Chapter 1
1.
“No offense dude,” says Foggy, “but you should never work with the blind.”
Matt gives the snarl of yarn a doleful poke. “I really thought it would be easier with your eyes closed. Because then I could just describe--ugh. I have no idea how you teach this.”
Foggy looks down at the half-finished hat abandoned on Matt’s bed. “How’d you learn?”
He’s always wondered if Matt’s tells are a byproduct of his blindness, or if he’s always been this much of an open book: the same blush and subtle hunch of his shoulders pretty much always precede any story about his past. “By touch. It was an O.T. thing, um, after. When I was in the hospital.” Matt’s frank enough about his blindness that it’s easy to miss that he pretty much never talks about losing his sight--just when I was in the hospital, or after, you know--and Foggy kind of feels like a jerk for asking, like he’s crossed some kind of invisible line.
“Is that seriously a thing?” Foggy asks. “Like, sorry about your eyes, but at least your scarf game’s gonna be on-point?”
Matt grins, and Foggy relaxes. “Vision is fleeting. Knitwear is forever.”
It’s Foggy’s turn to laugh. “Is that from a Kung Fu movie? Knitting Masters.” He brandishes the knitting needles like swords, and scowls. “I’m doing my best Kung Fu face right now, by the way. Fear my yarn-y prowess!”
Matt raises an eyebrow. “I am duly intimidated.”
“Seriously, though,” says Foggy, “I bet it’s a thing. Some secret order of blind monks who can kick your ass with knitting needles.”
He’d like to think that he’s at least partly responsible for the refinement of Matt’s perfect deadpan, honed in response to Foggy’s--well, Foggy’s pretty-much-everything. “Shhh. If they find out you’re on to them, I’ll be honor-bound to kill you.” Matt drops his voice to a whisper. “You have to scale a sheer 600-foot cliff in the dead of winter to reach to the monastery, but if you make it they’ll teach you to turn heels.”
2.
“You knit?” Candace makes a face. “Like you weren’t weird enough already?”
“Hey,” Foggy says, “Knitting isn’t weird. Matt knits.” It’s a low blow, using her crush against her, but given that she’s taken over his old bedroom, he’s willing to stoop to a few cheap tricks.
“Matt’s cool,” Candace points out. “You’re a dork.”
The headlock is a token gesture at best--Candace is a varsity gymnast, which in practical terms means she can squirm her way out of anything--but it does buy Foggy the precious few seconds he needs to jam a handful of snow down the back of her coat.
Candace comes and finds him later, while he’s racing to finish the crown of Mom’s hat. “You did all that?” she asks, poking the brim with one hand and swiping his mug of cocoa with the other. “It’s pretty.” It’s Foggy’s first stab at lace, and he’s pretty proud of it, even if there are a couple rows where he knows the count was off.
“I thought knitting was dorky,” Foggy fires back.
“Everything you do is dorky,” Candace tells him. “Because you’re a dork.”
“I’m the original model,” Foggy tells her. “If I’m a dork, you’re a knock-off dork.”
She settles on the couch, mug still in hand. “Did you make me one?”
“What makes you think you deserve one?” Foggy asks. Her hat is the first one he finished, already wrapped and under the tree.
Candace shrugs. “I put up with you. Duh.”
“Well, then I deserve two hats,” Foggy tells her, “for putting up with you.”
“Sounds fair,” she says, and falls asleep a minute later, nestled up against his shoulder.
Somewhere between Christmas and April, Candace learns to crochet, and Foggy gets a package in the mail with a card that reads, Now we’re even, dork, and two hats. They’re both bright pink, because Candace is a brat; but Foggy wears them anyway, because she’s his brat; and he and Matt team up to make her mittens labeled L and R just in time for summer.
3.
It’s not that Foggy has never considered knitting for Matt. It’s just that Matt already knits, and he’s good--really good, way better than Foggy--and he never keeps anything he makes, so Foggy’s not sure if he even likes knitted stuff or just likes knitting. Plus, he’s picky about clothes and weird about textures; and the kind of painfully polite where Foggy’s pretty sure he’d wear whatever Foggy made him even if he hated it; and Foggy really doesn’t want to be responsible for driving his roommate insane.
Except. Except--
When he asks Matt if he’s got plans for the holidays, Matt just sort of shrugs and blushes, which Foggy knows means something horrible and depressing, like staying alone in the dorm and going to Mass a lot. Matt has a standing invitation at the Nelsons’--everyone has a standing invitation at the Nelsons’--but he got so uncomfortable and squirrelly when Foggy brought it up the first year that Foggy’s been hesitant to ask again.
So Foggy decides they’re going to do Christmas there. “Not Christmas-Christmas,” he explains to Matt. “We’ll do it on the 20th. Dorm Christmas. I’m pretty sure that’s a real holiday.”
“It is definitely not,” Matt says, but he’s having trouble suppressing a smile.
“It totally is,” Foggy tells him. “It’s the day that, um, the Three Wise Men got their roommate assignments."
"Shouldn't it be in Summer, then?" Matt asks.
"Just like regular Christmas!" Foggy proclaims, triumphant.
“Dorm Christmas,” Matt echoes, dubiously. “What do you want to do?”
“I dunno,” Foggy says. “Pie. Presents. Whatever.”
Matt bites his lip. “Yeah,” he says, after a minute. “Sure.” And then, because he apparently thinks he's fucking subtle, “Hey, did you mention something about needing to get to the yarn shop? Because I need to pick some stuff up for a thing.”
4.
“This one, or this one?” Foggy asks, thrusting two skeins of yarn at Matt. They’ve been wandering around the shop for half an hour while Foggy pretends to agonize over the perfect yarn for an imaginary shawl for his mom and Matt does his slightly trippy yarn-shop thing, touching and smelling everything like a preschooler on E. Foggy has yet to decipher the rubric by which Matt judges yarn, but his nods and grimaces are decisive enough for Foggy to narrow the options down to a smooth wool-silk blend, and something alpaca that feels the way Foggy had imagined clouds felt until he hit third grade science and found out that they were basically the worst bait-and-switch ever.
Matt laughs. “I think you’re on your own for this one, buddy.”
“No!” says Foggy. “The texture, man! They’re both gorgeous, trust me.” Save for a few t-shirts, Matt dresses entirely in grayscale--“at least this way I know everything matches”--but as Foggy figures it, the whole point of gifts is that they’re things people wouldn’t pick out for themselves. After briefly flirting with going garish and neon and dismissing it as a dick move, he narrowed down to red or blue: the two colors a very drunk Matt once confessed are the only ones he’s still pretty sure he remembers accurately. Red would look awesome against Matt’s palette of grays and blacks, but it’d also kind of come off like a capital-S Statement; so Foggy’s going for blue. Dark blue, because it just seems more Matt.
Matt holds out a hand. Foggy passes him the skeins, and watches while Matt pokes at them solemnly.
“This one,” says Matt, finally, handing back the blend with a nod. “Definitely this one.”
“Sweet,” says Foggy. Now he just has to figure out what the hell to do with it.
5.
It’s Marci who gives Foggy the idea. Matt’s away for the weekend, and she shows up on Friday with a bottle of vodka, a manicure kit, and half a box of condoms; which in sum pretty much keep them busy until midday Sunday.
Foggy’s sprawled out in bed, admiring his newly turquoise toenails, when Marci pipes up from across the room, “What the hell is this?”
Foggy drags himself up and looks over to Matt’s desk, where she’s holding up Matt’s slate.
“It’s a braille thing,” Foggy tells her. “Do you want to get donuts? I kind of want to get donuts, but I also really don’t want to put on pants.”
Marci pokes the slate. “How’s it work?”
“You lock it around the paper, and then you use a stylus--that’s the pointy thing--to make the dots,” Foggy tells her. “It’s kind of weirdly violent. And you have to do it backwards. Donuts, though?”
Marci settles back down on the bed next to him “Pants, though.” She holds up the slate and peers at Foggy through the holes. “Do you know braille?
Foggy shakes his head. “Little bit. I’m super bad at it.” He can sort of stumble along in Grade 1, but he hasn’t managed to wrap his head around the jump to Grade 2.
“Aw,” says Marci. “Do you and Matt send each other secret notes? I bet you totally do.”
Foggy sticks out his tongue “We most certainly do not, because we are dignified adult man people.”
Marci giggles. “You’re a pair of twelve-year-old girls, and you know it.”
“That’s it,” Foggy tells her. “I’m taking back my Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.” Which is about the point where it turns into mostly-fake wrestling, and that’s the rest of the afternoon gone.
After Marci leaves, Foggy pulls the skeins of wool out from under his bed and stares at them, trying to will them into a plan. The slate is still on the bed, a grid of tiny rectangles, like a lace pattern.
Secret notes, he thinks.
He grids the damn thing out half a dozen times before it finally works. The bumps are slight but clearly tangible, and Foggy is pretty sure the spacing makes sense; but of course, there's no way to be sure until he gives it to Matt.
6.
For Dorm Christmas, Foggy finds every half-decent holiday playlist on the ‘net and bakes his mom’s pumpkin pie in the dorm kitchen--store-bought crust, but she doesn’t need to know that part. Matt contributes two pairs of reindeer-antler headbands with little jingle bells, a coffee pot full of spiked cocoa, and a box of horrific fruit-flavored candy canes. Foggy improvises audio description for Muppet Christmas Carol, and Matt grudgingly admits that Whitmire is a passable Kermit, which Foggy proclaims the first official Dorm Christmas Miracle.
“Okay,” says Foggy, once they’ve finished off the last of the pie. “Presents!”
Matt digs a package out from under the bed and pushes it over, and holy shit, is he actually blushing?
“The wrapping’s kind of crap,” he says, with a shrug, “But I’m told the paper is adorable enough to make up for it. Penguins?”
“Super adorable,” Foggy tells him. “They’re sledding. In little hats and scarves. It’s almost a shame to rip into it, but in these desperate times, desperate measures must be taken.”
Inside, he finds a precisely patterned scarf and a matching hat. Foggy’s pretty sure he recognizes one of the worsteds he liked best on their last trip to the yarn shop. “This is gorgeous. It’s like--Matt! There are stripes! How did you do stripes? And a hat, what the hell, Murdock? I didn’t make you a hat. Damnit.” He knows Matt’s faster, but still.
“It’s just keeping track of which strand is where,” says Matt. “The hat’s not--I had extra, so. Are the colors okay? Marci picked them.”
“The colors are the best,” says Foggy. They are, too: a dark, warm olive with maroon stripes. And yeah--that’s definitely the worsted from the shop, which means Matt was keeping track of Foggy’s picks at the same time Foggy was teasing out Matt’s. “They’re all--warm? I dunno. I fucking love them, man.” He pulls the hat down over his hair and wraps the scarf around his neck, admiring the stripes. Matt’s stitching is insane, like something out of a machine.
“I wish I could see them on you,” Matt says, and then rushes to add, “I mean, I assume my handiwork is spectacular.”
Foggy laughs. “Flawless. I still don’t know how the hell you do that, buddy.” He hands Matt his own package. “Fair warning: this is not gonna be up to your impossible standards.”
Matt tears the paper away, and his face lights up the moment his hands come in contact with the wool. “The yarn! I thought that was for your mom. Foggy, I--”
“It’s, um, dark blue,” says Foggy. “I know you usually stick to grayscale, but I figure this’ll go with any of that, and you need something with actual color.”
Matt nods. “Yeah. Dark blue. Good call.” He runs his hands along the length of the scarf, tracing the narrow rib knit, and pauses when he hits the change. His brow furrows. Foggy watches, trying not to hold his breath.
“So, um, I wanted to--I’m not sure if it worked, but--”
The moment Matt recognizes what he’s touching, his face changes so fast Foggy can almost hear the bulb click on above his head. “Oh, my god,” he says, and Foggy swears his voice actually cracks. Matt shifts the scarf so it’s flat, and works his fingertips across the text. “Foggy. This is--”
And then Matt bursts into tears.
Foggy doesn’t know what the hell to do. He’s never seen Matt cry. Matt doesn’t cry. Foggy’s the one who cries, and Matt--oh, shit, what the hell has Foggy done?
“Hey,” he says to Matt. “Hey. Buddy. Are you okay? Is it--I didn’t mean--”
Matt cuts him off by throwing his arms around Foggy’s neck and fucking clinging, scarf crushed between them. “No, Foggy,” he says, muffled, into Foggy’s shoulder. “It’s perfect.”