“Good for you, baby,” she said. “Now all the boys are gonna be chasing you.”
I rolled my eyes, but I was still grinning.
Lua hadn’t invited me to the show solely to watch. He and the band had finished recording their EP and had copied the songs onto flash drives shaped like skeleton keys for me to sell. I set up a table in the back corner of the club. Five bucks for the flash drive, ten bucks for a T-shirt. Each shirt was emblazoned with the band’s logo on the front—a cracked clock with a silhouette of Lua over it—and on the back was a list of tour dates, each set in the far-flung past or distant, imagined future.
I hadn’t spent much time with Lua lately—I’d been busy with Cal and Lua had been busy with the band—but I promised him we’d go to IHOP after the show to catch up, and not only was I desperate to spend time with my best friend and find out what was going on in his life, I really needed to talk to Lua about Calvin.
I couldn’t think straight around Cal. Kissing him filled my thoughts, though we’d managed to keep our lips firmly to ourselves. Sometimes we stayed up all night on the phone debating why the universe—the boundaries of which now extended barely farther than the moon—kept shrinking. I asked Calvin to explain where daylight came from without the sun, but he didn’t recognize the word, which made the discussion difficult. Everything was happening so quickly that I hadn’t had time to process what it all meant. Getting into UC Boulder and New College was an amazing feeling, but it meant I would have to make a decision about whether to leave or stay.
Should I stay in Cloud Lake for Tommy? Leave for myself? Could I admit that I had feelings for Calvin that I found increasingly difficult to ignore? Too many choices. Too many decisions.
“I’ll take a shirt.”
“Ten bucks,” I said without looking up from my phone. Calvin had texted me a picture of the Thai food he and his dad were eating, and I was trying to think up a witty reply.
“This piece of shit isn’t worth ten bucks.”
I glanced up, and the last person I expected to see was Trent Williams. He looked so out of place, wearing a Miami Dolphins jersey and khaki shorts, a sneer cutting his ogre face. I snatched the shirt back from him and returned it to the pile.
“What’re you doing here, Trent?”
“Came to see the show. What else?”
Trent was eighteen, but he must’ve had a fake ID that said he was old enough to drink, because he held a beer in one hand.
“So this is what a fag bar looks like,” he said. A couple of people nearby glared in Trent’s direction.
“I’m surprised I’ve never seen you here before, considering what people at school say about you.”
Trent’s smirk transformed into a snarl. “Was it you? Whatever Frye told you about me is a lie. He’s a fucking liar.”
“Calm down, Trent,” I said. “I’m sure it’s totally normal to get a boner while wrestling with another guy. Especially if you’re gay.”
“Fuck you, Pinkerton.” He inched closer to the table, but a line had begun to form behind him, and a woman said, “Move it, creep.”
Trent bristled and sneered. I doubted he’d start a fight in a club full of people who’d kick his ass for using the word “fag,” but pride makes people do stupid shit.
“Whatever,” he said, and backed away.
But I actually felt bad about what I’d said. I didn’t know whether Trent was gay or straight or fell somewhere in between, and it didn’t matter. Trent was an asshole, yeah, but no one deserved people talking shit about them.
“Trent,” I called.
“What?”
“Lua and I are going to IHOP after the show. Why don’t you come with us?” It had to be getting into college and my preoccupation with Calvin. Those were the only reasons I could think of that I was being nice to an asshat like Trent.
“I’d rather choke on a shit burrito,” he said, and disappeared into the crowd. Whatever. I’d tried.
I sold out of the flash drives before the stage lights rose on Lua and the band.
Your Mom’s a Paradox grew more confident every time I watched them play. It was only a matter of time before they graduated from opening band to headliner. And I was awed by them. By Lua.
There was a moment midway through the show, during the song “Corporal Jackie, the One-Legged Monkey,” when Lua cut his finger. Instead of stopping, he smeared it across the front of his straitjacket and played on. It was gross, yeah, but it was so badass.
I had no idea what my future held, but I saw Lua’s crystal clear, and it shone brighter than I could have possibly imagined.
385,972 KM
“HOLY SHIT!” LUA SAID, HOLDING his hand over the table for me to see. “I’m an idiot.” The cut ran down the pad of his swollen middle finger. “But I couldn’t stop playing. I mean, I didn’t even feel the pain until the end of the set. It was amazing.”
“It was endorphins,” I said, thinking about Calvin and his explanation for cutting himself.
Lua wrapped a napkin around his finger and cradled it to his chest. “Whatever it was, I want more.”
IHOP was brightly lit and loud. A bawdy group that had come from a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show occupied most of the other side of the restaurant, still dressed in their fishnets and corsets and skin-tight gold shorts.
Our server dropped off our grilled cheese sandwiches, and we dug in.
“So,” Lua said with his mouth full. “What’s going on with you and Calvin, college boy?”
College boy. I still couldn’t believe it, and I definitely wasn’t ready to think about what it meant for my future. “Honestly?” I said. “I have no idea.”
Lua rolled his eyes. “He likes you. Obviously. And you’re a damn liar if you say you don’t like him, too.”
I avoided answering by stuffing my face with sandwich. The bread was perfectly toasted and the cheese just warm enough to ooze over the crust and drip onto the plate. It was maybe the most perfect grilled cheese I’d ever eaten. But I couldn’t avoid answering all night. Eventually I’d run out of sandwich.
“Yeah, all right. I like him.”
“I knew it!”
“But,” I said, “it’s complicated.” I still hadn’t told Lua the whole story of New Year’s Eve, and I figured that was the best place to start. “So we sort of had sex in my car on New Year’s Eve, but he’s messed up and I’m messed up and we decided we should just be friends.”
Lua stopped with a fry halfway to his mouth. “Aren’t you supposed to friend-zone a guy before you sleep with him?”
“Like I said: complicated.”
“If this is about Tommy, I might strangle you with that guy’s feather boa.” Lua motioned to the Rocky table.
“It’s a nice feather boa,” I said. “All violet and fluffy. If you ever strangle me with a feather boa, that’s the one I’d choose.”