Olivia sat on the couch, staring ahead of her, eyes glazed over in deep thought, for quite a while. She didn't seem like she was doing very well, but the only thing I could do was hug her and tell her that it'd all be alright in the end. She kept nodding, the tears ever-present in the corners of her eyes, refusing to tip over the edge and fall down her cheeks. She would not cry.
When my mother got home, Olivia promptly stood up and announced that it was time for her to go, and Dylan eyed my mother as if she was a demon dragging him to the fiery pits of hell. I nudged him with my elbow, which made him quickly plaster on a smile. The ride to the police station was silent. Dylan had his head on my shoulder, adjusting every ten seconds because I was bony, but he had whispered to me that I smelled nice, so that made it okay.
What exactly did I even smell like? Was it anything like how my family members smelled? How my house smelled when I came home after a vacation or how the laundry detergent my mother used smelled? Or how my pillow smelled when I hadn't washed it for a while? I suppose I'd never find out.
I rubbed my thumb over the back of his hand and gently squeezed when I heard him let out a soft sigh.
"What do you think they're gonna do?"
"Who?" he murmured.
"North Korea," I replied. "No, the police, obviously."
He let out a short, small chuckle. "I don't know. I'm wondering about that, too..." He paused and played with my fingers in his lap. "I'm mostly curious how my dad is going to react."
"Well, whatever happens, it will all be alright," I tried to assure him. I seemed to be saying that a lot today and I didn't even know if it was true. Would it even be okay?
"Yeah... I guess it will." He turned his head to look out of the window and I put my hand under his chin to pull his face up to mine. I smiled as I leaned forward to give him a kiss, simply trying to let him know that I was there for him through the touch of our lips. He smiled back, though it didn't quite reach his eyes, and a few minutes later, my mother announced, "We're here."
Dylan lifted his head from my shoulder once again, gazing out at the police station. I could see how he fought the reluctance and the fear, and told himself to just get out already. Slowly, he unfastened his seatbelt and said, "Okay, let's go."
My hand slid out of his as he got out of the car, but he quickly grabbed it again when we walked towards the station. It was weird that Floyd wasn't here to support him, but we all knew it wasn't essential for him to be here. I didn't even have to be. The only reason I was here was because it was my mother that'd brought him.
When he spoke to the police officer, she said they could talk in a private room and even though I thought he'd go in alone, he didn't loosen the grip on my hand even the slightest bit and pulled me straight into the room with him. Mom wordlessly followed behind. She was the only one that accepted the drink that was offered to us. Dylan looked like he already had trouble swallowing the nerves down, let alone a drink.
"Very well," Officer Stokes spoke softly, taking the seat across from us. She casually leaned back in the chair and flipped open a notepad. "What shall it be then? What has your dad done that's so bad that you're bringing it to the police?"
Dylan cleared his throat and folded his hands on the metal table between him and the woman with her kind, light-blue eyes, before looking up to meet them with his own sad, chocolate brown ones. "He kicked me out."
Officer Stokes looked up at that. She scribbled it down on her notepad and asked, "Why?"
"B-because I'm gay."
"Ah, homophobic dad. What a joy."
He spluttered a laugh, his eyes flicking to me for a split second. So much joy. "Right."
"So you came out to him and he kicked you out?"
"No... he's known for a while."
"Then why did he kick you out now?" she asked with a frown.
He snapped his mouth shut. Once again, he met my eyes and I knew exactly what question was going through his mind at that moment.
Was it... illegal what we were doing? A seventeen-year-old boy dating two other seventeen-year-old boys sounded innocent enough, but what on earth did the law say about it? Would it be any different if we were adults? Floyd would turn eighteen in about a month, but... It wasn't illegal, was it? Cheating wasn't illegal either, no matter how shitty it was...
Officer Stokes kept looking at us, waiting for an answer.
"Uh, I—" Dylan choked out.
"I'm sorry, but you're going to have to tell me. I can't accuse him of something if I don't know the whole story."
He nodded, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. He couldn't say it and no matter how much I wanted to help, I couldn't do it either. Couldn't she be satisfied with the fact that he was homophobic? Was that not reason enough?
To my surprise, it was my mother who spoke up. "Dylan's father didn't approve of his current relationship."
"Because he's dating a boy?"
"Because he's dating two boys."
Officer Stokes held her pen still above her notepad and stared at the paper filled with scribbled words in a silence that stretched on for what seemed like hours. In reality, it took her but five seconds to recollect herself and ask, "Two boyfriends?"
"Y-yes," Dylan croaked, his voice breaking halfway.
"In what way?" she said, finally looking up at him. Then her eyes went to me. I could practically see her replaying the image of me and Dylan holding hands in her mind. "Are you like... a player... or a cheater or something?"
"No," I cut in. This was going in completely the wrong direction. Maybe we should have brought Floyd after all. She didn't understand. Nobody ever understood. "We are all consensually together!"
Dylan frantically nodded to support my statement and my mother added, "Their other boyfriend is a boy from their school."
Officer Stokes' eyes went from Dylan to me and my mother and back, and eventually, she sighed and leaned back in her chair again, smacking her pen onto her notepad. "You don't know how lucky you are you got me, young man. A lot of officers in here wouldn't have been very accepting of that."
I heard Dylan let out a breath very similar to the one leaving my own lungs. I didn't want to think of what would have happened if we'd gotten any of the other officers in this station.
"For the record," continued Officer Stokes, "I'll just put down that the reason for his anger was only your sexuality, but please tell me everything that happened and I'll pay your father a visit as soon as possible."
After that, Dylan seemed to be a little more at ease, yet he was still as quiet as he was before—if not, quieter. It was an odd thing to witness. Dylan loved talking. He loved teasing people. He loved being the centre of attention. But now, he was the exact opposite of that person he used to be, and it was kinda scary. He still wasn't telling me anything and it bothered me so much that I didn't know what to do. When I asked him something, he replied, but that's as far as it went. He didn't tell me any of his amusing stories. He didn't smirk while telling me a dirty joke. In fact, he didn't even tell me any jokes. He didn't make fun of me for all the things he could have made fun of me for, like the absolute mess in my room, or the wet stains on the front of my jeans when I got out of the bathroom. (It was water.)
I didn't get what was happening. I hadn't done anything wrong, had I? Why was he not talking to me? To my dismay, Floyd said he didn't know anything either, when I asked him about it—the first message I'd sent him in our private chat in weeks. The only things that were going wrong in our lives that we knew about (and that could possibly have Dylan brooding like this) were the terrible, terrible Derek Howe, Olivia's unfortunate breakup, and the whole... DukeCockroach thing.
Eve was still beating herself up about it and she hadn't even told me about the interview that'd finally been posted online. I only knew about it because everyone on social media was talking about it. All the students that went to our school were reposting the article and in no time, it was common knowledge across the entire world that DukeCockroach went to that one little, insignificant high school in the north of America. She hadn't posted a tweet in days and many people were starting to wonder where she'd gone, while I was the only one that knew she was binge-watching Netflix series in her bedroom. There was an empty bag of chips on the floor when I came to see her.
"Leave," she muttered.
"Why?"
"Because I'm not in the mood to talk."
I came to sit on the foot of her bed anyway, leaning over to see the screen of her laptop. "What are you watching?"
"I don't know. Some show about superheroes."
"You shouldn't feel bad," I said after a while. "It's not your fault."
"I know it's not." She sighed in frustration. "But that doesn't make me feel any less bad. I saw Olivia. She looked... broken."
"Do you know what happened with Joe?"
"I don't know, but Mr. Hanson said he won't bother me anymore."
"That's good," I said with a nod and another silence fell. Eve absentmindedly stroked the edge of her laptop, until I asked her what she was going to do with DukeCockroach. That's when her grip on the softly humming device tightened.
"I don't know."
"People are wondering where you've run off to."
She looked up. "Are they? What a waste of time. They shouldn't care about a simpleton that fucked up big time."
I rolled my eyes. "It's Joe who fucked up, okay? I doubt that that boy is even mentally stable."
She huffed a laugh. "Right?"
"Give me your laptop."
She squinted her eyes at me with suspicion, but she still gave it, and I opened a new tab with Twitter. The bubble in the left corner of the screen told me she had hundreds of notifications, but I didn't click on it and went to type a new tweet.
"Your gender is not a secret, right?"
She shook her head.
'Hi, this is DukeCockroach's brother. My sister is not dead. She's just dealing with some personal things. I hope you can understand.'
I clicked 'Tweet' and we watched the replies coming in, thoroughly amused at what everyone had to say. Some people were saying I was a sweet brother and others were complaining about me tweeting instead of her, but then there was this one reply that made my eyes widen.
"'Are you the gay brother?'" I read out loud. "Did you say that I'm gay?"
"I might have mentioned it once or twice."
I wrinkled my nose and said, "I hope people at our school won't put things together and figure out that I'm your brother."
Her eyes went as wide as mine were earlier, but then she whispered, "You could be closeted. You could be attending a different school in town. There are a lot of gay kids at our school anyway, since... you know, we have a gay principal."
"Yeah, I guess," I said.
"I'm so glad I never posted anything about you and Dylan and Floyd. Imagine the shitstorm that would have caused."
"I don't even wanna try to imagine that."
She chuckled—the first time I'd heard her do that in a while—and bumped her fist to my shoulder. "Speaking of them, why don't you invite Floyd over and spend some with with your boyfriends? I might even put my headphones like really loud so you can have some fun."
Immediately uncomfortable, I choked out a cough and told her, "That's not necessary!"
This time she full-on laughed and I couldn't help but smile. At moments like these, I could actually really believe that everything would be alright.