The Roommate Situation (26 page)

I swallow back the truth. If I tell her that, I’ll be smothered for the rest of break. “No,” I say. “No, an RA doing a room inspection found him while I was in class.”

She clutches my hand. “Thank goodness.”

“Yeah. So, uh, Jamie is waiting for me…”

“I won’t keep you. What are you two doing tonight?”

“I don’t know. Hanging out. I was going to bring my guitar.”

“How’s he doing with his first year of college?”

“Okay, I guess.” He’s smoking pot, actually. A lot. And lamenting how hard it is to get a hold of it back here. Like me, he can’t wait to get back to school—except he’s looking forward to being able to kick back and chill, and at this point, I’d welcome a fucking early start to calculus.

When I ran into him the other day, he confided he thought he’d failed one or two of his courses. I’m not too confident about my grades either—sex is a
lot
more compelling than studying. The aced astronomy test was my last triumph on the academic front. I’d even gotten a C on my persuasive speech on soundproof rehearsal rooms in the residence halls, and I thought that was going to be a shoo-in for a B, at least.

“Well,” my mom says, “you and Jamie have fun.”

“Will do.”

“And don’t worry about Skip. He was clearly a troubled boy. You had nothing to do with his decision.”

“I know, Mom.”

“I just want to make sure.”

“All right. I’ll probably be out late. I’ll see you in the morning if I’m up before you leave for work.” I kiss her on the cheek and grab my gig bag before heading out of my room, patting my pocket to make sure I have my phone with me. She is totally going through my stuff once I’m out the door.

I hope Jamie’s around. And if he’s managed to score a little pot, that would be okay too.

* * * *

Dance Gavin Dance’s latest album plays loudly enough to vibrate the Mountain Dew can in my hand. Or maybe that’s the weed. Jamie’s parents are out at a holiday thing. His sister, Lucy, is Christmas shopping with her school friends. And Jamie is sprawled on a purple beanbag that’s barely held together by patches of gray duct tape. Half its guts are gone, leaving it more like a deflated oversized pillow than a chair. The basement room’s walls—plywood nailed over studs—are plastered with metal posters, beer-girl pinups, and spray-painted anarchy symbols. My mom thinks of Jamie as “That Nice Douglas Boy” with the sideswept blond bangs and his school tie always stuffed in his trousers pocket. She has clearly never been in his room. Or seen the way he’d started growing out his hair and goatee the minute he’d set foot on campus grounds.

His tie-dye shirt is littered with Chips Ahoy crumbs, and he’s grinning at the ceiling, eyes closed, as his fingers tap his chest in rhythm with the music.

His serene oblivion gives me a chance to consider him from the new perspective I’ve gained at college.

He’s a good-looking guy, with his easy smile and lanky but strong frame. We’d gone to kindergarten together, elementary school, all of it, best friends sometimes, drifting apart for a while, then going everywhere together again for a few years. I’d seen him press a nostril shut with his finger and blow a stream of snot from the other, right onto the frozen ground outside the school in winter. I’ve seen him panicked as hell his mother would figure out the reason her wallet was twenty dollars light. The two of us had puked side by side when we’d decided to give smoking a try—something Jamie’d caught on to and kept up in secret for a few years, despite that initial vomit. Chucking up pizza for what seemed like hours was enough to get me to quit before I even got started. We’d swum in the Douglases’ swimming pool, both in swim trunks and, one gorgeous summer night when Jamie’s parents were at a fundraising event, naked.

I try to think back on that one. I don’t recall looking at Jamie’s dick. Probably I noticed it flopping around.

Jamie belches over the music.

He really doesn’t do it for me. I chalk it up to the snot, to the way he’d relentlessly tormented Mary Dowd in third grade—
“Howdy, Dowdy!”
—to the countless completely asexual sleepovers we’d had. Thinking about Jamie as anything other than Jamie is kind of like macking on my cousin Jessica. Not cool.

Thinking thoughts about Jamie only leads me to thinking thoughts about Derek—the way he’d look standing in Jamie’s room, with his little half smirk, leaning on a wall. The warmth of his skin, the boniness of his hips in my hands.

The taste of his mouth.

I’d give anything to be able to drag Derek off someplace right now. Fuck, go at it right here in Jamie’s rumpled bed.

I kick Jamie’s foot. “Getting any action at school?”

“Fuck yeah.” That grin again. “I’ve gotta say, weed is the great liberator. Liberator of bras, liberator of panties. We should have done more with that shit when we were in high school, brah. Instead of scratching our asses down here playing
Grand Theft Auto Part Seventy Bazillion
.”

I shrug. “I had fun. You still talk to Taylor much?”

“Nope. MIT, man. He’s too good for us assholes.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“What? You’re the one asking me if I’d heard from him.”

“Anyway,” I say.

“Anyway. How much ass are you getting?”

I lean back in his sketchy desk chair—you’re never sure if it’s going to hold your weight or let you fall on your head when you lean back. So far it seems to be holding. “I’ve been seeing someone.”

“Yeah?”

I shrug.

“Dude, you shouldn’t be ‘seeing someone.’ You should be taking advantage of all the college pussy you can. One day you’ll be too old, and it’d just be creepy. I mean, I wouldn’t think it was creepy, hooking up with college chicks when I’m fifty, but the chicks probably would.”

“Nah, you’ll pull it off.”

He flicks his lighter and puts the flame to the bowl of the pipe again.

I skate on the edge of confessing who I’m seeing. If he prompts for more details, I just might spill. But he says, “Shit, man. I’m going through this stuff too fast. I hope it’s a cash Christmas, because this is not a cheap habit to support.” He draws in another earnest lungful.

Holding his smoke in his chest, he passes the equipment to me, and I light up. If I get high enough, I might let the truth slip unprompted.

Or I might just stare at the cracks in Jamie’s acoustic ceiling tiles, following their veiny paths to the metal supports and trying to connect them up.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The twenty-third. I’m awake at seven thirty, the knowledge that it’s grades day leaning over me like a boulder. Quietly I pull my laptop onto the bed and log into my school account.

There they are.

I flop back and shut my eyes.

Shit.

From the kitchen, which is right below my bedroom, comes the sound of my mom getting ready for work, humming as she rinses out the coffee carafe. She’ll be gone in fifteen minutes, not returning till after six. Dad’s already left for the office—no telling when he’ll be home. His evenings have been erratic the whole time I’ve been back, despite Mom’s asking him to set work aside for just a little bit—after all, it’s not often they have their son home anymore.

What I really need is a plan to be somewhere else at six o’clock, and then to stay out as late as possible. Maybe until January.

In the meantime, the best I can do is stash my laptop under my bed and pull the blankets over myself, faking sleep with the effort of an Olympian fake-slumber competitor.

The garage door rumbles up. Mom’s car makes hardly any noise backing out; the soft crunch of tires over pebbles in the driveway marks her exit. The door rumbles down. The house settles into its daily routine of clicks, hums, and creaks.

I’m not failing, technically. But it’s not going to be pretty.

I can only take another hour lying in the warm cocoon of my comforter. I get up and trudge downstairs in a pair of pajama pants, running my fingers through my tousled hair. I start coffee, take a leak, pour myself a bowl of Cheerios. The digital clock on the stove flashes from 8:58 to 8:59, eventually to 9:00. My phone’s upstairs. I leave the dirty dishes in the sink, trudge back to my room, and close the door behind me.

Call me when you get up
, I text, then drop the phone on the bed.

Nothing to do then. I lie on my side, staring at my gig bag. There’s no fucking way they’re letting me take that back to school with me, not after these grades.

I’ve gotta get it there anyway. Maybe Jamie can borrow his mom’s car and drive me to the post office. I can ship it, have it waiting for me. After Christmas, when I have the cash for it.

Damn it.

I should just man up and pack it in the car when it’s time to go. They can cajole all they fucking want, but they’ve got no right to demand I leave my own fucking guitar here.

I plug my phone into my stereo—that same one that was supposed to have been a new bike—and crank up the volume on the post-hardcore racket of METZ, the only album on my phone loud and aggressive enough to bludgeon the
shit shit shit
running through my head.

Halfway through, in the middle of “Nausea,” my phone rings. I propel myself off the bed and check the screen, then yank the phone off its cord to cut off the music.

“Hey.”

“What’s up?” Derek asks.

“Grades.”

“Oh. Not great, I take it.”

“Definitely not great. Definitely only one A, and that’s in the class they think is a fucking joke.”

“Any Ds or worse?”

“No.”

“Well, at least you get to stay in school,” he says.

“If I survive that long. My parents have been dying to see how I’m doing.”

“You don’t have to tell them, you know.”

“Shyeah. Easy for you to say. You don’t live with the Spanish Inquisition.” I plunk myself on the side of the bed and rub my forehead.

“I’m just saying,” he says, “it’s an option. You can dig in your heels and maintain that it’s your legal right not to divulge your grades.”

“And I’m supposed to pay for college after that how? Custer probably had a better chance making his stand.”

“Listen,” he says, “just tell them you’re finding your feet.”

“I’m finding I hate fucking macroeconomics. And astronomy.”

“You passed, so those are behind you.”

“Hello, microeconomics and calculus.” Howdy Dowdy. I slide onto the floor, the laptop like a beating heart under my bed, ready to give me away. “Did you check yours?”

“Not yet. I’m still in bed.” The exhale through the receiver gives me an image of him reclining against a headboard with a cigarette pinched between two fingers, his chest bare, his hipbones showing above the hem of the sheet.

“Places I would rather be than here,” I say. “Your bed.”

He laughs. “That’d be nice. Being home is good, but I’ve missed you.”

“Me too. On the
missing you
part. I’m kind of up and down on the
being home
part. Mostly down.”

“Yeah, I gathered.”

I can picture him flicking ash into a glass tray on his stomach. “So what’s the big plan for today?” I ask.

“No plans. Everyone’s working ’cept me, so I’ll be all by my lonesome this afternoon.”

“If I hadn’t let my parents talk me into selling my car before school… You know what they leaned on me to do with the money?”

“Buy textbooks?” He exhales smoke again. I love that sound. It makes me feel like he’s right here, next to my ear.

I say, “Savings bonds. So I’d have money to start out with after I graduate.”

“And you did that, of course.”

I sigh and tip my head against the bed. “Have you heard from your mom lately?” Anything to get off the subject of my parents.

“Nah. There’s probably a card waiting at the mail center. I’ll have to call her on Wednesday, wish her a happy Christmas. Hear about how fantastic Oregon is, if that’s where she finally went.”

“I should have told her if she wanted to take someone to Oregon, I know a nice woman around her own age who needs to get out more.”

Derek laughs.

“They could have been Thelma and Louise,” I say.

“And drove off a cliff?”

“I wasn’t going to say it. How many more days till we’re back at school?”

“Shit, uh…today’s the twenty-third? Something like eighteen.”

“Damn it.” I regret asking. I crawl into bed, curl up on my side, and pull the covers over my shoulder, cradling the phone between my head and the pillow. “Are you still in bed?”

“Yep. I should probably drag myself through the shower at some point, sit upright for a while before my muscles forget how.”

I smile. “What are you wearing?”

“A raised eyebrow. And…boxers.”

“What color? Are they boxers I’ve seen?” I rub the sheet between my fingers.

“Have you seen me in any boxers? I found these in the back of my underwear drawer yesterday. They’re dark gray.”

“Nice.”

“You?”

I sigh a little before saying I’m wearing pajama bottoms with nothing underneath. “Have you ever had phone sex?” I ask.

“No. Is that where we’re going with this?”

“Do you want to have phone sex?”

“Do you?”

I’m only half-hard, but conditions could change quickly. I put my hand where it’s warmest. Half-hard and growing. I say, “I’m not sure,” but I’m stiffening under my touch. And he’s on another cigarette. I hear the soft
puh
of it as he takes a drag.

“I’ve been making you a Christmas present,” he says. “I couldn’t do it back in the room since, you know, you live five feet away.”

“We should have waited till Christmas to rearrange the room,” I murmur.

“I don’t think my neck would have survived sleeping double in a single bed that long.”

“So what are you making me?”

The sharp intake of another inhale comes over the connection. “How’s it gonna be a surprise if I tell you what it is?”

“I can still act surprised. I need to figure out what to get you.”

“You don’t need to get me anything. This is the kind of gift that’s as much for me as it is for you.”

“Man. A hint. Is it a double-ended leather dildo?”

He laughs so hard he wheezes, and it’s like all the rasp at the edges of his voice pulled together.