Clockworld, by Joanne Smyth, part 2

Aubrey’s story — that is, Aubrey’s part in the larger story, which might as well be called the shit that happened to Xiaoping Hathaway — begins a few minutes past midnight on Monday.

Aubrey and Hathaway are sitting on the roof of the Kruger-Wei science complex. Backs against the faux-plastic tiles, feet tucked in the guttering for balance. They’re getting high, of course. Hathaway always talks about how he and Aubrey should do more shit together, but there’s nothing to do in Blackhall, so doing shit always winds up meaning doing drugs.

Aubrey and Hathaway have been getting fucked up together for years — long before Josie Cooper entered the picture. It’s become a routine, really, like the Sunday roasts back home. The weed they’re smoking is a gift from this biochem girl Hathaway knows — well, sort of a gift, she let him get it at a discount because he pashed her once by the shuttle dock. The leaf is kinda brown and dry, but it smells okay and Hathaway, lying on his back on the plastic slates, says it's top shit.

“What is this weed, anyway? Is it an upper or a downer or a mindfuck?” Aubrey sucks the taste of it — sugary and bitter at the same time — off his golden fingers.

“Mindfuck, I think,” says Hathaway, frowning through his fringe. “It’s a hybrid but it’s based on the same stuff that grows on all the lawns. That’s why they cut the grass on the oval so short. You can dry it and smoke it.”

“Bullshit,” says Aubrey.

“If you say so.”

Aubrey takes the joint, rests it against his lips. Doesn’t inhale. Wrapped up in that thin white paper, he knows, is the very essence of Clockworld. This fucking planet is an upper and a downer and a mindfuck all at once.

It smells like candy.

On an impulse Aubrey leans forward, balancing his weight on the gutter and Hathaway’s unresisting shoulder. From the top of Kruger-Wei you can see all of Blackhall campus, those big stern buildings made out of resistant plastics, and then beyond them the alien jungle, unexplored and nauseatingly blue-green. Aubrey drinks in that sight, and remembers, in a distant, dreamy way, sitting on the balcony of his house back home and staring out at the familiar skyscape of neon and concrete.

“Weird, isn’t it,” says Hathaway.

“What is?”

“The jungle. The jungle is right outside. You walk twenty metres outside those gates and you’re in the middle of an alien planet.” Hathaway makes a small, nervous motion that’s not quite a shrug. “No one else seems to notice.”

“I do.”

“Josie doesn’t.”

“Yeah, well, Josie isn’t like us.” Aubrey snickers. “I think most people have an off switch in their head that they flip when someone shows them something they don’t want to know about. Like, take bacon. Everyone knows where bacon comes from. I mean, they kill pigs. They keep them in cages, and they suffer, and then they’re slaughtered and they scream, they scream all the time. But if we thought about that every time we ate bacon we’d go mad, right?”

Hathaway looks at him with big dumb cow eyes. “I’m a vegetarian.”

“Of course you are.”

They pass the joint for a bit in silence. A comfortable silence. Josie Cooper might be Aubrey’s best friend, but Aubrey has always felt — there’s no better way to say it — closer to Hathaway. Maybe it’s because they’ve known each other longer. And also because, well, they’ve always looked a little alike. They’re both half-Chinese, half-English, with similar round faces, similar mouths. Both have a tendency toward freckles and bad teeth. Aubrey’s far better looking, and he’s inherited his father’s frosty blue eyes — but really, the pair of them could be cousins.

When Aubrey gets really stoned, he can look at Hathaway and squint and it’s like looking at himself.

“Are you okay, Aubrey?” Hathaway asks. “Is there anything I can, um, do for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” says Hathaway, gesturing. Gesturing at Aubrey’s body, with that look in his eye that Aubrey knows too well, the look that calculates BMI and body-fat percentage in a blink. The look everyone at Blackhall gives him at one point or another.

“Oh, you’re my fucking shrink now?” says Aubrey, curling his lip. It’s hard to be fat. Sometimes Aubrey wishes he was a cutter or a drinker or a proper junky, because those are things you can hide — at least for a while. Being fat, and in particular, getting fatter, is like holding up a neon sign that says: MAJOR ISSUES, RIGHT HERE.

Hathaway blushes. “I mean, you know, stuff,” he says. “With the Slovak.”

“What stuff with the Slovak?”

“Josie didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“I can’t. I… you’d react badly. Because of your, your…” Hathaway swallows. Aubrey’s sociopathy (presumed, if not officially diagnosed) is something everyone knows but no one ever talks about — and would certainly never, ever, mention to Aubrey's face. “Ugh, man. I’m high. Don’t mind me. I’m talking shit.”

“What.”

“Look, you guys are… I don’t know. You’re like my family. Like my brothers.” Hathaway puts on that wheedling, desperate voice Aubrey’s heard him use when he’s trying to up-sell stingy customers. “I really love you guys. You guys are like… seriously… like, you know…”

But words fail him, or maybe he’s already too high to think clearly. Hathaway’s sentence trails off into mumbles and sighs.

“Aw, you’re adorable,” says Aubrey, pinching Hathaway’s cheek. Pitching his voice in a deeper, all-American Josie drawl. “We love you too, baby-doll.”

“Thanks, man.”

Then they get higher and talk about dumb stuff and Aubrey forgets about this weird little conversation until later, when it all starts to make sense.

Planet Clockworld is a long-ass way from Earth.

It's a fully habitable planet with an Earth-like atmosphere and six colonies scattered across its main (and only) continent. Most of the colonies are agricultural but at some point a less-than-bright spark decided it'd be a good idea to build a school there. The school is Blackhall and it's for rich posh kids with rich posh parents who can't be fucked actually being parents.

Living on another planet is supposed to teach the kids bullshit about fending for themselves and growing up. Aubrey finds that real funny because the Blackhall intake starts at first year — which means there are kids on Clockworld who are like, eleven years old.

It’s a little terrible when you think about it, but most people don’t.

Aubrey has this theory that they all got sent to Clockworld because they were bad people. It’s like how the British deported all those criminals to Australia in the 1700s. Only Aubrey doesn’t know how an eleven year old kid could do anything to deserve this: the isolation, the displacement, and, fuck, the drugs, which are everywhere, which are endemic, as much a part of Blackhall’s culture as the school mascot and the twelfth year formal.

Maybe that theory doesn’t pan out so well, but Aubrey’s got another: the school is part of an intergalactic social experiment. You put a thousand over-privileged kids on a planet where just about everything is smokable, and then wait to see what happens. The idea feels a little ‘Lord of the Flies’-esque in its wicked simplicity. (Often, when forcibly pushing other people’s buttons, Aubrey wonders how close he is to earning a rock to the skull.)

Aubrey has a lot of theories about why they’re here, and about where here really is. The theories have been getting more imaginative with each passing year. Aubrey’s shrink says it’s because Aubrey’s getting better at expressing himself, but Aubrey knows it’s because he’s losing context. He’s starting to forget what the world is like, the world outside Blackhall and planet Clockworld.

Aubrey hasn’t been back to earth for nine years. In one more year — his post-prep — he’ll have lived on Clockworld for as long as he’s lived in the real world.

And that’d make anyone pretty fucked up in the head, right?

At Blackhall there’s a sort of unofficial club for the school’s head-cases. Real head-cases, that is — not the nervy kids who faint before their exams, or the jock-types with bad attitudes, or the sad girls who vomit painfully and not-very-secretly in the bathrooms after lunch. It’s a club for people like Aubrey: the kids who are nutty enough to get their particular psychology printed across their secret student files in big red letters.

The BORDERLINE PERSONALITYs.

The OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVEs.

The BI-POLARs.

The SOCIOPATHs.

And sometimes people like Hathaway, too, kids who’ve managed to slip through the cracks of Blackhall’s mental health system because their particular brand of insanity tends to manifest in quiet, unimposing, unimpressive ways.

The head-case club doesn’t have meetings or events like the other special-interest clubs at Blackhall. Sometimes the head-cases have school-ordered group therapy together. Now and then they congregate in twos and threes in the library to compare drugs and dosages. But mainly they see each other in the school corridors. Their eyes meet as they pass by, and they’ll share a look.

And the head-cases say to each other, silently, in that look:

Something is wrong here, and I can’t get out.

A year ago, before all that business with the Slovak, Aubrey was seeing a uni-prep called Betts Darling. Betts is — was, he’s still not comfortable framing their relationship in the past tense — Aubrey’s secret girlfriend. They were together for months, and no one knew, not even Josie. (Aubrey did consider telling Josie. But didn’t, mainly because he knew it’d break poor Josie’s heart.)

It wasn’t love that bound him and Betts together, and it definitely wasn’t sex, because they never actually did it. But in a way it was better than love or sex, it was solidarity, two head-cases against the rest of the world.

Aubrey met Betts in group therapy. The group therapy sessions they attended were about addiction and clearly they didn’t work, because Aubrey never quit smoking or over-eating and Betts never quit pulling out her hair in huge clumps. She’d barely got any hair left by the end, and what remained was wispy and thin.

Betts’s shrink, Dr Mulgary, said Betts had a chemical imbalance in her brain, but Betts was fine before she came to Clockworld. Betts thought Clockworld was making her pull out her hair. She thought it was the isolation and the displacement and, fuck, the drugs. ‘How can you not go mental here?’ she used to say.

Aubrey didn’t really listen, because, well, chicks say weird shit sometimes. But then he went to her dorm one day to share a joint and found her lying on her back on the floor, giggling.

All around her were the remains of her text books, torn up into tiny pieces so they looked like snow.

Also: she was naked.

Aubrey carried Betts to Dr Mulgary, and Mulgary signed some forms, and Betts Darling was sent — still giggling — back to earth and the real world.

Which was all she’d ever wanted, really.

A month later Betts wrote to him.

Hey, fatty. WHAT’S UP? You’ll be pleased (or maybe jealous) to know I’m finally feeling like ME again. Even got an ALL CLEAR from my psychiatrist. Coming off my pills FOR GOOD next month. I told you, there’s something in the GODDAM water on that planet. Something FUCKING TERRIBLE.

ANYWAY. I’m getting my life together and thought you’d like to know. Maybe I’ll see you when you get back here. IF YOU GET BACK HERE.

Love from your once-mental pal,

Betts Darling

PS Keep your eye on Xiaoping!!

After Betts left, Aubrey found the Slovak, which helped, because the Slovak hated him and that was invigorating in a weird way. The Slovak became a kind of therapy. Aubrey would go to the Slovak, feeling miserable, and the Slovak would make him feel even worse, until Aubrey stopped caring.

Lately Aubrey’s started to feel like he’s sinking. Like Clockworld is dragging him down, down, down, into its lush and smokeable, hallucinogenic soil. Often it seems like the only things that keep him sane — that keep him from tearing up his text books and subsiding into hysteria — are the Slovak’s (requited) hate and Josie’s (unrequited) love. The two of them are his goddam anchors in this whole mess.

Although that’s not quite true. The Slovak and Josie help, but Aubrey knows he could make it without them. Aubrey is a survivor. He’s a fucking cockroach of a man. He knows he’ll get through his final year at Clockworld without pulling a Betts Darling. He’s not going to be a casualty of this fucking planet.

He was made for pissing off bigger and better people than the miserable little shitheads at Blackhall.

An hour after Jocelyn Cooper ran away from War Vladistov’s neck-kisses, Aubrey arrived at the Farmstead. He found War hanging out with a chick from the hockey team, bouncing a tennis ball against the Farmstead’s back wall.

“Hi,” said Aubrey.

“Fuck off,” said War, without looking up.

Aubrey sat on the grass and waited and watched. The chick said something about an early-morning study session and left. War bounced the ball against the wall alone.

“You’re late,” said War.

“Did you miss me?”

War bounced the ball harder.

“We should go do the thing we do,” said Aubrey.

“Whatever,” said War, but he followed Aubrey away from the Farmstead.

Here’s a secret, Aubrey’s secret, something Josie doesn’t know.

Aubrey and the Slovak are still fucking.

“Hello, Aubrey. Do take a seat.”

“Ta, love.”

“How have you been doing?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Anything you want to talk about in this session?”

“Not really.”

“Anything troubling you?”

“No.”

“Where should we start, then?”

“Lady, you’re the shrink. You tell me.”

There's no couch in Dr Mulgary's office, just plastic chairs. Uncomfortable plastic chairs. Aubrey slumps down in his and stares at the ceiling, which is beige and has a discolouration that runs from one corner to the light fitting. He wishes he could escape from this. The shrink, the plastic chairs, the stain. It's all so... depressing.

(And it reminds him of Betts Darling, because Mulgary was her shrink, too.)

Seeing a shrink isn't that unusual; there are two at Blackhall to look after a school body of six hundred. Josie, who's so fucking normal it hurts, sees a shrink because he's American and apparently that's what Americans do, it's a thing, like going to the grocers or checking out a new movie. The Americans don't have hang-ups about their mental health. It's all fucking thinking positive and self-help and that sort of shit.

Aubrey sees a shrink because he's not technically compos mentis or whatever the fuck they call it when you're too insane to know what's best for you. He doesn't get an option to not see a shrink, even though he's nineteen now and really should get some say (surely!) about who the fuck pries into his brain. Aubrey isn't sure why he has this reputation for being a complete headcase. As a kid he was caught setting fire to things, and this one time he strangled a cat, but that was it, that was fucking it, but it's all escalated now and it's like everyone expects his next step will be to become a serial killer.

It's fucking bullshit, in Aubrey's opinion. Kids do shit that doesn't make sense, kids are impulsive. Also: fire is shiny and that cat was a fucking asshole anyway.

“Alright,” says Mulgary. “I’ll make a suggestion, and you can tell me what you think.”

“Sure.”

“Maybe we should have a talk about your weight.”

Goddammit.

“What about my weight?”

Mulgary says nothing. Aubrey knows that's a shrink tactic that's meant to get people to talk, except it doesn't work on him. Aubrey likes silences and annoying people, particularly people who (theoretically) have power over him.

“Do you know how much you weigh?” she says eventually.

“No.” Which is a lie, but it's none of her fucking business anyway. As it happens he's a little under eighteen stone, according to the scale in the gymnasium. Eighteen fucking stone. He's getting into the sort of fat-territory that means he has trouble fitting into desks. His belly spills over the waistband of his uniform, spongy as freshly kneaded dough. When he walks it jogs and sways inside his shirts.

The Slovak didn't say he hates Aubrey because of his weight, but Aubrey sometimes suspects that it’s part of it. The Slovak's a sportsman, after all. Aubrey has tried to lose the weight, but he’s usually too depressed and anyway he's never been great at the whole self control business.

“Are you worried about it?” Mulgary asks.

“Yeah,” says Aubrey.

“Did you want me to see if I can get you a booking with the nutritionist?”

“Whatever. Yes.”

Mulgary smiles. She always seems to like it when Aubrey does things to help himself. Like he's a dumb beast that's learned a simple trick. “I think she's still in her rooms,” she says. “Look, give me a second — she leaves early today, but if I get in now maybe she'll be able to see you tomorrow. How about that?”

“Sure.”

She leaves the room. She leaves the door open behind her. Aubrey yawns and stretches and gets up, opens her desk drawer, and starts flipping through the files in there. Aubrey's never really worked out that whole personal privacy shit. If people don't want him to touch shit, then they should lock it up. Especially when they leave the room to talk to a nutritionist.

Shit, it's not rocket science.

So, who should he look for? The Slovak isn’t in there. (Shame.) Neither is Hathaway. (Major oversight.) Aubrey paws his way through the drawer, searching for — well, who exactly, he doesn’t know, but he figures most of the assholes at Blackhall are fair game…

He finds Josie's file. By accident, really, as he’s skimming backwards: from V-for-Vladistov through H-for-Hathaway to C-for-Josie-The-Fucking-American-Cooper. Aubrey pulls Josie’s out, dusts down its manila envelope. This’ll be good for a laugh, he thinks. A laugh, and maybe a little casual blackmail. From one friend to another. Aubrey flips the file open and is unpleasantly surprised to discover that Josie has been a fucking bastard.

Behind Aubrey’s back.

How much of a bastard Aubrey can’t be sure, but the topmost notes suggest Josie spent his last session agonising over his best friend’s ex. And Aubrey (who’s not half as sexually exciting or experienced as he lets on) has only ever had one “ex” that Josie was likely to be interested in.

But what’s worse than his friend, his rock, hiding things from him?

The fact Hathaway knew.

Hathaway knew and Aubrey didn’t.

“What are you doing?”

Mulgary has returned. Aubrey doesn’t turn around.

“Checking out other people’s files,” he says. “Is that not what it looks like?”

He gets a detention for that. It's another thing they can do to Aubrey that they can't do to anyone else his age.

There’s no sign of Hathaway in the dorm, so Aubrey goes to the ‘shop.

Technically the 'shop is wherever Hathaway happens to be, but practically it's behind the great grey kiln outside the Mithandry building. If you're going to deal contraband at Blackhall, the Mithandry is the best place to do it. The Mithandry is where they do woodwork classes and home economics and ceramics, so there's lots of boilers and closets and junk piled up around the place. Perfect place to hide away from the prying eyes of teachers and prefects.

Selling drugs at Blackhall is easy. Every student knows the sign language of the deal: scissor-snapping fingers for pot, a thumb tapped against the nose for coke and speed, and a finger drilled into the ear for hallucinogens. Of course you can get high for free, because you can get a decent buzz out of most of Clockworld’s vegetation, if you dry it out first on your dorm radiator.

But for a controlled high, a high that you can anticipate… well, for that you need someone like Xiaoping Hathaway. An affable broker between the school’s druggies and the school’s biochemistry students.

When Aubrey gets to the Mithandry, he finds Hathaway pashing some blonde chick on an old couch. Hathaway's got all the moves right but you can tell his heart just isn't in it. Hathaway is weird — he dates girls, only girls, but everyone knows he's queer as fuck, even the girls he's fucking dating know it. Only Hathaway doesn't, Hathaway doesn't get it at all. And no one tells him. Everyone keeps the secret in that gentle, misguided way parents don't tell kids there's no Santa.

Well, almost everyone.

Aubrey kicks Hathaway's foot and says, “Heterosexual?”

“Huh?”

“Confused, I thought so,” says Aubrey. “Get up and get off her.”

“Piss off, Aubrey,” says the girl, pushing her bangs out of her face. She's pretty, with a little sharp face like an animal and teeth that stick out too far for her mouth. Aubrey thinks they were in a science class once, years ago, except her hair was longer then and suited her better. “Ping, ignore him —”

But Hathaway is already getting up, brushing bits of paint chip off his shirt. He's got a heavy side-part which falls over one eye and he looks up at Aubrey from underneath it, sheepishly, like he knows he's done something wrong. “What is it?” he asks.

The girl throws up her hands, exasperated.

“Wanted to ask you something.”

“Sure,” says Hathaway. Twitching. He's so uncomfortable that Aubrey wants to laugh, except it's hard to laugh at Hathaway because he's so goddam earnest all the time. “You wanted to, um, buy something?”

“When have I ever bought shit from you?” Aubrey is one of Hathaway's only real friends, and because of that Aubrey never has to buy drugs, has never had to make a sordid pilgrimage to the Mithandry, a wedge of notes bulging conspicuously in the back pocket of his jeans. “No. I want to know what happened with Josie and the Slovak.”

“What? I don't know. Nothing...”

“I'll fucking break your face, Hathaway. And then I’ll kill Josie. In fact, I’m going to murder him regardless of what you do or don’t tell me.”

Aubrey says all that real calm; he doesn't raise his voice or his hand. He looks at Hathaway and Hathaway starts to cry. More than anyone else at Blackhall, Hathaway knows that something inside Aubrey isn't right: when you deal with Aubrey you’re always tiptoeing around it, around the bad thing, hoping it won't trigger…

“Hathaway?” says the girl, startled. “What the shit?”

Hathaway says, burbling, “I think they made out.”

“They made out?” says Aubrey, prodding.

Hathaway is sobbing, sobbing. “I don't know, maybe they fucked. I think they fucked. I think they fucked behind the Farmstead. I think they're dating. They're in love. Shit.”

Aubrey can't parse that. Can't even begin to. Josie. Josie is his best friend. Also, Josie's fucking in love with him. Josie fucking about with the Slovak. Who's like a dumb jock asshole anyway. He's about to ask more questions but Hathaway pushes past him, still sobbing, and runs away.

“You shouldn't have done that. He's insane. Like, really insane. He might jump off the top of something.”

“You're Kate, right,” says Aubrey, looking back at the girl.

“Yeah,” she says. “Surprised you remember. You're such a shithead, Aubrey.”

“So we —”

“Third base. But it was ages ago, whatever.” She shrugs and starts brushing out her hair with her fingers. “I don't even remember why I let you.”

“Maybe you have low self-esteem,” says Aubrey.

Aubrey shares his dorm room with Josie. They haven’t always. They do now because Aubrey’s last two roommates (in fourth year, and again in fifth year) tried to commit suicide. His roommate before that (third year) tried to kill Aubrey. It’s common knowledge in Blackhall that Aubrey drives people insane as a matter of course and that living with Aubrey for an extended period of time is a health hazard — although Josie manages okay.

But Josie’s calmer than most.

Also: Josie loves Aubrey. Maybe that helps, too.

It often amuses Aubrey that Josie manages to be in love with him without really knowing who the fuck Aubrey Partington-Hale really is. The person Josie is in love with — the asshole who bullies Hathaway, who talks big about sex and drugs and life, who picks fights he can’t win for the sheer hell of it — isn’t real. That Aubrey is a symptom of a problem, and that problem is Clockworld.

The main difference between the Aubrey Josie loves and the real Aubrey is that the real Aubrey is vulnerable.

Aubrey isn’t sure how he feels about Josie and War, about War and Josie. On one hand it’s hilarious: Josie screwing Aubrey’s sloppy seconds. On the other hand it really fucking hurts. And Aubrey doesn’t even get why. He’s not normally possessive about transient shit like girlfriends and boyfriends and fuck buddies.

Hell, why should that shit matter to anyone? In another year he’s going back to England and the Slovak is going back to Slovakia and Josie is going back to America and they’ll probably never see each other again. Nothing about Clockworld is permanent, not even the people…

Except. Except it burns.

They’re in love, Hathaway said.

Aubrey wants to throw up.

When Aubrey goes back to his room, Josie is there, shadow boxing in shorts and a t-shirt. He’s wearing sneakers. No, worse: basketball shoes.

“Hey, Aubrey,” says Josie, letting his fists drop. “How’re you?”

“Yes, fine, okay.” Aubrey isn’t in the mood for small talk. “Sooo, Josie, remember what happened a few nights ago? The night I ran off.”

“Yeah?”

“Where did you go afterwards? I looked for you.”

“I, uh, I guess I looked for you too,” says Josie. “Then I came back here. I think.”

“I heard you were hanging ‘round the Farmstead.”

“Maybe I looked for you there, too. I don’t remember. We were pretty stoned that day, right?”

Josie grins. Josie looks guilty. And Aubrey knows at that moment that whatever Josie did with the Slovak doesn’t matter.

It’s not the fucking or the love shit or anything else Hathaway burbled out at the Mithandry. Aubrey already knows the Slovak is an asshole. And if Josie had asked, if Josie had admitted everything, Aubrey would have probably let it slide. Would have probably been amused by their little love triangle.

What matters, the thing that burns, is that Josie is lying.

“Oh, yeah,” says Aubrey. “Stoned.” He wants to strangle Josie, but he doesn’t, not yet. Instead he smiles in a small, tight smile. “Look, Jo. I’ve been kind of down lately. Just wanted to say, you know. I appreciate you.”

These aren’t his words. They’re dialogue from some infantile chick-flick he watched with Betts Darling, years ago. The reason Aubrey remembers this scene, and these lines, is because he and Betts spent ages laughing about it afterwards. Fuckin’ maudlin Americana, Betts called it. Saccharine, greeting-card shit, he’d agreed.

But Betts was — is — a heartless mad bitch and he’s a heartless mad bastard and (in retrospect) Aubrey thinks he wasn’t exactly the movie’s target audience.

Unlike Josie.

Whose big brown eyes are looking even bigger and browner than usual, and also a little bit watery ‘round the edges.

“Thanks, man. Um,” he says.

“I’ve always appreciated you,” says Aubrey, paraphrasing and cannibalising movie-lines. “You’ve always been my friend, my best friend. Even though I’m a head-case. You’ve stuck by me through thick and thin.” He’s holding Josie’s hand now in both of his, like he’s about to propose, and it’s so naff, but Josie is eating this up. “I feel like I can tell you anything,” Aubrey says.

“You can, Aubrey, you can.”

“And you can tell me anything too. You don’t have anything you want to tell me now, do you, Josie?”

“Um, I don’t think so.”

“Nothing?”

“Er…”

“Good,” says Aubrey. “Because I’ve got something I need to say.”

“What?”

“Jocelyn Cooper, I’m going to break your nose. Because you’re a lying, cheating piece of shit.”

“Wha — argh!”

Aubrey leaves the dorm room clutching his forehead. He’s covered in blood, more blood than you’d expect from a nose bleed. Maybe a piece of Josie’s nose-bones managed to shatter into his jugular or something. Which would serve Josie fucking right.

Hathaway comes by as Aubrey is leaning against the door, wiping the blood off his face with his shirt tail.

“What happened? Oh my god —”

“I killed him,” says Aubrey, leering. “Told you I would.”

Hathaway squints at him: that expression Aubrey does when he’s trying to see himself in Hathaway’s familiar, similar face.

Then Hathaway backs away.

Runs away.

Again.

Aubrey doesn’t care. Hathaway is so fucking incidental.

That evening, the Slovak and Aubrey do the thing they do. Afterwards Aubrey smokes and War lies on his back and looks up at the ceiling. Note: he’s looking up at the ceiling, not up at the stars, or the trees, or the guttering of the Kruger-Wei complex or the eaves of the Farmstead or the Mithandry. For once they’re in War’s dorm room, and Aubrey wonders if that means something has changed between them or — more likely — if it just means that War couldn’t be fucked going outside to find a bush.

“You’re going to set off the smoke detectors,” says War.

“Wow,” says Aubrey, exhaling through his teeth. “That’s the nicest way you’ve ever told me to fuck off and go home. It was almost subtle.”

“I’m not telling you to fuck off and go home.”

“Oh. Is this where we cuddle?”

War laughs.

And then cuddles Aubrey.

Which is as nice as it is unexpected.

About twenty minutes later, a phone rings — War’s mobile, which peeps out the first few bars of Amazing Grace. War leans over Aubrey’s chest to grab it.

“What, hello?” he says, flipping it open. Then: “What? Huh? No. Yes. Fuck, I don’t know, I’ll ask him.”

He pokes Aubrey. “It’s your boy Cooper on the line. He wants to know if you’ve seen Hathaway. Apparently the kid’s gone missing.”

(To be continued)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4