“Oh, fuck off.” Mari rolled her eyes. “I stole a couple of blue books last semester for finals week.” She shrugged, then jutted her chin out. “I’m not at all surprised thatyouhave a story, though.”
“Obviously, me and the boys stole the Lucky the Bulldog statue before finals week freshman year.”
“No way,” Cole said.
“That wasyou?” Mari gasped. “Administration was pissed!Iwas pissed. I got a B on my bio exam and I always thought it was ’cause I didn’t get to rub his nose before class.”
“Oh, a B, thehorror—” said Tony.
“Wait, where is it now?” asked Cole.
“Proudly in Epsilon Epsilon Phi’s trophy room, god help him,” Tony said, and made a sign of the cross over his chest.
Brennan remembered to breathe again with the spotlight off him, glad to let Tony recollect his shenanigans as long as he wanted. But of course—
“Anyways, what about you, Brennan?” Tony asked.
On one hand, he appreciated that Tony was trying to include him. On the other hand,fuck.
Brennan floundered under the weighted gazes from all three of them. The alcohol sloshed in his stomach in warning.
“I stole the key to the top floor of Smith,” Brennan said, and it wasn’t a lie. Smith’s tenth floor was a fancy event space with floor-to-ceiling windows and open spaces for tables or dancing. It was mostly reserved for fancy highbrow events for big donors, which meant the best view on campus was eternally locked and restricted. “I used to go there to hang out.”
To stargaze and people watch and get away from everything on campus that left him feeling overwhelmed and alone. He’d bring snacks and drinks, sitting on the floor and watching campus from above, making up stories about the people who passed. He didn’t feel so lonely that way.
“Not anymore?”
Brennan blinked away the memory. Cole’s head was tilted with the question, and he wasn’t watching Brennan like it was a test anymore. He seemed interested. Maybe a little sad.
Suddenly Brennan regretted saying anything, regretted having tried to hang out with them at all. It was far from the first time Brennan had started what sounded like a fun story only for it to turn dark and depressing and uniquely embarrassing.
“I got caught last semester, they took the key back,” Brennan said, simple, like it was no big deal. But it had actually been abigdeal to him, at the time. The top floor had been his safe space to think and be alone and let the vastness of the universe comfort him instead of scare him. But he’d slipped up and ran into a janitor, and that was the end.
Maybe two weeks after that, he went to the woods to the bridge to nowhere and made the big attempt.
“Too bad, that would’ve made a great party spot,” Tony said.
Mari jumped in with her next Never Have I Ever, but her voice went out of focus as Brennan’s thoughts turned loud and fast and the world tilted sideways. It was the classic, unfortunately familiar feeling of folding into himself: spiraling. The physical sensation of depression and anxiety washed over him like a wave.
This was ridiculous. What was he doing here, playing these games and pretending these people were his friends, pretending he could be normal? He wasn’t normal before he became a bloodsucking monster, so he sure as hell wasn’t now. Brennan knew it. Cole knew it, too.
Brennan set his drink down when he realized his hands were shaking. The ringing in his ears turned louder. He stood up from the floor and barely mumbled an “excuse me” before fleeing the room.
Coffee, he thought, coffee was a distraction. Coffee helped. Step-by-step helped. He could hide himself in the kitchen, blessedly out of view from the others but not separated by a door. He heard some whispered concern but couldn’t let himself focus on it. Mari and Tony were probably lamenting what a weirdo he was. Cole was probably telling them everything, that he was a monster, that he had the audacity to think he could handle being a bloodsucking creature on his own—
Coffee filter, he commanded. His limbs didn’t want to cooperate.
The absolute worst thing—the thing he refused to think about or process until he was confronted with undeniable evidence that it was true: vampires tended to be immortal. That was their whole schtick. They drank blood in exchange for endless life.
Endless.
Life.
He moved for the filter, put it in the machine.
The world is big, filled with billions of people, all with a finite time on earth to make their lives matter. It was something that kept Brennan awake at night through the end of high school and most of college so far, when the heavy weight of understanding his place in the world settled over him in a dark curtain.
What did anythinghedid matter?
