by S. J. Goslee
“Well,” Wallace says.
Mike still can’t read his eyes. Or maybe he doesn’t want to. He drops his gaze and watches Wallace’s chest expand on an inhale.
“Maybe we should cancel, then,” Wallace says.
Mike sort of hates himself for saying, “Yeah, maybe we should.”
* * *
Mike walks his bike next to Serge and Jason on the way home from school.
Jason has his hands in his pockets and has been shooting Mike worried looks. It’s not like Mike doesn’t know why; he just doesn’t want to deal with it.
But of course Serge asks, “So why aren’t we just getting a ride with Omar?”
Mike tightens his hands around the bike’s handlebars. “No reason.”
Serge snorts. “Right.”
Jason pointedly doesn’t say anything. It simultaneously makes Mike want to hug him and punch him in the face.
By the time they reach his house, Mike has decided that he wants to get drunk. Mike wants to get so drunk he can’t remember his name, or Wallace’s name, or Omar’s name. He wants to drink himself into a stupor and not come up for at least three days. That would be ace.
He snags his mom’s bottle of cherry rum on their way through the kitchen and up to his room.
Jason says, “Are you sure—”
“Yes,” Mike cuts him off. “Yes, I’m fucking sure I want to get wasted, Jay. You’re welcome to leave if you don’t feel like watching me throw up all over myself.”
Serge makes a face, but says, “Cool. Count me in.”
“You’re too young to drink,” Mike says.
“Bullshit,” Serge says.
Mike eyes him narrowly. “Your brother will kill me.”
Serge smirks. “I sincerely doubt that,” he says, which is wrong. So wrong, because Wallace will either beat him dead with a baseball bat or guilt him to death with those puppy-dog eyes, the ones that tell Mike that he might’ve broken his fucking heart.
Jason says, “I’m leaving,” but he follows them up the stairs anyway.
“No, you’re not,” Mike says. Jason isn’t leaving, because Jason has appointed himself honorary Omar, and likes to follow Mike around and tell him about all the stuff he shouldn’t be doing. It sucks, but only because he isn’t actually Omar.
Mike is such a sad, sorry fucker. He plops down on his bed and twists the cap off the bottle of rum. It burns all the way down to his stomach, and makes him almost instantly light-headed. He probably should have actually eaten lunch.
“This is a stupid idea,” Jason says, taking the bottle as Mike passes it to him.
“Don’t let Junior have any,” Mike says, and Serge says, “Hey!” but, seriously, if Serge gets drunk on his watch bad things will happen. Mike knows this.
Jason takes a swig, grimacing, and then gives the rum back to Mike.
Mike lifts it in salute and says, “Cheers.”
* * *
“A bake sale,” Lisa says, sitting down next to him in math.
“What?” Mike says. He doesn’t know how he’s conscious. It feels like tiny, rampaging elephants are goring the inside of his skull with their tusks. He’d woken up that morning alone, on the floor of his bathroom—he vaguely remembers Jason telling him he was walking Serge home at some point. He hopes that doesn’t mean Serge was too drunk to walk himself, but Mike’s luck is not that good. He’d barely avoided a lecture from his mom, and his mom usually doesn’t bother lecturing him about anything.
“We’re having a bake sale,” Lisa repeats. “To raise money for a vending machine in the cafeteria.” She purses her lips. “Why do you look like something my cat hacked up?”
“Rum,” Mike says. “Lots and lots of rum.”
“I see,” she says, slow and careful.
“No. No, you don’t,” Mike says. Lisa has been so busy with school and student council and Larson that Lisa hasn’t seen anything at all.
She taps her fingers on the cover of her textbook. “Okay. Want to tell me what I don’t see, then?”
Mike shakes his head, then immediately regrets it. He swallows back bile that burns his throat like acid, and cradles his pounding head in between his hands. “Fuck.”
“Michael,” Lisa says sharply, then mouths later when Mr. Dougherty starts class.
Mike tries to make a break for it at the bell, but his hangover makes him slow, and Lisa grabs his arm and prods him all the way down the foreign language hall to the auditorium.
“We’re skipping class?” he asks. On the one hand, it means he doesn’t have to face Wallace just yet. On the other, he’ll be stuck with Lisa and Lisa’s interrogation face for at least an hour. Crap.
“You’re telling me what’s going on,” she says. They slip silently into the back of the dark auditorium and settle down on the floor by the sound booth. She crosses her legs and pulls her backpack onto her lap. “Now.”
Mike falls back and sprawls out on the floor. There are probably all kinds of gross things happening on the thin rug, but he doesn’t care. He wants to catch some awful disease and die. Maybe then all his cells will stop throbbing. “I told everybody.”
There’s a pause. “You told everybody what?” Lisa asks.
Mike throws an arm over his face. “The guys. I told Omar and Meckles I was dating Wallace.”
“Wait,” she says. “Wait, hold up, you’re dating Rook? When did this happen?”
“Let’s concentrate on the part where—where Omar hates me, okay? How about we do that.” Mike is not going to cry. Mike is super badass awesome and Mike is totally not going to cry.
Lisa makes a pshaw sound. “Omar doesn’t hate you. That’s impossible. You’re seriously dating Rook?”
“Was, I don’t know.” He doesn’t want to worry about that now. Right now he wants to wallow in misery, because his life sucks.
Lisa punches him in the thigh. “Tell me,” she says.
“My life is over.”
“That’s crazy,” Lisa says. “Stop being so pathetic. Now tell me about you dating Rook.”
Mike sighs. “We had sex in his car and then went for ice cream.” It’s still awesome in retrospect, but he can’t shake the feeling that if it hadn’t happened, maybe Omar would still be talking to him. Christ, he hates himself.
“You had—oh Jesus,” Lisa says. He can hear a hint of horrified amusement in her tone.
“Shut up.”
“I don’t see why you’re so upset,” Lisa says.
Mike drops his arm and props himself up on his elbows so he can look at her. She seems genuinely bewildered. “Did you miss the part about Omar?”
“No, but I don’t believe it,” she says firmly.
“You don’t,” Mike says.
“No,” she says. “I don’t.” She shrugs a little. “I bet it’s all a misunderstanding. Or religious angst. You know his dad’s uber Catholic, right? Like a yay-Jesus wilderness survivalist. You know Omar was raised weird, they’ve got dead animals all over their basement. Omar thinks you’re pretty awesome, though. He always has.”
“Well, he—wait, um. He does?” That’s news to Mike, actually. Omar’s the awesome one; Mike’s always felt sort of privileged to hang out with such a cool dude. Huh.
“Yeah,” Lisa says, grinning at him. “I don’t get it either.”
* * *
Dotty and Lenny flank him at the library table he’s claimed in study hall, and Mo takes the seat across from him, leaning back in her chair with one eyebrow raised.
Dotty says, “This is getting ridiculous. Even Mo thinks so.”
Mo nods, and Lenny says, “Super ridiculous.”
“What is?” Mike says, even though he’s pretty sure he knows the answer. Chemistry class had been weird. Mike had pretty much spent the entire period trying to ignore Omar ignoring him and avoiding Wallace’s glare.
“You and Rook,” Dotty says.
The three of them stare at him while Mike tries not to squirm.
Finally, Mo covers her m
outh with a hand and says, voice muffled, “Oh my god.”
Mike ducks his head. He can feel his face burning, even though she can’t possibly mean what he thinks she means by that. It’s not that obvious, or more people would have picked up on it by now. Right?
Except she says, “Oh my god,” again, and, “You’re blushing,” which is unfair, since he hadn’t been blushing until she’d said the first oh my god, but whatever.
“I don’t get it,” Lenny says.
Dotty narrows her eyes. “Wait.”
Mo leans forward, hands gripping the edge of the table, and hisses, “You and Rook.”
“No way, seriously?” Lenny squeals. She sounds delighted. She sounds like all her dreams have come true, because she’s clearly demented.
Mike buries his head in his arms. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Too bad, you totally have to talk about it,” Lenny says.
“Or we could just ask Rook.”
Mike jerks upright. “No.”
Dotty grins evilly. He seriously hates cheerleaders.
“You can’t say anything to Wallace. This is—” He wants to say private, but that isn’t really the right word. He just doesn’t want to make this situation worse than he’s already making it, and letting Wallace think he’s talking about him behind his back, however inadvertent, would suck. “—not a big deal,” he ends up saying.
Mo slumps forward and rests her chin on an open palm. She says, “I can’t believe you’re gay.” She isn’t scandalized, but there’s a hint of disbelief in her voice that gives Mike a vaguely gratified feeling—until she stares at him for a beat too long, and then he kicks her in the shin under the table.
“I’m bi,” he says, because he might as well. He’s not hiding anything at this point. “And shut up.”
Mo says, “Mike—”
“Shut up, shut up, just stop talking, okay?” Mike is going to go motherfucking postal if everyone doesn’t just leave him alone, right now.
Dotty raises her hands, fingers spread. “Whoa, whoa, calm down,” she says, eyes wide.
Mike takes a deep breath that leaves his body strangely achy, and he doubles over, banging his forehead on the wooden table. “Ow,” he says softly. He’s sick to his stomach, dehydrated, there’s a rhythmic pounding behind his eyes, and he has two more hours of school to struggle through, and then five more hours of work at the House of Cheese.
Someone pats him lightly on the back.
He just knows they’re all having a silent conversation about him with their eyebrows.
As long as they’re quiet, though, he’s going to let it slide.
* * *
Work goes about as well as it can when the smell of cheese brings back all of Mike’s earlier queasiness. Luckily, Uncle Louie lets him nap on the couch in the storeroom for most of his shift—it pays to be family. He’s doubly lucky that Mark is working, not Leoni, because he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t live through the night.
At the end of the shift, Mike pulls on his jacket and steps out the front door of the shop, and there’s Wallace, leaning on the metal stand next to Mike’s bike. There’s a pool of yellow from the streetlight, but Mike can still see Wallace’s breath, spooling out like smoke.
“Hey,” Wallace says.
Mike swallows down a groan. He doesn’t feel like dealing with this shit right now, because Wallace is mad at him and Mike is absolutely sure he deserves it. “Yeah?”
Wallace shoves his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. “You got my brother drunk,” he says gruffly. Mike should have been prepared for that, but he kind of wasn’t, anyway. He’d mostly thought Wallace would be angry for the whole brush-off thing Mike’s been giving him.
“Correction,” Mike says after a moment. “He got himself drunk. I told him to go away and leave my rum alone.”
Wallace’s lips thin. “Okay.”
“Yeah, so, is that all?” Mike’s in a really shitty mood, his head hurts, and he just wants to go home and sleep for two days straight. Maybe he can convince his mom he’s got the flu.
“No,” Wallace says, and here it comes. Wallace is going to call Mike on his crap. But instead, Wallace just says, “I thought maybe we could get some pizza. Or ice cream.” One corner of his mouth quirks up.
Mike says, “Are you kidding me?” because he’s stunned. Can’t Wallace take a hint?
Wallace lets out a noisy breath. “Mike, I don’t know what I did, but—”
“You didn’t do anything,” Mike says. “I just can’t—I can’t deal with this right now, okay?” He waves a hand around. “I don’t want to go out with you.”
Wallace’s jaw clenches. “You don’t.”
“I…” Mike stuffs his hands deep in his pockets, looks up at the night sky. The corners of his eyes water, catching on the edge of the halogen light. “Not right now,” he says. He thinks—he knows he wants—something. Something too scary to name, something that he can’t even think about, not while he’s trying to figure out how to fix this thing between him and Omar. Between him and Meckles, even. They’ve all been friends for too long for him to just fuck them over for Rook motherfucking Wallace.
He wants to say all that to Wallace, to tell him wait. But he doesn’t, and Wallace barks out an unfunny laugh, and when Mike looks over at him again, Wallace has a hand over his eyes. Mike watches as he drags it down over his mouth and chin. He sees that the line of Wallace’s lips is hard and the light in his eyes is damning, and Mike thinks that if he doesn’t fix this right now, if he doesn’t open his mouth and say something—anything—to make that expression go away, then he’s never going to get the chance again.
He stays there frozen for fuck knows how long after silently watching Wallace walk away.
* * *
Mike ends up on Cam’s front stoop with his bike leaning against his shins and the nub of a cigarette burning his fingers. He drops it when he hears the door open behind him, and Cam says, “Zack told me you were lurking.”
He sits down next to him on the step, pushing the bike out of the way.
Mike watches the back wheel spin lazily, rubbing at his bottom lip.
“What’s up?” Cam says.
Mike shakes his head. “Nothing. Everything.” My life’s a disaster, he doesn’t say, but he thinks Cam can read between the lines. Cam’s observational skills are usually on par with a rabid squirrel, but he’s known Mike for forever, and there are some perks to that.
“Look, teenagers are all assholes,” Cam says. “Selfish, jerkface douche bags, Mike. You seriously think high school means anything in the grand scheme of things? High school sucks, but once we’re out of here, we’re gone. Fuck everyone else, I don’t give a damn, and neither should you.”
Mike curls his hands over his knees. “Meckles is—”
“Meckles is scared of girls, dude, why would gay guys be any different? Wait him out, he’ll come around.”
“What about Omar?” Mike says. His fingers are cold, and he rubs them harshly over the denim covering his thighs.
“Yeah.” Cam makes a face. “Gotta admit, Omar shocked the shit out of me, too. I don’t know what’s going on there. Fuck, I’m not even sure he knows.”
“Right.” Mike nods. Thinking about Omar’s silent freak-out still makes his chest tighten so hard he feels a little like he wants to throw up. If Omar’s as lost as Cam thinks he is, though—maybe it’s something they can work through.
Cam drops an arm around Mike’s shoulders and pulls him in for an extended bro-hug. With his mouth close to Mike’s temple, he says, “I wouldn’t give a fuck if you only got hard-ons for unicorns, dude.” Then he ruffles Mike’s hair and shoves him away. “Now cheer up, gaybird, it’s not all bad. You’ve got a hot boyfriend, right?”
Mike swallows hard. Not really, he wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat.
He fucked that up royally, too.
eighteen.
Held the week before Christmas, Cam’s annual birthma
s party—a celebration of the baby Jesus as well as the day Cam was born, it says on the invitation—is generally smaller than and not nearly as epic as Cam’s end-of-the-summer blowout or his Halloween bash. This is the first year Mike’s ever dreaded it, though.
It’s at Meckles’ place, because Cam has a thing against hosting his own birthday party, and Mike is the only one out on the back patio. It’s cold out, and Mike can hardly feel the fingers hanging on to his cigarette. He’s not hiding, but he can see how Girl Meckles might think that when she finds him.
She flicks on the yard light before opening the sliding glass door. Music and laughter spill out from where almost everyone is crowded into the living room. Mike can picture everybody in their hideous Christmas sweaters—Cam never lets anyone inside without one—drinking fully spiked eggnog and hot chocolate, and eating Mom Meckles’ gingersnap cookies. Later, they’ll sing carols around Jason’s keyboard. It’s completely lame, but Mike usually loves it anyway.
Deanna has a pale blue parka on, a knit cap pulled down almost over her eyes. She fumbles a mitten off and grabs Mike’s cigarette, taking a quick, shivery drag.
“You know that Shawn has a crush on you,” she says, breathing out, wisps of smoke snaking up over her head.
It takes a slow second for Mike to realize she’s talking about Meckles. He chokes out, “What?”
She shrugs. “Not, like, romantic,” she says, and hell, she could have led with that and saved him the mini heart attack then. “A man-crush. A bromantic crush. It’s cute. He’s had it for years, but you being gay kind of made him freak out about it.”
“That’s so dumb,” Mike says, but he doesn’t really mean it. It’s dumb, yeah, for Meckles to think his, uh, man-crush on a gay or bi dude makes him gay, too, but it’s not dumb in the way that it could actually happen. Look at Mike’s fucking life.
