Middle of Somewhere Series Box Set

by Roan Parrish

  I’m lying in bed with another guy’s come all over me, I texted Will once I was back in my room, tipsy with alcohol and overwhelmed by the night, the only light my gently glowing phone screen.

  Still no sign of my new roommate, and I was glad I’d have a little time by myself. As freaked out as I’d been before, and as lonely, I didn’t think I could’ve stood facing a stranger while trying to strip off come-stuck clothes.

  It was a lie. My text. I’d taken a shower as soon as I unstuck myself. But still.

  I stared at the screen as it dimmed halfway, any hope of a response fading with it. Fuck, I couldn’t believe I actually sent that text. I didn’t know what I was hoping for. That it’d make him jealous? Punish him for not wanting me? Both were ridiculous in light of our earlier conversation. God, there should be a function where you can unsend a text for thirty seconds like there is in e-mail.

  Just as I buried my head under the pillow, my phone chimed. My breath came quicker as I looked at Will’s text.

  That’s exactly what you should be doing in college. Play safe, kiddo.

  I squeezed my eyes shut as if I could unsee the words. Obliterate them. But the hollow feeling gaped in my stomach, and I curled around it, pulling the covers up though it was warm in the room.

  The extra-long jersey knit sheets from the bookstore smelled of the plastic package they’d come in. Not comforting at all. No history of sleep or relaxation in their fibers. Just the reminder that they were brand-new, with nothing to make them inviting except time.

  3

  Chapter 3

  September

  I startled awake to the train whistle blowing and wondered for the millionth time why I’d chosen that as my alarm and yet, like always, was too asleep to do anything about it.

  Charles was perched on his desk chair, muttering furiously at his computer as usual. For the first week or so that we’d lived together, I’d never seen Charles sleep. I assumed that he just went to bed after me and got up before me, but I legit had a moment once, waking in the middle of the night to find him pacing his side of the room restlessly, where I’d wondered if he had some kind of never-sleeping vampire shit going on.

  His trackpad clicks got increasingly more aggressive, and his bony shoulders hunched closer to the screen.

  “Are the interwebs hurting you again?”

  He wheeled around like he was shocked to see me there, though my alarm had blasted a train whistle through our room not thirty seconds before. He did that a lot: seemed to forget I existed. But it was kind of nice. Like he was so used to me he could forget I was there and just be. I, on the other hand, never forgot about Charles because he practically vibrated this manic energy, and I could feel it from anywhere in the room.

  He’d blustered into the dorm room the day after I’d met Milton, a huge lumpy duffel bag strapped to him and four boxes stacked on the seat of a wheeled desk chair that he was pushing like a dolly. He’d stuck out a hand to me, nearly overbalancing the chair and boxes, and introduced himself, explaining that he was supposed to go to MIT but had changed his mind at the last minute—for some reason I’ve never fully understood—and now he was here, only yikes, he didn’t have a room and so they’d put him with me.

  The whole explanation took place while he was holding my hand, like he’d forgotten we were touching or that hands even existed. He made the kind of eye contact that would’ve been creepy if he’d seemed douchey, or intimidating if he’d seemed overconfident, but was just intense in the way that everything about Charles was intense.

  He was tall and far too thin for his frame, bony shoulders poking at the seams of his T-shirts and knobby spine perpetually bruised from sitting folded into lecture hall seats. His hands and feet looked disproportionately large and his Adam’s apple tested the boundaries of his skin when he swallowed. When he gestured, his long arms and bony hands looked skeletal and precarious. But in front of the computer, hunched and intent, he looked completely at home, just as he did walking down the streets in expansive, long-legged steps, his clothes billowing around him like some kind of Arthurian cloak.

  His curly brown hair was always frizzy and mussed because he pulled on it, and he had these permanent dark smudges under his eyes, but when he talked he was animated, and I had the suspicion that he might be some kind of secret genius. He’d said he wasn’t uncommonly smart, he just went to a good high school, had basic reasoning skills, and didn’t allow his personal beliefs to get in the way of reason, which made him seem smarter than most people. But I didn’t know. All that seemed pretty uncommon to me.

  “Someone on Wikipedia has written, ‘the tunnels beneath Paris are almost catacombic,’ which number one, is not a word, but even if it were, what would that ‘b’ be doing exactly—I mean, would it be said like cata-comic? Because that’s strangely the opposite. But mostly, they’re not catacombic. They are catacombs.”

  Charles was a near-compulsive Wikipedia editor. His expertise was vast and shallow.

  “Would you ever say ‘honeycombic’?”

  “I wouldn’t, no.” He sounded disgusted.

  “Well, how would you… adjectivize it or whatever? Honeycombish? Honeycombesque?”

  “They just are catacombs. No adjectivizing required.”

  Sometimes Charles was also super literal.

  Milton pushed our door open without knocking, took one look at me, and rolled his eyes, tapping his watch. We had Intro Psych lecture together, and he always came by to collect me because I sometimes fell back asleep after my alarm went off.

  Charles ignored Milton in the passive way he mostly ignored everyone—as if they hadn’t quite intruded into his headspace yet—and Milton clapped him on the shoulder like he always did, and then left him alone.

  Milton was good like that. He didn’t take shit personally. Lucky for me, because he was basically the best friend I’d ever had even though I’d acted like a total lunatic after we’d hooked up the first night here.

  I had been all, Oh my god, Milton, that was amazing, but I can’t be your boyfriend because my heart belongs to another, and he’d been all, Omigod, Leo, I don’t want to be your boyfriend, I was just horny as fuck and wanted to jerk off with you on a roof under the stars and now we can be friends because we barely even have chemistry really, okay?

  Well, maybe it hadn’t been in those exact words, but that was basically what had happened.

  We’d tried an experiment of kissing once more a few weeks later in the library, and both started laughing. I didn’t really get it, because that night on the roof, I had been legit into him, and it was super hot, but now… I just didn’t think of him that way, I guess. He said that was normal, and I believed him because if I’d learned anything about Milton over the past month, it was that he was like a Sex + Love Genius. He just completely got it.

  I dragged on yesterday’s jeans and a not-too-dirty T-shirt and jammed my feet into my Vans in about fifteen seconds, as Milton looked on, half amused and half silently judging me. He didn’t say anything, though, because my total lack of fashion meant we were on time for Psych and even had time to stop in at his preferred coffee shop.

  I texted Daniel, like I did almost every time I was in a coffee shop, and told him I was ordering The Daniel, which is what the coffee shop in Holiday christened the drink he always ordered: three shots of espresso in a large coffee. He texted back a string of random letters that culminated in an emoji of a grimacing head making a thumbs-up sign. I suppose that meant he’d finally gotten a smartphone.

  I saw the green ellipsis that meant he was trying to write something else, but after it stuttered a few times, it finally went away. I could practically see him, messing with the new phone to try and explain what he meant to type, making more nonsense, and finally giving up in frustration, most likely throwing the phone down on whatever surface was nearest.

  He’d probably forget where he tossed it and wander around later looking for it and pulling his hair out. Rex would ask him when he’d used it l
ast, and he’d remember that it was texting with me and that he’d gotten pissed. Rex would go to wherever he was and pull it out of the couch cushions or the stack of books or wherever he’d thrown it and hand it back to him with that soft look he gets only for Daniel. That look that says I love all these small things about you that are just you but mean something to me. Maybe he’d slide the phone into Daniel’s pocket and kiss him.

  Fuck, I missed them.

  We rolled into Psych just as Marin, the TA, was setting the professor’s notes on the lectern and adjusting the PowerPoint presentation. I was a little bit obsessed with her because she never smiled. Professor Ginsberg was pretty amusing and joked around, and Marin was just stone. I mean, maybe she’d heard all the jokes before, but still. Not even a polite, indulgent yes-I-acknowledge-humor quirk of the lips. She was totally nice in discussion section—even cracked jokes herself, so it wasn’t like she didn’t have a sense of humor. But still, no smiles, even when we laughed. It was like she was playing some kind of secret game and if she smiled it meant she lost.

  Thomas waved us over excitedly, having saved us seats. Thomas was always early and liked to sit directly in the middle of the classroom, like it was a movie theater and he wanted the best view. I wasn’t sure why he bothered since he drew little comics in his notebook throughout the entire lecture.

  “Hey, guys!” Thomas shuffled his stuff aside so we could sit down. “Did you see Marin’s shoes?” Everything Thomas said sounded like there was an exclamation point after it.

  I squinted to see that stone-faced Marin was rocking some Vans with kitties on them or something.

  “Are they cats?” asked Milton, also squinting.

  “They’re amaze!” said Thomas, turning to his notebook where he spent the next fifty minutes drawing a comic about a cat that had wings like Pegasus as Professor Ginsberg talked about Emotions. She said “capital-E emotions” to designate it as a topic. Which cracked me up, because of course I knew emotion was psychology, but the idea that we were studying emotions—going to school to learn about feelings like some alien species studying how to be human—just tickled me.

  Not that it’d go amiss for some people.

  I’d spent a solid week sulking over Will’s rejection. Then I randomly woke up super early one day, as I sometimes had in Holiday, and walked out into the morning. I found myself in Washington Square Park, strolling along the sidewalks as the city woke. I sat on the edge of the fountain, watching as, in the middle of this sprawling city, the water spewed upward, caught the sunlight, and fell down again, recollecting itself only to do it all over again.

  I watched, and I started laughing. At myself. Because I was here. Here. In New York City. Taking classes at NYU. Sitting smack-dab in the middle of Washington Square Fucking Park. And I was missing it. I was missing the whole damn thing because I was hung up on Will. It was, I told myself, basically the stupidest thing ever.

  It felt so good to laugh. I hadn’t done much laughing over the last year, what with missing Daniel, feeling abandoned by Will, and any enthusiasm for my classes at Grayling being crushed within a week of the semester starting. And as I sat there, grinning like an idiot, people who walked past me smiled back. I thought about what Will had said about not smiling at babies and their parents getting so offended, and I smiled even bigger.

  He’d been right. I’d tried it a few days after he had mentioned it in a twisted attempt to feel closer to him, though I’d broken at the last minute and smiled at the baby anyway. The baby’s mom had expected me to smile at her kid, and when I hadn’t, it was as if I’d broken some social law.

  But, though Will was right, his point wasn’t mine. It felt amazing to smile at someone and have them smile back. And I could tell from the way people smiled back at me that morning that they thought so too. After all, things were shitty so much of the time. If you could connect with someone over something as small and easy as a smile, why wouldn’t you want to?

  In that spirit, I’d texted Will.

  It’s soooo beautiful here today, I wrote, with three grinning face emojis and a picture of the fountain.

  His reply had been almost immediate, though it was barely 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning: Here too, and a picture of the view from out his living room window, sunlight falling gently on brick and, in the bottom corner, a man buying flowers at the corner bodega.

  Since then, Will and I had fallen into the habit of texting each other random silliness. Well. I texted him random stuff that I hoped he’d think was funny, and he texted me back, basically making fun of me. But in a friendly way. A flirty way, I hoped. That was how I chose to take it, anyway.

  Last night, for instance, I’d texted him a pic of mud splattered all over my skateboard and my shoes that said Another driver just tried to kill me. Should I be taking this personally???

  He’d responded: He probably took your shoes personally and wanted to put them out of their misery. Srsly, they’re dead.

  What I hear you saying is that you want to take me shopping! I’d written, though I totally did not have the cash for new anything right now.

  He hadn’t responded for a while, then wrote, Well, I’d be doing the entire city a service, I suppose. Saturday afternoon.

  I’d practically run my battery down looking at the text every ten minutes since it came. Every time I did, this warm, kind of squeeish happiness burbled up in me. It’d be the first time I’d seen Will since our awkward meeting at his apartment when I first got to town.

  Milton bumped me with his shoulder and I nearly dropped my phone.

  “What are you all slappy about?”

  I hesitated to tell him because Milton has made it really clear that he thinks what he refers to as my obsession with Will is pathetic. Well, misguided, anyway.

  “Oh,” he said, looking at my phone. “Will?”

  “He’s taking me shopping on Saturday.”

  I could see Milton physically stop himself from making whatever comment occurred to him, so to thank him for not harshing my vibe, I told him that he could pick the movies for tonight, even though I knew he’d pick this nine-million-hour-long documentary series about a staircase or something that he’d gotten from the library and had been trying to get me to watch for the last two weeks.

  “And this filmmaker was there practically from the very beginning, so you see the direct aftermath of the wife’s death, and then it takes you through his whole trial and everything, and each episode is about a different bit of evidence. Oh man, it’s so intense—like, in the middle, there’s this one—well, okay, no, I won’t give it away. But it’s so good. Don’t look him up online, though, or you’ll get totally spoilered.”

  Milton’s movie night pick turned out to be amazing—though at nearly eight hours long we’d stayed up almost all night finishing it—and I’d started telling Will about it right away. Partly because it had been fascinating, and partly in order to keep myself from saying all the things I really wanted to say to him.

  Like that the second I’d seen him loping toward me, I’d felt the same way I had when he would walk into a room in Holiday: as if the background receded and he was this pulsing star at the center of things. And how just like then, my face heated up and my stomach went all wobbly.

  Nope, definitely didn’t need to be saying anything like that. So. Describing an epic documentary about murder it was!

  Will said the neighborhood we were in was Chelsea. Brick buildings towered above us, and here and there you could see the ghost of where another building must have rested. The shops all had window displays that looked like art, or like they were trying to look abandoned. He kept pointing things out in displays and asking if I liked them. At first I thought he meant for me, but it quickly became clear he was just curious about what I thought was aesthetically pleasing, because I could never afford any of the stuff he was looking at.

  When I told him so, Will ran a finger along the worn neck of my T-shirt and shook his head, making a tsking sound.

&nbs
p; “You know,” I told him, “Einstein said ‘Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.’”

  Will snorted. “Yeah? Well, when you’re inventing theories of relativity I won’t say a word about how you dress like you passed out in a skate park in 1997 and just woke up. Until then, I’m happy both accepting that the universe is matter expanding into nothing and also that the combination of too many design elements in that universe looks like shit.”

  I elbowed him playfully.

  “So, was the guy found guilty?” Will asked.

  I gaped at him. “Dude, that’s the entire point of the documentary. I’m not going to ruin it. You’re supposed to watch and, like, form your own opinion based on the evidence.”

  “I don’t care about spoilers, man—a story’s either interesting or it isn’t. Besides, I assure you, I don’t have any problem forming my own opinion, even in a sea of conflicting ones.” He winked at me.

  I certainly believed that.

  “I can’t tell you. No way. If you wanna know, you can google it, but I’m not going to tell you the end. I am firmly in the no spoilers camp. It’s a lifestyle.”

  The look Will gave me was one I liked to think he saved just for me. Like I didn’t say what he expected, but he was glad that I didn’t, and also irritated with himself for being glad. Will was really not the surprised type. He was more the absolutely-nothing-shocks-me type. In fact, it seemed vital to him that he’d thought of every possible eventuality. So the moments when I did something that bypassed whatever formulas he’d cooked up about how people acted or how the world worked were total wins. Granted, I still couldn’t predict what was going to strike him that way. At all. But it was a start.

  The thing about walking with Will, I was realizing, was that everybody stared at him. Some people straight up checked him out, but others just… looked at him, like they had every right to. Like he was art, publicly displayed to be publicly appreciated.