Chapter Text
Columbia, 1963.
The first day of my junior year, I had never felt so sick. Sick of my brother, with his car and his books and his grades. Sick of my parents, who loved me like a gardener loves a misshapen carrot. Sick of myself for feeling so sick around my stupid, sickly sweet roommate.
To be honest, of all my Welton memories, I find it easiest to remember when I knew I loved him. I was sick. I was really, really sick. I knew I cared for him, but I could never say it. My love for him was something that I never let out, I kept it locked away in a tin box in my sock drawer. I still have that box, but I don't have him.
The fall was over. No longer was the wind warm, but it was real and harsh. I was so, so, sick. Everything seemed to spin around me. I love him, I had thought.
My tin box of poetry, words so terrifyingly sick that I could not keep them in my notebook, felt like the cause. It was me, I was just too fucking sick. He knows, he knows everything, and now he’s gone.
I began to not regret the words I had written, but to instead regret that I never acted on them. November still makes me think of his hair, the way it smelled like bar soap and linen. I never said it.
My tin box was a box of confessions. My confession now is that looking inside today, I only miss him more.
As you lay near me
Asleep and still,
I look upon your head, a twisting maze where there is no right direction
There is no exit route
No bright red sign
Above the door
To give me an escape from my own maze
Ugly, sick, and dripping with oil,
Weeping, seeping from my pores.
My box was becoming too small for my dreams of you. It seemed to me that I wrote about you in my every spare moment. It was prolific. Prolific and so very wrong. I couldn't stop. Your name flowed from my pen like honey. Soft and sweet. Sticky and sickly.
Whenever the leaves die and fall from the trees, I think of what I wrote here and hid away. I think of you. I think of what I wish you thought of me.
There is no look of horror when I run my hands through your hair. You're tired. You want me to make you a cup of tea and you want me to hold you. You want me to be what I cannot be, yet you don't care. You want me to kiss your chapped lips in the cold, cover them with honey and make them sweet. I make your life sweet. You love me with no hesitation, and you love me as a man loves his woman.
Seeing such raw emotion isn’t pleasant. I should burn them, and I should forget him as best as I can. It’s pathetic, right? I can’t forget a boy I spent a couple months with three years ago. I can’t stop thinking about him, everything reminds me of him. The dorm I share with a kid at Columbia, the way his back is specked with freckles, just like Neil. The Columbia dorm room is small like the one we shared, but the walls are somehow more imposing without him.
I can’t write poetry anymore. When I write, my brain jams like stuck typewriter keys, the letters E, I, L, and N depressed with no hope of coming up again. My roommate thinks I’m weird.
The guy I share a room with is named Michael. I hardly ever see him, and he doesn’t like to see me. When I do see him, we sit in silence. I don’t mind it, because he doesn’t interest me, and I’m too nervous to speak to people in the first place. I speak when I have to.
It’s around five in the evening, and my street is glowing in the orange light while I walk back to my little room. My nose is running from the cold, combined with the decaying leaves, and the fact that it’s simply that time of the year again.
Neil used to lend me his scarves. They were soft and warm, and they kept a part of him with me all the time.
I start to walk faster, cursing as I feel a few drops of rain on my head. I climb up the stairs and finally fall dramatically onto my bed. Something isn’t right, I think to myself. The drawer of my nightstand is stuck in an awkward position, the angle not quite right for it to close properly. The hair on the back of my neck stands straight up when I hear Mike’s footsteps. He stands in front of me, his face twisted into some expression of either disgust or amusement that I can’t tell between. My heart seems to drop straight out of my body when I see what he’s holding.
“Mike, that’s… that’s… that’s not yours,”
I stutter out, my eyes burning a hole into the little shiny tin box he’s clutching. He opens it, and I feel like passing out.
“What is this shit?” He yells quietly through his teeth, crushing the papers in his hands. He picks one out.
“The room we share seems to be getting smaller,” he reads, “...as I get lost in your eyes.” He’s laughing, laughing like I’m his very own personal circus freak, his very own queer. He stares at me.
“That’s not only corny,” he starts, getting ready to let loose every suspicion he’s ever had about the type of man I am, “it’s fucking grotesque. Do you really expect me to live with…” He stops. The silence is awkward and completely vacant. He opens his mouth, struggling to form words as if he could vomit from just the thought of me.
“Do you expect me to live with a fucking queer? A queer that wants to fuck me?” Again, silence. I don’t want to fuck Michael.
That’s not about you. That could never be about someone like you. Keep your nose out of my shit, I think, but I can't get the words out.
“I’m… I’m not.” I stop, my voice cracking as I feel myself losing composure. “I’m not a queer,” I say, looking anywhere but where Michael stands in front of me. If lying is supposed to make you feel powerful, then I’m doing something wrong. He throws my papers on the floor and they shower down like the chilly autumn rain hurling itself onto the window. And with that, he’s gone. He slams our door and the room shakes for a moment.
I taste my tears before I even realise I’m crying, the salt trickling into the corners of my mouth. I let out a long shudder and clasp my hand over my mouth, wanting to hide away in the corner of this room and never leave. Neil would know exactly what to say right now, I think to myself. It’s true, Neil comforted me when I didn’t think anything could. I have to get him out of my head. I reach for the telephone, and dial a number I haven’t called in ages. It rings and rings out, until I hear a click and soft static.
“Hello? Todd?” My brother says from the other end of the line, and I respond, trying to hide the trembling in my voice.
“Hey Jeff. Uh, I think I really… I think I really screwed up-” I say, losing control of my voice, letting it shake and crack at the end.
“Woah, woah. What’s wrong? What happened?” He says, and I can imagine him furrowing his brow and putting his hand on his hip, giving me the fatherly concern that I never got from our father.
“You know what I told you when I was… what, fourteen?” I say.
“You told me a lot of things when you were fourteen.” He responds. I sigh, trying to find the best phrasing for quite possibly the second most awkward conversation I will ever have. The first, of course, being the first time we had this conversation.
“Boys. Boys, Jeff. I’m a homosexual.” I whisper, glancing around the empty hallway and silently hoping that he’ll remember our first conversation on the topic.
“Ah, right. Sorry, I should have inferred,” he said, and I could almost hear his sarcastic smile through the receiver.
“What happened? Todd, did someone hurt you?” My hand grips the receiver tighter.
"No. I mean… not really. I'm fine," I say, feeling my stomach churn at the thought of my newly exed-roomate.
"Todd. You sound like you're about to chuck up your lunch," Jeff adds, and he's right yet again.
"I don't wanna talk about it."
"You're the one that called me."
I don't have a good comeback for that. He's right.
"Someone called me earlier," Jeff starts, and his tone immediately captures my attention; he's been holding whatever this is for a while. Before, it's been that our parents are getting us a pet, or that he got into Yale, or the Baltimore men's club, or whatever the hell he's up to these days. I haven't heard him speak quite like this in a while.
"He asked about you. Where you go to school," he says.
"What, did you tell him? Jeff, I don't particularly want my life to turn into a Hitchcock film." He lets out a laugh. Jeff laughs obnoxiously, and loud, at that. It's short and loud, almost like a shriek, and I'm feeling glad that I'm not in the same room as him at the moment.
"He said he knew you. He said you shared a room junior year, and I'll have you know I didn't believe him. But, I'd say he's at least… 87% legitimate. He’s coming into Penn Station tonight at eight."
I don't know what to say.
"Todd? You there?”
“He called to say that he missed you, and he’d like to meet you there. Just… think about it, okay?” My mouth moves to answer, but I can't.
"Ok… goodbye to you too," Jeff says, and the phone clicks distantly.
———— Neil
I never liked train rides. They're loud, shaky, and they make me nauseous no matter how beautiful the scenery is. But today, I honestly couldn't be more giddy. I look a lot more like I did three years prior, but my face is irreversibly weathered. I’ve got dark circles under my eyes that used to only appear after excruciatingly long study sessions, but now I’ve lost all hope of them fading. I used to pass out at five in the morning, agonizing over Latin-- then I’d wake up an hour later, ink all over my face and sheets, to Todd shaking me awake. He would tease me about my eye bags, purple and blue and a little sickly; but really he just wanted an excuse to stare. I mean, that’s what I thought. I thought it, and I wished I hadn’t, because it felt like an accusation. It wasn't the same as Knox going on about how Chris was thinking about him, you see, when I thought to himself,
I think maybe he wants to stare into my eyes,
it was criminal. Love couldn't be healthy coming from such a rotten source, something as rotten as the way I felt when we bumped shoulders in the hall, when Todd's hand touched mine. When he accidentally wore my sweater, I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t bear to ask him to change when it made me feel so warm inside. I threw up that night, because it felt like I had touched him all over and he had no idea. I needed it to stop.
I always have bags under my eyes now. They came, and they never went away.
The train ride that should have been over in a half hour felt ridiculously long, like a voyage across the Atlantic. Fitting, I thought to myself, as I heard a little girl in the seat across from me sing to herself,
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea
My Bonnie lies over the ocean
So bring back my Bonnie to me.
The train pulled into the stop with a screech, and the little girl stopped singing as her mother lifted her into her arms. I looked away, and focused on pulling my luggage out of the top compartment. As it swung down, the reality of the situation seeped in. I was in New York City, with nowhere to go.
It had been years since I’d seen Todd, but that hadn't kept his face from appearing, smiling and bright. I saw him in the moments before I fell asleep, filling in the blank spots between my every thought. I thought of him when I couldn't figure out a physics problem, when I practiced my lines or when I went on long walks. I thought of him whenever I could find an excuse to, and that happened to be quite a lot.
I still remember the smell of his hair, his tendency to wear his blazer inside-out, his refusal to wear colorful socks, the way he hid in the back of the shower room like a deer in headlights, and how he would nervously bite his lip. I remember staying up far too late for our own good, reciting lines back and forth huddled under a blanket, and I remember how beautiful Todd had looked with the flashlight's soft glow on his face. I needed to see him, even if that meant getting a fist to the face-- I knew that Todd should hate me. I also knew that he probably wouldn’t, because Todd was always forgiving and gentle. Gentler than he should be. I wait behind the mother with her little girl, who is now crying. I smile at her as the line advances. My suitcase is heavy in my arm, and I want nothing more than to get off this stuffy train. I finally step down onto the platform, and I can’t say that the air filled with soot from the train is any better than the smell of stale cigarette smoke in the train cabin. But then, I see his face through the crowd. Todd.