The soundtrack for Titanic played from the apartment across from the hall. For once the heater worked in November, but it worked too well. When the windows in my apartment started to steam, I opened the door. It was Sunday night, and I missed Hope. We spent the Sunday together until I had to drive back for Monday classes. She told me she didn’t like to be alone, so next semester I’d only take Tuesday-Thursday classes so I could spend Sunday night with her. Or maybe I could take my last semester online. There was something about Hope that made me want to reach the finish line for college as quickly as possible. The sooner I did, the sooner I could be with her on a full-time basis and not this weekends-only bullshit. Until then I was stuck in Casper while Hope was in Cheyenne.
The end of a weekend was universally felt on campus. I learned early on that in this apartment complex, whatever hookups happened on Friday were either fizzling or reaching new heights by this point. From the sickeningly slow beat of “My Heart Will Go On” and its melodramatic lyrics, it sounded like things were on a high note for my neighbor. I had two choices: suffer through the kill-me-now music or drop my last ten pounds through sweat.
Bob from the Depression Center would probably want to move into the building if he knew how scorching they kept the apartments. We now Snapchatted, and anytime his story popped up on my phone, I laughed. The cat was funny as hell and painfully honest.
I grabbed my phone, slid down the side of the couch facing the front door and the only notable breeze, and called Aaron.
“Jeffrey,” he answered.
“Fucker.” I shook my head and was pretty sure sweat flung from my scalp. “It’s Africa hot in here.”
“Stop your whining. Least you don’t have to pay for heat,” he said. “I just got my electric bill, and it was sixty bucks. Can you believe that shit?”
“What? Is sixty a lot for heat?” I honestly didn’t know.
“Sure, if it was for a month’s worth of heat, that’d be awesome, but this was for last month’s air conditioning, and I only had the AC on for a few days.”
“That’s a bummer.”
“Yeah, I’m going to see if Mom can help me out.”
“Dude, you’re joking, right?” I said with a laugh. “Mom’s got a lot going on right now. Hope and I brought her soup last time I was in town. The chemo’s hitting her hard.”
“Yeah, I know. I talk to her. But I’m not getting paid shit on or off campus. I’m making $8.50 an hour at three different jobs.”
“Three jobs? I thought you worked at the library and the grocery store. Did you get another job?” I asked.
“No. Well, yeah, kind of. It’s my internship at the nonprofit.”
“How’s that going?” I stretched my legs, and the sweat under my knees left a watermark on the carpet.
“It’s a shit show. Our building homes event is our biggest deal of the year, and my executive board is a joke.”
“Executive board? Are they paid?”
Aaron blew a raspberry into the receiver. “No, they’re not paid, and neither am I.”
“Then why do it?” It seemed obvious to me—no pay, no work.
“Bran, it’s good on a résumé. I’m the president of the executive board that helps build homes. What sucks is the other people on the board. They’re total morons. I’ll say, ‘Hey, do this,’ and they need step-by-step directions. So I’ll ask them to do the simplest job, like get twelve dozen bagels for the build. Not hard. Or go get hot water from the student union so we can have bagels and coffee for our volunteer home builders. But instead of doing it, I get a text from Mike at six thirty that he couldn’t get the water and the union closes at seven. So I had to go all the way back to the union and get the water for these massive coffeepots. Then fuckin’ Jill brings nine dozen bagels, not twelve, nine. And then our finance chair, Jayla, didn’t print the Excel sheets that listed what all the volunteers were doing that night.”
“Quit,” I said. “That’s bullshit. Just quit.”
“You can’t quit a volunteer job. Besides, I’ve worked too hard this semester to have it fall apart now. But I want to say, ‘Do you guys even give a shit?’”
“When’s it over? Your term,” I said.
“We have one more house build before Christmas, and then I’m finished.”
“And then what, you’re just done?”
“Then the vice chair, Chad, who’s a total cunt, takes over in January. This guy can’t even come to our mandatory exec meetings but has his dad, who’s the vice president of the bank and a college alum, email me because I gave his kid a hard time for not making the meetings. His father’s a cunt too.”
“Bro, you’re making my head hurt with all this shit.”
It was good to hear my brother laugh. He always took things so seriously.
“Nah, it’s fine. I mean, none of them got me their transition guides, and I’m like good luck running it next semester. Fuck you. If they all died, I’d be at the funeral doing a tap dance on their coffins.”
The next thing I heard was the sound of rapping on a table.
“I’d just tap the shit outta their coffins,” he said after he concluded his impromptu tap. “Buh-bye, suckers.”
The change in his voice along with the tapping made me laugh even more.
“So if anyone were to ask you in a job interview, ‘How was your home building experience?’ how’d you respond?” I asked, knowing Aaron would deliver something funny.
“Fuck. That. Shit.” He laughed again. “Let everyone go homeless. It’s easier.”
I chuckled.
“And what really gets me is that everyone on the board is like ‘You complain too much.’ And all I can think is ‘You want to be in my shoes for a day?’ I swear to God, Branson, you’d punch someone. But thankfully I’m almost finished with this semester.”
“I wouldn’t be messed up in that volunteer bullshit to begin with,” I said, and we both started snickering all over again.
“Bro, I’m not kidding you, this semester I had a permanent twitch. When people would say, ‘How’s it going?’ I’d go, ‘Uh, yeah, really good.” The shift in his voice was funny as hell.
If I wasn’t already sitting on the floor, my side-splitting laughter would’ve had me there in a heartbeat.
Then his voice shifted once again and his tone became much more serious. “I don’t know. It’s like a sign of respect. This entire year has been hell on me. I don’t like the fact that I get disrespected so often by my executive board. I can’t be mad at them, so I have to put on this face like it’s okay while they just go on disrespecting me.”
“Uh, I don’t know if it’s really disrespect so much as stupidity and laziness,” I said, thinking back to the Depression Center and the piece on accepting the shit we can’t change. “People say the most fucked-up things to me all the time, and I’m learning that it’s just ignorance. I’d love to tell people to back the fuck off and check their assumptions about me, but all that’ll do is make them think I’m crazier than I am.”
“Like that sorority bitch at the community college,” he said, and I shrugged.
“She actually had reason to question my sanity.” I chuckled. “But in the long run, she’s not worth my time.”
“Yeah, and from the pic you showed me in church, looks like someone put her in check.”
I grimaced. “Yeah, I dunno. I haven’t thought about her.”
“I get where you’re coming from, Branson, but you can’t let people disrespect you.”
“She’s stupid. If her opinion actually mattered to me, then yeah, it probably would’ve bothered me more, but she’s no one to me.” It was always weird whenever I heard this inner truth come out of me that I didn’t even realize was there. But it was true. That girl meant nothing to me. It seemed to bother my brother more than it bothered me.
“Whatever, bro. It’s your life.”
“Harsh,” I said, which was only met by silence.
When he finally did speak again, he wrapped back to a neutral topic. “So yeah, working two menial jobs and then interning for free, I’m fucked when my AC bill is an extra sixty bucks.”
I nodded. “Understood. I’m just not sure now’s the time to ask Mom, you know?”
“Listen, I’ve got to go.”
I knew my brother as well as I knew myself. His quick exit was a less-than-subtle fuck you. Whatever. I knew everything would be back to normal by tomorrow.