Page 1 of The Note
Prologue
~Eight Years Ago~
~Tyler~
“Find the derivative,”Gus prompted. “Hello? Earth to Tyler? Wejustwent over this, dude.”
“Jesus, I don’t know.” I threw my pencil down on the kitchen table and ran both hands through my hair in frustration, but shockingly, this did nothing to dislodge any bursts of insight that might have been lurking in my brain. “The probability of me figuring it out isnegative.I’m hopeless with this shit, Gus. Dead weight. Leave me behind and save yourself.” I stretched out my arm toward him, made a choking noise, and died dramatically atop my math book.
I was a smart person. I was. The SATs said so. But my mental block regarding all things calculus was made of reinforced steel, and I didn’t have the ability to cut through it on the best of days.
This was sure as fuck not the best of my days.
Gus rolled his brown eyes and flicked my forehead with his fingernail, his legendary patience apparently all used up thanks to my antics. “Dumbass. For one thing, how many times do I have to tell you that probabilitycan’tbe negative? And you do realize that if you put half as much time into figuring shit out as you do into thinking up ways toavoidfiguring shit out, we’d be way further along now?”
“Not a dumbass,” I muttered into my arm.
“But thenyouwouldn’t be getting paid by Big Daddy Turnbull, bro,” my friend Alex, Gus’s little brother, said from the sofa, his gaze fixed on the television where he was mowing down zombies in Call of Duty. “You should be thanking my boy Tyler for being shitty at calculus so you can make an honest living while you’re on summer break.”
I pulled myself upright again. “Oh, yeah. Yup. I’m sure this is exactly the riveting, fulfilling summer job every Columbia graduate dreams of right before med school: Tutoring his math-inept next-door neighbor after school, so said neighbor won’t flunk his final and have to go to summer school, which would embarrass the fuck out of his politician father.” I snorted. “No need to thank me for this awesome opportunity, Gus.”
“I like this job just fine, Tyler,” Gus said mildly. “And you’re not just our next-door neighbor, you’re my friend. You know that.” But then he looked at his brother and frowned. “Back up the bus. Since when is heyour boy Tyler?” he demanded, sitting back in his chair and looking from Alex to me and back again. “Last I knew, Tyler was friends with bothof usequally, even if the two of you happen to be in the same grade. Something new develop that you guys wanna tell me about?”
“What?” My cheeks heated. “No.”
I knew Gus was gay — everyone knew — and I was pretty sure plenty of people suspected I was gay too, though I’d only told a couple, including Alex. That didn’t mean I was ready to come out to anyone else, though. Not even sweet, patient Gus… Mostly because sweet, patient Gus was also my hot-as-hell next-door-neighbor-and-friend Gus, and sitting next to him during tutoring was hard enough without him suspecting I had a thing for him too. If he noticed the way I sprang wood every time he leaned over my shoulder to explain partial derivatives, the shame would melt me into a puddle. So yeah, there would be no coming out today, thank you.
And Alex… Well, I’d privately started to wonder if he wasn’t a hundred percent straight. It was there in the little comments he’d let slip, the way he hesitated a fraction of a second too long before talking aboutpeoplehe was attracted to, the way he suddenly got really defensive when the assholes on our lacrosse team mentioned Gus’s sexuality, even though it’d never bothered Alex before. If I was right, though, he was Narnia-deep in the closet. How the hell could Gus have spotted it when he’d only been back from school a matter of weeks?
Alex didn’t look away from the television. “Jesus. It’s a figure of speech, old man. My boy, as in myfriend. Mycomrade. My…oh fuck!Zombie, zombie, zombie!Shit.” Alex’s chin sank to his chest as the screen flashed and he became a victim of the zombie horde. He tossed the controller to the couch cushion next to him and turned his head to look over at the table. “Not thatyoucould give me crap about it, even if I was bi or whatever, Gus, ya big flamer.” Alex’s eyes widened and he looked at me in instant apology. “Shit. Sorry, Tyler. I didn’t mean that word.”
I squeezed my eyes shut for a second.
“Oh, fuck,” Alex said. “I just made it worse, didn’t I?”
“Uh.Yeah.” Gus scratched at his short, wavy brown hair, leaving the strands standing on end. “Takes a special kind of idiot to do more damage with the apology than with the insult. Congratulations, Alex.”
“Shut up!” Alex set his jaw, but his cheeks went red. “Tyler knows I didn’t mean… anything.” His eyes pled for mercy.
“Yeah. I know, Alex,” I said. I smiled wide, so he’d believe I meant it. “It’s… totally fine.” And it was. Because it had to be.
Shit happened.
Life was unfair.
Sometimes you get dealt a bad hand.
Everything happened for a reason.
It would all be okay.
There were lots of people worse off than me.
My mom died of cancer when I was thirteen, so I knewallthe platitudes.
Gus made a noise in his throat somewhere between a cough and a choke. “I’m sorry, too, Tyler,” Gus said in a low voice. “I shouldn’t have teased in the first place. I was just—” He broke off, took a deep breath, then raised his voice again. “Anyway. You know I’m here if you wanna talk, and if not, I’ll forget anything I might have heard today. Back to the exciting world of derivatives?”
I shook my head, slamming the text book shut. “No. I can’t. It’s no use. I’m fucked.”
