Seth flashed him a grin. “Well, you know. I try.”

  Dad just shook his head and moved into checkmate. Then they cleared the board and started again.

  KELLY CAME back down in the afternoon while Seth was working on homework, and for a moment, his pacing almost drove them both crazy.

  “Why don’t you draw?” Seth asked the third time Kelly bumped his chair in a pass around the living room. “I’m sorry we can’t leave the apartment, but it didn’t used to be so hard for us to be quiet together.”

  “I can’t!” Kelly exclaimed, his voice aching with frustration. “You don’t understand! People are like ‘Art is therapy, Kelly,’ but the things I draw, they’re ugly! And horrible! And I don’t want people to look at them and think I’m ugly and horrible too!”

  Seth regarded him for a moment, trying to put that into context in his head. “But your therapy art isn’t for them. You know that song I was humming to you? That’s your song. I play that every night. I don’t care if it drives my roommate batshit crazy. That song is yours. You do whatever you want with art that’s just for you. You draw a picture of your sister, you make it pretty. You draw a picture of how shitty you feel? You do whatever the fuck you want.”

  Kelly flopped dispiritedly on the couch. “It’s so awful,” he mumbled. “What if… what if you see it? What if Mommy sees it? And you think that inside of me is so awful, you don’t want me near you on the outside either?”

  “You’re so dumb! What makes you think either of us wouldn’t love you for that? God, Kelly, draw what you feel! Burn it if that feels better, but don’t worry about me or your mom or your dad or your shitty fucking brother. We weren’t in that fucking room!”

  Kelly stared at him, his pinched misery lightening to something… soft. Almost awestruck. “You’re… you were,” he said after a moment. “And later… you… you were someplace worse.”

  Seth looked away. “Not worse,” he muttered, although he dreamed of Castor Durant’s red smile, the way his neck bone could be seen as his head tilted back at a 90-degree angle. “Just… just as ugly. And I got songs for that too.” He threw a furious look at Kelly. “But nobody bitches about those songs being ugly. Nobody’s got room to bitch because they’ve got their own shit to sort out.” He sighed, his anger fading. “Just… just don’t let him steal this from you. It’s been yours from the very beginning. I had the violin. Your stupid fucking brother had soccer. You picked up a crayon and said, ‘This is my thing.’ Why does he get to destroy that? What did he do to deserve to take away this thing that makes you happy? It pisses me off.”

  Kelly chuffed a little bit of air and walked near so he could kiss Seth’s temple. “I can see that,” he said after a moment. “I’ll…. You promise not to look over my shoulder?”

  “Yeah. You promise to show me anyway? I….” Seth stared at Kelly, so damned happy to see him, see his face, even tired and not smiling and sad. “I’ll probably hate it, but only because it’s your pain. So let me see it. We’ll both hate your pain. And maybe you’ll find something sweet that doesn’t hurt after a while.”

  Kelly shook his head in wonder. “Your brain. It’s sort of a wonderful place, Seth. Have I ever told you that?”

  Seth’s eyebrows knit together. “No. Nobody has ever told me that. Please don’t. It’s weird.” He had a small sheaf of printer paper in his writing folder, and he pulled it out and handed Kelly a spare pencil. “There’s better stuff in the pen drawer in the kitchen,” he said. “And I think we have printer paper—”

  “You do,” Kelly said with confidence. “Your dad lets me use your printer, since I keep my tablet here.”

  Seth smiled at him shyly. “Thank you,” he said. “You take care of my dad real good.”

  Kelly let loose with a tearful laugh and grazed Seth’s cheek with his knuckles. “Yeah. That’s what happens here. I take care of your dad. If you need me, I’ll be on the couch, bleeding through a number two pencil.”

  “Fabric cleaner’s in the kitchen,” Seth said, hoping Kelly was ready for a smartass comeback. “In case, you know, you get blood on the couch.”

  “Asshole,” Kelly muttered, but he was smirking as he said it, so maybe he was healing after all.

  Seth went back to work, but for once, he kept his brain in his kitchen instead of in outer space. He heard the pencil start tentative scratching on the paper, and for a moment, he kept his back ramrod stiff in case the scratching stopped. But it didn’t.

  It kept going and going, hard and intense, like Kelly couldn’t draw fast enough.

  And more.

  A piece of paper was pulled off the top and replaced by another one. And another one. And another one.

  Kelly’s breaths became labored.

  Suspect.

  Shuddery.

  Seth held his own breath, his fingers hovering over his laptop keyboard.

  Does he need me? Should I wait? What does he need?

  “Seth?”

  Seth was squatting by the couch before the syllable was out. Kelly had taken his drawings and folded them in half, and Seth had promised he wouldn’t look over his shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was raped.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It really sucked.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “But… but… it’s not all that’s ever happened to me.”

  Seth pushed Kelly’s curly, coarse hair back from his forehead. “No.”

  “Some shit has been really good.”

  Oh. Kelly. “I really hope so.”

  A smile flickered across his mouth. “I want to live for that stuff. I… that thing that happened in that tiny room. There’s so much more to my life than that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’m done drawing for right now.” He actually looked at Seth instead of at the papers in front of him, and held his hand out and stretched it. “Hand cramp.”

  “You did really good,” Seth praised him. “Really good. You’re brave. You know that, right?”

  “I didn’t fake out a bunch of gangbangers by yelling ‘It’s the cops!’” Kelly told him dryly, and Seth grinned.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Kelly burst out laughing, the tears that had gathered around his upper lip sputtering onto the folded pages in his lap. “You’re such a dork.”

  “Yeah. But I’m your dork.”

  And Kelly grinned back. “You hopped on a train and cut school because you heard I was sad through layers of bullshit. You’d better not be anybody else’s.”

  Seth chuckled, and Kelly laughed back, and that’s where they were when Seth’s dad got back with groceries—holding each other and laughing, like everything in the world was gonna be okay.

  THAT NIGHT they lay in his bed again, fully clothed, and for the first time, Seth felt the restriction of that.

  He tempered it, though, satisfying himself by splaying his hand on Kelly’s bare stomach under his shirt.

  They talked this time, quietly, mostly about small things. Then Kelly surprised him.

  “It was a good day. I… I just know I’m not gonna be all better from just one good day.”

  “Maybe… you know. You graduate next year. Maybe you can get some scholarships to one of the schools in San Francisco. We can see each other more. Maybe….” He took a deep breath. “Get an apartment. The older kids can live off campus, but I’d have to get a job. Maybe… you and me….”

  And Kelly took off with it. With planning. With who they could be if they held on just right.

  It was spun sugar, maybe? Maybe cotton candy dreams, giant castles out of clouds, because they were still kids.

  But maybe cotton candy dreams show a person where the bones of real dreams may lie. Maybe if they had steel in their hearts and spines, they could build a skyscraper out of dreams and put that steel in the girders and the clear glass of vision in the windows, and the bedrock of their faith in the foundation.

  Maybe they could build something lasting from their cotton candy dreams in the sky.

  Seth fell asleep dreaming of a tiny apartment, and Kelly being a famous artist, and falling asleep like this every night.

  LEAVING WAS hard.

  Seth’s dad and Kelly dropped him off at the train station, and Seth kissed Kelly hard, right in front of his dad, and then hugged his dad and kissed his temple as he sat in the driver’s seat.

  “Take care of each other,” he told them, his voice rough.

  On the train, with that giant whooshing rumble of the tracks purring in his mind, he found himself pressing his forehead against the glass, looking across the dusty Sacramento farmland as he cried.

  He pulled himself together enough to order an Uber back to school, and this time he checked in with the dorm supervisor to apologize and tell them he’d returned.

  The man in charge—a roundish college student with earnest brown eyes and horn-framed glasses—was legitimately hurt.

  “Seth! I get that you wanted to go home, but we were worried about you. Vince was freaking out.”

  “Sorry,” Seth said, trying to remember how to be human after the weekend when it hadn’t been such a stretch. “It… it felt like an emergency.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes. But not in the way you’d think.”

  Kent tilted his head. “What kind of emergency was it?”

  “The kind where everybody has needed each other since May, but we never got a chance to have that big group hug.”

  Kent raised his eyebrows. “Okay. Okay. Sometimes emergencies are like that. Next time you have one of those, let me know. For one thing, I’ve got a car, and I can save you an Uber ride.”

  Seth smiled then. One Uber ride was another stuffed animal for Kelly. “Okay. Thanks, Kent!”

  “Not a problem. Now go make up to Vince. You really hurt his feelings.”

  Oh.

  He’d almost forgotten Vince’s name—he certainly hadn’t mentioned him to Kelly or his father.

  “Okay. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes people care about you whether you’re paying attention or not.”

  Oh hell.

  Seth grabbed his stuff and made it up the stairs to his dorm room. The boys’ rooms and the girls’ rooms were identical—two hard cots, side by side, with about five feet in the middle. They had a window by the head of their beds and a desk each at the foot, and a shared closet next to the door.

  Vince was sitting at his desk, doing what Seth thought of as “angry math.” It was a thing only Vince did, where he pressed the pencil so hard, Seth had once curiously looked at the blotter underneath and could tell what problems Vince was doing.

  “Vince?”

  Vince barely glanced at him before going back to his work, and Seth guessed angry math was a real thing.

  “Vince, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I was going.”

  Vince closed his eyes and took a deep breath, still not looking up. He was a handsome boy from Hawaii, whose Polynesian ancestry shone through in his copper-skinned, wide-cheekboned features. Seth had always figured they’d been put in the same room because most of the other students at Bridgford were white. Maybe the counselors, in their misguided way, had thought these two boys would have something in common.

  Seth had always wondered what would happen if he told Kent that he really didn’t have much in common with anybody there, except Amara.

  But now, looking at the hurt on Vince’s face, he thought maybe he’d been wrong.

  “I didn’t mean to worry you,” he said helplessly, wondering if this relationship would be broken beyond repair before he ever knew it existed.

  “You did,” Vince said, scribbling furiously on his paper.

  “I… things weren’t right at home. My boyfriend and my dad sort of needed me—”

  Vince swung around suddenly, fury written on his face. “See? I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend. Or a dad instead of a mom, or both. You practice until the rooms close and come in here and do homework and then go to bed. And sometimes, you and me don’t even talk. But you’re another human goddamned being, Seth, and it’s my job to look out for you, and….”

  A beat. Another.

  “And what?” Seth asked, curious.

  “And you don’t even know I’m here.”

  Seth grimaced. “I try really hard to give you time in the bathroom,” he said, because this was true.

  “I don’t even know if you crap!” Vince burst out.

  “I do. I have a break between second and third. I come back when you’re not here.”

  For a heartbeat Vince just stared at him. “Auuuuughhhhhhh!”

  Seth flinched. He wasn’t sure how that was failing as a human being, but apparently it was. “I… you know. Didn’t want to be a bother.”

  Vince scrubbed at his face—clean-shaven, because that was something he did every morning too. Seth had actually considered asking him for help in that area, but…. God. How embarrassing. The only person he could tell things like that to was Kelly.

  “How about a friend! You know, I’m new too! And I’m a junior. It would have been great this last month to have someone to talk to.”

  “About what?” Seth asked, thinking that now he could make himself available when he’d apparently failed before.

  Vince sighed and tilted back in his chair, apparently giving up on Seth. Well, Seth couldn’t blame him.

  “I can’t think of anything right now.” Vince sighed. “What was wrong at home?”

  Seth swallowed and looked away, and Vince rolled his eyes and turned back to his homework. Oh. Well, shit. Seth could at least tell him what he’d told Amara, right?

  “My boyfriend, he got beat up,” Seth said. “Really bad. Right before I was supposed to leave. I… I found him. He was in the hospital. I found the guy who beat him up, and….” Seth shook his head.

  “Those bruises? Your eyes?” Vince said, swinging around to face him. “We were all talking about it, that first week in the summer program. Your boyfriend was worse?”

  “A week in the hospital worse.” Seth swallowed, remembering how sad Kelly had been. “He’s still… not okay.”

  “Oh. Shit. I’m sorry.” He looked sorry too.

  “I just had to make sure he’d be okay,” Seth finished. And then, because Vince had been human to him, he added, “I’m sorry again. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

  “Mm.” Vince just kept looking at him, like there was more to say.

  “Do you miss your home?” Seth asked after a silence that felt like an atomic wedgie.

  “Horribly,” Vince admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. “Everything in Hawaii is either mountains or sea.” He gestured around them, the valley before the mountains that guarded San Francisco. “This shit ain’t either. And it’s not green. Or it’s not, at least, past the grounds. I can’t stand it here.”

  Seth smiled wistfully. “Remember when we played at San Francisco State? And we got to go to the ocean for half a day after the performance?” After the first leg of their journey touring Stanislaus State and Fresno State—in June!—the gray July day spent on the coast had seemed like heaven.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was the only time I’ve ever been to the sea.”

  Vince gaped at him. “It was cold as fuck!” he burst out.

  Seth shrugged. “It wasn’t 110.”

  Vince let out a laugh and then sighed. “I take off my shoes in the practice room,” he said, seemingly at random. But Seth didn’t mind.

  “Yeah? Does it help you play?” Vince played trumpet. Seth didn’t understand wind players—it seemed like you might as well talk, but he didn’t like to judge.

  “Helps me be,” Vince said passionately. “I wore flip-flips all my life, and I swear, here? They act like you’re spreading the plague.”

  Seth thought about it. “Aren’t they called flip-flops?”

  “Not in my family. My little brother, Marcus, called them flip-flips. It’s like a family tradition.”

  “Sounds like something Kelly would say.”

  Dear Kelly—

  I got back to the dorms okay, and had to apologize to my dorm mate for scaring him. It was okay, though. We talked. Apparently he’s nice. I had no idea. And he promised to keep teaching me how to shave.

  But don’t worry.

  He doesn’t like me like you like me.

  Did you know that when you lean your head on the train window in the dark, and you’re zooming through all the farmland in the valley, it looks like the ocean?

  I want to take you to the ocean someday.

  I want to play music that sounds like the valley at night on the train.

  And the ocean.

  And you.

  But Vince has a little brother named Marcus, and I told him about Lily and Lulu and Agnes, and he told me about Marcus.

  And you know something?

  Talking about you to somebody made you feel more real.

  I need to remember that.

  You’re so good with words and pictures. No wonder the whole world is real to you. I’ll try to be more like you.

  Love you.

  Sleep good.

  Seth

  Making It Through

  KELLY HUSTLED toward the bus stop in the chilly February morning, shoulders hunched against the wind.

  He wasn’t even sure if the bus ran on Saturday, but he had just enough money in his little bank account to pay for the train ticket, and not enough for a cab or an Uber. But God, he had to make it to Bridgford.

  Before his head exploded.

  Those magic hours with Seth hadn’t fixed everything, but they’d given Kelly some tools to keep working on it. And Seth hadn’t just visited that once. He’d come before Halloween, and for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He’d had to stay inside those times, and even for a space cowboy like Seth, wandering restlessly through the increasingly shrinking apartment wasn’t a treat.

  But he’d been able to be there for Kelly as Kelly worked shit out in his own head.

  Kelly was getting better at working that shit out in his own head.