The Roommate Situation (6 page)

“What else is there time for? I go for rides on my bike.”

“Until it’s too cold.”

“No such thing.”

“What else?” I pull my legs in and prop my elbows on my knees, the can of Natty Ice between my fingers.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Between school and work—I mean, it’s not just making the leather. I’ve gotta do the listings, ship the packages. I try to keep track of my expenses and income, which, I’ve gotta tell you, isn’t my favorite part, especially come tax time. It’s too bad you’re not taking accounting.”

“Better luck next roommate,” I say.

“I’ll take you over the last one. I can enjoy a good ballgame every now and then, but I don’t need to be surrounded by sports 24/7.”

“My dad only gets into basketball,” I say.

“What do you get into?”

“Music. I used to play soccer, and it was fun, but I’d rather play guitar.”

“I was in Little League for a while,” he says, and I can picture that, him with a plastic batting helmet on, tapping the end of the bat against home plate, lifting it up over his shoulder, squinting into the sun: ten-year-old Derek McClain with a number on his shirt, waiting for the pitch. I bet he spit in the dirt too.

“I liked it,” he says, “but my dad’s shift changed. Getting a ride became a pain in the ass.”

“I stayed in soccer until I didn’t make the team in high school.” I don’t remember rides being an issue; if my mom couldn’t make it, Jamie Douglas’s mom could. Or Taylor’s. Or anyone else on the team. “Where was your mom?” I ask.

He flutters his fingers in the air. Then he switches his toothpick back to the other side of his mouth and gets to his feet. “Break’s over. Back to the books.”

“I haven’t finished my beer.”

He smiles as he says, “Guess you’ll have to chug it.”

I follow him over the lip of the can, watching him return to his side of the room, his boots still on from going out to get the beer.

* * * *

A beer and a half isn’t enough for this, but my confidence is bolstered—or my sanity is shot—by successfully completing and even, I think, understanding two chapters of astronomy, so once Derek’s settled on the floor with his back against my locker again, I go ahead and say it: “You should take photos of people wearing your stuff. It’d sell better.”

He scratches his neck. “What, like a guy holding up his shirt so you can see his belt?”

“Maybe not the belts.”

“Pulling a wallet out of his pocket?”

“The other stuff,” I say. I know he’s just fucking with me.

He says, “Ah.”

The beer can’s denting a little under my fingers, but I’ve gone this far. “The chest harness, at least,” I say. “It just looks like spaghetti lying there on the poster board or whatever.”

His eyebrows lift.

“Chuck had your eBay seller name. His tutor knows you or something.”

“So you all had a good look, huh?” He pushes to his feet, sliding back up the locker just like he’d slid down.

I shrug a little, feeling like an asshole. Not like I’ve
been
an asshole, but how he could see it as I’ve been an asshole. “It’s just stuff,” I say. “He just showed us the screen, and then we went on talking about something else.” I hit surer footing there. “That’s one thing about Chuck—he doesn’t stay on any one subject more than a minute. Anyway, it was before you told me you made that stuff, so I didn’t even know if it was really true. That it was you, I mean. It could have been anybody’s account.”

Derek crushes his empty can and says, “Well, back to work. See you in another hour.”

“I’m supposed to be buying a round, right?” I lean forward, looking into Derek’s area.

“You can buy the next six-pack.”

“You’ll have to use your connection.”

“Not a problem,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“Get to work.”

* * * *

At the next break, he pours his beer into a plastic cup, running it down the inside so it doesn’t foam. He has an unlit cigarette between his teeth instead of a toothpick. Getting out of the room for a few minutes sounds like a fine idea to me, so I swallow the last of the water at the bottom of my Richland Rockets cup and fill it with beer.

The evening had turned dark. Only a few stars bother to twinkle through the clouds. The air has a chill to it, but it feels good after being cooped up inside. We’re technically standing off campus, but just.

“So,” I say, “did you really luck out and get a room to yourself? Before I showed up, that is.”

He taps ash off his cigarette. “I was supposed to have a roommate, but he never showed up.”

“And you had one last year?”

“Both years. Different guys.” He side-eyes me. “Both of them lived.”

“Lucky asshole.”

After a moment, he says, “It must have been fucked-up, finding your roommate like that.”

I push my hands deeper into my pockets. “Fucked-up is one way to put it.”

“If you ever want to talk about it.”

“I think what I need to do,” I say, “is not talk, if that’s okay. About that, I mean. Anything else is fair game.” The whole Skip thing had started to fade back into a nice, safe closet. I kind of liked it to stay there.

“Fair enough.” He takes another drag.

I watch a group of people pass on the other side of the street, the campus side, laughing.

“Does it get easier?” I ask.

“What—people dying?”

“Classes. Once you get past the boring introductory stuff.”

He shrugs. “It’s a lot of work the whole way through, I guess. Do you need help with any of your classes? I mean, I never took economics, but—”

“Not unless you can help make them less mind-numbingly fucking boring.”

He smiles. “Probably not.”

“The beer does help,” I say.

A couple of girls are headed in our direction, dressed to go out, deep in conversation: “He said he was studying in the library and turned his phone off, but that doesn’t even begin to explain—”

I watch them pass, watching Derek out of the corner of my eye at the same time. Watching him watch the tops of the buildings on campus. Watching him lift his cigarette to his mouth.

“So,” I say, “if someone was willing to model your stuff, would you use them?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Would you pay them?”

He drops the cigarette on the sidewalk, grinds it out with his foot. “I couldn’t pay much. I don’t make all that much. Are you offering?”

“As long as you don’t include my head in the photo.” There. It was out. My solution to paying for a guitar.

He slides his gaze toward me. It’s a quick appraisal; then he’s stepping off the sidewalk, his hands in his jacket pockets. “Let me think about it,” he says as I fall in step.

“At least the chest harness.”

“You’re just dying to try that on, aren’t you?”

“No, not especially.” I want to try the cuffs on, on both wrists this time. For more than a few seconds. When I’m not shell-shocked. I have no idea where that’s coming from, the memory of their feel in my hands, of that one Derek put on my wrist to show off how it worked. What were they like with locks on them? My head swims a little as we climb the steps to the building. My arms can almost sense what it would be like to have my wrists locked together.

I say, “The harness just doesn’t look that interesting, lying there like it is.”

“Like a pile of spaghetti.”

“Fettuccini. The other sellers put theirs on mannequins, which is better, but I don’t think that looks all that great either. Though…”

He yanks the door to the building open, and when I don’t finish my sentence, he says, “What?”

My face is hot. I’ve been running my mouth and— Damn. I say, “Of course, if the chest harness is meant for a woman…”

“Like I give a shit who wears them,” he says.

He heads for the stairwell. “The harnesses are the worst seller, so you might be right. It isn’t presented right.”

“There you go. Raise the price a few bucks, and give me a cut. If it still doesn’t sell, you’re not out anything. If it does, you’re still not out anything, and I make a little money every time one goes out the door.”

“Maybe you should switch to business instead of economics,” he says.

“Yeah, because that doesn’t sound just as fucking boring.”

“All right,” he says, shedding his jacket in the room. “Back to work.”

Chapter Six

“Late night last night?” Chuck asks as I slump into a seat across the table from him.

“Astronomy can go fuck itself.” I’d seen the dark circles in the bathroom mirror when I’d shaved this morning. Derek and I had polished off the six-pack—it only took three hours of studying. After another hour, it would have been my turn to buy, but by then we were both having trouble keeping our eyes open.

“How’d Pete’s date go?” I ask.

“No idea. I was asleep when he got in, and he was gone by the time I woke up.”

“How do you even know he came home?”

“He woke me up leaving. Didn’t answer my text, though,” Chuck says, unscrewing the cap off a grape Nehi.

“The one that said,
Meet me at the food, byatches
?” I ask. “Maybe he found true love.”

“Maybe he was kidnapped into a sex-slavery ring,” he says. “She could have been a front. Maybe she got in his way on purpose, made him spill his beer on her. Maybe it wasn’t even
his
beer on her shirt. The whole thing was probably rigged.”

“Poor Pete,” I say.

Chuck rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. He looks like he’d spent the past thirty-six hours in bed.

“Feeling any better?” I ask.

“Still pissed I slept through Saturday night and now it’s almost Monday again. Well, speak of the devil.”

I crank my head to see Pete approaching with a tray full of lunch. The first thing I say is, “Hey, is The Leaf hiring?” I’m kind of on a moneymaking high, despite not having actually made any money—or done any work for it—yet. Pete busses tables at The Leaf. They require black trousers and a white button-down shirt even for the busboys, which just happens to match my church clothes.

Pete says, “Not that I know of.”

“Work is for losers anyway,” Chuck says. “As well as for the occasional fine, upstanding go-getter like Pete here.” He flips a french fry at him, and Pete swears and wipes ketchup off his arm with a napkin. “So fill us in. You showed up at the door with the clean shirt. She yanks you inside by the belt loops. Boom-chicka-boom…”

“That’s not far off, except for the boom-chicka-boom,” Pete says.

“What happened?” I ask.

“When I got there, she was freaking out. She had a report due tomorrow, had it nearly finished after ten hours of work, and her computer stopped responding. So she yanked the door open, said, ‘Forget the shirt. What do you know about computers?’ and dragged me inside.”

“And?” Chuck says, eating it up along with his fries.

“And I took a look and lucked out. It was the same thing that happened to me last year. Took about ten minutes to remember how I’d fixed it. Her desktop came back up; her work was there and intact.”

“Boom-chicka-boom,” Chuck says.

Pete smiles. “She took me out for ice cream to thank me for saving her life.”

“Ice cream, pah.” Chuck takes a pull off his soda. “That was blowjob-worthy heroism, and all you got was a sugar cone.”

Pete shrugs.

“So then what?” I ask.

“So we hung out and talked. Turns out she’s from the same town as my cousins. She went to school with them. We talked about school, what we want to do with our lives, whatever.” He shrugs again. “I had a good time. We’re getting together tonight after work.”

“Better be some boom-chicka-boom, or I’m gonna start worrying about you, son,” Chuck says. “If you need the room, just shoot me a text, and I’ll hide in my locker.”

“Yeah, I think we’re just going for coffee for now.”

Chuck shakes his head slowly. “What am I gonna do with you?”

* * * *

On my way back to the residence hall, I meet up with Derek. In the stairwell, the crisp fall air coming off him is hard to ignore. He smells like he stood in the wind on the top of a mountain with his arms wide open.

“What’ve you been up to?” I ask.

“Went for a ride. Too nice a day not to.”

“I used to want a bike so bad.” Derek’s right: days like this are no doubt perfect for riding. The sky’s a clean blue; the leaves are just starting to turn crimson and orange.

“So get you one someday,” he says.

I smile. “You make it sound easy.”

“Weren’t too hard to get mine.” He’s grinning as he says it. “You still interested in doing the photo thing?”

“Sure.”

“I figure we can try the chest harness,” he says, “see if makes a difference. I’ll raise the price by five bucks. If it sells, that’s your cut. Every time I reuse the photo, you get another cut when it sells.”

“Okay.” I follow Derek into the room.

“You want to do it now, while the light’s good?” Sunlight streams through the windows on his side of the room.

“Sure.”

While he pulls a box out from under his bed, I stand around until I realize I’m going to have to take my shirt off for this.

“You’re keeping my head out of the picture, right?” I ask.

“Uh-huh.”

I grasp the bottom of my shirt and pull it up and off, drop it on my bed. The air stiffens my nipples. I guess that’s good for the photo. “Do you have a girlfriend?” I ask, thinking of Pete.

“Yeah.”

An unsettled feeling uncurls in my gut, like I’m disappointed to hear the answer. I guess I’m kind of used to thinking of having Derek to myself.

He says, “I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.” Tissue paper crinkles on his side of the room. “What with her being over here all the time, always sending me texts and ringing my phone off the hook.”

I roll my eyes and turn away, hiding my smile.

“You sure about this?” he asks.

When I turn, he’s shaking out the straps of the harness. It looks bigger than it had in the pictures, the straps wider.

“What am I supposed to be worried about?” I ask. “Someone who saw me walking back from the shower recognizes my chest when he goes online looking for bondage gear? Are
you
sure about this? What if someone you know looks at your listings and sees some guy modeling your stuff?”