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Kyle’s been walking around his room like a caged animal suffering zoochosis for about twenty minutes now.
Stan only knows that because he’s always up this late, and so is Kyle, and their windows face each other so he’s been able to see Kyle’s unnecessarily tall shadow pass along the curtain over and over and over again, lit from inside. Usually, they’re doing homework—or, rather, Kyle is doing homework, and Stan is spamming him with Reels or texts until he gets annoyed at the distractions and opens the curtain just to flip him off. Usually, there are no tall shadows crossing back and forth.
It’s weird. He knows Kyle tends to be neurotic. He knows he walks around sometimes when he’s thinking, he sees it all the time. But it’s not usually like this. There are no thinking pauses, and if there’s an anchor point, like a notepad or Kyle’s laptop, he can’t find it. The longer he watches the more it seems like not even Kyle knows what he’s doing.
Eventually, the shadow stops in the middle, and then grows bigger, and the edges fuzzier, and he has just enough time to shift and pretend to have been on his phone this whole time before he catches the sliver of light from the curtain cracking open out of the corner of his eye. He opens random apps—Twitter, his texts with Wendy, Netflix—and closes them so Kyle will think he’s doing something more productive than staring.
The light next door shuts off.
And then he’s flashbanged by the incoming call screen.
“It’s three in the morning,” he points out, in lieu of a greeting, squinting and turning his brightness down. Maybe light mode was a mistake.
“Yeah, no shit.” When he looks over, Kyle’s curtains have opened all the way. He doesn’t even look tired. He looks too awake. “I think I’m dying.”
“Can Kenny sing at your funeral?”
“Jesus. Sick. Nobody wants to hear that.”
“So that’s a no.”
“That’s a fuck no.”
It gets quiet. For a little while, he watches Kyle watch him, not saying anything. He barely even moves. It’s like trying to make friends with a skittish cat—he’ll come when he’s ready.
And, eventually, Kyle says, “I have a crush on Heidi Turner,” quick like ripping off a Band-Aid.
It throws him off so badly that for what feels like a long time, he can’t think of anything to say. He was expecting something bad, like Kyle giving up on a class or having a long night of self-reflection and coming to the conclusion that he doesn’t care about growing up to become a lawyer anymore.
But a crush on Heidi, he should have predicted that weeks ago. Kyle talks about her all the time; how smart she is, funny things she says in their AP classes. Nice things. He doesn’t usually have nice things to say about people. “Dude. Again?”
“Again.”
The last time that happened, it didn’t go too well. He remembers it all—Kyle being crushed for weeks, Cartman holding it over him. The silent treatment, and then the fighting. He rolls the idea of Kyle liking Heidi again around in his head. “What are you gonna do?”
“I don’t know, throw up? That’s what you usually do and you turned out okay.” He’s about to ask what Kyle means by just okay, but then he adds, “Mostly. Kind of.”
“Okay. Fuck you.”
“I promise I’m not interested.”
“No, ‘cause I’m not 5’2 or a girl.”
Kyle groans, dropping his head. “Shut up.”
“Maybe if I grew my hair out—”
“Yeah, very funny, asshole. I’m kind of going through something right now.”
He pushes himself up to sit in front of the window with his legs folded under him. “It’s not the end of the world. It happens.”
It being a girl is actually the most alarming part. For the past two years, there’s been a betting pool on when Kyle would come out as gay—not if, when. He doesn’t remember never, because he isn’t being an option. He’s gonna have to tell Wendy, who’s gonna have to tell Bebe, who’s convinced about half of the girls in their grade that they don’t have a chance with Kyle because that must be the only explanation as to why he turned her down when she asked him out in seventh grade.
Obviously, it had nothing to do with her brain weighing about as much as a bag of feathers. Or her attitude. Or her being, evidently, almost the furthest possible thing from Kyle’s type. Stan likes Bebe fine. She’s good to Wendy most of the time and she’s fun to talk to, but a relationship between her and Kyle never would have lasted long.
“It doesn’t, though.”
“Huh?”
“It doesn’t—I mean, it does happen, but not to me. I guess I just don’t—” Kyle props his elbow up on his desk and leans into it heavily, one hand over his face. “Like, what do I even do in this scenario? Aside from throwing up.”
“You could try, I don’t know, asking her out?”
Kyle snorts at him. “So Cartman can get in the way again? No thanks. He’d find a way, he always does. And even if I did, and by some miracle everything went well, he would still try to ruin it. Because it’s me. It would be better if I didn’t even try.”
Stan’s not a genius—by any means. He’s a B-average student even in so-called “easy A” classes, like that year he took Spanish. But he has his moments, moments like this, where he’s surprised Kyle didn’t have this idea already. “But wouldn’t it be, like, the biggest fuck-you ever for it to work out?”
“I guess,” Kyle concedes after a while. “But would you want to worry about someone sabotaging your relationship all the time?”
He chooses not to point out that half of the times him and Wendy have broken up, it’s been because of their shared tendencies to self-sabotage. Kyle doesn’t need to think about that right now. “No.”
“So I just don’t know.”
“You should ask your mom.”
“Oh, god. She’d never let it go. It’d be like the first time all over again.”
He’s always liked Mrs. Broflovski. She’s strict, and her expectations are only getting higher, but she kept them out of trouble. And alive. Every time he comes around she asks about his mom and how Shelley’s doing at college and if he’s eating enough, because you boys never do, apparently.
He doesn’t think he can really be of any more help. He doesn’t know if he’s been helpful at all. He hasn’t had to worry about starting a relationship for a long time, just restarting and repairing and wiping the slate clean. He lets Kyle take the conversation wherever, from there, until he decides it’s late enough and hangs up.
The sudden silence is so jarring that he has to get up and turn the fan on low before crawling back into bed. He likes listening to Kyle. He was really starting to get used to it.
He’s awake for a long time. Kyle hasn’t really talked to him about stuff like this since middle school, partly because most of what goes on with him is obvious from the surface and partly because, Stan suspects, that he thinks Stan has too many of his own problems to care about any of his. Or to have room for them, or something.
But it’s nice to think about someone else’s problems for once. It probably helps that Kyle might be the singular person who makes the most sense to him in the entire world, but still. He turns his phone face-down and pushes his face into the pillows.
He drifts off to sleep shortly before the sun comes up, and when he wakes up, Kyle’s curtains are still open.