…
God. I didn’t want to encourage this behavior and let Luke think he was allowed to be the humorous one, but I breathed out a laugh. “Okay, that one was funny,” I admitted.
“Yeah?” His voice sounded pleased.
“Yeah, I liked that one.” Hey, my voice sounded pleased too.
Suddenly, talking to Luke became fun and something I enjoyed, the way it should be, not a burden or a chore. I had a happy little smile on my face when we were done chatting, which I didn’t really notice until it slipped off my face when I noticed my roommate staring.
My roommate Jeremey was buff and looked like he spent time outside, unlike the rest of us pale nerds here who looked like the sun was something we’d only heard of but never encountered in real life. Was it really hot like they say? Either there was some of type of Affirmative Action program for meatheads that let him get in here or despite his exterior, he had a brain under all his muscles.
He usually looked at me like he wanted to kill me and eat me for dinner. No, he wasn’t even going to make a meal out of me and use my skeleton for science. He was just gonna kill me, throw me away, then go and kill a deer with his bare hands for dinner.
He barely spoke to me. Sometimes he tried, then shook his head and looked disgusted and walked away. So. That wasn’t great. However, he did back down first a moment ago, so I met his stare head on, silently challenging him, which was the only way I could challenge him as he was much bigger than me.
His face reddened and his darted eyes around, but his gaze kept coming back to me and finally he asked, “You have an asexual friend?” Wasn’t expecting that and I probably looked confused or annoyed from him listening in, so he continued, “You’re the one who came back in here and you’re also really loud.”
“So what? Why does it matter?” My tone was a bit aggressive and confrontational but that was how to handle predators bigger than you. Or at least with brown bears.
“Well, just, uh,” he stammered. “You’re gay and you know an asexual person and then there’s Morgan, uh.” He stopped then, like maybe it was my turn to speak, but I didn’t know where he was going with any of this.
When in doubt? Always pick sarcasm. Even when not in doubt, sarcasm was still an excellent choice. “Yeah, if I get my gay card stamped by everyone in the community, then I get a free sandwich.”
“You get cards?” He frowned. “I don’t have one.”
I rolled my eyes. “Life must be so hard for straight people.” Also, I wouldn’t say no to a card like that. Free sandwiches just for making friends with other people in the queer community!
“No, oh. I just. Uh.” He fidgeted in his chair, looking awkward and uncomfortable and I should really be more patient because I lived a lot of my life in awkward and uncomfortable ways, but I just couldn’t take any more at the moment.
“Well?” I prompted impatiently. “Spit it out.”
He looked at me with panic in his eyes, opened his mouth, closed it, and then got up. “Have a good night,” he mumbled quickly while grabbing the book he’d been reading from his desk and exiting quickly. He wasn’t even wearing shoes. Weird. Whatever. I shook my head and thought about my conversation with Luke instead.
I’d been ready to go all crazy. Yet Luke had ways of stopping that sometimes. Probably an important survival skill when dating a Ryan, but also just something about him. He was determined to make me laugh. It might suck but we would get through it. That seemed true again. We would try again. Nobody got everything right on the first try. Certainly not us. The important thing was to try again. Especially with something so important, we had to try again.
* * *
Lydia
The thing I liked best about my relationship with Alicia, compared to say, Luke and Ryan’s relationship—besides that Alicia was a girl—was how much better we were than them. Maybe it’s because we were women, better at talking and in touch with our emotions. Maybe that was bullshit. Emotions were so annoying. I didn’t have them as much when I was doing the lone wolf thing but now that I had friends and a girlfriend? My stupid feelings were always there feeling things. It sucked.
The real reason Alicia and I had less problems than Ryan and Luke? I figured we were just better.
We didn’t have any stupid misunderstandings or miscommunications that made everything worse. Or we didn’t until now. Alicia thought we would be having sex? Where had that come from? Even talking about it felt delicate because she was asexual and I wasn’t. That was, like, the one way we weren’t compatible, but we were on the same page in every other way.
I wanted to push these thoughts out of my mind for a little while. Now wasn’t the time to bring them up. Not when we were in public at the little diner in town and hanging out with Luke, but it was all I could think about while Luke and I sat on one side of the table with Alicia on the other.
My girlfriend provided a much better view than Luke. Her dyed red hair looked the same, but she was wearing a light blue shirt and shorts because she’d been at her camp counsellor job earlier.
Alicia and Luke were busy complaining about their jobs. “Yeah, you do heavy lifting and manual labor,” she told Luke. “But I’m outside a lot too and there’s children.” My girlfriend and Luke were currently competing to see who had the most terrible job.
“Cleaning up after animals is worse,” Luke argued.
Animals were slightly less annoying than people because they couldn’t talk but neither was that great. I hated to disagree with Alicia, especially when I could be disagreeing with Luke instead, but his job was worse because not only was it labor intensive, he had to be Luke while doing it.
We were at the diner for dessert. Alicia and I ordered regular sundaes, hers with chocolate and mine with caramel, okay fine there were two areas where we disagreed. Luke ordered a banana split. Banana. Split. He was asking, maybe even begging, to be mocked.
I was going to insult Luke.
