just a future conversation. How ridiculous to be scolded and warned over what was essentially a pipe dream. He felt for her, he did, but acid was burning his throat. The wind tore at his skin.
* * *
—
Yale and Charlie had long held tickets to see Julian in Hamlet at Victory Gardens. “Well,” Julian had said when he invited them, “not so much at Victory Gardens as in it. Like, on off nights.” The show was put on by the Wilde Rumpus Company, and this was how it operated—in other people’s theaters, on nights when the house would otherwise be dark.
It was the last show Nico had set-designed. He’d just completed the sketches when he got sick, and the company had executed things as faithfully as it could. Julian was the one who’d introduced Nico to the theater world, who’d hooked him up with the company. But then Nico was the kind of guy who made you want to do things for him. He always smiled so earnestly, looked so pleasantly shocked that you’d be willing to do him some small favor.
Yale rushed home from Evanston and changed out of his mud-smeared slacks only to find that Charlie was suddenly uninterested in attending. He was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “Did you see what they wrote in the Reader?” he said. “They called it ‘unnerving.’”
“It’s Hamlet,” Yale said. “It’s supposed to be unnerving.”
“Do you know how long that play is? We’ll be old before it’s over.”
Yale had taken off his loafers and was slipping his feet, again, into Nico’s shoes. They’d stretched a bit, the leather holding the shape of his toes.
“Oh,” Charlie said, “your dad called, I think.”
Yale’s father always phoned within the first few days of the month—regularly enough that Yale assumed it was something he scheduled, an item on his to-do list, like checking the batteries in the smoke detectors. It wasn’t an insult; it was just the way his father’s accountant brain worked. But if Charlie picked up, Leon Tishman wouldn’t leave a message, would just stammer that he must have misdialed. Five years ago, when Yale was so newly in love with Charlie that he couldn’t help shouting it from the rooftops, he’d tried telling his father he was in a relationship. His father said something like “Bop bop bop bop bop,” a sound effect to cover Yale’s voice, to stop his talking.
Yale said, “He was due for a call.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t say anything. Bit unusual. Just breathing.”
“Could be your secret admirer,” Yale said. “Was it heavy breathing?”
But Charlie didn’t find it funny. He said, “Anyone else it might’ve been? Because it was odd.”
Yale didn’t like the direction this was headed. He could have gotten defensive, or he could have just reassured Charlie, but instead he said, “Nico did promise to haunt us.”
Charlie rolled over, buried his face in the pillow. He said, muffled, “I really don’t want to go tonight.”
“Come on, get up. Let’s just do the first half, so you can say you saw the set design.”
“I do want to see the set. I just don’t want to watch the play.”
“What’s this about? Julian? Because I don’t get it. We can’t suddenly not have friends just because you’re going through this paranoid phase.”
“Don’t start that,” Charlie said, and Yale was about to counter that he hadn’t really started it, but Charlie was sitting up now, opening the dresser to change his socks.
* * *
—
It was an all-male production, Ophelia and Gertrude in drag, and not only were Guildenstern and Julian’s Rosencrantz clearly meant to be a couple, so were Hamlet and Horatio. Yale found it all darkly hilarious, with lines like “What a piece of work is a man” suddenly taking on new meaning, but Charlie didn’t laugh, kept folding his program.
Nico’s set design was bleak and postapocalyptic. Hamlet didn’t live in a castle, apparently, but an alleyway—all fire escapes and dumpsters. It was strangely beautiful, if slightly more suited to West Side Story. If Nico had been around to oversee things, Yale imagined he might have added more color, graffiti, light.
Julian looked, as always, made for the stage. His dark hair glowed like wet paint.
In high school, Yale had wished he’d had the acting bug. He didn’t want the social fallout, but he wanted, desperately, something to talk about with the guys who got up there and, with no apparent self-consciousness, sang and even danced their way through Guys and Dolls, through Camelot. But the thought of going