Sebastian looked himself over in the reflection of a dusty, bronze plated mirror above the underused fireplace.
"Do you think I need a haircut?' he asked, knowing his own decision, but wanting to hear the possibility that it wasn't as bad as he thought it was. He scratched his face pathetically.
Mercedes frowned, her short stature not reflecting from Sebastian's place in the mirror. She idled between a hot cup of tea and the boy standing in her living room, but she shrugged.
"Is that what you're so in a twist about? Your hair?"
"I have this thing, like a twitch— if things are going wrong for me, I just try to look as good as possible. Things usually clear up after that… things at school are shit. The natural order of things, to my understanding, is in disarray, and it appears I don't have the sway over my peers that I used to,' he was still caressing his hair and watching his reflection in a doomed fashion. "Being ignored by you isn't clearing that up at all,' Sebastian continued, turning to face the girl. She shrunk back at his gaze.
"What's going on with your friends?"
He shook his head, "We don't do that here, do you remember? Your suggestion." Sebastian walked over to the couch, sitting in the middle of it, as if he owned the chair, the room or the entire home. He had a matter-of-factness in his presence, and Mercedes felt small in the center of the room.
"Well, if you need to—,"
"Let's not be circuitous,' he watched her frown at being cut off so abruptly. He would apologize, he knew, very soon, for multiple things that had entirely flown over his head, but he wanted to get there first. "What's up, Mercedes?"
She rolled her eyes as a pretense, in truth, her stomach lurched. What was she going to say— more importantly— how honest was she going to be?
"I told myself that I wasn't going to put up with the same stuff this year that I've put up with my entire life— I wasn't going to let people walk all over me, and you did, but you apologized. You said you were sorry for disrespecting me, and I thought things would be different."
Confusion made a home on Sebastian's face, he raised an eyebrow. "It's not the way I talk to you…? You would've been long gone… If I did something, it's over my head."
Mercedes crossed her arms, the warmth of the mug in her hand heating her arm. She sighed. "Is there anything you think I should know?"
Sebastian shrugged. "That's a big question… there's nothing I think you shouldn't know."
Mercedes took another heavy inhale, breathing out through her nose and looking up at the ceiling. "You know, if I was seeing someone, I would have the common decency to tell you… we're friends, but, I don't know. Things change. I wouldn't want you to feel like you weren't still important to me."
"I didn't think it was possible, but,' Sebastian sighed. "I'm more confused than I was before… 'Seeing someone', what does that— who?... Where?... When? What? How? Just… where are you getting that? Because I haven't had a chance to see you this week? Are you jumping to that far of a conclusion?"
She gave a wry laugh that had an undertone of sadness. "I definitely saw you kiss that girl in the hallway, the one from the football game that you had such a problem with that night… but you respect me?"
Sebastian felt his stomach turn, and he locked eyes with shoes and didn't let go for some time. In earnest, he didn't have much of a rebuttal— he had kissed Quinn in the hallway, the same person that he claimed to hate, and even if Mercedes, as his friend, didn't have a right to be upset about the kiss itself, she had a right to be upset about the person. In fact, he was upset about the person, but Quinn was a difficult person to deny, and he'd been drunk.
"We aren't together,' he began before being quickly cut off.
"I know we aren't together,' Mercedes responded sternly, finally untraining her gaze from the ceiling. She looked at him.
"Me and her aren't together,' he responded, just as rough, looking away from his shoes and sending the girl daggers. They were fighting. Again. "Not to say you don't make a point, you're right: we aren't together, so I don't owe you an explanation about anything I do or don't do or anyone I do or don't do."
She pursed her lips, "You're right, you don't owe me anything, and I don't owe you a shoulder to cry on or an ear to complain to with that attitude. I don't even owe you my friendship, if it's the same thing you're offering to someone you claim to hate."
Sebastian laughed, putting his head into his hands for a few seconds. "I fucked her, is that what you want to hear? I had sex with this girl, like normal people our age do, and the next time she saw me, she kissed me. That was it, that was all it was. I was drunk at a party, and she came onto me, and I fucked her,' he continued passionately. "I'm sorry. I am sorry that I am the person that I am, and you have to see it, Mercedes,' he donned a fake pout and pretended to sympathize, patronizing her.
Feeling like she would be sick, Mercedes thought about kicking the boy out of her house, but she knew he wouldn't leave, or he would, and she'd never speak to him again. He'd never fully raised his voice with her, but they'd never been in a genuine argument. Minor scuffles, serious slights and plenty of offenses, but they had never both been irritated with each other to the point that one had raised their voice.
She wouldn't get loud back, she wasn't mad. She was hurt, and, for the first time with him: she knew why.
It had been very easy for Mercedes to isolate herself from other people and pour most of her social interactions and energy into Sebastian. It was easy. If he hadn't come along, she would have been searching for hands to help hold all the time she had to herself. It was easy for him to be everything, or most things, especially since when he did give her attention, he lavished it, and she flourished within it. He was a good friend, in a sense, an amazing person to know, and as of late, she never found him waxing lyrical about his friends or about things she found confusing or trivial. They enjoyed each other's company, and she pretended that she was the only one that got to know him intimately. Sebastian sleeping with another girl would have been an insult simply by that degree, but that girl being who she was made it hurt even more.
She was saddened.
Mercedes sat on a chair across from him and neither spoke for minutes. She had to go through times where he called her every night to intervals of days or even a week where they wouldn't speak except a small smile in the hallway. She wouldn't describe herself as being clingy or needy or anything similar. Mercedes sustained herself on the idea of Sebastian being totally loyal to their friendship, her dignity, and hadn't allowed herself to unravel that myth— a joke. She had a problem with being unable to see him for who he really was, but she liked to think she was the only one who did. How could they know each other, truly, if another person had gotten closer to him than she ever would? How could she fester so politely with her jealousy when he had tried to touch her before and she had denied him?
There was no right answer; there was no correct desire.
"I thought you were different,' Mercedes said eventually, pathetically.
Sebastian sat for a while longer before giving a lethargic shrug, "Different than what? Than the way we met?"
She nodded but said nothing.
"It's just a thing, Mercedes."
"With her?"
"I was drunk,' he responded, defeated, knowing that if everything else was explicable, Quinn wasn't.
"Even if I was drunk and really in the mood, I still wouldn't have-,"
He cut her off and laughed rudely. "If you were 'drunk and in the mood',' he scoffed. "Have you ever been either of those things?"
Silence.
Sebastian shook his head, feeling truly ill with the girl. She had upset him plenty of times, but she had never genuinely pissed him off— most of the irritation prior had been with himself, she had just been there to summon it, but now, he began to see her for what she was— not that he hadn't noticed flaws before; for the few months he'd known her, he had seen that she naïve, sanctimonious and dogmatic, but, of course, cutely, she would call that 'stubborn'. He didn't let himself entertain the idea that she was potentially jealous or slighted in any way; all Sebastian could do was recognize that Mercedes had seen an opportunity to question his character and taken in. He was beginning to realize, more and more, that most people were nothing like he thought they were. So, he sat in front of her, reveling in the realization that she wasn't a perfect person or anywhere close to it, simply a bit more honorable than he was or, at least, better at posturing as that.
He bit the inside of his cheek.
"I don't know why we're having this conversation,' Sebastian continued, looking past Mercedes but in her direction. "You obviously know what I'm like. You're the one who kicked me out of your house when I tried to have something with you. You had to know I was going to find that thing elsewhere and fast."
"I'm not mad you hooked up with someone, Sebastian,' Mercedes spat. The sound of him comparing her to the blonde tainted her ears.
He figured it was Quinn. In the grand scheme of things, he'd be upset too. "She doesn't matter to me."
"Even if it was about the act itself, which it's not, you can't even look me in the eyes, and tell me it won't happen again,' Mercedes responded, placing her mug on the table. "I don't understand how one fun night is worth the feelings and dignity of another person, especially one you claim to care about."
Exasperated, he sighed, placed his hands on his knees and pushed himself upwards to stand. Instead of leaving, he leaned on the arm of the couch, now towering over the girl but still from a distance. His hands were clammy, but he wasn't nervous. "I'm not going to lie to you. It might happen again… it might not. I don't think I know the trajectory of my friendships with any of them right now. What I have with Quinn is, literally, just sex. You know how I feel about her. If I had known it was going to make you feel this way, I wouldn't have even let her come near me at school."
"I know that you think you're making me feel better, but—,"
"I know,' Sebastian cut her off mid-sentence, solemnly. "I'm doing my best to keep my relationship with you separate from everything that happens with people from school and all the perpetual bullshit. I know that's what works between us."
Mercedes shook her head. "You don't need to hide anything from me, Sebastian, just be better."
"Be better? What's better, Mercedes? What? Instead of being with my friends, do you want me at Bible study with you on Wednesdays? Or playing hide and seek with you before and after school every day, trying to make sure that I can still maintain a full-time relationship with you while being a full-time deity to half of the students at McKinley? If you want me all to yourself, then I need you to provide me anything, literally anything but the bare-fucking-minimum, which is all I get from you other than the piety, sanctimony and fucking attitude. I came over, because I was worried about you, and I wanted to make sure we were okay. The last thing I expected was to get into an argument about something we practically promised not to talk about with each other."
Mercedes raised a hand to her face, trying to cypher through which emotion she wanted to address first. She blew heavily into her hand and refused to look at the boy. "You asked me what was wrong, and I told you, and you're trying to turn it back on me, so that you don't have to admit you were wrong. I don't even want to argue with you, just— you go days and weeks without speaking to me, which is fine. I don't complain, because I'm used to it, but you aren't even considering how it feels to go from talking and seeing you daily to all of a sudden you're making out with this girl in the hallway. The same girl you claim to hate, and you claimed talked negatively about me when I met her. If the roles were switched, I'd like to think I wouldn't still entertain her at all for your sake. I care about you enough that if someone disrespected you, I wouldn't want anything to do with them,' she paused and wondered what she would say next. "Even at the football game, the girl, Madison: she was saying stuff about you, and I changed the conversation. I don't find myself yoked with people who don't share my values. I just don't get it, Sebastian. It's like you want to have this constant conflict with me and everyone around you, and I'm not going to be a part of it. I'm not going to go back and forth with you every single time you decide to lavish me with your time and presence, you aren't God, and you're hardly being a friend. If Quinn is that important to you, if getting laid is that important to you, then you can have those things, but you won't have me in your life,' she shrugged, scared that it wasn't a difficult ultimatum for him.
He thought for a while, for so long that he assumed Mercedes would speak again or the front door would open or even that the earth would cave in under their feet, but none of that happened. Sebastian thought about the football game and about how he had watched Mercedes talking to Madison, had even watched Mercedes persona of giddiness droop once or twice, and how he'd immediately assumed it was because Madison had said something rude or patronizing. He hadn't taken the time to ever assume that Madison had said something negative about him, and, more significantly, Sebastian hadn't let the idea that Mercedes had ever heard a negative opinion about him enter his thoughts.
He felt warmness wrap him all over, that was Mercedes, but he felt coldness starting in his feet and lifting to his head: that was everything else. That was the friends that had proven their insurrection even longer before than he had thought, that was his father who he knew would find out he'd skipped tennis practice. It was the hair behind his ears that he kept reminding himself to get rid of, it was Hunter looking at him in disgust before the party last weekend. It was the phone call with Madison, it was her hanging up. It was the aching pain he kept getting intermittently in his ankle from where he'd injured it last, it was the football game, it was the posturing. It was Savannah, who he had promised to call weeks ago, it was Quinn laying in his bed Sunday morning, kissing him lazily and playing with his fingers, it was him kissing her back, it was him playing with her fingers.
It was everything in one hand, which disgusted him, the carnal pleasures multiplying to ignore the eternal displeasures— and in the other, heavily, was Mercedes and a smile and the scent of vanilla candles in her small bedroom, it was her giggling. It was the Valentine's note, and then, it was her, sitting in front of him in the dim and cold living room, asking, pleading, begging him to be a better person— and if not that, just to treat her better, and all he could give her was half of a reassurance and a quarter of a promise.
Sebastian watched, figuratively, as both of his hands began to ache, and he assumed that soon they would both falter, everything would crumble, and he would be empty handed.
They had read some excerpts from You Can't Go Home Again in English class, and he thought of the quote: It seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South-so much in balance, in agreement-and yet... the whole world lies between.
"I wish I knew what made you so different from everyone else,' Sebastian said finally, sadly. "That would make everything easier."
Mercedes looked at him with tired eyes, unsure of what to say. She'd thought that they had said everything there was to say a long time ago, but she was beginning to realize that there would always be a problem between the two of them, and they'd solve it because, for whatever reason, they were attached already. But they would argue again, ignore each other again and then talk solemnly in his car or her living room or on the phone. That was their thing. She hated it.
"I don't want to not be happy. I don't want to keep making you unhappy."
Sebastian shook his head. "You don't make me unhappy. You're probably the only thing right now keeping me fully sane. I just— a lot of things are happening right now. I'm not going to burden or bore you with them, but you help me. You help make it all feel better or okay, and I can't thank you enough for that. If Quinn is your ultimatum, then it's done. She has a really whiny voice, I was ready to be done with it,' he gave a light chuckle, trying to ease some of the tension. "Whatever I said earlier, just… forget it. I have this thing… I need to win, and I'll say or do whatever I can to get there."
Mercedes shook her head. "Not here."
