the giant elephant sitting in the corner of the room—banjos, Nada Surf, Manos: The Hands of Fate, body glitter—and ends up saying, “So. Cam’s end-of-the-summer blowout,” anyway, before he can stop himself. It’s like his brain just doesn’t want him to be happy.

  There’s ominous silence.

  Mike feels like there’s a lead ball sitting in the bottom of his stomach and he twists his fingers into his sheets to stop them from shaking. Jason hasn’t acted any different around Mike, but that doesn’t have to mean anything.

  He takes a deep breath and levers up on his elbows. “Jay?”

  Jason’s eyes are huge when he turns to look at Mike, and his skin is this pale gray. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Sure you don’t,” Mike says. He’s kind of sickly amused by how uncomfortable Jason is, and he sits up, crossing his legs and leaning his forearms on his thighs. “Lisa says you watched.”

  Jason’s eyes actually get bigger. “No! I mean, uh, watched what?”

  Mike snorts. “Come on, Jay,” he says, because Jason looks like he’s going to throw up, and yeah, this is really kind of fun. “Tell me you didn’t want in on that.”

  Jason goes from gray to flaming red in two point three seconds.
He opens and closes his mouth so many times he looks like a fish gasping for air.

  “No, really,” Mike says, laughing a little, “tell me. Lisa seemed to like all the tongue action.”

  “I can’t—Mike!” Jason flails his arms, banging his elbow into the side of the mattress. Then their eyes catch and he presses a hand over his mouth and starts laughing, too.

  Mike flops over onto his side, laughing into his mattress, and his stomach hurts by the time he’s trailed off into really kind of unmanly giggles, but whatever. “Jesus Christ,” he says, breathless. He leans up onto one arm and peers over at Jason. “I’m fucked up.”

  “Hey, no.” Jason’s sprawled out on the floor on his back. He’s panting and staring very carefully up at nothing.

  Mike says, “Yeah.”

  Jason rolls his head to the side, dark eyes still sparkling with amusement. It’s a good look on him. “You’re in no way fucked up,” Jason says. “Unless you count everything Cam gets you to do.”

  This is not exclusive to Mike. Cam’s really good at getting people to do shit they would not normally do. “Whatever,” Mike says, and then he dials up the volume on the TV.

  * * *

  Mike wakes up five minutes after the time his alarm would’ve woken him up if he’d bothered to set it before passing out the night before.

  Jason is still on his floor. He’s got his coat pulled over him like a blanket.

  Mike yawns and reaches out to grab a book off his nightstand to peg at Jason’s head. It hits him in the shoulder, and Jason just murmurs something unintelligible and rolls over.

  Mike spends a few minutes trying to figure out what woke him up, if it wasn’t Jason or his alarm, before yawning again and turning onto his other side to find Rosie snuggled up by his pillow.

  “Hey,” Mike says, his voice an early morning croak.

  Rosie says, “Sandwich thinks birds are too much work.” She looks disgruntled, like she spent a while arguing with Sandwich about this before grudgingly agreeing that Sandwich was right.

  “Sandwich is pretty smart,” Mike says.

  Rosie harrumphs. “Yeah,” she admits.

  “Is Mom up?”

  “No,” Rosie says, and then scoots to the edge of the bed and hops down onto the floor, presumably to go wake Mom up for breakfast. Rosie’s already dressed for school, wearing a too-snug red plaid vest that was part of last year’s Halloween costume—she was an insurance salesman—over a T-shirt, olive khaki shorts, and dark purple tights. All the other girls around her age are into sparkles, bright colors, and peace signs. Rosie’s T-shirt is the black-and-white Ash one Mike had bought her for her birthday two months ago.

  “Was your sister wearing combat boots?” Jason asks sleepily after Rosie clomps out of the room.

  Mike sits up, slides his feet off the side of the bed. “She’s going through a nineties phase. I blame Pearl Jam. And Meckles.” Mike’s got nothing against Pearl Jam, honestly, it’s just that Vedder’s a douche-nozzle. Meckles likes to defend him, because Meckles needs to justify wearing that much flannel in the twenty-first century. Rosie looks up to Mike and his friends, which is only unfortunate when she chooses to emulate Meckles instead of Mike. Still, he approves of the T-shirt and tights.

  “Huh,” Jason says, and closes his eyes again.

  “We have”—Mike checks his phone—“forty minutes to get to school.”

  Jason says, “Sure,” but doesn’t move.

  Mike chucks a shoe at him.

  * * *

  “Homecoming,” Lisa says, sliding into her seat next to Mike in first period trig.

  Mike groans and buries his face in his open textbook. “It’s only October,” he says, voice muffled. They have Homecoming later than most, because they’re the South Morrison Fighting Turkeys, and they always play the Connie Hill Maple Leaves around Thanksgiving. It’s tradition.

  “Junior Court nominations are in two weeks, Michael.”

  “And this is important to me why?” Mike doesn’t even know what a Junior Court is. The last school function he went to was a sixth grade social. Homecoming is generally a mystery to him.

  “Because we need to form a committee,” she says.

  Mike stares at her blankly. Finally, he says, “You want me to be on a committee?” Committees require talking to people who actually care about this shit.

  Lisa shakes her head. “I want you to be our class rep on the committee.”

  “That sounds so much better,” Mike says.

  “Apparently I have to liaise for the PTO and form interclass connections or something, so I need you”—she tugs a battered manila envelope out of her bag and shoves it at Mike—“to take care of all the preliminary Homecoming stuff. It’s the fall prom!”

  Mike makes a face, and refrains from pointing out that Lisa never cared about the fall prom before. He turns the envelope over in his hands; it’s fairly hefty. “What is this?”

  “Instructions and guidelines from Mrs. Saunders and Mr. Kerr, our faculty supervisors. Once I figure out what I’m doing with everything else, I swear I’ll help you, but for now you’re in charge,” Lisa says brightly. She’s grinning at Mike like she knows this is killing him, and she’s so very happy about it. “You need to get three other juniors to join, too.”

  “You are the worst friend in the history of all friends everywhere in the entire galaxy,” Mike says. How the hell is he supposed to get people on a committee about Homecoming? He opens the top flap of the envelope and dumps out the contents—sample flyers, checklists, lots of exclamation points. “This is the shit my nightmares are made of.”

  Specifically, it’s got shades of his current recurring dream where Cam’s a sparkly stoner unicorn, Mike’s a piece of birthday cake, and everything Meckles says comes out of his mouth as stars and rainbows. There’s lots of smiling and laughing and eating of Mike. It’s pretty gay, actually. Mike should’ve seen that coming.

  It probably wouldn’t take much to get Omar, Meckles, and Jason to join the committee for him, or even Cam, but the problem with making his friends get involved with Homecoming is that they don’t really care. Mike doesn’t care, either, but Lisa will claw all his insides out through his mouth if he messes this up for her, so what he really needs are a few dedicated yay-school! posers who will do all his work for him.

  He has to go to the dark side.

  He has to ask the cheerleaders.

  * * *

  The only cheerleader Mike knows personally is Dotty Ramirez, because she’s a Bobcat and friends with Mo, and while she’s a lousy outfielder and can’t catch for shit, she’s a good hitter and pretty decent at rounding the bases. Mike has to respect that.

  Dotty is almost as tall as Mike, with short, spiky brown hair and a gymnast’s build. She has the dubious honor of having been Chris Leoni’s first girlfriend, as far as Mike knows, until she stomped on his foot and gave him a bloody nose in the cafeteria last fall.

  Mike catches her leaving the field after they beat the lace panties off the Slugs for the seventh time in a row. He says, “I need your help,” and Dotty arches an overly plucked eyebrow at him. A bead of sweat runs down the length of her nose and she swipes at it with the hem of her T-shirt, giving Mike an expansive view of her flat, brown stomach and gray sports bra. Mike isn’t unmoved, but he doesn’t bother staring, either.

  “Help with what?” she asks.

  “Homecoming,” Mike says. “Know anyone in our class who’d want to be on a committee?”

  “I could ask around,” she says, dropping her shirt and placing her hands on her hips. She grins at him, and all her teeth are very, very white. “But only if you can get Meckles to ask me out.”

  That’ll be tough. Meckles is blatantly and irrationally terrified of girls. Mike’s got a theory that his compulsive flannel-wearing is specifically engineered to scare off any potential dates.

  “How about I get him to at least talk to you?” Mike counters.

  Dotty bites her bottom lip. “By
Cam’s Halloween bash.”

  “No problem,” Mike says. He can loosen Meckles up with beer. It’ll be fine.

  eight.

  An unfamiliar number comes up on Mike’s cell, which is weird, because Mike doesn’t get a lot of calls to begin with. Most of his friends just text him, except for Lisa and Cam—Lisa, because she doesn’t like the detachedness of texting, and Cam because he likes to sing into Mike’s voice mail.

  Mike warily slides his thumb to answer and says, “Hello?”

  “Michael. It’s Josh.”

  No immediate bells are rung. “Who?”

  There’s a sigh on the other end. “J. J.”

  “Good Christ, no.”

  “Yes. Michael—”

  “It’s Mike. Or Tate,” Mike corrects automatically, because only Lisa, Nana, and his mom call him Michael—and no one but Rosie calls him Mikey under threat of painful death.

  “Michael,” J. J. says, and Mike clenches his jaw in irritation. He hates J. J. so very much.

  “What?” he says tightly.

  “I was wondering if you’d like to—”

  “No.”

  “—come to a party I’m throwing next weekend. No need to be rude.”

  “Hell, no,” Mike says. He doesn’t want to get within ten feet of J. J. He doesn’t think he’d fall on him sober and try to suck his face off, but he doesn’t want to tempt fate.

  There’s a heavy silence. Then a soft curse and J. J. says, shortly, “Fine,” and Mike’s surprised to hear some actual hurt in his voice.

  Mike suddenly feels a little bad. It’s disconcerting. “Uh.”

  “See you around, Mike,” J. J. says, abruptly ending the call. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Mike presses the edge of his cell into his forehead, eyes squinched up tight. He’s such a fucking softy, god, this is J. J. This is the dude who, uh—well, okay, he’s never really done anything to Mike, specifically, except stick his tongue down his throat. Mike’s willing to take half the blame for that, though, because he’s not a complete asshole. But J. J.’s got a fully annoying and grating personality and an almost permanent sneer on his otherwise perfect, handsome face. And yes, Mike did just think that. Goddamn it.