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Todd’s afraid of many things, but being honest with himself isn’t one of them. It seems unfair to try lying to himself, and—well—he doesn’t like being a liar. It makes him sort of queasy.
Point standing: he knows there are numerous reasons why he doesn’t like Mr. Keating’s English class, and to pin it just on his dislike of public speaking, as embarrassingly obvious as it may be, doesn’t exactly do justice to the whole situation.
First, the aforementioned public speaking ordeal. It’s awful. It may just be one of the worst parts of being alive. Whoever thought it would be a wonderful idea to ask humankind to take everything shriveled up in their relatively tiny brains and try to force it out into the world should be publicly set on fire.
But Todd’s opinions on this subject are well known. Particularly by Mr. Keating himself, who seems to be determined to nudge Todd out of his “shell.” Todd approves of this metaphor for the circumstance; he is quite happy in his shell, thank you very much, and any animal forcibly ripped from its calcium exoskeleton would probably die very quickly anyways.
Another reason for disliking Mr. Keating’s class: his knowledge of literature is outrageous and, frankly, intimidating. It’s like he has to saturate every word with an allusion or quote or god forbid a metaphor, perhaps even a rhyme if the sun isn’t shining. It makes it nearly impossible to discern what he’s actually saying—it could actually be wholly impossible, as Todd doubts anyone else in the country has even heard of the poets Mr. Keating is referencing. This may be one of Todd’s more petty grievances: Mr. Keating is, of course, an English teacher, and a fairly good one at that. He’s much more educated than the rest of them, and has an inclination towards the arts perhaps dwarfed only by Neil’s.
And there: the third reason. Todd’s most shameful difficulty.
He has every single class with Neil Perry, and as well as being his roommate, he also spends a large majority of his time somewhere in Neil’s orbit. If anything, he should be wholly acclimated to his presence, even the parts of him Todd doesn’t yet have figured out like his mind or his heart or his hands.
But somehow, English class reveals a new Neil, one with glasses and wide, eager eyes and a mouth that won’t stop running, ever, and especially not when Mr. Keating is nodding so encouragingly, like the light illuminating the room is spilling from between Neil’s own two lips.
“I often go that way at sundown. I know the way—I know the way that takes the last shift of the hill,” Neil reads, glancing up at Mr. Keating every few words as though he’s asking for permission every time. Mr. Keating’s smile offers it continuously. “From there on is nothing but the sheer horizon's rim—Nothing but the silence—silence— And my soul along the sand, or maybe now and then a bird.”
Once he’s finished, the class hangs silent, draped over the edge of his last word. Neil looks up at Mr. Keating again, and Mr. Keating snaps his fingers. “Excellent oration, Mr. Perry. Perfectly captured Agnes Cornell’s great work.” Then he looks around the class, tie crooked as his grin. “And, goodness, isn’t it great work? So concise, such a regulated vocabulary. Oftentimes it isn’t the fancy words that catch our eye—none of us enjoy pulling out a dictionary while we read, do we?”
He rises from where he’s leaning on the table, and Todd watches as he grabs a chalk and begins writing on the board with sweeping strokes, a set of wings casting a haze of white dust. “When we keep our work simple, we keep it true. The real magic of poetry is this—“ and he gestures to what he’s written on the board before reading it aloud— “the universal human experience.”
Mr. Keating claps his hands together, a conclusion, and Todd sneaks a glance to his right, where the entire class watches, enraptured, all tilted just slightly forward in their seats. Drawn in by the show. Todd looks to Neil’s desk—Neil is a wonder to behold, fingers clasped over the edge of his textbook, his whole chair nearly tipped forward. Neil suddenly looks his way. Todd turns back to Mr. Keating, a not-unfamiliar flush creeping up his neck.
The bell rings just on time, and Todd gathers his books up close to his chest.
“I want a poem from you all by Thursday! Use simple words, simple phrases!” Mr. Keating calls at the retreating backs of those most eager to leave. Todd would typically count himself among those—anything to avoid Mr. Keating trying to catch him for a well-meaning word of encouragement after class—but today Neil lingers. And, well. So does Todd.
“I just love what Cornell did, with the repetition,” Neil’s saying to Mr. Keating, breathless from excitement. Listening to Neil speak about poetry is one of the extremely few reasons Todd likes English class. “It’s just so—it just tells you exactly what to focus on, what’s important.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Keating says, pleased. From his post behind the desk, standing behind a chair that Todd doesn’t recall ever seeing him actually sit in, his eyes shift to Todd. “Do you have a comment, Mr. Anderson?”
Todd absolutely does not, but Neil turns to look at him, and that bold, breathless look of undiluted eagerness makes words fumble out of Todd’s mouth, rushed and unpracticed.
“Um. I,” he looks down at his books as though the wisdom of poets before him will beam adequate conversational skills into his brain, “really liked Cornell’s poem too,” he says pathetically. At Mr. Keating’s smile, which he sees glancing up, he continues. “I—well. The way she says it sort of normally is nice. She interrupts herself.”
“Very good!” Mr. Keating nods quickly, and Todd chances a look at Neil before he very quickly has to look away—the full undivided attention of Neil Perry is a force to be reckoned with. “Very, very good! It’s familiar, yes? And adds to the simplicity. Good observation.”
Todd has a feeling Mr. Keating is more proud of the fact that he spoke anything at all, but the praise still makes him preen.
He averts his eyes, though, wholly done with being brave for the day. Perhaps the week, even. He nods towards the door, fumbling with his books. “I’m—going. To study.” Then he rushes out of the room, skin crawling. Mr. Keating is a human man, he scolds himself as he leans against the wall outside the classroom to arrange his things, and Neil Perry is a human boy. They are not going to snap open gaping jaws constructed of human remains and they are not going to swallow him whole.
A force knocks into his shoulder and he yelps, textbook sliding out of his arms. Neil drops to the floor and scoops it up, dumping it unceremoniously on Todd’s stack of notes with a bright smile.
“You spoke!” he cheers, slinging an arm over Todd’s shoulder. The weight of it settles Todd’s lingering anxiety alarmingly fast—like the warmth pressed against his shoulders and side has magical healing properties. Todd tries to focus on Neil’s words with his head so close to his own. “God, I can’t believe it. Mr. Keating looked like he was going to start dancing!”
“I’m so glad he didn’t,” Todd said morosely.
Neil shakes his shoulders, and they begin the trudge up to their room. “I’m so proud of you,” Neil says, so genuine it makes Todd’s heart lurch.
“Thank you,” he says quietly, unable to brush the comment off as he typically would. Neil beams, flushed, and leans away from Todd, who immediately mourns the loss of warmth.
Once at their room, Neil vanishes for an hour, leaving Todd and his schoolwork sprawled messily across their shared floor space. The common room is the last place he’d want to be at the end of the day, no matter how helpful Neil’s friends were alleged to be. After nearly eight hours of being forced to do torturous, inhumane things such as speaking to other students or, god forbid, a figure of authority, Todd would actually like nothing more than to bury himself under his covers and go to sleep. But trigonometry looks even less appealing at nine o’clock than it does at six o’clock, so Todd forces his way through pages of problems.
When Neil returns, he’s shivering, cheeks red from the cold. Todd flinches out of his skin when the door is kicked open, fearing the dormmaster or another student or something worse, his parents maybe, but it’s just Neil—hair soaked, eyes shining.
“Aw, look at you,” he cheers, shrugging off his coat and slinging it haphazardly into his wardrobe. “Being so productive.”
He flops onto his bed, and Todd watches, from the floor, as water drips steadily from his hair into his pillow. Todd gestures weakly to the near-perfect semicircle of papers and textbooks encircling him. “I have a lot of work to do,” he says defensively.
Neil sits upright. “Oh, no, I’m not insulting you!.” He clutches a hand to his chest, ever the dramatic. “I would never. I’m simply observing the alarming rate at which you seem to be completing those assignments—tell me, Todd, how could you have possibly finished…” he squints at Todd’s lap and Todd helpfully tilts his notebook to show Neil his work checklist. “Four classes worth of assignments in the time I was gone?”
Todd shrugs his shoulders, a smile tugging the corners of his lips up. “I’m efficient, and you were gone for an hour.”
Neil slides off his bed onto the floor, careful not to disturb any of Todd’s work. He props his head on his knees. “You were counting! I knew you missed me.”
Yes, is what Todd doesn’t say. Yes, I missed you. I like when you’re here with me.
Neil, the person he is, doesn’t prompt Todd to respond to that particular train of thought. Instead, he contorts to dig in his pocket, struggling for a few seconds before pulling out a folded-up piece of paper. He waves it at Todd. “Have you done Mr. Keating’s poem yet?”
Todd grimaces. “Not yet.”
Neil throws his hands up in the air. “Todd! It’s the easiest thing in the world! You can’t have chosen to work on trigonometry instead of this.”
“I save the easy stuff for last,” Todd mumbles halfheartedly, desperately trying to conceal his smile. His work checklist is cast to his side, long forgotten—every bit of his attention is focused on Neil and his voice and his laugh and his hands, twirling the paper between his fingers.
“Well then,” Neil says, smirking through his words, “if it’s so easy, how about you compose yours. Right now.”
Todd’s mouth drops open. “I-no!” he splutters.
Neil shrugs, feigning confusion. “Why not? It’s only a few lines, only a few words. A piece of cake, really.”
Burying his face in his hands, Todd groans. When he looks up, Neil is watching him, too, eyes gleaming—fond, maybe, Todd thinks wistfully. He clears his throat. “You have to read yours first.”
It’s much less of a challenge than it would initially seem. Neil loves reading poetry out loud. The practice is basically made for him.
“Why, of course!” Neil cries.
He shuffles a little closer to Niel, so his shin is pressed against Todd’s side. Todd’s attention fizzles to that single, burning point of contact, and he has to deliberately, and with great effort, bring his attention back to Neil’s voice.
Neil clears his throat dramatically. “Sky. By one extraordinarily talented Neil Perry,” he says, face completely seriously. He looks up at Todd through his eyelashes, focused, then back down to his paper. “I’ve seen it often. Once it was possible, maybe, to forget it—now I forget everything else. The rain touches heart before skin. The cloud touches heart before skin. The forever-shifting mood touches heart before skin. A head full of sky. Of sky.”
He folds up the paper with finality and chucks it onto his bed. When he turns back to Todd, his smile is small, and a little bashful.
“The end,” he says, waving his hands a little bit, and Todd exhales, shaking his head.
“That’s amazing,” Todd says, and it really was. To be truthful, even if it was the most horrible poem in the world, Neil’s voice would transform it into a performance akin to Shakespeare himself. Todd can’t form the words—he swallows. “It’s perfect.”
Neil grins, toothy and bright, and he tilts his head, hair flopping over his forehead. “You really think so?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
Todd watches Neil lean back against the bed, mischievous glint in his eyes. “Now it’s your turn,” he says smugly, and Todd groans. “No, don’t think you could flatter me into forgetting! We had a deal.”
“I know,” Todd whines, long and drawn out. He rolls his shoulders back, turning to more surely face Neil. “Okay. I can do this?” It turns out more of a question than he would have liked, but Neil just nods quickly, all joking gone in an instant.
“Yes, you do,” he assures. “Do you know what you want to write about?”
Todd bites his lip. “Uhm. No… not at all.” He winces. “I don’t really. Know how to come up with these things. Sometimes it just happens.”
Neil nods, sure. “It does.” Then he pauses, hands clasped together. “Okay, wait, I have an idea.”
Then—then—he reaches forward, and rests the tips of his fingers on either side of Todd’s head.
What.
Todd flushes furiously, and fights to keep his voice controlled. “What are you doing?” he whisper-hisses.
“Shhhhh,” Neil says gently.
Todd is almost completely frozen, his brain spinning frantically—Neil’s fingers, against his temple, just resting. Impossibly warm.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Neil says, and Todd is forced to make eye contact. Neil’s face is only a good ten inches away from his own, and the closeness seems to electrify the space between them. “I want you to calm down—yeah, calm down. And then I want you to just look at me, or close your eyes, or what have you. And then just say whatever comes to mind.”
Okay. Todd can do this. He hates English class enough to know that he’s totally experienced in handling terrifying situations involving poetry. What’s one more to add to the list?
“Okay,” he whispers. He doesn’t close his eyes—it feels almost like it’s physically impossible. Looking away would simply destroy him. Instead, he makes shaky eye contact. He can’t choose between Neil’s eyes, so he doesn’t. His gaze flicks lazily between. His heartbeat is still thundering, but it stops getting faster and settles. “Do I—“
“Just speak,” Neil interrupts, low and serious.
Todd swallows. “You,” he blurts. He flushes, but Neil doesn’t interrupt—just nods, focused, like the words out of Todd’s mouth are precise and beautiful, not nervous and messy. “Um. Brown. Warm. You… you warm one with warm blood. Holding, warming me. Finding me. ” He couldn’t look away if he tried. “In holding me, in warming me, in finding me… you… Um. You are… undoing. You are the undoing of me.”
That’s an end, right? Todd doesn’t remember how to think. Neil mouths Wow, pupils swallowing his eye whole. Todd’s arms jerk against his will, and he reaches up, wrapping his fingers around Neil’s wrists. They are solid and heavy. The touch—the tug—brings Neil closer. And closer.
“Wow,” Neil whispers again, before their lips crash together.
The first thing Todd notices is fitting: Neil is even warmer here, where Todd’s mouth finds his.
The second: Neil adjusts remarkably quickly to new situations. While Todd can’t help but melt, Neil is the one to gently push him backwards until Todd’s back hits the bed, Neil is the one to grasp Todd’s neck, wrists still held loosely in Todd’s slack grip. Todd tilts his head back into Neil’s palm and their lips separate, air damp and hot between their open mouths. Dripping from our tongues like honey, Todd thinks, a little desperate and a little delirious, as their lips slide apart and then back together.
His legs fall open easily, allowing Neil to push his way between them—Neil just takes, and it blows Todd’s mind every time. They’re touching everywhere but it’s somehow not enough. Todd uses his knees to press into Neil’s back and then—Christ—Neil’s tongue finds his, hot and hot and hot and hot. Todd’s skin is positively burning.
They finally separate with a wet noise that makes them both wince before they giggle, breathless, still touching everywhere they can reach. The weight of Neil between Todd’s legs, the way his fingers wander, up and over Todd’s shoulder or behind his neck or just under his sweater where his skin is still cool to the touch—it keeps Todd’s heart racing, even as they just look at each other.
“Wow,” Neil says, again, and Todd groans, burying his face in Neil’s shoulder, secretly delighting in the way he can feel Neil’s laugh shake his chest. Todd’s head is still ringing a little bit, maybe from the fact that he gets to hold Neil like this, that he gets to breathe in the smell of dirt and rain and boy like this.
Perhaps Neil can sense Todd’s racing mind (one of his uncountable skills, maybe) because he rests his hand under Todd’s chin, nudging him to meet his eyes with his thumb. “Hey,” he says, grin tugging at his lips—swollen, red, bitten. “Stop thinking so hard.”
“It’s what I’m good at,” Todd argues weakly.
“That’s true,” Neil hums. “But you don’t need to do that right now.”
Todd can’t argue against that—and he definitely can’t argue against that when Neil kisses him again, sure and firm and so impossibly, impossibly warm. He laughs against Neil’s lips, unrestrained. His workpapers are surely getting crinkled, and he definitely heard a rip earlier when he was, well, distracted, but Neil was right. He doesn’t care about those right now.
The bell rings, sharp and chipper, and the class rumbles to its feet, conversation bursting out from between them all.
Todd collects his books and approaches where Neil is chattering brightly with Charlie. Neil looks over, spots Todd, and throws an arm across Todd’s back, ruffling his hair. He’s engrossed in conversation, but the warmth against Todd’s side reaches all the way down to his heart.
He feels a set of eyes on him, suddenly—he scans the classroom, prickling. Then he spots Mr. Keating, actually sitting in the desk chair for once, but his feet are kicked up and he’s looking straight at Todd and Neil. When Todd makes eye contact, he raises his eyebrow, clearly looking at the way Todd naturally presses into Neil, and the way Neil’s fingers remain buried in Todd’s hair.
Todd averts his eyes, flushing, and adds a final entry to his list of reasons why he hates English class—Mr. Keating is a man far too perceptive for anyone’s good. Somehow, though, it doesn’t even bother him right now, and he considers this a sign of great personal growth. He’ll still never enjoy reciting poetry the way Mr. Keating would like him to, but he doesn’t need to—Neil does it brilliantly enough for the both of them.