“Dick hands —”
He hits the stairs.
I can hear Benson from somewhere downstairs, mild and unbothered. “Who has dick hands?”
“This asshole.” Stanley’s voice, on the landing, pointing up at me. “Is jerking off into the toilet bowl.”
Benson pauses and then he says, “You jerk off over the toilet?”
From the kitchen, Rowan starts rolling in laughter.
“Fuck every single one of you,” I mutter, and I cross the hall. I shut my bedroom door behind me and close my eyes.
I hear Stanley coming up the stairs. He stops outside my door. He doesn’t open it. He doesn’t even try the handle. He just leans, I can hear it, his shoulder against the wood.
“Hey,” he says.
I don’t answer.
“Golding.”
“What?”
“You good.”
His voice has dropped a register. He’s not doing the bit anymore. This is the part of Stanley that he doesn’t show anyone. Nobody outside this house gets to see it because Stanley doesn’t let anybody outside this house see it. He runs his mouth for ninety percent of every interaction and the other ten percent is this — quiet, on the other side of a closed door, asking a real question in a voice that doesn’t expect an answer.
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine, Stan.”
A pause.
Then, the volume coming back up like a dial being turned. “All right, brother. I’m gonna go tell Benson and Rowan everything I just saw.”
“I will end you.”
“You can’t end me, Blue. You love me.”
“I don’t love you.”
“You love me a normal amount.”
“I tolerate you.”
“That’s the same thing.”
I hear him push off the door and his footsteps go back down the stairs. When he walks into the kitchen, he immediately starts narrating, and Rowan laughs like a hyena again. I hear Benson sayingStanley, leave him alone,in the same tone he uses to break up scrums in front of the net.
Then I hear, faintly, “We’re going to the bar tonight. I’m taking Golding out. The man needs help.”
I close my eyes.
The bar Stanley picks isn’t a college bar.
It’s a real bar. Wood top, scarred at the edges from twenty years of drinks set down too hard. The kind of TV mounted in the corner that runs the game with the sound off and the closed captions on. Three older guys at the far end nursing whiskey on the rocks like men with nowhere else to be. A couple at a booth eating burgers in silence the way only married people can eat in silence. A bartender who’s known Stanley since freshman year because Stanley knows everyone everywhere within a forty-mile radius and has the same effect on bartenders that he has on the rest of us, which is to be tolerated.
