At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “I see,” McCraney said. “And you’re worried any choice you make regarding your future now necessarily excludes him.”

  “Yes!” I said. Hallelujah. Finally! A doctor who understood. “Tommy was my everything. All my friends are leaving: Lua’s going on tour, Dustin’s heading to the University of Florida, even Calvin will probably get out of Cloud Lake, but I don’t know what to do without Tommy. If I stay in Cloud Lake, I might be wasting my life. But leaving means admitting I may never see him again.”

  “Except he isn’t real, Oswald,” McCraney said. “It’s obvious you’re scared of the future, and this boy you’ve conjured is a convenient cover you’re using to avoid making a choice.”

  I’d been wrong. Dr. Dixie McCraney didn’t understand at all.

  I didn’t even finish our session. I stood and walked out the door.

  386,097 KM

  NOTHING EVER HAPPENS THE WAY we expect it ought to.

  I pulled into Lua’s driveway to pick him up for a show at a/s/l and honked. He ran out the front door, guitar case slung over his shoulder, wearing leather pants and something that looked like a straitjacket. After he tossed his gear into the back, he climbed into the passenger seat and held up his arms. Rust-colored buckles dangled from the sleeves.

  “You like it?” he asked. “Dinah helped me make it.”

  I didn’t answer. He could have gone on and on about anything and everything, and I wouldn’t have said a word because of the two envelopes sitting in my lap. Two envelopes that held my future.

  Lua snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Ozzie? Are you listening?”

  I picked up the envelopes and shoved them at Lua, who immediately quit talking.

  “You have to open them,” I said. Letters from UC Boulder and New College had both been waiting for me when I got home from school. Not my parents, not the realtor or some unknown family feigning interest in buying our house. Just those two letters. I’d taken them to my room, sat on my bed, and stared at them. But after my rejection from Amherst, I hadn’t been able to open them alone, so I’d brought them to Lua.

  Lua took the envelopes. “Which one first?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re gonna get in,” he said.

  Maybe I would have believed him before, but the first rejection had proved nothing was certain.

  “Just do it,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Lua tore open the first letter, unfolded it, read it, and set it on his lap. Then he repeated the process with the second. All while I sat there fighting the urge to puke.

  “Oh, Ozzie,” he said. “I’m so sorry . . .”

  My gut twisted. I ground my teeth together so hard I thought they would shatter.

  Then he said, “. . . you’re gonna be stuck in school for another four years. You got in!”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to college!”

  “Which one?”

  “Both, Ozzie. You got into both.”

  Lua burst out of the car, ran around to my side, and pulled me out. He squeezed me and we jumped up and down in the middle of his driveway.

  “I got in?” I said.

  “You got in!”

  Ms. Novak must’ve heard us shouting, because she came running out of the house in a robe with her hair in curlers asking what happened, and Lua said, “Ozzie’s going to college!” And Dinah screamed and jumped up and down with us, our hands joined like the points of a star.

  Lua hugged me and whispered into my ear, “I’m so proud of you, Oswald Pinkerton. I always knew you were too big for Cloud Lake.”

  • • •

  “I got into college!” I said to Bella Donna as she drew a fat black X on the top of my hand.

  “Good for you, baby,” she said. “Now all the boys are gonna be chasing you.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I was still grinning.

  Lua hadn’t invited me to the show solely to watch. He and the band had finished recording their EP and had copied the songs onto flash drives shaped like skeleton keys for me to sell. I set up a table in the back corner of the club. Five bucks for the flash drive, ten bucks for a T-shirt. Each shirt was emblazoned with the band’s logo on the front—a cracked clock with a silhouette of Lua over it—and on the back was a list of tour dates, each set in the far-flung past or distant, imagined future.

  I hadn’t spent much time with Lua lately—I’d been busy with Cal and Lua had been busy with the band—but I promised him we’d go to IHOP after the show to catch up, and not only was I desperate to spend time with my best friend and find out what was going on in his life, I really needed to talk to Lua about Calvin.

  I couldn’t think straight around Cal. Kissing him filled my thoughts, though we’d managed to keep our lips firmly to ourselves. Sometimes we stayed up all night on the phone debating why the universe—the boundaries of which now extended barely farther than the moon—kept shrinking. I asked Calvin to explain where daylight came from without the sun, but he didn’t recognize the word, which made the discussion difficult. Everything was happening so quickly that I hadn’t had time to process what it all meant. Getting into UC Boulder and New College was an amazing feeling, but it meant I would have to make a decision about whether to leave or stay.

  Should I stay in Cloud Lake for Tommy? Leave for myself? Could I admit that I had feelings for Calvin that I found increasingly difficult to ignore? Too many choices. Too many decisions.

  “I’ll take a shirt.”

  “Ten bucks,” I said without looking up from my phone. Calvin had texted me a picture of the Thai food he and his dad were eating, and I was trying to think up a witty reply.

  “This piece of shit isn’t worth ten bucks.”

  I glanced up, and the last person I expected to see was Trent Williams. He looked so out of place, wearing a Miami Dolphins jersey and khaki shorts, a sneer cutting his ogre face. I snatched the shirt back from him and returned it to the pile.

  “What’re you doing here, Trent?”

  “Came to see the show. What else?”

  Trent was eighteen, but he must’ve had a fake ID that said he was old enough to drink, because he held a beer in one hand.

  “So this is what a fag bar looks like,” he said. A couple of people nearby glared in Trent’s direction.

  “I’m surprised I’ve never seen you here before, considering what people at school say about you.”

  Trent’s smirk transformed into a snarl. “Was it you? Whatever Frye told you about me is a lie. He’s a fucking liar.”

  “Calm down, Trent,” I said. “I’m sure it’s totally normal to get a boner while wrestling with another guy. Especially if you’re gay.”

  “Fuck you, Pinkerton.” He inched closer to the table, but a line had begun to form behind him, and a woman said, “Move it, creep.”

  Trent bristled and sneered. I doubted he’d start a fight in a club full of people who’d kick his ass for using the word “fag,” but pride makes people do stupid shit.

  “Whatever,” he said, and backed away.

  But I actually felt bad about what I’d said. I didn’t know whether Trent was gay or straight or fell somewhere in between, and it didn’t matter. Trent was an asshole, yeah, but no one deserved people talking shit about them.

  “Trent,” I called.

  “What?”

  “Lua and I are going to IHOP after the show. Why don’t you come with us?” It had to be getting into college and my preoccupation with Calvin. Those were the only reasons I could think of that I was being nice to an asshat like Trent.

  “I’d rather choke on a shit burrito,” he said, and disappeared into the crowd. Whatever. I’d tried.

  I sold out of the flash drives before the stage lights rose on Lua and the band.

  Your Mom’s a Paradox grew more confident every time I watched them play. It was only a matter of time before they graduated from opening band to headliner. And I was awed by them. By Lua.

  There was a moment
midway through the show, during the song “Corporal Jackie, the One-Legged Monkey,” when Lua cut his finger. Instead of stopping, he smeared it across the front of his straitjacket and played on. It was gross, yeah, but it was so badass.

  I had no idea what my future held, but I saw Lua’s crystal clear, and it shone brighter than I could have possibly imagined.

  385,972 KM

  “HOLY SHIT!” LUA SAID, HOLDING his hand over the table for me to see. “I’m an idiot.” The cut ran down the pad of his swollen middle finger. “But I couldn’t stop playing. I mean, I didn’t even feel the pain until the end of the set. It was amazing.”

  “It was endorphins,” I said, thinking about Calvin and his explanation for cutting himself.

  Lua wrapped a napkin around his finger and cradled it to his chest. “Whatever it was, I want more.”

  IHOP was brightly lit and loud. A bawdy group that had come from a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show occupied most of the other side of the restaurant, still dressed in their fishnets and corsets and skin-tight gold shorts.

  Our server dropped off our grilled cheese sandwiches, and we dug in.

  “So,” Lua said with his mouth full. “What’s going on with you and Calvin, college boy?”

  College boy. I still couldn’t believe it, and I definitely wasn’t ready to think about what it meant for my future. “Honestly?” I said. “I have no idea.”

  Lua rolled his eyes. “He likes you. Obviously. And you’re a damn liar if you say you don’t like him, too.”

  I avoided answering by stuffing my face with sandwich. The bread was perfectly toasted and the cheese just warm enough to ooze over the crust and drip onto the plate. It was maybe the most perfect grilled cheese I’d ever eaten. But I couldn’t avoid answering all night. Eventually I’d run out of sandwich.

  “Yeah, all right. I like him.”

  “I knew it!”

  “But,” I said, “it’s complicated.” I still hadn’t told Lua the whole story of New Year’s Eve, and I figured that was the best place to start. “So we sort of had sex in my car on New Year’s Eve, but he’s messed up and I’m messed up and we decided we should just be friends.”

  Lua stopped with a fry halfway to his mouth. “Aren’t you supposed to friend-zone a guy before you sleep with him?”

  “Like I said: complicated.”

  “If this is about Tommy, I might strangle you with that guy’s feather boa.” Lua motioned to the Rocky table.

  “It’s a nice feather boa,” I said. “All violet and fluffy. If you ever strangle me with a feather boa, that’s the one I’d choose.”

  “No changing the subject, Mr. College Boy Subject Changer.”

  I set my sandwich aside. Not even it could save me now. “All right. You can’t tell anyone. You can’t even let Calvin know you know.” When I was certain Lua understood and agreed to my terms, I said, “Calvin was sleeping with a teacher.” I immediately regretted breaking Calvin’s trust, but I needed Lua to know Tommy wasn’t the only complication between me and Calvin.

  “Whoa,” Lua said. His mouth hung open. “Do you know who?”

  I shook my head. And since I’d already spilled one of Cal’s secrets, I kept talking. “And he cuts himself. He used to. I don’t think he’s done it in a while. He might be depressed. Maybe.”

  “But this isn’t all about him,” Lua said.

  “What do you want me to say? That I still love Tommy and I don’t even know if I want to go to college, much less start something with Cal, because what if Tommy comes back?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Fine. I said it.”

  I’d lost my appetite. I wiped the buttery grease from my fingers and tossed my napkin on my plate. “Look,” I said. “I don’t care if you don’t believe me about Tommy, or that you can’t support me because you consider doing so enabling what you perceive to be my delusion, but could you not shit on me for it?”

  Lua’s hard edges faded. He looked at me like I was one of those sad old dogs in a shelter that no one wanted to take home and would probably wind up euthanized. “I’m not shitting on you, Oz, but I don’t want you to trade your happiness now for some slim-to-nonexistent chance of happiness in a nebulous maybe-future.”

  “Do you think you’re telling me anything I haven’t already considered?”

  “Ozzie.” Lua reached across the table and took my hand. “Do you like Calvin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to go to college?”

  “Maybe?”

  Lua rolled his eyes. “Don’t ‘maybe’ me, Oswald Pinkerton. You know you want to be one of those snooty intellectuals showing off your mad smarts by lecturing your classmates about the homoerotic subtext in Hemingway’s pompous shitty books. You’re the only person I know who gets boners writing term papers.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Also, Lua wasn’t wrong—not about the boner thing; writing essays didn’t actually make me hard—I loved books and learning, and I thought I’d love college and the freedom to study subjects I was passionate about, which included pretty much everything.

  “Fine. I want to go to college.”

  “Then do it!” Lua said. “Fall in love with Calvin and then dump his ass and go to college. We’ll take a road trip over the summer before I go on tour. Be happy, Ozzie. You deserve it.”

  “But what about Tommy?”

  Lua bit back the first reply that popped into his head—probably about how I was stupid and Tommy didn’t exist—and I appreciated his restraint. “If Tommy comes back, and he loves you the way you obviously love him, he’ll understand.” Lua squeezed my hand. “You’ve waited long enough.”

  Lua made it sound so easy. Just stop waiting for Tommy and live my life. Maybe that included Calvin and college, maybe it didn’t. But my decisions had consequences, even if I couldn’t see what they were at the moment.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “Good enough?”

  “Not really. But it’s better than moping.”

  Our waitress cleared our plates and replaced them with slices of wobbly chocolate cream pie and thick chocolate milkshakes, which consumed Lua’s and my attention until we’d devoured both, leaving nothing behind but empty plates and glasses.

  “So,” Lua said. “How was it?”

  “Delicious, obviously.”

  Lua laughed. “Not the pie. Sex. With Calvin.”

  “Oh.” I suddenly became interested in drawing lines with my fork through the thin smear of whipped cream left on my plate. “He’s got nice equipment, and it’s all in working order.”

  “Nice equipment? That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “You want a blow-by-blow account?”

  Lua’s eyes grew wide and he nodded his head like I should have known better than to even ask. “Duh.”

  “It was nice. And Calvin was really sweet.”

  “Puke. Gross. That’s not what I meant.”

  “What? You want to hear how he went down on me and I went down on him but we didn’t go all the way because we were in my car in his driveway, which made things logistically awkward?”

  Lua’s fingers were covered with chocolate and he eschewed his napkin to wipe his hands on his jacket, which was already stained with blood. “That’s a decent place to start.”

  “It’s a better place to end.” I refused to divulge all the gory details. “Sex is weird, isn’t it?”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I mean, when you’re into it, when you’re naked and kissing and doing all that stuff, it seems normal and awesome. But then, after, when you’re sweaty and sticky and exhausted, it’s like you just spent an hour in some bizarro world where it’s totally natural to stick your mouth in places you wouldn’t stick it under regular conditions.”

  Lua might not remember, but he’d been equally inquisitive the night after Tommy and I slept together the first time. Lua had practically shoved metal slivers under my fingernails to force me to reveal the tawdry particu
lars.

  “Calvin laughed when he . . .” I mimed an explosion. “You know.”

  “He laughed?”

  “Like a crazy person.”

  “Is that normal? Are you sure you did it right?”

  I shrugged. “I hope so.”

  Lua nodded knowingly. “Jaime was all ‘don’t stop, don’t stop,’ and then he’d come and freak out if I even looked at his dick.”

  “Hey, it’s sensitive down there.”

  “Yeah, well, Jaime was a little too sensitive,” Lua said. “Most of the time I had to wait for him to leave so I could finish my business alone. You guys have it so easy. A couple of tugs and you’re done. For me, getting off feels like cracking a safe. Sure, I can let someone drill the lock and hope they pop it, but it usually takes time and finesse to do the job properly.”

  Many lengthy and graphic conversations with Lua had given me more insight than I’d wanted into female anatomy, but it still seemed abstract to me. While there were definitely downsides to wearing my genitals on the outside—random classroom boners being one of the worst—Lua made the alternative sound much less appealing.

  “Anyway, his laugh was demented,” I said. “I don’t know if he does it every time because we’ve only done it once, but it was funny. And his body did this weird spasm thing. It was cute and a little unnerving.” I’d decided not to tell Lua about Calvin also calling me a slut, because we’d sorted that issue and I didn’t want to give Lua a reason to hate him.

  “Let me guess,” Lua said. “You’re all stone-faced and serious when your soldiers break formation.”

  “I don’t really know what my face is doing. I’m usually too focused on what other parts of me are doing.”

  “Well, I suppose I’m happy you finally got laid. You should do it more often, even if the thought makes me want to vomit up my perfectly delicious pie.”

  “Thanks?”

  Lua shook his head, his eyes tinged with sadness. “It’s not you. I miss Jaime.”

  “You regret breaking up with him?”

  “Sometimes,” Lua said. “I still think it was the right thing to do, and I think I miss the idea of Jaime more than I actually miss Jaime, but it was nice knowing there was one person in the world who loved me more than anyone else.”