Chapter Text
Stan thinks about Gary a lot. Like, a lot.
Not the general concept of the boy, but the idea of that perfection that comes with him by default, wedging itself deeper each time Stan decides it’s the last time he’s going to think about it. It evokes the same emotions as the one and only time Stan spiraled in a downward slope of college acceptance videos. This vague hope bubbling inside that he, too, could achieve something so great, paralleled only to the far greater knowledge that he wouldn’t.
So it would be understandable, at least from an internal perspective, that Stan would grow upset to see the real Gary standing in front of him. Moreover, the real Gary has just brushed his shoulder accidentally. What is that supposed to mean, anyway? That Stan isn’t important enough to notice before brushing up against? And the big problem is that Gary holds an external perspective.
He smiles. “Sorry for bumping into you, Stan.” And before the tides have changed he swerves around and continues on his way.
Stan feels paralyzed standing up, his whole body shocked to the effect of an ice bucket, and then that shock sternly pushes him to turn around and watch Gary’s back walking away. His vocal chords are revving up like an engine, pistons firing simultaneously, and then it dies out and he’s left with an empty feeling in both his stomach and his head. Bullet after bullet of chagrin is shot, and finally, once Gary’s almost completely removed from his vision like a smudge on the lens, Stan whispers to himself, “Asshole.”
The next time he thinks about Gary, he’s doing math homework with Kyle.
It appears in his mind out of nowhere. What once was reviewing trigonometric functions and graphs is now completely blanked out with Gary. The boy, this time, and not just the concept of his perfection.
“What do you think about Gary?” Stan asks out of nowhere, because everything seems to be out of nowhere nowadays.
He looks up at Kyle, who doesn’t look up in return. Kyle’s furiously scribbling something down, unwavering as always, and doesn’t even blink when he says, “I don’t.”
The two simple words I don’t mentally leave Stan stranded and tied upside down with a rope around his ankles. His pencil clatters on the floor, each clack of the wood to the carpet multiplying the lack of understanding. Then Kyle does look up, because he always knows what’s happening in Stan’s inner psyche, and by the universally-accepted sign of that look, it means Stan has to explain himself. “But—but he’s the class president,” Stan says very simply. Very obviously.
“And Butters is the treasurer,” Kyle snorts. He raises his eyebrows up at Stan, as if that means anything more than his last judgmental expression, which Stan is sure it does, but he can’t be bothered. All it really says for the time being is I know something about you that you don’t know about you, and the only thing Stan can do in response to this blatant attack on him is to pick his pencil up from off the ground and continue with his math homework, which goes by that much slower now that it’s not the one and only thing he’s confused about.
Remember that math homework Stan was banging his head on a wall over? Stan remembers it very well. In fact, those same trigonometric functions vaguely float around in his head space, like a beach ball drifting to the far side of the pool on a windy day, when he sits in the principal’s office next to thee Gary fucking Harrison. He gives a sidelong glance at Gary and then resorts back to staring at the eggshell-colored wall behind the principal’s head, who is going on about something that’s become a terrible mess of muted noise to Stan. The most he notices from her is curly blonde hovering in and out of eggshell.
“Stan,” Gary whispers very softly, and for some reason it’s his voice that pulls Stan back into reality. It makes him incredibly distressed for a second, because the eggshell walls had just started to drown him in their neutrality, only for an alarming level of consciousness to beam him into the real world so quickly he gets a headache. He turns to look at Gary straight-on, and Gary flinches his hand back from the gentle action of patting Stan’s shoulder that he was just about to perform. “Um, Ms. Victoria is talking to you,” he says hesitantly.
Stan swivels his head back to the eggshell wall and focuses on Ms. Victoria this time, or, at least the blonde outline of her hair, and she has a face of complete defeat. Talking to Stan is truly a lost cause, and even he is aware of this fact. “Mr. Marsh,” she says very gravely. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said in the past five minutes?”
Stan blinks in her direction and says, “Sorry.”
She sighs. “Stan, as you are on disciplinary probation for cheating on your math exam, Gary here has insisted that you be taken under his wing.”
Stan narrows his eyes just slightly, licking his bottom lip, and then he lets out a small laugh. A breath of air reminiscent to a scoff. All he’s thinking about in the moment is the phrase under his wing, as if Stan is some wounded animal who needs shelter from a storm. At least, that’s how he interprets it. And then the rest of the sentence comes slamming into his face—the part with Gary in it. He raises his eyebrows and leans forward and blinks a little more. “Sorry?”
“It’s too late for apologies, Stan,” she replies.
He turns back to Gary, who smiles with a hint of awkwardness in the way he quirks his mouth. As if he’s sort of sorry for the whole situation, even though he proctored it. Stan just stares at Gary’s lip, that damn smile, and decides that he hates that quirk more than anything else, because behind that awkward sorry Stan is certain he sees evil. Malicious, no good, evil.
“I just can’t believe it!” Stan yells at lunch. Gary’s supposed to accompany him with that, too, but Stan had given a strongly-worded explanation for why he didn’t need to be spoon fed. He doesn’t know where exactly Gary goes for lunch, but for the time being he’s just grateful it’s not anywhere near him. “I mean, who the hell does that guy think he is, insisting that I go under his wing, like—like—“
“Like a wounded animal,” Kyle suggests, stabbing his fork into a bit of salad, and Stan snaps his fingers in Kyle’s general direction.
“Yeah! And really, who cares about cheating, here? It’s South Park.”
“Gary’s such a fag,” Cartman adds. He eats a burger and says through a mouthful of beef and patty, “If I were you, I’d totally kick his ass.”
Memories of fourth grade play like a film reel in Stan’s head when Cartman says that, and he recalls that he just couldn’t kick Gary’s ass, no matter how determined he was to do it. He doesn’t think he’d be able to kick Gary’s ass now, either, and it frustrates him beyond belief. There’s a mean, juvenile factor that’s playing into all of this that tells Stan he’s not thinking, but really, when is he ever? The strong voice he had dies out a little, and he says in a simple, matter-of-fact way, “Yeah. Of course.”
After school he goes to Gary’s house for extra help with his homework, or whatever. Since Cartman’s comment, the idea of beating Gary is more of a demanding challenge rather than a humorous suggestion. He shifts heavily from left to right foot and kicks the sidewalk beneath his feet when he rings on the doorbell. In about two seconds Gary flings the door open, and for a moment Stan is removed from negativity and just sees a boy in front of him smiling, and then the feeling sinks and it’s Gary again.
“Stan! I didn’t think you’d come,” he says.
Stan had been so sure he was going to do it. To do something. Anything. But suddenly he’s left feeling hollow, like he hasn’t eaten in days, and he chokes.
Gary holds the door open and Stan walks in with a sense of defeat weighing down each of his steps, but he’s too goddamn choked up to do anything about it. Before he knows it he’s sitting Indian-style in Gary’s bedroom and the thought, Wait. I’m in the enemy’s headquarters, is what comes to him then, but it’s too late.
“I don’t need your help,” he establishes very quickly. He feels queasy. “You—I’m just going to do my homework over here and I’ll leave as soon as I finish.” He doesn’t know why he even came to Gary’s house, if he’s going to be like this. Maybe a part of him was excited, but somewhere along the way it had gotten turned into anger like a twisted game of telephone.
Gary doesn’t say anything for a second, opting to sit at his desk with a perfect fucking desk lamp and everything, and then he says, “That’s fine.”
They spend the next hour in silence doing work. Stan has never actually finished so much in an allotted time period. He looks up at Gary, whose back is turned to him, scribbling something down, and then back down at his physics homework, which he doesn’t understand that much, and then back at Gary. But he doesn’t want to ask for help, because that would be totally gay and lame. So instead, he says, “I’m done,” as he stuffs the stupid homework into his bag.
“That’s great! You’re so productive!” Gary practically chirps as he swings his chair round.
Stan cringes away from the sounds of celebration, a look of perpetual discomfort present on his face that he hopes Gary can make out. It’s as if Gary’s suggesting that he’s normally not productive. He’s not. But how’s Gary supposed to know that? Moreover, the way he sounds like a doting mother just reminds Stan of the phrase under his wing all over again. He grabs his backpack and stands up. “Bye,” he says.
Gary waves excitedly, and Stan feels no hatred then but rather thinks for a brief moment that Gary is strange, and it’s something new. It’s not Gary wanting to help Stan that he finds weird, nor Gary’s never-ending myriad other acts of kindness, but somehow Gary waving goodbye is the most bizarre thing Stan’s seen that day. He almost smiles. Almost.
When it’s eleven at night Stan sits at the desk in his room with his half-not-working desk lamp with the end of his pencil between his teeth as he hesitates to sully the paper that is his journal (not a diary) with anything other than his purest intent in the form of graphite. It’s best to do late because the swimming flurry of thoughts go away, then, and he’s instead left with something he’s alright with. But tonight it’s not working and his head is still filled with unease, and come to think of it, maybe it is a diary.
He hovers the pencil above the blue lines of the paper for a few more seconds, deep concentration etched into his expression and a slight shake in the tip, and self-hatred shoots him in the head. Just as fast clarity comes to him if only for a few moments and he writes down in those fleeting feelings:
Obligation or want? I’m tired.
He stares at the writing for a good while and doesn’t understand it as much as he resonates with it and that’s that. At eleven-thirty Stan calls Kyle and asks him for the answers to his physics homework. Because there’s no way in hell he’s asking Gary. Ever.
He goes to bed with the same unease dirtying his thoughts and decidedly blames Gary for that, too. He thinks about Gary smiling at him, all sinister, and then a loneliness settles through his room so deeply and fully that he can’t help but answer it. He asks what he’ll be doing in the future and what he’s doing now, and why. He sort of feels guilty for cheating on his math test, then, and a hurt pushes into his throat and he almost cries but doesn’t. He thinks of Gary again, and that smile that can be considered warm at the right angle, and falls asleep with the wind carrying away the rest of it.
“So what’s the update on the Gary situation, Stan? You kick his ass?” Cartman asks on Monday. “Man, I bet he was so devastated you didn’t wanna ride him like he had hoped.”
Stan rolls his eyes. “Shut up.”
Cartman boggles at him. “What? Me!? Dude, you were the one who was freaking out over Gary, like he was the next coming of Satan or something.”
“Yeah, you were totally afraid he was gonna, like, blow your brains out,” Kenny says. He grins in Cartman’s direction, who grins back. They were always closer to each other than to either Stan or Kyle.
“Gary can actually be pretty nice,” Stan admits. It’s not like he’s saying Gary doesn’t have an alternate agenda, but in some irrational way Stan thinks he’s really the only one who has the right to complain about it. And he knows he doesn’t have anything to be embarrassed about, defending a (seemingly) decent kid, but in front of his friends, defending a decent kid is not valiant at all. Cartman snickers.
“This is just like fourth grade, you guys,” he says. Today it’s meatloaf he’s talking through. “Watch. This time they’re gonna go all the way. HIV and everything.”
“Dude, don’t talk about Stan getting AIDS,” Kyle says.
“Maybe it’s all blowing, no brains,” Kenny says.
“Are you saying I’m wrong?” Cartman asks over Kenny.
Kyle sheepishly smiles at Cartman and then Kenny and then Stan. “Well, I guess they would totally make out, yeah.”
“Fuck off,” Stan says, his face flushing, but none of the boys hear him over their own laughter.
Some days later Stan doesn’t understand another worksheet but something’s different. Somehow asking Kyle for answers now seems boring, and almost unkind. He still doesn’t want to ask Gary for help, though, so he does what he knows how to do best: waste time.
“Hey, Gary,” he starts.
Gary turns around, swiveling his chair. “What’s up, Stan?”
“I dunno. I’m just bored, you know? Sitting here doing homework.”
“The faster you finish the faster you can get out of here,” Gary laughs. He quirks the side of his mouth up, again.
Stan’s hit with some sense of indignant opposition. He’s taking the time out of his day to be nice and everything, only for Gary to suggest he leave. “I’m bored of homework. Do you have comic books in here or something?” He would say something like TV or pornography, but he’s pretty sure Gary watches paint dry for fun.
Gary gives an expression that’s difficult to interpret, leaning over in his chair thinking, and then he says, “Stan, do you need help with your homework?”
Stan gets that feeling he hates where his heart starts hammering into his rib cage and his hands start pulsating heat and sweat. “What? No.”
Gary puts his head down between his knees, and then he looks back up at Stan and it’s so piercing the pulsating feeling stops. “Okay. You wanna know something I like to do when I’m bored?” he asks.
Stan’s completely prepared for the, I like to pour myself a glass of water, or something equally bland, but Gary gets up and looks out his window. Stan’s never seen Gary look so giddy, and he means, happy like he normally is, but also nervous. He shifts his weight on either leg and beckons Stan over.
“Do you see that guy over there?” He points to Mr. Donovan from across the street.
“Yeah?”
“Um.” Gary looks at Stan, who looks back, and then he blinks rapidly and turns toward the window again. “I’m not supposed to do this, ‘cause it’s sorta mean, but on Wednesdays he mows his lawn, and I like watching him try and turn it on. Sometimes he makes Clyde do it, and it’s kind of funny,” he admits.
Something clicks inside of Stan’s brain. Or, rather, is unbound? He stares at Gary, who looks embarrassed to admit that he sometimes mentally makes fun of people. It’s the thing you don’t see when you look at Gary from afar, and something personal touches Stan. “You like to watch Clyde and his dad struggle to turn on a lawnmower?”
“Well.” Gary’s mouth twists bitterly. “Yeah. It’s a really old lawnmower, that’s why, and sometimes he’ll stand there for, like, ten minutes, just trying to turn it on. And it’ll keep burring every time he pulls it but it won’t go. Sometimes he’ll kick it.”
Stan’s idea of perfection is suddenly shattered to a million bits, and now what’s standing in front of him is just… Gary. “What day is it today?” he asks.
“It’s Friday,” Gary says.
“Gary, on Wednesday you better show me Clyde’s dad struggle to turn on that lawnmower, or I swear to God I’ll kick your ass,” Stan says, and for the first time in his life he really means it. He will.
Gary is silent for a moment, his eyes shifting back and forth into Stan’s, and when Stan doesn’t waver as usual Gary knows he’s being serious, and he laughs. “Okay,” he says.
So on Wednesday they watch. Intently.
Stan has both his hands on Gary’s shoulders leaning over through the window and Gary hushes him gently as he opens the curtains just enough to be able to see out onto the streets and into the Donovan’s yard. “This is so bad,” Gary whispers to himself from underneath Stan. Stan blinks down at him and has to stop himself from violently laughing.
“What?”
“This whole thing isn’t good, Stan.”
“Why?” Mr. Donovan walks out onto his green grass with the flipping lawnmower and everything. It’s perfect.
“I’m supposed to be helping you out, and here I am making fun of my neighbor with you. This is terrible.”
The whole world seems to stop for a moment, Stan and everything else, and then Stan’s mind reels back to him ten times the speed of the present. He tightens his grip on Gary’s shoulders. “Gary, you’re a moron, you know that?” he says.
“What?”
“Look at me.” Gary looks over his shoulder and up at Stan, clear affliction written all over his face. “Everyone makes fun of everyone. I mean, it’s a lawnmower, Gary. Clyde’s dad probably buys three Playboy’s a week at the rate Clyde gets them, and that’s… that’s a sin, right?”
Gary seems to falter and then slowly nods. “Sure?”
”So it’s fine,” Stan says. He leans closer to Gary and looks to the window again, the sunlight streaming in on both of their faces as he points to the pane. “Now, you and I are going to sit back, relax, and watch this shit, alright?”
So they do. Clyde’s dad tries several times unsuccessfully to turn on the lawnmower, and Stan is truly enamored with watching it in a way he’s never been before. And he’s sure under any other circumstance whatsoever he would find it boring but somehow leaning over on Gary watching it through a little crack in the curtains is enthralling. Eventually Clyde comes out of the house as well, scratching the back of his head and stomping around the grass in clear defiance to having to mow the lawn, but Mr. Donovan starts yelling at him and Clyde starts crying, and Stan would almost feel bad if it weren’t the funniest thing he’s seen that week.
“Does he usually cry?”
“No. I don’t think he’s ever cried.”
“Maybe he was in the middle of something.”
“Reading Playboy.”
And Stan turns to Gary so sharply his vision takes time to readjust, and he thinks he’s heard it wrong. Gary. Gary. Talking about Playboy? Making a joke? He cracks a smile if not out of awkwardness and can’t help but laugh into Gary’s shoulder.
When Clyde finally acquiesces in helping with the lawnmower, and they eventually turn it on, Clyde yelling so loudly that both Stan and Gary can hear him, “Why don’t we just buy a new one!?” Stan sits in some content silence. He wonders what alternative agenda he would have ever imagined Gary having, and then realizes he’s still leaning rather closely.
“That was awesome, actually,” Stan says, because Gary has that look on his face like he just stepped on a dog’s tail.
Gary looks back out at the window and tugs at the comforter on his bed and then looks back up at Stan tentatively. Stan’s heart starts beating into his ears, because it really does look like Gary just stepped on a dog’s tail, and it makes Stan break into a frown. “Stan, am I bothering you?” Gary asks, then.
There’s nothing more in Stan’s ears. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s just,” Gary starts. He sighs and looks up as if choosing his words very carefully. “I know you don’t really want to be here. I wanted you to be here, personally, because I thought I could help you with your schoolwork, but you don’t seem to need it. So I feel like I’m either wasting your time or simply being a bad influence on you.”
Stan stares blankly at Gary, who’s mouth quirks down, now. “What?”
“Did that make sense?”
“Gary. You think you’re a bad influence on me?”
“Yeah!” Gary exclaims in a passionate and clearly frustrated tone. He seems to get shy from the way he raised his voice in the way he mumbles the rest out. “What we did just now wasn’t productive, nor constructive…”
Stan kinda wants to hug Gary, because he feels like Gary, in some inconceivable way, needs it. But that thought is gone in the time it takes for him to blink, and it’s brought out in other physical action when Stan puts his hand on Gary’s shoulder and says, “You know I thought you were perfect up until, like, a week ago?”
“Huh?”
Stan laughs. “Oh, Jesus. You’re so…” He doesn’t want to say lame. Doesn’t want to put down that purity and kindness in the way his friends do. The word he really wants to use is something along the lines of sweet, but he settles for, “considerate.”
Gary looks confused for a second, and then says in that same frustrated tone, “Stan, you don’t need to keep stopping by if I’m overstepping my boundaries.”
Stan sits there for a little. “Wait,” he says.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Just wait,” Stan repeats, and he thinks. A week ago he would’ve relished in the defeat of his admittedly one-sided mortal enemy, but it’s suddenly not as relinquishing of a fantasy anymore. Now that he’s thinking about it, under his wing is just the kind of phrasing Gary would use. It’s softhearted. He laughs again to himself, and then says, “You’re not overstepping anything, alright, Gary?” softly. Because Stan’s sure Gary needs to hear it that way. “I had fun today.”
“Are you sure? You’re not just saying that?”
“Gary, if I really hated you, and I mean, you, I wouldn’t be here right now.” Just then Gary looks at him and reaches into his blues for some lie, something that Stan could be barring from the rest of the world, but when Stan notices this, he says, “But you’re a moron, sometimes,” and gets up and leaves.
“Okay, so,” Kyle starts. He eats a little carton of City Wok on Stan’s bed and the lavish dark night pleads through the window to be let in only to be ignored. “What does it mean if a girl says she wants to play truth or dare with you?” He picks up some of the chow fun with chopsticks stained orange at the end. “Wow, this is really greasy.”
Stan lies on the floor with his legs up on the bed next to Kyle’s torso. He stares up at the ceiling and the popcorn texture and the lights are off but the dim source of the hallway softens the world. He kicks Kyle’s elbow lightly. “It means she totally likes you,” he says.
“Really?”
Stan blinks and feels like he’s stuck in slow, sluggish motions. “Who asked?”
“Bebe,” Kyle says thoughtfully.
“She’s liked you since the fourth grade.”
“No!” Kyle shouts, and he lunges his body forward and knocks Stan’s left foot off the bed. “She was dating Clyde.”
Stan looks down across his chest to Kyle, who’s got a giddy look all over his face and a grin present Stan knows is the kind that’s impossible to suppress. He looks back up at the ceiling and everything that could be hidden within it. “Clyde and Bebe are addicted to each other because they’re both unpredictable and hot and no matter how many times they break up they live off of drama.”
There’s silence on the other end, and a guttural noise emerges, and then Kyle says, “You think Clyde is hot?”
“Get over yourself.”
“Ugh, continue.”
Stan sighs. “I dunno. I mean, she obviously thinks you’re hot. At least your ass.” He coughs. “Um.”
Kyle continues to eat his chow fun and the silence is enough to indicate agreement. Over the years he’s grown to be more succinct with his answers, at least if they’re the prompted kind. The unprompted kind are always long-winded and borderline egotistical, and anything else would be described by onlookers as curt. But Stan’s not an onlooker, and he knows and loves Kyle for every bit of himself. He gets up, then, because some epiphany has reached out from within the texture of popcorn.
He’s never opened his journal in front of someone else, but it doesn’t seem to matter much at the moment. He opens it on his desk, and Kyle perks his head up like a cat would with its ears and asks, “What’s that?”
“It’s… my diary,” Stan accedes.
Something wrong has just happened, but Stan doesn’t know what, exactly. It’s not the whole thing about the diary, it’s… it’s something beyond all palpable form. It’s just in his head, and it’s so minuscule not even Kyle can pick up on it. For the first time in his life Stan’s mind is completely void of thought at a time when he wants emotions. How terrible it is to not be able to feel!
Kyle doesn’t sound particularly surprised by Stan’s having a diary, indicated by his pitched, “Oooh,” as if the entire thing is all terribly interesting to him. “What are you going to write? Do you fill a page a day or what?”
“I fill as much as I want to for the day, which usually isn’t a lot. Sometimes I don’t write anything, or sometimes I write a lot.” Stan writes poetry, too, but it’s something that not even Kyle can resist making fun of. Maybe in the future they’ll all look back on it and laugh. Or, at least, Stan will, alone somewhere far, far away. He grits his teeth. “I don’t know what to write.”
“Well, don’t write anything, then.”’
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“You don’t understand, Kyle. I… I really want to write something.” He feels freakish and clammy. Like he could eat the flesh of gods and run a marathon and vomit it all back out. “This has happened before. When I just… can’t. But that’s when I have too much to think about to write clearly. Right now it’s all blank.”
Kyle finishes the rest of his noodles and gets up to lean over Stan. “Can I read some of it?”
Stan looks Kyle in the eye, that dead-on-your-feet sort of punch that means Kyle can’t make fun of Stan no matter what, and he says, “I write poetry.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s whatever.”
Kyle smiles. “It’s you. That means it’s great.” He gingerly opens the journal, Stan watching his fingers trace over the hard cover and the sound of the pages sliding like knives against each other, and he flips it to a new page. The expansive emptiness reflects Stan’s inner turmoils. “Have you ever tried drawing?” he suggests.
“No,” Stan considers. But it’s certainly innovative.
Kyle puts his hand to his mouth, contemplation ever growing in search of Stan’s answers. He slowly lowers his arm back to the desk, the weight of his other hand on Stan’s shoulder growing heavier, and he says, “You want everything to have meaning. Or importance. To you, at the very least, right?” Stan nods. “Then try and harness that. You don’t need to worry about prose right now.”
“I can’t believe I was talking about your ass, like, five minutes ago.”
Kyle smiles and doesn’t say anything. So Stan picks his pencil up and lets the lines carry themselves. He almost wants to close his eyes, feel like he’s in Carver’s Cathedral, but he keeps them open and follows the direction of the lead. Kyle dissolves and the entire world does, too, and he stops when he knows when he wants to stop. It’s a crudely drawn lawnmower and a couple of flowers.
Stan nearly heaves, because it’s ugly, but Kyle seems hugely fascinated. “That’s well-done,” he says.
“The lines are all crooked.”
“It’s you,” Kyle remarks a second time. He picks the journal up from the desk now, and Stan doesn’t think he’s let it leave the desk since he first bought it, but it seems like a step swept far from his normalcy. Like the new path of a new journey. “Hm.” Kyle’s curtness and abject hidden criticisms come to his expression as he flips through the pages, slowly. “I like this poem on July,” he says after a moment. It finally occurs to Stan that he’s exposing every part of himself to the world in his closed-off bedroom. He doesn’t even know if he should respond. Kyle closes the book at once and puts it back on Stan’s desk. “Stan,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for this. I mean it.” And he’s gone.
On the third week Stan does admit to needing help on his physics homework, which Gary supplies, and he even stays for dinner. It’s just like fourth grade again, he thinks to himself in some floating psychedelic-like dream state. About halfway through he gets a phone call from Kenny and doesn’t want to answer it, but goddamn, Kenny does not quit. So he apologizes profusely and rushes outside.
“What do you want?”
“Where are you?”
Stan zips it for a good five seconds and the wind slaps him and there’s the noise of static from the other end. “I’m outside.”
“Are you at Gary’s?”
Stan zips it for a good five more seconds, and then there’s howling on the other end and what sounds like Cartman’s distinctive laughter. “Dude, what the fuck?” Stan hisses.
“Stop! They’re cute!” is what Stan can hear to be Kyle’s muffled voice from the background while laughter continues on the other end. “Sorry,” Kenny says, “we were just wondering because we were gonna play video games but you weren’t home.”
“Oh. It’s fine,” Stan says.
Silence.
“So… is he in love with you or what?”
There’s more uproar cut off only by Stan hanging up the phone. He curses under his breath and swears even louder when he turns around and Gary’s on the doorstep and the light illuminates behind him.
“Gary,” Stan lets out. “You scared me.”
“Do you have to go?”
“Oh, what? No. Let’s go back inside.” Fuck you, Kenny, Stan thinks.
When Stan does leave, all of the thoughts that have been swimming around him since day one have disappeared. There’s suddenly no more buzzing, no more agitation. Just simply what’s in front of him. And when that happened with Kyle it drowned him and choked him of all horizons, but now it’s something to relish in as easily as a sunset or a smile.
“Do you… wanna walk with me?” Stan suggests standing out on the Harrison’s lawn. The light from the house behind him makes Gary’s hair look more blonde than normal.
Gary makes another unreadable face, and Stan’s heart drops to the ninth level of hell, and then Gary breaks into a smile and begins to walk in the direction of Stan’s house and his heart bounds all the way back and gets caught in his throat.
They walk in silence for some steps, just letting the occasional deep breath and passing car fill the temptation to embarrass, and then Gary says, “So, is this working or what?”
“Hm?”
“This whole studying thing.”
“I guess so,” Stan says. It sort of shames him to concede to such an admission after filling the universe with only hatred for so long, but he’s certainly not mad about it. He raises his right hand and closes his eyes. “I, Stan Marsh, promise not to cheat on another math exam.”
“Just math?”
Stan sighs. “Why, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s… It’s South Park, Gary. I don’t know. What’s wrong with it? Cheating.” Stan knows, in theory, why cheating is wrong. But the real question is, why should he care?
Gary doesn’t answer immediately, and when Stan glances up at him, he’s squinting up into the sky. “Stan, I think you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” he says.
Stan’s heart quite literally explodes inside his chest, for all intents and purposes, but he keeps it to himself. “What?” he asks, and it’s immediately a dead giveaway that he’s caught off-guard, because he sounds like he just got the wind knocked out of him.
Gary looks at Stan inquisitively, as if he’s wondering what Stan is freaking out for, and then he repeats, “I said I think you’re interesting.”
Stan laughs seriously. It’s not funny. But it’s not not a funny concept to make fun of. “Me? Oh, Gary. No.” He shakes his head and can’t stop the wavering of his chest in some sad mocking. “I’m, like, this bland piece of wet cardboard.”
Gary stops and holds Stan’s hand and brings it into the light of the street lamp. He says, “You’re interesting, Stan. And I think you’re smart, too. I just think you’re better than cheating because you’re, well, you.”
There’s that phrase again. What does being Stan mean, exactly?
He continues, “And you think of yourself as, um, what you said. Wet cardboard. But that’s just how you perceive yourself. And I’m not you. And sometimes I think we all need an outside perspective.”
Stan looks down at the hand Gary holds, and then up at Gary, who isn’t quirking any side of his mouth up, but just has this soft look. Stan sees no malice, then. He sees only good and love. Everything just seems to stupid, then. How could Stan ever have even considered hating Gary? He sort of hates himself a little in a form that had never been so tangible, the real thought of, I sort of hate myself.
“What does being me mean?” he asks.
Gary lets go of Stan’s hand and guides him further down the sidewalk as they continue their walk, his palm steadily on Stan’s back like both the anchor and the helm, and he says as they go onward, “That’s up to you.”
They reach Stan’s house after that and a long while of nothing and contemplation on Stan’s part. Half of the time he wonders when Gary will take his hand off of his back, and the other half of the time he hopes Gary keeps it there, which he does. So now they stand in front of his yard and Stan shuffles his feet round. “Thanks, Gary.”
“Any time,” Gary says. He stands there under the streetlight with the orange glow illuminating his face, and it makes Stan incredibly skittish.
“You know.” Stan bites his lip and considers if he wants to say what he’s about to say. But he decides recently all he’s done is expose his feelings to everyone and it hasn’t had disastrous effects thus far. “I thought I hated you.”
Gary opens his mouth to say something, maybe to protest but probably not, but Stan blinks down at his shoes and puts his hands to Gary’s chest. He needs to reject any more input, because otherwise he’ll never allow himself to do this again. “On top of thinking you were perfect, I hated you. I can’t tell you why. And I don’t feel guilty about cheating on that stupid math exam, but I guess I probably won’t do it again.” He should probably stop there, because he doesn’t even know why he’s saying any of this, but he doesn’t. “And you make me happy. I mean, happier than normal, because I’m not. Um. Happy, that much. And you’ve given me, uh, stuff to think about.” He wishes his rhetoric was better. He at last looks up at Gary, raising both his hands in the air like he’s been told to drop his weapons.
“Stan.”
“I still don’t like you,” Stan says quickly. He runs up the stairs to his door and gives one last look at Gary, who is smiling and cute and all and it melts Stan a little. “Goodnight!” And then he slams the door shut and runs to his room and runs his head into his pillow.
He gets up then and grabs his notebook and falls back into his bed, furiously scribbling with a nearly unnerving smile on his face. He writes:
I love Kyle and Kenny and Eric and my mom and dad and Shelley. I love Gary.
He draws mountains underneath, their beautiful ridges and edges, and doodles more flowers under that, too, blooming into the stones and their shadows. For the first time in his entire life he thinks that he likes being himself.
When he sleeps he thinks of himself as a vessel. A biological mechanism of flesh and a heart that pumps blood. How sorry he is to abuse such a vulnerable creature! To think unkindly of something that can’t help but continue its cycle! He separates himself from the machine, and regrets shaming the cogs and the buttons and the wheels. His heart can’t stop beating and his lungs can’t stop inhaling just as much as he can’t stop pondering and sleeping.
“Cartman’s writing slash,” Kenny blurts out on the weekend at McDonald’s.
“Fuck you!” Cartman cries. He smacks Kenny’s shoulder and proceeds to sip his Sprite in a slow pouty way. Kyle snickers.
“Slash? What’s that?”
Kenny looks at Kyle and Cartman with a frown and they all burst into laughter, a sound that Stan’s gotten way too used to hearing by now.
“Stanley,” Kenny says in a pleading tone, “he’s writing homoerotic fan fiction about you.”
“What!?”
They all begin to laugh again, Cartman joining in on this because he doesn’t give a shit about what Stan thinks of him, and through heaves Kyle says, “And we’re the beta readers.”
“What? Beta? Like what those people on YouTube talk about with the um, wolves?”
Sprite comes out of Cartman’s nose, Kyle screams in disgust as it gets on his jacket, and Kenny’s laughing so hard he starts choking. Kyle puts his hand on Stan’s shoulder, still looking sullen over the darkened wet patches of his jacket, and says over it all, “Stan, Cartman is writing a fan fiction in which you and Gary are head over heels in love, and Kenny and I read it and give feedback!”
Stan doesn’t process anything in the midst of Kyle beginning to hit Cartman, who is making a desperate case to defend himself, saying “I’m sorry for the Sprite, bitch!” and Kenny falling out of the little booth they’re in. The entire world goes deaf.
“You wrote fan fiction about me and Gary?”
“Gary and I,” Cartman says. “And yes. You wanna read it?”
They’re at Cartman’s house. Stan can’t process anything that’s happening, and he still doesn’t know what a beta reader is. When did Cartman have the time to write an entire fan fiction, anyway? The last time Stan had to read anything for Cartman was in the seventh grade when they had to peer review each other’s English essays at a time where they still called it Language Arts. He just hopes it’s not erotica.
“Okay,” Cartman says. They sit in a circle in the middle of Cartman’s floor and in front of them is a composition book with handwriting on the front written in blocky, sharp letters, “CARTMAN’S PROPERTY!” “This is the book. I think it’s pretty well-done, if I do say so myself.”
“It’s only good ‘cause of us,” Kenny says with a bored expression. He grins like he’s high as a fucking kite, which he probably is, and goes on, “Stanley. Kyle and I made sure this was well-written. Like, who even are we if we can’t write good homoerotic fan fiction on our best buddies, am I right, guys?”
Cartman gives a sassy scoff. “Gary is no buddy of mine.”
“Yeah, and neither am I, fatass,” Kyle says.
“I’m not writing fan fiction on you, Khal!”
“Let Stan enjoy this,” Kenny interrupts. He picks the book up and offers it to Stan whole-heartedly. Stan looks down at the composition book, mentally tracing the mess of Sharpie on the front, and then back up at Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny, who are all waiting for him to take it. He does.
It’s surprisingly okay, though Kyle and Kenny reiterate this point many times.
“I’m gonna kill you!” Stan screamed at Gary. He ran at Gary with daggers, as the trained ninja-warrior had been practicing for many years.
Suddenly, Gary disappeared and reappeared behind Stan. “Heh, Stan, you really thought your daggers were enough?” The blonde shot his ninja stars at Stan, landing perfectly around Stan’s clothes so he was pinned to the wall. The noirette growled… “You will never defeat me, the ultimate ninja.”
“What the fuck is this?” Stan asks.
“It’s Cartman’s, like, totally amazing Kill-Bill-infused-Ninjago romance?” Kenny says. Cartman nods approvingly and Kyle looks like he’s a second away from losing it.
He goes on.
Stan lay there in defeat as he waited for Gary to kill him. He still had the cyanide capsules genetically engineered into his teeth in case he was tortured for information on where the great Warrior Cartman was…
Just then, Gary leaned in close and raised his hand to Stan’s chin. Stan looked into Gary’s icy blue orbs and shuddered from the touch.
“N-no!” Stan cried.
“I don’t care about Cartman, Stan. Even though he’s super awesome, I’m only sexually attracted to him. I am emotionally attracted to you.”
Stan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He began to cry softly as Gary caressed him. He was—
“Okay. No. You guys didn’t actually edit this, did you?”
“The pages in the front are ripped out. It was worse before,” Kyle reasons. He shrugs and his eyes are watering from holding in his laughter for so long, but then he stares at Stan’s dumbfounded face for too long and they all fall on top of each other in a dog pile of stupidity over their ninja romance.
“There was a lot more grinding and stuff!” Kenny screams as Cartman crushes him, and all Stan can do is put the composition book down and leave while they shriek through the door as he closes it.
Autumn comes rushing in in a flurry of hazy orange and even the occasional violet. Fall break has Stan at Jimbo and Ned’s place up in the mountains, where he takes walks with Sparky and plays solitaire on the ground next to his futon while listening to music he downloaded off of his MP3 player from sixth grade. He truly despises middle schoolers and their tween wave. His mom and dad get the guest bedroom, and he would normally have to share a room with Shelley, but she’s in college, now. He wants to say he misses her, because it’s the right thing to say as family, but it would be a lie.
He brings the journal with him. When he takes walks with Sparky through the snow and the forest he sometimes attempts to capture what’s in front of him and to enjoy it. He doesn’t erase anything. Ever.
Jimbo offers to take him hunting, which he always reluctantly refuses on account of not wanting to hurt his uncle’s feelings. The guilt no longer becomes an issue, however, once Randy becomes whatever the male version of a harpy is.
On this particular day Stan is alone in a clearing of garbage billowing through the snow, wispy bits of plastic gone with the wind at nine at night. He holds a Remington, not out of want but insistence, and doesn’t do much with it, opting to place it in the snow by the trash while he backs away to sit on a stump and think. He draws the gun, the curvature of the stock, the straight ridge of the barrel, and finally the rotting beer cartridge a few feet over.
He picks the gun up again and feels the wood and walks down to the convenience store down the road where there’s actual service. There’s also an old rusted pay phone over there that Stan feels the urge to use. He drops the gun in the bush on the outskirts of the patchy grass of the store, and promptly inputs the quarters from his jeans into the machine. He doesn’t really know who he wants to call, but he spotted his dad rocking on a chair on Jimbo’s porch and doesn’t have the patience to put up with it right then.
He, inevitably, calls Gary, and doesn’t think much of the fact he has the number memorized. The yellows of the sun are behind the curve of the world and the imprints of starlight are emerging. He blows out and can see the breath in the light of the Shell Oil logo. There’s one ring, then two, then three, and disappointment boils. But on the fourth ring Gary picks up and Stan smiles.
“Hello?”
“Hi! Gary. Um, hi.”
“… Stan?”
“Yeah.” He looks up at the spindly branches and their dark creeping limbs and says, “So, um. I dunno. What are you doing right now?”
“I was playing a board game with my family!” Gary says on the other end of the line. “Is that Stan?” someone says on the other end, then, “Hi, Stan!” followed by more hello’s.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Oh, no! We were just about finished.” There’s a soft, “See you guys,” on the other end that’s not intended for Stan to hear. “So, what’s up?” More rattling and muffled noises.
“Well,” Stan looks out across the gas station and the single guy inside on his phone under the fluorescent lighting, “I’m at a gas station right now,” he laughs, “and I’m calling you from a pay phone. It’s cold as shit but I just wanted to talk to you, I guess. I’m bored.”
“You seem bored a lot,” And then there’s silence on the other end for real, now, though through a pay phone, that’s crappy static, and Gary says, “You wanted to talk to me?” not in a genuine question sort of way, but in a way that pokes Stan for answers nonetheless.
“Don’t make me repeat that,” he says. He leans on the pay phone box lightly and considers his word choice. “Gary?”
“Yeah?”
“… I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I was sort of wondering why you decided you wanted to help me when I cheated back then.”
“I thought we went over this. You’re better than that!”
“Well, so is Butters, I guess. But he still helps Cartman, doesn’t he?” His heart beats fast inside his chest and it’s so visible and rushing in the tranquility of evening he can feel his hand shaking against the phone, too.
“I don’t really like Butters or Eric. Do you?”
Stan laughs nervously. He’s scared but happy and doesn’t know what to call that. Being alive. And he guesses that if Gary doesn’t really like Butters or Eric, then maybe he likes Stan, just a little. “No, I don’t really like them, either. Uh, did you know… Cartman wrote a fan fiction?”
“A fan fiction? What’s that?”
“It’s in the title. Fan-made fiction.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, and he wrote fan fiction about, um, you and I.”
There’s more static, and for a second Stan thinks Gary hung up, but then there’s the sound of his breathing faintly in Stan’s ear that catches his attention magnificently. Like an opalescent sun. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You read it? Was it any good?”
“Um….” Stan laughs and hums. “It wasn’t… exactly, good? It was very—you could tell Cartman wrote it. You were a ninja warrior and I was a ninja warrior, too, and we were fighting. And I was talking about killing myself because I would rather die than be defeated by you. But you ended up confessing to me and I started crying while you talked about how amazing Cartman’s swole body was.” And as Stan says it out loud he actually finds a fraction of the story to be endearing.
There’s wonderful laughter—such joyous noise. “That’s awesome.”
“You’re not mad or anything?”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not, either. Stan?”
“Hm?”
“Is that all you wanted to tell me?”
“No,” Stan says hastily, because it would have been a real fucking shame if that really was all he wanted to tell Gary. But everything else seems so much harder to say. So much harder to do. “But wait. Before I continue, you need to tell me you helped me because you wanted to, and not because you have some… I don’t know. Some self-made requirement to help everyone you meet.”
“Really?”
“Just—Do it, please.”
“I helped you because I wanted to.”
“Okay. So.” Stan inhales deeply. “Could I draw you, sometime?” He had been thinking about it for a while, now, and had tried on scrap pieces of paper, but it never worked like he intended. It was never Gary, but some muddled down version of him, and that wasn’t what Stan was looking to draw. He wanted to capture something beyond that. “Are you free tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you meet me at the gas station near Jimbo’s Guns? When can you be there?
A little more silence. “Is ten thirty okay?”
“Yeah.” His heart is blaring inside his ears. “Thanks Gary, I mean it.”
“Thank you, Stan. I get to be a model! Listen, I have to go now. I’ll talk to you later, alright? Sweet dreams.”
“Goodnight.” Stan slowly lowers the phone away from his ear, placing it back into the metal, and the words dance on his lips softly, embracing him and tempting him to say them out loud. “I love you,” he says. He hopes it seeps into the metal of the phone and travels like lightning through the wire right into Gary’s heart.
He travels back in the dark slowly, dragging the gun on the ground to skip across the branches and leaves. When he gets back his dad is inside watching Game of Thrones with his mom and Jimbo and Ned are talking in the kitchen over brisket.
“Hey, kid!” Jimbo calls out when he notices Stan in the doorway. “You hungry?”
“Did you shoot anything out there?” Randy asks with only half his mind while the other is occupied with Jon Snow.
“No, I’m not hungry, and I didn’t shoot anything. I’m gonna go to bed,” he says. Because he wants to get up early tomorrow.
He writes:
I want to go grocery shopping a thousand times over. I want to tell Gary I love him because I do. It’s want, not obligation.