Chapter Text
Yasper and Aniq watch Xavier walk from his helicopter and through the small crowd of former classmates who have gathered to meet him. This time things are a little different. This part of the night is very predictable, as Aniq and Yasper always stay out of the crowd and watch his entrance from afar. They have never had a reason to try to change anything about Xavier’s approach. But tonight Xavier looks distracted. He has never looked distracted before. He’s not sick or unsteady, but his eyes are far away, and he doesn’t stop to talk to anyone or take selfies.
They follow him into the gym, brushing past the protests of the Jenns at the welcome table. Xavier goes straight to the bar, gets a large drink, gulps down the whole thing, and turns to throw the cup away. It’s then that he sees Yasper. He drops the cup on the floor, spins around, and runs out the set of doors that open onto the math wing.
“He knows,” Aniq says. “He’s in the time loop.”
"Shit, shit, put him back!” Yasper panics. “How do we put him back?!"
“I don’t think we do,” Aniq says.
Yasper raises both hands to his mouth. “I can’t be stuck here with him,” he says through his fingers. “I tried to—” he stops and lowers his voice, “—murder him.”
“Oh for—yeah, I know, and maybe that’s why we’re all here right now.” Aniq rubs the back of his neck. Everything is already starting to ache. “Incidentally, you didn’t just try. You succeeded.” Yasper looks wounded at this, even though it’s true. But Aniq is tired of being gentle with Yasper. He also really doesn’t want to try to ease Xavier into his new reality, but he knows that it’s the right thing to do. “Come on,” he says and takes Yasper by the shoulder.
Aniq marches Yasper out the same doors Xavier used to escape. They look in a couple of open classrooms, but each one is dark and empty. There’s a set of bathrooms at the end of the hall, so they try the boys’ room next. As soon as they open the door, they hear feet shuffling on the tile floor and then the rattle of a stall door being shut and locked.
“Xavier?” Aniq calls. “Are you in here? We, uh… we just want to talk.” When Yasper opens his mouth, Aniq shakes his head. “And I think you really want to talk to us,” Aniq continues.
“Aniq?” Xavier asks. His voice is small and it has much more Eugene than Xavier in it. “Is it just you?”
“No,” Aniq says. “Yasper’s here.”
“Fuck no,” Eugene whispers. Because of the tile floors and the tile going halfway up the walls, his words are clear and easy to hear. “He killed me. He actually killed me. If it was a dream, I’d know it was a dream, but it wasn’t a dream. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Yasper scrunches up his nose and looks contrite. “Sorry, man,” he says to Aniq. “I think I broke him.”
It’s not going to be an easy conversation. But it’s not like things have been easy with Yasper either. Aniq tells himself that they can do this, and maybe they’ll even help Xavier keep his sanity. “It’s true, some pretty bad stuff went down,” Aniq says. “But everything reset. In fact, it resets every night.”
“So… I die every night?” Xavier asks with immeasurable horror.
“No, no, no,” Yasper says. Aniq can tell that Yasper is working his hardest at being reassuring, but he’s still terrible at it. “I haven’t killed you since I got here. It was just the one time. I think.” He laughs. “I mean, we really don’t know how this all works.”
“He did want to kill you for a while,” Aniq says, “but I was drugging him so he slept through it.”
“Ha ha,” Yasper says. “Isn’t that crazy? Don’t worry, I’ve totally worked past that time in my life, and I’m not going to kill you anymore.”
There is a long, long silence from Xavier. “This might surprise you,” he says just as Yasper is starting to get bored and fidgety, “but I don’t trust you at all.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Yasper says. He hesitates and looks at Aniq. “I don’t trust you either,” he informs Xavier.
The stall door opens a crack. Xavier peers out at them. “Do you know what it’s like to die?” he asks.
Aniq is surprised by how creeped out he is by Xavier. He and Yasper have been in the time loop long enough that he’d forgotten how it felt to look over the balcony at Xavier’s and know that he was looking at a corpse. At the time, he’d had to push aside the wrenching, visceral knowledge that a person who had been alive was now a body to be dealt with—they’d had to figure out who killed Xavier, after all, and so there hadn't been time to meditate on what being murdered really meant for the dead man in question. “No,” he says to Xavier’s eye and the side of his nose, which is all that Aniq can see through the crack in the door. “I don’t know. I’ve never died.”
“It hurt,” Xavier says. “It hurt more than anything. Then it was like I was numb, but cold. And I could smell blood. This was just, like, for a second, I guess. It felt a lot longer. Then it was nothing.” He stops to think of how to explain it. “I don’t mean empty. But it wasn’t like going to sleep. It was nothing in a different way.”
Xavier’s experience does not sound very existentially promising. “That’s all over,” Aniq says in his most soothing everything-is-ok-now voice. “You’re alive again. We’ve been given a do-over.” He shrugs at Yasper. “And over and over and over.”
Xavier considers this news. “Just this night?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“But this night sucks.”
“Ah, but this time? No death!” Yasper bounces on his toes like this is very exciting. “That’s like a hundred percent better, right?”
Xavier opens the stall door a little wider. Aniq is encouraged. He can tell Xavier is about as skittish as a baby deer, and for good reason. But Xavier waking up in the time loop is a positive sign. Maybe. Aniq thinks that it at least gives them another clue about why they’re here and how to get out.
Because now it’s not just Aniq. It’s not just Yasper. It’s not just Aniq and Yasper. It’s Aniq, Yasper, and Xavier. Xavier is important. He always has been.
Is that a little galling? Sure. Maddening? No question. Unavoidable? Apparently so. But Aniq likes clues, and he likes progress. This development will keep him going for a while.
Xavier looks Aniq in the eyes. “Why?” he asks.
Aniq thinks he’s asking why they’re in the time loop. “We don’t know,” he says. “Honestly, we might never know. Yasper and I have been living the same twelve hours for months.”
“No,” Xavier says. He keeps his voice hushed, but there’s still no way Yasper can’t hear him. Good acoustics in bathrooms. “Why did he do it?”
And that’s The Question, isn’t it? That’s always been The Question. Sometimes he and Yasper are able to distract themselves with other people at the reunion—Zoë, Brett, Walt, Chelsea—but their serious talks have all had to come around to Xavier and what Yasper did to Xavier. It’s much harder for Aniq to be on Yasper’s side with Xavier standing in front of him and asking why he’d been murdered.
“Maybe because you’re an asshole,” Yasper mutters.
“Not helping,” Aniq hisses at Yasper.
Xavier doesn’t look in Yasper’s direction. He stays focused on Aniq. “I get why you might hate me,” he says. “But I didn’t do anything to him.”
Yasper groans. “Dude, you stole my line! You know you stole my line!”
That gets Xavier to stick his head all the way out of the stall. “You can’t steal something that’s totally generic! You think I stole it? Take me to court!”
“Ok, ok, ok,” Aniq says before this can escalate again. “Stop, stop, shut up—” He points to Yasper, who has his mouth open and both hands over his heart like he’s just been shot. “No more. All right? I’m starting to think this is the stupidest proxy argument you could possibly be having.”
“Proxy argument?” Yasper asks.
“What does that mean?” Xavier demands.
“It means that there’s something else you want to fight about, but for some reason you’re fighting about this instead.” Aniq turns to Yasper. “Because I really, really hope all of this wasn’t because of ‘How great is this party?’”
“Aniq!” Yasper says. “We’ve had so many heart-to-hearts about my fragile emotional state and deep-seated feelings of inadequacy stemming from the abandonment of—”
Xavier scoffs. “Bullshit,” he says.
Yasper tries to push past Aniq so he can get in Xavier’s face, but Aniq holds him back. “You’re bullshit!” he yells while Aniq tries to shush him. “Go to hell!”
“I’m already in hell!” Xavier shouts back. “I died! You killed me!” He takes a deep breath then says, “You want to talk about abandonment?”
“No,” Yasper says. “Not really.”
Xavier nods, like that’s about what he expected. He turns attention back to Aniq. “Do I have to stay here? Like, if I go too far away does it magic me back or what?”
“We seem to be able to go wherever we want,” Aniq says. “I mean, obviously we haven’t tried getting onto a plane and going overseas, but—”
“Dope. Then I want out.” Xavier does his best to slide past Aniq without getting too close to Yasper, but also without contorting himself and looking uncool.
Aniq nudges Yasper back so Xavier can leave the bathroom. “You can go,” Aniq says, “but you’ll be back. I mean, probably. We have every reason to expect you will be.”
Xavier pauses with his hand on the door handle. “How long does this night go?” he asks.
“The loop ends a little after 7 in the morning. You’ll be back in the helicopter at 7:03 pm.”
Xavier’s jaw clenches. He nods, then leaves without saying anything.
With Xavier gone, the atmosphere in the bathroom relaxes, but it’s still not comfortable. Yasper gives Aniq an uneasy look and forces a chuckle. “Wow,” he says, “that guy. Am I right?”
“I don’t know, Yas,” Aniq says. “Because of you, Xavier knows what death feels like. If it were me, I might be a little pissed off too.”
Yasper is about to answer, but Brett walks in. “Hey,” he says as he walks between them to get to the urinals, “why are you two ladies having a chat in the boys’ room?”
“Shut the fuck up, Brett,” Yasper mutters as he and Aniq shuffle out the door.
They leave the building and walk out to the field. The helicopter is gone, and neither of them is surprised. “You wanna talk about this in the art room?” Aniq asks.
“Art room,” Yasper says. “Yeah. And I’m getting pizza.”
They hang around outside while Yasper orders pizza and waits for it to be delivered. Once it arrives, they take the pizza to the art room. Yasper eats a single slice, then lies down on the floor with his jacket rolled up and tucked under his neck. “Do you think he really felt what it was like to die or was he just making it up?” he asks the ceiling.
Aniq takes a second slice. “I don’t know,” he says.
“Because I thought it was pretty much, like, you hit the ground and that’s it.” Yasper claps his hands together. “Splat! You know?”
“Well, he was high up, but not that high up,” Aniq muses. “Maybe if he hadn’t fallen on the rocks, he would have just been horribly injured.” It’s a terrible line of conversation for the middle of dinner, but Aniq can’t help himself. “You know, during the French Revolution they used the guillotine to chop off everyone’s head because they thought death was instantaneous, which would make it a more humane method of execution. But people noticed that the heads would continue to move for a few seconds after—”
Yasper groans. “Stop! I’ll barf all over your shoes.” He crosses one leg over the other and kicks at the air. “So could that have happened to Xavier? His head didn’t come off.”
“No, but I guess it’s possible that for a few seconds his brain still had enough blood and oxygen to feel things. And maybe for him that time felt a lot longer than a few seconds.”
“Hmm.” Yasper switches legs. Then he straightens them out, closes his eyes, and pretends to be a corpse. “I think he’s a big, fat liar,” Yasper says. He can’t remain quiet and cadaverous for more than a couple of minutes, however. He takes out his phone. “I wonder what he’s doing right now.” Yasper checks Xavier’s official Instagram, his official Twitter, and finally his very unofficial Twitter that Yasper found years ago after some patient detective work. There have been no updates.
The next evening, the helicopter doesn’t show up at all. Xavier must have told the pilot to turn around before arriving at the school. Aniq and Yasper shrug and don’t talk about it. They spend the night pretending Xavier doesn’t exist. It’s freeing, sort of. They still have to hear their classmates making disappointed noises about how Xavier didn’t show, however, so it’s not that freeing.
They’re feeling stalled when it comes to messing with the time loop—somehow Xavier being out in the world and ignoring them makes any changes feel pointless—and the next night when Xavier fails to make an appearance, they spend another evening in the art room doing nothing. “How would you want to die?” Yasper asks from his usual spot on the floor. “If you got to choose.”
“In my sleep from a heart attack or stroke,” Aniq says. “Nice and easy.”
“Not me,” Yasper says. “I want to go out big. Plane crash! Gas explosion! Huge car wreck!” Yasper plays with a royal purple colored pencil he found. He is trying to twirl it around his finger, the way some kids used to be able to back in high school. Yasper hasn’t mastered it yet. “Did you ever see that movie Crash?” he asks.
“The one with Sandra Bullock that won an Oscar for some reason?”
“No, this one was from the nineties and it’s about people who get hot for car crashes. Elias Koteas kisses James Spader, and I get a weird boner.”
Aniq shakes his head. “Ugh, Yasper,” he says, even though he’s not sure who Elias Koteas is.
“They’re literally driving themselves toward death,” Yasper says. “And I’m not saying that’s me,” he hurries to add because Aniq is looking concerned. “But I’m not not saying it’s me.”
Aniq nods. “But you caused someone else’s death,” he points out. “Not your own.”
“Yeah,” Yasper says. “I don’t really know how it all fits together.” He tries to spin the colored pencil around his finger, but accidentally flicks it halfway across the room. “Whoops,” he says.
Yasper checks Xavier’s social media at around midnight while he and Aniq are sitting in Aniq’s car and trying to doze for a few hours. “That little bitch,” Yasper says.
Aniq raises his head. “Hmm?”
“He’s posting pics,” Yasper says. He shows Aniq the pictures Xavier has posted of a blurry bar crowd. “I know that bar,” he says. “That is not a straight bar.”
“I mean, straight guys can go to gay bars,” Aniq suggests.
“No, they can’t,” Yasper says. “The instant they walk in, they’re at least bisexual.”
Aniq fails to stifle a yawn. “Whatever,” he says. “Wake me up when he kisses a dude.”
Yasper shakes Aniq awake at three am to show him a wobbly video of Xavier kissing an attractive, muscular young man at least a head taller than himself. “Huh,” Aniq says, “would you look at that.”
“I could go around kissing random guys if I wanted to,” Yasper sulks.
“Yeah, but not guys who look like this,” Aniq says and points to Yasper’s phone. He is groggy from being awoken, and so he forgets to be tactful. When he sees Yasper giving him whale eyes, he tries to explain. “Come on, that guy’s like a nine-point-five out of ten. You think he’d see you even if he was looking right at you?”
“I’ve had nine-point-fives,” Yasper insists. “I’ve had nine-point-nines. Anyway, Xavier is like an eight at best.”
Aniq laughs. “You are so transparent,” he says. “Xavier is at least an eight-point-five, and I bet his money bumps him up to a ten.”
Yasper falls back in the passenger seat with a thump. “I hate him,” he says.
“Why?” Aniq asks. He doesn’t hate Xavier. He doesn’t like him, not at all, but he can’t find it in himself to hate him. And maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense after what happened between them in high school, but Aniq isn’t going to waste any energy on hating Xavier.
Yasper is still staring down at his phone. It’s playing the short video from Xavier’s wild night on a loop. “I think I want to be him,” he admits.
“Please, god, no,” Aniq says. “We only need one Xavier in this world.”
“Does this surprise you?” Yasper asks, holding his phone up and tilting it back and forth.
Aniq considers the situation. “That he’s picking up guys or that he’s posting it on Twitter?”
Yasper pauses to tap on his phone and then scroll. “Oh, the comments are nasty. Wow. I guess he’s lucky it’s all going to reset soon.” He looks up. “But I meant: are you surprised that he’s kissing a guy?”
“A little,” Aniq says, and that’s true. Xavier acts very straight. He doesn’t look straight, but he acts straight, and that goes a long way. At the same time, Aniq remembers Eugene quite well, and Eugene was always a little suspect. In the ninth grade, Eugene’s biology notebook had a picture of Orlando Bloom as Legolas on the cover. Eugene liked musical theater. He’d always been very particular about his clothes and his hair. None of that added up to having sex with guys, but it did tend to steer the mind toward certain assumptions.
“I’m not surprised,” Yasper says.
That makes sense. Yasper sleeps with men regularly, while Aniq has but dabbled. “I defer to your experience,” Aniq says.
“You have no idea,” Yasper says under his breath.
For eight nights in a row, Xavier goes out and has gay adventures that he posts to Twitter and Instagram. Yasper seethes over every photo. Aniq is sick of it by day two. “You want to go out to bars and hook up?” Aniq says. “Seriously, be my guest. No one is stopping you.”
“No,” Yasper says, stomping his feet as they walk around the track together while all their peers are inside eating salad and chicken piccata. “That’s not—ugh, that’s not why I’m mad, ok?”
“So you’re not jealous?”
“No!” Yasper tosses his hands up above his head. For a second, Aniq thinks he might throw his phone to the ground. “No, it’s just… what an asshole! Like, you get brought back from the dead and this is what you do?”
That’s a point Aniq hadn’t considered, perhaps because going out and partying after returning from beyond the veil feels very on-brand for Xavier. “Well,” he says, “maybe now that there are no consequences, he’s doing what he always wanted to do.”
“Don’t make this into a ‘boo-hoo, isn’t it sad that he has to be closeted?’ thing,” Yasper said. “That’s on him.”
Aniq puts his hands into the pockets of his jacket and kicks at the dirt on the track. “No value judgement here,” he says. “I was just trying to explain his behavior.”
To Aniq’s surprise, Yasper spits on the ground. It’s an angry spit. “I hate him,” Yasper says. “That’s all.”
On day six of Xavier’s tour of every gay bar in the Castro, Aniq catches Yasper staring down at his phone and then swiping at his eyes, like he’s trying to chase away tears. Aniq leaves him alone. He spends the night talking to Zoë, and watches as Yasper cozies up to Chelsea and they both drink their feelings.
A couple of these nights, Aniq and Yasper try going to Xavier’s while Xavier isn’t there. The party still happens, and the house is a great place to crash until they get sent back to the beginning of the night, but Aniq can tell that being in Xavier’s house makes Yasper unhappy. That’s not a shock. In fact, what’s shocking is that Yasper agrees to come at all.
On the eighth night, Aniq loses track of Yasper at Xavier’s and goes on a search for him at two in the morning. After checking in all the most obvious places and not finding him, Aniq looks in places he can’t imagine Yasper wanting to go. It takes another twenty minutes, but he finds Yasper in Xavier’s bedroom. He thinks that the only place that would be worse for Yasper to be is down on the beach. But there he is, lying on Xavier’s bed and hugging a pillow to his chest.
Aniq is about to say Yasper’s name, then he sees Yasper’s closed eyes and the steady rise and fall of his chest. Aniq realizes that Yasper is asleep on Xavier’s bed, holding one of Xavier’s pillows, and he is so bewildered by this that he sits down on Xavier’s bed as well. It’s very soft and the sheets are luxurious. He lies back beside Yasper and reasons that Xavier won’t be using his bed tonight, so why shouldn’t they? Aniq gets comfortable. He adjusts the pillow under his head, then toes off his shoes and lets them fall to the floor. He closes his eyes.
When Aniq wakes up again, the sun still hasn’t come up. He has to pull out his phone and check the time. It’s nearly six-thirty. Soon they’ll be rocketed back to seven pm the previous evening. He sighs. Then he hears Yasper answer him with a sigh of his own. Aniq turns his head and finds that Yasper is awake. At some point he rolled over and now he is watching Aniq.
Yasper’s eyes are red. He is still clutching the pillow to his chest. “This is my fault, right?” he says. “That we’re stuck in here and we can’t get out?” Aniq doesn’t answer right away, so Yasper says, “I just want to hear it from you. I know you won’t lie to me.”
“It’s probably your fault,” Aniq concedes. “But I don’t think you can get us out of it by yourself.”
“Maybe we can’t get out at all,” Yasper says, and that’s a grim, grim thought. “Maybe everything we’ve tried has been for nothing.”
After the reset, Aniq and Yasper meet in the parking lot with slumped shoulders and heavy hearts. They hang out in the gym for a while, then leave and start looking in empty classrooms until they find a copy of Risk in a room in the social studies wing. They set up the board and try to play, but Aniq is distracted. He is thinking about what it means to be stuck in the loop forever. Will they never age? Never die? Does Xavier, in fact, have the right idea: if their lives have been rendered meaningless by the inability to escape this one night, isn’t mindless pleasure-seeking the correct and logical response?
That is why Aniq is very surprised when, halfway through their game, Xavier walks into the room like it’s not at all shocking that he should be there. “What the fuck?” Yasper says.
“When did you get here?” Aniq asks. Before Xavier can answer, he adds, “And how did you find us?” Xavier opens his mouth, and Aniq cuts him off. “And when did you have time to change?”
Xavier is wearing a normal pair of light gray pants and a white button-down shirt with the first couple of buttons undone. He clears his throat. “So first of all, I had these in the chopper,” he says, indicating his much more subdued outfit. “Like, just in case the vibes weren’t quite purple suit friendly. You know?” Aniq and Yasper don’t answer him, so Xavier goes on. “And, uh, I actually had the pilot drop me off about half a mile from the school to avoid getting mobbed and whatever. Then I saw Zoë, and she told me she saw you two walking out into the hallway? So I just started looking in all the classrooms.”
Yasper and Aniq blink at each other. “Ok,” Aniq says. “But… why?”
“Why?”
“Why are you here?” Yasper snaps. “When you could be living it up and fucking your way through the Bay Area?”
Xavier turns red. Aniq is shocked. He didn’t think it was possible for Xavier to be embarrassed by anything. “Oh,” Xavier says, “so I guess you saw some of the posts…”
“All of them,” Yasper says under his breath.
“I just needed to do something pretty out there to get a handle on stuff. Sorry, but I couldn’t come back to the reunion right away. And I couldn’t go back to my house.” Xavier hugs himself, like maybe a button-down shirt was the wrong choice for tonight and he’s realizing that he should have brought a sweater. “I still haven’t been back to my house,” he says.
Aniq nods. “Understandable,” he says. Yasper stares down at the game board. He arranges six pieces into a little circle on Asia.
“So is this what you guys do every night?” Xavier asks.
“Not every night,” Yasper says.
“We’re a little stalled right now,” Aniq explains. “We had been spending our time trying to enact certain scenarios. You know, to see if we could break the time loop by making things happen. Or not happen.”
Xavier giggles. Aniq thinks he sounds nervous. “Super-weird how not killing me didn’t do it for you. I’d think that would be the big thing.”
“Well, to be fair, we didn’t get looped around until the morning after we figured out that Yasper did it.” Aniq smiles at Yasper, and Yasper glowers back. “You actually went to jail, didn’t you, buddy?” Aniq feels like prodding Yasper a little. It’s easier to make light of the whole situation when the murdered party is in the room with them and asking questions.
“It ate ass in a very unfun way,” Yasper says. “Don’t get arrested.”
There’s a whiteboard at the front of the room. Xavier wanders over to it. He picks up a dry erase marker from the ledge along the bottom. “So you guys like games—I mean, Aniq, I know you do.” Aniq nods, and Xavier turns to the board and draws the crude empty gallows that begins a game of Hangman. Then he draws a series of dashes:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
“Aniq can start,” he says.
Aniq and Yasper exchange a look, but Aniq isn’t sure what else to do besides play along. He guesses E. Xavier draws a head on his hanged man. Yasper guesses A, and that gets two hits. Aniq guesses S, which gets another hit.
After another few turns, Aniq knows what the answer is, but Yasper hasn’t caught on. “Hey,” Aniq says, “this was a really good idea for a game, but maybe we could try something a little different—”
“What?” Yasper asks. “Do you know what it is?”
Aniq doesn’t want to say, but Yasper’s eyes are begging him to tell. Aniq sighs. “Y,” he says, and Xavier writes in the Y. “F. And L.”
The message is now:
IT AS YO R FA LT
Yasper’s eyes narrow and his bottom lip quivers. “Well,” Xavier says in a fake-friendly voice, “would you like to take a guess?”
“‘It was your fault,’” Yasper mumbles. Then he straightens up in his seat. “You know what? It was your fault.”
“Listen up, stupid: the ‘you’ in this sentence is you—” Xavier points to Yasper “—not me. And if you think it’s my fault, then you’re hardcore victim-blaming.”
Yasper stands up. “But you didn’t have to be such a dick when I tried to talk to you—”
“Saying no to you makes me a dick? Damn, you know, that sounds like rapist talk to me.”
“What?” Yasper’s jaw drops and turns his mouth into a perfect round hole. He looks down at Aniq and gestures at Xavier. “He just called me a rapist! I have never in my life—” Yasper stops to shake his head in wonder. Then he stabs an accusing finger in Xavier’s direction. “You! You told everyone you slept with Chelsea and you fucking didn’t!”
“Yeah, but at least when she told me to stop, I stopped!” Xavier thrusts the business end of the dry erase marker at Yasper. “And I think I should be able to say no to you without being murdered!”
“You called me a loser!” Yasper explodes. “You didn’t have to do that! You just wanted to be an asshole. But you know what? I think you’re the loser.”
Xavier is floored by the accusation. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Yeah!” The gears in Yasper’s head are grinding. “Like, I bet you have no friends! All your girlfriends are just for show! You make shitty music!” He pauses to try to fake something that looks like sympathy. “I actually feel sorry for you,” Yasper says.
“Well, I don’t think about you at all!” Eugene yells back.
Yasper holds up a finger. “Ok, so first? You obviously fucking do. And second, you stole that from Mad Men, you absolute fucking hack!”
“Ok,” Aniq says and stands up. “This is starting to get stupid again—”
“You’re being really mean right now,” Xavier says to Yasper, “when you should be super-nice to me, considering how we got here!”
“Maybe the way out is to kill you again,” Yasper says. “What about that?”
Xavier shuffles to the side, putting the teacher’s desk between himself and Yasper. “Or maybe we should see what happens if I kill you?” he says. Xavier drops the dry erase marker. He rummages in the supply drawer of the desk, pulls out a pair of scissors, and holds them aloft. Aniq is concerned until he realizes that Xavier managed to find a pair of Fiskars safety scissors, and that he probably can’t do much damage with them. “That seems fair, right? You kill me, I kill you?” Yasper backs up until he runs into the closest student desk. “What are you afraid of?” Xavier asks. “Everything will probably just reset itself. You won’t really die.”
“You’re psycho,” Yasper says.
“So are you.”
For a moment, Aniq thinks that this is destined to remain a standoff. Then Yasper lunges forward across the top of the desk and makes a grab for Xavier. He manages to close his hand on the collar of Xavier’s shirt, and in his panic, Xavier drops the scissors. That’s when Aniq wraps Yasper in a bear hug around his chest and yanks him back. They both stumble and almost fall. The combined force of Yasper pulling and Xavier jumping back rips his shirt at the shoulder seam. Xavier’s back hits the whiteboard. Aniq and Yasper crash into the desk where they’d set up their game of Risk. The entire game spills onto the floor.
All three are panting with exertion and, Aniq thinks, disbelief. Xavier is almost hyperventilating. “Are you stupid?” Aniq asks Yasper. “Do you really want to kill him again?”
But Aniq can see that Yasper doesn’t know what he wants. He is staring at Xavier who is flushed and breathing hard as he tries to adjust his shirt and smooth back his hair. Aniq shakes him, and Yasper blinks several times, like he’s emerging from the depths of hypnosis. “No,” he says. “Of course I don’t.”
“Hah,” Xavier says. He busies himself with examining the rip in his shirt so he doesn’t have to look at Yasper.
“Sorry, but maybe you should take a time out,” Aniq says to Yasper. “Go sit in the corner and chill.”
“I’m not a kid,” Yasper says. But he goes to the far end of the classroom. He takes two chairs, sits on one, and uses the other as a place to prop his feet up.
Xavier gives up on his shirt and leans on the edge of the teacher’s desk. “I know,” he says, when he realizes Aniq isn’t going anywhere. “This isn’t helping.”
“Probably not, no,” Aniq says.
“I’ve got, like, a ton of maladaptive coping behaviors,” Xavier says. “I’ve been to enough therapy to know that. But I usually give up before anything changes.”
This is a surprising amount of insight, Aniq thinks, and it’s fascinating to hear the word “maladaptive” coming out of Xavier’s mouth. “Why do you give up?” he asks.
“Well, because it’s hard. And I don’t like it.”
That sounds pretty normal. “Yeah, therapy is work. Change is hard.” Aniq sits beside Xavier. “Is there anything you want to talk about right now?”
“I don’t know. It’s just like… high school sucked. People didn’t like me. I don’t think they like me now, you know, but at least they have to pretend to. Because of all the money. But is that really better?” He sniffs. “Being ultra-rich is awesome, but being famous is like being in high school forever and all the popular kids don’t like me and the guys who are supposed to be my friends don’t like me.” He shoots a meaningful look at Yasper’s corner. “Like, I’m Xavier. So why do I still feel like a loser?”
Aniq puts an arm around Xavier’s shoulders and squeezes. Then he lets him go. Aniq doesn’t think he and Xavier are on cuddling terms just yet. “Look,” Aniq says, “I can’t pretend to know what all that’s like. But I do know how it is to feel like a loser.”
Xavier shakes his head like he’s trying to clear water from his inner ear. “I thought you had your own games thing. Like puzzle rooms or whatever. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”
“Well, yeah, I’m pretty happy with my job,” Aniq says. He’s surprised that Xavier knows anything about what he does. “But I’m not the best in the world or anything. I’m essentially a small business owner, same as Yasper.” Yasper draws his knees up and hunches his shoulders, trying to pretend he’s not listening to them. “That’s not easy. A lot of the time, I feel like I should be doing better.”
“Oh.” Xavier looks down at his hands. “Do you think I ruined your life?”
Aniq doesn’t, in fact. “You changed it, that’s for sure. But no. My life wasn’t ruined because of what happened in high school. I won’t pretend I was happy about how things went down, but I had to take responsibility too. I wasn’t exactly innocent.”
“No,” Eugene says. “But Aniq—I’m sorry.”
It’s not a heartfelt apology like in the movies, but it’s not frivolous either. Aniq thinks that Eugene really means it, and that’s a little bit of a shock. “Thanks,” he says. “Me too.”
“I felt really bad that night because of Yasper,” Eugene says. In the corner, Yasper makes a dismissive noise. “He said he wanted to break up the band because of you, that you’d said me and him were too different.” He shakes his head. “I always figured that you talked about me behind my back.”
Aniq feels an unexpected stab of guilt. They had talked about Eugene behind his back, and they hadn’t been nice about it. “We shouldn’t have done that,” Aniq says. “But if I remember it right, Yasper was the one who wanted to go solo. I just told him what I thought.”
Eugene nods, like that was about what he’d expected. “I was really happy being in our dumb band,” he says.
Yasper shifts in the chair and it creaks. He looks uncomfortable. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way you wanted it to,” Aniq says.
“It’s like, why even be sorry? Because maybe I wouldn’t have gotten this far without everything that happened.”
“You owe me,” Yasper says, raising his voice enough to be heard from across the room.
“I don’t owe you shit,” Xavier answers.
Yasper ticks the things he did for Xavier off on his fingers. “I gave you your name. I gave you ‘How great is this party?’ I pushed you to learn how to play guitar, because before that all you wanted to do was be in Hello, Dolly! or whatever bullshit. And I gave you your first kiss at ninth grade homecoming.” He leans forward, tensing like he’s ready to run at Xavier again. “You owe me so much.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with you,” Xavier says. “And that kiss sucked. It didn’t count.”
Yasper springs up out of his chair. “We made out all the time during senior year!” he says. “You think that doesn’t count now? Did you just erase everything about me from your mind?”
“Did you?” Xavier asks. “Because I don’t think all that mattered to you when you were dumping me!”
Yasper starts walking toward the door. He stays close to the wall, moving around the outside of the cluster of desks in order to avoid Aniq and Xavier at the front of the room. “I’m not listening to this anymore,” he says.
“Are you leaving?” Aniq asks.
“Yeah,” Yasper says. “Because if he can go out and have risky sex with strangers, why not Yasper?” He pauses at the door. “I can’t believe you’re taking his side,” Yasper says to Aniq.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Aniq says. “You always took his side back in high school.”
Yasper doesn’t react. He just leaves. Xavier and Aniq look at each other. Everything is uncomfortable, until Aniq decides that it’s not. In this room, dressed in these clothes, Xavier feels more like Eugene. As a teenager, Eugene was annoying. But as an adult, Aniq thinks he has a pretty good handle on Eugene, and there are worse people to spend an evening with. Anyway, they’re in the same peculiar boat of being stuck in a time loop with a man they both thought they knew at one time in their lives. But Aniq doesn’t think that either of them really knows who Yasper is, not anymore. “So hey,” Aniq says. “How do you feel about Risk?”
“Oh, I suck at games,” Eugene says. “You’ll beat me.”
“Well, I can go easy on you,” Aniq says. “Or you have your phone, right? Do you play any mobile games?”
The only game Eugene has on his phone is Stardew Valley, which Aniq finds charming and a little weird. He gets Eugene to download Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Eugene plays around with it for a while and shows Aniq what he’s doing. Aniq mentions that he went to a game design conference in Boston. “I’ve been to Boston,” Eugene says, “but not really. I mean, I’ve done shows there. I basically didn’t see anything but the hotel and the venue.”
Xavier has been in almost every major city in the country, as well as all the biggest cities in the world. But he’s had very little time to look around these cities or experience them in any way. “I know LA,” he says, “and I know New York. I’ve done tourist shit in London. I’ve gone on vacation, like, twice in the last ten years. One time to Paris, one time to Italy.”
“All of Italy?” Aniq asks.
“Pretty close,” Xavier says. “Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, and then some smaller cities along the coast.” He keeps his eyes on his phone as he talks. “That was a good time,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he means it.
“Well, yeah, a vacation in Italy sounds pretty great,” Aniq says.
“It wasn’t about Italy so much,” Eugene says, his voice getting smaller and smaller. “It was more about who I went with.”
“Ah,” Aniq says. He’s not going to pry, even though he wants to. He thinks of Yasper saying that he and Eugene made out all the time senior year. That might explain how it was that Skape Diem could practice constantly and yet not make any kind of significant improvement as a band. But Aniq hadn’t known. Whatever was between Yasper and Eugene in high school had never once felt like mutual attraction. Fifteen years later, Aniq can hardly remember what their relationship had been like. He hadn’t been paying attention.
Eugene closes Animal Crossing, looks up what movies are playing, and suggests leaving the high school and going to see the last showing of House of Gucci. It’s not a movie Aniq has been all that interested in seeing, but he agrees. They walk out to his car. Yasper’s rental car is gone from the parking lot, which isn’t a surprise.
Aniq drives them to the movie. Eugene pays for the tickets and snacks. It doesn’t matter who pays for what, but acting like it does is very normal and comforting.
Nobody bothers Xavier. Aniq finds that interesting. He sees some people looking at him like maybe they recognize him, but no one approaches him. The theater isn’t crowded, but it isn’t dead either. Maybe in his boring clothes, wearing a Giants sweatshirt that Aniq had stashed in his trunk to cover the rip in his sleeve, they can’t believe it’s Xavier. Maybe they see him with Aniq, a literal nobody, and think it can’t be him. Aniq is ok with that. He doesn’t mind being camouflage.
The movie isn’t bad, but Eugene is much more invested than Aniq. After it ends, he has a lot to say about the performances. Aniq thought the Italian accents were a little goofy, especially Jared Leto, but Eugene thinks they worked. “I don’t think it’s like a fully serious thing, you know? Obviously they aren’t really Italian.” They drive back to the school. Eugene keeps talking about how great Al Pacino was, which surprises Aniq because he thought Eugene would have more to say about Lady Gaga.
At almost one in the morning, it dawns on Aniq that Eugene doesn’t want to stop talking or leave Aniq’s car because he’s not sure what to do next. He doesn’t want to go home. The helicopter isn’t at the school. It’s easier for Aniq to just let him talk—about movies, about show business, about how Jared Leto isn’t really as weird as everyone thinks he is—than to try to figure out a plan. While Eugene talks, Aniq plays around on his phone. He checks Yasper’s Instagram, but he hasn’t posted anything. Then he checks Yasper’s Twitter and sees a video posted fifteen minutes earlier. He makes sure the sound on his phone is muted and clicks it.
The video is dark and the angle is weird. After a few moments, Aniq thinks he’s figured it out: Yasper had stuck his phone into the holder on the dash of his rental car and then started filming. What he filmed was himself leaning over the console to kiss another man.
It’s not a long video, which Aniq is happy about. Maybe Yasper thought he’d made his point, whatever that point was. But Aniq is still irritated. How is this helping them escape the time loop? It’s not.
Eugene sees the look on Aniq’s face and stops talking. “What’s up?” he asks.
Aniq hands Eugene his phone. Eugene plays the video. He watches it play through several times, then hands Aniq’s phone back. “Ok,” he says.
“Does that bother you?” Aniq asks.
“Should it?” Eugene asks. “Does it bother you?”
“I mean, it’s pretty obnoxious,” Aniq says. “We were at least trying to find a way to break out of the loop before you showed up.” He feels a flare of resentment toward Eugene. But while Eugene could stand to antagonize Yasper a little less, Yasper’s behavior isn’t really his fault.
Eugene nods. “He’s mad at me.”
“Well, yeah. I guess that’s the short version.”
“Is it weird to you that Yasper and I… you know? In high school?” Eugene’s face is turning red again.
Aniq has to think about how to answer. “Coming from Yasper? Not that weird,” Aniq says. “Coming from you? Gotta be honest, I didn’t realize you were—”
“I’m not gay!” Eugene hurries to say. “Sometimes I do stuff with men, but I’m not gay. Not like Yasper.”
Yasper is indeed, as far as Aniq knows, gay. Or mostly gay. He can recall times when Yasper brought up a woman he found attractive, but Aniq thinks those instances are more theoretical than something Yasper would ever pursue. It is, perhaps, the mirror of his own tastes: Aniq can find men attractive, but he isn’t going out to gay bars and Yasper isn’t on Bumble trying to have a serious relationship with an eye toward marriage. They stay in their own lanes, for the most part.
But Eugene does everything, if Xavier’s career and his recent run of wild nights are anything to go by. “Ok, so you’re not gay,” Aniq agrees.
“Like, maybe if everything were perfect, then I could be with a man—”
“But it’s never going to be perfect,” Aniq says.
“No,” Eugene says and frowns down at his lap. “Nevermind. You should tell me more about what you were trying to do to get out of here. Maybe we can figure something out without Yasper?”
So Aniq gives Eugene the shortest version he can. Eugene nods. He doesn’t have any suggestions at first, so he and Aniq sit in the car and pretend to think. Then Eugene says, “Well, maybe it’s not about making something happen or not happen. Maybe it’s an internal thing.”
“But how do you quantify that?” Aniq asks. Eugene screws up his nose, and Aniq realizes that he’s not sure what “quantify” means. “I mean, how do you know when you’ve gone far enough?”
“You don’t know now,” Eugene points out. “You don’t really know anything, right? Except that not killing me doesn’t get you out.”
“We do know that.”
“So maybe it’s like… we’ve all got the wrong attitude somehow. We have to do like a whole karmic reeducation, you know?”
There’s probably some truth to that, but Aniq is still inclined to be skeptical. “Ok. What do you need to relearn?”
Eugene sighs. “I have regrets. I’m not gonna pretend that I haven’t been shitty in my life. I died, man, and then I thought, ‘What have I really done?’ You know?”
Aniq does know. He would regret a lot of things in his life if he were Xavier. But he’d be pretty happy about some things too. “So what has to change?” he asks.
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” Eugene says.