arms up exultantly. Somehow we were hugging each other.
“God,” he said, breaking away to stare off somewhere, then at me. “This calls for some hot chocolate.”
Of course, the cafeteria was closed by this time, so we had to make our way back to the Academy Café in the rear of Galloway. We waited in line at the cashier with our cups, trailing water from our clothes, our hair. The cashier raised his eyebrows at us.
“I don’t have any clean clothes,” I realized aloud. I’d been meaning to do the laundry today.
Zach hesitated, his gaze flicked down and away. Then his eyes met mine: splashes of water, clouds, racing in the wet.
“I can spare you some,” he said.
I was not going to write that paper. I was not going to write that paper. My delinquency had never made me happier.
I trudged beside him through the rain in the direction of the residential quad, holding my hot cup. In his room, I suddenly realized how wet and dirty I was. “Radiator’s warm,” he suggested, and coughed. “We’re actually going to get pneumonia, though,” he said with a slight frown.
“Here.” He set his shoes and socks by the radiator, offered me a nightshirt and a pair of sweatpants to change into. He stripped out of his own shirt and jeans without a glance at me, revealing bronze skin, threw them on top of the radiator.
It made me stupidly happy, how well I fit into his clothes. I toweled my face off, any lingering wet on my body, and then we sat cross-legged next to the radiator, beside our sodden shoes and dripping clothes. I sipped my hot chocolate. The silence deepened, but we were close, our legs almost touching, until I pushed mine against his, gently. He set his empty cup down and I stretched out on the floor beside him. My hand found his; he let me hold it.
His leg brushed against my head and I pressed my cheek to his thigh, stared up at him.
Alex had pushed me away. Had he found someone to replace me?
But I couldn’t think about Alex now.
I pushed myself up, and into Zach. He closed his eyes and I kissed him. We tried to fit our arms around each other, our bodies into each other.
“You taste like chocolate,” he said pensively.
He brushed a leg against mine. We stayed like that for a minute or an hour, and it was uncomfortable, but also the best. Alice seemed strangely distant, not even real. We weren’t together; I’d barely seen her since our first week at Westing, but she’d be hurt. Was it my fault she’d be hurt? A voice in my head insisted: yes.
“As much as I don’t want to move—” I started.
“Because you’re drifting into my eyes—”
“Yes, that. As much as I don’t want to, my whole body is numb. If only there were a more comfortable place for two boys to lie.”
He tousled my hair, which nearly killed me.
“Very sly,” he said. “If only all my constituents were so subtle.”
“Mention your constituents. One. More. Time. Zach.”
I pulled both of us up, then pushed him gently onto his bed with a sheepish grin. I turned the lights off and jumped onto the bed after him, hit my head on the wall, and laughed.
“I’m so awkward,” I said as I slid under the covers and lay facing him.
The brush of his hair against my forehead made me feel real.
I wanted to tell him I liked that he said God all the time, and that he had led me on a race through the rain, that he would’ve won, that he’d let it be a tie, that his boxers were blue, that he smelled like clean clothes and rain, that he had a radiator, that he was sick, that he existed at all, that there was a world with Zach in it, that I could reach out and touch him, feel that he, too, was real.
I wanted to do more than just lie there, but I couldn’t.
He might say no.
He might push me away.
Before he fell asleep, he whispered into my ear, “By the way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m starting a club.”
“Of course you are.”
“I want you to be in it.” He paused. “It’s Polo.”
“Uh,” I said. “Like, with horses?”
“Don’t worry about trivialities, Noah.”
And then he was snoring into my ear.
POLO
I dragged my roommate Marty along to Polo Club’s first meeting, without telling him what I was dragging him to.
“It’s a surprise,” I explained.
“Noah.”
“Oh, come on. Hurry up,” I said, cutting across the