Perchance to Dream

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Disclaimer: See Prologue

Summary: Kyle is – on top of everything else he is – persistent.

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At Home III

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It's now the last day of May. I'm packing up my newly-bought heavily-used car for the trip to Boulder and my new life as a College Student. Summer term starts in two days, and I figure I'll use the intervening days to get settled and oriented to the campus.

Of course, just as I wedge the box containing the pieces for a desk chair into my backseat, who should come running up to me but Kyle. He looks like he ran over here in a panic, and he obviously ran over here without regard to what he's wearing. Those shorts are WAY too short and WAY too yellow. He looks like he ran over here from the set of a Richard Simmons video, to be honest.

"What the fuck do you want now?" I ask, heading back into the house to get my clothes. Well, at least, the ones I plan on taking with me. Six days of tee shirts, six pairs of jeans, six pairs of shorts, and a set of dress clothes, along with socks, and underwear, and my shoes. That's enough clothes for a week, and I can wash on Sundays.

"You to tell me what the fuck you're doing, for starters," he says, following me inside and up the stairs to my room. Since he insists on being there, I toss him a couple duffle bags full of clothes.

"I'm leaving," I say non-chalantly, picking up the last two myself. "Thanks, by the way, this saves me a trip." I breeze past him, out the door, down the stairs, out the other door, and down the walk to my car. Kyle, predictably, follows, his face contorted in confusion. Sometimes I wonder how he got the good grades he did, as slow as he can be.

"You're leaving?" he repeats, in question form.

"Yes. I said that already. Gimme those," I say, beckoning him to toss me the duffels, which he does, and I place them alongside the other two in my trunk, slamming it shut.

"Where are you going? It's not even June, and all your family is here…"

"Oh, I figured I'd take a road trip to the East Coast, and Florida, and Texas, and California, and Mexico and Canada while I was at it," I say airily. "No, I'm going to college."

"…But it's not even June," Kyle repeats, as if I misplaced two and a half months of my calendar and seem to think it's nearly the end of August.

"I know," I reply. "I'm going early. Figure I'll take a few classes over the summer and get a jump start on getting my general education requirements out of the way so I can start taking classes I'll actually give a shit about sooner. Besides, it gets me away from you all the quicker."

"But…Colorado State's summer term doesn't start for another two weeks," Kyle points out. "Aren't you going there?"

"Thanks for the vote of confidence in my brains, asshole," I shoot back. "I'm not so dumb that C-State is my only option. Besides, they don't have the major I want anyway. I'm going to be a Buffalo," I say with pride.

"But…I'm going to Colorado State," Kyle points out. "Why wouldn't you go there?"

"Um," I begin, ticking points off on my hands as I go along. "You're going to be there, I don't want to be sexually harassed every chance you get, Bebe's going to Colorado, and it's easier to hook up with people when you're not 60 miles away, hmm…oh yeah, did I mention you'd be there?"

"Yes, I believe you did," Kyle shoots back. "I don't sexually harass you!"

"OK fine, drop the sexually bit, but you still harass me! Hell, you're harassing me now. I just wanna get the fuck outta this town, if you DON'T mind…" I say, opening my door and sliding into the driver's seat. Kyle grabs the doorframe and prevents me from slamming it shut, though.

"I do mind, though," he says. "You can't just run away from everything you don't like, you know. Besides, like you said, CSU is only 60 miles or so from Boulder, I can still be down there any weekend I want. Or I can have one of the fifty or sixty people I know who go there 'harass' you for me. And seriously, Bebe?"

"Well, a college campus is a big place. You can try to find me, but good luck. One of the first things I plan on doing is finding every conceivable hiding place. I can also kick one of the fifty or sixty people you know who go there in the nuts if they try. And seriously, Bebe. She got left hanging out to dry when the jocks reassigned Kenny to Wendy, so she offered, and I accepted the offer, to 'fill in,'" I say, sniggering at my own little pun.

"I'll find you," Kyle promises. "Just because you're an asshole and hate everybody doesn't mean I won't find a way in and make you see the light."

"If by light, you mean the glare of your pale Jewish underbelly when you take off your shirt, I'll pass on seeing it."

"I'm tan, thank you very much," he informs me. "If either of us is pale, it's you."

"Nothing a few afternoons in the sun can't fix," I shoot back. "And good fucking luck finding me. With my major, I'll get a job where I'll only be able to communicate with maybe five people IF I choose. And I will be applying for internships every summer. You will never fucking see or hear from me again, and I will be a lot less likely to die of a stress-related heart attack before I turn 40."

"Just what the fuck do you plan on doing then?" Kyle asks. "Missionary work in Zimbabwe?"

"Nope, not even close. I'm going to be one of those Park Rangers in Yellowstone and those places who live up in those little cabins on those giant stilts, watching for forest fires for months at a time, virtually incommunicado. Environmental Studies. Ironic, huh? Cartman and that bunch spent the last three years calling me a hippie fag, and I'm going to prove them half right," I say, managing to slam the door shut finally, locking it and the other three to prevent Kyle from opening them. Putting the key in the ignition, I start the car, and just before putting it into gear, remember the one thing sitting in the passenger seat that made me glad to see Kyle.

I roll down my window and clutch it in my hand, ready to toss it out to him, and am instead assaulted.

"Don't you fucking dare," he says. "Don't you fucking dare run away in the middle of the night like this, leaving me in the lurch and wondering where the hell you went, and why the hell you have so much hate in you for me that you couldn't even tell me you were planning on leaving."

"Three things," I say. "It's like, 3:30 in the afternoon, you know where I'm going, and I didn't tell you I was planning on leaving because I knew you'd pull something just like this; come over and beg me not to leave you behind. I've gotta give you credit, though, I expected you to be groveling by now."

"I'm not begging, either, asshole," he sneers, hanging on to my door for dear life. "I'm just trying to make your dumb ass see reason."

"Same difference," I reply with an indifferent wave of my hand. "How did you find out, anyway?"

"Clyde texted me about half an hour ago and said 'Your boyfriend's packing,'" Kyle says. I bristle.

"I'm not your goddamn boyfriend."

"But you should be!" Kyle says, incredibly predictably. "Goddamnit all to fucking Hell, you should be!"

Blinking dumbly on my part at Kyle's incredibly profane reply, I manage to reply with "Maybe I should be, but that'd be kinda awkward for you, wouldn't it? Dating a straight guy? Isn't that like, against your Homo Code of General Faggotry?"

"There's no such rule!" Kyle replies, defensively.

"OK fine, but you don't win the 25,000 dollars and the trip for two to New Zealand," I answer sardonically. Kyle stares at me, confused again. "I watched Boy Meets Boy during that little gay phase we had."

"So?" Kyle asks, not understanding at all what this has to do with the current situation.

"So, if the gay bachelor guy picked a straight guy in the end, the straight guy won the twenty-five grand and the gay guy got his ass shamed on basic cable," I reply. "It never pays for a gay to date a straight, idiot."

"Yeah, well you're the fucking gayest straight I've ever met," Kyle says, angrily.

"I'm not even one percent gay!" I shout back. "What the fuck makes you think that?"

"The plain and simple fact that you like it when I kiss you," Kyle replies. "Straights don't like being kissed by gays. You liked being kissed by me. Therefore, you are not straight."

"QE-fuckin-D, eh?" I ask. "I only liked it, if you will remember, because I had no fucking clue who was kissing me."

"You lie like a fly with a booger in its eye," Kyle sneers. "You liked it because you are, deep down, a rainbow child to the ninth degree."

"Except, your logic proving that statement is more flawed than the tectonic plates California sits on," I reply. "Leggo of my window, douchebag. I'm not going to change my mind about this, and you're going to have the next six months to find another hot boy to leech onto. Maybe that one'll actually be gay and be more than happy to let you into his pants." To emphasize my intentions, I put the car into gear and start to slowly pull away from the curb. Kyle lets go, and I manage to finally throw the object I've held in my hand for the past three minutes out the window, catching him flat in the chest. I speed up, pulling out into the main street as he sinks to his knees in the space vacated by my car. I adjust my rearview mirror to watch it as I slowly drive away. In his hand he holds what I threw, and with the other he pulls a chain off from around his neck.

He puts them together, and they form a heart with a jagged line down the middle. I found my half of the old BFF necklace in the bottom of my dresser, along with a pair of baseball cleats, a recorder, my Goth beanie, rabbit ears, and a Peruvian Flue Band CD. Now he has the whole damn thing, and I'll be damned if I don't see tears falling down his face.

Kyle is officially a lost cause. I think, honestly, that I'm getting out of South Park at just the right time. Now that he's not confined to school for eight hours a day, that would have been eight more hours he would have been free to sit outside my window and play annoyingly sappy love songs in hopes of literally wooing the pants off me, allowing him access to my ass, which he so clearly covets. Now he's crying in the street because I'm leaving, and I hope he uses the next two months to seriously re-think the way he's operating, because the way he's going is clearly not working for him.

He needs to take a cold shower, first of all. His hormones are out of control. He's worse than Kenny is during a week-long case of blue balls. Second, he needs to find someone who may actually give in to his charms. He does have them, they just don't work for shit on me. Maybe our decade of friendship did me SOME good in immunizing me from them, because I have not been influenced at all by the very things that made cheerleaders swoon and normal girls faint.

Either that, or – if he's really serious about being with me – get a fucking sex-change. I'm never going to bend over for him, and if he wants me at all, he's going to have to bend over for me and have something that's not an asshole for me to stick it in. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is.

Goodbye, Kyle, and good fucking riddance.

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Notes: Don't worry, it's not over! In fact, this is just the beginning. I get the feeling I've said that before, but oh well.

I decided I'd put this out today as a Christmas present for all you readers of mine. I actually wrote this in a span of about an hour and a half, amazingly enough. I guess Baby Jesus just got my creative juices flowing on this one.

Reviews are appreciated. After all, you can't really get me anything ELSE for Christmas =P

See you again in 2009!

Phoenix II