Chapter 2 #4
“I’m fucking tired, Stan.”
“Bluey, come on.”
“Get out of my room and turn off the light.”
“No can do.”
He grabs the corner of my comforter. I grab it back.
He tugs. I tug. We have a short, stupid, entirely silent battle for the blanket, in the middle of which I am made aware of two things — one, that my shoulder is in real trouble, and two, that Stanley is sober enough to be having fun and drunk enough to not stop.
“Let it go,” he warns.
“You let it go. Don’t you have someone better to pick on?” I huff and pull the blanket up to my chin.
“I’m not picking on you,” he says, which is a lie. He’s decided in the past week that I’m his new best friend. “I just need you to get the fuck out of this bed and come downstairs.”
“No, man.” I close my eyes again. “I’m going to sleep.”
He doesn’t say anything for a second. Which is unusual.
I peek.
He’s staring at the floor, fully zoning out.
“Shit,” he says quietly. “Is it because you’re feeling like shit from the game? Did you get hurt?”
“Drop it, Stan.”
“You got hurt.”
“Drop it.”
There’s half a second where I think he might.
Stanley is, underneath the relentless mouth, a guy who notices things — that is the part about him that gets forgotten, because the mouth gets all the attention, but Stanley notices.
He notices when a guy has a bad period. He notices when a freshman is homesick.
He notices the things that the rest of us are too tired or too proud to notice, and then he does the most annoying possible thing with the information.
He does it now.
“Nah.” His face changes. He grins. “Nah, nah, nah. This is because of the girl.”
Fucking help me. “It’s not.”
“You think you’re so fucking slick, man.” He points at me with a smirk. “But I’m onto you.”
“You’re not onto anything.”
“So, what is it about her? Is it the hair? The hair’s a lot. Long. Heavy. She’s got a lot of hair —”
“Stan.”
“Is it the smile? She’s got a real nice smile. Wholesome. Like a girl who would bake you really good cookies—”
“Stan.”
“It’s the eyes. Isn’t it? It’s the eyes.” He leans in. “They fucking sparkle, man. Like diamonds.”
I stare at the ceiling, trying to keep my cool. They sparkle like diamonds?
I turn my head and look at him. “Will you grab me something?”
He brightens. “What?”
I point at the floor. “Down there. My duffle bag.”
He hops off the bed and grabs the duffel. He holds it up. “This one?”
“Yeah.” I close my eyes. “There’s some hockey tape in there. Will you wrap it around your face a few times for me?”
There’s a pause.
Then Stanley bends over and howls.
He drops the bag. He launches himself back onto my bed with the full weight of a hundred and eighty pounds of drunk winger, and my whole frame creaks. My shoulder grabs again, and I make a sound through my teeth that I cannot keep in.
“I fucking knew it,” he crows. “You had no idea she had a boyfriend, huh? Is that what this is?”
“This isn’t anything, Stan.”
“Bro —”
“It’s not anything except you making up imaginary shit in your head. I’m beat. I’m not going back down there.”
“Her boyfriend’s not a bad guy, you know.”
I don’t respond to that.
“Ermington,” I say sternly. “I’m trying to sleep.”
He stops talking and just stares at me in deep thought. I don’t want to know what he’s thinking, but he’s going to say it anyway.
“I’ve never seen you this fucking ruffled, man,” he says. There it is. That sharp observation, calling it exactly as he sees it. “Relax. I just wanted to make sure everything was alright.”
“It’s fucking dandy, Stan.”
But the second the words are out of my mouth, I hear how they sound.
I hear what they actually mean, which is that I ran.
I ran out of my own kitchen and up the stairs of my own house.
I locked myself in my own bedroom because a girl I have spent a lot of years pretending I don’t think about walked in with a boyfriend, and now I am lying here pretending it’s because I’m tired.
I did it again, and the worst part is that it wasn’t intentional.
“Am I allowed to go to sleep,” I say, “King Stanley?”
He looks at me dead in the eye.
“I don’t think you’re going to get any sleep until she leaves, so you can make the best of it by coming down to have another beer.”
I close my eyes. “I’ll stay here. Enjoy my shut-eye time.”
I reach out blindly and pat his shoulder twice.
“Get back out there. Sing more Taylor Swift.”
“You’re really calling it a night.”
“Yes.”
“All right.” He stands. The bed releases. “But tomorrow we’re talking about this behavior. This is not normal.”
“What’re you, my dad? Fuck, Stan.”
He laughs.
He starts dancing his way to the door. I open one eye and watch him do it. He is doing the thing where his legs go one way, and his shoulders go the other, and he flips the light off on his way out, and just before he pulls the door shut, he leans his head back in.
“I’ll keep an eye on her for you, big Blue.”
The door closes.
I lie in the dark and close my eyes.
The bass picks up downstairs, and I hear him shout when he reaches the bottom step.
Christ.