CALVIN

seventeen: the blow-job

"God, Roman's a piece of shit," said Patrick, finding me in the empty, concrete and glass-walled hallway. 

I bit off the last of the protein bar I'd bought in the train station yesterday. "Yeah. This is common knowledge."

"He called me a little bitch this morning."

We started walking down the steely corridor, the windows fogged-up, frost outside. "Shit, really?" I threw the wrapper in the rubbish bin as we exited the building. "Why?"

"Because I called him a juicy cunt the day after the Halloween dance."

"Why?"

"Because he beat up Schneider."

Him and I stopped in the barren courtyard. "Okay, first of all, Roman didn't beat up Schneider. He's literally a... a... cocktail shrimp, and Schneider's a lobster, or king crab, or something. It's physically improbable."

"Yeah, Schneider was drunk. You know how he gets when he's drunk."

We said it together: "Lame and sad." 

"Yeah, yeah, I know," I said. "But Roman was drunk too, and dressed like a fucking carrot, may I add. So I wouldn't use the verb beat up when describing what happened between our beefy lobster boy and twig bitch Roman."

"Oh, God. Ew. Never call Schneider a beefy boy again."

"I mean, I know all this, Patrick. Not the part about you calling Roman a juicy cunt, or anything, but the fight, I know about the fight. So, why...?"

"Schneider and Roman are beefing now. Which means haus 19 is beefing with haus 15. And... I know how your relationship is with Roman."

I blinked in repressed shock. "W-hat? What relationship? Which - what?"

"You guys hate each other. Maybe not hate, but you already don't like each other. I mean, that article you and Calvin wrote about him in the newspaper kind of cemented the fact that you have no intention of being on his good side."

"Ah. Right." We started walking again. "But we wrote articles roasting every school speaker candidate. It wasn't just a Roman thing."

"You called him, and I quote, 'a delicate geoduck intent on remaining the butt of penis jokes for an eternity'. And that was published. In the school newspaper."

"That was one of the best metaphors I'd ever written."

"Doesn't matter. All I'm saying is watch out. Because Jesus has been obliterating Haluk at Fortnite lately, too. Cusick, Roman, Marc, Andrei, Neal - all of them are pretty pissed. I bet it's not long before things get serious." I tucked my frozen hands into my jacket pockets as we walked up the path to our house. With a change of tone, Patrick looked at me. "Why'd you react like that?"

"What?"

"To me saying you have a relationship with Roman."

"Oh, that? Oh."

"Oh."

"I mean - oh, yeah. Psh. No reason. Just, uh, why'd you have to use the word relationship?"

"Is there something wrong with the word?"

"Uh, no! Nah. I'm just being weird, is all."

Suddenly, Patrick grabbed my arm and pulled me to the side, in front of house 19. He got awfully close to me, and said, "Elias. I know Roman is gay."

"What?"

"That was why him and Schneider fought. Because Schneider walked in on him giving head to..."