by Roan Parrish
“Tell me what you need to do and how long you have to do it, and we’ll figure it out.”
I held my planner out to him, now a crumpled hank of paper worried into a smeary exclamation-point-riddled mess. He held it between his thumb and forefinger then put it on the coffee table like an undetonated bomb.
“Why don’t you take me through it.” He patted my back. “One sec.”
He came back with a pad of graph paper and a pencil from his drafting table and sat beside me on the couch.
“Okay. Go class by class and tell me what you have left to do and when the deadline is.”
I shook my head. “My physics TA is trying to ruin my life. I should just go back to Holiday and rot.”
Will snorted. “You gonna work at Mr. Zoo’s for the rest of your life?”
“Yes. Someday maybe I’ll take it over and rename it Mr. Leo’s.”
“Great plan, kiddo. Come on, sit up. Tell me what you have to do.”
“I can’t.” I knew I sounded childish and petulant and I just couldn’t care. I was too tired, too overwhelmed. “Will,” I groaned. “Can’t I just drop out and come live here?”
“Christ on toast, Leo, you’re fucking depressing me. Sit up.” He dragged me up by my sweatshirt hood. “Now tell me what the deal is.”
I laid it all out for him. How Clark, my physics TA, hated me. How I’d done everything he asked us to do in terms of the proposal for the final project, but he kept forcing me to redo it because he said it wasn’t in compliance with one thing or another. And how, even though I’d asked Professor Ekwensi after class, and she’d mentioned that my project sounded great, Clark still made me revise it again, and when I’d mentioned Ekwensi’s approval, Clark had glared at me and gotten all pissy, accusing me of going over his head by talking to her.
“Let me see these e-mails.” Will’s tone was murderous, and even through my stress and agitation, the warmth of his anger on my behalf settled comfortingly in my stomach.
I showed Will the e-mails, in which Clark had sent comments on the drafts of my proposal where he asked questions that I was really sure most students in an introductory class shouldn’t be expected to know the answers to. And I showed him the comments Clark had written where he gave me totally contradictory feedback. I started to get freaked out all over again, and Will squeezed my shoulder as he peered furiously at the screen.
“I’m gonna kill this fucker! This petty, ineffectual little limp-dicked asshole has nothing better to do than lord his power over students like that makes him someone.” He devolved into muttering and then flopped back. I smiled at him and kissed the corner of his mouth where his lips turned down in a scowl. To my surprise, he flushed a little and shrugged like his shirt was suddenly too tight.
“Okay. Okay, tell me the rest, and then we’ll get back to that fucking guy.”
I walked Will through my whole schedule and he wrote it down on the graph paper in that neat all-caps handwriting I associated with architecture schematics. Even rendered in neat rows and tidy handwriting, it was a lot.
“I don’t think I can—”
“No, no commentary yet. Commentary is the seed of doubt. Doubt is the breeding ground for wasting time.”
Will tore off the page and recopied everything on a fresh sheet of paper, every task with a bullet point, every deadline in order of the date it was due, the chaos of my entire finals schedule neatly organized by the calming blue lines of the graph paper as if there weren’t a single thing that couldn’t be contained, ordered, made achievable. He outlined a box to the left of each task to check off when it had been completed. At the top he wrote Leo’s Guide To Kicking First Semester Finals In the Ass, which made me crack up to see in his neat handwriting.
It’s possible that my laughter was somewhat hysterical because the next thing I knew, Will was squeezing my shoulders and rubbing a hand up and down my back calmingly.
“Okay,” he said finally. He pointed to the schedule where he’d put a 1, a 2, and a 3 next to my tasks for the evening. “You start on this stuff.”
He pulled me up from the couch, sat me down at the desk, and tacked the schedule to the wall in front of me. While I was still trying to figure out how I’d ended up with a life coach and also wondering how I could make him do this every finals period, Will put a glass of water and a bowl of cashews on the desk.
“Protein. Good for energy. Stay hydrated.” Then he squeezed the back of my neck and left me to it.
Later, Will showed me the message he’d drafted to Clark from my e-mail account. It clearly laid out the work I’d already done, the changes he’d requested, and asked for clarification about several points, all of which were numbered. It was written so incisively that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could read it and not just agree to everything it said.
“Oh my god, you’re a genius.”
With Will’s eyes on me, I clicked the Send button without changing a word and closed my laptop in relief.
“Thank you.” I twined my arms around his neck, holding on tightly. Will’s arms tightened around me and he sighed deeply into my hair.
“You can’t let people push you around,” he said.
“Except for you, right?”
He huffed a breath out against my neck, but didn’t disagree.
Over the next five days, I only went back to the dorms once, to grab a bag of clothes and the rest of my books. I told Charles I was staying at Will’s, and he barely spared me a glance, just muttered something about the role of local politics in the Salem witch trials and nodded at himself as he typed furiously.
When Will went to work, he left me a pot of coffee on the counter and a Post-it note reminder to FOLLOW THE SCHEDULE AND DO NOT PANIC. Even on a Post-it, his handwriting was perfect.
He brought Thai food with him when he came home from work and we ate on the couch. The spicy smells of curry, peanut sauce, and ginger combined with the musky smell of Will’s body wash and the clean, bright smell of his shampoo and I wanted to stay here forever.
He was wearing a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants, but they weren’t normal—they were some kind of perfectly fitted versions of these staples, just like all his clothes, even the most casual ones, looked like they’d been tailored to fit him. When I asked him about it, he looked at me strangely and said they were just white T-shirts, but it seemed impossible.
Will was inhaling his food at a speed that seemed potentially hazardous for a wild dog, much less an average-sized human, when my phone dinged with an incoming e-mail. I grabbed for it, and when I saw it was from Clark, I almost dropped the phone in my Tom Kha.
“Omigod, he actually answered all the things!” Relief washed through me as I stared at my phone, and the weight that had been hanging around my neck like that damn albatross we read about in Great Books disappeared. I tossed the phone on the couch, and Will put his plate down just before I threw myself into his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck, and hugged him tight.
“Thanks,” I said in his ear.
His arms came around me and squeezed me tight, one hand moving up to stroke my hair.
“Sure, babe,” he said, and my heart practically stopped from joy.
Later, I was taking a break, running through some easy yoga sequences. As often happened, after a few minutes of me doing something else, Will started to talk to me.
Initially, I’d thought this tendency was just Will being perverse. Like he was only interested in me when I wasn’t interested in him. After it happened a few times, though, I realized it wasn’t true. It was that Will felt most comfortable talking about some things when all my attention wasn’t on him. So, though my instinct was to pay attention when someone was talking to me, I’d learned it was best to just keep doing whatever I was doing and listen.
So I kept moving, keeping my breaths deep, in through the nose, out through the nose. Move and breathe. He watched me, perching on the arm of the couch so he could look out the window behind me at the same time. Will looked out the window a lot. The v
iew was the main reason he’d taken this apartment, he’d told me once.
“You can’t get caught up in that kind of shit like what happened with Clark again,” Will was saying, staring past me into the dark city outside. “You’re too smart. You shouldn’t let people have that kind of power over you.”
This was pretty laughable coming from the guy who had such incredible power over me. But I didn’t say that. It was best to just let Will say his piece before responding.
“I know he’s your TA, so he does technically have actual power over you. But you have to remember: NYU is providing a service, and you’re the customer. They’re there to educate you. To make sure you learn the material. Not to make you feel like shit, or like you’re not good enough. Not to try and control what you do with your life.”
That gave me pause since Clark had never tried to control anything about my life.
“Did that happen to you?” I asked carefully, pitching my voice softly so it sounded offhand. I moved into downward-facing dog like I was barely listening to the answer.
Will said nothing.
I pressed my thumbs firmly into the carpet, turned my elbows out to protect my shoulder joints, and moved my shoulder blades together on my back, bending into my knees and then pressing my thighs up to straighten my legs. I could practically hear Tonya’s voice in my head whispering adjustments.
“What happened?” I asked, and then I just breathed—in through my nose, out through my nose—and waited, not sure if Will would answer or not.
“There was this TA for my Intro to Graphic Design class, second semester freshman year.” Will ran a hand through his hair, still looking out the window. “Or, I guess he wasn’t technically a TA, since he wasn’t a grad student; he was a senior graphic design major, but whatever. He was really talented and really harsh. You could tell he kind of hated doing teaching stuff and thought he was too good for it. But he liked me. Said I had potential. He helped me out a lot—helped me with my designs and with adjusting to school. To the city.”
It was strange to be reminded that once Will was just a kid from small-town Michigan who’d never been to the city either. That however far away from me he sometimes seemed now, we’d come from the same place.
“But he was manipulative as hell too. Talked me out of using this one idea I had for a design and then used it himself. And when I called him on it, he told me that I hadn’t known what to do with it so it couldn’t’ve worked; that knowing how to use a design is just as important as the design itself.”
My arms started to shake, and I moved through a few vinyasas, my attention always on Will.
“Hell, he even manipulated me into thinking that I seduced him.”
I dropped to my hands and knees, breathing deliberately, like his words hadn’t knocked the wind out of me. As I moved into plank pose, out of the corner of my eye I saw him twisting the hem of his shirt between his fingers.
“Anyway, what did I know? I was a baby. If he told me I was good, then I was good, period. I didn’t know myself, really. I cared too much what he thought of me so I ran everything through this filter of what he’d think of it before I decided what I thought of it. It became automatic. That’s the worst part—way worse than him stealing my design, or the rest of it.”
Will’s voice had gone bitter, cold. Like he was still chastising the version of himself who’d acted that way. And the description was so far from the person he was now that I could almost imagine it as someone else entirely. I wanted to go to him, touch him, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to. Not in a mood like this. He shook his head and turned away from the window, hands in his pockets.
“Anyway, whatever. He was a shithead who made me care about him and then fucked my head up and dumped me at the end of the year. I heard he did the same damn thing to someone the next semester. Sociopath creep.”
My legs were shaking, my arms were burning, and my stomach was trembling. Tonya said that you should be able to sink into each pose. Hold it and relax and breathe, and that was the challenge: to push your body only so far as it could go without causing agitation for your mind. But now it wasn’t the pose that was agitating me.
Will took a deep breath and turned to me.
“Look, college is great and everything, just don’t make the mistake of thinking those fuckers are magical founts of wisdom or anything, okay? Take everything you can get from it and don’t put up with any of the shit that isn’t useful.”
Okay, that was officially a subject change if I’d ever heard one.
“That sounds like your personal philosophy in a nutshell,” I said, collapsing out of plank in a totally un-flowy way. Tonya would not approve.
“I don’t have a damn philosophy.”
I rocked forward into child’s pose to wait him out. Will might be feeling snarky with himself, but he was still the most honest person I’d ever met.
“But okay, fine, if I did, then, yes. People have a terrible habit of not separating things out into their component parts, you know? They think if they accept one part of something, then they’re under some obligation to accept it all, as if there’s no in-between. As if it’s more important to agree than to be accurate.”
And there it was again. A reminder of one of the reasons I loved spending time with Will. No one had ever made me feel so comfortable just saying whatever I thought before. I didn’t have to worry that disagreeing with Will would hurt his feelings or piss him off. I mean, he might be pissed because of my opinion, but not because it was different than his.
I had grown up constantly trying to blend in with people at school so they wouldn’t notice I was gay. Constantly trying to find common ground with my family so I could feel like one of them. Always sure that it was because I was weird that I didn’t really have many friends in Holiday. To be able to simply speak my mind and know that Will was speaking his… it was a sweet relief.
That didn’t mean I didn’t still enjoy messing with him a little, though. I flopped onto the couch next to Will.
“You never agree with anything, asshole.”
“It doesn’t make me an asshole that I actually listen to what people say and address the points where my thoughts diverge instead of ignoring the parts I don’t agree with.”
“Oh yeah?” I nudged him with my shoulder. “Then what makes you an asshole?”
Will grinned. “A lot of other things.”
“Well, why focus on the things you disagree with rather than the ones you agree with?”
“I don’t focus on them. But if someone says, ‘I like peanut butter, cheese, pickles, caramel, and taking it up the ass, don’t you?’ and I just say yes, then they’d assume that I agree on all counts, which is inaccurate. So if I want them to know what is accurate, I’d have to clarify the place where we diverge.”
“Um, you don’t like….”
He raised his eyebrows at me and smirked.
“Taking it up the ass?” I asked at the same moment he said, “Peanut butter.”
“You don’t like peanut butter? That’s outrageous! Peanut butter’s—” Then my brain caught up to the actual content of what he said. “Oh,” I said.
Against what felt like all odds, I’d finished everything, Will’s blocky letters in their perfectly ordered blue boxes guiding my way through finals.
I was ready to collapse on my bed and sleep for the foreseeable future, but when I got to our room I found Charles packing and ranting because apparently there had been some kind of electrical problem in the dorm designated for the people enrolled in January term classes, and res life had temporarily reassigned them to the rooms on our floor. So now Charles and I, and anyone else on our hall not signed up for January term classes, had to clear our stuff out and store it in basement storage until spring term started.
As Charles explained, gesturing vaguely toward his computer monitor at an e-mail I’d clearly missed in the hustle of finals, total panic set in. Because I realized that I hadn’t even thought about what I was doing for Jan
uary term. Or, I’d thought about it in the vague way that happened when my mom mentioned something about Christmas or people in the dining hall talked about plans for winter break. But I had failed to actually do anything about it.
Which is why instead of being facedown on my bed, I found myself knocking on Will’s door with my fingers crossed, my heart in my throat, and my duffel bag over my shoulder.
“Did you finish?” he asked, not seeming surprised to see me as he waved me inside.
“Yeah. Um. Haha, about that. Funny story.”
I told Will the situation, my panic mounting as I got to the part about how I’d totally fucked up and forgotten to make plans.
Will looked at me skeptically.
“I was just so stressed about all the finals stuff, and stuff with physics. I didn’t even notice the e-mail, I swear!”
Suddenly it was less important that I find somewhere to stay for January term. I mean, really, I could go back to Michigan if I needed to. I could take the bus again, or my mom would probably be able to scrape up plane fare for me. It was more that, standing here in Will’s apartment after spending the last week so close to him, the idea of leaving him for a month—of not getting to hear him make pronouncements or bitch about things, of not smelling him fresh out of the shower, of not feeling his eyes on me—was unbearable.
“Jesus! Fine, just stay here,” he said. “Holy puppy dog eyes, Batman.” He shook his head at me and took my duffel bag, putting it next to the couch.
“Wait, really! Oh my god, Will, thank you! You won’t regret it, I swear! I’ll do the dishes, I’ll do… um, you know, other chores. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
I flung myself into his arms, intensely relieved, and now thrilled to have my life unavoidably intertwined with Will’s for the next month.
Will fell backward onto the couch, and I landed half on his lap and half on the floor with an “Oof.”
“Ouch, Jesus!”
“Sorry, sorry.”
Will dragged me up and kind of wiggled over at the same time, and I ended up lying on top of him. God, he smelled amazing.