Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

“Anyway, what did I know? I was a baby. If he told me I was good, then I was good, period. I didn’t know myself, really. I cared too much what he thought of me so I ran everything through this filter of what he’d think of it before I decided what I thought of it. It became automatic. That’s the worst part—way worse than him stealing my design, or the rest of it.”

Will’s voice had gone bitter, cold. Like he was still chastising the version of himself who’d acted that way. And the description was so far from the person he was now that I could almost imagine it as someone else entirely. I wanted to go to him, touch him, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to. Not in a mood like this. He shook his head and turned away from the window, hands in his pockets.

“Anyway, whatever. He was a shithead who made me care about him and then fucked my head up and dumped me at the end of the year. I heard he did the same damn thing to someone the next semester. Sociopath creep.”

My legs were shaking, my arms were burning, and my stomach was trembling. Tonya said that you should be able to sink into each pose. Hold it and relax and breathe, and that was the challenge: to push your body only so far as it could go without causing agitation for your mind. But now it wasn’t the pose that was agitating me.

Will took a deep breath and turned to me.

“Look, college is great and everything, just don’t make the mistake of thinking those fuckers are magical founts of wisdom or anything, okay? Take everything you can get from it and don’t put up with any of the shit that isn’t useful.”

Okay, that was officially a subject change if I’d ever heard one.

“That sounds like your personal philosophy in a nutshell,” I said, collapsing out of plank in a totally un-flowy way. Tonya would not approve.

“I don’t have a damn philosophy.”

I rocked forward into child’s pose to wait him out. Will might be feeling snarky with himself, but he was still the most honest person I’d ever met.

“But okay, fine, if I did, then, yes. People have a terrible habit of not separating things out into their component parts, you know? They think if they accept one part of something, then they’re under some obligation to accept it all, as if there’s no in-between. As if it’s more important to agree than to be accurate.”

And there it was again. A reminder of one of the reasons I loved spending time with Will. No one had ever made me feel so comfortable just saying whatever I thought before. I didn’t have to worry that disagreeing with Will would hurt his feelings or piss him off. I mean, he might be pissed because of my opinion, but not because it was different than his.

I had grown up constantly trying to blend in with people at school so they wouldn’t notice I was gay. Constantly trying to find common ground with my family so I could feel like one of them. Always sure that it was because I was weird that I didn’t really have many friends in Holiday. To be able to simply speak my mind and know that Will was speaking his… it was a sweet relief.

That didn’t mean I didn’t still enjoy messing with him a little, though. I flopped onto the couch next to Will.

“You never agree with anything, asshole.”

“It doesn’t make me an asshole that I actually listen to what people say and address the points where my thoughts diverge instead of ignoring the parts I don’t agree with.”

“Oh yeah?” I nudged him with my shoulder. “Then what makes you an asshole?”

Will grinned. “A lot of other things.”

“Well, why focus on the things you disagree with rather than the ones you agree with?”

“I don’t focus on them. But if someone says, ‘I like peanut butter, cheese, pickles, caramel, and taking it up the ass, don’t you?’ and I just say yes, then they’d assume that I agree on all counts, which is inaccurate. So if I want them to know what is accurate, I’d have to clarify the place where we diverge.”

“Um, you don’t like….”

He raised his eyebrows at me and smirked.

“Taking it up the ass?” I asked at the same moment he said, “Peanut butter.”

“You don’t like peanut butter? That’s outrageous! Peanut butter’s—” Then my brain caught up to the actual content of what he said. “Oh,” I said.

AGAINST WHAT felt like all odds, I’d finished everything, Will’s blocky letters in their perfectly ordered blue boxes guiding my way through finals.

I was ready to collapse on my bed and sleep for the foreseeable future, but when I got to our room I found Charles packing and ranting because apparently there had been some kind of electrical problem in the dorm designated for the people enrolled in January term classes, and res life had temporarily reassigned them to the rooms on our floor. So now Charles and I, and anyone else on our hall not signed up for January term classes, had to clear our stuff out and store it in basement storage until spring term started.