Page 8 of Footlights and Forever

“Dylan, I…”

“I was being serious.” I tapped the edge of the book. “We need to get a start on this. We wouldn’t want to waste your time. Just out of interest, what course are you going to be taking in college?”

Austin smiled. Walking across the room towards me, he rested his butt on the edge of my desk and reached into his back pocket. He placed an envelope down on the desk in front of me and gestured for me to open it. I held the envelope between my fingers and pulled out the cream paper within.

“Dear Mr. Ridge, we are pleased to offer you a conditional place here at New York University, New York campus. The course you will be undertaking is Theatre as a Major with a Filmmaking Minor program.” I placed the paper back in the white envelope and passed it back to him. My heart beat wildly in my chest, the thrill of expectation buzzing under my skin.

“So yeah.” He smiled shyly.

I watched as his hand fiddled with the envelope, his fingers skimming the edges of the paper nervously as if he expectedme to mock him or something. Not really thinking of the consequences I reached across and placed my hand on top of his, stilling his motions and giving his hand a small squeeze. “Wow Austin, really well done.” I offered him a bright smile, which he returned. “That is really impressive.”

“Well…”

“No I’m serious, it’s a big deal. I mean wow! You really are a theatre nerd.”

“Hey!” he frowned.

“I’m kidding.” I held up my hands. “But I do mean it. Well done.”

“Thank you.” He plucked the paper from my hand and folded it back, placing it carefully back inside the envelope. “How about you?”

“Me?”

“Like, where have you said yes to?”

I reached inside my desk drawer and pulled out the small stack of envelopes tied together by one of my sister’s old hair bands and laid them on the desk in front of him.

“Wow, bragger.”

“Ass.” I win. “But I only said yes to this one.” I pulled out the bottom envelope and handed it over to him. He turned the envelope over and immediately his eyes lit up, a smile that seemed to shine from somewhere inside him.

“You’re going to NYU?” he breathed.

My brain glitched as I watched his face flush and his breath quicken. He bit his bottom lip, and his gaze volleyed quickly between my face and the envelope in his hands. “You really mean it, you’re going to be coming to NYU with me… I mean you’re going to NYU?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I mean, you are going to have to put up with me a little longer as we are majoring in the same thing.”

“No way!” All of a sudden, he launched towards me and threw his arms around my shoulder, his nose pressing into the side of my neck. “This is fucking epic.”

I awkwardly reached up and laid a hand on his back, the muscles rippling under my touch, and I fought the urge to squeeze him to me. “I’m so glad you’re going to be there too.”

He sighed, warm breath skitters down my back.

“Well let’s get to studying to make sure we get you to NYU.”

He pulled away from me a touch, staring directly at me and nodding. “Let’s.”

Chapter 4

“People who love themselves, don’t hurt other people. The more we hate ourselves, the more we want others to suffer.” ? Dan Pearce

Dylan

The next six weeks seemed to fly by in a sort of haze of my own making. Each day at school stayed the same. I went to class, I shot the shit with Hailey, she made me listen to whatever German Hard House rave track she’d pilfered from LimeWire the previous night and I pretended to take it seriously as music. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I dodged the football jocks where I could. It had been noticeable that they only rarely had me in their sights of late; I mean, did they shoulder past me in the hallway and call me a fag if I so much as breathed heavy around them? Sure. But had they stuffed me in a locker and shoved me in any more disgusting hampers? Not one. I had a sneaking suspicion that I owed that small mercy to my newbie study partner.

The part of my life that had changed, was that every other evening Austin Ridge knocked on my front door and spent thebetter part of the evening in my room studying. I would have liked to say as a good tutor that the whole time he was there was spent studying; I should in fact have said that as finals were coming up very soon and he needed to be ready. But it wasn’t not always the case, sometimes we studied but sometimes we just lay side by side on my bed and talked.

We talked about anything and everything. We talked about what movies we liked, his being mindless action flicks with explosions and guns that never seem to run out of bullets, mine being good scary horror movies. The big scary jock, it turned out, was afraid of horror movies.They scare the bejesus out of me, he had said in his most manly voice. I wanted to know what a bejesus looked like, so one of our study sessions had been taken up with Austin pressed against me on my bed While we watched Jason Vorhees hack up some unsuspecting but very horny counsellors.

---