The Roommate Situation (12 page)

“Class can go fuck itself today.”

“There’ll be other bands.”

“I know.”

“Other opportunities,” he says.

“I know.” And I’ll probably miss them all.

“You need to wrestle your guitar back from your parents so you’re ready when that opportunity comes.” His hand rests on my chest, rising and falling with my breaths.

I say, “Yeah, that’ll happen.”

“Plus—” With a soft grunt, he sits up. “I’d like to hear you play again. What I heard sounded pretty good.”

“Are you trying to say I need to go to class?” I trail my fingers down his side. I’d much rather stay here.

“You can do what you want,” he says.

“I want to skip class today.” I rest my sticky hand on the pillow, cum drying on it.
I’d
done that. I close my hand into a fist, like I can hold on to this.

“All right,” he says, climbing over me to get off the bed. “Do you want to grab some lunch?”

“As long as it’s someplace cheap that takes dining cards. I’m saving up for a guitar.”

“I think we can do that.”

* * * *

Sun streams through the tall windows. Everyone in the dining hall seems more awake than I feel. I bump into Derek’s shoulder as we order our burritos and drinks. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

We find a table in the middle of everything, but everything feels like background noise. I try not to look like I’m watching his fingers squeeze hot sauce from a packet, but I am. Try not to stare at the toothpick lying on a napkin, its wood lightly nicked with teeth marks.

“Have you thought about e-cigarettes?” I say. “Then you could smoke in the room and stuff.”

“Toothpicks are cheaper.”

“Can’t argue with that.” After a few seconds, I say, “Why not give up cigarettes altogether?”

“Gotta have some joy in life.”

“Right. You ride a motorcycle—that’s not joy enough.”

He grins.

“What are your parents like?” I ask, thinking about the zillion ways mine would suck the joy out of having a motorcycle: links to articles about motorcycle fatalities, YouTube videos. They’d dig up some friends from church whose son was a vegetable thanks to a motorcycle and tell me all about what his life—and theirs—was like now.

Derek says, “My dad works in a factory that makes power trains.”

“What about your mom?”

He shrugs. “She went off to a commune when I was three. She’s always into some thing or another. She traveled farm to farm for a while, following crop seasons up and down the country. She was in California a few years, where she became a Buddhist and lived with them for a while. I think she thinks her stories are interesting and exciting when she descends upon us between one crazy thing and the next, but it’s just annoying more than anything. I kind of prefer it when she’s not around.” He takes a pull off his Pepsi bottle.

“Were you mad at her for not taking you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes. Mostly I don’t like the guys she hooks up with, and I do like my dad and uncle, and she’s just a fucking flake, you know? I don’t have a lot of patience for it.”

“Are they actually divorced?”

“Yeah,” he says. “My dad had to do all the work, and when he sent the papers for her to sign, they came back undeliverable, so he had to sit on them until she showed up, which, like I said, she does. They had a big fight over it. I don’t know why—it’s not like she wanted to be with him. I mean, if you want to be with someone, you stick around, right?”

It makes sense.

After making some progress on his burrito, he says, “She did take me with her that time. After the fight.”

“Yeah?”

“It lasted about six weeks. I was supposed to be starting first grade. My dad didn’t want to get the cops after her, though, so he just tried to reason with her, but that’s fucking impossible.”

“Sort of like my mom in that respect,” I say.

“Is it a mom thing?” he asks.

“I have friends with perfectly reasonable moms.”

“We got shafted.”

“Yep. So what happened?”

“Well, I was six,” he says, “so I had no idea where we were going when she put me in the back of the car with a blanket and some coloring books. I woke up in the middle of the night being carried out of the car, and I was so sleepy I didn’t even look around to see where we were. When I woke up with the sun in my face, I realized I was camped out on our front porch.”

“No shit?”

“She couldn’t handle taking care of a kid, and she didn’t want to face my dad knowing he’d been right. She didn’t come back for a few years after that. When she did, it was like none of that had happened.”

“I can see why you’d rather stay with your dad,” I say.

“Yep.” After a second to think, he says, “I don’t hate her or anything. She is who she is, you know? I just don’t have a lot of patience for bullshit, so it’s a relief when she pulls out of town.”

I lean on my fist, my knuckles digging into my cheek. “Why is your life way more interesting than mine?”

He shrugs. “You don’t have to pay for school.”

“Who picked your major?”

“Touché,” he says. “How long are you gonna let them run your life?”

I push the remains of my burrito around on its wrapping. “Either till I can afford to run it myself, or until I snap and tell them off, or until they die. Whichever comes first.”

“Dire prospects. I’d lean toward option two if I were you.”

“It’s headed that way,” I say, thinking about my last call home. If my mother’d gotten her way with the school, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, talking to Derek. Fuck her.

But he says, “Is it? I thought you were getting an economics degree and going behind their backs to buy a guitar.”

“Can we go back to talking about your family now?”

He laughs.

Chapter Twelve

My phone chimes. I drag it off the desk and check it. Four messages, all from Chuck. The most recent:
WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US?
I set it back down.

“Hey,” Derek says from behind his computer.

“What?”

“The cuffs with the straps sold already.”

“Sweet!”

“I guess I’ll have to make more. But first, the mail center. Oh, and.” He pulls out his wallet and hands me my cut.

“Thanks.” I smile. I’m up just ten dollars, but I’m looking at it like a snowball: we get more listings updated; I get cuts across a wider range of products; more money rolls in…I buy a fucking guitar, fuck my parents. I check my own e-mail—nothing exciting. My phone chimes again. Chuck again. Fuck it. It’s not like I’m in the mood to study. I type:
All right all right I’m coming
. “I’m going out for a while.”

* * * *

I get back to the room late—well after dark. Chuck had been alone in the student lounge when I got there; Pete and Ally, the girl from the party, showed up a little while later. We played foosball, Ally not doing too badly holding her own—both with the game rods and Chuck’s trash talk. If it hadn’t been for Pete’s arm going around her waist, and her leaning against him, it would have been just like hanging with the guys. The two of them were probably walking across campus right now, hand in hand, saying good night with a long kiss at the steps to her dorm.

Derek’s light’s on, but his desk is empty.

“Hello?”

“In here.”

I walk around the locker. Derek’s on his bed, hunched over his laptop.

“Studying?” I ask.

“Yeah.” He stretches and yawns. “It’s about time for a break, though. Did you have a good time?”

“Not too bad.” Chuck and I had won a few games off some of the other guys hanging around, but nobody wanted to put any cash up, so my guitar fund was still at sixty bucks. I’d scored a few drinks from the vending machine, though. We can use dining credits on those, and people are a little more willing to do that than hand over “real” money.

“There’s some beer in the fridge,” he says with a nod toward the cube in the corner. I get two out and pass one over before popping the tab on my own. He’s moved his laptop to the floor, so I sit on his bed, down at the other end, my shoulder against the wall.

We drink in silence for a minute or two. I take the chance to look around Derek’s side of the room—yesterday’s clothes spilling out the open doors of his locker, a new set of cuffs and straps lying on his desk, identical to the pair he’d just sold. His boots sit beside the desk, one tipped over on the other. Last time I looked at his part of the room, we hadn’t slept together yet. Now everything’s about ten times more interesting.

Not that I hadn’t been fascinated by his stuff before.

“Is that your dad and uncle?” I ask, nodding to a photo taped to the back of the locker behind his shoulder.

He twists his head to look. “Yeah.” The two men stand on either side of a younger Derek, their arms thrown over his shoulders. The background’s familiar: the front steps of Johnson. He says, “Kind of cheesy, but there you go.”

“It’s cool. My parents have a photo just like it, but with different people. I’m sure I’ll see it framed in the living room when I go home for Thanksgiving.”

“It’s the done thing,” he says, taking another pull off his beer.

“So…I’ve got a question for you,” I say.

“Okay.”

“Right. Um. Have you…” I look at my fingers gripping the can. “Have you been with a guy before?” The tips of my ears burn. I raise my eyes but not my head.

“Are you worried about AIDS?”

“What? No. I mean… Shit. I hadn’t even been thinking about AIDS.” Now I’m worrying about AIDS.

“You just looked so serious,” he says. “And I don’t think you can get AIDS from mutual jerking off. In case you’re wondering about that now. Plus, also, I don’t have HIV.” He takes another pull off his beer before saying, “And also, no, I’ve never been with a guy before.”

“No?”

“I hadn’t ruled out the possibility,” he says, “but no. You?”

I’m quick to say, “No.” Then: “I hadn’t even
thought
of the possibility. I guess you would have at least thought of it, you know, because of your uncle.”

“I guess. When I was a kid, I thought he was the coolest guy in the world. I mean, he’s still pretty cool. My uncle Dan is one cool cat.” I have no idea which guy in the photo is Dan, but both look like cool cats. I mean, they look just like older Dereks. That’s what he’s going to look like, I think.

“I wanted to grow up to be just like him,” he’s saying. “You know: ‘Girls, yuck.’ But I got older and realized girls weren’t all that bad. But I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, so I’m definitely straight, then.’ I’ve had an open mind about it.”

I sink down against the wall. “We don’t have anyone cool in my family. Or gay, for that matter.”

“You’re cool.”

“And probably gay, apparently.”

“Do you think so?” He leans over to set his beer on the floor. The edge of his T-shirt hikes up a bit, exposing a slice of skin.

I say, “I don’t know. I seriously never thought about it one way or another. I mean, I just, you know, went with what you’re expected to do. Homosexuality happens to other people’s children.” I smile, but it’s kind of painfully true: my parents would have just steamrolled right over the possibility, as if I couldn’t possibly know my own self.

And here it is: Clearly I fucking don’t.

“So you’ve dated girls,” he says.

“Yeah, there was Katie Duke sophomore year. She was cute and liked me, so I asked her out. We texted a lot, made out when we could. I felt her breasts up, but I didn’t go below the waist. Mostly because I was fucking terrified.” I’ve never told anybody this. As far as I know, me, Katie Duke, and the girls Katie Duke told about her lame boyfriend are the only ones who know. “For one thing,” I say, “My mother beat it into my head that you’re supposed to wait until you find the ‘right person.’ She’s big on the ‘you’ll know when it’s right’ thing. With, of course, the implication that ‘when’ is not anytime soon.”

“It’s after the wedding bells,” he says.

“Right? Plus…I don’t know what to do with, you know…girl stuff. I mean, I’ve got a dick, so that’s pretty familiar territory, but despite the Internet—” Which I didn’t have a lot of private access to in high school; the one computer in the house sat on a desk in the kitchen. Most of my Internet porn viewing took place in Jamie Douglas’s bedroom, which, as I think back on it, sounds as gay as jerking off your roommate, since we’d sit there watching it together, usually lesbian stuff because Jamie picked it out. And I let him because I had no fucking idea what I wanted to watch, and I didn’t want to risk suggesting the wrong thing and have him think I was a freak.

“The female anatomy is just…I have no idea,” I say. “I have no fucking idea how to deal with it, and the minute I make a move toward it, I know she’s going to know I have no fucking idea.” I always pictured Katie Duke going to her friends, saying,
He grabs my tit like it’s a softball
or
I’m in the process of drawing him a fucking map to my clitoris
. “So.” I take a deep breath. “I figured that was just part of knowing when it was ‘right.’ As in, when it’s right, I’ll stop being so worried about it and just fucking go for it.”

Like I had. With my college roommate.

I take a gulp off my beer.

“But you liked making out with Katie Duke and feeling up her breasts?” He’s leaning back, his head settled against the locker, his fingers turning his toothpick over his knuckles as I spill the sad details of my teenage love life.

“Well, it was weird at first, shoving my tongue into someone’s mouth, tasting the Doritos they just ate.” That’s what she’d been eating the first time we kissed, and that’s the first thing I think of to this day when I think about kissing Katie Duke—secondhand Cool Ranch Doritos. “It got to where I liked it, though it was always kind of a push-pull thing. I enjoyed it, but was she expecting more? Was she wondering why I didn’t go any farther? I’d have that in the back of my head constantly. I liked dry humping—it was sex without having to worry about whether you were doing it right, because you could do it with your pants on.”

“With
her
pants on,” he says.

“Right. So what if you have to home and finish up on your own? That was all right. It was better than someone getting pregnant or me getting laughed at or, God forbid, my mother finding out and sitting me down for a lecture.”