Chapter Text
Between four and four-thirty in the afternoon, Eric and the three other members of the afternoon kitchen crew take a mid-shift break to eat an early meal before madness descends with the five o’clock dinner hour. They tend to sit at a table in the main dining room just off the kitchen, scrolling through social media on their phones and gossiping.
The second shift is all returning counselors -- Eric, Skye, Steph, and Will -- so they’ve been casual friends since the summer before and loosely connected on Facebook and Twitter over the past year. Eric’s had a vague sense of changes in relationship status, spring break travels, progress made toward various educational goals. Skye and her boyfriend of two years are engaged and planning a wedding for the following June. Will is starting at Tennessee State University in the fall, after finishing his associate's degree at Oconee and taking a year off to work with AmeriCorps. Steph had spent her spring break in Honduras volunteering at a school with her sorority sisters.
“I guess I just never saw the point of pledging,” Skye was saying today, in response to one of Steph’s stories about rushing at Georgia Tech.
Steph shrugs. “I was looking for a place to live after the freshman dorms, right? And everyone on my floor was rushing. If you didn’t rush, you didn’t have a life on the weekends -- you know?”
Skye looks at her dubiously. “Maybe it’s different if you don’t have a team -- I spent the time I wasn’t studying with the swimmers, and most weekends at meets or in practice.” She looks over at Eric, who’s considering the balance of cinnamon and orange in today’s vanilla and blackberry parfait. “You play hockey, Eric,” Skye says, “Back me up here.”
“Yeah, but he lives in some sort of fraternity house for hockey players,” Steph says. “It’s like a fraternity that, you know, happens to play hockey.”
Eric laughs, “Yeah, in Rans and Holster’s wet dreams. But we do throw a mean kegster on occasion. And we’re the only house at Samwell where you’ll be guaranteed not only cheap beer but also pie.”
Skye shudders. “I’ve never understood how you guys do it, the partying and still you end up in the final four. I guess some swimmers do, but -- I know I couldn’t keep it up.”
Eric shrugs, thinking back to the last few parties they’d had at the Haus. “There’s always a few kids you have to watch out for -- but most people learn their own tolerance a few months into their first year. My boyfriend was always at the kegsters but he hardly drank at all. He’d nurse one beer all night long and no one ever called him on it.”
Not that Eric has anything approaching objectivity in the matter, but he’d like to think that he manages to make my boyfriend sound casual, not forced. Like he hasn’t been sitting at lunch all week waiting for some sort of opportunity to reference Jack without naming names. To say my boyfriend like it’s the sort of thing you just say without sweating and feeling slightly nauseated by the unpredictability of people's reactions. Like Will might say, “My girlfriend’s picking me up tonight,” or Steph might talk about what a drag it was when her Junior-year boyfriend was in Berlin for the spring semester.
All through high school and into college Eric imagined, longingly, being one of the people who got to do that, one of the lucky, confident people who breezily identified themselves in relation to others in that way. He’s watched peoples’ statuses on Facebook shift in and out of various permutations of in a relationship with… and thought enviously about what it would be like not to move through the world in the singular for a while, maybe eventually for always.
Now he’s said it aloud, familiarly, possessively. Said my boyfriend in front of a table of people who -- while they didn’t know him in high school -- do know him in Georgia, who are friends with friends who might know or be related to someone Eric went to school with. And he hasn’t said Jack but he’s definitely said boy.
There’s an almost imperceptible hitch in the conversation. For a minute Eric thinks he’s made huge mistake. Part of him had almost hoped that, the first time he said it people wouldn’t actually hear him. Or think they’d misheard him. Hoped that he’d be able to say it in public without actually having to face any meaningful response.
“Yeah,” Steph says, finally, nodding, “I knew a Theta who’d do that. He had a little sister and I think he felt responsible for the pledges who might do something stupid.”
Eric carves a bit of parfait out of his dish with his spoon, but sees the others nodding in his peripheral vision. Skye, sitting next to him, leans over slightly and nudges him with her shoulder. “Leave it to you to find a responsible one,” she says with approval.
“The big question, obviously,” Will says from across the table, “is whether this boy appreciates Eric’s pies with the degree of reverence they deserve.”
“Oh yeah,” Eric says, feeling the stupid smile spread across his face. “Yeah, he does.”