by L. A. Fields
So Noah said goodbye to Ray and promised himself that they would only spend a week apart; that’s what made him get through it without any whining or blubbing. He was being the most dramatic of everyone involved with the change. Even Ray’s parents didn’t linger over him as much as Noah did, and this was the flight of their own baby nestling. But then, Noah judged them against his own mother, who looked wound up with worry every time he saw her in the days before he left.
“I’m sorry,” he finally blurted to her after she turned off the TV for the night, on his last night at home. Noah had collected a packet of transcripts and a stack of recommendation letters from one of his professors that day, and there was nothing left between him and Ray but the drive.
“Hi, Sorry, nice to meet you, I’m Faye,” was her response. She was smiling, but her face drooped around it. Noah didn’t say anything until she broke the quiet spell her sad joke had conjured. “Don’t be sorry for me. It’s my job to feel sorry for me, but I feel happy for you,” she told him.
Noah nodded, even though he didn’t believe her. “Okay,” he said.
“You’re going to be so happy once you get there, all this sorry stuff will go away, trust me.” And that, she was actually right about.
The drive to Michigan was a numbness. It was four pure hours of near-silence, with nothing but the hum of the tires on the road for Noah to hear. He couldn’t stand the thought of having the radio on, of listening to idiotic pop songs and crass advertisements on such a momentous occasion. Instead he let his accelerator foot madden him with its tension, and he let his worries and fantasies repeatedly stomp through his head. Surely Ray would get sick of him when they actually shared a room, or maybe he’d already realized how much he enjoyed Noah’s absence after just one week alone. Noah let the thoughts repeat without fighting them. He was ready to turn right around and drive home if his pessimism all came horribly true.
He parked first near the visitor’s center, then again near the admission’s office, and for the last time where he actually belonged, in his own dorm’s lot. He left his car, full of his books and clothes and technology and vitals, so he could locate his and Ray’s room and see if he should even bother to unpack.
Noah spent almost a full minute fitting his key in the lock quietly before gently turning the handle. He wanted to keep his presence secret for as long as possible. He was right in this urge, because he managed to step inside without waking up a passed-out Ray, still sleeping with his socks and belt and watch on, and with a breath that stank of alcohol when Noah crouched down to be on level with his friend’s face. There was sweat on Ray’s upper lip, and drool resting beneath his slightly parted mouth, and the hair that was usually combed back perfectly, nearly compulsively over each ear, was that morning matted greasily on his forehead. And still he looked good to Noah.
Noah wanted to stroke the hair back into place, but instead he pushed Ray’s shoulder with the palm of his hand, shifting him out of sleep.
“I guess you’re not helping me with move-in,” Noah said, surprised at how little it actually bothered him. It would be more fair after packing Ray up himself that Ray should pay him back with some unpacking, but he was just happy to find Ray so disheveled, so off-guard. That made him feel more on par with his buddy again, especially after all his concern that Ray might have magically outgrown him in just a week away at college.
“Yugg,” or a noise that sounded like that, was all Ray had to say for himself. He put one hand over his own eyes and forehead, probably resisting the bright summer day blasting in through their one drapeless window. He put his other hand over Noah’s whole face, weakly trying to block him out too, to cram him away, but there was no real push in that movement.
Noah smiled, and all the worry and tension that had delivered him to Michigan disappeared.
He had known it on some level all along: Ray wanted him here.
9
RAY WOULDN’T CHARACTERIZE HIMSELF AS a heartless person, but he knew what he was feeling as that first semester in Michigan progressed, and he knew what he was doing to deal with it; he was peeling away from Noah, and he was setting up escape hatches all over campus, ready for the first open window from which he could take flight.
Noah stayed the same. That isn’t a bad thing, having a true core self that never changes. People who don’t pretend to be someone they’re not, not even in college, have a certain dignity that can’t be denied (though they’re probably duds at parties). But everyone else went to college to explore themselves, to find out what they were capable of, and that’s what Ray liked about college. Ray took this new stage as an opportunity to perform, and far from being an effective straight man, Noah was more like a pro wrestling heel, a saboteur.
“That’s not the way it happened,” Noah would say bluntly whenever Ray tried to embellish any of his crimes for an audience. He’d pop his big eyes halfway out of his head, searching for an answer he should have already had. He had no sense of art, this kid, no craftsmanship when it came to words, and he knew so many more words than everyone else put together! That knowledge was practically wasted on Noah.
He was scaring the civilians away from Ray, all the normal students attending the U of M fresh out of their hometown high schools. They thirsted for stories of Chicago, for someone bright and bold like Ray. Who doesn’t love a cheerful criminal? History and politics are full of them! Fame or infamy, it didn’t matter, everyone had the same quality of legacy, but Noah didn’t think of the big picture in that way. Noah was Watson to Ray’s Holmes, a horribly literal magician’s assistant who revealed the mechanism behind every trick. He plotted the course of his life, and he was right about having the talent for details and contingency plans that Ray lacked, but what good is all that work and effort if it couldn’t net him any attention?
Ray lived with Noah well (Noah was neat, but not yet a nag about it), and he still enjoyed Noah’s company, their talks. Every week they managed to have a friend-to-friend debriefing about campus life: the sad qualifications of some of the adjunct professors, the sexual exploits of the TAs and the tenured (those tiers were the most lascivious in all of college), or the mental density and sluggishness of their so-called peers.
“Can you believe these people are all older than us? They’re such children.” Noah was particularly amazed now that no one knew he was still an infant babe; everyone here assumed he was a young-looking freshman, no one knew he ought to be in junior year of high school (same as Ray), and was instead a top-grade sophomore in college (unlike Ray).
“So many of them don’t even do the reading for class, let alone read for pleasure,” Ray agreed. “I’m surprised they get their shoes on the right feet every day.”
“Oh, you’ve met some in shoes? I’ve seen so many walking around with filthy bare feet, I’m almost worried about their toes come winter.”
Ray snorted, found his sip of soda leaking painfully out his nose, and no one else in his life had ever made Ray laugh like that. Noah was still his best friend.
And yet: who says you should live with your best friend?
The true intention to move started with Joey, a guy who would eventually go by Joseph like his parents wanted him to, and with a job and a wife they approved of, but in college he was still going by Joey like a boy. This guy liked the idea of Ray, liked to talk to him about moving to Chicago when Ray knew Joey’s family had filled out and submitted his college applications for him. He didn’t have the personal motivation to do anything he wasn’t told to do, and even Ray couldn’t tell him to try living in Chicago; a novice thief like Ray still considered Joey an easy mark. In fact, Ray once told him he looked like a Mark, though of course Joey didn’t get the joke, even after it was explained to him. Noah thought it was funny.
Joey asked if Ray knew where he was rooming next year, did he want to get a four room suite-style dorm with Joey and his friends, because they were looking for their fourth. The reason for this: Joey’s roommate was moving into a frat house the next
year. A fraternity intrigued Ray, he had vaguely considered that option because his father was in a frat and would like to have his son join one too. When it occurred to him again, Ray realized that a frat might be the best way to put just one or two walls between him and Noah, and still keep him as a friend.
Ray turned down Joey, and Joey was actually pretty sore about it, because he’s the one who started a rumor that Ray and Noah were gay together, that the rejection was all Ray’s fault, his damage, his secrets. That added to the dissatisfaction Ray had for his living situation, because Noah didn’t help put out that rumor at all. Their crime-for-coupling pact was suspended in Michigan, since they were both busy with classes, but Noah still tapped his shoulder instead of saying, “Hey, Ray,” and Noah sat right next to him no matter how many chairs or how much bench was up for grabs, and Noah was jealous about people liking Ray too much—he’d had conversations with boys and girls alike that were basically him telling them, “You don’t know Ray like I do.”
It certainly didn’t help that the only time Joey came by their dorm room looking for Ray was on one of the few instances that Ray and Noah woke up in the same bed together. With Ray’s drinking, sometimes Noah would join him for the night without Ray noticing, or Ray would just land on the first bed he found and not care whose it was (and Noah certainly wouldn’t correct him), and that was the story he tried to tell Joey when it was obvious that Ray had stumbled to answer the door from the same bed with a shirtless Noah in it: “I was so wasted, I must have fallen into the wrong bed by mistake when I passed out.” But Joey didn’t want to believe that bit of fabrication after he was turned down as a roommate, and that excuse certainly didn’t explain why Noah would have stayed in the same narrow bed with a blacked-out Ray; Noah didn’t drink that hard. People around campus were getting way too close to the truth about them, and so Ray started looking into frats.
Ray began wheeling and dealing until he could find a house that would let him move in without a year of pledging or hazing or whatever they do to the freshman. He wasn’t a freshman, and he was capable of paying for the privilege of moving in early, or of replacing any undesirable member they had as soon as possible. It worked out for him: the Zeta Beta Tau house was on disciplinary suspension, they’d had to move their chapter off campus into a rented house, and they needed money as much as they needed well-behaved members. Why not the rich boy pegged to be the youngest person to ever graduate from the University of Michigan? That might just get ZBT off the Greek society shit list. He was in.
All he had to do was break the news to Noah.
10
NOAH TOOK THE NEWS BADLY, but gradually.
He believed it when Ray said, “This isn’t a me-and-you thing, this is a me getting serious thing.” His sub-reasons: (1) a fraternity looked good to schools and employers, it makes a guy look like a friend and a joiner; (2) Noah was just too fun, Ray couldn’t concentrate on his studies with his best friend right by his side; (3) his parents and his older brother were really pressuring him to get more of a social circle, “and you know why that is,” Ray concluded with. Noah had sat quietly during the whole presentation, barely noticing how much the bright winter day outside made their little cell of a room look all the less impressive.
“Yeah,” Noah said, “those rumors about us.” They were becoming rumors about Noah more than Ray at this point, because Ray was out trying to combat them. He’d even gone to his older brother for advice on it, and the brother enlisted their parents in an anti-Noah campaign. Noah knew all about it, because he and Ray really were best friends, they didn’t keep secrets from one another, except for this move-out idea. Ray already had it all set up, which means he’d been planning it for weeks, maybe since before the Christmas break. He couldn’t even last one semester with Noah without looking for something better.
“Now don’t start eyeing my side of the room yet,” Ray said, switching from his bed to Noah’s, where he could put his arm behind Noah’s back and lean close to him, a half-gesture between stiffness and a hug. “They don’t have a space open in the house until next year, and probably not until the Spring term, because they’ve got one of those loser fifth year seniors still trying to finish a thesis. He might be out sooner than Spring, but he can’t stay any longer, so that’s when I’ll move. Plenty of time left for us.”
Noah was convinced by Ray for months. The rest of their year was pleasant if hampered by Ray’s new policy of chaperones, of never being seen alone in public together. Noah committed to another year in Michigan because at least it would begin with him and Ray living together, and in the semester it took to move Ray over to the ZBT house, Noah even tried to join a fraternity himself. He was very briskly rejected by them—those rumors about his sexuality were the most likely culprit—Noah was as unpopular as ever. It didn’t bother him as long as he had Ray, but how long was that? A year passed between when Ray announced leaving and when he actually did it, but it felt like no time to Noah at all.
Ray’s moving out coincided with a dangerous turn in Faye’s health. Every day after his sixteenth birthday was a bad day for Noah.
The day Ray moved out all his new friends came into their room, cast judgmental eyes over Noah, over his overabundant books, and his wall of post-it notes in Sanskrit (to keep their contents secret from prying eyes), and Ray didn’t even hug him goodbye, didn’t even look at him, not in front the guys. He murmured, “See you around, dude,” which is not something he’d ever called Noah before, and left his side of the room hideously stark and empty.
The day his father called Noah and told his son he had to come home during winter break, during every break, because they didn’t know how much time Faye had left. Her kidneys were failing, she was going to dialysis, she was not high on the transplant list because she was too old and too weak, her body would just quickly wreck up a replacement organ that might save another person’s young life, so she wasn’t going to get one.
The day a blizzard hit and Noah was trapped in his single room alone for three days with nothing but an unapproved hotplate to keep him warm, knowing that Ray was in a large heated house drinking with his brothers.
The many, many days Ray was suspiciously too busy to hang out with Noah; couldn’t grab dinner, see a movie, meet at some crowded event (Noah even offered to see sports if his piece of bleacher could be next to Ray’s), but he always had plans to do something else. One day he even claimed he had to study, and that is when Noah felt truly and personally injured. That was a lie, and it was a sloppy one, and if Ray cared so little about Noah that he couldn’t even make the effort to lie properly, then it really was his greatest fear come true: Noah left his mother in her final days for someone who left him in return. If he had any religion in him, Noah would have thought he was being justly punished. Instead, he did what Ray would have done: he stalked with the intention of ambushing his friend, so that at least the breakup would be formal.
Like Ray had once followed him through Chicago’s snow with cheer and promises to get him to Michigan in the first place, Noah took after Ray’s plumage in hopes of catching him alone.
Maybe Ray wasn’t lying about being busy all the time, he really was surrounded at all hours of every day, in his room, in the dining hall, to and during and from every class. The way Noah finally got him alone was by being a terrible stalker. People noticed Noah’s skulking, mentioned it to Ray, and because of that Ray detached from his acolytes and came to Noah on his own.
Noah left his room for a trip to a sandwich shop and a stop by his mail box, and on his way back to the dorm, Ray was suddenly in stride beside him, eating a sandwich from the same shop Noah had been at, with his own mail sticking out of his coat pocket. Noah couldn’t stop his eyebrows from lifting in surprise. He was happy that Ray had snuck up on him so carefully, but he desperately hoped it didn’t show on his face.
“Like the great detective, if you see no one, that is what you can expect to see when I follow you.”
“What you may expect
to see,” Noah corrected him, “and I don’t know why you always think you’re Holmes and I’m Watson. I’m the weird, isolated, painfully smart one, you’re the one with all the friends, who tells the best stories, because you’re the best liar.”
“Well, you’re a terrible shadower like Watson, and you’re clearly mad at me.”
“What could I be mad at, I haven’t seen you since you moved out.”
“You’ve seen me, you’ve followed me.” Ray was paying Noah back for correcting him.
“You know what I mean,” Noah said, reaching the door to the room they once shared and getting his key out of his pocket.
“Got a new roommate yet?” Ray asked.
“Of course not,” and with that answer Noah was pushed inside, and Ray pulled the key from the handle and locked them both inside.
“The way you’re acting now is part of the reason we aren’t roommates anymore. You’re making this look like the falling out of a pair of cocksuckers.”
“See, you said your reasons for leaving were all about you, not me. And I didn’t invite you in. And we never did stuff like that.”
“Why? Because you didn’t want to? Or because you didn’t have enough to trade for it yet?”
That made Noah quiet because he didn’t exactly know the answer. In his silence, Ray came closer, and took everything they both still had in their hands, and moved all that stuff to the empty desk. He pulled Noah into a hug, and even kissed the side of his neck in apology.
“We’re still friends,” he told Noah, and Noah believed him. Again.
1
RAY RETURNS TO CHICAGO AFTER his Chernobyl semester, knowing that his lack of Noah was the main culprit. But how to win him back? There is a chance that Noah will still take Ray any way he can get him, but wouldn’t that be pathetic on both their parts? Ray stripped of his sheen, picking up something he once threw away, and Noah too desperate to even care that he’s a consolation prize? Surely one of them would find enough dignity to walk away if Ray makes this approach without care.
