Sparks and Spares

Two: The Last Time

"Till you were a hundred," Ely corrected. "I'd be ninety-nine. Or ninety-eight. Or ninety-seven?"

He flicked a fry across the table. Suffering Vera's unvoiceable self-stiflement for the past two hours had him feeling antsy.

"Fuck off," Jake said through a mouthful of hash browns. "Also, you're shit at math."

"I was being you, obviously. Acting like an idiot's just part of getting into character."

"No surprise you're a natural."

They tried to make light of it, but age had long been at the heart their trouble. That eighteen-month gulf was the second largest between them, though it kept out of sight, an undersea trench of the same dark wet salt in which Ely compiled while Jake slept on cryogenic hiatus. By the time the clone was old enough to revive his progenitor, they were the same size, ready to meet the same milestones, the funny quirk of their age remembered only twice a year by family and friends. Neither of them cared for birthdays, but only Jake, with his lost time, was allowed to show it.

They finished their meal and left a grubby snowball of ones and fives on the check. Jake drove, their mother's conscientious Prius a silent accomplice to their late excursion. A block away, he cut the headlights, and they crawled along a tall boxwood hedge until they reached a wrought iron gate. Ely leaned out the window and punched in the code by phone light; they turned the up the long driveway and stopped before a familiar brick façade choked with ivy. 

"Back so soon?" A window glowed to life on the house's west side, a tousled head poking out over the Anselm boys huddled below.

"Hurry up. It's freezing," Jake called, powdered breath occulting the stars.

The head withdrew and in its place tumbled a rope ladder.

"Gotta love your parents' Ambien addiction," Ely said as he heaved himself through the window after Jake, wrangling the ladder none too quietly.

"Yeah, their juvenile competition has perseverated to an almost abient stalemate. Out-sleeping each other is just the latest pissing contest. Beats their ukulele phase. But anyway." Marco Sepúlvedathrew himself down on a beanbag and crossed his pinstriped pajama legs, browline glasses sitting low on his nose; all he was missing was a legal pad and fountain pen. "Tell me about your achievement."

"We have crossed the Rubicon into manhood," Ely said with mock gravitas. He and Jake kicked off their jeans and slumped, yawning, onto Marco's bed and swivel chair respectively.

"'Bout time," Marco snorted. He glanced between their identical, impassive faces, smiling through the corners of his dark eyes. It was an expression Ely recognized well: smugly inquisitive, amused by his own bemusement. The aspect of a seasoned academic. When they were five it had been unnerving, like a child in a horror movie who knows too much; now it just looked ridiculous, overlarge on his adolescent features. Maybe in another ten years he would grow into it.

"What a chore, eh?" Marco needled. "Bet you're glad that's over with."

"Fuck off," Jake said.

"I'm sorry," Marco laughed. "It's just I've never seen anybody so apathetic over losing his V-card!" He leaned back, shrewd. "Was it a let down, after all that careful planning? Too fast, too fleeting, months of set up for a few slippery minutes? Now you're wallowing in the anticlimax. It's textbook, really—what Spinoza might've called postcoital tristesse—"

The Anselms bombarded him with pillows, a sneaker, and spare change from their pockets.

"Could be latent fixation, if you guys wanna get Freudian—"

A Wiffle ball bat, a dirty pair of boxers, a dog-eared copy of Antigone.

"The real mystery is how you ever got laid," Ely snorted.

"Some spontaneity helps," Marco said almost apologetically.

"I'm going to sleep," Jake announced. He lifted his sweatshirt over his head and the T-shirt beneath rode up above his navel; a curved brown line smiled between his hips, like a mirror cracked from side to side.

Marco pecked at his laptop for another hour—"Regular decision for Northwestern's due Monday, just got a few more tweaks to my essay"—as his friends pretended to sleep. The room sunk to black when he shut the screen and fumbled into bed between them, snoring in seconds. Ely opened his eyes and blinked across the rise and fall of his striped flannel back.

"Ten bucks says he wrote his essay about us," he whispered. "What his best friends have taught him about forging your own destiny. Plus some bullshit about the Jungian theory of individuality or whatever. Laying it on thick."

"You're probably right. Goddamn that's quirky. Fuckin' A. Bet admission's gonna lap it up. Wish I'd thought of it." A pause. "So what did you write ab—"

"No. We said we weren't gonna tell each other."

"Fine. Chill."

Marco breathed between them, slow and even. A smattering of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling reflected off Jake's eyes like cool will-o'-wisps.

"I'm glad we didn't hold out for sisters," Ely said. "Or twins. Not that I've ever met any under thirty."

He hung on the word "twins" with marked antipathy.

"Maybe next time," Jake laughed.

"This was the last time."

"What, you taking a vow of chastity? One and done?"

"Fuck off. You know what I mean. We agreed."

Marco mumbled something between them and they fell silent.

"I know," Jake said after a while, speech slurred with sleep. "Last time."

Ely closed his eyes. On the backsides of his lids he watched, with the slack arousal of one dusting off forgotten footage, a recapitulation of soft skin unmasking, of dark hair tumbling over slight shoulders, of fairy lights peeking through clefts in flesh regularly held flush. It really was a fantastic evening, he realized, now that it was over.