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Friday after school, when homework was done and nobody would be looking for them, was Mario Kart time. Oz would drop Alice off at the tarot shop where Gilbert Nightray worked and get the key to his apartment, and then leave Alice there to bother Gil (who loved to be bothered only when it was Oz or Alice doing the bothering) while Oz, Elliot, and Leo all headed off to Gilbert’s apartment, where snacks and video games awaited them for an excellent afternoon and evening.
They walked to the apartment, because Oz didn’t have a bus pass and Leo wasn’t going to fight Elliot for gas money now when there would be plenty of time to do that during their date Saturday night. Elliot, who did have a bus pass but never thought to use it when the other option was seeing who out of the three of them could walk on top of the weirdest shit without getting arrested.
The winner that day was Leo, who somehow made it up a telephone pole and across three telephone wires before coming down with every hair on his body (or so he said, and Elliot made a couple crude jokes about checking) standing on end, an accomplishment that it was likely neither Oz nor Elliot could ever top.
“How did you manage it?” Oz asked, once Leo had shut Elliot’s jokes up by suggesting that they get a waxing appointment together so that Elliot’s imagination was no longer an issue. “I honestly would have thought you’d be electrocuted to death just touching the wires, let alone walking on them.”
Leo shrugged. “I’m pretty unkillable, I think,” he said. “It’s a genetic thing. Runs in the family. Which is cool when I’m scaling electrical towers but not so cool when I have to talk to my dad.”
Oz laughed in the manner of someone who perhaps harbored similar feelings about his father, and said, “I mean, murder’s kind of hard to pull off even in mortal circumstances.”
“Yeah, but at least it’s an option, you know?” said Leo. “When a man uses ‘I fucked your mother’ in every other sentence you really do want to throttle him.”
“God, I think I’d actually die,” said Elliot.
“Right?” said Leo. “It’s even worse when he says it in front of my half-sister, who is four years younger than me and living proof that he was either cheating on my mom, my aunt, or both at the times of our respective conceptions. She used to cry every time.”
“Your dad cheated on your mom with her sister?” said Elliot. “That sucks, dude.”
“No, he either cheated on her with his sister or cheated on his sister with her,” said Leo, “which is a hundred times worse.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Oz.
“This all went down at the same time that my aunt—his sister’s—older son was murdered by her ex,” said Leo. “It was a bad time all around.”
“Holy hell, your family sucks, ” said Elliot, who had yet to realize that his family sucked too. “I think I would, like, actually die. Like, I’d pass away of pure fucking horror at being part of that shitshow.”
“Luckily for me I didn’t start living with them until my mom died when I was eight,” said Leo. “I mean, it was all a very bad time then, but when I think about how much worse it could have been if I was around during all that drama I thank my lucky stars. They’re genuinely insane. I am so glad I don’t have to deal with them anymore.”
“Probably comes with being unkillable,” said Elliot. “Like, that makes you crazy, or something.”
“Are you calling me crazy?”
“I mean, you did just, like, use electrical wires as a tightrope,” Oz pointed out. “That’s not really a sane thing to do.”
“It’s literally so much saner than banging your adoptive sister because she thinks the best birthday gift for her brother is an actual literal baby,” said Leo, “while you are in a committed relationship to another completely normal woman.”
“Yeah, with that as your comparison a lot sounds sane,” said Elliot. “But I really don’t think that’s the standard you ought to measure crazy shit by.”
“Yeah,” said Oz, who was now eyeing up the apartment wall below Gilbert’s window and pretty obviously debating with himself whether or not he could climb it. “Personally I think we should measure crazy stuff by that time Elliot threw a textbook through a window because he was mad at the teacher.”
“It was historically inaccurate and you know it,” said Elliot.
“Your mother is historically inaccurate,” said Leo.
“Look,” Elliot said, as Oz began scaling the portcullis, “it is complete motherfucking bullshit and honestly straight up historical revisionism to ever even think of claiming that…”
Oz tuned him out as he got past the second story; by the time he was up at the fourth and struggling with opening Gilbert’s window, he was wishing he’d stayed on the ground and listened to the argument. He wasn’t about to climb back down, though—that would mean admitting defeat—and so fiddled with the thing a bit more and eventually got it open just wide enough to squeeze through, which he did, and then collapsed, panting, to the floor of Gilbert’s bedroom.
It didn’t really look any different than it had any of the other times Oz had been in here—sneaking in to prank Gil, or following him in for any of the six dozen innocent reasons why Oz followed Gilbert Nightray like a duckling, or sneaking in after midnight after picking the lock on the apartment door after things at home had gotten worse than usual in order to curl up against the sleeping Gilbert’s warm back and drift in and out of sleep until it got close enough to morning that he’d have to sneak back out again, both to keep Gil from realizing he’d been there and to keep anyone at home from realizing he’d snuck out.
Oz got up, once he’d managed to catch and tie down his breath, and closed the window again, noting Elliot and Leo still fighting on the pavement below. Climbing up was more trouble than it was worth, probably, but it was also three less locks to pick and now he knew he could do it. He casually short-sheeted Gilbert’s bed and unlocked his bedroom door from the inside and stepped out into the apartment proper, and realized belatedly that it was probably a bad idea to lock the door behind him, since Gil had only given him the apartment keys and Vincent was sitting at the kitchen table, diligently making a Tinder profile for what appeared to be a very pretty blond-haired red-eyed girl. It was not a good idea to let Vincent know that Oz carried lockpicks with him, and an even worse one to let him know he was good at using said lockpicks on Gilbert’s bedroom door. Poor Gil would just have to deal with the unlocked bedroom, then, and the short sheets wouldn’t be anywhere near as much of a surprise for him.
“Hullo, Vincent,” Oz said, stepping fully out of Gil’s room and closing the door behind him like any normal person would. “What’re you doing?”
Vincent jumped before recognizing Oz and relaxing. “And what were you doing in there, hm?” he said. “Did Nii-san know you spent the day in his bedroom?”
“I am a man of many talents,” said Oz. “I don’t suppose you know where Gil keeps the key, though? I’d like to re-lock the door for him.”
“He’s kept the only copy on his person ever since I let Miss Ada’s cat give birth on his bed,” said Vincent, which was fair. “I’ll re-lock it for you, if you’ll do me a favor.”
“A favor?”
“Ladies like Miss Ada are drawn to pathetic, sad, handsome men who have been unlucky in love,” said Vincent. “Unfortunately, nobody ever catfishes me. If I re-lock Gil’s bedroom for you, I’d like you to use this Tinder profile to catfish me and never ever let anyone know you’re behind it.”
“I don’t think Gil would let me download Tinder onto my phone,” said Oz, “and he pays the phone bill and has like three different parental monitoring programs on it to make sure I don’t run into anything dangerous online, so he’d definitely know.”
“Nii-san is absolute garbage with anything more technologically complex than a calculator, he makes me review those programs,” said Vincent. “I would make sure he never knew you had Tinder.”
Oz considered this. “Help me put some pink hair dye in his shampoo, and then sure,” he said.
“As wonderful as Nii-san would look with pink hair, that would ruin its texture and anyway we’d need to bleach it first,” said Vincent. “How about perfuming his soaps? I’m sure Nii-san doesn’t really need the vanilla extract, and he’d come out smelling even better than he normally does.”
“Wow, you sniff Gil on the regular? Weird,” Oz said, but he agreed anyway: he also did things in GIlbert’s vicinity that might be considered odd or strange or weird or even a little creepy. It was the main thing he and Vincent Nightray agreed upon.
First Vincent went to the kitchen, where he and Oz hunted around for a few minutes before finding the open vanilla extract and the two backups—there had been a sale, and Gil hadn’t been able to resist—and then they went back into Gilbert’s room, and into the connecting bathroom, and dumped the little bottles into Gilbert’s shampoo. A lifetime as Vincent Nightray’s brother had taught Gilbert some valuable lessons about protecting his personal property, but he hadn’t learned them well enough to keep both Vincent and Oz out of his things, and less than a minute later Vincent was locking the door behind them— he had no problem using lockpicks in front of Oz, who wasn’t anywhere near as innocent and impressionable as Gilbert believed—before heading over to the table and introducing Oz to his new life as a catfish.
It was only a few minutes later that Elliot started pounding on the door, clearly having realized that Oz had gone up into the apartment while he and Leo were otherwise occupied. Vincent got up and answered it as Oz started making his new Tinder account look like it was owned by a real person and not Vincent’s idea of a beautiful asshole, and when Elliot entered, he looked between them and sighed explosively.
“What are you two tormenting Gilbert with now?” he said as Leo leaned over Oz’s shoulder and started critiquing the woman the Tinder page was supposed to belong to.
“It might shock you, Elliot, but neither Vincent nor my lives revolve completely around Gil,” Oz said. “He’s actually recruited my help in catfishing him so that the girl he likes will take him out on a pity-date.”
“Christ, that’s pathetic,” said Elliot. “What are you getting out of it?”
“Your mom’s phone number.”
“Bullshit.”
“Your mother is a lovely woman, Elliot, and I would catfish Vincent in order to get her phone number too,” said Leo.
“I fucking hate you both,” said Elliot. “Come on, stop hanging out with my freak older brother and let’s play some goddamn Mario Kart.”
“Oh? But you’re so bad at Mario Kart, Elly,” said Vincent.
“And you’re so bad at getting catfished, so it all evens out here, doesn’t it?” said Elliot. “Also, I’m not that bad at Mario Kart. I beat Vanessa and Ernest, like, every time.”
Elliot was, in fact, bad at Mario Kart; Vanessa and Ernest just let him win whenever they played with him because they found him completely adorable. He spent the next two hours getting completely decimated by Leo, while Oz remained perfectly mediocre at it and vacillated between sixth and eighth place the entire time. Leo gloated, and Oz smiled politely and cheered whenever he made it into sixth place, and Elliot cussed so loudly that Vincent got out his noise-canceling headphones and then started bitching into his phone about it. Gilbert came home with Alice in tow sometime between the twenty-ninth and thirtieth time Elliot lost miserably, and announced his presence by assuring Elliot that he’d definitely do better next time (a near-impossibility) and then praising Oz, who had gotten a stunning tenth place, for being the best Mario Kart player he’d ever seen. He then congratulated Leo on winning as though he hadn’t heard a single word that passed through his own mouth, or maybe hadn’t had a coherent thought once in his life, before watching the next round, which Alice joined in on, and continuing to talk about how Oz was the best at Mario Kart.
Leo was not offended by this; everyone who wasn’t Gilbert knew he was the best, and he seemed to see Gilbert’s blatant favoritism towards Oz more as a lovable quirk than something to grow jealous over. He had encouraged Elliot to view it that way, too, and had reminded him that if Gilbert even tried half the mothering he pulled with Oz on Elliot Elliot would have broken his nose, and then pointed out that if you didn’t let it under your skin, Gilbert’s preference and the way it blinded him to certain facts of reality, like Oz’s complete mediocrity at Mario Kart, was really quite funny.
Elliot was slowly coming around to seeing the humor in this, but in the moment, losing at Mario Kart, he did not. His only balm was Gilbert’s wholehearted belief that Oz was better than Leo, who had been consistently getting first, second, and once third place the entire afternoon, and his own wholehearted belief that he was better than Oz, which, if you looked at those two beliefs a certain way, pointed nicely towards Elliot being able to beat Leo at some point.
That never occurred. Oz also never scored higher than fifth place, although one round Elliot did manage to beat Oz. Alice, who was as aggressive as Elliot and who had much quicker reflexes, was the only person able to give Leo a run for his money. Their games eventually ended when Gilbert, who had been trying to make cookies, realized that he had absolutely no vanilla extract in the kitchen and, used to things going mysteriously missing around Vincent, rounded the four teenagers up to accompany him to the store and to grab a pizza on the way home.
It was, in short, a perfectly ordinary and perfectly fun afternoon, one that would later be capped off by Gilbert realizing what had become of his vanilla extract before trying and failing to get into bed as, across town, Oz started catfishing, hidden under his blankets, and Elliot and Leo texted until they fell asleep, everyone, in their own ways and to their own extents, perfectly content, and very nearly perfectly happy.