Jim - Nineteen

Jim

            After everything that happened with Gabe and Erich that last month of school, I couldn’t help but feel like nothing exciting was ever going to happen to me. Really, I was in the middle of the most exciting time of my life, and I still felt like I had the most boring person on Earth. Sure, I was sleeping with my best friend’s sister and trying to keep him from sending her back to war torn Poland. But with Erich and Gabe running into flaming buildings after each other, my adventures were still outmatched. 

            I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen to those two. I thought I had a tough decision to make by the end of the term? Gabe and Erich were on a completely different level of insanity. It would kill them to be separated, and they both knew it. But the other option was to admit their now-painfully obvious feelings for each other. I knew the chances of that happening were pretty damn slim.

            What Gabe had admitted to Rebecca and I had not come as a surprise, obviously. We could all tell he was homosexual, and I had pretty much gathered that Leo was dead, whoever he was. What I couldn’t believe was that he had actually kissed Erich. That kind of thing, it just wasn’t something anyone did. Even the boys like Gabe I had known from back home had the sense to go halfheartedly after girls. I had never in my life met someone like him who actually acted on his seriously taboo feelings. I’m more than a tiny bit embarrassed that it scared me. I think I actually blacked out for a minute when he told me.

            Rebecca handled him a lot better than I did. Really, Rebecca always handled everything better than I did. It was like she was Gabe’s f*****g sister instead of Hersch’s. I’ll bet he was pretty damn glad to have her to talk to. I was next to useless.

            Then Gabe ran after Erich, and everything just got worse.

            It was my fault we didn’t go after him. I had gone in search of help instead of just running down there with him. In retrospect, it probably saved us from getting roasted alive inside that music building, but no matter how many times I pointed that out to Rebecca and Hersch, I still felt like a disloyal friend. By the time we got down the hill with a couple professors in tow, Gabe had gotten Erich and they were both on fire. Literally, on fire. It only took a second for Rebecca to put Gabe out " only his pants were burning. But it took Hersch and me both to stop Erich’s arm from burning.

For probably the first time in my life, I stayed calmer than Rebecca. The both of them were blacked out by the time we got there (unsurprisingly, Gabe used his last lucid moment to touch Erich’s face, the romantic idiot), and she panicked because she thought they were dead. It scared me for a minute too, if I’m being honest. But they hadn’t been in the fire long enough for their oxygen to be cut off, and they were both gasping again within a few seconds. The professors said there wasn’t an ambulance that could make it there in time, so we had to just about literally drag them up the hill. Hersch picked Gabe up by himself, but took about five of us to carry Erich, and about halfway up the hill an attendant form the infirmary brought us a wheelbarrow. That was a sight, let me tell you.

Up at the infirmary, we weren’t allowed to see either of them until the doctor was sure they would pull through. Believe me, that was about the scariest hour I had ever spent in my life. Rebecca felt suffocated in the waiting room, and wanted to walk around the courtyard by herself. Naturally, Hersch and I used the time to intelligently and maturely discuss the matter at hand.

“Did Gabe tell you?”

“Yeah. Erich told you?” I knew he had gone to the roof with the intention of dragging the truth out of Erich.

“Yes.” Then a pause that lasted about twenty minutes, in which Hersch sat with his head down and his hands clasped in a gesture that looked frighteningly like prayer. “This is bad.”

“Yeah.”

Other than that well thought out and useful conversation, we spent that hour pacing nervously and, in my case, pressing my ear anxiously to the door. On the last such occasion, the doctor pushed the door open and sent me sprawling backwards into Hersch. I could tell you that I didn’t cry a little when he told us they would both be fine, but that would be a lie. Hersch wouldn’t want me to say this, but he did too.

We were allowed to go in and see Gabe, who was awake and soon to be dismissed. They wouldn’t let him go, because he was having these fits where he kept demanding to see Erich. The doctor called this shock, but Hersch and I knew that Gabe would have been panicking for Erich no matter what had happened. It took Rebecca to get him calmed down enough for them to let him see Erich.

I wanted Erich to be okay, mostly for Gabe’s sake. We had convinced the doctor that he could handle seeing Erich, but honestly, we might have been wrong. It looked pretty bad when we got there. They hadn’t bandaged Erich’s arm yet, so we could all see his charred, blistered skin. The burns were the worst around the hand, and I was not about to be the one who observed out loud the coincidence of Erich’s second hand injury.

We didn’t want Gabe to stay, but he wouldn’t leave. As much as we didn’t want him to torture himself by waiting for Erich to wake up, we really didn’t want to leave him alone. So we stuck with him for a few hours, just watching Erich sleep. Gabe cried at intervals, and one of us would pat him on the back or squeeze his shoulder, but none of us said anything. We sat through one of Erich’s fits; I tell you, the only thing worse than seeing them tie Erich up was watching Gabe’s face while it was happening. He begged them not to do it, but they (rightly) thought he was going to hurt himself. Around then, Hersch and I decided we had had all we could take. We halfheartedly asked Gabe to come back with us, knowing that he wouldn’t, and trudged back to the room for some sleep.  

We learned later on Friday that the town at the bottom of the hill had been hit hard by the raid, that the campus was most likely not the direct target. If they had wanted to hit us, they would have hit us, according to Hersch at least. Knight was convinced that the Germans had their eye on the school, though Hersch spent an hour in his office Friday morning trying to convince him otherwise.

We didn’t see Erich for two days after that, and we saw Gabe maybe twice. Gabe came back to the dorm later that evening and told us Erich didn’t want anyone to see him, which seemed pretty stupid to me since we had already seen him. But apparently Erich didn’t know that, and Gabe wanted to keep it that way. Besides, Knight announced that the term would be ending next Friday, since he was now convinced that the Germans were targeting the school, so Hersch and I were up to our ears in work anyway. Because of their new hero status, the fact that Erich’s roasted arm was still cooling, and the doctors insistence that the two of them were in shock, they were both were exempt from final exams. Hersch and I were not so lucky.

We were so swamped with studying we barely noticed when Erich made his grim return. He just kind of sat down next to us at dinner Sunday night, with a slung up arm and a funny lisp. None of us dared to say a word about the fire " and I don’t think Erich could have said much if he wanted to " but he sure looked a hell of a lot better than he had Thursday night.

Of course, it was my stupid job to make sure Erich lived through the week. Someone had to change his bandages every two days, and smear on antibacterial to keep his arm from falling off. The burns were still some of the worst I had seen, but Erich had the pain tolerance of a boxer and a grizzly bear, or maybe of a dead guy. He was comfortable around me, too. I think he assumed I was the only one who didn’t know about him smooching it up with Gabe. I didn’t dare bring it up, since I was pretty sure that even one-armed Erich could tear off my lips and feed them to me. Even so, watching him take long hits from his flask while I wrapped up his arm, I realized that I really would miss his sullen, quiet company.

Anyway, like I said, we barely had a chance to think about anything but our exams for the rest of the week. I had Literature and Brit History on Tuesday, and African Geography and Biology on Thursday. Gabe tagged along to the Biology final, since missing him and Erich made our lab group short two guys, though all he succeeded in was getting his scalpel stuck in the chest cavity of the bird we were dissecting. I think he would have been better off taking his exams, honestly. All Gabe had to do for seven days was wander around (you can bet he wasn’t about to stay in the dorm with Erich) and think about the huge mess he was in.

Not to say my mess was any less huge. Mostly, I think I threw myself at the exams so I wouldn’t have to think about what I would have to do come Friday. Rebecca and I had absolutely no plan. We were just about the two least responsible people in the world, and we had put off the tough decisions until the last possible moment.

Unluckily for me, it was Thursday night before I knew it. Exams were over, classes were through, and it was our very last night together as roommates. It was pretty tough to believe it had only been three months since I first stepped out of that cab and shook hands with Gabe.

This was not how I had imagined my adventures in Europe. In all honestly, I had probably had more adventures than it would have been reasonable to expect. But in my stupid old fantasies from back home, I had imagined myself fighting back Germans and dodging bullets and having a different girl every night. Nowhere in my old dream were there sets of bunk beds in a boiler room or a furnace full of booze and food, but that’s what I got. There certainly weren’t three other guys watching my back.

None of us talked about it. If any of them had the same sick, sad knot in their stomachs that I had, they didn’t show it.

And that is how we ended up sitting together in the dorm in silence on our very last night at Wellington’s. We were in our usual spots: me on the floor next to my bunk, Hersch at the desk, and Gabe sprawled on his bed.

Erich was the only exception, sitting on Hersch’s trunk drinking the last of the whiskey. He was usually next to Gabe, but ever since Erich got out of the infirmary the awkwardness between the two of them had been so ripe you could taste it. He was talking normal again, and I had taken his arm out of the sling for the night. He was halfway drunk, now; we were trying to use up the last of the whiskey and cigarettes before we had to pack up. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was trying to drink away his fear of losing Gabe tomorrow.

Hersch, of course, was the one to break the silence. “So this is it.”

Erich ask sullenly. “This is what?”

“Shut up, Amery, you’re drunk.” I wanted to hear what Hersch had to say.

“M’not.”

Hersch didn’t finish his thought, and it was Gabe who picked it up again. “I’m going to miss you guys,” he said quietly, the most sentimental of us, of course. “You all… well you looked out for me when I needed looking out for, and that’s more than anyone’s ever done for me.” His voice was still a little raspy from breathing in all the smoke. He hadn’t smoked all week.

“What are you talking about, Moretti? Heroes don’t need looking out for,” I joked. He laughed quietly but the mood stayed grim. “But seriously,” it had to be said, “this is the best group of guys I could have hoped for. Any one of you can come look me up in Wisconsin.” I failed to mention that I would most likely be bringing Hersch’s sister with me.

“Don’t you come to Germany. I don’t wan any of you b******s to get killed.” Erich added.

“Well spoken, Erich,” I commented sarcastically. They laughed for real at that one.

“Hey, remember when we got the stash?” Hersch asked.

“What, you mean before Erich got rid of our Wanker problem?”

“Yeah. Remember what we said that night?”

I didn’t know exactly what he meant. We had said a lot of dumb things that night, and I wasn’t even sure I remembered all of it. It was Gabe who knew. “We were going to have the time of our f*****g lives,” he said.

“F**k, we were dumb,” Erich tossed an empty bottle aside. “We’ve been in hell.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t the time of our lives,” I argued. Maybe it wasn’t true for him, but there was no doubt in my mind that I had had the best time of my life here at Wellington’s. "I mean, hell, we're the Sons of Thunder, aren't we?"

Hersch nodded. “I’m with Banhart.” Hee stood up and went to the boiler. He emerged with four of the last bottles of whiskey. “Here,” Hersch passed them around. “One more time.”

We all knew what he meant. The four of us stood together in the middle of the room. Together, we lifted our bottles to the center for what we all thought was the last time.

“To the best f*****g time of our lives.”

I had to keep down the pathetic lump in my throat. I would probably never see any of them again.

And that wasn’t even the worst part of the night.

We all went to bed not too long after that. Actually Erich, stalked off to get drunk by himself with the last remaining whiskey bottles. But we were all done talking. Really, there was nothing else to say. If I’m being honest, I badly wanted to stay in bed. Not just because I was scared of making a decision with Rebecca, but because I just wanted to sleep in my bunk, with the guys snoring around me, one more time. I lay there for longer than I should have, listening to the quiet of the dorm, before Gabe started crying or Hersch started talking, when everything was just peaceful. Why couldn’t we just stay like this, I wondered.

Eventually, I had stalled too long, and I crawled out of bed and out of the room. I felt sick as I made my last walk up the dark stairs and down the corridor to Rebecca’s room. No more sneaking around after this. I should have been happy. But I had a nagging feeling that ten, twenty years from now I would wish I could walk that pitch black hallway and stand outside her door again.

Rebecca didn’t meet me at the door like usual. I was scared for a minute that she was gone; her room was quiet and dark. But after a second I saw that she was in bed, that she had fallen asleep waiting for me. The sick feeling didn’t go away. For weeks I had been certain that Rebecca would come home with me, but now I realized that keeping her in my life was almost as unlikely as keeping any of the guys.

            I climbed into bed with her and wrapped my arms around her waist. She stirred and woke up, and I could practically feel the smile on her face. “You are late,” she murmured.

            “You didn’t give up on me, did you?”

            “Not for a second.” Rebecca rolled over and pressed her head to my chest. “James,” she said sadly, “what are we going to do?”

            The answer wasn’t planned, but I had to say something. She sounded so sad and scared, that suddenly it didn’t matter how sad or scared I was. I had to fix this. “We’ll tell him,” I whispered into her hair. “We’ll tell him tomorrow, and he’ll come back with us.”

            “What if he doesn’t?”

            “He will.” He had to. I couldn’t even bring myself to think of any alternative. Hersch would understand, and he would come with us. I had absolutely no idea what we would do if he didn’t. “He will.”

            That was enough for Rebecca. She kissed me and pulled my undershirt over my head, end of discussion. She must have known I was wrong, but if this was going to be the last night I spent with her, I wasn’t going to ruin it by making some plan that would never work anyway. I just wanted to be with her.

I put my hands under her nightgown and felt her narrow shoulders, the delicate underside of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the soft inside of her thighs. I wanted to remember every part of her. I couldn’t get rid of the thought I that I might never get to touch her again. Rebecca sighed and buried her face in my shoulder as I held myself over her.

Maybe if I wouldn’t have been so focused on memorizing her lips or her eyes or the way she felt under my hands, I would have heard the sound of someone out in the hallway. Maybe if she hadn’t been shutting her eyes against tears, she would have seen the door crack open. But we didn’t. We wouldn’t know it until the next morning, but there was a person in the doorway, someone whose world was torn apart in that one goddamn half second.

It was Hersch. 

Reviews

[Arianna]

and theyre screwed, erichs drunk. and why do i feel like you are going to make me really sad with this book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ugh! i still love it though.