"KEEP smoking like that, Collins, and you're going to go back to the dorms smelling like Wesley's ashtrays." Harvey crinkled his nose in distaste.
"We'll blame it on the cook's bacon," Erik said after another drag of the cigarette. "The kitchens smell worse after Friday dinners." He let his fingers flutter near his lips before snuffing out the cigarette against the cold tiles of the roof, watching the red hot embers fade to ash. Isaac laughed, which quickly turned into a cough when the smell of nicotine wafted through the air. The four boys sat on the red-tiled roof, feet dangling from the edge, cigarettes passing between trembling fingers.
Nathan leaned back on his elbows, his eyes glazed over. His cigarette lay next to him. Despite the regular, meaningless chatter the other three boys engaged in, Nathan's eyes had a faraway look. His fingers strummed against the brick red tiles absentmindedly. Isaac sat next to him, looking over the edge of the roof, down at the school grounds below. His uneven, raspy breaths blew misty clouds in the chilly evening air.
Harvey's eyes flickered over all the boys and landed on Isaac. He looked away immediately, nervously fiddling with the hem of his sweater. He hated how it was...different with Isaac. He hated how his chest seemed to constrict, or his breath hitched in his throat, or his heart fluttered ever so slightly. He hated the way the 14 freckles near Isaac's eyes faded to the colour of honey in the sunlight, or the way his smile always stretched more to one side.
For a while, he thought it was a mistake. Falling for Isaac was a stupid, naive mistake. And he'd kept that part of himself hidden away. This was his defect. A lapse in judgement. A sin he wouldn't admit to. For his sake and Isaac's.
x
NATHAN hoped his friends didn't notice his unusual detachment from the evening's proceedings. He tried to pay attention to their words, he really did, but he found himself slipping away from the conversation. His hands grazed his collar where the locket used to be. Her locket used to be. The one she'd stolen from an old, crumbling drawer in her grandmother's attic. The one she'd sneaked out of her home to leave at his doorstep. The one he'd had for five years.
He met Joanne five years ago. At the start of summer, when he'd barely come home from Columbus, he had been prepared for another three weeks filled with nothing but the monotony of the Price household. And then he saw her.
"The Davies' just moved in," he remembered his mother saying at dinner one day. And that was all they'd said about them, at least for now. He hadn't thought much of this either, till he saw her one afternoon. It was out on the street, and it had been a good four minutes till he realised he had been staring. She was standing out in the grass, barefoot and squinting against the sun, which turned her black hair a light shade of brown.
"Hi," he had said impulsively. This was so unlike him, it almost made him laugh in retrospect. Of course, she had looked unamused.
"I wasn't amused in the slightest," she had told him a year later, laughing. But he had known, by the way her fingers felt in his, that this was right.
And now she was gone. Sometimes he would forget that she wasn't around anymore, but then it would hit him again. Like an open, fresh wound.
