Page 103

“Alright. Just put some rashers on your breakfast roll for me so you can tell me about it later,” A.J. said. If there was one thing from Ireland he missed aside from the people, it was their selection of breakfast meats. “Oh, and Bren?”

“Hm?”

“Maybe reach out to Dustin sometime this week. Just to, like, let him know you’re on his side.” He paused as the degree to which he knew his boyfriend settled in his head. “Without making dick jokes.”

“Ah, you’re really tying my hands here, Arlo.”

He didn’t like to think Bren lived a henpecked life, but there might have been a kernel of truth to the thought because, after another call from Maura, he sighed.

“Alright, I’ll try and be all sincere, like. Gotta go. Love you enough to come out for you.”

“Love you more than rashers. But, like, only just.”

Bren’s laughter cut off as he hung up and A.J. rolled onto his back, the earbuds slipping into his ears without conscious thought.

48

“I should just get it over with, right?”

“Yes!” Nat and Bren said as one, despite the thousands of kilometers between them. Under normal circumstances, A.J. might have registered how unsettling it was for the two of them to be this united, but pacing around his bedroom was taking all of his mental stack right now.

“OK, but ignorance is bliss, right? Can I just be blissful for five more minutes?”

Nat rolled her eyes so hard A.J. was surprised his bed didn’t shake.

“Oh, yeah, because you’ve been a fucking delight all week.”

The spurt of rustling over the speakerphone told A.J. that Bren had barely managed to suppress a laugh, and again he refused to let it warrant a reply.

He hadn’t been that bad when you got right down to it. OK, maybe the conversations at lunch had been more focused on college application standards and acceptance rates than they should have been, but he couldn’t see how that was any different from when Nat went through her Avenue Q phase back in grade ten.

“Arlo—”

“Don’t Arlo me right now. Please,” A.J. said, quickly adding the nod to manners when he realized how harsh that had sounded. “If these two say no, I’ve only got three more shots.”

He could always try listening to the gnarled corner of his soul that said it didn’t want to go back to Ireland anyway—but he wasn’t a fox and he knew these particular grapes were plenty sweet.

“And then we just go to University of—” Bren’s voice quavered as he approached the name he’d never been able to say with a straight face. “Regina. ’Cause in case you already forgot, your man got in there.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know if I got in there. So we should probably just wait until the U of R letter comes, right?”

“Okay, I love you, but I cannot take another week of you like this,” Nat said from her spot on the bed.

He was able to pull away from the thoughts of himself to wonder if she wasn’t upset that University of Vancouver had been ruled out. The two of them had gotten their acceptance letters the last week of April, right before Bren received the first edition of Thanks But No Thanks magazine. Why the hell Vancouver had gotten back to him before the town fifty minutes down the road was beyond him, but it felt unfair enough that he’d considered writing to his MP.

“Lad, if I got into Regina, then you did for sure. You’ve seen my grades,” Bren said.

“Oh, you mean your super unimpressive collection of 90s? I’ve got the worst math grade in the room.”

“I mean, you've got the worst math grade in most rooms.”

Nat caught the look he threw her and fiddled with a hole in her jeans.

“Here, just, you do it. Please?” He shoved the letters into her lap and went back to pacing before she could protest.

“Is his face all scrunched up and red, like?”

“Yup,” Nat said, tearing an envelope open.