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Alfred sat staring at his knees on his unmade dorm bed. Although there were two beds in the room, only one of them was in use– His roommate had long dropped from the school, flunking out with a grace that did nothing to hide the steady disappointment in the eyes of the man who’d picked him up. He’d been a nice Italian dude, and the man who’d picked him up looked… the same as he had, just with slightly darker hair and a more dead-inside atmosphere. It’d probably been his brother.
Alfred would take a perverse amount of schadenfreude (word learned from a German friend of his) in that, if he wasn’t currently facing the exact same issue.
Not the dropping out of college issue– No, far worse. Sitting on his nightstand was a phone that was about to ring.
A phone that was about to tell Alfred he was about to be expelled.
But how did this happen?
To understand that, one must understand that Alfred loves his friends very much. He also loves his foster parents, even if Arthur is the most grumpy British dude he’s ever met and Francis had a little too much attachment to his French history. Alfred could not compromise the love of one for the love of the other… but that’s exactly what he’d done.
And on Arthur’s birthday, no less.
Alfred currently sat staring at a wall on his too-hard too-lumpy dorm mattress because he was going to take the fall for an unfortunate group project. A group project he’d been in with another friend of his, a too-shady Russian man who he could admit had started out as an enemy. Even as Alfred awaited the inevitable phone call proclaiming he was getting expelled and had to leave posthaste. A half-packed suitcase on the bed told of Alfred’s half-functional efforts to jump the gun.
The clothing strewn around the floor in a circle around the suitcase told of his (lack of) success.
Alfred had agreed to do a group project with his Russian friend– Ivan Braginsky– because he’d trusted the man to be nice about it. Ivan and Alfred had been academic rivals when he’d started out at this school.
You see, both Alfred and Ivan were in the honors program for astrophysics. Alfred had always wanted to explore the stars, and the opportunity to do so being accessible with a degree, an internship, and some training? Sign him up! He’d studied hard, harder than he’d ever done before. By the end of high school he’d been on track to be a D1 athlete and was a 4.0+ student. Straight As didn’t even begin to cover it. Alfred’s GPA had been so high he’d been going on a 5.0.
(Look where that had gotten him– Sitting here, head in his hands, staring down at the unfeeling and cold concrete-tile floors of a dorm room. Alfred’s eyes stayed dry only on the virtue of having nothing left to cry.)
Anyway, back to his life’s story. Where was he? Oh yes. Alfred had entered college with an ego as high as the moon and as large as the Sun. Ivan Braginsky, the scrawny little runt in his intro class: Stars & the Solar System. It was so ridiculously boring and everything covered Alfred had already known, but Braginsky?
Braginsky answered every question quietly, but with depth that was completely displaced in an intro course. Depth so staggering that not even Alfred could keep up, that had immediately earned him the grace of the boneheaded professor teaching that class.
The very same boneheaded professor who was the department’s head.
Alfred had nursed a grudge for the Russian student ever since, even though he was a transfer and not sticking around. Braginsky had seemed to take it as a friendship of sorts, however, and soon enough “Braginsky” had become “Ivan.” Alfred hadn’t kept track- Coursework had ramped up pretty exponentially in the semesters following his first, and he hadn’t cared about his rivalry-come-friendship with Ivan. Not until this semester, where they’d been placed in the same class and assigned as group project partners for the end of the school year.
And of course, it was the Nuclear Physics course.
Since they’d been partnered together for a project worth a whopping 50% of their grade, Alfred had put aside any residual grudges to actually… make nice, with Ivan. They’d quickly become good friends.
By some forsaken stroke of luck, Ivan and he had submitted the project right before the deadline. Alfred alone was called into the professor’s office– the same professor from that very class he’d first met Ivan in, in fact– to discuss an “issue.”
Of “severe academic importance.”
Yeah, that email had gone over well. Alfred had woken up to it, in fact. He’d been so fucking scared. He’d walked over to the professor’s office like a man to the gallows.
What the professor had to discuss was eye-opening: Not only had Ivan completely faked his part of the project, he’d ripped it out of none other than NASA’s top secret security systems. Encrypted security systems, so devastatingly secure that the US government was now looking at Alfred.
He would’ve gotten away with it, too. His plan had been foolproof, if not for one thing…. This professor was an ex-NASA employee. The files Ivan had ripped off were his old work, done with colleagues near and dear to his heart.
Alfred had felt his heart drop to his toes.
Did the professor suspect him of being an accomplice?
No. The professor suspected him of orchestrating the whole thing. The old, grizzled man had never liked him, and had always been rather fond of Ivan. He’d said that Alfred would receive a call within the day informing him of his immediate expulsion, and potentially face some interesting court cases in the future.
Alfred had gone back to his dorm and barricaded himself in it.
He’d first tried to call Ivan– No reply. Dial tone, immediately. He unfurled the text notifications from the man, and all they did was admit that Ivan had blocked him. A mystery number had also texted… admitting to the crime.
Ivan’s voice read the texts out loud in his head as he stared, stared, stared at his hopes and dreams burning before him. He’d made sure his only rival for the internship would go down, he said. He’d made sure there would be no record of this conversation or connection to him, he said.
“Good luck with the rest of your life,” he’d said. Then, he’d signed it that same cyrillic lettering Alfred had come to realize as the Russian word for goodbye.
До свидания, he’d written.
Alfred let curiosity get the best of him. He looked it up, finding out it meant goodbye. Finding out it was the formal connotation, and the fact that formal Russian used between same-age friends was… a bad sign.
Emotional distance, read the text. A friend using formal language can signify them creating emotional distance between you.
Were they ever really friends?
It was about this time that Alfred had ceased his pacing around the room and sat down on his unmade bed. He’d placed his head in his hands around the same time he’d put together that no, Ivan had probably hated him all that time. Alfred had just been too egotistical and naive to notice.
That brought him to now: Sitting on the edge of his bed like a teenager watching an R-rated horror movie, completely unprepared for the jumpscare that’s about to happen and still impatiently awaiting it. Who would call first? His foster father, Arthur, inquiring as to why he hadn’t sent some kind of birthday message? The dean? The professor? Ivan’s mysterious burner?
Just as Alfred was thinking this, his cellphone rang.
Time to face the music.