CALVIN

five: the vomit boy

"Come to clubhaus with me."

Schneider was standing in the doorway to my room, letting the light from the hallway spill in. He was wearing skinny jeans and a puffy Moncler jacket, his thick black hairstyle floppy on his head. My hand relaxed under my bed sheets. "Dude, I'm busy."

"Stop masturbating and come with me."

"I don't want to cum with you. I want to cum by myself."

"That's gross. Not what I meant."

"When are you going to give up your alcohol addiction?"

Denis appeared behind Schneider. "So." he said. "You admit that Schneider has an addiction, but you won't admit that I do?"

"Fuck off, Denis."

He still stood there.

"Maddy's supposed to be in clubhaus tonight," Schneider said. "Help me."

"Help you with what? You're not even going to talk to anybody. You're just going to drink excessively and start aggressively flossing in the middle of the dance floor. And then you're going to blow 1.1 and get leitungsrat."

Schneider rolled his eyes and moved out of my eyesight, but he came back a second later. And walked straight into my room. "Put your dick away," he said.

"Schneider - "

With a swift, aggressive movement he pulled the bed sheets to the floor. I scrambled into the corner, but not before he put his arms around my torso and dragged me from the bed. "I'm up!" I yelled. "I'm coming!"

"You have to drink, too," he said, his arms still clamped around my body.

"I'll drink Cola."

"Beer," he insisted.

"I'll put beer in the Cola."

Schneider let go of me and walked out. "Cool," he said. "Let's go in five minutes."

Schneider left my room triumphantly. Denis still stood in the doorway, sipping San Pellegrino from the bottle with a straw. "You've still got a boner," he pointed out. I dived back into bed.

...

German boarding school did this funny thing where it let its students party and drink until they vomit on campus three days a week. It's not even, like, a secret or anything. It's an official additive to the culture, here. And I guess it was all fun and games for the kids who actually liked to bounce around to terrible trap music and flashing lights for forty-five minutes but for the rest of us it was really quite a nuisance. Imagine having Post Malone and Rihanna blasting through the campus on a Tuesday night when you have a theatre test the next morning.

"What do you think of Germany's foreign policy during World War Two?" some kid yelled at me over a bottle of beer. He was on the verge of being swept away by the crowd, but barely noticed.

"I think it was very successful," I yelled back.

The kid elbowed aside a couple loiterers until he'd invaded my personal bubble.

"What do you think about Roman?" he yelled into my ear.

I shook my head. "Who's Roman?"

"He's running for school speaker!" the kid yelled. "He did an interview for the newspaper and he said he was a fag!"

"I think that's very chivalrous of him!" I answered.

Suddenly the kid disappeared and I was staring into a swath of sixteen-year-olds grinding on each other, blue mood light and a lot of hazy smoke. The music was burning my ears and my Cola was becoming quite lukewarm (and I didn't know where Schneider or Denis were). After a little while a short girl with thin brown hair approached me. "Hey Elias!"