Landon Reilly
The color of the leaves had already started changing drastically since the end of summer. Autumn was always my favorite season, the changing colors around me feeling like a new beginning.
I wasn't used to anyone being happy to see me, but Micah had a wide grin on his face when I stepped off the train in front of him.
"How was the train ride?" he asked, bumping my shoulder as he came to stand next to me. "You didn't get into any trouble, did you?"
I lightly shoved him away from me, putting some space between us.
"It was fine, no, I didn't get in any trouble," I mumbled back, readjusting my bag on my shoulder.
"Well you weren't texting me back so I had no idea if you even made it on the train," Micah replied, his tone slightly clipped yet still light.
He had this passive aggressive nature about him. He never blew up at me, but he had a way of making sure I was aware when I was testing his patience, which seemed to be all the time.
"My phone died," I told him in a bored tone as Micah led me toward the campus.
"Well, you should keep it charged," he said. "What if something happened? You would need some way to contact someone."
I rolled my eyes. "Okay, Dad."
"Maybe I'm acting like a Dad, but I'm right," Micah replied. At least he seemed to care about my well-being more than my actual Dad.
As Micah and I walked through campus, nearly everyone around us greeted him. We were only two weeks into school, yet Micah seemed to know the whole campus. It was like that for him in high school too. He was one of those people that no one had a bad thing to say about. Everyone knew him, everyone liked him.
Of course, that was until our hockey team became divided our senior year and half the guys on the team ended up hating him. Somehow the two of us started on opposite sides and ended up in the same place.
"So we got invited to a little get together tonight," Micah told me as he waved to another person. "Not a party, just a few of us. We don't have to go if you don't want to, but I think we should."
"I don't care, Micah."
"Also, my dad wants you to call him at some point," Micah said. "It doesn't have to be now, but sometime this weekend. He doesn't want to bother you, but he wants to hear from you."
"But you have no problem bothering me?" I asked.
Micah shrugged. "Not at all."
"I'll probably go home next weekend to try to see my sister," I said, rolling my eyes.
"My parents will be happy if you go home."
It was still strange talking about home as the Hanson's house. I had only lived at their house for a few months before going off to college, but it still felt more like home than the house I grew up in ever did.
I guessed that was part of why I felt the need to go back there. Not only did I want to go back to see my sister, but I wanted to go back into the Hanson's house and have that feeling of home again.
Micah looked over at me and must have noticed a difference in the way I was walking.
"Is something wrong with your leg?" he asked.
"Some asshole knocked me over on my run this morning," I told him. "It's fine."
"Maybe you should get it checked out," he said. "Before hockey season starts and it becomes a problem."
"Maybe."
Eventually we made it to Micah's room and I set my stuff down next to his bed. I had been here one other time when I went with Micah and his parents to move him in. He lived in a suite with other freshmen hockey players. The bedroom was small, but bigger than mine, and it was a shared room.
"My roommate is staying with his girlfriend this weekend," Micah told me, sitting down on his desk. "He said you could use his bed. He put on new sheets before he left."
I scowled at him. "I'm not sleeping in some dude's bed.
He rolled his eyes. "Okay, you can sleep in mine then. I'll take his."
"I'll take the floor."
"You're not sleeping on the floor," Micah denied, crossing his arms over his chest.
I let out a sigh but didn't respond. It wasn't worth arguing with Micah. He always seemed to win our arguments anyway, not that we argued about anything serious. He just didn't like to see me be stubborn or wallow in self pity.
"I think you'll like hanging out with my friends here," Micah said, obviously feeling like he had won our argument. "They're kinda low key. Not real big partiers. It's nice."
I had enough of parties in high school back when I was popular and so good at faking like I had my life together when I was really doing everything I could to hide who I really was. Back then, parties were where I could let loose and receive all the validation I never got from my parents. They were where I could be with girls and try to convince myself that was what I wanted.
Now a party seemed like the last place I wanted to be. I was beyond seeking validation and trying to convince myself I was straight. Now I just wanted to be left alone and perceived by no one.
"I can just stay here and you can go hang out with your friends," I told Micah, sitting down on his bed.
Micah shot me a look that told me that wasn't going to happen. He would rather stay here with me than leave me all alone. He thought I didn't socialize enough and he made sure to tell me that. Just like I made sure to tell him he wasn't my therapist and he could keep his mouth shut.
"I'm not leaving you here alone," he said, shaking his head. "So let's not even start an argument."
I nodded, rolling my eyes as I leaned over on his bed to plug my phone into his charger.
"Have you made any friends at school?" he asked me, though he already knew the answer.
I wasn't the friend making type. In high school, I had been friends with all those kids since we first learned how to skate. I never needed to make friends because we had been around each other before it was so hard. Then I became captain of the hockey team in high school and I didn't have to make any new friends then either. I had the hockey team and that was it.
It wasn't like I was trying and failing to make friends in college. I just didn't talk to anyone. I barely even talked to my team because I didn't want them finding out more about me than I wanted them to know, though I was sure some of them already knew. At least the ones my age who I had played against the last few years.
Eventually, Micah won our silent argument and dragged me over to one of his friend's dorm rooms. At least Micah was an honest person, and the gathering we headed to was actually low key. There were only four other people there sitting in front of a TV and playing NHL on Xbox.
The one who opened the door was taller than both Micah and me. His expression brightened when he saw the two of us and moved aside to let us in.
"Micah!" he exclaimed, his arms opened wide. "And you must be Landon. I'm Dylan, one of Micah's teammates."
I nodded at him in a greeting and followed Micah into the cramped room. This dorm was in a suite, with a common area in the middle surrounded by the bedrooms. There was a couch and a couple chairs with some bean bag chairs scattered on the floor.
Micah's friends made room for the two of us on the couch and I sat on the end closest to the window while Micah sat in the middle.
"Either of you want to play?" the guy on the other side of Micah asked. I shook my head and Micah politely declined.
I just watched the game on the TV and listened as Micah made small talk with his friends. I tried not to think about how I didn't fit in with these crowds anymore or how I preferred my solitude over being surrounded by people.
I wasn't paying too much attention to the conversations in the room until one of the guys lying down on his stomach on a bean bag chair let out a loud groan at something that happened on the screen and said something along the lines of "that's so gay" which earned a reaction of Micah.
"Jeremy," Micah said.
"Sorry," Jeremy replied, turning to face Micah. "Forgot I have to take that out of my vocabulary."
Micah glanced over at me and it took everything in me not to kick him in the shin. I wasn't necessarily hiding the fact that I was gay anymore, but I didn't want to announce it to everyone, especially a room full of hockey players at a catholic school.
Ever since things went sour with he and Elijah, Micah's had this gray cloud of guilt hanging over him. So when he got to college, the first thing he did was get involved with the diversity and inclusion board at the school, and he was now an ambassador for the hockey team. It came to no surprise that he would bring that over to his friendships as well.
"We all have to," Dylan said. "You never know who on the team could be struggling. You have to watch your mouth."
"I know, I know," Jeremy replied. "We already got this lecture."
"Yeah, I'm just saying you shouldn't say those things in private either," Dylan responded before turning to Micah and me. "You two had a gay guy on your team right?"
More than one, so apparently Dylan didn't know about me.
Micah nodded. "Elijah. He transferred senior year and we played against him and his boyfriend, Fox. They're playing at BU and Northeastern this year."
Micah would never tell these guys, but the reason Elijah transferred out was because he had to. After he came out to Micah, Micah couldn't hold it in. He told me, worried about what Elijah's confession meant for him and the team and I lost it. I had pent up rage over my own sexuality and hearing about Elijah's made me snap. Then he told his mother before she heard from anyone else and she kicked him out.
So, he didn't just transfer. He was forced out and I was a huge part to blame. Just another thing to add to the list of things wrong with me.
"It's cool though, having two out players in the NCAA," one of the other guys said. "It'll hopefully make hockey culture less toxic."
Micah hummed in agreement, scrolling through his phone.
"Oh, speaking of," Micah said, tilting his phone toward me. "There they are."
He was on Instagram, a picture of Elijah and Fox displayed on the screen. There were a few things I noticed then.
One was that I couldn't look at Elijah without feeling a squeezing in my stomach because I felt so guilty over the way I had treated him and how he helped me when I needed it despite that. Another thing was that I couldn't look at the two of them together without a painful throb in my heart because I envious of what they had, and how they could be out in the open together.
The last thing made me clench my fists and my jaw. I saw Fox and instantly placed the familiar stranger who knocked me on my ass. Fox's brother. The one who held me back from punching Fox one day in the school parking lot. The two looked too much alike for me not to notice.
And now all I could do was hope I'd never run into him again.
***
Wren Ridley
Every time Stella convinced me to go out, I always told myself it would be the last time. But I had always been a bit of a liar.
Having to make the drive home on Saturday morning instead of Friday night was only part of the reason I was mad at myself for going out last night. I could have slept in a little later, spent some time with Fawn and Colt, but instead I was watching everyone around me get shit-faced and then fucking the first guy who showed interest. That might have been what every other college student wanted, but not me.
The idea of all that bored me, but somehow I always ended up giving in. It made me wonder if I did that because I was stuck searching for something within myself, trying to find a piece of me that had yet to be uncovered. Or I just always feared I'd be missing out if I didn't go, even knowing I wasn't missing out on anything that didn't happen every weekend in the bars in college towns.
Thankfully, the ride back home from Providence was roughly half an hour, maybe a little bit longer, and that was something my mother reminded me of whenever she sent me a text message or called me.
"You know, it's only half an hour. You can come home for the night and still make it to class tomorrow," she'd say.
When my sister, Raven, moved out over the summer, my parents had all but begged me to start living at home and commuting to school for the upcoming year, despite knowing that I had already signed a housing contract and there was no getting out of it for the year. My parents had six kids because they wanted a big family, and they hadn't readied themselves for when we would start moving out.
So now I was on my way home on a Saturday morning because I could always hear the sound of my mother's sad voice in the back of my head about how much she missed her kids. And I was hoping that visiting more often would make her voice fade from my mind.
Mom was waiting for me by the door when I arrived home. She had a big smile on her face and held her arms open wide for me to step into.
"I'm so happy you're home!" she exclaimed, throwing her arms around me. "Colt has been on a mean streak lately. I need you to talk some sense into him before I make him sleep outside."
I chuckled, returning here hug and looking behind her small frame to see if Colt had been lingering nearby.
"What's his problem?" I asked, releasing her and shutting the door behind me.
"He gets like this when you leave for school," she told me. "Because he likes when you take him out. I think it's worse now that Fox and Raven are gone too. And Fawn's always hanging out with Ava and her friends. I think he's feeling lonely."
I thought that Colt just liked being a little asshole sometimes, but I wouldn't say that to my mother.
"Where is he?" I asked, noting the silence in the house.
"He's in the back with Dad," she replied. "Dad's been trying to make him play outside more and get off that Switch thing he's always playing with. He's not happy about it."
"And Fawn?"
"Ava's," she said. "Dan and Mindy are going through the same thing as us. They love having the girls there."
Just after the words left her mouth, the back door opened followed by loud footsteps bounding through the house. Colt stomped inside and up the stairs, barely sparing me a glance. Dad walked in with a look of exasperation, his eyes wide as he threw his hands up then let them fall to his sides.
"That kid is a menace," Dad said with a huff. He wiped his hand over his forehead and it was then that I noticed the red mark on his face.
"What happened to you?" I asked, pointing my finger at him.
"We were playing wiffle ball. Colt hits hard," Dad said, placing his hand on the mark then wincing. "It's like he took all his aggression out on that poor ball. It cracked!"
I stifled laughter as Mom walked over to him to get a closer look at his face. I took the opportunity to go toward the stairs and to Colt's room.
Colt was the baby of the family and he hated being treated like it. I could only imagine how much worse it had gotten since the rest of us moved out. The kid was in seventh grade now. He was at that age where he thought he was more mature than he actually was and didn't want to be doted on by our parents.
He had always looked up to the rest of his siblings, but the two of us had some sort of connection that he didn't have with the others. We were a lot alike, but not in the way Fox and I were which made the two of us clash. Colt and I were alike in a way that made us have a mutual understanding of the other.
I knocked on his door before entering, knowing he wouldn't hear my knock anyway. He was sitting on his bed, headphones on over his ears when I walked in, playing a game on the laptop I had gifted him after I bought a new one.
I sat down on the bed next to him and yanked his headphones off.
Colt whined. "Stop."
"You stop being a punk," I shot back.
"Tell them to stop treating me like I'm a little kid and I'll consider it," he said and I winced. He sounded more like me every time we spoke.
"You are a little kid to them," I told him. "You're just going to have to deal with it."
I contemplated on whether I really wanted to say my next words. I had been thinking about not manipulating or bribing my siblings after it became such a big issue between Fox and me, but I felt as thought this situation called for a little bribery while it still worked on Colt.
"I'll take you out right now and buy you whatever new game you want, but you have to start acting better," I offered. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye then closed the computer and turned to face me fully.
"What if I don't want a new game?" he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
I let out a heavy sigh.
"Okay, then what do you want?"
"I want a new phone. I'm sick of getting everyone's hand me downs," he replied.
I sighed again. This was my own fault, really. The kid had learned my ways of always getting something out of whatever agreements or decisions I made. He was only using my own ways against me.
"I can't just get you a new phone," I argued. "I have to talk to Mom and Dad about that."
"So talk to them."
I stood up from the bed and made my way to the door.
"The phone is way more than I offered, so you're going to owe me," I told him with raised eyebrows.
All he did was shrug at me with a wicked smile.
I shook my head and went back downstairs.
**
Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you thought of the chapter.
How do you feel about Landon and Wren now that you're in their POVs?