Content Warnings: Brief sexual content. Discussion of drug use. Brief references to past domestic violence, past sexual assault, past abortion, past gun violence.

"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." -H.G. Wells

240 days sober

Summer hits Westchester County on the same day as my Advanced Placement English exam. For weeks, the Patton campus has been a blustery, muddy mess as April rained its way out, but on Thursday morning, the weather is as close to perfect as it can get. The sun is beaming down from a bright blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds, straight out of a Bob Ross painting. A gentle breeze stirs the new leaves in the trees that line the visitor parking lot, and the air is warm enough that both Travis and I leave our jackets in his car.

“I’m going to strip naked and roll around in the grass in the residential quad,” I decide.

Travis takes my hand, like he thinks he might be able to anchor me down if I take off running. He won’t, but considering how much faster than me he is, he’ll probably catch me before I can commit anything worse than a misdemeanor.

“Maybe don’t,” he suggests. “You have two weeks of classes, one week of final exams, and one week of graduation practice. If you apply yourself, I bet you can make it through this whole month without getting expelled again.”

This is perfect expulsion weather, though. I bet I could get myself kicked out for something really dope this time—not like last year, when it rained for a week straight, and my mom called me the day after my birthday to tell me that Lakewood High had expelled me for excessive absences, and I was so drunk and depressed that all I did was mumble okay, sorry, and roll over on Jamie’s dorm room bed to sleep through the rest of the afternoon. Not like that at all. Because now it’s summer, and I’m better.

Right at the edge of the parking lot, I skid to a stop next to a black Escalade. The windows are darkly tinted, but cracked enough that the quiet strains of Bauhaus filter out. I step closer and peer in over the top of the driver’s side window to find Jamie curled over the gearshift with his face in Ben’s lap.

“Good morning to you, too,” I say, and there’s a brief flurry of chaos in which Ben bangs his head against the passenger window, and Jamie starts choking, and Travis takes a curious peek into the car as well, only to reel back like he’s never seen a blowjob in a parking lot before.

“Jesus, you guys, this is a school!” he exclaims. A bizarre, contrarian impulse to object rises in my throat. Patton is a “school” the same way my gig at Rush is a “job”—sure, maybe it technically is, but it’s not soft or safe or sexless like the normal version would be.

Jamie gets that. He climbs out of his car as gracefully as someone with an obvious semi marring the crisp lines of his well-tailored shorts can. “Please. I’ve done worse things in significantly more public places on this campus. Besides, if you want the benefit of my boyfriend’s tutoring, you’ll have to tolerate my best efforts to distract you all.”

I raise my hand. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t give a shit about studying for this exam, so I’m good with a distraction.” I look around and suggest, “Foursome?”

“Okay, that’s definitely not allowed at school,” Travis says, and he heads around to meet Ben on the passenger side of the Cadillac.

Jamie inclines his head to me and murmurs, “Someone should probably have told us that rule before we had all those foursomes at school.”

“And that one fivesome,” I say, staring across the campus. I can’t actually see Whitman Hall from here, but it looms in my mind like a big, secret-telling, slut-shaming threat. “And that shockingly well-organized orgy we ended up at that one time.”

“That was over at the Ward House, so I’m not sure it counts as something that happened ‘at school,’” Jamie offers.

I’m starting to feel a little nauseated. “That probably won’t make a difference to Travis.”

Jamie leans a hip against the side of his car and takes a sip from the iced coffee he brought with him. He looks decidedly cheerful, which probably means he’s getting ready to say something awful. “Here’s a fun fact for you: Declan Campbell was the one who planned that night, when he and the rest of your new friends were making their case to inherit the Ward House after we graduated. Do you think that would make a difference to Travis?”

“Oh god,” I blurt out. “Please don’t say anything to him. You know how much he hates Declan.”

Jamie’s expression sharpens into something that might, embarrassingly enough, be concern. “Of course. I was only making a joke, but I’m sorry if it touched a nerve.”

“It didn’t.” It did. “Whatever, let’s go.”

I circle around the nose of the Cadillac to where Travis and Ben are discussing the upcoming exam. It occurs to me now that I’ve never gotten to see much of Ben’s summer wardrobe. Our friendship was on the rocks after I returned to Lakewood late last spring, and then I spent nearly the entire summer in rehab. Today, he is wearing a pair of what I assume were once black skinny jeans, which have been cut and ripped off just above his knees. His black shirt is long-sleeved, as always, but in deference to the weather, it’s made of a material so thin that I can see the faintest hints of tattoos and scars when he moves. There are two tiny silver studs glinting on his left nostril, like a metallic spiderbite. It’s kind of adorable, even if that’s probably not the descriptor he’s going for.

“Hey,” I greet him. “Ready to make me pay attention to a bunch of boring lit terms I’ve been putting off learning since last September?”

“God Himself and a fistful of Adderall couldn’t make you do that,” Ben replies. “I’m only here because James said the library at the sister school next door has some of Julia Ward Howe’s original letters in their archive, and we’re going to go look at them while you guys are taking your exam.”

“Julia Ward Howe,” I echo. “She was a poet, wasn’t she? Do I need to know anything about her, other than that the students at her school seem to have a general preference for rum-based cocktails?”

“She wrote ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’” Travis says. He kind of blurts it out, actually, like the study guides he has been obsessing over all week are finally leaking out of his brain. “Her first book of poetry was called Passion-Flowers, and the second was called Words for the Hour, and both were published anonymously. She—”

“Probably won’t even come up on your exam,” Ben interrupts. One of Travis’s eyes twitches. I start rubbing his back in slow, gentle circles, and Ben goes on, “The multiple choice section will provide excerpts from books, poems, and plays, and you’ll answer questions analyzing them. The essay section is basically the same. You’ll have to interpret the themes and techniques used in what they print for you, but you don’t need to worry about rote memorization of author biographies or novel plots.”

“Good, ‘cause I’ve only done, like, a quarter of the reading I was supposed to do this semester,” I say. Travis shoots me a look of pure horror. I smile beatifically at him and hold my hand out to Jamie. “Can I have some of your coffee? I’ve barely had any today.”

“We brought extra,” Jamie says, hopefully loud enough that it drowns out Travis muttering, you’ve had three cups.

Ben leans back into his still-open car door and surfaces with a takeaway tray of three more iced coffees. Travis and I each accept one—mine is at least twice the size of anyone else’s, and the only one that’s still black—as Jamie sets the empty tray on the passenger seat, closes the door, and offers up his hand. Ben takes it, and I notice that his nails are painted with chipped black polish at almost the exact same moment that I realize Jamie is still wearing both of his parents’ wedding rings.

All at once, I want to hug the two of them, and throw my iced coffee on the ground, and maybe cry.

Travis bumps his shoulder into mine, and when I glance over at him, he’s frowning back at me. “Is everything okay? You got a weird look on your face just then.”

“Everything’s great,” I lie, stepping back from the group and heading for the quad. “We should find someplace to sit down. Get this study session going, or whatever.”

“Yeah, just—I mean, it’s your school, you can tell us where to go,” Travis says. I twist to answer him over my shoulder, but before I can get a word out, he shifts his gaze away from mine and says, “Are your friends going to be around today?”

Like I don’t know what that means.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Are you planning to just go sit in the car until the exam starts, if I tell you we might run into him?”

Travis lets out a sharp, short exhale—a sound that might be surprised, might be just frustrated. “I wasn’t asking you about Declan specifically—”

“The way you spit out his name like you taste poison on it tells me you were asking about Declan specifically,” I interrupt. “And I don’t know what to tell you, T. He goes to this school, he lives on campus, so yeah, you’ll probably see him at some point today.”

Except I really, really hope he fucking doesn’t, because the only thing worse than the idea of being in a situation where Declan can see me interacting with Travis is the possibility of being in a situation where Travis can see me interacting with Declan.

After the dorm inspection on Monday, Declan told Javi that we needed their room for a private conversation, and as soon as the door was locked, that conversation melted seamlessly into a full afternoon of achingly incredible fucking. I’m talking about hours where the only things that seemed to exist were his hands wandering my body, my teeth against his shoulder, a sheen of sweat on his freckles, both of us groaning out words and pleas and demands that had us blushing like two jaded sluts shouldn’t even be capable of, coming so hard and so many times that everything started to blur together. It was, without question, the best sex I’d ever had in my life, and I told Declan that when we finally finished. Just blurted it out like a fucking moron. I’d assumed that he was going to roast me for that comment, but instead, Declan goddamn Campbell pulled me in so that we were lying almost nose to nose in his bed, skimmed a shaky palm up and down my back like he was debating whether we should cuddle, and said, “Me, too.”

We didn’t cuddle, for the record. Not really. But the next day, he sent me an exquisitely composed picture—which I was pretty sure he’d taken with his real camera, not his phone, and which might have involved some staged lighting—of the straight line of mottled purple that had been bitten into his V-cut by the edge of his desk when I’d bent him over it, and that felt like it translated to basically the same thing as a post-coital snuggle, in Declan-speak.

Now it’s days later, and the memory of that afternoon has my toes curling under the steel cap of my boots. I don’t know what to do with that feeling, and if I can avoid having to deal with it today, so much the better.

“We can go to the library,” I suggest. “I can request access to one of the smaller study rooms for us.”

“This late in the semester? I’d be shocked if any were still available. All of the time slots are usually taken before breakfast is even over,” Jamie says.

Shit. He’s right. I force a smile and say, “Okay, not the library. We can just stay outside. The weather’s nice enough for it.”

“Sure, but your attention span isn’t,” he shoots back. “Why don’t we go to the common room in Whitman Hall? I can’t imagine it’ll be too crowded now.”

It doesn’t matter how many people are there, though. All that matters is whether I’m about to be stuck in a room with Travis and Declan and all the unspoken tension that entails. But Travis isn’t looking at me right now, and I don’t want to get into this shit. I open up the newest Patton group chat—the one that’s just me, Javi, Declan, Taylor, and Steven, now that Charlie and Sam aren’t hanging out with us. I need someplace to study, I type. I’m in the quad w/ Travis + James + Ben. Any of you wanna sign us into Whitman so we can take over the common room?

If you need three tutors who are all in college, maybe you should resign yourself to failing this exam, Taylor replies.

I send a series of emoji that I’m hoping suggest something uncomplimentary about the size of his penis.

That attitude is why I’m not coming down to sign you in, he says.

They’re not my tutors you asshole, I type. Travis is taking the exam too and Jamie is just here to look hot & take me to lunch after. Ben is the only one who’s actually going to help me study.

Steve & I can sign u guys in! Javi offers. He’s the only person I know who uses exclamation points when he texts. We’re in the common room anyway. We got the good couch near the windows. There’s a string of party horn and confetti emojis. Plenty of room for u 4, it’s just the two of us up here right now.

Good. Campbell, stay in ur fucking room, I don’t trust you near Travis, I send. To my friends waiting in front of me, I say, “Javi and Steven are the only ones in the Whitman common room, so they’re going to come down and sign you in as guests.”

“Feels a bit strange, needing to be signed in as a guest after living in this building for four years,” Jamie says.

He gazes up at Whitman Hall, eyes drifting over the back entrance and the facade of the second story to land on the third floor. Like every dorm on campus, Whitman is a horseshoe-shaped building, two wings of bedrooms and bathrooms connected at one end by a wing of common rooms, utility rooms, elevators, and stairwells. The room that Jamie and I shared for three years is on the opposite side of the building, overlooking a pathway and some benches instead of the quad we’re standing in. Third floor, second from the end of the landing, directly above the room where Charlie Walczyk and Sam Ellis live now. I can’t see into the window from here, and I haven’t been back to it since the day my dad married Ev and I finally returned to Lakewood, but the rotation of incoming students into the graduated seniors’ old rooms means there must be freshmen living in it now. It still feels like it’s ours, though. Like I could go up there right now and let myself in, and I’d find my guitar case under my bed and Jamie’s clothes arranged by color in the closet.

My phone chimes again, and I glance down to finally see that Declan has contributed something to the group chat.

im not in my room. currently @ the gym. who’s travis?

What an asshole. I scroll through my photo library on my phone, find the most nauseatingly cute photo I have of me and Travis—a selfie of us snuggled up in bed last December, me trying to bite the side of his face, and him smiling so brilliantly that my stomach flips every time I look at this picture—and send it to the chat. This is Travis. Fucking middle finger emoji. And if you come back to the dorm before we leave for our exam, you better be nice to him.

no, im gonna bully him, Declan texts. Before I can get pissed, he adds, come on, are we five? like i give a shit who u hang out with.

The rear door to Whitman Hall bangs open, and Steven leans out to shout, “Yo! Instead of doing your assignment or whatever, you wanna go get fries?”

“Yeah!” I shout back.

Travis bumps his shoulder against mine and says, “We have an exam. Besides, it’s ten in the morning. Who eats fries at this time of day?”

“Well, I’m”—Steven slips his dab pen out of his pocket and wiggles it meaningfully—“so I’d eat pretty much anything right now. Not sure what Garen’s excuse is.”

“I’m just like this,” I say. Travis is still eyeing me like he thinks I’m going to turn tail and sprint for the nearest McDonald’s, which is insulting, but not unfair. I lead the way up the front steps to the dorm.

Javi is waiting for us just inside the doors, and he greets me with a smile that is exuberant even by his usual standards. I snort. “Let me guess. You finished your exams already?”

He spreads his arms wide and tilts his head back to bask in the fluorescent light of the lobby. “Spanish was on Tuesday, Calculus was yesterday. I don’t have a single thing to do until Monday.”

“I wasn’t allowed to use my AP French credit towards the two-course minimum because I took it as a sophomore, but you’re allowed to use Spanish for credit even though it’s your first language. How does that make sense?” I demand.

“They don’t know it’s my first language, ‘cause I wasn’t stupid enough to tell them. I just signed up for level two when I was a freshman, and I’ve been getting an A ever since,” Javi says. “Taylor did the same thing.”

Steven nods. “Yeah, he’s been done with exams since noon on Tuesday. But I can’t get too pissed about it, ‘cause mine are today and tomorrow, so I’ve been chilling for a few days now.”

Logically, I knew that Patton’s AP requirements would extend to every student here, even the genuinely stupid ones. That doesn’t make it any easier for me to picture Steven successfully completing any course, let alone an advanced one. “What are you taking?” I ask.

“I have U.S. History tomorrow, and I did German this morning,” he says. He rips his dab pen, even though the desk attendant is about five feet away from us. A cloud of watermelon-scented smoke billows from his mouth a moment later as he adds, “German’s fuckin’ easy though. When in doubt, you just mash a bunch of words together into a single word that kinda describes what you mean. Like freundschaftsbeziehungen.”

“Of course,” Jamie says. “And that would mean…”

“Friendship demonstrations,” Steven replies, like that’s a phrase we use all the time. Or ever.

“Like us signing you into the dorm,” Javi says, gesturing broadly to the reception desk.

Steven smirks. “No, we’re doing that ‘cause ich will sehen, wie Campbell einen Mord begeht.”

None of us respond. None of us can respond, because none of us speak German, although when I glance over, I can see that Ben’s eyes are flickering around like he’s trying to pick out enough word origins to diagram the sentence in his head anyway.

Steven appears unbothered. “If you all spoke German, at least sixty percent of you would have found that funny.”

“Right,” Travis says doubtfully. He bumps his forearm against mine and adds, “Maybe we could go upstairs now? Do some studying in a language we both understand?”

We get ourselves signed in with the desk attendant who barely looks up from his copy of The New Yorker and make our way up to the common room to get comfortable in the best seats Whitman Hall has to offer. The couch near the windows is always sun-warmed and cozy, and the armchairs across from it are perfectly overstuffed. Steven and Javi return to the chairs they previously vacated, and Jamie sits down in another, while I drop down onto the couch. There’s room for Travis and Ben to join me, but they both sink to the floor—near mine and Jamie’s legs respectively—and begin unpacking their backpacks onto the coffee table.

“Most of my schoolwork from senior year is still at my parents’ house,” Ben explains. “I went there last weekend to pick up a few things I thought might be useful. There are some blank practice tests, if you’re worried about the multiple choice portion, or we can just go over the study guide Ms. Markland handed out when I did AP English with her last spring.”

He fans the papers out across the coffee table, and Travis picks up a practice test to flick through the pages. “You kept all of this?”

Ben is silent for a moment before he sits back, his spine against Jamie’s shins, and says, “Uh, yeah. You and I were still dating when I graduated, and I didn’t know if we’d still be together by the time you took your exam, but if we were… I don’t know. I thought you might want them?”

Jamie reached out and rakes his fingers through Ben’s hair. “How hurtful. You mean to tell me that you didn’t expect to be dating me instead?”

Ben turns around and raises his hand to cup Jamie’s cheek, gazing at him with a tenderness that would make me throw up if not for the fact that he says, “No, I expected syphilis to have rotted your brain right out of your skull by now.”

Jamie swats his hand away, laughing, and says, “You’re a menace. Piss off and do your tutoring. I don’t want to talk to you, if you’re going to be a brat.”

“I wasn’t aware you had that standard.”

“He doesn’t,” I say, “or he wouldn’t be friends with me.”

Jamie nods his head in concession of the point, then takes a book from Ben’s backpack. He settles back into his seat and picks up from a place somewhere in the middle of the novel, clearly with no intention of either helping us study or preparing for his own upcoming exams. It’s a commitment to slacking off that I can really appreciate it.

Travis digs into a practice test, and I take one of the study guides. It seems like a better option for fucking off and pretending I’m working. I highlight a few random terms on the page, then pull out a notebook and open up to some song lyrics I’ve been working on for the past few days.

A melody got stuck in my head a few days ago, and I’ve been fucking around with it ever since, teasing it out with my guitar and some wordless humming until it formed the very beginnings of a song I think I can work with. I need to play it for Ben sometime when it’s just the two of us and we can really get into it, because I don’t think I can get the sound I’m looking for with just my guitar. It needs bass, obviously, but there’s a part of me that wants to see how something else would sound in there. Cello, maybe. Something that feels deep and warm and woody and intimate.

The lyrics are another problem entirely. The miserable truth is that I can’t remember the last time I wrote about anything or anyone besides David. Him, his fists, the hospital, my bruises and broken bones, my scar tissue. It’s all a big scab I’ve been picking at since last spring. Last Saturday was the one-year anniversary of the night Dave almost killed me; today is one year since he was formally charged with assault, and I’m trying so hard not to think about it, to focus on this goddamn song instead, because this song isn’t about Dave. I know that much for certain. This song is good, and it’s coming to me in this beautiful synesthetic way that smells like summer bonfires and tastes like whiskey aged in old oak barrels. It feels like a soft flannel blanket and getting what I want.

I scribble out the last line I tried writing, some shit that doesn’t make any sense, and draw a little campfire in the top margin instead. “Hey, Ben?”

Ben makes a noise of acknowledgment, but his head is resting against Jamie’s knees, and he seems to be trying not to fall asleep as Jamie lazily drags his fingers through Ben’s hair. It’s pretty close to how Jamie would look petting his cat, if his cat didn’t fucking hate him.

“How many instruments do you play?” I ask.

“Play well, or play at all?”

“Both.”

He raises a semi-limp hand and starts counting off on his fingers. “Piano, guitar, bass guitar, drums, clarinet. Those are the ones I’m good at.” He raises a second hand to continue the count. “I started learning the violin last summer, but I’m not great. My sister signed up for band next year, and she wants me to be able to help her practice, so I found some YouTube videos and taught myself to play the flute over winter break.”

“I find the timing of these new hobbies rather suspicious,” Jamie interrupts. “Are you sure you don’t just pick up a new instrument out of frustration whenever you aren’t getting laid?”

“How ’bout I fucking dump you so you can find out?” Ben suggests. He adds another finger to his tally. “I have a banjo at my parents’ house that I haven’t played since I was ten, but I think I could pick it up again easily enough.” He drops his hands back to his lap, then immediately raises them again, now with a ninth finger raised. “Wait. Mandolin.”

“That’s a fruit, not an instrument,” Steven says.

“A mandarin is a fruit, you dumbass,” Javi says. “A mandolin is like, a lute.”

Steven shakes his head. “No, he already said the flute was number seven. The mandolin was number nine.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Travis mutters, and he tosses his pen onto the table so that he can bring up pictures of stringed instruments on his phone for Steven. Jamie’s laughter shakes Ben’s head off his knees, and I draw a little mandolin on the corner of my notebook page and say, more to myself than any of them, “I love my friends.”

“Why did you want to know what I play?” Ben asks me.

“Oh. I was hoping you knew the cello. I’m kind of working on a new thing,” I say, gesturing to my notebook.

“I thought you were kind of working on a study guide.”

I shrug. Ben holds out a hand for the notebook, and I shrink back into the couch. “These are just some lyrics, and they suck shit. But I can send you a voice memo of the music later.”

“Ba-dum,” Steven says. Javi and I glance at each other, but a non-word isn’t much dumber than any of the full sentences Steven has said today, so we don’t say anything. A few seconds later, he repeats, a little more urgently, “Ba-dum.”

“If he’s having a stroke, you’re supposed to call an ambulance and then put him on his side with his head slightly elevated to increase blood flow to his brain,” Jamie offers. Instead of moving to do either of these things, he turns to the next page of his paperback.

“Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum,” Steven says, pointing to his phone.

“It’s the Jaws theme,” I realize. Shit. That must mean--

“Dec’s on his way back,” Javi says after he checks his own phone. “At least, I think that’s what his last text means.”

I open the group chat, where Declan has just sent us a new message. It’s a black and white gif of Nosferatu creeping past a window.

What the fuck stay away nobody wants you here STAY AT THE GYM, I started typing as fast as I can, but my ferocity is blunted by the fact that my message goes through at the same time that Taylor sends a picture of Kermit the Frog riding a scooter, captioning it with Dec on his way to make his boyfriend’s other boyfriend cry.

“I swear to god, I’m gonna beat Lewis’s ass the next time I see him,” I say, but Javi and Steven are too busy snickering together and sending more memes to the chat to hear me.

Travis clears his throat and says to me, “It’s not a big deal. You said it yourself, we were probably going to run into him at some point today.”

This was exactly what I wanted to avoid today—Travis feeling uncomfortable around my Patton friends but pretending he isn’t, Declan thinking that discomfort is funny because he’s not the one who has to find a way to fix it.

“I can ask him to hang out in his room until we leave for the exam,” I offer.

Steven snorts and says, “Yeah, and he can tell you to go fuck yourself. It’s not like Dec is good at taking instruction.”

“He doesn’t have to be,” Javi says. Something in his voice gnaws at me, and I look over to find him watching Travis. There’s a dissatisfied twist to his mouth, something that makes him look closer to anger than I think I’ve seen from him before. He adds, “It’s our dorm. If he wants to hang out in the common room, he’s got as much right to do that as any of us, and more right than any of you.”

I can’t figure out if the last part is directed towards me, or just my friends. Either way fucking sucks.

“It’s fine,” Travis promises me. His words provide just enough comfort for me to offer him a tight smile in reply, and then he returns to his practice test.

Across the table, Javi slouches down in his armchair and starts texting furiously. Usually when he abandons a conversation to focus on his phone, he’s talking to Vanessa. Now, though, I glance down at my own lap to see a string of messages arriving on the screen of my cell, pointedly outside of the group chat.

Your boyfriends, your business. All I’m going to say is that this is the first time all semester that you haven’t looked happy at the prospect of seeing Dec

I’ve known him for 4 years and he has NEVER talked about anybody like he talks about you

We’ve only known about you guys for like 2 weeks now but istg he’s been about you since the semester started. I thought he had a crush on you even before you guys hooked up

So if you and Dec are that into each other but you’re suddenly worried about a fight bc Travis is here, maybe Dec’s not the problem.

Footsteps in the stairwell become audible before I can formulate a response to Javi, and I find myself feeling guiltily grateful for that. Getting a lecture from Javi about either of my two half-formed relationships is mortifying, and the idea that he suspected Declan was into me before anything even happened between us is too bewildering for me to deal with right now. I set my phone down on the couch and turn towards the sound of steps.

Declan appears in the common room doorway looking like something out of one of my more embarrassing late-night, “straight jock first time with guy” PornHub searches. He is glistening with fresh sweat, and his shirt is off, dangling from the pocket of running shorts that are slung so low on his hips that they’d probably fall off if he actually tried to run right now. I narrow my eyes at the spot where his obliques disappear under fabric. This motherfucker definitely stripped down and pulled his shorts damn near off right before he walked in here, just to turn me on and piss Travis off. There’s no other reason for him to have all those chiseled muscles on sweaty display right now.

Three distinct hickeys are visible on his neck and shoulder right now, and I have memories, staggering in their vividness, of putting another two on him in places I can’t currently see. When I finally manage to drag my gaze up to his face, he’s staring straight back at me, giving me the sweetest, most wholesome smile his lying mouth is capable of. He’s the most annoying person I’ve ever met, and I’m so fucking hot for him that one of my legs starts trembling. I stamp my boot hard against the leg of the coffee table to get it to stop, and when Javi shoots me a bewildered look, I say to him, “Leg fell asleep.” My shin connects with the edge of the table, which hurts like a motherfucker, but at least it makes the shaking stop. As casually as I can, I say, “Hey, Dec,” and pick up my English notebook again.

“Hey, Garen,” he says. He sounds like he’s trying not to laugh, and I have a brief, but satisfying fantasy about slashing the tires on his truck. Then he adds, “And Garen’s friends,” and I watch every muscle in Travis’s back bunch up like he’s trying not to flinch.

“Good morning, Campbell,” Jamie says. “Will you be joining this charming little study group, or have you already finished your exams?”

“I’ll be back out here after I clean up, but I don’t need to study. My Spanish exam was the day before yesterday, and Studio Art has a portfolio instead of a test.”

“Really? I would’ve signed up for Art, if I’d known I could get out of taking a final exam,” I say.

Declan leans against the door frame and raises his eyebrows. “Do you have some kind of artistic skill you’ve been waiting to surprise us all with?”

I turn my notebook around and tap my little sketch. “Look. I drew a mandolin.”

The corner of Declan’s mouth twitches. “Cute. Definitely on par with the photography portfolio I’ve been working on for three months.” To Jamie, he adds, “What about you? Is your semester over yet?”

“Final exams are next week, but to be perfectly frank, I don’t give a shit,” Jamie says. “I’ll wing them.”

I stare at him. With the exception of a few ill-advised sexual conquests, including the one sitting at his feet right now, James Jackson Goldwyn has never winged anything in his entire life. Travis shifts just enough to give me a meaningful glance over his shoulder, and Ben remains silent, but looks wholly unsurprised by Jamie’s comment.

Clearly, I have missed something.

“Good luck with that,” Declan says, and then he hits me with a look that makes me want to crawl to him on hands and knees. “I’m going to go take a shower. Care to join me?”

Travis moves so suddenly that I have to fight the urge to shrink back in my seat. All he does is put his pen down on the table and stare straight ahead. I can’t see the expression on his face from where I’m sitting on the couch, but I can picture the blankness in his eyes. I’ve seen him get like this when he’s really upset—almost as if he has to shut down entirely to stop himself from reacting. Considering I’ve seen him “react” to things he doesn’t want to hear by throwing textbooks across the room, smashing glasses on tabletops, and tackling guys who were talking shit, I’m grateful that he isn’t saying or doing any of the things he’s undoubtedly thinking.

“Fuck off, please,” I tell Declan. He doesn’t even say anything to that, just grins and pushes away from the doorway to disappear down the hall to his room.

Barely a second after Declan has left our sight, Travis twists around to face me. “Maybe we should go outside to finish these practice tests.”

“Outside where? You mean the quad?”

“Sure. The quad works. Or go back to the car. Literally anything that doesn’t involve me still sitting here when he gets back.” Travis’s blankness cracks enough for him to offer an almost apologetic half-smile. “I know you two are hooking up, and that isn’t really any of my business, but I don’t want to hear him make jokes about it.”

“He won’t,” I blurt out. Travis rolls his eyes, and I probably deserve that, but I shake my head and heave myself up out of the squishy couch. “Seriously, T, he won’t. I’m going to go talk to him.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Travis says.

“If you’re uncomfortable, then yes, I do. Just give me two minutes, and I’ll tell him to cut that shit out, and everything will be fine.”

It’ll be fine. It has to be fine.

Declan is coming out of his room with a towel and fresh clothes when I get to the hall. He opens his mouth, probably to say something slick, but I cut him off before he can get the words out. “I need you to not make jokes about us today.”

“Who was making jokes? I really was inviting you to take a shower with me,” he says.

I shake my head. “No. I’m serious. Travis isn’t comfortable hearing it. I know we’re all in a shitty situation right now, and that’s my fault. I should’ve had Jamie and Ben come straight to my house this morning so that Travis and I didn’t have to be on campus early. But I’m a fucking idiot, so I thought this would be fine, and now I—”

“Garen, stop,” Declan interrupts, and I shudder into silence.

On some level, I think I’m expecting him to offer me physical comfort. It’s what almost any of my other friends would do in this situation. James would take my hands in his and squeeze them tight. Ben would stand up on his toes and wrap me in a hug. Even Taylor would land some kind of reassuring touch to my arm to keep me from spiraling further. But Declan doesn’t look like he cares about grounding me or soothing me. Mostly, he looks like he’s pissed.

“Don’t be mad at me,” I plead.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are, I can tell by the look on your face.”

“You can’t tell shit, then, because I’m not mad at you,” he repeats. His gaze flickers over my shoulder, even though the common room is tucked out of sight from where we stand in the hallway. When he speaks again, his voice is low enough that it feels like he’s telling me a secret. “I don’t like this.”

“I know. Me neither,” I admit. “It’s fucking weird having you guys near each other. But I promise this is the last time I’ll make you—”

“That’s not what I meant,” Declan says, still in that carefully measured tone. “I’ve said all of ten words to your roommate. Today is only the second time I’ve ever laid eyes on him in my life.”

“Third,” I quietly correct. “The first time was laser tag. The second time was when he walked in on us in my bedroom. This is the third.”

“That doesn’t make as much of a difference as you want it to. And it doesn’t make me feel any better about this situation. You’re twitchy and anxious, and you seem desperate to keep me and your roommate apart, like you’re afraid of what one of us might do. That’s the part I don’t like, Anderson. Because I know you’re not afraid of me, and I know that you know I wouldn’t ever do anything you asked me not to. So that makes me think you’re afraid of what he’s going to do, and I’m telling you right now, I don’t fucking like the idea of you being with someone who scares you. Ever. So, if there’s something I need to know about this situation, I think you should tell me now, when it’s just the two of us here to have that conversation.”

It only takes me a couple of seconds to realize what he’s talking about, and then I can’t get my objections out fast enough. “What the fuck, Dec, no. Travis doesn’t hit me. Even in our worst arguments and our nastiest breakups, we’ve never gotten physical with each other. That wouldn’t happen.”

“Okay,” Declan says.

It is, very pointedly, not the same as I believe you.

“My relationship with Travis is…” I hesitate, months of memories and thousands of moments turning over in my mind.

Kisses in Halloween masks, open mic nights, silver rings, that first I love you that he couldn’t make himself say back, small black tattoos, promises and plans for the future, months of unbearable drunken solitude in a Patton dorm room while he moved on without me, a cup of black coffee taken from my hands and smashed on the table in front of me, a steady stream of I hate yous that ended with me back in Dave Walczyk’s Lexus, weeks of physical therapy while my bones knitted themselves back together, begging for second chances and always being told I didn’t deserve them, months of rehab and a single visit, flirting over phone calls and holding my hand in the hallway of Lakewood High, a scaffold swimming under my feet as I watched him kiss someone else, his inability to wait until I’d even sobered up before he dumped me in Ben’s bed and told me he didn’t want to be around me anymore, so many stilted exchanges in drama club rehearsals, tears on my doorstep and in my bedroom as he told me he was going to be a dad, bitter jealousy when we were both with other people, Ben on his knees on the hood of Travis’s car, standing in the bathroom of an urgent care clinic with the taste of vomit still sour in my mouth, trying to smile when Travis told me he hoped he was having a daughter, a whispered if I were single, what else would you do to me? in the dark, a crumpled purple and white pamphlet titled What You Should Know About In-Clinic Abortion, Thanksgiving, Travis kneeling in front of me in a booth on stage in the Lakewood auditorium, dozens of therapy sessions, breakup after breakup for a relationship that never even seemed to be happening, Travis going off his meds and back on again over and over, the porch swing outside our little red house, Omelette, you’re not ready and not until September and this is just a casual thing.

“My relationship with Travis is complicated,” I finally say.

“That’s a cop-out,” Declan says.

“Fine,” I sigh. “It’s a messy, obsessive, on-and-off disaster, just like every other relationship in my life. Dave, James, you, the desk clerk at Omelette’s doggy daycare place. I’ve never had a social interaction I couldn’t turn into a hurricane. But Travis isn’t abusive, and my relationship with him is important to me. Can you please just promise me that if you’re going to come back out to the common room, you won’t say anything shitty?”

“That doesn’t leave much room for conversation, but fine. I’ll play nice,” Declan grumbles.

I’m not feeling too confident about that. I take my phone out of my pocket and check the time. “He and I are leaving for our exam in forty-five minutes. Do you think you can at least go that long without calling him Trevor?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should make it a really, really long shower. Eat up some of the time before you come back out.”

“Fine.” Declan’s voice drops to a low murmur as he echoes, “I’ll make it a really… really long shower.”

I’m going to regret saying that, I just know it. He starts to walk away, but I stop him a with a touch to his elbow.
“One last thing.” I hand him my phone, open to Javi’s last few texts to me. I watch Declan’s eyes as he reads, and there is a moment where they stop moving as he finishes, but still doesn’t look up. When he finally hands the phone back, his face is smoothly expressionless. I ask, “So, how long before we hooked up did you realize you liked me?”

“I never said I did.”

“Sure,” I agree. “Except the thing about you being a massive fuckin’ liar is that I have to do a lot of reading between the lines, and you never said you didn’t.”

His face splits into a smirk, and he admits, “Fine. I might have given it some thought before that first time. I’m a slut, but I’m not stupid about it. I wouldn’t have risked changing the dynamic of our entire group of friends if I wasn’t sure it would be worth it.”

That’s almost… sweet. I settle my hands on his sides, right where the waistband of his shorts meets his skin, and walk him backwards until he bumps gently into the wall next to his door. “That still doesn’t answer my question. When did it start for you?”

“Fuck off. When did it start for you?”

“Easy. My first day on campus, the moment I saw you. You’re fucking hot.”

He laughs and moves in to kiss me, but I dodge it. He tries again, and we end up wrestling against the wall for a minute, me protesting come on, tell me, and him trying to end the conversation with a kiss.

“Oh, Jesus. Since when is that a thing?” says a voice only a few feet away.

I jolt and peer around to see Barrington and Rogers passing us on their way to their dorm room.

“Dunno, but I guess now we know why Campbell ripped your arm out of the socket that one time you caught an attitude with Anderson,” Rogers says, laughing, and he takes Barrington’s punch in the shoulder as his due.

Declan uses that distraction to his advantage and finally hauls me into a kiss. It doesn’t feel like I lost the fight, though, because when the door down the hall clicks shut, he pulls away and says, “It was the first morning you showed up to PT after you shaved your head. Sam asked you why you cut off all your hair, and you said, ‘Because your daddy won’t stop pulling on it while I’m sucking him off.’ Then you shotgunned a sixteen-ounce Red Bull and spent the rest of the training session loudly speculating about what Sergeant Smith’s fursona would be if he had one.”

“Okay, when you lay it all out like that, I sound annoying and unhinged.”

“You are. It’s fucking fantastic.”

We crash into each other once more, a tangle of tongues and limbs. It’s only when he gets a hand up into my hair and finds enough length there to tug at it that I really grasp what he has said. I wrench my mouth away and say, “Hold up, I shaved my head in February. You’re telling me you were interested in me for an entire month before you bothered to do anything about it?”

Instead of answering that, Declan just laughs and smacks my ass and heads off to the showers. I have to take a moment to train the smile off my face before I can go anywhere, and it’s only once I’ve returned to my seat on the common room couch that I realize I’ve been gone way longer than the two minutes I said I needed.

I don’t owe anyone an explanation for who I talk to, I start chanting to myself. I don’t owe anyone an explanation. I don’t owe anyone an explanation.

Fuck it.

“I’m sorry. I thought it would be better to ask Declan not to be an asshole now than wait for him to come back and start being one on instinct,” I explain to Travis. My voice is low, but not low enough to stop Jamie from snorting derisively. I look him square in the face and say, “That was a really ugly noise. Also, you’re rude.”

“Clearly I’m not the only one, if you feel the need to give all your boyfriends stern talking-to’s in order to prevent a fist-fight in the common room,” Jamie says.

Okay, that pisses me off.

“Wondering if Declan is going to say some shit isn’t the same thing as being afraid he’s going to hit someone I care about,” I snap. “He wouldn’t do that. He’s not violent.”

“What, you don’t think setting a car on fire is violent?” Travis asks, and I almost jump out of skin because he says it kind of loud.

Jamie’s eyebrows dart upwards, and Javi makes a short, angry noise in his throat, but it’s actually Steve who leans forward and says to me in a low voice, “For real, dude? You need to get this shit under control.”

Travis rolls his eyes. “Before Declan comes in here and shows me how non-violent he is?”

“No, bitch, before I do,” Javi snaps back. “You’ve been making these passive-aggressive comments since you got here, and you don’t even know—”

“Santos, shut up. All of you, shut up.” Coming here was the worst mistake. I knew it would be awkward to have Travis and Declan in a room together, but I didn’t know it would be outright hostile, and I sure as hell didn’t know it would bleed over into the rest of my usually amiable group of friends.

Fortunately, Javi does shut up. He sinks even deeper into his armchair and starts texting again. This time, he’s definitely talking to Vanessa.

Travis is silent, too, but he hasn’t gone back to his practice test yet. Smart money would be on him gearing up to say something the second Declan returns from his shower. I set a hand against his cheek to turn his face towards me.

“T, I get that you don’t want to be here right now,” I say quietly. “Believe me, I’m not exactly having the best time either. I love you, and I’m really sorry that I put you in an uncomfortable position. But you need to chill the fuck out, okay? There are things we can’t talk about in the middle of the common room. There are things you can’t say to my friends here.”

The frustrating part is that I can’t exactly get into why it would be so bad to talk about this now. Neither Charlie nor Sam are in the common room, but if Travis says anything else about what happened to the Lexus, it’s possible that word would get back to them anyway. Two days ago, Steve texted the rest of our group to let us know that he’d spoken to Sam and found out that Monday’s dorm search resulted in Sam and Charlie both being banned from all of the end-of-year extracurricular activities—namely, prom and the seniors’ day trip to the city during Fleet Week. It’s still up in the air whether either of them will be allowed to walk the stage at graduation.

I’m not surprised that both of them have cut contact with me, Declan, Taylor, and anyone else who takes our side in this whole mess. I’d be even less surprised if Charlie took advantage of an excuse to retaliate.

“How about, instead of any of you saying anything, the two of you go back to preparing for your test?” Jamie suggests. “Ben can quiz you on terms, and if there’s an answer key lying around anywhere, I’d be happy to check those practice tests when you’re done.”

Travis returns to his test without comment.

My phone chimes, and I look down to see a text alert from Declan. I open the message. It’s a video that I am absolutely not going to watch right now, because if the first frame is any indication, it’s a peek at what he is doing during this really, really long shower I asked him to take. I stuff my phone into the couch cushions and fling the study guide across the table at Jamie. “Here. Quiz me.”

“You’d probably benefit more from having him read it to you,” Ben tells me. “You have better auditory recall than anyone I’ve ever met, and it would be nice for you to use it for something other than memorizing Top Forty hits after a single radio play.”

Having Jamie read the study guide to me is actually the perfect distraction from the rest of my thoughts. He’s got a voice like an audiobook dipped in honey, and if I focus on the cadence of his words, it’s easy to get absorbed in this process.

At any rate, it’s probably a better studying technique than doodling in the margins of my notebook was.

When Declan joins the group of us sometime later, he’s carrying his laptop and a stack of papers that he sets down between us on the couch. He doesn’t say or do anything worth noticing—he doesn’t try to flirt with me or kick Travis in the back of the head or anything—just nods a vague acknowledgment towards Ben and then turns to ask Steve something about one of the classes they share. I let myself sink a little more comfortably into the couch cushions.

It turns out that Ben was right about my recall abilities. After one careful read-through of the complete study guide, Jamie starts asking me to define terms at random, and I’m able to parrot each of the definitions right back at him. I even do it in his accent, which earns me a series of increasingly rude hand gestures.

“How do you feel about the essay portion?” Ben asks me once the quizzing is finished.

I shrug. “Okay, I guess. My grades have been decent all semester, but I’m sure there’s something you could critique. Hang on, I’ve got my last essay here somewhere.”

I feel around the sea of papers on the couch for my study guide, but the stapled packet I end up surfacing with isn’t even mine. It’s a list—several pages long—of names, some of which are highlighted. I don’t recognize most of the people on it, but I can pick out just enough to know it seems to be a list of all the current seniors at Patton and Ward. I keep digging until I find my most recent essay to hand over to Ben, then roll the list of names into a tube and poke Declan’s elbow with it. “Is this all the people you’ve had sex with, or all the people you’re planning to murder? I feel like it could go either way.”

“I don’t know which is more ridiculous: you thinking that I want to kill this many people, or you thinking that I’ve fucked this few,” Declan says, taking the list back and thumbing through the pages. “It’s for the yearbook. Student Council asked us to put together a slideshow for the end-of-year awards presentation during graduation practice week. The whole project ended up on my plate, since I’m the only photographer on the yearbook staff who bothers to organize his files, and now I’m trying to make sure everyone in our year gets included roughly the same number of times.”

“Does that mean the entire school is going to have to see my nudes projected onto a giant screen in the auditorium? ‘Cause the only pictures you’ve ever taken of me were the ones I used to get my job as a go-go dancer.”

“Tell your parents that Benjamin and I are requisitioning their tickets to the awards ceremony,” Jamie says immediately.

Ben looks up from my essay to twist around and level Jamie a wholly unimpressed stare. “You realize that if either of us wanted to see a picture of Garen’s dick, we could just scroll back a couple of months in our respective text histories, right?”

“Speak for yourself,” Jamie shoots back, looking a little offended. “He hasn’t sent me anything like that since at least the end of last summer.”

I dig my phone out from between the couch cushions and start swiping through my photo albums. “A complete oversight on my part, I’m sorry. Do you want me to AirDrop them to you, or should I just put them in the group chat?”

“What if you did neither?” Travis says suddenly. When I look at him, he is still hunched over his practice test, carving his answers into the paper so viciously that I’m surprised the tip of his pen isn’t gouging the table beneath. He adds, “I promise it’s possible to go an entire day without getting your dick out for your friends.”

Like you’d fucking know, I want to spit at him. Ben, Alex, even Josslyn goddamn Pryce—you’ve never gotten naked with anybody I didn’t hang out with first, so don’t fucking talk to me about ‘not getting your dick out in front of my friends.’
I’m chewing on the inside of my cheeks to keep myself silent, though. Doc Howard would be so fucking proud if she could see me now. It’s been almost a month since we started working on dialectical behavioral therapy during my weekly sessions, and if me keeping my mouth shut instead of saying something really shitty isn’t a demonstration of interpersonal effectiveness, I don’t know what is. Instead of throwing the full-fledged tantrum that is brewing in the back of my brain, I just put down my phone, and I swallow my angry retort. It feels like a lit match is stuck inside my throat.

Across the table from me, Jamie is staring down at Travis with an ugly twist to his expression, like he wants to say something ten times ruder than I can even think of. Ben, still looking up at his partner, must see the same thing I do, because he snaps back around to face the rest of us and says to Declan, “Do those organized files of yours go back far enough that you can show me pictures of James during an awkward phase?”

Declan’s mouth twitches into a smirk, and he brings up a new folder on his laptop. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“What you can both do is bite me,” James says primly, “because I never had an awkward phase.”

“Of course you didn’t. I’m sure you’ve always been just a stunningly beautiful magnolia flower of a man,” Ben says in his best Blanche Devereux drawl, and the next several minutes are lost in Jamie trying to stomp on Ben’s fingers while Ben tries to steal Jamie’s shoe in self-defense.

All of my nerves are still made out of live wires. The only way I can think to soothe them is by getting some of the tension out of Travis’s posture. I know Travis. He doesn’t want to be part of a conversation full of charming little quips about what a slut I am any more than he wants to be sitting here next to Declan’s feet. Bringing him to Whitman Hall was a stupid idea. Everything is better when all these different parts of my life are separate, and I’m a fucking idiot for thinking he wouldn’t hate having to attend an impromptu roundtable of all the other guys I’ve slept with recently.

I slink off the edge of the couch onto the floor and wriggle closer until I can rest my chin on his shoulder and say quietly, “How’s the practice exam going?”

“Fine,” he says. He doesn’t shrug away from me, so I take it a step further and curl against his back, one arm wrapped around him and my head turned sideways so I can lay my cheek against his shoulder blade. After a moment, his hand settles onto my knee and gives it a gentle squeeze. I close my eyes, breathe in deeply, breathe out. He smells like freshly-ground coffee, like he always does… like he has since the day I met him.

Because Travis isn’t the one who has changed. I am. And that means that if our relationship feels different now, if it isn’t working like it used to, if we went into this expecting to recapture that private bliss of finding home within each other and instead we found jealousy and judgment and a big, snarling question mark where our future should be, it isn’t Travis’s fault. It’s mine.

If I think he’s treating me like nothing I do is good enough anymore, maybe it’s because it fucking isn’t.

“Alright,” Declan says abruptly. I open my eyes to see him practically climbing over me and Travis to make his way to the other side of the coffee table. He drops down onto the floor next to Ben and sets his laptop on the edge of the table in front of them. “There aren’t any pictures of an awkward phase, but there are eight shots of him getting shitty drunk and embarrassing himself at house parties, a video of him participating in the Mr. Student Body pageant as a junior—”

“The what?”

“—and one picture of him in a dress after the lacrosse team lost a bet with the baseball team, but your mileage on that one might vary based on whether you think cross-dressing is funny or hot.”

“Let’s skip over the last one,” Jamie suggests. “I seem to recall showing quite a bit of leg in that dress, and the last thing Ben and I need is to add another kink to the mix. We hardly have enough time to fit them all in as it is.”

Ben leans in closer to the computer and says, “Someone still needs to explain what the Mr. Student Body pageant is.”

“It’s a silly performance the junior class puts on every year,” Jamie explains. “We do a badly choreographed, group dance number to start, then a formalwear runway made all the more ridiculous by the fact that we’re all wearing identical dress uniforms, and then there’s a talent competition with activities we randomly select from a hat a few weeks before. In case it makes any difference, the ticket sales go to charity. Also, I won.”

“Well, sure,” I say, “because we cheated.”

“How dare you,” Jamie says, looking down his perfectly straight nose at me. If he had a glove to throw in my face, I think he’d do it.

“We did! We paid that guy on the organizing committee to rig the talent selection so we’d both draw the activities we wanted,” I say. I cup my hands around my mouth and stage-whisper to Travis, “The cheating was his idea. James doesn’t like being bad at things in front of other people, so he needed his performance to be something he’s actually capable of doing.”

Travis slides his completed practice test across the table and looks at me, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “What did he pick?”

“Ballroom dancing,” Steven answers. “It’s the worst option every year, so the other dudes who were competing probably thought he did them a favor.”

“Yes, except this was approximately four months after my best friend from back home made her debut into Savannah society. I spent most of the summer in dance lessons so that I could escort her without humiliating either of us.” Jamie shrugs delicately. “If you’re capable of a decent quickstep, it seems like a waste not to bring it out when you have an opportunity.”

Ben tips his head back to stare up at Jamie as he says, almost admiringly, “You pretentious piece of shit. Her debut into Savannah society, a decent quickstep, shut the fuck up. Who talks like that?”

“I do, you wretched cunt.” Jamie grabs a fistful of Ben’s hair and forcibly redirects his attention to the computer while Ben gasps out a broken laugh. “Now, are you going to watch this video and be charmed by my elegance, or not?”

Ben starts up the video on the screen, and the muffled sounds of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” crackle out of the tiny speakers.

Travis bumps into my side and asks, “Can I assume you rigged it so you’d get to sing?”

“No,” Declan says. It’s the first word that he and Travis have shared directly all morning, and he wields it like a switchblade, though I don’t know exactly what the injury is supposed to be—that Travis and I have history together, but not as much as I have with Patton and all its boys, or that Travis doesn’t know me well enough to guess the absurdity of the real answer. Either way, the single syllable sounds derisive as shit.

Before he can say anything else, or before Travis can reply, I finish the rest of the explanation. “It was a rhythmic gymnastics routine to Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer.’ Well, routine is the wrong word. It was mostly a lot of dramatic ribbon-dancing and some extremely bad juggling with those big clubs, and then I punted a ball across the auditorium at the freshmen. Jamie likes being good at shit in public, but I have a lot more fun being a goddamn nightmare at people.”

“The glittery, red leotard you wore definitely checked the nightmare box for me,” Javi agrees, and I give him the finger.

“Excuse you, dickhead, it was a unitard.” I add to Travis over his laughter, “I think it might still be in a box at my dad’s house, if you want to see it.”

“I liked the part with the hoop,” Declan says suddenly. I look at him, and he sits back enough to lift one foot and rotate his ankle a few times in demonstration. “I thought that was cool.”

He’s right. That part was cool, and it was the only part I practiced ahead of time. I had a theory that making an ass of myself for five minutes and forty-one seconds—“Like a Prayer” is a fucking long song—would be more entertaining if I punctuated the experience with a few solid tricks, just to keep everyone guessing. The moment Declan is talking about took me two weeks to actually nail; I stretched out on my side on the stage floor, head propped up on one arm, and I raised one leg straight up into the air, a perfect right-angle leg extension, and twirled a hoop around my ankle. It was a pain in the ass to execute, but completely worth it for the reaction. It killed.

“Thanks,” I say now. “The girl who used to sell me ketamine taught me how to do it. And she let me borrow the light-up hoop she brought to raves.”

Declan’s brow furrows. “I thought you only bought from Hayden.”

Jamie is pretty focused on watching himself dance, but he does take the time to make an annoyed sound at the name. I ignore him and answer, “Mostly, but he didn’t really sell club drugs. I got my K and molly from Naomi until she graduated from Ward, and I got my shrooms from that Russian kid who transferred right after junior year. Hayden only sold me weed, coke, and pills. And I think crystal one time.”

Declan shakes his head and takes control of the laptop again as the video of Jamie’s performance ends. “Nah, that must have been someone else.”

“How do you know?”

“Because after this fucking lunatic”—Declan points over his shoulder at Jamie—“shot him in the leg, Hayden was so piss-in-his-pants afraid of selling anyone bad drugs that he stopped buying garbage from locals and found a supplier with better shit, higher rates, and a different inventory.” Declan flicks his hand upward, like he’s answering a teacher’s attendance call. “I don’t sell meth, though. So, whoever you bought that from, it wasn’t Seth Hayden.”

I make a face. “I can’t believe you waited until after I got clean to let me know you were higher up in the drug supply chain than Seth. I could’ve just bought directly from you and saved so much money.”

Declan snorts. “The hell you could’ve. We weren’t friends, I don’t accept blowjobs as payment, and I’ve got a solid ‘tax the rich’ policy when it comes to selling. You would’ve paid me just as much as you paid him.” He stops typing and turns the laptop back to Ben. “Here’s the gymnastics video.”

I finally take the rest of my weight off Travis’s side so he can shift over to watch the video, but he doesn’t move. He’s watching me with a strange, almost startled look on his face, like he doesn’t trust that the person sitting next to him is the same one he’d see on the screen, or the one he woke up next to this morning. My stomach turns over. Whatever is happening, I know I don’t feel good about this situation.

Before I can say anything, Travis starts to repack his backpack and get to his feet. “We should probably get over to the exam room.”

“Definitely,” I say, scrambling up after him. He gives a half-hearted goodbye wave to the rest of the group before heading for the hallway, but I pause long enough to say to Jamie and Ben, “Should we meet you guys here after?”

“I’m not sure where we’ll be. You can just text me, and we’ll find you,” Jamie says. I nod to him, accept a round of good luck wishes over Madonna’s crooning, and chase after Travis.

The first few minutes of our walk over to the academic buildings pass without a word between us. I’m not good at silence. In fact, I fucking hate it. We only make it halfway across campus before I can’t take this anymore.

“Can you at least tell me what’s wrong, so I’m not obsessing over it through this entire exam?” I plead. “I know you’re mad at me, I know I did something, but I guess I’m an idiot, because if you don’t explain it, I’m not sure I can figure—”

“I’m not mad. And we can talk, if you want, but I don’t… I don’t want you to get defensive,” Travis says, which only serves to immediately put me on defense. He continues, “I was just surprised when you started listing all the drugs you used to buy. I knew you did cocaine, and I saw you taking pills after you got out of the hospital. But I didn’t realize you did, like, everything.”

“Oh,” I say blankly. Everything seems like it might be a bit of an exaggeration. I can think of at least three drugs I never got into, and even some of the ones I tried once or twice didn’t make it into the regular rotation.

“It’s fine,” he says quickly, “I know you’re clean, and it’s not like I can get too upset about stuff you did in the past. We didn’t even know each other then, so it’s not… it’s not my business, I guess. But it was weird hearing you talk about who you used to buy your shrooms and heroin from. Or, sorry, your ketamine. You haven’t done heroin.”

I’ve definitely done heroin. Twice.

“Right,” I lie. There doesn’t seem to be much I can say right now, so I just add, “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Travis says. We walk on in staggeringly awkward silence for a few minutes. Then, just when I’m contemplating the benefits of sprinting up a few flights of stairs in the building next to us so I can throw myself off the roof, Travis blurts out, “Kind of funny to think of a freshman dealing all those drugs.”

It’s not funny. More to the point, “I didn’t deal drugs. I just bought them and did them.”

“No, I know,” Travis says. “I was talking about Declan.”

I hate the way he says his name, so casually I almost miss the bitterness in it.

He keeps going. “Until you got expelled, he was in the grade below you, same as me. If he started supplying drugs to your former dealer halfway through your sophomore year, that would mean he had some kind of drug operation up and running within a few months of coming to Patton. He would have been fourteen years old. It’s a little funny.” There’s that word again. He speaks so neutrally, but when I look over at him, it’s clear that he has never found anything less funny. Still, he smiles tightly and asks, as if we’re discussing the weather, “Is that how he makes most of his money these days? Selling drugs?”

There’s an ache spreading through my limbs, a bone-deep tiredness at the idea of having this barely-different version of another argument about Declan. Right on top of that, there’s a bratty, instinctive itch at him asking all these bullshit narc questions.

Instead of answering with the yes-or-no I’m clearly supposed to provide, I pick my words out as carefully as I know how. “Declan doesn’t really make his money in any one particular way. When he used to go back to Nebraska for the summer, I know he did some day labor for a construction company whenever they needed more guys on their crew. He also worked nights as a clerk at a twenty-four-hour gas station and convenience store, and he had a weekend gig as a waiter at a restaurant in McCook, which he said was a nearby city, but I looked it up, and it has a population of like, seven thousand people. Doesn’t count as much of a city, as far as I’m concerned.” Have my delicately selected words turned into rambling? I think so. That doesn’t mean I can stop. “Right now, he has some passive income shit goin’ on. He’s a photographer, and he licenses a lot of his work online through those stock image websites. He also had this kinda brilliant set-up last fall, where he put ads for his portrait photography in the newsletters of all the Westchester country clubs, so he got a lot of business from rich moms who wanted family portraits that didn’t suck ass. Oh, and the student ambassador thing! That’s always been a big part of it. I mean, the school doesn’t pay him directly, but his participation in the program meant they cut his tuition in half for three years, then getting into West Point meant they comped the whole senior year, so he only paid… what’s that, three-eighths of a normal tuition rate? That’s—”

“Jesus, Garen,” Travis snaps. “Does your shitty pyro boyfriend sell drugs, or not?”

“Yes.” I stare straight ahead and keep walking, because if I stop to have this fight, I don’t know that I’ll be able to stop yelling long enough to take this goddamn exam. “Yes, my shitty pyro boyfriend has spent the last four years selling drugs to shitty pyro drug addicts like me. This cute little campus is home to hundreds of bored rich kids who will happily spend thousands of dollars of our parents’ money on illegal substances, and Declan carved out a spot in the Patton-Ward drug market for himself, ‘cause somebody was going to get all that money, and it might as well have been him. He sold a lot of drugs, he made a lot of cash, he put himself through school, he takes care of himself and his friends, and I don’t begrudge him for a single bit of that. And just so we’re clear, it’s none of your goddamn business.”

“Fuck that, and fuck you,” Travis spits. We make it to the door of the academic building, and he shoves it open with a viciousness that makes me flinch. He might be too angry to notice that, though. “You made it my goddamn business when you decided to drag me into this stupid, CW love triangle with a guy who made a profession out of the thing that almost ruined your life!”

“I didn’t drag you into shit, Travis. Two weeks ago, you told me you wanted us to start casually dating again, and you knew I was involved with Declan when you asked me to do that. Hell, you said it was good! You said you wanted it to be a model for how we dated!”

“I wouldn’t have said that if I’d known he was a fucking drug dealer.”

“Oh, piss off. You don’t get to refuse to have a committed relationship with me and then get upset because the other guys I date don’t live up to your standards.”

“Don’t talk to me about standards, Garen. Your boyfriend’s a coke-selling, car-bombing skank. Can you name one thing you like about him, other than his dick?”

“Sure,” I snarl, stomping to a halt in front of the classroom where we’re scheduled to take our exam. “He’s fun, and he’s loyal, and he’s nice to me, and he gets along with all my other friends without trying to fuck them behind my back, and he didn’t make some arbitrary, manipulative rule about not being with me until I’ve been sober for a year.”

“That’s because he knows you can’t do it!”

The sentence rings in the hallway between us. I don’t know if Travis expected me to talk over the echo, or if he, like me, didn’t realize we were yelling until there was silence.

We stand there, still, staring at each other.

“I didn’t mean that,” Travis says after too long a pause for me to believe he’s telling the truth.

“Okay,” I say, I think. My lips are numb, and my head feels fuzzy, so I can’t be too sure the word really makes it out.

“It came out wrong,” he insists. “I’m sorry, you know I don’t—what I meant to say was that Declan doesn’t… he doesn’t care about your sobriety, about what’s best for you. If he did, he wouldn’t still be dealing.”

“Okay, I repeat. Travis looks panicked and so, so regretful, and I can’t deal with that right now. I need to get out of this conversation, away from the buzzing inside my skull and the dull, distant shattering inside my rib cage.

Don’t cry, I tell myself. Don’t you dare fucking cry right now.

Travis looks like he’s gearing up for another apology-explanation, so I turn quickly to wrench open the classroom door. “Okay,” I say for a third time. “We can talk about this later. After the exam.”

I hunch down in the front corner desk where I always sit—A for “Anderson” can be such a pain in my ass—and wait in such absolute, uncharacteristic silence that I can feel my classmates peering around at me in alarm as they enter the room one by one. Travis hovers at the front of the room until the proctor joins us and he can introduce himself, and then he gets sent to the exact opposite corner of the room in the only open desk.

I make it through the entire multiple choice section and most of the free response section without incident, and without the feeling fully returning to my face. Halfway through the introductory paragraph to my third essay response, my vision starts to blur. I blink a few times to clear it, but all that does is shake the wetness loose from my eyelashes. A fat, salty tear lands right in the middle of William Shakespeare’s name, blurring the ink. Another lands on the paper, then another.

Two hundred and forty days clean and sober, and I’m only just now realizing that every single one was a surprise to the person who I thought loved me and understood me and believed in me more than anyone else.

​I try to touch the trembling tip of my pen to paper again, but it tears right through one of the damp spots. Fuck it. I put my pen down and don’t write another word. 

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