Always Somebody Better, Part One
by Tsukizubon Saruko (月図凡然る子)



The first time he met Austin, River was sitting on the curb on 50th Street just past Radio City Music Hall, trying not to puke or have a freaking breakdown or whatever it was he was about to do. Which was embarrassing enough by itself.

He'd been there for two days. Mostly at the venue in general, but a fair amount of it on the curb, too: camping out by himself to get in, his head on his backpack and gnawing through two Robert Jordan novels and half a John Updike. And then, of course, he'd sat through the entire draft, which was probably the most boring thing ever created by the human mind even for people who cared about it, and sometime in the middle of the seventh round it had hit him, really finally hit him, full force in the brain. Not me, was what had been written on the brick that smashed in his mental window. Not, in a million years, River Lewis from White Spring Hills, Colorado, population fewer people than he now went to college with. He would not stand on that stage and hold up a jersey into the lights with a slightly lost grin on his face. It was never going to happen. Have all the fantasies you like, this unseen iceberg, this Titanic-wrecker said; go ahead and hear them say your name in your own head. Hell, be Mr. Irrelevant in your picture, if that gives it that little comforting ring of veritas. Just don't make the mistake of getting any of that confused with the possible world. This is a game you are not even in.

Despair was a godawful, melodramatic word to assign to yourself in any circumstances, one he hated even in fiction. Certainly it wasn't a feeling any person with half or greater of a brain had about the NFL Draft, for God's sake. But he still felt like he knew what it meant now, in spite of his own scorn: like somebody with cold hands had closed their fist gently around you, and only just begun to squeeze.

"You okay?" somebody said, and he glanced up, blinking in streetlight glare, to see who they were talking to.

The somebody was a tall guy -- young, probably only a couple years older than him -- with an effortless tan on a broad, open, excessively handsome face, and long dark hair that committed the crime against nature of looking good in what could only be described as a mullet. He was broad-shouldered and wearing a suit, and squashed down on top of his ridiculous hair was a Jets cap, to which -- in spite of the circumstances -- River's punch-drunk brain didn't manage to assign the appropriate significance. Partly because it turned out he'd been talking to River, which was unexpected to say the least. The guy was standing half in the street next to him, separated from the tidal crowds washing past and away, one of his feet propped up on the curb beside where River was sitting. It was wearing what looked like a tooled cowboy boot, in spite or perhaps because of the suit, which didn't make River so much instantly homesick as home-nauseated.

"Um," River said, and scrubbed his hands over his face. Argh, stupid non-stereotypical New Yorkers. "Yeah. I'm, I'm cool."

The guy shrugged, leaning on his knee. "All right. Just making sure. You looked a little..." He gestured meaninglessly at his face. When talking at greater length, he had a strong southern accent that River vaguely recognized as Texan, if only from obnoxious ski tourists, which if nothing else meant he was actually behaving well within stereotype. So that was something. River sighed.

"Yeah, I am a little," he said. More kindly than he could have, though not by much. "But it's nothing. ...Thanks."

"De nada," the guy said, or at least that was what River thought he said, considering it came out sounding more like day nodder. "You from around here?"

Great. Now not only was he actively despairing over the draft, he had a leech. A tourist leech. "Not to start with," he admitted anyway, folding his arms on his knees. People were still streaming by behind them, in a roar of chatter, cars pulling by sometimes at a Manhattan-standard hostile crawl. "I'm from Colorado, but now I'm going to LIU. So, you know. Long Island. I just came over for the draft."

"Ah, gotcha." The guy glanced around, maybe looking for someone more interesting in the crowd to latch onto. One could hope. If so, he was apparently disappointed. "Pretty crazy, right? New York. I never been before."

"Yeah," River said. Trying not to sigh again. "I hadn't either." Finally, he conceded to the inevitable: "My name's River, anyway."

"Yeah?" The guy looked interested, which was depressing but at least better than laughing himself sick. "Like the, ahh, the actor guy?"

"Not particularly," River said, which the guy didn't appear to get. No big. "River Lewis." He considered the circumstances, and then stuck out his hand anyway. What the heck.

"Austin Villarreal," the guy said, again in the whitest way possible, and shook it, but by then River had completely frozen. River had permafrosted. There was a series of clicks going on in his brain, like when you get all the pieces in order in one of those sliding tile puzzles, and everything just falls into place.

He'd heard that name before, very recently. And very loudly.

"Just got drafted to the Jets," Austin went on with a big dopey cheerful grin, as if that were just some piece of regular good news, tapping the bill of his cap for belated emphasis as he straightened back up. "So I guess I'm moving here, looks like, or at least close by." He stood, fully, in the street, ignoring a taxi that honked at him. Still grinning: a gorgeous, ear-to-ear, bright-white-tooth grin. "Good to meetcha, man. Wanna go get a beer, on me? I gotta do something to celebrate, and I don't know the neighborhood."

River stared up at him for a minute, still paralyzed from neck up and neck down. What pick had Austin been? Near the top, he thought. Yesterday at least. God. God.

I hate you, was what River thought when at last he managed to think, with perfect, crystalline, wondering clarity; with the exquisite sweetness of sudden revelation. It burst onto his mind like a sunrise, all radiance and pleasant coral colors. I hate you. I hate you and I despise you. I hate you forever, with every fiber of my soul. No one has ever or will ever be hated like I am going to hate you, starting now.

So of course he ended up letting Austin buy three six-packs, and doing his best to help with them in Austin's ridiculous hotel suite (Austin was probably old enough by a matter of no more than months, but River was too young to take into a bar), and ended up talking about crazy dumb crap with him until the hour got small, and ended up falling asleep on the couch in the suite's sitting room, too drunk and too late for the LIRR and the bus back to school. And he ended up with Austin's number in his new, extremely cheap cellphone, and somehow, around the middle of June, looked up out of whatever daze he'd been in to realize that for the first time in his entire life to date, he had a best friend.

Austin was like that.

---

Austin (he had discovered since) had grown up in Abilene, "right between nowhere and nowhere else." He had tried out for the high school football team on a whim, after not much more than the occasional friendly pickup game before, and was discovered to have a just unreasonable knack for quarterback, not just playing but strategy too, just the right body and head -- like some sort of spooky musical prodigy. Or idiot savant, River thought privately, although the mental abuse lost most of its venom almost immediately. Austin was like that, Austin was like that, it got old fast but even though tired it was true. In spite of his exhausting, frustrating perfection, you couldn't hate Austin, even with the best intentions at heart. Not without some kind of medical condition: surgical removal of the puppy center, maybe, or like... soul cancer.

Anyway, Austin had been so good his coach had begged him to go to football camp, so he had, and sure enough a UT scout practically had a seizure over him as soon as he was old enough. He went to college in his eponymous city (a fact that Austin apparently never stopped finding hilarious) for no more than two years before a scout went crazy over him at a pro day, and so on and so forth. After signing with the Jets (second string, but maybe not for long, was the prevailing opinion), he dropped out of school to move up north, and who could blame him? The other half of college, or a salary in six digits? Gee, let's think it over for a minute.

The thing about Austin was he was not real. He was humanly impossible. He was a fairy tale, a padded Cinderella. Nothing happened to anybody like what had happened to Austin. He didn't even want it particularly; he was just along for the ride. In his head, they were still all pickup games. He just had a few more friends turning out for them than before. And you would think all of that would make it easier to stomach, but it didn't, was the thing. Even if it never happened to anybody, you couldn't help thinking: why couldn't it happen to me?

If Austin weren't Austin, River had thought at least six or eight thousand times by the end of the first year, he'd be dead.

---

"Never. Seriously?" Austin said, in the third or so of his first weeks as an actual resident of New York. He was perching on the ridiculous sofa he'd purchased to go with his ridiculous apartment; perching because the cushions were still wrapped in plastic, since apparently the pro life was way too busy and demanding for things like "unpacking" or "buying food" or "leaving clothes other places than the floor". Mock as he might, River had to admit this had saved the brand-new leather at least two pizza spills already. He couldn't see how Austin was supposed to survive in the wild. "You've lived here, what, a year, man? Never?"

"No," River said, to his summer course reading. The dorms didn't have air-conditioning, of course, and you could only spend so much time at the library, and, well, Austin had said anytime. "That's tourist stuff."

Austin snorted. "What, and you're Joe Manhattan? Come on, we gotta go."

River rolled his eyes, and set the book down on his lap. Faulkner, with Flannery O'Connor still in his backpack. This was what he got for trying to be an English major: a month packed with drunk, miserable southerners. Then again, he guessed he couldn't blame them. "What's there to see? Giant green lady, miles of high school kids..."

"The giant green lady of, of, freedom and liberty, and -- "

"Freedom and liberty are the same thing."

"Hot dogs!" Austin aimed an accusing finger at him. "Apple pie! Football!"

"I wasn't aware she played." River sighed, and scrubbed his hands across his face. "Okay, okay, just stop pretending to be a gay Jeep commercial. When do you want to go?"

And Austin just grinned like this was the opening he'd been waiting for. "Let's go now."

River paused. "I beg your pardon?" he said.

So that was how he ended up taking a ferry from Battery Park in the middle of July, pouring sweat in the sun because Austin was utterly entranced by the filthy water and had to be right up to the rail, River's finger still stuck in at his page in Light in August until well into Liberty Island. Austin's haste meant they couldn't get passes up into the statue proper, which Austin complained about with typical good humor, but they messed around at the pedestal and River actually sort of enjoyed the Ellis Island museum, a little. There was so much more history on this side of the country. It seemed like everything was old in New York, and it was kind of cool -- even if that usually included your apartment building and the sandwich you got at the deli. He ended up stuffing his battered book in his back pocket, which he thought was a tremendous concession on his part, and later on a security guard recognized Austin and pretty much transformed from a gigantic guy with an earpiece into a shy, excited little girl on the spot. Which was hilarious if slightly disturbing. Austin chatted with him for a while about the upcoming season -- holding up the entire line behind him -- and then when River finally dragged him along, said goodbye to the guy by name. It was just on his ID, but Austin was... well, you know.

"You're retarded," he grumbled on the ferry back, wincing against the wind, but Austin just laughed.

"I bet kids up here just go to places all the time on field trips and stuff, right?" He shrugged, but Austin wasn't looking, hanging on to the ferry railing. In profile he looked more serious, even smiling -- more adult. It brought out the severe line from his brow to his mouth, and River had to stop himself lingering in a long, weird look and turn his gaze back out to the city. From out here Manhattan looked strange and towering, an alien future-city with Brooklyn huddling off to the side and looking nervous. "Back home it was the Alamo if you lucked out, and you know, that's a day round trip. You say you're going to the next state over, you're gonna need a hotel room, and up here it's like, what are you gonna do with the rest of the hour?"

River shrugged. "At least you had the Alamo. I think my nearest landmark growing up was that hotel The Shining was about."

Austin, of course, perked. "Yeah? You ever been there?"

"No, that's tourist stuff," River said -- but he was grinning, and when Austin started laughing, yeah, okay, he did too.

But he was faking it, a little, and it wore off quick, especially once he was on the train back to Brookville that evening, and alone with Faulkner and his own hamster-caged thoughts. It probably should have made him feel better to realize what he should have known all along: that Austin was homesick, that Austin was maybe as lonely as he was in this clogged and jostling city. It didn't. Instead it just made him wonder if that was the only reason -- and if it was, how long he had, before Austin settled in enough that River didn't matter anymore. Got back on his feet in his new digs and kicked out the moody, sarcastic crutch he'd been walking on.

So he was the retarded one, probably. He didn't get any more reading done all the way home.

---

C.W. Post was an okay school, on the whole. It didn't seem like anything special, but he guessed he didn't know what he was missing, either, so no harm done. He could have done better, he supposed. His grades in high school had been unimpeachable (it happened when you had nothing to do but study), and his SAT scores had ended up being the highest in about three graduating classes, or so he heard. Which River thought was embarrassing for his school, considering; they weren't really all that great. Still, his mother had burst with pride so fierce it had seemed more like anger, it had alarmed him away from her for the month or so it was at its peak. She'd put up his printed scores on the fridge over his protests, but he kept half-expecting her to take them back and just carry them around with her, to shake in people's faces around town or maybe slap them with. His school guidance counselor had been near tears, this close to begging him, when he flatly refused to apply to Amherst or Wesleyan or anywhere that wasn't at least Division II. Football scholarships aren't the only types of scholarships there are, she had said, through closed teeth possibly, but he knew, and he didn't care. He knew what he wanted. He'd always known.

Well, that didn't mean he got it, but at least he knew.

In White Spring Hills, he was an outstanding scat back; he'd wanted to play quarterback, of course, but by the time he was fifteen even River'd had to admit he'd need stilts and a muscle suit first. In White Spring Hills, he'd been good enough to make reluctant admirers out of an entire high school stadium's worth of people who'd previously have chucked beer cans out their SUV windows at him if they passed him walking on the road; good enough to make Coach G, somewhere through his first two seasons, switch over grudgingly from calling him Twiggy to calling him Hey Kid to calling him Riv. Good enough to merit a few neutral mentions in the typo-riddled town rag, with which he also half-feared someday he'd catch his mom smothering someone. Playing for Andrew Jackson High hadn't had him rolling in cheerleaders or swimming in friends, let us not speak of miracles, but it had still gotten him drunk on his own crazy, unexpected power, the magical possibility of being good, of being someone. He hadn't even known what to do with the sudden bundle of hope in his arms. But at a summer football camp just outside Denver, no one had known his name at all, for better or worse; and before he knew it his heart had capsized, under the terrible weight of how everything was relative.

"You're pretty good," the scout from LIU had said before giving him his phone number, and warmly, sure, but god damn it all, it shot him down out of the sky. Because he was right; of course he was. That was exactly what River was, had been, and always would be. Put it under his yearbook photo. River Lewis. Running Back. Pretty Good.

C.W. Post had a good team, and he played well for them. They paid his tuition bills and he lived in Long Island, about as far away from Colorado as it was possible to be. What more could you want, right? Let us not speak of miracles. Or speak of them very softly, so low no one can ever hear and remind us later; whisper their names only enough to keep ourselves warm. Forget them the next day, and get up and go back to business as usual.

Hell.

His roommate was another guy on the team, a wide receiver with the unlikely name of Javier; he was from Elizabeth, and was staying over the summer too. His attitude toward River seemed to be one of benevolent puzzlement: he cracked a joke occasionally about all River's books and sometimes asked for help looking over his essays for Composition, but by and large seemed to accept his roommate's bizarre chimerical nature without comment. River didn't mind any of it. At least it was better than home. Once or twice Javier had coaxed him out to be uncomfortable at one party or another for about half an hour before leaving, but after that they had both given up pretty quickly, and left things between them to a comfortable, tolerant complete lack of interest. Otherwise River hung around the library a lot, worked a boring job stocking shelves at the campus bookstore, didn't do much of anything, didn't make friends. Or at least, not until recently.

He mentioned Austin in his letters and calls to his mom, trying out of habit not to sound too impressed by him, or by anything where he was. He thought she was still upset that he'd decided to stay at school for the summer, and he didn't want to make it worse: Hey, gosh, Mom! You'll never guess how great it is without you! All the places in the world you've never been are my favorites! He'd gone home at Christmas, but she'd barely been able to coax him out of his room the whole time, let alone out of their little doublewide altogether. What if someone in town asked how things were going -- maybe having somehow seen the contact information he'd been careful not to give Jackson's tiny alumni office, maybe with a knowing, gleaming smirk behind his eyes? O Icarus, our schadenfreude rests on thee, etc. He never wanted to go back again if he could help it, although of course he couldn't tell Mom that.

She seemed happy that he'd made a new friend, anyway, although not like she quite understood how weird it was. She sent him a card in June with an apparently clinically depressed black lab puppy on it, floating a bubble-font Thinking Of You... over its head. Inside, apart from the usual ballpoint sentiments, was a local paper clipping about the kickboxing studio some dreadlocked couple from Empire had opened in town. Sara was near the back left corner of the black-and-white photo, a group shot of a class practicing their forms. Her hair pulled back in a long, dark, shiny ponytail, fists up in front of her; her face, tiny and half-obscured, set in a frown of serious thought. He'd stared at it for nearly a full ten minutes, before sticking it, memorized, between two falling-out back pages of The Two Towers.

But if it was a lure to bring him home, it wouldn't work. She was the last person he wanted to see.

---

In spite of his brain's weird, acrobatic fears, he ended up at Austin's apartment more and more near the end of the summer, and less and less bothering with heat or summer parties in the dorm as an excuse. Austin's apartment was, Austin was happy to admit, more luxury than any human person could ever need, and at least for Manhattan, more space, too. Might as well mooch boldly, River figured. ...Plus, he liked hanging out with Austin, which was so odd to him he couldn't seem to stop listing it as an afterthought. They watched movies or played video games or drank beer or all of the above, or just... talked. He ended up telling Austin a lot, stuff he'd never imagined he'd have reason or desire to say out loud.

Somewhere along the line, unsurprisingly, Austin had ended up with a girlfriend, too, who was about as unlike what you would expect Austin to have for a girlfriend as River could imagine. Mandy was a year or two older than Austin, and she was short, pretty, pleasantly rounded, covered in tattoos, and constantly dressed in heavily scissored, earth-toned layers; she had two gold rings in her lower lip and a floating fountain of curly brown hair she often sat on by accident. She lived in Park Slope but worked at a florist's in Chinatown, and zipped around the edges of sidewalks on a rusty pink scooter that ran with a sound like it was coughing, selling bouquets curbside sometimes out of the package carrier. Only later did River find out that was mostly a front, and that the tiny seventy-something Korean lady who owned the shop cheerfully let Mandy use her back garden to grow an astonishing quantity -- and quality -- of pot. Still, River was in deep, nearly superstitious awe of Mandy, utterly tongue-tied in her presence. He thought she was easily the coolest human being who had ever been troubled to notice his existence. And amazingly enough, she seemed to like him.

The fall semester kept him busy most of the time, with classes and practice, but on the weekends he pretty much crashed with Austin continually; with the second bed there, it seemed pointless to keep making the trek back and forth to Long Island. Javier started prodding him with some unsubtle hints about whether he'd gotten a girlfriend, which he found pretty funny but also disturbing, for reasons he couldn't entirely explain. Well, and reasons he could. There wasn't anything gay about his friendship with Austin, though, he insisted to himself more often than maybe he should have; it was just that it sort of came off that way.

Football season had gotten his blood way up once upon a time, made him crazy with excitement, but now even more than last year it seemed grueling, like a chore. He sleepwalked through practice, grumbled through games. Austin only made it to one or two, relatively unimportant home games, although he was always making noises about it; if River was busy, Austin was everywhere at once, he'd try to pull off his arms if it meant they could go do more stuff for him. He did get River and Mandy tickets to his home games, though, and they went, in spite of their respective reservations. The first one, Mandy insisted on sneaking in a bottle of Wild Turkey in her jacket, and River kept himself together by sharing it with her, and giving her increasingly hilarious and untruthful shouted explanations of what was going on on the field, until they were both dead drunk and weeping with laughter, nursing side stitches. Which at least gave him something to blame it on when later he had to sit down for a minute with his eyes closed, taking long, slow breaths, trying not to throw up. She stood next to him, rubbing his back, smelling like patchouli and cloves and whiskey, not asking, and he thought for no reason of his mom and bit his tongue against the burning in his eyes.

Then Austin took them out for a middle-of-the-night dinner, and told such stupid stories about his teammates and from his adolescence in Texas that River couldn't help laughing along, in spite of the giant headache as he sobered up. And the next game, he wasn't quite surprised to find, was easier.

When it came out in one conversation or another with Austin that he wasn't planning on going home for winter break, he launched into the same musical number he'd given his mom: "Act II, Scene I: Airfares Are So High, Student Jobs Do Not Pay Much, It Breaks My Heart But I Fear I Must Remain, Etc. Etc." Austin gave no indication of having bought it any more or less than River's mom had, but then again, he was probably too busy to have given it a huge amount of thought.

"You should come home with me!" was more specifically what he was busy saying, stirring the pot of queso he had on the stove. This recipe, the jewel in the crown of Austin Le Chef, seemed in its entirety to demand a) having a block of Velveeta, b) having a can of Ro-tel, and c) making them somehow coexist in a state of hotness. River was horrified, but fascinated. The saucepan was maybe two months old and already permanently disgusting. "Don't they, like, shut down the whole campus? You'll be cold and in the dark. You can't be cold and in the dark on Christmas, that is like the sad part of a Disney movie or something."

"If I can't afford to go to Colorado, I can't afford to go to Texas," River pointed out. Austin waved his hand, dismissing crazy River and his silly obsession with money.

"I gotcha. I'm going anyway, grabbing an extra ticket's no prob."

And River bit his tongue before he could snap at that, which was definitely not the right way to respond to someone being generous. He hated it when Austin did that, tried to throw a couple hundred dollars at him like it was a beer or a bag of chips, but he couldn't think how to call him on it. "Your family won't mind?" he said instead, trying to inject as much skepticism as possible without being rude. Austin just shrugged.

"They won't notice, more like. We got so many people running around, this time of year, they'll probably forget you're not some kind of cousin." He laughed at himself, prodding with his spoon. He had a new watch on that hand, a little too big for him so that it jangled when he did, but River thought it still looked good on him: drew attention to the thick rawboned wrists under his suntan. "C'mon, man, it'll be a good time! Uh, if you don't mind it'll probably be like eighty degrees the whole time."

"Kind of sounds nice right now, actually," River forgot himself enough to say, and after that there was no possibility of escape.

So he flew into DFW with Austin, watched Austin rent some sort of Cadillac Mobile Mansion DX (he'd sold his inevitable pickup truck before moving to Manhattan, River'd long since learned), drove over three hours of flat brown nothing with Austin with the winter sun in their eyes and an epic game of Know How I Know You're Gay? to keep them busy. He found himself a little sorry when Austin finally pulled into a driveway, and up to a spotless McMansion in the outer ring of Abilene. It had been a while since it had been just the two of them on their own for any length of time. As much as he adored Mandy, he hardly ever felt like anything but an awed, desperately unhip, trailer trash kid from the sticks in her presence, always just trying to keep up. Austin, though, was always telling him how smart he was, laughing at his jokes, not like he was trying to kiss up but just like it was by-the-wayside stuff River ought to know already: unbiased reporting on the facts. Being with Austin made him feel... cool. Special, even, if that wasn't a little too on the hearts and sparkles side.

Austin's mom was a teased, shellacked, dark-rooted blonde, sparkling with tennis bracelets and packed into underaged jeans, but she had a nice smile under her lipstick and hung onto River's hand constantly, as if she'd already adopted him. Austin's dad looked almost exactly like Austin, except squarer and short-haired, but the permanent grin that had creased Austin's eyes was replaced in his by a harder, more watchful smile. In their vast granite-covered kitchen River accepted a Coke that was actually a Dr Pepper and listened dizzily to all the vowels drawling for three miles, and to at least eighteen y'alls without one hint of irony among them. He counted.

"River!" Austin's mom -- Nancy, she'd said, although that was never happening -- marveled, sounding like she was eating both Rs alive. "That is such a unique name! Were your mom and dad, ah, flower children?" She laughed, toothily but pleasantly, apparently delighted by the idea that something as exotic as non-Republicans might exist out in the world somewhere. River smiled, shaking his head.

No, my mom was just fifteen at the time, he thought, but didn't say. No point in stopping the conversation before it even got started. "No, I think my mom just liked it." Over her shoulder, he could vaguely hear Austin's dad -- Tommy, although that was happening even less -- grilling him about the Jets' so-so season and the lineup for next year, and he clawed for something else to talk about over it. She beat him to it, though, first glancing over her shoulder too at her husband and son, and then slipping her arm around him.

"You know, honey, I am really glad to see you here, and I hope you don't mind me telling you this," she said in a conspiratorial undertone, before he could react. Not that he knew how he would have reacted anyway. "But I was just so worried about Austin, moving to New York? He just seemed so down about it, and he wasn't going to know anybody..." She pressed a hand to her chest, and smiled at him, and he could see a little more of the resemblance. "And now, it just does my heart so good. Just look at the two of you."

Yeah, River thought, smiling uncertainly back at her, not sure whether to feel all warm and glowing inside or totally like crap. Just look at us.

---

Austin's house was stupidly huge on about the same scale as his apartment, but River still ended up put on an inflatable mattress on the floor of Austin's old bedroom. This was because Austin, it turned out, had exactly as many cousins as promised, if not more. The run-up to Christmas was a marathon obstacle course of people in various stages of being related to Austin appearing, drawling, and disappearing, sometimes with incidental cake. River ate some of the cake, and otherwise tried to stay out of the way. It didn't help that he was almost certain Austin's dad didn't like him, in spite of the fact that they had maybe exchanged three full sentences in the whole week previous, and two and a half of them had concerned football.

What interested him more about the whole thing was the fact that Austin was obviously miserable. ...Well, maybe obviously was too strong a word, but he could tell. He tried to act surprised when on the twenty-third Austin got him aside, in between Austin's mom trying to organize a troupe of aunts, and said with a slightly pasted smile, "Hey. You want to grab the car, take a drive around for a little bit?"

River shrugged, setting his book aside. Only days of practice and mental training had convinced him it was okay to leave anything in the Villareals' immaculate living room, but he was getting there. "Yeah, sure."

"Oh, thank God," Austin said immediately, and then laughed and dropped his eyes when River raised his eyebrows. "No, I mean... Nah. Come on, let's get going before they ask us to lift something."

Abilene wasn't a whole lot of city, but it was some; it went out instead of up, like River was used to at home, not like back East. All giant parking lots and giant housing developments, sprawling amoeba malls, the greed for space its possibility instilled. A part of him felt like it could breathe again all of a sudden, but he was surprised to find that another part of him missed having the sky shut off, seemed to cramp up around the absence of crowds and graffiti and dirty, used air. Austin flirted with a disembodied female voice at the Sonic so egregiously that they got something like 15 extra mints with their Route 44 cherry limeades, and then just drove around drinking them, talking little, Austin pointing out occasional landmarks. River glanced at him from time to time, sidelong; his serious driving profile looked a lot sterner than Austin ever was. It took him a while to identify the discomfort in his chest as pity. He couldn't even imagine, personally. If it hadn't been for his own mom when he was a kid, getting his back against the whole world, he thought he'd be dead by now.

"Did you meet my cousin Randall?" Austin asked suddenly at a lull, and River glanced over at him, frowning. He'd been hit with so many names this week he'd sort of stopped recording, and it took him a couple minutes of mental scanning to hit the answer. Randall, yeah; nice kid, a little younger than River, who he remembered mostly because Randall also looked a lot like Austin. Not as tall, and kind of beefier, but with the same coloration and unneccessary handsomeness and guileless, affecting grin. They'd stood against a wall in the kitchen talking for a while before some dinner or another, Randall had just finished college apps and wanted to know what both the northeast and Colorado were like. River had liked him: he'd been funny and kind.

"Looking at CU-Boulder, looks a lot like you?" he guessed, just to make sure; Austin laughed at that last, but nodded. "Yeah, we talked for a while. Why?"

Austin shrugged. "Just thought you'd like him. He's a great kid. I don't get to see him enough, 'cept for this time of year. Even before I moved away."

River frowned at him again. "Where's he live?"

"Huh? Just down the road a piece." After a second, though, he seemed to get it, and shook his head. "Oh. No, that's not why. He just doesn't come over much. At all. If he can help it." River kept looking at him after he lapsed into quiet again, waiting for him to pick up again, and eventually at a red light Austin glanced over at him and smiled. It wasn't a very typical Austin smile; hard-lined, curved only at the ends. "My dad's pretty much why he can't come out."

"What -- "

But the wheels turned while his mouth was making the word, and then they clicked into a row and River shut his mouth again on the rest. Oh. Right. Come out. He thought of Randall's big grin again, his friendliness, his warm dark eyes, and sudden, unwanted, guilty panic squeezed at his lungs. Oh, jeez, do you think he thought I was -- fought its way into his mouth next, and he bit that back, too, looking away and out the window. He didn't know a lot about this stuff, but he knew that as a response deserved like an F-minus grade on the Sympathetic Friend test. And probably the Decent Human Being test, too. So he shut up his mouth -- but that couldn't stop his head racing over his conversation with Randall, how close Austin's cousin had or hadn't stood, what he'd said, the way he'd looked at River, how much he'd looked like Austin, what River might have said wrong or right. The thought kept drawing him back in a way that he told himself firmly was all horror, all the way down.

"Oh," he said finally, lamely. The silence that followed was probably only awkward for him.

"It's not a big deal, I guess," Austin said after a while. They were traversing a dusty stretch of not much now, nearing the edge of town. "I mean, he'll go off to college and work things out on his own, and his parents'd probably be all right if you could get 'em away from mine. But it's like... Dad just kinda gets into everyone, you know? I remember when I could actually go to our church." He shrugged, rolling his head around restlessly on his shoulders. "I dunno."

"You guys don't get along?" River said. Which made it sound like he hadn't even been listening, but this was about the most uncomfortable he'd ever been and he figured just making an effort should count for something. Austin gave him that funny, not very Austin smile again.

"Nah, it's not quite like that. I mean, we don't not get along." He shrugged again. "Mostly 'cause all we ever talk about is football. I think the football's pretty much the only thing about me he wants to deal with anymore." The hard smile blossomed into a hard little grin. It made Austin look more like his dad, which River was also prudent enough not to point out. "And even then, I'm playing for the Jets. When I was a Longhorn was about the only time he'd ever talk about me to other people."

River let a long pause spool out, thinking. There was a lot of history lying in that unsaid -- a lot of it in those cut little curves of Austin's smile -- but he guessed in the end unsaid was fine. He could see enough of it through the glass.

"So... you're bringing Mandy out to meet them next year, right?" he said instead, finally, trying to grin. He was glad, too; Austin glanced over at him again, and laughed, and there was just enough more of himself around its edges again.

"Oh, yeah," he said, grinning back, and tapped two fingers to the corners of his lower lips. "I figure once Mom sees her snakebites she'll probably want her own, you know?"

"Maybe she can get little diamonds on hers," River said, in a compressed sort of voice -- not knowing if he should, not wanting to be mean -- but Austin busted up laughing himself sick, so hard he had to pull off the road for a second, so he guessed it was probably okay.

When they'd both collected themselves a bit, Austin back on the road and making a vague loop back in the direction they'd come, River did add, sheepishly, "I don't mean to... I mean. I like your mom."

Austin smiled over at him, his gaze distant. "She likes you," he said, with his eyes back on the road. "...I think my dad kinda hates your guts, but you gotta understand, there's not much better anybody could say than that about your character." River let out a little half-breath of uncertain laughter.

"Well, thanks, I guess." He leaned back in the leather seat -- this monster thing was so huge he could probably kick his feet up on the dash or something, but it was so clean and new-smelling he didn't dare -- and shrugged. "I'd say most people usually get to know me better before hating my guts, but that's so not even true."

That earned him another quick glance from Austin, between dusty stop signs. One of them, River had noticed, had had a tattered NO JESUS, NO PEACE / KNOW JESUS, KNOW PEACE bumper sticker plastered on it. How did someone decide to do that, anyway? Did you go out and buy a bumper sticker special for sticking to random road signs, or did you just want to get rid of an extra you had lying around? "Oh yeah?" Austin asked, after a minute, in that where is the land mine exactly here? tone of voice. River hesitated.

"Kinda," he said at last, and looked out the window again. "...Nobody had much use for me or my mom back home." He looked over at Austin after a few seconds' pause, catching his uncertain gaze skittering around. "I sort of know where you're coming from, is all."

"Yeah," Austin said, to nothing in particular, his eyes back on the road.

So it was about the last thing he was expecting a minute later, when Austin came out of absolutely nowhere with: "So do you have some kind of problem with gay guys?"

River stared at him, tried in his confusion to sigh and snort at the same time, ended up with some sort of angry buffalo noise. "What does that even have to do with anything?"

"Just now when I told you about Randall, you pretty much looked like you were about to bust a gasket." River jumped -- caught -- but Austin was still looking out at the road, not at him. "And I swear to God, half the time, every other word out of your mouth is gay something or gay something else. This or that or the other thing's gay." He glanced at River, and then away again. "You sound like my dad."

River kept staring at him, but it didn't seem to be helping. "Well, I'm not," he finally said. Austin just shook his head.

"Okay, fine, but that ain't the problem. Why you got such a bug up your butt about it? If you'll pardon the expression. I know a bunch of gay guys, not even just Randy. They're great guys. I just don't understand why you're so freaked out."

River struggled for anything to say. "I'm not -- I'm not freaked out. I don't care. I'm just -- I don't have a problem with them, I'm just not gay."

Austin shrugged. "I didn't say you were."

"Okay. Well." He fumbled for a minute longer. "I mean -- I'm sorry if it came off that way. I didn't mean to. I'm not, like... I don't hate gay people or anything. Just... yeah. You know."

"Okay," Austin said, equably. River tried to think of something else to say, since that obviously wasn't an ending, but couldn't. Things lapsed into a long pause instead, and he let them, frowning out the window again.

"But you know -- " Austin said at last, and River's stomach lurched up his throat just at something in the sound of his tone. "I mean -- it's cool, man. I just want to say, you don't have to, like -- prove anything to me. If you were -- "

"Oh my God." River put both his hands over his face and groaned through them. "I'm not gay."

"I'm not saying -- "

"You are! You totally are. You are trying to have a heart-to-heart with me about how you think I'm gay and, and hiding it from you, because you are insane and retarded and from outer space." He dropped his hands back to his lap, and his head back against the leather headrest. "What do I have to say?"

"Okay!" Austin threw up his hands, but let them fall back back down on the wheel again with a slap before River could get nervous. "All right, you are heterosexual. Loud and clear, Captain, we read you, ten-four or something. All right, are you happy?"

"You think I'm gay," River accused. Although he was alarmed to find his mouth twitching a little, as though this could possibly be funny. Austin, though, was way ahead of him; when he glanced over at River again, finally, he was back to his all-out grin.

"No," he said. "No, I know you're gay. And do you want to know how?"

"No," River said, definitely not grinning back. Nope. Totally impossible.

"You own," Austin intoned nonetheless, portentously, drawing out every word, "two... Vienna Teng albums."

"Screw you, she sings like an angel," River said, and then they were both howling and Austin nearly killed yet another stop sign.

And five minutes later they were talking football again -- who they thought was likely to get drafted this year -- and later on they found a movie theater and spent the afternoon watching something stupid and explosion-filled, air-conditioned against the warmth of December. So that was all right.

Probably.

---

When River's mom called him on Christmas, she asked -- wistfully, although she tried to keep it out of her voice, which just ended up making him feel more guilty -- what he was doing with himself for the holiday. Up in Austin's room, he glanced at the door, where the family was rolling on at a high-drama roar just down the flight of stairs.

"Nothing much," he said. "Just hanging out with a friend. How about you?"

He managed to avoid cousin Randall for the entire rest of the holiday, and was less sure than he would have liked to be that what he felt about that was relief.

---

It was in late January, when River was grumbling about how anemic-looking his schedule of classes for spring had ended up being, that Austin finally hit him with the unthinkable third option -- the Get Out Of Jail Free card he'd hidden under the mattress, so as not to be tempted to use it unless absolutely necessary. The Final Solution. The T-bomb.

"Have you ever thought about transferring?" Austin asked, tossing him an easygoing pass over the back of the sofa. Tossing a ball back and forth while they were talking was a habit they'd gotten in recently, after Austin's parents' backyard had finally afforded them the opportunity to mess around with playing each other. River still felt a little condescended to about it, and wasn't a hundred percent sure he thought it was a good idea, but hey, if Austin wasn't worried about Austin's giant TV then he wasn't worried about Austin's giant TV. Austin was just looking at him from the kitchen, clearly had no idea what taboos he was breaking open, but River went a little white-knuckled around the football anyway. "I mean, it doesn't seem like you're that crazy about it, and there's lots of good schools around here. I bet you could get in anywhere easy."

"Not anywhere," River said shortly, and passed the football back. "I don't know. Not really."

Austin frowned, jogging the ball spinningly in one hand. "How come? Seriously. There's, like, Columbia -- "

"I'd never get into Columbia." Austin looked at him inquiringly, and he shrugged, looking away. "I wouldn't. There's no way."

"Okay, whatever -- Fordham? NYU? Barnard?" River snapped his head back up, glowering, and Austin grinned and aimed a finger at him. "Just making sure you were paying attention. I'm just saying -- "

"And I'd afford any of those how?" River cut across him -- trying not to snap, to keep his tongue on a leash, but all the prickers seemed to be jabbing up at once out of his skin. Self-defense. "It's not like I can pick up a football ride into Columbia, even if I could get in. Do you know how much schools like those cost?"

Austin shrugged. If he'd understood that low punch, he let it roll off him like water. Somehow it just made River madder that he could. "Not in figures, no. But you could get some kind of aid, right? And whatever's left over -- I'd cover you."

"No you wouldn't!"

He hadn't meant for that to come out a yell, and it didn't quite -- but there was still enough of a whetted metal edge on every side of it that not even Austin could ignore it anymore. He was standing very still now, the football arrested in his hand, and River had to look down and away. Like always when he was really pissed, he forced his anger out in unsteady laughter, trying to make a joke of it. "Oh my God, what. What are you, my, my sugar daddy? No, okay? No."

"I didn't say I was," Austin said, a little quiet, and River shook his head hard.

"Then don't go around saying you're going to pay, like, tens of thousands of dollars for me to go to school somewhere different. 'Cause you feel like it -- like you're going to get dinner or something. It's... dammit, do you have any idea how much that drives me crazy? I hate it when you do that." What he could see of Austin's expression out of the corner of his eye was hard to stand, but the cat was out of the bag now, he guessed. No reason to stop now that the door was open. "Okay, you have more money than you know what to do with, you can throw it around whenever you feel like it. Good for you, but it's not really fun for me."

The pause that followed that was a little longer. "I'm not trying to -- " Austin said again, even quieter, and suddenly River couldn't stand to listen to him do it, couldn't stand to not look at him anymore. He turned around on the couch to face Austin, flopping his hands down on his lap, trying to struggle himself calm.

"I know. It's okay, I know. It just." He sighed, and rubbed his forehead. "It really bugs me. Never mind."

"I'm sorry," Austin said, and River didn't have much of anything to say after that.

He went home not much later, making up some excuse, and tried not to think anything of it, which worked about as well as it ever did. They ended up spending the next few weeks doing the Guy Argument thing, where they avoided direct contact but still had stilted awkward AIM conversations when River was in the computer lab, usually ending with somebody saying 'brb' and then never actually b'ing rb. The dance of how true manliness eschewed all possible feelings, and feelings were involved in having fights, so they couldn't possibly be having a fight, so everything was fine, except it so laughably obviously wasn't. This went on uninterrupted through the start of spring semester, and might have continued God knew how long, if one afternoon he hadn't answered a knock on his dorm room door to find Mandy standing out in the hallway, a ratty backpack with weird band names pen-lettered on it dangling off one shoulder.

"Does your dorm have a laundry room?" she asked without preamble, and River, gaping, resisted the urge to poke her to see if she was actually happening. These were two worlds that were not meant to collide.

"Um. Yes?"

"Cool." She shouldered past him into the room and dumped her backpack on his bed for a second, just long enough to free her hair from a peculiar tangle under it. "Can you show me? Be, like, my beard, I almost look like I could go here, right?"

He stared at her for a second, then shook his head a little and tried again. "...you came all the way out to Long Island to do laundry?"

Mandy turned, fixing him with a long patient look. "No," she said. "I came out to Long Island to yell at you. I just realized I had some stuff on me I need to wash."

"...Oh," River said. Mostly he found himself disappointed, oddly enough.

It was early enough in the semester that the laundry room was pretty empty. Mandy had no trouble finding a machine, and then she sat on the table in the middle of the room with a bag of sunflower seeds, also from his dorm's vending machine. At some point River had missed, she'd managed to lose her shoes; quite possibly they were in the wash. "Mostly I'm pissed because this whole thing is such utter bullshit," she informed him with her mouth half-full, digging her hand into crinkling plastic. "You guys are fighting because, what, he offered you money and you wouldn't take it? This is supposed to be an actual grownup problem?"

"We're not fighting," River said. Mandy tilted her head toward him, her chin down and eyes up, a sign for BITCH, ARE YOU FOR REAL so universal it might as well have been neon. He sighed. "So I don't want to be his charity case. It seriously doesn't bug you, when he pulls stuff like that?"

"No." She scooped out another handful of seeds, dumping them into her mouth in a short shower. "I take it or I don't. It doesn't have to be a drama. And this isn't about me."

He didn't say anything to that, and she finally sighed and kept going. "Look, it's like you're trying to kill yourself proving something, and half the time I can't even figure out what it is. Nobody thinks you're trying to freeload on Austin -- if I thought you were we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Yeah, he's got a buttload of money, but it's not like he's showing off about it, he doesn't even realize he's got it enough for that. You know that, right?"

Even back in Texas, Austin's weird suburbia house was gigantic, his mom studded with diamonds, their garage overflowing with SUVs. River nodded, reluctantly. "Nice for him," he muttered anyway, unable to help himself, and Mandy shrugged.

"Yeah, it is." She looked at him, for a second, hard. "He loves you," she said, finally. "Like way more than me, which I think is kind of hilarious. Except it bugs me a little too, because sometimes all I feel like I see you doing is acting like he's out to fuck you and you're damn well gonna be ready when the other shoe drops."

It took him a minute to process that she didn't mean that first part literally, which didn't help him formulate a response any faster. But more than that he was just gobsmacked, gaping at her with everything smacked out of his head. "I don't... do that," he managed finally. His tongue stumbled around on the sentence, caught completely off-balance. "I mean... I don't think that. About him." Mandy looked back at the sunflower seeds, measuring her words.

"Even if you don't, that's how it comes off," she said. "And I think you do a little."

He struggled to unstick his tongue; it seemed like something he was doing a lot of lately. "Look," he said, and groped briefly. "I've pretty much never actually had a friend before, okay? I mean, back home, we're more or less talking my mom, the girl I had a crush on from the time I was like six who maybe twice or so noticed I was there, and maybe two guys on my high school team who were, like, at least partially cool with the fact that I existed. I don't a hundred percent know what you do with one. So I'm sorry, but -- "

"Oh, sweetie," Mandy said, sighing, and then abruptly reached up and cupped River's chin in her hand, holding it steady. "I'm not saying you're crap at friends. I'm just saying... you're jumping at shadows that aren't even there." She tilted her head a little more, serious, meeting his eyes. "Austin's not smart enough to break your heart. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, but it's true."

"I know," River said. The phrasing didn't exactly make him comfortable, but it was the truth, and anyway under the circumstances he didn't think it would be prudent to object. If Austin had gotten annoyed with him for gay stuff making him nervous -- Mandy looked at him and he looked away, letting out a breath, tipping down his head in her hand but not quite out of it. "No, I do know that. ...In the nicest possible way."

"But the other thing is," she said -- going on as if he hadn't said anything, which he supposed meant she was satisfied -- "you're more than smart enough to break his."

He didn't have a lot of anything to say to that.

She sat back, finally, letting him go, if only to rub her hands at her face. "You are smart, Riv. You're a really bright kid. You're probably a good writer, I bet -- you can tell just by the way you talk." He looked away, still tongue-tied, and she leaned in a little closer. "You ought to take him up on it. LIU's not a bad school, but you especially, there's so much more you could be doing. There's so much stuff I bet you want to do, if you weren't working so hard on being miserable all the time."

River shrugged, his stomach doing something small and weird and clenching. "...I don't know. It's kind of a big decision."

"Why?" He looked up at her, but his small smile had to take the place of an answer. Once she realized that, she thought for a long moment, and then took a breath he could see. "You know, the other thing is... I know he'd never say it, but -- Austin thinks you shouldn't even be playing football anymore."

"Fuck him," River said. Immediately, and again a lot sharper on the edges than he'd really meant it to be.

At the sudden severity of the look she gave him, though, he faltered, and then finally quailed. "No, I mean..." he said, a lot quieter now, and rubbed his hand across his forehead. "That's not what I mean. I mean, f-- screw that." He paced away a few steps before coming back, a little of the edge able to come back to his voice now that he wasn't looking at her. "What, so I'm not as good as he is so I ought to just give up? Yeah, awesome. Or, or I'm never going to be pro, so I ought to take my ball and go home. I failed already, so I can't even keep trying? Yeah, because that's completely the mature and not pathetic thing to do."

"Do you even think for a second that that's what he thinks?" Mandy asked, quiet enough that it shut him up. "I swear to God, something is broken in your brains."

He lifted his arms, flapped them back against his sides. "Then what?"

She leaned forward toward him, resting her elbows on her knees. "He thinks -- and I think -- you should stop because it's not making you happy. Because you're the only one who's worried about whether you're as good as him or not. And you're the only one who thinks you've failed." River stared at her, and she sighed again. "It's not like you suck. You're on a good team. Austin says you're good, all the time. But -- Jesus, River, what do you think you need to be? You're so smart and it's like you still can't even think your way around it."

She put her hands against her temples and then thrust them out, expressively, holding air between them. "It's like, you're so hung up on all this bullshit people have been saying to you all your life," she said. "You've got yourself locked in this box where football is the only thing you can ever possibly do to be worth anything." And she dropped her arms across her lap, at last, and looked at him. "Austin's just trying to let you out."

---

Hey, River typed into the text box on his web client, as soon as av_hookemhorns signed on. The sudden panic that Austin wouldn't respond was beyond ridiculous -- he had thus far, hadn't he? -- but inescapable. He still didn't think he agreed with Mandy; he was more worried that he was going to be the one to screw everything up forever and ever.

The pause wasn't long, but it felt like it. hey appeared on the screen, calm and ordinary. He shut his eyes for a second, then felt stupid -- his Psych paper forgotten in the other window. sup

Just doing homework. Anything going on there?

mandys friends are over, came back a lot quicker this time. all goin on about pitchfork & drinking pabs blue ribbon. save meeeeee

River snorted in spite of himself, then glanced around guiltily with a hand half over his mouth. Oh crap, hipsters, ask the landlord for traps

i know rite

A pause.

Hey, so, he typed next, and then deleted a letter of it, and then put it back before he could get too far. The next sentence took about four rewrites before he was able to give up and sit staring at it, his pinky hovering over Enter. You still think you'd be up for helping me out, if I transferred?

Once he mustered himself up and hit the button, though, the response was so immediate he barely even had time to get nervous again. sure appeared at once under his damning question, somehow starker and surer for the customary lack of punctuation. if thats cool i mean

It's cool, he wrote back, as quickly as possible, trying not to close his eyes again. Sorry I blew up at you.

Thanks.

Another brief, hovering pause. no prob Austin wrote; and he could breathe again.

And then, a second later: sooo does this mean i AM ur sugar daddy??

lol

River rolled his eyes, now completely oblivious to the fact that he was in the lab or anyone else who might be using it. You know how I know you're gay?

how

Because you actually WANT to be my sugar daddy.

hahahahaha came back, and he just waited for it. know how i know ur gay

Oh, please, enlighten me.

well cause you just said that first of all Austin shot back, and he couldn't help snorting again. no srsly, its just cause youre the one givin the sugar

baby

if u know what i mean

River signed off on him then; but he did it grinning.