cute.
I needed to stop thinking about Zach.
I needed to stop using Alice to make myself feel better.
So for a while, I skipped out on Polo Club.
I AwayWeWatched a lot of movies on my laptop. Homeless children being rounded up and harvested for their dreams. A world government that ends war, poverty, crime by implanting everyone with chips that monitor their behavior and location at all times.
I spent nights trying to catch Raj, who proved elusive.
On Christmas night I arrived at Galloway 407 armed with ample volumes of eggnog, and was welcomed like a hero, and drank like a hero while the DJ alternated between shitty songs from MaxBeats and shitty songs from the Farsiders—at one point I got up on a chair. It wobbled under my feet as I spoke:
“If I am to be harvested to save the life of some Columbia professor of art history living in SoHo or NoHo or MoFo, then the least I can do is pass along some cirrhosis as well.”
AWAY WE TUNE
Lyrics Database: The Farsiders—“The Other Side”
The walls we live behind
The sick, the poor, the blind.
Everyone’s so busy
Differentiating ugly from pretty.
Everyone’s so glad
With the views from their heights,
They can’t tell good from bad,
Or dark from the light.
So bring on the pills and the drink,
Weekend projects, fix the kitchen sink.
Bring on the duck confit in Le Chateaux,
All that’s missing from life is a nice gâteau.
Children, children, you’ve got to choose!
Skip along your merry way,
Do the dishes, pretend to pray,
Pretend you’re a color other than blue,
Or fuck the walls, come for a ride
We’ll take you to the other side.
Flushed faces stared up at me with admiration. One of them spoke: “Get the fuck out of my holiday airspace, you bitch-ass.”
I got my bitch-ass the fuck out of his holiday airspace.
Then I was making out with a profoundly annoying boy named Juan, because Raj had gone into a room with Cassidy, and this had left me with another small hole in my heart. It was deflating fast, my heart, so Juan would have to do. He was one of Marty’s theater friends, the assistant director on Marty’s spring production, but more interestingly, at nineteen and a half, he was a super-senior, a rare breed at Westing, since nobody stayed around that long. We hadn’t started rehearsal yet, so I knew Juan only in theory, from a distance, but, longevity aside, my impression of him was that he was one of those effortlessly good-looking kids who know they’re effortlessly good-looking, who do not appear affected by the meds at all; I disliked him on principle.
So one moment I had his tongue in my mouth in Galloway 407, and the next I had his tongue in my mouth in a room I didn’t recognize, in a bed I didn’t recognize. I put a hand on his chest, disoriented, unsure of how I’d gotten wherever I was, but he kept kissing me. He was in his boxers. I had only my jeans on.
“I’m a good person,” he was saying, “Or shit, I try to be, yeah?” His hand was in my jeans, I realized, but I felt distanced from the situation, enough so that I started laughing, because my zipper was giving him trouble.
“I think it’s—it’s all relative,” I said as he continued to struggle with my zipper, so I decided to help him, kicking my jeans off, onto the floor. But my words had given him a pause. He cupped my balls through the fabric of my underwear and asked, “Have you read Hume?” and I didn’t know if I wanted my balls cupped or not. My balls and I were miles apart.
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what exactly I was responding to.
“Shit, I got so much hate on that guy,” he said, laughing. “Fucking Hume. Okay, okay. Let’s say for a minute or a second or whatever that you’re right, Noah, yeah yeah? It’s only society looking out for its own self-interest and individuals in society looking out for their own self-interest. Now tell me something. You ever love someone? ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,’ AwayWeRead Romance Pick of the Minute, and you know. Just say yes. Say yes.”
“I don’t believe in love,” I said. “I believe in porn.”
“Of course you’d say that. How did I know he would say that? Look, whatever. Just pretend you’re in love with me, yeah?” He shifted closer, put a leg over mine.
I could’ve left. But I knew I wouldn’t. He was attractive enough that you could love him