by Tim Floreen
He slung a huge arm over Lydia’s shoulders and gave her a kiss. “Morning, Strawberry.”
Lydia turned red. She’d had a thing for Tor for years, everybody had always known it, but now that she had him, it was like she’d won the lottery and didn’t have a clue what to do with the money. She took his public displays of affection with a mix of pleasure, mortification, and bafflement.
Tor leaned forward to ruffle my hair. “Morning, Nice Guy.”
My name’s Jeremy, Rem for short, but he liked to call me Nice Guy. Mr. Nice Guy if he was in a formal mood. Tor was into nicknames—he was the one who’d started calling us the Boreal Five—and he had one for each of us. In my case the nickname had caught on around school, too, and I suppose it fit well enough. Maybe I hadn’t done anything as impressive and altruistic as my brother, who’d single-handedly started the crisis hotline at Duluth Central during his time as a student there, but I knew how to get along with people. I didn’t gossip. I didn’t pick fights. I didn’t have enemies. None I knew of, at least.
Callie appeared next. She opened the back door and found Tor occupying what had been, up until a few weeks ago, her usual spot. “Oh. Right.” Scowling, she slammed the door shut, flung open the front passenger door, and dumped herself into the seat.
“Think of it as a promotion,” I said.
She cut a black look at me.
“I don’t get what the problem is,” Tor said. “It’s a free country, isn’t it? We’re all friends, right? What’s the big deal if Lydia and I want to get a little friendlier?”
Callie let out a noise halfway between a sigh and a groan as she pushed at the coiled mass of black hair piled on top of her head, a precarious hairdo that had given rise to Tor’s name for her—Elvira. “It threatens the integrity of our group, Tor.”
“ ‘The integrity of our group’?” Tor repeated. “What are we, a team of Navy SEALs?”
“We didn’t mean for it to happen, Callie,” Lydia said. “It just sort of did. We were spending all that time together in the bio lab after school.”
“Right,” Callie muttered. “There’s nothing like a little cat dissection to get two young lovers in the mood.” She seized the rearview mirror and angled it so she could look Tor in the eyes. “We’re graduating in June, Tor. We don’t have much time left together. I don’t want you ruining it.”
“Why would—”
“Come on,” she snapped. “You’ve never in your life dated anyone for more than a month. So what’s going to happen one week from now when you kick Lydia to the fucking curb just like you do every other girl?”
“Who says he’s going to kick me to the effing curb?” Lydia said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Don’t kid yourself, missy.”
Lydia’s freckle-strewn cheeks turned crimson again. “You know what really threatens the integrity of our group? The mean things you say.”
Callie ignored her. “What do you want with Lydia anyway, Tor? She’s a prude who can’t even bring herself to say the word ‘fuck.’ Don’t you prefer the slutty types?”
“That’s enough, Callie,” I said. “Give them a break. You can’t control who you fall for.”
“Thank you, Rem,” Lydia said.
Callie turned to glare at me again, her mouth open as if she wanted to say something. But then she grabbed one of my hands from the steering wheel instead and lifted it up. “For God’s sake, Rem, don’t you ever wash?”
I’d been painting that morning, lost track of time, and ran out the door without bothering to clean off the smears of pink and green and yellow covering my palms and fingers. That happened a lot. Callie was an artist too—mixed media collage mostly—but she was much neater about it.
Without a word Tor got out of the car, opened Callie’s door, and held out his hand. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
She eyed his open palm. “What?”
“You’ll see. It’ll be good, I promise.” To me and Lydia he said, “You guys come too. Leave the car running, Rem.”
He led us out the garage’s rear door and through the trees that separated my backyard from his. Callie complained loudly as she picked her way through the snow in her cork wedges and miniskirt. She was just as impractical a dresser as Tor.
Her choice of swearwords got more creative when he plunged into the woods at the back of his yard. The snow was harder to navigate here, but at least we didn’t have to go far. Twenty feet in, Tor stopped at the base of a huge maple.
Callie’s face softened when she realized where we were. Tor grinned at her and nodded.
The trunk of the maple grew at a low angle, extending over a ravine where a creek ran during the summer, so you didn’t have to climb the tree so much as walk out onto it. Still, it would be a challenge in wedges. Callie didn’t protest anymore, though. She followed Tor in silence, taking his outstretched hand for support. Lydia and I stayed close behind.
Just before the place where the trunk split off into branches, we all dropped to a crouch and peered over the side.
“They’re still here,” Callie whispered.
Below us, a family of red foxes played in the snow-choked ravine. Three or four little kits dove into the snow and exploded out again over and over, while their mother kept an eye on them from a comfortable branch a few feet off. Years ago, when we were all eight or so, Tor had discovered the foxes and started taking us here to watch them. It had become one of the Boreal Five’s first secrets: we’d never told anyone about them, not even after a neighbor’s pet rabbit had gotten mauled and we’d all known who must’ve done it.
At some point we’d fallen out of the habit of coming here. We probably hadn’t paid our foxes a visit since middle school.
“Hi, little guys,” Callie said in an uncharacteristically sweet coo.
Tor set his big hand on her shoulder. “We’ve all been friends for how long, Callie?”
“Forever, pretty much,” she mumbled.
“Exactly. A year ago, something horrific happened, and everything changed. But we’re still here, just like they are. The four of us, at least. Still together, still driving to school in Rem’s rust bucket every morning. Now Lydia and I are dating, and things have changed again. That’s what life is, though. Things will always be changing. We’ll get through this change too.”
Tor could come off as cocky and insensitive sometimes, but every once in a while, when you least expected it, he’d shift into this gentle voice and say something kind and sweet and wise that left your insides feeling like warm oatmeal.
Callie remained unmoved, though. Her face darkened again. She turned away from the foxes and hoisted herself to her feet. “Whatever. We should get going. We’ll be late for school.” Once we’d all piled into the car and I’d backed out of the garage onto Boreal Street, she added in a low mutter, “You’ve got some fucking nerve comparing what happened to Pete to your little thing with Lydia, Tor.”
Our eyes all veered toward the way back, like we could still see Pete’s huge body crammed in there, his head propped against the window while he took his morning snooze.
Beyond that, through the Saab’s rear window, the blue house at the very end of Boreal Street had shifted into view—much smaller and older and shabbier than the others, its front walk unshoveled, its driveway dug out just enough to let through a tiny compact, its porch hung with dozens of old and tangled wind chimes that murmured in the breeze.
Franklin Kettle’s grandmother lived there. Up until a year ago, so had Franklin.
The whole way to school, Callie didn’t say another word. I parked in the school lot, and we all shuffled up the front steps. In the hall Lydia held up her stack of posters. “We still have some time before class. Would you guys mind giving me a hand with these?”
“You got it, Strawberry.” Tor hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Rem and I can take this side of the building. You two take the other.”
Lydia split the stack in two and gave half to me. Callie snat
ched the other half and took off down the hall, banging the floor with her wedges, her heap of black hair bobbing and listing and threatening to avalanche any second.
“Seriously, Lydia, don’t mind her,” I said. “I think the anniversary has us all on edge.”
“Yeah.” Tor gave her another kiss. “You know Elvira. She can figure out how to be in a bad mood even at the best of times.” He grabbed one of the rolls of tape from around her wrist and tapped it against the posters in my hands. “We’ll get right to work on these.”
Lydia grinned, showing the freckly blush that had inspired the nickname Tor had given her. She hurried after Callie, her auburn ponytail bobbing as she went.
Tor and I started off in the opposite direction. We didn’t talk as we turned a corner and headed toward one of the building’s back exits, Pete Lund smiling at us over and over from the posters lining the walls. The cold walloped us in the face the second we stepped outside. Tor led the way along the rear of the building until we reached a place where concrete steps crusted with grimy snow led down to the basement. He glanced from side to side to make sure no one had spotted us before heading down.
At the base of the stairs Tor grabbed the padlock that held the banged-up metal door shut, twisted it, and yanked down hard. It released, and he heaved the door open. We stepped into darkness. After pulling a cord to turn on a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, Tor stomped down another staircase, this one long and narrow and made of wood. His boots shed crumbs of melting snow. At the bottom a corridor stretched off in both directions, and sweaty, searing-hot pipes ran along one wall. The air felt hot and soupy down here. Tor grabbed the posters from me and dumped them on the floor. I unwound the long blue scarf I wore around my neck.
Then we turned to each other in the dark and crashed together like cars in a head-on collision.
Tor buried his face in the curve of my neck. I pressed my chest against his, like we were still outside in the cold and I might freeze to death if I didn’t.
“Are you sniffing me?” he whispered.
“You smell like chlorine.”
“Well, you smell like turpentine.”
“Is that bad?”
“Stop talking, Rem.”
We grappled some more. His sweatshirt came off. So did my wool coat. Not my paint-spattered long-sleeve T-shirt, though. I didn’t have the same superhuman level of body confidence Tor did. Not even down here, where he could barely see me. I put my arms around him, and he felt gigantic, his muscles hard and hot like the pipes on the wall behind us.
Then, because I’m pathetic, and even though I knew exactly how he’d react, I went in for a kiss on the mouth.
He turned his head to the side, and my lips landed in the short hair behind his ear. The chemicals in the school swimming pool had turned it wispy and soft, like stuffed-animal fur. We stumbled a few steps, our feet splashing in the puddle of melted snow that had already formed around us.
Normally I’d consider myself sufficiently humiliated and let it go at that, but something got into me today. I grabbed his chin and tried to turn his face toward mine.
Tor tilted his head back and slipped out of my grip. “What are you doing?” he said, pushing me away. He was laughing, his straight white teeth flashing in the low light.
“I guess I’m trying to kiss you.”
“You’re so weird.”
“Why is that weird? Don’t most people kiss in this situation?”
“Come on, Nice Guy. You know I’m not into that. You know I’m not really gay.”
I took a few steps backward and bit my lip. Behind me the heat radiating from the pipes pressed against my back. Dozens of retorts rose up in my throat. Dozens of visits to these steam tunnels I could offer as evidence.
Dozens of not very nice things I could say.
“Look,” he went on, “I think it’s great that you’re gay and out of the closet and all that, but I’m not like you. See, for me it’s like this: girls are all bends and curves, guys are straight lines.”
He gestured to illustrate his point, undulating his hands for the girls, slashing them downward for the guys. I listened in silence, even though I’d heard variations on this speech from him before.
“Girls are hot, but they’re so high maintenance. Sometimes I just want to get a little play without dealing with their shit. You know, without it having to mean anything. With guys, it’s simple. No complications. Am I right?”
He smacked my chest with the back of his hand. I stared at his snow boots and my sneakers swimming in the small, dirty puddle we’d created. I wanted to say yes, match his bro tone, maybe even come out with an off-the-cuff joke, but my mouth wasn’t cooperating.
“Nice Guy? You okay?”
I raised my hands and noticed a streak of acrylic paint on the side of my right thumb that was still wet. I couldn’t make out the color in the darkness. For a second I imagined myself melting into the puddle at my feet, leaving only a multicolored paint swirl floating on the surface of the water. Apparently whatever had gotten into me today was intent on disproving Tor’s “guys are straight lines” theory.
I should never have tried to kiss him. I knew perfectly well how unbending he could be when he’d made up his mind about something, and although I guess you could call what we did in the steam tunnels making out, he never allowed his lips to touch mine. They went plenty of other places. My neck. My ears. Once he spent probably a full minute sucking on my nose, which was weird. But no mouth-to-mouth kissing. That was his rule.
And nothing beyond hand jobs. That was mine. If we weren’t going to kiss like normal people, I’d decided, we weren’t doing any inserting of things into places either. At least I had that much self-respect. So between his rule and my rule, we’d fumble and grope and slobber over each other for a while, and then we’d unzip and finish each other off without looking down. Like a handshake at the end of a business meeting. For two years, that had been our ritual.
Except today Tor said, “Listen, maybe we shouldn’t hang out down here anymore.”
I looked up. “Why not?”
“Because I think this might not mean the same thing to you as it does to me.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it does. I’m all about no complications.” Although the complicated way I’d started waving my hands around as I talked probably told a different story.
A dubious smirk flickered across his face. “Really? You’re acting weird today, Rem.”
I looked down again and stirred the puddle with the toe of my sneaker. “What about Lydia? You must be finding things pretty complicated with her.”
“You mean because she won’t put out?”
“Well, yeah.”
He shrugged. “I’m starting to realize there are more important things in a relationship. I mean it, Rem, I’ve never felt like this about anyone before. I don’t know why it took me so long to see how special she is.”
Now it was my turn to smirk. But you’re still down here with me, the smirk said, and I saw him read it on my face. He grabbed his sweatshirt from the pipe he’d tossed it over earlier and pulled it over his head.
“So how about we take a break from the tunnels for a while?”
The smirk wilted and dropped off my face. I picked up my coat and long blue scarf from where they lay on the floor. “Sure. We can do that. No problem.” I wound the scarf around my neck, wishing I could hang myself with it.
“I think it’s for the best,” Tor said. He turned to head up the stairs, but he stopped with one boot on the bottom step and looked back at me. “Hey, I know I don’t even need to ask this, but you haven’t told anyone about what we do down here, right?”
“Of course not.”
“Nobody?”
“Not a soul.”
“Good.” He grabbed the end of my scarf and gave it a tug. “It’s not that I have anything against being gay. You understand that, right?”
“Sure.”
“It’s just that I’m n
ot, like I said, and if this got around, people wouldn’t understand. Especially Lydia. She’s the sweetest person I know. I don’t want to confuse her.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“And it would probably be weird for you too if people found out.”
I couldn’t see his face. The lightbulb glowing behind him at the top of the stairs had turned him into a hulking black shape. He still hadn’t let go of my scarf. I wanted to ask what he meant. How would it be weird for me too? I’d come out of the closet three years ago, and Tor was the most popular kid at school. It wasn’t like my stock would suffer if people found out what we’d been doing.
Or did he mean it another way? As a threat or something?
Tor started to turn away again and his face caught the light. On his chin where I’d grabbed it earlier was a smear of bright pink acrylic paint. I thought about not saying anything, imagining him fumbling to explain the smear to whoever pointed it out to him later.
Instead I touched his shoulder. Tapping my chin, I said, “You’ve got something right there.”
I watched as he licked his fingers and rubbed, coaching him until he’d made the mark disappear.
Because that was what I did. I was the Nice Guy.
I spent the rest of the day and most of that night replaying the scene from the steam tunnels in my head. Thoughts of Tor even preempted my usual nightmares involving people having their brains blasted out through the backs of their skulls. (I’d been having those even more often lately, probably because of the upcoming anniversary.) After a while I stopped trying to sleep, turned onto my back, and did what I always did when my mind went into a tailspin: I worked on a new design for my Tattoo Atlas.
By the time pale light started to show through the blinds, I’d mapped out the image in my head enough to try putting it on paper. I crawled out of bed and, on the way to my desk, pushed one of the blinds aside to check the weather.