Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (32 page)

I finished my story on a down note and got the usual nods and smiles and, ‘That’s rough, Stephen.’

Then the weird kid pulled himself to his feet.

‘Well, I think you’re all shallow,’ he said after a strange pause. ‘Utterly superficial.’ Looked right at me. ‘Especially
this jerk.’ He turned and swept out.

Everybody started talking at once. We were trying to decide whether the ‘shallow’ comment was some kind of slur because most
of us at the table were gay, but then we couldn’t figure out if he was as well. Nobody could even remember who’d invited the
scary redhead along in the first place.

I lit a cigarette. ‘Great guy. Kind of looks like Eric Stoltz fucked a chicken, no? And that’s the love-child.’ I got a couple
laughs.

The next day the same guy bought me a coffee and decided to explain why he thought I was a superficial jerk, which I suppose
was nice of him.

‘It was that story,’ the weirdo said. We were at one of the outdoor tables at the Student Union coffee shop. He’d flagged
me down as I was daydreaming my way along the sidewalk, waving his arms. ‘Stephen! Hey!’ I wasn’t even sure how he knew my
name. His name was Ryan.

He unfolded his legs and the table wobbled dangerously. ‘I mean, if it was true, then that’s some pretty harsh stuff. But
you were using the whole thing as a joke. To get attention. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?’

His accent sounded slightly off, vowels that lingered a hair’s breadth too long. Turned out he was American.

A cold breeze numbed the end of my nose. I could have said something mean, but instead I told him it was just a way of keeping
it all distant.

‘You know what I’m talking about, right?’ I said. ‘Turn something painful into another dumb story. It’s human.’

Ryan looked at me as if to say that he’d heard of these humans of which I spoke. Then he asked me how long I’d known Mark.
And which bands Mark liked, and what we used to do on his birthday, and on and on. I told him way more than I should have.
Ryan started tearing napkins out of a chrome dispenser chained to the table and throwing them at me.

‘I’m not going to touch you. Obviously. But I’m sorry you’re upset.’

Afterwards we stopped by a second-hand bookshop so I could buy him the
Hitchhiker’s Guide
trilogy. I’d said something about that night with Mark being like going through the Total Perspective Vortex and I knew he
wouldn’t be able to understand that without the second
book. I still wasn’t sure if Ryan was gay, straight, or some asexual being from outer space. Over the next few weeks, he turned
into best friend number two.

I liked him for his weirdness. Most people didn’t – Ryan was mercilessly excluded just about everywhere he went. But I think
he sensed that I wouldn’t hurt him, because after that coffee he was stuck to me like a barnacle.

Midnight and spitting flecks of rain. I was outside a club, exposed on a hill away from the rest of the bars, shivering and
getting carded, watching my friends filing in without me. I launched into this stupid explanation of how I’d left my liquor
ID and my passport and my driver’s licence at home – not really listening to myself, drifting in and out of an English accent,
hoping I’d bore the enormous heavy-lidded bouncer into waving me in. No luck. I told him I had a student card and he said
he wouldn’t take it. I handed it to him anyway. He ran his thumb along the plastic and smeared off the little bump of marker
where I’d tried to turn 1969 into 1968.

‘Nice try … Stephen,’ he said, reading off the card. Somebody looked up at the sound of my name. It was Christopher, stumbling
out of the club with his arms around a boy I’d never seen before. Beautiful like him. Christopher nodded at me.

‘Hey, how’s it going?’

I just stood and stared.

Christopher’s friend lost his balance and lolled back against him, glanced at me and then back to Christopher.

‘Is there, like, weirdness here?’

‘Course not,’ Christopher said. ‘We’re cool, right, Stephen?’

I stammered out something stupid. I think I told him that of course we were cool, nothing was weird, and I hoped they’d have
a great night. ‘Just gonna go home,’ I finished, smiling vacantly, ‘drink some arsenic.’ Christopher said that sounded nice.
I watched them swaying down the sidewalk together. He mumbled something into his friend’s hair.

‘The Valley!’ the guy said. ‘That’s so cute. Did he grow up on a farm?’

At the end of the night, I was down by the waterfront, sitting on a wooden pier with my feet knocking over the edge. The air
smelled like gas stations and old fish. Ryan was gazing into the horizon and babbling on about string theory. I’d dragged
him out of his room at the guys’ dorm so he could join me on this hellish walking tour of misery. Now I couldn’t keep my eyes
open.

Ryan poked me in the head. ‘Stephen, you’re missing it.’ Missing what? Oh. Sunrise over the harbour.

‘Think I got dumped tonight.’ My voice was like something crushed under a tyre.

I was expecting him to say something dismissive. Instead he reached up and very tentatively stroked my shoulder blade through
my coat, like a small child trying to make friends with some large and dangerous animal.

‘Poor little muffin,’ Ryan said gravely.

I was strangely moved, but at the same time couldn’t help laughing. He shrugged in his twitchy way. ‘My grandmother says that.’

‘Nice grandmother.’

I closed my eyes against the cold wind off the water, sound of seagulls fighting over food scraps. Wondered how I was going
to find the strength to drag myself home.

Then it was Saturday morning about a week after Halloween and I was shuffling aimlessly along the shore. There was no sand
for a beach, just slabs of stone and some wind-blasted pines; across the harbour you could see hills thick with coloured leaves
and a clutter of houses and office buildings that was Dartmouth, the purgatorial twin city. Ryan was with me. His turn to
haul me out of bed so I could keep him company on a long and pointless walk around the city.

Ryan was looking especially awful that day: acid wash jeans and a yellow polo shirt with his own musty sneaker footprint across
the front. Like he’d picked the closest thing off the floor and pulled it over himself. This is exactly what he’d done, of
course – I’d seen Ryan getting dressed before, fresh out of the shower in his dorm room, so wrapped up in explaining his lecturer’s
inadequate methods that he didn’t seem to notice he wasn’t wearing anything.

Pale and smooth and graceful like a marble Jesus. It had surprised me, that body.

Then he’d realised and thrown a towel over my head, made me sit blinded on the edge of his bed like a damp terrycloth ghost
until he was decent.

Light was glaring off the rocks. I kept my sunglasses on. Ryan had left the trench coat at home and the wind was making him
shiver. I was painfully hung over, kept bumping into him as I walked, a sick swayback horse. He accused me of putting the
moves on him.

‘I’m just tired, you idiot,’ I said.

‘Probably because you were fucking that Chinese guy all night.’

I had to stop. ‘He’s not Chinese,’ was all I could think of to say. ‘And how …?’

A look of utter disgust, as if a bug had just flown into his mouth. ‘Bunch of my friends saw you. All over each other at the
bus stop. It was gross.’

‘What friends are these, Ryan?’

He kicked at a wine bottle with an inch of red sludge still rolling sickly inside. It went spinning for a moment, then wobbled
off down the side of a length of rock.

‘You know, you really disappoint me, Stephen. I don’t know if I should be around somebody with such low moral standards.’

‘Okay, great. See ya.’ I turned and headed off over an incline of sun-bleached stone, gave him the finger over my shoulder
so he wouldn’t follow me.

The next morning he appeared outside my apartment building with a box of Timbits.

‘I don’t take back what I said, of course. You really do have shockingly low moral standards.’ He was looking up from my doorstep
where I’d nearly tripped over him on my way out. ‘But it’s possible this is none of my business.’

‘Gee, really?’

Ryan was around a lot that cold November. His roommate at the dorm got a girlfriend and they wanted their privacy – in fact,
they wanted privacy day and night, which meant Ry ended up crashing at the blue box on a regular basis. It was cosy and companionable.
Or it would have been, if he wasn’t warning me every five minutes not to ‘try anything’. He kept all his clothes on when he
was sharing the futon with me, even that filthy trench coat. Took me a while to get used to the smell.

One night I woke up to a small choked voice from the other side of the mattress.

‘People back home actually like me, you know.’

I knew what this was about. We’d been to a party that night and, as usual, Ryan could not seem to stop pissing people off.
After about an hour the whole building was united against him: the girls sneering, the boys ready to put him in the hospital.
He’d sneered and threatened back, but I could tell he’d had enough.

‘Nobody has a problem with me where I’m from. Must be hard to believe, huh?’ He sounded like he was about to cry. ‘I miss
them all so much. I miss my mom and dad. I miss my stupid brothers. I miss my dog. I really, really miss my dog.’

‘Aw, Ry.’

He was quiet for a minute.

‘Stephen, will you hug me? I mean, don’t act too gay about it, but—

‘C’mere.

We lay on our sides with our arms around each other, him in his Columbo get-up, me in a T-shirt and boxers. Ryan had shoved
a pillow over his crotch, said it was in case I got a boner being this close to him, that at least he didn’t want to feel
it. I just laughed. He talked for a long time about the sadness of being Ryan Darby, alone in this cold country with only
one friend. I stroked his frizzy hair; it crunched under my fingers like fine polyester lace.

‘Ryan. Poor little muffin,’ I said. We fell asleep.

Ryan avoided me after that. I tried not to take it personally.

November turned into December. I’d just finished an exam and was outside the Science Building wrapped in my big black overcoat,
smoking and waiting for Janine. I was on an incline at the top of a set of steps.
Made me feel like I was surveying my kingdom – the Arts Building opposite with its immense historical pillars, the girls’
and guys’ dorms in grey stone closing the square, light reflecting off a fresh snowfall in the quad.

Then I noticed somebody marching across the square. Ryan. He was bundled into an enormous parka, the kind of thing jumpy American
parents would buy their son bound for study in the frozen wastes. I watched his footprints making a dotted line through the
snow. Then he was an arm’s-length away – snuffling with a red-nosed cold, frowning as if I were the one who’d gone running
after him. I mumbled a ‘hi’.

‘Here.’ He shoved something into my hands. It was small, with hard corners. A box. ‘It’s your Christmas present.’

‘I’m Jewish.’ It was what I always said whenever people would get Christmassy at me. Ryan ignored this.