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When Keith dreamed, he dreamed of an oblivion that captured him in a rapt stupor until his thoughts become unhinged and morphed into the particles of dust dispersed in the early sunlight. His dreams were fleeting and nonexistent, a empty void that anchored him to a reality Keith didn’t want to face. A reality where the only liable foundation Keith had was the vast loneliness of his life.
Maybe that was why Keith’s breath stopped short at Lance’s invitation. Shitty movies on a Friday night could take the air out of everyone’s lungs, especially when it was coming from the guy who prayed that he could bury Keith six-feet under. Then again, there was the possibility that Lance McClain was an aspiring serial killer, and Keith was the gullible victim for fell for his promising guise of ‘Sharknado’.
The sun disappeared and the moon appeared, a perpetual cycle that would end once life turned into a molten crisp by the same star that birthed it. Keith arrived at Lance’s family home three minutes late. The windows were stained and frosted with dirt and age, the cracked-tiling on the doorstep needed to be redone, and everything about it screamed ‘home’ in all-caps. It was a place worn down by time and love-- a place that Keith wish he had.
With an awkward-but-loud knock against the navy-blue front door, an upstairs window became newly illuminated and Keith’s ears automatically-tuned themselves (a habit formed from years of eavesdropping) to hear the harsh (and very familiar) footsteps of Lance McClain.
“Look at who finally decided to show up!” Turned out that Lance’s voice was still equally as annoying and aggravating even at 8:03 P.M. Not really that much of a surprise.
“There was traffic.” There wasn’t any vehicle-related traffic, but Keith counted his desire to stay home as personal traffic.
Lance simply rolled his eyes back in mock-exasperation and ushered Keith in, really ushered him in-- the type of ushering that belonged to someone who was trying to sneak their semi-friend-semi-rival into their bedroom, and Keith definitely noticed it, but didn’t mention it. He didn’t want to start bickering with Lance this early in the evening; maybe once it’s half-past-two though.
Keith expected Lance’s bedroom to be an assortment Playboy posters and littered with trash. While the latter of the two ringed true (seriously Lance, just spend one weekend cleaning and you can live like a proper human being), he was pleasantly surprised to see that the majority of the room was space-themed. The ceiling was decorated with glow-in-the dark stars that accurately represented the Big Dipper, but the rest of it were just randomly stuck on there like ‘hey, I put in enough effort to do this, so I can probably just bullshit the rest and no one will find out’. Lance even hung the a replica of the Solar System on his ceiling. (It still contained Pluto, so either Lance decided to do this back when he was seven or he was one of those people.) There was miniature set of astronauts placed loving on the beside table, each figurine dressed in a bright orange suit and a glass helmet. Lance declared his love of space in his own room, an important part of him that Keith never knew.
Keith also found it hilarious (and slightly endearing) that Lance slept in a rocket-shaped bed. It’s impressive that Lance could fit his entire 6-feet-2-inches frame onto a bed meant for kids, and Keith made sure to question the credibility of that achievement.
“How do you fit your entire body onto your bed?” He said, hands making box-like gesture to further emphasize his point.
Lance just shrugged. Could that count as an answer? That shouldn’t count as an answer. Who shrugs as an answer? Fortunately for Keith, Lance clarified himself.
“I’m flexible.” Still not an acceptable answer, but Keith will take it. The only time when he should contemplate about spatial relation is in physics; any other time outside of that is something that he casually pushes back into the ‘I don’t give a fuck’ allotted-section of his mind.
“I would ask you to prove it, but I don’t care about whether you can do a split or freakishly bend your fingers backwards.”
“At least I can move my bones! Your joints probably crack whenever you walk--” Lance’s words were cut-off short with Keith stretching down until his fingers were pressed flat against the ground, providing Lance more than enough evidence of his flexibility. Silence dwelled in the atmosphere as Keith felt a very intense gaze on his ass. He wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or humiliated.
“Are you trying to take a mental photo of my ass?” Keith noticing Lance’s apparent stare and alerting him about it caused two things:
1.) Lance’s face flushed red.
2.) Lance’s typical-suave voice cracked.
“I-I wasn’t staring! I was just-- um-- Admiring how beautiful my wall is!” What the fuck, Lance.
Keith just sort of… stared at him, and straightened himself back into a standing-position. Lance must have noticed how quiet and tense it got because the next thing he did was drag Keith over towards his kiddie-sized bed and plopped him down on his star-patterned bedsheets. This also implied some other things, but Keith’s pretty sure Lance invited him to see ‘Sharknado’, not to suck him off while his siblings were sleeping in the room adjacent to his McClain-crafted ‘rocketship’(which itself could be interpreted as a sexual innuendo).
By the time Lance managed to pirate ‘Sharknado’ on his half-dead laptop (it still ran Windows Vista) and prepared a bowl of knockoff microwaveable-popcorn (stale and dry, but add enough butter and salt, and it could taste as deliciously artery-clogging as theater-brought popcorn). Keith was already halfway to Sleep City, but the McClain family photos that were sloppily hung on Lance’s walls kept him awake.
Seeing them left a bitter taste on Keith’s tongue that could only be derived from his jealously. He wanted a home, a familiar place to return to after a long day at school, someone who accepted him for who he was, someone who smiled at him like the way Lance’s mother smiled at Lance in these faded photos, but instead all Keith got were crowded foster homes and homophobic nicknames. It was emotionally-exhausting to be in the McClain home because Keith couldn’t bare the love that emitted from the crayon-marked walls to the mismatched throw pillows.
A warm grip collided with Keith’s shoulder and made him practically jump out of his skin. Shrouded under the heavy night shadows, Keith squinted up at the perpetrator who was none other than Lance McClain and his pearly-white grin that was too bright for a high-school senior. Senior year was suppose to be the year where all you realized that all your ambitions would never come to fruition; Lance definitely should not be smiling like an 1000-watts light bulb when college was about to rear its ugly end, but yet he still was, grinning wide and brown eyes squinted close in elation.
“Are you ready for the best time of your life, Mullet boy!?” Lance exclaimed, which earned him three loud screeches of ‘CÁLLATE!’ from the room next door. Keith couldn’t stop the small smile that spread across his lips as Lance physically winced from his verbal beating. Familial endearment was something that soften the calluses on his heart.
Maybe that was why Keith allowed Lance, a friend of a friend who felt sorry for his pathetic social life, cover him in an old comforter that smelled like laundry detergent and blueberry shampoo.
Maybe that was why Keith allowed Lance fling unpopped-kernels at him, the two engaged in a popcorn food-fight that ended with greasy kernels everywhere for ants to collects later.
Maybe that was why Keith allowed Lance slump into his chest as the credits of ‘Sharknado’ rolled in and the shitty-to-the-point-of-being-good film came to an end.
There were a lot of maybe’s but if there was one thing Keith knew for sure, it was that Lance snored in his sleep.
‘Well, that explains why he has his own bedroom.’ Keith thought to himself, unable to close his eyes when Lance was practically roaring into his left ear.
But as their limbs became entwined with each other on a mattress too small to properly fit two teenagers, Keith couldn’t find himself complaining about the warm body pressed against his. Instead he stared at the freckles dispersed across the smooth span of Lance’s neck, silently making constellations from the soft skin of a boy who laughed at poorly-timed jokes and made the puzzle pieces of Keith’s existence fit together.
Slowly but surely, he fell asleep under a ceiling full of pretend-stars and fake planets-- in a kid-sized rocket that belonged to Lance McClain, a boy who dreamt of worlds far beyond Earth.
For the first time in a long time, Keith dreamed, dreamed of the infinitely expanding universe, of plastic stars covered in phosphorus, and of an astronaut with a cheeky smile.