Sebastião Rodrigues was walking on the deck of the Portuguese sailing ship. It departed from the islands of Cape Verde a few identically-sunny mornings ago. Sebastião was not yet used to the constant motion. Looking at the horizon sometimes helped. It helped on the ship between Portugal and the Canary Islands. This time it only made him think of how big and deep the ocean really was. They would not make port again for many weeks.
Francisco Garrpe joined him on deck to report on the sad state of their brother in Christ, Juan de Santa Marta, who would not join them on deck.
“Is he still so ill?” Sebastião asked conversationally.
“That he is already so ill.” Francisco answered with a stoic concern. The distance from this harbor to the next at Cape Town would be long.
“This fresh air is not doing me any good, anyway.” Sebastião said this very platonically to comfort his friend, in a friend way,
Peter Simmonds sketched several strikethrough lines over four words and continued writing.
in a coworker way, because Sebastião himself was an ordained priest. Neither struggled with sinful, carnal impulses. Neither did Juan, definitely not recently, because he was seasick and nothing is less sexy than being seasick. This matter wouldn't even come to mind, not for any of them. This was supposed to be an adventure. A very serious, tragic adventure. A holy calling. “I will return below deck with you to pray over our brother in Christ. When the sea is calmer we can carry him up together. He can improve then.”
The two men crowded the narrow stairs to the cabin. The heat beneath their clothes and the jostle of their body made the darkness so inviting in Sebastião’s most troubling dreams he
This was a bad idea, Peter Simmonds thought. He dropped his purple ballpoint pen and pressed the palms of his hands to his face, muffling a humiliated groan of “What is wrong with me?”
Even when he wasn't writing, they lived on in his mind. Francisco Garrpe looked like an older version of Matthew Lloyd, who Peter had a crush on ever since he watched him audition with Cain's song from Children of Eden. Matt's performance had been flawless in tone and control, the song selection so daring—but Matt himself was reliable, by-the-book, trustworthy, smart…and he liked girls. Why wouldn't Matt like girls? Matt was normal. Matt would like girls.
The Francisco Garrpe in Peter's mind went uncomfortably shifty-eyed, and then everybody in the story time-travelled to a few moments before.
Peter furrowed his brow with concentration and re-read what he wrote, readying his ballpen.
Sebastião said “I will return below deck with you to pray over our brother in Christ. When the sea is calmer we can carry him up together. He can improve then.”
Peter scribbled over the name to block it out and wrote carefully in the narrow space between the lines.
Francisco said “I will return below deck with you to pray over our brother in Christ. When the sea is calmer we can carry him up together. He can improve then.”
“I…” Sebastião declared as though prodded by a line prompter at the theater stage (author's note: fix this line later), “...will watch for land. It cannot be so far now that we cannot see it, and it would bring me comfort. I will pray with both of you from here, and will tell you if I see any giraffes.”
Francisco Garrpe returned below deck.
Adventure, Peter thought again. It was his reason to start writing this story. He thought it would be fun. Now, from the confines of his room at boarding school, he only felt seasick. Peter didn't know what Sebastião looked like yet, because he saw the story through his eyes.
Sebastião wouldn't know that wild giraffes weren't coastal animals, though.
Peter wanted this story to be as realistic an adventure as he could write without researching too much, because there was the writing mood and the reading mood and research was something only possible to do in a reading mood. He was in a writing mood.
At the same time, it was like he lost some God-given writing talent.
Back when he was in grade school, stories flowed from his pencil as easily as reading. He thought the output and input would always be that easy. Now he had no idea what should happen next.
Adventure, Peter thought, like he was wandering around his mother's house about to call the name of his dog. It had to be around here somewhere, behind the sofa or out in the yard.
Juan de Santa Marta could be found dead in his cabin, and Francisco Garrpe would cross himself in grief and begin a prayer. In the middle of it, Juan's corpse could stiffly sit up, then lurch towards Francisco with an undead cannibal hunger—
Peter sighed, already bored at the idea. Movies about the undead never ended very happily.
Sebastião, for once, could look down past the hull of the ship, and marvel at how clear the waters truly were. He would see their ship pass by corals, colorful tropical fish, and a muscular merman with glittering violet and blue-green scales undulating like a dolphin to keep up with the speed of the ship and… wow, is half a human man still a whole lot of man...
I hate my mind, Sebastião would think, as he forced a smile and waved politely at the merman passing by. Why can I not marvel at all God's wonders with equal innocence? Why do I invent fantasies of resurrection horror, and pagan merpeople?
I hate my mind, Peter realized. I hate my heart. I hate everything about myself. God, give me something…Why can't I write a version of Sebastião who's normal?
He forced the next sentence out. Ocean scary. Say that but fancy.
Father Sebastião Rodrigues looked west at the ocean, not east towards land, because he liked better to scare himself.
Peter paused as he thought, and tapped the opposite end of the pen against his cheek like he was knocking a sticky boiled-sweet out the bottom of an upturned jar. Sea monster? No, no, no, no, no, he wanted to write realistic historical fanfiction. Holy vision of Jesus walking on water? That was good! He should have thought of that first!
No. Wait. That wouldn’t be keeping with the story. The novel Silence was about how Father Sebastião Rodrigues could never really be sure.
This idea would ruin what fans of anything would jokingly call the canon, and Peter wanted to honor the story instead of ruin it.
Peter hoped fans jokingly called it canon. It would be wrong if a fiction author were treated the same as the Pope. That didn't mean he wanted to ruin a story that inspired him, only because the author wasn't the Pope.
It was so difficult to write something good. He could only do this much because it wasn't his story, not really. There wasn't as much pressure to be good at writing this. He still wanted to tell a good story, though.
Peter leaned back in his chair and grumbled at the ceiling, lazily spun the ballpen between his fingers and it dropped.
He thought, violent video games are a less stressful hobby. I should play more Duke Nukem.
He would have to borrow his roommate Jason's console and the game cartridges, which they hid carefully during room inspections. When the upperclassmen were busy with exams, the boys would plug the wires and jacks into the television in the common room. The game didn't have that interesting a story to watch somebody else play through. In the hours they could steal, Peter would watch Jason zoning out as he played and decided the appeal was more in something to do with your hands without thinking.
And that practice led to better sense of what was left or right, and better hand-eye coordination. More benefit than these messy stories that Peter couldn't even turn in for English classes. There were scientific studies.
Jason liked girls too. Peter knew that because Jason hypnotized himself on console video games like Duke Nukem where all the computer-animated girl characters had giant breasts. Their admiration seemed to be the main reward after winning the game. None of the real-life girls at their school were shaped like that, and maybe that was why Jason wasn't what Peter's mother would call a skirt-chaser.
Peter got his ballpen back in hand and decided to write whatever came to mind. He thought too hard, maybe that was the problem, he could go back to following the same creative flow that he had back in grade school and then nobody else would even know he wrote drivel in his personal notebook.
He kept writing.
Sebastião was almost lulled by fear of the Atlantic seas’ unknown depth and endless horizon that he did not see the danger approaching on the surface. Everybody retreated below deck at the cry of alarm at the corsair attack. They barricaded the doors behind them and left Sebastião alone with a crew of bloodthirsty strangers. He crossed himself, sorry to die so soon without learning the truth about his mentor, and ready to surrender to God's will if this is how his life must end.
“Leave him alive,” commanded a voice that the corsairs obeyed. Sebastião looked to its source to find the speaker, a handsome pirate captain,
“Whatever!” Peter declared to nobody in particular, alone in his room. He continued scribbling, trying to write faster than his thoughts
fix him with a penetrating stare. The commanding, confident pirate captain had wavy golden hair that undulated with the ocean breeze like glitter on the sea waves in the distant horizon. He had harsh, hawkish eyebrows and a cutlass smile. When he smiled it dimpled a cheek like the pillow of a rakish lover after daybreak. “He is a holy man. He doesn't own enough that we can rob from him. Maybe he can be of some amusem*nt to me.”
Some of the invading crew’s members erupted with cruel laughter. They were already amused because their captain was thinking to be. This is no ordinary man, Sebastião thought.
The captain said, “Remove his cassock and make him embrace the cannon. We’ll whip him.”
With another jeer of laughter, the crew set about doing that. Some pulled at Sebastião’s cape. Others readied ropes around the cannon further along the deck.
Sebastião cried, “Why must I be tormented for your amusem*nt? To hell with you, rakishly handsome criminal!”
“I am honoring the ways of your faith,” the pirate captain said to him. The crew pushed and prodded the naked Sebastião on to the cannon, as the pirate captain said, “This is punishment in advance of the sins that you are to commit.”
That's all right, then, Sebastião thought and almost said. Then he decided against it and declared, “No, you shall not tempt me to sin! The mortification of my flesh is only your vanity, you wretched unholy creature!”
“What spirit! You will be the best amusem*nt.” To the one of his crew who was waving a cat of nine tails up triumphantly, the pirate captain said, “Now lay ten lashes on his back and upper legs. Do not flay the backs of his knees.”
The pirate’s crewman began the torture, but was too showy and went so fast that the captain called for a halt at six lashes and took it from the pirate crewman. Sebastião had felt six sodden slaps.
“Sorry about that, we'll finish you off properly,” the handsome pirate captain said to the priest. He turned to the crew and said, “A demonstration, my brothers, if you would oblige me with your attention?” Then the captain snapped the whip at Sebastião’s naked fleshy thig
Peter heard the turn of the doorknob mid-scrawl of a cursive letter H and slammed his notebook shut.
Jason McConnell entered the room they shared, school gym uniform (jersey and shorts) streaked with moisture.
“Did you fall in?” Peter asked first. He meant at rowboat practice, because Jason was on the team that year.
“I took a dip in the pool after practice, before coming back here,” was Jason's response. He passed by Peter's desk and knocked the back of his chair. “Sit with me at dining hall.” The invitation should've been a question.
As Jason rushed to change for supper (because those were the rules, blazers and neckties at dining hall or they get merit point deductions, also if they were tardy at dinner then it was better to not show up after all because the dining hall proctor wouldn't deduct merit points for not attending) Peter stammered that he spoiled his appetite that afternoon at the dormitory vending machine.
Jason tsked. “You can't have candy bars for dinner every night. Sit with me. You won't get bullied.”
“Thanks, but I really want to catch up on my civics essays.” Peter tried to get his civics notebook open to look busy, but it was in his schoolbag and he wondered how suspicious that would look that Jason hadn't interrupted him in the middle of working on that essay. Peter opened up his notebook to the middle of a signature that he could tear out later more tidily. He pretended to think while waiting for Jason to leave the room, but Jason took so long that Peter did start thinking and listing his thoughts. Peter had the comprehension questions for their lesson about light refraction in science class. There was a reading assignment for French that he already did the reading and understood it, but had difficulty talking in French about it, and didn't know how to practice to the satisfaction of their French teacher who would expect it. Jason would be good at that, but Peter didn't want to ask him. Jason was always busy with something, and Peter didn't want to be another thing in his way just because they were roommates.
Jason dressed and then dawdled until the campus bell began to chime for five minutes to dining hall. “Hey,” Jason said from the door. When Peter turned to look, the other boy’s face flickered a quick, bright smile. “I'll steal you a carrot stick. Or a thing of those oatmeal and honey nut clumps. Clusters.” Hawkish eyebrows almost furrowed in search of the right word.
The smile was contagious. Peter could feel it on his own face as said, “I'll be fine without it, mom. Go on, get out of here.”
Jason sighed as though tragically banished and left the room, the flaxen locks that framed his face flouncing with him.
Peter turned the pages of his notebook back, re-read his story. He added a cursive letter S to the end of the word thigh.
In his mind, faster than he could write it, the golden-haired pirate captain with the hawkish eyebrows and the cutlass smile abducted the priest into his pirate ship. This version of Sebastião Rodrigues would never live through the real story now, the one Shūsaku Endō wrote. Instead, he and his prayers for deliverance would be sequestered away in a cabin of the strangers’ ship, until the pirate captain entered the priest's prison as he pleased…and defiled the holy man with carnal knowledge…
Which was fine, Peter decided, “Whatever!” at nobody in particular again. It was not fine as in good to happen to anybody—this was terrible to happen—but the pirate captain was not a good person. It was realistic. Peter wouldn't write a story about men getting carnal knowledge from each other and that being good. Catholic school taught him better than that.
The scourging at the cannon sounded like the right end to the first chapter, anyway. He wouldn't continue this story, at least not on paper.
Peter got ready for bed and went to sleep early, in his mind he was being pushed to kneeling by a bossy pirate captain that was the source of both his penance and his sin. The pirate captain smelled like chlorine water, and fed Peter carefully from his hand: clusters of honey-covered oats and crushed almonds.
In waking life, ants swarmed Peter's desk trying to dismantle the clusters that Jason snuck in and left there the night before. Peter wanted to use the desk, but didn't want to kill the ants, so he blew streams of air there until they got scared off and then dropped the food into the rubbish bin before being late to breakfast. It was a Saturday, and Peter thought he would spend the morning after breakfast catching up on his coursework so that he had the rest of the weekend free. What happened instead was what always happened. The start of the weekend would feel like the freedom of a weekend, the edge of a plank of a pirate ship on the high seas, and Peter would treat it as such and then doom himself to stay up past curfew on Sunday night to cram that assignment in time for science on Monday morning.
It started when he jotted a few keywords and sentences down to remember an idea for a story that he was going to go back to write after the science class assignment. (The ants long since wandered off.)
He meant to jot down a few keywords and a sentence or two that would summarize the whole story, then he had ideas for details that he didn't want to forget. Before he could stop himself he was in the zone.
The story was to be in first person, but he had to think of a different name so that nobody would think the mother character was his mother.
His mother didn't have the loud, unapologetic style of the mother in this story: studded cat-eye sunglasses and a glamorous faux fur stole over gym wear and stilettos.
She was in the same sympathetic situation, though, at least she had Peter's sympathy.
“I want you to graduate from a good school, Theodore, because I want what's best for you. The fact is we can't afford your tuition fees, so you'll have to work over the summer and I'll get paid. It's for the best, you know.” She gestured with a martini glass across the parking lot and the tour bus.
Theodore hugged his notebook of blank music sheets to his chest. “O Mother! Why could I not take on a normal summer job that would let me come home to grandma and my little sister at the end of every work day? I can't intern for the competing band of five singers. My friend Ivy from school would feel so betrayed, because she's so talented and famous that every music critic pits her against five skinny white tenors in their twenties in the question of who is a bigger cultural influence. She's not really named Ivy because this isn't real. I need to think up of a different name for the character leading that subplot.”
O Mother refilled her martini glass and tucked the tiny liquor bottle in her bra. “I already signed your work contract for you. Go on the tour bus, then, and be good.”
“But the foreshadowing of conflict!” Theodore wailed. “What if I can't be good in this situation? What if I become morally ambiguous? Nobody likes characters that do that.” His mother made an impatient sound and pulled him along by his collar towards the bus, the nearby five skinny white tenors, and their entourage of secret agents in grey three-piece suits and earpieces. The entourage was there to prevent the pop stars getting assassinated or mobbed by teenaged girls that were usually their fans. Theodore despaired. The Older Brother type isn't really related to me. What if I start to like him? What if I start getting fantasies about fixing the Rebel?
Theodore was mostly afraid that his own musical snobbishness would leave him so unprepared to work with these superstars. As his mother pulled him closer he did recognize the types well enough: The Older Brother, the responsible one who was going into music production or being someone else's agent and he was retiring from the spotlight any day now; The Rebel, who in this band was the real thing because he did have a mysterious and traumatic personal history and went to a juvenile detention facility…but he was nice now; The Flirtatious One, who couldn't find any teenaged girl fans at the moment so he turned his flirtation to one of the fifty stonefaced secret agents surrounding them—to keep sharp; The Cute One who seemed quietly happy without being shy (emptyheaded, but honestly the very best vocalist of the five), and The Shy One who was just as mysterious as The Rebel and just as cute as The Cute One.
I guess we can't both be shy, Theodore said to himself. He extended his hand and introduced himself to The Shy One. “I think I read your interview with that journalist from
Peter halted his writing for almost a quarter of an hour, trying to think of the name of a music journal or zine that didn't exist but could but didn't.
F-Clef magazine.”
Peter didn't like the name, but he liked the feeling of stalling even less. He should be filling in the answers in his science assignment.
“I didn't think anybody would recognize me from back then,” The Shy One said. He looked at the rest of the band, who were busy talking with Theodore's mother and waiting for their manager. “I was an independent artist writing my own songs. When I joined this band, our manager said my songs didn't fit the band's sound or image, so I gave up on songwriting and I'm only a performer now. I don't even play the guitar anymore. Nobody else in the tour bus knows, because I went by a stage name back then, so would you mind keeping quiet?”
Theodore said he didn't mind, but privately thought it was such a shame that nobody could truly express themselves at a job like this. He used to think that being in a boy band would be the best job in the world.
He was going to discover that being an intern to the manager of this boy band was the actual best job in the world.
But how? Peter wondered. He leaned back in his chair again and bumped the back and top of his head against a familiar cotton-jersey clad chest. “Jason! How long were you there? Were you reading over my shoulder?”
“No,” Jason answered, but he leaned over and craned his neck. Peter covered the notebook with his hand. “I was going to invite you to play basketball. There's only us four against some of the junior year boys. We can't find Lucas.”
“Thanks. No. Did you try the green room behind the theater? Tanya's a first-chair flautist and they have that recital next week—”
Jason was still craning his neck to look into the notebook. “What do you write in there?”
“Some silly stories. They bother me until I can write them out, but they aren't good. Stop,” Peter was through with leaning away, and was ready to shove him.
Jason stepped back. “What's the one you're writing about now?”
After a moment debating whether to tell him off or tell him the truth, Peter grunted, “Internship under Boyzone.”
Predictably, Jason gave a quiet ick. “Couldn't you make it an internship with Nirvana?”
“You could write that if you want.” Peter drew himself up like he was getting huffy, but he was glad to put Jason off from reading his stories. “But I'm feeling more the bubblegum pop. So what?”
“What happens in the story?”
“I haven't thought that far.”
“You should have the bad-boy looking guy OD on crack. And then make the tour bus explode.”
“Why would it explode?”
“Because the studio executives wouldn't meet the terms to stop a hostage terrorism situation.”
Peter gave him a disagreeable look and said, “I'll think about it.”
Jason flashed another one of his contagious smiles and he ruffled Peter's hair before he left the room.
Peter kept on writing. Theodore got The Cute One to do a cover of The Shy One's old songs and then The Older Brother Type overheard and wanted to make it a demo of that cover because they all thought Theodore wrote the song. He tried to tell them that he didn't. Some of The Rebel’s ex-friends kidnapped the fan club president and held her hostage until the condition was met that the manager terminate The Rebel's contract. The Rebel purposely overdosed on drugs because this was such a stressful time, he didn't want to leave his newfound family, but he couldn't let the president of their fan club die. The Flirtatious One got flirtatious at the wrong time because that was the only thing he knew how to do, even at a time like this, and Theodore was so upset by everything that he succumbed to The Flirtatious One’s flirtations. The Shy One was on the way to tell Theodore off for breaking the promise never to bring up his dark past as an indie singer-songwriter, while The Cute One had an out-of-character moment of being unhappy and wanting to stop The Shy One from blaming their intern. The two of them caught Theodore with The Flirtatious One and then after telling him off because of the obvious power imbalance and exploitation—they joined in on a grief-stricken four-way orgy.
The Older Brother Type found them the next morning and gave them all a stern telling-off that was very similar to what The Shy One was trying to tell them. When Theodore tried to apologize for them, saying that it just happened, then The Older Brother Type told him that it wouldn't risk such a scandal if only Theodore chose one.
But they could all forget it, because the teen idol pop singer diva that Peter forgot to make up another name for…she was going to the Rebel’s hospital room to pay her professional respects, and Theodore had to go take notes for a press announcement for some reason.
Fictional Ivy was furious with him.
“How could you do this to us!” She cried. “You let them cover your songs? You never wrote songs for me. I thought we were friends.”
“It wasn't my idea,” Theodore tried to explain about his mother, “And it wasn't even my song!”
“Blaming everyone and passing the buck, as usual! Hiding behind your Bible as usual! Haven't you stood for anything, Peter?”
Ouch, Peter thought, and he crossed out his name and wrote Theodore.
Finally he wrote
And then the tour bus exploded like a volcano full of fireworks, and everybody died from it, except for Theodore's mother who made enough money for university and called him home, and then The Rebel died of too much drugs. Ivy went from a pop star to a pop superstar, because she had a moral compass. Theodore promised never to work in this business ever again. After he graduated from high school he joined a monastery and lived alone in the woods in Italy. The End.
That was fun, Peter thought. The story totalled twenty thousand six hundred or so words, and he wrote it in one sitting. He had to admit it was satisfying to be able to write The End. Drug overdoses and orgies with the rich and famous, though…that wasn't like him. Could he stand by the artistic merit of his characters’ sexual experimentation? Peter answered himself: It was like with the pirate story. He wasn't saying any of this was good. He opened up his diary that was a separate notebook and found the marker that reminded him of Saturday. He would have a marker on Saturdays because he had theater club immediately after lunch, which he was already late for because he ought to have changed his clothes.
He was only a little late, thinking he could take the merit point deduction for tardiness and improperly tied necktie at lunch—the priest’s concerned lecture at Peter's lack of focus lately, that was a surprise—but Matt and Ivy got to be Sunny and Terpsichore in a bit from Xanadu while he was saddled with the role of the mean businessman from the same show.
“I can be mean,” Peter said optimistically, when Sister Chantelle told him, but Ivy only laughed and told him to have fun. She also wanted to be the one to help him run his lines, even though they didn't really have any scenes together.
Matt was struggling to move around smoothly on stage, with the rollerskates.
There were other students practicing other scenes. The senior-years mostly did monologues from Shakespeare plays. Lucas Carter and Tanya Garrett, the only other ones in their grade, decided not to show up today. Peter watched his two friends duck their heads when they looked at each other.
Peter wasn't sure how to ask. “Ivy, did something happen between you two while I was running late?”
Ivy gave a slow, deliberate eye-twitch. “We got cast as the leads, together. It's great. I'm so excited. I love this character. Sister Chantelle said I don't even have to put on an accent.”
Matt managed to spin a circle on his rollerskates. Peter applauded, and Ivy pretended not to see because Matt was looking very hard for her to be sure that she'd seen him.
Finally Ivy whispered, “Matt is too method. You know that just because we play these parts, he's going to think,” Ivy cut herself off, hesitated, then said, “Remember that junior-year girl who played Cathy Hyatt?”
Peter sipped the air between grimaced teeth, which was exactly the reaction Ivy expected.
Nobody remembered the junior-year girl who dabbled in theater club. They remembered Cathy Hyatt, because Matt understudied for Jamie Wellerstein—Cathy’s devoted husband, in his interpretation anyway. Alan didn't have as much of a problem separating the character from the actress, and he was officially cast. Matt made rather a fool of himself last year, nothing explosive, but had several awkward conversations that ended with Matt alone in a quiet corner during one of Lucas Carter's secret parties. Matt had his first beer, then, thinking it would mercifully kill him with alcohol poisoning, so he would never have to look at the girl’s face again and be reminded of the misunderstanding.
Matt survived two and a half pints of beer, the girl quit the club, and last Peter heard she was doing really well what with being a senior-year now. Her standardized test scores were impressive, and she even made salutatorian. Peter could look up her name in the yearbook later on. It bothered him that he couldn't remember. He thought he was so welcoming to new club members.
Peter mumbled, “Maybe Matt learned his lesson.”
“What makes you think that?” Ivy whispered back.
Peter’s mind raced. “Hope. Springs eternal.”
Ivy folded the script and smacked it against Peter's shoulder. “As if you'd fight for my honor if he didn't!”
Peter whined. “We don't fight! We're friends. We never fight.”
“You’re right.” She petted his shoulder where she smacked him. “So if we're all friends, could you, would you, please just always be here? When he gets too into it, I forget my lines. There. You don't have to stand up to him for me. I never knew you could even stand up for yourself.”
“Ivy, that's harsh.”
Ivy's face looked honestly surprised that it would be. She pouted to underscore how she didn't mean it that way.
Peter gave a resigned sigh. “Peter Simmonds, reporting for third-wheeling duty.”
Matt liked girls. Peter wondered why that qualified for normal, when it gave Matt so much grief.
The three of them gathered together at the edge of the long table in the dining hall until Jason hopped into the space on the bench between Peter and Ivy, almost edging Ivy off the bench. He said, “Girls’ side or minus merit points,” meaning that Ivy should transfer seats to the sophom*ore girls’ long table.
“Not until the dinner bell,” Matt said across from Peter, but Ivy already stomped off with a sulk. “That wasn't very gentlemanly.”
“Like you'd know,” Jason said with a laugh. Matt's expression didn't change. “Too soon?” He caught the look on Peter's face and began to explain, “The basketball game earlier, remember I told you—”
“I hope I can still do the book-bearing tomorrow,” Matt interrupted. “I think I twisted a knee on the rollerblades.”
“—so the junior year boys filled out their team with senior-year girls.”
“It's only over-exerted, should be fine in the morning after a good night's rest,” Peter said.
“Matt refereed.” Jason made it sound like a conclusion, but maybe there was more to the story that he didn't want to say. He switched to, “I'm glad you're here.”
“I'm always at dining hall on Saturdays,” Peter said.
“Not last Saturday.”
“Was too,” Matt chipped in. “Jason, you were at the freshmen boys’ table. Didn't even get a merit deduction then.” He looked around the dining hall for Ivy.
“Monsieur Marquand recommended I tutor the Carter twins. I introduced myself, he was procter, it wasn't a problem. The Saturday before then?”
“I'm here most Saturdays,” Peter said flatly.
After a pause, Jason smiled and said, “Now I know.”
When Matt was satisfied that he knew where Ivy was, although he wouldn't have a view, he noticed Jason still there and said, “We're happy that you decided to sit with us. We should do this all the time from now on.” His toneless drone suggested he meant the opposite, but not too blatantly.
Dinner was quiet in their corner of the sophom*ore boys’ table, except for the occasional passing student greeting Jason, and Jason's own attempt at starting conversation. No danger to their merit points if they weren't too loud, or for as long as they weren't cussing.
Then Jason and Peter headed back to their room.
In the middle of their walk, Jason said, “We live together. It would be nice if we were friends. Don't you think so?”
Peter was getting drowsy and his head ached from an afternoon of people…talking without saying. It was like the blinding glitter of sun on the waves. If there was anything underneath, Peter never caught it, sometimes obstinately made a point not to try.
“You don't think so,” Jason said to Peter's glowering silence. He shoved his thumbs in his trouser pockets as they walked. Peter watched him bite his lip. “Wow. Huh.”
“You've got plenty of friends,” Peter said, trying to cheer him up.
“I think you're interesting.” Jason looked in time to catch Peter wince. “Not weird. I meant more like mysterious. Interesting. I'm saying everything wrong.”
“No,” Peter said flatly. They kept walking in silence. Eventually Peter said, “I am weird, though.”
Jason couldn't get him to elaborate before they got to their room, or after. Peter found himself tempted to take up his reading assignment and sigh a lot until Jason offered to tutor him too, but he went to bed early instead.
On Sunday, Peter dressed and left early to attend to Mass. Matt's knee was as Peter predicted, so they didn't have to find somebody else to be the book bearer. When the rites started, he did eye the pews looking for Jason, not overly keenly because this wasn't his first Mass as an altar boy. He hadn't gazed around in wonder even when he did first take up the honor and the duty. If he did so now, would anybody get suspicious?
Matt beside him muttered, “Lucas and Tanya are absent, too. They're not a good influence on her.”
Only after Mass when they got the albs off did Peter answer him. “Ivy's smart, headstrong. She’ll end up being the one influencing them.”
“She has a lot of energy. Would be a shame to watch her waste it on parties.”
“As though you've never gone to Lucas Carter's parties.” Peter chuckled good-naturedly and took Matt's hands in his. “Girls just wanna have fun! Cyndi Lauper. A great modern philosopher.”
Matt groaned miserably and pawed him off.
Peter's first thought on the walk back to the dorm was that Matt was infatuated again, and that was why he stormed off. Good friends would just know when they needed to apologize—and when they didn't because it wasn't about them.
Good friends just knew. Peter started to feel a gnawing doubt. Should he have grabbed Matt's wrist or stood back entirely? Was it the Cyndi Lauper reference? Maybe Peter did need to go after Matt and apologize.
What if he apologized, but Matt already forgot because he was obsessed with Ivy, and the reminder and apology from Peter would get Matt suspicious about what there was to apologize for?
What if Peter never apologized, and the growing resentment and discomfort got Matt wanting to talk to someone else about how weird Peter was being? Weird and devious. No sense of what was proper at all. While they were at church, no less! Peter Simmonds is not a good friend.
That was how Peter thought himself into a hell on earth by the time he reached the dorm room, which…as it turned out…Jason never left.
“Welcome back,” Jason smiled as he said so in a drowsy just-woken-up voice and messy hair. He took a sip of tetra-packed vending machine coffee that he had in one hand.
He had Peter's notebook open in his other hand.
Every surface of every wall seemed to pull away, leaving a tunnel vacuum stirred by the wretched realization of what Peter put in that notebook, that was now in Jason’s mind where it definitely didn't belong.
Peter shouted without words. He slammed the door shut behind him. Jason had the nerve to give him a look of wide-eyed surprise and innocence. “That's mine! It's private.” Jason's lips parted, his hawk-brow furrowed slightly with confusion. God, how stupid was this jock? “It's as bad as you reading my diary!”
Jason set his coffee down and stammered, “I would never read your diary! I know it's private, and it's there.” Jason pointed to the table. “Journal.” He raised the notebook that he still hadn't closed. “Notebook. Not the same thing.” Peter made a grab for it, and Jason twisted away like he was guarding a basketball. “I was getting to the good part! Hey!”
“THERE IS NO GOOD PART,” Peter roared. “IT'S DRIVEL. SINFUL FILTH. BUT IT WAS MINE!”
Jason raised his hands in surrender. “...It’s still yours.” Peter mauled it from his hand, his vision sparking with angry tears. “Sorry. Peter, I'm sorry. It isn't bad though—”
Peter wasn't going to stay here and listen. “Don't follow me,” he said on the way out.
“You're overreacting,” Jason said but it sounded like a plea.
Peter broke into a clumsy, desperate run, crying, “Leave me alone!” He didn't close the door behind him.
The place he found refuge in was the crawl space between the green room and under the stage. It was dusty, not damp, with elaborate stone facades that suggested it used to be the exteriors of two buildings that were too close together. Now a narrow ray of light spilled in from the theater ghostlight. After a good amount of laying in the crawl space and sulking, he crawled out to use the building restroom and then drink from the water fountain by the green room. In the green room would be assorted ballpens, pencils and markers for adding notes to music sheets.
He took a red ballpoint pen and his notebook into the crawl space with him, and by a parsimonious ray of light there turned to the next blank page in his (now much-battered) notebook. Peter wrote, in ink as red as fresh blood:
If I were going to murder Jason McConnell, this is how I would start…
Peter woke up still in the crawl space. He didn't know if the thin, runny snot and burning around his eyes was from a dust allergy or crying. Jason said his name again and jostled further into the crawl space. Peter sat up and hugged his knees. “I told you to leave me alone.”
“It's almost dinner. How long did you want to be left alone? Come on out, this place is gross.”
“I'm sleeping over.”
“What? Here?”
“The school office is closed until Monday. I'll ask them to move me to a different room.”
“Don't do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you'll be safer with me.”
“It's too dark for you to see but I'm giving you such a hard side-eye.” Peter wiped his face on his sleeve and sniffed.
Jason had crawled far enough to sit right next to him by then. He sat down. “I thought I might spend the whole night out looking for you. The room inspector gets less thorough about well-behaved students, you know. That's us, or it was.” Peter heard him rummage a bit, a knock of cardboard tetra packs and candy bar wrappers. He nudged them against Peter's elbow.
“I'm not hungry,” Peter said, just when his stomach decided to growl with interest, amplified by the silence of the crawl space.
“Suit yourself.” He heard Jason unwrap one of the bars and bite into it, smacking his lips as he chewed. “These wafers are flaky, mmm, the salted caramel just melts like butter.” He took another bite, and muffled by that mouthful, said, “I could sit here and eat all six of these.”
“Get me out of here,” Peter finally said, as he squirmed from a sitting position to a crouching crawl and made to squeeze past him.
Happily, Jason hurried to cram everything in his pockets and then scooted and crawled towards the opening. When he was out, Jason turned and grabbed Peter's arm to help pull him out, even though Peter was saying that he could do it alone. Peter's back scraped the top of the crawl space entrance, and he stopped to rub it, while shooting a now-visible side-eye at Jason. He kept his notebook clutched in his hand, the ballpen left behind and forgotten.
Jason asked as Peter dusted himself off and stretched, “How many times should I have to apologize?”
Peter hugged his notebook defensively. “Are your friends waiting in the hallway, to kick me around?”
“No.”
“Not yet.”
“Not ever.”
With doubt in his tone, Peter said, “Sure.”
They heard the distant dinner bell.
“I'm not dressed right,” Peter said, because he went for the knit vest and button-down shirt under the alb earlier instead of the blazer. His uniform trousers and black leather loafers would've been appropriate otherwise. Jason wore his weekend tee shirt and cargo capris and sneakers.
They marched back to their dorm room in tense silence, until Peter had to stop because he hadn't even drunk anything for hours. Keeping up a tense silence was exhausting.
Jason thought so, too, because in the days that followed he would keep trying to get Peter to answer him about something—anything, things Peter didn't think were important enough to speak up about, and didn't charge much of anything to have said it. This was usual roommate behavior. Now that Peter was suspicious of him, he did start to pick up on how every petty conversation that Jason struck up was because Jason wanted something other than what the conversation was about.
Some time in the middle of the week Jason, in his uniform blazer, caught Peter at the vending machine and kept talking in a friendly and forceful way. He blocked Peter's way to their dorm room in almost the same way he guarded opponents on the basketball court, which got Peter suspicious.
“No, really,” Peter repeated the demand. “Why do you want me at dining hall?”
“Because they're serving your favorite,” Jason said.
“What's my favorite? You don't know my favorite.”
“Oh my God you are like a dog rescued from some illegal fighting pit and then an animal shelter. Badly socialized,” Jason answered before Peter could ask, “And I live with you. It's cramping my style. Every student sent to study at Saint Cecilia's is rich, do you know that? You. Don't. Have. Problems.” He laid both his hands on Peter's shoulders, stepped in close and growled between gritted teeth, “We go walkies.”
Peter followed Jason's lead without even being tempted to snark that maybe Jason was the one cramping his style.
They went to the dining hall and sat across from each other at the edge of the long table's long bench. Staff served their platters, and Peter found pigs in a blanket. “Oh. That is one of my favorites.”
“Which is why you should eat here on weekdays, too,” Jason said.
“It's tough to wind down when there's so many people at dining hall, and it's so formal. I was always doing something wrong. Breakfasts and lunches are never so bad for merit points.”
“You're not still put off by that one time I stole a fudge brownie from dinner for a midnight snack, then.”
“Was it my fudge brownie?”
“No, but I wrapped it in a napkin and joked that I was packing fudge, and then Zack repeated it, so I repeated it, so Lucas repeated it, so Zack and I said it louder…and after that night you stopped going to dinner.”
“I don't remember that.” Peter told the truth. He hadn't even noticed it happening. “How many other students think that was why?”
“I’m not a mind-reader, but I'd say only me.”
“You're warning me, then?”
“Warning you?”
Peter looked around the dining hall. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to them. He lowered his voice just in case. “That you know what I'm like, and if I don't do your assignments for you while you play your videogames then you'll tell your friends to trip me in the halls and play keep-away with my graphing calculator. That's what this dinner is for. Isn't it?”
“That again. Did I do anything to deserve this? Aside from one joke that I'm already apologizing for, that you don't even remember. You have too much imagination to be this cynical.”
“If I had more control over my imagination, I wouldn't need to be cynical,” Peter thought aloud.
Jason laughed and shook his head as though Peter said something funny.
They finished eating dinner, and walked back to their dormitory together. Leaving the dining hall was more difficult for Jason, as one of the Carter twins in freshman year had a French question, and then Not Cathy Hyatt from senior year had a personal issue, and then Tanya Garrett obviously wanted to ask him what Not Cathy Hyatt said but asked around the question, after which Monsieur Marquand and the priest wanted to thank Jason for being so helpful to wayward students. It was at the tip of Peter's tongue to tell him, “I'll meet you back at the dorm room” and run off with embarrassment at being counted among the wayward.
The moment they left the dining hall building, Jason said, “I know a shortcut. There's no pavement, but it's more private.”
Peter was starting to dislike how Jason expected him to follow along, but not enough to form the words I’ll meet you at the dorm and run off down the paved path, the long way.
Besides, Jason started talking again. “I think I'll take back my apology. The Rebel died of an OD and then the tour bus exploded. That was my idea. I should get to read that. It's my story too.”
The cuss was out of Peter's mouth before he thought it. “f*ck that. You didn't sit for hours trying to think up of independent magazine titles, or keep track of whose elbows were going where in a room of four people with the same pronouns.” That was eight elbows, his and his and his and his and his and his oh no that was his not his.
“I'm only sorry that you're nervous now, but I'm most sorry that you make yourself nervous over something that isn't real.”
Peter was starting to think this was the worst un-apology he had ever been offered in his whole life.
Jason was still talking. “Why won't you believe that I’d never? I keep saying I'd never do that—”
With deadpan sarcasm, Peter said, “That's all I needed.”
“There's no way to prove that I wouldn't, except that I not—which I haven't—and then,” Jason gestured helplessly, “You still think I'm going to? You really still think I'm going to.”
“Yes.”
Jason said more tersely, “What do you think the team's going to do to you that they wouldn't do to me if I told them, huh?”
“It's how you tell them. It's who's telling.”
“I meant it, though, you know. You're safer with me.”
“Why does it matter if I believe you or not? You know. There's nothing I can do about that now is there?”
“You can let me read your notebook. It's my story too. We're in this together.”
“If you say so,” was all Peter could say.
In anticipation of a cluster of Catholic holy days, one afternoon all students were herded into the church for the mandatory rite of Confession. Jason made sure to be first in line, surprising Peter—until right after, when Jason ambled past the pews to Sister Margaret and mumbled something about feeling like he was sick with something. He was right that some teachers and staff would be more lenient with generally well-behaved students, so she let him return to the dormitory early.
After sitting in line at the pews, it was Peter's turn to enter the confessional booth with the lattice between him and the priest, and say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…”
“Three months,” supplied an elderly, bored-sounding baritone from the other side of the lattice.
“Three months since my last confession, and these are my sins,” Peter said. He thought that he should find some comfort in the familiarity of the enclosure and the routine, and feel more reverence about it, but there was always something ridiculous to him about it. He already knew what the priest looked like. The wizard of Oz had already gone beyond curtains and machines. Confession at Catholic boarding school wasn't healing souls, it was more schoolwork. “I don't want to cause too much panic, but I heard that there are demons that make it difficult to study and I might be possessed. Everything feels slow and heavy. I don't really enjoy life like I used to. Could I be pardoned from Lent if I live the bare minimum in advance anyway?”
The priest answered, “It's unlikely to be demonic influence. It's that age and season, but you have had difficulty focusing. A rosary first thing after the end of class can set you right, God willing. You still do have your responsibilities as a student, as a servant of God, and by his grace your struggle against sloth will not be in vain.”
“I also said the f-word to my roommate a few days ago. He said I cramped his style but he doesn't want me to move out. I think we're all right now, but I did say it, and I didn't apologize to him, even though I am sorry. Will that come with an act of contrition? I don't know how to bring it up.”
“No, my child, for that I think your confession is enough.”
“I'll honestly try not to do that again.”
“Your confession and penitence is enough.”
“One last,” Peter said reluctantly. “I can try not to do something again, but if I can't be sure that…I can't even try, then I shouldn't bring it into Confession. Right?”
“Carnal thoughts?”
“Yes!” Peter shouted too loudly. “Thank you I didn't want to be the one to say so. But I'm also so angry a lot of the time, and sometimes they even mix together, the anger and the…hmrmhm…And I try to write it out to get clear about it, but it's all violent and…”
“Hmrmhm?” prompted the priest.
“And maybe we're all at that age, my classmates and I, but is there really nothing to take it away?”
“Your suffering is blessed. Even a punishment from God is a blessing.”
“Please? I'll see a doctor, I'll get those…libido-lowering injections, that must be invented by now…Right?”
The priest told him to stay strong, to pray another two rosaries, and practically chased Peter out with blessings and forgiveness and the rote-memory rite.
Peter tried not to look too disappointed as he approached Sister Margaret and requested to follow Jason to the dormitory to check on him.
“I can't let every student go early,” she warned. “Be back.”
Peter nodded in earnest and took the same shortcut that Jason showed him.
He opened the door to their dorm room and found Jason in pyjamas sitting up in bed, reading that damn notebook again. This time, his other hand was rummaging down the front of his pyjama pants because of course he would.
Peter slapped his own hand over his eyes. “I guess you're not that sick.”
“Maybe a little bit,” Jason answered. “I could stop, or you could learn to knock.”
“Are you re-reading the crappy boy band story?”
“No, this is the new one.” When Peter dropped his hand and stared at him, Jason did stop. “Don't look at me like that. You wrote it.”
“You are sick! I'm going to Confession!”
“Because of me?” Jason looked surprised, then terrified. “What would you tell him? Don't do that, Peter, you…You already did, there's no need to right away—”
Peter slammed the door behind him and ran away down the hall again. He was doing that a lot lately.
When he returned to the church, he jogged past the pews and practically dove into the Confessional booth the moment Not Cathy Hyatt was leaving—he cut in line.
“Forgive me Father for I have sinned! It's been about 25 minutes since my last Confession!” Peter shouted over the ruckus outside. “This is my one worst sin that I've ever done—”
The door to the Confessional booth was wrenched open and Jason leaped in and caught Peter in a chokehold. He shouted, “Don't listen to him, Father! He's embarrassed that he caught me celebrating Palm Sunday in our room! That's all it is!”
Peter wrenched Jason's inside elbow away from his throat long enough to shout, “I murdered him! I wrote that I was going to murder him, and then he started—he started—”
“Beating the bishop!” Jason suggested, unhelpfully, “Varnishing the crucifix! Shucking corn! Polishing the banister!”
“Make him stop,” Peter choked on his sobs, struggling to elbow Jason off him.
“Practicing the safest sex! Tapping my potential! Giving myself a low-five! Manual override!”
Peter took a deep breath and let out one long scream interrupted only by the priest grabbing his collar.
The priest said, “I’ve dealt with this a dozen times at every grade but never this disrespectfully in a holy place,” and he got Peter walking to the classrooms. When Peter tried to look around him, he found Jason getting similarly ushered by Sister Margaret and Sister Joan on either side.
The two boys were escorted to the detention room and instructed to write I will not raise my voice in the Confessional booth (Jason) and I will not jump the queue (Peter) a hundred times each, chalk on blackboards. The detention room had multiple large double-sided blackboards on wooden frames and wheels. Those could be rolled parallel to each other to leave room for aisles between them.
They took the step-stools from the corner of the classroom and began, at first silently, on their penalty, writing their first lines as high as they could get to on the blackboards.
The knowledge that this was a punishment better suited to third-grade students rather than high-schoolers was part of the punishment.
Jason broke the silence with, “If they leave us alone together, they don't suspect that much. That's good. Don't you think so?”
“Hrmm? No.” Peter coughed.
“You don't have to tell the priest everything in Confession.”
“I'm pretty sure we do all have to.”
“He doesn't want to hear everything. Besides, weren't you the one so worried that I would tell the other boys?”
“That's different. They're not priests.” Peter wheezed and coughed at the stuffy room and the chalk dust.
Jason passed by Peter's aisle and took a peek. “Why don't you sit by the window and take a breather? I can write the other lines for you. Mine’s all done.”
Peter didn't believe it until he looked at the other blackboards and counted the lines five at a time. Those were a hundred lines of I will not raise my voice in the Confessional booth .
Peter said, “The Sisters will know that's not my handwriting.”
Jason scoffed. “They won't care. Besides, you don't know how to spell queue.” He kept writing Peter's lines.
Peter opened the window and took several deep breaths. The stinging in his eyes eased up and he flopped half outside the window with relief.
“Don't jump,” Jason called over half-heartedly. “Suicide's a sin. They'll take so many merit points off if you died that way.”
Peter folded his arms to make a cushion for his chin at the window sill. “Father said a dozen?”
“Merit points?”
“No, he said he has to deal with Confessions like mine a dozen times for every grade. There aren't a dozen students in our grade.”
“Zack’s roommate caught him masturbating on eight different occasions, Lucas’ thrice, and one of Matt’s balls itched one time and he scratched it and felt better. They took all that to Confession. Matt's didn't count. He felt awful about it, but he described it to us and we all think he really was scratching an itch. No euphemism.” He hopped off the step-stool and kept writing, I will not jump the queue . He said, arm now moving automatically, “For someone who likes boys, you don't spend much time with the rest of us, else you'd know all this.”
“Because you're all awful. One day a real man's going to sweep me off my feet.” Peter sulked.
“Oh? Pirate captain or pop star?” Jason’s chalk continued to tap and squeak on the chalkboard surface.
“A royal prince.”
“Inbred, with a Hapsburg jaw and hemophilia.”
“It doesn't matter what he looks like. He's caring and brave, and we're in love.”
“That’s so pure. I'll conjure up something nice for you both right now.” Jason waved the chalk stick like a wand, like an orchestra conductor with a baton. “There. Now your butt-ugly threat-to-democracy boyfriend is hung like an anaconda.”
Peter snickered. He stepped away from the window and wandered back to the blackboards. “That would be a plus, but not a requirement. Who decided that butts were ugly, anyway?”
Jason finished writing Peter's hundredth line, dropped the chalk stick in the chalk tray, and dusted off his fingers. He stood back as Peter looked up at his lines. Jason did an eerily good job copying Peter's blackboard handwriting.
Jason said, “That real man sweeping you off your feet? He's a serial killer, with a van that has tinted windows.”
Peter was having so much fun that he let a lisp slip. “I think I can fix him.”
“You can't resurrect all the people he killed.”
“I can love him into not being a serial killer anymore. It's the least I can do if I can't stop being a sodomite.”
“You haven't started being a sodomite, Peter. Start with people your own age.”
“Here now? At Saint Cecilia's? In high school? You're kidding.”
“I,” Jason declared, stepping right up to him, “Am volunteering.” He planted a quick kiss on Peter's mouth.
Peter sputtered in surprise and stepped back. “What was that for? I wrote out every sordid detail of how I was going to kill you!”
“I think I can fix him.” Jason repeated Peter's words and imitated his accent. Just then, Sister Margaret entered the room because she heard Peter yelling.
The nun counted the lines on each blackboard one by one, two hundred altogether, and then dismissed them.
Peter was already dressed enough in uniform for the dining hall. Jason, who only tied on sneakers to chase him down to the Confessional booth in his pyjamas, told Peter to go on ahead. He said it so casually, as though they hadn't locked lips in detention.
Dining hall dinner was the knowledge that about fifty or so other students would turn to him walking in. That was more than a hundred eyes. He was the masturbation witness. He would never be anything else at this school. The humiliation was too much to bear.
Then the other alternative was to go back to his room and probably catch Jason McConnell celebrating Palm Sunday again, and then have to explain that he was flattered but he didn't like him that way.
Maybe I'll move into the crawl space behind the theater for the next three years, Peter pondered. He could be a school-specific urban legend. He could be the ghost of the theater who groans whenever somebody sings a note too flat, and who makes cast party banquets and snacks disappear, and nobody would ever find him.
He would have taken that third option if Matt hadn't come up to him outside the dining hall building and said, “Let's sit down,” like it was an ordinary evening. Peter could have wept with gratitude.
Dinner was a baked macaroni with cream cheese, something citric or vinegary, and some gray flaky fish meat.
Matt said to him, “One time I had an itch down there and scratched it. It happens.”
“Thank you for trusting me with that,” Peter said, at a loss for anything else to say.
“By down there I mean—”
“I guessed. Matt, I can guess.”
When Peter returned to their dorm room, he found that Jason changed out of his pyjamas and into different pyjamas and was fiddling with the ribbon on his typewriter.
Peter shut the door, lightheaded and stomach turning with nervousness. He said, “I'm sorry for telling on you to Father and getting us into trouble. I felt guilty, but what you do about it…that part, wasn't mine to tell.”
“Wasn't it?”
Peter took a breath. “I don't like you that way. I don't like anybody that way.”
Jason blinked several times in disbelief. “But the pirate?”
“That was only a story. It doesn't mean…” the sentence died in the middle because Jason inhaled painfully hard a couple of times and bit his fist with intense thought. “It doesn't mean anything. You've got so much going for you, you know. You could have anyone. But my type is fictional.”
“I'm glad you set me straight,” Jason said, sounding unhappy.
Peter nodded. His mouth was so dry that the aftertaste of the casserole dinner turned metallic. He excused himself to shower and the first thing he did was rush to the toilet to vomit. A fatigue began to seep out of every bone. His skin was clammy.
After a gargle of mouthwash over the sink, he went through the motions of showering. He forgot to bring the clothes he was going to change into and the towel he always kept neatly folded and hanging over the back of his chair. Then he thought, “Whatever!” Because he already caught his roommate masturbating less than five hours ago and if Jason didn't stop right away then Peter should be allowed to walk to his bed, equally shameless, with all the nudity God gave him.
Just in case, he shouted through the bathroom door, “Don't look! I forgot my towel.”
Jason turned his head as Peter entered, distractedly saying, “Don't wha-ohh…?” Then he didn't cover his eyes or turn away.
“This is the worst day of my life,” Peter sighed, as he rummaged through the bag of clean laundry for an oversized tee shirt and boxer shorts to sleep in. He got them on as fast as he could and flopped into bed, feeling sick.
Jason became very concerned with and interested in his typewriter.
The strange thing about food poisoning is that sometimes it doesn't stay in the stomach, occasionally writhing, bursting out of one end or another as it runs its course, and leaving everything else alone and all right. Peter's mouth went from too dry to salivating, and it was difficult to say how but the fatigue turned painful everywhere.
By the time lights out was getting reinforced by Sister Faustina, their dormitory proctor, Jason was getting worried.
Peter said, “It's botulism. We learned about it in science class. In maybe two hours I'll be dead and gone.”
Sister Faustina let it slip that something was going around, but didn't seem worried enough to call the nurse.
“Can I keep the light in our room on?” Jason asked the nun. “Then I can check that he's still breathing just by looking.”
“Nine-thirty in the evening is not called lights kept on, here, it's called lights out,” was Sister Faustina’s verdict.
Long after she left, and put the lights out, Peter heard Jason snap, “Draconian bitch!”
Peter groaned, “Don't…Jason, don't call nuns bitches.” He curled up like a beetle grub, and couldn't hold back a miserable whimper.
After a while, Jason crawled on the bed and slowly rubbed his arm. “Still alive?”
“I don't like it right now, but yes.” Peter's speech slurred with pain and tiredness and misery.
“You're sweating a lot. If you were crying earlier, you might dry out. I'll leave you a tetra pack of juice in case you wake up in the middle of the night…That won't be enough, will it? When I got sick at home our nanny made me drink a whole pitcher every hour. I'll get some water bottles…”
Peter realized he meant from the vending machine, which meant sneaking out downstairs. He grabbed Jason's hand in the dark. “Don't! That's against the rules!”
“What if you are dying?” Jason took his other hand. “Would you please, please let me help you?”
Peter swallowed hard, then let go. He said, “Downstairs there's a payphone. My mom's number is on the first page of my diary, coins piled beside…Tell her I love her.”
“O-Okay,” Jason stammered.
“Tell her I'm gay.”
“Absolutely not. I'm saving that for your funeral.”
Peter started crying again. “I need her to know. This is my deathbed request, you're refusing!”
“When you hold up your end of this bargain and actually die, then I'll tell her. That's only fair. I'll call her now, though.”
Jason thumped the drink containers on the bedside table, petted Peter's hair with another few thumps, then disappeared into the dimly-lit hallway.
Peter woke up to morning light in their room and Jason stroking his brow with a cold towel.
“Can you sit up?”
It was soothing to have somebody stroke his skin, even through his clothes. Without that, it was like the rest of his body was on a self-imposed death row, trembling with despair and waiting for the ground to give way and drop into a cold unfeeling void. With the rhythmic, soothing contact…he was still sick, but the same nervous instinct relaxed into the conviction that this suffering was temporary. Every time another person truly cares, it lends this warm and nourishing ember of hope and strength.
But he couldn't sit up.
Jason asked again, “Can you swallow while lying down?” He shook a small bottle of Pepto-Bismol in Peter's bleary field of vision. “This is contraband. I got it from Lucas Carter. This,” he held up an absurdly small paper cup, “I got from Alan.” He poured a dollop of Pepto-Bismol into the cup, and poured from the cup into Peter's mouth, pausing when Peter swallowed. “You think you'll be better today? I'll take the rest to Nadia. She caught the stomach bug too.”
“It was everyone?”
“When I called your mother to tell her you loved her, and that you were dying, she said you tend to dramatize. Matt threw up a lot last night and felt better. He's fine now. Zack didn't feel anything last night or this morning but he's got the runs like anything now. Alan feels wretched but he can sit up. Lucas ate three Tums the moment he started to feel not-great and called in sick just in case.”
“God's punishing me.”
“Punishing you for what?”
“Isn’t there something in the Bible about how…Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill… but then Jesus added on to that… Whosoever looketh on a man with wrath committed murder already, with his heart.”
“Oh yeah? Could a murdered man do this?” Jason poured the rest of the Pepto-Bismol dose down his throat, saying, “Didn't think so!” After he crumpled up the cup and tossed it into the wastepaper bin (basketball overhead shot), he said, “That verse was talking about adultery, not murder.”
“It's talking about everything in my heart, I'm being punished for.”
“You're dramatizing again. The only reason you got the most sick is because you never leave this room, you never eat fresh veggies when the dining hall has them, and you hate exercise and fresh air.” He thumped some extra water bottles beside the tetra packs and twisted then untwisted the caps. “Drink up. I'll tell Nadia you said hi.”
After Jason left, Peter crawled to the bathroom, had diarrhea over the toilet, died there, resurrected, flushed and washed up while nearly fainting several times, then crawled back into bed.
Sometimes he woke up to the sound of Jason at the typewriter.
“Do you still have class?” Peter wondered, when he was feeling better. He sat up and reached for a candy bar, although after a day and a half of stomach problems nothing in that area sent flares of hunger. He only thought that he should eat something now that he could.
“Hmm? Teachers called in sick, each and every one.” Jason yawned and stretched in his chair. “It's like the secret eleventh plague, macaroni casserole gone bad.”
“What are you typing?”
Jason's own handwriting was really very tidy and clear, but he did type his essays out more often than not. Monsieur Marquand always told them that there was a subliminal psychological advantage to turning in assignments that were printed out by computer or typewritten, and that students would understand when they were older why even tidy handwriting got marked lower than the content deserved—when the letters were microscopic.
Jason answered distractedly, “It's a surprise.”
After lights out, Peter couldn't sleep. He'd slept almost two days through while sick and recovering. Now he was wide awake and had nothing to do, and everything was in the dark.
When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he snuck to his desk and felt around for his diary. Jason didn't put it back where he found it, after calling Peter's mother at the number he wrote on the first page. Peter wasn't too irritated, guessing that Jason put it down somewhere on his own desk out of habit and was not hiding it out of malice.
On Jason's desk, Peter found a familiar crumpled shape that was his notebook of stories. He would know it in the dark, beside the typewriter. He felt around for one of Jason's ballpoint pens, and took pen and notebook into the bathroom so that turning on the light wouldn't wake him.
After the murder fantasy in red ballpoint pen, Peter turned to what he expected would be a fresh page. He found unlined papers filigreed with typewritten paragraphs, fitted so carefully into the notebook that the pages looked like they'd always been in there.
He started to read.
Over the summer between their sophom*ore and junior years at Saint Cecilia’s, Nadia McConnell was selected to be a debutante.
The McConnells could have thrown a lavish party on Nadia's birthday and called that a debutante ball. Most girls got something like that nowadays. When the debutante committee had such a schism, though, and the phoenix-rebirth of the resulting cliques of capital-s Society wanted kindling—well! Isn't this an opportunity too good to pass up? This way, Nadia would be a true debutante, deemed to be such by the right people…so (Mama McConnell said) she should quit rolling her eyes and grumbling.
You listen to this all with bewilderment, from where you stand in a three-piece suit that was too large here and there, and unfashionably broad at the lapels (too long at the hem.) It was the closest fit that the events managers could provide to “guests without membership”. I try to spare you from the snobbery. Did I already fail that by writing this to you? My tuxedo had been tediously tailored, damn my growth spurts for making me have to stand for fittings about a hundred thousand infinity times and f*ck the tux I wear a button-down collared shirt and chambray jeans now (because my dad thinks denim jeans are too casual for anywhere in a country club. It's both pants. I hate it here.)
The four of us are in Nadia's cottage at the country club. It isn't a rustic cottage. The vanity in the corner is a hexagon of mirrors from the floor to the ceiling, two armslengths in diameter. Beyond the French window-doors bubbles a jacuzzi. From the very center of a glass dome that serves as a skylight, hangs a chandelier that can turn on, off, or change colors when anybody in the room claps their hands together twice.
At a beat of silence longer than we've had in the past hour, you hear me clear my throat.
My mother snaps, “What are you still doing here? You'll make me look bad if you keep the other bachelors waiting. Go hurry.”
I take you by the sleeve and head out without saying goodbye. You follow, biting your tongue against the temptation to tell our gracious benefactress that Jason said six times in the hour-long lecture scolding that we were keeping the bachelors waiting, and that Mama McConnell refused six times to let us leave.
Down the hallway, out of earshot, you watch the trolleys of our bags vanish along the bellboys’ secret passageways. You watch me consult a map to our own cottage, watch me frown until you take it from my hands and turn it sideways and back in my hands, before my face brightens because you made the world make sense to me, and I know where we should go next.
I should know already, I swear hearing my mother go off at my sister makes it impossible to think clearly. I'm not faking incompetence at map-reading. (I probably would, though.)
We leave Nadia's cottage porch. The view of the golf course from the cottage hills is splendid, an opinion shared by the entourage of a young woman in a tulle-and-chiffon chrysalis of a gown. Giant lights and reflectors assisted the bulky camera equipment. Thick cables flow over the balcony.
I warn you as we shuffle past, “Boys are supposed to stay on the other side of the golf course.”
You tear your gaze from the photoshoot. “But the tech crew—”
Most of them were men. I correct myself, “Bachelors stay on the other side of the golf course. You're an eligible bachelor for this.”
“Was that a debutante? She’s such a vision.” The gown really was a work of art, pearly iridescent like an elven countess.
We pass by the golf course. It's a lot to pass by. I'm sick of the view already by a few steps in. “Don't worry about that yet. Most of the girls are closer to twenty rather than Nadia’s age. Those ones will want to pair up with older boys, and they get to choose. Usually that takes a month, with the committee directors helping. This time it's three days, but with everything else going on it's really a window of time that's…” you watch my uncertain hand gestures try to demonstrate how the timetable narrows down to “...brunch tomorrow.”
“I should have started worrying a month ago,” you say, and I must think it's so adorable how you say that (like it would help) that I walk into you on purpose with the breath of a chuckle against your neck.
Would you think that's too aggressive to be affectionate? I'm so bad at imagining all of this from your point of view. You always surprise me. I've never met anyone as alive as you are.
What if I made a turn for the stone-tiled footpath that led to a valley hedge maze? Would you follow me there?
I say, “This is a shortcut to the club house.”
You say, “We can tell them we got lost in there and that's why we're late.” You glance at my sly smile and respond with one of your own.
The other boys aren't waiting for us. They could keep on not waiting for us the whole night. Oh, they're handsome all right, sculpted hairstyles and sleek formal suits, but there's no way to stop them from ruining everything by talking. Them, I already know what they say: Denim jeans in the clubhouse? I suppose you do that because your family's important enough that you can. Oh chambray, carry on then. How was your holiday? I swam with the whales, you should try it some time. We can all go in a submarine expedition to see the wreck of the Titanic, I know a brilliant inventor who secretly made one himself. Show jumping has too many women, can't they keep to more ladylike dressage so that I don't need to change to horseback polo to save my masculinity? What a pollution girls are. Anyway, let's look at this catalogue of debutantes and then never, ever stop talking about girls for the next three days.
I'll have to say very loudly that that's my sister when I see her in the catalog. The snobbish silence would recover itself with the same phoney conversation.
“Let's get lost,” you say. I want so badly for you to say it so that I can agree.
The hedge maze has hedge rooms in it—tessellating stone floors and curlicues of cast-iron tea tables and garden chairs, green leafy fountains blossoming yellow and violet roses—if we can find them.
I would happily follow you as you take us in circles, and let's say that I do. As the afternoon turns into evening, I lead you to the best one, that has a large oak door that can be bolted from the inside, and a sort of bandstand with lattice and gauze curtains all over the walls. Somebody thought to put a bed in it. It was a warm afternoon that evening threatens to turn into an unpleasantly clammy chill. I kick my shoes off and jump into the bed, exhausted. You shed your blazer and vest (about time, too) and fold them neatly at the cushion’s edge, before crawling beside me close enough that I can feel the body heat through your crumpled shirt (the scent of crushed flowers and herbs that we ran through earlier mingled with the honestly mouthwatering scent of y
Jason entered the bathroom and blearily squinted into the light. He looked down at the floor where Peter said, frozen, one hand holding his notebook open and the other covering the front of his boxer shorts. “Thought you were in bed and left this light on by accident.”
Peter mumbled something wordless but agreeable. Jason went to stand at the toilet and hosed a noisy stream of urine into the bowl. “Don't stop because I walked in. It's almost like poetic justice, isn't it?”
Peter made a few more noises, wordless but disagreeable. He tried to feel around for the ballpen, and then tried to stand up.
Jason tucked his member back in, flushed and went to the sink to wash his hands. He had a sleepy smile on his face when he asked, “Am I getting murdered? Was that what you were touching yourself to?”
At that, Peter found the words, “No, this is the new one.” Jason's smile became a grin. “Shut up.”
“I wasn't saying anything,” Jason laughed lightly.
“Not another word, Jason McConnell!” Peter skittered, hunched over, out of the bathroom and into the safety of his bed, whimpering with embarrassment the whole way. Jason made sure to pass by and flick some clean, cold tap water at his face and softly laugh some more.
Interesting meaning mysterious, he said, Peter thought, But I would do that.
He would do what Jason wrote. When Jason kissed him in the day-bed in that hedge maze, he would be paralyzed between pushing him off and ducking away himself, and then do neither because he wanted this boy to kiss him. As Jason nipped at his neck and collarbone, he would want to keep his shirt on (covered up later anyway by the vest and blazer), and get his pants off in case they stained that and couldn't know so in the dark.
And he would interrupt the massage Jason McConnell’s mouth was giving his stiffer muscles, to tell him that there were fireflies on the bandstand ceiling, and they should watch the green meteor shower together, because that would be better than sex.
Part of Peter wanted to hide or run away from this…this other soul that knew him too well, that laid his own soul bare on ink and paper…
Most of him was thrilled, as though he did run hand-in-hand with this lively and beautiful boy through thorns and velvet-petalled blossoms, and watched tiny auroras woven by lightning bugs blaze before his eyes, and gasped summer-evening air as his heart pounded at Jason’s body pressing against his. The world could be beautiful. Life could be so beautiful.
Stop it, Peter thought with a groan. Jason's just a hormonal teenager. And so are you.
The thrill couldn't be love, he wouldn't let it.
He fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning and woke up at noon—dressed for the dining hall, curious what the kitchen would serve after the past several days, and found a parsimonious commissary set up in its place, run by an unfamiliar elderly nun who told him that he wasn't allowed to sit and eat here, but he could look at what was on the table.
He selected a raisin bagel and a sesame-poppy bagel each matched with miniature cheese wheels, plums, a pear, an apple, and from the chest freezer a small carton of milk that wasn't frozen and a can of soda that also wasn't frozen.
In the elderly nun's hands it all went into small paper bags that went into a larger paper bag, and then he took it all back to the dormitory and stopped by the common room.
Jason stretched his legs out in front of him on the floor, back leaning against the sofa. He stared through the television screen, hands unmoving on the console controller as the final cutscene played. Some computer-animated models were getting lasers scans to find out if their measurements suited the muscular rectangle-jawed title character.
“Was it a good game?” Peter asked.
“The gameplay was intuitive enough.”
“Answering a question about a console roleplaying game with how your favorite part was the gameplay, is like somebody asking how's your soup and you answer that the spoon is exquisite.”
Jason saved the game into a memory cartridge with some jabs at the controller. “What's in the bag? Exquisite spoons?”
“A thank-you for taking care of me while I was sick.” Peter slid the paper bag over the floorboards towards him.
“Oh, sweet! I'm famished,” Jason said when he looked inside, and dug in. They had a bagel each and sampled half the other’s wedge of cheese.
Eating in the dormitory common room wasn't allowed, and neither was playing video games, but everyone was either still sick from food poisoning, or recovering, or wouldn't report them for breaking the rules. The common room was empty except for the two of them.
Peter still peered over at the entrance and the hallway past it, then said, “It's like we survived the end of the world and have to forage around and ration stuff…living on the lookout for danger...”
“I’m sure classes will be back on in no time,” Jason told him. He one-handedly juggled two of the plums while still seated on the floor. “They'll probably schedule them on weekends to make up for the time everyone missed, and there's no dodging it because we live here. Then I'll wish I were a day student.”
“You didn't already wish you were a day student before then? I think your roommate sucks.”
“Does he?” He caught both plums in his hands and tossed one to Peter, who caught it. Jason stood up and stretched his arms up and around, twisted to stretch his back, and said, “I'm taking the P.S. back to the room, wanna come with me and get changed?”
“Changed?”
“Out of your uniform. No class today.” He started hopping in place, to get the feeling back into his legs. “So I'm going to the basketball court. We can play some one-on-one, or you can spot me. Let's go.”
They went. First they changed the channel on the television, unplugged the console, folded up the empty paper bags from the dining hall, snuck down the dormitory hall, tossed the wrappings in the rubbish bin there, and raced into their room where Peter remembered that he didn't like any of the sportsballs kind of games but he changed his clothes anyway.
Then there was stealing a basketball from the big polished indoor basketball court, and then leaving.
Jason led them through an unkempt-overgrowth overridden part of the campus that Diane Lee—from Peter and Matt's Bible Study club—always swore was haunted. When Jason plunged on so fearlessly, though, Peter couldn't help but follow.
Jason led them to an expanse of cracked asphalt with a square lot fenced in by chickenwire and peeling paint. A solitary basketball hoop on one side really was only a metal hoop, the netting already long weathered away.
Peculiarly, this cramped excuse for a basketball court that was maybe just over only nine times the area of a telephone booth had a small segment of bleachers opposite the hoop. Peter took a seat there with a small duffel bag of frozen bottled water. Jason dribbled the ball slowly.
As Jason poised himself to shoot, he said, “I don't want to get tortured and stabbed to death in real life, you know.” He made his shot. The ball bounced off the backboard and into the hoop, and he ambled over to get it back. He picked it up and said, “Reading about it was sexy, though. It's the penetration, and all the body-temperature fluids, and the begging. Maybe it's the way you write it.” He tossed the ball to Peter, who flinched away and let it bounce off the bleachers.
Peter sat up again, and said crossly, “So it's my fault!”
Jason retrieved the ball and held it to chest level, letting it roll from one palm to another. “Come down here and shoot your shot, man.”
Peter flopped on his side to lay on the bleachers in protest for a moment, then the next climbed down to take the ball from him. He squinted up at the hoop, basketball between his hands. “It’s pirates and pop stars and murderer-cannibal-necrophiles. None of it is real.” He threw the ball. The arc it formed in the air didn't make it halfway to the hoop.
Jason chortled. “What was that! Were you setting free a baby bird whose broken wing you healed?” He imitated Peter's lazy-armed toss. Peter chased after the ball for a bit and handed it to him. He said, turning his back to the hoop so that he could look at Peter, “Jason McConnell is real. Every Christmas Eve my sister Nadia would leave milk and cookies out for him, and the next morning would find him under the tree with all these presents out of their boxes.”
“It's your dad in costume.”
“That would be a Christmas miracle.” Jason tossed the ball over his shoulder. It slipped right into the hoop, without even a chafing sound to mean that the ball touched the hoop’s inside.
Then it was Peter's turn. This time Jason gave him some pointers about how to angle his arms for a better catapult, and where the strain and propulsion should come from. Peter let his arms drop. “I meant this doesn't happen, either.”
“What's this? What's happening right now, what we're doing, you mean that this doesn't happen?” Jason still wasn't taking anything seriously.
“I know the jokes people make about boys’ boarding schools. They like to point out the irony, or the hypocrisy. The fact is, it's so unlikely to happen that…This isn't happening. This isn't real.”
“You're being embarrassingly wrong with the word fact, there. You could say you don't like me, and I'd listen.”
Peter knew by now that wouldn't be true, either, he did like this boy. If Jason needed to hear the opposite, though, Peter could say so.
Jason stood back, arms folded across his chest, waiting. “You can't, can you. You can't say it.”
Peter could try to say so. “I…” The basketball slipped from his hand. His heart pounded, much less pleasantly than usual. “I…feel dizzy…Can't…” breathe, he mouthed.
Jason uncrossed his arms and hugged him from the side. “Lie down on the bleachers,” he said, urging him to walk. “There where there's shade. You'll get some blood back in your brain that way.”
When, with Jason's help, Peter lay down on his side, Jason thought it would help even more to press the side of a frozen water bottle against the back of Peter's neck.
Peter yowled softly in pathetic irritation.
“In case it was heat exhaustion,” Jason explained, whining right back at him. He changed the position of the ice-and-water bottle to between Peter's shoulderblades (at which Peter squirmed) then Peter's forehead (at which Peter grumbled.) Jason decided, “I think you'll live.” With his other hand, the one not keeping the ice-and-water bottle in place, he stroked and rubbed his palm against Peter's back. “I shouldn't have forced you to exercise so soon after you got better.”
In a small voice on the verge of tears, Peter said, “Not ready…”
“I know that now. I'm sorry.”
“...not real...”
“But I thought you said that was exactly your type. And I am in a story. Twice,” Jason teased. He paused to drink some of the melted ice from the bottle. As he capped it, he said, “The hedge maze at the country club is real, too. If you're all well again and ready this summer, I'd like to show you the fireflies.”
“You already did,” Peter rasped. He gulped to clear his throat. “And I liked that better…that it stays a story…”
Jason sounded a sigh of resignation and kept rubbing Peter's back. When his arm got tired he let it rest over Peter's stomach. To his surprise, Peter clutched at his hand, and cried quietly, “What's wrong with me?”
To that, Jason didn't know what to say.
After that, Jason didn't know how friendly or flirtatious he should be. He guessed it was complicated to Peter, who seemed so unhappy with having any sexuality. Jason knew the jokes that Peter mentioned in the abandoned basketball court, and thought it meant that it was as common as sneaking in alcohol and cannabis to dorm room parties, maybe less common than eating in the common room or playing a video game there. With the priest preaching hellfire for everything and anything, it became a noise. Peter took it so seriously but wouldn't say either yes or no.
Jason caught Peter gluing his typewritten pages into their notebook, and asked again if Peter would join him in the summer.
Peter answered, “My grandmother’s old, and I live here most of the year. I don't know how many summers together we have left.” That meant no. He couldn't say no.
By junior year, neither of them would remember if they lost any weekends to catching up as Jason predicted. They had exams. Jason switched from rowing to basketball. Peter signed Chrissy Macaulay's yearbook, because she was graduating and remembered he was nice to her when she joined the theater club (he left his favorite Bible quote and made a careful effort not to dedicate it to “Not Cathy Hyatt”.)
The rest of the notebook pages remained blank.
They packed up for the summer and went back to their parents.
Room assignments at Saint Cecilia's was done by some randomizer machine every year. When Jason moved into the junior-year boys’ dormitory in September, he was relieved to find that he would be sharing a room with Peter Simmonds again, and surprised to find the very same Peter Simmonds holding a broom up with a flashlight taped to the end of the handle.
“Did you request to room in with me?” Jason asked him, although the dormitory proctor would have informed him first if there were any changes to the way they usually go about rooming arrangements. The management didn't like customized requests.
When Peter answered no (wide-eyed, as though he'd been caught with his hand in a cookie jar), Jason replied wryly that, “Nothing can keep soulmates apart.”
Peter almost dropped the broom with the taped-on flashlight, he was suddenly so flustered.
Interesting, Jason thought. Weird. Cute. Adorable. He bustled about, unpacking. “What'd you do this summer?”
Peter was peeling the duct tape from the broom. He said, “Not to brag, but I think…I've grown up a bit…”
“That doesn't sound ominously vague.”
Peter smiled. He said, “I wish I said yes to your invitation to Nadia's debutante ball.”
Jason groaned. “So do I! I invited Zack. He told everyone and their mother that he was already dating someone else, and that's great, whatever, it's a debutante ball not a wedding. Then he called Nadia a whale and…”
Peter clapped a hand over his mouth, appalled. “No!”
“...then he made it to third base with that girl from Hansard the board of debutantes assigned him to, so much for lovestruck loyalty. I made sure he's coming back here to Kyra with some Explaining to do. So yeah, he and I are not talking,” Jason concluded with grim determination. They heard the bell for the dining hall chime. “I'm hungry. Gonna bounce and come back to unpacking later.”
“I'll go with you,” Peter said. He was dressed anyway.
Dining hall was now set up like a cafeteria. Students would line up with trays, selecting from two or three options per course. Nobody was deducting merit points anymore.
Lucas Carter, Tanya Garrett, and Ivy Robinson joined them at their end of the table to place bets on whether or not Kyra was going to break up with Zack. Lucas let it slip that there was a rumor that Jason “broke curfew to cry on the phone to his mother” and Jason hastened to correct that he wasn't crying on the phone to Mama McConnell but to Peter's mother.
“But it's true you were crying? Aww,” Ivy crooned.
Jason snapped, “I thought Peter was dying of botulism!”
Peter only laughed.
Since nobody was deducting merit points for the girls sitting with the boys, Nadia sat herself beside Jason and gloomed through everybody's congratulations at being a real proper debutante in capital-s Society.
Not to be outdone, Matthew Lloyd sat beside Peter to ask about their schedule for Bible study club this year, and if he thought anybody in their year would make it out of the chorus for the winter play that year.
It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
When they got back to their room, Peter wanted to get a head start on lights out. He didn't seem sleepy, in fact, Jason thought his roommate was almost vibrating in eleven dimensions with eagerness.
“Sure,” Jason said agreeably, and he went around their room turning all the lights off.
Their ceiling was ablaze with tiny star stickers that glowed green.
Peter met him at his bedside. He said, “It's not as good as real fireflies, but I wanted…umm…”
“You wanted?”
“Yeah.” Peter answered abruptly, realized that didn't make sense, and stuttered, “To! To, to, to, show you that…I think I'm in love with you.”
Jason grinned. “I think you're in love with me, too.”
He tackled Peter into bed as Peter grumbled a muffled, “Jerk!”
“Written anything new over the summer?”
“I gave up on writing. I think I'm gonna be an accountant.”
“Oh man,” Jason whispered. “Where am I gonna get free p*rn now?”
The mattress shook with Peter's stifled laughter. “You'll figure something out.”
Peter lay close to him and nuzzled against his chest as he looked up at the stars, which maybe wasn't as good as the real stars, but it meant something.
