“Sorry about that.”
“It’s cool.”
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do with them,” Carver said, his brow knit. “I’ll have to get over it, I guess. At least I have something to actually get over. But I just….” He exhaled, then cleared his throat. “I don’t know if they realize, uh… how much I thought, you know, that I was the problem. And it turns out it was something where — yeah, I was the problem, but it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could have done.” He paused. “Maybe I’m not making sense.”
“You’re making sense.”
“And now I’m going back over it like, oh, maybe I could have — you know.”
“Could have what?”
Carver shrugged, then said in a light little tone, “Been easier.”
“Come on, dude. Come on.”
“They felt guilty, though. I didn’t realize they felt guilty. Maybe I could have killed them with kindness instead. Closed the gap. Maybe they would have felt bad for me.”
“Carv, look, I remember the shit you said after you hurt your shoulder, it was as real as you ever got with me about this, you said you —”
“I was on a lot of Percocet,” Carver interrupted.
“— you said you hoped they would feel bad. You were furious and you wanted them to feel guilty, and they didn’t. Or at least they pretended not to.” Scott studied his face in profile as he appeared to absorb this. “And I remember that made you even angrier, and then you kind of said, you know, fuck it, whatever, fuck them — at least for a little while.”
This little while, which began in October of their junior year, was when the two of them began smoking weed and fooling around. Carver stopped smoking weed second semester, out of concern for his grades, but they did not stop fooling around.
Carver gave Scott a warm sidelong glance as if he too was recalling this. “I was furious?”
“You were. You were really pissed.”
Scott could still remember the hot gush of Carver’s anger. He was angry at his sling, angry at the pain he was in, angry about the sympathy and questions. He hid it well but vented it to friends in private, Scott especially; Scott was overwhelmed by this anger but found it beautiful in its clarity. He was a dumb teenage boy who longed to write music about the extremes of human emotion despite his youthful lack of experience with them, and here was one of them, an actually justified hatred of authority which he could study up close.
He never really knew what to say, but this didn’t seem to be an issue. Carver just wanted someone to listen, and Scott was surprised by how willing he was. He watched Carver excoriate his family as if watching lightning strike in a field.
“But I didn’t even know what I was angry about,” Carver said. “I was angry about the wrong thing.”
“It sounds like you were angry at the right thing without realizing. I mean, it was never about football, it was about — yeah.”
“Yeah,” Carver sighed, and appeared to get lost in thought.
Scott smoothed his hands over his own hair, pushing it back from his face, and waited.
“You know,” Carver said, “I was getting angry at them earlier, but for a lot of it, they were just pathetic. Like, broken-down and crying and shit. Normally they’d only be angry back, or cold. I’ve never seen them pathetic. Now I’m back and forth betweenfeeling sorry for them and wanting to beat them in the head with frying pans.”
“Just take it one day at a time, I guess. All you can really do.”
Carver ran his tongue over his teeth. “I’m so fucking bad at that.”
“But it’s the easiest way to do it.”
“Not for me.”
“I can help,” Scott said.
Carver looked over at him, his eyes soft, and smiled again. “You want to help?”
“Yeah. Let me help.”
They leaned in toward each other, close enough to feel the warmth of each other’s breath, and Scott reached up to slowly unzip Carver’s hoodie. Carver kissed him as he did this, a light little kiss that he placed on Scott’s mouth like a dollop of whipped cream. Scott’s dick pulsed hard. In no way had he expected to get laid tonight. He had written off all hopes of getting laid after Lillian interrupted their flirting on the balcony.
