Chapter 30

Sinder didn’t come home that night, which was too bad, because Gavin had been hoping for some roommate bonding. 

He ordered pizza and beer, put the pizza in the cold oven to keep it insulated, searched the internet for student-teacher porn Sinder would like. He wanted to offer something.  Something besides, What the fuck is going on between you and Rona Gomez.  He didn’t want to be jealous like that.  Sinder was his true friend, the only person in Indiana who really cared about him.  It was Sinder who had gotten him drunk whenever he was depressed about his dissertation, gone out with him when he was bored and lonely, entertained him when he was too unmotivated to leave the apartment.  Cleaned up his vomit at least twice.  Spent hours when he should have been studying for his exams searching out porn with Liam Stump references, just to make Gavin laugh.

And who was Rona? Some girl he had slept with once, some girl who was barely talking to him.  It was time to get his priorities straight.

He had some trouble finding the right porn.  Especially because he really, really wasn’t in a porn mood.  Kind of like the opposite.  But disinterest was good, in fact required for proper judgment. So he was going to roll with his lack of enthusiasm and find a lesbian porn, the best fucking lesbian student teacher porn ever, one that would blow Sinder’s mind.  

He put a couple of slices of pizza on a plate, opened a beer, a can because the pizza place had run out of bottles.  Let’s see.  Sinder liked hot but not too serious.  The actors should talk, like as much as possible. Bonus for some exaggerated physical characteristic like ginormous boobs or really really tiny ones or huge crazy pubes or something.

He skimmed through maybe four of them, but they all seemed to have punky girls who reminded him of Rona.  One with a black hoodie.  Another in combat boots.  Forget it.  He gave up on lesbian porn, switched to interracial, which actually meant white girls with black guys.  He found a pretty good one with a kind of ugly guy with a seriously donkey-sized dick fucking a really skinny blonde girl with big fake boobs.  They talked a lot about Einstein’s theory of relativity, because the guy was supposed to be her physics teacher.

So, um, E equals…MC?

Very close, very close. It’s MC squared.

Oh! I knew it was something like that.

Excellent work. You’re my top student.

Nothing in it reminded him of Rona in any way.  Perfect. He emailed the link to himself, lay on the couch, watched some Korean hip hop videos and some extreme natural disasters caught on film and a rap battle between Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton that Sinder had told him to watch like two months ago.

Then it was three in the morning, he had eaten twelve of the sixteen pizza slices and drank all the beer, and it was time to go to bed.  He slept weird, bad, dreaming about Sinder on some crazy drug binge in someone’s dirty basement.  Sinder getting hit by a car as he stumbled home, bleeding to death on the unlit roadside. Sinder alive and well in Rona’s dorm room, their bodies pressed together on the narrow bed, his brown skinny body on her pale curvy one.  Lovers kissing in a field of mosaic and gold.

When Gavin got up to make coffee at eight the next morning, Sinder was sitting on the couch with a bottle of tequila and two boxes of supermarket donuts.  Which meant he hadn’t gone to bed yet, had been up all night, but Gavin didn’t want to ask where he’d been.

“I found a pretty sweet porn.”  He got his laptop off the kitchen table, sat down on the other side of the couch.  “Wanna see it?”

Sinder shook his head. “Not in the mood.”

The response seemed a little weird to Gavin, actually really weird.  He wished he had made coffee before he sat down. 

“You’re never not in the mood for student-teacher porn.” It was always Gavin who wasn’t in the mood, because he was too stressed out or he had gotten rejected by some girl or he had just masturbated in the shower or it was eight in the morning.  Sinder never seemed deterred by those kind of things.

“That was the old me.”  Sinder poured a shot of tequila into a souvenir shot glass from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. There was a whole set of them in the cupboard. He tipped his head back to swallow it, sighed.  Held up a second glass, empty. “Want some?”   

Gavin shook his head.  He was pretty depressed already, and the day was just starting.

“Donut?” Sinder held out a box.  Chocolate-covered.  That smooth, even chocolate that looked like it was made of plastic.

“Okay,” Gavin said.  It squished between his fingers as he pulled it out.  Sugar and margarine smell, slimy chocolate.  He shoved most of it into his mouth in one bite, the rest in a second bite, just to get it out of his hand as fast as possible. He looked around for something to wipe it on, but there weren’t any napkins or anything over here.  He considered using the bottom of his t-shirt—he had already slept in it, and he could put it right in the laundry when he got dressed—but it just really wasn’t his style.  He got up, still morning-creaky, went to the kitchen and got a paper towel.

“How was Kansas?” Sinder asked.

“Okay.”  He sat back down, checked out the donuts in the other box.  Cinnamon.  “Kind of weird.  They offered me the job.”

“Congratulations.”  Sinder poured tequila again, this time into both shot glasses.  “So you’ll be moving.”

“One way or the other I guess.  I still haven’t heard from Santa Clarita.”

“You should just call them.”

“I can’t.” Right?  One, two, three hours earlier, so that meant. “It’s five in the morning there.”

“Call them later.”

Sinder passed one of the glasses to Gavin. Gavin took it, even though there was no way he was going to do shots at eight fifteen on a Tuesday morning. It was actually good tequila; they had bought a few bottles of it in Mexico last year during spring break.  They drank the others ones but this one had been sitting on top of the refrigerator for a year.  The label had a painting of a desert landscape on it, and a picture of a worm on the back, but there wasn't  an actual worm floating at the bottom.

“Okay, I’ll call them,” Gavin said. “This afternoon.”

Sinder swallowed his shot.

“Drink yours.”

Gavin held it to his nose.  Yup, tequila. It had that kind of sweet smell that made him think of margaritas.  He dipped the tip of his tongue into it. Not bad, okay really.  Seemed like it would clear the donut grease out of his mouth, anyway. It would go down better with salt and lime, but of course they didn’t have any limes or even lemons or anything, and just salt was kind of nasty. He drank about half the glass. 

“I’m going to drop out,” Sinder said.

Gavin put the half-finished glass down on the coffee table.  No more.  Clearly morning tequila had been a bad idea.

“Why?”

“Let’s see.”  Sinder took a cinnamon donut out of the box, pulled a piece off of it.  “You won’t be here. Randy hates me. I’m sick of philosophy. I have nothing of value to contribute to the study of ethics.  I hate New Buffalo.  I fucking hate Indiana.”

He pressed the chunk of donut into a greasy disk, rolled it into a ball, pressed it back into a disk.

“Okay,” Gavin said.  Calm, adult, reasonable. “What are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know.”  He threw the ball of donut in a neat arc at the coffee table.  It dropped into Gavin’s shot glass, plunk.  Little bits of grease and flour floated up to the surface.  “Move somewhere.  I haven’t figured it out yet.  I mean, I could do anything.”

It was true.  Anyone could do anything, couldn’t they.  He watched Sinder lean across the couch, grab Gavin’s tequila with the dissolved donut pieces floating in it, swallow it down.  Anyone could do anything they wanted to, and there was nothing you could do to stop them. 

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