Page 4 of College Town

The woman beside them lets out a shocked gasp.

Lawson turns to her, donning a grave face, and says, “Ma’am, don’t let her face and hair fool you: that girl is a Grade A demon.”

The woman rears back in her chair, baffled.

Dana laughs. “I love you!”

“Yeah, yeah. Keep that.” He flicks his fingers toward the cookie that still sits in front of her. “I’m suddenly feeling nauseous as all hell.”

She rolls her eyes, and opens her mouth to respond – and a shadow falls across the table. Lawson knows from the shape of its hair that it’s Kyle, just like he knows, before he turns his head, what sort of expression Kyle’s wearing: the pinched-brow, cat’s asshole mouth pucker of the truly self-righteous.

Lawson smiles sheepishly at him. “Hi, boss.”

Kyle jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Break room. Now.”

“Yes, boss. Right away, boss.”

When he glances back at Dana over his shoulder as he follows – trying to duck his shoulders so he doesn’t tower over Kyle quite so dramatically – she winks and sticks her tongue out at him. He shoots her the bird, and she smiles.

They’re okay. They’re always okay.

He just hopeshewill be once this whole reunion business is said and done.

2

The gross thing about love is the way it can make your whole life feel bigger. It makesyoufeel bigger. Like you’re important; like your feet barely touch the ground.

And then, when it’s snatched away – when itrunsaway – nothing cuts like the pain of being reminded how terribly small you are.

~*~

Lawson’s mother and Dana’s mother were best friends growing up, and so they’d begun their own friendship laid down for naps together in the same playpen, plunked down in the sandbox together with plastic pails, stuffed into the same stroller on mall trips and left with the same sitter together when their moms had a girls’ night. There had been jokes when they were toddlers, and then not-so-joking allusions to marriage when they were older, from all four of their parents, and from school friends besides. But it had never entered either of their minds. When Lawson confessed, finally, aged ten, hugging his legs and crying into his raised knees, that he liked boys, Dana had kissed the top of his head and said, “Yeah, I know, dummy.” Hemighthave stared a little too long at her Backstreet Boys poster, go figure.

Other friends had come and gone, cycling in and out of their orbit, like Harmony, some sweet, some traitorous, but they were a fixed unit. The Dynamic Duo. The Wonder Twins. There was no room for anyone else in the soldered steel of their foundation.

But then…

Then.

The Cattaneo family moved to town.

And the Dynamic Duo became the Fantastic Four.

~*~

Middle school really, really sucked. It sucked big ones, as Lawson had said at dinner two nights ago, and earned a half-shrieked lecture from his visiting grandmother about “vulgar language.” He’d donned an innocent expression, and said, “I was only talking about penises. You know, dicks? Middle school sucks great big donkey dicks.”

He'd been glad to abandon his dinner in favor of his room, and had snickered to himself on his way up the stairs while Grandma upbraided both his parents for the way they were raising their only son.

But middle school did suck great big donkey dicks, because it didn’t let out each day untilfour-fifteen. In the long, bitter winter months, that meant it was five by the time the bus dropped him off at home, the sun was already halfway down, and he had only a scant twenty minutes before Mom expected him inside at the table slaving over his homework. Twenty minutes wasn’t long enough to get down to the park with his skateboard, much less spend any time working on his tricks. Not that he could do any tricks, but it was the thought that counted. In summer, in spring, he could buy a Mountain Dew from the vending machine by the bathroom, and he and Dana could sit side-by-side on the concrete steps and watch the high school boys grind down the handrails, the smoke from Dana’s cigarette tickling his nostrils.

By October – the fifth of which was today – their afternoons had grown pinched and cold and half-dark, and Lawson was properly down in the dumps about it. “Seasonal depression,” Dana had called it, sagely. She talked like an adult, smoked like one, too, cigarette held negligently between two upraised fingers.

Lawson had told her she was full of shit, but he wondered if she was right. If the expansive darkness that shimmered and rippled like a puddle inside his chest was because of the season…

“What are you looking at, freak?”

Or because of something else.

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