Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time I meet him, it's late September and I'm in my eleventh year.

Spring is upon Australia, evident by the ever-increasing temperature and the vibrant color of life. The grass is greener, the trees are alive, and the flower bushes are blooming. A fresh start. I need a fresh start. I think everyone does.

After being stood up by a girl at the cinema who was, ultimately, out of my league anyway, I decide to just go watch the stupid movie by myself instead of going home and sulking. It's the Footloose remake—total chick flick, but I don't really care. I already spent the money, anyway.

When I walk into the theater, it's hard to find a seat that isn't taken in the dim light. I'm not surprised to see couples from school, cuddling, kissing, looking happy. Suddenly being stood up bums me out a lot more. I try to find a seat in the back where no one can see me if I cry.

It's then that the neon green catches my eye.

At the back of the theater, he's surrounded by a group of boys who are obviously taunting him. He's a young boy, a bit on the scrawny side with mid-length blond hair swept across his forehead. He has the dorkiest pair of fluoro-green aviators pushed into his hair.

I approach the crowd of boys, recognizing most of them as year twelves from my school. The kid must be a year nine, maybe even younger. He's cowered in his seat, looking down and not saying a word as one of the boys calls him a faggot and flicks his glasses. The kid flinches but says nothing. How can people do that? How can they sit there and make fun of some innocent kid and laugh about it?

"Why don't you piss off and leave the kid alone?" I tell them when I'm just a few feet away. The tallest of the five of them, probably the ringleader, raises his eyebrows at me like he can't believe I have the nerve to say anything. Maybe under different circumstances I'd mind my own business, but at this point in the day, I've had enough of year twelves and their superiority complexes. What makes them so great? They're in the theater for Footloose, just like all the rest of us.

"Why don't you mind your own business, huh, mate?" he says, earning a chuckle from his friends. Is that even a comeback? Is that really worthy of a chuckle?

"Look, mate,"  I sneer. "I'm not above kicking your ass right here in the theater." There's little weight behind my words, as I've never been much of a fighter, but eventually the guy just scoffs in my face before leaving with his friends. 

In the softest voice I've ever heard, the kid tells me, "thanks." I turn to smile at him, looking him in the eyes for the first time. They're blue. The kind of blue that makes you forget what you were saying for a second.

"No problem." I take the seat next to him and nudge his shoulder with mine. "I like your glasses. They're cute."

He smiles so big it reaches his eyes. It makes me feel warm inside.

We talk through half the movie before deciding to go get lunch somewhere.

***

The next time I see him is at his locker the following week.

I didn't know we went to school together, which is funny, really, because we've been in school for nearly a year now and he's had a locker across the hall from mine the whole time. He's very shy, so quiet sometimes you forget that he's there, which I assume is the reason I never noticed him before. Who would've thought that we'd passed each other every day and not even met until a few days ago, at the movies no less. It's strange how the world works, isn't it?

He's talking to another young looking kid, roughly his age. He has dark skin and hair to match, at that stage just after a buzzcut when it's just starting to grow back in. I can't hear what they're saying over the cacophony of voices in the hall. I want to approach him and ask how he's doing, but I decide to let him talk to his friend, instead.

Another boy approaches the tan one. He has blond hair that falls in his face and sticks out in every direction. He says something to the tan boy and then they leave, and the kid looks at the ground, shuffling his feet.

So I approach him anyway.

"Hey, Luke."

He lifts his head when he hears me, any trace of disappointment gone from his face. He smiles the same dorky smile he did when I told him I liked his glasses. I want to ask him what happened with those boys just now, but more than that, I want him to smile, so I don't bring it up.

"Hi," he says sheepishly, and it makes me smile because he is so innocent and there aren't a lot of kids like that anymore.

I spot his glasses in his locker and I can't help but laugh a little. "Still wearing those glasses?"

His cheeks flush bright red and his eyes find his feet again. Blond strands fall over his eyes and I want to push them away, but I don't. He's only an inch or two shorter than me but it feels like an entire foot. He's small in the way that you're scared to let him out of your sight.

"Nah, I don't think I'm gonna wear 'em anymore."

Immediately I want to lecture him on not letting assholes dictate whether or not he wears fluorescent green glasses, tell him that it doesn't matter what they think, but I was his age once and I know that you don't learn those sorts of things until you learn them yourself. I'm disappointed to say the least. I like when people have dorky little thing like that—it makes them seem more real.

"Do you have any plans after school today?"

It's out of my mouth before I even realize what I'm saying and he looks just as surprised as I am.

Before he can answer, I suggest going back to my place and playing FIFA since no one will be home; it takes me a moment to remember I don’t like FIFA, but he probably does. He nods his head. I tell him to meet me by the exit at three and we’ll walk together.

When he leaves, my eyes follow him as if acting with a mind of their own. His cheeks glow as he looks at the ground, and my stomach knots up. I can’t help but smile even as he leaves me.

***

It’s not until he introduces me to his new friends that I realize how much I love being his only friend.

I don’t mean it conceitedly. He’s incredibly sweet and funny when you get to know him, so if anything, I think Luke is deserving of as many friends as he could possibly want. But I worry about him, and I don't want him to be friends with a bunch of people who don't really care about him. And, well, I like being the one he wants to share everything with. I barely talk to any of my other friends now that I have him—he's infinitely more interesting than the rest of them.

Of course I can’t criticize him for wanting other friends, and I’m proud of him for branching out, but I can't pretend I didn't like when it was just us. We’d become something of a team, and I just want to watch out for him and make sure his new friends aren’t assholes in disguise.

I recognize them as the two boys who were at his locker a few days ago. The ones who made him look sad. I don't trust them already.

Regardless of how I feel, I pretend to like them because he seems excited.

"Ash, this is Calum and Michael." Calum is the tan one. Michael is the one with the blond fringe. He's much paler than Calum, but not as pale as Luke.

I shake their hands, a gesture which proves to be mildly out of their comfort zones. My grandfather always said that it's harder for a man to betray you if he's shaken your hand. I'm not a confrontational guy but if they end try to take advantage of Luke, then I might be.

They play a few rounds of FIFA while I skim through the shelf of old records on the other side of the room. It's a mixed bag, everything from ZZ Top to Chopin. I doubt any of them are his, since I only ever see him wearing Busted t-shirts. Not that there's anything wrong with Busted, but who could resist a guy who listens to ZZ Top in this day and age?

Luke laughs, and I turn to seem him horsing around with Michael on the couch. He tosses his controller onto the ground and climbs on top of Michael, pinning his arms down. Michael laughs too, and Calum laughs as he watches the two of them, and then Michael rolls he and Luke off the couch and onto the ground and I can't see them anymore. I sigh and turn back to the records, probably looking as lonely and pathetic as I feel.

After another minute of thumbing through records, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I'm disappointed to find Calum standing behind me and not Luke.

"Hey, so you're year twelve, right?"

"Eleven," I correct him. He nods to seem interested but I can tell he doesn't really care.

He presses his lips into a thin line, rocking back on his heels. "Luke's pretty cool, huh?"

I continue to thumb through records, trying to seem nonchalant but suddenly I can't stop smiling. "Yeah, he's pretty great, isn't he?"

Calum laughs, elbowing me playfully. "You sound like you have a crush, mate."

I laugh so as not to seem weird but his words settle uncomfortably in my stomach.

He gestures to the record in my hand. "Dark Side of the Moon. Classic."

"Huh?" I look down at the record, greeted by the classic symbol of light diffraction. I think I read somewhere that the logo is scientifically incorrect, but I don't really know how, and I failed physics anyway. Is it even physics? "Oh, yeah. Great album." I know I'm being awkward, but I really don't even want to be here. Being friends with one year nine is okay, but three of them? That's definitely one way to not look cool. "You play?"

"Hell yeah, dude. I play bass and Mikey plays guitar. I've only ever see Luke play acoustic on his YouTube channel, but I'm sure he'd do fine on the electric, you think?" I want to mention that I play the drums, but I can't get past Luke's YouTube channel. He plays guitar? He posts covers? Why didn't I know this? Sure, I've only known Luke a couple of weeks, but that's still longer than these guys. Why wouldn't he mention it?

Calum rambles on about something Michael said, but I don't really listen. I'm too far in my own head. Eventually he joins Luke and Michael again and they play a few more rounds of FIFA before Michael and Calum have to leave. Luke looks happy. I have to get going, too—mostly so that I'm not stuck in a room alone with him right now. Before I can slip out the door, he asks me what I thought of the guys. I didn't really get a chance to meet Michael, but Calum seems alright, so I tell him that, and he smiles. Once I get home, I spend the rest of my night watching Luke sing on YouTube.

***

One Saturday night while I'm alone at the house, he knocks on my door.

Mum's at work and my brother and sister are at the neighbor's house for the night, and Luke shows up at my door with wild eyes and a crooked smirk. Michael and Calum are waiting at the end of my driveway on their bikes, while Luke's is laying on my front yard, tires still spinning. The initial excitement of seeing him is gone. I haven't seen him outside of school since the night I met the guys. He's not so interested in me anymore, but it seems to pass just over his head how much it bothers me.

"Ash, Mikey stole a bottle of vodka from his parents and we're gonna go to the lake. Wanna come?" The words come out at a million miles an hour, and Michael holds up the bottle and waves it in the air with a wild look on his face to match Luke's. Calum seems more tame than the others, but he's still a year nine, and I remember getting way too excited about breaking the rules. Hell, if I hadn't given up all my friends for Luke, I'd probably be out at a real party right now.

Regardless of whether it's hypocritical or not, I tell him no.

"Why not?" he whines. "Come on, it'll be fun! I don't wanna go if you're not gonna be there."

It makes me happy in a weird way when he says that, but it's not enough. "Vodka will get you really messed up, Luke. I really think you should return that and find something else to do."

He scoffs in my face. He's small and innocent but it still hurts me, because apparently I'm nothing without a fifteen-year-old's validation. "What? Why?"

I sigh. It's not an argument I want to get in with him right now. I want him to ditch his friends, to come inside and watch Say Anything with me and talk about how we just can't believe Diane didn't get out of bed for the boombox scene, but I know it won't happen. In the end I just want the best for him and getting drunk on vodka miles away from home on a bike is not the best.

"Have you ever been drunk before, Luke?" He shakes his head. "Well vodka will get you super drunk and the last place you wanna end up is five miles from your house. You can't ride a bike drunk, Luke."

He looks at me for a moment and something like shame passes over his features. But then, like the moment when a butterfly decides not to land in your hand, just barely brushing your fingertips with its wings, he huffs "whatever," and runs back over to his friends. He gets back on his bike and leaves without another glance back at me; for some reason this hurts me. I don't know why it matters so much—why the minute he's gone I divide down into a fraction of what I was before.

Reluctantly, I return to the couch in the living room to watch Say Anything by myself, but I can't stop worrying about Luke. What if he drinks too much and drowns in the lake? What if he wanders into traffic and gets hit by a car? What if he gets abducted and is too drunk to fight back? What if Michael and Calum are only using this as a ploy to lure him into the woods, kill him, and bury his body on the shore?

Irrational as it may be, Lloyd hasn't even even asked Diane to Vahlere's party before I'm slipping my shoes on.

I lock the door behind me with the spare and place it back under the fern next to the door. If I have to swim to the middle of the lake to save Luke then there's no saying what might happen to my key, so it's probably best that I don't bring one. I jump on my pushbike and start pedaling north towards the lake, so fast I feel like my legs might fall off, but eventually I lose feeling and there's nothing left to stop me.

When I finally come through the woods into the clearing, all of my worries dissipate into the sticky air around me. They're sitting around the firepit that's been there for ten years, playing guitar and singing and laughing. Maybe I just don't get it because I'm not fifteen anymore. Year eleven is all worrying about graduating and moving out and going to Uni so I just don't remember what it's like to be in year nine, living just to have fun with your friends. It's probably the reason he keeps excluding me: I've become more like a big brother than a friend.

I turn around and begin wheeling my bike back through the woods so they don't hear me, but my efforts prove futile when I hear Luke. "Ash!" he calls. "You came!"

He stands up and I half expect him to run towards me, but then I see Michael tip his head back and chug a bit of vodka, and then I notice how off-kilter Luke's center of balance seems. He wobbles to the right, barely catching himself before falling directly into the fire. I drop my bike in the leaves and run after him, forcing him to sit back down. 

"Did you know Mikey plays the guitar, Ash? Did ya?" he asks excitedly, grabbing hold of the sleeve of my sweatshirt. I don't want him to let go. I want him to stay with me where I can make sure he's safe.

"Yeah," I reply, my monotonous tone juxtaposing his boyish voice. "Calum told me."

"Did he tell you that he plays bass?"

I nod my head. "He even told me that you play guitar. And sing."

Luke's cheeks flush dark red and I can't help but laugh a little. He may be drunk, but that doesn't stop him from being cute. "Oh no," he gulps. "Did he tell you about the YouTube channel, too?"

I nod solemnly. He removes his hand from my arm to bury his face in his hands. "Caaaalum!" he groans.

Michael and Calum laugh, and for the first time, Michael addresses me."He's had a lot to drink for such a skinny boy," he tells me humorously, and Calum nods in agreement. "Maybe you can stay with him while Cal and I go for a swim."

I'm not sure if I should feel flattered that Michael considers me the best person available to care for Luke, or annoyed that he's just glad to have someone to pawn Luke off onto. Either way, I don't really mind. I'll happily spend my night making sure Luke doesn't fall face-first into the fire, and having Michael and Calum out of the picture is even better. They strip down to their boxers and wrestle each other into the water, disappearing under the dark, murky waves. I don't pay attention to see when they reemerge.

"Is it just me, or is the whole world spinning and I am staying still?" Luke slurs, unwittingly breaking the silence that paralyzed me. Nothing I say right now will leave a lasting impact; he'll be lucky if he even remembers I showed up. Yet I feel inexplicably more aware of myself, of my own heartbeat, of his breath on my skin. I struggle to find what's changed in three minutes to make me feel so out-of-body.

It's only the second time we've been alone together since Calum made that jarring accusation, but the first time I didn't have a chance to bring it up even if I wanted to. Not that I want to now but I...I could. And that leaves a certain bit of power lingering in the air that I don't quite trust myself enough to grasp.

He catches me off guard when he lays his head in my lap.

The fire burns hot next to us, popping and crackling as the wind carries sparks northward into the water. The distant splashing from the guys is almost enough to drown out the persistent chirping of the cicadas, though their song ultimately pierces through the loud silence above anything else. I can't tell if he is afraid to talk or if he's just too drunk to notice the tension hanging in the air.

"You know, if a cicada were to sing right next to your ear, it would, hypothetically, cause hearing damage," I tell him, purely because it's the most relevant icebreaker I've got right now. He cranes his head to look at me and I notice that he's smiling this big, dopey smile. "That's how loud they are."

I look into his eyes for a moment, searching for the answer to a question I haven't asked. Eventually he looks back up at the sky, and we fall into a silence again. So much for that. I've never had such a hard time talking to him. Usually when we talk it's the way the sun rises, the way the waves crash—It just happens without fail. But today I have nothing to say and I'm not sure why that is.

So we sit in the not-so-silent silence of the fire and the bugs and the splashing until eventually the guys come out of the water. They stand in front of the fire, arms wrapped around themselves and talking quietly to each other as they dry. I wonder what they're talking about but I don't care enough to listen. Their lips are blue. When they put their clothes back on, it's evident by the dark marks on their clothes that they're still wet but I say nothing, even though it's getting cold out. I don't care about these strangers the way I care about Luke, who is practically asleep in my lap.

"You and Aurora ready to head back?" Michael asks, and Calum laughs, and then Michael turns and laughs with him. They stand up after pulling their shoes on but I don't go anywhere, frozen in my spot on the ground. God, what is this guy's problem?

"You know, I can't tell if you guys are intentionally being dicks to Luke, or if you're just so stupid you don't realize what you're doing," I say without a second thought. I don't usually talk like this but I can't stand the thought of them teasing Luke.

Michael looks taken aback, looking at Calum and then back at me. "Jesus, it's just some friendly banter, mate. Don't get your panties in a twist."

Calum laughs. It's classic, really, how domineering Michael's personality is over Calum's.

"You think I don't see what you're doing?" I counter. "You sit there and you tease him and he lets you because he thinks you're his friends but you're not."

Michael slings his guitar over his shoulder before stopping to look at me like I've completely lost my mind. Who knows? Maybe I have. "Who are you to decide whether or not we're Luke's friends?"

I shoot Calum an incredulous look, but he dodges it, shifting his gaze to the ground instead. "If you were really his friends you wouldn't drag him out here to get drunk and then ditch him the minute you decide he's too annoying."

Michael laughs haughtily. "Your words, mate, not mine."

I have to physically bite my tongue so I don't say something I might regret. "You know what? Why don't you guys just go. I'll get Luke home by myself," I snap. "And you should be careful how you treat Luke, or you're gonna have a problem with me."

Michael all but laughs in my face, collecting his bottle of vodka and his best friend. I watch their backs as the disappear through the woods, leaving me and a drunken Luke alone. 

I kick sand into the fire, effectively snuffing it out, and then turn back to face Luke who's barely managing to sit upright.

I sigh. "Oh, Luke."

I manage to get him to stand, only by keeping his arm slung around my shoulder and supporting most of his body weight with my own. I look to my bike that's dropped on the ground at the edge of the woods, and Luke's which is laying down in the sand, and decide that there's no way I can get him and both of our bikes home in the same trip. God. I'm going to have to get him home, come back, and get both the bikes. It's five miles to his house. I'm going to have gone twenty miles by the time I get back home.

I start walking him through the woods, having to practically drag him as he continues to stop and gush about pretty flowers or birds that he sees. By the time I get out of the woods, it's already been five minutes, and he's really weighing me down on one side. How the hell am I supposed to do this? Why would those guys not stay and help me?

I stop for a moment, carefully setting Luke onto the ground as I try to plan out my next move. I could call someone. It's only nine—my friend Finn could come pick us and the bikes up in his car and we'd be home in ten minutes tops. I haven't been hanging out with him outside of school much, only really talking to him in class, but that shouldn't matter, right? He has plenty of friends. He probably hasn't even noticed I'm gone.

I pull out my phone and call him, keeping my eyes on Luke the whole time in case he tries to go anywhere, but he just sits there, swaying back and forth with the wind. I tilt the speaker away from my face. "Are you alright, Luke?"

He opens his eyes suddenly, looking up at me. "My tummy hurts," he says. "And also it's really hot outside."

Finn doesn't answer, and I don't bother call again. So much for that idea.

I look back to Luke. His lips are turning blue. "Jesus Christ, Luke."

I put my phone back in my pocket and pull my sweatshirt off, kneeling in front of him and pulling it on over his head. He whines at me about how hot he is, but I ignore it. He obviously has no idea how alcohol works, which is just another reason for him not to drink.

I grab his hands and pull him to his feet. I feel this sudden urge to cry, that overwhelming feeling like the night's never going to end, but I push it down. I'll be fine. Eventually Luke will be home, and I'll be home, and we'll both be in bed and this will all be over. I take a deep breath. He smiles this crooked, drunken grin at me, and it's enough to make me laugh. I guess if I had to be stuck dragging someone's drunk ass home, I'd rather it be Luke than anyone else.

"Get on my back, Luke." He looks at me slightly bewildered, so I turn my back to him, reaching over my own shoulders for his hands. When he puts his hands in mine, I wrap them around my neck, and by some miracle he understands, jumping the rest the way onto my back. I hold him on my back by his thighs, thanking whatever God there may be that he's so thin. I can carry him home like this. 

His skin is flushed, his arms hot against my neck and thighs warm on my hands. As I start walking again, he presses his cheek against my neck. It sends chills down my spine despite how warm he is. He needs to get home and raise his body temperature, and soon.

It takes me two hours to get him home, having to stop and wrest every fifteen minutes or so. Carrying him on my back is less time-consuming than trying to make him walk, but it leaves me completely drained. We spend the first hour talking about music, animals, school, and anything else his inebriated mind feels like bringing up, and by the second hour, he can barely stay awake. He tells me about his brothers, Jack and Ben, about his first guitar, how he was afraid of me when we first met, and then, after nearly twenty minutes of talking about girls, he tells me that he's never been kissed before. 

For some reason this makes my hair stand on end, suddenly very aware of our closeness.

When we get to his house, he tells me that the spare is beneath a brick in the front stoop. How he remembers that, I have no idea, but I'm glad he does. I open the door slowly, as quietly as I can, but the stairs creak slightly beneath our combined weight. I tell him to stay quiet, and he does, and then eventually I get to his room at the end of the hall. I push the door open, and when I go to set him down, I realize the only reason he was quiet is because he's already asleep. 

I lay him down in his bed and pull his blanket over him, leaving him to sleep off the copious amount of alcohol in his system. He's gonna feel like shit in the morning. I hope he knows that. If he doesn't, he'll at least learn a lesson.

I watch him lay there for a moment in my red sweatshirt, curled in on himself, finally looking innocent again. Part of me wants to stay, but that'd be too hard to explain in the morning, so I leave.

It's 2:30 in the morning when I finally get home from retrieving our bikes.

*** 

It's not long until I see him again.

It's Sunday evening and he shows up at my door just like he did last night, except this time my family is home, eating dinner in the living room just on the other side of the doorway. When I open the door, the skin beneath his eyes is red and irritated, his hair disheveled and his hands in fists.

"What did you say to Mikey and Calum?" he accuses, taking a step into my doorway as if to stop me from closing the door. My stomach knots up as if I've just been punched in the gut. He's wearing my red sweatshirt. I wonder if he knows it's mine.

"What are you talking about?"

"Don't act all stupid!" he raises his voice, shoving me by the shoulders. He's too small to really move me but that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt me.

I peak to the side of me, where Mum is looking at my worriedly. I shoot her a smile and wave it off, and she reluctantly turns back to the television. I try to walk Luke out of the doorway but he resists, so I push myself against him until he has no choice but to walk backwards with me. I close the door behind us and he shoves me again. "They won't even talk to me and it's because of something you said!"

"I said they were being shitty friends," I tell him truthfully. I omit the details because talking about how they isolate him would make him feel small and I don't want that.

He contorts his face into something between confusion and betrayal. "What are you talking about? Michael and Calum are my best friends!"

I shove my hands in my pockets so as to constrict myself from physically clutching my heart. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but I kind of figured I was his best friend. He barely even knows these guys and they're already above me? It's probably my own fault. I'm always reading too far into things.

I sigh, shifting my gaze to the ground. "I just want what's best for you, Luke."

It sounds pathetic, but I just want him to know the truth regardless of how it makes me look.

He scoffs in my face. "What, are you jealous or something? You can't stand me having other friends so you drive them away from me? That doesn't sound a whole lot like you wanting the best for me."

Does he really think I would do that? Intentionally scare his friends away because I want him to myself? It's a nice thought, but I could never screw him over like that. He should know that.

"They dragged you five miles from your house to the lake so you could get wasted and pass out on me while they went swimming and had fun," I shoot back. He can tell me I don't matter to him, but he can never tell me he doesn't matter to me. "They let you get wasted and never cut you off. They rode their bikes home, Luke. I had to carry you, barely conscious, all the way back to your house. I practically broke into your house just to get you to bed! And then I walked five miles back to the lake to get our bikes, just to turn around and ride it another five miles back to my house!"

"Well, who asked you to be Batman, Ash?" One stupid question and it's enough to shut me down completely. I took care of him last night. I carried him five miles on my goddamn back just to make sure he was safe and he doesn't even care.

A part of me, however twisted, is oddly okay him pushing me around, just proud to see him hold his own for the first time since I met him. I've never heard him yell like this before.

"You know what, Luke? You're right," I say despite myself. "I should've just left you there. With any luck, you would've passed out in the sand and stumbled home in the morning." His jaw is clenched, fists still balled at his sides. He hasn't cried since he got here. "You could've died, Luke, do you realize that? You could've drowned or gotten hit by a car or lit yourself on fire and Michael and Calum knew this but they just egged you on! They were barely even drinking, Luke! They let you get drunk so they could laugh at you!"

"Well if you don’t like my friends then maybe you should get your own!" he snaps. I know he's saying whatever he thinks will hurt me, but knowing that does nothing to soothe the blow. I wish he could see that I'm only trying to protect him. That all I've wanted to do from day one is to protect him from assholes who don't see how special he is. "I mean, what's your deal, anyway? A year eleven hanging out with a bunch of year nines? What, everyone your age thought you were such a loser that the only way you could make friends was to befriend a bunch of fifteen-year-olds?"

When he showed up, he looked hurt above anything else, but now he is consumed entirely by anger, raging so fiercely that I can feel it hit me in the chest. I'm not friends with a bunch of fifteen-year-olds. I'm friends with one, and the other two are leeches trying to steal and warp my best friend. How can he sit there and hurl these things at me like I don't matter? I have to mean something to him. I have to.

"Maybe you should go home, Luke," I say, my voice teetering on the edge of desperation. His hands fall to his sides and I barely miss the guilt on his face as my eyes drop to the ground. I had no idea he could be so vicious.

"Yeah, maybe I should," he says, but there's no trace of guilt in his voice. He looks at me sadly, distantly, as if he's a million worlds away from me. I'm so scared of losing him I feel like I'm going to be sick. 

As he turns and leaves, I feel like the smallest shards of a broken plate, dusted beneath the refrigerator and forgotten about.

***

A week passes and I learn that he has gotten really good at standing up for himself.

We pass each other in the hallways and he doesn't even spare me a glance, meanwhile I can't seem to tear my eyes from him. He's made up with Michael and Calum but I'm not surprised—year nine fights are so juvenile that they rarely last long. However, it made sense to me that once he was okay with them he would be okay with me, but I guess I was right about not meaning as much to him as I thought I did.

On the plus side—if there is a plus side—I've rekindled some nearly abandoned friendships which has landed me an invite to a year twelve's party. Stella is her name. I don't know who she is, but Finn knows her and said it's alright if I tag along, that she's seen me around and thinks I'm kind of cute. It's an offer I can't refuse no matter how much I don't want to go. If Luke doesn't want to hang out with me...fine. Sulking seems like the only way to make him notice me, but I'm not going to cut off my nose to spite my face.

Finn gives me a ride to the party, but once we're there, I disappear into the kitchen to find something to drink, and he hangs back to talk to some friends of his I barely know. In fact, I barely know anyone here, and I don't even know what Stella looks like in the event that I might want to find her. Some rap song I've never heard pulses through the house, rattling the walls. People are talking, dancing, or making out in nearly every area they could possibly stand.

A girl with dark brown hair cut to the tips of her ears pushes a cup into my hand. I throw it back before even acknowledging her—vodka. How ironic.

"You're Ashton, right?" I look up and nod, momentarily taken aback. She has brown eyes. She giggles a forcibly cute giggle as she pours more vodka into the plastic cup. "Finn's told me a lot about you."

Oh.

"So you must be Stella, then." I smirk, but it feels anything but natural. It's hard to be alluring when you have dimples and laugh like a little girl. 

I drink the second shot of vodka as she begins telling me about how she's seen me around. She places the bottle of vodka down next to me, and I take that as an invitation to keep pouring drinks. Six shots later, we're dancing in the living room while she talks about the first time she saw me with Finn. I haven't put my hands on her yet and she's playing with her hair. She looks cute with short hair. Some girls look terrible with it but she...she pulls it off. Looks good on her.

"Do you remember in year nine—"

I grab her by the back of the neck, dropping the empty cup still clutched in my hand as I pull her into me. I've kissed girls before but I've never been so bold about it—she's usually the one to kiss me. But I have enough alcohol in my system to wave all of my inhibitions, nullify any preconceived notions about what kind of person I am. Tonight I can drunkenly make out with a girl I didn't even know existed until a few hours ago, and it doesn't have to change anything.

She curls her fists in my t-shirt at my sides, pulling me closer. I kiss her as deep as I possibly can, trying to escape the voices in my head telling me to stop. I trail one hand down her spine, stopping at her lower back. Her tongue meets mine, but all I can think about is how angry he is at me. I move my hand to her ass. She doesn't push me away. For some reason I wish she would. All I can see behind my closed eyes is him on the first day I met him, laughing at some stupid joke I told him about playing poker in the jungle. It wasn't funny but he couldn't stop laughing—

I open my eyes. If I don't close my eyes then I can't focus on anything but now—a hot year twelve is making out with me. Thinking about some year nine is probably the worst thing I could be thinking about right now.

But then I see him across the room. He's holding a cup of something and he's looking right into my eyes for the first time in a week. What the hell is he doing here?

I swipe my tongue along the side of hers and slide my other hand down to her ass. Neither of us look away. Deciphering the expression on his face feels like defusing a bomb.

Stella runs a hand up my chest, and although I feel sick to my stomach, I keep kissing her so she doesn't think anything's wrong. I see Michael out of the corner of my eye. He says something to Luke and Luke replies, still looking at me. Michael follows his line of vision and when he sees me, Luke looks away, as if to pretend it wasn't me he was looking at. I don't stop looking after him. Luke hands his cup to Michael motioning towards the kitchen, and then disappears from the room.

I break apart from Stella with no excuse to give her. She opens her mouth to confront me but I'm so terrified of this entire situation that I don't let her say a word.

"I drank too much," I say. It's not a lie, but it doesn't feel like the truth, either. "I think I'm gonna be sick." Also not a quite a lie.

I don't wait to hear her response before I'm pushing past people, trying to find Luke. From across the room I see him leave through the back door.

A hand lands on my shoulder and I spin around to see who could possibly need me right now. At this point, I'm not even surprised to see Calum standing behind me. How the hell did a couple of the dorkiest year nines I know get into this party?

"Hey, Ashton," he says, half as a greeting and half to get my attention. I'm too drunk to be paying attention, not to mention I feel sicker than I've ever felt. Idon't know if it's the alcohol or Luke—probably a combination of the two. "Hey, I just wanted to say sorry about the other night." I can barely hear him over the music despite raising his voice. "I really like Luke. Michael, too. He and Michael used to hate each other, and it shows sometimes more than others. But they actually get along real well now—and, hey, we're starting a band! So you don't have to worry about Luke." 

They're starting a band? Why didn't Luke mention it? Who's their drummer?

"Nice seeing you, Cal-Pal!" I say without really thinking about it, clapping a hand on his shoulder and heading in the opposite direction. I really don't want to talk to one of the guys that drove Luke away from me, and I especially don't want to sit and talk with him about what amazing friends they all are. 

When I finally come through the door, the air feels cold on my skin—a rather lovely feeling considering I've been inside drinking and dancing with a bunch of sweaty strangers. The sun hasn't completely set yet but the stars are out. I can hear the cicadas, chirp-chirp-chirping, and suddenly I'm back at the lake with him and he's laying in my lap, staring at the stars.

There's no one else outside; a mosquito bites me on the neck as if to tell me why. I don't see him at first, so I cross the back porch, and when I round the corner, he's seated on the hill, staring at the ground instead of the stars.

I suck in a deep breath and do my best not to make a drunken fool of myself as I all but stumble over to him. He meets my eyes and I stare back at him, but I'm absolutely speechless. I've said all there is to say to him and it didn't matter, so why should it matter now? What's changed in week to make my words mean any more?

He looks away from me. I sit down next to him so our shoulders are touching but that's as close as I get. I don't say anything, and neither does he—the sun's stopped rising, the waves have stopped crashing.

You can see Pegasus in the sky. I wonder if he knows that. It looks nothing like a Pegasus but it's beautiful, anyway.

"Do you ever think about how crazy it is that we actually exist?" he asks me suddenly. I'm probably too drunk for existential questions like that, but I pretend I'm not.

"Yeah."

He takes a deep breath and pulls his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around them protectively. "All the millions of different babies that our parents could have conceived but we were the ones that were born. I mean, isn't that insane? That we could have just as easily never been born at all?"

I turn my head to look at him. He's looking at the stars, not noticing me at all.

His long blond hair is hidden beneath a gray beanie, tufts of it sticking out from underneath. He has dark circles like he hasn't slept for a week, but he always has those. He looks so young, so small, that I'm overcome guilt for ever hurting him, even if I didn't mean it.

"It kind of makes you not want to dwell, you know?" I don't want to sound like I'm using his words to manipulate him into forgiving me; that's just how I feel. "I mean, it's amazing that we're even alive, so what's the point of wasting it being angry all the time? Why let little nothings hurt you? Isn't that a waste of your only time on Earth?"

He doesn't say anything for a minute. I wonder if he's pondering what I said or if he's thinking about something else. I can never tell with him. "Yeah." He shrugs. "But feelings are what make us human, y'know. If I didn't get my feelings hurt by a bunch of boys making fun of my glasses then I'm just another sociopathic freak of nature, aren't I?"

I almost feel like he's trying to explain himself to me but despite sobering up, I'm just not sober enough.

"But reasoning is part of the human condition, isn't it?" I say. I don't want him to feel like I'm attacking him; I could just sit and listen to him talk about the universe forever. "We can get our feelings hurt...but we have to try and fix it because that's what humans do. Part of having feelings is acknowledging the reason that we feel those feelings."

He sucks in a deep breath and holds it. It feels like forever until he speaks again. "It really bugged me that you went behind my back to talk to Michael and Calum without confronting me first," he says, and my chest swells up and I don't really know why. He makes me so proud sometimes I can hardly contain myself. "I'm not a child, you know. If you thought that Michael and Calum had a problem with me then you should have mentioned it to me first. I can handle it."

"I'm sorry," I tell him, because I am. "I just want the best for you, Luke."

"I know." He keeps looking at the stars, but it doesn't hurt anymore.

He forgives me.

***

My psychology teacher thinks I have a problem with feeling unwanted.

It’s not something she said unwarranted. I talked to her about how my best friend doesn't like to hang out with me much anymore, and she told me that if I really want to hang out with him then I should make plans, instead of waiting for him to do it first. She theorizes that I wait for him to make plans in order to validate myself. I hate to admit it but she’s probably right.

Regardless, I don't make plans with him. We talk a bit when we see each other in the hall, but he doesn't really text me anymore, and we haven't hung out since the party. On my way to my first class I run into Stella, who shamelessly kisses me and asks if I have anything going on this afternoon. I tell her no because it's the truth. She asks if I want to go to the movies with her after school, so I say yes, because she’s a year twelve and she's pretty and she can drive and she likes me, so why shouldn't I? She kisses me again before I head back on my way.

I don't see Luke again until lunch.

Outside, I sit down beneath a large fig tree, where Finn and I used to sit with a few other people. It's on the opposite side of the school grounds from where I usually sit with Luke and his friends. Despite the distance, Luke finds me, and he sits down. Michael and Calum are nowhere to be seen.

“Ash, are you okay?” 

I can't help but laugh. I apologized for what I said to Calum and Michael, and he forgave me, but it didn't solve my issue of him not liking me as much as he likes them. It's stupid, I know, but how am I supposed to be okay after realizing this kid I thought was my best friend doesn't even miss me when I don't come around for a while? Doesn't he see that? “Of course, Luke. Why?”

“You’ve been acting weird lately." His shoulders slouch from their initial offensive position, but he doesn't look at me.

I shrug. I don't want to tell him that Michael and Calum bug me, because I don't want him to feel like he has to choose. It might sound selfless, but really I just don't want to know who he'd choose. “Don't worry about me, Luke.”

Despite my efforts, he persists. “Is it Mikey and Calum?”

“No.”

“Then why are you sitting over here?” He motions to our surroundings. The sky is clear, and the sunlight is hitting him in the face. His skin is so pale he practically glows in the light. It's kind of beautiful. "I just spent fifteen minutes trying to find you."

I try not to think too much about how he cared enough to look for me. “Because you're right, Luke. A year eleven hanging out with a bunch of year nines is kind of sad.”

He looks a bit hurt by my words, fiddling with his fingers in his lap. “Oh,” he all but whimpers. “I didn't know I was bugging you.”

God, of course he isn't bugging me. More than anything I just want him to ditch his friends and come sit here with me, but they're starting a band together, Calum says, so at this point they're a package deal, and I get that. I'm not trying to throw it in his face. I'm just trying to give him the space that he obviously wants.

“You’re not bugging me, Luke. I just want you to know that...that you're not obligated to hang out with me.” I pause to gauge his reaction but he doesn't give much of one. “I'm not some sad sap with no friends. I have friends, good ones, that I've known for years.”

I don't mean for it to come out as cold as it does. He forces a chuckle.

“Yeah, well. I guess I should get back to my year nine friends, then." He stands up, dusting off his pants. "Wouldn't want to bug a big, bad year eleven, like you.”

“Luke, I didn't—”

“Your girlfriend’s pretty, by the way." I don't know why he brings it up, but it makes my stomach knot up. Does he think I'm ditching him for Stella? “Calum says she's really nice, so. You know. Congrats.”

I don't get a chance to answer him as he turns around, hesitating for just a single second before walking in the opposite direction. I want to drop everything and chase after him, but when Michael meets him by the entrance, and drapes his arm over his shoulder, I decide to stay in my spot. I sat here because I didn't want to see Luke or his friends. Going after him would defeat that entire purpose, wouldn't it?

Part of me hopes that he'll turn around, march back over here and tell me to get over myself. Fighting with him would be better than whatever I just did. I don't mean to keep pushing him away but I just...I don't know what else to do. He thinks I'm boring. He doesn't have to explicitly address me as “Ashton, you dull, pathetic, loser” for me to understand that. Michael and Calum are new and exciting. And they’re starting a band. And I'm just some upperclassman who likes to play big brother. Of course he's bored of me. Of course he is.

With this sudden realization, I’m less surprised than I would have been that he doesn’t actually turn around.

I never see Finn, or any of my other friends for that matter, and I conclude that Stella doesn’t have this lunch because I doubt she would have left me alone for this long, even if she were aiming for a slow burn. I head inside ten minutes before the bell, feeling like perhaps the biggest loser on the whole campus. I don't doubt that I am.

I wander through the hallway at the back of the school, a vacant wasteland now that everyone in this hall is at lunch. I turn the corner by the boy’s restroom. A head of dark hair walks through the doorway on the other end of the hallway, and I can’t stop myself from calling out to him.

“Calum!” He turns around, and the serious look on his face takes me by surprise. I’ve never seen him not smiling. But then he smiles his normal, cheeky grin, the second he sees me, and my split second of intimidation is gone.

“What’s up, Ashton?”

God, what the hell am I doing?

“Can I ask you something?” 

“Yeah, shoot.”

I meet him halfway down the hall so I don't have to yell. “Does Luke...does Luke talk about me, ever?”

He laughs, placing his hands casually on his hips. He's wearing a white, sleeveless shirt, with a pair of sunglasses dangling around his neck.

“In what way?”

“I don’t know, just. In general.”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “It bothers him that you don’t want to hang out with us, but I told him it’s just ‘cause you’re a year eleven and got a lot going on. But he kind of thinks you're embarrassed of him.”

I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m shocked to hear him say that. Part of me wonders why he would think that, but my other part, the more logical of the two, knows that I haven’t exactly been the warmest of company lately. It’s not his fault. It’s mine. I just can’t help but take everything personally.

“Oh,” is the only thing my stupid, worthless brain can manage to sputter out. I wish he could just read my mind. That way he would understand that I just feel left out, and that it has nothing to do with me conspiring against him; it’s not like I wanted to hurt his feelings. But it’s a two way street and he can’t crash into me and expect only my legs to break.

Calum continues to stand there, seemingly oblivious to my internal monologue. He seems like a smart, cool guy, but sometimes he has this look on his face like the only thing going on in his head is that ukulele music from Spongebob playing on loop in his head. He's nice, though, so who am I to judge?

“Is there another reason?” he asks suddenly, and he looks at me, I mean really looks at me, and it makes me want to crawl out of my own skin, like he’s in on some joke that I’m not, and it makes me so anxious I can barely utter a response.

“No,” I say, but it comes out more like a question than anything. What reasons could he be dreaming up? “Well, maybe. I mean, I don’t know, I just…”

“You don’t like me and Mikey.” He catches me off guard, and I’m not sure how to respond without lying or hurting his feelings. I don't dislike them. I just dislike the situation they've caused. “It’s okay, I get it. You’re just worried about him.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you get that, because he doesn't.”

He tilts his head, letting his hands fall to his sides. “I know you probably think I’m just some dumb kid but I see things, you know.”

I swallow. I never said he was dumb, just...naïve, maybe? “Like what?”

“Like he misses you and doesn’t know what to do about it.”

I release the breath I had no idea I was holding in.

He misses me?

“Will you—can you just ask him to call me after school? I don't think he wants to see me right now, but...I just want to, like, explain myself, I guess.”

He smiles again. It's a comforting kind of smile, that makes you feel like he's on your side. I hope he is.

“Yeah, sure thing, Ash.”

***

He doesn’t call me.

I spend the weekend at home waiting and waiting for my phone to ring, and it does, but it’s only Stella. I listen to her talk about what she did with her friends Friday night and then she asks me if I want to go to the movies with her. I tell her I can't, that I'm out of town. It’s nothing against her, but she already doesn't understand that a year nine is my best friend, so to tell her I'm busy waiting for a call from him would just lead to a bunch of questions I don't want to answer.

Honestly, I can't say I understand any of it, either.

I see him in school the following Monday. For once, he's alone; I do a full scan of the room, but his ‘best friends’ are nowhere to be seen, so I approach him without thinking about it.

I open my mouth but the words get stuck in my throat when he looks at me. He doesn't look right. He's not smiling.

“You didn't call me.” It’s supposed to be a question. Why? Why didn't you call me?

“I know.” He keeps his eyes trained on his locker as he organizes books and folders. At least I know Calum told him.

“Why?” I blurt. He doesn’t flinch.

“Because I don't get why you're doing this,” he says uncharacteristically monotonous. My stomach twists. I don't want him to hate me.

“Doing what?” 

He stops organizing his locker abruptly, textbook knocking against the side and making me jump. “One minute you don't want to be my friend, and then the next you act like I'm the one pushing you away.”

He is pushing me away. How is ditching me for his other friends not pushing me away?

“Luke, I just…” I don't know how to say it. I'm always so bad at saying it straight; I can't put how I feel into words. I wish he could just feel what I feel. “I just thought you got bored of me so I didn't want you to feel like you had to hang out with me.”

“Well, you're kind of making an ass of yourself.” It might be the first time I've heard him swear. It makes me laugh, for whatever reason.

“Yeah, I see that, now.”

“Why are you dating that girl?” he asks suddenly. He still won’t look at me, but he has nothing to pretend to focus on, so he picks at the corner of a book in his locker. My heart feels heavy and I don't know why. “Just because, like, you never mentioned liking a girl to me, and you're supposed to be my best friend.”

I feel like a little girl when that makes my heart swell. I knew it wasn't all in my head.

"I don't know." I don't know what made me so inclined to kiss Stella, let alone continue to go on dates with her. I guess I was just lonely, and Stella was interested in me, and it's a nice feeling when somebody likes you as a person and not just because they think you're cute. Sure, I don't know her all that well, but she could remember details like the first time she saw me, so she must like me beyond just what I look like, right? "She likes me, and she's nice, and pretty, and older. I'd be dumb not to date her, wouldn't I?"

I wait for a response, for him to tell me that, no, I wouldn't be dumb to not date a girl I don't have feelings for, but he just looks at his feet and nods. I mean, I've only just met her, right? Once I get to know her, it won't feel so forced. 

"I gotta get to class, Ash," he tells me, but it feels oddly like a cop-out. There's still four minutes until the bell rings, and in my experience with Luke, he's late half the time, anyway. I don't want us to do this dance where we pretend everything's okay and ignore the tension. That's worse than fighting. I want to fix this, and I want him to want that, too.

"Don't go," I say without thinking. A surprised smile tugs at his lip as he looks at me. "Skip with me. We can go to the music room." Does he know that I know about their band? That I watched every single one of his covers on Youtube in a night? He was completely shitfaced for that conversation, so it's a gamble, really. "Or something," I throw in to draw away any suspicion.

He looks at me for a moment with his hand lingering on his locker door, and then glances down the hall toward the math room, and then back at me. His smile grows until it takes up the better part of his face and his cheeks glow a light auburn. It's easily the most encouraging thing I've seen in days.

"Okay," he says, and then he shoves his books back into his locker, ruining any organization he had achieved while pretending to ignore me. "But Calum's in the music room right now and I know you don't like him."

I nearly jump to defend myself before his smile gives him away. He's just teasing me.

 I throw my arm over his shoulders and lead us in the opposite direction."For the record, Calum's growing on me,"

We don't go to the music room.

Instead we end up under the bleachers in the gymnasium, the slightly tense silence between us masked by the sound of sneakers on the gym floor, balls bouncing, kids yelling over each other, and the occasional blowing of a whistle.

I follow him as he climbs through the metal bearings, focusing all of my attention on the way he moves. He looks like the kind of guy who could barely walk without tripping over his own feet, but he has this way about him, like every step he takes, he's about to fall, trip, slip, stumble, but he never does. Like he'll stand on a chair and I'll wait and wait for him to fall, but eventually he gets down, and completely unscathed. I think it says a lot about him as a person.

Eventually he stops and turns to face me, one hand on a metal beam and the other brushing his hair from his face. He looks like he's about to say something, but as I wait for him to speak, I realize he's doing the same thing.

"A little birdy tells me you're starting a band," I speculate, hoping it's enough to fuel the conversation.

I obviously catch him off guard, as he blushes and moves his gaze from me to his feet.

"Yeah," he chuckles awkwardly. He looks back up at me. His eyes are soft, suddenly less self-conscious than before. "We've only done like two covers. We still need a drummer."

I play the drums, I want to say, but the words get caught in my throat. They creep towards the tip of my tongue and then right before they dive, they back down, and there's nothing I can do to push them. It's agonizing.

Instead, I tell him that they should hold try-outs.

"That's not a bad idea," he says, and then laughs. "Except we're kind of losers, so I'm not sure anyone would care."

"No, no, hear me out," I say. He's not a loser. He's definitely not a loser. "You put an ad out in the paper, right? You say, 'drummer wanted' and then put your phone number. Simple as that. It'd be like thirty dollars. And thirty dollars will be nothing when you're a millionaire rockstar."

He laughs at me like I'm joking, which I am, but I'm half-serious, too. He could be anything he wanted.

"What's your band name?"

He looks down at his feet again.

"Uh, it's kind of stupid," he replies sheepishly.

"Come on, tell me!" I tease, and he laughs, but doesn't look up at me.

"5 Seconds of Summer." He doesn't wait to hear my reaction before he tenses up and turns all red. "Mikey came up with the name, so don't laugh at me!"

"Laugh?" I ask incredulously, swinging through a few more of the metal bearings until I'm just a few meters from him. "That's awesome! I can picture it now, standing front row at your sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden, screaming '5 Seconds of Summer! Woooooo!'" I yell as loud as I can, until Luke is in complete stitches over it, running over to clamp a hand over my mouth and shush me.

His hand twists in my shirt and he keeps his hand over my mouth even as I laugh, and he leans against me, giggling, and we laugh and we laugh and we laugh until it's all I can hear, and it feels like I've never known anything else except for this moment. I want all this back, before Michael and Calum came along, when it was just Luke and me against the world.

"Irwin! Hemmings! I don't wanna know what you're doing back here but get to class!"

We're torn from our moment by the coach's voice, looking over to find him watching us with his brows furrowed. Luke steps back immediately, probably coming to the same conclusion as me about how this must look. He nods feverishly and takes off ahead of me, and the coach leaves, so I grab Luke by the arm. He raises it eyebrows.

"Hey, so we're good, right?" I ask. "I just mean...I'm sorry that I was a dick about your friends. We just had a lot of fun when it was the two of us and I guess I just didn't want that to change."

He grins at me like he can't help it. I hope he can't. "You're my best friend, Ash. That's never gonna change."

My heart swells, and then he's gone before I can say another word.

***

The following week, when the local paper comes out, I see their ad on the fourth page. I get this clever idea to go to the try-outs, because really, it'd be shallow of me to assume they'd want me as their drummer just because they know me. I ought to try out like everyone else, right?

So when the day comes, I jump on my pushbike, inexplicably nervous, and take off pedaling towards Luke's house. We've been hanging out alone more often, though I've been making a conscious effort to spend time with the guys and learn to like them. Michael's not really that bad when you get to know him—he just has a really warped sense of humor. And Calum, I've found, has this tendency to act like a groupie around older kids, but I still like him more than I like Michael, because at least I feel like I can talk to Calum. He hasn't sold me out this far—at least not to my knowledge.

Then there comes the problem with Stella, who technically isn't my girlfriend, but is still a girl that I'm dating, and thinks I should be spending all of my time with her, or at the very least making plans to spend time with her. I'm starting to like her more, but there's still a part of me that wishes she would leave me alone every once in a while. I try not to talk about her to Luke, because he doesn't seem to like her much. On the other hand, it's one of the few things Michael's willing to talk to me about, and it's only because he thinks she's hot, and wants to know the dirty details of our relationship. I humor him when I can, but I really don't want Luke to hear me talk like that.

Anyway, when I get to Luke's house, I see a younger looking guy, a bit on the short side, leaving his garage and looking rather bored. It's hard to say how old he is, because he's well below average height but also has a fair amount of facial hair. I'd still bet he's too old to be drumming with these guys.

I drop my bike on the grass in front of Luke's house and walk into the garage with my back straight and my sense of purpose practically dripping from my pores. They guys are sitting on a fold up table in front of the drum kit. Luke smiles when he sees me, but I make a point not to smile back no matter how hard it is. This is a very serious matter.

"Hello, I'm Ashton Irwin," I say firmly, shaking Michael's hand, who looks like he's trying not to laugh, then Calum's hand, who is already laughing, and then Luke's hand, who looks completely bewildered by my actions. "I'm here to audition. I hope you take walk-ins."

Luke's hand lingers in the air after I let go of it, eyebrows furrowed together like he can't quite piece together what's going on. Michael, however, sits back down at the table, very obviously amused by my antics.

"What will you be playing for us today, Sir?" he asks, folding his hands together. Calum won't stop laughing at the whole situation, and Luke still hasn't put his hand down, watching my every move like he's trying to calculate the next one.

"I will be playing 'Holiday' by Green Day," I tell him.

He nods.

"A classic."

As I begin to play through the song on the crappy set of drums they have set up, Luke slowly starts to drop his arm into his lap as he sits on the table and watches me. Eventually he joins in with Michael and Calum's laughter, and suddenly I'm struggling to focus on the drumming because I just want to stop and laugh with him.

I manage to pull through to the end of the song, and there's a short silence that follows after I put the drumsticks down. Then, Luke hops off the table, walks over to me, and sticks out his hand.

"Luke Hemmings. Singer and rhythm guitarist," he says mock-seriously. "Welcome to 5 Seconds of Summer." I shake his hand with a curt nod, trying impossibly to contain my excitement, and then the two of us erupt into a fit of laughter, and my chest swells just like it always does with him. He's the first real best friend I've ever had. I had no idea it could feel this good to be with another person.

"Dude, that was sick!" Michael jumps in, reminding me that Luke and I are not alone.

"Yeah, why didn't you tell us you played, dude?" Calum adds, and I feel a quiet sense of pride growing in my chest. Not only did they find me funny, but they actually think I'm good at what I do.

"That's not important!" Luke says as he lets go of my hand. I didn't even think about the fact that I was still holding it. "We have a drummer!"

They hoot and howl like the teenage boys they are, and I can't help but join in. Maybe they're not so bad after all. 

***

"Did you know that the Big Dipper isn't actually a constellation? It's part of Ursa Major."

I look up from the piece of graphing paper with one sorry attempt to graph a trig function, barely legible due to the multitude of erase marks. We've been killing time before our first band practice for an hour and this ADHD fifteen-year-old has probably done more work than me.

"Luke, we're in Sydney. You can't even see the Big Dipper," I say tiredly. Math is not, nor has it ever been, my strong-suit. Especially in year eleven, with trig functions and logarithms and all those other things I'll never understand. If there really are infinite universes, then I hope that, by some miracle, I'm in the universe where the band works out, so I never have to do math again. "You working on astronomy?"

He nods just as tiredly, shoving his textbook out of his lap and throwing his head back onto his bed as he pulls his pillow over his face. I have the astronomy class right before his, and it's a lot more complex than one would think. Contrary to popular belief, it's not just some fun elective where we sit and look at constellations for forty minutes, so I completely understand when he lets out a bloodcurdling scream that is ultimately muffled to silence by the pillow. No wonder smothering is such a common method of murder.

Is that dark? I'm so bored I can feel my inhibitions slipping right from between my fingers.

I'm seated across the room in a navy blue beanbag chair, my gangly arms and legs spilling limply over the sides. My binder has slid down my legs onto the floor. I have officially given up.

"Hey, what do you think of going to a Halloween party?" I ask suddenly. He sits straight up, letting his pillow fall in his lap. His hair is ruffled. I don't know if he notices that he's pouting, but he is, like a little kid. It's kind of cute.

He squints his eyes at me. "Who's throwing it?"

"One of Stella's friends."

He scoffs, and seems to almost immediately realize how harsh it came off. "Sorry," he says, though he doesn't sound sorry. "It's just, I don't really get why you're dating her if you never seem to hang out with her."

Actually, if I stopped hanging out with Stella, I could be hanging out with Luke almost twice as much. As appealing as that is, however, I'm too worried that Luke and I are going to get into it again, and I don't want to have no one if and when that happens. I became too dependent on Luke at first. Stella gives me something else to focus on.

"Luke, I got here at four. Before that I was with Stella since ten. I promise I spend plenty of time with my girlfriend." I laugh, and he chuckles, but it's hollow, like he had to tear it from his lungs with his own two hands. I hate it. I know he doesn't care about Stella, but it's just because he's young, and doesn't get that kind of stuff yet. "Anyway, party? Or no party?"

He bites down on his lip nervously. I notice he does that a lot. "Are you going either way?"

I can't tell if it comes from a place of insecurity or mere curiosity. I shrug. If it were up to me, I'd really like it if he would go. I like Stella but she can be...overwhelming in large doses.

"Can I bring Cal and Mikey?" he asks. There's a teasing smile on his lips, like he knows the magnitude of the question. I try to refrain from making a face, but I don't try very hard. He seems to notice. "How about just Cal?"

"Deal," I reply, without missing a beat. He smiles triumphantly, pumping his fist in the air.

I like Calum. I like Michael, too, I just don't think he's very fond of me, which makes him difficult to get along with. I'm a pretty positive guy, whereas Michael operates with this sense of impending doom, and despite what they say about opposites attracting, I don't think that applies to this situation.

I follow Luke with my eyes as he closes his books and folders and hastily shoves them into his backpack. He crosses the room and drops his bag in his desk chair, before slinging his guitar over his shoulder by the strap. He smiles at me. I raise an eyebrow at him. He gestures towards the clock with his hand. "It's time for band practice."

I return his smile and shove my stuff to the side.

We head down to the garage to find Michael and Calum just walking up the driveway with their respective guitars slung over their shoulders. My drumkit sits assembled to the left of the mat, and my cajón is at the back of the garage. Hopefully this goes well so I don't have to move anything again—it's quite the physically demanding task.

"Ashton, my man," Michael says, looking me up and down and grinning. "What the fuck is that hideous shirt you're wearing?"

Everybody but me laughs as I look down at my purple shirt. What's he talking about? This is my favorite shirt I own.

The guys plug their guitars into the amps, doing some minor tuning and adjusting before we're finally ready to go. We mess around with the song, trying a few different things instrumentally, eventually deciding to drop everything but the cajón and one acoustic. Calum is going to sing with Luke, which surprised me initially, because Calum doesn't strike me as the singer type, but I roll with it.

Michael asks if everyone's ready to go. There's a hum of agreement. I count to three before slowly coming in on the cajón, followed by Michael on the acoustic.

"Her name is Noel, I had a dream about her." Calum sings first, and he's actually a lot better than I thought he was going to be. Not that I thought he was going to be bad, but you wouldn't be able to tell by his talking voice that he would make a good singer. It has a unique, almost boyish sound to it. I like it. 

He sings through the first verse before the song finally picks up and we go into the chorus. As Luke begins to sing loudly about he's just a teenage dirtbag, baby, my chest swells and I slip up on my drumming, earning a quick glare from Michael. Calum looks at me and chuckles innocently. Luke doesn't notice, though, of course he doesn't, because he's too busy belting out the song and being amazing to notice anything else. The veins in his neck bulge, and a part of me can't wait until he stops singing so I can focus on my drumming again. He's so much better in person. So much better.

My head floods with all of these songs I can imagine him singing.

I want this song to be over so we can move onto the next one.

***

With less than twenty minutes before the party starts, I ring Luke's doorbell anxiously, a paper bag dangling at my side. My legs shake anxiously, partly from waiting for him to answer the door, and partly from actually being dressed like this out in the open.

The door swings open and he opens his mouth to say something, obviously halted by my outfit. I give him my cheekiest smile, but he just looks like he's fighting a laugh.

"Robin? Really? That's kind of dark, Ash," he says incredulously, and I'm at least glad he understands where this came from. Sure it's dark, considering it was one of the crappiest days of my life, but if we can't joke away our pain then what can we do?

"You said to me, 'who asked you to be Batman?' And so I thought about it, and you were right. No one asked me to be Batman. But just because I'm not Batman doesn't mean I don't get to be as overprotective and obnoxious as I want to be. Even Batman needs his loyal sidekick."

He furrows his eyebrows, a crooked grin playing at his features. He's wearing his question like a stick-on mustache: very, very obviously.

"Here," I say, handing him the bag. "It will explain everything."

He takes it skeptically, looking me up and down one more time. He has this crushingly endearing face, like he's trying really hard not to smile, but the corners of his lips are curling anyway. When he opens the bag, he bursts into laughter. I laugh with him until he looks up at me like I've completely lost my mind.

"You want me to go as Batman?" he laughs. "Are you serious?"

"Completely." He looks like this is the most surreal situation he's ever been in, but it's Halloween, for God's sake. "Think of it as a promise. I'm gonna stick by your side no matter what stupid shit you get yourself into, Bruce."

He stares at me dumbfounded for a moment before glancing back into the bag, and his pale face flushes with the deepest red I've ever seen. I want to scoop him up in a bear hug, but I don't. I think I've reached my daily cap for how overbearing I get to be.

He puts on his Batman costume, and he looks fly as hell in his fake abs. I've never seen Luke shirtless, but something tells me there's probably not an ab situation going on under there. "This must be a nice change for you," I tease, and he shoves me playfully. I can't help but snicker at my own joke.

The party's just two blocks over so we walk the distance, probably looking like a couple of fools while we're at it, being two heads taller than everyone else wearing costumes out here. For once, Luke doesn't really seem to notice all of the people staring at him—he's just talking and laughing and enjoying himself. My chest swells with pride. I've only known him a month and I can already tell he's growing. I soak up some of his courage and stop thinking about it, too.

When we get to the party, however, the music is rattling the house, and he gets cold feet. "Are you sure it's cool that I'm here, Ash?" he asks. "Do you think Calum's here yet, Ash?" he asks. "How much should I drink, Ash?" he asks. If he were anyone else I'd tell him to get over it, he'll be fine, it's just a party, but it's not just anyone, so I stop on the doorstep and turn to face him.

I grab him by the shoulders and look him in the eyes. He has his mask pulled up into his hair. "Luke, I know your last party wasn't great, but that was entirely my fault, okay? This is going to be fine. Just be yourself, and let loose," I tell him, as if those two statements don't completely contradict each other. "You don't have to drink anything if you don't want to. Don't let anyone pressure you into doing anything you don't want to. If anything goes wrong, just find me, okay? I'll be easy to spot."

He swallows hard and then nods at me, and then, with no warning, he throws himself at me, wrapping his arms around my neck and burying his face in my shoulder. Once I'm over the initial surprise, I wrap my arms around his waist and hug him back, as tightly as I can without crushing him. This is the first time he's hugged me. My chest swells. He pulls away first, tugging his mask back down over his eyes and delivering me a confident nod. He opens the door like he owns the place and I lose him in the crowd before I can even muster up the strength to step inside.

When I finally make my way into the party, what sounds like a remix of the classic "Monster Mash" is blaring throughout the house. It makes me laugh for whatever reason.

I swim through the ocean of people in search of a familiar face, when I see that of my girlfriend. She sees me just as I see her, suddenly grinning and waving my way. I return the gesture and stand where I am as I wait for her to pull through, but when she finally stands in front of me, my heart drops to my stomach at the sight of her bright purple outfit.

"I'm Starfire!" she yells over the music, gesturing to her outfit as if I couldn't tell already. "You told me you were going as Robin, so I figured I ought to match!"

I grin right back at her, tell her how great she looks, but it feels like I'm lying through my teeth.

Suddenly, my primary goal for tonight is to make sure Luke doesn't see her.

She wraps her arms around my neck, kissing me deeply. She tastes like vodka, which is enough to make me decide that I need a drink, too.

"Do you want a drink?" I ask over the music. She nods excitedly, kissing me one more time before turning around as one of the girls she was with calls her name. As she leaves, I can't help but wonder what the deal with kissing is. Why are we supposed to enjoy mashing our lips against someone else's? How does that prove our feelings? All those movies that talk about the sparks flying...it just feels strange to me.

Regardless, I turn around to get my girlfriend a drink. In the kitchen, I find a dozen half empty bottles of liquor. I pour the equivalent of two or three shots into a cup for Stella, and the same amount in rum into a cup of my own. I chug the rum and wince, taking a second to collect myself before refilling it and heading on my way.

The house is completely packed, almost doubling the number of attendees at Stella's last party. There's barely any room to walk, so I settle for sidling between people and elbowing when I have to. The majority of the first floor is lit only by neon-colored lights, so finding Stella again proves difficult despite being in a bright purple outfit.

I see Luke across the room, standing next to Captain America. Upon closer inspection, I realize that it's Calum, only by the wideset nose and two distinct freckles by his mouth, as the rest is covered up by his mask. They're both laughing. I'm glad Luke's having fun. I eventually find my girlfriend sitting on the stairs with her friend whose name I have yet to learn.

When she sees me, she shoos her friend away and takes her drink from my extended hand. She chugs it just as I did before, placing the empty cup on the step beneath her legs. I slam the rum and toss the cup on the floor behind me, trying not to think about the horrible taste too much. She looks at me with this coy smile, biting down on her lip, a playful glint to her eyes. I'm six shots deep in less than fifteen minutes, so I throw myself at her, the mix of vodka and rum quickly hijacking my taste buds. She's quick to react, kissing me back, pulling herself up from the stairs and curving her entire body against mine.

She pulls away from me suddenly, dragging me up the stairs by my hand. There are other couples littering the halls, making out and feeling each other up. Not that I've never touched Stella but...in public? That's a line I definitely wouldn't cross if I were sober.

She opens the door at the end of the hall, revealing a room that's blandly decorated with white sheets and phlegm-yellow walls—probably a guest bedroom. We stumble to a stop in the doorway. I'm more drunk than her.

There are two people already making out on the bed: a girl with long, dark hair, well below average height, and a rather well-built guy, with short black hair and freckles down his neck, probably two heads taller than the girl. He looks like he works out. He could probably kick my ass.

"My turn, Rose," Stella giggles, and the short girl pulls away from the guy, looking from Stella, to me, and then back at Stella. She smiles widely and pulls the bemused guy off the bed with her. He rakes me up and down with his eyes before following her. Chills rattle up and down my spine.

She pushes me down onto the bed and reattaches her lips to mine, and we kiss and we kiss and we kiss, but it feels so mechanical. What's wrong with me? Any number of guys at school would kill to be in my position. She's hot and sweet and she actually wants to hook up; girls never want to hook up. And for whatever reason she's chosen me, and I can't even enjoy it. There has to be something wrong with me. There has to be.

I figure maybe it's just nerves and that I'll get over it as I get comfortable, so I kiss her, down her jaw and her neck and her collarbones, and then she's pulling on my Robin shirt so I slip it over my head and drop it with my mask on the floor. She runs her hands up and down my chest as she swipes her tongue across mine. She trails her lips down my neck and chest, eventually sliding off the bed and kneeling on the floor between my legs.

She begins to pull down the bottom half of my costume when I realize...nothing's happened. I'm making out with a hot girl who now wants to take it a step further and I can't—I can't even get there. Fuck. I must've had too much to drink. She's gonna think I'm—

"Hey Ash—oh my God, oh God, I'm so sorry—"

The door closes as quickly as it opened, but not before I catch a glimpse of Batman's bright red face. Stella is apparently too drunk to notice that the door just opened, but I'm too drunk to pretend that it didn't. I sit up abruptly and wrestle her hands from my pants. She falls back onto her butt and pouts at me childishly, but I don't have time to coddle her right now. She probably won't even remember this happened.

I grab my top and my mask and stagger out into the hall after Luke, but he's nowhere in sight. I elbow through everyone else in the hall and hope they're all too messed up to notice that I'm half naked right now.

By some miracle, I get to the bottom of the stairs without falling by bracing myself on the railing, but as I scan the room, he's nowhere in sight. I see Captain America talking to a girl that's way out of his league, but he seems to be doing alright, somehow. I decide trying to get to Calum would be too difficult and time-consuming, so I burst through the front door at the bottom of the stairs, and there I find him, mask pulled back into his hair, sitting on the front steps.

"Luke."

He turns around, his eyes widening when he sees me still half-naked, my clothes in my hand at my side. "So your girlfriend goes as Starfire and I'm, what, your groupie?" he scoffs. "Was that your plan all along?"

"No," I say. "I didn't know she was going to do that."

I didn't think that Stella would care if I went as Robin. She seems like the kind of girl who goes to a party dressed as a slutty nurse or something—not the kind of girl who gets a Teen Titans reference, however, I guess Starfire is the most scandalously dressed titan. I should've told her I was going to match with my best friend, even if she thinks I'm lame for liking him so much.

"I'm sorry." He doesn't look back at me.

He snorts. "If anything, I'm sorry, Ash. She was totally about to blow you."

For a fifteen-year-old boy, Luke doesn't tend to speak very crudely, so hearing him say that takes me by surprise. It sounds weird coming from him and not, say, Michael.

I take a seat next to him, close enough that our arms are touching. I'm sweating from the rum and, now, the humidity, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"I couldn't get it up," I tell him honestly, hoping at the very least it'll make him laugh. Thankfully it works.

"Seriously?" he asks, turning his head to look me in the eyes. "A lot of guys think she's, like, the hottest girl at school."

As if I haven't been over that same piece of data in my head a million times. I know she's hot, but she scares the shit out of me. She shouldn't, but she does.

"I think I got whiskey dick," I tell him. I can't control what's coming out of my mouth no matter how hard I try. "Or, I don't know. She scares me."

He huffs a dry laugh. "Yeah, me too."

We fall silent after that.

The house is up on a hill with a long driveway, placing us out a quarter-mile from the main road. The landscaping looks professional, and from the size of the house, it wouldn't come as a surprise. There isn't a single chip in the pastel blue facade, large columns lining the front porch. Stella's house isn't quite this ritzy, but it's not far off. I don't belong with these people. I have a single mum who is working to support three kids; my house is just a house, I ride my pushbike everywhere I go, I have four pairs of pants in my closet. Maybe that's where this odd feeling is coming from. These people are above me and I can't quite stomach it.

I belong with Luke. I belong with Luke and, despite my feelings for them, I belong with Michael and Calum. They're my people. They're like me. Being with Stella is pretending to be someone I'm not. I am not the guy who dates the hottest girl in school, no matter how much I would like to be him.

"I had my first kiss," Luke says softly, barely piercing the silence. My stomach knots up, and suddenly I feel very oddly like I'm no longer in my own body. I can't think of a single person in there that I trust enough to take such an innocent thing from him. "That's what I was going to tell you when I walked in on you."

I press my lips into a thin line, trying to be okay with it. I know I told Luke I was always going to be overprotective, but I also know that freaking out about who he kisses and when is crossing some kind of line. I just don't want him to have some idea of how the world works and have it crushed by some girl who doesn't care. He doesn't deserve that.

"How was it?" I ask, rather than who, like I really want to. He probably doesn't even know the girl.

He shrugs. "It was cool, I guess. They always talk about sparks in the movies but it kind of just felt like...well, like we were moving our lips together." He stares out at the horizon over the trees. The sun has already set behind them, illuminating the earth in a soft orange glow. "I kind of thought it'd be more groundbreaking."

I can't help but laugh, because I had my first kiss when I was just a little younger than him, with a girl I had just met. There was nothing natural about it. First kisses aren't all they're cracked up to be.

"Yeah, well, it'll be better when it's with someone you care about."

He leans into my side but still doesn't look at me, so I settle for just watching him watch the sunset.

"Is that how it was for you?"

"Yeah, it was," I tell him, rather than telling him that I've never actually kissed someone I really liked. I don't want him to think that just because I've never felt that spark, doesn't mean that he never will. I don't want him to think he's broken just because I am.

"Do you want to go home?" I ask him gently. He considers it for a second and then nods, slowly.

"Come on, Loverboy," I tease, standing up. When he follows me, I sling my arm over his shoulder, and he wraps his around my bare waist. I feel suddenly very aware of our skin touching. "Let's get you home."

***

Luke doesn't seem too worked up about the Stella thing. Not that I assumed he would be, but sometimes Luke gets mad at me about stuff I don't really understand. Not that he isn't entitled to be mad at me regardless of whether I understand it or not but...well, it makes him hard to keep up with sometimes.

Stella, on the other hand, has decided that my stopping her from blowing me at the last second was not for my own selfish reasons, but simply a noble, chivalrous act, as she was intoxicated and "never would have acted that way sober", so rather than breaking up with me, we are now attached at the hip.

It's not her that I don't like. I just don't like the type of person she is. She's perfectly nice, and her socioeconomic standing should play no part in what I think of her as a person, but I just can't help that it does. Our relationship is 95% about her, and 5% about me—it's not that she doesn't care, it's just that she doesn't understand me, and that's part of the reason why. I don't mind that it's mostly about her, but it's not like this is going to become anything, so what's the point?

I just can't help the part of me that wishes she broke up with me.

"What's up, Hemmotron?" I ask as I approach him at his locker. He's wearing my red sweatshirt again, and it compliments his pale skin, makes him look like he's glowing. I don't ever want it back.

Luke visibly cringes at the nickname, but he smiles nonetheless, shrugging as if to answer my question. He continues exchanging things from his backpack for things in his locker. His tongue is caught between his teeth and his eyebrows are scrunched in concentration.

"Are you excited for the observatory trip?" I ask.

All three of the astronomy classes are taking a field trip to the observatory tonight, and though we've known for weeks, half the people I've talked to about it this morning aren't going, which blows my mind. Who wouldn't be excited to see our solar system through an observatory-grade telescope?

"Why would I be?" he groans. "We're leaving at seven. I'm losing my whole Friday night for this stupid trip."

I drop my mouth open in playful disbelief, choosing not to joke about how he probably didn't have any plans other than to play FIFA with Michael, anyway. "Stupid? Have you ever been to the observatory at night? It's beautiful!"

He huffs a gentle laugh and then shoots me this little disbelieving side-glance as he closes his locker. "You're a nerd."

He begins walking in the opposite direction, headed for his math class. I jog to catch up with him and sling my arm over his small shoulders, tightening my grip and laughing as he tries to escape me. He should really learn to accept that I am shamelessly embarrassing.

Across the hall, Stella is looking at me over her friend's shoulder. I recognize her friend as the one from the party the other night. Stella glances between Luke and me with an indecipherable look, but when she meets my eyes, she smiles brightly. I use my free hand to wave at her, and she sends a small wave back. I'm supposed to go to dinner with her tomorrow night, but I've been pretty broke ever since I got fired from my job two months ago, so I'm gonna have to ask Mum for money, which I hate. Stella could easily pay for herself, if not everyone else in the whole restaurant.

We reach Luke's class in a comfortable silence, and I decide at the last second not to ask if he'll skip with me. I'm pretty sure he mentioned having a test today, and I know he struggles with math despite having a math teacher for a mother, so I decide to just go to the library and study by myself instead of going to history. I have an A in that class, anyway.

I sit at the table furthest in the back and out of sight, pulling out the remainder of my math homework. I don't get trig. The basics I get, but inverse, logarithms, and inverse logarithms are very murky water. I don't know why I need to know any of this. It's not like I plan on joining NASA or something.

"Hey," I hear that unmistakable, bubbly voice say. God, how did he find me here? "Michael's mad at you, just a heads-up."

I groan. "What now?"

I haven't even been in here for a minute and Calum's already managed to find me. He must have put a GPS chip in me when I wasn't paying attention or something, or else his ability to locate me everywhere I go could, at this point, be considered a special skill. 'Professional Locator of the Innocent', perhaps.

Before he answers, he plops himself down in the chair opposite me, placing his head in his hands and his elbows on top of some of the papers I have spread out, with no regard for personal space. I know he's not doing it to be rude, but his inability to read certain social situations is borderline frustrating sometimes.

"Well, I don't know if you saw me at the party the other night, but I was kind of gettin' in there with this really hot chick, and I was telling Michael about it, and then he goes, 'wait, you went to a party without me?' and then I panicked 'cause Michael's my best friend and I don't want him to hate me so I was like, 'well, it was Ashton's friend's party so I don't think I was allowed to invite anyone' and then he was like, 'what, Ashton doesn't think I'm cool enough to go to his parties?' and I was like, 'no, of course not, it just wasn't his party' and then he was like, 'but he invited you, and obviously he invited Luke' and then I was like—"

"Calum," I interrupt, gently rubbing my temples. He speaks so fast I can barely understand him sometimes. I don't need a play-by-play—all he has to say is 'Michael found out about the party' and that's that. "Why would you mention my name at all?"

He stares at me blankly for a moment, as if he didn't register the question at all.

"Well, 'cause if he's gonna be mad at someone, I'd rather he be mad at you than me."

I shoot him a smile that is so sarcastic it's more of a grimace than anything else. "Thank you, Calum. That's very noble of you."

"Sorry," he shrugs, but he's obviously not. I'm not that upset about it—I should have invited Michael in the first place. I mean, you would think that getting a year nine invited to a big, older party would leave him indebted to you, at least enough to not sell you out to the guy who already doesn't like you, but that's clearly not the case. Besides, since he does already hate me, it's not like this changes much.

"Yeah, well, tell him he can have my girlfriend when I break up with her as an apology," I say, half-joking, half-serious. Calum doesn't laugh, though. He just looks at me with wide doe-eyes.

"You're breaking up with her?" he all but gasps.

"No." I hold a finger up to my lips to shush him as people turn to look at us. "Well, maybe. Probably, actually, yes."

"Why?" He leans even closer to me. "Do you like somebody else or something?"

I furrow my eyebrows. "No, I just don't like her."

"Oh," he replies, slumping back in his seat. "Well, anyway, don't forget we have band practice tomorrow night, so you might wanna fix it with him before then. Seeya Ash!"

And then he's gone as quickly as he was there.

"And I fight my way to the front of class, to get the best view of her ass!" Luke sings into my ear, as if I'm not listening to exact same song as him. I can appreciate a good Busted song now and again, but he's played the same song on repeat five times already, and I wouldn't be surprised if he went in for a sixth. He takes obsession to a whole new level, and that's saying something.

I remove his earbud from my ear, tossing it into his lap to better convey that I'm bored; however, he doesn't take this personally like he should. Instead he puts the second earbud in his ear and continues to mouth along to the words.

"I see her in her underwear, I can't help but stop and stare," he continues, reaching down and pinching me on the ass. He laughs as I flinch against the window. The latest I've ever hung out with Luke was about 7:00 p.m., and it's now past 7:30. It's stereotypically childish of him to be getting this hyperactive as the night goes on. Year nines like him have yet to have their spirits crushed, and it's pitiful, really, if not one of the most endearing things I've ever experienced.

The astronomy teacher stands at the front of the bus as we pull into the observatory parking lot. He tries desperately to quiet everyone down long enough to tell us what to do, but ultimately fails. Even Luke, who is typically quiet in large groups, is continuing to sing his vulgar song in my ear rather than paying attention. He asks that we head inside single-file and quietly, but as the two buses begin to unload students, everyone is talking to their friends and horsing around and doing exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing. I'm not one to side with the teacher, but Luke is killing me. Actually killing me.

Inside, we split off into groups to survey the observatory in sections, but I make sure to drag Luke in the direction of the telescope. We're the first people to get there since we've ditched our group. There's a man fiddling with the viewing end of the telescope. I take Luke's hand and shamelessly approach the man, who gives us a brief background on the building of the telescope, and what we can expect to see through it. I bite back the urge to tell him that I've done this before because I hate to sound like a know-it-all.

I go before Luke, because I'm more excited than him, anyway, so it only makes sense. When I have to let go of his hand, he holds on a second longer after I let go, and for some reason I feel bad. It's weird for guys to hold hands, I know, but sometimes I just want to be close with him and enjoy a moment, and touching him makes us feel more connected.

The smallest gasp escapes my lips when an icy blue catches my eye. I've never seen Neptune before. It's beautiful.

Mars is pretty, but you can also see Mars with your naked eye, sometimes, so it's less impressive. The blue of Neptune makes me think of the boy standing behind me. I can't quite justify why it makes me think of his eyes, wide and innocent, still sparkling, but it does. Sometimes I forget that he was in year eight not that long ago. God. He is so young.

I tear myself away from the telescope to give him a chance, though I could stand here all night. Seeing space so close is just...it is truly extraordinary. It's difficult to explain the way it makes you feel. So small and inconsequential. Like everything you've ever been scared of is completely insignificant—a microscopic blip in an infinite timeline. It really makes you wonder why we think so much, when we should just be out there, seeing and feeling and doing.

I push him towards it, and he gives me this look like I'm the biggest nerd in the world, like I'm blowing this out of proportion. Maybe I am a little bit of a nerd when it comes to space, but my reaction is directly proportional to the situation and no look he gives me can change that.

He puts his eye up to the telescope, and he looks and he looks and he looks, and for a moment I worry that he won't understand. But then he inhales deeply, and he looks a second longer, and then he just says, "Wow."

My smile grows as he looks through the telescope, grinning wickedly at what he sees.

"Oh, wow, Ash," he gasps. "It's so...blue."

The man who is still standing off to the side of Luke chuckles. I nearly forgot he was even in here.

"I know," I reply. That's my exact reaction when he pulls away from the lens and looks me right in my eyes. They are so blue. His eyes are sparkling. I've never seen Neptune before tonight and now I don't know if I'll ever be able to look him in the eyes without thinking of it, of this night. It's so beautiful.

He looks through the lens one last time, and laughs in this completely bewildered way, like he's thinking the exact same thing that I am. That we're just tiny little people on this tiny little rock floating through an infinite plane of darkness, and nothing we're doing even matters.

As he finally pulls himself from it and sees me again, he smiles the way a newborn smiles for the first time, finally grasping the concept of happiness. It's the look on his face that makes me think for just a second that maybe we're not completely insignificant. After all, for all we know, there are no other beings like ourselves in the entire galaxy. In all of space, there is no evidence of another being like Luke existing, and that is enough to take my breath away.

The rest of the observatory is comparatively boring, as it's just to do with the history of the observatory and related things. I've seen it a million times, and compared to what he's just seen with his own eyes, it's simply not as interesting, so I don't make him look at any of it with me. We walk outside in a comfortable silence. I know without him saying a word that he's still thinking about it.

He follows me a small ways down the hill where I sit down, and he plops down in the grass next to me, so close that our sides are pressed together. It feels like we're the only two people in the entire world, despite the distant echoing of other student's voices coming from the observatory.

"I'm sorry I called you a nerd," he says after a moment of mercilessly plucking blades of grass from the earth. "You were right. That was beautiful."

I think to make a joke about how I'm right, always right, of course I am, but I don't. Instead I just nod, with the dorkiest smile on my face. The past month or so that I've known him I've seen him grow so much; I've been there for his first real friends, his band, his first kiss, his first grasp of humanity as a whole...I feel like I truly know him, see him, inside and out. I wonder if he feels the same way about me, even if it might not be true.

I feel his eyes on me, but I don't turn to meet his gaze.

"How come you've never asked me about my dad?" I blurt. The moment I register what I've just said in my own ears, my heart drops to my stomach. I didn't want to make this heavy. Why did I say that? Why do I always have to ruin good moments? I grab them by the throat and choke the life right out of them, like ruining things is the only thing I know.

I refuse to look at him, even after I've said that. I see him shrug out of the corner of my eye. He's staring right at me.

"I don't know," he replies, paying no mind to the sheer weight of the topic I've just brought up. It's reassuring, in a strange way. "I just figured that if you wanted to talk about it, you would, and if you didn't, you didn't have to."

He's completely unphased by it, yet I can't help completely regretting opening up in the first place. I want him to know me. Of course I do. But people tend to be weird about absent fathers; they either pity you or make fun of you, and the two are equally as terrible. I wish it wasn't such an obvious fact. Then I wouldn't have to acknowledge it.

"He left when I was two," I say simply, though it's not simple at all. "He's in a lot of my baby pictures, but if I'm honest I don't remember him."

Luke nods. I'm still not looking directly at him.

"Well, that's not entirely true," I admit. "I have this one memory. There's no real context to it. But I just remember sitting on his lap while he rocked back and forth in a rocking chair. Mum said it must've been her father's house, because that's the only place she could think of that had a rocking chair. But that's all I know."

At this point I realize that Luke's not going to say anything. One of the most awkwardly talkative people I know is shutting up to listen to me talk. I really dropped a bomb here, didn't I?

"My mum remarried a few years later and had Harry and Lauren, but they got divorced not long after Harry was born. He moved to the states and stopped sending child support a year or so later." I fall silent for a second after that. It's hard to focus on what I'm saying with Luke's eyes on me. I don't know why that is.

As if he can read my mind, he looks away from me, casting his eyes out to the horizon. It's too dark to really see anything, but it's beautiful, anyway.

"It's just—how can people do that, you know? How can you hold your own child in your own fucking arms and then the next day just...decide you don't want it anymore?"

My entire childhood was riddled with this feeling of inferiority. Every kid I knew growing up had both of their parents. Some had divorced parents, but they still saw both of them. You can stop loving your spouse and still love your children. They're your children, for God's sake. How can you stop loving something that you've created?

"It's not fair," I continue. It's easier with him not looking at me. "And I don't just mean for me. I mean it's not fair that my mum has to kill herself every day trying to make enough money to take care of her children. She gave up everything to take care of us. Everything. She gave up on her dreams and took on two jobs just to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. And that's just not fucking fair, that these assholes get to just leave her with nothing. It's not fucking fair at all."

I don't mention that there were days when we couldn't afford to eat—the countless times Mum went hungry so we didn't have to. She loves us. She makes sure we know that every single day. But that doesn't mean she's happy, because she's not, and no matter how much I wish I could change that, I can't. He's still young. He doesn't need to hear something as sad as that.

"He took a part of me, you know?" I redirect instead. "Like, when you were in primary school, making those Father's Day cards, and everyone was doing it, and having fun, and talking about their dads...I would just sit by myself and make my grandpa a card instead." I feel his weight shift, leaning into me the slightest bit more. "My mum taught me how to shave. How to drive. How to be a man. And she's my hero. But I've always had this thing looming over me, like there's something missing. And I try and I try and I try to fill the void but nothing works. And I just...sometimes I worry that it's never going to go away. And that scares the hell out of me."

I finally work up the courage to look at him, but as I'm about to turn my head, he looks at me. In that split second, I catch a glimpse of his face: his eyebrows are knit together, raised in worry. That look I've been trying to avoid all night.

"I don't want to feel like this forever," I finish. I think that sums it up quite well. I could talk about this for hours, but I just don't want to. He knows now. That's all that matters.

I don't realize that I'm crying until I feel his hand on my face, swiping a stray tear away with his thumb. So it wasn't pity. He looked like that because it's the first time he's ever seen me cry.

I press my face into his hand as he continues to wipe my tears. When the last tear falls, I leave my face pressed to his palm, and he leaves his palm pressed to my cheek. My eyes flutter shut, and we stay just like that for a long moment, and then I slowly pull myself from his touch and recline back into the grass.

He stays sitting for a second, his hand falling to his lap, eyes trained on where mine would be if I were still sitting. This feeling washes through me, like I can feel the earth rotating on its axis, like we're moving in slow motion. When he begins to lay back in the grass, I watch as my own arm extends itself out onto the grass behind him, so that his head meets my flesh instead of the cold ground. He doesn't say anything. He stays just like that.

The silence isn't as suffocating as I anticipated, but I also can't help but wonder what he's thinking. He hasn't said anything, which in other circumstances might put me on edge, but I know that there's not much you can say in a situation like this. Especially when both of your parents are still happily married.

I curl my arm towards myself reflexively, and Luke rolls onto his side as I pull him closer. He wraps an arm around my torso, the entire front of his body pressed against me. He's still wearing my sweatshirt, and as he rests his forehead against my neck, just below my jaw, I feel his eyelashes brush against my skin, sending chills rattling through me. I run my hand up and down his back in the soothing way that you do to an upset child, and we lay just like that, the sounds of even our breathing barely audible, until I hear him begin to sniffle quietly, and I can feel his tears on my neck. As his tears slowly escalate to quiet sobs, I don't know what else to do but rub his back and let him cry.

He doesn't need to explain himself; I was his age not too long ago, and I was sensitive just like him. He can feel what I feel. That's what happens when you really care about someone—you become connected. He's not crying for himself, he's crying for me, and I've never felt something so strong, so genuine, so simply human, that it overwhelms me beyond tears.

So maybe what I said was true, and space is infinite and we're all just clusters of cells, walking around and looking for this greater purpose until we die, and maybe there's nothing beyond that. But if there is a Heaven, if we are all just souls, then his and mine are connected. Somewhere on that ethereal spectrum we overlap, and we are connected, eternally. I can feel it.

***

The Saturday after that is enough to make me believe in a God—a vengeful, spiteful, merciless God who will strike me down for even considering the idea that he might not exist.

On the bus ride home last night, he fell asleep on my shoulder for the duration of the trip, and I remained wide awake, my mind swirling with thoughts ranging from my father to Luke to our infinite timeline and the fact that I'll die before we ever venture outside of our own solar system. We didn't mention our talk again, nor did I mention the way he cried into my shoulder until it was time to leave. Some things don't need to be talked about. I know that neither of us will forget that moment, so I let it settle, rather than try and confront it.

Point being, all was well last night when we got back to the school and went our separate ways. I built my castle in the sand last night, but by mid-afternoon the next day, the tide comes and washes away any trace of my efforts.

It starts with a short but eventful phone call to Stella.

I tell her that I can't make dinner tonight, that I forgot I had other plans (band practice, but I don't explicitly state that). She stays silent on her end for a moment, and then she says, "Are you going to break up with me?" She doesn't sound sad like I would imagine her to be. Instead she sounds expectant—like it's just a matter of time.

"What makes you say that?" I ask as a means to deflect the question. I've been thinking about how to break up with her, and this moment would make sense, but I can't be that guy that dumps his girlfriend over the phone. I can't.

She takes a moment to answer again, and I find her silence unsettling. "Well, obviously you don't really like me," she says matter-of-factly. "If you did, you wouldn't ditch me all the time to hang out with those year nines."

God. She's always throwing that in my face, like somehow I'm less-than because my friends are younger than me. It's so goddamn shallow.

I open my mouth to speak before I can actually muster up a decent response, but she continues before I have to say anything. "I mean, are you gay or something?" she asks, and it doesn't sound like an attack, but it sure feels like one by the sudden wave of nausea that washes over me. "One of my friends said they saw you cuddling with that boy, Luke, at the observatory last night," she continues, but I wish she would just stop talking. I want to hang up the phone, or tell her to mind her own business, or anything to make her stop, but the second she says Luke's name, my heart drops to my stomach. She knows who he is. What if she says something to him? "I mean, it would make sense. He's with you everywhere you go, and he's all you ever talk about. If you guys are like, together or something, then just own it, Ashton, and don't just use me to cover it up and totally lead me on."

"We're not together," I snap, but it's more urgent than venomous. How could she think that? If we were two girls, if it were her and one of her girlfriends laying together on the hill last night, no one would think anything of it. But two guys are comfortable enough to hug each other so automatically we're gay? No chance for redemption, the fact that I've had my hands down her panties completely jettisoned, not a second thought to it.

"Ashton—"

"No," I hiss. There's venom in my voice this time. If she's going to act like a snake, then I'll be the spider that eats the snake. "If you start telling people that we're gay—if you say anything to him about this, you'll regret it."

I don't know where the threat comes from, and I don't know where it will lead me, but the second she drags Luke into it, I'm not messing around anymore. He gets enough trouble as it is. Rumors about him being gay are only going to make matters worse, and no one will take me seriously standing up for him if they think it's because I'm his boyfriend. If he hears rumors like that...who knows how he'll react. I assume it'd be similar to how I would've reacted two years ago.

The silence lasts even longer this time, but my heavy breathing is enough to keep it tense.

"I won't say anything to him," she says, though I have just threatened her, so who knows if it's genuine. "But only if you promise me that you don't have feelings for him."

"Of course I don't," I retort immediately. She hums in response. "But I don't..." I don't have feelings for you, either, I mean to say, but suddenly I can't work up the nerve. It'd be terrible timing, breaking up with her the second she accuses me of being gay. It'd give my previous statement zero credibility. "But I don't want any rumors going around. He's young, and he has a hard enough time as it is, so just don't say anything."

We don't reschedule our plans, but we don't break up, either. I hang up after she says goodbye, and I sit there for a moment, my stomach churning, and then I pick up my phone and scroll until I find the contact I'm looking for.

"What's up, mate?" His voice sounds uncharacteristically genuine, which makes me even more uneasy. Calum said he was mad at me. Why is he being nice all of a sudden?

"Hey," I reply, slightly taken aback. I sit down on my bed, no longer feeling inclined to pace the room like I did on the phone with Stella. "Uh, I just wanted to apologize. You know, for—"

"For not inviting me to your party like a total fucking dickhead?"

I press my lips into a thin line, scratching the back of my neck awkwardly. "Well, yeah." I mean, it wasn't my party, but his point is the same. "It's just, I didn't even really want Calum to come, but Luke didn't want to go without you guys, and it's just, like, when you guys are there he tends to forget about me, I guess, so he asked about just bringing Calum, since you and I—"

"Hate each other?" 

"Well, I was going to say butt heads, but if that's how you want to put it, then sure."

"No hard feelings, dude," he says, which takes me by total surprise. That's it? No fighting, no yelling, no swearing—just, 'no hard feelings'? What's going on here?

"Yeah, I know what you're thinking," he explains, as if he can actually hear my thoughts. When it comes to Michael and Calum, I always feel like maybe they can. "'He's not going to rip my head off?' Yeah, I'm over it. From what Calum told me you and Luke were a total snooze-fest anyway."

"What?" I protest. "How?"

"Oh, you know, he hit on some girl while 'Luke and Ashton's Magnificent Traveling Shit Show' went on outside. It's like a goddamn soap with you two sometimes. You live in your own little world." He laughs, but there's something so sharp about it it almost cuts me.

"He's my best friend," I say, like he doesn't already know that.

"Yeah, well, we're his best friends, too. We're in a band, mate. That makes us all, like, brothers, whether you like it or not."

Huh. I guess I'm always too busy getting worked up by him choosing them over me that I never stop to wonder if maybe they feel the same way, too, sometimes.

"I know you think I hate you," he says.

"Michael, two minutes ago you called me a fucking dickhead and said you hated me."

"Well, I believe I said we hated each other, actually, but whatever. Invite me to your party next time, asshole."

I chuckle. "Will do."

"Can I ask you something?" he says suddenly, and my heart drops to my stomach. Great, is he gonna accuse me of being gay, too?

"Hmm?"

A short silence lingers in the air before he replies, but it feels like the longest silence of my life. "What's your deal with Luke, anyway?"

I swallow hard. My ankles knock against the metal bed frame. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I don't care that you're older. I'm not trying to throw stones here. But, like, you're almost a legal adult and your best friend is barely hitting puberty." It's the first time I've ever heard Michael let his guard down, and it feels weird, but it's nice to not feel threatened by him, even if just for a moment. "Like, I can't imagine myself being best friends with a thirteen-year-old, so like, what's the situation between you two that makes you...not feel weird about it?"

I blink, stunned by his question for some reason. The obvious answer is that he's mature for his age, but that's a lame response, and also not the whole truth, which is the least I can give Michael.

"I don't know," I tell him. "I guess I just...I don't know. I kind of see myself in him."

He scoffs, but it doesn't sound serious. "So you're an egotistical bastard, is what I'm hearing."

I snort. Yeah, right. "No, I just mean that when I was his age, I was quiet and dorky, and I let people push me around, and you know he does that, too. And I just feel like...like if I can help push him to be the best version of himself, then maybe that can justify how I wasted my high school career."

"No offense, but I'm still kind of hearing the whole 'using-him-to-justify-my-failures' thing," he points out. "Which, if that's the case, you've got some real donkey balls calling me a shit friend."

"That's not what I'm saying." It comes out a lot more hostile than I intended, but he just laughs at me. I know he's just giving me a hard time, but I'm not quite in the mood for it. "Luke is...he's smart, and kind, and talented, and year nine crushed me, so I'm just using my failures to push him in the right direction, is all, because I know he can do great things." For once, Michael has nothing negative to say, no sarcastic retort, like for once I'm saying something sensible. I can't help but grin. "Plus his boyish innocence is quite charming."

Michael laughs, but it's a real laugh, not the kind that feels like it's somehow at my expense. It's reassuring that for once he isn't trying to catch me with my pants down. "Yeah, it is, isn't it?"

I laugh.

"For what it's worth, he really likes you. Idolizes you, even," he says after another moment of silence. "When you guys went through your rough patch a few weeks back you were all he talked about. He would never come out and say that he missed you, but he managed to spin every topic of conversation back to you. FIFA? 'Oh, Ashton hates FIFA.' Music? 'Did you know Ashton's favorite band is The Doors?' Movies? 'You know, I met Ashton at the cinema.' His stupid, neon glasses? 'Oh, well Ashton likes my glasses.' You know, that whole argument, or whatever it was, made no sense to me. You were both miserable without each other."

I can't fight the smile the consumes the better half of my face, and now that I'm alone in my room, with no one to judge me for it, I don't try. I smile until my cheeks hurt like I'm the biggest, floweriest twelve-year-old girl there is, and the weight from my chest is lifted. It's not often that you meet someone who really cares about you like that, so I let butterflies fill up my stomach, and I let myself feel happy without worrying how it makes me look. Luke makes me happy. I should be able to wear that on my sleeve without being accused of being gay.

"He's the best person I've ever met, you know."

"I know," he says. I can hear the grin in his voice, like there's a joke somewhere and I'm missing the punchline. At this point, it's probably true. "I know."

We say our goodbyes, and when I go to hang up the phone, I feel much better than I did before.

"Oh!" he exclaims before I can end the call. "Band practice is cancelled by the way. Something came up, I guess. Luke wanted me to tell you."

My stomach churns when he basically tells me that Luke didn't want to call me himself, but I mutter an okay and hang up the phone.

Oh, God. They already got to him, didn't they?

As I stand on his doorstep, my legs tremble. I try to blame it on the wind, but I know that it's entirely my own fault, as far back as I can trace it. Before I pulled him into me, before I told him about my dad. It's been a long time coming, really. It's all my fault.

I don't realize I've pressed the doorbell until the echoing resonates in my ears, and I consider, for a split second, jumping on my bike and getting out of here before anyone can open the door, but I miss my chance as the door swings open.

"Can I help you, mate?"

The voice is unfamiliar, and when I look up, I find a man who looks like a taller, tanner, more muscular version of Luke. His hair is just as blond, but shorter, curling at the ends. He has Luke's nose that perks at the tip, his Neptune-blue eyes, his deep, crater-like dimples. It's eerie, almost, how alike they look. He's actually quite a handsome guy.

"I—uh—I'm here for—is Luke home?" A deep blush crawls its way up my neck and seeps into my cheeks, and when I realize how childish I must look, I instantly regret coming here, or at the very least not booking it in the opposite direction when I heard the door begin to open. The first time I've met his brother and I turn into a babbling idiot. From what he's told me, I would assume this one is Jack. Ben is supposedly shorter, meanwhile this guy towers over me, makes me feel small despite the inviting smile on his face.

"He's upstairs," he replies, leaning against the door frame to allow me inside. "You know where his room is?"

I open my mouth to reply, but the words die in my throat, so I opt for a nonchalant nod. I can feel the blush creeping back up my neck, so I duck my head and hurry up the stairs before he can see me. I hear him chuckle despite my efforts.

I wonder if Luke's going to look like him when he's older. They have the same face, already, so surely Luke will age the same, right?

As I approach his bedroom at the end of the hall, I take a deep breath. It smells like aftershave as I pass the washroom, a very outdoors-y smell of oak and moss. Luke doesn't have any facial hair to shave, so it must belong to his brother, who looks freshly shaven. It's a very subtle scent. It's nice.

His door is shut, which isn't abnormal but it still makes my stomach churn. I don't even know if he's heard, if that's why he cancelled band practice. Maybe something else really did come up. Maybe it's just that his brother is visiting. That's a perfectly rational reason to call off band practice, right? 

I slowly turn the doorknob, opening the door quietly so as not to alarm him. My heart plunges into my stomach as I spot him across the room, sitting in his desk chair by the window. He has his feet kicked up on the window sill, tossing and catching a red hacky sack that I've seen on his desk before. He's staring out the window into the trees, barely moving, as if his soul has completely transcended his body.

"Luke?" I ask sheepishly. He doesn't turn around, like he's known the whole time that I was standing in his doorway. He doesn't say anything, and I can't stop the lump that swells in my throat. Things were going so well, for once, and I ruined it. I knew the second I mentioned my dad that I was ruining it, but I kept going, anyway. I'm such an idiot. "Are you alright?"

I barely see him shrug with the back of the chair facing me. He stops tossing the hacky sack, instead settling for rolling it around his palm with his thumb. I wish he would say something, at the very least to confirm that I'm right about what I think is wrong.

"What happened?" I prod gently, hoping to coax him into confirming my suspicions. It's been a while since he's yelled at me, but the quiet is somehow worse. I'd rather have him screaming and cursing in my face and pushing me around. When people are mad, it's easy to just tell yourself that they'll get over it, it won't last forever. But he doesn't seem mad, which makes me uneasy.

A long silence follows, and then he drops his feet from the window, tossing the hacky sack onto his bed and turning to face me. He has my sweatshirt on, and I begin to wonder if he's ever going to take it off. He won't look me in the eyes. I don't know why I expected him to be crying, but he isn't. His face is blank, the little bit of color in his cheeks completely drained, as if he's just seen a ghost and I missed it. Maybe I'm the ghost.

"I went to the market today," he begins, but his voice is so monotonous I can barely focus on anything else. "Remember the guys from the cinema that day? When we first met?" God. Of course I do. Those sad bastards still give me rotten looks every time they see me in the hall, but to my knowledge they've left Luke alone, which is why I feel consumed by guilt as soon as he mentions them. I know where he's going with this. "I passed them on the street and one of them—he just stops and laughs at me, and then all of his friends start to laugh, too. And so I stop my bike and ask them what's so funny, like I've got any room to talk, as if I have one over on them because they won't mess with you." He casts his eyes toward the floor. "And the first guy to laugh goes, 'don't have your boyfriend to defend you today, huh, faggot?'"

I hate the way it sounds when he impersonates the guy's voice, as if the comment is completely seared into his brain. I want to say something, but I can't think of anything. Nothing I can say will make it better.

"And I had no idea what he was talking about," he continues, though it doesn't eleviate the pressure of not knowing what to say. "So I asked him. And he starts to tell me about your girlfriend, how she told a bunch of people that you were gay, which is why you wouldn't have sex with her, and that people saw us together last night. And then, uh, he laughed and called me a faggot, again, and then they left, and I just stood there like an idiot because I had nothing to say back to them. Everyone thinks I'm gay now, 'cause of your girlfriend."

I open my mouth to explain myself, but he cuts me off.

"It's just—Stella Martin? Really, Ash?" he asks, with tired anger in his voice, like he can't believe he has to explain this to me. I didn't even know her until a few weeks ago. How does he know her? And why has he always pretended not to? "I mean, don't you know her brother, Isaac? He's in your year. You know he once beat the shit out of a guy in my year just for being gay, right? His name was Henry. We were kind of—no, we were friends, but he moved after that and I never heard from him again." His shoulders tense up and he looks back at me, but still not in the eyes. "That's—that's the kind of girl you're dating. The kind of girl who lets her brother beat up gay kids and stays quiet about it."

"Luke..." I start, half-expecting him to cut me off again. When he doesn't, though, I feel like I've just hung myself with my own words. Or, I guess, my lack-there-of. "Luke, I'm sorry," I say, and not just to fill the silence, but because I can't properly express exactly how sorry I am.

He shrugs again, raising his eyebrows as if in defeat. "I mean, don't apologize. It's not your fault that people think we're gay now," he says. I thought that if he'd heard the rumors, he'd be more angry, more offended, the way that fifteen-year-old boys usually are. But he isn't. I should know him better—to expect hostility is to reduce him down to a stereotype. He's not mad. He's just scared.

"I'm still sorry." Sorry that I can't protect him anymore without people thinking I'm protecting my boyfriend. Sorry that I caused this. Sorry that I practically imprinted on him like an animal.

"I know."

If he's not mad, then where do we go from here? I mean, what's next?

"Maybe we should—maybe we should try and keep some distance." He offers it like it's the best thing we can do, but it feels more like a slap in the face. "In school, I mean. We can still hang out and everything but maybe, I don't know, you can hang out with your old friends, and I'll hang out with Cal and Mikey, since you don't really like them, and then people will stop talking, right?"

Michael's comment about us being brothers earlier echoes in my head. What old friends? I never had any real friends.

"I like Michael and Calum just fine," I snap after a moment of silence. I shouldn't be mad. Luke could blame me for everything that's happened, because I'm older and I should know better, but he doesn't, and I should be grateful for that. I am grateful for that. But Luke can be so...oblivious, sometimes.

He furrows his eyebrows in confusion. It's the most emotion he's shown since I got here.

"I don't know how you don't get that." I don't know why I'm angry all of a sudden, but I can't reel myself in. I don't want to snap at him—if anything, it's the last thing I want to do. But I don't care if people think we're gay. He does. So why should I have to suffer for it? "Michael called us brothers today," I tell him. He looks surprised. "I talked to him on the phone and I apologized for not inviting him to that Halloween party, and we talked, like two civil people, and it was nice. I thought he hated me, that's all. Turns out I like Michael just fine. And Calum...I talk to Calum all the time. I talk to him in school when you're not there. About you and Michael, about the band. He's a little wild sometimes but he's still my friend. This is my band, too, Luke, so you don't just get to take fucking custody of the guys and kick me out on my ass."

His eyes are wide, mouth slightly ajar. I've never been angry at him. And I'm not angry at him now, I'm just angry in general, because all that stuff about Heaven and our souls and being connected is a real load of shit. If there is a God, then he loves to kick me when I'm down, and I'm just...I'm tired. That's all.

"Ash—"

"No, just—just ignore me. It's fine. I'll be fine," I lie through my teeth. He's young. I shouldn't snap at him just because my life has made me internally spiteful of everything. "You're right. Hell, maybe we should shelve the band for the time being, too. If we're not gonna talk in school then why not just commit? I won't come 'round, won't text or call. You're right. It's a great idea." I can't tell what exactly he's feeling as his eyes gloss over, his jaw clenching angrily. God, I really fuck everything up, don't I? He had a perfectly reasonable solution and now I've made him cry about it. "I'll see you when this blows over, Luke." I don't intend for it to come out as venomously as it does.

I close the door before he can say another word. As I try not to stomp down the stairs, all I can think of is his face before I left, the tears in his eyes. I really made him cry. Not just my best friend, but a year nine, no less. I made him cry and now I'm taking off, quitting like all the men in my life have taught me to do. God. I'm such a disaster that I'm just not satisfied until everyone else is miserable, too.

"See ya, mate," Jack says to me, as if completely oblivious to the look on my face. I don't look at him, let alone respond, before I shut the door with a bit too much force behind me. Not a slam, but enough to rattle the windows.

I pick up my pushbike and pull out my phone, wheeling it down the sidewalk as I scroll through my contacts. I pick her name and put the phone to my ear, listening as it rings, and rings, and rings.

"Ashton?" 

"Fuck you," I spit, and though I half-expect her to say something bitchy, she doesn't get a word in before I start speaking again. "I give and give and give and then I ask you for one thing, and you can't even give me that! Don't ever fucking talk to me again!"

I hang up before she can say anything, pocketing my phone. I storm home with nothing but the sound of rocks crackling beneath me and my bike, and suddenly tears are clouding my vision, and I let them fall and fall until I finally reach the familiar grass of my front yard, and I drop the bike, delivering a swift kick to it, and then another.

Whether I do it to myself, or if it all just happens to me, my life is just one bad hand after another. They say you win some, you lose some, but I always lose, in the end.

***

The week that follows, Luke doesn't talk to me, and I return the favor.

Unlike the first time we fought, when he completely ignored me, I keep catching him staring at me.

I'll stand at my locker, talking to Finn about his track meet or the girl he hooked up with over the weekend, and I'll habitually glance toward Luke, only to find him already looking at me. Not only do I catch him in the act, but he doesn't seem to care. One time in particular, Finn's telling me about how he managed to fend off some more of the gay rumors about me the day before, that 'things are going to be fine', and then I look over to Luke's locker, and he's standing there, looking me right in the eyes. His eyebrows are furrowed, raised in worry, and he's frozen in the middle of an action, hand on his locker door and a book resting on the edge of the shelf, grasped loosely in his other hand. His eyes aren't Neptune-blue anymore. They're dull, constantly glazed over like every time I see him he's just finished crying. Luke's not a crier, though. Instead he walks around like a kicked-puppy and one look from him carves your heart out of your chest.

For the first time, I look away before he does. I can feel his eyes on me as I turn my back to him and keep talking to Finn, thank him even though I don't care who believes what rumors about me. He mentions a party he went to on Saturday. It was Stella's party. I know this, and obviously, he does, too, but he doesn't think much of it as he tells me about it. I haven't spoken to her since our phone call, and she hasn't tried to talk to me, either. I guess all I have to do to get her to do something for me is scream at her. Whatever.

Usually I go to lunch with Finn and some of our other friends, but some days I go to the music room. On these days Calum sneaks away from Luke and Michael to come play music with me, usually just some Green Day or something in the soundproof room, but we've been dabbling in writing our own stuff. So far we've scrapped everything, but we have one song, a bit on the slower side, that we haven't thrown out yet. We don't have a name for it yet, but it's the best one we've done so far. I'm good at the emotion part, and he's good at translating it into lyrics.

When we're not writing, he tells me about Luke, before I can even whittle down my pride enough to ask.

The second Monday of silence, we're sitting in the soundproof room, struggling our way through Jesus of Suburbia when we decide to call it quits for the day. I'm sitting on the drum seat, muscles sore from drumming and sweat gathering in my hairline. Calum puts the bass in its stand and turns to face me.

He looks at me for a long moment, like he's trying to figure out what to say. I look away from him in hopes that he won't say a word.

"Nobody cares if you're gay, Ashton."

I'm a bit taken aback. I knew he was going to say something about the fight but I didn't think he was going to say that.

"I'm not gay."

His expression doesn't change. He just stands there, hair pushed out of his face, hands resting tiredly on his hips.

"Ashton," he says, gesturing to the room around us. "We've spent the last four lunches in here writing a love song about Luke."

I scoff loudly, tightening my grip on the drumsticks in either hand. The fact that I'm fighting with Luke has nothing to the content of the song—any musician would know that it's about tapping into your emotions as a whole. It's why musicians can write break-up albums when they haven't been in a relationship in four years; lyrics can mean something to you without them being a direct narrative about your life.

"You've helped write the song, too."

He must be in love with Luke, too, then. Maybe we're all in love with Luke and we just don't know it, huh?

He shrugs. "I've been working off of your stuff. You lay out this song idea of all the things you could never say to the person you love, how it's too late, and I just go from there."

God, why is he attacking me with my own music? My only solace during this whole thing and he's going to beat me down with it?

"I'm not trying to point fingers, Ashton," he tells me sympathetically. In what world does some year nine know what's going on my head more than me? "I'm just saying, if you have feelings for Luke, there's no reason to feel bad about it. Nobody's going to judge you."

I snort. "What fairy tale land do you live in, Calum? In what world are high school boys okay with homosexuality?" I look at him disbelievingly. "God. Let's just scrap this one, then. We can start a new song about beer and trucks and pussy, you know, a real manly song, that way no one thinks we're gay, right?"

I know it's wrong to take out my irritation on Calum, of all people, the only person who's been on my side this whole time, but I can't help it. I don't care if people think I'm gay—they're going to think what they want no matter what I say. But I'm tired of people throwing it in my face like they know me so well just because they heard one stupid rumor.

"You should really work on that, you know," he says after a moment of silence.

I scoff again.

"Yeah, I'll get started. With today's music we'll make the charts in—"

"No," he says. "You should work on taking your feelings out on people who are only trying to help you." There's no way to describe his expression except...disappointment. Like I've let him down. "It makes you look like a right ass."

I want to tell him I'm sorry, but I'm so stubbornly set in my ways at this point that I can't say anything. I move my eyes to my hands in my lap so I don't have to see the way he's looking at me.

"I'll see you tomorrow at lunch," he says tiredly, and then I'm all alone again. I feel slightly relieved that Calum's so tough. He's the only one who knows how to take my shit: he just hands it right back to me. I know that's a good reason not to take my anger out on him, but I just can't help it, when I know he'll still be my friend anyway. So maybe I am an ass. I didn't used to be.

I spend the rest of the school day napping through my classes. I don't see Luke—or Calum and Michael, for that matter—for the rest of the day. This very well could be because I'm still groggy from sleep, and just don't notice them, but more likely than not they're ignoring me. Michael's viciously mad at me, and I can't say I blame him—I talked to him on the phone without ever hinting anything was wrong, and then I took my anger out on Luke, which, considering the fact that Michael's nearly as protective as I am of his friends, was not my best move. It wasn't my best move in any aspect, really.

I decide to accept Finn's offer to drive me home, so I won't be stuck taking the bus. Stella drove me while we were dating, but I doubt that offer's still on the table. Not that I want to be stuck in a car with her for twenty-five minutes, since that's already insufferable enough with Finn, but it was the one benefit to our relationship. Finn says she hates me, now, doesn't have a nice thing to say about me. I can't say I blame her. I don't have a nice thing to say about me, either.

Finn fills most of the silence with his rambling, barely noticing that he's doing it. I think that's why I don't hang out with him much anymore. He's cool, and is as nice as his subpar grasp of reality allows him to be, but he just lacks any real substance. He's not shallow, per se, but he's not particularly significant. I never would have realized this if I had never let Luke, who's a real kid with thoughts and feelings and aspirations. God, he really set the bar high, didn't he? Ruined everyone else for me forever.

When I get home, there's a note stuck to the refrigerator from Mum asking me to run to the market and pick up some asparagus for dinner. The hardest part is trying to keep it together in front of her—acting the same as I did before this whole thing, indulging her when she asks me how Luke's doing, making up some lie about how he's too busy with his brother visiting to come over, which is why she hasn't seen him in a while. The whole thing is becoming insufferable. Covering it up for everyone's sake is tiring.

Lauren's ten, so she's old enough to stay home with Harry while I run down the street. I kiss them both on the foreheads and promise to be right back, before locking them in. I don't bother take my bike since it's only a block away.

I kick a rock leisurely down the sidewalk, in no rush since Mum won't be home for two hours anyway. When I turn the corner, Luke's house comes into sight. I could say that I completely forgot I had to pass his house to get to the market, but the truth is I've been worried about it since the second I saw the note on the fridge. I consider crossing the street, to avoid walking directly in front of his house, but determine that that would look worse. Michael and Calum's pushbikes are laying on their sides in the front yard, and Luke's curtains are pulled. They must be playing FIFA or something.

"Ashton!" I hear, and my head perks up immediately before the voice registers in my head. It's too deep to be Luke's, even though his voice has recently dropped a few octaves, and if it's too deep to be Luke's than it's definitely not Michael or Calum's. Then I see the guy behind the voice crossing Luke's lawn towards me.

"Uh, yeah?" I ask, wondering what in the hell Luke's brother is doing talking to me. I manage not to bush like a little girl this time.

He approaches me with a wide grin, like he has no idea that his brother hates me. He's wearing a tank top and shorts that come just above his knee. He's barefoot—classic Aussie style.

How does he know my name?

"You're Luke's drummer, right?" he asks. I wonder when Luke told him about me, if it was before or after the silent treatment. Probably before. He barely even mentions me to Calum. Though the band's on a hiatus until (or if) this argument blows over, I nod.

"Yeah, why?"

"You better get going, mate!" he laughs, gesturing towards the garage. "They've been out there practicing for half an hour already. Doesn't sound right without the drums, if you ask me."

They're practicing without me?

It feels like I've just been punched in the gut, but I laugh to cover up my betrayal. It comes out sarcastic and dry, and—much to my dismay—his brother notices, and shoots me a confused look.

"I wasn't invited to band practice," I clarify, hoping desperately that he mentions it to Luke, maybe even his mum, and it all blows up in Luke's face. His mum loves me. She'd be floored if she found out what Luke was doing to me. "Your brother doesn't like me very much. Or, he doesn't like the connotations that come with being my friend."

He quirks an eyebrow. His hands are resting casually on his hips. "What's that supposed to mean?"

I debate whether or not to tell him, because I don't know how he'll react towards me, or worse, Luke. Luke's already getting crap at school, and the last thing he needs is to hear about it at home, too, even if I am mad at him. But on the other hand, maybe his brother could talk some sense into him, right? Lots of guys get accused of being gay with their best friend—the difference is most guys ignore it. Luke wanted to keep the distance in school, be fine in every day life, but I couldn't take that. I couldn't walk around school by myself knowing that he's ashamed of me.

"Luke and I are close," I start, still not sure where I'm going with it. "Sometimes high school boys like to...interpret that a certain way."

He looks at me for a moment, but then he nods, obviously understanding what I mean. I shove my hands in my pockets, ignoring the way that his muscles flex slightly as he rolls his shoulders. "You know, it's not my place to say anything, but sometimes Luke talks about you like it's his day-job," he tells me. I wonder how recently he stopped talking about me like that. "I don't think these 'connotations' will last in the long run. You were his first real friend, you know. He had friends through primary school and everything but never one like you." In other circumstances, my heart my swell at a comment like that, but instead it makes me feel heavy, like instead I have to carry it on my shoulders. My head hangs and I stare at my feet. I kind of wish he would stop talking and let me leave. "I just—I don't know what you did that made him like you so much but for all of our sake I hope things get better between you two. It's been a while since any of us have seen Luke this happy."

It's weird to look at him and listen to him talk about Luke, because they really do have the same face. His is more defined, sure, but he's so obviously related to Luke it pains me to talk to him, knowing I can't actually talk to Luke.

"I'll put in a good word for ya," he grins, clapping a hand on my shoulder and sending me a wink. He doesn't stick around to see that same blush from a week ago creep up my neck and into my cheeks, the embarrassed smile that takes residence on my face. That's one charming guy, I'll say that much.

When I walk by the garage, I hear Luke singing the words to that Busted song he was singing in my ear on the astronomy trip. The memory washes over me and I feel sad all over again. Part of me wishes I could retrace my steps all the way back to the day, choosing to give him perhaps a few comforting words instead of holding onto him for dear life in the grass, but then the other part of me—the less rational of the two—can't stomach even the idea of sitting three feet away from him while he cried into his own shoulder instead of mine. Maybe things are kind of messed up now, but if I could go back in time, I would do the same thing all over again.

***

When Calum comes into the music room, I'm sitting on the edge of a table, my toes just barely touching the floor as I kick my feet. He smiles at me despite our last interaction being a negative one, but I don't smile back. He's been on their side the whole time. That's pretty clear now.

"Ready to write?" he asks, completely oblivious to my contempt. I don't move as he drops his backpack on the table, fishing for the teal notebook with all of our lyrics, both scrapped and works in progress.

"You're having band practice without me," I say, once I realize there's no way to sugarcoat it, no way to make it sound any less pathetic than it is. He stops what he's doing, lowering his hands to his side. He looks completely caught off guard. Good.

"It wasn't my idea," he protests. "Luke said you were fine with it."

I scoff. "What makes you think I'd be fine with my band moving on without me?" He doesn't flinch, even as my voice raises. "What makes you think Luke had even talked to me? This whole thing is because he won't!"

"No, Ashton, this whole thing is because of you!" he snaps, finally. Calum gives me tough love but he's never yelled at me, never insulted me like that. I open my mouth to retort but he cuts me off. "Luke wanted some space in school so that people would stop harassing him, and you decided to take it personally."

"Because it was personal!" I snap. "It was personal when he decided that what people thought of him was more important than being a good friend." I've always treated Luke with respect. All those people that made me feel like he was something to be embarrassed about made no impression on me, and he couldn't even give me the same decency.

"Just because you're in love with him doesn't mean the feeling's mutual, Ashton," he spits, and I think for a second that maybe it was the heat of the moment, but his face doesn't falter. "He's your whole fucking world, whether you admit it or not. Just because you'd drop everything for Luke doesn't mean he'd do the same for you. You can't ask him to choose between you and the band and you know that. So stop moping and get over it, Ashton, because the victim-shtick is getting real old."

I want to fire something vicious back at him, if not to prove him wrong then at least to save face, but I have nothing to say. What could I possibly say to that? He's not wrong. The second Luke needs me, I'm there. I drop everything for him at a moment's notice and I don't even think about it. I gave up my friends for him. I broke up with my girlfriend for him. I ditched parties and skipped class time and time again for him, and every time he gets mad at me I'm always the one apologizing, even if it wasn't my fault. I don't know where the lines started to blur, when I started needing him so bad that I couldn't even function properly without him around. I used to have integrity, and now I'm just half a person, only full when he's there. God, I'm a mess, aren't I? I've always been a bit of a mess but this is just...This is pathetic. I'm pathetic.

"Ashton, if you really don't have feelings for Luke, fine. Fair enough. I'm not in your head, I have no way of knowing, so if you say you don't then I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and leave it alone," he says, more tame this time. Calum's a good friend. With Luke out of the picture, he's probably my best friend. He gets me, all my fucked up thoughts, and he's not afraid to tear me open and let me bleed if that's what it takes for me to admit there's something wrong. He does what he does because he cares. I get this. "Just—just make sure that whatever you're doing, you're doing it for you, because it makes you happy, and not because you're trying to fit a mold, okay?"

I nod, ignoring the bulk of what he says for my own sanity and just absorbing the second half.

He tosses the notebook onto the table next to me. "Now, are we gonna finish that song, or what?"

***

Calum and I finish the song. It's not the best song out there, but it's something we've written together, with no help. He thinks we should step away from it for a bit and then come back to it, see if there's anything we want to change with a fresh perspective, which seems like a good idea to me. We don't talk about the conversation we had on Monday, but I spend every second that I'm alone thinking about it, while I shower, while I eat breakfast, while I'm trying to fall asleep at night. My knee-jerk reaction is to say he's wrong, but for once, it's not being forced on me. Calum just wants to know what my truth is. I thought I knew what it was until I realized there was more than one option.

I manage to find a party that is in no way connected Stella, since it's a Uni party. Finn briefly mentions it, as his older brother is the host. He tells me I'm free to go, if I want, but that he doesn't know if he'll make it.

I've never met his brother, so my only way of knowing I'm at the right house is because the music is so loud that I can feel it vibrating in my chest even as I stand across the lawn on the sidewalk. The door is open, and the attendees are spilling out onto the front porch. There are groups of guys laughing and horsing around and people making out and feeling each other up. It's basically a free-for-all. I regret not drinking anything before coming here.

Regardless, I take a deep breath, and venture across the lawn to the front steps. Once I'm inside, nobody spares me a glance, even as I elbow past them. Most of the guys here are the hyper-masculine type, and most of the girls are very scantily clad. It feels like something straight out of a movie, but I decide not to take digs at anyone since I'm undoubtedly the youngest person here. I just want to find the booze.

After a few minutes of getting pushed around by people drunk-dancing on me, I find the kitchen. There are bottles and bottles of spirits, and I feel so overwhelmed by the choices that I just grab a plastic cup and fill it halfway with vodka so I don't have to venture over here again. I must stick out like a sore thumb, even with my hair left natural and curly instead of in its typical straightened fringe. I don't know how to make myself look older. Maybe not showing up in a graphic t-shirt and salmon-colored pants, huh?

I chug what's in my cup until it burns too much to continue; I made a point to show up with an empty stomach so it hits me faster, but even then it takes a few minutes to feel it. I drink whats left and toss the cup on the ground. I must have six, seven shots in me now? Maybe not my best idea.

Once I'm good and drunk, I become quite the socialite. I dance with strangers, grab random girls by the hips and relish in the way they grind on me, make older guys laugh some crude jokes about the girls, and at one point end up surrounded by a circle of people as some random guy and I race to see who can chug a pint of beer faster. By some miracle I win—even though it's Heineken and I hate dark beer—and people cheer for me and it feels great. By the end of the night it's no secret that I'm not a Uni kid, but for whatever reason, they like me anyway. High school parties always have so much drama going on that it can sometimes ruin the fun—this party, however, everyone is too drunk to care.

With nothing in my stomach but several shots of liquor and a few pints of beer, I try to find my way to the bathroom so I don't end up like one of the guys throwing up on the front lawn outside, but the house is big and I'm really, really drunk. I open doors, completely indifferent to the number of people hooking up that I accidentally walk in on, until I find myself in a hallway that I don't remember being in yet. Am I really this drunk?

I stop to lean against the wall, dizzy from walking in circles. I close my eyes. What time is it? Did I tell Mum I was leaving? How do I get home from here?

"Well, if it isn't the life of the party!" I hear from behind me. I open my eyes and turn my head to see who it is without moving my body. I don't recognize him; he looks the same as all the other guys here, except there's something about the way he looks at me that's different from the rest of them. His cheeks are red, lips glossed over. Obviously intoxicated but not as drunk as me. I'm not sure anyone here is as drunk as me. I don't think to say anything, so I just stare at him until he speaks again. "I'm Charlie," he calls over the music. Charlie? I didn't know there were people named Charlie that weren't, like, children. Huh.

"Ashton!" I reply. He smiles down at me. He's a few inches taller than me, but that might be because I'm leaning against the wall.

"I like your pants," he tells me, and I have to look down and see what he's talking about because I forgot I was wearing these ugly pink pants. I definitely don't look as cool as I feel, right about now. "Don't look like the kind of guy who grinds on girls and jokes about pussy, but we're all full of surprises, right?"

What is he even saying? God, I have to throw up. I should ask him where the bathroom is. I wonder if he knows. Maybe he's here because he was gonna ask me the same thing. I sure hope not, because then we're both screwed.

"You're goddamn cute, you know," he says, leaning an arm on the wall over my shoulder. He's looking me right in the eyes, smiling this charming smile, and I don't know how to react for a second. He is very alluring, and I don't think you have to be gay to see that. The tank top he's wearing shows doesn't leave much to the imagination, as his defined arms and chest are in plain view. I wonder if he's dressed like that on purpose.

Calum wanted me to do what makes me happy, right?

I maintain his eye contact despite how dizzy it makes me, and then he moves in slowly, and all the sudden I'm kissing this random Uni guy and I'm drunk, obviously very, very, drunk, but even exchanging sloppy, drunk kisses with this guy I've never met feels better than any kiss I ever gave Stella, having my hand on his hip beneath his shirt feels better than all the times I felt her up, and maybe, just maybe, it's because I'm drunk, but this realization sobers me up pretty quickly. He presses me against the wall and moves his lips to my jaw, my neck, and then, despite the amount of alcohol in my system, I realize I'm getting hard. I grab his face and I pull him away from me, and then he's looking in my eyes, still smiling, like he's too messed up to realize that I'm freaking out.

"I'll be right back," I lie, God, it's such a lie, and he just nods, but as I look back over my shoulder I see him wandering in the opposite direction. Oh, God. No, no, it's good if he forgets, because if he forgets, I can forget, too, right? He's just some random guy and I'm so shitfaced I can barely remember where I am, so it doesn't mean anything, of course it doesn't. I don't have to tell Calum about it. It doesn't change anything.

I end up outside, stumbling drunkenly down the sidewalk. All I want to do is go back and find him, finish what we started, because all those times I thought I just hadn't found the right girl yet are starting to make sense. As much sense as they can in my jumbled brain, at least. God it's—it's one thing for people to think that I'm—but I can't actually be, right? Everyone's just been so in my face about it that it's worked its way into my subconscious, under my skin.

I wander down the street until I see the familiar house, the one that I've been basically barred from, and all for nothing. All the connotations weren't just connotations, were they? Luke—he was onto something when he decided to stop hanging around with me in school and I was so in denial that I didn't even realize why it hurt so much. He wasn't rejecting the connotations, he was rejecting me.

"Luke!" I yell below his bedroom window, trying my best to maintain my balance. I wait for him to open his window, or anything, but when he doesn't, I call his name again. And again and again and again. His front door swings open, then, and then I see him, looking at me like I'm insane. He's wearing a Welcome to Paradise shirt, a pair of jeans that are unbuttoned like he only just pulled them on, and no shoes. His hair is messy. I hope I didn't wake him up. What time is it, anyway? The only light comes from the streetlights and the moon.

"Ash?" he hisses, closing the door behind me and walking over to me. "What do you—are you drunk?"

I stagger backwards involuntarily, swaying even as I try my very best to maintain my balance. "Of course not!" I slur. "I'm just very happy to see you."

"Jesus Christ, Ash," he sighs, coming to my aid and wrapping an arm around me as I nearly fall. I instinctively turn my head and bury my face in his neck. He smells like a mix of sweat and that canned deodorant that teenage boys wear, and it's nothing like the guy from the party, who smelled like cologne and vodka. It's so much better. It smells just like him. God, I've missed him. Whether it's the alcohol or simply a pure reaction, my vision blurs, and warm tears begin to streak down my cheeks, pooling in the dip of his collarbone. He turns his head as if to look at me, but I keep my face in his neck so he can't see me crying. "God, Ash, you're a mess."

I know. God, do I know.

He helps me inside, but I don't stop crying. He shushes me, telling me I'm gonna wake his parents if I'm not careful, but it's impossible to keep it in. Tonight was supposed to be a chance to get away from everything that was going on, and it ended up blowing up in my face, ruining everything. There's nothing wrong with living in a bubble. I mean, is living a lie so bad if you don't know that it's a lie? Why do I have to push boundaries? Why do I have to show up to parties I shouldn't even be at and make out with people I shouldn't be making out with? Why do things have to change? Why?

When we reach his room, he sits me down on his bed, and my eyes immediately land on my hands tangled in my lap, too afraid to look him in the eyes. He's just standing there, probably staring at me, and I just can't bear to see it. It's different than the last time he saw me cry. This time the tears just keep coming and coming, and my throat burns from trying to hold back the sobs, and I'm drunk, and it's all worse than last time. Everything is so brutally honest when you're drunk. I can't hide myself when I'm like this.

He takes a step closer to me, and then he stops, and then slowly he takes another step. I feel his fingers at my side, slipping up under the t-shirt I'm wearing. I probably only beat that guy at chugging beer because half of it ended up spilled down the front of my shirt, which I don't realize until Luke is pulling it up over my head. He tosses the shirt on the ground, and then crosses the room. When he returns, he slips a clean t-shirt over my head, wrangling my arms through the sleeves, and then he grabs my arms just above the elbows, pulling me to my feet. I'm still crying. I don't know what I expect him to do, but when he wraps his arms around me, hand tangled in my hair as I sob into his shoulder, I thank whatever force has driven me back to him, even if I feel like nothing is ever going to be right again. At least I'm falling apart in his arms. At least.

"She was right," I hiccup. I don't know how I'm ever going to pry my arms off of him. Another sob racks my body. "Stella, she was right, wasn't she?"

He doesn't say a word as he tightens his hold on me. I don't know what it means, but I let it feel comforting, because he's holding me and I'm holding him, and not everything has to make sense all the time. Sometimes all that matters is how you feel, and in this moment, he is all that I can feel, inside and out.

***

When I wake up the next morning, my head is throbbing, and my stomach churns from the amount of alcohol still in my system. My throat burns. I peek through my closed eyes to find the curtains pulled shut, not a single light on. I open them the rest of the way, and see Luke laying on his side facing me. I'm confused for a minute. What's he doing here? Is this one of those false awakenings? Am I about to wake up from another dream? God, I hope not. He's looking right at me. I smile when I see him, despite this being arguably the worst hangover I've ever had.

"Good morning," he says, a small smile playing at his lips. I want to reach out and touch him, but I'm just so happy to see him smile at me that I keep my hands where they are. I recognize his sheets, so I must be at his house. How did I get here from the party last night? I didn't even know how to get to my own house. How did I find his instead?

"Not very good," I wince. It's hard to be happy when I feel this sick, but he makes it easier.

He sits up abruptly, and I want to grab him, make him stay, but I can barely move without feeling like I might be sick. I want to go back to sleep but I don't want him to disappear. He grabs something off his nightstand, turning back to me to offer me an aspirin and a bottle of water. Our hands touch as I grab the aspirin. I'm definitely not dreaming.

I sit up slowly, popping the aspirin and drinking half the bottle of water before laying back down. I lay my hand over my forehead, brushing my hair out of my eyes. My head feels hot.

"I've never seen you with curly hair," he says. I'm not looking at him but I can hear the smile in his voice. I run a hand through my hair, curls tangling in my fingers. I forgot I rocked my natural hair at the party last night. I turn to look at him then, desperate to see his smile for myself. He twirls a curl around his finger, still grinning, and then drops his hand back to his lap. "I like it. You should keep it like that."

I laugh lightly, weary of my headache. "Don't like the fringe?" I tease.

"Who wouldn't?" he jokes back. My heart swells, and it's not just the heartburn. "But the curls are goddamn cute."

As he says that, a tide of memories form last night hit me like one big tsunami. A guy called me cute last night. A guy called me goddamn cute last night and then I kissed him, and it felt right. Wrong, but still so right. God. God, I didn't say anything to Luke, did I? If he thinks that I'm—no, I couldn't have possibly said anything. He wouldn't have slept in the same bed as me last night if he thought that I was.

"What am I doing here?" I ask, finally. Not that I mind but I'm missing chunks of my night last night and I just need to make sure I didn't do anything stupid. I probably did, knowing me.

He breaks my eye contact then, moving his gaze to his hands. He's sitting with a one leg tucked underneath him, the other dangling off the bed. He's wearing cuffed sweatpants and a Green Day shirt. This makes me suddenly aware that I'm not wearing any pants as my legs rub together underneath the blanket, my favorite salmon-colored pants laying in a pile on the floor by my shoes and t-shirt. I look down to see I'm wearing his favorite Busted shirt.

"You showed up outside my house calling my name," he shrugs. God. It sounds just like Say Anything, except if Lloyd showed up outside Diane's window with no boombox and just screamed drunkenly at her. I'm such a romantic. "It was late and I didn't want to walk you all the way home so I brought you inside and you passed out almost immediately."

"That's it?" I ask. The yelling his name part is a bit embarrassing, but if that's as bad as it got, then I'm actually pretty proud of myself considering what happened before I showed up.

He nods. "That's it."

I sit up too quickly, my head pounding in response. He looks at me expectantly, and suddenly I regret deciding to say anything at all.

"Luke..." I start, and then stop. I don't know how to say it. "I'm—I'm sorry." He smiles gently, eyebrows furrowed slightly, like he didn't expect me to apologize. Why wouldn't he? I always come crawling back to him, don't I? "I was an ass. If you want to keep some distance at school, I'm okay with that. I will be. Just don't—don't kick me out of the band."

He laughs disbelievingly. "Ash—"

"I know you were having band practice without me," I explain, and his eyes shift to his hands. "I'm not mad. Well, anymore. I can't ask you to pick between me and the band. I know you'll always choose the band." He opens his mouth to say something. "It's not personal. The band is your dream. I know that. And I just—I want to be a part of that. So I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he laughs, like he can't even believe he has to say it. "And you know, I'd rather hang out with you in school and have a few people think we're gay than to not see you at all." He leans in closer to me as he says, "I mean, who else am I supposed to skip class with?"

I don't know what to say, partly because my hangover has me at half brain capacity, but mostly because he leaves me speechless, always does. He really is such a kind soul, even if it's sometimes hindered by being a teenage boy and wanting to fit in. In the end he always does what's right. It's what I admire about him. He's still growing, still maturing, but I can tell he's going to grow into an amazing person. He's already grown so much in two months, I can't imagine where he'll be in four, five years.

It doesn't matter if it's platonic or romantic, because in the end what I feel for Luke is the same: he's everything to me. He's turned my whole life around; he became my purpose when I didn't have one. I protected him, and he protected me, and he's my person, the one I can talk about myself to and not feel guilty about it, and now we're in a band together, and with him as our frontman, I don't doubt that we'll be famous one day. He is all that matters to me.

I lurch forward and throw my arms around him, pulling him back on the bed with my. I hug him tightly as he laughs at me, and I laugh, too, despite how much it hurts. I plant a big kiss on his shoulder and he snickers at me, trying to squirm out of my grip, so I roll over until he's pinned beneath me. I pull my face from his neck, laughs spilling from our mouths, and I look him in the eyes. I can feel his breath on my chin. I could kiss him, if I wanted to. There's a part of me that considers it, just to see what it would feel like, but the part of me that isn't still drunk from last night knows that it's not worth the risk. If I messed something up, I'd never get to hear this boy laugh ever again, and I can't even imagine what a gloomy life that would be.

He rolls us over so he's on top of me, and then he climbs off of me, and then the bed entirely. He smiles so big his eye crinkle. "Let's go get breakfast," he says, and then the moment is gone.

God, I missed him.

***

I should tell him, shouldn't I?

If not Luke, then I should at least tell Calum what happened. Calum's good at rationalizing things, putting them in perspective. I'm in a situation where I'm realizing I might not know myself as well as I think I do, but then again, I also feel like maybe this whole thing has messed with my head, and now I'm not sure what's right and what isn't. So maybe I was attracted to one dude enough to kiss him, but I was also drunk. And maybe I haven't been able to look at Luke all day without thinking about kissing him, but he's Luke. He's the reason everyone started asking me if I were gay, so, naturally, he'd be the one at the center of this confusion, right?

We decide to have band practice, mostly because Luke feels guilty. I don't want him to feel guilty, considering the bulk of it was my fault, but I'm excited for any excuse to play with them again. My drums have sat in Luke's garage since we first started fighting, so I've only been able to play on the ones in the music room. I missed my babies. We practice Teenage Dirtbag a few more times. Luke wants to record it and post it soon, but Michael wants to practice more before we record anything. I think we sound great, but I'm also glad that Michael's showing some responsibility for once. I know the guys love the band, and that they—Luke especially—want it to become something, but they won't get anywhere if they don't start taking this seriously.

Luke has his electric guitar out, plugged into the amp he's sitting on. He's playing a simple riff on loop, and I'm sitting at my drums doodling my name onto my drumsticks in sharpie. Michael has Calum in a headlock on the floor as they wrestle and argue about who would be the Ultimate Fighting Champion; they could be the only two participants and they would both still lose, but I don't say anything. 

Luke starts plucking at strings, mumbling frustrations under his breath as he fumbles with a few chords. I recognize the song but I don't remember what it is. Michael and Calum knock into my drums, messing up the 'Ash' on my second drumstick. "Fuck off," I groan, whipping the ruined drumstick at them, missing Michael's face by just a few inches as it bounces off the ground and rolls out onto Luke's driveway. Michael laughs sadistically at me, a playful grin on his face. Calum takes this opportunity to grab Michael's leg, wrapping his own legs around Michael's other free one in a scissor lock.

The song transitions to an easier part which Luke begins to play effortlessly. "What's the deal with my brain? Why am I so obviously insane?" he sings, smile tugging at the corner of his lip. Calum lets go of Michael as they lay there on the ground, short of breath. "In a perfect situation I let love down the drain," Michael joins in with him, laughing. Calum shoots me a pointed look, but I pretend not to notice as I join in with them. "There's the pitch, slow and straight, all I have to do is swing and I'm the hero, but I'm the zero."

Luke turns back and smiles at me for a short second before turning forward again, and I try to push the thought of kissing him to the back of my head. "Singing, o-oh, o-oh, o-oh!" he belts, and the rest of us are singing but Luke's the loudest, which only makes sense because he's the best. I lose myself in it for a moment, because Luke is sitting there putting his whole body into playing guitar, and Michael and Calum are sitting on the floor with their arms around each other, and we're all just singing, not with the goal to sound good but just because we're caught up in the moment, and it's the best I've felt in a long time. I've always loved playing the drums but I've never felt so consumed by music, like it's the one thing I can see myself doing for the rest of my life and love, love, loving it right up until the day I die. They were really onto something with this band, weren't they? I thought it was all for fun but this...this could be something, if we really wanted it to be.

We keep singing, waiting for each other to stop, but no one does so we sing the whole song through. Once Luke strums the last chord, it fades out on the amp until we're sat in silence, and it lingers over our head for a moment before everyone erupts into laughter as if on cue. I sit on my drumseat, staring out at my band with the dopiest smile on my face. Luke turns and looks at me, and he smiles the same dorky smile as me, and then he just nods, like we're thinking the exact same thing.

I hope we are.

***

About two weeks before Christmas, once we've finished our final exams, we finally upload the cover of Teenage Dirtbag, and it's only because we've all managed to convince Michael that it's good. 'Good? I don't want good! I want epic!' he had said, over and over and over until we'd eventually told him that we were posting it no matter what he said. He grumbled about not being real musicians, but stopped protesting long enough for us to put it on Youtube. They'd already developed a bit of a following before I joined the band—just a few hundred followers but it's more than I thought they'd have. The first comment just says, 'you guys could be famous!'  The guys don't stop talking about it, and it makes me feel warm inside to see them so excited about something. It's sparking their passion. That's awesome.

Calum and I don't talk about what happened at the party, considering I never actually tell him, and Luke and I don't talk about the night I showed up drunk at his house. I try to joke about it, but he doesn't seem to find it very funny despite forcing a laugh every time I bring it up, so eventually I let it go. It must've been a bad night for him, having his ex-best friend show up outside his house drunk and yelling, but I feel like we've gotten closer since then. We hang out nearly every day now, just to watch movies or listen to music, if not for band practice. Sometimes people still give us crap in school, but Luke's gotten more confrontational than before, telling people to piss off and mind their own business when they approach us. It's a change of pace, definitely, but I'm proud to see him stand up for himself—for me.

Calum and I clean up the song we wrote a bit, but for the most part like it just how it is. We don't tell the guys about it, or talk about it, really, because there still seems to be some controversy in regards to who or what it's about. I don't talk to Calum about Luke, or how confused I've been lately, even though I know I can trust him to keep it between the two of us. I think it's just because saying it out loud would make it real, and I am, quite frankly, very terrified of that. If I keep it inside then it's just this abstract idea that I never feel obligated to act on. Right?

Michael pitches the idea of going to dinner at a fancy restaurant to 'celebrate our impending fame'—mostly he's joking, but we decide to go anyway. I'm not particularly acquainted with the high life, given my current economic standing and all, and Michael and Calum just aren't the type, so Luke sheepishly picks a restaurant on the bay that none of us have ever heard of, and Calum offers to make the reservation despite me being the most outgoing of the four of us. If he wants to branch out, good for him.

When I get to the restaurant, I'm wearing a forest green dress shirt, black pants, and a pair of Oxfords I've only wore once before, and my curls are left natural but neatly combed back; however, I still feel unbelievably out of place. It's not not a 5-star gourmet restaurant, but it's obviously higher-end, as there are a lot of wealthy-looking people here. The hostess takes me through the restaurant, and out a set of glass doors at the back to a patio area directly on the bay. There are strings of lights coiled around the railings, and the outdoor tables are built of distressed wood with a single red flower—a carnation I think—vased in the center. I spot Luke at one of the tables looking down at a menu. It's a table for two.

The hostess leaves me at the table, where I stare down at Luke dumbfounded. He notices me and smiles obliviously, before noticing my confusing. 

"Cal and Mikey couldn't make it," he says nonchalantly—and of course he's not concerned, of course, because he has absolutely no reason to believe that they would set him up. It's me they're setting up. Goddamn me, and really, Luke's so uninvolved in this whole scandal of mine that of course he doesn't think anything's off. Michael and Calum are always canceling. They're flakes. It's who they are. So of course, it only makes sense that they won't be here tonight, of all nights. Of fucking course.

I sit down across from him, pretending there aren't air raid sirens going off in my head. "Why not?" I ask casually.

He shrugs. "Michael said they were about to leave when he got a notification that The X-Files was on Netflix, so they cancelled to stay in and watch it," he explains. God, I've made out with a guy and they're still gayer than me. Like a married couple or something. "I was already here when they called me."

That's the best they could come up with? Knowing Michael, I would've thought it'd been more along the lines of 'the Prime Minister's coming over for dinner and Calum's been dying to meet him' or maybe 'NASA called earlier looking for the first teenagers to visit the moon and we couldn't say no'. Where's the imagination? Shameful, just shameful.

I nod anyway, as if I completely understand. In a way I do. I should've known they were going to bail, but I just thought we could have one nice outing as a band without someone bailing or messing something up. I should've known better—Michael said we were brothers and I made the mistake of interpreting that in a positive manner. My only brother is too young for me to get it, but brothers are horrible to each other, aren't they? Luke has two older brothers, so it's no wonder he's used to Michael and Calum.

Luke's wearing a maroon dress shirt beneath a simple black blazer, black pants, and boat shoes. He got his hair cut a week or so ago, and it's brushed back a bit like mine. I hold back a small laugh—this is obviously not Luke's first rodeo, though, knowing his mum, I doubt he picked out his own clothes. It's endearing, really. If I had thought I'd be one-on-one with Luke tonight, maybe I would've asked my mum for wardrobe advice, too.

The silence is a lot less tense than I worried it might be, probably because Luke's completely oblivious to Michael and Calum's ulterior motives. It's like the other silences we share, comfortable and undemanding, not needing to be nourished constantly out of fear that the other might get bored. I'm in my own head, and he's in his own head, but we're both aware of that and okay with it. 

A waiter comes to take our order, a twenty-something-year-old man with light stubble and combed back hair, a bit on the small side but still fit. He has a nice smile, the kind that makes you feel like you're amongst friends even if you've never met him. I order the cod because it's the only thing I'm familiar with on the menu, and Luke orders some other fish I've never heard of, and then the waiter flashes me a smile before leaving. I have to focus on pulling my eyes off of him as he leaves.

I look back at Luke who is already looking at me, just the ghost of a grin left as he gives me an indecipherable look. I hope he didn't notice me staring. I didn't mean it, it's just...I don't know. It's hard to look at guys the same with everything going on in my head. It doesn't mean I'm attracted to the guy, but I can say he's attractive, right? There's nothing wrong with that. Girls tell their girlfriends they're pretty all the time and no one thinks they're gay for it. I can think a man is attractive without being attracted to him, whether people find that weird or not.

When the waiter brings us our food, he tells us that the fish is fresh, and I make a lame joke about how it better be if we're eating right on the ocean. I feel a sense of satisfaction when he laughs, touching my shoulder momentarily. He smiles at me again before leaving us to our meal. I try not to trail him with my eyes this time. I'm not making this up, right? He's at least a little bit into me—he's been paying more attention to me than Luke, and since he's waiting on both of us he shouldn't be doing that, right? He's into me and I'm loving it. God, I'm so messed up. I'm supposed to be here with Luke, my best friend who looks goddamn good tonight, and here I am relishing in the fact that a waiter—a guy nonetheless—is flirting with me. God. What's wrong with me?

Luke's wearing the same expression as before, but smiles when we make eye contact. I hope he can't tell. I'm a very outgoing guy, he knows that. I talk to strangers all the time. I doubt he's going to assume anything's changed.

I try to keep the conversation light while we eat, despite all of these things swirling around in my brain that I feel like I should be talking about. I crack jokes about the guys, about Stella, even about meeting his brother, which he had only known because Jack did, apparently, put in a good word for me like he said he would. I tell him about our minor exchanges and that he seems like a real nice guy, but I gloss over everything he said about how Luke talks about me 'like it's his day-job'. He says that Jack is his favorite brother (jokingly, of course, but also not) and then apologizes if Jack said anything strange.

I wonder if telling me that Luke talks about me all the time qualifies as 'strange'.

By the end of dinner, I'm barely thinking about Michael or Calum, or how they set me up tonight, or even that Calum obviously said something to Michael about me for this whole thing to happen. I tell the attractive waiter that this is the best service I've ever had because I just can't help it, and he tells me that I'm the best person he's served in a while. The look he gives me as he leaves sends chills down my spine, but I pretend not to notice so Luke doesn't think anything's off.

We end up back at his house, because Jack's gone and his parents are out. Luke gives me a pair of sweats and a blink-182 shirt, and once we've both changed, we end up on the couch in his living room. I'm sitting upright, and Luke's laying down with his feet in my lap. I have a hand wrapped loosely around his ankle as he scrolls through the TV guide.

"Say Anything!" I yell as soon as I see it, without a second thought. He turns his head slightly to look at me with a bemused yet judgmental look on his face.

 "Isn't that movie from like, the 80s, or something? And American?" he asks.

I drop my mouth open. "All the best movies are American," I say. "The Godfather, Casablanca, Pulp Fiction—Reservoir Dogs!"

"Ash, this is an American rom-com from the 80s. This is nothing like any of those." 

I snatch the remote from him and put it on anyway.

We sit on the couch and watch the whole movie through, and I'll be damned if I see Luke blink once. He tears up when Lloyd shows up outside Diane's window with the boombox playing In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel. I don't call him out. "I always hated that she didn't get out of bed," I say instead. "If somebody's standing outside your window playing a song for you in the middle of the night, you get out of bed, and you meet them at the window because they are obviously in love with you."

Luke half-shrugs. "She was in a bad place," he says. I pretend not to notice his small sniffle. "Lloyd knows that. If he really loves her, he'll wait for her."

At the end when Diane shows up at the boxing ring, I smile, because Luke was right. He loves her, so he waits for her.

"I need you," she says, and Luke gasps a little. I get so excited that I shift from underneath his feet and I lay so that I'm propped up on one elbow behind him, holding tightly onto his arm in anticipation. 

"You do?" Lloyd says.

"Everything else means nothing to me. If I hurt you again I'll die."

"Hurt me again? Not a chance, don't worry about it."  Luke tenses slightly, and I don't let go of his arm.

"I love you."

"What?"

"I love you," I whisper with Diane. Luke slowly turns to look me right in the eyes. I search for some indication of why he's doing it, but come up short as I continue, "How many more times do I have to say it?"

The rest of the movie falls into a soft buzz in the background as he looks me in the eyes, his mouth slightly agape. My breath catches in my throat but I try not to let it show, even as the whole world slows to a stop around us. There's only ten minutes left of the movie. Ten minutes, and then I can go home, and all of this will be forgotten in the morning. I should sit up, I know I should, so we can finish the movie, but he just keeps looking at me, and I get this tight feeling in my chest like I don't know what I should do, and then I just kiss him. I kiss him because even though I know I shouldn't, I haven't stopped thinking about it for days, and maybe he doesn't feel the same way, but I can't go forever without just doing it, because he is everything to me, and despite denying it I've known deep down that Calum was right. The song was about Luke, even if I couldn't admit it to myself, but I don't want it be about him. I don't want to have a song about Luke called Everything I Didn't Say, because I want to say it all. I don't want to carry this around inside me, even if it means he hates me forever. Luke showed me that you have to chase what you want. So I'll chase him.

I swear he kisses me back, which shocks me to my core, so for some reason I pull away to look at him. I'm hovering over him, and he's just laying there, hair rustled by the arm of the couch, eyebrows furrowed as he shakes his head lightly. "Ash, I'm not—"

"Stop," I cut him off. My heart drops to my stomach, that way that it does the moment after you fuck up monumentally. When you do something so stupid that all you can do is pray that it's all just a dream, that you're about to wake up, but you never do. And when you realize that it's real life, that you're awake, you pray that by some miracle the clocks will shift back, and you'll have that second chance to do the right thing. But you don't wake up, and the clocks don't shift back, and you're stuck, sitting in that moment, wondering why you were even born. I shouldn't have done it. I didn't want to keep it inside but now that I'm looking the consequences in the eyes, I realize that I should've kept it all inside because at least then I would've had him, in some capacity or another, forever. But instead I screwed it up.

He stares up at me, shifting the slightest bit underneath me as I search for anything to say. I stare at a spot on the arm of the couch just next to his head, because I want to look at him but I'm too terrified to, and then I open my mouth to say something but nothing comes out. I shake my head. 

"I—" I stop as a lump grows in my throat. There's a distant ringing in my ears, but I try to pretend it's not there, like I'm not moments from mentally collapsing. "I shouldn't have—that was stupid, Luke, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I shouldn't have—God, I was caught in the moment and I just—just—"

I throw my feet onto the floor, getting as far from him as I possibly can because he's probably terrified of me right now. I stand there, the sound of a commercial for a kitchen cleaner or something playing ironically in the background—what I'd give for some quick fix for this mess.

He doesn't sit up—in fact, he barely moves, instead laying in the same position, mouth still dropped open, staring downward with his hands still half-suspended in the air where they were originally grasping my sides. It's too late. I can apologize a million times, say I didn't mean it, but the damage is done. Nothing I can say will fix this.

I hurry out the door before he has the chance to say anything to me. I don't think he'd insult me but I don't want to hear his pity or his awkward sympathy, either. A part of me would rather he called me a faggot and tell me to get out than to hear him feel sorry for the sad, confused gay kid. God. As if being gay isn't bad enough, but to fall for my best friend? My best friend who's two years younger than me and not even—the whole thing is pathetic. Being closeted is easy when you don't even know you're in the closet, but Calum grabbed me by my ankles and dragged me out kicking and screaming. What the hell were they thinking doing this to me?

The entire walk to Michael's house, I don't shed a single tear. My mind is racing so fast it actually feels blank, and I can't even cry because my body is using the only energy it has left to carry me all the way to Michael's house. How fucking dare they do this to me, ruin my life like this. They're gonna kick me out of the band. Even if they don't, I'm gonna have to leave, aren't I? I can't sit there playing music with them knowing that Luke doesn't want me. It was better before I knew, when it was more of a concept than anything. But I'm gay, and I want Luke, need him, and he doesn't want me, and all of that was put out there on the table in less than 60 seconds. God, I'm gonna have to transfer schools and everything. 

How do I move on without him?

I walk right into Michael's house as soon as I notice there isn't a car in the driveway. He and Calum are sitting on the couch in the dark watching some pouty-lipped guy on the TV ramble incoherently at a redheaded woman. They barely notice me until I slam the door behind me, and then they both sit up immediately as Michael pauses the show.

I walked in here thinking I was going to rip into them, yell at them about how they ruined my life and what could they have possibly been thinking, but I can't work up the nerve to say anything as we stare at each other in silence. They wait for me to say something, and I wait for them to say something, but no one knows what to say, and for a moment I think I'm going to start crying, but I just keep holding it in.

"I kissed him," I say after a moment. Calum moves to say something but I don't give him the chance. "You bastards set me up, and you got what you wanted."

They exchange a look, and then Michael looks at me, scooting to the edge of his seat. "Ash—"

"He doesn't want me," I explain with a shrug. I knew that but they didn't believe me. "You think I didn't know something was up?" I continue when they look too scared to try and speak. "I know that I liked him too much. I've always known that, since the first day I met him. But you," I point to Calum, who's staring up at me doe-eyed, "you couldn't just let my deal with it on my own. Everyone at school was calling me gay and you took it and shoved it down my throat, and you pushed me when I didn't want to be pushed and you—it was none of your business! Either of you! You go on and on about how you don't care if I'm gay, and then you insert yourselves right in the middle of the whole thing! You couldn't just let me figure it out on my own! You had to go and play matchmaker and now look what you did!" I point to Michael, seething. "And you! God, I gushed to you about Luke like a little girl and you just encouraged it! How could you do that me? Either of you? We're supposed to be brothers, but you set me up to fall flat on my face and you knew it!"

Michael stands up. "Ashton, you need to calm down."

"I'm not going to calm down!" I yell past the lump in my throat. "He is everything to me and you ruined it!"

I take an angry step towards them, and Michael does the same, shooting me a warning glance. Oh, he's the defender of the innocent now? Gonna protect Calum from me like I'm some rabid animal? If anything, I should punch at least one of them, if not both of them. I'm not a fighter but God, oh God, I could be. Luke was always the exception to that rule. He's the exception to every rule.

"Calm down, Ashton," he tells me again, but it's more of a warning this time than a plea. "You made those choices, not us."

I take another few steps toward them, fuming with rage. If this were a cartoon, I'd be bright red, blowing steam out my ears. "You got into my head! Don't pretend you didn't!" Calum looks at me with a different look than Michael—it's softer, more understanding, whereas Michael's ascending the same level of anger as me. "You made me think that he liked me, and I ended up outing myself for nothing! You ruined everything!"

My throat's raw from yelling, and at this point I just want to go home and lay in my bed and never get up ever again.

"Ashton, you're wearing his Loserkids shirt," Calum says quietly.

I look down at it, greeted by the face of the original Loserkids bunny. So? I'm wearing his sweatpants, too. How does that change a damn thing?

As if reading my thoughts, Calum continues. "I know it doesn't seem like much but—that shirt's almost as old as Luke, dude. He bought that shirt from some garage sale when he was like, eight, or something. He was wearing it when he met Travis Barker last year. I don't even think he's washed it," he laughs, turning to Michael, who chuckles with him. "Michael and I aren't even allowed to touch it and you're—" he gestures to me, "—you're wearing it."

"It's a shirt," I spit, mostly because I don't want to overthink it like I've overthought everything they've ever said to me about Luke. It's just a shirt, and we're best friends, so who gives a shit about a goddamn shirt? It doesn't change anything. 

"I'm not saying he's in love with you because you're wearing his favorite shirt," he says, grinning crookedly. "But if he's willing to let you take the Travis Barker magic out of it...then I think that's worth something."

They laugh lightly, and Michael gives Calum's shoulder a little shove, and I just stand there, not knowing what I should believe.

I leave not long after that, and when I get home, I sneak in through my window so I don't wake Mum. The moment my head hits my pillow, the tears finally come, the sobs eventually rocking me to sleep.

***

Mum leaves early in the morning for work, and I don't wake until noon.

The sun casts a narrow beam of light through a crack in my curtains, hitting me directly in the eyes. I should get up and fix the curtains, but I know that once I'm up, getting back into bed is unjustifiable. If I just lay here all day, I can say that I was just too tired to get up. Harry and Lauren have their last day of school today—I thank whatever lucky star fragments I have left that we're out for the summer now. I can't imagine having to go to school and look at Luke across the hall knowing what I've done.

I turn onto my back and run a hand through my hair, tearing through a few of the knotted curls. There's residue from the small bit of gel I used to comb my it back yesterday, and I'm quite sweaty from having the window open all night. I should shower, but that would mean getting out of bed and putting on clean clothes, which is far too demanding a task for me. I'm still wearing Luke's shirt, and if I showered, then—again—putting it back on would be unjustifiable. The only thing I have the energy to do is lay here in my own grime. I turn my back to the light so that it no longer hits me in the eyes.

The only notifications I have are messages from Calum—nothing to lengthy or sentimental, just things like 'are you okay dude?' or 'things will be okay, promise'. It's nice, but it doesn't really help, because I know that things aren't going to be okay. 

It's not even that I'm gay, or that I kissed him. Luke might have been a bit disoriented about the whole thing, but he's not the kind of guy who would hold it against me—it might be weird for a few days and then it'd be back to normal. But it's the implication. It's the fact that everyone's been calling us gay and I've been deflecting the rumors while in reality I've had this big, stupid crush on him the whole time, and even if I didn't realize it until recently, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, I like Luke, and he doesn't feel the same. So no, things aren't going to be okay, even if they don't ostracize me from the group, because not only are Luke and I on different pages, but I'm not even sure if we're in the same book.

It was just so stupid, wasn't it? I became so obsessed with this kid and I constantly justified it by saying that I was just looking out for him, that he was just my best friend, and I was so goddamn naïve to believe it. Our knuckles would brush against each others and I'd get butterflies in my stomach. I'd say something funny and he would laugh so hard he could barely breathe and my chest would swell. I would cut class and ditch parties and cancel on my girlfriend and I didn't do it because he needed me—I did it because I didn't care where I was, or what I was doing, so long was I was with him. Best friends don't pine after each other. Calum and Michael are my best friends. Luke is my whole world.

Eventually Harry and Lauren get home, and I'm still laying in bed. My stomach growls but I don't think I can will myself to get up, let alone actually stomach anything. I know I should get up. I know. But every time I think about getting up, I think about how much better laying here is, and then I never do. Wallowing in self-pity is pathetic, I know that, but I'm kind of pathetic these days, so what difference does it make?

My door swings open suddenly, and despite my surprise I'm too tired to even flinch. I lift my head the slightest bit to see who's there, and see Lauren staring at me, her pink backpack draped off of one shoulder.

"Ashton, do you feel okay?" she asks after a moment of squinting her eyes at me.

I huff a laugh, but just smile at her. "I'm okay, Lauren."

"Really? Does your tummy hurt or something?" she persists.

I guess I should have some excuse for laying here, shouldn't I? I can't exactly tell a ten-year-old that I ruined my friendship because I'm gay, and that's why I've been in bed for sixteen hours. "I've just got a headache," I tell her. It's not entirely a lie.

Her shoulders fall from their initial offensive position. "Well, alright," she says. "You just tell me if you need anything."

I laugh for the first time today, even if it's just a chuckle. She sounds exactly like Mum when she talks, so grown-up-sounding that I nearly forget how old she is sometimes. She just listens to Mum talk and regurgitates it back out in her ten-year-old voice, but it's sweet anyway.

"C'mere and give me a hug, Lauren," I say with a small smile, and she grins back at me, dropping her bag on the floor and running over to me. She throws herself into my arms and I grab her in a big, tight hug, and I squeeze her until she laughs, and then I squeeze her some more. "I love you, you know that, right?"

I drop her feet back to the floor, and she's still wearing that wild grin when she looks at me. "I love you, too, Ash."

I don't have to be cataclysmic. I'm always tearing myself down and I just...I forget that I don't have to do that if I don't want to. It's okay to be hurt, but I'll always have my family, so what's the point in hating myself for things I can't control? Who cares who likes me, so long as Lauren's here to tell me she loves me and pretend she's Mum when I need it.

"But you stink," she says after a moment, waving her hand in front of her nose and laughing. "Take a shower!"

And then she skips out of the room without a second look back at me. So much for being sentimental.

I eventually pull myself out of bed and into the washroom. I start the shower running and I drop Luke's sweatpants from my legs, kicking them onto the floor. I peel his shirt off of me, too, and I smell it to gauge its soil level, determining that 'not that bad' is good enough for me to put it back on after the shower. I'll just put on extra deodorant and no one will even know—it's not like I'm going anywhere, anyway.

I step under the spray of the shower, and despite being sweaty, my hands and feet are so cold that the hot water feels blistering on my skin. I don't bother turn the temperature down, because the hot water works out the knots in my back from laying in bed all day. Steam swirls from the shower, already fogging up the mirror above the sink. 

I scrub my skin until it's red, hoping that maybe I can scrub this guy off of myself—like with enough soap and hot water I won't be this guy anymore, and everything can go back to normal, and Luke will look at me and think, 'hey, now that's one straight guy' and we can pretend that none of it ever happened. I don't want to feel like this. I don't really have a problem with being gay—my problem lies in the fact that I want Luke so badly, and now he knows it, and we can never be friends again because I ended up falling for him like an idiot. I don't want to not be myself, but I don't want Luke to hate me even more.

I end up standing in the shower for forty minutes trying to determine my next move, but I come up with nothing. I have no idea how I'm supposed to recover from this. I think maybe I should apologize to Michael and Calum, because it's not fair to blame them for my mistakes, my miscalculations, even if they did play a small part in it. They were just trying to be supportive, to help me, and even if it didn't work, I shouldn't blame them. They're younger than me. I should've known better.

When I finally pull myself from the shower, I pull on my own, clean boxer briefs and sweats. I lay Luke's shirt on my bed while I stand in the center of my room shirtless, pretending that I'm not going to put it back on. I pick up my phone and see the same notifications as earlier. I open Calum's messages and try to think of a response, but eventually end up calling him, instead.

The phone rings and rings and rings, but he doesn't end up answering. The texts were from four, five hours ago, so I'm not really surprised that he's not there anymore. The phone beeps and I take a deep breath. What do I say?

"Hey Calum," I start. It probably sounds far too peppy for my current state, so I dial it back a bit. "I just wanted to say I'm doing fine, and also say that I'm sorry to you and Michael for acting like an ass last night. I know everything that happened is my fault and I shouldn't blame you, 'cause at the end of the day I'm the one who kissed him, not you guys. So I just wanted to say thanks, actually, 'cause despite what I said you guys have been good friends, always putting up with my melodramatic shit." I pause, at a sudden loss for words. Am I really gonna do it? I mean, I don't really have any other options, do I? "But it's summer now, and in a month or so I'll be going into year twelve, and I just think that maybe I should be focusing on that. I mean, this is my last year before I have to go to Uni, and with this whole Luke thing now...I don't think I can be in the band anymore." My heart drops to my stomach as I say it—I don't want to leave the band, but I really think it's my only option. Mum needs me to go to Uni and get a good job so I can help her out. I owe that to her. "And this isn't like when Luke and I fought and I just didn't come around for a bit. I mean...I'm out. I'm just out. There's no other way to say it. The band is a nice thought but I'm gonna be eighteen soon so I can't sit around playing in this band and hoping it'll become something when it's just not practical," I say, but I don't really mean it. This band could go really far if they put their minds to it and I know that—I just need to distance myself, make them not want me in the band so it isn't so hard. "Tell the guys I'm sorry, but that I have some drummer friends I can hook you up with if you want. Just text me and I'll send you their numbers." I stay silent for a minute. "Thanks for everything, Cal. I'll see you around."

The second I end the call I feel like crying again, but I'm so tired of crying and moping and being sad. I should start looking for a job or something—I can make some money for Uni and get my mind off of everything. Kill two birds with one stone.

I look for something to eat for lunch, eventually just eating an apple and watching some kid cartoon with Harry and Lauren. After an hour or two I decide to head down to the market to see if I can apply there. It's within walking distance so I don't have to worry about a car, and I've heard that they pay teenagers well.

When I get to the corner where I should turn, I stop in my tracks. If I keep walking straight, I can turn at the next block and avoid having to walk by Luke's house. I doubt he'll be outside, but I'd much rather walk the extra block and pass Michael's house instead. Michael's never at his own house.

So I cross the street, heading down the second block over. When I pass Michael's house, his parents' cars are gone, but then I notice Calum's pushbike pushbike laying down in his front yard, and my stomach drops. I pick up my pace a little, and as I'm nearly out of sight from his house, I hear it.

"Hey, Irwin!" I turn around to see Michael crossing his front yard, fists balled at his sides and face twisted in anger. Oh, shit. Calum got the message, didn't he?

I don't know what else to do, so I do the first thing that comes to mind—I turn and start running in the complete opposite direction as him. 

"Don't you run from me, you coward!" he yells, and lucky for me Michael's never been much of an athlete so I stay pretty far ahead of him. I turn the corner, trying to lose him, but as I look back over my shoulder, I see him still chasing me. What he lacks in speed he makes up for in endurance. Shit. Oh, shit. I start to get tired but I keep running anyway, because Michael could probably kill me if he wanted to, and he probably does right about now. Eventually he's right on my tail, and then he's flying through the air, tackling me to the ground in the middle of the street.

"You bastard!" he yells, raising his fist as if to punch me. I grab him by the wrist, twisting until I'm on top of him, and then he jerks my arm out from underneath me and gets me on my back again. We wrestle in the middle of the street until he grabs a handful of gravel and moves to shove it in my face. 

"Okay, okay, uncle!" I yell, and then he smirks triumphantly, dropping the gravel back on the ground as he sits on my chest.

"Uni? Really, Ashton?!" he yells, hitting me once in the shoulder. "We're not the kind of people who go to Uni!"

I scoff, trying to squirm out from underneath him. He keeps me pinned to the ground. I move to knock him over but he pins my shoulders down with his knees. "I get to do whatever the hell I want!" I yell. "I'll go to Uni and get a good job and support my family if I goddamn please! I offered you another drummer! Now get off of me!"

"No!" he yells. "You're not an outsider, Ashton. So you were the last to join the band. So what? That doesn't make you any less of a member than the rest of us, so why aren't you fighting for this? You're leaving the band? Are you kidding me? You don't get to leave the band, how about that!" A car swerves around us, blaring its horn, but Michael doesn't budge. "You're not in this band just because you can drum. You're in this band because you're Luke's best friend and he wanted you by his side. And this band—we're brothers! All of us! And if we have to cut open our palms and take a blood oath right now just to prove that to you, then let's do it!"

He falls silent for a moment, staring at me with this deranged look in his eyes. I really don't want to cut open my palm, but Michael looks just mad enough to actually do it. At this point I've stopped fighting him.

"Exactly, he says. "Look, Ashton, I don't know you as well as the other guys, but I can tell you're in a weird place, and I don't just mean the stuff with Luke. I can't fix that for you, but what I can tell you is that you're not gonna change anything by moping around. If you want to make up with Luke, then grab life by the balls—not a gay joke—and fucking do it. We're still kids. Even you. So if you want to fix this, there's still time." Part of me is trying to ignore everything he's saying, just wondering when he'll stop talking, but the other part of me knows he's right. I just don't want him to be. "Don't walk through life feeling sorry for yourself. If you're sad, don't act sad. You that thing people say about faking it 'til you make it? It's true. Look for a silver lining, and if there isn't one, make one. But don't complain that everything sucks when you're not doing anything to change it."

He pulls his knees back from my shoulders. My arms are numb from the lack of circulation and Michael is still sitting on my stomach, sharp pebbles stabbing into my back and shoulder blades. I think he's finally done talking, so we're just sitting here in silence, because I really don't have anything to say. He's right. I know he's right. But what good does that do? I can't be in the band. It's not that I don't want to. It just isn't an option anymore. Who wants to see that shitshow? Who wants to go to a concert where two of the members can't even look each other in the eyes? So I'm wrong. Okay. But I never said I was right.

"You're still wearing his goddamn shirt," Michael points out after a long moment of silence. "Goddammit, Ashton, you sad sap."

I shrug as much as I can in my position. Of course I'm still wearing the shirt. Maybe it doesn't smell like him anymore, but after what he and Calum said the other day...of course I'm still wearing the shirt. There's another moment of silence, and Michael still hasn't gotten off of me. I'm not sure I'd be able to get up, anyway.

"Since when did you become a motivational speaker?" I ask, half teasing, half serious. Michael's always been more of the existential, life-is-meaningless kind of guy.

He laughs, shrugging his shoulders.

"This band is changing me, dude," he confesses. "Which is why I'll kick your ass if you break it up."

"Michael?" I ask gently. He hums in response. "Get off of me."

He laughs and punches me in the shoulder, before sliding off of me and collapsing onto the pavement to my side.

These guys don't let me get away with anything.

***

I go over a million different ways to apologize in my head, everything from writing him a letter to dropping to my knees and quoting Sunflower Sutra, but none of them seem genuine. I know the only option is to wing it, but wing it how? I don't want to go to his house, look him in the eyes and see him in all his beautiful glory as I pretend that what I did was a mistake. I didn't mean to do it, but it wasn't a mistake. I regret the consequences but not the action.

I press the doorbell, fighting my urge to run. I spend so much time considering whether or not I should even be here that eventually the door opens, and he's standing there, doe-eyed, mouth slightly ajar as he takes in my presence. With the way he looks at me I'm glad I changed my shirt. I look at him for a long moment, and this wave of sadness wash over me, but I try my best to keep my feet on the shore. He's beautiful. He's beautiful and I can't do anything about it.

"Hi." His voice is gentle, testing the waters.

"Hi," I reply weakly. He bites the corner of his lip, eyes flickering to his feet. He has one hand on the door like he's ready to close it at any moment. Part of me hopes he does—that he just slams the door in my face and all of this can be over. This is the worst thing I've ever done. Who makes a fool of themselves and then shows up for round two? 

He looks up at my face but subtly dodges eye contact, looking out over my shoulder and squinting his eyes in the sun that's setting just over the trees. So it took me 24 hours to work up the nerve to come here, big deal. At least I'm here. "I heard you left the band."

My stomach knots up as I move my gaze to the ground. I can hear a quiet hurt in his voice, but I don't know how that's fair. How could he expect me to stay? How do I just put the whole thing behind me? Being here isn't the hard part. The hard part is looking at him and knowing that I'll never be able to touch him again without it being misconstrued as something intimate. That hard part is knowing that I'm about to lie to him and it's all for nothing, because you can lie and lie and lie to the people around you but you can never consciously lie to yourself. 

Michael asking me to be here and to fix things is Michael asking me to lie to myself. If he needs me to, if he really, really needs me to, then I will, but fuck me if it doesn't hurt like my inside are being gassed and set on fire. Luke never made me pretend to be someone I wasn't, and now here I am, doing it by choice.

"Yeah, well," I respond eventually, shrugging halfheartedly. I don't look up at him.

He opens his mouth to speak but I cut him off before he can protest. I'm too scared of what he has to say to let him say it.

"Look, Luke, I'm just here because..." God, fuck you, Michael Clifford. "Because I fucked up the other night. I mean, that movie is my favorite movie—I mean I've seen it like, twenty times, and so I was just sitting there quoting it and not because I meant it or anything but just...just because. And I got caught up in the moment and I kissed you and I shouldn't have. And that made things weird and I'm not—" I force a chuckle. "—even if I were gay, you're too young for me, anyway. So I just...can we just forget about the whole thing? Go back to the way it was before?"

There's a distant look in his eyes, one I can't quite decipher the meaning of. I know I'm asking a lot for him to forget everything, but I told Michael I would try to fix things. He's right. He doesn't deserve to have his band broken up just because I did something reckless.

A moment of silence stretches out between us, and then he nods, slowly. "Yeah, sure, Ashton," he says. He hasn't called me by my full name since we met. Everything's broken and we're supposed to pretend that it's not and I can't. I just can't fucking do that.

But I do it anyway, and it makes my whole chest ache.

"You mean too much to me to just walk away," I tell him, because I just can't help it. It's the most honest thing I've said since I kissed him.

"I know." It's so quiet it's almost swept away with the wind.

I step backward off the front stoop to indicate that I want to leave, and he stands there for a moment, stepping further into his house to close the door. We both linger there, ready to run in opposite directions.

"I'll see you at the next band practice then," he says awkwardly. This whole interaction feels forced and mechanical. "I'll, uh—I'll text Mikey and he'll let you know...when that is..."

I nod, pretending I'm interested. "Great," I say. It's not great. "See you then."

No one smiles. There's nothing genuine about what went on here.

A loud melancholy follows me all the way home.

***

I don't talk to Luke the next day, and the only conversation I have with Michael or Calum is to text Michael and tell him that I apologized.

The day after that, we still don't have band practice. Instead, Michael texts me and tells me to head over to Luke's for an impromptu band meeting. I reluctantly get out of bed and take off the Loserkids shirt again. I know I shouldn't still be wearing it but it's the last tangible piece of Luke and me before everything went to shit, so when I'm sitting alone in my room I wear it, because it makes me feel better, and because I can.

The walk to Luke's house is humid and sticky, the air heavy from the impending storm. The sky is blanketed in tar-gray clouds, giving this sense of being trapped, closed in. An apocalyptic feeling, even. It's ironic considering the circumstances: I'm about to be trapped in a room with Luke for God knows how long, and if the storm starts during the band meeting I might be stuck there even longer. Great.

When I get to Luke's house, I wander into the garage to find the guys already there, a few chairs laid out in messy circle. The moment Luke sees me he looks back to the ground, but the split second of eye contact sends shivers down my spine. Michael and Calum are sitting next to each other, so I stay standing instead of sitting next to Luke, shoving my hands in my pockets. I raise my eyebrows as if to ask what we're here for, and Luke does the same thing. Michael looks between me and Luke, squinting his eyes, but then continues.

"Now that we're all back together," he starts, "Calum and I have decided to kick out anyone who interferes with the progression of the band."

Are you kidding me?

"Are you kidding me?" I scoff, pulling my hands from my pockets. "You made me rejoin the band so you could threaten to kick me out of it?"

Michael opens his mouth to speak but for some reason he doesn't, looking from me, to Luke, then back to me, and then to Calum. I see Luke look at me out of the corner of my eye, but I try not to look at him, instead waiting for Michael to answer me.

"Michael made you rejoin?" His voice is soft and fragile, but sharp like thumbtacks at the same time. Oh, God. Michael looks at me then, eyes wide, and gives me a very small shake of his head.

I turn to look at him. Tufts of blond hair are sticking out beneath his gray beanie, the same one he wore to Stella's party a few months back. It makes him look even younger than he is, like I'm breaking a five-year-old's heart right now instead of a fifteen-year-old's. Oh, fuck it. None of this was going to work anyway.

"Yeah, he did," I reply coldly, not faltering in my eye contact with him. He looks a bit angry, but hurt more than anything. I don't want to hurt him but everything's falling apart anyway so what's the point?

He turns and looks at Michael. "You made him apologize to me?"

Michael starts to look a bit panicked, turning to Calum who doesn't say anything. "Well, I didn't tell him to apologize," he defends. "I told him to stop being a pussy and fix it."

"Hey!" I protest. "I'm not a pussy!"

He scoffs. "Yeah, that's why you've been hiding in your room for days, crying into Luke's shirt."

My face flushes a deep red and Luke looks at me. I can't tell what he's thinking, if he looks angry or just overwhelmed. "Fuck off, Michael," I say. What the fuck is his problem?

"You told me you fixed it, meanwhile you and Luke here can barely look at each other!" Calum nudges him as if to tell him to knock it off but it does nothing. 

"I told you I apologized!" Luke just sits there with a distant look on his face, watching the whole thing unfold. "I told you I couldn't fix it and you didn't believe me! You made me feel like I was a horrible person if I didn't rejoin the band, like I'd be screwing you over!"

"You would be screwing me over!" He stands up, jabbing his pointer finger at me across the room. "You'd be screwing all of us over!"

"I don't live for you, Michael!" I spit, jabbing a finger right back at him. "I live for me and I live for my family, and I'm not going to put myself through this just because you don't want to lose your band!"

He scoffs, rolling his eyes as he rounds the chair and looks at me again. "You're screwing us all over because you got rejected!"

"Michael," Calum hisses, and the room falls to a silence of ragged breaths and heartbeats.

I grit my teeth, eyes feeling like they're bulging out of my skull. My fists are balled at my sides, nails digging into my palms, and I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until I feel like I'm going to break skin. So much for that blood oath. My chest constricts as I look at Michael across the room, who is practically seething.

"Yeah, well, you can take your band and go fuck yourself with it," I growl. "I'm out of here."

"Oh, right, run away like you always do!" he yells after me, and when I don't react, he adds, "God knows you do it so well!"

I take off out of the garage, noticing as Luke storms inside and slams his door. Good. Great. Now we're all miserable.

Calum texts me later that night, apologizing for what Michael said, and that Michael feels bad but will never admit it. What's the point of being sorry if you're too far up your own ass to do anything about it? I know Michael. I know he's stubborn. But him being sorry does nothing to heal the fact that Luke knows how I feel about him now. The bands broken up. Michael and Calum still have each other, but Luke's mad, and I'm mad, and a lead guitarist and a bassist aren't going to get anywhere without, at the very least, their lead singer. God. Fuck that band. I wanted it to last but they're just a bunch of little kids. I should've known this would happen eventually.

It's late now, nearly eleven. Mum went to bed hours ago since she has to be up by 4:30, and Lauren and Harry are passed out on the couch with the T.V. still playing some kid's movie. The clouds finally caved, a wall of rain moving over Sydney. The rain that started as pitter-patter now drums heavily on the roof, falling so fast that it becomes one amalgamated sound like the rotor blades of a helicopter. If I had still been at Luke's house, there's no way I would've made it home. I would've been doomed to a silence in Luke's room until the storm blew over, or being swept away in a great flood. At this point I think I would've chosen the flood.

I sit at the table in the kitchen in a pair of sweats and Luke's shirt. I washed it this afternoon in the sink, with cold water to preserve the printing and everything. I don't know why I care so much. I feel like I should hate him but it's not his fault—he tried to be okay with me when I went to his house the other day, but after what happened earlier today, I doubt he feels very forgiving anymore. Of course I wanted to make amends somehow, but Michael pushed me to do it, just like he always does, and I doubt Luke sees that. Whatever. I'm not in the band anymore, so what do I care?

I sip leisurely on cup of chamomile, but I hate it. I've always been more of a coffee kind of person, but caffeine won't help me sleep and I know that. I can't take sleep supplements because they always give me vivid dreams, and with everything that's going on right now, I'd rather not have those. I just wish everything could cool off for one night, so I could just have one night to recharge and then try again.

I finish my tea and get up, heading towards the living room to wake up Harry and Lauren and take them to bed. I shut off the television and walk to the couch, gently shaking Lauren's arm. She opens her eyes for just a moment before groaning and turning her back to me. I sigh. "Lauren—"

I'm interrupted by a quick series of knocks on the front door. Who the hell is here at eleven o'clock at night in the middle of a storm this bad? I leave Harry and Lauren asleep in the living room and go to answer the door.

When I was a kid Mum used to say that the rain was God crying. I always thought that was silly until this moment, when I open the door and see him standing there, his eyes puffy and his nose red, tears mixed with torrential downpour outside. All of my breath leaves my lungs in one quick exhale, like I've just been punched in the gut. His pushbike is laying down in my front yard, his clothes soaked all the way through and clinging to his skin. He's wearing my sweatshirt for the first time in days.

"Luke," I breathe. He hasn't broken eye contact with me since I opened the door, and the look in his eyes is so heartbreaking, so earth-shattering that I can't look away no matter how much I want to. "Luke, you're going to get sick, come inside."

I step to the side to try and let him inside, but he shakes his head vigorously. He's panting, chest heaving up and down as he stands there.

"I can't." He takes a step backwards. "I can't, you—you have to come outside because I need to yell and the rain will drown me out."

I step out into the rain, closing the door behind me without a second thought. I'd walk through burning coals if he asked me to. What's a little rain?

He stares at me for a long moment, and if there circumstances were different, and he hadn't shown up at midnight in the pouring rain to yell at me, I would think that he were going to kiss me with a look like that. But of course it's just my subconscious desires projecting themselves onto reality.

"Why did you—" He stops, moving his gaze to his feet and tangling his fingers together. I want him to hold my hands, instead, so he doesn't have to be scared by himself, but I don't try to touch him. "Why did you have to kiss me?" 

He looks back up me then, and his eyes are glossed over, his bottom lip quivering. I can hear the lump in his throat. He said he needed to yell but I think he just hoped the rain would hide his tears. I hate that look. That look like I ruined him. I can barely handle how I feel already and to pile that on top—this notion that I've wrecked him—would just be insufferable.

"I don't know," I tell him, but it's a lie. I know exactly why I did it. I did it because I just couldn't help myself. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, that there was only ten minutes left of the movie and then I could go home, but as soon as I considered it I knew there was no way I was going to leave that house without kissing him first. I didn't care how catastrophic the consequences were because I just had to do it.

"Well, figure it out!" he yells, but it's broken, not a real yell. He's going to start crying and it's chiseling away at my heart. 

I force myself not to look down at my feet, to keep my eyes trained on him. I take a deep breath but it does nothing to lift the heavy weight in my chest. "Because I just had to. I don't know."

He nods, biting down on his lip as the tears starting to spill. His eyebrows are furrowed as he stares down at his hands, picking at his cuticles. I want to hold him when he cries like that but I know he doesn't want me to.

"Luke," I say desperately. "I didn't mean for this to—to screw you over." I feel the lump growing in my throat but I choke it back. I don't have any reason to cry. I did this to myself. "We were just laying there and the movie was playing and you looked at me and I just—I got caught up in the moment. But now that it's all blown up in our faces I just...if this is the last time we ever speak to each other I just want you to know that the only thing I regret about it is how I made you feel."

He nods again, looks back to his hands. "Well," he says, "well, yeah, you should regret that."

I cave, letting my eyes hit the ground. I didn't think I could feel any worse but he really has a way with words. The Luke I first met in the cinema would never have done this, would never have shown up unannounced in the middle of the night in the pouring rain to give me a piece of his own mind. He never would have stood up for himself. I'm so proud of him, even if it kills me.

"I was gonna give you that shirt," he says suddenly, pointing to the Loserkids shirt I forgot I was still wearing. "Michael asked me why I let you wear that shirt and it was...I was gonna give it to you, because I met Travis Barker in it, and I just thought it would be funny," he chuckles, but it sounds warped through the tears, like he's choking on it. "'Cause I was gonna make a joke about the Travis Barker magic and how if you wore it you'd be as good as him." He looks at the shirt, his eyes tracing the outline of the design.

"You can have it back, if you want," I say. I don't really mean it, but I have to.

He shakes his head. "No, you're—you're the best drummer I know. You should have it."

A dry smirk tugs at the corner of my mouth. "Well, a drummer without a band is just a guy making a whole lot of noise, so," I shrug. "I don't really see why I need it."

He nods again. I wish he would stop nodding and just yell at me already.

"I can't be that guy, you get that, right, Ashton?" He shuffles his feet and sniffles. We may be standing in the pouring rain, but I can still tell which droplets on his face are tears. We stand in silence for what feels like centuries until he continues. "I'm already—I mean, I don't play sports. And I wear fluoro-green glasses and I only have three friends, and nobody—no one even knows my name, Ashton. I can introduce myself to people a million times but they'll only ever remember me as the scrawny kid." He sniffles again. It's getting harder and harder not to reach out for him. "And now you want me to be gay, too?"

My heart cracks like glass and shatters right there on my front lawn. It's all I can do not to drop my knees in the wet grass and fall apart entirely. "I don't want you to be gay if you're not gay, Luke."

"That's not what I'm saying." He looks up at me again but it's becoming very hard to look him in the eyes while he sits here with a fist squeezed around my heart. "It's not about whether or not I am, it's about the fact that I just can't be. I'll never live it down, do you get that?" A sob escapes his lips by—literally—the skin of his teeth. "You can't ask me to be gay. You just can't." 

I don't know what hurts more: being rejected because he's straight or being rejected because he doesn't want to be gay. Somehow they're equally as horrible.

"I'm not asking you to be anything but honest, Luke." 

He smiles wryly, scoffing. "I don't get to be honest, Ashton. I can't even wear green glasses without getting called a faggot and now you want me to actually be..." He shakes his head, looking off towards the road as a car speeds by. "I just can't."

He wanted to talk outside because he was going to yell, but he's not yelling, and I wish he would. Yelling means he's still angry, that the things he's saying might not be entirely rational. But he's not mad at me anymore. He's just explaining himself to me, and even though he's crying, it sounds as honest as he's ever going to get. Guess love doesn't make the world go 'round when it's taboo.

"At the beginning of year eleven my teachers started asking me what I wanted to do with my life," I say. "At first I told them I didn't know. And then I talked with a counselor for a while, and when she got to know me, she told me to consider law." He furrows his eyebrows, raising them slightly. Tears are still running down his cheeks but he's not actively crying anymore. "I was gonna go to Uni to be an attorney. An attorney. I can't even spell attorney." He chokes on a laugh, and I feel the faintest flutter in my chest. "Drumming was always just a hobby of mine. I never considered it a possible career path. And then I met you," I say breathlessly. "And you made me realize that everything in my life was a lie. My friends weren't really friends, I never cared about my girlfriends...I thought I wanted to be an attorney, for fuck's sake. But you make me realize, with the band, that drumming was what I wanted to do forever. And I didn't know what true friendship was until I met you guys. And I didn't realize I didn't like girls until I met you."

"Ashton..."

"I'm not asking you to be gay, Luke," I say. "I'm asking you not to lie to yourself. For one moment, just this one single moment we're in right now, just stop worrying how it's going to make you look. Stop worrying what people are going to think of you. And just...just be honest. If not for yourself then for God's sake, just be honest with me, because I've been tearing apart at the seams ever since I realized how I felt about you and half the time I swear I can't even breathe, so please, Luke, for one second can we please just focus on you and me and not everyone else?"

He looks at me for long moment, longer than all the rest, the rain falling around us and soaking me through my clothes. My curls are clinging to my forehead and his hair is falling in his eyes, and he looks beautiful. He's young, and sure, maybe he's a little scrawny, but he's beautiful.

And then his face drops, and he begins to cry again. This time I just can't stop myself, so I move forward and I capture him in my arms, and instead of resisting, he collapses into me, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. It's the most painful thing I have ever experienced. "You broke me."

I hug him to me tightly around the shoulders, so nothing can ever hurt him. "No, I didn't," I say. "You're not broken, Luke."

Thunder rumbles around us as the rain grows heavier. "I didn't feel anything when I kissed that girl, and then you kissed me—" he sobs brokenly into my chest. "And it changed everything."

"You're everything," I whisper into his shoulder. "You're everything to me."

When he stops crying, I take him inside. It feels too familiar; it wasn't that long ago that he was doing the same thing for me. I send him upstairs to my room, heading into the living room to get Harry and Lauren. I shake Lauren awake, eventually convincing her to stand up. I take her by the hand and pick Harry up in my free arm, who stays asleep on my shoulder. My clothes are still dripping, but he has to change, anyway. I lead them to their room, letting go of Lauren's hand as she practically dives into her bed, and setting Harry down on the edge of his. I retrieve a pair of pajamas for him, staying and making sure he actually changes. Once he's changed and dry, I tuck him into bed, kissing him on the forehead, and then Lauren, and then I finally go back to my own room, where Luke is standing in the doorway still soaked.

"I didn't want to track water in," he explains tiredly. I tell him not to worry about it as I walk in ahead of him, fishing some dry clothes out of my dresser. I give him my only Doors shirt, and I see a ghost of a smile as he changes in front of me shamelessly, underwear and everything. I turn around before I see everything, flushing red all up my neck and in my cheeks, and change my own clothes.

When I turn around, he's smiling at me. It's small, but it's real, and it gives me butterflies. "They're really lucky to have you for a brother," he says. "You take good care of them." 

I shrug sheepishly, not really wanting to get into it. Without a dad around I'm the closest thing they've got. Of course I take care of them. Just because their dad's a deadbeat doesn't mean they should feel any less loved.

I turn to walk towards the bed, stopping to look at him for a moment. My shirt hangs loosely on his skinny frame, the drawstrings on the sweatpants tied tightly. He's so cute it physically pains me. I reach up and brush a tuft of damp hair out of his face, smiling fondly at him. He's everything. I mean that. 

"Come on, Lukey Boy," I grin, crawling into my bed. My warm, dry, beautiful bed. "You need some sleep."

He hesitates for a moment before eventually walking over and climbing into the bed next to me. He turns onto his side so he's facing me, his cheek laying on his open palm. For a long moment, he just looks at me, and I look at him, and everything swirling inside me finally dulls to a stop. He's everything. How can he not see that he is everything?

"Ash?" he asks suddenly. I hum in response, not taking my eyes off of him. I love hearing him call me Ash again. He bites down on his lip, not taking his eyes off of me, either. "Did you mean it?"

I reach over, brushing a few stray strands of hair out of his face, just because I can. I can touch him again and there's nothing wrong with it. "Mean what?"

He half-shrugs, a tired smile on his lips. His hair is finally starting to dry. "That you changed after you met me?"

I laugh breathlessly. Does he really have to ask? "You changed my life, Luke."

He smiles this small, delicate smile, and it's so beautiful I want to frame it. "I didn't think I could do that."

My hand falls from his hair to caress his cheek, running my thumb over the smooth skin of his cheekbone. "You changed all of our lives—me, Mikey, and Calum. You should hear how they talk about you." He smiles so wide it reaches his eyes. It feels like years since I've seen him smile like that. "Who cares what anybody else thinks when you've got a band like this?"

He smiles fondly as I say that, probably just happy to have the band back. Michael said I was miserable without Luke, and he's right, but I also think we're all miserable without each other. 

He shifts towards me, putting his hand against my cheek the same way that I'm doing to him, and then he leans forward, our noses brushing together softly, and he kisses me, and it's the most innocent thing I've ever felt. His third kiss of his entire life, and it's so gentle I feel like it's my first kiss ever. I slide my hand into his hair, pulling him closer to me, kissing him deeper. I don't know how many times I've kissed or been kissed, but I know that none of them amount to this one, right here in this bed, right in this moment. He is so much larger than life, consuming everything inside of me and all around us. I love him, but I don't need to say it.

It shows. It's always showed.