despite his planning role, had nothing to do with setup—and so they barely had their coats off before a dozen people ran to see them. Or, rather, to see Charlie. Not that they didn’t want to see Yale, not that he wasn’t their friend. But everyone had urgent and hilarious things to tell Charlie. Teddy’s friend Katsu Tatami, a counselor at Howard Brown, came bounding across the room like a gazelle. Katsu, despite being Japanese, had ended up with hazel eyes. He said, “We got like two hundred people up here! We’re gonna run out of raffle tickets!” Katsu fetched them both beers, because Charlie wasn’t going to make it to the bar without being stopped twenty times.
It was the regular crowd mostly. Which was comforting but always a bit disappointing: It would be nice, one day, to see people who hadn’t been at the last fundraiser, and the one before that. To see an alderman, a straight doctor or two.
The silent auction wrapped the edges of the room—donated wine baskets and concert tickets and a free hotel night downtown courtesy of Charlie’s travel agency—but the room was so crowded Yale couldn’t make his way around to see everything.
He spotted Fiona and Julian in deep debate, Fiona talking with her hands. Bird hands, he’d told her once, and she’d fluttered her fingers up to his face, flapped them on his cheeks. He thought he should maybe rescue her; Fiona, as intense as she was herself, found Julian exhausting. “He’s like a mouthful of Pop Rocks,” she said once. “And I like Pop Rocks! I do! They’re sweet, and he’s sweet. I’m not being mean. But you don’t want a whole mouthful.”
Richard took photographs, as Yale had suggested: candid shots of people eating and laughing and talking. His camera was such a permanent appendage that no one much noticed—the key, Richard said, to getting great photos.
Teddy came up to congratulate Charlie on the event before turning to Yale and asking if Evanston was even colder than the city today. “You’re so far up the lake!” he said. He kept rotating the pint of beer in his hand. His face looked fine, his nose looked fine. A scar right at the bridge to match the one on his upper lip. Then he said, “Have you seen Terrence?” Actually he whispered it. Yale scanned the room for Terrence’s lanky frame, his wire-rimmed glasses. “It’s not good,” Teddy said. And then Yale saw him, and Charlie must have, too, because he gave a low gasp and turned immediately back. Yale had thought the idea was that Terrence would look bleak, maybe have lost some weight since they’d seen him at Thanksgiving. What was that, two weeks ago? But Terrence was propped against the wall like a scarecrow, his head completely shaved, his cheeks sunken in. If it weren’t for the glasses, Yale might not have placed him. His skin, once warm and rich, was the color of a walnut shell. He looked barely able to lift his head.
“Bloody hell,” Charlie whispered.
“I mean, he’s sick,” Teddy said. “He was always sick, but now he’s sick. Like, his T cells are fucked. The Rubicon is crossed. He should be in the hospital. I don’t know why he’s here.”
Charlie said, “He was fine! Two weeks ago he was fine!”
Yale said, “Two weeks ago he looked fine.”
Charlie said, “And now he looks like Gandhi. Oh my God. Oh my God.” Yale thought Charlie would go over to him, but he didn’t yet. He headed for the bar with his empty glass.
The beer was good. He should remember to eat. He needed to talk to Terrence, needed to see how Terrence was doing, but he wasn’t ready to cross the room to where Terrence now sat by the wall in a chair, Julian and some old guy flanking him. He wasn’t sure he could keep a steady expression on his face, didn’t know how not to look horrified. And so he headed back to the bar, where he bumped up behind a woman in a purple dress. She turned and said, “Yale!” and he breathed beer into his windpipe. It was Cecily Pearce. An inch taller than him thanks to her heels, blue eye shadow she’d never have worn at work. “I’m delighted to see you! I should have known!”
He wasn’t sure what she meant, exactly, and so he said, “My partner was on the planning committee.”
“Oh, is he here? I came with friends, but they’re making out with