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Henry couldn’t have told you how, exactly, he and Gabe Goodman came to be friends.
It wasn’t that Gabe was unlikeable or that it was hard for Henry to feel close to him. He wasn’t the most open with people, but he tended to act at least politely interested in whatever conversation he was roped into—maybe giving off the air that there was something else he’d rather be doing, but not in a particularly rude way. The sentiment was just there behind his eyes, left unacknowledged unless someone else pointed it out first.
Henry had worked with Gabe on a few school projects before, and they’d gotten along pretty well. Well enough that Henry wondered why they didn’t talk more. When Gabe was in his element—especially when it came to music—he relaxed by a mile. He laughed and joked and he’d respond to a jab with snark instead of going quiet, not responding. Gabe and Henry didn’t speak that much outside of the odd group assignment, but that was an arrangement that mostly worked for both of them.
Then, one day, Henry walked in on Gabe in a practice room after school. And something shifted.
Gabe looked up from his guitar, absent-minded strumming continuing for a second longer before he turned his face away, into the shadows of the room. The light was off, which Henry almost questioned, but for some reason couldn’t.
“Hey,” Gabe said, his voice strained.
Henry just watched him for a moment in confusion. Gabe passed one hand over his eyes, shoulders rising in embarrassment, and understanding crashed over Henry in a warm wave.
“Oh—I can leave, if you—” Henry began, shuffling back into the hallway.
“You’re good,” Gabe told him. “It’s fine.” It was quiet enough after he spoke that Henry could hear both of them breathing. While his own breaths were steady in a way that seemed comfortable, if not a bit faster than usual after accidentally intruding on what seemed like a vulnerable moment, Gabe’s were measured enough that they didn’t sound normal, and a little too shallow. Regulating.
Gabe dropped his gaze back down to his guitar. Henry sat across from him at the piano, one hand resting on the keys, but he didn’t start to play just yet. “Extra practice for tomorrow?” he asked, his voice feeling much too loud in the silence of the practice room. “Working things out?”
“Something like that.” Gabe let out a watery, shuddering laugh. It cut off abruptly, like it didn’t come out how he intended it. He strummed again, staring at the guitar. Henry, on the other hand, looked straight at him. At the wetness on his cheeks.
“...Are you okay?” Henry asked awkwardly.
Gabe shrugged and shook his head at the same time.
“Hard nights, you know?” Gabe muttered, being purposefully vague with the wording. He rolled his shoulders and swallowed thickly. “It happens.”
“It happens,” echoed Henry.
They didn’t say much more. Henry quietly joined in with Gabe’s playing at his tiny nod, and eventually a soft smile fell into place on Gabe’s face. It looked nice on him.
The light faded gradually from the window. Gabe’s phone buzzed. He checked the notification, and something flickered behind his eyes, darkening his expression for a split second. Then he glanced over at Henry, who let his chords taper off into an echo, and then silence.
“’S my dad,” said Gabe, standing. He packed up his guitar and slung on his backpack.
Henry nodded.
He didn’t expect anything else. But then Gabe stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and looked back.
“Henry?”
“Hm?”
A pause, like he was struggling to find the right words. “Thank you. For staying, I mean.”
“No problem,” Henry said. It hadn’t seemed like a big thing to him, in the moment. He’d always been a caring type of person, and something had drawn him to that room, to walk in on Gabe and to stay even after he had the chance to leave. It had just felt right to sit there with him. He hadn’t thought that warranted a thank you, considering being there was all he’d done.
But that was all Gabe needed, then. It was only something Henry realized in hindsight, when he would walk in on Gabe in that practice room like clockwork every few days, then every couple days, and soon nearly every day of the school week. Gabe got comfortable sharing, providing bits and pieces that sounded painful to get out but removed a shard of glass from an open wound, and Henry got comfortable asking. And slowly, Henry put the pieces together.
Gabe just liked that someone saw him.
Actually saw him. Not spoke briefly in the hallways between classes. Not invited him to sneak into clubs. Not shouldered him playfully before jazz practice.
Saw him sitting in the dark in a practice room, playing because he didn’t want his mind to wander elsewhere. Saw him as he admitted his own fears and became, for the first time, someone real. Saw him tense and curl in on himself when the cramps got bad, and then hesitantly accept, like he wasn’t sure how to respond to being offered something so easily, when Henry offered to drive him home early.
Somewhere along the road, they became friends. And maybe it wasn’t just Gabe that needed it. Maybe Henry needed it too.
“You’re good,” said Henry.
Henry sat on his bed, slaving over trigonometry homework, while Gabe worked out a melody on his guitar. He’d refused to take the bed when Henry had offered and opted for the floor instead, even though this was far from his first visit to Henry’s house and he shouldn’t have had doubts about intruding.
“What?” Gabe asked, like he hadn’t heard him.
“The guitar,” Henry clarified. Any break from his equations was welcome, and he leaned back, propping himself up with his hands. “You’re good at it.”
Gabe paused. He did that a lot, whenever Henry sent a compliment his way or remembered something small. “Thanks,” he said.
“How long have you been playing it?”
“I dunno.” Gabe shrugged. “I started pretty young. I can’t remember exactly how old I was. Maybe…seven?”
Henry nodded. “Mom got me on piano when I was, like, five,” he said, smiling. “I thought it was really boring at the time, but I guess I’m glad she kept signing me up for lessons. I enjoy it more now. One of those I told you so moments.”
“I chose the guitar for myself.” Gabe’s voice sounded odd, taking on a different quality, but he soldiered forward as if he didn’t hear it. “It was something that was just mine, for a while.”
His fingers continued to move over the strings, picking out notes while the conversation lapsed. A month ago, the silence would have felt off, Henry wanting to say something to fill it. He’d never liked long stretches where no one talked. Enough time with Gabe, who tended toward that type of thing, had started to help. It was like some kind of exposure therapy that went both ways: Gabe opening up and speaking, and Henry learning to enjoy the quiet.
“When do you need to be home?” asked Henry after a while, trigonometry homework halfway done. He decided that was basically finished and pushed it to the side.
Gabe shrugged. “Whenever.”
That was what he usually said. Henry tried not to ask about it now. He remembered the first time he did, the way Gabe shut down immediately. He’d backed off after that.
Henry’s mother cracked open his bedroom door and peeked inside, taking in the both of them. She asked if Gabe would like to stay for dinner, but Gabe declined with a soft smile.
“Well, if you change your mind,” she said, looking him up and down, “don’t be afraid to let me know.”
Gabe ducked his head, a little embarrassed. He looked down at his guitar. “Thanks, Mrs. Ramos.”
Satisfied, she retreated out of the room, pulling the door gently shut behind her.
“You’re not hungry?” Henry asked.
“No,” said Gabe, which was the answer he always gave.
The same situation played out every time Henry’s mother brought up the subject. Gabe froze up when he was given the offer, then covered for his hesitation with a smile and a polite refusal, and he seemed to get a little smaller. He was afraid of being a nuisance, of taking too much, even if he didn’t say it aloud.
Henry had an idea why he felt that way. But there was a limit to the things he felt comfortable asking Gabe, even as Gabe had felt more at ease sharing things, and that wasn’t within the limit.
“That’s due tomorrow, by the way,” Gabe said after a moment.
“Huh?”
Gabe nodded in the direction of Henry’s trigonometry homework.
Henry’s eyes widened in dismay, and he looked with mild panic at his messy handwriting and concerningly large amount of untouched or skipped equations. “Uhm. Help?” he asked, a little miserably.
Gabe winced. “Ew. No. I haven’t even started on it yet.”
The disgust with which he regarded the homework made Henry laugh.
“Can you help with anything else, then?” he asked, rifling through his backpack.
“What’ve you got?”
“Half of an essay for English.”
Gabe stared at him for a moment, eyes narrowed, like he knew handing him English work of all things was definitely a calculated move. Then he sighed, setting his guitar to the side and holding out a hand. “Give it over.”
Henry did, perhaps with a little more relief than he meant to let on. “You’re a life-saver.”
Gabe rolled his eyes, but there was a grin on his face. He scanned what Henry had already written, and his eyelid twitched. “I know.”
Silence for a beat.
“If you’re gonna use a semicolon, at least do it correctly,” Gabe told him.
Henry giggled.
The jazz practice after school was added with little warning. Something extra before a performance, to ensure there wouldn’t be any big bumps during the real thing. The practice wasn’t the hard part. It was what came after.
Gabe didn’t speak the entire time, and when the practice was over he left the room before anyone could catch him to try to talk to him. Including Henry. It felt a little odd, but Henry shrugged it off. Sure, they were close, but that didn’t mean Gabe wouldn’t have commitments outside of the practice. He probably had somewhere else to be.
He closed the cover over the piano keys, left the room, opened the outer door with his shoulder, and jumped.
“Hi,” he blurted, because that was the only thing that popped in his head. Gabe, leaning heavily against the wall, looked up.
“Hi,” he echoed.
“You good?”
Gabe’s mouth was a hard line. He hunched slightly, head tilting as he thought about his answer. He landed on, “Not really.”
Henry looked at him questioningly.
“Bad pseudo-obstruction,” Gabe supplied. “It’ll pass.”
“Your dad’s picking you up, right?” asked Henry.
At that, Gabe cringed. It was tiny, but Henry had learned to notice things when it came to him. “...I was planning to walk. I didn’t tell my parents about the practice, so…” He trailed off.
“They won’t be worried that you didn’t come home on time?”
Something passed over Gabe’s face. He shrugged, looking away.
“By bad, how bad do you mean?” Henry asked him after a long moment.
“Manageable.”
“Actually manageable, or Gabe-manageable?”
He got a frown. Gabe-manageable, then.
He made the decision in a second. “Okay. I’ll give you a ride.”
It was an offer he’d made a few times before, but he was still met with the same reaction. Gabe’s head snapped up, eyes locking on Henry, wide with surprise. He was silent for a while, like he was deliberating.
“Why?” said Gabe. The way he always did.
“Um, duh? Because I’m not gonna make you walk all the way home when you’re like this?” Henry answered. “Now, c’mon.”
Gabe huffed, but he followed.
The drive to Gabe’s house wasn’t long, but it wasn’t the shortest either. Gabe didn’t say it, but he was silently grateful for Henry’s offer. He curled up in the seat, bringing his knees up to his chest, his breaths shallow. His fingers dug into the fabric of his hoodie. A CD of 2000s rock music played softly in the background, the only thing filling the silence between the two of them, but it wasn’t an awkward silence. They’d long since grown past those.
Henry pulled into the Goodmans’ driveway, and Gabe went still. Henry hadn’t even known he was moving until he stopped.
They sat with the car still running in the driveway for a long while. Gabe’s face had almost no expression at all, eyes trained on the light coming from the living room window.
“Alright?” Henry asked.
Gabe’s eyelids fluttered shut. “I will be,” he answered.
He still didn’t get out for another several minutes. When he finally pulled himself out of the seat, he swayed on his feet, nearly falling against the side of the car.
Henry yanked the key out of the ignition and shoved it in his pocket, marching resolutely around to the passenger side. Gabe was good at pretending he was fine, and it always annoyed Henry, but sometimes he would slip. “Can I help?” Henry asked, with a tone that suggested he would still help even if Gabe said no.
Gabe thought about it for long enough that Henry expected him to refuse, the way he usually did. He nodded, but said, “Mom and Dad are home.”
Henry hadn’t met Gabe’s parents. He’d been inside the house before, when it was just him and Gabe, but he couldn’t go inside when his parents were there, something Gabe was incredibly insistent on. “Just to the door, then. Will you be good from there?”
Gabe nodded again, leaning heavily into Henry’s shoulder. It must have been a lot worse than he’d originally let on. But as they reached the front steps, Gabe straightened, the only outward sign of his discomfort the tension in his shoulders and the hand that flitted to his stomach before he dropped it. His expression was carefully schooled, though his eyes remained slightly hesitant as they landed on the door.
Henry was supposed to wait as Gabe opened the door, at most lingering for a few seconds to make sure he’d really be fine getting upstairs to his room, and take his leave. That did not happen.
The door was thrown open right as Gabe’s hand brushed the doorknob, revealing a man with greying hair who Henry assumed was Gabe’s father.
“Gabriel!” the man exclaimed, a frighteningly large smile plastered on his face.
“...Hi, Dad,” Gabe said quietly, shifting back on his feet.
But his father’s attention was already drifting behind him, over his head. Something settled in his eyes that made Henry blush. “And this must be Harry,” the man said, appraising him.
“It’s Henry,” Gabe bit out.
“You talk about me with your parents?” Henry asked quietly. He smiled, but something about this situation was deeply wrong to him, and he couldn’t shake the feeling.
Gabe mustered up a smile of his own. “You’ve come up a time or two, maybe,” he said. Then the smile faded and his eyes went dark and fell to the floor tiles, his body stiffening.
“Lean if you need,” Henry told him in a low voice.
“I’m fine,” argued Gabe automatically.
A pause.
“...I might lean a little.”
Gabe’s mother rounded the corner, eyes startlingly bright. Gabe actually flinched back at that, bumping into Henry before he corrected himself and shifted his weight back onto his front foot. The movement hurt a lot, judging by the fleeting wince on Gabe’s face. Before either of them could say anything, Gabe’s mother rushed forward, pushing past Gabe and taking Henry’s face in between her hands to drop an uncomfortably long kiss right on his lips.
Henry froze as she let go of him, brain buffering. What was the correct reaction to that sort of thing?
“Mom—!” Gabe shouted, his eyes growing wide with abject horror. Both of them were herded into the kitchen and directed to the dining table as Gabe began to protest. “Henry’s got, uh…homework?”
He received no response. Gabe’s expression flickered—from another cramp or something else—and he took a step back, his shoulder brushing lightly against Henry’s. Henry stepped forward in an effort to make the leaning look more natural, though both of them felt Gabe’s father’s eyes on them.
“Surgery?” Gabe tried.
Nothing.
“Rabies!”
Henry looked to Gabe in alarm. Rabies? he mouthed.
Gabe didn’t meet his eyes. He just stood and watched his parents moving around each other to set the table and make dinner with familiar disappointment on his face.
When dinner was on the table and it was clear Gabe’s parents weren’t going to let Henry leave without taking at least one bite, seemingly dead-set on making this the most perfect, normal meal as was humanly possible, Gabe plopped into a chair and scowled. He came down too rough, grimaced, and his eyes found Henry sitting beside him.
Gabe’s mother wouldn’t stop talking. Almost like she was afraid to. His father nodded along, interjected at points, glanced between Gabe and Henry like he was making connections. Henry could barely keep up, and most of it he elected to tune out in favor of checking on Gabe and ensuring he was okay. During times like these, he knew that Gabe would prefer to wait things out in his room, deal with everything silently. He hadn’t liked it before, but caught in this whirlwind now, Henry started to understand. After seeing Gabe outside of the jazz room and the ride home, he didn’t even know how he was managing to sit and bear it with little more than a frown.
Under the table, Henry offered his hand. Eyes fixed firmly on his plate, fully focused on remaining upright in his chair, Gabe took it. He squeezed hard enough that Henry predicted he’d never have complete circulation in that hand ever again. That was okay.
Henry dutifully ate a few bites of pasta. He might have been desperately wishing that he wasn’t in this situation, but he was trying his best not to be rude about it. Gabe didn’t touch his food whatsoever, and if his parents noticed, neither of them commented on it. Actually, his mother appeared too distracted to care. She rose from her seat in the middle of dinner while Gabe’s father attempted to pry things out of Henry.
Then—
“Okay,” Gabe’s mother called, her voice sing-song and light. “It’s somebody’s birthday!”
Gabe’s grip on Henry’s hand slackened, his head snapping up. His face was pale. In the silence that followed his mother’s announcement, Gabe’s free hand drifted to his abdomen, eyes never leaving the mismatched candles on the top of the cake his mother presented to the table.
Eighteen. Gabe wasn’t turning eighteen. It wasn’t the month of his birthday, either.
Henry tried to brush it off and smile, but it didn’t sit right on his face. “Whose birthday is it?” he asked.
Gabe continued to stare at the candles. His father shifted in his seat, lifting a hand to his face, taking a steadying breath. “My sister’s,” Gabe answered, voice small.
That hit Henry like a freight train. He has a sister? He never mentioned one before. And if Gabe had a sister, where was she? Why wasn’t she at the table? Did she graduate early, was she already taking university classes?
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
Gabe ripped his eyes away from the candles, looking only at his untouched plate, leaning away from the cake as his mother pulled out a lighter. He flinched each time the lighter sparked. “I don’t,” Gabe said, strained. “She…died. Before I was born.”
Before Henry could react, Gabe’s father stood from his chair. He touched his wife’s arm gently.
“What?” she asked, taking in each of their faces, like she didn’t understand. “What is it?”
“She’s not here, love,” murmured Gabe’s father. There was pain in his voice.
Gabe yanked his hand out of Henry’s grip. “This is fucked,” he announced, pushing out his chair abruptly and throwing his napkin down. He stumbled, pressing a hand to the table.
His father’s gaze moved briefly to over to him. “Language,” he reprimanded softly.
“No—fuck this.” With that, Gabe shouldered past his father and up the stairs, his steps heavy.
Henry sat in his chair, unsure of what to do, looking between husband and wife. “...It was wonderful to meet you both,” he eventually said, getting up. He grabbed an apple from the bowl at the center of the table as he went, whispering a thank you and following behind Gabe.
He was sitting at the top of the stairs when Henry reached him, like he made it up but couldn’t go further. Both of his arms were wrapped around his stomach, and he let out a tiny laugh as Henry slid down next to him.
“I should have grabbed the meds,” he croaked. His breathing reminded Henry of the practice room so many months ago—careful and measured, playing at normal but rehearsed enough that it couldn’t have been natural. He wondered how many times Gabe had been sitting next to him and waiting out a pseudo-obstruction, but he just hadn’t noticed. He thought he’d gotten good at recognizing the signs. He wasn’t so sure anymore.
“I can grab them,” Henry offered.
Gabe shook his head. In the same moment, his parents’ voices rose, turning into shouting that echoed up the stairs. Gabe pressed himself into the corner and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Do you want me to leave?” Henry asked after several minutes.
Another shake.
The shouting match continued for what felt like forever. Neither of them spoke. But at a particularly bad spike, Gabe reached for Henry without looking and squeezed his hand again, eyes wet.
Gabe’s father appeared at the bottom of the stairs, but he didn’t seem to notice them. He got up two steps, then collapsed on the third, resting his elbows on his knees and dropping his head into his hands.
When Gabe spoke, his voice was rough. “When she gets like this, she’s useless,” he said. He sniffled, scrubbed at his eyes. “Can’t use the phone, can’t—drive, can’t…”
Trying at humor, Henry bumped Gabe’s shoulder and said, “Well, I bet she’s got great pills.”
It didn’t land well. Gabe turned his head slowly to glare at him, brown eyes darkening, and Henry winced.
“I mean,” he backpedaled, “not that I would go there. That shit’s inorganic.”
Gabe sighed, dropped his head against the wall. “And totally ineffective, apparently.”
“You know me. I’m old-school—a dying breed.” Gabe didn’t give any sign to show he was listening, staring straight up at the ceiling, but Henry continued. “You see, all the preppies and the jocks? They’re raiding their parents’ medicine cabinets. They’re popping Xanax and snorting Adderall.”
Gabe’s eyes sparked then, and he looked over at Henry. “Really?”
“But me? I’m the master of the lost art of making a pipe…” Henry pulled out what he’d been working on during the argument, presenting it to Gabe with a flourish. “...out of an apple.”
Gabe’s expression didn’t change. He just stared at the apple. “Yeah.” He shifted, trying to push himself up straighter against the wall. “You’re the MacGyver of pot.”
Henry held the apple out to him.
“You promise this’ll help?” asked Gabe. For a moment, he seemed…not hopeful, really, because it wasn’t bright enough to be hope. Maybe something closer to desperation, simmering in his voice.
Henry shook his head. “No,” he answered, trying to give Gabe a reassuring smile. As far as he knew, Gabe hadn’t done something like this before. Gabe stared down at the apple for a long moment, hesitant. Then his eyes drifted back to his father at the bottom of the stairs. “What?”
“Do you think they’d even notice?” Gabe asked.
“I don’t know,” Henry admitted. He felt like he shouldn’t answer. That it wasn’t his place.
Gabe looked down at Henry’s hand, still in his.
“They’d notice if it was her.” Gabe’s tone was decisive. Confident, in a sad sort of way. Henry frowned. “They notice Supergirl. Not her brother of glass.”
Henry wanted to say something to help, but Gabe wasn’t the type of person to accept empty words. Honestly, he probably wouldn’t accept true ones, either. He just watched Gabe’s face, watched him press his free hand hard into his stomach, biting everything back, and wondered how things got this way.
Gabe stood without warning, steadying himself against the wall, his jaw tight. Henry followed his lead in confusion. “What are you doing?” he asked.
He didn’t get a response. Gabe let go of his hand and started down the stairs, and Henry watched it happen but didn’t follow. He rocked back on his heels as Gabe pushed past his father, who glanced up at him with half-glazed eyes, and headed for the kitchen with his expression drawn and his shoulders strained.
He thought, for a moment, that Gabe planned to get the painkillers. He didn’t.
Gabe headed straight for his mother on the floor and started arguing, with a ferocity that Henry hadn’t seen from him before. She argued back, but with some kind of resignation, her initial indignance turning to exhaustion. Her husband stood sometime during the argument, but didn’t try to butt in, just looked on like he wasn’t sure how to deal with his son suddenly and finally becoming the center of their family.
Henry didn’t catch every word, but he knew the moment the argument shifted.
“I love you,” Gabe’s mother said, “as much as I can.”
And Henry watched as Gabe began to lean forward with expectation, with disbelief, and then back again. Crumpling as the breath was knocked out of him. Then, in the silence that followed, there came a tiny, halting sob.
From Gabe.
He shook his head, breathing heavily, and stepped back from his mother. Henry saw him try to fit his usual mask back in place—any one of them, the perfect son or the angry one or any of the others he’d meticulously developed—and fail.
“Gabriel—,” began Gabe’s father, reaching for him as he lurched for the stairs.
He was already beginning to retreat into himself when he reached Henry at the top. He continued to tremble, but he forced a separation in place, a wall between the Gabe confronting his mother and the Gabe standing in front of Henry. When he looked up at Henry, his face was blank, his eyes wet but emotionless while tears continued to run down his cheeks. It was slightly scary to watch, if he was being honest.
He’d wanted to know Gabe. He’d wanted to meet his family. But he’d gotten that, and now he felt like an intruder.
Gabe reached for the apple without speaking, and Henry let him take it. He coughed, wiped his mouth. Swore once as he fell against the wall, then pushed himself away from it and headed to his bedroom.
“I can leave if you want,” Henry said, hushed.
Just like the first time he proposed it, he was met with a shake of the head.
“You don’t want me to be alone right now.”
Gabe said the the words almost humorously, but they came out wrong. The frown remained fixed on Henry’s face as he followed Gabe.