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It wasn’t that Hermie hated his roommates, per se, he just kind of hated everyone these days. It might’ve been the new medication - he’d been meaning to talk to Samantha about that, the little white pills he dutifully swallowed every morning weren’t really doing anything to make his depression any more manageable - but whatever the reason behind Hermie’s irritability, it made him want to do nothing except hole himself up in his room all day, memorizing lines and practicing choreography and watching Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet on repeat. He was grateful, at least, to have a room to himself, a door that he could lock, and a nice pair of noise-canceling headphones to lose himself in whatever world he felt like inhabiting. Anything was better than this one.
But the fact of the matter remained that Hermie and the three other people he shared a too-small apartment with were not necessarily peas in a pod. The room that Hermie now inhabited had belonged to Hero before she got her own place a couple months back, and when she left, she very generously put in a good word for Hermie with her friends. He had from there been able to seamlessly slip into the role of someone who hit it off great with Hero’s three ex-roommates, but it had gotten tiring after a while, and by now, he had dropped it completely. They weren’t bad people, of course; Hermie was simply incompatible with them, as he was finding was the case with most people these days. They rubbed up against all the wrong edges of his personality. Whenever he had down time, he had taken to spending it going on long aimless walks through San Dimas, just so that he didn’t have to be in the apartment.
It was on a hot August day during one of these walks that he got a call from Normal Oak. A year ago, this would have been a baffling and conflicted experience, but these days, Hermie was happy to report that the only emotion coursing through him when he saw Normal’s name light up his screen was one of overwhelming fondness.
A bell began to ring somewhere inside him, a little voice that tried to speak up in the back of his brain, but he silenced it.
“Why hello there,” Hermie said, answering the call. “To what do I owe the pleasure of speaking with you on this lovely afternoon?”
He heard a sniff, and then a quiet chuckle on the other end. “Why do you always talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Like a radio host from the Great Depression. Or Ernest Hemmingway.”
Hermie snickered. “A gentleman never tells.”
Normal gave a quiet laugh, but when he did not speak further, Hermie continued. “Did you, uh, have something that you wanted to talk about? Or were you just calling to chat?”
Normal sighed into the receiver, any hint of laughter gone from his voice. “Could you… do you wanna come over? It’s Lark’s night to cook, and we could… I dunno, watch a movie or something? Whatever you wanna do, really.”
‘Lark’s night to cook’ meant that dinner would be under-seasoned, almost certainly deep-fried, and relying heavily on the use of potatoes. Of all the Oak cooks, he was Hermie’s favorite.
“Hmm… I have been sufficiently tempted. As long as you remind your uncle that salt exists, then I would be happy to spend the evening in your company.”
“Perfect.” Normal sounded relieved. Or maybe just exhausted. Hermie briefly and bittersweetly remembered the Normal he had known in high school, of the beautiful energetic kid he once was. Hermie hoped his friend would be able to smile and laugh like that again someday.
“Do you need me to come pick you up?” Normal continued.
Looking around at his surroundings, Hermie realized that his feet had been moving of their own accord; he wasn’t actually all that far now from the Oak-Swallows-Garcia residence. “No, I’m nearby. I’ll be there soon.”
-
When Normal opened the door a little later, he blinked at Hermie in surprise.
“You weren’t kidding when you said soon, huh?”
“I was in the neighborhood…” Hermie started, trailing off as he stepped across the threshold and took in the sight of his friend. To put it plainly, Normal looked terrible. Half of his long brown curls were pulled loose from their ponytail, spilling over the offensively blue work uniform shirt that he hadn’t bothered to remove yet, and the bags underneath his eyes looked heavy enough to deadlift. It was immediately apparent why he had invited Hermie over.
“Long day?” he asked. He could see a few tears welling up in Normal’s eyes as he nodded.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Alright. Is there anything I can…?” Hermie trailed off.
Normal sheepishly held his arms out for a hug, and Hermie smiled as he pulled his friend in close. He smelled like industrial deep fryers and patchouli essential oil, which was to say he smelled like Normal. Hermie closed his eyes. The little voice was back, trying to tell him something; it sounded important. He did not listen.
The past couple years of Hermie’s life had been spent desperately trying to convince himself that he didn’t want this, that he didn’t miss the way his and Normal’s bodies clicked together like puzzle pieces. They had the perfect amount of height difference between them, close enough so that Hermie didn’t have to bend down awkwardly, but still enough distance that he could rest his chin on Normal’s head, and it had been agonizing to think about back when it was out of his reach. If he hadn’t visited his own grave on a whim almost a year ago, the two might never have even decided to give friendship another shot, but now, it was nearly impossible to picture a life apart from each other. Hermie felt as if Normal were woven into the fabric of him, and he was determined to do everything in his power not to fuck things up this time.
He could feel the way Normal's chest expanded and contracted with each deep breath as they hugged, neither wanting to be the first one to break the contact. Hermie carded a hand through Normal’s long dark curls, and the two of them just stood there for a few moments, breathing together.
“Can we just…” Normal asked after a moment. “Can we just lay down for a little bit?”
Hermie’s heart leapt, and he smiled softly. “Yeah, of course.”
This was another thing they did together, the two of them; whenever Normal had a bad day (or, sometimes, whenever he could tell Hermie had a bad day but was too proud to admit it), he would ask Hermie to come over, and then the two would make their way upstairs to Normal’s bedroom, where they would… well, Hermie utterly despised the untoward implications of the phrase “touching each other,” but “providing mutual physical comfort” sounded just as bad, and he downright refused to call it “snuggling” or “spooning” or any cutesy shit like that. To put it simply, Normal and Hermie would do their best to get comfortable on Normal’s too-small bed, and indulge their mutual oft-neglected need for human contact; it didn’t really matter what you called it, though, because it didn’t change the fact of its odd comfortable beauty. Sometimes they would relax into hugs that lasted hours; other times, they did nothing more than sit and hold hands while Normal played a game on his phone and Hermie reread his small volume of Shakespeare’s selected sonnets for the millionth time. Regardless, though, it always left both of them feeling much more alive afterwards.
Once the pair arrived in his room, Normal stripped himself out of his work uniform, replacing it with a too-small pair of basketball shorts that might once have belonged to Link. Hermie remembered how he had flushed all the way down to his toes the first time Normal asked if he could take off his shirt before they cuddled, but now in the dead of San Dimas summer, it was either that or deal with the textural nightmare of Normal in a sweat-drenched t-shirt, and Hermie greatly preferred the former. It had been a not insignificant battle to reach the place in their friendship where they could change around each other and have it not be weird, and Hermie was deeply and utterly grateful for the level of comfort they’d achieved. It was much easier this way, not having to worry about Normal’s romantic feelings or any will-they-won’t-they bullshit; they were friends, and that was something Hermie wouldn’t trade for the world.
Normal collapsed onto his unmade bed, and made grabby hands at Hermie to join him. Hermie smiled; he was already comfortable in his short shorts and cropped tank top emblazoned with the word LIBRA in a hot pink font, so he didn’t bother to remove any clothes before he climbed onto Normal’s bed and collapsed into his friend’s arms.
“Thank you,” Normal mumbled, snuggling closer into Hermie’s chest.
“Of course,” Hermie said fondly. He rubbed a soothing hand across the slightly-sticky plane of Normal’s back, feeling his fingers catch with the friction. It didn’t take long for Hermie to realize Normal had fallen asleep in his arms.
The little voice in Hermie’s mind spoke up again, and this time, there was nothing to distract him. He wasn’t ready to listen - but then again, he didn’t think he would ever be ready.
As sunlight trickled in through Normal’s window and spilled across the floor like melted gold, he finally let himself think it:
I am in love with Normal Oak.
Funny how easy it was for such a simple truth to captivate and terrify him. Normal Oak, with his gorgeous curly hair and acne scars and sad eyes and soft chubby body, Normal Oak with so much love in his heart that the feeling leaked out from the seams. His weight was situated perfectly in Hermie’s arms, snoring slightly as a small puddle of drool dripped out of his mouth and soaked into Hermie’s shirt, and he loved him so much. Hermie knew in that moment that he would happily wake up every morning and fall asleep every night to a view like this. He knew he would come over every time Normal called him, and would hold him for as long as he asked; he would try every day to make up for the years he had been gone, because Normal deserved nothing short of the world.
But Hermie was not the world. Hermie was a shallow recreation of his former self. Hermie was a boy who had died and not quite managed to come back. Normal had literally been through hell and back; he deserved so much better than the broken boy beside him.
In Hermie’s arms, Normal shifted slightly and groggily said, “I can hear you thinking.”
Hermie flushed. Clearly his friend hadn’t been as asleep as he’d thought. “I’ve never had a thought in my entire life.”
Normal giggled sleepily, and wiggled impossibly closer, tucking his head under Hermie’s chin.
“Mmm. You’re funny. Love you.”
It was thrown out so loftily, like he had said it a thousand times before, but it coursed through Hermie like the tide. He tried to remember: was this a confession he’d ever made before? Had Normal ever assembled those words in that order to Hermie? It was true of course, as true as the turning of the earth and the shifting of the tides and the pull of gravity - Normal loved Hermie, and Hermie loved him in return - but it was one thing to know this, to feel it in every glance and laugh and phone call, but it was quite another to actually say it out loud.
Normal didn’t mean it romantically, of course. He was not in love with Hermie, he was simply stating a fact of which anyone who spent more than five minutes around the two of them was already aware. But that begged the question, was Hermie supposed to say it back? He didn’t know. Probably he should, to be polite, even though Normal already knew. But “love you too” was too close to home, too close to being the full truth, too close to being something that should definitely not be said out loud; try as he might, Hermie did not think he would be able to make his lips form the words.
He was quickly saved from any decision-making, though, by the faint whistle of a snore that emanated from Normal a couple moments later, already fast asleep again. Hermie breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t matter now how he responded: Normal had probably been too asleep to remember anything. He likely wasn’t even aware of what he said in the first place.
Hermie hugged his friend impossibly tighter, willing the weird bright feeling coursing through his body to disappear. It didn’t. The feeling didn’t even have the decency to stop feeling good, to stop warming his chest from the inside out like his own personal furnace.
He looked again at Normal. The young man was barely visible, close as he was to Hermie, just a tuft of curly hair and a couple limbs in his periphery. He could not lose this. Normal was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He couldn’t lose him.
In that tiny too-hot bedroom, Normal sleeping like a lover in his arms, Hermie closed his eyes and made a deal with himself:
I am in love with Normal Oak.
And I’m never going to tell him.
It felt good to decide, the conviction strengthening his resolve, turning festering unused energy into an achievable goal. He kept the secret like a smooth stone in his fist as Normal woke up, and as Lark called them down for dinner. Hermie kept it as he shook seasoning onto perfectly golden-brown french fries, and he kept it as the night got dark, and he kept it as he finally had to bid his friend goodnight, looking Normal in the eyes and definitely not the lips. Hermie repeated it in his head like a mantra: I’m never going to tell him. I’m never going to tell him. I’m never going to tell him.
But despite his conviction, Hermie couldn’t change himself. There was one truth that defined him to his very core, a terrible immutable thing that bubbled up again and again every time he tried to stop it:
Hermie was a liar.