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Tyler isn’t... you know.
He’s just. Not like that.
Subconsciously, maybe that was why you picked him as a friend in the first place. Subconsciously, maybe you were sick of the sexual tension in your male relationships, and even more sick of the sexual tension in your female relationships, and just wanted someone to talk to. Subconsciously, you just wanted a drinking buddy.
Subconsciously.
Too bad your subconscious has a knack for fucking you over.
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Tyler Joseph transferred to your school in the fall of your junior year, from an east-coast boarding school with a name that impressed every adult in the district. Impressions make gossip and the whole community was clamoring. At first, you didn’t care. You didn’t care because he wasn’t in your grade or in your life and mostly you were really sick of hearing about all the things adults like to talk about. You were eighteen, but not an adult, not even close, and you had a list of everything you swore you’d never talk about to your kids when you became one. SATs, ACTs, APs, scholarships, responsibility, the future, your future, and Tyler Joseph.
It wasn’t his fault, and you could accept that, but you don’t think you would have minded the excitement as much if one single adult could tell you something interesting. They wanted to know about rowing, professors with PhDs, and unlimited opportunities. Your brother wanted to know if he had a sister.
No one would tell you what kind of music he liked, if he even liked music, or if he liked controlled substances or George Bush or those stupid facts under Snapple caps. They couldn’t even tell you what he looked like.
“Oh, Josh, I don’t know. His mother’s pretty. They’ve lived here for years, apparently. She’s an attorney, I don’t remember what the father does.”
You stopped asking your mother things, after that, and let everything slip from your mind as summer slipped into autumn. You started school and resumed your routines that three months of freedom had eroded. You had your friends and your friends had their girlfriends and things were just happening like they always had.
So, when Mark marched up to your lunch table the week before Thanksgiving break with a tray in one hand and a boy in the other, you weren’t so much surprised as curious.
“Guys, this is Tyler, and he’ll be eating with us for the rest of his life.”
And everything about the summer came flooding back, and you didn’t know if curiosity killed the cat but it was definitely threatening to drive you insane.
He didn’t look like you’d expected, and that was just the first in a succession of continual surprises. You didn’t know what you were expecting, exactly, but Tyler wasn’t it. In fact, there were a lot of things Tyler wasn’t, and you liked it immediately.
He wasn’t tall, like Mark, or chunky like your friend Jack. He wasn’t trendy like you. He wasn’t queer and he wasn’t pretty like most people thought of pretty.
He was beautiful.
He was a year younger, but most of your friends were, and you didn’t want to grow up anyway, so you started asking questions and every answer left you feeling like you had an itch somewhere you just couldn’t reach. You asked him questions all week, and by Friday you thought maybe you had him figured out.
He didn’t like Underoath or The Number Twelve Looks Like You, but he loved Death Cab for Cutie and got sort of glowy when you mentioned Third Eye Blind. He didn’t wear tight jeans but he always wore collared shirts, and on Wednesday he wore a tie for no reason at all. He chewed his fingernails and cringed when you cracked your back, and he’d never done a drug in his life.
His girlfriend had broken up with him the week before in the name of distance, and all you could say to that was that nomenclature was a pretty shitty excuse. And that statement helped you figure out that when he smiled, his lips threatened to hit his ears and his teeth were fifty shades of fucked up.
By Friday everyone else had stopped trying to speak to either of you at lunch, because all you had time for was each other. The next week, when you weren’t sleeping, you were with him. You woke up when he woke up without even realizing it, and he would show up at your house looking groggy at ten past noon just as you were stumbling down the stairs. Your brother was creeped out and his sisters shook their heads at the two of you, but you both just laughed and camped out in the basement.
In the basement, you realized you didn’t have him even close to figured out, but only in ways that were unimportant enough to be fascinating. He never told you why he came home from New York, or why he left in the first place, but you never asked. You had never been good at asking potentially disastrous questions, which was paradoxical because you caused typhoons in most of your classes with your questions. He laughed at that and said to stop asking “Why?” so much, because none of them really know the answer anyway, and your grades began to climb.
By Christmas, he’d started hanging around school every day until 5:30 when you were finished with your inevitable detention, so you decided he might as well have them with you. At first he protested all your ideas, like switching the vegan and meat-lovers pizzas in the cafeteria on Wednesdays or stretching saran-wrap across the toilet seats in the girls’ bathrooms, so you settled for framing him and finally he relented. He still lectured you about inappropriate behavior but he came up with the idea of zip-tying all the lockers shut and you’d never had more fun.
You learned that he could sing on accident. You think he tried to hide it for the first few months, and you didn’t even notice because you played music too loud to hear anything else at all. Third Eye Blind was the only band you could agree on at first, because he didn’t get screaming and you didn’t get the Dave Matthews Band, so every weekend you would drag him to parties, and on the way Stephan Jenkins would tell you it’s beautiful to be a junkie. And, finally, underneath ear-blistering decibels, you caught something else. You smacked the stereo off, breaking rule numbers one, two, four, and seven of your car, and catching Tyler mid-word. Maybe he didn’t sound like an angel, but he definitely sounded at least twenty-six, and you were blown away. His cheeks seemed permanently red all night after that, but you were too excited with your discovery, and then too drunk, to notice.
You had your band with Jack at the time. A shitty screamo deal you’d named Social Disorder one night when you were both stoned on a golf course, and the biggest problem with that was that Tyler still didn’t get screaming. You’d gotten him to accept Underoath, but he still couldn’t handle Fear Before the March of Flames, or even Scary Kids Scaring Kids, even though he thought every band name longer than three words was the best thing he’d ever heard. So, you compromised, and started covering bands like Simple Plan and Blink-182 just for fun, and renamed it Anklebiters because Tyler didn’t get stoned.
In between practices you found out he’d been singing for years in church, and he was always five minutes late to first period in the mornings because he came straight from Seminary. You didn’t really know what Seminary was, but in your head it sounded like Sunday School and you made fun of the name as much as possible. At first he would clench his fists and protest that you were being immature but you saw the grin clawing for exposure behind his words. Finally, the grin broke free and he admitted how much he hated it and your heart trembled just a little as you watched him. And you were one hundred percent thrilled he wasn’t like you.
At first, no one knew about you except for Jack, because he’d caught you mid-moan over a paparazzi picture of Pete Wentz, and swore he’d never say a word. He didn’t, not even to you, but he stared you down at parties when you disappeared with girls with his lips pressed tight. You always were a sucker for secrets, you just couldn’t keep yours straight, and when you let it slip to Mark his mouth mirrored Jack and it was all you could think about in between every curve.
But Tyler’s mouth never condemned, which you thought was ironic because you were pretty sure the things you imagined about it would send you straight to Hell. You learned that his aversion to all things mind-altering wasn’t religious, because he hopped in and out of back rooms with girls too fast for even you to see. You never got details, but you assumed they would have been worth hearing because he got calls, promises, and pouts. Valentine’s day had his phone ringing off the charger and switched it with yours and said, “Merry Christmas.” You didn’t get your own phone back for another two weeks, and after that he started giving out your number instead of his anyway.
When you got your acceptance letter to Ohio State, time hit you like a speeding car and every afternoon in Mark’s basement left you staring at the clock’s hands swinging backwards. For the first time, in between palm cramps and shredded fingertips, you had a future. Life was happening and you weren’t sure of anything at all except that you didn’t want it to be. You pushed practices later and later, until Jack threw his pick at you and said to get the fuck out because he couldn’t do one more riff. Most nights, Tyler would walk you home, but your dad started drinking again so Tyler started walking you to your car instead. He asked you where you went every night, once, but you never even told Mark about your spot. You relented, though, after you fell asleep at the wheel one night, and you had to admit it felt better hiding out with someone else.
You got him stoned for the first time on one of those nights, in the back of your car, parked on the ninth hole fairway of the country club you’d worked at the summer before. You don’t remember much of anything about it, except that, when his mom called to make sure he was safe, you loved her, because your mom never did that, and you thought if you had a son like Tyler you would call to make sure, too. You also remember that he broke up with his current girlfriend that night, with rescinded affections tumbling out between breathless giggles.
After that, he was hooked, and every weekend after practice you parked on the fairway and fell asleep mid-laugh with your head on his shoulder and his hand in your hair. After your graduation, you skipped the parties and the pseudo-friends in favor of him and your spot, and sitting on the roof of your car you wondered if all those pseudo-friends were happy. You weren’t sure if you wanted them to be, but they were probably too drunk to care themselves. Tyler sprawled out next to you and played with your sleeve and looped his tie around your wrist, and you thought that in three months you’d be living in a dorm room and drinking too much beer and maybe only see him at Christmas. Your life was starting and your future was the present, and you puked up everything you’d ever swallowed.
Tyler held your hair and joked that you’d better cut it before college because he wouldn’t be there to hold it, and your stomach tried to climb out of your throat. After that, you think you passed out, because in the morning you couldn’t remember anything else. Tyler wasn’t there and when you called him all he could do was shriek out that everything was happening.
By August, when all your pseudo-friends were crossing the county to their residence halls, you were crossing the country to a recording studio. Neither you nor Tyler had decided to go to college and when you thought about your future, you didn’t feel happy and you didn’t get sick, because you didn’t really feel anything at all except completely relieved, and the only thing keeping the blood in your head and your feet on the ground was the way Tyler looked at you as you played him an alternate verse.
Tyler isn’t like that. He isn’t like you. You’d never seen his New York yearbooks with the f-word that even you, with all your “shit”s and “fuck”s wouldn’t say, slashed into the covers. You’d never seen the hate messages instead of signatures in the backs of those yearbooks, the ones he always wanted to burn but kept as reminders of what people can be like. All you thought was that he wasn’t like you, and you loved him for that.
So, when you played him your latest and greatest, you thought he could really sing it because he knew what it was like in the passenger seat of a car when it didn’t mean anything except desperation. But he just stared at you with his big eyes that always, always saw more than anyone gave him credit for and you thought maybe it was because of your voice, because you knew you couldn’t sing. You got flustered and stopped, and when you asked him what he thought you couldn’t look at him, and when he answered you couldn’t breathe. Because his fingers fisted in your hair and dragged you forward and you had a whole year of experience on him but you’d never been kissed like that.
And with his tongue on your neck and his teeth in your pulse and your heart beating faster than you’d ever thought physically possible, you really fucking love your subconscious.