Unwrapping Hank (6 page)

I knew the fact that I wasn’t seeing him around the house, in the flesh, wasn’t an accident. He’d become the Invisible Man. A few of the other guys even commented on it. But between doing posters and recruiting actors and all of that for the party, and trying to get through my class material leading up to finals, I didn’t have a lot of time to worry about it.

This was how I saw it: Hank thought I’d come on to him, and he was uncomfortable with that. Whatever baby steps we’d made toward friendship had been scuppered. I felt really shitty about it, but I knew that ultimately it was for the best. Message received. Maybe if I played it cool and acted like I didn’t care if I ever talked to him again, we could reach some sort of polite tolerance again. Eventually.

For now, I had a Christmas party to survive.

*             *             *

Hank

The Delta Sigma Phi Christmas party of 2014 was wicked awesome. I had to admit, Frenchie did a bang-up job on the mystery part. He designed a little game and put clues up around campus, ransom notes for Santa from the ‘Justice For The South Pole League’. People were supposed to guess what it was the kidnappers wanted in exchange for Santa’s life and bring it to our party. Sloane and his team plastered posters all over campus, even at the gym, and updated them daily with a countdown. And yeah, the fake body parts were so gross! I laughed my ass off at some of the prissier reactions to them, but most people thought it was sick.
Good
sick.

The night of the party, I, and three of the other biggest Delts, dressed up like Men in Black with suits, dark shades, and JSPL pins. Micah wore a Santa outfit Sloane had picked up at some costume shop in town. We led Micah, in chains, across campus to the Delts house, inviting people as we went along. When we got to the house, the place was already rocking. There had to be a hundred people there.

We wrestled Micah/Santa into the living room, playing it up tough. Sloane and Emanuelle, Micah’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, were waiting for us. Emanuelle was dressed in a sexy elf costume, and Sloane… Sloane apparently was a reindeer. He had on skin-tight brown pants and a fitted brown T-shirt and wore antlers on his head. Every time he turned, he nearly put someone’s eye out. He pulled it off, though, managing to look like a hipster version of Rudolph. The fucker.

As we’d scripted, I pulled Micah/Santa in front of me and put a water pistol to his head. “Where’s the payoff?” I asked Sloane. “Make it quick, or the fat guy gets it.”

Sloane raised his hands and looked around helplessly at the tittering crowd. “Anybody know what these guys want?”

“We must save Santa!” Emanuelle enthused on cue.

We’d planned for the contingency that no one had actually followed the game and presented the correct solution. We had a ringer seeded in the crowd. But we didn’t have to resort to that. Four different groups of people held up a six pack of Rumspringa Old Order APA beer, the ransom the mystery clues had all hinted at.

With much hooting and hollering, we opened the big gift box we’d had out on the porch and divvied up the gift certificates, candy, and other doodads that were in there. Micah/Santa tossed them to the winners and… hostage situation negated. The jolly old elf survived to live another year.

Then… then we could fucking relax and party. I was glad to see people had gotten into the spirit of the thing. There were some cosplayers in the crowd—several pairs of Holmes and Watson, a few Bogarts and a Miss Marple—and lots and lots of dead people. There were even a half dozen dead Santas and elves dancing around.

I was loading a plate from the snack table when fuzzy red sleeves clamped around my chest and someone attempted to lift me off my feet. He managed. Barely.

“Micah, dude! Watch the plate!” I groused, but I didn’t really mind. It’d been a long time since Micah had done that, and it reminded me of when we were kids.

“Jesus, Hank, what do you eat, rocks?”

I turned to find him grinning at me. He had Sloane with him, and he brought us both in tight with arms around our backs. “Success! You guys did it. This is the best Delts party ever!”

Sloane and I looked at each other. It was the first time I’d been close to him since that night—the night he’d given me a backrub, the night I had freaked the fuck out. I still felt humiliated about it, about how I’d egged him on, how I’d felt when he sat on me—turned on and terrified, and about how I’d acted like a loon afterward. My stomach flushed hot and then cold. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry.

“Yeah, it’s a good party. Nice job, Frenchie.” I tried to sound upbeat, but I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“You too, Hank.” Sloane said other stuff, but he sounded like he was muffled in cotton through the pounding in my ears. I got away as quickly as I could. I was headed for the booze table when I saw Linda giving me the eye from across the room.

Linda was yet another girl Micah had dated briefly, and she had a thing for me. She was a cute brunette, and I… I was determined to get drunk and forget everything. I found the red and green Jello shots—I’d won that argument. I did a red one. Then I had to do a green one to compare. Then I did a third just because.

“Wanna dance?” I asked Linda, my tongue only slightly numb.

“Sure!” Linda grinned at me like I’d offered her a winning lottery ticket, and I took her hand.

The next day, I had to start studying for finals. That night? That night I was getting plowed.

*             *             *

Sloane

The thing about planning a party is, once it’s actually rolling there’s not a lot more you can do. So there’s a sense of relief, like waking up from a dreaded surgery or finding out Sherlock really isn’t dead despite having gone over Reichenbach Falls.

I wandered around making sure everyone looked like they were having a good time. But our assigned crews in charge of keeping the food and drinks replenished were on it, and everything was going smoothly. I chatted with some of the frat brothers. I watched Micah dancing with Emanuelle.

I watched Hank dancing with some buxom brunette.

The Mystery of H.S. #12: He’s surprisingly not a terrible dancer

And shortly thereafter,

The Mystery of H.S. #13: He’s kissing a woman. With tongue.

And that, I decided, was the end of the list, the last time I would concern myself with Hank Springfield. Case fucking closed.

I turned away from the sight of Hank making out on the dance floor with a girl and swallowed down a ridiculous and much loathed throb of pain. I had no one to blame but myself. I’d made the classic mistake—unrequited love—or at least unrequited lust. It was the first time it had ever happened to me in a way that was more than just a fleeting annoyance, in a way that hurt.

My parents were right. The college years were formidable in their opportunity for life-changing suckage.

“Hey, man!” It was Will, a fellow Delt. He was drunk. “Obscene party, Sloane! I’m so glad I voted for your membership.
I
am a genius.” Will toasted himself for, however circumstantially, engineering this party. He took a long drink.

“You are an intellectual giant among men,” I agreed.

“So what’re you doin’ for Christmas?” Will asked.

Ah, party small talk.

“I fly to Greece a week from Sunday,” I said over the music. “My parents just moved there.”
And I’m going to find a gorgeous gay stud on the beach, or maybe two or three, and shag their brains out. Hot, muscular guys, preferably, since I apparently have a thing for that now. And when I come back, I will have forgotten all about Hank Springfield.

“Phew, shit! Greece!” Will looked impressed. “I’m just going home to Harrisburg.” He laughed the laugh of the very drunk. “Hey, have you met Liam Donahue? I saw him around here somewhere. He’s gay too. He’s cute, I guess. I mean, whatever.”

Normally, I would have made a polite excuse and run far, far away from any straight frat boy trying to set me up. But not tonight.

“Absolutely,” I said, taking Will’s nearly empty glass. “Let’s refill this because, honestly? We need some vomiting if this is going to be a legitimate frat party. And then… let’s go find Liam Donahue.”

        ~6~

Sloane

I WAS scheduled to fly out on Sunday, December 21st. On Saturday morning, disturbingly early for the post-finals hangover I was sporting, my parents rang my cell phone. I assumed this was a standard check-in and wished I’d remembered to turn my phone off the night before. But I was awake now.

“Yeah?” I answered.

“Greg? Sorry to wake you, but we wanted to be sure to catch you this morning,” my father said.

“Mmm. Wassup?” I rubbed my face, trying to pull my head out of some weird-ass dream about flying around on the back of a monkey. My mother would have a field day with that one.

“We have exciting news. It’s a bit unexpected.” I could hear the hyper tension in my mom’s voice. That didn’t bode well. “You remember the Levensteins? He was a colleague of your father’s at NYU and she’s a surgeon at Mount Sinai. She does Doctors Without Borders too.”

I remembered them. They were ‘substantial’ people of the sort my parents loved. They had two daughters just a little older than me who were freakishly intelligent and more than a little snobby.

“Yeah.”

“Well, their Sara just spent a year in Israel, and she met a man. She’s getting married! It’s a last minute thing. They’re having the ceremony in Jerusalem on the 25th, right after the last night of Hanukkah.”

I sat up in a hurry. “
December
25th?”

“Yes, and I know we had plans to spend Christmas here in Greece but, well, what an amazing opportunity! To attend a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem at this time of year! And we’re leaving early so we’ll get to experience part of Hanukkah as well. The Levensteins were such dear friends. They’re scrambling to pull this together at the last minute, and I promised Hannah I’d be there to help.”

I closed my eyes as if I could make this entire conversation disappear. This was
just like my parents, always flittering after the next ‘amazing experience’ and never mind how it uprooted my life.

“Greg?” my mother prompted with a touch of guilt. “Now, your father’s already called the airline. Dr. Levenstein wrote you a note so we can avoid the airline change fees. We can just move your Greece tickets to spring break. The weather will be better then anyway. And we can get you a flight to Israel if you’d like to go with us. Of course, it’s ridiculously expensive last minute like this, but the Levensteins insisted on paying for
our
tickets so—”

“No,” I said.

There was silence on the other end of the line. I could picture my parents communicating to each other with their eyes.

“Tell us what you’d like to do, Greg,” my father said in his professional voice. In other words,
this is your decision, and we expect you to be mature about it
.

What I
wanted
was to spend Christmas on the beach in Greece and be with my parents. I’d actually been ready for a little parental unit time after not seeing them for four months, even though they could drive me round the twist. What I didn’t want was spend my break in a strange country with people I barely knew and with my own parents busy helping with a wedding. It was nice of them to invite me, but I didn’t want an ‘adventure’ for Christmas. I wanted… I just wanted to go home.

And where is that?

“You know what?” I said, my voice rough. I cleared my throat. “I think I’d like to just stay here. I have a ton of stuff to do, and I’ll see you guys at spring break anyway.”

“But, sweetie, we don’t want you to be alone at Christmas,” Mom complained, as if I was missing the point.

“I really think you should take advantage of the opportunity to visit Israel,” Dad advised.

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty burnt out after finals, and I want to just relax. I can hang out here. And there’s snow and… yeah. It’s fine. I’ve got friends I can spend it with. It’s perfect actually.”