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Stargazing was Stan’s favorite childhood pastime. 'Was' being the operable word here. With each passing year he spends on this isolated, nowhere weed farm, he finds himself hating the night sky a little more.
South Park is a small town with not a lot of light pollution. The stars were beautiful just from a glance outside his old bedroom window, even prettier when he went camping with his Uncle Jimbo, who called him a homo for sighing so serenely at them.
Out here? Out here Stan can see the cosmos.
Clusters of stars—thousands, no, millions of them. Perfect pinholes of light illuminating the sky. Picturesque; a sight people would drive to see, pay money to witness... not that anybody ever visits Stan to find that out for themselves.
It’s a scene from his boyhood fantasies, but it’s a different sky than everyone else sees.
He can hear Kyle sneering in his head, saying, “Everybody sees the same sky, dude. The whole world looks up at the same sky.” And like, yeah, okay, that’s true, but his friends can only spot a few constellations on a good night, maybe point out Orion’s belt if it’s not too cloudy. Stan looks up at the entire galaxy suspended above his head. They are not the same.
Stan scrubs his face and groans into his hands. The sound is lost in the breeze.
Graduation is tomorrow.
He’d barely managed to pass. Good enough to get into community college with Kenny and Cartman—not that you need to qualify so long as you have a pulse—but the commute isn’t worth the price of gas when Stan doesn’t even know what he wants to do. Once it became clear that Stan lacked what it took to play football, and that his middling musical talent would never score him a scholarship, his dad was quick to make shitty comments about how great it would be to have Stan working the farm full time. His mom assured him a gap year would be good for self-discovery. Stan isn't sure who is more irritating.
Stan resigned himself to the fact that he wouldn’t be following his friends long ago. Wendy had a list of top 10 colleges written out in a sparkly pink spiral notebook when she was nine. She got early acceptance into all of them. Kyle is going to some prestigious Ivy League of his parent’s choosing. Two years in he’ll probably develop a coke habit, realize how much he hates college, drop out, and move back to South Park under a cloak of shame. Who knows? Doesn’t matter. Stan can’t wait around for his best friend to have an identity crisis. That doesn’t help him right now.
Besides, he said goodbye to them back in middle school when their divulging futures became apparent. Sure, he’ll miss them, but it doesn’t sting.
Wendy and Kyle don’t sting. Tolkien does.
Because unlike them, unlike all his friends, Tolkien has become the one constant in Stan’s life. Ever since they were ten years old and his parents moved him out to the same desolate fields to work the same rows of reeking weed plants. Tolkien, the boy who lives across the dirt road, who lives the life Stan always wanted: the confident football star with friends who don’t drag down his precarious social standing. A guy who still smiles through his dismal time on their parallel farms.
The only other person to share his sky.
Stan often finds himself wondering if Tolkien feels alone beneath a ceiling coated in watchful eyes. If he also thinks of this sky as different from the one they spent their young childhoods playing under, different than the one his friends now sneak out beneath. When they drink themselves sick and raise their bottles to the moon, does Tolkien believe it’s the same body that receives their toast?
No, he doesn’t think that because, like Kyle would say, he’s not a fucking idiot.
There is an ache in his tailbone that tells Stan it’s time to get up. He pushes away from the grassy hill, the only spot for miles that isn’t lousy with pot, and starts back towards his house with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets.
He looks both ways before stepping onto the dirt road that separates the farms. Too many times has his dad come barrelling through on a tractor going impossibly fast for him not to be cautious. Stan wouldn’t mind being killed, but he won’t let his friends rip on him in memoriam for getting crushed by Randy Marsh.
It’s a decent trek between his stargazing hill and the house, made longer by the biting cold slowing him down. South Park’s never-ending winter is something they couldn’t escape, even out here.
About five minutes into his walk, the fine hairs on the back of Stan’s neck rise to attention, and that uncomfortable feeling of a pair of eyes locking onto him is ever present in the pit of his stomach. Slowly, he looks over his shoulder, fingers securely wrapped around the house key in his pocket, just in case.
There’s a cow following him.
A rope wobbles limply through the air to thwap against her broad back, sliding to the ground in a heap of dust. Someone drags it away into the darkness. The cow moseys along the path completely unbothered by her pursuer, passing Stan on her way to a patch of grass that has sprouted up against a fence post.
Stan doesn’t know much about cows except that they have big, beautiful brown eyes that make him sad, and eyelashes that make him jealous in a way he refuses to examine, and that he won’t eat them no matter how many times his dad calls him a pussy for it. And speaking of his dad, he definitely would have told Stan about any harebrained schemes he had involving cows, and he hasn’t, so that means this cow must belong to—
“Don’t let her get away!”
Cows aren’t exactly runners—at least this one isn’t—and Tolkien doesn’t seem out of breath when he approaches them, but the exhausted creases in his forehead still manage to speak for him. He's been at this all night.
“Uh,” is the only intelligible sound Stan manages to produce. The cow takes one look at Tolkien and his rope and meanders away from the fence, not going fast, but going.
Tolkien mutters, “Goddammit,” under his breath, and stomps after her.
“She’s not even fast, dude,” Stan helpfully tells him.
“Yeah, but watch.” Sure enough, as soon as Tolkien gets close enough to slip the rope around her neck, she tosses her head and picks up speed. Not exactly a run, or even a trot, but a power walk just quick enough to avoid the rope each time. With a frustrated grunt, Tolkien unsteadily whips the lasso in the air before launching it in her direction. This time, it can't even manage to graze her.
“Finally found something you’re not good at, huh?”
Tolkien scoffs. “It’s not like I’m auditioning for the rodeo, man. I’m just trying to get my dad’s stupid cow back in the pen.”
“What’s he doing with a cow?”
“Hemp-infused milk.”
“Ah.”
“He’s been trying to keep it under wraps from Randy, but at the rate tonight’s going? She’s gonna be knocking on his fucking window here in a minute. I can’t believe I’m spending the night before graduation chasing down a cow...” Tolkien trails off, then glances back at Stan. “What are you doing out here?”
“I don’t know. Just… thinking.” About the sky. About how he feels like Tolkien is abandoning him, getting away from all this shit. He can’t say that.
“Well, try thinking about how to get this cow. You’re an animal guy.” Tolkien shoves the lasso in his face.
“Seems like she’s trying to find something here that isn’t fucking weed,” Stan thinks out loud. The two of them keep a respectable distance as the cow continues down the dirt path toward their houses. The notion reminds him of his mom, who would also like to live in a world that isn’t hemp-braided and THC-infused, and it’s then he recalls something she’d been sighing about over dinner last week. “Doesn’t your mom have a vegetable garden?”
“Oh yeah! What do you think she’d like? Do cows eat carrots?” Apparently, Stan hadn't learned anything from having an entire veal farm’s worth of calves holed up in his room when he was a kid, because he frankly doesn’t know the answer to that question. Tolkien is already gone before he can open his mouth.
Three carrots are clutched in his hands when he returns, and this time, he is out of breath. “Think that’ll be enough?” he asks. Stan doesn’t say that it will have to be.
He trades the lasso Tolkien shoved at him for the carrots and ignores the nauseous cartwheels spinning in his stomach when their hands touch. “Does she have a name?” he asks, pulling away too quickly.
“My dad named her Miss Mascot.” Tolkien rolls his eyes. “But he’s just been calling her Missy.”
Cute, Stan thinks, half-jogging to catch up with Missy on the path. “Hey Missy girl.” His voice is soft, low, so as not to startle her. He can see his reflection in her round brown eyes. “Hope you like carrots.”
Right away she attempts to lip at the bundle in his hands. Her fine whiskers tickle his skin, still tingling from where they’d brushed against Tolkien’s. Stan lets her have one to tempt her into turning around and following him back to the pen.
“She likes carrots,” Stan says to Tolkien as they pass him.
“Yeah, alright!” Tolkien moves to clap his hands but thinks better of it, and instead gently instructs Stan on where to go next, showing him a gate on the Credigree side of the road he’d never noticed before. A new walking path forged through the rows and rows and endless rows of marijuana that lead to a shiny new red barn. Red enough to notice even in the dark.
It’s huge, too, as is Credigree tradition. Bigger and better and more ostentatious than anything his dad can afford, preemptively plunging them further into debt just to feel like he has something over Steven Black. Two dozen cows could fit in here comfortably, probably more. Stan supposes that’s the idea if this hemp-infused milk idea shakes out.
All the stalls are pristine except for one that’s loaded with fresh hay and a large bucket of water. Stan tosses the remaining carrots inside and Missy trots in after them. And just like he does for the dogs at the shelter when they don’t want to stay in their kennels, he makes sure her back is turned before he shuts the gate and secures the latch.
“They’re called stalls, not pens, by the way. Just so you know,” Stan says, wiping his palms on the already dirty knees of his jeans.
“Same thing.” Tolkien isn’t upset by the correction. He’s smiling with all his teeth, and Stan pretends to take interest in Missy happily munching away so he doesn’t meet his eyes. As Stan’s rotten luck would have it, Tolkien stands beside him at the gate, close enough that he can feel their ribs touch when they breathe out. “I owe you one.”
“Okay, then stay.”
The words fall out of him faster than Stan’s shame can stop him. He can almost see them in a grotesque puddle on the floor of the barn, like so many crushes and drunken nights before them. He can also see the stunned expression on Tolkien’s face, though subtle—he’s always been good at checking his emotions. His raised eyebrows are the only indication.
“Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m like. Fucked up about graduation, just ignore me,” Stan attempts to correct, side-stepping away from Tolkien before he legitimately pukes on him.
“Is that what you’ve been thinking about all night?” Tolkien asks.
Stan feels caged. “Graduation?”
“No, about me leaving.”
He’s definitely fucking caged.
The words keep coming though, spilling from Stan’s throat with nothing to catch them. “You’re the only one who gets it, and you’re leaving. I don’t know, dude. It sucks.” They’re not poignant, or memorable, or a fraction as powerful as the feelings he’s only realized in the past hour of his life, but they’re still too vulnerable. He feels exposed, and he’s done it to himself, fingers prying himself open to reveal his heart to Tolkien.
“Yeah, I know.” Calm and even-toned as always. Goddamn him. There’s a little sigh at the tail of Tolkien’s words though, and Stan finds himself clinging to it. “Dude, the day I moved to this farm I lost something with everyone but you. Or maybe I gained something, like a shitty experience no one else gets? I don’t know. Point is, I can’t talk to my friends about—” Tolkien gestures around the barn, “—this. They don’t get it when I tell them I can’t make it to grad night because I’m chasing down my dad’s cow. Even now, and we’ve been on these farms for how long? They still think I’m lying to get out of it.”
“And they don’t come visit.”
“And they don’t come visit,” Tolkien echoes, “And they won’t visit me in college either. I’ve accepted that.”
Missy accepts her imprisonment in her so-called pen, and beds down in the hay for the night. Stan accepts his, too. Trapped in an invisible pen of his own, pouring his guts out through the bars to Tolkien staring at him from the other side.
Yet Tolkien shares in equal volume, willingly.
“I’ll visit you.”
“You could just come with me,” Tolkien says with a half-hearted laugh, like he can’t believe his own words. “I know you don’t want to stay here. I hear Randy telling my dad about how he can’t wait for you to work here full time.” Stan winces at that. “That’s not what you want, right?”
“I don’t know what I want,” Stan admits, “I don’t have it figured out like Kyle does. Or Wendy. Or you.”
“You think I have it figured out? Stan, we’re eighteen—”
“I’m seventeen.”
“You’re almost eighteen. I don’t have it figured out any more than you do. I picked math as my major because it’s my best subject. What the hell am I supposed to do with a math degree? Maybe I’ll find my calling when I’m there. Maybe I’ll want to be a private detective or a marine biologist. Maybe I’ll die next week. Who knows?”
Tolkien says it all with such conviction that Stan feels foolish. “Yeah. Who knows.”
His heart stutters when Tolkien bumps his hip against his side, flashing that perfect, straight-A, doesn’t-have-his-shit-figured-out grin at him. “And between you and me, I don’t think Kyle or Wendy know shit.”
That cheers Stan up in an entirely petty way. “You really want me to come with you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Why would you?”
“Because we’ve come this far together, right?” Tolkien says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “No one gets it like us. Remember? Come on, you literally just said that.”
His brain trudges through mud trying to make sense of what Tolkien is getting at. Something between the lines that Stan fails to grasp because they’re making eye contact now—his heart is threatening to shatter his rib cage, and his stomach is sour with bile. Tolkien closes the short gap between them. Under the milky light of the moon, against the gentle snores of Missy in the hay, he opens his mouth to swallow Stan’s breath and kisses him.
And Stan doesn’t kiss back.
“Ah,” Tolkien murmurs. Stan can feel his lips moving against his when he speaks. His stomach lurches. “Did I misread this?”
“Muh—What?” Synapses fire on everything and nothing. Why did Tolkien kiss him? Why the hell didn’t he kiss back? Back on the hill under the stars, when their hands briefly touched, didn’t Stan come to the conclusion he felt something here? Something akin to love was percolating in his mind and making him stupid. Stupider.
“I thought—Never mind, it doesn’t matter what I thought. We should probably head ba-AH!”
Stan grabs hold of Tolkien’s soft, round cheeks to smash their mouths together, far less gracefully than Tolkien had done moments before. They stumble backward, the space between them hot with their ragged breaths, tongues and spit and broken words. Tolkien hooks his thumbs into the belt loops of Stan’s jeans and leads him to a pile of overstock hay shoved into the corner.
They fall into it. It’s sharp and itchy against his back despite the thick fabric of his jacket, but Stan sinks further into it, pulling Tolkien with him. This isn’t the kind of practiced, precise kissing Stan imagines Tolkien shared with his girlfriends. This is desperate. Two bodies that refuse to separate, let go, move on. A culmination of eight years worth of puppy love and admiration that’s morphed into an insatiable hunger.
“I’ll come with you,” Stan says through the heat, and Tolkien moans some sort of acknowledgment into his mouth. Such a rash decision for two kids to make, because Tolkien is right, that is still what they are. Kids. Kids stumbling into their adult lives. Kids who have not and will not talk any of this through. Kids who have failed to navigate their feelings in the heat of the moment, or the fact that Stan will have to get a job, or the steam about to pour out of Randy’s ears when Stan tells him he isn’t sticking around to work the farm after all.
The invisible shell they’ve wedged themselves between cracks open at the sound of Tolkien’s dad calling for him from outside the barn doors. “Tolkien? Son, are you in there?” They pull away from each other like they’re on fire, but they stay smiling, lips swollen and bruised, breath rolling off their tongues in short huffs.
“Yeah, I’m in here, Dad.”
His dad enters the barn with seemingly no suspicions, just a stitch of concern knit into his brows. “How’s Missy?”
“She got out,” Tolkien tells his dad, shockingly honest. Stan pushes himself to an unsteady stand, brushing loose bits of hay from his clothes in an attempt to avoid Steven's gaze. “But Stan helped me get her back in. She’s good. Sleeping.”
He’s satisfied with that. With a wistful sigh, Steven clasps his hands together and regards them both fondly, a gleam of nostalgia twinkling in his eyes. The same one all their parents get when they reminisce on their past. “Graduation tomorrow. You boys excited?”
“I am now,” Tolkien says, shooting Stan that grin that makes his knees tremble, “Finally hit me.”
“Yeah. Uh,” Stan coughs into his fist to clear his head. He can see the dumb, lovestruck look he was giving Tolkien in his mind’s eye. “Yes, sir.”
“Good, good. Well, I’ll leave you boys to it, but you might want to think about getting to bed soon. Big day tomorrow. And Stan—" He can hear the sympathy in Steven's voice. "I think your dad is looking for you.”
Stan's smile thins. Of course he fucking is. “Thanks for letting me know, Mr. Black.”
“It’s cute that you still call him ‘Mr. Black,’” Tolkien says once his dad is out of earshot.
Stan rubs the back of his neck. “He’s your dad. I mean, you call my dad Randy, I guess…”
“That’s because I don’t respect him. And you call him Randy, too.”
“Yeah… because I don’t respect him.” They both laugh at that, a break in the amorous, frantic atmosphere they’d created. Although it’s clear both of them want to continue what they’ve started, and flesh out the exciting details of the future, they find themselves leaving the barn—Tolkien taking care to shut and lock the doors this time—and heading back down that familiar dirt road.
Pinkies linked, they both tilt their head towards the sky, at the tremendous clusters of light sparkling overhead. More stars than they would ever be able to count with the finest telescope Tolkien’s family could buy.
They don’t talk about the barn. They don’t discuss their inevitable move. They don’t decide there and then what Stan is going to tell Randy. There’s no mention of graduation, or the friends who don’t visit, or their families, or how long they’ve been feeling this way towards each other. Just the stars, and their breath fogging in the frigid air.
“You can’t get this in South Park,” Tolkien says. “We’ll always have this, even when we’re in the city and can’t see it anymore.”
“You’re probably gonna think this is stupid, and it is? I don’t know. But I’ve always thought of it as like… Our sky. Our stars. The other guys don’t see it. Literally, they don’t see this every night like we do.” Now that it’s out in the open, Stan somehow feels less embarrassed for thinking it at all, and Kyle’s pompous correction is all but silent in his mind.
“It’s not stupid. And it is kind of our sky, isn’t it? They see it, but not the way we do.”
It’s enough for Stan to drag Tolkien into another kiss. Languid, soft, without the sense of urgency from before. In the distance, he hears his dad crooning his name, dragging out the ‘A’ in that particularly grating manner of his. Stan grits his teeth as he pulls away.
“Don’t worry. We have an entire summer and then some,” Tolkien assures him, letting their palms drag against each other as he pulls away. “Go see what your dad wants. I’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early.”
Stan sheepishly waggles his fingers in a wave as Tolkien breaks away, walking a few paces ahead back to his house, while Stan returns to his. Randy is waiting for him on the front porch in his underwear, unsurprisingly shitfaced and wailing about cows and hemp-infused milk and how they need to build a barn so they can get ahead of Credigree. They’re going to paint it green because a red barn on a weed farm is ‘fucking stupid.’
He ignores him and heads up to his room, blissfully shutting his father’s racket behind the door. After he gets ready for bed, he grabs his pillow and plops it opposite the headboard, right beneath the window so he can watch the stars as he drifts off.
Graduation is tomorrow. Summer after that. Then, his entire life is free of the farm, a new world with Tolkien by his side.
And no matter where they go, they’ll be under the same sky.