A trapdoor dropped down above us, allowing us to see a narrow ladder that first Astrid, then I climbed, leading into Eric’s room. Except “room” wasn’t quite the right word. His room was the attic, and the attic stretched the length of the entire house, narrowing at the sides where the roof came down. It wasn’t like any teenager’s room I’d seen before; it felt more like an art studio.
One side of the room was paint-spattered, with multiple easels where Eric and some of his friends were working. Damian was there, sitting in a corner with a sketchbook and a box of colored pencils. There was also a big plastic tub of clay sitting next to a wheel where Jess, the girl from the lunch table, was throwing a pot or something. She was the only one I hadn’t officially met; I tried to smile at her, but she looked at me quickly and then turned back to her pot, and I figured it wasn’t a good time. I didn’t want to interrupt her, especially since this whole making-new-friends thing was still not my area of expertise.
The other side of the room was filled with books and DVDs, and there was a decent-sized flat-screen TV hooked up to a Blu-Ray player and a stereo, though I didn’t see any video games. Bummer.
“Hey, guys, glad you could make it,” Eric said, coming out from behind one of the easels. “Sam, I take it you found Astrid okay?”
“I did,” I said, and she grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
Eric’s face broke out into a grin. “I see. It’s about time, Sam.”
I blushed again. This was all pretty new to me. “This is your room?” I asked.
“Mine all mine,” he said. “Ran out of bedrooms when my little brother was born so I convinced them to give me the attic. I turned it into a combo art studio/movie house, so now we hang out here a lot.”
“Your parents leave you alone?”
“More or less.” He walked back over to the easel. “Make yourselves at home. You into art at all? We’ve got just about everything here you’d need.”
“Not really,” I said, though I wished I was. “What are you painting?”
Eric looked over at Astrid. Something passed between them that I didn’t understand. She shrugged. “Come check it out,” he said.
I walked over to the easel. He’d been working on what appeared to be a portrait of a boy, blond, sharp-featured, sad. He looked familiar, though I couldn’t place him right away. “You’re really good,” I said.
“Thanks. Can’t seem to get it quite right, though.” He frowned at it, then put his paints down. “How about we watch a movie? Everyone up for that?” He walked over to the rack of DVDs and scanned through them. “Theme today is teenage angst, just like every other day.”
“You pick,” Damian called out.
“Dealer’s choice it is,” Eric said. He loaded up a movie, and Jess and Damian started arranging stacks of pillows and blankets along the wall across from the TV. I guess they knew the drill. I found a big square pillow to lean on, and Astrid curled up next to me as a creepy song I recognized from Hayden’s mix came over the speakers. Lying together watching a movie with Astrid was pretty much the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.
The movie itself was disturbing, though. It was old—from the ’80s or ’90s, I wasn’t sure—about a loner kid with a pirate radio station. At one point he dealt with a suicidal kid who eventually killed himself. He felt really bad about it and ended up giving this long, ranting speech about why suicide wasn’t the answer. I found myself fighting the urge to get up and walk out, even though the speech itself wasn’t preachy or anything like that. It was just that I hadn’t realized what the movie was about; even hearing the word “suicide” was kind of like getting kicked in the stomach. Hayden had never even tried to talk to anyone, let alone some random asshole on the radio. Would that have made things better or worse?
“You okay?” Astrid whispered as the credits rolled.
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I meant it.
“Not the most sensitive pick, Eric,” she said.
He had the decency to look embarrassed. “I know, I’m really sorry,” he said. “Totally didn’t think it through before I put it in, and then it was too late, you know? No offense?”
“None taken.” I didn’t think he’d set out to make me feel bad.
“I was actually remembering the homophobia more than the suicide,” he said. That had been part of the storyline too; I’d been so focused on the other stuff that I hadn’t considered how the rest of it would affect other people. Like Eric. “No shortage of homophobes at Libertyville High, that’s for sure.”
“It’s not as bad as it was back then, is it?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for him.
“It’s better than it was, but it’s still not great,” he said. “This is still a town where most people belong to one of two churches, and both of them preach the evils of homosexuality on a regular basis. There’s no LGBTQ group at school, even though all the other big high schools in Iowa have them. Most people around here would rather stay closeted than run the risk of, I don’t know, losing a scholarship because your church found out you were gay.”
“But it seems like everyone accepts you,” I said. “Your family, your friends.”
“They do now,” Astrid said.
“Let’s not talk about that,” Eric said.
“They’ll get what’s coming to them eventually,” Jess said quietly. I think it was the first thing I’d ever heard her say.
“Maybe they already have,” Damian said.
I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but I had a feeling it was Jason and Trevor. I didn’t understand, though—Trevor I could totally believe as a homophobe, but I thought the rumor was that Jason was gay. I wondered whether Eric could have been talking about Jason and that church scholarship—everyone knew how religious his family was, and he was definitely the type to win scholarship money.
The room was quiet after that, but it wasn’t a normal silence. It was filled with something—I couldn’t tell exactly what, but something wasn’t right. Did they all think I’d done it, too? I wanted to say that I hadn’t, that it must have been someone else, but I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t want to lie.
“It’s getting late,” someone said. “We should probably head out.”
“Yeah, we should too,” Astrid said. “Can anyone give us a ride?”
Damian had borrowed his dad’s car, so he offered to drop us off. I thought maybe I’d get to see where Astrid lived, but Damian went by my house first. “Good to see you guys,” he said. “We should all hang out again soon.”
“If I don’t keep Sam all to myself,” Astrid said. She kissed me before I got out of the car.
If she kept kissing me like that, I imagined, maybe the other stuff wouldn’t matter so much. But I felt guilty even thinking it.
MOM, RACHEL, AND JIMMY were all hanging out in the living room when I got home. “Did I miss a party?” I asked. There was an empty box of pizza on the coffee table. “Is this becoming a weekly thing?”
Mom lounged in her usual chair, the one that Hayden had always liked. “Did you meet with the guidance counselor? The school called, you know.”
“Forget the guidance counselor,” Rachel said. “I heard you’ve been hanging around with Alison Whitman.”
Word traveled fast. “She goes by Astrid now.”
“Is that the girl who came over before that party?” Mom asked. “She has an . . . unusual sense of style.”
Rachel snorted. “Weird, you mean.”
“You’re one to talk,” I pointed out. Rachel’s current ensemble included yet another tiny skirt, plus eye shadow in so many shades of pink, purple, and orange that her eyes looked like the sunset I’d just seen.
“Peace, all,” Jimmy said, which was also hilarious since he appeared to be wearing some sort of studded dog collar. He didn’t exactly look like the U.N. But it seemed to work, or at least it bought me a minute to drop my stuff and sit down on the couch.
“What did you and the guidance counselor talk about?” Mom asked.
I glanced over at Jimmy. “Glad to know we’ve got such a good sense of boundaries around here,” I said. “Beaumont said it was confidential.”
“Nice try,” Mom said. “Nothing’s confidential from your mother.”