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“Stop squirming.”
“I’m not fuckin’ squirmin’,” Gary squawked.
“Yes, you are, asshole. Now stop,” Rank scolded, one gloved hand gripping a section of Gary’s hair and the other wielding a tint brush loaded with hair bleach.
Gary froze briefly. He sat perched on the closed toilet lid, facing the shower, while Rank hovered behind him, the mixing bowl of bleach balanced precariously on the sink.
With painstaking precision, Rank brushed bleach onto Gary’s darker, ashy brown roots. Gary’s leg started bouncing again within seconds. Rank tipped his head back and groaned at the ceiling.
“You’re taking forever,” Gary whined.
“I’m making sure I don’t miss any spots,” Rank said, voice tight with concentration.
“I don’t care if you miss a spot! You’re torturing me on purpose.”
“It takes this long every time, dude!” Rank shot back. “And I respect myself too much to give you a shitty bleach job. Maybe I should let you go back to frying your own hair.”
Gary huffed, crossing his arms like a petulant child, but quieting down for a moment. Rank set the brush in the bowl, peeled off one glove, and walked out of the bathroom and into their dorm room.
“Wait! Come back!” Gary called after him. “You can’t just leave me like this!”
Rank ignored him, rummaging one-handed through his backpack until he found what he wanted. When he came back, he was holding his handheld console. Without a word, he shoved it into Gary’s hands.
“Work on the farm,” he said flatly.
Gary blinked. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
With a sigh of resignation, Gary powered it on. The familiar music filled the tiny bathroom. As Rank tugged his glove back on and resumed painting bleach through his hair.
With Gary distracted by the game, Rank finished applying the bleach in record time. He checked through the strands one last time, then snapped a clear shower cap over Gary’s head with a satisfying pop.
“Done. Timer’s on for thirty minutes.”
“Fuckin’ finally.” Gary stood from the toilet, stretching his arms overhead. He saved the game, turned off the console, and set it on Rank’s desk while Rank tidied up the bathroom.
“I wanna smoke,” Gary announced, already rummaging through his desk drawer for his lighter. “Come with me.”
Rank stepped out of the bathroom, hands on his hips. “Codependent much?”
“Fuck you,” Gary shot back, no heat in it. “You gotta check my shit every ten.”
Rank rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He tugged on a hoodie, grabbed his phone, and snagged a few sheets of folding paper. “Lead the way.”
They left their dorm and headed down the hall toward the door that led to the back stairwell. They made quite the pair.
Gary had his bleach-slathered hair tucked under the crinkly shower cap that rustled every time he moved. He wore a pair of sweatpants that Rank was pretty sure belonged to Collie, and his oversized She Wants Revenge shirt hung off one shoulder, blotched and freckled from a hundred past bleach jobs. Rank trailed beside him in his stupid anime hoodie and khaki shorts. It was an equally tragic ensemble, though at least his didn’t smell like peroxide.
Both wore the same horrible, neon plastic flip-flops. Gary’s Barbie pink, Rank’s OSHA orange. Gary had grabbed them from a five-and-dime as a “temporary fix” two semesters ago when he needed something to slip on around the dorm. Two semesters later, they were still going strong. Nothing’s more permanent than a temporary solution.
They looked weird. So what. Everyone already thought they were weird anyway, especially when they were together. It was easier to lean into it than fight it.
The back stairwell spat them out onto a paved path behind the building. Rank nudged a loose brick with his foot until it propped the door open just enough to let them sneak back in later.
Gary pulled a cigarette from a battered purple pack. It was the same off-brand kind Rank had never seen before meeting him. “It’s a Florida thing,” Gary had explained once. He slipped the cigarette between his lips, lit up, and took a slow drag before shoving the pack and lighter back into his sweatpants pocket.
They wandered down the path until they reached a bench. The bench faced a grassy stretch where a few students lounged on blankets, laughing softly in the late afternoon air.
Gary plopped down, and Rank sat beside him, pulled a square of origami paper from his hoodie pocket, and started folding. Gary exhaled a stream of smoke out of the corner of his mouth, opposite the side where Rank sat.
“Collie going to that party tonight?” Rank asked, trying for casual but failing to sound entirely disinterested.
“Huh?” Gary blinked, thinking for a second before it clicked. “Oh- the one with the Musketeer losers? Yeah, he’s going. How’d you even know about that?”
“Harkness mentioned it in class yesterday.” Rank kept his gaze fixed on the paper in his hands, pretending to study a crease that didn’t need fixing. “Collie invite you?”
“Uh, yeah,” Gary said, exhaling another thin stream of smoke, careful to angle it away from Rank.
When they’d first met, Gary used to blow smoke straight into Rank’s face just to get a rise out of him. To make him cough, to watch him squirm. Then one day, Rank had a really bad asthma attack, freaked them both out. They never talked about it, but sometime after that, Gary stopped.
Rank’s shoulders dropped just a little. He tried to keep his tone neutral. “How do you feel about that? First time really hanging out with Collie’s other friends, right?”
Besides Stebbins, Collie’s roommate across the hall, and Harkness from the school paper, Gary didn’t know many of them. He’d met a few in passing before he and Collie ever started hanging out, but they were just faces that didn’t mean much then.
Gary sat up a bit straighter, eyeing Rank sideways. “I ain’t goin'.”
Rank looked over, caught off guard. “You’re not?”
Gary stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “Obviously, I ain’t fuckin’ goin'.”
“But your beau invited you-”
“He’s not my beau, asshole.”
“He’s totally your beau.”
“Whatever.” Gary threw his hands up. “Beau, not beau, doesn’t matter. I ain’t goin’.”
“Why not?”
Gary squinted, incredulous. “Do you have brain damage? It’s fuckin’ game night, dumbass!”
Rank’s head tilted. “That’s why you’re not going?
“Duh, fuckwit.” Gary crushed the end of his cigarette against the brick path. “You think I forgot or somethin’?”
“No, I just thought- with Collie and everything…” Rank’s voice faltered, fingers fidgeting with the paper crane in his lap. He knew how it sounded, too ‘invested’, but he couldn’t help it. “I figured the party might be more important.”
Gary scoffed. “Don’t be fuckin’ gay, man.”
“One of us is in a romantic and sexual relationship with another man, and it’s not me.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Gary huffed, flicking him on the arm. “I meant it, like… metaphorically or whatever. Whoopin’ your and Curley’s asses in Smash is a bajillion times more important than some lame-ass Musketeer party.”
Rank bit back the smile tugging at his mouth. It was stupid, childish, even, but the words landed warmer than he wanted to admit. Not that it meant anything. It wasn’t like he and Gary were friends or whatever. That’ll be a cold day in hell. They barely went a week without threatening to strangle each other.
Still, the thought had been gnawing at him. This idea that once Gary got wrapped up in Collie and his new crowd, Rank would just… be left in the dust. He’d never say that out loud, obviously. He’d rather eat glass.
But hearing Gary blow off the party for game night had caused some of the tension to ease out of Rank’s shoulders. He refocused on the folds in his paper, the corners coming together clean and precise.
Gary leaned back on the bench, watching him in the lazy, half-lidded way he did when he was winding down. The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable. It just hung there, familiar.
After a beat, Gary broke it. “Can you check my roots?”
“Man, fuck you,” Rank said automatically, but he was already turning to look with a smile he couldn’t quite hide.