Off Campus

by Amy Jo Cousins

  Chapter Four

  Tom figured the cardboard box could be seen as a peace offering.

  Right?

  He spotted the flattened box where it sat behind the sixty-five gallon trash bin at the end of the hall in the kitchenette when he went to refill an empty water bottle to keep by his bed. His head ached from too little sleep this weekend and he knew he was probably dehydrated too. He couldn’t always find a water fountain to refill his bottle when he was driving and he sure as shit wasn’t about to use a gas station bathroom sink. Or buy a new frigging bottle of what was probably tap water anyway every time he got thirsty. So he knew he should drink up if he didn’t want to slip into migraine territory just in time for class on Monday morning. When he spotted the box, he grabbed at it as another gesture he could make to Reese in the hopes of waving the “Hey, look at me! Not a bad guy!” flag.

  Back in their room, he set up the box, reconstructing its four sides and tucking opposite flaps under one another to lock in the bottom until he got some duct tape. He cut the top flaps off and when he stripped down, dropped all of his dirty clothes in his new laundry basket at the foot of his bed.

  Might not be pretty, but it was functional.

  He knew the minute Reese spotted it when he finally showed up in the room at about eleven o’clock, no trick in tow for once. The kid was stripping off a black hoodie, in full-on goth mode with a black T-shirt, pants and eyeliner that made you look at his eyes more, when his motions slowed until he stopped, hoodie dangling from one hand as he narrowed his eyes at the foot of Tom’s bed.

  “What’s that?”

  Tom looked up from the book in his lap. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed in his boxers, since it was hot as balls in their room and he still didn’t have a desk, what with the giant entertainment center that squatted there. He’d opened the window all the way, but with no through-draft, the Indian summer heat was sitting in their third floor room, camped out for the night. His skin felt sticky wherever his limbs touched, elbow on his thigh or fist against his cheek. And being hot and sticky didn’t exactly bring out the Ms. Manners in his personality.

  “Never seen one of those before, huh?”

  Reese rolled his eyes and hung up his hoodie in his closet. On a frigging hanger. Must be cooler out now that the sun had been down for a while if he’d worn it, but Tom sure couldn’t feel the temperature change in his shorts.

  And that was the last thought about anything in his shorts that was going to be allowed.

  “What’s it for? Packing up your stuff?” Reese fluttered his eyelashes and patted his chest. “Be still, my eager heart.”

  “You aren’t that lucky.” All of a sudden, he felt kind of stupid at admitting it. He’d been trying to do something nice, but somehow saying that out loud felt almost like, well, flirting. Like when you offered to take a girl to the chick flick you knew she wanted to see instead of the one about MMA fighters getting into street races with other gangs. And he sure as shit didn’t see Reese as a girl. There was no mistaking the wiry muscle and hard bones of his body for the cushiony softness that he looked for in a girl. “It’s a laundry basket. Duh.”

  Jesus. He was turning into a twelve-year-old. Duh?

  He didn’t look up again, but he heard the harrumph Reese let escape and hid a grin behind pressed lips.

  “I didn’t want to be Oscar,” he offered after a moment, not sure if the reference would mean anything. He’d played the part back in high school, when trying out for a school play and getting one of the leads was still important to him. Because he’d been kind of a show-off and little bit of a prick about rubbing it in to his friends that he could do anything he put his mind to.

  “Because I’m the uptight, OCD gay roommate who doesn’t know how to have any fun?”

  “Hey, man. Sounds to me like you get up to all kinds of fun in here.” Okay. So maybe he’d planned on going more than three minutes before bringing up the blowjob party in their room that Reese had been intent on holding the last time he’d seen him.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not…what it looks like.” Reese didn’t look at him as he pulled books from his backpack and stacked them on his desk.

  “It’s not you sucking dick in the hopes that making me listen to guys coming their brains out is gonna make me move out?”

  “Okay. That part’s what it looks like.”

  “Thought so.” He snapped shut his book. “Look, kid—”

  “Stop calling me kid. How much older than me can you be anyway? What are you, twenty-five?”

  He felt ancient some days.

  “Twenty-two.”

  The look of shock on Reese’s face was almost comical.

  “Twenty-two?” His voice hit the ceiling in a screech. “How the hell did you get in Perkins then? It’s supposed to be for older students.”

  “And what are you? Benjamin Button? You can’t be a day over nineteen.”

  “I’m twenty and—” Reese paled and started putting the books he’d removed from his messenger bag back in it like an automaton, “—the school wasn’t, um, sure where to put me, so I, um, ended up here.”

  My Aunt Fanny, Tom thought, and laughed at how the voice in his head that said the words sounded like his mother when he was a kid. That was the crappiest non-explanation he’d ever heard, but he thought he could see Reese’s hands actually shaking as he moved books around and didn’t look at Tom. If the kid wanted to keep secrets, that was totally fine with Tom.

  He had plenty of things he didn’t want to share with everybody and their neighbor too.

  “Yeah, me too,” he finally answered. “The school wanted me here. Keep me away from the riff raff.” He tried to crack a joke about it.

  “What? Some kind of celebrity? I mean, you did go here last year, right?” Changing the subject back to Tom seemed to bring Reese back to life a little. He didn’t really look at Tom, instead glancing at him out of the corner of his eyes, as if Tom were a grizzly bear whose attention he wasn’t sure he wanted to draw to himself. Giving a little hop, he got his ass up on the edge of his desk, bracing his Chucks on the seat of his chair. Apparently he was settling in for some good ole roomie get to know you conversation.

  Great.

  Just when Tom really wanted to drop the subject. Now the kid wanted to talk.

  “Not last year, no. I took some time off.”

  “But before that?”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t know why he was dragging it out. It was probably only a matter of luck and stubborn refusal to accept even the idea of him that had kept Reese from doing at least an idle Internet search on him. And Tom’s father’s arrest by the Feds made up results one through infinity when you dropped Worthington into a search engine.

  That’s what happened when you were the subject of the largest price-fixing takedown in the history of white-collar-crime, undercover FBI stings. Your name was on the front page of every newspaper in the country for months, especially after you tried to kill yourself while on house arrest and your kid, home from college at the school’s request after reporters swarmed his every move on campus, had to call 911 when he found you unconscious with an empty bottle of pills and a mostly empty glass of Scotch on the bedside table.

  It was the kind of story that made reporters drool.

  This wasn’t a secret that could be kept under wraps for very long.

  And making himself sound mysterious, as if he had a secret backstory that no one knew, was only going to speed up the process of destroying what little privacy he’d managed to enjoy in the last week on campus with a roommate who didn’t know him, keeping his head down and flying under the radar everywhere he went.

  He’d known it wouldn’t last, but he’d hoped to go a little longer with Reese at least treating him like a regular douchebag and not a semi-celebrity douchebag with a criminal father.

  �
��So what’s the deal? Why don’t they want you in the dorms?”

  “Listen, kid.” He grimaced. “Sorry. Just drop it, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Seriously? Because I don’t want to fucking talk about it, okay?” But he could already see where this was going. He only wondered if Reese would wait until he left the room to do it.

  His roommate stared at him speculatively for a moment, tapping his bottom lip with one index finger before shrugging and grabbing his phone off the desk.

  Nope. Guess not.

  Reese looked up after a second.

  “What’s your last name again?”

  It figured. The kid didn’t even know his last name. Shit. Who knew how long he could have flown under the radar here, with this guy having no idea who his last-minute roommate was. Tom flashed back to the rugby chant a Pakistani dishwasher had taught him in the month last year he’d spent working under the table in the kitchen at a local chop house, knowing if he used his social security number for a legit job, some reporter would track him down faster than he could say breaking news.

  “Shit-damn, fuck-a-damn, fuck-a-damn-damn,

  Some motherfucker just fucked my man,

  I’ll fuck another fucker better than the other fucker,

  Shit-damn, fuck-a-damn, fuck-a-damn-damn!”

  Strange, the crap that got stuck in your head and insisted on popping up at the oddest moments. But as he sat there, staring at Reese, this kid with the soft mouth and the tired eyes who’d perked up for all of two minutes at the idea of figuring out what he probably thought was a fun bit of gossip, Tom couldn’t think of anything else but that foul-mouthed rhyme, sung in a British accent. Tell the kid or not? If he didn’t, it wouldn’t get him more than ten hours of grace, since all Reese had to do was dial up Res Life in the a.m. and ask “Who the hell is this guy in my room again?”

  For a minute, those ten hours seemed as if they might be worth it. The last little bit of peace he could hold on to. One more night. Who knew what would happen then. Worst case scenario had the kid taking naked pictures of him and selling them to some gossip mag. He could see the made-up headlines now. Price-Fixing Jailbird’s Son Does Porn. He remembered the days, and then weeks, months, of having flashes blow up in his face every time he tried to set foot out the door of their Beacon Hill home. Of trying to sneak out in the middle of the night, only to realize that the paparazzi never left. That there was always someone watching them, watching him. He started referring to the pack of them as the Evil Nemesis. He remembered the first time he’d tried to argue with a reporter who shouted out lies about his father as Tom pushed his way through the crowd blocking the gate to their front walk, wanting to get inside and hide.

  “Did you know your father was embezzling money too, Tom?”

  He’d been told later that it was a trick question, designed to draw him out. The PR company that had been working on his father’s press, until the corporate board decided that working to repair the image of a man who was absolutely, positively going to jail was a waste of money, sent an agent around to coach him after that disaster.

  Losing his cool sure had made for good television. Tom had watched himself on television that night and even he didn’t believe himself. All of his sputtering furious protests about his father’s innocence looked like a fucking cover-up. With their enormous red brick Georgian townhouse visible behind the eight-foot-high wrought iron fence that surrounded their property, he looked like a spoiled little rich kid who was throwing a temper tantrum because someone wanted to take his toys away.

  A pretty accurate picture at the time.

  The PR guy had shown him how anything he said could be twisted around to mean the opposite by the time reporters were done with it. The guy had advised him to keep his fucking mouth shut and tattoo the words No Comment across his forehead.

  “Also, don’t fuck any under eighteens and please God, don’t let someone take a picture with their fucking cell phone of you with your lips wrapped around a bong. Or some guy’s dick, all right?”

  He’d thought that was a funny one right there, hadn’t he? Had elbowed Tom and rolled his eyes. A little dick-sucking joke between two straight dudes, right, buddy? Ha, ha. Tom had never been sure if there’d been a kernel of true warning in the kidding around, though. Something about that guy screamed that he’d seen it all and wouldn’t be surprised to see it again.

  Reese was waiting across the room, perched on the edge of the desk like a dark little bird with claws, thumbs ready to go on his phone. If he was tempted to smile because he knew he had Tom, in the end, even if not right this moment, he kept it to himself. But his eyes and the press of his lips together said he wasn’t going anywhere until Tom coughed up his name. If he’d said anything, one word, made one crack about cyberstalking or celebrity disguises, Tom would have told him to fuck off and gone to bed. But the kid just sat there and waited.

  Like he wasn’t going anywhere, ever. Which should have felt stalkerish and creepy but instead felt…inevitable.

  Tom looked Reese in the eye, letting him see that this was the last thing he wanted. The kid would learn why in about point eight seconds.

  “Worthington. Need me to spell it?”

  He waited for the light to spark in Reese’s eyes, the way it always did when someone found out who he was. Everyone wanted something, even if it was just to gossip about how awful he must feel and how terrible it must be for his family to lose everything. But even those pain vultures, who got off on asking “Aren’t you too embarrassed to show your face anywhere? You must be so miserable,” didn’t really believe it. Everyone assumed there were hidden assets. Extended family to fall back on. Foreign bank accounts. What the fuck ever. And he’d let them go on believing it, shrugging off all concern, real or fake, because after a while he couldn’t tell the difference. He nodded or shook his head and stopped saying anything at all because he never knew what someone would turn his words into. And now he waited for Reese.

  The kid laughed at first, actually looked up after a split second of staring at the screen and laughed. Tom almost shot up off the bed and put him on the floor, hard.

  “The Third? Thomas Worthington the Third?” He actually snorted with laughter for a second and the grin he flashed at Tom was so full of play and lightheartedness that Tom leaned back for a moment, forgetting that he was in danger and smiled back at the kid ruefully. “You know that’s pretentious as shit, right? Please tell me you know that.”

  “I told my dad that nobody does that anymore, but he said it was a little late to go making changes to my birth certificate when I was about to graduate high school.”

  “Man, that sucks. Sorry, dude.” His eyes glanced down again, scanning the first lines of what was probably a page of Google links. Sure enough, Tom could’ve clocked it with an egg timer.

  Point eight seconds.

  “Whoa.” The word slipped out under Reese’s breath, his lips pursed a little on the soft exhale.

  There it was.

  Reese’s eyes flicked from his phone to Tom and back again. Tom pretended to read but waited for it.

  “Oookay.” Reese sounded as if he were feeling his way through a dark room with a hand out to keep from walking into something hard. “That…wasn’t what I expected.”

  “No?”

  “Not really.”

  “Rings a bell now? The name, I mean.”

  “Not really.” He flushed and looked around the room, anywhere but at Tom. “I was, um, sort of a club kid in high school. I partied. A lot. The news wasn’t really my thing.”

  “Guess you would’ve been a senior when all that went down, huh? If you’re a sophomore now.”

  “Yeah.” Reese’s laugh was short and sharp. “There’s a lot of things that are hazy from senior year. And after.”

  “Well, if you didn’t have a 401k invested in a mutual fund anchore
d by my dad’s company, then you probably weren’t too worried about it.” He tried to joke, feeling grateful. Grateful that Reese wasn’t battering him with questions or looking at him as if he was a two-headed whoremonster who ate babies for breakfast.

  He heard another gasp, this one barely audible as the kid swallowed it before letting it halfway out of his mouth. No need to ask what sparked that sudden air suck.

  Everyone always gasped when they hit the suicide story.

  “I don’t want to talk about that part.”

  “Do you hear me asking?”

  No. He didn’t. He glanced up out of the corner of his eye, carefully keeping his head down while he snuck a peek. If anything, the kid looked even paler than he normally did and his hands were shaking as he carefully laid his phone down in the center of the desk and didn’t look at it again.

  “You travel light for a rich guy.”

  Which was far enough for Tom right fucking there. There was no way around admitting he was the son of a convicted felon whose trial had kept courtroom reporters in shits and giggles for three months. But what had happened to him after that was his own fucking personal business and since he’d managed to drop off the paparazzi radar, there was nothing to read on the subject, even for the morbidly curious.

  “That’s how I roll. Spent a lot of time ducking the press. Learned to travel light.”

  “Well, when you find a place to settle in, you oughta invest in some more stuff. Maybe an actual laundry basket.”

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought Reese was teasing him. Which was definitely a change from outright hostility.

  But he wasn’t about to get into a discussion of what he was or was not going to be buying. If the kid hadn’t noticed yet that Tom wore the hell out of an extremely limited wardrobe and had exactly one pair of running shoes, which were way past the five-hundred-mile marker that would normally mean it was time to replace them, then he wasn’t about to point it out.