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Ethan has third period with Chad Meeks-Martin.
It is not the first time he sees him that day. It is not the last. He considers it a steady middle ground, the time of day that’s most precious to him, when Chad asks for a sheet of notebook paper because of course he forgot again and he’s so sorry for giving Ethan so much trouble and he promises to bring his own tomorrow.
He knows Ethan by name. He knows Ethan Landry from AP Psychology who lends him supplies and slides him answers to homework when he inevitably forgets. Ethan knows he knows this. He pays attention. He studies the way Chad’s mouth moves when he says it. Hey, Ethan, can I borrow a pencil? His tongue flicks through his teeth as he whispers it, it’s a quick movement but it slows the more he watches. Ethan. His name on Chad’s lips, between his teeth, biting into the sound, savoring it.
And when Chad tosses that barely touched notebook paper in the recycling bin at the end of the class (which doesn’t hurt as much anymore), Ethan can’t help but grab the remnants of him when nobody else is in the room. He studies the marks of Chad’s (Ethan’s) pencil and forms the words into sound in his head, being spoken to by him. Chad’s voice repeats back notes on classical conditioning, skipping over the doodles of god knows what in the margins just to speak to him. To tell Ethan something. Anything.
Third period should be Ethan’s favorite, but he prefers fourth, AP Statistics, where he can lay out the memory of Chad on his desk and drag his finger along the lines, his forefinger gliding with the creases, imprinting onto something Chad had touched. It’s like he can taste him through it, eyes closed and teeth bared like some feral animal, longing for more than just a carcass. The paper is dead. Things become dead when not in Chad’s touch anymore. Ethan wants him alive, wants him breathing, wants him to notice things he hadn’t before.
He stays after school for Yearbook Club every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’s on these days he’s allowed to wander the halls after nobody is inhabiting them, going over the path of Chad’s classes over and over again until it’s as familiar as his own, tracing his footsteps to Calculus, then Economics, then AP Psych, then Foods. It’s a simple pattern, only two floors to scour before he’s ran his course, then he finds himself back in Yearbook Club, developing photos onto his laptop and eyeing the background of each one just in case he missed a breath of him in the daylight.
Ethan is skilled with a camera, something his entire family can vouch on, the mechanics of photography and video passed down from his brother. Richie taught him how to focus a blurry image, how to snap a picture when he wasn’t supposed to, how to edit and manipulate things into his own vision.
Ethan finds it useful not just for his extracurriculars, but as a hobby. A lifestyle, as Richie would’ve said. There is a sense of forever in a photograph, a moment chilled in time. It kept things alive.
It kept Chad alive when he was out of sight.
He doesn’t mind that the football team thinks he’s weird, because he’s just doing his job. The Yearbook is pages upon pages of athletes, every high school’s pride and joy, and even if the boys don’t want to admit it, they like being immortalized like that. Their fifteen minutes of fame highlighted in high definition, big tacky letters of their names next to their bodies as they rough each other up like a pack of puppies, fighting over their toy and growling at anyone who tries to take it.
Chad’s jersey number is ten. Ethan’s birth month. The time on Ethan’s clock in second period. The age Ethan turned eight years ago at his Star Wars themed birthday party, ten Star Wars movies to date. Ten, double digits, like his age, same as Chad’s. They share many doubled things; two eyes, two ears, two legs and arms and hands. Ten fingers on both hands. Ethan counts them out just to make sure they’re all there every time he watches that blue and yellow flash catch the ball from pummeling to the grass.
He sits on a bleacher in the field, the one all the players sit at when it isn’t their turn. He wonders if Chad had ever sat where he is now. The lens of his camera is following him, taking a shot every with every sudden movement, that bright number glistening on the back of his practice jersey.
One two three four five six-
There’s a low chatter on the field, some laughing, and Ethan is so winded he isn’t quite sure why yet, but he opens his eyes and he’s flat on the grass, camera knocked out of his hands and head pounding like a church bell. He sits up before he can process what just happened, that he definitely almost got knocked out by a football.
Did Chad see? is all he can think, did he actually have to see me like this?
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry, man. Are you alright?”
Chad’s voice slaps him back to normalcy. It’s right there. It’s closer than it’s ever been. It rings in his ears and makes his head hurt worse. There’s a hand on his shoulder. Ethan flinches, and Chad doesn’t remove it.
“Yeah I’m-“ he struggles to even speak, he refuses to look at Chad. The players in the field are laughing to themselves and Ethan can’t tell if he wants to die or not.
“Jesus, dude,” Chad says, “I didn’t even see you there. You’re like a ghost.”
He wants to shove him off and run, to retreat back to the film classroom where everything is quieter, where he can bury himself in work and hide his embarrassment. He wants to get up and apologize for being in the way, but he can’t, because Chad is kneeling beside him and keeping him steady, touching him, holding him, and Ethan doesn’t even dwell on the implications of going unnoticed, because now, in this moment, he is.
“Sorry,” is all he can squeak out, eyes still forward, squinting and opening them on loop and hoping that nothing serious actually happened.
“Don’t be. It’s my bad. I need to work on my aim,” Chad says through a laugh.
Ethan turns to him, and their eyes meet, and his vision is still blurry but Chad’s smile is so bright and his head hurts like a bitch but he can’t do anything about it. It hurts because of Chad. He doesn’t think he wants the pain to ever go away.
Before Ethan can attempt to say anything else, he’s being hoisted up onto his feet, Chad’s hands gripping onto his forearms and yanking him up off the dirt, and all Ethan can do is think about how right it feels to be within his grasp. Taken. Shown compassion when all of his teammates are hacking up lungs from laughing so hard. Ethan wonders what Chad would do if he fainted, or dropped dead. Would he feel bad? Would he call for help? Would he drag Ethan’s limp body somewhere nobody could hurt him again?
Ethan grins and his lids flutter as he regains composure. He hasn’t stopped looking at Chad’s face, his brows furrowed in worry for Ethan, all for him, all for his care.
“Let me take you to the nurse,” he offers, and Ethan doesn’t refuse. He nods, because he’s unsure of how else to handle the situation without saying something he will regret.
When Chad begins to walk, he tugs Ethan alongside him like a lost child, like he’ll run off if he’s released. Perhaps it’s because he’s shy, or embarrassed, or so struck by the presence of a star athlete that Chad holds him like he does, one arm draped around his back and clasping his shoulder, the other stilling Ethan by his elbow, steadying his steps as they exit the field.
Ethan wonders, shamefully, if this is what it’s like to be loved by him. If this is what it’s like to be Tara. He wonders if she knows how lucky she is to enamor him. It stings him to his core when he catches them together, swooning, kissing, being in each other’s bubbles of air as much as they want. He wants to hate her because of it. He wants to prove something to her— that he could be all the things she lacks.
He could ask Chad, hypothetically, about the topic of his relationship, bait him into spilling what he secretly loathes about his girlfriend, what he wished she could do better at, or what she could give more of. He could really try, really get under his skin and pull out those thoughts that hide behind the thumping red filter of young love.
But Chad is nothing like him. Chad is good. Chad loves Tara with all the heart he’s not already given out to others. He loves her through her faults, through the days she comes to school in pajamas, through the times where she hasn’t been able to attend his games. He knows he loves her because he cannot keep his eyes off of them.
He hates that he doesn’t hate Tara, that he wants to see her be happy, even if it’s with the one thing he wants more than anything. He wants her to smile around Chad, to laugh with him, to be able to do all the things he knows he could never do.
But that doesn’t stop him from wanting.
“I’m sorry again,” Chad says as they enter the building, his hands still burning heat onto Ethan’s skin. “I guess this is my payback for all the times you let me cheat off of your quizzes.”
Ethan laughs, his eyes glued to his feet as he does so. He refrains from asking which quiz it is that Chad has in mind. Which memory of Ethan he’s reflecting on.
“It’s okay. Seriously.” Ethan is stammering. His cheeks are heating up and he wants to lean into Chad’s embrace. “My brother used to push me down the stairs so this is nothing.”
Why did you fucking say that you stupid ass fucking-
“No way. My sister used to do that to me too.”
“Mindy?”
“Yeah! You know her?”
“I do,” Ethan says, “she’s in my film studies class.”
“Oh, sweet. Must be nice being surrounded by the Meeks-Martin twins all day, huh?”
You have no idea. “Uh- yeah. Totally. Even better now that I know your sister is a badass.”
He knows it's a joke, that the two are making small talk and it means nothing more, but he knows that in his tone there is truth. What he wouldn’t give to be around Chad for eight hours a day, on his heels like a dog, watching him like a hawk, touching him like he knows he’s meant to do, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to imagine the lengths he would go for it. He fears what his brain could come up with if he tries.
“Low blow. You think I’m cooler though, right?”
I think you’re a fucking saint and I want to have you all to myself and I want Tara to leave and I want you to love me and I think you’re gorgeous and I think I’m afraid of myself whenever I’m close to you and oh God I don’t think I can be this close to you ever again.
“Yeah. Way cooler. For sure.”
Chad doesn’t respond, he just smirks, and Ethan thinks for a moment he said something wrong, that the minor possibility he actually spat everything out loud came true. He has plenty of ways to kill himself if that was the case. His dad is a cop, he could take his gun and blast a hole through his head, or take all of his sister’s medication, or all of his own medication.
“I think you’re pretty cool too, you know.”
Ethan stops and looks into Chad’s dark eyes, trying to extract the source of that statement through them. Looking for something sinister behind them, waiting for a bark of laughter and punch to the gut. He avoided for so long grouping Chad into that box, the mean football player, someone who could humiliate him on purpose, but he sees nothing. He sees no harm, no unkindness, he just sees Chad.
His heart is telling him to lean forward and kiss him, and he’s pretty sure his brain is telling him that, too, and he feels stuck in his body as he stands face to face with the boy he’s pined over all of high school. To do something stupid like that wouldn’t be out of character for him, because all he did was stupid things. And if he said it out loud he’d be told how smart he was, and he knows he’s smart, but Chad makes him so fucking dumb that it hurts him. He wants to thank that football for flying straight into his temple and leading him to this moment, the one where he fully realizes he is so fucking in love.
In love. He’s crazy. He’s aware he’s fucking crazy. He’s past the point of caring if it’s rational or not to fall for someone who barely spoke to him up until ten minutes ago over a mistake. He could tell Chad right now and get it over with and deal with the heartbreak faster. He wants to consume him. To keep him alive forever.
Chad’s hands remove themself from his body and he feels fucking dead.
He feels as dead as all those balled up notebook papers and pencils and pens that once had the opportunity to bear his touch but lost it when they were abandoned. Chad isn’t touching him anymore and he wonders what the hell he did wrong, why he’s a failure, what he said to make him back away. His soul hangs in the trenches of his body like it doesn’t have room anywhere else. He looks at Chad’s hands by his side and counts his fingers. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightninete-
“You okay?”
No, he wants to shout, he’s not fucking okay. He’s not okay and he thinks he’ll never be okay again unless Chad just fucking touches him one more time.
“I’m fine,” is all he says, “just got dizzy.”
Chad stares for a moment, judging him, pulling him apart in his brain, studying every inch of him under a microscope for why he’s so weird, why he would ever decide to lend Ethan a hand.
But it was just for a moment. He grins, and Ethan feels something inside of him take a breath.
“Alright, just don’t pass out. We’re almost there.”
Chad’s hand is on his shoulder again. Ethan feels alive.