Cutback

ix

Brussels, April 2015

I sat at the kitchen table and started drinking despite my headache. Errol and I had gotten annoyed with each other in the past but we had never argued—not like that. I paced the room oscillating between fury and sadness. First with Errol for breaking our plans, and then at myself for trying to manipulate him into going with me since the first night we talked about it over bottles of Boon. But really for being a terrible friend and pitting myself against his girlfriend like it was a competition—and then getting upset when she won. Of course she won. Her bargaining chip was sex.

Over the next two weeks Errol and I existed in a state of cordial iciness. I apologized, since I was obviously wrong, and I felt that he would have done the same if he'd been the one who overreacted. But still, there were no more French TV nights or horror films and the only time we drank together was when we happened to be in the main room at the same time and made awkward small talk. As a result, I ended up spending a lot more time with Sam than I think either of us would have liked. At least that's the good thing about having a second friend to fall back on. Admittedly, it was nice to have someone else to talk about Errol with.

Then, right before finals, just as things between us began to thaw, Errol disappeared.

I don't mean literally—he still lived with me—but for three or four days he spent all his time shut up alone and got incredibly quiet out of nowhere. Even our small talk was strained. No, he didn't want any leftover Chinese. Yeah, the weather was great, he guessed. Was the Wi-Fi down? He'd just wait for it to come back up in his room.

He had basically become me, which I found frightening. I knew I had to do something to make it up to him, I just didn't know what. We only had a few weeks before we'd finish finals and leave Brussels for good.

Because our school was so small, I was taking a class with Jess, French lit, though without Errol for her to fawn all over this time. Jess and I hardly had much to say to each other even before I fought with Errol, but when she missed a review class for the final I decided to take good notes and share them with her as an ice breaker. Hey, it had worked wonders with Nick back home. Maybe she'd tell her boyfriend.

When I tracked her down and handed her the notes, she seemed startled. "Oh, right, Thomas, that's brilliant," she said, and told me I didn't have to do that.

"It was nothing—I wanted to," I replied, and suggested we all get together soon, in what was probably the first instance of the words "we should all get together soon" ever passing my lips.

"Oh, I don't know, might be a bit weird," Jess said with a nervous laugh. I had no idea what she meant but thought to ask when she and Errol were leaving for London.

"I don't know about Errol," she said. "That's not really happening anymore, but I leave right after finals." Then she thanked me and made some excuse to go, leaving me bewildered about what had just taken place. Did she and Errol break up? Was that why London was off? And why didn't he tell me?

I walked home along the spectacular tree-lined Blvd. Géneral Jacques, blossoming in spring, with my head down, terrified, because I knew I had to talk to him about it, if for no other reason than I was trying to be a better friend and I couldn't do that while he was still shutting me out. And, OK, being shut out was actually killing me a little. When I got home, I found Errol in his room, of course, with the shutters drawn, the door ajar. Even in what must have been emotional turmoil, he always kept his room relatively neat, probably because he put his clothes away instead of throwing them in a heap like I did. I told him about Jess and the notes and London.

"Yeah, we broke up the other day," he said, sitting plaintively on the half-made bed. It's why he'd been in a funk lately. I switched on the light and sat down next to him, the first time I had ever been on his bed, even though half of me wondered if our friendship was strong enough for me to do that. He told me the acting workshop fell through and that he and Jess didn't see much of a future together. Her dad wanted her to clerk for a lawyer and it wouldn't have left much time for the two of them if she accepted.

"I should have told you, but you've got your own things going on," he said, despite knowing full well that I absolutely did not.

I asked how he was doing with it and if he was OK and all the things you're supposed to say and we talked it out for what seemed like an hour. He and Jess had an argument too, which made me feel strangely better. There was a vulnerability to him that I had never seen before. I felt the need to apologize again for giving him a hard time about it all during our fight.

"Water under the bridge, man," he said. "It was stupid. I shouldn't have backed out on our trip after all, I guess."

I told him it was fine, because at that moment, it really, truly was. He wanted to know if I was still going, and I said yeah, I was thinking about it, which was true, though it wouldn't be quite as much fun alone.

"Well, I'm free this summer," he said with a sigh, slanting his elbows on top of his knees, palms up. "If you still wanted to go. But maybe it's too late."

"Of course I still want to go with you," I said immediately—a rare instance of saying exactly what I was thinking without filtering my feelings first. "And it's not too late if we buy our train tickets in the next day or two."

Errol stood up and slid his wallet off the top of his dresser and handed me his credit card. The plan had always been that I'd book the trip but we'd put both Eurail tickets on his card because he had a higher limit than I did, and I'd pay for other things. I rose to take it, touched that he had remembered a detail like that after all these weeks.

"We can afford it all though, right?" he asked behind wide puppy dog eyes. "You worked it out—the whole two months?"

I told him we could, but I wanted to make sure he was doing this for the right reasons. "Are you sure about this?" I said, dragging the words out one at a time. "You just had a bad breakup." The last thing I wanted was to take advantage of Errol. I swore I would never do that again.

"No, I'm sure," he said. "I want to see Europe and I want to do it with my friend." Before I could even react, he raised his hand to the center of his chest and slapped my hand, pulling me into a tight bro hug.

I knew right then that my infatuation with him had made me underestimate our friendship, which was always stronger than I gave it credit for, and that when he called me his friend he meant it, meaning he wasn't just a second Nick. And I also knew that of all the straight guys I could have fallen in love with, maybe just maybe, I'd found the most decent one.

"Bros before hos?" I offered out of nowhere, slipping into my Tommy Boy voice.

"Bros before hos," he repeated, and for the first time in weeks, we started to laugh.