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The first thing Matt ever said to Mello was, “Dude, our house is flooding.” To which Mello had replied, “Yeah, no shit.”
Well, not the first thing. They had exchanged their fair share of “Hey man”s and “What’s up”s. Standard human stuff. At that point Matt had been living in the peeling, dust-colored split-level at 112 Escuela for a year and a half, Mello for four months. Matt had not been home the day Mello moved in and had not, in fact, been informed anyone was moving in, so his first impression of Mello had been the rude sight of him sitting on their kitchen counter, zipped into his habitual leather, sharing a spliff with three of their ten other housemates. They exchanged anemic greetings. Matt had thought Mello, that’s a weird name; Mello had forgotten Matt’s name immediately.
Still, they would’ve gotten to know one another sooner if Mello hadn’t been, well, Mello. Since the house’s three actual bedrooms were occupied by the original leaseholders, Mello, as a latecomer, should’ve been assigned an unfavorable makeshift room. Like Ben Cho, who was up in a crawlspace in the attic, or like Matt himself, who’d joined another guy in the basement for $250 off the rent a month and free utilities. They would’ve bonded over their shared miseries: the lack of windows, the lack of air. The perpetual stank of weed and socks.
Mello did not do misery. Within three weeks of moving in he’d turfed another guy out of a primo location in the master bedroom and settled the fuck in.
Matt and his dungeon-mate Thanesh gossiped about it, between bouts of Smash Bros on their hyper-janky console setup.
“He like, probably showed Kevin his dick or something,” theorized Thanesh, “and since Kevin’s such a homophobe he got scared and fucked the hell off.”
“That’s crazy,” laughed Matt. “Why the fuck would he do that?”
“Dude, like, he’s gay right? So...”
“Is he?”
Thanesh snorted. “C’mon, Matty boy, don’t play PC with me.”
Was Mello gay? He dressed in skin-tight and stomach-baring clothes and wore his hair long and painted his fingernails, so—probably. Matt had very few data points to go off when it came to gay men. There had been one or two in his high school, but Matt hadn’t hung out with them, hadn’t known much about them beyond their names. They seemed to Matt to always be surrounded by hordes of girls, shrieking in laughter.
Matt was able to consider himself open-minded and fair, while simultaneously assuming that gay guys were generally effeminate, flamboyant creatures that he, while not having any particular problem with, also had nothing in common with. It did not occur to Matt to reconcile these contradictions in his viewpoint. He had not put much thought into it. He’d grown up straight and white and male in the tender cradle of America, which is to say he was mostly unused to examining himself or his intentions.
“Yeah, no, definitely,” he said, flicking Thanesh off when Thanesh mimed sucking a cock, and resumed keeping out of Mello’s way.
()
He didn’t encounter Mello much over the next couple months. Mello wasn’t around much. Matt was, but he spent most of that in the dungeon, streaming video games on Twitch or tinkering with various shitty PC rigs, stripped down to his boxers to kill the risk of static electricity.
He did notice that Mello brought intimidating girls (and boys, but Matt and his housemates roundly ignored those) around to the house sometimes. The girls he hung with wore complicated and sharp-edged makeup, or no makeup at all, faces scrubbed challengingly bare and eyes like something ancient, shining at you with the wisdom of the jaguar or the wild lion. This boosted Mello’s position in their household immeasurably, as one or the other of Matt’s housemates would have a go at them, trying out pickup lines and accidental brushes of shoulders.
Matt did not have a go. The presence of these challenging women made him uncomfortable and nervous, since he was already firmly spoken for by a challenging woman who brooked no competition on her territory. He made sure to wear his homeliest socks and his worst posture, and he flew way, way, way under Mello’s fucking radar.
()
Then it was spring break. Everyone left the house but him and Mello, Mello for unknown reasons and Matt because he had told his friends he’d caught strep throat and couldn’t travel to Denver after all, when in fact he had caught nothing but a deep depressive spell.
Or more like it had caught him. To Matt it always felt that way. Like twisting your ankle in an unexpected rabbit hole and falling down, which wasn’t so bad, but then, for whatever reason, you couldn’t get back up for the next few weeks, or months, or whatever. Your body stayed glued to the dirt. Tall grass grew around you, obscured your prone form completely.
They ignored one another for the first day and the second day. On the third day, it rained.
Water tapped on Matt’s face. Water tapped on Matt’s nose. Matt opened his eyes for the first time in five hours. Rain was pouring into the basement from the edges where the ceiling met the walls. Matt had assumed he was crying, which he sometimes did for no reason when he got like this.
He went upstairs with an armful of server equipment and met Mello in the kitchen with an armful of bass guitars.
“Dude,” he said to him. Those fateful words! “Our house is flooding.”
“Yeah, no shit,” said Mello shortly. “What’s your name again?”
“Matt,” said Matt mildly. Mello was giving him asshole vibes, but Mello had given him asshole vibes from the moment he’d laid eyes on him. “I live in the basement,” he added helpfully—there were two Matts living in the house at the time, of which basement-Matt was obviously the lesser.
“Great. Listen, Matt,” Mello said. “You know somewhere dry to keep this shit?”
()
Matt fetched his Jeep Wrangler from down the block, jogging with his arms up through the rain. He backed it up straight over the lawn into their porch. They loaded their shit into the back, and then Mello climbed into his passenger seat.
As he drove, Matt was continually surprised by the sight of him there, looking wet yet still glamorous.
Mello was rummaging through his glovebox. “You smoke menthols?” he said disapprovingly, holding up Matt’s carton of Newport Smooths.
“Feel free to like, not borrow one.”
“Menthol is fine,” Mello said, lighting up without asking, as Matt rolled his eyes.
Matt drove them to a computer lab he had card access to. The air inside was dry and stale. A couple heads popped out of rooms as they heaved their stuff in. “Hey, Shaomi, Amit. Hey Alex,” said Matt.
“Jesus, so there’s life down here.” Mello shook his head like a dog. Matt watched everyone flinch as water flew everywhere. Thin T-shirted arms drifted instinctively over fat Linux towers. Amit was staring at Mello like he was a loose crocodile. Shaomi gave Matt a hostile look. Get rid of him, it said.
“You can’t—sorry, you can’t smoke in here.”
Mello gave him an amused look, an I’ll-play look. It was supremely condescending. He did not put out his cigarette (Matt’s cigarette), but held it with bent arm near his chin. “So where am I allowed?” he asked.
Matt shepherded him to the grad student lounge on the fourth floor. Mello was not allowed to smoke there, either, but at least here he wouldn’t get dirty looks from Matt’s fellow code trolls.
Even at that early stage, Matt was aware this was something he’d done more to preserve Matt’s dignity than to protect Mello in any way. Mello, as always, couldn’t give a fuck.
They sat on separate legs of an L-shaped sectional. Mello ignored Matt while Matt watched him uncomfortably. He wanted to leave but he was afraid Mello would do something destructive if left alone.
“We should probably do something about the—”
“We don’t need to do shit.”
“—the house. Uh, why not?”
Mello shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s just shit.”
This resonated deeply with Matt. He had been waiting all his life for someone to tell him this. He kind of wanted to take this blonde stranger by the shoulders and say, yes, man, yes, it is all just shit. Mostly he wanted permission to go back to sleep. He lowered his eyelids to half mast and yawned loudly, looking hopefully at Mello, but Mello showed no signs of fucking off.
After a while, Mello asked, “Do you like living in the basement?”
“It sucks, but I mean, like, it’s fine.”
“How can it suck, but be fine?”
Matt had had about enough. “So how’d you get Kevin to move out?” he countered.
“I told him I’d stick it in his ass while he was sleeping.”
“That’s—what? Dude, that’s fucked up.”
“I’m kidding, jesus. I can’t believe you’d buy something like that.”
“Well, I don’t, like, know hardly anything about you, man.”
“So what, you think I could be a rapist? Just because I’m gay?”
“I never said anything about—I didn’t even know you were gay! I just—you could be anything! That’s my point!”
Mello took something out of his pocket and held it at Matt. “Have a cigarette,” he said.
“No thanks,” said Matt.
“I’m just giving you a hard time, man. Have a cigarette.”
“Why’d you smoke mine if you had your own?”
“I was curious about you,” Mello said.
Matt rubbed his eyes. This kind of conversation was exhausting for him. Mello was bewildering. He wanted to lie down and get back to his bad mood. He did not want to be babysitting this blonde, belligerent, smoke-stealing apparently-gay jerk.
“You’re confusing as shit,” he said to Mello, stretching out—he had luckily chosen the long leg of the L.
“Are you going to sleep?”
“Mhmm.”
“It’s two in the afternoon.”
“‘m tired,” Matt mumbled into the pillow of his folded arms. “Nice meeting you.”
“Can I borrow your car?”
“Uh-huh, whatever.” Matt couldn’t care less. He barely felt Mello’s fingers tugging the keys out of his upper right jeans pocket. He drifted into sleep like drifting into a wall with your car. Blackout.
()
When Matt woke up the lights were out. Sometimes he barely noticed, to be honest. Whether his eyes were open or closed, or the lights were on or off, or the sun was out, or wasn’t, or wasn’t ever coming back out. Big fat whatever.
His mouth was bone dry. He lay there for another eighty minutes debating whether to get up and go to the tap. He knew it was eighty minutes because he could see an analog wall clock from where he lay, letting handfuls of seconds loose to drift slowly to the floor, like feathers in the afternoon gloom. Matt was sinking into time like quicksand. He felt grains brush his eyelids and closed them again.
At the eighty-five minute mark, Mello showed back up.
“Hey, man. Power’s out.”
“No,” said Mello. He stamped his feet and the lights came back on. Right. Motion sensors. It was Matt’s own fault that Matt was lying around in the dark. Like always.
“I think you should get up,” Mello said.
“Why?”
Matt meant this in an existential sense, but Mello took him literally, which was probably fair. “I need to go to the dollar store.”
“Don’t you have my keys?”
“I left them on the table when I left, fucking christ. I wasn’t just going to take your fucking car.”
“You could. I was offering, like seriously.”
“Are you always like this?”
“Uh-huh. Well, like sometimes. I dunno, I think I’m sick or something. Could you, uh, could you get me some water?”
Matt heard him walk the fifteen steps into the kitchen and then back. In the meantime, he went through the ordeal of turning onto his other side. He took the glass of lukewarm tap gratefully.
“Thanks.”
“Ben Cho told me you guys were supposed to go to Colorado, but then you ditched out because you got sick. You don’t look sick to me.”
“Well, I feel sick.” Cunt, Matt thought.
What Matt didn’t and couldn’t know was how transparent he was to Mello, who had himself been through bouts of depression so severe he couldn’t speak. Mello never pitied himself, which sometimes led people to believe he was pitiless in general, but in fact he was perfectly capable of empathizing with others—especially when those others were strangers, which Matt was, at that point. He had already made up his mind to help him.
Mello licked his index finger efficiently and stuck it into Matt’s ear. As Matt jolted up, swearing, Mello continued conversationally, “It’s just bad brain chemistry, Matt. Nothing to be upset with yourself about.”
“Isn’t that, like, really reductive? And scientifically inaccurate?”
“Oh, am I being reductive?”
“I think you’re being very fucking reductive, considering you, uh, don’t know jack shit about me. I think you’re assuming a lot.”
“And I think you’re feeling better now that you’re sitting up, and you’ve had some water, which I got you, and you’re not lying in the dark, and I think you’ll feel even better if you drive me to the store and stand outside for a bit.”
Matt hesitated. He had not heard the latter half of Mello’s self-congratulatory bullshit, because he was zoning back out, staring at the large damp spot he’d left on the couch. It was like a Rorschach blot in the shape of Failure.
Mello tossed his keys at him, startling Matt into catching them. “Come on,” he said, not unkindly. “Let’s go.”
()
Matt drove them to the dollar store, where they were the only customers. Mello looked wildly out of place, roaming the aisles between boxes of tampons and racks of greeting cards. He picked out several plastic buckets and a mop and a flashlight while Matt leaned on the handle of a shopping cart like a crutch, pushing it around with his body weight.
When Mello opened his wallet at checkout, Matt saw several hundred-dollar bills inside. He tried to look without staring, craning his neck discreetly. Mello thumbed them efficiently aside and paid with a ten and seven single one-dollar bills. Outside Matt offered to Venmo him. Mello snorted, taking out one of the hundreds and handing it over.
“That’s kind of douchey of you,” said Matt.
“You were the one who was looking.”
“I’ve never seen one of these, like in real life, I mean. Is it real?”
“Why the hell would I be carrying around counterfeit money? Check it. It’s got the watermark and everything.”
Matt immediately held the bill up to the car’s dome lights. Mello liked that, found it funny and unpretentious.
“Cool, man. Thanks,” he said as he handed the money back to Mello, and Mello said formally, “You’re welcome,” which made Matt laugh and then startle at the sound of it, since he hadn’t laughed in a while.
()
Mello told him to drive back to the house.
“I thought it was ‘just shit’,” Matt said accusatorily. He did not want to confront their watery house. He did not want to confront his watery life. He could sense a tiring situation upcoming, like a headache over the horizon.
“Changed my mind,” Mello said briskly, and Matt was too cowed to protest.
Inside, Mello walked around efficiently, putting out buckets and trash cans beneath various drips, laying out garbage bags over the carpet and furniture. He climbed into their attic, tracing the lines of water running down the joists with a thoughtful expression. He tied his hair back and went daringly out onto the roof in the rain, where Matt handed him a makeshift tarp made of cut-apart filched Ikea shopping bags through the window, which Mello weighted down with bricks from their backyard.
“Have you done this before?” Matt said admiringly.
Mello swung himself in through the window. He shook his hair loose of its band, spraying Matt with water. He said, “I’ve done a lot of shit before.”
Back inside, he knelt on the kitchen floor and sucked up water into the mop, and wrung that out into a bucket and dumped the bucket into the sink.
“See,” Matt pointed out. He was lazing on a dry spot on the floor, snipping garbage bags in half for Mello to use. “You’re like, you’re literally just moving rain a foot from the floor to the sink.”
“What’s your point? Life’s just moving rain?”
“I didn’t say anything about life, man.”
“The point is that tomorrow, or whenever the fuck this fucking rain goes away, we won’t be stuck living in a house with a water-damaged floor.”
“Who cares if it’s damaged? It’s not our house, anyway. We’d get used to it.”
“The real question is, why should I have to settle for getting used to anything? You and I, as able-bodied, perfectly capable twenty-something-year-olds, shouldn’t have to—”
The power went out as Mello was speaking. They both kept still for a couple seconds, expecting it to come back on. Water trickled in the dark.
Matt commented, “It sounds like the house is taking a piss,” and Mello sighed deeply and said, “Oh, fuck me.”
()
They discovered the fireplace simultaneously. Ever since Matt had moved in, it had been buried behind a constantly growing bottle collection.
“Did you know we had a chimney?” asked Matt. He was squatting half in the fireplace, looking up the dark flue, having cleared a path through empty, dog-sized handles of Seagram’s and Smirnoff.
“No, ‘cause who the fuck needs a chimney in L.A.?”
They toured the house by flashlight, gathering the shittiest pieces of Ikea furniture they could find, and broke them down in the living room. For kindling, Matt sacrificed two of his textbooks (K&R’s classic C Programming Language) and Mello sacrificed several novels (Brideshead Revisited, which he said he’d jacked off to as a “horny baby Catholic”, and Lolita, which he called a fashion inspiration).
Mello got the fire started with an ostentatious Zippo, engraved with an image of the Virgin Mary on one side and an elaborate scrollwork “M” on the other.
“Functionally, a Bic is, like, the same deal,” Matt muttered.
“I guess,” allowed Mello, handing over his lighter so Matt could run his fingers over it.
Although the light was nice, the fire made the room too hot, and both of them eventually took their shirts off. Matt tried and mostly failed to remain unintimidated by Mello’s washboard abs and lifted pecs. Matt had stoner fat, which meant he looked relatively skinny but all his flab was secretly gathered compactly around his torso like a nice jelly roll, or a bulletproof vest.
Discreetly poking his stomach, he comforted himself with the thought that Mello might have a small dick. He had watched a documentary about guys with micropenises with Thanesh one night, the two of them higher than hell and unable to stop giggling throughout. You never knew when one of those might strike.
“So, should we talk about life, or what?” yawned Mello.
“... Nah.”
“Cool,” said Mello. He took out a book and ignored Matt for the next hour. Matt melted handfuls of M&Ms over the fire, singing the hairs on the back of his hand. He felt exhausted, burnt out by Mello’s continual presence, but too delirious to sleep.
Mello’s phone kept rattling against the floorboards as he received texts in continuous bursts; Matt’s phone remained silent. The way Mello texted bothered Matt. “Dude, take it easy,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t have to tap the screen that hard.”
Mello ignored him completely, and Matt watched him bap-bap-bap his fingers into his phone screen until he’d driven himself into a half-hearted rage.
“I think I’m gonna sleep up here,” he said, when he couldn’t keep his eyes open another minute.
“‘k.”
“You want the couch, or…?”
Mello flapped a hand at him to take it. “I’m going to stay up for a while.”
Matt drifted off to the sound of Mello’s furious texting.
()
Matt dozed and woke and dozed, woke. He never slept well when he got like this. Mello was always awake, stirring the fire or emptying a bucket into the sink or talking softly on his phone.
One time Matt woke to a wet sensation on his face. He touched it, thinking the ceiling had sprung a new leak, and realized he was crying.
Alarmed, he immediately shifted onto his stomach so his face was pressed into the couch’s armrest. God, how fucking embarassing.
Fuck, had Mello seen?
He tried to breathe quietly and evenly, but lying facedown like this, his nose was getting really fucking clogged.
He felt something hit his elbow lightly. Mello had deposited a box of Kleenex onto him.
“Thanks. Allergies, y’know,” snuffled Matt, and Mello agreed, “Yeah, they fucking suck,” with no hint of irony whatsoever, and then wandered out of the room so Matt could sit up and wipe his face and blow his nose—a gesture of grace for which Matt would be grateful even many years later.
()
In the morning, Matt woke up to the sound of a fight. He cracked an eye and immediately closed it again. Dude. The guy whose face Mello was getting into was probably in his mid-thirties, taller than tall and fit as hell, biceps straining against the contours of his well-tailored sports coat. The absurd platinum wrist candy on his right hand glittered and flashed as he threw his arm out. He looked like he could be the next James Bond.
Mello, Matt thought vividly, probably did not have a micropenis. Unless James Bond was specifically into that.
“—fucking skanky, really? You begged for a piece of this skanky ass, Jamal,” Mello was saying, stabbing a finger into the guy’s built chest. “You can lick my fucking boot.”
Matt’s face heated. Jesus.
The argument went on. The guy got quieter and quieter and Mello got louder and louder.
In the middle of a particularly cuss-laced sentence, Mello cut off abruptly, and the couch shook under Matt with a bang. He snuck another peek and saw that the guy had Mello pinned by the throat against the wall.
Fucking christ, enough already. Matt yawned and stretched ostentatiously, saying a bit too clearly, “Fuck, what time is it?”
The guy let go of Mello immediately. “We’ll talk,” he said lowly, and Mello shot back, “We fucking won’t,” holding the door open with his foot.
They stood at the window together and watched him drive off in a stone-black new model BMW.
“Ex?” said Matt.
“Nope.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Hell fucking no. I don’t date. He’s just some fucking exec I made the mistake of fucking a few too many times. I mean, he’s married, for fuck’s sake.”
“Oh. Figures,” Matt said. He was thinking dreamily about the guy’s Rolex, his nice ride. Matt had zero ambition but his lower-middle-class upbringing had enfused him with fairly conventional desires: to be wealthy, to have a pretty car and pretty things. “I mean he looked like he was, you know, kinda loaded.”
Mello snorted. “He’s not sugaring me, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“Oh, I, no, I didn’t mean—”
“Although I’ve done that a few times. Not really my thing.”
“...You have?”
“No, Matt, christ. Man, you really fucking believe too much shit.”
“Well you—”
“Yeah?”
“—I mean, like, you look—”
“What, I look—”
“—like, you dress a certain way, man—”
“Slutty?”
Matt made a helpless gesture. “Kinda?”
“Real hookers wear normal clothes like everyone else. That’s just something you see in the movies.”
“Oh, because you’ve hung out with a lot of real hookers, I guess,” said Matt, irritated with the blowhard quality of Mello’s statements.
“They’re just normal working people,” responded Mello matter-of-factly, promptly making Matt feel like he was the asshole. Matt changed the subject. Jerking a thumb at the window, he asked, “How’d you even meet a guy like him?”
“He’s a studio head. Studio like record studio. I met him a release party.”
“Oh, is that something you’re trying to get into?”
“Uh huh.”
“Sleeping your way up?”
Matt figured Mello wouldn’t take offense at this, and he didn’t. He hitched his narrow pants up his narrow hips about half an inch. “Keeping my options open,” he said.
“Cool, that’s cool.” Matt flicked a light switch a couple times. “Man, the power’s still out.”
“Yeah. Apparently a bunch of trees got knocked down in the storm, took down some power lines. Power’s out all over L.A.”
“So, it’s probably not gonna get fixed today?”
“No. We should go buy some real firewood while it’s still—”
“Shit, shit. I need to go.”
“Why?”
“I need to get my girlfriend’s fish.”
()
Mello stood around in the gloom, watching Matt gingerly unplug the aquarium’s complicated, now non-functioning filtration system.
Matt’s girlfriend, Xinlei, owned a single betta fish. Privately Matt called it Frank. She called it nothing. She had not named it, out of spite, because her Mother had given her the animal and Xinlei hated her. Nevertheless, she took excellent care of it. She’d be pissed to hell if Frank died while she was out touring Morocco. Xinlei’s relationship with her family was complicated.
Matt had always been attracted to people who were out of his league. In middle school he dated a girl who would go on to be the third-place runner up for prom queen. In high school he was cheated on by a succession of Popular Girls. His freshman year he met Xinlei, who flamed a bunch of his code on a public message board and then came out from behind her handle and revealed herself to be, in addition to whip-smart and wicked sarcastic, well-dressed, tight-bodied, and very, very pretty.
The first time they’d met in real life, they spent several minutes running their eyes over one another. She had told him they should be project partners. Matt, already head over heels, thought this was the best goddamn idea he’d ever heard. They spent a very fun semester ignoring their coding assignments and touching one another in the tenuous privacy of their dorm rooms.
Things now were less fun. Well, they were okay. Anyway, it wasn’t like anything had really changed. Xinlei had always been too good for him. He was just more aware of it, lately.
“Nice place,” Mello said.
“I know, right? It’s like a real human house.”
They stood together in silence, drawing comparisons to 112 Escuela. Matt was steeping in the smell of the place—her smell. They were pretty far into their codependence on one another. He missed her desperately. Forlornly, he straightened one of her tiny size-five shoes. Mello was watching Matt mope around and touch her things. He had noticed that the room did not contain an ashtray and did not smell of Matt’s cigarettes, that Matt had made Mello take off his shoes before entering the apartment, and that so far Matt had put more energy into rescuing a goddamn fish than much of anything else. Mello, who considered himself a good judge of people, thought that this was telling.
On the way back to campus, Matt made Mello drive so that Matt could sit in the back with his arm around the fish tank.
Xinlei called him while they were en route. Matt picked up instantly. “Hey, babe, how’s Denver,” she asked. “Cool, everything’s cool over here,” said Matt, flapping one hand frantically at Mello to chill the fuck out with the revving of the engine and the loud music and all that. “How’s Morocco?”
After he’d hung up, Mello turned part way around and asked, “Why’d you lie to her about going to Denver?”
“She doesn’t like when I lie around or whatever.”
“She’s ‘fun’?”
“I mean, I guess she’s got a life, and she thinks I should have one too.”
“She sounds nice.”
“She is nice,” Matt said defensively. He was not used to hearing others’ opinions of his girlfriend. Generally, she didn’t enjoy his friends and refused to step foot in their filthy house. Most of his housemates had never even met her.
Trying to change the subject, Matt noticed the glossy beads snaking inside the neckline of Mello’s vest. Pointing at them, he asked, “Are you really Catholic, or is that for fashion?”
“I’m really Catholic,” Mello said, pulling the rosary out so Matt could see the tiny figure of Christ hanging from its end.
“Oh, wow, nice.”
“You just thought, he seems loose for a Christian, didn’t you?”
“You are literally always putting words in my mouth.”
“So tell me I’m wrong.”
“... You’re not wrong, necessarily.”
“That’s what I thought. Keep your stereotypes to yourself.”
“I feel like we’re learning so much about each other,” Matt said, apropos of nothing.
“Yeah, like you’ve learned that you’re intimidated by the people I sleep with.”
“Well, not intimidated.”
“Judging people by their choice of lay is a poor assessment of character.”
“No, yeah, I totally agree,” said Matt, deflating a bit. He’d been hoping that Xinlei’s tastefully appointed apartment had boosted his image in Mello’s eyes. He was aware the past twenty-four hours or so had consisted of a lot of Mello being busy and useful and Matt being slovenly, and probably hadn’t sold Matt in his best light.
And why the hell did he care what Mello thought of him, anyway? Matt couldn’t quite put a finger on it.
This was because Matt was not used to making friends, although that was what was happening. Neither of them were.
Matt was a slope-shouldered introvert, good at throwing snide remarks into a crowd, easygoing and charming-enough company at any party, but generally more comfortable keeping to himself. Mello was a raging extrovert who could manufacture chemistry with just about anyone—but he had not tried to manufacture anything with Matt, and yet they had chemistry anyway. It was mystifying. They snuck looks at one another. They were both thinking variants of the same thing: fucking hell, I get along with him? But he’s really not my type.
They drove back to campus, thinking the power might be back on there, but the lab was dark when they pulled up. Amit and Alex and Shaomi had vanished, leaving behind ghostly smells of reheated pizza and soda-flavored burps.
“Goddamnit,” groused Matt. “I thought this place was supposed to be on its own grid.” He quickly checked his laptop batteries: 28%, not looking good. Matt without power was a fish out of water. He didn’t fare well without distractions. He Googled “do betta fish die no tank filtration”, but his signal was crawling at a snail’s pace, probably because the cell towers were down or overloaded. Was Frank swimming a little more sluggishly than normal? Was he about to go belly-up? Matt tapped his finger on the glass. “Hey, you little bastard,” he warned. “Don’t even think about it.”
Mello was watching this drama play out in miniature in Matt’s rearview mirror. Who even the fuck, he thought. He considered his options for a moment. “I might know someone,” he said.
()
As Mello drove them out towards the hills of Azusa, he shouted at Matt over the roar of the radio that “Sofie” was a sure bet to have power, but didn’t say much else about her.
Sofie was not, as someone might reasonably guess, an outdoorsy and well-prepared Scandinavian woman. Sofie was tiny and ancient and Filipino, spoke very little English, and hated and distrusted the United States government with a passion expressed in every inch of her rambling property, from the cellarful of freeze-dried food packets to the boxes of ammo stashed in her kitchen drawers to the three backup generators crouched in her backyard.
She and Mello almost immediately got absorbed in a heated political discussion in mixed English and Filipino, leaving Matt alone to his own devices. Relieved from the burden of Mello’s constant passive scrutiny, Matt flopped onto the floor with the fishtank. He plugged Frank into one socket of an outlet and himself into the other. He leant against the wall, feeling it trembling with the force of the generators roaring in the yard. Watching his laptop battery creep upwards, he felt marginally better.
“I’ve never met a prepper before,” he said conversationally to Frank, watching Frank make a bubble.
Some hours later, he was lying on his stomach, yards-deep in an online forum crafting insufferable memes about cryptocurrency, trance music blasting in his headphones, when Sofie saw fit to appear at his elbow and nudge his side with a rifle muzzle, shouting simultaneously, “You! Shoot?”
Matt saw Mello watch him flinch half a foot sideways and bang his elbow hard against the wall. He was cackling in laughter. Asshole.
“Yeah,” he panted, “uh huh. I can, uh, I can shoot.”
“Okay. So shoot, motherfucker,” she said.
They went out into the backyard, and set up some cans on a rusted piece of rail at twenty paces distance. Sofie and Mello shot handguns. When Matt chose a rifle, Mello rolled his eyes at him and said, “Big dick, huh?”
Matt outshot them both handily. “Big dick,” he agreed, as Mello gave him the finger.
“Fuck you. I thought Californians were allergic to guns.”
“One, Texas-born, and two, rural California,” Matt corrected. He shot two of Mello’s cans out and Mello jostled him with his elbow, the pistol still live in his hand, which made Sofie bark angrily at them in Tagalog.
They took a leisurely tour of Sofie’s backyard. Standing outside her chicken hutch, they discovered that all three of them viewed animals that were destined to be eaten without much sentiment. Not long after that, Matt was treated to the terrifying sight of Mello efficiently butchering a hen.
“You know how to pluck this?”
“Yeah,” said Matt dazedly. The contrast between the brilliant scarlet swipe of blood smeared over one of Mello’s high cheekbones and the ice color of his eyes was… something. Stirring. “You’ve got a little.”
Mello wiped at his cheek with the back of one wrist. “Great,” he said, handing him the scalded chicken corpse without ceremony.
Matt wanted to ask under what the hell kind of circumstances Mello had grown up that he was able to fix a roof, butcher animals, speak Tagalog, and seduce music executives with equal prowess, but he was kind of too scared to.
In the afternoon they went back into the house, where Mello cooked them some kind of complicated stew, in (what Matt thought) a transparent power play to make up for Matt being a good shot. Matt was determined not to enjoy any of Mello’s bullshit, but he couldn’t help himself. Cooking was like Matt’s kryptonite. He was a hopeless sucker for any kind of homemade meal.
“This is good,” Matt said begrudgingly, talking with his mouth full.
“You don’t have to lick the fucking plate, there’s more in the pot.”
“I’m not fucking licking it.”
Sofie chuckled, watching them bicker. She ruffled Mello’s hair, which seemed like a dangerous move to Matt. Mello tolerated it.
“So how’d you guys meet, anyway?”
“She taught me guitar.” Mello touched Sofie’s elbow. “Saan ang iyong gitara?“
The instruments she brought out looked nothing like any guitar Matt had ever seen. They were short and fat and shaped like a teardrop.
Mello and her sat across from each other, cross-legged on the carpet, and played a duet that had a rhythm like rain. They moved in perfect synchronicity, watching one another’s fingers, covering for one another’s mistakes, weaving their two melodies like holding hands. It was like watching a dance.
It was lovely. It made Matt kind of gloomy. Witnessing the effortless grace of their connection had made Matt start to worry that he’d never achieve anything like that for himself. The closest he had come was good sex. Matt wanted more. He wanted intimacy. He wanted to wash himself in the tide of someone’s breathing. He wanted a soul mate. He felt alone. Being in a relationship was supposed to fucking save him. Now he was in a relationship and he was still lonely. Sometimes it felt worse than before.
He was doing a piss poor job of washing the dishes from their lunch, too distracted by his love pangs. Mello came over to criticize, and demoted him to drying. He flicked water at him.
“Stop thinking so hard.”
“Huh?”
“I said, this is still so goddamn wet,” said Mello, taking a plate out of Matt’s slack hands. Matt looked at him with eyes like cracked glass.
“I, uh... Like I feel kinda weird.”
“Mm-hm?”
“Yeah. Um, I think I’m gonna go nap for a while.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
“Sorry,” said Matt. Doggedly, he took the plate back from Mello and swiped at it with the towel. Mello sighed. The guy was swaying on his feet with tired. Mello had watched him toss and turn all last night.
Mello usually thought that anybody who took the time to sit around and be depressed clearly didn’t have enough going on in their life, but there was something about Matt—some helpless earnestness—that brought out hidden reserves of patience in him.
“Fuck, go lie down, man, go,” he said, shooing him off. “I can deal with a couple dishes.”
Matt stumbled into the nearest armchair and fell into sleep like dying. He woke up to a crick in his neck and Mello shaking him by the arm, saying, “Wake up, man, we’ve got to go. Sofie’s boyfriend is coming over.”
“She has a boyfriend?”
“Good for her. I hope to christ I’m still getting it when I’m eighty,” Mello said. He was thumbing at his newly-recharged phone. “Power’s back on in South Central.”
“Uh,” Matt replied. He had never set foot in South Central and, as a pale person with a decent sense of self-preservation, did not intend to.
“Let’s go,” said Mello, uncaring, climbing into the driver's seat of Matt’s Jeep without asking. “I wanted a haircut anyway.”
()
Mello drove them confidently past miles of browning lawns and basketball hoops, and pulled them up in a strip mall advertising Tobacco, Nails, Beauty and Cleaners.
The amount of commentary they got when Matt heaved a fishtank into the salon on Laurel Street was overwhelming. “Aw, hell no, I know none of you ordered no Filet-O-Fish sandwich!” “Niggas be out walking they dogs, but this nigga so advanced he walking his goddamn fish!” “Somebody call Disney, ‘cause this nigga went and found Nemo!”
Mello laughed. Matt went red in an arrow-straight line, from neck to hairline. Mello thought this was kind of cute, but kept his opinions to himself. When Matt tried to wait it out by the door, Mello gestured at him to sit and told him getting a damn haircut was the least he could do.
“God, I could die,” Matt groaned into his hands, as his hairdresser clucked at him to stop moving. Mello, eyes closed and head a froth of shampoo, said, “You really need to get over your ego, Matt, it’s just going to hold you back.”
“I— don’t—need to be hearing that from you.”
Mello was enjoying himself thoroughly. Matt’s hairdresser mouthed boyfriend? at him over Matt’s prostrate, mortified head, and Mello winked at her, just to give Matt hell.
Afterwards, they enjoyed hamburgers at a joint down the street, while Frank enjoyed his filtered water at the salon. Licking fry grease off his fingers, Matt eyed Mello’s new hair. He had done something to it to make it bouncy and shiny as hell.
“Do you dye your hair?”
“What? Fuck no,” said Mello, sounding very offended.
“I just thought it, like, didn’t match your eyebrows or something.”
“I don’t dye shit,” muttered Mello, looking pissily out the window. Matt felt bad. Mello looked like a goddamned god, compared to him—and had killed a chicken and made Matt lunch, to boot—and here Matt was, nitpicking.
“Sorry, I mean, it looks good,” he said conciliatorily, and Mello said stiffly, “Yours too.”
“Like, I like the way you do your bangs,” said Matt. He was trying to apologize, specifically for having ditched Mello with the dishes earlier, and in general for being depressed and subpar company.
“That’s overdoing it.”
“Oh, fuck you. I was trying to be nice.”
“You’re clearly nice, Matt. Anyone could tell that in about one goddamn second.”
“Wow, thanks,” said Matt, stung.
“It’s a compliment, man.”
“Well, I mean, ‘nice’ is just… Everyone knows nice is just fucking, like, code for average. Boring, or whatever.”
“No,” said Mello. “Nice means nice.” Matt watched him twist a straw wrapper round and round his finger. Matt had already noted that he was a chronic fidgeter. “It’s not fucking common,” he added.
Matt smiled unguardedly at Mello. A smile looked nice on him. It emphasized his eyes and reduced the size of his ears. Mello rolled his eyes and stole a fry off of Matt’s tray. Straight boys would be the goddamn death of him.
“Come on,” he said, standing. “Let’s go rescue Bubbles before Ronda’s cat gets to him.”
()
They drove and drove, chasing electricity. They drove to El Monte, and Huntington Park, and Silver Lake because Mello wanted this one specific, pretentious type of chocolate. Matt requested one stop, in Inglewood, to visit his weed dealer.
They took Wilshire down to the beach, hitting reds the whole way, and rolled joints, sitting in the sand.
They were busy noticing new things about one another. Matt had noticed Mello’s voice, which was deep and smoke-rough and not at all effeminate. Mello noticed Matt’s freckles.
Matt hesitantly brought up some of his more esoteric interests: political anarchism, 80s anime, the usefulness of hidden buffer overflows. Mello was not only able but willing to communicate intelligently about these things because Mello ravished for all knowledge; his mind was like a whetstone, continually thirsting for new and sharp things to strike against.
They appeared in the background of exactly eleven photos taken at the beach that day. Many people walking by glanced casually at them and assumed they were old friends. They gave off that type of energy.
“So like, being real, dude… How’d you get Kevin to leave?”
“I convinced him he should move in with his girlfriend.”
“... Didn’t he end up breaking up with her?”
“Did he? That’s a personal problem.”
“Dude. You’re such a bitch.”
“Shut up. Bitch.”
They sat in comfortable silence, letting the tide come up to their toes. They kicked water at one another.
“Feeling better?” Mello said, out of nowhere.
“Yeah,” said Matt. He was.
And then they went back home, where they discovered that the power was back on.
()
After the power came back, Matt and Mello went on to do a lot of other shit, but I think you’ve gotten the idea by now. I’ll leave them to it, but note two things:
One, that although neither of them knew it, they had already fallen into the dynamic that they would have for the rest of their lives together: Mello bullshitting confidently, Matt striking just the right balance of calling him out and falling for it.
And two, when they were standing together, finally, at the end of their long, neverending, drag of a spring break, they both had the same thought, nearly simultaneously:
What a weird week. What a weird guy.
We’ll probably never talk to each other again.
Neither of them had a goddamn clue.