Voices pulled North from his bed.
He and Shaw had spent the day relaxing, after what felt like endless days and nights of work. They’d taken their dirty clothes to the laundromat, and while the clothes washed, they’d walked up and down Market Street so Shaw could check out the shops. Then, after switching the clothes to dry, they’d gotten a very late lunch—halfway to dinner, really—at a cop bar called St. Taffy’s. They’d brought their clothes back to the motor court, and while Shaw meditated (napped), North flipped channels.
Until, that was, he heard men talking outside their room.
He stood at the door and listened.
“Because—” That voice was definitely Jem’s. “You’re the only one he won’t yell at.”
“That’s an assumption.” The second voice was clearly Tean’s. “You’re assuming he won’t yell at me because he hasn’t yelled at me yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean—”
“It’s because of your beautiful eyes.”
Silence.
“Probably,” Jem added.
“Probably? Jem, he doesn’t care about my eyes—”
“That’s what you should do if you get into trouble. If he looks like he’s getting mad, or like you’re bothering him—”
“I don’t want to bother him. I don’t even want to be here.”
“—you just take off your glasses and—ok, try batting your eyelashes. No, you’re staring at me. Batting your eyelashes is more like blinking but—do you have any mascara?”
“Why don’t you go talk to him?” Tean asked.
“I already told you: you’re his favorite.”
“I’m not his favorite. One time he put a blanket on me and then later I heard him tell Shaw he didn’t see me sitting on the couch.”
“See? You’ve already got your meet-cute.”
“Jem!”
“Please?”
North had heard that tone before, and he knew that Teancum Leon, wildlife vet, had lost the battle.
After a moment, Tean snapped, “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“But if anything goes wrong, I’m not batting my eyelashes.”
“No, not without mascara.”
“I’m going to say, ‘Boy, it’s so hot out here.’ No, that doesn’t sound natural. I’m going to say, ‘It’s really hot out here.’ And then you come charging up the stairs and save me.”
“I don’t know if me charging up the stairs—”
“This is why I have a husband!”
“Ok, ok. I’ll come charging up the stairs. As soon as I hear you use your safe word.”
Jem grunted, and the sound suggested he’d been punched. Probably not hard enough. Steps rang out on the concrete, and when the sound drew closer, North threw open the door.
“What?” he demanded.
Tean stared at him, his hair wild, his eyebrows crazy. He did have beautiful eyes, North thought. Jem hadn’t been wrong about that.
“Boy,” Tean said in an unnaturally loud voice, “it’s hot out here.”
What sounded suspiciously like laughter came from the bottom of the stairs.
North stared at the vet.
Big drops of sweat were breaking out on Tean’s forehead, and North was willing to bet they were only partially connected to the simmering evening heat. Tean stammered, “We were wondering—”
“I,” Jem prompted from the bottom of the stairs.
Tean shot a furious look toward the voice, but he started over. “I was wondering if you and Shaw would, um, want to get a drink. With me. At a bar.”
“You don’t drink,” North told him.
Tean stared at him for a heartbeat. “It is really hot out here.”
Jem sounded like he was about to pee himself.
“Oh my Christ,” North muttered. “Shaw, wake up. We’re going to get a drink with Tean.” He pitched his voice louder. “And Jem.”
“’mwake,” Shaw snorted as he sat up. Then, blinking, he added muzzily, “Hi, Tean. Is it morning already?”
“Morning,” North said as he pulled on the Red Wings. And then, a little louder than necessary, “I thought you were meditating.”
“I was meditating, but then I went on a vision quest—”
North pitched a pair of lime-colored capris at Shaw, followed by some sort of creamy silk tunic thing, and then his Chacos. Shaw struggled into the clothes—literally.
“Ok, this tunic is definitely cursed because the neck hole keeps changing into the arm holes—” He was, as a matter of fact, stuck inside one of the arm holes in question when he pushed back some of the fabric, peered out, and said, “Hi, Jem!”
“I think this bar has a rule about pants,” Jem said from where he’d moved to the landing.
“He’s going to wear—” North stopped the shout. No shouting. Not anymore. No snapping, either. No barking. No growling. Maybe, in a few years, he could work his way up to yipping, like the puppy. In a calmer voice, “He’s going to wear pants, Jem.” North was feeling quite proud of himself because he even managed not to say, Obviously.
“Commando?” Jem asked.
North had to leave the room.
He was down in the parking lot, contemplating the possibility of a quick smoke—better not, he decided; Jem had an uncanny way of showing up where he wasn’t supposed to be—when the other three joined him. They rode in the rental Jetta across town, and North focused on Tean’s remarkable obedience to traffic lights so that he wouldn’t comment on what their choice of rental car—a base-model Jetta, for Christ’s sake? And white?—said about them as human beings. He did almost lose it the third time Tean stopped at a green light—not red, not even yellow—but he managed to swallow the comment.
A little noise must have escaped him, though, because Tean mumbled, “It looked like it was about to turn yellow.”
North didn’t say anything to that either. He even managed a noise that, under the right conditions, might have sounded like acknowledgment.
When they got to the Pretty Pretty, the club was doing steady traffic without being busy. North had driven past the club; he recognized the industrial-chic exterior, and he knew it was Wahredua’s only gay bar. He’d never been inside, so once the bouncer waved them through, he was only partially prepared for the contrast: mirrors, colored lights, the blast of dance music, the heat of bodies making the mixture of body sprays and colognes steam in the air. He’d been in plenty of clubs—gay and straight—before, and the Pretty Pretty struck a nice balance between over-the-top campiness and unexpectedly comfortable.
The other guys were already at the bar. A chorus of greetings met North and Shaw as they joined them, and North found himself on a stool with Auggie on one side and Jem on the other. The bartender was pretty and dark haired, and he kept glancing at Emery with the kind of wariness that suggested the possibility he’d been punched at least once. North asked about the beers on tap and was trying to decide when he caught a fragment of the conversation next to him.
“Colt is spending the night at Ashley’s house,” Emery was saying, “and Evie and Lana are with Foley—he’s got a million fucking kids to wear them out. Are you ok there?”
“Fine,” Auggie said. “It’s a little bit of a stretch. My toes can touch the floor if I scoot all the way to the edge.”
No, North thought, and he threw up a mental wall. No comments. No jabs. No jokes. No picking on anyone, not even Auggie, not even when he deserved it. North asked for an IPA, nodded at whatever the bartender said back, and tried to focus on the music.
That, of course, was when Theo said, “Darn it, I forgot my cheaters.”
For a moment, the unfairness of it all washed over North. Not just his reading glasses. Hell, not even just my cheaters. He’d said Darn it. Right out loud. In public. And North couldn’t say anything about it because—
Because he was going to be nice. He was going to be a decent human being. He could—and would—make friends. Even if it killed him.
“I know it’s lush,” Jem was shouting over the music, running both hands over his beard as he spoke to Shaw. “But do you think it’s too lush? Or does it need to be lusher? More lush? Like Theo’s?”
That one almost got North; the words were right there on the tip of his tongue, something about Gramps and Brylcreem, or maybe Vitalis—but at the last moment, he hit the brakes.
One thing, he argued with himself. One tiny thing. Because Jem could go on for hours about his stupid beard.
No, he told himself. Not tonight. Not ever. Never again.
His beer came, and he lifted the glass and was about to take a sip when he caught a glimpse of Emery’s face. The pulsing lights and shadows made it hard to tell if it was only North’s imagination, but he would have sworn Emery was smiling.
And then Auggie giggled, of course.
“What the fuck?” North demanded.
Theo put a hand over his mouth. Jem was cracking up.
“No,” North said. “No. No. What the actual fuck?”
“Would you guys be nice to him, please?” John-Henry said. “He’s trying so hard, and all you want to do is bait him.”
“In their defense,” Emery said, “he does make it easy.”
North stared. His jaw slackened for a moment. And then he said, “Y’all are a box of dicks.”
That broke them all up. Even Tean was taking a suspiciously long time to wipe his mouth with a napkin.
“Fuck you,” North said, “and you, and you—fuck all y’all, and you can fuck yourselves with a big old multipack of dildos.”
“Don’t be mad,” Auggie said through a grin. “Jem texted us about the green lights, and it was just too funny.”
“You were in on it too?” North demanded of Tean.
Tean managed a not-quite-convincing, “Um, yes?”
“You make it too easy,” Jem said.
“I was trying to be nice, you collective fuckstain!” North did hear, in the wake of that comment, the mixed message. He pointed at Theo. “And you, Paw-paw! You’re supposed to be a fucking adult. Senior citizen card revoked. AARP membership canceled. Turn in the keys to your golf cart.”
It was, as far as North knew, the first time he’d seen Theo laugh hard—not a chuckle, not quiet amusement, but the laughter welling up and spilling over. Auggie leaned into him, the two of them practically crying.
John-Henry put a hand on North’s shoulder, squeezed once, and leaned in to whisper, “One thing you should know about your friends? They live for this stuff.” Then, moving back, he called out, “I’m the designated driver tonight, so everybody else needs to get a drink and start relaxing.”
They got drinks—North, Jem, Theo, and Auggie with beers, Emery insisting on a Guinness, Tean with a cider that Jem picked for him, and Shaw and John-Henry with Cokes. They moved to one of the booths, and food started arriving—it was only bar food, wings and toasted ravioli, but North was surprised he was hungry, and surprised again by how much fun it was to sit around, beer in hand, shooting the shit. Plus, he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t nice to be able to yell at these dillholes again.
He wasn’t sure how it happened. He threw a French fry at Auggie to make a point—he couldn’t remember what, exactly—and Auggie the wundertwink snatched it out of the air without missing a beat. A cheer went up around the table.
“Luck,” North said. He threw the next fry like a javelin, and Auggie caught that one too. More cheers went up, and Auggie pretended to bow.
“How do you think I get him to eat his vegetables?” Theo asked.
Everyone burst out laughing, and North could hear his own, scandalized, “Gramps!” ring out as Auggie blushed and shouldered into Theo and then started laughing too.
“Oh my God,” Jem said, “we should play darts!”
“Nice try,” North said. “But I like my money.”
Everyone else declined until, of all people, Emery said yes. And then it was something they couldn’t walk away from. They had to wait while the bartender—Chase, North heard Emery call him—rummaged around until he found the dartboard (clearly not a regular feature at the Pretty Pretty). But he hung it for them near the bar, and he had a full set of darts, and Emery and Jem started their game.
It went pretty much how North had expected. Jem yammered and chattered and pranced around—acted like Jem, in other words—while he slaughtered Emery in the game. Emery grew flustered, to the point that once, when he went for his drink after a bad throw, he crashed into Jem, and Jem had a shocked look on his face as they separated. But after a couple of drinks, Emery seemed back to usual, making his little comments, offering his tiny smile, and whatever the blip had been, it was over.
When the game was over, their group did a little cheer for Jem, and he bowed and clapped Emery on the shoulder and grinned. “Good thing we weren’t playing for money, right?”
“Good thing indeed,” Emery said. Then he did this thing with his eyebrows that was annoying, and North decided to tell him how annoying it was, but when he opened his mouth, he stopped. Because Emery was holding up Jem’s wallet.
Jem’s mouth opened in an O.
“Holy shit,” Auggie crowed.
“You didn’t,” Jem said, but he was already laughing.
Emery shrugged and passed back the wallet, and Jem wrapped him in a hug, and everybody had to cheer again.
More drinks. More food. It was, it turned out, karaoke night, and as the club staff set up the equipment on a temporary stage, someone in their group ordered shots—that part was hazy—and Theo came back with a roll of quarters.
“You’re shitting me,” North said.
“In college, North always beat everybody at quarters,” Shaw said, hanging from North’s neck. He was talking at approximately the speed of light, and North tried to make a mental note to cut off his Coke the next time he had a chance. “North always beats everyone at quarters!”
Auggie said something to Theo that made Theo grin, and then they started to play. Tean, Shaw, and John-Henry opted out, but the rest of the guys were in. They set up the goal cups and the penalty drink, and they started to play. North managed to get his quarter in—barely. Emery didn’t, and he had to drink. Auggie drank too. Jem got his quarter in with a smirk.
But so did Theo. And something about the way Theo grinned—a tiny expression, only for himself—made North worried.
He messed up the next round and had to drink, and Emery—after a lot of swearing—drank as well and then said, “I’m out.” Auggie had to do a shot, and then, with a surprisingly guilty look at Theo, said, “Me too.”
Jem made his next shot, and Theo.
North didn’t. He ripped another shot.
After that, he knew he was fighting an uphill battle. He couldn’t prove it, but he was pretty sure Jem was cheating somehow—although what that might look like in a game of quarters, North had no idea, and he wasn’t in any condition to consider it more carefully. Theo, on the other hand, was just a machine, and he destroyed North.
Finally, North had to surrender. “I give up! I give up!”
Theo laughed, and Jem slapped him five, and somehow North was grinning as big as anyone else at the table.
That was when the music started, and a familiar voice came over the speakers. Shaw had gotten on the stage somehow without North noticing, and next to him, of all people, was John-Henry, grinning.
“This song goes out to my soulmate—” Shaw began.
“Take it off!” someone from the crowd shouted.
John-Henry grinned and patted the air for quiet.
“We want to see the duct tape!” another man screamed.
Whatever that meant, it made John-Henry burst out laughing. Even Emery laughed, and North felt a moment of remote surprise when he realized Emery Hazard was drunk. And I’m drunk, he thought, although that was less clear to him. We’re all drunk.
“—North McKinney,” Shaw concluded.
Maybe it was the beer. Ok, it was definitely the beer. But North felt himself tearing up.
The song was “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” by Big & Rich, and an enormous cheer went up from the crowd. North already knew Shaw had a nice voice, but he was surprised—and then not—that John-Henry did too. Because of course John-Henry did. Because he was John-Henry. The best part was that they both got into it, and when the chorus came, Shaw dropped down to all fours, and John-Henry stood astride him and pretended to twirl a lasso. If that wasn’t a panty-drop moment, North decided, he didn’t know what one was.
That was why he almost missed Tean and Theo’s private contest. The two men were sitting in the booth, faces screwed up as they stared at each other, and for one unsteady moment, North thought they were shitting themselves. Then Tean reached into his mouth and pulled out a cherry stem that he’d tied into a knot. With his tongue.
“Oh my God,” Auggie hammered on the table. “The doc!”
Tean blushed, but he was smiling, and Theo grinned wryly as he pulled the cherry stem from his mouth—untied, North noticed.
“That is my man!” Jem shouted as he crawled down the booth to pin Tean against the wall and start what looked like a serious make-out session.
Everything was less clear from that point. North had a vague recollection of Tean (once he’d wriggled free from Jem) and John-Henry trying to balance coasters on their noses. And he remembered Emery and Shaw doing barstool races, spinning and then running and then spinning again until they couldn’t stand up straight and had to lean against each other, laughing. And then, of course, the dance-off.
He couldn’t remember how it started, only that he found himself at the edge of a clearing on the dance floor as Jem made his way to the center of the circle. The music changed, and when the beat dropped, Jem started break dancing. North knew enough to recognize top rock, and Jem was doing some quality footwork. Then, when the bass hammered in, Jem went down. He started with the flare, his body supported on one arm as he swung his lower body around in a circle. Then he flipped over, and North had no idea what the next move was called, only that it was some kind of transition into the windmill. Jem rolled and spun, only his shoulders and arms making contact with the floor. The music swelled, and all of a sudden Jem was doing a one-handed handstand—a freeze, North thought it was called. And then it was over.
North was surprised to hear himself screaming along with everybody else as Jem got to his feet, grinning. Tean collided with him, and Jem staggered as the two of them moved out of the circle. Auggie was laughing as Theo whispered in his ear, and then he slipped out onto the dance floor. He looked so serious for a moment that North had to fight the giggles. Then the beat dropped, and Auggie started to move.
It was pop-and-lock, and maybe it was the beer, and maybe it was the long night of surprises, and maybe it was the fact that Auggie was just such a wiener, but North actually couldn’t believe how good the kid was. Maybe, a distant part of his brain suggested, it was all that fucking TikTok. Auggie started with forearm hits, then added in the isolations. A body roll. And, of course, locking. But when the beat changed, and the song accelerated toward its end, Auggie turned everything up. All of a sudden, he was shirtless, and he chest-popped his way over to Theo and, with apparently zero inhibitions, stuck his tongue down Theo’s throat. And Gramps—well, North could say one thing for Gramps, and it was that he was clearly a hell of a kisser. Auggie broke the kiss, grinning goofily, and as the song ended, did a standing backflip.
And then, because he was a little shit, he did another.
More cheers went up. Jem lurched out onto the dance floor, crashed into Auggie, and for a moment, the two of them looked like they’d go down. But they steadied each other, laughing, as the crowd roared.
North remembered apologizing to John-Henry, the words pouring out of him as John-Henry patted his back and told him it was ok. But he definitely didn’t remember getting loaded into the minivan.
“We’re not going to Waffle House,” John-Henry was saying, and he had the tone of someone who was sick of repeating himself, so maybe this had already come up before. “North, seat belt. Shaw, seat belt. Auggie, don’t you dare puke in my minivan.”
“It’s my minivan,” Emery said from the passenger seat. “I drive a fucking minivan!” And then he whooped drunkenly.
“Good Lord,” John-Henry said.
“We can’t go home,” Jem was saying in the back seat. “Guys, we can’t go home. Guys, we can’t—did you see Auggie do a backflip?”
“Auggie can do anything,” Theo said. And then, his tone darkening, “If you think Auggie can’t do anything, I will fight you!”
“Nobody’s fighting anyone,” John-Henry said. “Theo, cool it.”
“Jem’s right,” Emery said, “we can’t go home.”
“We should go to the moon,” Shaw said with jittery energy. “I designed a rocket that’s powered by Coke, and by my calculations, we could get to the moon in—North, where are my napkins?”
“We should go camping,” Tean said. “You guys are my best friends, and I want to go camping with you.”
“Camping is dope,” Emery said.
“Dope,” John-Henry muttered. “Does anyone have a camera?”
It turned out everyone did, and they all told John-Henry about it until he was shouting, “Stop talking! Everybody stop talking! Bunch of lousy drunks, that’s what you all are!”
That was when Jem shouted, “Think fast!”
He hurled a football toward the front of the minivan. North blinked blearily. He was vaguely aware that the football had to have come from somewhere, and he thought tracking that down might be a good thing for a detective to do. He was also vaguely aware of John-Henry laughing and swearing, the van lurching, everyone swaying around him.
“Did you see that?” Jem asked. “Tean, did you see that? Guys, did you see me throw that football? I’ve got a fucking rocket on this arm!”
“Theo can—” Auggie tried to say, but then he made a dangerous noise and leaned against the glass.
“That was nothing,” Emery was saying in the front seat. “That was nothing! You should see John throw. John has a trophy!”
“Oh my God,” Tean said. “We’ve got to see the trophy.”
“We’re not going to see—” John-Henry began.
“Trophy!” Shaw shouted.
“Tro-phy,” Theo said, and he split the word. “Tro-phy!”
North picked it up. “Tro-phy! Tro-phy!”
Emery joined in. “Tro-phy! Tro-phy!”
The chant grew. Jem, then Tean. Even poor Auggie, who was definitely looking greenish.
“Oh my God,” John-Henry said, laughing. “Fine, fine.” Shaw was trying to do some sort of spider-monkey hold on John-Henry from behind, and John-Henry laughed harder as he said, “You’re going to make me drive off the road!”
Somehow, they made it to the high school. The night was still and surprisingly cool. The sky was clear. As soon as Jem was out of the car, he struck a Heisman pose, the football tucked up against his chest. Then he sprinted across the lot toward the football field. Laughing, North took off after him, and he could hear the other guys behind him.
The field lights were off, but the ambient light from the city around them, combined with moonlight and starlight, turned the field into sketched-out sections of turf mixed with thick shadows. North wasn’t sure how it began; the pick-up game just seemed to happen. At one point, he had the ball, and then Theo was on him, riding him down to the ground. The turf felt like ice against North’s hot cheeks. Dew soaked his shirt. When he rolled over, Auggie (remarkably recovered after some noisy puking) and Shaw had turned the lower bleacher into a stage and were doing a cheer.
Later, and after another chant, John-Henry took them inside the school. He did a trick, jumping up to slap the corner of a fire door, and it made the door pop open. Which was pretty badass, even though Theo had a key to the building. North remembered standing in a dimly lit hallway, looking at the trophies, smelling floor wax and dry erase markers and thinking that schools never changed. He caught a glimpse of something, Emery with his arms around John-Henry, both of them staring at the trophies like they meant something else, something only for them.
And much later, they were sitting on the bleachers. Auggie fit in the vee of Theo’s legs, and Jem was asleep with his head in Tean’s lap. Emery and John-Henry huddled together. The morning was so cool it was almost cold, and the sky was a gray thinning to white. North tucked Shaw under his arm, and his head rested on Shaw’s, and he could feel Shaw breathing, the slow, full easiness of it all. The sun came up, light spilling across the field, climbing the bleachers, bronze riding the edge of the turned aluminum. It caught that coppery patch in Shaw’s hair, and North felt something rising inside himself to meet it, and he realized, with something like wonder, that it was morning.