I Still Need ✓

35. I'm gonna be walking on air

"Oh, stop moping, dude," I said. "It's in the same town."

"Hey!" He slapped my arm. "Back at it again with the 'dude'?"

"What, you want me to call you babe? My love? Sweet cheeks?!" I rolled on top of him to shout it in his ear. "Ah, mi amor!"

He covered his ears.

"Baby cakes, dearie! Listen to me, love of my life!"

"I love you, but shut the fuck up!"

As I tried (and failed) to stop laughing, you can trust Floyd to be the sober one and suddenly ask dead-serious, "If you had to choose a boyfriend name, which would you choose?"

"That's simple," Dylan said. "Boyfriend. Just 'boyfriend'."

I put my hands on my sides and said in the most annoying voice I could muster, "Suck my dick, boyfriend."

"Not if you say it like that, boyfriend. Go clean your mouth."

"Why don't you clean my room, boyfriend?"

"No."

Floyd burst out laughing and randomly pulled on Dylan's hair, and the poor guy yowled in pain. Floyd had made pulling on his hair a habit, for some reason. It got Dylan seriously pissed off every single time—it was absolutely hilarious—but this didn't stop Floyd from doing it. His favorite activity was braiding it, even though he had no idea how to do it.

"Ow! Pull any harder and I'm going to go bald!" He pinned Floyd to the bed and started tickling him to take revenge. "I should just cut it all off!"

"Fuck no," I said. "That is not going to happen."

"Then you can tell boyfriend number three that he shouldn't be pulling out the hairs one by one instead."

I couldn't even imagine Dylan with short hair. It probably looked weird. I tried to see it in my head as I looked at him, but the image just wouldn't come to me. Ever since I'd met Dylan, he'd had long hair, and I had to admit, back then, I had thought it looked amazing. I was already having gay thoughts.

"Why are you staring at me?"

"Remember first year of high school? Your hair came to your shoulders. I think that's the shortest I've ever seen you have it."

"Yeah, I cut it off in middle school because I lost a bet," he sighed. "It took a while to grow back. It looked hideous."

This called for scouring the internet for pictures of Dylan with short hair, which had all of us bullying one another with the old pictures we dug up. They even found one of me with my ex-girlfriend and this was absolutely hysterical to them.

When we went to college together, there'd be more than enough time to make new memories. I couldn't wait. I constantly felt like I was getting to the end of a book and waiting for the writer to finally publish the sequel. Yet, even if everything seemed to be back to normal, there was still some paranoia left. Whatever happened to Joe the blackmailer was a mystery, because after the stunt he'd pulled, he'd kind of disappeared off the face of the earth—well, the school, that is—but there was still the possibility of someone finding out that Eve was DukeCockroach. Fortunately, she was good at keeping it a secret. Now that she no longer talked about her close friends or things that happened in her class in particular, it was impossible to find out who she was.

I eventually logged into the twitter account Eve had made for me and discovered that there was a surprising amount of people who actually wanted to talk to me. I even got some questions from other gay kids who wanted to know if I was out of the closet and how I dealt with coming out and everything. I was shocked they wanted advice from someone they didn't even know, but I liked giving it, so I didn't mind. Neither did Dylan and Floyd, who occasionally liked to steal my phone and troll people as DukeCockroach's brother's evil boyfriend.