by Roan Parrish
Three hectic hours later, Layne called me over.
“Well,” she said matter-of-factly, “you definitely don’t know anything about coffee.”
“No,” I said.
“But you’re perky and polite, which shocks people in this industry.” She cocked her head, seeming to consider me.
“Look,” I said, “sorry about before when I said the thing about being gay. That was like maybe inappropriate? I dunno, I just meant—I was trying to say that—I didn’t mean to assume—I just thought you might like me more if—or be more likely to—um, but maybe that’s accusing you of some kind of, uh….”
“You’re not really helping yourself here.”
“Sorry.”
She shook her head. “Even if I did happen to be politically committed to providing jobs for queers, some pretty boy cis white dude wouldn’t be at the top of my list.”
“Oh shit. Good point. Um….”
She looked at me for a while, and I could almost see the questions she wanted to ask running through her head. “How do you feel about puns?” she asked, finally, smiling slightly and narrowing her eyes at me.
Crap! Did she like them and I was supposed to say I loved them? Or did they annoy her and if I said I thought they were cool I wouldn’t get hired?
“I-I—well….”
“You’re totally trying to figure out what I want to hear right now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, you’re hired on a trial basis. Be here tomorrow at three for training.”
It turned out to be no coincidence that Milton had known how to get on the roof the night we met. He made it his business to always know an escape route, a side effect of going to a snobby private school, he said, where immediate egress was sometimes the only thing that had stood between him and losing his mind.
We were sitting on the fire escape on the north side of the building where we had Psych. Milton had pulled me out a fire door after lecture unexpectedly, talking loudly about nothing, and then hustled me up two flights before flopping down onto the chilly metal.
“What are you doing? Where are we? Jesus, is this even safe? This doesn’t feel safe.” The metal was an open grid, so if I looked down, I could see the dumpsters five stories below.
“Oh, just hold on to the railing, we’re fine.”
“Soooo….”
Milton rubbed his temples. He looked thrown.
“Umm, just this guy. He’s a senior and he’s like the best actor. Seriously, he was on some TV show or something after high school, and he took a few years off to do it and then came back to school because he wanted to learn more about his craft, isn’t that cool?”
Milton sounded uncharacteristically swoony.
“And why are we outside on this deathtrap because you have a crush on the next….” I couldn’t think of a really famous theater actor, and Milton laughed at me. Then he muttered something.
“What was that?”
“I just saw him coming down the hallway and I panicked is all.”
“Oh my gosh, this is great!”
“Not from where I’m sitting.”
“Oh, sorry, no, not great for you. Definitely not. For me! Because if you can get all freaked and flustered over a guy, then it means I’m not such a total mess. Jeez, I just thought you were cool all the time, but this is way better.”
“Gee, thank you so much, Leo.”
“Sorry, sorry, but I mean, obviously this guy will like you. You’re so awesome. And you’re hot. And a great kisser. I’ll testify to it if this guy wants.” We could say things like this to one another now, since we’d firmly established that we were not ever going to hook up again. It felt nice. Intimate, in a friends kind of way. “What’s his name, anyway?”
“Jason,” Milton said, the word practically a sigh.
After a few moments where I thought he’d say more and he stared down at the dumpsters, Milton seemed to shake it off, and he hauled me up by the arm and hustled me back to our dorm saying we were running out of time to eat before movie night.
“Direct all your criticisms to Milton,” I told Thomas and Gretchen. “I had absolutely nothing to do with this decision.”
When Milton announced that for movie night tonight we’d be starting to watch Felicity, I thought he was kidding, until he pulled out a disturbingly pastel box set.
“Are those DVDs?” Thomas asked, the way you might ask “Is that a cockroach?” Milton clutched the box set to his chest and glared.
Gretchen narrowed her eyes and looked between me and the box set. “Ah, I get it,” she said with what I could’ve sworn was pity.
“I am not Felicity!”
“Oh, boo,” Milton said, shaking his head. “You really haven’t ever seen the show, have you?”
My Cultural Foundations paper was due in twenty hours, and Charles was deep into one of his conspiracy theory rants, this one, as far as I could tell, something about the Denver International Airport being secretly designed by the Freemasons.
“—an entire network of subterranean tunnels that they claim were an automated baggage delivery system, but it never worked even though its installation cost millions of dollars,” Charles was saying, and I was only half listening, nodding at what seemed to be key phrases, like “bunker” and “shadow government” and “New World Order.” Usually, if I just kind of nodded along, Charles would eventually run down his own motor.
It had become my approach ever since the day he’d tried to explain the theories of the second gunman in the JFK assassination, complete with schematics of the grassy knoll, reedited versions of the Zapruder film, and heavily redacted scanned documents from the Warren Commission.
Charles did eventually lose steam, trailing off back into his research. I was exhausted from my first real day of work at Mug Shots, despite my proximity to the espresso machine meaning I could caffeinate at will. Even though I’d taken a shower when I got home, everything still smelled like coffee, to the point where I was convinced that maybe coffee particles were stuck in my nose hairs or something, like bits of pollen on a bee’s legs, so that every breath I took was being filtered through coffee. Hell, maybe that’s why it was so addictive? I’d have to see if Charles had ever heard of a conspiracy theory about that.
The caffeine had clearly worn off, though, because I was staring at the screen where I’d written some notes for my paper and my brain felt like mush. I wrote a thesis statement and immediately deleted it because it was self-evident. I wrote another that I deleted because I knew I couldn’t support it, and another that I deleted because it would be too much work to explain. Ugh.
I closed my laptop and went to see if there was any tea in the hall kitchen. I found a mangled box of jasmine tea that it didn’t look like anyone would miss it and put water on to boil, slumping against the counter in the hope that somehow a paper idea would magically fall into my head.
“You gonna get that?”
I jerked up to Gretchen’s voice and the sound of the kettle screaming.
“Oh my god, I actually just fell asleep standing up.”
“You okay?”
“I have a paper on Jane Eyre due tomorrow and everything I think of is idiotic and I’m so tired.”
There was something about Gretchen that made me accidentally tell her all my problems.
“Come to yoga with me,” she said.
“Oh, no, I don’t have time,” I said. I thought only hippies and health nuts did yoga.
“Well, you’re not getting anything done in the state you’re in, are you? Also, you just majorly over-steeped that.”
I didn’t know you could over-steep tea. I took a sip. It smelled floral and sweet but was intensely bitter. I winced and Gretchen nodded in commiseration.
“Ugh!” I dumped the tea down the drain and slumped. “I can’t even make tea, what’s wrong with me?”
Apparently she decided this was a rhetorical question because she just nodded and said, “It’ll be good, I promise
.” Then she took me by the elbow and pulled me after her.
The first twenty minutes were ridiculous, the next twenty minutes were torture, and the last twenty minutes were amazing. I was clumsy and not strong and had no idea that I apparently breathe incorrectly. But the instructor was amazing, telling us ways to adjust our bodies to do the poses more safely, more effectively, more beneficially, and every time I followed her instructions, I could feel my muscles engage differently, feel my breath deepen, feel myself calm down and my mind clear.
With all my attention focused on breathing in and out through my nose, turning my right hip forward and my left hip back, pulling my navel in, squeezing my shoulder blades together on my back, retracting my chin back so my head was in line with my spine, pulling my feet energetically toward each other, and pushing into the inner edges of my feet, along with a dozen other things I couldn’t do, I had no time to feel tired or stressed. I didn’t give a single thought to my paper, or to Mug Shots and all the ways I’d managed to humiliate myself in front of my coworkers, mess up people’s drinks, or spill things on myself.
I didn’t even think of Will. And an activity that managed to take my mind away from him and the fact that he’d kind of blown off my last few invitations to do anything, citing being busy at work? Well, that was worth something.
As we walked back to the dorms, I was alert and energetic, but not bouncing off the walls the way I often felt. I was calm. And how much did I love Gretchen for not asking me how I liked it and saying she told me so.
“I go three times a week” was all she said when we went our separate ways. “Come whenever you want. Good luck with your paper.”
The next month went by in a rush of total chaos, punctuated by the most fun I’ve ever had. Maybe it’s because of how busy and stressful everything was that the moments with my friends felt so intoxicating. Or maybe it was because I’d never really had friends like these before—the kind who knew about my daily life, who I was excited to run into at the library, or slump next to at a table in the dining hall with plates of pizza that managed to be simultaneously dry and greasy.
The kind of friends you told everything to because they were the fixed points in your ever-changing universe and who told you everything because you were the fixed point in theirs.
Milton had a seemingly endless supply of stories about adventures he’d had with his theater friends from high school. Nights they had to stay at school until two in the morning to finish painting the scenery for opening night the next day. Nights they told their parents they were at the theater but actually went out to bars and clubs. Times he snuck away to mess around with guys in the lighting booth or the sound booth or the catwalks (Milton had a bit of a thing for techies).
Milton’s roommate, Robbie, seemed to be the one person immune to Milton’s charms. He was quiet and kept to himself, leaving the room whenever we were hanging out in there even though Milton always made an effort to include him in the conversation. Milton said at first he’d worried that Robbie was freaked out by having a gay roommate, but he’d realized he was just pretty solitary.
Gretchen’s roommate, on the other hand, was the opposite. She was aggressively cheerful and always wanted to talk to anyone that Gretchen brought to their room. She had frizzy red hair that she straightened religiously, but she always missed a spot in the back, like she was waging an epic, unwinnable battle against a part of herself.
Within the first month of school, she had already joined something like ten clubs and was always encouraging Gretchen to come to this meeting or that event with her. Gretchen was basically a saint, but even she couldn’t keep her cool with Megan all the time. Thomas started calling her Megan-with-no-H because he said she was like the inverse of Meghan from Felicity. Then, so she wouldn’t know we were talking about her, we shortened it to No-H.
Sometimes, No-H would launch into cheery, interminable monologues and Gretchen would silently gather up her study materials and slink into the common room. If it was occupied, she’d come to my room, sink to the floor next to my bed—Gretchen loved sitting on the floor and had the kind of excellent posture that made it look like she sat on a throne even when wearing sweats on our dorm carpet—take deep, centering breaths in an attempt to cleanse herself of the static of No-H, and then work in total silence for hours, seemingly undistracted by either my sighs at my work or Charles’ clumsy entrances, exits, and muttering at his computer.
After I’d gotten the job at Mug Shots, Gretchen had started coming and doing her work there when No-H was driving her particularly up the wall, and I’d slip her coffees that people sent back or that went unclaimed at the counter.
Gretchen was from just outside Ithaca and was really close with her huge extended family, so she’d had a lot of experience blocking out noise and chaos. That No-H was able to get to her even though that was a true testament to her level of irritation. Gretchen had tons of stories featuring a zillion different cousins, aunts, uncles, and second-somethings-twice-removed that sounded idyllic and chaotic, like scenes from a movie.
Family reunions in parks where picnic tables full of food got eaten by dogs or doused in flash floods. Christmas Eves when all of the siblings and cousins slept jumbled together in living rooms, attics, and basements of various houses and opened metric tons of presents all at once. Birthday parties shared with three other people that sprawled over backyard fields and lasted late into the night.
Thomas’ stories were rambling and often featured his twin brother, Andy. They sounded inseparable. Thomas even narrated in the first person plural. They had only gone to different colleges because, after a guidance counselor told their parents she thought they were overly dependent on one another, their parents had said they’d only pay for school if they went along with it. Neither Thomas nor Andy had really spoken to their parents since then. They chatted and texted constantly throughout the day and played video games online together at night with a group of friends they’d been playing with for years.
Charles didn’t really tell stories so much as give disquisitions on various topics that sometimes included how he’d learned about them. So, I found out that he knew so much about computers because he built one as part of a school project, taken under the wing of a particularly zealous teacher, scavenging the parts from a computer lab graveyard of tech going back to the seventies in the basement of the school. (This was also the moment when I started to think that maybe when Charles said he went to “a good high school” that he actually meant some kind of super-genius school for science and technology.)
Thomas was irritated by Charles, I knew. He took things Charles said personally and got offended when Charles corrected him. But since Charles was also the only one who No-H seemed flummoxed by talking to, and since Thomas had hated No-H with a passion ever since she’d yammered at him about some study she’d read about how codependent most twin relationships were, Thomas usually suffered him without complaint.
I saw Will a lot, too, and though our hangouts had begun grudgingly, he clearly wasn’t just humoring me anymore. We got along in this way that shouldn’t have worked but did, like the first time someone tells you that Brie and pear go well together and it seems impossible until the tastes are lingering on your tongue.
Sometimes we just watched Netflix and Will got takeout, never accepting the money I tried to press on him, which was lucky for me since I didn’t really have any to spare. With anyone else I would’ve tried to argue over the bill, but Will rolled his eyes when I tried and made it clear my protests irritated him, so I stopped. Other times we’d talk for hours—meandering conversations that spiked in heated disagreements and equally heated laughter.
Will was the only person who had ever made arguing with him feel safe. He wasn’t angry or threatened if I disagreed with him, so I found myself licensed to be more forceful with my opinions than I ever had been.
One night, disagreeing over I don’t even remember what, I rose onto my knees on the couch and yelled, “That’s the dum
best thing you’ve ever said!” It had sounded ridiculous the moment it was out of my mouth, but Will, after a beat, had grinned and ruffled my hair, pulling me down on top of him as he laughed, clearly pleased with me.
On Halloween, Milton, Gretchen, Charles, Thomas, and I went to the Village Parade with a whole group of people from our dorms. In the dining hall before we went, we each came up with lists of things we thought we’d see and then made bingo boards of them, agreeing that the first person to get bingo got to pick the next thing we watched at movie night. Of course, Milton turned out to have a huge advantage because, being from New York, he’d been to the parade before.
The rest of us had no reason to imagine that we should put down things like “a person dropping a puppet head,” “someone’s hair catching on fire,” “a child being terrified of an overly zealous adult in costume and screaming,” or “drunk dude running out of the bar and dropping trou to moon the parade.” (Although, I did randomly get lucky because I wrote down “a dragon,” mostly as a joke, but then there was a sister and brother dressed as Puff the Magic Dragon and Puff’s little brother.)
I called Will when I got home, exhilarated and a little tipsy.
“You know we met two years ago, today,” I told him.
“I remember,” Will said. I could hear the smile in his voice. “You looked hilarious falling off that skateboard.”
I got flustered all over again at the memory.
He’d been coordinated and sophisticated, and I—well, I’d fallen off my skateboard, half in actual clumsiness and half to disguise the fact that I got hard under Will’s stare, as if his hands were touching me everywhere his gaze landed while he looked me up and down for the first time.
He had been abrupt and aggressive and a little bit rude. He’d pissed off Daniel, made me feel like a loser for having no one to hang out with on Halloween, and had even managed to make Rex roll his eyes. Despite all of it, he had been the most dynamic person I’d ever met. He was honest and uncompromising and didn’t seem to second-guess himself. He wasn’t awkward or nervous or uncertain about anything, and for some reason that made him seem invincible, superhuman.