The Hookup Equation: A Loveless Brothers Novel

by Noir, Roxie

  “Okay,” says Harper, who seems determined to get this back on track. “Here’s to the end of another semester, and to one more ahead of us.”

  “Hear, hear,” says Victoria.

  “Aye, aye,” says Margaret.

  “You’re a pirate now?” Harper asks, and we all drink.

  “I’ve always been a pirate,” Margaret says when she comes up for air. “Not my fault you haven’t noticed.”

  "I did think all those times you told me to walk the plank were odd,” Harper admits.

  “And that hook hand is pretty notable, but I didn’t want to be rude,” I add.

  Victoria’s got her beer in one hand, then points at Margaret with the other, her nails a deep, shimmering purple. That’s how you can tell Victoria’s stressed: she’s painted her nails, something she always does when she needs to assert control over a situation, even if the situation is what color her nails are.

  “Wait,” she says. “Wait, no, this is a joke about booty and how much of it she finds.”

  “Yarr?” says Margaret, and with that whatever nervousness I had about this dissolves, and I start giggling like a schoolgirl. I start giggling and I can’t stop, and after a moment Margaret and Victoria and Harper are giggling too, and then there are tears running down my face and I can’t look at any of them and I also can’t stop laughing.

  “Stop,” Harper gasps, hiding her eyes.

  “I can’t,” squeaks Victoria.

  “It’s okay,” says Margaret. “It’s okay, it’s under —"

  Then she snorts and starts laughing all over again.

  “Do you bury it?” Victoria asks, wiping tears out of her eyes.

  “Booty?” snorts Margaret.

  “Those poor boys,” I say. “They must have sand in the worst places if she buries her booty.”

  “Oh no,” giggles Harper. “Oh no. No, now I’m picturing it.”

  “Margaret’s buried booty?” I ask. “I’m sure she gives them straws to breathe through.”

  “Those aren’t straws,” says Victoria.

  “This is too weird, stop it,” says Margaret, laughing almost too hard to talk.

  “Is there a treasure map?” I wonder aloud. “Is this an ‘X marks the spot’ thing, or…?”

  “Here be dragons?” says Victoria.

  “Here be booty,” corrects Harper, and Margaret just covers her face.

  “I’m dying,” Margaret says from behind her hands. “We have to talk about something else. Med school placements. Anything. How’s Todd?”

  “Well, and back in Boston,” answers Victoria. Todd’s her boyfriend of a little over a year. “I guess that’s where the X on my booty map would be.”

  I snort.

  “Don’t laugh or we’ll talk about where your booty map X is,” she says. “What’s Josh the frat boy up to right now?”

  I look from her to Margaret to Harper, then drain the rest of my beer.

  I may have told them that I’m dating someone named Josh, a frat guy. None of them believed me for a single second.

  “He went home,” I say. “To… California. Does anyone else want another drink?”

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, we’re all on our fourth beers. Should I be having four beers? No. I should never be having four beers, because four beers is so many beers, but The Rail is having a ‘last day of finals’ special and most of campus has already gone home, and why not have four beers for once in my life?

  That said, my fourth beer is still practically untouched, sitting in front of me, because three beers was already a lot.

  “No,” Margaret is saying, leaning forward over the table. “I hate it. I refuse to accept it. It’s wrong.”

  “There’s scientific evidence,” Harper points out.

  “My argument is a moral one,” Margaret insists. “I reject this assertion on moral grounds.”

  Victoria just sighs.

  “Margaret, that’s stupid,” she says, sounding very, very patient.

  “No,” Margaret says.

  “Dinosaurs having feathers isn’t immoral, it’s just… a thing,” I say, eloquently. “Like how you have skin. And hair. And a nose. Do you guys ever think about if aliens find human skulls a million years from now? They’re going to reconstruct us so ugly.”

  I take a quick sip of my fourth beer.

  “Dinosaurs must be pissed,” I muse.

  Harper reaches out and puts a hand on my arm.

  “They’re dead,” she says gently. “Hence the reconstructions.”

  “Which are wrong, because fuck feathers on dinosaurs,” Margaret chimes in.

  “I think they’re spectacular,” says Victoria. “And fun.”

  “Dinosaurs are not fun,” insists Margaret. “They’re impressive. And awe-inspiring. And scary. And not feathered.”

  “You forgot fabulous,” teases Victoria.

  “And funky,” I add.

  “And…” Harper says, then blinks. Then narrows her eyes. “…flippant. Nope. Sorry, guys, my brain’s out of words, I’m just gonna sit over here for a few minutes and be quiet. Few? Is that anything? No.”

  “She turned in her Taciturn paper ten minutes before we came over,” Victoria says.

  “It was Tacitus, and I hate him,” Harper says through her hands. “I hope he’s in hell.”

  “He probably is,” I say comfortingly.

  “Thank you.”

  “Speaking of things we were doing ten minutes before we got here, Thalia, what the fuck,” says Margaret, who’s the furthest through her fourth beer.

  The table suddenly gets very quiet.

  “What?” I ask, a bad feeling already worming its way through my stomach.

  “You were not in the library. I went there to see if you wanted to walk over together,” she says.

  “I ran some errands after I finished my last paper,” I say, drunk and defensive. Then I point at her. “And I don’t have to tell you were I was. Fuck off. I wasn’t running errands, I was in a secret location that I’m not telling you!”

  “Not a secret,” Harper says, looking down at the table.

  “One last time to say thanks for the A?” Margaret asks.

  Victoria puts one hand over her eyes.

  “What the fuck?” I ask.

  “We know Josh the frat boy is really Caleb the professor because we’re not morons,” she says, taking another drink of her beer and rolling her eyes.

  “And you think I got an A because we’re dating,” I say. Anger flares in my chest, but I force myself to hold it back.

  “Oh, come on, I was kidding,” she says, smirking at me.

  She wasn’t kidding. We’ve been best friends for nearly four years, I know when she’s kidding.

  “What a funny joke,” I say. “Thalia’s not smart enough to get an A so she has to date the professor! Ha ha!”

  “Sure, dating,” she says. “That’s what you’re doing.”

  “Margaret, shut up,” Harper says softly.

  “Sorry, are you the only one who gets to call it that?” I ask. “When the rest of us go sleep with someone we’re supposed to say ‘hey I’m gonna go bang this dude’ but you, Margaret, get to call it dating?”

  “You don’t get to call it dating when it’s your professor,” Margaret says, and drains her drink. “Calling it dating implies there’s some level of —"

  “Enough,” declares Victoria, putting her half-full drink down loudly in the center of the table. “You two can talk about this when we’re not all shit-faced because we’re damn well not doing it now. Margaret, don’t be a bitch. Thalia, stop lying to us about Josh the frat boy, we’ve all seen Caleb drop you off at one in the morning at our apartment and walk you to the front door. Maggie’s at least right that we’re not morons.”

  I drink.

  “Don’t call me —”

  “Quiet, Maggie, or we’ll do it for real,” Harper says. “Thalia, I think it’s weird that a professor is into a student but honestly he s
eems very sweet and you seem happy to be getting nailed by this dude, so power to you.”

  “This dude who you think gave me an A because I’m letting him nail me?” I hiss, leaning forward over the table.

  “No one thinks that,” Victoria says quickly, shooting a glare at Margaret. Margaret won’t look at me. “You’re obviously capable of getting your own A.”

  “And your own D!” Harper says, brightly.

  No one laughs.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  I close my eyes and lean my back against the booth behind me, but that just makes everything spin unpleasantly, so I hold my head upright, keep my eyes closed.

  “Fine,” I say, without opening them. “Fine. Yes, there is no Josh the frat boy and yes okay fine it’s actually Caleb but it’s not in exchange for grades, it just sort of happened, and yes I know it’s bad, but…”

  I don’t know but what. All I know is that I shouldn’t have had this fourth beer, end of the semester or not. I know that admitting that we’re together even to my closest friends feels like I’m betraying Caleb, but lying to them about it felt like I was betraying them.

  “…but I like him?” I finally say. “I don’t know, you guys, I just like him. That’s all. I like a guy and he sort of happened to also be my calculus professor, and now he’s not any more and if you could please just keep this quiet until June, that would be really cool, okay?”

  “Okay,” agrees Harper, instantly.

  “Okay,” shrugs Victoria.

  I open my eyes, and we all look at Margaret.

  “Okay,” she finally says, her eyes on her empty glass and not on us.

  “Thanks,” I sigh.

  * * *

  I sleep over at Caleb’s that night. We don’t even have sex again, he just comes and gets me from the bar, then lets me drunkenly raid his fridge while I sober up a little and recount the should-dinosaurs-have-feathers argument that I had with my roommates.

  For the record, he is very definitely laughing at me, even as he coerces me into drinking water and eating some bread. I tell him several times that dino feathers are no laughing matter, but I can’t keep a straight face either.

  I don’t mention the other argument.

  I wake up to Caleb’s hand on my shoulder, shaking me softly.

  “Thalia,” he says. “Hey. Thalia.”

  I feel like someone’s dragging me up from underwater. When I finally open my eyes and look at him, I’m not sure what’s happening.

  “Huh?”

  “Your phone,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Your phone is ringing,” he says, groggy but patient, and I lift my head a little higher.

  Then, finally, I hear the muffled, tinny sound.

  “What time is it?” I ask, then glance at the bedside click myself.

  Four-thirty in the morning.

  “Shit,” I mutter, then roll out of bed. At least I’m not drunk any more, but I’m not exactly at my best, either. I manage to find my way to my purse, tossed in a corner last night, and then rummage through it until I finally get to my phone.

  The moment I find it, the thing stops ringing, and the missed calls pop up.

  It’s from Bastien.

  Actually, I’ve got four missed calls from Bastien, and that’s when the fear grips my heart. I let myself slide to the floor, the wood cold against my bare thigh, my head pounding, my whole body feeling heavy.

  “What is it?” Caleb asks from the bed, just as my phone starts ringing again. This time, I answer immediately.

  “What happened?” I ask, not bothering with a greeting.

  On the other end, Bastien clears his throat.

  “They found Javi,” he says.

  I can’t breathe. I need to know, need to ask, but I can’t find the air to do it with.

  “Alive,” Bastien says.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Caleb

  Thalia bursts into tears.

  I’ve never gotten out of bed so fast. I drag half the sheets and the blankets after me, spilling onto the floor, as I kneel next to her and put one arm around her, my other hand on her leg.

  “Where?” she whispers into the phone as she turns to me, eyes wide, tears spilling out.

  Then she shakes her head, looks away from me at the wall again, puts her hand over mine on her leg and I have no idea what any of that means.

  “In Richmond?” she asks, pauses. “Is that — is he still? Can they keep him, or —"

  Another pause, and even though I can only hear her half of the conversation, I’ve got a feeling that I know who this is about.

  Thalia closes her eyes and tears drop from beneath her lashes. I plant my lips on her bare shoulder and keep them there.

  “Okay,” she says. “Right. But —"

  Another long pause, and she looks over at me.

  “He’ll be okay, right?” she asks, into the phone. “From this, I mean? The worst is over from this?”

  She waits a second for a response.

  “Thanks,” she says. “I’ll let you know. Love you. Tell Mom and Dad that too. Thanks, Bossy. Bye.”

  She pulls her phone away from her face and hangs up, turns it off, plunging my bedroom back into darkness with nothing but the faint light of a street lamp around the edges of my curtains.

  Thalia takes a long, unsteady breath, then lets it out, and I pull her toward me until her head is on my shoulder.

  “Javier?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she whispers, her voice rough. She clears her throat, takes another breath, wipes at her face. “He overdosed, but —” she takes another deep, rough breath, “ — he got the Narcan in time and someone called 911, so now he’s in the hospital in Richmond. Bastien and my parents are heading there now.”

  “But he’ll be okay?” I ask, letting my fingers drift through her hair.

  “He survived the overdose,” she says. “Okay is… a big ask.”

  “That’s all I meant,” I tell her, already wishing I’d said something else, like alive.

  “I know,” she sighs, and I wrap my arms around her, let her lean against my chest.

  “I’m ready to go whenever you are,” I tell her, looking at the street light filtering through the window. It’s close to the winter solstice, so the sun won’t be up for nearly two and a half more hours. We might be there before the sun.

  Thalia’s quiet for a long, long moment.

  “I can’t ask you for this,” she says.

  “You’re not asking.”

  “I’ve never given you anything back,” she says, her voice a scratchy whisper in the near-dark. “I came home way too drunk last night and ate all your snacks while I was complaining about dinosaurs, and you put up with me and got me to bed properly, and now it’s not even five in the morning and my stupid family has more awful bullshit and I can’t — you can’t be this nice to me, Caleb. You can’t.”

  All I hear is her saying I came home. She just called my house home, and something deep inside me grows wings and takes flight.

  “I’m not being nice if it’s what I want to do,” I tell her. “I want you to see your brother. I’d want to see mine. It’s really that simple.”

  “I’m sorry we’re such a trash fire,” she goes on. “I’ve got a junkie brother and a closeted brother and my parents don’t talk and my dad’s just a straight up asshole. Jesus. Meanwhile you’ve got this perfect beautiful family with an awesome niece and a cute nephew and four older brothers who are all functional adults and your cool mom is a fucking astronomer, I mean, come on.”

  “Those assholes are not perfect,” I say, quietly, and Thalia lets out a single laugh.

  “You know what I mean,” she says. “You’re so wholesome and here I come with all… this. I’m sorry.”

  I start laughing softly at wholesome. I try not to, but I can’t help it.

  “Okay, what?” she says.

  “Levi’s a weirdo who talks to trees and has personal relationships with every squirrel in
his yard,” I say. “Eli failed out of college and then disappeared for a while to backpack the world before he decided to become a chef. Daniel spent his teens and early twenties raising hell until he impregnated a monster of a woman who didn’t even tell him he had a kid, Seth’ll fuck anything with two legs and tits, and my cool mom’s been lying to everyone for years.”

  Thalia’s quiet a moment.

  “Oh,” she finally says.

  I decide, right then, that I’m going to tell her the thing that I’ve never told anyone.

  “And my father, the heroic policeman who has a road and a building named after him, was drunk when he died,” I say.

  Thalia goes very, very still.

  “In the car accident?” she asks, her voice small.

  “He hit a tree doing seventy down a mountain road,” I say, heart still beating fast.

  I can’t believe I told someone. It feels surreal, like maybe I could still reverse time and undo it.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispers.

  “The county coroner knew him,” I say, suddenly unsure how to proceed. “And she knew my mom, and she knew us, so when she found out that he had a blood alcohol level of point twelve she covered it up. My mom was the only person she told. I guess she thought she deserved to know the truth.”

  I stare into the dark, remembering two things at once: the late-night knock on our door, watching from the stairs as my mom opened it, Levi’s hand on my shoulder, and then also years later, when I was the only one still living at home, overhearing my mom on the phone.

  I remember the fight we got into, the fight we had for weeks afterward: me, a know-it-all, righteous teenager; my mom, steely and pragmatic. I wanted to tell my brothers, to tell the town newspaper, to tell everyone. I wanted to share my disgust and horror with the world, but she talked me out of it.

  She said he’d already paid for what he did. That at least he hadn’t hurt anyone else, that we didn’t need to pay for it too. That he wasn’t a bad person — he wasn’t even much of a drinker — he was someone who made a bad decision and paid for it.