Chapter 2
Oli, Monday, Move-in Day, Sophomore Year of College
“Are you sure nothing is going on between you two? If so, I will request an immediate room change for you, Oliver.” My father made no effort to hide the curl in his lip as he stood stiffly by the door, eyeing down Jonah, my best friend since childhood and roommate for the second year in a row. He’d been making comments like that about my sexuality for over a year now, ever since he found me holding Alan Kristiansen’s hand just a few weeks after high school graduation.
Ah, yes. Hand holding. The worst thing an eighteen-year-old boy can do.
My parents, Jonah, and I stood in our new, crappy dorm room. It looked exactly the same as the one we had last year, which was crappy. It had the same long layout, a bed on each side, two armoires facing each other, and two desks; one between the beds facing the single window, and one at the foot of one of the beds. The walls were white but dirty. I never understood why they would choose white for a bunch of nasty college kids but whatever. I didn’t have the interest or power to do anything about it.
Jonah’s totally cool and loving family left about twenty minutes ago, and my father was still here interrogating us, my mother standing off to the side impatiently.
My mother was wonderful but, generally, she did almost nothing to nudge my father in a more positive direction. I couldn’t really blame her. She loved him, she really did, despite his faults. And he loved her too, which I certainly did not envy. She’d never been the target of his attacks; whereas me, well, I’d all but set up camp in the middle of the bullseye. My thoughts surrounding him were a bit more complex than hers.
Jonah glowered in a way that made my heart rattle as he said, “Actually, yes—”
I smacked him on the shoulder. He knew better than to talk back to my father, but he had trouble keeping his sassy voice down when it came to such blatant discrimination.
“Jonah and I are still just friends, sir. No funny business. Not with him or with anyone,” I said, offering a short nod of the head. I bit down on my tongue piercing to keep myself from saying anything else.
With that, my father nodded back and finally followed my mother out of the dorm room.
“Always a pleasure,” Jonah called after them.
I rolled my eyes. I was used to my father being such a flagrant piece of shit. I was even used to playing along. A layer of my heart flaked away every time I did.
“That schmuck makes my teeth grind,” Jonah mumbled as he tied his long, black hair into a low bun.
“He’s my father,” I snapped, unzipping my metal suitcase.
“He’s a homopho—”
I whirled around on him with nothing more than a glare. Just as he knew better than to talk back to my father, he knew better than to tell me shit I already knew. Like I hadn’t fucking grown up with the guy under his fucking roof.
“Fine. Sorry,” he muttered.
And as if being near my father for more than an hour hadn’t put us both in the shittiest moods imaginable, we were also back here, at fucking college.
It was honestly a mystery to me what Jonah was even doing here. He had always been, quite literally, the most talented person I knew. In my twenty years of life, I had never known someone with a singing voice so incredibly striking. His range could make birds cry. And the lyrics he wrote? Well, let’s just say being the saddest piece of shit on the face of the planet did have its pros. He could wander into town on any given day, pull out his guitar, and get picked up by some agent within the hour.
Me, on the other hand…I had to be here. You think growing up with a prejudiced father was tough? Try growing up with a prejudiced father, and then tell him you don’t want to go to university because you want to be a musician. Better yet, a drummer.
“I need a cool down,” I said, rubbing my fingers over my temples. My head was swimming with hot rage, a sensation often left behind by time spent with my family. I hated how my days could start by sneaking over to Jonah’s house to put whipped cream on his hand and tickle his nose while he slept, and end with me disgracing everything I am just so my father, who was virtually always upset, didn’t get upset.
“Me too.” Jonah grabbed his fancy headphones that I loved so much and flung them across the room. I caught them and strung them over my head.
He’d done nothing more to unpack than pull two pairs of shoes out of his duffle bag, stick them on the floor, and throw the entire bag into his armoire. He’d made his bed while his parents were still here, for the first and last time this year, likely so he could get into it immediately. Two guitars stood against the foot of his bed, and his bag of music gear was already sitting on the chair at his desk by the window with cords and notebooks sticking out of the top.
In a way, I envied his simplicity. But mostly, I worried for him.
At least he took the desk by the window, as I’d begged him to when we got here. If he was going to spend another year without leaving the dorm room, I wanted him to at least get some sunlight. The guy was practically transparent.
I clicked open my phone and connected it to the headphones just as Jonah whipped out his own device and curled up on his bed. That was his cool down. Video calling Kai. Mine was listening to music that would give my father a heart attack while I organized my supplies and possessions. That and eating. I made a mental note to head to the store later to buy inventory for my secret closet stockpile of food.
The most incredible death growl rumbled through my ears in excellent quality—thanks to Jonah’s professional headphones—just as the rapid double bass kicked in. My heartbeat reacted immediately. I laid my suitcase flat on the floor, unable to hear a single thing besides the music, and picked up a neatly folded stack of T-shirts. The kind with logos for some of my favorite bands on them. The kind that made my father’s eyes roll.
My pants were in a stack as neat as my shirts. I stuckboth piles in my closet tidily. My socks and such were already in a plastic bag, so all I had to do was pick it up and dump it into a drawer. I then used the bag to line our trash can. My shoes were all bagged as well. I placed them along the bottom of my closet before tucking away the bags for future use.
I’d brought some of my prank paraphernalia—a whoopee cushion, a can of Silly String, and other goofy toys and whistles—which I stored on the top shelf along with my practice pad. Finally, I looped my fingers through the hooks of the hangers in the right side of my suitcase and lifted my arm, all five of my usual flannels in different colors straightening out for me to hang up. My shower caddy was already packed, so I simply picked it up from my suitcase and tucked it in a corner.
And that was it. Tidy as can be. My father would’ve loved it had the clothing choices not been so alternative, as he liked to put it.
The last thing I had to do was stick my suitcase under my bed and organize the contents of my backpack on my desk. The heavy music pounded in my chest as I straightened my five-pocket folder on the right side. I dropped my pencils into the cup in the left corner and placed my laptop neatly in the center, plugging it in immediately so it would always remain charged. My hands worked in tune with the music, and by the time my belongings were all straightened away, so were my thoughts.
Maybe my home life wasn’t always the greatest, but I was an adult, I was strong, and I was here with my best friend.
I clicked the headphones off and returned them to Jonah’s naked desk which would likely be covered in papers by tomorrow. He was still curled up on his side, holding his phone close to his face, his thin body almost undetectable beneath his black blanket.
Kai’s voice came through his phone speaker, breaking my heart a bit. “Sorry, Jojo. I gotta go. I just got to the dance studio.”
She should’ve been here with us, and I think she felt that way too. There was something up with her lately that I couldn’t quite pin. Something empty about her. She was a ghost, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say Jonah was the corpse she left behind post-mortem.
“Monday, 7:00 p.m. in Madrid, 10:00 a.m. in LA,” Jonah said to her, looking at his phone with his droopy, green eyes. He did that frequently, say both times like that. He had it programmed into his head. “One hour of heels and one hour of conditioning. You’ll be out at 9:00, and you’ll call me on the way home. Won’t you?”
“No, Jo. I need to rush home to shower. I work at 11:00 and I’ve got a long shift at the bar ahead. You can’t keep me on the line all the time.”
“You say that as if you don’t love being kept,” he teased.
Smooth. He’d been hitting on the girl for the better part of the last seven years and she was none the wiser. It was pretty sad that she was so oblivious. Pretty funny to watch him try, though.
“You’re cut off,” she said with a giggle. “I won’t receive any calls from this number for the next twenty-four hours. Texts only.”
“I’ll just call from Oli’s,” Jonah murmured, a faint smile forming on his lips.
“You’re an asshole.” She giggled some more as she finally bid him goodbye and clicked out of the call. He hugged the phone into his chest as if he were hugging her very being, making no effort to get up from where he lay.
“Has this turned into a good day, then?” I asked, looking hopefully at his soft grin.
“It never does,” he crooned.
I sighed.
It had been over a year since Kai moved to Madrid with her family. Over a year that Jonah had spent moping about it. She was supposed to stay home after high school graduation and save up to come here as a freshman this year, but some family stuff went down and they ended up following a handful of aunts and cousins over to Spain. Jonah hadn’t been the same since she left.
He and I met in kindergarten when all the preschools in town merged into one elementary school. Even back then, he was a total whiner.
Oli, the other kids in the class are so annoying.
Well, Oli, another shitty Monday in this boring ass town.
Oh, Oli, isn’t being a teenager just so fucking hard?
Always whining, whining, whining.
I’m kidding, of course. Only a little. His issue, honestly, was that he was always a little too smart for this world, a little too cognizant. Awareness came easily to him, and it got in the way of relating to others.
I didn’t have that trait. I always had to try really fucking hard to get good grades and come off as a coherent human being. Effort seemed to be the only constant in my life. Results? Success? Some day, I hoped. But effort? Always.
Anyway, Jonah was always a whiner. Then we met Kai. She was twelve, we were thirteen. I swear on my sweet mother, his eyes lit up the moment he saw her, and that light didn’t go out until the day she left just over one year ago. I’d forgotten how dark his gaze was before she came around, how much pain it held. He had done such a good job of covering it up with his undying love for her.
The three of us were inseparable throughout school, and she became my beloved sister. Not legally of course but, for all intents and purposes, Kai was my sister. Except now, life was unbearably different. We both could’ve really used her here.
“I need to know the band schedule,” I said, switching gears before nostalgia got the best of me. I splayed my planner across my desk with a pencil in hand. “How are we going to work it out this year?”
“I don’t know,” Jonah mumbled, still rolled in his sheets which he clutched around his neck.
To be honest, we put far too much effort into the whole music thing for a bunch of kids who still had at least three more years of studying ahead of us. Not that I didn’t love playing with the guys. I did. But I wasn’t going to be chasing some pipe dream without at least getting a college degree first. Jonah might’ve had the talent to make it big time, but I needed more solid reassurance than that.
I had a plan.
I would study hard, graduate summa cum laude, ensure I had a good foundation to stand on, and then take a giant shit on my father’s head when I decided to try my hand at music. If the music thing failed, I could always go to corporate. As long as I had those options and didn’t get stuck at my father’s law firm.
“Noah is probably going to do his Nature Club on Thursdays again,” I said. “So, Thursdays are a no-go for him.”
“My schedule is so fucking easy this semester.” Jonah shook his head. “All my classes are between 8:00 and 1:00.”
“Perfect.” I looked at my schedule which was definitely not easy. “My latest class goes to 3:45 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I’m done at 2:00 and I start again at 6:00. Finish at 7:50.”
Jonah thought for a moment. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, sometime between 2:30 and 5:30 then?”
I had half a mind to say three days a week was too many, but I knew us well enough. There were days we spent an entire hour perfecting a single lyric, other days we plowed through recording samples, and other days we all huddled around Jonah’s computer to stick bits of sound together in different ways.
“I’ll ask Noah.” I navigated to our band group chat and suggested the times to our bassist. He immediately texted back with multiple exuberant messages about how great this year was going to be. I smiled and turned to Jonah who took one look at his screen and buried his nose in his pillow with a groan.
“A simple yes would’ve been fine,” he said.
Jonah didn’t like frivolous texts or excessive enthusiasm, which were two of Noah’s favorite things. We could’ve taken Noah to buy milk and he’d be thrilled about all the different kinds. We could’ve taken him to the dentist and he’d be in awe of the posters on the wall and the models of teeth. Jonah, on the other hand, could be standing in front of one of the seven wonders of the world and find a way to complain about it, the most likely being that Kai wasn’t there to see it.
With Noah’s confirmation, I sat down in the chair at my desk to block off the majority of the free time I had left for the semester in my planner. Sometime later, I lifted my stiff neck from manually marking down every known obligation from now until December break. That pretty much left Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4:00 p.m. to bedtime to do all homework, projects, and relaxing. Weekends were free but, knowing us, we’d probably spend them working on music anyway. Plus more homework.
Classes hadn’t even started yet, and I was already stressed out of my wits. I took a deep breath, reminding myself that I simply needed to focus on my path and it would all pay off in the end.
Three more years.
Just three more years.