Winona left the apartment early the next morning, taking the subway to get to the university. On Fridays like this she had her dreaded basket-weaving elective first thing, while I could afford to stay under the covers until noon.

  She was a deep sleeper. That meant it fell to me to roll her out of the bed we shared by pressing my foot against her ass. It always riled her up, but she was also grateful in the end when I did it. Left to her own devices, she tended to tumble out of bed entirely, suddenly lost, disoriented, and without any to hold onto.

  I wanted to stay under the covers myself, but then the landline rang. Winona and I were probably the only people on campus who still had a landline phone. We’d ditched our smartphones together as part of a pact to be more entwined with the offline world, yet we’d simply replaced our hours spent browsing with gaming instead.

  Nonetheless, it was still nice to get away from all that buzzing and annoying ringtones and whatnot. I should’ve had the foresight to install it somewhere else though.

  I reached for the crimson-coloured telephone. It was modelled after the one from The Powerpuff Girls — you know, the one with the cutesy grin? I twirled the cord around my fingers and sighed, hoping it wasn’t one of those dreaded scam calls that, for some reason, kept taking an interest in me and Winona.

  But it wasn’t a scammer calling from halfway across the world.

  It was my mother.

  “Mom?” I said, exasperated. She rarely phoned outside the weekend. Well, it was Friday — but Friday didn’t count as the weekend, did it?

  “Hi, sweetie!” There was warmth in her voice. It had been wondrous when I was growing up. A place to hide. A place to confide and cry in. But somewhere along the way it had morphed into something else. Something suffocating. Something that made my skin crawl.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want?” Her voice rose into a sharp little shriek at the end. I could picture her already, glaring down the receiver.

  “Can’t I phone my only son?”

  “We had a rule, remember?” I replied flatly. “Phone calls on weekends only.” I’d grown tired of the pestering — the sudden, renewed interest in my life and all my hobbies once I’d finished high school and moved away to study.

  It was exhausting. I just wanted to be alone now that I had my own place and my own part time jobs and wasn’t getting much in the way of help either from my parents besides the leftovers I took with me after Thanksgiving.

  Even Winona could be dire company if she didn’t allow time for myself after a difficult performance as Irish Navajo together.

  “It’s Friday, Nathan.”

  “And?”

  I could hear her grinding her teeth back home.

  “…Fridays are usually considered part of the weekend.”

  “Not until after midday,” I said. “Why are you even calling so early? It’s only half eight.”

  She drew in a deep, audible sigh, and I felt something in my chest snap like a twig. I hadn’t meant to upset her — she was still my mother — but I was just tired of having lived under her thumb for so long.

  It felt like every waking moment of my teenage years had been accounted for on a minute-by-minute basis. So many extracurriculars I’d been forced into because they would look good on a university application; so many AP classes I’d been made to take because she felt I had the brains to get through all of them.

  I didn’t want that pressure to keep eroding whatever sense of self and independence I had left. So much so that instead of venturing down the cobbled streets to Harvard like my mother wanted me to, I’d picked up my guitar and headed with Winona in the direction of the less prestigious — and, in her eyes, intellectually less stimulating — Boston University.

  “…Your father and I are heading on a road trip.”

  “You mean, a holiday?” Our holidays growing up had always boiled down to moving through state lines. I still hadn’t left the confines of the United States of America, although Winona had once asked me if I wanted to visit some reservations in Quebec.

  It was still very much a work in progress. We could chance a nine-hour bus drive, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. Taking the train was more comfortable, but also longer and even more expensive. Flights were out of the question for a pair of poor students. We didn’t have a car, though we could always rent one and split the driving duties between us.

  “No, a road trip!” I could hear her waving her hands in frustration. It’s crazy how one becomes so attuned to another person’s body language after spending eighteen years living with them. “Your father won an RV!”

  “An RV?” He’d always had an obsession with RVs, and now it had become a reality. We’d had to make do with a tiresome Volkswagen Transporter that constantly broke down during our holidays as a trio. “How?”

  “One of those crosswords he was always writing into, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.” That was another strange obsession of his I never quite got either. Every time I sat down to do one, I felt there were a thousand more interesting things worth doing in life. Ditto with Sudoku. Thankfully there were no AP classes in either when I was still in high school — otherwise Ms Hannah Connolly would’ve sent me to one to fix my perceived deficits.

  “Where are you both heading?”

  “Up north. To Quebec.” Oh. Scratch that, Winona — we won’t be going there anytime soon.

  “Then afterwards?”

  “We’re going to visit some of the reservations there,” she replied. “Weren’t you planning on going there a few months ago?”

  “Yes,” I murmured. “With Winona. It was her idea.” I shouldn’t have brought her up. As much as my mother was itching to go to Quebec and see the reservations, she and Winona hadn’t seen eye to eye much this past year. She silently blamed her for leading her only son astray — away from the warm glow of a Harvard degree and into what she considered mediocre squalor under the pretence of being a rock star.

  There was silence on the other end, then she hastily changed the topic. “We’ll be gone for a few months. That means someone will have to look after Triple H.”

  Triple H was an Afghan Hound named after the professional wrestler of the same name. I’d called him that because I was a big pro-wrestling fan at the time, and the long, stringy hair reminded me of Triple H’s hairstyle back then.

  Like his namesake, he took up most of the spotlight growing up — even to the detriment of others around him. He was beginning to slow down now, and probably only had a year or two left in his bones. There wasn’t as much spring in his step, but at least he had the sense to retire into a quiet life instead of running himself ragged like Triple H had done towards the end of his career.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Which means… you want me to house-sit?”

  “We want you to come home, Nathan. And look after your dog again.” There were brief murmurs and whispers on the other end, then my mother snapped something at my father who didn’t know how or what to pack in a suitcase.

  “You still have your key, don’t you?”

  “The one with the Ed, Edd n Eddy keyring? Yep.” I could still remember pestering my dad endlessly to win that thing when we went to Chuck E. Cheese together.

  “Good. We’re leaving tomorrow. Maybe come around three-ish? I know you’re not one for farewells, so we’re leaving at two if you don’t want to come.”

  “I… understand,” I said. I really wasn’t one for crowds — or people, in general. “I’ll tell Winona you said hello.”

  She stiffened. “Yes. Tell Winona I said hello. Chat to you later.”

  “You too,” I replied. “See you soon.”

  I pressed the red receiver down and sauntered my way into the kitchen to make homemade root-beer pancakes.

  I did say I came from a medical background, but my parents weren’t doctors or surgeons or anything of that sort. They were simple rad-techs who’d inherited a distant uncle’s Milton estate before I was born, giving the impression we were solidly more upper middle class than we were.

  It was the best place in the whole world to grow up. So many hours had been spent bringing friends back from elementary school to play hide-and-seek among the many rooms within it. We hadn’t kept on the same maids and butlers our uncle had employed, but that didn’t matter to me - I had fun growing up!

  Nonetheless, the salary of two rad-techs isn’t much to get by on. My parents worked very hard to keep up appearances, but so many of our fellow residents turned their noses up at us once they realised neither of them had their surnames etched onto a ward of Massachusetts General Hospital.

  I think that’s where all my mother’s pressure for me to succeed came from — the need to be visible. To be taken seriously. To not be reduced to living in empty estates while our peers hosted cocktail parties we were never invited to, scraping just slightly above the minimum-wage point while pretending otherwise.

  Busking with Winona late at night hadn’t figured into their plans. Nor had hosting horror movie marathons with our friends in the local graveyard for charitable causes. I was visible, yes — but not in the way they’d hoped I would be. I was always centring myself among the miscreants and deviants of Boston’s artistic underworld, instead of pursuing my education as diligently as I should have.

  Even as I made my way down to campus on one of the subway trains, I wondered if I really wanted all those luxuries in life if it meant giving up time with Winona and the rest of the oddballs I’d grown up with.

  Yes, chauffeurs were nice and all — but I’d rather be with Winona and the artistic misfits, even if it meant having to take a dirty yellow train like this. I looked around and thought I saw a rat rummaging beneath one of the seats. I would’ve leapt up onto my chair if it weren’t for the fact that I was seated beside two grimy homeless people, fast asleep on the benches. I didn’t want to wake them.

  The midday class on variables was a horrible experience to get through. It always kicked my ass without much respite or mercy. I could feel the glucose in my brain fizzle every time a new programming technique from the wondrous world of computer science was embedded into my muscle memory.

  See what I did there? Embedded. Muscle memory. Because embedded is a computer science term, and you know… Oh, forgive me — I’m just rambling at this point.

  Still, I knew I had to endure the pain if I wanted to see Gerry Adams: Stick ’Em Up! brought into reality.

  My stomach rumbled, and I realised it was time to get something to eat. I needed to find Winona too, who had hopefully not been kept back to help with other students’ work. She was always being saddled with more responsibility than I felt was fair. Sometimes she confided in me about it, admitting it felt like the price she had to pay just to be acknowledged in life.

  She was tired of it. Tired of being known only as the Navajo girl on campus. She wished she could be seen like everyone else, but she stood out like a sore thumb in a heavily white place like Boston University. I was tired of it too — tired of hearing the Pocahontas jokes whispered through the campus. Tired of seeing her offered only the role of Tiger Lily whenever the drama club staged Peter Pan.

  She had far more to offer than just Native girl. Funny. Brave. Smart. Full-time Major League gamer. Sometimes irritable when she whined to me about missing the latest episode of Bleach — even though we both knew the anime had become horribly dire — but everyone, of course, has their weak points.

  I looked around the campus hallways and then realised I didn’t even know what outfit Winona had put on before she’d left. I’d been far too sleepy to notice. Now it was strangely hard to spot a girl with bronze-copper skin and long dark hair among the hordes of cream-coloured Bostonians.

  Then I saw her.

  Not Winona — Winona would never be caught emerging from the sports hall unless the university had finally caved to our demands and hosted a professional wrestling show in aid of Indigenous wildlife funding.

  No, it was Felicity.

  Still dressed in her fencing uniform, she was swatting away the hordes of strangely mindless college students who stampeded around her like zombies, desperate for an autograph.

  She didn’t hesitate to bat them aside — with her épée. No doubt the zombie horde would keep rushing her regardless, and there was little question that the Brighams could afford to smooth over any bad publicity even if Felicity did wind up poking out an eye or two.

  She noticed me from the far end of the hallway and gave me a deep, wholesome smile. I hated the power women had over men. The hallway was air-conditioned, but I still felt like I was going to melt.

  Then she made a beeline straight for me — still smiling, still swatting away the uncultured plebs she wouldn’t give the time of day to — and stepped directly into my personal space.

  “Nathan Connolly!” she exclaimed. “How’s my favourite IT tech wizard doing?”

  “Felicity…” I somehow managed to gargle out before recomposing myself. “You, um… missed our computer science class.”

  “I know!” she said. “But the world championships are next month in Paris, so—”

  “Paree,” I murmured, trying to sound intellectual. Trying to keep up with her. “That’s how it’s pronounced over there. Not Par-iz.”

  “Yes, well, anyway.” She shrugged and rolled her eyes. My heart skipped a beat. “Did you do my homework already?”

  “I did, yes.” I rummaged through my Austin 3:16 backpack. She wouldn’t have needed it in the era of ChatGPT, but Professor Song had tried to push back against the inevitable rise of AI by making us do all our work with pencil and paper. There wasn’t even enough time in Felicity’s schedule to scribble down a regurgitated ChatGPT prompt.

  “Here you go!” I beamed. “These variables have been kicking my ass lately, but they’re not so bad if you look up Professor Messer’s videos on YouTube. He’s great, I recommend—”

  “Great!” She snatched the homework from my hand. “I’ll keep that in mind. We’re doing a module on if and else switches next week, right?”

  Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t even recall the last time Felicity had actually been inside the computer science classroom.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Amazing! Could you do that one for me as well?”

  “Sure,” I replied.

  “Wonderful news!” She swatted away one of the more angst-ridden zombies desperate for her signature. “Same time next week, then?”

  “Sure. Same time next week,” I mumbled.

  “Great! Love you!” She sidestepped me and pushed her way back through the mindless horde, all of whom followed after her.

  I stood there, speechless. Then I touched my cheek and sighed deeply, alone in the now-emptied hallway.

  “She said she loved me,” I repeated softly. “She really did say she loved me.”

  That was a sure sign it was only a matter of time before Felicity Brigham was grovelling to be beside me, her famished need for love sated only in my company.

  I started to hiccup. I was drunk on mad love again.

  It wasn’t normal to feel like this — but it was happening to me.

  I was madly in love. No doubt about it.

  Then I was suddenly snapped out of my dreamy mindset when I heard soft tsks coming from an Arizonan accent beside me.

  “Not very healthy — demeaning yourself just to have a woman gaze at you,” the voice murmured.

  It was Winona.

  “I’m not demeaning myself,” I shot back, straightening up and puffing out my chest like one of the countless alphas on campus. “I’m just… helping her out. A bit.”

  “I wouldn’t consider doing someone’s homework helping out a bit,” she replied as we started walking down the hallway. “Helping out involves a crisis. Or at a funeral. Or something a bit important than programming.”

  “She just needs someone to guide her through the course,” I said.

  “That’s the professor’s job,” Winona shot me a look. “Do you even get anything from her for it? Like money?”

  “Well, no.”

  “So you just get one of her well-groomed smiles as a prize?” Winona moved in closer and whispered, “I’m not sure how you can accept that. It’s like the Joker’s smile — so creepy to an outsider like me looking in.”

  “What? You think she’s secretly some psycho?”

  “Obviously we live in a psycho world, Nathan,” she grumbled, “and you’re the willing lapdog for everything she throws at you.”

  I knew that was meant to shake some sense into me, but it had the opposite effect. The thought of being Felicity’s lapdog sounded wondrous. She might even smile or giggle at me the way Winona did whenever I trotted out one of my many silly jokes, carefully memorised over the years.

  Winona tugged at the hem of my corduroy jacket. “Earth to Nathan? We’re at the cafeteria.”

  I shook my head, suddenly realising I still needed to tell her about having my parents’ house to myself and ask whether she wanted to move in with me for the next few months. But that could wait. First, it was time for hot dogs with a side of cheesy garlic fries.

  “Are you getting it this time?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “We can’t rely on your tutoring of Ms Brigham to foot the bill.”

  “You finally got her surname right!”

  “Shut up!” She grinned, then she took me by the arm and walked us in.