Chapter Text
“We are proud and pleased to present the Samwell Class of 2017!” says Headmaster Mosso and four hundred caps fly in the air, signaling the end of Lardo’s college career. It’s a start, too, she guesses, but right now it mostly feels like an end. A sad and utterly unwelcome end. All her friends seem to have something lined up to pass the time this summer and fall (and the rest of their lives ) and she feels unanchored, like she’s been pushed underwater with no warning.
Her art friends grin when she turns to look at them, and she’s sure the pictures will show her with a pale, sick expression instead of the smiles of everyone around her. She feels flushed and hot under the normally-pleasant May sunshine. The rays of light off the lake seem to shine directly into her eyes, blinding her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life, and it doesn’t seem cute or romantic or auspicious anymore.
“Lardo!” someone yells, and she’s yanked out of her reverie, snapping her head around whiplash-quick to find the source.
It’s Ransom, handsome in his cap and gown, jeans and his tacky neon-yellow sneakers underneath. Holster stands next to him, shielding his eyes from the glare of the pond.
“C’mere!” he calls. “We’re taking a picture.”
Lardo wades through several groups of friends laughing on the lawn to get to them. She brushes her hair out of her eyes, not even sure what she’s self-conscious of. Everyone else looks self-assured and purposeful, like this is just the beginning of their five-year plan. It feels like she has Art Student In Debt carved onto her forehead.
Jack and Bitty flank Ransom and Holster, trying to avoid looking at each other. They stand at an awkward distance apart, the distance of two people who are used to standing close together and now have to re-learn that. Jack is occupied, camera in hand, snapping all sorts of shots with a focused look on his face. He tries to take a candid of her, and she turns away with a grimace.
“Lards,” he says reproachfully, sounding like her dad on their family vacation when she was fourteen and wanted desperately not to be looked at. Every picture in that photo album has the same pouty face she’s making right now. “Let me get a shot.”
She forces a smile, one she hopes he reads as I’m majorly overstimulated right now, please get me out of here, you of all people should know how I’m feeling . She makes eye contact, but he misses the cue, probably too distracted himself to try to clear some air for her. “Okay, guys, get into formation,” he says, and she lets Holster and Ransom manhandle her into one last hug. She tries for a smile, but all she can think about is the future, and, sure enough, when she looks on Jack’s digital display later, she has a hunted, grim look on her face.
Bitty and Jack and the rest of the team excuse themselves to go back to the Haus to prepare the last kegster of the year (and probably the last kegster ever, for her), and Holster and Ransom are going out for a joint lunch with their families, and Lardo is left alone on the lawn, in a crowd of people she doesn’t know well, wondering what the hell she’s going to do next.
Her parents didn’t come. Which, whatever, she didn’t really expect them to, they hate the idea of art school and have since she first brought it up her junior year of high school. Her brother came down for the day on the train from Cambridge where he goes to Harvard to study astrophysics. She tries not to be bitter at Adam for doing exactly what their parents wanted both of them to do, for being the perfect kid to balance out her fuck-ups, and at the same time, she knows her parents wouldn’t have missed Adam’s graduation for anything, let alone a birthday party at their restaurant in Hartford.
Because Adam is the perfect everything, he takes her out to lunch and makes excuses for their parents. They eat salty made-by-white-people pho at The Vietnamese Lantern, and he tags her in a bunch of Instagram posts and tells everyone how proud he is of his big sister on, like, twelve different avenues of social media with stupid hashtags she doesn’t really get.
She walks him to the train, makes sure he has his ticket stub and a map so he knows when to get off.
“Call them,” he says into her hair when they hug goodbye. “They love you. They just need some time. Be patient.”
“Love you,” she whispers into his soft sweatshirt that smells like the detergent their mom uses. She doesn’t bring up calling them, because she’s pretty sure she’s not going to. She’s twenty-two. If her parents love her so much, they’ll call.
He cuffs her gently on the back of the head, and she swats him back. “Don’t miss your train, Einstein,” she says sarcastically, and he gives her a smile that’s tinted with a shame that makes her want to cry. “Sorry,” she mutters after a second, wondering when she’d gotten to be such an asshole.
(It’s actually pretty easy to figure out when she became one.)
Lardo’s asshole origin story isn’t that shocking. It starts like this: Shitty graduates and asks her out. These two events are in the same day, and Lardo spends two hours on the night of Shitty’s Last College Kegster Ever making out with him in Holster’s chair-swing in the attic while Katy Perry blares downstairs.
And it had been...it had been fun, and she loved him too much to say I don’t know about this or this is going too fast for me when he’d asked with those big, sweet brown eyes.
When he’d touched her collarbone like she was...valuable. Not delicate, or anything else patronizing and patriarchal and icky. But like she mattered to him more than most people.
So they’d hooked up in a fucking chair-swing, and suddenly Lardo was Shitty’s girlfriend without ever really agreeing to it, and they were a couple who went on dates with couples like Jack and Bitty . That was the first six weeks of Lardo’s summer, dates with Shitty and spooning with Shitty and having sex with Shitty, really equitable sex where she had twice the orgasms that he did and foreplay was a must. All with a core of discomfort that sat right in the pit of her stomach the whole time.
And what could she say to anyone? Shitty treats me with too much respect? I’m not attracted to this guy who loves me for my mind and my body? All she knew was that something didn’t feel right, and a month and a half after they’d first hooked up, she’d woken up and moved all her shit out of his apartment in Cambridge and had bolted home to Hartford.
She’d gotten twenty-one texts from Shitty, one a day, starting with a confused where’d u go? and ending with a resigned idk why ur m.i.a. but im done.
(Not to mention the paragraphs she’d gotten from Ransom, Holster, Johnson, and Bitty, all of whom were appalled and didn’t speak to her through September.)
She’d spent from the Fourth of July until February crying intermittently and hooking up with a girl from Samwell she’d met on Tinder. She didn’t sleep well for months and she let her grades drop. She didn’t turn in one of her final projects until a month after her original extension and still got a D on it. This year has been one of regret and trying to redeem herself: to Shitty, to her friends, to her parents. And so far, it feels like she’s failed.
But tonight is different. Tonight is a kegster and anything is possible. Tonight Shitty is going to be there and this time she’s ready. She’s not afraid. She’s ready. She’s ready for Shitty, if Shitty’s ready for her.
She walks back from the train station to the Haus to clear her head, and when she gets back the party is in full swing, full of her fellow seniors and the team, and even LAX bros because miracles can happen, even small ones.
People are everywhere, and despite everything she looks out for Shitty, checking first the Tub Juice tub and then the kitchen where more than thirty people are lighting up using the gas burner.
She wonders for a second if he’s even here, but of course he’s here, he told Bitty he would be and he never flakes on them.
Not like her, she thinks, and shoves the thought immediately out of her head.
Of course it’s the last place she looks, just when she’s figured maybe he did flake.
”Have you been avoiding me?” she asks him, jokingly, when she finds him on the front steps.
Shitty gives her a sidelong glance, but he doesn’t move over. She sits down in his space anyways. He’s high, but when isn’t he, and the rush of affection she’d tried to temper since sophomore year, even in Kenya, rushes back. It’s a thrum of excitement and love for him, and maybe she doesn’t want to tamp it down. She’s a little punch-drunk, the way he always seems to make her, as she reaches out to stroke his stupid mustache.
“Lardo,” he says, warm but firm, taking her hand off of his face and giving it back to her. “Lards, I can’t.”
“You can’t what?” she asks, trying to sound flirtatious and giggly.
“I can’t do this thing where you decide you want me for a few days and I totally rearrange my life for you and then you back off. Not anymore.”
“I didn’t do that,” Lardo protests, her face flaming. She feels her smile falter. She totally did that.
“You did do that.”
“This is different. I’m ready now. I like you so much--”
“And I like you, Lards, I was in love with you for a while, but I can’t break up with my girlfriend and change my law school plans again so that you can dump me for a classics major named Ingrid. It’s not fair to me.”
She hangs her head. “I’m sorry. I never meant for you to… I never meant to lead you on, like... I thought we weren’t--”
Lardo mostly just depends on other people to finish her sentences for her when she’s struggling to get them out, but Shitty has never been about putting words in other people’s mouths, and this is no exception. He stares expectantly at her, wanting some sort of explanation.
She doesn’t know what to say. Shitty Knight has never been outwardly angry at her, and now he’s frowning at her, arms crossed. She just wants to go back to the way things were, when he lived at the Haus, before she’d gotten scared and broken things off last June. She doesn’t want him to be civil, she wants him to love her, like she loves him. But there’s no way to just say that without fucking something up.
She leans in, then, and kisses him as tenderly and sweetly as she’s ever kissed anyone. Maybe the touch will explain it, explain her.
She doesn’t want to be away from him anymore.
He’s not deepening the kiss, though, and after a second, he pulls away, and says, “Lardo.”
She opens her eyes.
“I have a girlfriend,” Shitty says. “I can’t kiss you. I’m sorry that you were too late, I am really, really sad about that. But I like Samantha a lot, and I don’t get involved with other people when I like someone.”
The like you do is implied, and more petty than Shitty normally gets. It’s a cheap shot, but Lardo feels it right in her stomach.
“Please respect that,” he says after a few seconds’ pause.
“I got it,” she says, her voice rough.
“Good,” says Shitty, staring out at Samwell’s campus. He’s radiating leave me alone vibes, something Lardo almost never even sees, and has never been directed at her before. It makes tears well up behind her eyes, and she stands abruptly.
“Good luck in Pittsburgh,” she says, vision blurring as she turns to head back into the Haus. He’s silent.
She walks through the Haus in a daze, smacking into now-blitzed people left and right. Bitty tries to grab her, but she shakes him off as gently as she can. She just-- she doesn’t even have a place to sleep tonight, she’s already turned her room in the artists’ housing over to a photography major. She’d been planning, if she’s honest, to crash with Shitty, and the idea makes her tear up all over again. She just needs-- she needs a moment alone.
She bumps into solid muscle, and looks up to see Jack frowning down at her.
“Lardo?” he says, staring down at her, concerned. “You okay?”
“N-no,” she says, her voice mangled.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. She shakes her head.
“Just get me out of here,” she says, and he nods, pulling an arm around her and leading her up to the second floor. She starts crying harder as he jimmies the lock to Bitty’s room before leading her in.
She collapses on Bitty’s bed, and he pulls up a chair and sits down next to her.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Jack shakes his head. “Nothing you wouldn’t do for me.”
That much is true. Lardo has rescued Jack from many an awful party scenario, and she gives him a watery smile.
“Shitty?” Jack guesses after she’s stopped crying for a few minutes. She nods, and closes her eyes taking a deep breath.
“I tried to k-kiss him tonight,” she says, hiding her face in embarrassment. “I didn’t know he was still with Samantha,” she says hurriedly, when she peeks at his face and sees his eyebrows raise.
Jack puts a placating hand on her arm. “I wouldn’t care if you had known,” he says. Lardo’s eyes water all over again when she thinks about how nice he’s being to her.
“So, what did he do?” Jack asks.
She shakes her head. “Pushed me away. He was mad I was being so,” she laughs wetly. “Fickle. Because of last summer.”
Jack waits for her to go on.
“And now, when I decide to go for it, he can’t because of Sam .” She doesn’t really try to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “He’s pissed at me. He told me so.”
“You hurt him,” says Jack diplomatically. “I mean, he’s a carefree guy, Lardo, but there’s only so many times you could expect him to get down on one knee.”
He’s right. Of course he’s right.
“I did hurt him. I was selfish,” Lardo agrees.
“But is that the whole story?” asks Jack. “I was pretty firmly in Shitty’s camp this year, between you and B--Eric , but I don’t think I ever got your side.”
Lardo sighs. “It’s definitely the short version.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” says Jack. “But what you did...I don’t think you’d ghost Shitty without some sort of reason. And I might be able to be a better ear if, uh. If I knew what was going on. The whole story.”
“I--you might think even worse of me,” says Lardo. “If that’s like--”
“I’m not mad at you,” says Jack. “And I promise I won’t think badly of you.”
“Okay,” says Lardo. “I just--like, we moved so fucking fast, Jack. After that last night in the Haus, like, it just felt like we jumped straight on the relationship train and we were fast-tracking towards serious. And we didn’t even really discuss it, which I know is a shitty excuse for what I did--”
Jack shakes his head.
“--And all of a sudden we were really, really serious, and it just felt like too much. Seriously, I mean, he’d like talk about our kids someday and it was so flattering but it was smothering, too. I just felt like I never really got a say in where we were headed and how fast. So I took the emergency exit.”
“That,” says Jack. “That makes a lot of sense. Okay. That makes a lot more sense.”
“I just feel so bad ,” says Lardo. “I feel like the worst person for hurting him, y’know?”
“I know you do,” says Jack. “But I get why you did it.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” Jack says. “Like he didn’t really ever give you a chance to talk about it. Of course you’d stop feeling like you could slow it down with words. You went into escape mode. Been there, done that.”
Lardo wants to cry all over again at how good it feels to have someone say out loud what she’s been trying to explain for months. He didn’t give her a chance to slow it down.
“Oh, Lards,” he says. He must see the tears that are rising again, because he leans forward in his chair until he’s looking her right in the eyes. “You weren’t selfish. You were overwhelmed. You did the best you could. You just didn’t expect him to move on.”
“Well, either way,” says Lardo. “I’m paying for it. I was going to go to Pittsburgh.” Her face flames. It’s embarrassing, to think about how she’d waltzed in, and thought everything would work out fine, that Shitty would rearrange his whole life for her. “I’m so stupid. ”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” says Jack. “You’re not giving yourself room to make mistakes.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Pot, kettle, but I know, Lardo. That shit eats you up after a while.”
“I just feel like I’m not being hard enough on myself. Like, I really fucked up with it. I screwed up the whole team for a while there. Like I still feel like I need to punish myself for what I did, you know?”
Jack looks away, and Lardo imagines he knows exactly what she’s talking about.
“Is that what this whole year has been about?” Jack asks after a second. “The whole ‘I gave up my spot at the Senior Art Fair’ thing?”
She imagines her face gives away the answer.
Jack’s face contorts in sympathy. “Lardo,” he whispers. “You gotta forgive yourself for this. I promise, Shitty is going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. I bet long-term that even your friendship is going to be okay.”
“But what do I until it is?” Lardo whispers, turning on her side to look at him. “I can’t go to Pittsburgh when he doesn’t want me there.”
“Did you have a backup plan?”
“No,” she says, halfway between laughing and crying. “I could always go home.”
She doesn’t want to go home. She doesn’t want to hear about how an art degree never got anyone anywhere, she doesn’t want to hear her father talk about her brother getting his diploma a year earlier than planned.
Jack would relate to this if anyone could. He’d mentioned early on in their friendship that he doesn’t like going home or being in his old room, seeing all the trophies and plans for him that he’d fucked up with his anxiety.
Now, his face gives off even more pity, if that’s even possible, and she closes her eyes, leaning back into Bitty’s soft flannel sheets.
“You could,” she hears the hesitancy in Jack’s voice and opens her eyes to stare at him. “You could live with me.”
Lardo’s eyes nearly bug out of her head. “You want me to live with you?”
Jack looks away, almost shy. “Yeah.”
“So, me?” she says, for clarification. “Not Bitty , me?”
“Yes, you,” he says, disgruntled. “And lay off Bitty, okay? It’s over. I know it’s not over for me, but like. That’s my problem. I don’t want him to feel pressured because I can’t get myself under control.”
Lardo is too drunk to choose whether she should direct the conversation towards Jack’s chronic low self-esteem and inability to believe anyone better than Kent Parson could love him, or focus on the whole you should live with me thing, and eventually, Jack says, “You can just say you don’t want to. I won’t get my feelings hurt.”
“Jack,” says Lardo. “Why do you want me to, though?”
She thinks she might already know the answer, and sure enough, it takes just over a minute for him to admit, “I’m pretty lonely in Providence.”
“No kidding,” she says.
Jack had lived with an older d-man, Arseny Sarsakova, an A on the team, his rookie year, which sounded like it had been fine, but not great, because Sars couldn’t speak English or French that well, and hadn’t really cared to get to know Jack off the ice. Lardo had driven down for the day a few times with Bitty or Ransom and Holster or the frogs, and Sars had cleared out of the apartment right away.
“He doesn’t care much for people,” Jack had said sheepishly.
There were only two other rookies on the Falconers Jack’s rookie year, and one had been sent down to Westport almost immediately. The other was an eighteen-year-old that made Chowder look relaxed and down-to-earth. It sounded like Jack spent a lot of time alone; alone on the bus, alone on the plane, alone in his room.
Then, when he and Bitty had decided long-distance wasn’t working out, Jack had taken it upon himself to withdraw from Samwell completely. His martyr thought process was that him totally alienating himself would make Bitty’s life easier. Lardo and Ransom and Holster had fretted and sent encouraging texts and tried to visit, but Jack wasn’t having any of it, convinced that him walking out of their lives was somehow going to make Bitty happy. (It hadn’t.)
They could all see it, Jack going increasingly stir-crazy in Providence, with no one to drag him out of his shell or joke with him. Lardo doesn’t know if he’s depressed or not, these days, but she can see the tired bruises under his eyes, the ever-growing frown lines and dimple between his eyebrows.
“So are you thinking about it?” he asks, his nervousness showing through his wobbly smile.
“I just... “ Lardo hesitates. “I feel like I’d be totally dependent on you, then. I just got out from under my parents’ feet, and I’d only be relying on somebody else instead. I don’t want to, to do that again. I want to prove I can make it, even without a shitty astrophysics degree.”
“Just think about it,” says Jack. “There are, like, galleries near my apartment, and I have two extra bedrooms, and I really, really don’t mind.”
“I’ll think about it,” Lardo agrees, patting his arm. “You think Bitty’s gonna mind if I crash here?”
“Nah,” says Jack, and swallows loudly.
“What, Jack?” she teases. “Were you planning to sleep here?”
Jack frowns instead of elbowing her like she’d expected, and, after a minute, volunteers, “He’s actually making out with Cameron Sutter right now. Downstairs.”
“The lacrosse bro? Ugh, insult to injury, that sucks, Jack.”
Jack shrugs, looking all of nine years old with his sad puppy eyes, and Lardo scoots over to make room for him on the bed. He gets in after he pulls off his shoes, and snuffles immediately into the pillow. She turns over, and tries to close her eyes before she thinks about…
...about Shitty.
Fuck.