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Rule 6: If eating it is not going to kill you, there’s really no compelling reason to back down from a dare
The cockroaches aren’t even that bad, really. Jonny eats two of them to prove that the first one wasn’t a fluke. Then he smiles, and as his mouth stretches into a grin, he can feel the surely-visible bug guts smeared across his teeth.
Rule 1: Kill your father
Jonny would say that Oedipus had the right idea, but mom was pretty much a non-entity even when she was around so the analogy only goes so far.
Dad still calls the house sometimes, but Carmilla doesn’t say Jonny has to answer, so the answering machine for the house phone is on pretty much constant call-screening duty.
“J-Jonny? It’s Dad calling. I wanted to know if you’d thought about Christmas? Of course Carmilla’s invited, too, and the other kid she’s got there, if she wants. Look, I know you don’t have the best memories of this place, but we can’t work on adding any better ones if you never come back. Call me some time, okay?"
It’s not Jonny’s fault the man doesn’t know he’s a walking corpse. That’s not a threat, it’s just a fact, but most people don’t listen to Jonny closely enough to tell the difference.
Rule 2, 3, 4, 9, 32 probably?: Find someone who’s better at it than you and make them one of yours so their better-at-it-ness is on your side and not in competition with you, making it no longer necessary to become any better than you already are
The “it” doesn’t matter, really, which is good, because if asked, Jonny suspects he’d have a difficult timing pinning down a definition.
…
Jonny’s aunt Carmilla is a forensic pathologist. This means she cuts up dead bodies for a living so she can see how they died, and that means that six-year-old Jonny follows her from one end of the family barbecue to the other, trying to catch any snatch of a work story she tells to the other grown-ups. At a certain point, she looks behind her to catch him hiding under a table, listening, and, ever so slowly, she winks,
and
He’s heard all about her from Carmilla on the drive down, but Jonny only sees Nastya for the first time from the car window when they first turn down Carmilla’s street, which means he probably sees her before she sees him. She’s perched on the stoop of Carmilla’s run-down little bungalow, and she’s got her elbows on her knees and she’s wearing a shirt with a collar and a conservatively long-ish denim skirt, and her hair’s combed all neatly, her shoes look really clean, she’s so square she kind of loops back around to punk again, she’s perfect,
and
Everyone at school says Ashes O’Reilly is going to burn the building down one of these days. Jonny needs to meet them immediately,
and
The boy TS bring to lunch is quiet and cryptic and definitely not more interesting than the fact that Ashes keeps ditching World Hist. without inviting Jonny to ditch, too, but when Jonny sees him next, he’s wild-eyed and furious, he’s taken down a guy twice his size in front of God and the entire third period B hall crowd and now he’s sagging in the restraining hold of the school security guard and Jonny wants to lick the adrenaline-tears off his pretty cheekbones,
and
Who knows? There’s always someone better at something. Jonny is sure the issue will come up again.
Rule 10: That time Tim smashes his fist into some guy’s face at a party—
And it isn’t even really a very good punch. Jonny knows how to punch, how to do it right, and there’s no care, no craft in this, in the way Tim — hair a few months grown out from his neat JROTC cut and grown back in patchy, shorter in places that got shaved off completely to make way for stitches after the accident and falling loose into his face — lurches forward like he can knock this local university frat-boy-reject off the face of the earth with his knuckles alone. The guy doesn’t engage, which is a little disappointing. Instead, he staggers back, and Tim doesn’t chase after him, just stands there all wide-eyed a moment before shoving his way out of the room in the opposite direction, not stopping til he’s out the front door.
The guy said something first, before the punching, but Jonny’s not interested in that part. That part is only going to matter if Jonny decides to acknowledge that the guy was talking to him, to Jonny, before the face-smashing, which could have some debatable significance if Jonny chooses to remember that, as far as he’s seen, up until this point Tim has mostly only broken people’s faces in ways that are either directly or indirectly connected to Tim’s lost and lamented, sainted Bertie, and that breaking a face over Jonny instead is a break in the pattern.
Following that line of thought through to its end sounds messy, though, so Jonny sets it aside so he can meditate on the important things: the thin line of blood on the guy’s face, small and smeared and bright, not his own but Tim’s where Tim’s knuckle had caught on a tooth just hard enough to scrape, and the swollen, slightly torn skin of Tim’s knuckles in the aftermath. Jonny had thought, after watching Fight Club, that bruised knuckles would be something he would be into, and, indeed, in the couple of times when he’s had the opportunity to do some damage to his own hands, he’s enjoyed the way the look of it had lingered a little on his skin. But when Brian fights, or TS, Jonny hasn’t felt stirred by much more than a healthy appreciation for the damage they’ve done with it, and he’s unprepared for the way the sight of Tim’s hands after throwing a punch makes him want to wrap his own hands around the long bones of Tim’s forearms and hold those hands still, get a closer look.
Jonny isn’t the only one who follows Tim out of the party into the front yard, or even the only one who looks ready to follow when he finds a winter-bare shrub able to hold his weight as he climbs up onto the roof of a shed, and from there up to on top of the garage. Ashes and Brian both have their serious, worried faces on as they watch Tim make the climb, which Jonny thinks is a little over-dramatic, honestly. Tim only hit the guy once — this isn’t some maddened, berserker rampage, or anything. Jonny thinks his feelings about the whole thing must be visible on his face, because when he goes to vault himself up onto the shed, Ashes puts a hand on his shoulder, and says, “No, I’ll stay.”
Jonny wonders what they think he’s going to do, then wonders what he thinks he’s going to do. Wonders if Ashes can look at his face and see how he wants to tear Tim apart with his teeth sometimes — but not, like, in a bad way. Not in a way where he wants to hurt, not really, not mostly, and so maybe Ashes is right to stop him from climbing up onto the roof tonight.
Rule 5: Sometimes, shit happens. Other times, the Toy Soldier happens, which is a different issue entirely
“We’ll work in pairs for this one,” the teacher says, then launches into the team-ups she’s planned for them. “And Jonny, you’ll work with Jessica.”
Jonny doesn’t know that many of the people in this class — knows Ashes and their friends aren’t in it, which is the only information which really feels relevant — so he doesn’t know exactly who the teacher means. A few minutes later, when a blur of over-sized camo gear bounces over to slide into the empty seat next to him, he figures it must be Jessica.
“So, topics! What do you fancy?” Probably-Jessica trills.
“I don’t care,” Jonny answers truthfully. He thinks there’s probably some topic on the list which can at least be twisted in a suitably macabre direction, to at least make the research portion interesting, but he hasn’t been paying enough attention to know which it is, which really says it all, probably.
“Nor do I!” Probably-Jessica says, sounding thrilled. “Isn’t it marvelous? I’m usually paired with someone who has interests, for this kind of thing. Which really sounds exhausting, don’t you think?”
Probably-Jessica is very chipper for a nihilist, that’s what Jonny thinks.
“So how invested are you in actually getting a passing grade on this thing?” he asks. If probably-Jessica is as ambivalent about it as he is, maybe they can get through this group project with a minimum amount of interaction.
“Personally, not very,” probably-Jessica says, “But incidentally, quite a bit. Jessica’s mother doesn’t let it go, when my grades start to slip.”
And, well. That’s a weird way to put that, isn’t it?
“You don’t really seem like a Jessica,” he ventures, and is immediately annoyed with himself. Taking an interest in people’s lives and personalities is a terrible way to make them go away.
“I don’t, do I?” maybe-not-Jessica agrees, and he’s still getting used to that technicolor-bright tone of voice which, he thinks, would sound almost Disney-princess-ey, if it didn’t have such a weird edge of menace to the things it said.
Jonny has never been on this side of this conversation before, but he’s starting to think he does know what kind it is. He asks, “Is there something else I should call you?”
Probably-not-Jessica pauses, eyes wide, but Jonny can’t tell if that’s with surprise or just because that’s what probably-not-Jessica looks like.
“Well,” probably-not-Jessica says, finally, “I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a toy soldier, you know?”
Jonny does not, in fact, know. However, the fact that he has no idea what that means is kind of fun in and of itself. Maybe, he thinks, this group project won’t be such a bust after all.
Rule 11: The ‘check engine’ light is usually bullshit, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it indefinitely
Jonny refuses to call Nastya and tell her that he wrecked her car. He won’t do it, and since he’s probably going to want to talk to her again one of these days, that means that the car has to make it through this — it just has to. There are no other options.
“That’s quite a bit of smoke, though, old bean,” the Toy Soldier says, not entirely helpfully.
“We’re going to miss out sound check slot,” Marius frets, like a nerd.
“Who cares?” Jonny asks, peering helplessly down at the engine beneath the looming popped hood. “Do you think the Sex Pistols made it to gigs in time for their sound checks?”
“Yes!” Marius exclaims, and oh, he should work on that, he sounds a little shrill when he gets all worked up, it makes Jonny want to dawdle like his life depends on it. “If they wanted to really reach their audience, and effectively share their message, they showed up to sound check!”
“I’m really not sure they did, mate,” Jonny tells him absently. Nastya always made it look so easy — pop the hood, read the tea leaves in engine grease and smoke, tinker around a bit with her handful of shiny, well-kept tools, and poof, all set. “Either of those things,” he clarifies, belatedly thinking through Marius’s final sentence.
“The Sex Pistols were a publicity stunt as much as they were a band,” Ashes weighs in, “I don’t think what they would or wouldn’t do matters much. It’s pretty cold out here, though. Jonny, do you have car insurance?”
Rule 12: Things Nastya says are automatically just a little bit more memorable than things said by people other than Nastya
There’s a moment — just a moment — right when Jonny goes to stick his hands down Tim’s pants for the first time, when he looks down into that wide-eyed, slack-mouthed face and hears Nastya’s voice telling him, you fuck that kid up worse than he was when you got him, I have this feeling you’re going to feel bad.
It doesn’t mean any more than it did when she said it the first time, but it hovers there, sharp and immobile in his mind, just long enough to give him pause. He slows, the fingers of one hand resting just lightly on the button of Tim’s jeans, and reaches down with the other hand to press his thumb just lightly down against that kiss-slick red bottom lip, and says, “You want me to?”
He doesn’t get more specific than that — he’s got only adrenaline and a feeling of heat under his skin where his plan for what he’ll do when he’s got Tim’s fly undone should be — but he figures he’s gotten the point across. Tim stares back up at him for a moment — for a long enough moment, in fact, that he starts to wonder if he’s about to get a ‘no,’ and he’s about to move his hands when he feels the mouth he’s still touching, pressing against lightly with the pad of his thumb, move beneath his hand. “Yeah,” Tim says. “Yeah, I want—yeah.”
It’s not the most eloquent declaration, but it gets the point across, and Jonny is just reaching up again to hold the hand Tim has kept above his head, up against to the arm of the couch since Jonny released it to reach down and start fondling his face like a weirdo, when Carmilla’s voice makes its way down the basement stairs. “Jonny?” she calls out. “I’m home, I’m ordering Chinese for dinner, and you’ve got ten minutes to get your order in.”
Jonny always orders the same thing, it’s Nastya who will always take ten years to pore over a menu, even for places they’ve ordered from a hundred times. Jonny winds his fingers through Tim’s, still keeping Tim’s hand pinned above his head, very deliberately removes the hand still resting at Tim’s waistband, then leans down to muffle his face against Tim’s chest and laugh hysterically for just a moment, before raising his head to yell his regular takeout order up the stairs to Carmilla. He thinks about it a second, looks down to where Tim is still spread out beneath him, red with muffled laughter of his own and trapped between Jonny’s spread thighs, and yells up again, “Oh, and egg rolls for Tim!”
Tim’s been a vegetarian for about two weeks now, and Jonny doesn’t necessarily approve, but being shitty about it only earns him some judginess and attitude from Brian, so he’s trying to let the whole mess run its course on its own. Surely Tim will notice how much worse life is without meat on his own before long. In deference to this idea, he yells up the stairs one more time to clarify, “The gross vegetarian kind!”
“They’re not gross,” Tim says, “They’re exactly the same except they don’t have pork in them.” He doesn’t sound upset about Jonny’s assessment, though — in fact, he’s still grinning a little, left over from his laughter earlier, and after a moment he says, “Thanks.”
And that—it’s nothing, offering Tim the out of dinner with Jonny and Carmilla so he doesn’t have to manage dinner with his own parents is nothing Jonny wouldn’t also offer to the Toy Soldier, or to Ashes, if they wanted. It’s not something to thank him about. Jonny leans down to kiss him into shutting up before he can say anything else off-putting.
When their food gets there, Carmilla brings the whole bag down to eat with them in the basement. When Jonny hears her on the stairs, he climbs off of Tim and shoos him upright, so they’re each only taking up a single square of the couch, but Jonny thinks it’s probably pretty obvious what they’re been up to, and Carmilla’s questioning eyebrows when she makes it to the bottom of the stairs only confirm that hypothesis. She doesn’t say anything, though, just plunks the takeout bag down on the coffee table in front of the couch and takes the final seat for herself.
Later, when Tim has gone home and Jonny is unloading the dishwasher while Carmilla rinses the dinner dishes to load in when he’s done, she says, “It’s my job as the person keeping an eye on you to make sure you’re being safe.”
That’s — mortifying, but probably something Jonny should have been expecting. Still, “Pretty sure that’s not your business,” he tries, just to see if it’ll fly.
Her hard-eyed look says it’s probably a non-starter, and the next thing she says is worse. She says, “You can talk about it with me, you can call your dad back and talk to him, or we can set up an appointment with your doctor to talk about it there.”
“We, uh.” This is awful, they should hook up at Tim’s place next, let him have horrible conversations with his parents. Still, of the options as she’s presented them, it’s probably the most painless. “We haven’t gotten that far. To where, uh. ‘Being safe’ is a thing.”
He’s trying for actual sincerity, like maybe if he tells the truth quick enough, he can make this whole scene end sooner. He’s not trying to be funny, but she huffs out a quiet laugh, anyway, and says, “‘Being safe’ is always a thing. But the way you mean — I’m going to stop by the drug store on the way home tomorrow, and then we’re going to talk barrier methods. Whenever you get there, if you get there, I want you to be ready.”
Rule 13: When the Toy Soldier decides to happen, there’s little that can be done to stop it
It hasn’t given any indication that it’s planning on even coming to see Jonny off, when he drives out of town, mid-way through the summer and all ready to head out to the city and crash on Nastya’s floor until he can find a place of his own. It hugged him goodbye whether he liked it or not just the night before, in fact, when saying goodbye with all the others. But when Jonny steps out the door the next morning, a bit later than when he planned to get going but still in the right ballpark, the Toy Soldier is outside, sat on the hood of Aurora and leaning back against the windshield.
When he and Carmilla make it out into the gray morning light, it scrambles to its feet, and when Jonny asks it, “What are you doing here?” it answers, “I’m coming with you!” like that’s just a given.
Jonny raises both eyebrows. “You can’t even drive, why would I take you as my co-pilot?” he asks. He’s not smiling. He’s not.
“Falling asleep at the wheel, my good fellow,” it answers smoothly. “Terrible problem, terrible, and so common! You need me!”
“You know what? I think it’s right, Jonny,” Carmilla says, and there’s a laugh in her voice. “I’ve heard about that terrible, common problem. You’d better take it with you.”
Jonny glares her down like the turncoat that she is, but she only grins, shakes her head, and goes in to grab another of Jonny’s bags to load up the car.
Rule 8: Sharing actually is, occasionally, caring
When Jonny gets his period, it’s everybody’s problem. He makes sure of it.
He figures that if he’s got to be miserable on a semi-regular monthly schedule, he may as well share the wealth, so he asks for a bathroom pass from U.S. Hist. by hinting about vague but dire consequences if he’s not allowed to go, then waits to leave til Mrs. Collins has turned back to the board so he can kick his backpack out of the room in front of him. Definitely not coming back to this class today. He’s pretty sure Mrs. Collins thinks he’s threatening explosive diarrhea, but that’s just one of the perks of having a carefully-curated reputation for being crude and terrible. Then he heads up to the library to bug Ivy for pain killers — some of the heavy-duty, prescription-strength NSAIDs she got prescribed when she cracked that bone in her foot during gym sound pretty good just now. Ivy comes through for him with both a pill and a hiding spot behind the desk for the rest of this class period, though she does make him go to the drinking fountain for water to swallow the painkiller first, instead of letting him bring a drink into the library.
When the bell rings, Jonny and Ivy make their way down to lunch. Jonny has to make a pit stop at the bathroom on the way down, but that turns out to be fine, because the pattern of clots in the toilet water as he changes his tampon give him a conversational topic that carries him straight through lunch. His friends aren’t too enthusiastic about the subject at first, but that one clot had looked like someone’s profile, and all it takes is his assertion that it’s like reading tea leaves, just bloodier, and at least the Toy Soldier is on board.
It’s a pretty good distraction, especially when Marius looks vaguely ill, but it’s not a great one, and by the end of the lunch period, Jonny is pestering Ivy again for another pill, and this time, she’s a bit less obliging, talking about dosing limits and side effects like intestinal damage. Jonny doesn’t care, but she doesn’t budge, either, telling him, “There’s a reason this strength of pill isn’t available over the counter.” She sounds a little sorry as she says it, so at least Jonny can enjoy that a little viciously in the back of his mind.
In the end, Jonny actually whines enough that Brian offers to smoke him up after school. Jonny wouldn’t say that he was angling for it, but bad periods are the only time when he really wants to get high, and he’s certainly not going to buy his own. He tends to get more of the depressant side of pot, and god knows there’s enough depressants to get high on naturally, without chemical assistance, but when it feels like his lower abdomen is getting slowly but surely gnawed out by dull-toothed voles, getting a little stoned actually does help.
Nastya shoots him a judgey look when Jonny accepts, and agrees to meet Brian and Raph after school, but Nastya isn’t his mother, she can fuck right off. “It’s that or carving out an internal organ with a rusty handsaw, Nastya, so shut it,” Jonny tells her.
“Which one?” Raphaella asks, far sounding far perkier than Jonny would prefer for anyone to sound in his immediate vicinity for the foreseeable future. “Does it have to be the organ responsible, or is this more of an indiscriminate, vengeful god scenario?”
“I’m always a vengeful god,” Jonny says, and the set-up was nice, he thinks it was just for him, thinks it’s maybe Raph’s weird way of trying to cheer him up, but he’s not just being dramatic for the sake of being dramatic, he feels like shit, so he doesn’t take the bit any further.
“I’m not judging you, Jonny,” Nastya lies, but he thinks the lie is a peace offering, so he lets it go. After school, he follows Brian and Raphaella out to the park, down a hill and into a stand of pine trees, and then he lies down on the ground and waits for Brian to pass him a joint. By the time the edges of the pain start to feel fuzzy, he doesn’t even mind when Raphaella reaches down to play with his hair.
Rule 7: All hot sauce is, inherently, a dare
See Rule 6.
Rule 14: Eventually, you’re going to have to fight about it
Tim shows up to Jonny and TS’s apartment one weekend with a backpack on his shoulder and says, “I’m here to see the cats, I can crash on the couch, right?”
He acts all casual about it, too, like they’ve last seen each other just yesterday and not nearly three months ago, when he dropped by to leave the cats with TS before his semester started. “No,” Jonny tells him, not to be an asshole, but just because it’s not possible. “You can’t.”
Unfortunately, TS doesn’t have much of a sense of discretion, and it beams at Tim, pulls him inside, and explains, “You could if we had a couch, but we don’t, so you can’t.”
Tim cracks a smile and says, “Well, I can’t argue with that, can I?” shooting a questioning look Jonny’s way, but then the fucking cats must hear his voice and come swarming, and he sits down amongst them, and Jonny doesn’t really have the chance to assert whatever it is he was trying to assert when he was busy not letting Tim in the door before TS came over to investigate.
The Toy Soldier says Tim can bunk with it, or that he can probably have Jonny’s bed since Jonny works most of the way through the night on Fridays. Jonny kicks it, both for going around offering his space and for offering that piece of information when he hasn’t decided how much he wants to share.
“Oh yeah?” Tim asks, “Where are you working?”
He asks it perfectly pleasantly. Jonny wants to hiss like one of the damned octokittens does when he almost sits on it when it’s sleeping in his bed camouflaged in the unstraightened blanket cocoon.
Instead of hissing, he says, “Oh, you know. Places.” then glares the Toy Soldier down in case it gets any big ideas about filling in any of the blanks.
Tim, cross-legged on the floor and swarmed by the purring horde, looks up at him with a question in his eyes. Right there, on the spot, Jonny decides that Tim doesn’t get the answer to any question he can’t be bothered to ask out loud. Instead of saying anything else, he stomps off to start getting ready for work.
He’s half-dressed and glaring at the pile of dirty laundry on his floor like that will get it to give up its secrets, like the fact that his good, tall boot-socks don’t appear to be in it, when he hears a little knock on the side of the frame of his unclosed door. TS never knocks, it’s obviously Tim. Jonny doesn’t turn around.
“Are you really going to stand there and act like you aren’t even a little bit pleased to see me?”
“I have to get ready for work,” Jonny says, digging through one of the stacked cardboard boxes he’s been using for a dresser. He already checked there, but maybe he didn’t check well enough.
“Doing something too mysterious to tell me about?”
“Is this what they teach you at college?” Jonny asks him, finally turning around to stare him down. “How to be as shrewish as humanly possible?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Tim shrugs. “Not sure what else I’m there to learn about.”
“Oh, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for you now? Poor sad Tim is sad again, isn’t it awful how terrible things and terrible people just keep happening to him.” There’s something vicious shifting under Jonny’s skin, he’s got to get out of here before he keeps talking.
“Should I go?” Tim asks, and he sounds like, if Jonny says yes, he’ll do it. He’ll go back off to wherever it is he’s been, and he might not come back again.
“Whatever,” Jonny says, not entirely sure what he means by it. “Take the bed, I don’t care, TS is right, I don’t get back till nearly morning, anyway.”
Tim takes him at his word, apparently — when Jonny gets home later, as late night bleeds into early morning, Tim is there, bare feet sticking out from under the blanket at the end. Jonny wants nothing more in the world than to climb in, pull a blanket over his head, and go dead to the world, but his bed is full of nineteen-year-old boy who he can’t quite figure out why he’s so annoyed with, so before he sits down to pull off his boots, he takes a moment to stare.
Tim looks good, which is annoying, but probably isn’t at the root of the feeling. He’s always fallen asleep disgustingly easily — Jonny has never spent a night with him before, but on evenings over the summers when they’ve built bonfires, half the time, Tim fell asleep beside them, right there on the ground. It’s another thing Jonny could resent him for, if he could just work up the energy.
It’s a couple of hours from light out, though, and his body is tired in the way where it feels like he could fall asleep, too, and that’s not a feeling to squander, so he kicks off his boots, climbs out of his jeans, and forces himself not to feel awkward about climbing into bed. It’s his bed, after all. To prove it, at least in his own mind, he pushes until Tim gives up a bit more space, sighing in his sleep.
When Jonny wakes up the next day, in the early afternoon sunlight, he can hear Tim and the Toy Soldier out in the living room, putting together an obstacle course for the cats, which Jonny refuses to keep calling ‘the kittens’ the way the rest of them do, since the little fleabags are clearly as fully grown as they’re going to get. It occurs to him that somebody needs to go out there and tell Tim and TS that Tim’s contrary little fur-monsters aren’t going to follow any path that’s set out for them, or there will be no one there to be smug about being right when the cats completely ignore the obstacle course to go sleep in a sunbeam. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. Jonny heaves himself out of bed and goes to join them in the living room.
So that’s Saturday, and Saturday night when Jonny gets back from work, Tim is there again, in his bed. Jonny curls one hand around the tendons in the underside of Tim’s thigh, just above the knee, warm and slack with sleep, as he drifts off that night. In the morning, Tim is still there, and then Sunday night, Jonny doesn’t work, and when the Toy Soldier excuses itself to get an early night before the farmers’ market the next day, Tim trails Jonny to bed like it’s a given, and that’s fine, it’s all fine, except that then it’s Monday, and Jonny is pretty sure college students are supposed to be in class on Mondays, and Tim still doesn’t leave.
Instead, he heads down to the farmers’ market while the Toy Soldier is working to see with his own eyes the fact that its current profession requires being personable with the public, and then he comes back to the apartment with a bunch of food he doesn’t know how to cook.
TS doesn’t know how to cook, either, and Jonny would have told anyone in the world that he didn’t know how to cook, too, but there’s not knowing how to cook and then there’s not knowing how to cook, and Jonny may not know how to do too many things, but he knows that what Tim and TS are doing is flirting with a kitchen fire.
He lets it happen for a while, but he shoves them out of the way before anything gets too charred. What they end up with is pretty much edible, and after dinner, Tim is still there, just like he has been for days.
“You really should have a couch, though,” Tim tells Jonny and the Toy Soldier that night, all three jammed into the time fire escape out one of the windows, legs dangling down into the darkness. “Not that I’m complaining about sleeping arrangements,” and here he shoots Jonny this sidelong, smiling look that Jonny has no idea what to do with, “But having one would definitely make it feel more like you actually live here.”
“I’m sorry our interior decorating skills aren’t up to your exacting standards,” Jonny says, suddenly obscurely annoyed.
“I don’t know if a cardboard box dresser meets the minimum standards for being called a decorating choice,” Tim muses. Jonny shoves him, a little harder than is probably advisable for a fire escape this high up. Tim laughs.
“I wouldn’t mind a greater wealth of home furnishings,” The Toy Soldier muses like a traitor, “But sofas don’t grow on trees, you know.”
“At school, a bunch of people found free furniture on some exchange website, I can ask Dan, that’s my roommate—”
“When you get back?” Jonny cuts in to interrupt. “Is that the plan? That you’ll head back to school whenever your — break is over? Are you here on a break? Or are you just drifting from one thing to the next like you’ve got no control over your own life?”
Tim laughs again, but this time it’s a colder sound. “You’re really giving me a hard time for not having a plan?” He asks. “You? Jonny d’Ville?”
Jonny decides he doesn’t know or want to know what that insinuation means. “Well, clearly someone’s got to,” he says, wobbling to his feet enough to climb back in through the window.
Tim follows him in, saying, “If you want me to go, you can just say it,” and then it’s Jonny’s turn to laugh.
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean,” and Jonny thinks he means this — every word coming out of his mouth feels divinely inspired, feels like an immutable truth of the universe — “That your problem is the way you just let life happen to you. College, the fucking car accident, even your own feelings — ‘Oh, I don’t know what came over me,’ like the way you used to go around smashing people’s faces in was just! Out of your hands! Demonic possession! Who knows the fuck what!”
“Right,” Tim says, and Jonny thinks this sinking sensation must be what winning feels like, he thinks he’s got Tim speechless. If there’s a moment to go in for the kill, this is it.
“Tim, can you just, for once in your entire life, ask for what you fucking want?”
Tim stares back, dead-eyed, he looks like he did when Jonny first tried to kiss him, he looks like he did when TS first dragged him over to their lunch spot, he looks barely fucking there, Jonny wants to scratch him till he draws blood just to drag some emotion back in that face, and Tim says, “You know what? I don’t think I will. Not from you, not if you’re going to be an asshole about it.”
That night, Jonny gets his bed back to himself. He can’t sleep, so it’s a pretty useless upside, but he does his best to enjoy it, anyway. He wakes up early, for a given value of waking up which involves only a minimum amount of being asleep to begin with, and when he does, he has the kind of energy under his skin that only a long walk while chain smoking is going to exorcise, probably. On his way out the door, he notices that the Toy Soldier’s door is open a crack. He doesn’t look, he doesn’t care, but he does see that it’s not in there alone, that there’s another sleeping body curled to face it, like a pair of parentheses.
Tim made it sound, the night before, like Jonny doesn’t know how to make or stick to a plan, but his plan to walk around and smoke works so well that he makes it through the pack he started with and has to buy another to start working his way through on the walk home a few hours later. As he’s walking, he does his best not to think about anything, and it’s a skill he’s spent enough time perfecting that he mostly succeeds. When he makes it back to the apartment and finds a large, eye-wateringly orange, obviously second-hand couch dominating what has previously been a fairly minimalist living room, it occurs to him that maybe he should have spent a bit more time clarifying his position in his mind, since it seems like last night’s discussion isn’t over.
TS is collapsed over one arm of the couch, feet kicked out in Jonny’s direction, and when he walks in, it looks up and says, reproachfully, “You could have helped carry, you know.”
It’s a pretty large couch, Jonny can see that it must have been pretty difficult to get up the stairs with just TS and, presumably, Tim. Still, “Well, I didn’t know it was happening, did I?” Jonny snaps, a little defensive. “Also, no I couldn’t, what the hell do we need a couch for?”
And there’s Tim, coming into the living room from the kitchen like he was just waiting for an opening, and he says, “Well, I could sleep there, if you want your bed back,” and then, “I got a job, you know. At that coffee shop down the street? I mean, it’s still your apartment, I don’t have to— but you were talking about me saying what I want, and making choices. So I’m telling you those are some choices that I made.”
He says it calmly, but he keeps drying his hands on the front of his jeans, and it gives him away. That’s fine. Jonny thinks he probably gave some things away, too, when he shouted last night.
It’s not until later that evening, in what Jonny is resigning himself to admitting is going to be a shared bed for the foreseeable future, that he thinks to question a part of this declaration. “So you … what? Went out and batted your eyelashes at the overpriced, hipster-bait coffee shop today, and they hired you on the spot?”
Tim shakes his head, slowly blinking his eyes open, hair fanning its way across the pillow disgustingly cinematically. “Uh-uh. I filled out the application on Friday, on my way here from the bus station. I had an interview yesterday, on my way to see TS do customer service.” He yawns, “I only got the ‘you’re hired’ call today, though."
Rule 15: Cultivate a little low-fi charm
Ashes doesn’t do letters and Jonny doesn’t like to text, so both of them have to compromise by turning to a mutual second-favorite form of communication. “Is that actually a tape deck?” Tim asks.
“What? Yeah, weren’t you and TS going to torture some antique shop or something?” Jonny was pretty sure he was meant to have the apartment to himself for at least another hour. He snaps the brittle plastic case of some stranger’s used mixtape open and shut, open and shut.
“Yeah, we, uh, broke a mirror,” Tim says, dropping down onto the bed beside Jonny, jostling the boombox as he goes. “Hey, were you hiding this from me?”
He doesn’t sound — suspicious, or annoyed, or anything. If anything, he sounds like he thinks the idea of Jonny keeping something from him is kind of funny. Tim jostles his shoulder into Jonny’s shoulder and reaches for the tape.
Jonny snatches it back before he can get a look, and, okay, that look on Tim’s face is a little harder to read. After a moment, grudgingly, Jonny explains, “It doesn’t matter what’s on this one, I was just about to tape over it.”
To emphasize this fact, Jonny flops down on his front, facing the boombox, and slips the tape into one of the slots, reaching for another to load into the other side to record. After a moment, Tim follows him down, till they’re both lying on their stomachs, propped up on their elbows, watching the tape fly as Jonny hits fast-forward till he gets into the right region of the cassette for his chosen song. Gripped by a weird, confiding impulse, mutters, “It’s for Ashes.”
Then he hits play, and just before the first strains of Nick Lowe’s “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” start to play, he hits record. He shoots Tim a warning look to make sure he knows that there will be no replying to anything he just said while the record button is rolling.
I love the sound of breaking glass, / Especially when I’m lonely, the boombox croons. At Jonny’s side, Tim leans in, relaxed and heavy and warm, head resting against Jonny’s own.
Rule 16: Words don’t mean things (except for when they do)
At the open mic, the barista behind the counter comps Jonny’s drink, saying, “You’re Tim’s boyfriend, right?”
This puts Jonny in kind of an awkward position. On the one hand, boyfriend is a terrible word, and he’s not going to use it. Ever. On the other hand, he’s hardly going to turn down a free drink. Grudgingly, he nods, and she breaks into a brilliant smile.
“Oh good! I saw you come in together, but I didn’t want to assume,” she says, and, “Tim’s so mysterious, the fact that he’s playing tonight and that he brought someone is kind of like Christmas.”
She sounds unbearable, Jonny isn’t surprised Tim hasn’t mentioned her. Unfortunately, it’s also not a surprise that she’s more interested in Tim’s life than he is in hers. Across the room, up by the sign-up sheet, Jonny catches a glimpse of Tim, head bowed over a mic and adjusting a wire. Jonny’s boyfriend is distractingly-looking.
Rule 17: Knowledge wants to be free
The kid’s too young, Jonny knows just by looking. He’s about to get handed an absolutely egregious fake ID when he cards this kid, he just knows it. A part of him wants to be benevolent, to just let the kid skate through, but they’ll never learn if nobody teaches them. Instead, he steps down the counter a few paces, to about the place where he’s noticed a blind spot on the security camera, and he asks the kid, “ID?”
The card he gets handed is, indeed, an egregious fake. Jonny starts out with a softball, asking, “Birth date?”
The kid rattles it off easily — which is just the baseline, for the care and feeding of baby’s first fake ID, but it’s good to see they’ve at least got the basics down. “Street address?” he asks, and the answer to that comes as quick as the first. “Favorite color?”
“Red,” the kid says, and then, “..wait. Uh—”
“It’s not a trick question, kid,” Jonny says, still enjoying the confusion. “Hey, I’m going to give this back to you, okay, but just as a keepsake. I wouldn’t go trying to use it again, the weight of the plastic’s all wrong, it gives you away.”
Wide-eyed, the kid takes the card back silently. In the space that the lack of reply leaves, Jonny goes on, “You’re probably going to want to shell out for a better-quality fake before you try it again — I know it hurts, the good ones really are so much more expensive, but it’s worth it for the way they actually work. A cheapo one like this one, you’re pretty much throwing that money away, however little it was.”
Silently, the kid nods. Jonny is feeling pretty benevolent, so he leans forward to offer, in a conspiratorial whisper, “The best ones are always the actual IDs, if you can get someone who’s moving out of state to sell you one. If you know any college kids, get them to ask around for you.”
Again, the kid nods, before asking, “So, uh, can I still buy—”
“No, you cannot,” Jonny says, and the feeling of power in being on this side of this transaction is a little thrilling. “What I’ve given you tonight is more valuable than,” he looks down at the counter to verify what he’s supposed to be ringing up, “A couple of packs of truly disgusting — wait, is that price right?” He turns back to the kid, “Good eye, that’s a really good deal. But no, the thing I’ve given you is much more valuable, and that is my wisdom.”
The kid, who doesn’t look too impressed with that line of thought, turns to leave.
Ah, the next generation. It’s beautiful. “Go forth and sin some more,” Jonny tells the kid’s retreating back as they vanish into the night through the sliding glass door.