Auggie groaned.
“I put a new toothbrush on the kitchen table.”
Another groan, this one with an underlying note of gratitude, as Auggie staggered toward the bathroom. The sound of running water came, and Auggie spat several times. Then the shower came on. Theo flipped pages and continued to work. Eventually the shower turned off. Clothing rustled. The sound of bare footsteps moved over the floorboards.
Auggie dropped onto the couch face first, knocking over one of the piles of papers. He was wearing the Van Halen t-shirt and mesh shorts that Theo had left in the bathroom for him. He smelled like soap.
“How’s your stomach? I think you need to eat, but I don’t want to make you feel worse.”
The cushion muffled Auggie’s groan but didn’t hide it completely.
“Ok. We’ll wait a while.”
For the next twenty minutes or so, Theo actually managed to get some words on the page—a feat that had become less and less common during this school year. This chapter of his thesis was about Romeo and Juliet. It should have been easy. He’d had plenty of time in Wagner’s class to think about the text, to re-read the criticism, to assemble his own argument and contextualize it. Theo even had necessity on his side: if he wanted to finish the PhD in a reasonable timeframe, he needed to submit his thesis over the summer and transition to working on his PhD-level coursework and his dissertation. But he came home to an empty house. Or he came home to Cart. And either way, whatever he typed was shit. He took advantage of this rare burst of clarity and typed like mad.
In those twenty minutes, he got more done than he had in the last three months. He checked his notes, made sure he’d included the references he wanted, and added the header for the next section.
“You type very aggressively,” Auggie croaked.
“I’m excited. I’m finally making some progress.”
“That’s great.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’ve got the perfect description. And I was going to share it with you. But lying here, I’ve realized the only good option left for me is to sneak out the back door and run away and join a circus traveling through South America. So I think I’m going to do that. ’K, bye.”
Theo caught his leg as Auggie tried to worm his way off the couch.
“What do you think about this part?” Theo asked. “When Capulet tells Paris, ‘My child is yet a stranger in the world,’ his point to Paris seems simple: Juliet is too young to decide about marriage, and so Paris must wait two years before she can consider his offer. But estrangement is at the heart of the play, along with the misunderstandings that accompany it. So many deaths in the play result from misunderstanding—or an incomplete understanding. Tybalt and Mercutio, Romeo and Tybalt, Romeo and Paris, and Romeo’s suicide. Perhaps the only character to see clearly is, ironically, Juliet, who wakes and immediately and correctly understands the sequence of events that have preceded her death. While an argument may be made for dramatic exigency, it is nevertheless significant that Juliet, the character marked most clearly as a child-stranger, is the one who sees and understands. Such an accounting of Juliet opens up larger questions about the play’s thematic interest in estrangement. To what extent, the play demands, are we all strangers to the world? To each other? Perhaps, even to ourselves? Friar John’s missed message provides an opportunity to examine the praxis of estrangement within the world of the play, as I shall show in the next section.”
Auggie flopped onto his back. He put an arm over his forehead and looked out at Theo from under it. “That’s really good.”
“Thanks.”
“Except you plagiarized my essay.”
Grinning, Theo slapped Auggie’s leg. “I didn’t plagiarize, dummy. Look.” He turned the laptop to show Auggie. “The footnote.”
Auggie propped himself up on an elbow and read, “I am indebted to August Lopez, a rising Shakespeare scholar, for this reading of estrangement in his unpublished paper blah blah blah.” His eyes came up to meet Theo’s. “I’m not a rising Shakespeare scholar.”
“You are if I have anything to say about it. Plus it was an awesome analysis, and I want to steal it, and in order to steal it, I have to give you credit. So, boom.”
“Oh my God, did you just say boom?”
Theo smiled. “Let’s get you something to eat. Big Biscuit, on me.”
Arm across his eyes again, Auggie shook his head. His voice was thick when he said, “I don’t deserve Big Biscuit.”
“Well, it’s more a question of—”
“Theo, I am so, so sorry. I hate myself. I hate myself for what I did last night. I never meant to out Cart. I mean, someone did that to me, kind of, and it was horrible, and then I did it to him. I thought—I was just trying to say something so Dylan and I could leave, and, I don’t know. I knew he didn’t want things to be very public, but I didn’t know he was totally closeted. And then I showed up here, and I was a mess, and oh my God, if we ever have to talk about what happened last night, the other thing, I mean, I’ll probably never be able to have sex again. So, um . . .”
Water dripped in the bathroom. Outside, a cardinal streaked past the window, a red comet that interrupted a chickadee’s fee-bee, fee-bee. Then the cardinal was gone, and the chickadee picked up its song again.
“Do you know what he gave you?”
Auggie cleared his throat. “He said it was molly. Well, he didn’t say that, but we’ve done it before. Molly is—”
“I know what molly is.” The tightness in Theo’s chest made it difficult to speak. He tried to keep his voice even. “So you took something and you didn’t even know what it was? That was really stupid.”
“I know.”
“If you know—”
“Please don’t do this,” Auggie whispered. “You can be mad and hate me, and I’ll never bother you again, but please don’t do this.”
Theo leaned back against the couch. He ran his hand up Auggie’s leg. In his mind, he was in the loft again, looking down at Luke’s face, the flies crawling on his eyes. After everything Theo had done, after the brawls, the knife fights, the nights of searching, the days of making sure he didn’t choke to death on his own vomit.
“I don’t know how,” Auggie said, “but I’m going to make things right. I’m going to talk to Cart. I’m going to—God, I don’t know. I’m going to figure it out.”
“Good luck. He’s not answering his phone. He wasn’t at his apartment last night, and he wasn’t there this morning. I knocked loud enough to wake up his whole building. Both times, actually.”
Auggie moved his arm away from his face. His eyes were wet. “Is that how you hurt your hands?”
Theo shook his head.
Then Auggie saw the Jordans he’d left at Dylan’s sitting by the front door. “Did you—”
“Don’t ask me,” Theo said. “And I won’t have to lie to you. Your clothes are in the dryer.”