In high school, it was Forrest and Gregory. The two met in the eighth grade, the flung-together way two twelve-year-olds would meet one another. A boxy seating chart projected out onto the whiteboard with their names side by side. Forrest had braces. Gregory, with worse teeth, would mention Minecraft in passing and come late to class once in a while. He would stutter through an explanation. Most of the time, it was his mother’s fault—she would make them run late, she would eat up time in the morning struggling to get out of bed, although Gregory would frame it as the late shifts made her exhausted. She was raising three boys. One of them liked Minecraft.

            Forrest and Gregory started dating in the tenth grade. It was strange for them, to be out in their sexualities, holding hands as they walked down the undercover pathways from where Gregory had bought a meat pie and an orange juice, to the crop of concrete that constituted somewhere to sit. Somewhere to notice. Be noticed. Sometimes a classmate would shove their teenage-greasy hands against Forrest’s shoulders, slamming him into the tiled walls of the toilet block. He started to avoid them. He started to train his bladder to retain the need for him to go to the bathroom until he caught the bus home, and he’d wail out, internally, when he sat at home on the toilet. Like the homophobia of it all clung to his skin regardless. He was fourteen and he felt fourteen.

            Billy was a friend, then. No one spoke of their sexualities unless you asked them about it, but Forrest and Gregory and Billy would have infrequent sleepovers at that age, since the three of them met at twelve. No one questioned boys, no one thought boys talked about kissing and what it meant. When Forrest and Gregory started to date, Billy readjusted. It was comfortable, then. He had other friends, in other classes, but he was oh so sweet on the friendship he had with the two boys who were falling in love with one another. Billy thought himself lucky. He was weaving for himself a transition from hanging around the primary school friends that couldn’t quite get him—they talked so much about the shit he didn’t know anything about, and by fourteen they just wanted to fuck bitches (or something a little less crude). Billy looked at them like they looked at him. One of us is a freak, and it’s not me. He couldn’t have the freedom that Forrest and Gregory had, but he could ogle it. He could bear witness to it. This ritual, this stance of accepting that the crushes on girls were just truces with his old friends, could be possible. He figured he would have to persevere until after graduation, but that thought hadn’t come to him yet.

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It was late in the year, the weather beginning to warm. Forrest and Gregory and Billy overlapped, then quietened down as they prepared for a series of exams each dreaded for different reasons. Forrest spent a few sleepless nights running ideas through his head, falling back on old memorising techniques. Gregory studied until nine at night, then shut the lid of his laptop and collapsed into bed. Billy furiously masturbated, paused to drink a glass of milk, then opened his notes and stared at them with an overwhelming headache. Sometimes he woke up in the morning and he couldn’t remember if it was Forrest or Gregory he’d been kissing in his dream. Sometimes either Forrest or Gregory would wake up and send a sleep-around-the-eyes selfie to the other.

            It was late in the year, the weather beginning to warm, and the three boys were figuring out how to be men. Forrest had this ambition: he wanted to get through high school, get accepted into university, go through the motions of becoming qualified to teach. He saw himself in a classroom, younger children than he is now, little minds inside little legends. The thought of teaching high schoolers, remembering what he thought about at sixteen versus what they would be thinking about while they stared at him half-unfocused, petrified him. Billy would study. Something like a gap year sounded promising and exciting but his parents would shame him for it. A silent shame, really. They’d wonder why he couldn’t make it work. Vacation plans would revert into getting hooked on the latest RPG and drinking at parties. Gregory took a career-aptitude test and it printed results labelling him the dream crematoriumist…he just thought he was making up words in his head. A scene replayed in his head for an hour or so, jerking a silver metal tray back and forth, back and forth, watching the lifeless corpse of an old woman like a distant cousin to his grandmother become a lit cigarette. Gregory took the test again. It said: slacker. He liked that.

            Gregory quickly realised he was this time just playing The Sims 2. His little humanoid figure had left the sofa, moved to the computer, and spat job search from the menu. The slacker career had a little symbol of a coffee sitting on a saucer. He salivated.

            During an exam, the three of them glanced up at the exact same time. They all took note of the time on the clockface: half of the test time had elapsed.

            Their relationship was the typical high school fanfare. Forrest and Gregory fought over the mundane things, but neither ever cheated. On graduation morning, Gregory dropped his pants and sent a picture of his semi-hard cock to his loving boyfriend. Forrest was already dressed, tying his shoes in the hallway. He’d already seen Gregory’s cock plenty of time. He was pissed this was his boyfriend’s reaction to the last of their fights, which had ended sourly the night before. Forrest still salivated.

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