The Scenic Route

Chapter 17

Smut Warning

On the last Friday before Thanksgiving, Kyle is the only person in Geary Hall who isn't packing up his stuff for the trip home. The halls are filled with a frantic energy that's making him anxious, everyone celebrating the papers they just turned in or tests they just came back from, looking forward to a week of gorging and slacking. Kyle feels like the entire eastern seaboard is being evacuated for an emergency and he's the only one getting left behind, but there's no way he's going back to South Park for the holiday. If he did, he might have to see Stan.

"Broflovski!"

Jacob shouts this almost every time he walks into their room, as if he's genuinely surprised to find Kyle in his usual place: at his desk by the window, hunched over the keyboard of his laptop. Kyle gets along with him fine, but he's glad that Jacob is going home to Rhode Island during the break. He can't wait to have the room to himself, for the ability to watch porn in peace if nothing else.

"Are you seriously going to stay here?" Jacob asks. He's asked Kyle this daily since he learned of his plans. "The dining halls are gonna be closed and everything. What will you eat?"

"I'm pretty sure they're not going to shut down the whole town for Thanksgiving break," Kyle says, though he wouldn't be surprised if some of the smaller restaurants shortened their hours. The town isn't named 'State College' for nothing, and it will be pretty empty until classes resume.

"Won't your parents be pissed that you're not gonna be there on Thanksgiving?" Jacob asks. He's packing wrinkled piles of laundry into his duffel as he speaks. Kyle checked the box for 'Extremely Important' on his roommate questionnaire when asked, 'How important is cleanliness to you?' He's not sure how he ended up matched with Jacob, who hasn't washed his sheets once since they moved in. Kyle washes his every Thursday.

"My parents aren't thrilled about it," Kyle says. It's an understatement; his mother cried on the phone when she told him he wasn't coming back until December. He'll have to cross that bridge when he comes to it, but right now the idea of returning to South Park still leaves him feeling raw and ruined, as if he's back on that beach, eyes closed, lips puckered, swooning like an idiot. He gets hot with embarrassed rage just thinking about it.

"Don't you want to see your friends and stuff?" Jacob says. "You - do have friends at home, don't you?"

Kyle snorts, his face growing hotter. He hasn't talked about anyone from home with Jacob or any of his other friends at Penn State. On move in day, Jacob asked Kyle if he had a girlfriend, and Kyle tersely outed himself in response. Jacob proclaimed this to be 'cool,' and he occasionally asks Kyle if he's met any nice guys, but that's the extent of their discussion about Kyle's social life.

"I have friends," Kyle says. "But they all live in California now. They're not coming home for Thanksgiving, either."

His friends number exactly two: Butters and Kenny, who are too busy being internet famous to get in touch with him very often. Shortly after Kyle's abrupt departure from California, they met a UCLA film student slash amateur pornographer who convinced them to use their mutual adorability to their financial advantage. Five months later, blondtwinksinlove.com is pulling a little over six thousand dollars a month, and Kenny claims that he has an interview lined up with the Times about the popularity of their kitschy porn site, which features both hardcore sex and cooking segments that involve Butters wearing a frilly little apron and nothing else, cheerfully making cupcakes as if he finds nothing odd about this situation at all. It might be more accurate to say that Butters himself has gotten famous, through some combination of his screaming orgasms and natural sweetness. People outside of South Park don't really know what to make of him. Kyle has read articles about their site online, ranging from finger-pointing hilarity to overblown psychological analysis of the concept. He's sort of proud of them and sort of horrified, mostly just relieved that they only have sex with each other in their videos.