Uncertain Terms, Pt.1

Normally having all your friends abandon you and treat you like crap is a bad thing, right? But when they accidentally set you up to hang out with a hot guy and his friends, it’s hard to be mad at them. At least it was for me. I guess that makes me shallow, but whatever. They weren’t great friends to begin with, so it seemed like it would be a fair trade. It had potential, at least. I wasn’t really sure what possessed them to invite me over in the first place.

I had planned not to go at all. I figured it was all a big joke, I had never even spoken to any of them before. I was just going to stay home, rot my teeth with soft drinks and play video games till two in the morning. The less conscious I was at school the next day, the less crazy it would make me. But of course that didn’t work out because Adam ended up showing at my house. Adam is the hot one, if I didn’t already say that.

When I opened the door he was leaning on the frame, looking absolutely dashing and bored.

“You ready to go?” he asked me. I was admittedly too stunned to speak, but luckily I didn’t have to think of anything because my mother materialized behind me. She was just home from work and still in her super expensive suit.

“Go?” she said and then she caught sight of Adam. “Who’s that?”

“My name’s Adam Cross, ma’am. Dylon’s going to come help me with my math homework.”

“Are you his boyfriend?” I might have actually fainted, except I had to stay awake to figure out the fastest way to kill myself. Adam didn’t seem to be phased by it however.

“Oh. No, ma’am, I didn’t realize you knew about that. I didn’t mean for it to sound that way.”

“Well then I’d very much like to know where you’re taking my son, if you don’t even know him well enough to know he’s as likely to tutor math as he is to get pregnant.”

Again, I expected Adam to just give up and leave but instead he shrugged.

“We just met recently at school, and I invited him over to play video games. In my experience parents are more likely to cooperate with an obvious lie than the truth about what their child is doing at night instead of school work.”

She came over to the door and stared at him with her arms crossed.

“I don’t impose tyrannical rule upon my son’s life, Mr. Cross. The truth will be just fine in the future. Will there be drinking?”

“Sometimes we do, but not on a school night.” Adam answered evenly. I couldn’t help but notice that he was smiling. He actually seemed to be enjoying the interrogation.

“Drugs?” my mother added.

“Oooh, hey mom. Next ask him if we’ll be sacrificing a virgin to the devil. I want to make sure I’m well equipped.”

Adam laughed before answering her.

“My friends and I don’t do drugs. Or satanic rituals.”

“Alcohol is a drug.” she said, pointing a finger at him. His smile widened. Suddenly it occurred to me to wonder how he knew where I lived, but I didn’t want to ask in front of my overzealous mother.

“We don’t do what people usually refer to as drugs.” He answered.

She looked from me to him and then blew a patch of bangs out of her face.

“Home by ten.” She said before turning and walking back into the house.

“Cool.” Adam said, sounding slightly surprised. I hurried to cram my shoes onto my feet and then stopped. I had forgotten that I didn’t actually want to go with him. It was too late now, so I reluctantly followed him out, pulling the door closed behind me.

“How did you know where I lived?” I asked him, the question suddenly popping back into my head.

“I asked that Sara girl I’ve seen you around school with before. She told me she hoped my friends and I beat the crap out of you. Nice girl.”

I might have made some rude comment about Sara but I was too busy focusing on the part where he said he’d seen me around school before. Not a big deal, right? People don’t walk around with their eyes closed, and we’d been in a couple classes together. But we had never spoken to each other before.

He wasn’t one of the “popular” kids, but a lot of people liked him. He was a cocky troublemaker, and very popular with girls. Popular with their lips and their tongues at least, I wasn’t so sure about their hearts.

I guess I hadn’t said anything for a few minutes because he gave me a little shove.

“Cheer up, Dylon. My friends and I are not going to beat you up.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, stumbling back onto the sidewalk.

“Matt’s house.” He said, as if that cleared everything up. I was about to make some sarcastic remark when he added “A couple blocks up. We’ll do formal introductions when we get there.”

We didn’t speak the rest of the way there; I just didn’t know what to say. It was all so weird to me. When we got there Adam didn’t even knock, he just walked in, kicked off his boots and went into the kitchen to grab a bunch of junk food while I removed my own shoes. He nodded his head for me to follow and ran up the carpeted stairs. When we got to a white door at the end of the hallway Adam shifted all the snacks into one arm and knocked with his free hand.

“Zippers up ladies, you’ve got guests.” He called.

“Go fuck yourself.” Someone said back and he pushed the door open and tossed a bag of chips at someone’s head.

“Careful, asshole. I don’t want to be eating my chips through a straw.” Said the target, who was sitting in a beanbag chair playing video games.

“Introductions?” said the other guy from the opposite corner, where he sat in a chair in front of a desktop computer.

Adam walked over and jumped onto the bed. His introductions weren’t at all helpful; he had apparently forgotten the formality he had mentioned a few minutes before.

“Loser,” he said pointing to the guy in the bean bag chair “wanker,” he said indicating the guy at the computer, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he had actually been masturbating or if Adam was just being a jerk. Then I realized what he was probably going to introduce me as and I cut him off.

“I’m Dylon.” I said quickly and the guy in the bean bag chair raised his hand but didn’t turn around.

“Right,” said the guy at the computer. “Well I’m Chris, and that’s Matt. I’m guessing you know that’s Adam.”

“Not gonna shake his hand, Chris?” Adam said innocently.

“Bite me.”

“Nah, cuz then you’d have to jack off again.”

“Okay.” Matt butted in, pausing his game and turning around. “Don’t make the new guy kill himself in my bedroom, please.”

“But if I kill Adam that’s okay, right?” Chris said hopefully.

“You can take him out back and beat him with a shovel when we’re done.” Matt promised. “We need four for games.”

“If he can stop beating himself long enough.” Adam muttered.

At that point Chris whipped something at Adam’s head, I couldn’t see what it was but it made a loud smack when it hit his hands and bounced away onto the floor. As Chris stood up and walked out from the desk I got a bit of a better look at him. I had seen him at school but not really paid much attention.

He was a semi-tall, thin blond guy with a kind of square face. He was wearing a green jersey type of t-shirt, and baggy blue jeans. I was guessing he played basketball or something after school.

Matt was shorter and kind of chubby with a small face, black hair and glasses. Any time I’d seen him at school his shirt either displayed something video game related or spattered with the name of some band. As far as I could see, the one he was wearing today was something to do with the former – black with some neon green letters and shapes. Currently he was wearing khaki shorts.

Briefly I turned my attention back to Adam, who had found a little rubber ball and was tossing it up and catching it. I noticed for the first time that seeing the three of them together was an odd sort of picture, they didn’t really seem to fit together.

Adam was kind of medium height with an almond-shaped face and light brown hair that he usually spiked up at the front. He wasn’t ripped because he wasn’t a jock or anything, but he was in good shape. He was wearing a tight green t-shirt with some big white words on it that I couldn’t read because I didn’t want him to see me staring. He also wore a belt that stuck out in an oddly cool and sexy way. He had to wear it pulled up to the very last hole because it was so big, and he obviously didn’t need it because his jeans were… very well fitted, if you get what I mean. I mean I couldn’t make out the exact shape and size of his junk, but I wanted to write a letter to the company that made those jeans and thank them sincerely.

“Dude, take a seat.” Chris said to me, pulling the computer chair over next to Matt’s beanbag chair and grabbing another controller off the tv as Matt shut his game off and started to look for something else to put in. Not seeing any other options I sat down at the foot of the bed as Chris handed me another controller.

“What kind of games do you play?” Matt asked as he searched through shelves of game cases. I started naming off a few titles before I realized that they were all single-player. Not helpful. I started racking my brain for some multiplayer stuff. None of my old friends really liked video games, but I managed to think of a couple.

“How are we all going to play on one tv though? Won’t that be a bit cramped?” I asked, feeling kind of dumb even though I was sure it was a valid issue. Maybe they only played two at a time when it was just three of them, and they hadn’t thought of it?

“Two tvs.” Matt corrected me and when I looked I felt even more stupid. The other tv was sitting two feet from my head, in an entertainment stand with another system and everything.

“Shit.” I said. “How do you afford all that?”

“This tv is my brother’s, he couldn’t be arsed to take it with him when he moved. Extra systems are Chris’s, and he has all the same multiplayer games so we can just do a game together over the internet.”

“Yeah, we’re pretty serious about our games.” Adam added in a slightly sarcastic way.

With the vague directions I had given him, Matt picked a game and Chris and Adam approved the choice, I just shrugged my shoulders. It was a game I was pretty familiar with. The guys decided to put Adam and I on the same team so that each side would have its own tv and we couldn’t spy on each other. It turned out working well for Adam because both Chris and Matt were better at the game than him, and I was better than both of them. I also ended up learning that all four of them swore enough during video games to shame any self-respecting sailor.

At one point I ended up taking out both Chris and Matt a few seconds apart. Chris just dropped a typical F-bomb, but Matt viciously declared me a cocksucker, which caused everyone except me to stop and turn their hands. I didn’t even notice they had stopped playing until I killed Chris again and he didn’t swear. I looked up and then my mind registered what happened.

“Oh.” I said. “Whatever.”

“Sorry man, it’s kind of a habit.”

“Well, next time you kill me I’ll call you a cunt humper and we’ll be even.”

Adam burst out laughing.

“Shit, Dylon. Even bastards like us don’t use that word so casually.”

I opened my mouth to tell him he’d get used to it but then I realized they probably wouldn’t be inviting me back, so I just shut up and went back to the game. We decimated the junk food population and committed genocide against canned soft drinks, and it got dark out. I was dying a little bit inside because I hadn’t eaten supper before I left.

At some point during the evening Adam laid down on the bed so that his head was right behind mine and his arms were bent, holding his controller almost right up against my neck. I actually felt it vibrate a couple times.

Lucky me, right? I felt like I should think so, but all I actually felt was uncomfortable. I wanted to move but I didn’t want to weird him out or have him teasing me about being turned on. Maybe he was doing it on purpose. Luckily our game had just ended and I had a very good excuse to get up; my bladder had been full for almost an hour.

“Matt, where’s your bathroom?” I asked him, standing up and putting my controller up on the tv stand.

“You gonna be long?” he asked. I shook my head.

“Nah,” I said. “But I’ll sit the next one out anyway.”

“Down at the end of the hall, right next to the stairs.” He said and I got up and left.

I kind of loitered for a couple moments, brushing my hair down with my hands and then messing it back up again. Checking to make sure I was wearing deodorant, though it was a few hours too late to do anything about that. When I finally went back I stopped dead in the doorway. Adam was sitting on the floor, right next to where I had been sitting all night. He was leaning back against the bed with his hands behind his head, apparently not playing this round either.

“You can sit on the bed.” Matt offered. “Dickhead tends to move around a lot, and doesn’t really care if he steals someone’s spot.”

I grabbed my controller and sat up on the bed with my legs crossed, still a little bit confused by the sudden switch. We only played for about half an hour more, during which Chris was constantly playing with his phone. When he finally got up and announced he was going to meet up with “Kelsey” and hang out for a bit, Adam and Matt seemed almost relieved.

“What are you going to tell her when she asks why you can’t get it up?” Adam asked him behind a stifled yawn. Chris flipped him the bird before grabbing his jacket and walking out the door. The rest of us sat in silence for another fifteen minutes or so before I decided I should get going too.

We said our round of awkward goodbyes and I went home and raided the fridge. I still wasn’t really sure what to make of the night, but it had been pretty enjoyable. I did notice however, with a twinge of panic, that none of them had said anything along the lines of “see you again.” But it could be worse. Even if they now knew how much of a loser I was, at least they gave me a chance. That was something, right?