I could hear that he was doing something while he talked to me, and I imagined him unloading the dishwasher or cleaning up a spill in his sister’s house, all alone in the dark while her scared kids were asleep upstairs.
“Do you know how long she’ll be in the hospital?”
Will made a sound in the negative, and I could hear his long, shuddery breath. When he spoke again, I could barely hear him, even cupping my hand around the phone and pressing my other ear against my shoulder to block out the noise of the city around me.
“And even when she gets out, there might be problems. I don’t know. Anyway, sorry. Oh shit, I forgot—how were midterms?”
“They were fine. Listen, Will, how are you?”
If we were in person, Will might blow this question off with an eye roll or go into the kitchen to do something else. Hell, even over the phone, he might ignore me; he might even tell me to fuck off. But he wouldn’t lie.
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he was going to ignore me after all.
“Leo. I—fuck, Leo, what if it’s always like this? Those poor kids. They’re growing up just as fucked as we did.”
Will didn’t call me by my name that often when we weren’t in bed. It was usually “kid” or “kiddo” or, occasionally, if I’d done something idiotic, “fuckhead.” It sounded different now. Everything about the way he was talking sounded so un-Will. He sounded scared, vulnerable. Like maybe he needed my help.
“I just, um… I don’t suppose you’re coming back to Holiday for spring break, huh?”
“Will—”
“Ugh, Jesus, never mind. Don’t listen to me. Fuck, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s this fucking house. All messed up and creepy with no stuff in it. There are like weird stains and shadows and shit and it’s making me go all Penny Dreadful, like there are monsters lurking in my periphery or something. Anyway, it’ll be fine. Everything’s… yeah, it’s totally fine.”
It was almost painful to listen to him try to reassure himself. Everything in me screamed that I needed to take Will in my arms and reassure him. Or just be there.
“Listen,” I began, but before I could say more, there was a voice in the background.
“That’s Sarah. She’s been having nightmares. Look, I gotta go.”
“Okay. Well….” But I couldn’t think of a single thing I could say to make any of it the slightest bit better. “Call me whenever,” I finished lamely.
Will’s whispered “Okay” was lost in the scream of a truck reversing on the next block.
THE SECOND Milton saw me, he knew something was wrong, and I ended up blurting out the whole story and then apologizing profusely when I realized I’d made us miss the movie.
“He’s just always so together,” I told Milton. “Or, like, I don’t know, he says how things will be and the world either falls into line or he rejects it. But he can’t really do that with this stuff. Oh shit, maybe I shouldn’t have told you about Claire. Fuck. It’s… whatever, scary to see him freaked out. I just hate that I’m not there. Maybe I could help. I mean, Milton, he called me. He called me.”
“But you’re not together…,” Milton said uncertainly.
“No, but….”
But Will’s distress was so immediate, his vulnerability so genuine. And the fact that he’d called me when he was upset, that even though we weren’t sleeping together—fucking, as Will would no doubt put it—I was the one he’d reached out to when things had gone wrong. That had to mean something, right?
“Well, it is spring break, so I guess you could swing it. Or does he not want you to?” Milton’s lip curled as he no doubt remembered all the times Will had turned down my invitations to come with us when we went out.
“Actually… I think he wanted to ask me. Kinda. I dunno, it’d be like the least Will thing of all time to ask for me to be there with him, but I swear he just about did.” Milton hit me with this look that said I was being pathetic and also potentially delusional so I swatted at him.
“It doesn’t matter anyway, there’s no way I can afford a plane ticket and even a train ticket’s hella expensive. I looked it up when I got off the phone with him. Besides, it takes forever to get to Detroit and then I’d still have to get up north….”
“You really want to go?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, sighing, sliding into full-on sulk mode. “I hate money. And time. And distance.”
Milton laughed. “Well, you’re a physics major. I guess you’ll have to do something about that. Uh, the time part, anyway. Or the distance part? Whatever. I have no clue what physicists do.”
I rolled my eyes at him.