Morgue Files

On the way toward Macdonald Hall his final year of secondary school, carrying what felt like the contents of his entire house in the backseat of what was possibly the ugliest car below the treeline—Melvin O’Neal hit a dead moose.

It would be funny in six or so years (or probably immediately to Bruno, who had no soul), but between the Forestry Service’s solemn lectures, Mounties biting their lips to keep from laughing, and his mother’s deranged wailing, the very, very last thing he needed was to reach Macdonald Hall two days later, heavily dosed on Percocet for the enormous full-body bruise, only to find the entire school already in a very secret uproar.

“What the hell are you doing this time?” Boots hissed, stomping into room 206 to find Bruno writing in revolting, curlicue script all over an enormous pink heart, edged with lace.

Bruno looked up, all bright eyes and easy smile and waved, fingers dotted with glitter and flaking Elmer’s glue skin, worn into the grooves of his palms. “Glad you could make it, you slacker—we have an appointment with Mr. Fudge next week, by the way.”

Then, he turned back to the enormous paper heart, adding a flourish beneath the phrase “loins burning with desire.”

Boots rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I—I just got here! How can we have an appointment with the guidance counselor already?” he demanded. “And what in God’s name are you making? On my bed! Is that glue?” he asked angrily, pointing at a gummy spot on the naked mattress.

“I dunno. I think Sydney thinks we’re in love,” Bruno said, shrugging, before his expression turned solemn and he said, “Oh—that’s right. You don’t know yet.” Bruno’s face became tortured. “Oh, Boots. You’ve come during terrible, terrible dark times.”

“You don’t say,” Boots said through gritted teeth, making a note to punch Sydney in the mouth—that stupid tattletale—right after he punched Bruno.

Nodding seriously, Bruno continued, “So Professor Frescette is taking some ‘personal time,’ which Mark Davis hears means he like, fell in love with naked winter kayaking or something and he divorced his wife to go rub up against glaciers—and the Hall replaced him with some total psychopath.” Bruno’s scowl deepened. “He gave me an F.”

Boots blinked. “It—it’s the second day of school.”

Bruno’s scowl turned positively toxic. “I know.”

“Oh,” Boots said. “Um. Maybe you can change it?”

“Or maybe,” Bruno said, growing excited, “I hid in a bush underneath his window all night yesterday and realized that he has the biggest, most pathetic crush on the new math teacher at Scrimmages ever and am going to preserve the sanctity of Macdonald Hall and save the Canadian education system by getting rid of Miserly McKay once and for all.”

Boots felt a migraine coming on. “His name is Miserly?” he asked, since there didn’t seem like there was much else he could do. Elmer, when Boots had seen him earlier, was sobbing brokenly into what looked like a scale replica of an EM field, letters floating among the charges saying “YOU ARE MAGNETIC.” And considering Elmer still technically had a get-out-of-Walton free card, the fact he was participating was the worst possible kind of sign. At least nobody was wearing ties.

“Rodney,” Bruno said, non-nonplussed. “Anyway—he’s a jerk and has a poisonous personality and will need absolutely all the help he can get.” Then, Bruno cackled.

Boots covered his face. “I really wanted to graduate from high school,” he whimpered. “I mean, I kind of figured it was unrealistic after I met you and we almost got expelled that first time, but you know—pipe dreams.”

“The best part of this plan is,” Bruno said, “that we already know it will work. I mean, if we could marry off Wizzle, McKay should be a dream: I hear he’s totally loaded.”

Boots wanted to cry, but didn’t, and it was very hard. “I’m going to go take a shower now.”

Bruno waved him off. “Don’t take too long—I’m cultivating aphrodisiac plants in there.”

*

Dr. Rodney McKay, a quick Google search revealed, was a world-renowned physicist of uncommon caliber. He’d graduated with honors at the age of 16 from Northeastern and started collecting PhD’s and honors like they were going out of style, which he frequently assured the science press they never ever would. Lucky for Macdonald Hall, after a small if very violent “incident” at a conference where he’d pitched a fit, attempted to physically assault another physicist, and then collapsed with chest pains all in one hour, he’d been convinced to retire—however briefly—to his native land of Canada, where through machinations with dark lords, he’d acquired the temporary post as a science professor as a favor for an old friend.

“You have got to be exaggerating,” Boots muttered through his yawn.

Bruno glared. “I’m not, Boots. I’m not. You just don’t know yet.”

The night before had been one for the books: a festering combination of sexual tension and discomfort daisy-chained around the fact that two growing teenaged boys with rapidly-lengthening limbs and long arms should not be trapped in one twin-sized bed.

“Bruno, I seriously doubt he peddles his ass to the Prince of Lies,” Boots hissed, lowering his voice as two startlingly-young first years passed them in the hallway, looking lost and almost swallowed by the enormous, dark-wood halls of the school.

Rolling his eyes, Bruno said, “Whatever. You’re just grumpy because you didn’t sleep well—which was completely your own fault.”

Boots scowled. “Whatever.”

Boots, whose sheets had been lost in the car accident—stained hopelessly blue from the economy-sized bottle of laundry detergent that had upended all over it—and whose mattress was sticky to the touch from head to toe, had punched his roommate in the shoulder and said: “Move over or I kill you.” Bruno, who was always disturbingly agreeable when half-asleep, had only murmured sleepily and shifted until he was pressed up against the wall, head off the mattress, and Boots had slid in under the light, summer sheet, exhausted.

It had been, in theory, a good idea—and then Boots had remembered he’d spent an embarrassingly large number of hours over the summer mooning over Bruno: Bruno’s messy hair, his wayward smile, his stupid ideas, and the way that he always gave Boots his ice cubes because he knew Boots liked his water very, very cold.

So for his own foolishness, he’d spent the night on the edge of wakefulness and sleep, terrified at the warring prospects of passing out and murmuring something incriminating during one of his vivid dreams or even worse, just rubbing the evidence of it against the small of Bruno’s back.

By the time the sun had started peering out over the mountain of dreary gray clouds, Boots was out of bed and into the shower, carefully ignoring some highly suspect plant life sitting on the counters and on the back of the toilet and too depressed to bother doing anything other than fisting his morning erection. My life is a freak show, he’d thought, and come on the shower tile.

“…And anyway, that’s why Sadie’s going to cotillion and how Dad got me drunk for Labor Day,” Bruno finished.

Boots blinked twice, categorized whatever Bruno had been saying under the heading of “Walton family freak stories” and said, “Your family’s so strange.”

Bruno shrugged, and sighing as they neared their English class, he said, “Can’t live with them, too much red clay in the yard to dig through and bury the bodies.” He grinned brightly and looped his arm around Boot’s shoulders in a friendly if thoroughly arousing way. “Anyway, I’m back now—and it’s going to be a great year.”

Mrs. MacKenzie’s English classes were somewhat notorious for their painful reading lists and by the time Bruno and Boots staggered out of their first section of the day, they already felt demoralized—school session nostalgia disappearing in a puff of classical literature and paperback copies of Madame Bovary.

For second period, Bruno headed off for a comparative political systems course and Boots wandered toward Canadian history, with Bruno saying as he went, “I’ll see you again in third—for physics—and then you’ll see!”

“Ridiculous,” Boots said to himself. “Totally ridiculous.”

“What’s even more ridiculous,” Dr. Rodney McKay said later, standing in front of the room, stiff-backed to the whiteboard, “is that I promised to take on this position under the impression I’d be teaching the very best of Canada’s future and they stuck me with classroom after classroom of subpar and—” he looked sharply at Elmer, who appeared to be on the verge of tears “—mediocre excuses for students.”

Boots stared, pencil still upright in weak fingers as Bruno hissed vile imprecations under his breath two seats over—loudly enough that Boots could hear them and probably loudly enough that Dr. McKay would hear them.

“Suffice it to say, I’m crushed by the weight of your inadequacy already,” Dr. McKay finished viciously before slapping the projector, an unbelievably complex physics equation suddenly shot up against the whiteboard, with whisper-traces of blue and red pen still stained into the surface. “Now—you have five minutes: solve for theta.”

Despite Boots’ tendency to let Bruno walk all over him he loathed to admit Bruno was right, but as predicted, everybody crept out of the physics class stunned: like fish after dynamite.

*

That night, Bruno gave Boots the shakedown over the shenanigans with the moose—which Boots had conveniently neglected to mention. It would have warmed Boots’ heart to see Bruno so concerned if it weren’t for the fact that Bruno tended to be very physical in his inspections, hands warm and enormous—when had Bruno’s hands gotten so big? Boots thought morosely—on Boots’ shoulders, his sides, down his arms.

“I’m really fine,” Boots said, high-pitched, trying to catch Bruno’s eyes so his roommate wouldn’t do something like look down and see what else Boots was pitching.

Bruno snorted. “Please,” he scoffed. “I saw that pharmacy you unloaded into the bathroom and went and asked the Fish—I can’t believe you hit a moose and didn’t tell me about it.”

Boots scowled. “I was understandably distracted by the fact that you’d already gotten the entire school into an uproar,” he said sarcastically.

“It’s not an uproar, Boots,” Bruno said seriously, putting a hand on the back of Boots’ neck. “It’s a movement—a peace movement at that. Do you want the fragile social fabric of this school torn to pieces?”

Boots could feel a flush bloom out all over his skin: hot and wanting and awkward. The lizard-brain just above where Bruno was stroking a concerned thumb up the side of his neck murmured crazily: just do it, shove him against the wall, kiss that look off his face.

“Not even everybody’s in physics,” Boots managed to say sullenly. He knew that made about as much sense as his irrational crush on his sociopath of a roommate.

Bruno made a dismissive noise and pulled his palm away before turning round to rifle through a small stack of pages on his desk, saying, “Look—Macdonald Hall is a cohesive entity: when one of us suffers, we all suffer.”

“By which you mean you make us suffer,” Boots said, but didn’t mean it, and Bruno knew it, too, by the way he didn’t deign to give it a response, choosing instead to say, “Ah-hah!” and jerk a sheaf of papers out of the stack. “What’s that?” Boots asked.

“Research material,” Bruno said, triumphant, and held up a sheaf of grainy-gray pages, print-outs of…oh sweet Jesus.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Boots shrieked, hands flying up to cover his face as he yelled, “That’s gay porn! Why do you have print-outs of gay porn?”

“Breathe, Melvin,” Bruno said, rolling his eyes and turning the pages back to shuffle through them casually, with a speculative expression on his face. “The print quality on the inkjet in the newspaper office is terrible—I can barely see anything,” he sighed.

Boots heard a broken noise come out of his throat and kept his hands tight over his eyes, because if he didn’t he’d probably open his eyes again and stare at the blandly pixilated images of a dark haired man bending another one over the side of a desk. Their hips were sealed together, nearly seamless, pressed so tightly that Boots could feel his throat starting to close up: this was what he’d spent his summer desperately trying to avoid looking up and now it was in his room—in Bruno’s hands.

“Bruno—Bruno,” he moaned, knowing just how pathetic he sounded, and peered out from between his fingers. “Why do you have printouts of gay porno?”

Glaring, Bruno demanded, “Have you been listening at all? McKay has the flaming hots for the new math teacher at Scrimmages—you’ve been in class with the guy, he needs all the help he can get.”

Boots took his hands off his face and blinked. “Scrimmage’s new math teacher’s a guy?”

Rolling his eyes, Bruno said, “To quote Cathy and Diane, he is so hot, their ‘underpants spontaneously caught on fire.’” He lifted the pages again and tugged out one depicting a frighteningly buff pair of identical twins making out. “What do you think? Stick this under his door? Think it’ll be inspirational enough?”

“Will you—!” Boots snapped, slapping the pages away. “Will you think about this seriously for a second? Just because McKay is gay doesn’t mean the other guy is!” he finished, trying to ignore the bubbling hysteria over the painful irony of it all.

Bruno looked thoughtful. “You know,” he said. “That’s a very good point”

*

“No,” Cathy and Diane said together, scowling.

Bruno and Boots exchanged a baffled look before turning back to the girls.

“No?” Bruno asked, uncertain.

“No,” Diane confirmed, raising her brows in challenge.

“No,” Boots said, just to be sure.

“No,” Cathy snapped. “Look, I don’t know where you got this harebrained scheme, but we’re not letting Mr. Sheppard become your sacrificial lamb here.”

Diane crossed her arms over her chest. “Also, don’t think we haven’t heard the horror stories about Miserly McKay over here, too—we’re not putting poor Mr. Sheppard go through that just so you guys can dump another crazy teacher.”

Bruno sputtered and made frustrated-looking faces.