Archive of Our Own

DAY 0

Meeks sees the email first. He’s always been the one most ahead of the curve. When Knox drags himself out of bed Wednesday morning, a half-finished Ethics paper awaiting him as the dawn breaks, he finds Meeks at the kitchen table, staring unfixed at his laptop screen.

“Have you checked your email?”

Knox yawns in answer. Meeks slowly slides the laptop across the table and Knox drops into a seat, eyes still blurry with sleep and mind muddled by fading-fast dreams. That has to be why it takes him so long to comprehend what he’s reading.

“...based on public health leaders’ counsel, we have made the difficult and painful decision to move classes to a distance learning format and to make significant changes to our normal operations. After 5PM, Friday March 13th, we will no longer be holding in-person classes…”

And with that, Knox is wrenched completely into harsh reality.

“This can’t be real.”

Charlie says the exact same thing, just louder and with greater ire, a little over an hour later. If any of their roommates had not been up by then, they’d have been rudely awakened by Charlie’s booming voice echoing up to the heavens.

“They can’t just cancel our senior year.”

Knox wants Charlie to sit down. His prowling about the living room can't be good for the hardwood floors nor his pounding footsteps good for the aching in Knox’s head, but he’s afraid if he tries touching Charlie, he'll detonate.

No one else looks remotely up to the task of calming Charlie down. Pitts and Meeks are huddled at the kitchen table and, every so often, Knox hears snatches of conversation about electronic equipment and lab access. Cameron has sequestered himself in the kitchen, away from the yelling, but with his phone pressed to his ear, no doubt talking to his father. Neil has been staring at the fireplace since Meeks gently broke the news to him. Knox knows where his mind is, on the Welton stage, performing Henry V to an audience now never to be. Todd sits beside him, computer open on his lap, but his fingers are tapping around the mousepad, not the keys, as unreachable as Neil.

“—what about senior week? What about graduation?”

“Uh– guys…”

“Does Dean Nolan have any kind of plan or—”

“Shut up for a second!” Everyone in the room starts at Todd’s sudden outburst; Charlie stops so abruptly his legs collides with a side table. The shock is enough to get Charlie sitting, but he perches on the armchair like he’s ready to arm himself at any second. They’re all looking at Todd now, who has never been sure what to do under such attention. He fidgets for a second, taking a deep breath to brace himself. “I just got an email from Health Services. It looks like -uh...a student in one of my classes is showing symptoms.”

Cameron, emerging from the kitchen, asks wearily, “So, what does that mean?”

“It says –uhm,” Todd looks back at his screen, eyes scanning through the email, though Knox has the sinking feeling that comes with knowing exactly what it all means. “They recommend anyone who was in class yesterday self-quarantine. And anyone we’ve been in direct contact with, too…”

Charlie collapses into the chair and, head tilting back to the ceiling, pronounces what they all have to be thinking. “Well, fuck.”

DAY 1

After a long email thread with Health Services, a hundred Google searches, a handful of messages exchanged with the Dean, and a painful number of calls with their parents and a few miscellaneous relatives, their little off-campus house is officially on lockdown.

They’ve each reached a different stage of grief by midday.

Cameron has yet to leave denial. He’s holed up in his bedroom, still on the phone with his father, trying to limbo his way out of a situation where the bar is on the floor.

Pitts and Meeks hit the bargaining stage, trading off emails with various professors in hopes of sneaking into a lab and bulldozing on with their projects once the two-week quarantine is through. Knox occasionally hears a small groan from the kitchen table that signals how well it’s going.

The door to Todd and Neil’s bedroom hasn't opened all day. Everyone else has seemed to silently agree it’s best to leave that alone for now.

It’s Knox who has found himself, strangely and quickly, arriving at acceptance.

“So, how are you holding up?” Chris asks from the bottom step of the porch, through a screen door. Like that angel she is, she brought them at least a week’s worth of groceries, dropped off just before she leaves campus.

“It’s okay so far,” Knox answers with a shrug. “But it’s also only day one.”

“I’m crossing my fingers for all of you,” she says and holds up both hands with crossed fingers to prove it. “And I also wish I could give you a hug right now.”

A year and a half ago, Knox’s heart would have burst at the idea of Chris Noel wishing to give him any kind of affection. Today, he just wants to hug his friend, a friend he might not be seeing again for a long, long time.

“Don’t be a stranger, Knox.”

They leave it with promises to stay in touch, like they're middle schoolers signing yearbooks and telling each other to have a great summer, but Knox watches her go wishing he could give her something more. All he can do is gather up the groceries and haul them inside after she’s driven away.

“Come bearing gifts from your girlfriend?”

And there’s Mr. Second Stage, anger, sulking on the couch with his arms crossed tight over his chest, resolutely staring at the television screen without watching what’s on it.

Charlie has always enjoyed making jokes about Knox’s former hopeless crush on Chris, but it never came in the form of anything more than gentle ribbing, from a place of security in their own relationship. This joke stings of bitterness, subtly cutting. Knox has to remind himself it’s only misplaced anger, jealousy stemming from how far Chris gets to drive away from here.

“We’re not going to starve,” Knox says, dumping the bags on the table in front of Pitts and Meeks. Their heads—both still ducked towards their laptops—snap up briefly, but they say nothing. “So that’s something, huh?”

The brain trust ignores him again.

“You had Chris get the gluten free pasta, right?” Cameron asks from the stairs, his phone cradled between his ear and his shoulder.

“Uh...” Knox starts aimlessly searching through one of the bags, because pretending to look is better than admitting he forgot to ask.

“It’s a quarantine, Cameron, we’re all going to have to give up things,” Charlie says, still glowering at the TV. “Your diet can be the first casualty.”

“For the last time, Charlie, it isn’t just a diet—”

And they’re off to the races.

Knox slumps into an empty chair and begins running through important dates of World War I in his head to drown out the sound of Charlie and Cameron bickering. At some point during Cameron’s graphic listing of the symptoms of celiac and Charlie singing the tune to ‘Immigrant Song’ to throw Cameron off, Todd slips down the stairs, making a beeline for the kitchen. Knox shoots up immediately to follow him.

“Hey, how’s Neil?”

Without looking at Knox, Todd grabs a bottle of water from the fridge, shuts the door, and squeezes past him in the doorway, all the while waving his empty hand in a motion that's meant as “fine, fine” but reads like “we’re all doomed.”

Like a specter, Todd vanishes upstairs again without Charlie and Cameron halting their battle royale or Meeks and Pitts glancing up from their laptops.

“I’m going to go take a nap,” Knox announces to no one.

Except Pitts finally hears him, taking in the overflowing grocery bags in front of him. “Wait, shouldn’t we put these away?”

“Now you notice me,” Knox mutters, bypassing the table and the bags. “Your problem.”

From the top of the stairs, Knox overhears Cameron, in a reprieve from the gluten debate, asking, “What’s the matter with him?”

We’re going to be fine, Knox thinks as he shuts his bedroom door and thumps his forehead against it. Everything is going to be fine.

Somewhere on the first floor, there’s a seismic thud. It’s either a bag of groceries hitting the floor or Cameron’s skull.

It’s really going to be fine.

DAY 2

“If I got to choose who I’d get to hole-up in the apocalypse with,” Charlie says, hanging upside down off the couch, blood rushing to his face, “I wouldn’t choose any of you.”

“Gee, thanks, Charlie,” Neil grumbles at the same time Pitts asks, incredulous,  “Who else do you know?”

The atmosphere on the first floor has become stifling. They're trapped in the limbo right before the volcano blows, smoke and ash and darkness swirling around them. At this exact moment, three of them are doing work, three of them are pretending to do work, one of them has given up any pretense of being productive in isolation, and all of them are sick and tired of one another after just over forty-eight hours together. Charlie may be right about something—none of this bodes well for their chances of surviving in an actual apocalypse.

“Well, you’d be giving up getting laid,” Cameron says, monotone and without leaving his Business Law textbook, so he misses Knox’s glare.

Knox glances over to Charlie and finds him already staring, one eyebrow piqued. Too tired to communicate in elaborate signals, Knox sighs. “It’s two in the afternoon, Charlie.”

That’s enough to pull Cameron out of financial law. “Actually, that reminds me—”

Charlie, snapping up, cuts him off. “Don’t even say it.”

“We’re all sharing this house, Charlie—”

“Just because you only have your own hand to get off—”

Meeks, smarter than them all by a half, has had noise cancelling headphones nestled over his ears for the last two hours. Todd buries his head in his folded arms, face crimson. Beside him, Neil looks ready to storm upstairs. The entire machine is breaking down and their only attempts at fixing it have been to hit it over and over again with the blunt side of a wrench.

“They’re going to kill each other before this is over,” Knox mutters under his breath.

“Not if I kill them both first,” Pitts replies, jaw tightly set.

It can’t go on like this. Knox thinks they know that deep down, but admitting they have a problem means admitting the good, the bad, and the ugly: the petty ticks they dislike about each other, the disappointments and anxieties they’ve been shouldering, the nitty gritty things saved for three in the morning half-drunk conversation or the day before moving out. Knox used to roll his eyes at jokes from casual friends about how co-dependent their tight-knit society is, but he’s starting to realize tight-knit has nothing to do with dependency. Knox knows Pitts lost his virginity in the back of an old Volkswagen van his junior year of high school, but he didn’t need to know he has to hum Bach to himself while reviewing chemistry notes. There’s time better spent alone.

And there’s time together better spent than sitting around trading snide comments like they’re shooting off paper airplanes.

“Oh, blow me, Dalton.”

Knox can’t stand it.

“You wish, Cameron.”

How does that line from Network go? I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore?

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Knox finds himself standing, fist curled on the table. Better than pulling his hair out in tuft-fulls. The rest of them are staring in various states of alarm, but it’s Neil’s face Knox gets stuck on, pale and exhausted, like someone has sucked the sun out of him and left him without a light. That’s not Neil. “When did we all get so miserable?”

“I’d say it’s about the time Cameron was born—”

“Shut up, Charlie,” Knox says and Charlie’s mouth snaps closed immediately. A pang of guilt vibrates within Knox’s chest, but he’s too sick of the fighting to backtrack now. “It’s been two days. We can’t deal with each other for two days? We can make this fun. We should -”

An idea like a blazing comet shoots through Knox’s brain. As quickly as he found himself standing, Knox climbs onto his chair.

Meeks, staring at him bug-eyed from behind his glasses, asks, “Uh—what are you doing?”

Knox is not quite sure what he’s doing, but when has that stopped any of them before? “Gentleman,” he begins, voice cracking on the second syllable. He pushes onward anyway. “It is time we seize this quarantine.”

Charlie’s stifled laughter is a surprisingly encouraging sign. “Okay, Knoxious, you have our attention.” Because he’s Charlie, he has to climb over the back of the couch to join them at the table, leaning into Todd and Neil’s space with a game smirk. “What exactly are you talking about?”

Even as he’s started to regret standing on his chair, Knox keeps his eyes on Charlie and feels steady, grounded. “There’s stuff about senior year we’re all disappointed in missing right?” Rippling across the table, there’s a murmur of agreement. “Let’s do it here.”

“Do what here?” Todd asks lightly, more encouraging than Meeks’s furrowed brows and Cameron’s tight-lipped frown.

“Anything,” Knox declares and, in hearing how vague and lame that sounds, continues, “We’ll make a list of senior stuff that’s been cancelled and we’ll do our best to make it happen here. There’s seven of us and you’re the only people I cared about doing that stuff with anyway, so…”

His cheeks flush; he mined deeper than he intended to, struck a vein a little too sappy for day three of quarantine. All the other boys have a thoughtful look about them though, even the sour face of Cameron turning a touch sweeter.

Then, ever his champion, Charlie claps his hands together and declares, “I’m in.”

Pitts nods fervently. “Me too.”

“It’s not like we have anything to lose,” Meeks reasons with a tentative smile.

That smile is mirrored on Todd’s lips as he says, “Okay.”

“Things have been getting a little boring,” Cameron admits, and by the fireworks bursting in Charlie’s eyes, Knox knows he’s already assembling an internal list of things they can goad Cameron into doing by the end of these two weeks.

They're still waiting on one voice, perhaps the one that matters most. So many of their ideas start as the horrifying brainchildren of Charlie, encouraged by Pitts and made a little saner by Meeks, with Todd and Knox himself dragged along for the ride, and Cameron following after complaining as he went, but none of them were in if Neil was out. He’s their north star, the guiding light that makes it all seem possible.

Finally, Neil nods, cracking a smile when he realizes he's under the spotlight.

“Okay then,” Knox says, looking down upon his merry band of friends and reveling in the first signs of hope shining on their faces. Now where to begin.

(“I’m begging you please get down.”

“I’m not going to fall.”

“Knoxious, I’ve seen you trip on a level sidewalk.”

Knox begrudgingly accepts Charlie’s hand and still nearly stumbles face first onto the floor.)

DAY 3

Pitts and Meeks graciously donate their whiteboard to the valiant cause Knox has dubbed “The Grand Quarantine Plan.”

“Okay, not counting today, we have eleven days to cram in as much senior year stuff as possible,” Knox says as he finishes numbering the board. He turns to face his audience and finds a collection of blank and unsure eyes blinking back at him. He suddenly pities every professor who has had to instruct any of them. “Who wants to start?”

To his surprise—and relief—Todd raises his hand first. “I was supposed to present my English thesis at the academic conference and honestly I’d actually prefer just presenting it to you guys.”

Knox claps his hands together, the sound reverberating off the walls, and scribbles “Todd thesis presentation” in the first slot. One day of emptiness filled.

“You have the handwriting of a monkey learning to write, my love.”

Knox scowls over at Charlie lounging in the armchair. “You couldn’t do much better.” At Charlie’s considering face and shrug, Knox hastily adds, “That is not an invitation.” He has no doubt Charlie would write something like ‘orgy’ just to see Cameron squirm.

“Meeks and I were supposed to present our thesis, too,” Pitts says. “We won’t have all the equipment, but...”

“Doesn’t matter, we’ll be there.” Right under Todd’s thesis, Knox adds Meeks and Pitts to the roster. Remembering there is one more among them who had been scheduled to share their work, Knox puts down Cameron’s name at spot number three. When Knox catches his eye, Cameron shoots him a pleased smile.

“Okay, not to get in the way of all this academic excellence, but can liquor be involved in one or two of these activities?” Charlie asks, an uncapped beer perched precariously beside him.

“Well, what are we missing from senior week?”

“The last pub night,” Charlie says, exceptionally forlorn. He tips his beer up towards the ceiling before taking a mournful sip.

“Booze cruise,” Pitts adds.

“The spring concert,” comes Meeks.

“Convocation,” Cameron supplies, sounding every bit as disappointed in its cancellation as Charlie is to be missing the final pub night.

“You want us to hold a mass?” Charlie asks with a snort.

Ignoring the bickering happening behind his back, Knox jots down all of their missing future memories and a handful of his own. There’s a glaring gap still staring at him though. Neil sits silently on the couch beside Todd, his eyes drifting over the board without any real sign of interest. Clearing his throat and trying not to sound like an overly-encouraging elementary school teacher, Knox asks, “You got anything to add, Neil?”

“No, I think we’ve got it covered,” Neil says with a tight smile that doesn't reach his eyes. He stands and strides toward the stairs, calling over his shoulder, “Let me know what you guys are doing for dinner,” before vanishing.

Without meaning to, their collective focus shifts to Todd. Under the scrutiny, he folds and stands as abruptly as Neil did. “I’m just going to...” The sentence goes nowhere and Todd disappears after Neil. The tentative happy mood goes with them.

It’s not long before Pitts and Meeks retreat to their room, Cameron not far behind, leaving Knox, Charlie, and a half-filled white board of half-baked ideas. With an exaggerated groan, Charlie heaves himself out of the armchair and joins Knox by the fireplace-turned-planning-zone, observing their brainstorming with tired eyes.

“You really think we can make any of this work?” he asks, skeptical, and the creeping tendrils of doubt start curling themselves again around Knox’s heart.

But watching as Charlie runs his finger beside “senior dinner,” Knox finds his resolve. “It’s us. We’ll find a way.”

Glancing sideways at him, Charlie musters up a small smile. “Fair enough.”

DAY 4

Sometime in the long, lazy hour between ten and eleven in the morning (Knox has noticed time taking on a flexible, elastic quality), a knock comes at their bedroom door.

Charlie’s still buried under a pile of covers he stole from Knox in the middle of the night and Knox is standing in front of the closet, debating if he should bother putting on clothes today, and that's how Todd finds them when he slips into the room.

“Did you bring breakfast, Anderson?” Charlie asks into the deep crease of Knox’s pillow.

“He’s not your butler, Charlie.”

“Not with that attitude,” Charlie grunts as he rolls over, putting his back to them.

“I wanted to ask you for a favor,” Todd starts, and Knox instantly flashes back to junior year, to a conversation that also took place in Knox and Charlie’s bedroom, where a favor turned into a pact turned into a series of increasingly complex and disastrous plans, turned into two fairly healthy relationships by some grace of the gods.

“Anything,” Knox says with a smile, because it can’t get much more complicated than last year and at least this time they’re confined to the house.

“I’m having trouble cheering Neil up,” Todd admits.

From the depths of a mountain of cotton comes, “Have you tried—”

“Just go back to sleep, Charlie,” Knox says, loud enough to drown out whatever his suggestion might have been.

In a testament to how excessive exposure to Charlie builds an impressive immunity, Todd continues with only a faint blush across the apples of his cheeks. “And I was thinking since you’re planning all these senior things for us to do, that maybe we can…”

Todd trails off, bouncing lightly on his toes, and Knox can practically see the conversation Todd’s having within his head, his anxiety telling him to second-guess himself. Carefully, Knox steps forward and places his hand on Todd’s shoulder. “Whatever you plan for Neil, you know he’s going to love it.”

“It’s not just anything,” Todd whispers, almost too soft to hear. “I think we should put on Henry V. It’s his dream and—and he deserves for it to come true.”

It’s impossible for Knox to agree more emphatically. “Let’s do it!”

“It has to be a surprise.” Both Todd and Knox turn to see Charlie sitting up in bed, hair sticking up in a hundred directions and eyes squinting, but alert enough to say, “Perry’ll never agree to it if we ask him. He won’t want us to waste our time on him.”

“We can do surprise,” Knox says, shooting an encouraging grin in Todd’s direction.

Charlie snorts. “Knoxious, every feeling you’ve ever had is written on a billboard across your face.”

Knox is not proud of the pterodactyl squawk of protest that comes out of his mouth, not in the least because Charlie snorts, taking it as proof of his point.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Charlie says with only a hint of sarcasm. “It’s one of the many things I love about you.”

Knox has to ignore the flaming in his cheeks as he turns his focus back to Todd and not Charlie, shirtless, climbing out of bed. “We’ll plan it for tomorrow night. I’ll get the other guys on board and you just make sure Neil is pretty distracted for the rest of today and tomorrow.”

“You can try—”

“Give it a rest, Dalton.”

Charlie glares at Knox, indignant, as he says, “I was going to say chess. Anderson can borrow our board.” He squeezes past Knox, the sleeve of the shirt borrowed sweatshirt he tugged on brushing against Knox’s arm, and gathers up the chess set laid out nicely on his desk. He hands it over to Todd with a clap on the shoulder. “Either that or you could blow him.”

“Charlie!”

His laughter echoes down the hall, but one of his suggestions must have come to fruition because no one sees Todd or Neil all morning. It gives Knox ample time to gather the remaining four roommates in the living room and hand out some thick stacks of paper.

(“Wait a second, did you use my printer for all this?”

“Send us an invoice, Cameron.”)

“Gentlemen,” Knox says, brandishing a prop sword he had dug out of their cursed storage closet. “We’re putting on a play."

DAY 5

Surrounded by every spare cardboard box they could scavenge and all the mismatched art supplies they’ve pillaged over the years, Knox puts the finishing touches on one stone tower. With a few more gray boxes, they’ll have the full ruins of a castle, a stronghold fit for a king’s army.

He’s gotten started on a wall when his gaze flickers up and he catches Charlie staring at him. Knox realizes then that his tongue is poking out, an unattractive side effect of intense concentration. He quickly snaps his mouth closed, face flushing, but Charlie just laughs, looking happier and lighter than Knox has seen him in days.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Charlie says, shaking his head as he returns to coloring the great and historically inaccurate crest he's been constructing. Then, in the purposefully casual way Charlie says everything of extreme importance to him, he adds, “We just don’t deserve you, Knoxious.”

Knox is struck momentarily dumb, his brain stalled on Charlie’s words. He hopes his face is not half as red as it feels, but Charlie’s intent on shading his crest and Knox swears he spies the slightest blush on his cheeks, too.

“Sure you do,” Knox says softly, though he may be a bit biased because he’s always thought Charlie deserves the world and he certainly deserves whatever Knox can give him. Whatever keeps him smiling and laughing like he is right now.

Suddenly overwhelmed by how much he loves Charlie Dalton but a little too proud to blurt out the messy musings of his heart while Charlie is in a laughing mood, Knox abandons his wall and crawls across the small space between them. Charlie, always in step with him in everything, meets Knox halfway.

“Careful,” Charlie whispers against his lips, all teeth and wide grins. “Don’t let Cameron catch you.”

Knox pulls away an inch to breathe out, “Who cares?” before capturing Charlie’s lips again.

(Pitts wanders in a few minutes later and says, “Don’t let Cameron catch you.”

“That’s exactly what I said!”)

At the stroke of five, Pitts finishes stringing up the red-fleece curtain just as Todd is leading Neil down the stairs, a tie looped around his eyes. Knox shoos everyone to the outskirts of their new stage and tries to quell the childish impulse to shout “surprise!” as soon as Neil takes off his makeshift blindfold.

“What happened to all our furniture?” Neil asks as his rapidly-blinking eyes take in the room.

The couches had been pushed into the kitchen and all the kitchen chairs arranged in two neat rows in front of their curtain. Knox motions to Pitts to raise it, just for a moment, and reveal to Neil the full cardboard box set, Charlie’s blazing red crest hanging proudly over their mantle.

Neil’s lips part, his eyes blown out.

“Okay, enough gawking,” Charlie announces before Neil can even speak. He shoves Todd’s Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo costume from two Halloweens ago into Neil’s unsuspecting arms. “You’re the star of the show and you’re not even in costume yet.”

Amidst Charlie pushing him toward the overstuffed kitchen, Neil locks eyes with Knox. He’s known Neil long enough to read the slight incline of his chin and Knox dutifully follows into the kitchen.

“I hope you’re ready,” Charlie says, voice pitched low and deadly serious. “My Pistol is a revelation.”

As he exits, Knox can hear Pitts calling, “Wait, I thought I was Pistol?”

Dazed, arms loaded with the cheap chainmail Charlie threw at him, Neil seems at a loss for words and Knox wonders if he hasn't completely missed the mark here. Maybe Neil only wanted time and space to mourn, not to be forced into a pale imitation of the real thing.

Carefully, Neil places the costume on the counter, the thin metal clanging together. Just as Knox opens his mouth to apologize, Neil tosses his arms around Knox’s neck and squeezes tight.

“Uh,” is what Knox’s brain eloquently supplies, his arms wrapping loosely around Neil’s shoulders.

“You guys really did all this for me?” Neil asks. When he pulls away, his eyes are shining.

“It’s really not much,” Knox admits, neck scorching. “You’re about to see six guys play about forty parts very badly.”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” shouts Charlie from the other side of the wall.

“Him especially,” Knox says, punching up his volume to be sure Charlie hears him. The thump of a prop hitting the doorframe sends Neil and Knox into a fit of laughter. When it subsides, Knox squeezes Neil’s shoulder. “We just wanted to do something that might make you happy.”

Neil smiles, the real one that has everyone who meets him falling just a little bit in love. It’s everything they’ve been sorely missing over the last few days. “I’m getting there,” he says, stepping back and taking up to his costume again. “Let’s perform some Shakespeare.”

It’s truly a disaster. Charlie speaks all his lines like he wants the whole neighborhood to hear them. He's also convinced Meeks to do the performance sans-glasses to preserve the historical integrity of the piece, which means Meeks has to hold his script three inches from his face to read his lines. Cameron embodies the phrase “don’t quit your day job” and Knox’s talents are not much better, with the added caveat he'll find a way to trip over air if he tries walking and performing a line at the same time.

Pitts and Todd are the saving graces of their little acting company, Pitts from some natural born ability and Todd from the sheer magnitude of Neil. In the rare moments Neil is not elevating their meager stage, Todd trips and starts over most of his lines, but standing opposite Neil, Todd radiates the overflowing love and affection Henry’s soldiers must have felt for their king.

They’re all basking in the light of Neil’s burning sun as he gives the St. Crispin’s Day speech. All at once, it doesn’t matter that there are no stage lights or real sets or a true audience. With Neil at center stage in their lowly living room, surveying his poor acting companions as though they're his most treasured compatriots, Knox feels he never understood Shakespeare better.

(“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition”)

They’re up until the small hours of the morning, shouting bacchanalian cries to the stars. Eventually, they collapse in the grass of their tiny backyard, half in and half out of costume, chests heaving and hearts alive.

On one side, Pitts has begun snoring whilst Meeks fiddles with an ancient radio, miraculously stumbling on a static-laced Bob Dylan song.

On his other side, Knox watches as Neil whispers something into Todd’s hair. It looks an awful lot like “I love you.”

DAY 6

Knox awakens disgustingly early on day six to Charlie hovering over him, far too eager for the hour (Knox might have guessed he never actually went to bed last night had he not passed out on Knox’s chest drooling). Worse than that though is the shirt he’s wearing.

“You’re not even Irish,” Knox slurs, words muffled by a pillow.

“That’s not the spirit of the holiday, Knoxious,” Charlie says before giving Knox a smacking kiss on the cheek. “C’mon, there’s breakfast beer and pancakes downstairs.”

(“I think he’s finally going to poison us,” Meeks whispers, poking at a toxic green pancake.

“We should be so lucky.”)

The arrival of St. Patrick’s Day does coincide nicely with Knox’s plans for the evening. He arranges a liquor store delivery stocked with the best alcohol his bank account can afford and enlists Pitts's help hauling down the dart board that hung on the door of his and Meeks’ room (and they debate the safety of the very sharp darts—Charlie’s aim isn’t stellar sober; drunk it’s near lethal). But caution gets thrown to the wind along with, once again, most of their living room furniture as they transform the first floor into a makeshift pub.

Everyone is at least three beers in when Meeks picks up an empty bottle to use as a microphone and announces, “It’s time for trivia!” He has a sheet of paper in hand, already stained and sticky at the corners. “Question number one: how many fingers did Knox break sophomore year when he fell down the library steps because he thought he saw Chris waving to him?”

“Buzz!” Pitts shouts, slapping the heel of his hand against his thigh as if he had an actual buzzer. “Three!”

Knox flexes his hand, a shot of phantom pain coursing through those once mangled fingers.

“Wait, shouldn’t we be writing the answers down?” Cameron asks. “And shouldn’t we have picked teams? And—”

“Too much talking, not enough trivia,” Charlie says, shoving an overflowing shot of tequila into Cameron’s unready hands. Cameron splutters, but downs the shot anyway and receives the raucous applause of Pitts, Neil, and Charlie for his effort.

“The answer was indeed three,” Meeks says after the clapping and hooting dies down. “Mr. Pitts is on the board. Question two: what sports house did Charlie get chased out of freshman year after he tried to smuggle out their team flag?”

“Buzz!” Pitts and Neil yell at the same time, but it’s Neil who gets out, “Lacrosse!”

“Point for Mr. Perry!”

“I was hiding from anyone who looked even vaguely like a lacrosse player for weeks,” Knox says, cringing at the memory of darting down the drunken-student packed streets off-campus at one o’clock in the morning, a pack of boat-shoes and polo-shirt wearing neanderthals hot on his heels.

“So you hid from every other guy that goes to our school,” Charlie says, finishing off the last of his drink. He waves the drained bottle in Neil’s general direction. “Including Neil.”

“Hey!”

“Question three: what room did we accidentally get Cameron locked into second semester sophomore year?”

“Buzz!” Knox slams his bottle on the table for extra emphasis. “Dean Nolan’s office.”

“To this day, still not funny.”

“No, it was fucking hilarious.”

The great peels of laughter favor Charlie.

The night is endless in the greatest possible way. When they reach the end of Meeks’ trivia questions, they make up hundreds of their own. Who fell in the fountain after the spring concert during their junior year? Where did Knox and Charlie get caught making out by public safety? How many campus rooftops has Pitts successfully snuck onto? What kind of car did Meeks nearly blow up in an experiment gone horrifically wrong? Who won the Great Fall Break Hide and Go Seek Championship of 2019?

(“I did!”

“No fucking way, your spot was totally out of bounds.”

“We never said under construction buildings didn’t count.”

“Safety was implied!”)

They manage to argue over who won at trivia, too, as if anyone kept score. Charlie declares himself victor anyway and, almost completely collapsed against Knox by this point, demands they spend tomorrow making him a winner’s crown.

“I’ll get right on that,” Meeks says, dripping with sarcasm, only for Neil to deconstruct one of the beer boxes and fashion it into a spiky cardboard crown. Charlie places it on his head as if he were performing in a scene as a boy who would be king, taking up his mantle for the very first time.

He then promptly falls against Knox in a fit of laughter and one of the points pokes Knox in the eye.

“Wouldn’t be pub night if Knox didn’t accidentally get a black eye,” Neil says with a joyous grin, Todd chuckling beside him.

“Question!” Pitts yells despite the game’s unofficial end. “How did Knox actually get a black eye at the beginning of junior year?”

“Buzz!” Todd exclaims, hand raised. “We were trying to break into the exorcism room and when Knox leaned down to help Charlie with the lock, Charlie elbowed him in the eye.”

The humiliating trip to health services that next day still stings at Knox’s pride. It must show on his face because he feels Charlie’s arm snake around his waist, squeezing the shame out of him. “Come on, it wasn’t so bad,” Charlie says, spoken like someone who did not have to endure the likes of Chet Danbury asking to see the other guy. “That was the beginning of our love story.”

“It really wasn’t.”

“Nah, you’re right,” Charlie says with a smirk, catching Knox off-guard. Charlie’s rarely in the business of admitting anyone’s right, even happy-drunk and a little out of this world. Then, lowering his voice so only Knox can hear it, he whispers, “I’ve loved you for a lot longer than that.”

Knox, also happy-drunk and a little out of this world, has no adequate words to answer that. If they were in the real pub, Knox would grab Charlie by the hand and drag him home, not stopping until they were behind their locked bedroom door. Here, in their living room decked with dusty Christmas lights and stinking of two dozen empty beers, surrounded by their friends now shouting out incorrect lyrics to "Come On, Eileen," Knox leans his forehead against Charlie’s instead and smiles, eyes half-lidded.

“We’re really going to need a better story to tell our future kids.”

Charlie’s laughter sings in Knox’s ears. “You’re the romantic,” Charlie says, his lips trailing along Knox’s jaw. “You’ll think of something.”

DAY 7

“Gentleman,” Neil addresses to one side of the room, where Meeks and Pitts are fiddling with a large, blinking contraption that Knox refuses to touch for fear of electrocution. Neil then turns to the other side of the living room, to Knox and Charlie sitting like a panel of judges on the couch, “and gentleman. Welcome to the first and last annual Welton Academic Quarantine Conference.”

A polite and restrained golf-clap erupts around the room.

Neil beams, the smile growing more blinding as his eyes dart to the person waiting in the wings. “It is my honor and privilege to introduce our first speaker. Our country’s future Poet Laureate, a Walt Whitman in the making, and a fantastic kisser"—Charlie snorts and does a terrible job disguising it as a cough—“please welcome Mr. Todd Anderson, presenting his thesis entitled ‘Amongst the Dead Poets Society.’”

A much more raucous round of applause greets Todd stepping behind their makeshift lectern—a collection of cardboard boxes and crates left over from the night before. His face goes scarlet, but he’s somehow glowing, too, and that’s enough to convince Knox that in some strange, divinely-intervened way this is the best case scenario for Todd’s presentation.

“Uh—thank you for that kind and, uhm...highly inappropriate introduction.”

Charlie doesn’t bother hiding his laughter at that, but he and Neil do try to be subtle with their high five as Neil folds himself into the empty space left on the couch.

Todd, eyes on his slim stack of papers and studiously not on Neil Perry, clears his throat. “When, uhm, when I first sat down with my thesis advisor, Professor Keating, to talk about my project, he told me that many of our greatest writers were writing about the things they felt were missing from their lives. Missing time, missing family, missing affection, missing love.” His eyes flicker up, only for a moment, but they land unfixed somewhere above their heads. Todd clears his throat again and continues, “Professor Keating also told me that when we miss things, what we often mean is we desperately want them. We want time, or family, or...or love.”

His eyes do find Neil this time and Knox has to turn away from them both, feeling at once like he’s intruding on something rare and beautiful and not for him.

“If Professor Keating asked me freshman year to write about the things I was missing, I wouldn’t have wanted to admit it, but I’d have had a lot to write about. But when he asked me that question on one of the first days of my senior year, I suddenly discovered I wasn’t missing all that much. I had found, perhaps accidentally and against other people’s better judgement, more companionship and love than I could have ever hoped for.” Todd paused for a breath, a small and treasuring smile on his face. “And all I wanted to write about was them.”

Knox feels Charlie’s hand slip into his own, holding tight. Across the room, he sees Meeks’s mouth hanging open, amazed, and Pitts blinking back tears. Cameron looks like someone who has had a veil lifted from his eyes, shown a world brighter and more vibrant than he has ever seen before. Knox still can't look at Neil, not when he’s barely holding it together as it is.

Todd may be wrong about some things—there’s never been anything accidental about his place amongst them—but he’s always been right when it comes to just about everything else.

“So, uh, yeah, this is Amongst the Dead Poets Society.”

Later, long after Pitts and Meeks presented their technological triumphs and Cameron his business ethics musings, Knox gently shuts the door to his bedroom with itching eyes he can't blame on allergies.

(“You want me to get you a roll of paper towels, Knoxious?”

“Shut up, you cried at the end of The Seagull last semester.”)

“Another rousing day of quarantine in the books,” Charlie proclaims as he crashes down on Knox’s bed. “Always knew Anderson was the softest of us.”

Charlie’s carrying on—something about the emotional intensity of the future Anderson-Perry children—but Knox finds himself stuck on one section of Todd’s thesis, replaying it in his head like a skipping record. In one poem, Todd muses on how everyone has a place they have to wander to, at least once in their life. Everyone has a Herculean task they must complete, one that often takes them far away from the people who matter most to them.

Knox has known of his Herculean task for some weeks now, but it never felt as important as enjoying the last few months of his senior year. It's the wider world coming to knock at his door and Knox thought he had a little more time to pretend he isn’t home.

“...and you just know Perry’s going to cry if one of his kids takes up acting.”

“Hey, Charlie,” Knox says, interrupting a conversation he had already checked out of. Charlie doesn’t seem too bothered to roll off his train of thought, so Knox feels brave enough to say, “I have something I have to tell you.”

“You’re leaving me for Steven.”

“What?” Knox splutters. “No!”

“No, Knoxious, really, I understand,” Charlie says with a martyred look. “He’s a very intelligent and deeply sexual man. He’d have been my second choice for a wife.”

“Charlie, I’m being serious.”

Knox must have sounded more frustrated than he meant to because the face of the martyr is gone. “Okay, okay, I believe you. What’s going on?”

Pinned by Charlie’s full attention, Knox struggles to begin. He’d give anything for a well of Todd’s words, or a hint of Neil’s charm, or a scrap of Meeks’s levelheadedness, or a modicum of Pitts’s quiet tenacity. Knox is not the person for the big moments, the important conversations, the stuff that matters.

He’s the person who, with the articulateness of a child first learning to speak, blurts out, “I got into Yale. I—I got into law school.”

Charlie blinks at him, like the words Knox spoke had no meaning, but then, in the next instant, he vaults off of the bed and barrels into Knox. “Holy shit, that’s incredible. Knoxious! When did you find out?”

“Maybe two weeks ago,” Knox mumbles into Charlie’s shoulder, content to burrow into his arms and not have the rest of this conversation.

What he deserves is Charlie pulling away, brows furrowed. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Who else knows?”

“Just my parents,” Knox says, close to adding that even they wouldn't have known if not for the daily calls, texts, and emails in the days leading up to the decision, his father more nervous than Knox himself.

“Why didn’t you want to tell us?”

The truth is stuck somewhere in Knox’s ribcage, too close to the heart. It’s finally gnawing at him, with a ferocity has him scared shitless, but Knox has never been in the business of lying to Charlie and the idea of starting now scares him more.

“I guess I wasn’t ready for it to be real,” Knox says with a weak shrug, the remains of the day coming to exhaust him. Outside, the stars are hanging in the sky and the street is quiet. Down the hall, in other rooms with shut doors, their friends may be having similarly heavy conversations. Here, only Charlie has to see him so weighed down. “It felt too much like admitting we were all going to be leaving soon. We wouldn’t be with each other all the time.”

When Knox says "we" he means to encompass all the Poets, but in his heart of hearts, he knows he really means Charlie. It’s Charlie who might be leaving him soon. It’s Charlie he won’t get to be with all the time.

Charlie takes a step back and, given Charlie’s strong force of gravity, Knox falls after him. He’s looking at Knox, really looking, of the kind that strips a person bare, and Knox’s breath catches, heartbeat thundering in his ears.

“There are a lot of banks in New Haven,” Charlie says, tone noncommittal when what he’s saying is anything but.

“There are,” Knox agrees, heart pounding ever faster against his chest. Knox thought there was going to be a long and winding road to this conversation, but he’ll have to stop underestimating life’s ability to throw curveballs and Charlie’s ability to hit them all home with his eyes closed. “I thought we’d have more time to talk about this.”

“I don’t need time,” Charlie says easily. “Not when it comes to you.”

And just like that, the circuits in Knox’s brain completely fry.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Knox sputters, followed up by an exaggerated groan, and flops onto Charlie’s bed, arms spread out like a starfish.

“Doing what?” Charlie asks with an amused chuckle. Knox hears him walking to the edge of the bed, knees knocking against his own.

“Saying things that make my brain stop working.”

“My apologies,” Charlie says without sounding sorry at all, not when he's climbing onto the bed to straddle Knox and the last working wires in Knox’s head fizzle out. “Didn’t realize Lover Boy Knox couldn’t take what he dishes out.”

Moving to cup his face with both hands, Knox thinks to tell Charlie that he’s got it all wrong. Charlie’s the real romantic and Knox is just the heart-eyed boy racing to catch up. 

There are far worse lots to have in life.

DAY 8

How they manage to find two plain white sheets that had not been used to clean spilled spiked fruit punch, or torn up for Halloween costume, or both is a miracle. Meeks and Pitts string them up between the two large oak trees out back and have the projector equipment configured before most of the other boys are awake.

(“Just a quick but crucial question: where did this projector come from?”

“Really, every household needs a good projector.”

“Now see Pittsy, I just don’t think that’s true.”)

As dusk falls, splattering the sky in shades of orange and gold, the boys soldier out to the backyard, armed with lawn chairs and large bowls of popcorn, and settle in for movie night. While Meeks queues up the first movie, Pitts stands in front of the screen, the wash of the lights giving him the look of an old Hollywood film star.

“Fellow society members, thank you for being here,” Pitts says with a formal bow. “While the annual drive-in movie night may have been cancelled, we can still come together in this time of turmoil to honor a true master of his craft: the great Tobe Hooper.”

Knox’s hand freezes in the depths of his popcorn bowl.

“First, please enjoy his underrated classic: The Funhouse.”

“Wait, wait, wait—” Knox says and Pitts halts mid-step, his body suspended half in light and half in shadow. “Am I the only one who didn’t know this was going to be a horror movie night?”

Todd has the decency to look sheepish as he nods his head, while Neil merely shrugs and shoves a handful of popcorn into his mouth. Cameron’s not even bothering to meet Knox’s eye. The ringleaders are showing the barest trace of guilt, Meeks ducking his head behind a speaker and Pitts fading further into shadow.

Charlie, hiding nothing, snickers beside him. “We just didn’t want to put up with you whining about it the whole day, Knoxious.”

“I wouldn’t have whined,” Knox protests.

“But you would have begged us to change it,” Meeks says, reclining in his lawn chair as the opening credits crawl. The music already sends a slow eruption of goosebumps up Knox’s arms.

“No, I wouldn’t have,” Knox says, rubbing at his arms. “...but would you have considered it?”

Neil lobs a piece of popcorn that bounces off of Knox’s cheek. “Hey!”

Knox has no choice but to respond with a handful of popcorn that rains down on Neil and Todd in equal measure. In the hailstorm of popcorn that ensues, no one is spared until Pitts has to shout, “Show Mr. Hooper more respect!”

When the cheese dust settles, Charlie leans in to whisper in Knox’s ear, “Don’t worry babe, you can hold my hand if it gets too scary.”

At that, Knox purposefully stuffs his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt.

And within five minutes, Knox has Charlie’s wrist in a vice grip, his eyes darting from the screen to the ground at a rapid velocity. At least two further popcorn fights occur over the course of The Funhouse, each one incited by Knox chanting some version of “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this” through gritted teeth.

Halfway through Poltergeist, Knox is ready to run upstairs and burrow under his covers, trying not to think about the non-zero possibility their house had been built over a sacred burial site. The one thing stopping him is not wanting to give his traitorous friends the satisfaction.

Case in point: when Knox gets up to refill his popcorn bowl, he swears he hears Cameron making cry-baby noises the second his back is turned.

“Hypocrite,” Knox mutters without looking back.

He’s surprised to find Pitts standing at the door, not looking to go inside but not seeming to want to sit down either. He has an oddly distant look on his face, the kind of look he or Charlie usually chalk up to a trip to ‘Pitts World.’

Knox tries to shrug it off, but when he returns from the kitchen, bowl overflowing, he stops to stand beside Pitts. “Is the movie scarier from far away?”

For a second, Pitts does nothing, his unfixed gaze remaining. Then, he blinks and his eyes dart to Knox like he’s registering his presence for the first time. “Huh?”

“I said the movie, is it—” Knox pauses, not finding a point in repeating a joke that had been dumb the first time around. “You okay?”

Pitts nods, a reflexive move, but after a few seconds pass, he sighs. “It’s weird, ya know,” he says, surveying the backs of their friends on mismatched lawn chairs and picnic blankets, all made aglow by the light of the big screen. “Like this is all stuff we could have been doing before, but we didn’t think of it.”

“Or we didn’t have time,” Knox says with a shrug, though he knows what he’s saying isn’t exactly true. How many nights did they spend lazing in the living room, drinking a few beers and complaining of boredom while their homework piled up. “It was the best of times…”

“...it was the worst of times,” Pitts finishes.

Knox glances sideways, regarding Pitts in profile, and takes a minute to wonder if he missed out on more than just a handful of unusual bonding experiences. It’s just that there had always been natural pairs within the group - Todd and Neil, Meeks and Pitts, himself and Charlie, Cameron and the cross hanging above his bed.

And sure, Knox has taken a creative writing class with Todd, eaten lunch with Pitts and Meeks in the Science Complex on Mondays and Fridays, received help from Cameron in Statistics, and ran lines with Neil in the heat of theater season. They've spent time together in random configurations of trios, and foursomes, and on and on, but Knox has trouble remembering the last time he and Pitts sat on the couch together, just the two of them, and talked.

Knox isn’t naive (despite whatever Charlie may say to the contrary)—he knows friendship is a spectrum, not a check-marked list of weekly tasks two people have to complete in order to qualify. Chalk it up to the strange perspective a worldwide pandemic brings about that he’s even thinking about this at all, wandering down a few roads not taken.

“Oh, I love this part,” Pitts says, this part being some thing with a clown doll that Knox already knows he’ll hate. With a keen sixth sense, Pitts adds, “You can tap out now if you want. You already made it way farther than Charlie bet you would.”

“Nah, I want to stay,” Knox says, using an admirable amount of self-control by not also glaring at the back of Charlie’s head. “How bad can it be?”

The grand finale is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so the answer to Knox’s question is absolutely excruciating. Knox sits next to Pitts rather than Charlie though and manages to muster a few smiles at Pitts's ravings concerning Tobe Hooper and his influence on horror cinema. Nothing feels that weird, even with the chainsaw noises.

Except during the infamous final chase, Knox does grit out, “You better be making a lot of money off Charlie with that bet.”

DAY 9

The strobe lights Charlie bought for their misbegotten Homecoming party last semester still work, despite Knox’s pleas to God for the contrary. The karaoke machine works, too. Not a single one of them doubted it would.

“The cursed machine returns!” Pitts had announced when he and Charlie lugged it downstairs.

A half hour of set up, strobe lights included, later, the machine sits innocuously enough in the center of the living room, just like the car in Christine once sat innocuously in the garage.

“It’s biding its time,” Meeks says ominously. Pitts shudders beside him.

“Why are we doing this again?” asks Todd.

“Why did we keep it is the better question,” Neil answers.

“This is spring concert we’re trying to recreate here,” Charlie reminds them. He’s in a Springsteen muscle tee and short-shorts, the outfit made complete by a lid hat worn backwards. Knox is a little concerned he has this level of a frat-bro look on-hand. “It’s not spring concert if someone doesn’t cry, someone doesn’t make out with someone who isn’t their boyfriend, someone doesn’t throw up, and someone doesn’t start a brawl in the middle of the mosh pit. This baby right here can guarantee all of that.”

“Can I object to everything you just said?” Meeks tries.

“No.”

“Alright, sir.”

Cameron, leaning against the back of the couch, tempts fate waving his hand at the monstrous beast. “You know, I still don’t really get it. What’s so wrong with this thing?”

The entire room lets out a muted moan.

“You’re blocking it out because you’re the one who cried,” Charlie says, and as Cameron splutters in indignation, asks, “Who wants to regale us with the saga?”

“Once upon a time...” Neil begins, only half-joking.

The long and short of it is where the karaoke machine goes misery follows. Charlie bought it on one of his whims towards the beginning of sophomore year and the first time they fired it up, Hopkins from down the hall arrived with a baseball bat to smash the thing to pieces. Knox ended that night with a busted lip, Charlie with swollen nose, and Pitts a pair of bruised knuckles. The machine escaped without a scratch.

The second time, they whisked it off campus to one of Gloria’s infamous house bashes. Cameron got too drunk and cried while singing “I Will Always Love You” and, just three songs later, Tina threw herself at Pitts in the midst of him singing “Hungry Like the Wolf” in full view of Tina’s very big, very football-playing boyfriend. They were chased out of that party. The machine showed up on their doorstep the next day, pristine.

Third time’s a charm, Charlie insisted before their Homecoming party last fall. Meeks threw up halfway through “The Longest Time” and Hopkins once again picked a fight when Charlie dedicated his short-lived rendition of “Like a Virgin” to him. Neil had a bloody nose, Knox a black eye, and Pitts more bruised knuckles. Knox swore the machine laughed at them.

“I really don’t want to punch anyone again, Charlie,” Pitts says, flexing his knuckles as if he felt echoes of the pain.

Charlie takes a moment to consider this perfectly reasonable request and sighs, “Fine, I’ll take the brawl off the table.”

“The machine makes no such promises,” Knox mutters darkly, because he doesn’t like his odds of escaping injury. It’s been too many days in quarantine now without him needing any kind of major medical.

Charlie, bravado hitting peak levels, strolls over to the machine. Everyone else in the room holds their breath. It feels like a scene out of one of Charlie’s beloved action thrillers, where the grizzled hero has to diffuse the bomb without knowing the exact wire to cut. Charlie presses the power button. The machine hums to life, unfurling its catalogue of all the 80s most memorable mistakes.

“Welcome to Spring Concert 2020.”

The warm-up is Charlie singing “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin so loud that glass in the living room windows seems to vibrate. It’s a ridiculous song—if you took a shot for every time Terri Nunn sings some version of the word "love" you’d die—but Knox feels his neck grow hot every time Charlie locks eyes with him.

In follow-up, Knox gets goaded into singing “You Make My Dreams Come True.” Badly. Cameron goes with “Uptown Girl.” Pitts takes on “Call Me.” When they’ve finally got enough liquid courage into Todd, he and Neil rock their way through “Under Pressure.” They all wolf whistle when Neil hits the Freddie Mercury high note effortlessly.

Queen bleeds into The Police rolls into ABBA fades into Bowie charges into The B-52’s. Knox has to take a breather around the time Pitts and Meeks are finishing “Love Shack” and Charlie and Cameron are about to kill them dead by performing “Don’t You Want Me.” He retreats to the kitchen island in hopes of escaping the direct blast.

That’s where Meeks finds him, pouring a new cup of lemonade and just a dash of vodka. Meeks’ entire face is flushed, a combination of alcohol and screaming his lungs out. Knox tips his cup at him and grins. “That was probably better than any performer the school was going to get.”

“Thank you, thank you.” For a moment, they’re both silent, watching the beginnings of a truly terrifying duet. Just as Cameron starts to croak, Meeks leans toward Knox. “Congratulations, by the way, Knox Overstreet, esquire.”

“Congratulations for—” Knox groans when the tail-end of Meeks’ sentence clicks. “Charlie!”

The man in question—yell-singing "don’t you want me, baby" in Cameron’s face—doesn’t notice the scowl Knox sends his way.

“You’re not sure?” Meeks asks. His glasses are foggy, but Knox sees the sincere interest in his eyes. Meeks has always cared earnestly about their futures, sometimes more than they themselves did. He’s the one who made sure Neil kept up with his pre-med courses, and aided Charlie with his trigonometry, and drilled Knox until he knew his Latin conjugations frontwards, backwards, and sideways. Steven Meeks, their master of the universe.

Knox wishes he was more like him. Not just the brain the size of a galaxy, but his secure knowledge in the path that lay ahead for him. Meeks will be off at Harvard next year working towards his PhD, with little doubt that it’s exactly where he’s supposed to be.

“You still have some time, you know,” Meeks says.

Knox nods, but finds himself saying, “Do you just sometimes feel like there’s this big clock now and it’s counting down way too soon?”

“Yeah, kind of. But what’s been making it better is all of this.”

Meeks motions to the room beyond. Neil and Todd are curled in an armchair together, Neil with his head thrown back and Todd with his shoulders quaking in laughter. Pitts is stretched out on the floor, his forearm shielding his eyes as if the sight of the trainwreck duet is too much for him. Charlie has provoked Cameron into a competition to see who can sing the loudest and both look like they’re about to pass out from lack of oxygen.

Knox’s heart has gotten too big for his chest.

“It’s thanks to you, you know,” Meeks says with a smile. “I’m not sure we deserve you.”

Knox has to duck his head to hide a blush. “Charlie said the same thing.”

Meeks snorts. “Not surprising. He’s been saying stuff like that about you since freshman year.”

His head flies up. Meeks doesn't look the picture of a man who has just revealed a close-kept secret. In the background, the duet has ended at last. Pitts is on deck. The opening piano chords of “Alone” by Heart are playing as Charlie makes his way over to them.

He slumps against Knox, resting his sweaty forehead against his shoulder. His hair is matted, face tomato red, and Knox really does love him. “So freshman year, huh?”

When Charlie looks between Knox and Meeks, his eyes are as wide as planets. “Betrayal!” he yells, pointing directly at Meeks’ chest.

“I’ll remember this moment when I give a toast at your wedding,” Meeks says flatly.

“Pittsy, the deal’s off! Brawl on!”

There is no brawl. No one throws up or makes out with someone they shouldn’t. And Knox only cries a little bit when midnight strikes and they’re singing “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” with all the windows open, so it seems like the world is singing back.

DAY 10

Somehow, the fire alarm has not gone off. Yet.

It’s also possible they had taken the dying batteries out of the smoke alarm months ago to shut the thing up and then continued forgetting to put in new ones.

The only thing Knox knows for certain is the fire department will not be on hand to stop what’s shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster.

“Is it supposed to look like this?” Todd questions quietly. He’s standing over the largest stock pot they have, sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

Neil, riffling through the pantry, calls back, “Like what?”

“Uh...not blue?”

Knox moves to stand beside Todd and peers into the pot, gagging at the sight of the light blue liquid swirling inside. “What could possibly be making it blue?”

Slowly, with a pair of tongs, Todd extracts a bundle of herbs from the witches brew. Holding the herbs together is a piece of string that has been slowly leached of its color. Knox immediately turns to the culprit.

“It said to keep it bound together,” Charlie says, hands held up in defense.

“Really? The cookbook said to keep a piece of bright blue string on it?”

“Mom and dad stop fighting,” Pitts mumbles over his cutting board, where he’s currently butchering a tomato. The salad, surely the easiest of foods to assemble, looks closer to the waste scraps a restaurant tosses to the dogs hanging around the back alley.

Meeks, returning to the kitchen from a bathroom break (that Knox assumes was also a sanity break), pauses in the doorway, sniffing the air. “Is something burning?”

“Shit!”

Knox yanks open the oven door and a plume of smoke wafts directly into his face. Coughing through the dark cloud, he wrenches out the tray of garlic bread, reduced to a blackened crisp, and the tray of asparagus that now resembled the shriveled remains of Pompeii.

Silence thicker than the smoke rising to the ceiling falls over the kitchen. They stand with stained clothing and sweat-slicked foreheads, surveying the massacred dishes surrounding them. Knox tries desperately not to think about himself, bright-eyed and eager this morning, telling the rest of the boys that following the recipes in the book would be a breeze. They’d have a senior dinner rivaling the meals served on campus in two hours tops.

At last, Meeks breaks the silence. “Is any of this edible?”

Pitts nods toward his salad, but it’s nowhere near enough for seven people’s dinner and Knox is pretty sure he dumped a whole bag of raisins in it. The answer, ringing as clear as their smoke alarm should have, is a resounding no.

Knox opens his mouth to say just that, done with the charade of "everything’s fine; no one panic," when the doorbell rings.

“Who the hell’s that?” Charlie asks.

“That,” says Cameron, materializing from nowhere, leaning across the counter to address them, “is the catering order I placed this morning.”

Every single one of them gapes at him until Charlie finally blusters out, “Ye of fucking little faith” at the same time Pitts tilts his chin toward the ceiling and shouts, “Thank god!”

An hour and a half later, with the stuffed stomachs to prove it, no one’s complaining.

(“Cameron, I used to think you might be a demon sent straight from hell—”

“Excellent start to a speech, Charlie.”)

They’re cramming leftovers into tupperware and building a tower of the dishes in the sink when Knox catches Cameron in a moment alone.

“I just wanted to say thanks again,” Knox says. “I really didn’t think it would end up being that much of a disaster, but...”

“You know, I didn’t do it because I have zero faith in you guys. But I also just know you,” Cameron says simply, no trace of condescension or pity.

Knox glances over his shoulder to where Pitts is scarfing down a third helping of bread pudding, his favorite. Charlie is writing “CHARLIE’S—DO NOT TOUCH” on a tupperware full of extra spicy chicken wings, which no one would have touched anyway because of the heat. Neil and Todd are still picking at a chocolate lava cake ordered especially for them and Meeks is wrapping up the rest of his cheesecake to save for another day.

Knox smiles and knocks his shoulder against Cameron’s. “Yeah, you do.”

DAY 11

“Can you believe this was only 150 on the Walmart website?”

Meeks, assessing the monstrosity now monopolizing their backyard like a rogue alien craft, sums it up best: “You’ve provided me pain and suffering for less.”

“You assholes have no imagination.” Charlie lounges back on his gigantic inflatable swan and sips from a drink with a dainty umbrella sticking out of it.

“This has to be against our lease,” Cameron grumbles, hands planted on his hips. “When did you even order this?”

“Day 3,” Charlie says, smirking. “What can I say, I think ahead.”

“Unbelievable,” Cameron mutters, though he must know it amounts to a token protest. What’s Cameron actually going to do, pop a hole in the side of the enormous above-ground pool and drown their entire backyard and the backyards of the neighbors? That’s the brilliance of a good Charlie Dalton scheme—the boulder is gaining speed down the mountain before any of them know to try and stop it.

“Well, if it’s here,” Neil says with a forgiving shrug.

Charlie answers with a wolfish grin. “Gentlemen, welcome to the senior year booze cruise.”

They break out the specialty liquor they reserved from pub night and Pitts volunteers to play mad scientist mixer. His concoctions are the color of the neon lights at an eighties arcade and taste like popping six warheads. Charlie hands everyone a string of anywhere between five and ten fairground tickets, equal to one drink each.

(“Whoever doesn’t finish their tickets, I will personally hunt you down…”

“A Charlie Chainsaw Massacre!”)

By four o’clock in the afternoon, Knox has three plastic leis scratching at the back of his neck, his shirt is somewhere in the wind, and his tongue is fluorescent green. And that's after just two and a half drink tickets.

Following the footsteps of the sage Meeks, Knox has been burying his tickets deep into the dirt of their neglected flowerpots whenever Charlie’s back is turned. If he were really as smart as Meeks, he would have also snuck into the house and smuggled a few regular old beers to sip gingerly while sunbathing on a beach chair. Steven Meeks, the true picture of relaxation.

There’s no telling how many drinks Pitts has had and no use trying. Knox gave up guessing how drunk Pitts was on any given night out midway through sophomore year. He's still mixing away in a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the navel, serving up a drink to Cameron that’s sunshine yellow. It’s purportedly a pina colada.

The drink Neil’s sipping in the pool is its sky blue counterpart. Neil, who commandeered the swan float from Charlie sometime ago, looks more relaxed than Knox has seen him in years. Possibly ever. The only thing continually disrupting his me-time is Charlie himself, splashing Neil with water whenever he's stopped listening to whatever Charlie is raving about.

Charlie is surprisingly only the second drunkest person at the not-cruise booze cruise. Second only to—

Todd sags onto the chair next to Knox, arms and legs limp like pool noodles. In his hand, he has one-third left of a drink stolen off the pages of a superhero comic.

“You good there?” Knox asks. His hand flexes, ready to snatch the drink away if the next words out of his mouth sound like pig latin.

“Hmm?” Todd moves his head to side, cheek smashed against his shoulder, and looks, a little unfixed, at Knox. “Oh—yeah! No, I’m good. This is the best day of my life.”

Knox stifles a laugh. “This day?”

Todd squints his eyes, like he has to consult the greatest hits of his life. When he’s finished playing the highlight reel, he bobs his head in rhythm to the Jimmy Buffet song playing in the background. “No—no, you’re right. There have probably been better days.”

“I thought so.”

“Like the day I fell in love with Neil.”

Knox smiles, the kind that's gooey in the center like a chocolate chip cookie. The Neil and Todd effect at work. “That sounds like a good one.”

“Or like the day I met you.”

Knox’s own drink slips in his grip. “You mean the day you met Neil.”

“No, the day I met you,” Todd says, shaking his head like an insistent child. “It was the first day of that terrible basic acting class my mom pushed me into taking and the movement instructor came in and told us to...”

“Paint the floor with our bodies,” Knox finishes, giggling. He suddenly feels a lot more drunk, not unlike when he was laying starfished on his back in a hot dance studio being told his limbs were paintbrushes and the floor a blank canvas.

“Yeah!” Todd’s whole face shines when he laughs. Knox loves it about him. “And I turned to you and said I didn’t know how to dance.”

“And I said something like—”

“I don’t think this is dancing.” They say it at the same time and break off into another peel of laughter. The sun is slowly descending beneath the trees and everything is golden. Knox is starting to think maybe this could be one of the best days of his life.

As their laughter subsides, Knox clutching at his aching sides, Todd says, “And as we were leaving, I said I was probably going to drop the class. You said you were, too, and asked me what class we should take instead.”

“We took pottery.”

Their final projects are on proud display atop the mantle inside, Knox's lopsided black vase with a chip on the lip and Todd's speckled blue bowl that their lost-in-the-sixties professor called a revelation.

“And then you introduced me to your roommate, Neil,” Knox says, recalling an early morning breakfast that should have been awkward but wasn’t because Neil makes easy conversation with everyone. “And he introduced us to his childhood friend, Charlie.”

And Charlie dragged his stick-in-the-mud roommate around everywhere. And Cameron had met Meeks and his roommate, Pitts, in a bio lab. There is a version of this story where Knox never took basic acting for the art credit or never stood next to the shy boy in class or didn’t think to suggest they take a different class together. He would have never met this wonderfully odd assortment of people drinking around a Walmart above-ground pool at four in the afternoon.

“That was one of the best days of my life, too,” Knox says, misty-eyed as he reaches over to clap Todd on the shoulder.

“Neil, quick, get the camera, our boyfriends are crying.”

Knox’s groan carries across the entire backyard.

“You know, you can break up with him at any time,” Neil says with a jovial smile. He extends his hands out to Todd and pulls him to his feet, not faltering a step even when Todd crashes into his chest. “I think it might be time to head in.”

Knox realizes now that Meeks and Cameron have disappeared already and Pitts is packing up the bar. As Todd and Neil head inside, Pitts right behind them, there’s talk of ordering a pizza, potentially Chinese. His stomach growls and his chest stings from a mild sunburn, but when Charlie drapes himself onto his lap and rests his head on his shoulder, Knox finds he has no interest in leaving just yet. True signs of a best day.

(“So do you have any kind of plan for draining the pool?”

“Details, Knoxious, details.”)

DAY 12

The banner, made from the deconstructed corpse of the pool box, reads “THE GREAT HIDE AND GO SEEK CHAMPIONSHIP OF 2020.”

“Gentleman, the rules are simple,” Pitts says, strutting like a ranking general down the line of five players. The sixth is sulking at the dining room table. “You will have two minutes to hide anywhere in the house. At the end of those two minutes, the seeker will begin to seek and destroy your hiding spot. Found players must return to the loser’s lounge, also known as this living room, and stay there until the last person is found. As per the rules set down in 2018, the seeker will be last year’s big loser.”

All necks crane in the direction of the loser, looking particularly sore. “This house is too small and this is going to be incredibly boring.”

“Save some of the fun for us, Charlie,” Neil says with a hard eye roll.

It had been a point of contention in Knox and Charlie’s room that morning. Charlie kept insisting their house was too small to have the true hide and go seek experience. Knox, scraping the bottom of the barrel for activities to pass the time, argued they’d all be disappointed if they didn’t host one last championship. The fight went back and forth like a pendulum until Knox’s phone rang.

Knox endured a fifteen minute phone call with his mom about Yale, and about how he'd be getting home in three days time, and what he wanted for his big twenty-second birthday. There wasn't a way for her to secure the gift of time travel in under twenty-four hours, so Knox asked for a yacht and then a watch just to get her off the phone.

When Knox reentered his room gearing up for the Hide and Go Seek Fight: Part Two, Charlie had changed his tune.

(“I’ll do it, but I’m going to complain the entire time.”

“Well that was a given.”)

“Is the big loser ready?” Pitts asks, handing off the whistle to Charlie. Knox catches Cameron grimace in his peripheral vision.

Without another word, Charlie strolls to the front door—they had decided the seeker should spend the two minutes countdown on the porch, facing the street—and swings it open. The screen door slams behind him and, when all they can see is the sandy top of his head, the whistle blows.

Pitts, Meeks, and Cameron dart like skittish woodland creatures toward the stairs. Todd and Neil make a beeline for the backward. Knox waits until they’re all out of his eyesight, footsteps pounding overhead, before he makes his way to the basement door.

The basement, everyone’s least favorite part of the house, looks to be modeled after the ending location of The Blair Witch Project. It's cold, no matter the season, and there were rumors of rats when they first moved in. Their landlord told them not to worry about it. Knox does worry about it. Constantly.

But his desire to win outweighs his desire not to contract a previously-undiscovered strain of the plague. Knox quietly shuts the door behind him, happy not to hear it creak, and slowly creeps down the stairs.

The space is mostly populated by storage boxes and old furniture the landlord keeps there in exchange for fifty dollars off the rent. A looming wardrobe screams championship hiding place, but knowing Knox’s luck, he’ll accidentally lock himself in and they’ll have to break quarantine to call the fire department.

Knox chooses the safer bet, hiding between the wardrobe and a dust-covered chaise lounge. To complete the spot, he arranges a few half-empty boxes for cover.

The long wait begins.

Except the door swing open fifteen seconds later and someone comes racing down the stairs.

Too early to be Charlie. Knox peeks his head over his haphazard stack of boxes and sees Neil ducking behind an old couch. Spot thief, Knox thinks to himself, pulling his knees closer to his chest. In the process, his heel knocks against the lowest box in the stack. It teeters ominously.

“You’re not going to win like that.”

Knox’s nostrils flare, not that Neil can see it. “Well, I’d stand a better chance if someone hadn’t encroached on my spot.”

“Encroached,” Neil says, voice full of mirth. “Fancy.”

Above, the screen door claps against the opposing wall. Seconds later, loud footfalls can be heard on the stairs.

“Sounds like he’s getting more into it."

“He’s probably just trying to end it as quickly as possible,” Knox says, while knowing Charlie's competitive nature has inevitably taken over. And after all, the seeker is arguably the game's leading man.

They lapse into silence, listening as one set of footsteps turn into two, turn into three. Knox swears he hears a bellowing groan from Pitts. Two down, four to go.

“What’s the plan for tomorrow,” comes Neil’s voice again into the darkness after a few minutes have passed.

It’s not a question Knox has been dreading per say, but he doesn't have an answer to it. He thinks he might acquiesce and let Charlie have his senior prank day, over Cameron’s strong objections. What’s the worst that can happen with Charlie having so little time to prepare (another question Knox doesn’t dare consider too long).

“Well, we’re going to do something for your birthday, right?”

Now there’s the real question Knox has been dreading.

“I don’t know, maybe,” Knox says, trying for casual. He fiddles with the cuffs of his jeans and his foot once again kicks the corner of his box tower. The bottom floor box skids forward, sending the rest of the tower toppling to the floor with a series of dull thuds.

Knox catches Neil’s eyes as they survey the damage. Neil gives him a what-can-you-do shrug and moves out from behind the couch to take a seat on it instead. Looks like they’re throwing the game together.

“So, your birthday.”

“I didn’t really make a plan,” Knox admits, unfurling his legs and wincing when the joints pop. “I kind of forgot about it since everything started and then when I was on the phone with my mom this morning talking about it, I thought it might be for the best if you all just forgot, too.”

And like an idiot, Knox only realizes then that Charlie must have overheard snippets of that phone call. Why else would he have folded and agreed to play hide and seek under very little additional protest, but for it being an early birthday present.

“Why would you want us to forget?” Neil asks, suddenly very soft and serious. Knox would never own up to it out loud, but this side of Neil used to scare him. Charlie would let an innocuous comment like that pass by in a swirl of distracting jokes. Neil has a way of turning it into a real and honest conversation.

But they’re already hiding out in a shadowy basement that smells of rust and damp leaves. Anything said here would only reach the ears of Neil and the mice. “I don’t know. I guess it just kind of feels weird celebrating right now.”

“Knox, we’ve already been celebrating all week.” Neil drops any pretense of hiding and crawls over to Knox’s spot, clearing a space for himself amidst the overturned boxes and settling cross-legged in front of him. “And it was kind of all your idea.”

“It’s different, though,” Knox insists. There’s an extensive spider web in the top right corner of the ceiling and Knox focuses on that instead of Neil’s earnest face. “This is us making up for things that we’re not going to get. I have a birthday every year.”

“Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate. Could you imagine if we told Charlie we weren’t celebrating his birthday because we already celebrated last year?”

Knox shudders at the thought. Going on since freshman year, Charlie’s birthday has transformed into a whole weekend affair. Knox isn’t sure Cameron or Pitts have recovered from last year’s extravaganza. There’s a little blot of ink permanently stained on Pitt’s left wrist from where he almost got a tattoo.

“Do you remember…”

Neil’s right there with him. “It was supposed to be some kind of chemical symbol right?”

The basement brims with laughter. Knox is sure it’s drifting up to the first floor. They’ll be found any minute now.

“And Charlie’s was going to be ‘Nuwanda’ in his own handwriting,” Knox says, remembering how hard Charlie gripped his hand that night and how relieved he looked when Pitts somersaulted out of the parlor chair.

Neil, though laughing, shakes his head. “That wasn’t actually what he was going to get.”

“Wait, what?” Knox pokes at Neil’s shin with his big toe. “You have to tell me now.”

“I’ll stipulate he was very drunk because that’s what he’ll say when he finds out I told you,” Neil says. “He was going to get the date when you two finally got together.”

Knox’s lips part and then close again. It’s been two weeks of small yet strange revelations and none have failed to render Knox momentarily speechless. What other things about Charlie has he left to learn? Knox is getting the sense there’s enough to fill a lifetime.

The basement door opens, saving Knox from having to come up with a coherent response. He has nothing, not when he’s watching Charlie trample down the groaning steps and thinking he may die of happiness. Or of love. Or of both.

“Did I not tell you this was going to be boring,” Charlie says, plopping down next to Neil. He doesn’t look to be in a hurry for someone “It” at hide and seek.

“Are we the last ones?” Neil asks.

Knox sits up a little straighter at that, willing his heart to stop beating so rapidly. Despite any deep and meaningful conversations he and Neil just had, Knox is ready to argue he won fair and square. Charlie would have seen Neil first coming down the basement steps and this was Knox’s hiding spot first.

“Todd, Meeks, and Pitts are upstairs watching Ready or Not,” Charlie says. When he stretches out, resting his weight on his forearms, it’s calculatedly casual. Knox narrows his eyes. A punchline is coming. “Cameron is this year’s big winner.”

There it is.

“And we’re going to go upstairs and tell him that,” Knox says, but knows by the smirk on Charlie’s face that they’ll be doing no such thing.

Charlie glances at his bare wrist and says, “Now, how long do you think he’ll stay hiding for?”

Neil checks his phone, the screen flashing twelve minutes past ten. “He’ll make it to eleven.”

“No way, I give him another twenty minutes tops,” Charlie says, undercutting his own joke. He’s grinning anyway. “Knoxious? Gonna place a bet?”

If Knox were a better person, he’d stop this here and now. If Knox were less in love with Charlie Dalton—

No point following down that road.

“He wanted it bad this year,” Knox says. “I think he’s going to make it past midnight.”

They’ll pull him out of whatever crawlspace he’s in when the clock strikes. Knox will call it a compromise and wish Charlie a happy senior prank day.

DAY 13

The mid-morning sun beams through the thin curtains drawn across the windows, the clock on the bedside table reads twenty minutes past ten, and Knox is locked in his own bedroom.

“Uh, hello?!”

He tries banging on the door again even though his right hand is sore and it has become abundantly clear this is on purpose. None of their bedroom doors lock from the outside. Someone has to have jammed it. He has a mental list of six suspects and the strong suspicion they’re in it together.

“A very merry actual birthday to me,” Knox mutters to the tune of that old Alice in Wonderland song.

Another fifteen minutes pass and no one comes. It’s enough time to make Knox wonder if this has nothing to do with his birthday. Maybe Charlie has gone through with a senior prank day after all and he's keeping Knox from foiling his plans. Or this is Knox’s prank itself, a little undercooked if that's the case.

Knox will be sure to tell Charlie so if he escapes their bedroom alive.

Another ten minutes pass and still no one. Knox starts drifting down a Twilight Zone train of thought. Everyone in the greater Welton area has disappeared except for Knox. This is some elaborate social experiment that’s supposed to teach him the importance of independence, or learning to live without the ones you love close by, or death. It always circles back to death with Rod Serling.

Knox isn’t proud of it, but he goes to the window and peeks through the curtain, relieved to see the kindly old woman across the street picking up her newspaper. Not alone in the universe at least.

He’s on his back, staring up at the ceiling and contemplating what he’d actually do if he took a trip to the twilight zone, when he hears someone messing with the lock. Knox shoots up and promptly knocks his head against the bed frame.

“Jesus Christ!”

“You’ve called me stranger things in bed,” Charlie drawls from the open door.

Knox, rubbing at the bump freshly formed at the crown of his head, glowers.

Todd and Neil are peeking over Charlie’s shoulder, Todd’s face a faint dusty rose and Neil grinning. It proves Knox’s first assumption correct: they’re all in this together. Knox thinks he might want to sulk a bit longer, let them wait like he had to wait, but Charlie strides into the room and takes Knox by the hand, yanking him up.

“I know it’s your party and you can cry or pout if you want to, but let’s get to the actual party first,” Charlie says as he tugs Knox out of their room and down the stairs.

Once again, the living room has been transformed.

There are streamers everywhere—taped in long loops across the ceilings, waterfalling over the windows, wrapped around the spindles of their dining chairs—all in an assortment of mismatched colors, red and green from Christmas, orange and black and covered in bats from Halloween, sparkling silver from New Years. The light from the windows reflects off the streamers to create pools of colored light that dance across the hardwood floor. Someone managed to dig up five stray balloons and stuck them to the fireplace, forming the world’s smallest and saddest balloon arch. On the coffee table, there’s a stack of presents bundled up in scraps of tissue paper and sealed with duct tape.

It’s a lovingly-crafted disaster. That about sums up their entire time in quarantine. It might just be the warning label for their entire college careers.

“Happy birthday, Knox!”

He’s not sure who says it. His ears are ringing, just a little. Luckily, he has Charlie to guide him toward the kitchen table where a cake awaits. It’s a quarter covered in baby pink frosting and three-quarters slathered in cotton-candy blue. Something happened there that Knox will have to ask about later. They’ve somehow managed to cram twenty-two birthday candles on the cake, in a nonsensical pattern that surely only Pitts can decipher.

It may not be edible. Their creations haven’t been known to be.

It’s perfect anyway.

They sing "Happy Birthday" in that terribly out-of-tune way they’ve perfected over the birthdays that have come before. Someone, likely Pitts, ruffles his hair as he blows out twenty-two candles. He forgets to make a wish, not that he has much to ask for at this precise moment in time.

While picking out the candles in preparation to eat, Charlie gets a glob of frosting on his thumb and decides to wipe it directly on Cameron’s sweater.

“Charlie! Are you kidding me?”

“You were looking a little too pristine.”

“Too pris—” Cameron, jaw clenched, drops the candles he was holding onto the table and drags his pointer finger along the edge of the cake. He draws a long blue-frosted line down Charlie’s white t-shirt. Charlie lets it happen.

Because with a smirk, he looks from the line down his chest to Cameron’s scowling face and says, “Game on.”

It’s a bloodbath.

Meeks takes a fistful of cake to the face, not able to get his glasses out of the way in time. Pitts, with his height advantage, sends a handful right smack into the side of Neil’s head. Neil comes away with his hair looking like a bakery floor. A retreating Todd takes a clump in the back like a blast from a shotgun. A particularly large piece hits Knox square in the chest, right below the heart.

After tossing a corner piece at Cameron’s shoulder and diving out of the way when Pitts adds leftover batter to the mix, Knox needs a minute to breathe. He slips underneath the dining room table for cover and tries to wipe some of the frosting out of his eyes lest he be crying sugar tears later that night.

Just as he hears Cameron crying to save the couches, Charlie crouches down to join him.

“The birthday of your dreams, right?” Charlie has pink frosting striped across his cheek and spongy globs of cake clinging to his bangs. It’s bizarrely beautiful.

“I think I remember saying to Neil I didn’t mind if you guys forgot about my birthday,” Knox says, a smile betraying him and his weak protest.

“And since when have we ever listened to you?” Charlie asks, barely dodging a chunk of cake Cameron chucks his way. It explodes against the wall behind them and splatters at their feet.

“More than you think, actually." It’s supposed to be a joke, but Knox finds that he means it. They’ve just had two whole weeks that prove they do. It wasn’t something he expected to have, at least not before college—friends willing to follow his lead, even as he went tripping and stumbling toward the ends of the earth.

“We do,” Charlie says and throws his arms around Knox’s shoulders, jostling him into a hug. “Which is what makes us good at hearing what’s between the lines, too.”

Knox winds his arms around Charlie’s waist and presses his frosted face into his neck. It doesn’t matter that he feels cake smearing against his shirt and his jaw and just about everywhere else. It’s the greatest birthday cake he’ll never really taste.

DAY 14

The last night passes in snapshots.

Snapshot one: the backs of his fellow society members as they march outside. It reminds Knox of all the times they ran off into the woods because they wanted to live deliberately. Neil’s hand looks warm where it’s splayed on Todd’s back and Charlie’s hands are pushing down on Pitts’ shoulders like he’s about to jump on his back. All their laughter and conversation sounds like wind chimes. They’re the greatest people Knox knows.

Snapshot two: the fire crackles between them. They have no real work of substance to burn for this time-honored tradition. The semester hasn't officially ended. They’ve brought symbolic pages instead. Cameron has a Statistics test from last semester. Charlie a graded Business Ethics paper. Pitts a Physics lab report. Meeks a Chemistry set. Todd an old draft of the first poem he wrote for his thesis. Neil a page torn from a battered copy of Henry V. Knox found a marked-up version of his Yale admissions essay. He’s not sure what burning it means yet.

Snapshot three: the backyard smells of roasting marshmallows and sounds of saxophone. Knox’s fingers are sticky. A scratchy wool blanket is thrown over Todd and Neil’s knees. Cameron is lying on the grass gazing up at the stars. Pitts and Meeks are back in the kitchen making coffee of all things, but if Knox cranes his neck just right, he can see them stirring in cream. Charlie’s hitting all the right notes.

Snapshot four: Neil’s telling them about the first time he met Charlie. They’ve heard this story a thousand times before, but every time feels like the first time because Neil’s an epic poet and Charlie a great chorus. They were six, on a playground, and Charlie had ridden down the metal slide so fast that he knocked his knee into his mouth and lost his first tooth. Instead of racing to his parents, he showed the first kid he found. He had blood on all his fingers.

(“Absolutely disgusting.”

“It’s the stuff of life, Cameron, the stuff of life.”)

Snapshot five: they’re walking about the stairs to their bedrooms, well past midnight. The fire in the backyard had been put out. Knox watches his friends drift into their rooms, one by one, and wishes he had the power to freeze time. One door shuts. Then another, and another.

“It’s not an ending, Knox,” Charlie murmurs, because he has a permanent place of residence in Knox’s head.

Not an end, Knox thinks, trying the words out for himself. And if it hadn’t been an ending when the first sight of Charlie Dalton that Neil Perry got was one covered in blood, why would it be an ending now? They are the happy few.

Charlie tows him by the wrist into their room and Knox shuts the final door.

DAY 0

Cameron leaves first. He has been accumulating bags and boxes since day one, so Knox isn’t surprised to stumble downstairs at the dawn of their freedom and find his things neatly stacked by the door.

It’s harder than Knox thought it’d be. They’ve each had their ups and downs with Cameron over the last four year, but he's a steadfast and integral part of their little society. The shredded carrots in their salad. The Jerry in their Parks and Recreation department. The dictionary on their shelf of much cooler, sexier books (Charlie and Pitts spitballed most of the analogies as far back as the first semester of freshman year). Knox can forgive the gripes after that much history. Cameron has forgiven his fair share of gripes, too.

“No one died,” Cameron says like it's an award-worthy achievement. He seems to consider sticking out his hand for Knox to shake, but thinks better of it and shoves both into his pockets.

“For us, that’s a thrilling result,” Knox replies with a grin.

Cameron nods toward the living room, looking indecently exposed without Pitts’ sci-fi posters and Meeks stacks of textbooks lining half the bookshelves. “My father said one of you can take the couches. He says the hassle wouldn’t be worth what he paid for them.”

“How generous of him,” Charlie says flatly, lazing like a lap dog on one of said couches. His eyes fly open when a pillow thumps onto his chest.

Neil, down one pillow, smiles at Cameron. “Tell him thanks for us and sorry that we couldn’t see him.”

“We still have graduation,” Cameron says with an endearing earnestness that reminds Knox why they befriended him in the first place. When he’s sure of something, it feels like they all can be. “Whether it’s this summer or September.”

“On that, we can agree,” Charlie says.

Cameron grins. “It had to happen sometime.”

They could probably get away with hugging, but it's never been Cameron’s style. Knox, along with Pitts, helps him bring the last of his bags to the car and they watch him drive down College St. until his car is lost to the trees.

“This is weird,” Pitts says, like he’s been saying for the last two weeks, but there’s a period on it now. A finality that hadn’t been there before. No one’s going to skate by, snap their fingers, and set the world right.

It only gets weirder with Pitts and Meeks's departure. Pitts’ car is overflowing with bags, boxes, and knicks, and knacks. Charlie’s still trying to shove in a final cushion as Pitts starts up the engine.

“Why do you have so much shit?” Charlie calls, punching the cushion in until it resembles a misshapen blob.

“Hey, half of it is Meeks’!”

“Yeah, half,” Meeks intones, rolling his eyes. The passenger seat has a box on it and the legroom is taken up by various plastic bags full of spare pantry items Pitts claimed as snacks for the road. Meeks stands by the open door and surveys the lot of them, his eyes misty behind his glasses. It occurs to Knox, as sudden and disorienting as an unexpected camera flash, that he’s never seen Meeks cry. His first instinct is to dash back into the house, but he stays rooted to his spot on the curb, partly because Charlie’s clutching his hand so hard he'd have to rip his fingers off to get running.

“I’ll see you guys soon,” he says at last.

“Oh, I’m going to call you so much, your mom’s gonna think you have a secret girlfriend,” Charlie says, winking.

“Please don’t,” Meeks groans, but he’s chuckling, too. A stray tear slips down his cheek, but he brushes it away quickly with the swipe of a hand.

“We’ll still have Twilight Zone marathons,” Pitts yells from the driver’s seat. “I’ll FaceTime you all in.”

“Perfect,” Neil says with a brilliant smile and a welling of tears in his eyes.

As with Cameron, they wait until the car is a speck on the horizon before heading back inside, to the emptiness that awaits them.

The truth is though, Knox has not packed a single thing yet. He has three, going on four, missed calls from his mother, no doubt asking him what his travel plans are and what time to expect him home. She’ll never accept as open-ended an answer as “I don’t know.”

Neither will Charlie, who’s bouncing on the balls of his feet beside their newly-acquired couch, looking like he always does when he can’t stand the elephant in the room any longer. “We never really talked about a plan, did we?”

Neil, returning from the kitchen with two beers in hand, hands one off to Charlie and says, “The lease isn’t up until the end of May. I already told my father I’d do better working from here and…” Neil glances over at Todd, sunken into the armchair.

“And I told my parents I’m staying, too,” Todd says, ears a vibrant shade of pink.

Something swirls low in Knox’s gut now, nothing like the anxiety of when this all began. It’s strangely eager and hopeful. Knox wants to cap it in a bottle and save it for a rainy day.

“We could have our own rooms now,” Charlie says with a smirk. “I’ve been shacked up with an octopus and I can’t live like this anymore.”

Knox wishes it were possible to roll his eyes up to the ceiling. “At least I’m not the one who snores.”

“Do you think whoever moves into Cameron’s room will be cursed to celibacy?” Charlie posits.

With ferocious speed, a finger flies to each of their noses as they shout, “Not it!” like any of them have any real plans of changing their current rooming situation.

When the laughter peters off, Knox finds Charlie left staring at him thoughtfully. Knowing Knox will ask him what’s wrong, Charlie comes out with it himself. “So, does this mean you’re staying?”

Knox ducks his head and sees that his phone’s ringing. Call number five. “Get ready. You’re about to hear a lot of yelling from my mom.”

It’ll be worth it, Knox thinks, pressing accept. Charlie’s beaming at him, wide and real, and Knox marvels in what he’s known forever, from freshman year until now, that Charlie’s the person he wants standing next to him for everything.