3.
Yuri peered into the glass display case, where colorful boxes of overpriced candy were arranged in neat rows.
"And, uh, a box of Reese's Pieces." He reached into his pocket to retrieve his wallet, not looking up at the employee as she calculated his total in a bored voice. There went that tip money.
With one arm wrapped around an overflowing tub of butter popcorn, the other balancing a cardboard tray of soft drinks, Yuri wondered why he was the one that always ended up standing in line for snacks. The girls had run off for that mysterious pre-movie bathroom pilgrimage, apparently a necessary part of the experience. They'd promised to save him a seat.
By the time he got into the theater it was dark, of course. Now for the fun part: waiting for his eyes to adjust so that he could find his friends among the softly sloping rows of seats. Yuri was only a few steps into the room, though, when he felt a tug on the hem of his shirt.
"Yuri," Estelle hissed. He stopped short, depositing the popcorn bucket in her lap before shuffling past her legs into his seat.
"Why are we so far back?" Yuri turned to Estelle with a mock-apologetic expression. "I know you want to make out with me, but it's not going to—"
"Yuri!" She batted at his arm, voice just loud enough for the people a couple of rows ahead of them to turn around and scowl in their general direction. Geez, it was just the previews. "Judy's right over there!"
Yuri kind of loved the fact that for Estelle, the main objection wasn't that he was into guys but that they would have a witness. He chuckled and slung an arm around the back of her chair—and the other around Judy's when she pouted at him. Of course, devious thing that she was, Judy used the opportunity to grab the box of Reese's Pieces from where it had perched on his armrest.
The only decent movie they could agree on had been suspenseful horror, which meant Estelle clinging to Yuri so much that she was practically in his lap, squealing with fright every few minutes and apologizing profusely immediately after. Yuri thought that maybe she should apologize to the popcorn, which really suffered the most in this situation. The clean-up crew was going to love them. As for Yuri, he couldn't bring himself to focus on the movie, not even when everyone was dead except for the endearingly-dorky protagonist and the large-breasted screaming girl. Oh, and their bland sidekick, but nobody cared about him. He was only there for unfunny one-liners, and probably to die next so the couple could get together. So stereotypical. It was never two guys at the end, or hell, two girls. Yuri was equal opportunity that way. He reached for a handful of popcorn, musing that America was totally ready for a gay zombie movie. Uh. Gay zombie-movie, he clarified in his mind, not gay-zombie. There was a big difference. He snorted, and Judy looked over at him with a look of mixed bemusement and concern.
The truth was, Yuri's mind had been skittering around on odd tangents all weekend. He didn't consider himself a particularly deep thinker, not one to sit and angst about something when he could fix it instead. But when he did have something on his mind, it nudged at him until it couldn't be ignored. And that finally happened in the back of a dark movie theater, while the drooling undead charged at the screen.
Things he hadn't dealt with. Things he hadn't thought needed fixing. Memories floated up from where they had been long ignored, brought to the surface from that face-to-face encounter with his past on Thursday. Yuri tapped a thoughtless, uneven beat on the armrest, suddenly so over this movie. He pulled himself to his feet, glad that they didn't have rows of people behind them that would complain.
"I'll be back in a minute," he muttered, figuring they would make the reasonable assumption that he'd had too much soda. So it was with some surprise that he turned outside the room's double doors to find Judy not far behind him, arms crossed and head tilted slightly to the side.
"Estelle's going to get scared in there by herself," Yuri said. He looked back at the doors pointedly.
Judy smiled, clearly not buying the excuse. "She'll be fine. But the question is if you are."
Damn. She was way too perceptive. Yuri shrugged and leaned his back against the wall.
"Just needed some air. Thought I'd walk around for a bit, come back after Mr. Third Wheel ate it."
This made Judy chuckle. "His days are numbered, aren't they? Well, then. Perhaps I'll take a walk, myself."
That was Judy for you. She wouldn't look up at you all dewy-eyed and ask what was wrong. She'd just be there, somehow, as if it had been your idea in the first place. They walked together down the burgundy-carpeted hall without speaking, taking turns at random, until they ended up in the lobby again. The front entrance was mostly glass and through it Yuri could see the busy parking lot, where the sun was starting to go down.
"I thought I'd go visit my parents," he said, tone even and casual as he glanced over at Judy out of the corner of his eye. "Wanna come with?"
Of Yuri's two best friends, Estelle was the one that was sweet and naively compassionate, the kind of person who would adopt stray cats and give money to homeless people, never thinking they might feed an addiction rather than their stomachs. Judy, though, was the one who could see right through him. She would know that despite Yuri's neutral expression, he was saying please come with me. I don't want to do this alone.
"Okay," she said after a moment, just as casually. If she was surprised by the request, Judy didn't show it. When they got back to their movie, Estelle scolded Yuri for leaving them during "the scariest part!" and showed him the straw to her soda, its top chewed into nervous oblivion. On the screen, the couple was back to back, facing down the zombie horde with pocket knives and the Power of Love. Their sidekick friend was nowhere to be seen.
They drove up early on Sunday, after the family had left for church. Yuri didn't think Ken and Lori would mind him visiting his birth parents' grave—in fact, they'd probably think it was a healthy sign—but he really preferred for that to be private. The last thing he wanted was to be grilled about it once he got home, even if it would probably be in a cautious and sensitive way.
The cemetery was on the outskirts of Yuri's old hometown, so it took about an hour to get there with traffic. Yuri cranked up the music, let it play just about the whole way there, pointing out this or that along the road but otherwise not talking much. Judy looked out the window, sometimes sang along, and even though it was kind of quiet Yuri was still glad that she was there. Glad that with her, he didn't have to say so.
They pulled into the drive, slammed car doors shut. It was a nice day, if a little chilly. Sun reflected off the wet grass, which sloped gradually in a hill dotted with statues and headstones. For some stupid reason, Yuri felt like it should have been raining, or that there should at least be some fog or something. It hadn't rained at the funeral, either. Another thing that the movies usually got wrong.
"Would you like me to wait here, or…"
"Nah, just walk with me for now." Yuri reached down and zipped up his black hoodie, stuffed his hands into the pockets as they started up the hill.
Honestly, it had been so long since he had been here—just twice since he'd had to stand there for an hour and a half in a miniature suit, and he'd still been a kid both times—that Yuri wasn't sure he remembered where his parents had been buried. There had been this one tree; its branches were gnarled and knotted like arthritic hands, and he remembered staring at it, not knowing what else to do. Of course, there were a lot of trees. Yuri wandered the rows, glancing casually at the names and dates carved into headstones as he did, making of game of sorts out of finding the oldest one.
He'd probably been at it for twenty minutes when it loomed in front of him, more skeletal than he'd remembered with its bare winter limbs. The image had been burned into his memory; what he was searching for wouldn't be far, now. Just two rows over, dark gray stone, not as weathered as some but not new, either. A small bunch of silk flowers, pink and white, sat propped against it. Yuri had no idea who put them there, or how long ago. Cursed himself mentally for the fact that he hadn't brought any of his own. He turned his head to look back at Judy, who had been following him pretty closely, but she had gone to look at the tree, hands clasped behind her back as if it was the most fascinating thing in a world. As if that was what she had planned to do all along. Yuri shook his head, smirking a little.
Not concerned about grass stains on his dark jeans, Yuri knelt near the stone. Read the names etched there that were still oddly surreal, brushed his fingers over them.
Thomas Lowell
June 1st, 1962 - July 27th, 2000
Beloved son, husband, father
Nadia Volkova Lowell
December 15th, 1963 - July 27th, 2000
Treasured daughter, wife, mother
Just like that. Their entire lives, summed up in four words. Yuri didn't really feel like philosophizing life's fragility and impermanence, though. He tried to remember their faces—not the ones from photographs, frozen and memorized. Faces in motion, laughing, scolding, alive. Flickering from moment to moment, unpredictable.
Yuri wasn't the kind of person to talk to graves. He knew they couldn't hear him; that it wouldn't make him feel better, just kind of foolish. Instead, he sat there, remembering things he hadn't allowed himself to dwell on in years. The way his mom would smooth hair back from his face, laugh at him when he told her to call him Connor. How his dad, bearded and serious, would order pizza when it was just the two of them, winking like it was a secret.
It had been a long time since then, years of memories piled on top of what now would never be. A different past and future, erased in an instant by a sleep-deprived long haul trucker. Yuri wasn't sure what to do with this. He missed them. He couldn't change it. Steadying a hand against the flat top of the stone, he stood and brushed the clinging bits of grass off his jeans.
Maybe he wouldn't wait so long before visiting again, next time.
Yuri went to find Judy, who wasn't at the tree anymore. While he made he way back down the rows, a crouched figure caught his attention. Yuri stopped walking a few paces away, hand set on his hip, suddenly curious.
He knew that guy. He was kind of hard to miss, with brilliant white-blond hair that was even longer than Yuri's own, falling in waves down past his waist. Yuri didn't actually know his name, but had seen him on campus countless times; he was kind of infamous, though no one could say whether he actually attended classes there. Normally he was just known as "that weird guy who plays with squirrels." Any given day one could find him under a shady tree, a plastic bag filled with some kind of seeds or something on the grass beside him, enticing the squirrels that inhabited the quad to creep ever closer. One girl that had been in Yuri's astronomy class last semester swore that she saw one of them climb up onto the guy's shoulder. Most people assumed that he wasn't quite right in the head.
Yuri had seen him at other places on campus—thought he might even live in the same dorm building—but never out in the "real world." Certainly not this far from the city. He realized, then, that the guy was talking. His voice was startlingly deep and resonant, dropped to almost a whisper.
"You should still be at my side, Elucifer. Why must humanity be so cruel?"
Okay, yeah. Weird, for sure. E-lu-what? Did Yuri hear that right? Now intrigued, he didn't even worry about the fact that he was probably intruding on a very private moment. That is, until a bloodshot pair of eyes swept over to lock with his. He rose to his feet fluidly and, before Yuri could do or say anything, strode away with his long coat flapping behind him.
Curiosity got the better of Yuri, once he had recovered from that oddly charged moment. He walked over until he stood where the squirrel-guy had been. A fresh bundle of curling fern fronds and orange lilies had been left against the stone.
Eliot Shaw
October 4th, 1989 - October 4th, 2008
Yuri sure if what he found there had him more disappointed (the guy wasn't actually named after the devil) or intrigued (he died extremely young, and on his birthday. Man, that would suck.) That impulse of curiosity now satisfied, the information was filed away as something that didn't mean anything to him personally, but was kind of interesting. Yuri turned and walked away.
He found Judy back at the car—"I got cold," she said, smiling. Yuri refrained from pointing out that her thin V-neck sweater wasn't exactly built for warmth, that in fact exposing more skin was counterproductive to that kind of thing. Instead, he put the key in the ignition, felt it rumble to life, let the music wash over them both.
To: Yuri Lowell (yclowell)
Sent: Mon 3/15/10 9:47 AM
From: Scott Moore (sdmoore)
Hey Yuri,
This is your RA. I thought you should know that your roommate came by earlier this morning and requested a room change. That request was denied. I'm not going to make any assumptions—I've done this long enough to know that there's always two sides of a story. The bottom line, though, is that rooms are only changed mid-semester in the case of an emergency, and his claim did not constitute one. The university doesn't discriminate based on age, gender, race, social status, or sexual orientation. Whether his concerns were founded in truth or not, the fact is that without proof of harassment or some other legitimate problem, he's not getting special treatment.
I realize, though, that the two of you might still be in an awkward situation. He made some inflammatory comments that I won't repeat, but if he causes you any problems, don't hesitate to contact me or another RA about it. Fortunately we've only got a couple of months left in the semester, and new room assignments can be made for next year. Registration is coming up soon, so make sure you don't miss the deadline.
I don't think I've really gotten a chance to talk to you since the beginning of the year. If you have any questions or just need someone to talk to for whatever reason, my door is always open. Drop on by anytime, man; that's what I'm here for.
Scott Moore, Resident Assistant, Whitehorse Hall (room 108)
Yuri leaned back in his desk chair, torn between being darkly amused and pissed off. It wasn't like it surprised him. He'd actually kind of wondered if this would happen, but that didn't make him any less disgusted with the request. Closing out of the e-mail, he put Scott on his mental list of People That Don't Suck, even if chances were slim to none that he was going to go down to his dorm room for a heart-to-heart any time soon.
On Mondays, Yuri had the same classes as he'd had on Friday—English and Algebra—with one significant difference. Monday and Wednesday, he also had Econ. (Yuri wasn't sure if it would be of any help in whatever major he decided on, but it filled a core requirement and satisfied his number one rule: it didn't start before 9:30.) He expected dry explanations of supply-and-demand and long, boring textbook assignments. What he got was very different.
"And here we have an example of the kind of person who would be missing out on potential profit opportunities if this were a business," Dr. Kaufman was saying as Yuri slipped into the room and down into a chair ten minutes late. She nodded to him, and the playful glint in her eyes behind glasses was not unkind. Behind her, keywords and ideas were scrawled across the whiteboard in an elegant but not-entirely-legible script.
Kaufman's Economics class was one of the very few that Yuri wouldn't sit huddled in the back, taking notes unnoticed and unheard. She encouraged participation, made the principles relevant and (almost) fun. Plus she had a streak of sass a mile wide and a sharp sense of style that some people might put into the "sexy librarian" category. (This morning, that thought took Yuri's mind somewhere else entirely. The glasses didn't help.) At any rate, he could understand why a lot of the guys in the class seemed to have a crush on her.
"Lowell, we're on page 142. In fact, why don't you read the first paragraph of that page. Under the 'diminishing marginal utility' header."
At Yuri's sour look, her smile was positively wicked. The woman knew how much he hated to read out loud. But it wasn't like he didn't have fair warning. It was in her syllabus, in fact: show up late without a serious excuse and leave your dignity at the door. Worded more subtly to make it past the administration, of course. Weirdly, it made Yuri respect her more than it annoyed him. She was also one of those professors who would answer your cell if it rang in class. This had only needed to happen once. Yet even with all these things and an 8-page end-of-semester paper, only a couple of people had dropped the course.
"The law of diminishing…" Yuri started, low and fairly monotone.
"Barnes, can you hear him back there?" Kaufman leaned casually against the podium, looked out over the classroom to a guy seated in the back who called back with a quick 'nope.' Yuri rolled his eyes.
"The law of diminishing marginal utility," he said, louder now, "states that as a person increases consumption of a product, the marginal utility gained from consuming additional units of the product will decline."
Yeah, that wasn't so bad. Kaufman nodded curtly, her gaze sweeping out over the room of students.
"Excellent. I'm sure you've all heard that one can't have too much of a good thing. That's not true in life and certainly not true in business. Can anyone think of some examples of how this might be true?"
Voices chimed in immediately, almost talking on top of each other. Yuri smirked down at his textbook. Only in Kaufman's class.
When Yuri practically threw himself down a stairwell to avoid a guy who vaguely looked like Flynn, he started to think that maybe he was becoming a bit too paranoid. Hell, he'd hardly thought about the guy over the weekend, a little too busy poking and prodding at the memories of his dead parents and brushing off the dust. But now that Yuri was back on campus, he found himself expecting to run into Flynn at any moment. And he really wasn't sure how he felt about that.
Really, in most other cases, Flynn himself wouldn't have rated all that high on Yuri's list of things to worry about. So, okay, he was hot in his nerdy way, and they'd made out. Whatever. But there was something Yuri couldn't put his finger on, even as he shrugged that off—maybe a bit of wounded pride in the way he'd been so suddenly and thoroughly walked away from, with that sad little smile and blue eyes staring him down. He didn't get it, was all. Why it was a big deal, what made this kind of quiet yet oddly intense law student different.
Yuri could have called him, of course. Had even noticed his number a few times, right under Estelle's, and thought briefly about doing it. He wasn't going to sit there agonizing over it, though, and hadn't really decided what to say in the first place. Any offer to hang out at this point seemed like it would be kind of opportunistic, so it was probably better to just lay off for now.
But that didn't stop his mind from deciding that every shaggy-blond, relatively tall male on campus was Flynn. And there were more of them, it turned out, than you'd think. Eventually, he managed to convince his brain that this was stupid, and looked pretty much straight ahead as he walked back to his dorm from the last class of the day. Early afternoon. Plenty of time to do whatever he wanted: sleep, waste time on the internet…and read the assignment for tomorrow's History class, only when it became absolutely necessary.
He was almost back to his dorm hall, wondering idly if Eric would be there and if he'd clear out of the room upon his arrival, when that thought seemed to summon the horde. You know, so to speak—if a horde could be a ring of five muscular, freakishly tall upperclassmen, zeroing in on Yuri as he crossed the parking lot. Oh, yeah. This could only lead to bad places.
The words were first, shouted across the short distance between them, nothing original, nothing he hadn't heard before. Yuri fixed his eyes up ahead, kept walking, hoping they were the kind of idiots that would follow him for a minute spewing hateful garbage before slinking off like the cowards they really were. Of course, minds full of testosterone and not much else, they had to surround him. A few passersby shot nervous glances over at them, ducked their heads down and hurried on their way. That was the way the world worked. People could get stabbed in a subway car and everyone would be too scared to get involved. One crazy person against five, twenty, a hundred. Didn't matter.
They were loosely arranged around him, now. Yuri adjusted his bag on his shoulder, stared them down, wondering what they were planning to do. Beat him up, in broad daylight? Yeah, right. No way they were risking their precious little sports scholarships on a punk like him. Of course, that was assuming they had two brain cells to rub together to remember that.
Sure enough, one of them got stupid-brave enough to shove his shoulder, sending him staggering off to the right a little.
"People like you make me sick," he growled.
Right back at you, moron. Yuri glowered at the jock—up at him, really—and brushed off his shoulder like he'd been touched by something unclean.
"Whatever. You done?"
Which was, in retrospect, kind of a stupid thing to say in that situation. Next thing Yuri knew, he had been pushed again, more roughly, and his knees and palms hit asphalt. They were, at least, playing it kind of lightweight—pushing someone around a bit was far less incriminating than a full-on beat down. But that didn't stop them from directing a stream of abuse in Yuri's direction, making him grit his teeth despite how old and tired it all was. He was a few unimaginative insults away from getting up and starting this fight for real, despite the likely result for him being messy and painful.
Abruptly, there was a shout of surprise behind him that turned to pain, one of the players sinking to the ground in the corner of Yuri's vision, grasping his shin. The others backed off, not even stopping to help their teammate, until he too struggled to his feet and limped away.
"That's a relief," said a voice above him. "Apparently they don't know that there's no way I could have taken them all."
Still braced against the rough black tar of the parking lot, Yuri started laughing, a kind of manic reaction that was more wheezing than anything. When did his life become some kind of ridiculous gay action-hero romantic comedy? (Another as-yet unexplored cinematic genre, that.) He rocked back until he was sitting on his knees and dusted off his hands. They were only lightly scraped. Yuri stared at them as he spoke.
"You kept up with the karate, I take it." Dared a glance up at Flynn, who was smiling a little.
"Among other things. I'm, ah, a second degree black belt in that discipline, but I've dabbled…" He ran a hand along the back of his neck. Embarrassed, or something. Which was…cute? Ugh. Yuri barely resisted facepalming, if only because they stung like hell at the moment.
"Well, thanks, man. I owe you one." Yuri started to push up onto his feet, blinked when he realized that Flynn had extended a hand to pull him up. He backed off a little once they were both standing, though.
"Don't mention it. I…well, a lot of people in my dorm hall know that I attend martial arts classes on campus. I guess one of them noticed what was going on, and next thing I know someone's pounding on my door…" Flynn spread his hands, shrugging, that same embarrassed smile pulling up one corner of his mouth.
Right. There was the flaw in Yuri's assessment of the world. When people cowered too much to take action themselves, they called the people that they knew would. The police. Security. Armed forces. Batman, or something. And that's where the association started to go a bit weird. Flynn was definitely not Batman; if he was going to be a big-shot lawyer, that was pretty much the opposite of someone he should emulate. No matter how awesome the masked vigilante might be. Yuri cleared his throat.
"Anyway, uh." Thoughts flashed into his mind and were dismissed: How was your weekend? Lame. Sorry I didn't call you. Too sappy. Want to go get some coffee? That's a pick-up line, Yuri. "Glad to see one of us stuck with it. Could've used some of those moves a minute ago."
Well, as these things went, it was better than "sure," anyway. Flynn was looking at him thoughtfully. As if on the verge of asking him what had happened, although Yuri really hoped he didn't. "I was too busy being a complete terror to the first few families that tried to take care of me" was kind of a conversation killer.
"You should join us, then," Flynn said brightly, as if that sentence on its own made perfect sense. "The kickboxing classes, I mean. We meet on Thursday mornings, at nine. It's not exactly the same thing, but you could still learn a few good ways to defend yourself. At the very least, how to look intimidating." He smirked.
One part of Yuri's mind locked in on the "at nine" detail and immediately buzzed no, no, no. He'd made a rule for himself and he wasn't going to cave on it in his second semester, dammit. But there was this other, rebellious part of his mind, whispering do it in his ear. He wasn't sure he liked that part.
"Maybe," Yuri found himself saying. And meaning, ridiculously enough. He shouldered his bag, not bothering to investigate too deeply into his sudden interest in something he'd skimmed over in the course catalog before. "Just send me a text with the when and where. I'll forget, otherwise."
"Okay," said Flynn. "Will do. Well, I have to get back to…you know, studying…"
Knowing Flynn, that probably wasn't an excuse. At least he hadn't run out here in his glasses. Yeah, like that'd be a bad thing. Yuri rolled his eyes at himself internally.
"Yeah. Later, man."
And that was it. No awkward "this is where we stand now" conversation; not exactly picking up where they left off, but close enough. It was that easy. Yuri stepped up onto the sidewalk to continue toward his dorm room, laughing at himself. His phone started vibrating ten minutes later, and he grabbed it off the bedside table before it fell.
From: Flynn (2:28 P.M.)
Hey, the kickboxing class meets at 9 a.m. Thursday in the Heracles Fitness Center. Room 4. The teacher will let new people join even though it's mid-semester. Hope to see you there!
Proper punctuation and capitalization in a text message. Dork. But for some reason, Yuri could only shake his head and smile.
A/N: …I tried to give this story chapter titles, but it stressed me out too much to go back and find ones that fit the previous two. This did not bode well for the future. Sorry if that bothers anyone; it's hard enough to think of single-word titles that sum up entire Glass Fortress chapters. Ha, I'm picky. Anyway, I did go back and change a line in chapter one that had been bugging me for a while; I felt like it was too stereotype-y even though it was based on personal, real-life observations of people of whom I'm very fond. But anyway. It's changed now. (If anyone cares to go back and look, it's right after Yuri noticing Flynn's designer jeans.) Hope everyone enjoys the new chapter!
(Anyone who has been in college and doubts Yuri being able to join the class: I know. XD Just go with me on this. I promise it makes sense.)
