7

The clock reads 12:13pm when Malcolm wakes up the next day, and a brief spike of panic races through his chest before he remembers he has work off today. He stretches out, starfishing across the bed and groaning noisily. He takes a moment to come to his senses, sleep still fogging his mind, before throwing his legs over the bed and making his way to the kitchen.

Taped to the fridge, he finds a note. It’s decorated with several strawberry stickers and a fairly decent doodle of Lady Governor. The real Lady Governor curls around his ankle, purring in interest.

Malcolm,

Goby’s at work and I’m going to the skate park. There are banana waffles in the fridge. Please use the toaster, you’ll ruin them in the microwave.

Love,

Your favorite roommate

“God bless Mona Greene,” Malcolm says, grabbing the leftover waffles out of the fridge. Lady Governor chirps at his feet in agreement, knowing she’ll get to have some as well. He can never deny her a nibble of whatever he’s eating, as much as Jazz says he’s spoiling her.

As if the thought summoned her, the front door suddenly bangs open and Jazz strides through. Malcolm jumps at the force of her entrance.

“Shit, Jazz!” Malcolm yelps. “Don’t do that, you nearly made me drop my waffles.”

“Did you just wake up?” Jazz says, closing the door with the sole of her boot. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks,” he grumbles, popping the cold waffles into the toaster. He grabs whipped cream from the fridge and peanut butter from the pantry, throwing the latter to Jazz. She catches it easily, grabbing a spoon from the drawer and plunging it into the jar before shoving it into her mouth.

“Seriously, dude, your eye bags have eye bags,” she says, noisily smacking her way through the peanut butter. “How late did you stay up?”

“Some of us need sleep, Jazz,” he responds. “We can’t all be little gremlins who thrive off Red Bulls and jars of Skippy.”

“Why’d you stay up if you’re such a sleep slut, then?” Jazz says, hopping up onto the kitchen island.

Jazz puckers her mouth, her top lip jostling her septum piercing as she squints at him. He hates how easily people can get him to talk if they just wait him out. For Jazz, it never takes longer than a few seconds for her to wear him down.

“There’s this radio show I started listening to,” Malcolm explains. His waffles pop out, and he turns away to lay them out on a napkin and spray an unhealthy amount of whipped cream on them, thankful for the excuse to not look Jazz in the eye. “You can, like, call in and stuff.”

“You called in on a radio show?” Jazz says, and he can hear the incredulity in her voice. “Why?”

There’s a pause, and he can imagine the face Jazz is making. The slow dawning realization.

Malcolm nods, finally turning around with a bite of waffle in his mouth. Jazz has her eyes narrowed and her lips quirked up into a smirk.

Malcolm shrugs again, wishing his body remembered how to do anything else. “I dunno. Nice.”

“Uh huh,” Jazz nods, tossing her spoon into the sink and leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

“Well, of course I was going to,” Jazz relents, hopping off of the counter to follow him. “Baby boy’s got a new crush!”

“You absolutely do.” She plops down on the floor, next to where Malcolm had flopped belly-first onto the couch, hiding his blush in the cushion. “Would you say their voice was more Han Solo, Ferris Bueller or Elizabeth Swann?”

Malcolm looks up at her and scowls. “How dare you use my bisexual awakenings against me.”

Malcolm closes his eyes, accepting that this is his fate now. “Max Rebo is the name he uses.”

Jazz pauses for a moment, her eyebrows furrowing. “That sounds really familiar, actually.”

Malcolm turns his head to her, excitement bubbling in his gut before he can stamp it down. “Really? Do you know where it’s from? He said if I can guess where it’s from then he’ll tell me his real name.”

Jazz leans back from where Malcolm had steadily gotten closer, nearly falling off the couch in the process. “Well, now I’m definitely not gonna tell you.”

“I can’t just ruin his weird attempt at flirting right off the bat!” Jazz says. “That’s some cute shit, dude. He obviously made up this game so that you’d have a reason to come back! No, you have to figure it out yourself.”

Malcolm falls back onto the couch, the old leather squeaking. “I don’t know if it’s flirting.”

“I don’t even know if he’s queer! He could be straight and I’m just looking into something that isn’t even there.”

Jazz purses her lips and picks up the stack of googly eyes that Goby left on the coffee table. She starts taking them off and sticking them on her leather jacket. “Ask him next time.”

“You’re calling in again next time, right? Ask him if he’s straight or not.”

“Jazz,” Malcolm says seriously. “I can’t just ask someone—someone on live radio—if they’re gay. What if he is gay but he’s in the closet? Or what if he’s straight and I just make an absolute fool of myself?”

“There are ways to go about it without directly saying, ‘Hey, do you happen to be a raging homo by any chance?’” Jazz says. “Just, like, ask him about his dating life or something. Slip it in there, all casual-like.”

“Casual-like,” Malcolm repeats. He hates that he’s starting to warm up to the idea. Dating could potentially come up as a topic of conversation on a late-night radio show, yeah? It’s possible. This could work.

Malcolm laughs, throwing a pillow at her that she dodges with ease. “No, I mean, Mona’s at the skatepark. You’d usually be tripping over yourself to watch your girlfriend look cool on a board, what are you doing at the apartment?”

Jazz pauses, using Lady Governor’s presence at her side as a distraction. She takes off a googly eye from her jacket and places it on Lady’s forehead.

“Mona said you might need a distraction,” Jazz finally says, sticking another googly eye on Lady’s chin. She’s a surprisingly patient cat. “She told me about what happened at the pub.”

Malcolm momentarily worries that she’s talking about what happened in the alleyway with Peter—but no, Mona didn’t know about that.

“I’m sorry,” Malcolm says, eyes downcast. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that to Mona. I was way over the line.”

“I mean, yeah, you shouldn’t have,” Jazz says, nodding. “But she said you’ve already apologized, like, a hundred times. I’m not mad, dude, and neither is she. We’re just worried about you.”

“It was more than that,” Jazz says sternly. “She says you looked like your world was falling apart when you came into the pub. Like you’d crumble at the drop of a hat.”

“Is it happening more often?” Jazz asks, her voice far kinder than it usually is.

He wants to tell her to stop, to say something crass and loud. He needs her to be normal with him. He can’t deal with everyone changing up their routines. First Peter being companionable, and now Jazz being nice. He can’t handle all of these changes—but he knows he owes her an explanation.

His episodes (he’s never sure what else to call them) happened pretty frequently in school. He spent the majority of his weekdays on edge, feeling like a soda can getting shaken up as he squeezed through the crowded halls to get to their classrooms where everything was just too bright and loud, and it would build and build until he’d lash out. He was usually able to keep it in until he got home, punching at his pillow and at his arms and legs until all of that energy drained out of him. But sometimes he’d let it out on his friends. On Jazz. It’s a wonder how he kept any of them.

“You know I don’t know the answer to that,” Malcolm says. He reaches over and plucks one of the googly eyes off of Jazz’s jacket, sticking it onto Lady Governor’s ear, which flicks a few times in response. “I just keep it bottled up the best I can until I can go somewhere to calm down.”

“I hate that you have to go through it at all,” Jazz says, and he looks up at her curiously.

“You hurt people the way a wounded animal hurts people, dude,” Jazz says. “You don’t mean to hurt anyone, you’re just in pain. I see it in your face, in your whole fuckin’ body, everytime it happens. I just hate that we can’t help.”

Malcolm slides off of the couch and sits down next to Jazz, bumping his forehead against her shoulder. The leather of her jacket is cool and solid against his skin. She pats at his knee, sighing. He wishes it didn’t sound so defeated.

He doesn’t say anything. He wishes he could say that they’ll figure something out. That there is something they can do to help. But he doesn’t know a single thing about why it happens or how to change it, how to cope with it other than by isolating himself or exploding.

Jazz seems to notice him retreating into his head, and she kindly changes the subject.

“You’ve got a pretty rad cat, man,” she says, sticking yet another googly eye on Lady Governor. She’s starting to look more and more like a biblically accurate angel.

Malcolm smiles weakly. Lady Governor always had a way of dragging him out of his pity parties. “Yeah, she’s pretty neat.”

Lady Governor meows, a pitiful high-pitched sound that was one of the reasons why he took her in when he first found her. She steps over into his lap carefully and makes herself comfortable, still ignoring the plethora of sticky eyeballs on her fur.

Malcolm makes a face. “Don’t call him that, it makes him sound like a dad.”

“You shouldn’t be allowed to speak,” Malcolm says, and Jazz shoves at his shoulder with her own. He laughs and continues, “Yeah, I think I’m gonna call in again. He said his segment is every weekend, including Fridays.”

“I know it’s Saturday.” Malcolm hesitates for a moment, poking his tongue against his bottom lip. “Should I not wait? Would that be too, like, clingy?”

“Don’t fucking wait, dude! You’re probably the best thing that blessed his boring night,” Jazz says. “Can I listen in? I want to listen in.”

“Because if he does like men and is also somehow interested in me of all people, I don’t need you ruining my chances by dicking around while I talk to him.”

“I’ll be silent as a mouse! Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jazz says. She swipes her finger across her chest in a slicing motion, complete with surprisingly accurate slicing sound effects, before letting her head fall to the side with her tongue rolled out dramatically.

Malcolm smiles, but it falters when his phone buzzes in his pocket. He feels his face pale, and Jazz sits up.

“I don’t know,” he says, digging the phone out of his pocket. His shoulders relax when he sees the contact. “No. No, it’s just Mona.”

“Never heard that one before,” Mona says. “Are you available tonight, love?”

“Uh, yeah,” Malcolm says, looking at Jazz, who raises a quizzical eyebrow at him. Why can everyone do that but him? “What do you need?”

Apparently, Mona needs him at work tonight. Two of the night workers gave up their shifts, so the pub will be short staffed. Mona, being too kind for her own good, had already said she and him could fill in for them.

“I’m so sorry,” Mona says. “I shouldn’t have said you could do it without asking, especially after the day you had yesterday—you need rest, and here I am making you do even more work—”

Malcolm has to shout her name a few times for her to relax, but he eventually convinces her he’s fine enough to work.

“Can’t pause my life every time I have a breakdown,” Malcolm says. “I’ll be there.”

“Are you sure you’re alright to go in?” Jazz says. “I know you said this episode wasn’t as bad as in school, but from what Mona told me—”

“Mona hasn’t seen me during an episode like you have, remember?” Malcolm says. “By the time she knew me in college, I was having episodes every few months instead of every other day. She was just surprised, that’s all.”

Jazz still seems unconvinced, so Malcolm touches her cheek until she looks him in the eye with no small amount of reluctance.