Chapter Text
Oscar moves to America when he’s four years old.
They move to Florida right when the mid-July heat is at its stickiest, humid and gross, like every step outside is wading through mud. Oscar gets squirmy in it because he’s young, and he doesn’t really know how to help, but his mother keeps smearing sunscreen on his face when he keeps insisting he wants to stay outside, fighting it every single time. He sits and watches the move-in truck get emptier and emptier, perks up when things look like they’re his, and listens to his parents talk about things that must be so much larger than him.
The neighborhood they moved to was advertised as “kid friendly,” quiet and close to the elementary school he’s meant to go to and with a playground down the street. The move was planned, of course, but to Oscar’s four-year-old mind, it felt like a blink: one day he’s somewhere, and the next he’s somewhere else. The long, boring plane ride is a vague memory, and he must have slept through most of it, but he woke up on the other side of the world with a new house and a new bedroom that feels much bigger, much emptier than his old one.
His father has only just finished putting together the bedframe—with Oscar sitting on the floor watching him, squinting, handing him tools because he insisted he wanted to help—when the neighbors come knocking on the door. Oscar hides behind his mother’s legs in the doorway and looks outside, where there are two parents and another boy doing the same thing, sun-blond and probably pretty close to his age. Oscar can feel the heat crawling in from outside, and he’s not sure how much he likes that.
“The house is a mess,” his mother is saying, gesturing behind her. When she pulls her hand back, she rests it on top of Oscar’s head, trying to coax him out from where he’s hiding. “We’re still getting settled in, but it’s nice of you to come over.”
Oscar stares at the boy outside, and he stares back. Above him, his mother proposes talking in the front yard, and slips outside. She doesn’t really drag Oscar behind her, but she isn’t not urging him out, the hand on his head slipping off but staying outstretched, as if to say, follow me. Oscar steps hesitantly back into the Florida heat, grimaces a bit when it hits his skin. It feels like an actual thing, all heavy and awkward, like the sunscreen his mother smeared on him still-new, grossly palpable.
The new family lives next door, and they point to which house it is. It’s a bit bigger than the one Oscar lives in, now, with blue shutters and a second story and two cars in the driveway. While the adults are talking, the father Oscar doesn’t know crouches down next to his own son, whispers something in his ear. Oscar kind of just stands there and watches them, unsure of what to do with his hands.
Then the boy comes up to him. “I’m Logan,” he says, looking a lot less awkward than he did before. Logan, Oscar thinks, rolling the name around in his head.
“Oscar,” he says.
Logan’s face splits into this massive grin, all askew teeth, and he giggles. “Your voice sounds funny,” he says, but it’s not— he isn’t insulting him, just exploratory, curious. Maybe he’s never met a kid from Australia before.
“Your voice sounds funny,” Oscar quips back, and Logan just laughs again. It’s this bright, high sound, and it makes Oscar smile, too.
“Hey, be nice,” his father admonishes, tapping Oscar lightly on the back. Oscar wants to say he started it, or something else deflective and stupid, but his father is already looking away. Oscar frowns at the grass.
“I’m four!” Logan is saying, and he proudly holds up three fingers. “And my brother is seven,” he adds, looking down at his hands, all ten fingers outstretched. He squints at them, like he’s not pleased with what looks back at him.
“I’m four, too,” Oscar says, because he thinks that’s important. “And I don’t have a brother.”
“Aw, really?” Logan says it like that’s the worst thing he’s ever heard—Oscar not having a brother. His face kind of falls a bit, too, and Oscar isn’t sure how to feel about that, because he’s never really thought about it before. “Well, you can meet mine. He’s the coolest.” And he grins again. The coolest. Oscar smiles a bit, too.
The neighbors leave not long after that. Oscar stands in the yard for a minute, and he watches Logan run around to the back of his house the second he gets into his own yard. Their shutters are blue, red flowers planted in the window boxes. Oscar doesn’t go inside until his mother grabs him by the hand and pulls him up the weathered brick steps.
Later, when they’re eating dinner on the floor of their empty living room stuffed wall to wall with boxes, Oscar asks, “Can I see Logan again tomorrow?”
His mother smiles at him. “If he wants to, honey.”
Oscar hopes he will.
——
When the boy from Australia moves in next door, Logan doesn’t even want to go over and meet him. He’s been stealing glances at the moving truck out the window all day, asking his father question after question, but when it gets close to dinner time and his mother is saying “we should go over and say hello,” Logan doesn’t want to leave his own backyard.
His brother isn’t even going over. It’s not fair, that he has to.
But he goes, because his parents make him, and he stands behind them on the doorstep and stares at the little boy he doesn’t know is from Australia yet, at his soft face and his short hair and his dark eyebrows. Suddenly, he’s more curious than he is annoyed. Suddenly, he doesn’t care about whatever it is he left in his backyard.
Oscar is four years old, like Logan. Oscar has a funny accent. Oscar doesn’t have an older brother.
They go home and Logan’s parents keep calling them “the Piastris” over dinner, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce that word. He tries to repeat it, and it doesn’t fit in his mouth, gets fumbled over. His father laughs at him. Logan isn’t sure why.
“Will I get to see Oscar again tomorrow?” Logan asks. He’s swinging his feet back and forth under the table, narrowly missing Dalton’s knees.
His father smiles, ruffles his hair. “If he wants to see you.”
Even then, Logan knows it: he will, he thinks. He will want to see me again. And later in life, when that becomes a distant but still-clear memory, he’ll keep having the same exact thoughts: Oscar will want to see me again. Oscar always wants to see me again. It’s Oscar. We come back together, every time. Like magnets.
Because it’s immediate, how inseparable they are, a bond that won’t quite break. It’ll be years before either of them say the word, but Oscar has been calling him half of it for his entire life, even when he was barely as old as the number of letters: mate. Starts with s, ends with mate.
——
Oscar and Logan are in the same kindergarten class. The letters come in the mail with the teacher’s name on them, and the first thing Logan does when he gets his is ask if he can go next door, saying the almost-too-long last name under his breath the whole way across their front yards so he knows he’ll pronounce it right when he gets there. And he does, then Oscar says he’s in the same class, and it kind of feels like the world is both ending and beginning at the same time, because nothing very large has ever happened in Logan’s life but something about this feels very large.
They go to school on their first day and Logan doesn’t even cry to his mother that he doesn’t want to leave her at the gate the way some of the other kindergarteners do, and it’s probably because he knows Oscar will be there when he gets inside, and he’ll be there when he gets home, too, and he’ll be there tomorrow, and—
It’ll stay that way forever. Logan and Oscar, Oscar and Logan. As if they move alongside each other, parallel lines, infinite and infinite and infinite. They collide, sometimes. It’s never explosive.
——
August in Florida is a disgusting time of year. It’s hot and it’s gross, but it’s been raining a lot, which Oscar takes as a small blessing. The air is still thick and oppressive even when it rains, but at least it feels cool for a second, the water hitting his skin.
It rained yesterday. The road is still damp in certain places, puddles sitting in the worn-down dips, but the sun is high and trying its best to dry it all out. All the playground equipment is damp when Oscar and Logan get there, but Oscar doesn’t bother with wiping off his swing before he sits down, and Logan doesn’t, either.
They’re both just sitting there, rocking back and forth on their toes. Oscar’s feet barely reach the ground, but Logan gets there half-easy, because he’s taller. It’s not by much, but Logan’s always been a little bit taller; Oscar almost wants to blame it on the fact that Logan is older than him, but it’s only by, like, four months. Even if four months feels infinite to a six-year-old, the argument pretty much dies before it’s even started.
And besides, Oscar thinks he likes the fact that Logan is taller than him. He’s pretty sure Logan likes it, too—even if it is just because he likes teasing Oscar about it—probably because he’s the younger one at home, stands shorter between him and his brother. Oscar doesn’t really mind that he’s shorter, even if he’s being teased about it. It’s kind of funny, when Logan makes them stand nose-to-nose, makes his back all straight and sizes him up like he has something to prove. It’s cute.
At the moment, they look like they could be the same height. They’re sitting side-by-side on the swingset, the tail end of their summer before first grade, not even saying anything to each other, because they don’t have to. It’s a bit strange, when it gets like this, because Logan is a mile-a-minute type kid; Oscar’s not only seen it for himself, but heard it from his parents when they all eat dinner together. It makes Oscar feel special, to share silence with him. Like it’s something rare.
When they were here two days ago, Logan wouldn’t stop talking, always finding a new sentence to follow the last one, like he was made to go forever. Then he slipped and fell and hit his mouth on the slide wrong, and he lost his second baby tooth that he’d just been saying was barely loose, and Oscar had to walk him home while he was crying, blood fresh on his lip.
He decided then that he doesn’t like seeing Logan sad, or hurt, or— just crying, really. It was an odd thing to realize, standing on Logan’s front step saying he was sorry to his father, like it had been his fault Logan was all bent out of shape, because he didn’t really care when the other kids at school cried. Just Logan.
Maybe it’s because Logan is his best friend. Oscar’s mother told him once that seeing people you care about in pain is hard, and Oscar has realized that the list of people around him right now that he cares about isn’t very long. In America, he really only has his parents and Logan, and he doesn’t see his parents in pain much at all. It makes him wonder if adults get to grow out of pain. He thinks life would be a lot nicer if he didn’t get hurt so much, if Logan didn’t get hurt so much.
“I think I wanna play football,” Logan says out of nowhere, probably because he was thinking about it. He gets off the swing and mimes throwing a ball, with his hands, which is weird, because he said football.
“What are you doing?” Oscar asks, because he actually doesn’t know. Logan just looks at him, does the gesture again, where he pretends to throw something. He’s fake-throwing it at Oscar’s face, now, and Oscar flinches. “You don’t throw footballs.”
“Yeah you do!” Logan argues, quick but not really mad. He jumps around for a second, doing this weird thing with his feet, and Oscar has never felt more confused watching Logan do anything ever. “Don’t you watch it on TV? My dad likes this team called the Dolphins.”
Dolphins. Huh. Oscar rocks a bit on the swing, feet off the ground. “My dad likes Melbourne,” he says, “‘cause that’s where I’m from.”
Logan stops short, then, and he frowns. He’s looking at Oscar like he’s out of his mind. “They don’t play football in Australia.” He still says the word wrong. Ow-strayl-ee-uh. It breaks a smile across Oscar’s face, equally proud as it is amused. He taught him that word.
“Yeah, they do,” Oscar corrects. “They kick it.” He kicks at the air, like he’s miming something, now. “The black and white ball.”
The frown on Logan’s face sets deeper, takes up more of his face. “No,” he says. He does the fake throw again. “Brown ball. Just one guy who kicks it.”
Oscar doesn’t know what to think anymore. Later, when he brings this conversation up at the dinner table—and tells the whole story in that confusing way kids do, where it’s all out of order and rushed and fumbled over—he’ll learn that they’re actually both right. Logan just watches American football, and Oscar watches— well, the sport the rest of the world calls football, but America calls soccer, because they think they’re special, or something. (That’s what his dad says about it, at least).
For now, though, they swiftly move on from the topic, because they’re kids, and they can just talk about something else. Logan sits back down on his swing and starts rocking again, then they’re quiet for a bit, just the breeze and the heat and the sounds of the chains creaking. Oscar feels sweat gathering at the back of his neck, where he definitely didn’t put on any sunscreen.
Then Logan kicks his ankle. The toe of his sneaker is a bit hard, and he gets Oscar above his sock, just skin. Oscar doesn’t acknowledge him at first, but then Logan does it again, and again, and again.
In the time that Oscar’s known Logan, he’s learned at least one thing: Logan is stubborn. He will sit there and keep kicking Oscar’s ankle, and if that doesn’t work, then he’ll swing his swing into Oscar’s side, and he’ll say his name one hundred times, so fast that the R and the O will start blending together, all tripped over itself until it’s one long command.
So Oscar turns, and says, “What?” before they can get to that point. Logan is looking at the ground, where his foot is still closer to Oscar’s little ripped-up square of rubber than his own.
“Have you ever thought about kissing?” he asks their shoes, and Oscar blinks. He turns the question over in his head once, twice.
He’s almost still too young to fully grasp it, but he does. Says, “A little bit.” Says, “I bet it feels really weird.” And he giggles, trying to think about it. He pushes his tongue into the space between his bottom teeth and his bottom lip, like that’s anything close to the real thing.
Logan looks up at him, his face making this weird expression. It looks too big for his features, all these things he hasn’t grown into yet. “Do you wanna try?” he asks. Earnest.
Oscar stares at him, open but not— not startled. Nothing really moves, because they’re not old enough to be pushing anything around yet, and the air smells damp and heavy and Oscar’s tongue feels like it won’t fit in his mouth anymore, behind all those temporary teeth, the ones he won’t get to keep forever.
He hopes he’ll get to keep Logan forever, if anything.
“Okay,” he says. Neither of them move for a second.
The angle, in the end, is awkward. Logan drags his swing closer to Oscar’s and twists his body strangely, necks arching around swing set chains to bump their mouths together. It’s quick, juvenile, probably too puckered, and it does feel really weird, all soft and too-wet and fumbling. Oscar doesn’t even realize he’s closed his eyes until he’s opening them again, finding Logan settled back into place on his swing, just staring at him.
He licks his lips. “Yeah,” he says out loud, “weird.”
Logan laughs. “Right?” he says, the grin on his face so big it’s contagious. “Grown-ups are so weird.”
They catch each other’s eyes for an odd, fleeting second. Beneath the heat of the Florida-August sun, Oscar thinks about when he gets to figure it out. If eventually, it’ll all just come to him, those hundred-odd adult things he can’t quite fit his little hands around yet. Maybe he’ll think about this when it happens, and how he reached for them all, anyway.
——
It’s probably to a fault, how much Logan speaks his mind. But kids are usually lacking in that specific brain-to-mouth filter, an integral part of a person’s internal makeup that takes a little extra time to develop. It’s just a fact of life, really, how kids will open their mouths and say things they probably shouldn’t, whether they’re mean or shocking or otherwise.
And Logan has an older brother. And Logan likes to repeat. And even if Dalton is only three years older than him, the three years between six and nine are larger than life itself. It’s half to a third of their lives, and Logan is impressionable, and he shares a room with Dalton and has trouble keeping secrets from him, and it’s a two-way street, really, because the kid never shuts up.
So it’s probably his fault, really. Later in life, Logan will blame him—not to his face—pressing the idea firmly into his own mind that it was Dalton’s doing, the reason why he opened his mouth on the playground and asked Oscar about kissing. Even then, the words didn’t feel like they fit in his mouth. He bent them until they did.
Maybe they’re so young they don’t know how to think about it. Maybe that’s the number one reason why they shouldn’t be doing it. But even later, as an adult, Logan won’t figure himself around regret. He’ll look at it, tell people sometimes, wait for their surprised reactions.
“You had your first kiss when you were six?”
And Logan will say yes, and he’ll sink back into it, all yellow-gold and juvenile and soft around the edges. He never says much more about it, like that he’s happy it was Oscar, that he was, then, too, that he thinks no matter how old they were, it would’ve been the two of them. He plays out seven hundred different first-kiss scenarios in his head over the years, and none of them are ever with other people, because he just can’t fathom it.
Maybe they could’ve kissed as teenagers on the Fourth of July, with sparklers burning to the tips of their fingers. Maybe they could’ve kissed at a beach bonfire the night before graduation. Maybe they could’ve kissed at the middle school dance, or under the bleachers of the football field, or on the beach near their neighborhood. Or maybe it could’ve just been on the bed, or on the floor, crammed into the narrow space between Logan’s top-bunk mattress and the ceiling when they were twelve, or maybe neither of them would’ve kissed each other until they were twenty-two and drunk on Christmas Eve or maybe— maybe—
Logan doesn’t know how to wrap his head around a world where he didn’t kiss Oscar. No matter how little he understood it at the time, it feels like something important, an integral part of his person’s internal makeup that took a little extra time to develop. He can’t remember the exact day it took shape, but he recognizes the thing now, and he puts a thousand different names to it.
——
For his seventh birthday, Logan’s father gets him a skateboard. He opened it on the floor of his living room six days after Christmas, ornamented tree still up, and probably screamed embarrassingly loud when he saw it. But it was the only thing he had asked for, and he had to fight his mother about it, and later, he’d learn his father had to fight her, too.
Really, she just didn’t want him to get hurt. But Logan was insistent, and he wanted to learn to skateboard, so he got one for his birthday with a helmet and matching blue knee and elbow pads, and he had to promise his parents he wouldn’t ride without everything on. He had mostly been learning with his parents watching him, but Oscar liked to watch him, too, would sit on the sidewalk and cheer for him when he made it the full line between their houses without falling off, and that was— nice.
Logan was glad he had a friend like Oscar. His parents would say similar things a lot, too: “Oscar’s a sweet kid. I hope you’ll keep him around.” Logan hopes so, too, but secretly. He doesn’t know how to confess to those things yet.
Sometimes, Oscar laughs at Logan when he falls, but that’s alright. Logan would probably laugh at Oscar if he fell off a skateboard, too.
“Mate, you look stupid,” Oscar says after Logan falls again, kicking his skateboard out from underneath him. He manages to stay on his feet, but he stumbles, hearing the wheels skitter away behind him. Oscar stands up to flail his arms around like an idiot, probably mocking whatever he did to catch himself.
“Shut up,” Logan huffs, going back for his board. He runs over to kick Oscar in the shins for good measure, now that he’s sitting back down. Oscar swats at his protected knees. “You should try,” Logan says, dropping the board on the ground, “it’s hard. If you’re better, then you can be mean to me.”
Oscar scoffs. Crosses his arms. “Don’t wanna,” he insists.
But Logan is persistent if anything, so he crouches down at Oscar’s level and clasps his hands together, says, “Please? For me?”
And Oscar is easy to convince if anything, because he just says “fine,” and stands up, poking at Logan’s skateboard with the toe of his shoe. “Do I get to wear your knee pads?”
“No,” Logan says instinctively. He doesn’t feel like taking them off. When Oscar gives him a deadpan look, he holds up his arms. “I’ll hold you up. You won’t fall, promise.”
Oscar seems reluctant, but when Logan grabs his elbows, forearms to forearms, he sinks into it. Gets up on Logan’s skateboard despite his reservations and grins, feet wiggling a bit to stay upright. “Hey,” he says, looking down at Logan with a closed-lipped grin, “now I’m taller than you.”
Briefly, Logan thinks about shoving Oscar onto the ground, because the power is in his hands. Oscar is unstable enough that he thinks if he let go of him now, at least one foot would fall off the skateboard, but—
But Oscar is trusting him. He’s smiling down at Logan—smug or boasting or otherwise—and he’s trusting him. So Logan just looks up and only frowns a bit, presses his thumbs into the creases of Oscar’s elbows, where his skin is warmer. “Don’t get used to it,” he says, watching Oscar’s face twist into a pout. He giggles a bit, because it’s cute. “Do you want to move? Can show you what my dad did to help me learn.”
A bit defiant, Oscar shakes his head. “Don’t wanna,” he insists. “It can be your thing. I’ll be the smart one, and you can be all athletic.” He hops down from the skateboard, which puts them really close, and doesn’t let go of Logan’s arms. Logan doesn’t let go, either.
“Hey, I can be the smart one, too,” he complains, and Oscar laughs.
“Nah,” Oscar dismisses immediately. He lets go of one of Logan’s arms just to flick him on the nose, making him flinch. “But it’s alright, mate. I can help you if you promise to help me, too.”
Logan smiles so big it makes his cheeks hurt. “Well, duh,” he says, rolling his eyes. Nothing about the gesture is annoyed in the slightest, all sweet-sticky mirth. “I’ll always help you. You’re my best friend.”
——
Logan continues to be “the athletic one,” and Oscar continues to be “the smart one.” It’s kind of funny, because they’ll both say it to each other sometimes, like they only could’ve been one or the other. Like it was always going to end up the way it did.
But Oscar didn’t really know what skateboarding even was until Logan started learning. He’s scared of it at first, because the thing has wheels and no handlebars and he can’t stop thinking about Logan falling and hurting himself, but he has a helmet and kneepads and enough safety-whatevers to make Oscar feel a bit better about it.
The feeling is weird, though. He wonders if it’s how his parents feel when he does less-than-safe things: heavy and dreadful and over-cautious. He wishes Logan would do less stupid things, less dangerous things, maybe think reading was as fun as he thought it was, or something. It doesn’t change, though. He learns eventually that pain is not a thing adults grow out of, and he goes to high school football games with his nails in his mouth because he’s heard stories, and he’s always scared it’s going to be Logan, next, winces when he gets tackled too hard.
Then he feels a bit stupid, after. Every time Logan is fine.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to learn how to do all those things Logan does. Maybe that’s why he gets up on the skateboard when he’s six and Logan is seven and says he doesn’t want to move—not because he’s afraid of getting hurt, but because he’s afraid of Logan worrying he might. Afraid he’ll get the same drop-stomach feeling watching Oscar roll down the street that he does every single time Logan falls.
When Logan says he’s grown out of his knee pads, Oscar cries three hours later at the dining room table, and when asked, says he doesn’t know why. At the time, he didn’t. In hindsight, he connects the dots.
——
The first time Logan spends the night at Oscar’s, he doesn’t ask his parents. It just gets late for their age and he falls asleep on Oscar’s bed, because he’s tired, and Oscar’s bed is bigger and softer than his bed at home—or at least it feels that way—and he feels comfortable and safe and happy.
He doesn’t wake up until the next morning, and he’s still wearing his clothes from the day before but he has a blanket thrown over him now, and Oscar is curled up on the other side of the bed underneath the duvet. He holds a little koala while he sleeps, and Logan thinks it’s cute for three seconds, in a way only kids think things are cute. He crawls across the bed on top of the comforter with a throw blanket stuck to his heel and wraps his arms around the shape of Oscar’s small body, loose and unsure and a bit naive.
When Oscar wakes up to Logan half-snuggling him and asleep again, he doesn’t move until Logan lets him go.