The Backupsmore University brochure wasn't nearly as interesting as one would would think by the way Stanford Pines pored over it, but if anyone were to wander by and see the way he stubbornly refused to look away from it's pages, they might think it a map to glistening treasure or the Fountain of Youth, rather than just a mediocre list of mediocre "luxuries" provided by a mediocre "school":
-Bug free dorms!*
-Edible lunches!*
-Certified non-criminal teachers!*
There were lots of asterisks on the inside panel, and if anyone cared enough to make it all the way to the end of the brochure (most people didn't) they might find an abundance of words like "mostly" and "kinda" and "only in the state of New York."
Ford had stopped reading after the first three bullet points, letting his mind wander endlessly on in the silence of the train cart, not allowing himself to look up at his mother sitting across from him. In all honesty, she'd only tagged along to make sure (at least one of) her son(s) would be safe on his first long trip away from home, and since her last awkward comment on the quality of the train ride ("My, Stanford, aren't these seats soft?", "Wow, there's enough space here to take a nap.", "There's enough room for another bag! I bet you could have packed a suitcase more and a half!") she had lost her tongue, following her son into absolute silence and staring out the window with the same laser-focus he was giving to the brochure currently being crushed in six-fingered fists.
(looking at the two of them, one would realize that it was from his mother that Ford got his keen ability to avoid the thoughts that were ripping him into pieces, that running away is often genetic, and that the only distinction between their habits lied in the routes they took away from their problems— she escaped in false divination in the stars, he distracted himself with a dedication to finding the truth in them)
Of course they were quiet — neither of them could really get a word in edgewise over the rumble of the train and the incessant silence of a brother who wasn't there, who would have wanted to be there, who would have wanted to see me start at college and—
He's fine. He's got personality. Stop. (Repeat.)
The mantra had stuck itself to the roof of Ford's mouth, sharp and sticky like bramble, and he chewed on the thought like old gum. Stan's absence was still there, but it had since lost its flavour and Ford wanted more than anything to expel the heaviness of the words he'd never gotten to say from his lips, to climb to the roof of the rickety train cart and scream it from the top of his lungs, to spit the unfathomable idea of missing Stan (dad said he was only slowing you down and it was on purpose he was suffocating you o e) into the wind, even if it meant it would fly back at him.
He was speeding towards a school which he already hated well before he even got the chance to see it (but he would hate it regardless, inevitably so, because it wasn't West Coast Tech, and there would be no hope for some deformed Jersey Yid to do anything with himself there, nothing more than to roam the hallways with a mouthful of resentment and unspoken words and letters he would never get to send to a brother who) — He's fine. He's got personality. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine—
"Honey?"
He wrinkled the BU brochure in his hands (it was an ugly brownish-red, printed on thin flimsy paper, nothing like the royal blue and golden trim of the brochure for West Coast; no, it was red, dark red, Stan had liked red, He's fine —)
"Yes, Mom?" His eyes met her teary ones for a split second before it struck him what a stupid idea that had been and he bounced his gaze back down to the brochure shaking in his fists.
"I'm proud of you, Stanford." The words were wet and heavy and he knew if he looked up he'd see tears falling, so he refused to look up, doubling down on passing the illusion that the stain on the big, brown "B" of his brochure was as fascinating as the cure to cancer, or a pin-up centerfold.
"Thanks, Mom." It came out sharper than he'd intended, the barbed feelings leaking out slightly. A rustling filled the room as she straightened her back, adjusting the faux-fur coat she'd grabbed from the window of the pawn shop while Filbrick was still passed out that morning, surrounded by empty beer cans and reeking of a heavy conscious.
If Ford had spared her a glance, he might have seen her hastily scrubbing tears from her eyes and mouthing a curse at her newly smudged eyeliner. She turned back towards the window, at the rolling New England countryside spinning along the horizon. The distant city was in view.
Her eyeliner was still a mess when she got off the train, but Ford couldn't find it in himself to mention it. She had noticed it herself in the window of the hailed taxi, and spent the majority of the ride from the train station to the campus rummaging through her purse, pulling out one cheap eyeliner pencil after another and dragging them across her lid.
When the taxi finally rolled up in front of the iron gates signalling the front of campus, Ford trudged to the trunk to unload his bags, silently judging the dead trampled grass on Backupsmore's lawns, the unkept vines crawling their way up the side of the Student Services Building, and the ambiguous brown markings on the iron bars of the windows and gates, which honestly could have been either rust or blood. Ford shrugged, at least appreciating that the mystery was up for interpretation, and lugged one duffle bag after another over his shoulders. The first was filled with clothes, toiletries, family photos and the small wad of fives his dad had offered him (at his mother's request) with that perpetual scowl etched into his perpetually unimpressed face. The other four duffel bags were filled with books.
He couldn't take them all, he'd realized when he packed away the bookshelf on his side of the room in Jersey (a process that entailed him facing left at all times, putting an impossible effort towards ignoring the empty bed and the boxing gloves on the dresser opposite his, He's fine—), but choosing which books to leave behind for his father to inevitably throw out felt as painful as leaving behind a family to go fight in the war.
(he threw out that analogy as quickly as it graced his thoughts—it was nothing like the war, nothing like the drafted lists that would have picked him from the comfort of his books and the discomfort of his one-person-too-small family, straight into a rainforest in Vietnam, where the horror stories were already starting to spew back to the states in hushed rumors of gunfire and screams and terrors that left the fighters shell-shocked, shells of their former selves, and a part of him was horrified that Stanley's "accident" crossing him off the list at WCT almost would have landed Ford in the middle of a cloud of bullets, but the other part was almost relieved, because even if Stan wasn't actually fine—He's fine— out there, at least he was safe from the draft, from the war that would have eaten away at his—He's got personality—personality, and at least Stanley would stay Stanley, even if it meant being Steve Pinington in Pennsylvania, selling bandages on late-night TV and—Stop—)
"Stanford Pines?" The receptionist called his name, with a bored and droning voice that screamed they don't pay me enough. With a deep breath, Stanford dragged his bags to the front desk, trying not to stare at the six—geez, that's a lot—thin metal hoops hooked through her nostrils.
He swallowed his nerves and stretched a smile that probably looked more grimace across his features. "Yes. Um. Yes?"
Without a word she thrust a stack of forms and a silver (and slightly sticky) key into his hands. She stared at his sixth finger. He rolled his eyes, decidedly too tired to shove his hands in his pockets, and no longer tried so hard to stop himself from staring at her sixth piercing.
"The orientation kick-off ceremony's at five, in the cafe-gym-itorium. Try not to be late, or you'll be stuck with the benches with ants." The words left her in a monotone stream, like her mouth was working off muscle memory in a song-and-dance she'd been performing since the freshmen started spilling in that morning. "You'll be bunking in the Cood B. Werce Dormitory Building, on the north side of campus. Here's your key, here's a bottle of bug repellent — first one's on the house — and here's your roommate agreement contract. Make sure to get it signed by your roommate when you meet him, and returned to this desk by Wednesday. No girls allowed in your dorm without—"
"Um, I'm sorry, what was that?" He shuffled through the papers until the form in question was on top of the stack, awkwardly shifting his fingers, which were still under her scrutinous gaze.
"No girls allowed." As she spoke, her eyes bounced from finger-to-finger, counting them again and again, and she shook her head every time she got to six. "This is a place of learning, not getting funky—"
"No, no. God no. I mean the part about the roommate? I don't have a roommate. I requested a single dorm room." He cleared his throat and when she didn't lift her eyes, he doubled his efforts of staring intently into her piercings.
"So did everyone else here. Corners had to get cut, so—"
"Listen, ma'am. I signed the single-dorm request form months ago, and I really, really think I—"
She finally tore her eyes from his hands, seemingly finally satisfied with her ability to count to six, and shot a glare up to meet his. "No, you listen,sir. I don't know where you think you're enrolled, but we can't afford to give a single-room to every student who asks. It's a first-come, first-served system, and there's nothing I could do about it. This is Backupsmore. Not some fancy-shmancy set-up like, I dunno, Oxford or West Coast Tech."
Whatever response Ford had lined up curled up and died in his throat as the receptionist called the next student for their key.
When he met with his mother again outside the Student Services Building, she was putting out a cigarette and pretending she just hadn't been smoking, and he was pretending not to notice it.
"So." She crossed her arms and looked him over, checking for miscellaneous stains to nitpick at or a stubborn cowlick to lick down, but found nothing. He had never been the messy twin, after all.
"So." He shifted awkwardly from one foot to the next, holding the folder of forms behind his back, as the air thickened between them expectantly.
Without another word, she pulled from the pockets of her coat a glistening necklace with a pendant shaped like an open hand. It was a Hamesh— a Jewish good-luck-charm for warding away evil. Ford gasped at the sight of it and the way it sparkled in the sun; the pendant was set with gleaming blue stones in the smooth silver palm, and the chain it dangled from was thin and stringy like spider silk.
He recognized the necklace from a glass cupboard in his grandmother's home, an apartment across the street from his father's pawn shop which always smelled like pastries and tobacco. The pendant had never been alone, though—it usually sat in its revered spot next to his grandmother's old tchotchkes from the homeland and her good china, on a velvet jewelry cushion alongside its brother, its twin, an identical Hamesh pendant inlaid with rubies, fixed on a chain of gold.
"I was going to give it to you back during graduation, but I was hoping..."
The words I was hoping Stanley would come back eventually to be here for this died on her lips and she fumbled with something in her pocket, something he suspected to be the golden-chained ruby pendant, the relic Stanley would have received alongside Ford if he was still around.
She unceremoniously dumped the blue-stoned pendant in his hand and curled his fingers around it protectively, before wrapping him in a tight hug. The faux-fur coat smelled a bit like cats, but he returned the hug anyways, letting his mother kiss him way too many times on the cheek before pulling away from her iron-bar-like-arms with a struggle and a muttered thanks.
(family was like that, he supposed, like a comfortable prison that you sometimes had to break out of, even if it meant leaving the once-secure metal bent out of shape in your wake, because sometimes life had to be lived, even if the warden's intentions were pure)
He walked her to the taxi, kicking a rock in front of him with each step to distract him from the sentimentality his mother was exuding through clandestine sniffles and glances in his direction. When they finally got to the cab, he opened the door for her, and a few beats passed before she moved to climb into the backseat, her knuckles white as she clutched her purse, but not before landing yet another slew of kisses on his forehead.
"You be good. Alright, Stanford?" She offered a watery smile through the open window as the driver grumbled impatiently.
"Of course, Mom." He surprised himself with the way the words scratched at his throat on the way out, wearing away at the dam of emotion building in the back of his mind for the last four months. "I'll be fine." He's fine.
They stayed there, still as statues, basking awkwardly in resonant silence, and they both knew they should say so much more, but the driver had already lifted his foot off the gas, and the words evaporated before they could climb into the open.
Stanford clasped the silver chain behind his neck, watching the taxi disappear around the bend.
Backupsmore's courtyard was an epicenter of movement and giggles and shouts and bodies of students colliding and revolving around each other in cliques and clumps like particles. The grass here was trampled into the mud, and anywhere a smudge of grass may have survived, it wouldn't for long—not with the waves of freshman confusingly being herded to their respective dorms and appointments like cattle by the frustrated upperclassmen behind them.
Ford stood to the side, leaning against the miscellaneous brown patches on the iron gate. He was sizing up the cracked brick buildings that stood like ruins around him to the markings on his outdated campus map, fruitlessly trying to get his bearings.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a small black spider hover too close for comfort to his shoulder, and he let out a ridiculously high-pitched squeak, flailing his arms and gaining a nervous stare from a nearby gaggle of students. He cleared his throat and picked up the papers scattered in the mud, thinking to himself that this school was going to kill him, and what if the bugs were venomous, and he wouldn't be surprised if it were a black widow, and he almost wished it were a black widow, because Jesus fucking Christ was he dreading this, and the words Stupid fucking school fit themselves into his mantra, right before the Stop.
He glared at the students, a scowl to rival his father's gracing his lower jaw (it disarmed him how fluidly it had fit into his features, something about apples and the distance fallen from their relative trees, and the thought only deepened the scowl more), and turned to walk between what he assumed to be the Language and Literature Building and what his map referred to as the Cafegymatorium. The wind from the courtyard whistled between the brick walls at either side of him, and carried hoots and shouts of excited students, the patter of feet, and an oily-musky-herby scent that invaded Ford's nostrils.
(it smelled like the boys Ford's mother would ask him to avoid, the boys who would sit behind Glass Shard High in groups of four or five with smoke wafting over their heads, tossing dirty looks out left and right like fishing lines and making an effort to look effortless to everyone who passed them by)
It was nothing like home, like Glass Shard Beach, with it's empty expanses of sparkling sharp beachfront, the taste of salt thick in the air and —Stop. — calling for him over the shrill shriek of the seagulls and the crashing waves. Ford wiggled his toes in his bargain-store dress shoes; his mother had bought them for his first day of school—Stupid fucking school— but they just felt stuffy and suffocating on the sixth toe of each foot.
(he almost missed the sensation of gingerly stepping barefoot on the shards of beer bottles that would wash up on shore, making bets with —Stop. — to see who could take the most steps before chickening out and slipping sandals over the thin cuts on the bottom of their heels, and the winner was almost always —Stop.)
Ford stopped on the other side of the building, in front of a constellation of students, scattered in a field, hovering around a makeshift stage.
In the center of the glorified stack of boxes stood a boy in green with a red ascot tied around his neck like a noose. Painted on each cheek was the three-pronged peace symbol in deep red paint (it reminded Stanford of the BU brochure, of the miscellaneous stain, of blood, and the way the paint dripped down the boy's cheeks was doing no favors.) The boy in green was barefoot, and bouncing from one end of the splintering stage to the next as he yelled, almost like performing a jig.
"Peace is the only answer!" Stanford was struck with the full force of the boy in green's Appalachian accent, like he was born and raised from a jug of moonshine in bluegrass fields. The way the boy moved as he screamed, free and exuberant, like he was drunk on the attention from the thin crowd, only made the analogy more concrete.
"When the government stifles peace an' love, it leads to young men going to Nam fer glory and coming back with bullet holes and stumps fer limbs!" Cheering and applause sporadically budded among the onlookers, and the boy in green took another step forward on the stage, encouraged by the applause.
"When the government stifles peace an' love, it makes the boys who di'nt come back in body bags jealous of the ones who did!" The cheering was still there, but more muted as the gravity of the boy's words permeated the atmosphere. Death tends to be a buzzkill, Stanford observed.
"When the government stifles peace an' love, they make a system where the only ones who can get peace are the lucky ones like you an' me, the ones who can afford it, the ones biding their time in school!" The cheers had started to die down, and a guilty look plastered itself on the faces of the passerby. The constellation spread out, expanded like a mini-universe in the field, as students started to clear out. Nobody wants to be reminded of their role in ignoring a mess.
"When the government stifles peace an' love, and especially love, it forces people to fight fer it, to die fer it— an' I don't mean just on foreign shores, but on our own. I'm talking about riots like what happened in Detroit an' Baltimore last year! Not only that, I'm talking 'bout what happened in Stonewall this summer!"
Now, Stonewall, that seemed to be the final brick in the wall, and the crowd began to dissipate almost altogether, with only a few stragglers resuming their cheering. And as the boy shook his head at the crowd's sudden loss of passion, he shifted the yelling back to the war, which everyone universally seemed to despise, and the cheering presumed again. But Stanford was still stuck in Stonewall.
Stanford thought of his father in June, shortly after the Stonewall riots, and how he had been scowling in front of the television set, looking even more unimpressed than usual. "A bunch of disgusting degenerates," Filbrick had said. "I'd rather have a dead son than a fag for one," Filbrick had said.
(Stanford thought of Stanley, and how during the summer prior to that, he had climbed through the window in the dead of night when he thought Ford was asleep, smelling like booze and reeking suspiciously like the boys that hung out behind Glass Shard High.
(Stanford thought of Stanley, and how after an interrogation and a half, his twin had broken down because yes, he had been by the pier, and yes he did kiss that Latino boy who stank like leather and cigarettes beneath the boardwalk
(Stanford thought of Stanley, and how I can't turn it off Ford I fucking can't I'm sorry I'm trying I swear but I'm broken and well try harder Stanley because dad would throw you out in a heartbeat if he found out and not saying that if he could pretend to turn it off then maybe Stan could too—He's got personality—)
He's torn away from the spectacle of the man (who reminded him of too much of blood and of war and of red and of Stanley), when he collides with one of the particles, one of the students, with a full frontal thud. Newly bought textbooks fall from the other student's arms, splashing in a puddle of mud beneath their feet.
"Hey what the fuck, asshole?" The student was a boy who couldn't have been much older than Ford, but looked much taller and heftier, with a droopy mess of greasy blond hair giving him the appearance of an extremely wide anthropomorphic mop. The boy grabbed a fistful of Ford's shirt by each lapel and drove him forward, until their faces were inches away from one another. "I just fucking paid for those!"
Ford made a show of visibly flinching away from the boy's breath, and the student just pulled him closer with a glare. "I didn't do it on purpose. Let go of me." Ford balled his fingers into fists at his sides, trying to think of a reason not to drive a fist into the mop-boy's face. What's the worst that could happen? I get expelled? The idea of not needing to go through with BU almost drove his fist forward into an uppercut, but then what? Go home? Scrape barnacles? Go to war?
"Oh, a Jersey boy. Nice accent, asswipe. Well, since you obviously crawled out of some cardboard box on the shore, lemme show you some manners." Before Ford could lift his fists, two other students, who smelled just as bad, materialized at either side of him, grabbed him by the shoulders and kept him in place; in their grip, he struggled to propel himself forward, to show this shitstain what those boxing lessons had taught him, to really punch that smug look off his face. He glanced at the circle of students quickly forming around the action. In the distance, worlds away, the protester was still screaming about war.
"First things first, you say 'excuse me' when you bump into someone. I dunno what kind of cheap broad your mother was to not teach you right from—"
Ford spit as hard as he could in the mop-boy's face, the way his grandmother did to ward away evil spirits, and the satisfaction he earned watching the boy freeze in place, 50 percent in horror, 50 percent in shock, was immense to say the least. Ford smirked as the crowd around them fell silent, even as an undignified string of saliva fell from his bottom lip.
The satisfaction was ebbed when Mop Boy drove a fist forward into Ford's gut.
"You motherfucking — oh… what's this?" Ford's vision was still fuzzy from the punch, but he reeled back to lucidity when the boy reached forward to get a better look at the silver Hamesh still dangling from his neck. Mop Boy smiled like a snake and yanked the chain, snapping it from behind Ford's neck. "Is this real silver? Wait— Jesus, are you a kyke?"
The hairs on Ford's neck bristled at the phrase and a spike of fear rippled down his spine. "Give it back! Or I'll—" Another punch was driven forward into Ford's gut, and he heard a cheer yip out somewhere in the crowd amongst the collective gasps. Ford struggled against the lackeys at his shoulders, reaching forward as far as he can and—
"Fuck, look at this! You got extra fingers? Christ, what isn't wrong with you?" With that Ford mentally berated himself and tried to shove his fingers into his pocket, before anyone could see, but Mop Boy grabbed one of his wrists and lifted it gingerly, pinched at arm's length between two fingers, as though it was a contagious condition, and showed it to the crowd. Ford felt himself go slack in the grip on his shoulders as a nervous chuckle or two rang out from the surrounding students, and with a flick of Mop Boy's head, the boys standing at either side of him let go, let Ford drop at their feet, to splash in the mud.
Mop-boy glowered at the Hamesh with a predatory grin. "Well, this should definitely cover the cost of the books, thanks. And after all, this cool kyke necklace only has five fingers, so I'm sure it suits me better anyways." He bent over and smiled in Ford's face, making sure to hover close enough to see him flinch away from the breath, and ruffled Ford's hair. Ford's fists were shaking at his sides.
Stupid fucking school ran in an endless loop, fueling the anger that Ford had harbored in him since May, since his brother was turned on the streets, since West Coast Tech called him a waste of a car trip, since the only school that accepted him with a full ride was this Stupid fucking school. His fist was drawn, and he was about to stand up, about to try to punch this boy's head in, about to punch and punch and h until the boy's teeth were scattered in the mud with his textbooks, even if it meant the lackeys at either side of him would kick him down before he got too far—
(and who cares if he gets expelled from this Stupid fucking school, 'cause to hell with college, he'll fight in the war in Nam, and maybe he'll lose his stupid deformed hands and get those stumped limbs everyone's talking about, or maybe he'll fucking die there, because at this moment he can't think of anything he'd rather have than to go as pointlessly as he came into this world, and he's about to make (Stanley-his mother-his grandmother) his father proud, and he can't fucking wait until they put him in the cold hard ground, and he figures it's a good thing he's down because he'll have to get used to being covered in mud, and he ignores the voice in his head that says—) Stop.
"What's goin' on here, fellas?" Up close, the Appalachian accent hit Ford twice as hard, and from the floor he lowered his fist and glanced through the circle of students standing around the altercation, at the stage where a girl with cropped black hair had resumed the screaming in the boy in green's place.
Because suddenly the boy in green was in the middle of the circle, staring down Mop Boy and standing expectantly between the two of them. This close, Ford could see the way the red paint on the boy's cheeks has cracked in the sun, the sweat drops gathering on his forehead. Ford looked the boy up and down from the floor, starting from the Appalachian's bare feet wiggling in the mud to his friendly face, where Ford could make out a single yellow canine tooth jutting out just slightly to the left in the boy's otherwise pleasant smile, as though all the rural and unrefined blood in him manifested in that one out-of-place spot.
"Ah, Mcgucket," the living mop sneered. "Looks like you took a break from your sick hippie bullshit to join the fun. My new friend Jersey here was just about to help pay for the books he knocked over. Ain't that right, Jersey?"
Ford was shaking as he sat up in the mud. Was he being fucking saved like some defenseless fucking DD&MD damsel? Was that what was happening? He shrunk beneath the gaze of the student body. The fight probably had more onlookers than the protest in the middle of the field. He heard a student in the crowd giggle, and, if possible, Ford shrunk even smaller.
"I'm fine. I can handle it my damn self. I don't need your hel—" he mummered at McGucket's back with clenched teeth, but he's cut off by the Mop.
"Oh yeah, you had me at the end of my rope, kyke." Mop Boy shot a grin at Ford, at the mud on his clothes, at his balled-up fists, refusing to let Ford maintain even a semblance of pride.
"Now leave him alone, Erickson." The accent in Mcgucket's voice rang out among the crowd, but where Ford expected mockery or laughter, the students stared ahead, hungry for the situation to escalate.
"I know you have a thing for the pretty ones, Mcgucket, but you could do much better than this freak. Check out his hands."
"Why'dya think I'm here just for him? Maybe I stopped by just to keep you company. I feel like it's been a long time coming fer me to pay you a visit." McGucket's polite grin became a dark smirk and he placed his hands on his hips.
Erickson's mocking tone quickly sharpened into something much more primal, something angry and harsh. "Are you coming onto me, fag? I swear to fucking God, if you are—"
"Oh please, I've seen pigs more attractive than you in the farms back home, Erickson."
More giggles broke out in the crowd and Erickson sneered, arms crossed. "Well, you would know, McGucket. You've probably fucked pigs back home, you inbred redne—"
The punch to Erickson's jaw flied faster than lightning, faster than a seagull plucking a fish from the water's surface, faster than Stanley diving from the pier— in the blink of an eye, Erickson was flat on his stomach in the mud, with McGucket clasping his arms behind his back and rubbing the fat boy's face in the mud like a puppy being ground into his own mess.
The two boys propelled forward from next to Ford but Mcgucket shot them a look that could probably kill a wild bison with enough prolonged exposure, and the boys shirked back, watching their leader writhe on the floor as Mcgucket leaned forward to speak into Erickson's ear.
"Never fucked a pig, Erickson, but I sure know how to wrangle one. How to pick out which pigs are the runts. How to get a pig to stay still right before it becomes Christmas dinner. An' let me tell you, you are much easier to get laid out." He bent close and pulled the Hamesh out of Erickson's hand, climbing to his feet and rubbing the pendant on his green shirt to get the mud out, before turning towards Ford and kneeling down. He offered the Hamesh with a bright (if slightly crooked and yellowed) smile, and an even brighter twinkle in his dark blue eyes.
"You alright, Jersey Boy?" His voice was gentle and a part of Ford knew he should be grateful, but a scowl was still planted on his face as he yanked the chain from Mcgucket's hand, trying not to stare at the sweat, or the askot, or the tooth, and trying not to be angry but —
(no, Ford's not even trying to hide his anger; Ford's shaking and Ford's furious because Stanley was always the one who stepped in when the fights got bad, and Ford will be damned if he's gonna let someone else do it. He wanted to not be suffocated, right? Then he needs to fight his own goddamn battles and—)
— he felt the crowd staring him down, felt eyes on him, and they were tearing him apart, but he reached for the hand that McGucket had extended to help him up anyways, when he heard Erickson's voice crack through the air like thunder,
"What is it, Jersey? Gonna hang out with the Fiddler? You're a kyke and a queer?"
(— his face is on fire and he's gotta stop —Stop.— waiting for someone else to offer a lending [normal five-fingered] hand because he isn't able to pull himself up by his own and just because he hasn't got — He's got personality. — a normal fucking brain, or set of hands, or any sense of self-preservation, doesn't make him weak— right?) — Repeat.
"I am not a fucking queer!" The words came out harsher than a snarl, and he hoped they convince the crowd more than they convinced himself. He slapped McGucket's outstretched hand out of the way, ignoring the hurt expression and that stupid fucking tooth and the not-blood blood, and walked right by Erickson (who stands like he just won a battle despite being covered with mud and a fastly growing black eye), shoving his way through the crowd.
Ford made it to an empty bathroom in the Literature building before he broke down in the stalls, holding the Hamesh to his lips and wishing more than ever to be somebody, anybody else— someone who was fine.
Someone with personality.
Ford ignored the bruises (and the guilt) gathering in his stomach as he unceremoniously dumped the mud-caked duffel bags on the bare mattress, disregarding the cockroaches scattering away from their home as he started emptying the luggage out onto the bed.
"Mostly bug-free dorms, my ass," he muttered. "The room is more bug than dorm."
The dormitory was a ways away from the bathrooms he found refuge in earlier that afternoon, and the walk of shame past the student body in the direction opposite to the one he had fled towards after the fight had been a long one, passing by familiar faces of several students who had witnessed him fall in the mud, witnessed him be held down and punched, witnessed him get robbed of his pride and silver, witnessed him needing to be saved by some barefoot mountain-man.
But wait— he hadn't needed to be saved, he reminded himself, as he entered the near-empty dorm. He totally had it under control. One more second and Erickson's gross greasy face would have been ground to dust. But, nope—now he was a Jersey rat, a silver-hoarding kyke, anda wussy fag, and quite honestly, Ford could have done without the last one being tacked on with the help of McGucket's swooping hillbilly rescue.
(and Ford felt in his heart of hearts that this useless fucking pride was probably what had forced Stan home every other night with bloody knuckles and a split-lip-smirk and swelling bruises that transformed his face with galaxies of purples and greens around his eyes — and while he never understood it before, Ford now realized that Stan's fights were about more than just inconveniencing him to drag out the first-aid kit, more than slipping loose change from the register on the sly so he could get peroxide without his father finding out, more than What are you gonna tell Mom if she cries again I don't know what I'd do with myself Stanley, more than why can't you ever just ignore them when they say these things instead of throwing left hooks around I know you're capable of ignoring them hell you're ignoring me right now, more than I hope you fucking won Stanley because if Dad found out you lost a fight you'll get even worse from him and I can't mend bones with just a first aid kit, more than Jesus Stanley you're gonna get yourself killed, more than Jesus Stanley why do you act like you want to get killed—
(that it was about something more, something deeper, something that Stan had deep in him that Ford now realized laid dormant behind his own stomach as well, that had awoken with the slammed fist to his gut and the hand wrapping itself around his Hamesh, and that he'd die before he let this new part of him wither away)
Ford grabbed the toiletries, and walked towards the bathroom, pointedly looking away from the dark ominous mold making its home on the shower walls, opting instead to look towards the toilet as he unloaded his soaps, sponges, combs and razors into one of the two bathroom cabinets. On the way back to the bed, he stomped out any cockroaches that defiled his path, bouncing on one heavy boot to the other to the beat of his mantra: He's fine (Stomp—Squish). He's got personality (Stomp—Squish). Stupid fucking school (Stomp—Squish). Stop (Stomp—Squish). (Repeat.)
When he got back to the bed, he picked up the complimentary bug spray and liberally coated the walls and floor around his bed, unprepared for the audible scampering of cockroaches he heard fleeing. Were there really that many, or was it all in his head? The answer was don't think about it, and Ford tossed the bug spray aside and focused all his energy towards picking out a sweater vest and shirt to wear to the orientation, scheduled to start in under an hour. As Ford yanked clothes off the mattress and shoved them into the drawers of a bedside dresser of rotting wood, he unearthed two small photographs that flitted from the pockets of one of the jeans onto the mattress.
He knew the photos were generally in his mother's safety lockbox in her room, and he hadn't seen them in years. He thought of her offering to help him pack the previous night and snorted— what did she think was going to happen? That he'd see the photos and suddenly his college chances at WCT wouldn't be ruined, that he and Stan could waltz around the betrayal of a lifetime for the rest of their lives?
The first photo was old and thin, featuring two young boys on the helm of a shipwrecked sailboat (possibly with pirate ghosts or Mesoamerican gold) proudly displaying the sunburns and freckles etched into their puffed-out chests and ready to take on the world forever, for as long as the world lasted, not knowing that the world they knew would crash and burn a month after their 18th birthday.
The second photo was newer, but not new by any stretch of the imagination. One brother had his arm looped around the neck of the other, in front of the backdrop of doting parents (or as doting as their parents could be). The boys worried about next to nothing, still clinging to the dreams of a rotten sailboat on New Jersey shores making it out in one piece, neither of them able to guess that they were merely a couple years away from getting out of Jersey themselves, their dynamic duo in shambles.
Ford glanced at the other side of the room, empty and bare but for a rotting bed and dresser identical to his own, and a part of him was glad that BU had given him a roommate against his will, and excited to see who might show up later in the day; he decided he was sick of half-empty rooms.
Orientation had been as underwhelming as Ford had expected it, with Backupsmore not able to exceed expectations even in this. He had spent the entirety of the conference in a creaky seat, squirming uncomfortably whenever he felt the ghost of an itch of the scampers of little legs, or worse, the sharp bite of tiny mandibles.
He was placed between a girl with a pig-like nose wearing an obnoxiously bright tie-dye top, and a man whose beard reeked with the same general air of disappointment as the rest of the campus, listening to the heavy, boring drone of the dean, who it seemed believed in the merits of the school even less than some of the students. Ford found himself distracting his mind with glances of the photographs from earlier between the speakers' half-hearted remarks of the school's luxuries, including but not limited to:
Three vending machines, not a single one of which worked
A "highly-vigilant security team" comprised completely of a single 98-year-old deaf man who had been sitting there with his hearing aid turned off, snoring near the stage of the auditorium.
Working bathrooms (they no longer had to use the outhouses three blocks away—Hooray!)
Overall, Ford had to at least concede that his day hadn't gotten any worse after a horrible morning and afternoon, so he cashed in his winnings and headed back to his dorm, eager to meet his new roommate.
There were three flights of stairs between the front door of the Werce Building and Ford's dorm. Midway through the second flight, the scent of strong pot hit him full force, and he had to fight through the odor, thick in the air. At the third flight of stairs, he was positive it was coming from someone on his floor, but when he approached his own door and pulled it open, he hadn't been expecting to be punched with the brunt of a thick fog of his hot-boxed dorm.
A groan had started to formulate on his lips, but when he saw who was sitting in the previously empty bed, surrounded by a mess of empty pizza boxes and DD&MD figurines, the groan died before it could enter the smoke-choked air. Lying there, muddy bare feet and all, was McGucket, looking just as unhappy to see Ford as Ford was to see him.
"Oh," they both said in unison with the same tone of disappointment, before glaring deeply at one another as though offended at the other daring to utter the same syllable.
"What are you doing here? Aside from turning my dorm into a crime scene through your use of illegal substances, of course." Ford's eyes narrowed at McGucket, who simply took another puff of the joint still lit in his hand before stretching and sitting up against the wall.
"Well, this is my dorm, Jersey." McGucket said, rubbing the end of the joint into an ashtray at his side before glaring up at Ford. "I would think that much is obvious. Just in case, though, what're you doing here? Aside from still being ungrateful, of course, while also possibly being a narc."
Ford crossed his arms and stayed his ground. "I'm sorry I didn't expect to come back from orientation to" he coughed on his next words, seemingly for emphasis of his point, "to this."
"By this do you mean the weed or me specifically?"
"Both, really."
"Gee, you're polite." The sarcasm dripped off the hillbilly's tongue in massive quantities.
"I guess we can just send in a request for a roommate switch, right?"
The eyeroll McGucket shot at him him was earth-shattering. "We're never gonn' get our rooms switched, genius. BU doesn' work like that." He swung his legs over the bed and nimbly leapt to his bare feet, an imprint of his bottom still sunk inches into the mattress, and started walking towards where Ford was rooted to the ground, fuming. "You 'nd I are stuck in this room together 'til summer, an' nothing is gon' change that, short of one of us murdering the other— an' even in that case, I'm sure you'd have to bunk with the body unless yer willing to pay to get it removed."
McGucket paused in front of Ford, standing almost exactly level in height, his tumultuous blue eyes meeting Ford's starry brown. "You're stuck with me, Jersey boy."
Ford crossed his arms, baring his teeth in scowl that might as well have been plucked from his father's face. "I have a name."
"And I couldn't possibly care less. Look, I don't know who the fuck you're so angry at, but it sure as hell shouldn't be me. I did you a favor."
Ford's arms shook against his chest as he snorted. I have every right to be angry, he didn't say, because it wasn't true. I know exactly how I should be feeling, he didn't say, because he wasn't sure. I know why I feel this way, he didn't say, because he didn't want to contemplate the honesty of the words. "I had it under control. I could have crushed that motherfucker!"
"I know."
"Everyone thinks I'm just some skinny Jewish Jersey freak, but—wait, what? You know?"
"Hell yeah, I do," he said and Ford's head tilted in confusion as McGucket sat down on the bed again, and let out a sparkling laugh that bounced around the room, off Ford's ears, off the thin-walls, off the cockroaches wriggling unseen in the drywall like stars in a daylight sky, and off the jagged yellow tooth hugging the side of McGucket's smile. It took a few moments for the laughter to clear up and for McGucket to speak again, still smiling. "You shoulda seen the look on yer face. Was like a rabid dog, I tell ya! I haven' seen a man with that look since my uncle Joey found out the pastor's boy knocked up his daughter Patricia — that there was a quickly-planned wedding, lemme tell you. But yeah, you were 'bout to rip Erickson to shreds faster than a wolf in a henhouse. You're sure-as-hell skinny, and sure-as-fuck Jewish, but that don't mean Erickson didn't escape an early grave today."
The confusion rattling in Ford's brain was incessant. "If you knew I had it, why'd you step in?"
"You gotta wait your turn, Jersey boy!" McGucket raised an eyebrow and smirked over his shoulder in Ford's general direction as he fidgeted with a figurine on his bed-side dresser. "I've had a fixin' to punch Erickson right in his fat stupid face for a semester and a half. I've been letting that anger fester in me a real long time, because revenge is best served cold, ya know. and I've been biding my time, waiting for the boiling to stop, formulating the perfect plan to make sure he never wants to wake up again, when I look over, and see you, some spanking new freshman who hasn't even unpacked his bags, about to maim, if not murder, the object of my loathing. There's a long, long line of people who Erickson and his buddies have made miserable, and frankly, I'd blow Nixon before I let some fresh meat who's been here for all of five minutes kill him before I get my chance."
Ford sputtered indignantly. "What does it matter? If you had a problem with him, then does it really matter who gets to do it, as long as he gets his ass handed to him?"
"You tell me, Jersey Boy. Does it? After all, you seemed mighty angry with me for doing it for you."
At that, Ford sat on his bed, his ass sinking through the mattress against the bed frame, with his shoulders raised to his ears. He wanted more than anything to let out a frustrated whine—he didn't really have a right to be angry at all, did he? McGucket seemed to pick up on the way Ford's anger whittled down to nothing in a fraction of the second it had taken for the embers to burst into hot flames; all that energy, unable to be redirected, was fizzling out and dissipating, and it was truly a sight to behold. The hillbilly let out another chuckle before speaking again.
"At any rate, you should be glad. Like I said, I did ya a favor. Erickson's dumber than the son of a slab of concrete and a pebble, so I wouldn't be too worried about him, but he's still got a whole slew of buddies who jump on his say-so. There's bound to be a pretty little target on my pretty little ass fer a hot minute an' a half. It's just a shame I had to settle fer just punchin' him an' holding him in the mud. I could've done that whenever, you know? But quality revenge?—Whoo-wee, that takes time to plan." McGucket let out one last chortle of laughter, replacing the figurine back on his dresser, before a thick and uncomfortable silence filled the room.
Ford sunk even deeper into the mattress, his feet hardly touching the ground, as though the mattress had more give than a hammock. Still, he tried to be comfortable, leaning his head awkwardly against the wall, only to wince when he felt the collision on the back of his head and the side of his face where a bump was swelling from being dropped in the mud earlier. A righteous anger flared again in the pit of his stomach, like the reminder of the events of that afternoon had the flammability of gasoline, and the mantra recycled itself, kickstarting again with the newfound energy. Because how dare he? (And Ford wasn't even sure who he was, but how d a r e he? Was it no one in particular? Was it everyone and everything he had encountered since bothering to wake up on this miserable, muddy, pest-infested day? How dare Erickson, how dare McGucket, how dare thisStupid fucking school, how dare Stanl—)
"There's some ice in the freezer, you know."
Ford roused himself from his thoughts and struggled with the mattress to sit up and offer McGucket a questioning look. "Hmm?"
"Ice. You know?"
When Ford's only response was silence and confusion, McGucket tossed back another monumental eyeroll for the history books before bouncing off the mattress and towards the kitchen. While mumbling something under his breath about stupid freshman and stupid Jersey and stupid doe-eyed pretty-boy twerps (so quietly that the words were stuck in a vacuum between McGucket, the roaches and God Himself), the hillbilly grabbed a couple items from the small freezer, before slamming the door shut. In seconds, McGucket was gliding back across the room in his bell-bottoms and bare feet, stopping and kneeling before Ford (still sitting awkwardly and twiddling his thumbs on the bed) before placing a small ball of aluminium foil into Ford's idle hand and none-to-gently shoving a sandwich baggie of hard ice against the fastly growing bruise on Ford's cheek (leading to a high-pitched yelp from Ford and an exasperated sigh from the hillbilly pressing ice-cubes into his skin).
"Well, I ain't holding it in place," McGucket said, after a beat of silence, and when Ford looked up at him, blankly and dumbly, McGucket grabbed his six-fingered hand to hold it against the bag of ice, not letting go until Ford caught the message to keep a grip on it.
"Jesus, are you concussed or something, Jersey? Just hold the ice there 'til the swelling goes down," he said, letting go of Ford's hand and adding a slightly-quieter (but not too quiet to be heard) mumble of "fucking Jersey moron."
Ford nodded numbly, trying to ignore the bite of the ice on his skin as the bruise slowly, but surely, stopped throbbing. "You didn't have to," he muttered back, not meeting McGucket's expression slowly relaxing into something softer.
"Well, we're gonna be sharing a room for the school year, right? I know that murder option is still on the table, but I've seen you angry, and that doesn't seem like it'd be a pleasant way to go." At that, Ford's frown stretched into a thin, dry grin tugging at the corner of his mouth, before quickly rolling back into a frown of confusion at the cold aluminium bundle in his hand.
"And, uh, what's this?"
McGucket snorted and started walking back to his bed before collapsing to lie on his back with a grunt. "It's a twice-baked 'tater. My momma made them for breakfast this morning before I drove out here and insisted I take the whole batch. There's plenty left over, and I figured you should eat something after that incredible ass-kicking earlier today. Normally I'd tell you to toss it in the oven to heat it up, but the power's off in the dorms until tomorrow morning, because in case you haven't noticed, Backupsmore sucks ass. The 'tater's probably not frozen completely through, though, and if I know my Ma's cooking, it'll taste great either way."
Ford hadn't even thought about food since that morning; between the cyclone of feelings furling in his chest and the life-altering move across states, hunger hadn't exactly been a priority. Still, once McGucket had mentioned it, his stomach came to life, rumbling against the butterflies hovering in his abdomen; while still keeping one hand dutifully against the ice on his head, Ford unwrapped the potato, unfrozen but chilled, and took a bite to find it was stuffed with sour cream and cheese. He practically groaned with delight when he swallowed the bite down.
"Not bad, right?" McGucket looked smug from his side of the room, but Ford couldn't muster up the nerve to be bothered by it, instead opting to take another huge mouthful of potato goodness, to the hillbilly's amusement.
"Ma's twice-baked taters are always perfection. They go better with bacon, but with the power out—"
Ford deadpanned, swallowing the creamy bite in his mouth. "You literally watched me eat shit an hour ago for being Jewish."
"Oh yeah. I sure got my foot in my mouth. So you, er, what's-the-word…. You, er, kosher then?"
"Keeping kosher is part of being Jewish," Ford said pointedly, looking at the ceiling.
"Is that a yes?"
When Ford responded by shoving another bite down his gullet and avoiding eye contact, McGucket gasped once more and jumped to his feet.
"Oh my God, you're not Kosher, are you?" The hillbilly said it in hushed conspiratorial tones and Ford felt his face heating up.
"Okay, so I had bacon once, but I was really curious and—"
Mcgucket cackled at Ford's uncomfortable squirming. "You're a bad Jew!"
"You mention this to nobody! If my mother knew I'm not completely kosher she'd throttle me!"
At that McGucket stopped his laughing and solemnly nodded, throwing Ford for a loop. "You, uh, you're not going to laugh at me? For being scared of my mom?" the freshman asked, hazarding a glance up to meet McGucket's face, which was almost comically somber.
"Nope. If there's one thing I know, it's not to cross someone's momma. God knows a threat from mine is as serious as a heart attack. I'd chance walking into a lion's den, or even into a ring with you when you're as angry as you were earlier, over crossing her. So how's 'bout this—I won't mention yer bacon, if you don't mention my bud." McGucket jerked his head towards the ashtray and gave Ford a wink, and the atmosphere settled into something much more palpable as the freshman regrettably ate the last bite of the potato, before another thought suddenly entered his mind.
"Wait a second. If the power's out, how do you have a running electric refrigerator?"
McGucket's stormy blue eyes widened into excited navy galaxies and he rushed to the kitchen. "It's actually an invention of mine! A self-charging electrochemical power cell!"
Ford's attention went from grieving the loss of his potato to the implications of McGucket's words in a millisecond, and dropped the ice and rose to his feet, practically leaping after McGucket to the fridge. "Self-charging? But how do you rebuild the zinc's mass after the ionic transfer to the copper plate?"
As if working on the same wavelength, Ford and McGucket yanked on the back of the fridge simultaneously, and peered inside at the power cell keeping it running.
"Well, I charge the porous barrier to replenish the zinc for the transfer, of course." McGucket sounded like he was trying (and failing) to hold back his own pride, and honestly Ford was bursting at the seams at the sight of the machinery.
"But how?!"
"It was easy. Here you see I had generator hooked up the barrier, keeping it perpetually charged with the energy it gets from—"
"Moses above, is that a perpetual motion machine?"
"Yuppers! Like what you see?" McGucket buzzed with excitement but stopped when he noticed that Ford's excitement had come to a halt and become a contemplative humm.
"I actually made one of these babies myself back home," Ford said, hand on his chin and thinking deeply— don't think about Jersey don't think about WCT don't think about Stanl— "And y'know, McGucket, I think you can make this more efficient."
"No way, Jersey Boy." McGucket's prideful energy had come to a standstill, narrowing into a competitive smirk, as Ford went back to his dresser and pulled out the blueprints for his own perpetual motion machine from the Glass Shard High science fair.
"Read it and weep, Bluegrass." With a victorious leer, Ford tossed the rolled up blueprints over to McGucket who then raked over the calculations slowly and let out a low wolf-whistle.
"Damn, Jersey. This is quite a hunk of metal you got planned here. When you're right, you're right. I could get way more charge out of this baby." McGucket glanced up at Ford with a raised eyebrow and a toothy grin, his yellow tooth glaring like gold. "Whatchya doin' in a shitpile like BU? This is some West Coast Tech-level stuff"
Ford's proud victory mellowed down into a ruefully bent posture, and he glared at his shoes. "Well, you know. Shit happens."
"Shit happens?"
"Shit happens." It was said with a sharp finality, and McGucket chose not to question it further, scanning the blueprints deeper as the tension thickened around them, when Ford decided to break the silence.
"So, what about you? Your power cell is definitely too impressive to just be cooling potatoes in your fridge. Why didn't you get into to West Coast Tech?"
"Who said I didn't?"
McGucket had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at the way Ford sputtered, eyes wide with a face somewhere between shocked and angry. "You got into West Coast Tech?"
"Yup."
"Yup?" Ford was definitely angry, McGucket mused. Angry and resentful.
"Yup. And those hogswaggling white-collar gold-trimmed small-dicked fake-liberal motherfuckers wouldn't know genius if it vibrated in their asses and blew them." This simmered the anger down a lot, and McGucket smiled as Ford let out an indignified snort, so he continued on.
"Trust me, Jersey. It's just an expensive circles of white boys reaffirming every good thing they've ever heard about themselves. They call the place a school, but honestly, the only thing people learn there is how not to break their wrists jerking one another off."
Ford laughed harder for a few moments, and when the chuckles trickled down, he asked incredulously, "So what— you got accepted but turned them down on principle?
At this it was McGucket's turn to snort. "Oh, no. I'm not an idiot. I absolutely enrolled. I mean, Momma raised her baby with principles, but she didn't raise an absolute blathering moron with principles—it's West Coast Tech! No one turns down West Coast Tech! It's the best college in the country!"
Ford started to sober up a bit at that, but a smile still quirked at his lips. "So what happened? Why are you here?"
"Well, like you said, shit happens. I may have started a fire or two."
This was news to Ford, who shook his head, trying not let out another bout of laughter as McGucket continued.
"Or three…. or four..., or really it might have been seven, but—"
"You accidentally started seven fires at West Coast Tech?!" Ford's completely lost it at this point, and he collapsed on to his bed.
"But it was for a REALLY good cause, I swear!"
"What cause could possibly be good enough to start seven fires at West Coast Tech?!"
"Science, of course!"
They both crumbled into a fit of laughter, and it resonated deeply in Ford, a warmth bouncing around inside his gut in a way it hadn't since—Stop.—had been at his side. He had fully collapsed into the chuckles, rolling on the mattress with too much give, mirthful with abandon, with tears running down his face. Soon the laughter subsided, and McGucket reached into his drawer and pulled out another joint and a lighter, seemingly one of his own creation, that flickered on near-instantly with a thin press of a button. Ford's eyes hovered toward the clock on the wall, and McGucket's gaze followed.
"You gotta be somewhere?" The hillbilly stretched out, turning on his side and facing the freshman, looking content as a Cheshire Cat, yellow tooth like gold in his smile.
"Yeah, I gotta get my textbooks before the shop closes. I only got 30 minutes." With a groan, Ford unfurled from the mattress, rising to his feet, and grabbing a fresh outfit that didn't smell like weed before going into the bathroom. Through the door, Ford heard McGucket speak.
"So, Jersey Boy. I wouldn't mind getting your name now, now that we've confirmed that we won't kill each other." Yet, the air whispered silently between them.
"Oh, uh, it's Ford."
At this he heard a chuckle that probably went on a bit longer than the already-stoned McGucket had intended. "Nuh uh. You can't be Ford. I go by Ford."
"Really?"
"Yup. short for Fiddleford, and I ain't going by Fiddle. D'you got a longer name we can use?"
"Um… Stanford, actually." Ford heard a sigh of relief from outside the bathroom, but his own fingers tightened on the top he gripped in his hands.
"Good. then you could go by Stan, and then—"
"No." The curtness and abruptness of Ford's anger surprised both of them, and he felt his shoulders quake. With an exhale, he tried to salvage the atmosphere with a softer tone, pulling the new shirt over his head. "I, um, would prefer not to go by—"
"It's fine. You can be Ford if you wanna."
Ford strained his ears as he switched pants, listening for any passive-aggressiveness or frustrating on McGucket's part. "Are you sure, McGucket?"
"Yeah." A beat of silence went by as Ford pictured Fiddleford taking a deep pull from the joint. "I've been meaning for a change of pace anyways. I can go by Fiddle. Or Fidds. Who knows, maybe Erickson will get confused and I'll lose the target he'll inevitably paint on me. He probably has no object permanence—I wouldn't be surprised if a new name threw him off."
"Alright, Fidds." Ford glanced at his reflection in the mirror—the swelling had gone down drastically since earlier that day; the ice must have really helped. "Thanks."
"No problem, Jersey Boy." Ford rolled his eyes at the giggling permeating through the door and then turned to the toilet. On the bottom of the bowl, he saw the image of a familiar face seemingly scratched into the porcelain. It had definitely not been there earlier when Ford had unpacked his toiletries, meaning it must have been keyed in while Ford was at the orientation ceremony.
"Uh, Fidds?"
"Yeah Ford?"
"Why is Lyndon B. Johnson's face where we shit?"
A beat of silence, and then the strained stifles of heavy laughter.
"Oh, um." Fiddleford let out a cackle and Ford waited patiently, staring at the watery likeness of the 36th president, the man who kickstarted the American involvement in the Vietnam War. "Well, with all the shit we've seen come out of his mouth," Fidds said as he composed himself, "I figured he's probably into it... the sick fuck."
Ford shrugged and reached for his belt as Fiddleford giggled through the door. He really had to go, and who was he to deny the former president of his needs?
Ford had returned to an empty dorm room after his overpriced venture to the campus bookstore. There hadn't been a note, but Ford thought nothing of it. Who knew what a guy like Fidds could be up to after dark?
He stretched out on his mattress, fighting to find a smidgen of comfort lying down on it's jagged protruding springs, before giving up on that and opting to sit up instead with his new book on nuclear physics open in his lap.
Well, "new' in a sense, but he doubted the wrinkled (and somewhat sticky) pages were fresh from the printer, as he struggled to get a head-start on his reading through several ambiguous brownish-black stains.
But somewhere, nestled between the definitions and notes on the topological structure of spacetime and the Klein–Gordon equation, his mind was already racing through the stars, deep in thought in a sea of dust and ice, riding out the memories of the last couple of days, the last couple of months, on a rotten sailboat.
It had been a rocky adventure, he decided, subconsciously congratulating his second-mate, who looked a lot like him and wasn't like him at all, for making the sailing as smooth as it could have been, as they navigated their father's belt and their mother's deception, yellow rocks jutting out wildly to the left from the sea like teeth, and (for some reason) glowing golden slit-like eyes.
The daydreams fit themselves into his mantra, as Ford nestled into the mattress and the wall (ultimately deciding the wall was the more comfortable of the two, even with the faint scampering he swore he heard within it):
He's fine. Jutting tooth. Schrödinger. He's got personality. Appalachia. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine. Barefoot. Relativistic quantum field theory. He's got personality. Electrochemical Power Cell. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine. Blue Eyes. Mass-energy equivalence. He's got personality. Pot. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine. War. Scalar electrodynamics. He's got personality. West Coast Tech. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine. Peace. Electromagnetism. He's got personality. Miscellaneous stains. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine. Angry. Feynman–Stueckelberg interpretation. He's got personality. Joint. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine. Not kosher. Phosphorescence. He's got personality. Seven fires. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) He's fine. He's got personality. Stupid fucking school. Stop. (Repeat.) Yellow slitted eyes—
A knock on the door yanked Ford from his deep trance of thought, and he stretched his legs despite the protest of his knees and climbed to his feet. "I'm coming," Ford called, glancing at the clock. It was 11 p.m. Fiddleford was probably back by now.
Ford rolled his eyes as he approached the door. "Fidds, it's a bit late. Try to give me a heads up next time, alright. I—"
Ford's words caught on the back of his throat as he tossed the door open, meeting Fiddleford in the doorway, in pain and struggling to hold himself up. Ford forgot how to speak. He forgot how to breathe. Stop.
One of Fiddleford's eyes—the raging passionate dark blue eyes— was swollen shut. The hillbilly was leaning against the door frame, still barefoot, heaving for breaths, with blood dribbling down his chin. The jutting tooth— the yellow, bright landmark of his smile—was missing, gone, knocked out of it's place.
"Erickson… he…" Fiddleford's words trailed off into a fit of coughing and dry heaving, and he bent over, struggling to find another breath as more blood dribbled off his lips with his drool.
Bending back upright, Fiddleford met Ford's worried wide-eyed shock with a scared look of his own for less than a second before he collapsed forward, unable to hold his own weight, landing directly in Ford's shaking open arms.
A new mantra took hold in Ford's mind as he closed the door and set himself and Fiddleford to the floor of the dorm:
He's going to be fine. We're both strong enough in our own way. We'll make it through this school. Stop. (Repeat.)