Chapter Text
For his whole adult life, Tom’s told people that he’s from St. Paul. The thing is, it’s not entirely true. Sure, his parents worked in St. Paul, and he went to school there, but he's not from there.
His actual hometown sets his teeth alight, and makes him bite down on his molars until it feels like they may crack. The bumfuck town he grew up, the one where his house was the only big and ornate one for miles, surrounded by cornfields and run down, ramshackle eyesores.
As far as he’s concerned, St. Paul is the only place to be from, if you’ve got to be from Minnesota. His embarrassment of a hometown simply won’t do.
He’s Tom Wambsgans, from St. Paul, Minnesota. Broad-shouldered, sharply-dressed, rising miles and miles above his station.
That’s who he is. It doesn’t matter who he began as.
----
Tom gets into real, serious trouble for the first time at thirteen. It isn't really his fault, and even if it was, it wouldn’t have happened if that fucking moron from third period hadn’t opened his fat trap. Even at forty-two years old, loaded to the brim with enough self-loathing to sate an entire town, Tom reserves a special piece of hatred for Tristian Mastradon.
The trouble happens because of stolen cigarettes.
The problem with Tom, or at least one of the problems with Tom, is that he’s never had friends, not really, because the kids that your mom makes you play with while she has coffee with their moms doesn’t count.
Tom’s never had friends, but he knows what people look for. He knows what makes someone appealing, and he has the pieces to make himself appealing, he thinks, but he can’t figure out how to snap them together.
In his third period biology class, he’s assigned to sit next to Trevor Harpsring, the class favorite. Privately, Tom thinks that Trevor is just a kid who knows when to laugh and when to joke and when to shut up. Tom could be him. Anyone could be him.
Except, all Tom knows how to do is talk, and that talking is really just like a drowning man attempting to kick to the surface: violent, aggressive, ultimately useless.
Anyways. Tom sits beside Trevor, which means that he’s in Trevor’s lab group for weekly lab. Trevor never really talks to him, just talks to his other friend who’s in the lab group, but Tom listens. Always.
“My sister stopped buying me smokes,” Trevor says one day, a week before The Incident. Tom thinks that Trevor sounds ridiculously cool, calling cigarettes smokes. His accent flattens out the words but it’s still cool, like something a guy in a movie would say.
“Seriously?” Christian, the friend, asks. Tom looks between the two, rapt. “What a bitch.”
Tom expects Trevor to flush or snap, the way Tom would if someone called his nonexistent sister a bitch, but Trevor just nods. It’s another thing that Tom files away in the vault.
“She sucks, dude. Now I don’t know where to get them.”
Tom carefully focuses the microscope, and thinks of prison. Cigarettes are currency there- who’s to say they can’t be the same thing here? Give a loosie, get some respect. Give a pack, get a friend.
“Do you have the lab done yet, Tom?” Trevor asks, and Tom nods, pushing his notes across the lab table.
Right now, he’s only good for one thing. But that won’t be for long.
Tom thinks about the cigarettes for the rest of the day, and then he thinks of the convenience store on the corner near their middle school.
The next day, he turns to Trevor the moment he sits down, disrupting their otherwise quiet routine.
“Remember that stuff you said yesterday about cigarettes?” Tom asks, and Trevor squints at him, sort of confused.
“What?”
“In lab yesterday. You said your sister stopped buying them for you.”
Trevor looks at him like he’s a freak. Tom doesn’t really mind the look anymore, because it’s something he’s pretty much used to. It doesn’t make him grit his teeth as much as it did, but it still sets him on edge. He wants to give Trevor a reason to stop looking at him like that. He wants to win at whatever game he’s just started playing.
“Uh, yeah, man. I guess.”
“I can get them for you.” Tom thinks of playing it cool. “If you want.”
Trevor stares at him for a moment, then a slow smile spreads across his face.
Tom likes the look; it makes him feel like everything about him has clicked into place. He’s filling out his too tall height, his long nose, his strong brow. He’s clicking together all the pieces he has to be a cool guy, a likable guy, a guy like Trevor.
Trevor looks at Tom like he’s a valuable asset. It feels fucking incredible.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, man.” Tom says. “I’ll get them tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Tom.” Trevor nods. “You’re the fucking man.”
Tom nods, not letting himself smile.
That, he realizes as an adult, was the defining moment. The switch flip. The realization that he could change who he was, what he was, what people thought of him, with a little bit of power. The realization that getting power is pretty easy, too, so long as you’re willing to muddy up your hands.
The next day, Tom cuts his last period to sit in the bathroom and think up a strategy. He’s nervous about the whole thing, hideously so, and it pisses him off. He paces back and forth in front of the sinks, and thinks about pocketing the cigarettes that aren’t locked up behind the cash register.
His mom’s disapproving face briefly flashes in his head, and he ignores it.
Don’t be a fucking pussy, he thinks bitterly, and then storms out of the bathroom. It’s easy to cut across the football field and walk down the street, but it’s difficult to force his legs to move and go into the convenience store.
It’s a faded thing, a sore thumb on an otherwise nice street. It’s where all the high schoolers go to get alcohol and not get carded. There’s a rumor that someone sells weed out of the back.
Tom doesn't know why he's so nervous, because he's a clean-cut kid. He wears collared shirts beneath his sweaters. He shouldn't fear getting caught at all. So, he adjusts his collar, pushes back his hair, and steps into the store. He makes it easy for himself: buys a package of gum, and slips a pack into his pocket when the cashier isn’t looking.
He steps outside triumphant, feeling like a fucking king. He’s about to become something more than a friendless freak.
The cigarettes make him feel thirty pounds lighter. He practically soars to the bus stop.
“Shit, Wambsgans,” Trevor says the next day, with a low whistle. “Thank you.”
Tom likes being called by his last name. It makes him feel like he’s on a team more impressive than the modified baseball team, where all the guys hate him, anyway.
“No problem,” Tom says, grinning. Trevor carefully tucks the cigarettes into his backpack, and Tom watches the movement with careful eyes.
He looks up at him and nods, and Trevor nods back. It’s a secret between the two of them. It’s a pack of stolen cigarettes, and it makes Tom understand how good it feels to be valuable.
For the rest of the week, Trevor treats Tom differently. They do work together, instead of Trevor copying Tom’s. Trevor laughs at Tom’s mumbled jokes when the teacher talks. He tells Christian to stop being an asshole when he trips Tom.
That’s the ticket, Tom realizes. Give them something they want, something they need, and they’re going to like you. It’s basic economics. It’s supply and demand, item scarcity. Tom’s Rockefeller, they’re starving for oil, and he's more than happy to pour it down their waiting throats. It doesn't matter how much it bleeds him.
The bubble pops a week later, when he slips Trevor another pack of cigarettes and that fucking snitch Tristian watches him do it. He squeals to the teacher, and Trevor doesn’t cover for Tom.
“Tom gave them to me.” Trevor says, far too quickly. Any other guy would get called a snitch, a dick, a wuss. But Trevor’s Trevor, and Tom’s Tom, and the rules don’t apply the same way in this realm.
The teacher tells the principal, the principal calls Tom’s parents. His mother cries and his father looks at him with genuine disappointment, and Tom is filled to the brim with hot, angry loathing. He wants to beat Tristian’s ass. He wants to slam his knee into Tristian’s nose until there’s blood on his khakis. He wants to punch him in the mouth and feel teeth rattle under his fist.
Instead, he has to go apologize to the convenience store clerk, some sixteen year old drop-out that Tom’s surely smarter than. The clerk thinks it’s funny, Tom’s dad gives him a reproachful look, and he’s marched home and promptly grounded for a month, after a stern and shrill talking-to from his mother.
At school, Trevor doesn’t waste his time with Tom anymore. The monopoly’s been broken up, and there’s nothing left. Tom’s no longer an asset. He’s just the asshole in third period, stewing and angry, a body to do work and present it for copying.
From then, Tom decides not to bother wasting time with his moronic classmates. He doesn’t need their friendship; they don't need his platonic love-bombing. He doesn’t need some idiotic thirteen year old already addicted to cheap cigarettes, calling them smokes like he's anything more than a rich white kid from St. Paul.
He’s going to be better than them, at any cost. He’s destined for big things- his mom told him that his ambition is a gift from a young age. None of what they have to offer is worth sinking to their level.
Tom’s heading onwards and upwards, upwards, upwards.
----
Tom takes Lucy Pepper to senior prom. He thinks she’s prettier than in the usual midwestern way: long blonde hair, green eyes, white teeth. She’s objectively hot, and Tom tries to jerk off thinking of her, but it doesn’t work.
He’s been trying that sort of thing a lot lately: jerking off thinking of girls he knows. It stemmed from his first girlfriend, Kelsey Mets, being unable to make him come during a hand job junior year. She went at it for a while, until both of them were red faced with frustration, and his stupid dick couldn’t throw him a single bone.
Kelsey was just a fluke, so Tom’s been trying since then, to horrid results. It doesn't matter. He keeps trying.
Lucy wears a green prom dress, so Tom naturally wears a matching tie under his black suit. This is one of three suits that he owns, because he’s not a plebeian like the rest of his classmates. He doesn’t intend to rent a suit, ever.
They take photos in front of his mantle, her mother tears up, his mother calls him Tommy too many times and fuses with his immaculate Windsor knot until he snaps at her. Then they meet with their other friends, take photos in beautifully manicured backyards in St. Paul, and then load up into their cars to drive to dinner before the dance.
“Do you like my dress?” Lucy asks, as Tom fiddles with the radio. He glances at her and nods, forcing a smile.
“Yeah, you look great.” He already told her this. He doesn’t know why she’s asking. He wants her to shut up so he can find a radio station.
“It’s supposed to match my eyes.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“You think so?”
Lucy’s fucking needy, Tom thinks. It probably explains why he couldn’t finish at the thought of her.
“Yeah.” Tom grits his back teeth. “I just said so.”
Lucy goes kind of quiet at that, and Tom’s pleased. He asked her to prom because she’s hot, because his handful of friends told him to, and because he figured it would look good. It would make him look like a little less of a dick, or whatever.
But she’s fucking annoying. He keeps catching glances of her, making doe eyes at him, batting big eyelashes. He wants to turn and tell her to cut it the fuck out. He wants to tell her to sit quietly.
He just drives.
Someone spikes the punch at prom, which is such a ridiculous movie trope that Tom almost doesn’t believe it until he takes a swig and tastes nothing but Sprite and cheap vodka. He drinks another cup to be safe, and then goes to dance with Lucy for a few songs.
She’s less obnoxious when the music drowns her out and he can focus on her big eyes. They’re sort of deer-like, which doesn’t annoy him. It’s kind of nice.
They slow dance and his hand travels the curve of her waist, warm and steady, but he doesn’t feel anything as he does it. Lucy looks up at him expectantly, so he bends and kisses her quickly, so as not to alert any teachers. It doesn’t feel like anything besides a wet exchange of lips, not particularly horrible but not particularly interesting, either.
After the song ends, he excuses himself to the bathroom. It’s empty besides Trevor Harpsring, the little weasel from biology class.
“Hey, Trevor.” Tom says as he washes his hands. He still hates the guy a little for severing some sort of trust between him and his parents, but it was five years ago. Tom's recovered.
Still, Trevor's being weird. Just sort of lurking behind him, watching Tom in the mirror.
“Hey, man.”
“Having a good night?”
“It’s okay.”
“Yeah.” Tom tries his hands and starts for the door, but Trevor stops him with a sudden hand on the wrist.
He just stares at Tom, swallowing and looking like he’s coming to terms with something. Tom just watches him, ignoring the sudden feeling in his chest, ignoring the thought that Trevor Harpsring has really long lashes and full lips for a guy.
That’s when Trevor kisses him, and Tom doesn’t push him away. He just kisses back.
Trevor tastes like cheap vodka, smells like cheap vodka, is probably composed of at least one percent cheap vodka right now. With another guy’s tongue down his throat, Tom is suddenly the most sober he’s ever been.
"Don't make it weird, Wambsgans." Trevor’s hand fumbles, drunk and unsure, for the zipper in Tom’s pants. Tom doesn’t hesitate to let him.
This time, when he’s given a hand job, he comes.
“Where were you?” Lucy asks, catching him as he steps out of the bathroom, feeling weird and fucked up and good. Trevor’s somewhere behind him, because Tom had remembered himself in the post-jizz elation and shoved him off and said, “Fuck off and leave me alone.” He left Trevor in the bathroom, drunk with a come-splattered hand and an erection in his boxers.
Tom glances down at Lucy, and belated wonders if there’s a visible wet spot on his pants.
“Bathroom.”
“You were gone for a while.”
“Yeah, and?”
“Do you want to dance again?” She asks, raising her blonde eyebrows.
Tom wants to tell her, your dress looks like shit, by the way. Where’d you get it? Sears?
“Not really.” He says instead, because he doesn't want to be a total asshole.
“What?”
“I said no. I don’t want to dance again. I’m kind of bored of this whole dance, actually. It’s pretty kitschy. Sort of ridiculous.”
“I think it’s cute.”
“You would. You have horrific taste.”
“You’re such an asshole, Tom.” Lucy’s pathetic eyes are wet and wide. “You always act like you’re so much better than everyone else.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, you’re not. You’re just the same as the rest of us. What, do you think you’re too good for us?”
Tom pauses, running his tongue over the scar on his lip that he got when he was ten and fell into the glass coffee table. Lucy stares at him, tears on her red cheeks, waiting for an answer.
Screw it, Tom thinks. I’m out of here in a month.
“I actually do think that, Lucy. I think I’m going to be more successful than all of you. Richer, smarter, more powerful.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Yeah. You’re all destined for state schools and community colleges. I’m going to fucking Cornell, and then I’m going to be an executive at some big company. And where will all of you be?”
“You’re a dick. It’s no wonder everyone hates you.” Lucy snaps in a whisper, horrified, and Tom just shrugs his shoulders. He’s a little drunk, riding off the high and shame of what just happened in the bathroom, and he doesn’t give a shit. The Lucy Pepper’s and Tristian Mastradon’s and Trevor Harpsring’s of the world aren’t destined for much. Not like Tom is.
Tom turns and leaves, and doesn’t take Lucy back home. He just leaves, and when he gets back into his bedroom, he inexplicably starts to cry.
When he’s done, shame rolling onto him in waves, he goes to the bathroom and scrubs his face with cold water. Lately, he's been feeling like he's always tasting nonexistent blood, so he scrubs out his mouth, too. When he looks back up at the mirror, hardened eyes look back at him.
Welcome to your new life, Wambsgans, Tom thinks. Here’s where everything changes.
----
College is good. College is fucking fantastic. Tom reinvents himself, starts using the St. Paul lie, trains himself to ditch his stupid accent. He calls his mom semi-regularly, he buys a new suit, he keeps his dorm room clean despite his slob of a roommate. He pretends that he never came in another guy’s hand in a bathroom at his stupid senior prom, pretends he doesn’t still jerk off thinking about it.
At a party his first week in, Tom makes out with some nameless guy in the bathroom. He shoves the guy off before it can go too far, vaguely threatens him, and chalks it all up to the alcohol, even though he only had one drink. The guy looks confused, so Tom shoves him again and storms out of the bathroom. Outside, he pukes in a bush.
From then on, he focuses on girls.
Cornell motivates him to be better than his peers. Smarter, tougher, sharper. Tom gets a Roth IRA. He builds a stock portfolio. He pulls a face after he drinks cheap liquor. He laughs when his friends laugh, speaks when they speak. He’s not the friendless freak from middle school anymore. Here, he’s a god. Here, he gets plastered and fucks the girl from his Micro class, and feels like he’s been charged with holy lightning when he doesn’t think of Trevor to get off.
He meets the Fly Guys at the end of freshmen year, and they give themselves the shitty nickname to poke fun at other stupid cliques. Privately, they all think it sounds cool as hell. It sounds fratty and douchebag-ish and rich, three things that they're aspiring to be.
The Fly Guys are his best fucking friends. Matt, Jonas, and himself. A fan-fucking-tastic trio. They move through sophomore year with ease, with grace, going to rowing events and football games and parties. Going through girlfriends and nameless hook-ups and three drug dealers, because Tom can't stop running his mouth to the first two about their prices. It all works out flawlessly. Tom feels good, like he's somewhere where he belongs. The ringing in his ears and ever-present metallic taste in his mouth disappear, until he forgets they were ever there in the first place.
The summer after sophomore year, they all get prestigious paid internships in New York. It's not a question of if they'll live together, so they share a studio, and spend their nights getting plastered and high. They go to expensive bars, drink expensive liquor, party like expensive kings.
Tom’s unstoppable for the whole summer. Every day, he puts on a new expensive suit and strides off to Wall Street. Every night, he feels like he could fight God and win.
He’s so hopped up on youth and tequila and the odd bump of coke that he doesn’t acknowledge the rare blowjob or hand job he gets from random guys in club bathrooms. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, because it doesn't matter to him.
After all: everyone’s a little bit of a glutton, right?