The next day, Winona and I packed our bags and sauntered our way out of our creaking apartment and back toward the soft, flabby lifestyle of the cul-de-sac estates of Milton, Massachusetts.

  Despite the events of the night before, neither of us had gotten drunk, but we still weren’t in any hurry to head down there. We spent the morning packing our bags and gently roughhousing over what we needed and what could stay behind for the time being.

  Was it a waste to rent an apartment neither of us would be living in for the rest of the school year? Probably. But we didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t get our deposits back, and we couldn’t bring Triple H here either, since the apartment didn’t allow pets of any kind.

  “Anything that makes a horrible cracking noise if it falls should stay behind,” I announced. “…Which means all your Navajo cutlery isn’t coming.”

  Winona had all the kitchenware bundled in her arms. “Nuh-uh,” she rebuked.

  “Yes-uh,” I replied. “You can’t be carrying that stuff around the Boston subways. People will think you’re trying to offer them a gram or something.”

  It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. All sorts of eccentric characters hung around the Boston subway these days, and I didn’t want Winona being painted with the same brush as the usual suspects.

  Thankfully, my parents were leaving their car for us to use. No more missed trains or buses while carrying hundreds of dollars’ worth of music gear. We could just throw everything into the back of the green Ford pickup and drive to whatever lovely establishment we were booked in.

  We waited until after two, once my mother had texted to say they’d left and were on their way to Montréal. Winona didn’t want to speak to her. I didn’t blame her, and I didn’t want to be caught in the middle of a tense feud either.

  I didn’t want to say farewell myself. Not out of a lack of love or care — farewells, with all the fuss and headaches and brazenly bizarre displays of affection, just weren’t my thing.

  I hadn’t taken much with me. Just the bass guitar strapped to my back and a small bag filled with clothes, along with the Powerpuff Girls landline we needed to bring along. Once we’d settled in, the rest of the day would be spent deciding which telecommunications company offered the best home landline package.

  I smiled as Winona struggled mightily with all the Navajo ornaments she’d taken with her. She didn’t want to leave it to chance and have the landlord snooping around the place and helping himself to her most cherished possessions.

  According to her, they’d been handcrafted by relatives in Arizona, using the dark ground of the landscape and the blue hue of the sky as the basis for their colours. Some of the plates were even marked with Navajo tribal symbols. I liked them. They beat the plastic plates we’d used when we’d first moved in.

  “You can always leave them back,” I whispered.

  “Never!”

  “Not even if Triple H starts snooping around and licking them?”

  “He gets to lick them as long as there are leftovers on them,” she said, catching up to me despite the burden she was carrying. “I’m going to spoil him rotten for these next few months.”

  Winona got a lot closer to Triple H than she wanted to when the door opened and he suddenly threw himself at her with a thousand furies. He licked at her and scratched at her, and it didn’t help that Winona had dabbed some mascara and concealer on before she’d left.

  “Nathan, get your stupid mutt off me!” she roared.

  At least one happy reunion had unfolded. I looked over at the driveway and saw the green Ford still parked there. It felt good to finally be able to drive again.

  “You wanted to spoil him rotten,” I said, “and that’s what you’re doing.”

  “Just get him off me and stop the make-out session!” she gargled between breaths.

  I reached around Triple H’s abdomen and lifted him off her.

  He’d grown lighter. In fact, he’d aged quite a bit since I’d last seen him too. The golden locks had faded away, replaced with dull grey fur that wouldn’t be out of place in a retirement home. He didn’t have much time left, and that saddened me. I reached for his collar and saw the familiar plastic HHH name tag wrapped around his neck. It was him.

  “Hungry?” I asked.

  “A little,” Winona mumbled as she got up. “Those Chinese leftovers from last night aren’t the best start to a day.”

  “Not you,” I said in mock disdain. “I meant Triple H.”

  He nodded at me, but his dark eyes had sunk further into his face. My heart broke. Father Time really did stand undefeated against everyone.

  “Alright, boy, how about a sausage sandwich? With bacon? And some fresh eggs to boot?”

  He wriggled in my grip with excitement.

  “Okay, let’s get your fry on.” I turned back to Winona. “Don’t forget to take my bags into the living room, would you?”

  “Yes, master of the house,” she grumbled.

  “This place is very dirty,” Winona said aloud, letting her fingertips streak over the dust and cobwebs that had settled on the living-room mantelpiece.

  “It’s always been this dirty, Winona,” I said. We’d had our strange breakfast–brunch–lunch quasi thing together with Triple H, and now we were wandering through the house.

  “It didn’t feel this dirty when I came over,” she replied.

  “That’s because you only came over when there was a party going on,” I said. “Then we had to make sure everything was spotless.”

  It was true. Suddenly we’d all put our elbow grease in to get rid of whatever grimy rapscallion spots had eluded us once we were going to have guests over. Often the only time the house felt alive was when there were many people sharing its walls—which was the way it had been built for.

  “Couldn’t you hire a maid once a month or something?”

  “Getting a Brazilian maid isn’t enough to keep a place spotless, Winona,” I shrugged. “Besides, we couldn’t afford it on my parents’ salaries.”

  “Is that why it’s so cold as well?” Winona shivered. “The only damned spot in the house that isn’t cold is the fireplace, and your mutt sits next to it.”

  “Well, it’s hard to keep central heating going in a place like this,” I murmured. “You do remember that my parents are rad-techs?”

  “Which means they’re not rich,” Winona chided, “but they seemed rich.”

  “You can appear rich and not be rich,” I countered. “They wanted to be like that. They didn’t like being reminded they were a working-class couple from Quincy.”

  She moved over to the windows and ran her hands up and down the crimson curtains. The colour had withered over the past few years, but one could still make out that they’d once been intended to be red. My parents had never replaced them. They held far too much sentimental value for a pair of curtains.

  “But they were caught out, eventually.”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “How so?”

  “Well, when you’re the only couple in this estate that drives a Ford pickup truck over a Mercedes…”

  Winona snorted.

  “We weren’t invited to any more cocktail parties once our working-class roots had been sniffed out by the bluebloods next door,” I added.

  She snorted again.

  “If it seemed like a constant headache, then it was.”

  Winona wrapped the not-red curtains around her like some kind of robe.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Then why didn’t you sell this place if it were such a headache?”

  “They liked living in it,” I murmured. I liked living in it too, but only when there were more people about. It was too big for a family of three and a dog to live in—so much empty space for a child to get lost in and scream and shout, but with no other children around to keep him company.

  Hours spent on your own, especially when the house was divided by two imaginary lines when your parents weren’t speaking over some slight argument, or whether or not one of them had been ogling one of the bluebloods next door. I hated those days. Hated, hated, hated them.

  “It’s still too big, but maybe that’s just my imagination.”

  “It isn’t just your imagination, Nathan.”

  “It always feels a lot bigger when we leave that apartment of ours,” I said. Then I frowned. “I actually kind of miss it now.”

  “You mean with all the damp mould and rat infestations we had a few weeks back?”

  “It was still our home,” I said. I went up to her and gently pried the red curtain off her shoulders. “That’s a priceless artefact, you know. Can’t you see dressing up in it will ruin its asking price?”

  “Your mother would hate that,” Winona sniped.

  “I know, no need to remind me.”

  I was about to shutter the curtains against the wall again when I noticed something across the estate from us.

  Someone was moving in. There were U-Haul vans and truckers going in and out of the house with large boxes of art supplies, while a posse of arthoes giggled incessantly outside the front gates.

  Arthoes. Giggling. In a posse together.

  I didn’t need to see the silhouette of his dark, spiky hair and heavily framed glasses to know who it was.

  “Huh. Would you look at that.”

  “What?”

  “Benjamin Renzetti is moving in opposite us.”

  Winona’s expression snapped from calm indifference into sudden fanatical obsession.

  “Where?!?”

  I pointed to the house in front of us. “There.”

  She looked, then grabbed hold of my arm. “Come on, we have to welcome the newest neighbours to the cul-de-sac.”

  “Winona, we are the newest neighbours here,” I said.

  “Then I meant newest newest neighbours,” she nearly yanked my left arm out of its socket as she dragged me down the first flight of stairs. “C’mon!”

  “Why do you need me there again?” I asked.

  “For protection.”

  “From a posse of arthoes?”

  Winona nodded. “That, and I still need your help winning his heart.”

  Winning his heart. Something about that caused a deep pang to bloom in my own chest as well.

  “Could we at least wait until the arthoe posse goes first?” I said. I held firm to Winona’s green sweater to stop her from bolting out the front door.

  “But whyyyyyyy?” she mockingly whined.

  “Well, for one, Benny over there is up to his eyeballs in the arthoe posse already,” I reddened. The innuendo wasn’t lost on Winona either, and she reddened too.

  Benjamin was working the arthoe line, signing autographs and whatever other memorabilia his fan club had gathered about him while on campus. There was a massive horde of them outside now, a stampede only being prevented by the large fences the U-Haul truckers were steadily putting up on Benjamin’s behalf.

  “Remember what I said about being unique in the quest for his heart?”

  “How I shouldn’t fall in line with the rest of them?” Winona murmured.

  I nodded. “Patience. You’d just be another dime-a-dozen arthoe itching to glomp him.”

  Glomp him. Now that was a term I hadn’t heard in a long time. Not since my hazardous Twilight fandom days, at least.

  “So what should I do until then?” Winona asked.

  I gestured to her face. “You still look very smeary from the impromptu make-out session with Triple H, remember?”

  Winona looked in the hallway mirror and was dumbstruck by her reflection. Her mascara and concealer were everywhere. Had she walked out like that, her whole campaign to win Benjamin’s heart would’ve come crashing down in a fit of arthoe giggles.

  “Clean up a bit,” I ordered, “then maybe spruce up a bit?”

  “Sex-wise?”

  I nodded. “You’re going to have to get his heart racing, somehow. Bring anything risqué from the apartment with you?”

  Winona shuffled her feet. “Well, there is something, but I can’t wear it right now.”

  “No, you can’t. You’ll be riddled with knives from the posse out there before you can even get to Benjamin.”

  “Maybe it might be best to wait then,” Winona whispered, letting go of her grip on the door handle.

  “However long it takes,” I added. “Now how about some Overwatch 2 in the meantime?”

  The evening rolled on, and Benjamin had his hands full dealing with irate U-Haul truckers and obnoxious fangirls crowding him wherever he moved around his front garden.

  I didn’t notice this myself, but Winona did. Even as we were playing Overwatch 2 together in the living room, she kept sneaking glances through the windows to see what Benjamin was doing at any given moment.

  She filled me in repeatedly on his exploits, and I filled her back with repeated cries to keep her mind focused on the goddamn match we were playing, and not to let it wander over what Benny Renzetti was doing in his own free time.

  Hours passed, and Benjamin was still busy. Winona began to panic, realising she didn’t want to step on his toes once he was spent from dealing with people all afternoon. I told her not to worry and that, considering how poorly we were doing in Overwatch 2, she should rush upstairs and get changed, since we weren’t going to win anyway.

  Like an elf paladin guarding a fire, I kept watch. Winona took her sweet time getting ready upstairs, and I watched Benjamin slowly push away all the annoying hangers-on who had followed him.

  Then he started moving in our direction.

  In the direction of our house.

  In the direction of where Winona and I lived — all the while a horrible posse trailed after him, watching his every move.

  Then he sprinted.

  They sprinted after him.

  Then he was banging his hands against the door, yelling and screaming for someone to help him, and I quickly followed suit to let him in.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, man,” I shouted. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “I had to get away from them,” he heaved.

  “Them?” I asked, pretending to be oblivious. “You mean there’s a zombie apocalypse going on outside?”

  “Worse!” He grabbed my shoulders and shook me steadily. “The uncultured swine of Boston University who’ve become enraptured with me!”

  “The uncultured…” I breathed in. “Look, calm down, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re not going to munch on you,” I said. “They’re just a bit obsessive. Coffee?”

  He nodded. I motioned for him to sit down on the couch and I headed into the ensuite to put a cup on him. It was only when I was reaching for the espresso pod and asked if he wanted milk or sugar within it, did I realise Benjamin Renzetti was sitting inside my parents home.

  A Benjamin Renzetti who was totally unaware of one Winona Bluebird sexing herself up on the floor above us. I sighed, bringing his warm cup of Espresso coffee over to him.

  “Here you go,” I murmured.

  “Thanks, Mr….” He stopped.

  “I’m not that old,” I grumbled, but it wasn’t my lack of a withered face that had caught him off guard.

  “You’re that Connolly guy, right?” he said, “the one always doing Felicity Brigham’s homework?”

  There was a pause, then I gave a reluctant nod. “…How did you know that?”

  He shrugged. “She told me once, we’re in the same group chat together.”

  Right. The popular kids stick together. I should’ve known, considering the amount of high school TV dramas I’ve watched over the years.

  “I hope that isn’t common knowledge,” I murmured.

  “Kinda hard not to be when you follow after her like a lost soul,” Benjamin replied.

  “Do I really stand out that badly as a sore thumb?”

  He shook his head. “Not as a sore thumb….but maybe as Felicity’s overworked mule.”

  I groaned.

  “Maybe someday she might give you a faint scowl as a reward,” Benjamin teased.

  I wanted to snap back at him, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t think of any snappy comeback that would send him flying onto his butt or outside the door. Not that I would want that, considering he’d be ripped to pieces by a posse of art hoes. Even I have my standards.

  “Why did you come here, anyway?”

  Benjamin loosened. “I saw someone I knew in the window earlier,” he explained.

  “Winona?” I asked.

  He nodded. “You’re friends, aren’t you?” He stirred the coffee around with his teaspoon. “I saw her poking her head out the window from time to time.”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, “she’s really into with you.”

  “How into?”

  “Enough to willingly model for you naked.” I snapped, but I needed some sort of catharsis for the dull ache in my heart. It felt like salt was being rubbed into it with Benjamin Renzetti inside my home, teasing my obsession with Felicity while Winona was sexing herself upstairs for him.

  He blinked. “It’s not really naked, just boudoir shots. I’m trying photography.”

  “Right,” I said. “And you need Winona to do that.”

  He smiled faintly. “Work does go by fast with a pretty girl at your side.”

  On second thought, I should just throw him out now and be done with it. Let him be ravaged by the horde of insolent art hoe swine he so desperately wanted to get away from.

  “Nathan, who are you talking to?”

  I didn’t even have time to turn around. Winona was halfway down the staircase, dressed in pink babydoll better suited for a private night by herself than an unexpected guest.

  She bit her lip when the dishevelled artist came into view. Really, do women have no shame?

  “I-I’m talking to Benjamin, Winona…” I mustered out. “…He wanted to get away from his fans, and I couldn’t say no to a pleading man with…”

  “With?” Winona raised an eyebrow.

  “…tears in my eyes,” Benjamin finished. “I was glad to get out of there, thanks to your buddy, Nathan.”

  She smiled at him, and suddenly I felt like a grey wallflower once more, blending into the background as Winona sauntered down the stairs and started talking to Benjamin.

  She was animated. Lost in his gaze. Babbling on about a multitude of things I’d never heard Winona speak about before—to me or to anyone else—but with him she just let the words come undone.

  He made another one of his self-deprecating jokes, and Winona laughed, and I felt myself and my whole world coming apart. It was all a blur—but I wanted it to be a blur. I didn’t want it to become so crystal clear to me how much in life I fell short in comparison to Benjamin Renzetti.

  Then he took her hands into his, whispering soft, sheen promises about spending time with her and how they should do this more often, and I nearly wanted to puke all over them.

  Winona was enraptured. How could she not be? But how could she not see through this clean fa?ade from a man who had a whole list of women in the background ready to tear Winona’s hair out just to be with him? Winona wasn’t his first or last muse, but she was still starstruck.

  “Nathan,” Winona said, not even turning to look at me, “me and Benjamin are going out to get something to eat, okay?”

  “Okay…” I mumbled. I didn’t even bother mentioning how I was already making dinner for her; that was going to wait now.

  “We probably won’t be back until late in the night,” Benjamin added. “You don’t mind if I steal her for a few hours?”

  He pulled her into his grasp, and Winona giggled in delight.

  “No…” I replied, but Benjamin was grinning at me—a razor-sharp smile that said she was already his, and there was nothing in the whole world I could do about it.

  “Very well, McDonald’s, Winona?” he asked.

  She nodded. She was so smitten she couldn’t even get any words out.

  “I’ll keep watch of the zombies outside when you go,” I muttered, but neither of them heard me. Suddenly they were gone, bolting out the back door while the rest of Benjamin’s deranged fans clawed and started to pick away at the brick walls that stood in their way.

  I stood there for a while, resisting the urge to run up to my room and call it a night. Instead, I pretended I wasn’t hurt. Pretended Winona hadn’t just suddenly up and ditched me and run away with Benjamin in tow for a late night on the town that was reminiscent of what we got up to when we were younger.

  Then, wiping away the mist that had frothed at the corners of my eyes, I took hold of the TV remote and put on Night of the Living Dead, pretending the hordes outside were the same zombies I was watching on TV, looking to feast on my flesh and bones.