"How are you going to fit all this stuff?"
"Not gonna. It's yours."
"I can't use all of this."
"Just take what you need."

-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Graduation Day

You think it should feel differently when you set down the brush for the last time.

"I think." It's your final project for PIFA. You've already done your senior show, handed in your portfolio, taken your token academic proficiencies. This is it. "I'm done."

The patch of drop cloth you've staked out by the window feels like a small paint-splattered desert island. You look up and imagine that Brian's desk is a rescue boat.

"Brian, did you hear me? I said that I think I'm finished."

"Mmmhmm," Brian mutters, and doesn't look up from the computer screen.

You stand up but you've got blue paint on your feet, so you can't leave the drop cloth. You walk to the edge and let your toes hang over just a little bit, pretending that it's really an abyss. "Brian, look at me," you say. "I'm really done."

Brian looks up.

"You know you've said that every night for the last week, right?"

You bite your lip. "Yeah," you say, rocking back on your heels, "but it's different this time. If I didn't think the fumes would kill us, I'd varnish it right now."

Brian raises his eyebrows. "Prove it," he says. "Wash your feet, we're going out."

You know it's a test, because you haven't washed your feet or left the loft for about twice as many days as you've been saying the project was done. You reach for a rag and wipe your feet off enough that they won't spot the floors. You pull off your shirt, your pants, you tuck your thumbs in the waistband of your underwear and slip them off, too, holding eye contact with Brian the whole time. You cock your head toward the bathroom.

"You coming?"

Brian shakes his head. "I want to finish up here," he says.

Brian's been working on a project, too. He's finalizing plans for opening a New York office.

*

This is the truth:

You enrolled at the Pittsburgh Institute of Fine Arts. You dropped out a week into your first semester, but you reapplied and you were admitted for re-enrollment at winter term.

You almost dropped out again a year later, not realizing that you should have saved them the trouble because you ended up getting kicked out anyway.

Then you got re-admitted, but you'd missed a whole quarter plus the one you sacrificed for what was either stupid wide-eyed idealism or your firmly held political beliefs. So it was never going to be four neat and tidy years, this was clear.

Plus, you ended up having to take some more time off anyway, even though you actually requested a leave of absence that time, with a photocopied form signed by your advisor and everything.

Basically it's been six years on the short bus through college and you are finally going to graduate.

*

Next stop, Babylon, and you feel like the only light you've ever known is the sunlight that filters through the window onto the island of drop cloth, because everything feels harsh, garish, candy-coated. The filtered spotlights on the dance floor cast everyone in uniform hues of blue and pink and gold and you wonder if it would help the marriage of media textures if you put a monochromatic wash over the entire canvas. It could be flat, but also liberating, and --

Brian taps you on the shoulder. "You still with me, Sunshine?"

You blush, but you're under a gold filter. "Let's dance," you say.

You see Emmett, at the bar, later, nursing a Cosmo and snagging traffic with his hip bones. "Hey, baby!" Emmett says. "Long time no see!"

You kiss the air next to each other's faces, Emmett in a puckered exaggerated way that's more about being Emmett than the number of drinks he's raised tonight.

Under the lights, Emmett is blue and violet and pink. "Where's Manus?" you ask.

Emmett shakes his head. You shrug out an apology, but you're basically lucky you even remembered his name, because before Manus it was Tim and before Tim it was some guy with a really awful tattoo and before that you don't even remember. Emmett used to be happy-go-slutty but now he dates, never for more than about six weeks but always very serious, very heartbreaking. Every time.

He's been like that ever since Ted got married.

"What about you, sweetie," Emmett says, patting you on the shoulder, "how's the project coming?"

"I think it's finished."

"Oh my god!" Emmett says. "That's so fabulous! I'm so proud of you!" Each sentence is like a successive burst, verbal glitter strewn all over the place. "You must be so happy!"

You try to smile, but you're playing Mad Libs in your head with the word happy. Possible replacements include: relieved, numb, panicked and horny. (In addition to sunlight and foot washing, there are a couple other things you've missed in the last two weeks.)

Emmett looks down at his glass and you watch the miniature tornado of pink as he swirls the stem in his fingers. "So what are you going to do?"

"I have to hand it in on Monday. If they like it, I graduate."

"No," Emmett says, "I mean. What are you going to do?"

*

This is the truth:

Brian was always going to move to New York.

Brian was going to take the job and leave Pittsburgh with no apologies, no regrets and no forwarding address.

Brian was going to get Stockwell elected and use his fat cat friends to pave his way to a Manhattan office.

Brian has always been too much of a big fucking success to stay in Pittsburgh forever or as long as it took you to get a bachelors degree in fine arts, whichever happens to come first.

*

What passes for domesticated in your quasi-committed, non-defined, non-conventional co-habitating relationship arrangement: These days you and Brian fuck at the loft more often than the back room, and you fuck on the bed more than, say, bent over the couch or pressed against the length of a steel pillar. You're not seventeen anymore, and Brian is --

At the moment, Brian is fucking you, hands molding the shape of your hips, and he's close, you can tell, his calculated thrusts have gone erratic. So what's the point of wondering what he'd do if you told him that you two practically fuck like breeders anymore, but six times as often, when you can push your ass up to meet every thrust, because if you can just --

When you come, you see colors that you can never mix on a palette.

After Brian's achieved a boneless sprawl and lit a cigarette and you've arranged yourself like a rag doll against his side, he smirks. "If for some reason they won't give you that degree in finger painting," he says, "I think you've more than logged enough lab hours for a degree in," this is one of the, like, four thousand six hundred things that you love about Brian -- he can barely keep himself from laughing at his own lame jokes, "fucking."

You roll your eyes. "Either way, I'm still going to end up working at Starbucks."

"Bullshit."

"It's not bullshit. What else am I going to do with a degree in, as you so kindly put it, finger painting?"

Brian takes a long draw off his cigarette but apparently not because he has to think of an answer, because he immediately says, "Be brilliant," as though it's that simple. Or at least that deciding that doing something that intangibly impossible is easy. "Trust me, Sunshine, you're going to be ordering the triple skim no whip mochas, not making them."

He seems so sure that you want to lie back, close your eyes and think of believing him. So you do, and you laugh a little bit. "Skim?" you ask. "No whip?"

There's a rustle as he bumps his hip against your own. "You're not seventeen anymore, you know."

*

The next day's Saturday, so it's not that you're afraid to hand the project in, it's just that you, you know, can't. Brian gets up first thing and goes to the gym, but you laze around in bed for a while and decide to call Daphne.

Daphne graduated and moved away two years ago, same as everyone else you went to high school with, probably, but Daphne's the only one you've ever given a shit about. She answers the phone with, "Hey, I'm on the bus."

"Why'd you pick up the phone, then?" You're still in bed, and you stretch as much as you can with the phone wedged in your shoulder.

"Because you never call me anymore," she says.

"Hey, I call you, I've just been busy."

"That's right, how's the project?"

From the bed, if you're sitting up, you can see the shores of the drop cloth island, but not the project. For good measure and your own sanity, though, you're lying down. "I think I'm finished," you say, and you've only told Daphne so once before, so she might even believe you.

"Yeah, but, really?"

Or not. "Yes, really," you say. "I have to hand it in on Monday anyway, if I want to graduate."

"God, that's right! Wow, that's awesome, Justin, you must be so excited."

"Um, yeah, I'm really excited that I'm finally graduating two years after my class," you say. You roll over so you're back in the patch of sunlight that's splitting the bed. "I don't even think I'm going to go to graduation."

There's static in your ear for a good long stretch of seconds, and then she says, "Uh, are you sure about that?"

"Whatever."

"I just think. It's dumb to blame yourself. You know that." You didn't know that you were blaming yourself. "I think you should go," she says, "but try not to show up stoned, okay?"

You and Brian went to Daphne's graduation. You barely had to drag Brian along but he insisted on smoking a joint in the car first, claiming he hadn't even been sober for his own graduation. There were speeches, and the sun hurt your eyes. You don't remember much, so you figure you can't really be missing anything.

"How's your boyfriend?" you say, deciding it's time to change the subject.

"He's great. He's, um," she coughs, "he's a lot like you, actually."

"Yeah?"

"He's gay."

You lean back, laughing, glad that some things will never change. "Well," you say, practically wheezing, "you did move to San Francisco."

*

This is the truth:

You got bashed.

You got bashed, you got hit in the head with a baseball bat and it was six weeks in physical therapy before you could pick up a fucking paperclip. You could still feel the imprint of the hospital wrist band against your skin when you showed up for your first day at school.

Your father basically disowned you.

You were standing up to a corrupt and homophobic mayoral candidate and your actions had a direct impact on the outcome of an important election.

Brian had a reoccurrence and even though he's completely better now, he was really, really sick.

So you weren't exactly taking semesters off to be a ski instructor in Colorado, is the thing.

*

Later in the afternoon, Brian gets back from the gym and you're still in bed. You see him, still glistening, wifebeater sticking to his chest, and you say, "Hey, why don't you come back to bed?"

Brian shakes his head, circles the bed toward the wardrobe and you watch the long line of his back when he strips his shirt. "Can't," he says, "Gotta be somewhere."

"Where are you going?"

There was definitely a time when Brian would have said "none of your fucking business," but that time is over, even if you can't remember when exactly it ended. So it's what he says that's surprising, not that he answers. "I'm taking Gus to a movie."

His shorts pool at his feet, and he turns to look at you from over his shoulder and he is, he is so fucking beautiful. "So, are you coming, or what?"

"I'll get dressed."

*

The movie is animated and bright and garishly colorful and fun in an action figure tie-in searching for a reason sort of way. Gus is enthralled but you can tell Brian is pained and that he probably thinks that the experience would be more bearable with a couple tablets of E, but after Gus hit toddling Brian became meticulously careful about being fucked up around his kid.

On the drive home, Gus is talking about summer school and you realize that his, like, entire life plus a year is the time that you spent at PIFA. It's incredibly self-absorbed but also kind of mind-boggling.

"--and then she asked me if Gus was short for Augusta, but I said no. My name's just Gus!"

You laugh, because, "I helped name you," you say, "the night you were born. Do you remember that?"

"Yes!"

You look at Brian out of the corner of your eye, and you can see that his estimation that he and Lindsay both had an infant the night you and he met probably hasn't changed much. "No you don't," you tell Gus. "You were just a baby."

Gus is sure he does, though. But he's seven, and you're pretty sure that's how it works.

Brian pulls up in front of Lindsay's house. "Well, here we are, sonny boy."

Lindsay must have been watching the window, though, because she's out the door and down the walk before Gus can say, "Bye, Justin, bye, Dad!" and Brian can grudgingly accept a hug from around the front seat.

Gus goes inside and Lindsay sticks her head through the driver's side window.

"Thanks for taking him," she says. "He's really going to miss you when you move to New York."

You imagine that this is just supposed to hang in awkward silence because Brian is Brian and it's not like anyone can change his mind, but Brian rolls his eyes and says, "Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm leaving Theodore in charge, you think I'm not going to have to come back and put out fires once a week? I promise that your kid won't forget what I look like, even though he might be better off otherwise."

Lindsay doesn't bother pretending not to be extremely pleased. You smile at your hands.

"Your graduation is next Sunday, right?" Lindsay says in your direction.

You shrug. "I don't even think I'm going."

She raises her eyebrows. "I should get inside," she says. "I'm taking the kids over to Mel's for dinner."

Mel and Linds are okay now, houses in the same neighborhood, swapping the kids back and forth, going to school plays together and everything else. You don't understand why they don't just get back together, because they obviously still love each other, and it seems like that ought to be all that matters.

You mentioned this to Brian once, and he made you feel like you were still seventeen and a would-be stalker. "It doesn't work like that, Sunshine," he said, and didn't want to talk about it anymore.

*

This is the truth:

It's not like the last time. Brian isn't going to take off for New York with the big fuck you and a promise that he'll forget you all as soon as he walks out the door. Because Brian's not that guy anymore. But he's also never going to be the guy who settles and stays in Pittsburgh and buys a house in the suburbs and a white picket fence.

So instead he's skulking around, trying to let everyone know in his own way that he'll miss them.

You're waiting to see what he'll try to offer you.

*

You turn the project in Monday afternoon, and when you get back to the loft you're jittery. You pour yourself a glass of water and then dump it out in the sink, open the refrigerator, stare, close it again.

Brian's working at his desk. He doesn't look up, but calls out, "Quit it."

"Quit what?"

"Get over yourself," he says. "You are not going to spend the next thirty-six hours acting like a queen." You catch him watching you, and you're probably about as surprised as he wants you to be. They're going to post the final project grades on Wednesday morning.

"Brian, this could decide my entire future."

"It could, if there was any chance that you weren't going to pass," he says. "False modesty makes my dick soft. Why don't you do something useful, like send out your fucking graduation announcements?" He waves toward the forgotten package that's been sitting with the mail since you bought them a couple months ago. You haven't sent them out because what was the point if you weren't actually going to graduate?

Still, you spread the invitations out on the light box, even though you'll probably have to hand-deliver them and Deb's been mouthing the news to anyone who will hold still for the last month. You write out names because it's something to do, picking at random from the jumbled list in your head.

Then you stop.

You're staring at the envelope so hard you don't notice when the click-clack of Brian's keyboard stops and you're startled when Brian eases around behind you, chin over your shoulder. You point to the envelope. "What do you think?" you ask.

It says "Craig Taylor." There's no address because you don't even know his address, you haven't been to his house in years or even spoken to him since an angry phone conversation after he found out from Molly that you and Brian were still living together. That ended with Brian's hand on the back of your neck while you puked up most of a bottle of very expensive tequila.

Brian eases back, and his fingers find the nape of your neck. "What do you want to get out of it?" he asks.

You imagine your father showing up at your graduation, telling you he's proud of you, that you're very talented, that you made the right decision. You imagine him shaking Brian's hand and saying, "It's good to see you again." You put your hand over your mouth so you won't laugh.

"Nothing I can have," you say.

"Then burn it," he says. "He doesn't deserve the chance to disappoint you." He presses his lips to your temple before he goes back to his desk.

*

Michael and Ben bought a house out in Lesbian Land, and now Michael has a second mortgage to keep him awake at night just like his mother.

"I hope you're hungry," Michael says when he opens the front door. "I made lasagna!"

The similarities, unfortunately, don't stop there.

Dinner is a little quiet. At the party for the launch of the New York office, Brian put one finger over Michael's lips and said, "Don't. One word and I won't give you my new phone number." So Michael's bending over backwards not to mention it and it's like trying to pass Michael's slightly crispy lasagna around an elephant flopped in the middle of the table.

"Do you want some more?" Michael says. He's holding the dish with these pink quilted pot-holders. It's kind of terrifying.

You shake your head and say, "No, thanks, I'm really full," around a mouthful of what tastes like sawdust. Behind Michael's shoulder, Hunter snickers, and pushes his massacre of noodles and sauce around on his plate.

"So, Justin," Ben says, helping himself to more salad. Ben must have been in charge of the salad, because it's all dark greens and tomatoes and tangy vinaigrette, not the bag of carrots and iceberg drenched in ranch that Deb favors. "You must be excited about graduation."

The way he says it makes you feel twelve, which is weird because the rest of this dinner has made you feel about thirty-seven. Dinner with your partner and his best friend and his husband and their kid, and all. Brian must really hate this. Either that or he's really going to miss Michael a lot. You glance at him; the tiny sliver of lasagna he allowed himself to be served up is mostly untouched.

You realize you never answered Ben's question. "Yeah, I don't know," you say. "I don't think I'm even going to go to the ceremony."

"Right on, dude," Hunter says, and everyone else looks at their plates.

Michael walks you and Brian to the door when you leave, and Brian puts Michael's face between his hands and says, "I love you, Mikey, even if your lasagna tastes like shit."

Brian's already out the door when Michael catches you by the shoulder. "You need to talk to him," he says, and you shake your head and shrug him off before he can specify about what.

In the car on the way home, Brian's silent, staring straight forward, with both hands on the steering wheel, and you realize that he's maybe pissed off about something. You count seven lights before you say, "Do you want to tell me what's wrong or should I just start guessing?"

Brian snorts, and eases up to a red light. "Just do me a favor," he says. "Stop fucking telling people that you're not going to go to your graduation."

"Whatever," you say. "Why go? So I can be reminded that everyone I started out with graduated three years ago? So I can sit next to a bunch of dumb kids while the administration that wanted to kick me out makes a bunch of stupid speeches? Who cares, anyway? I mean, my mother, probably, but she'll get over it."

"Of course she will," Brian says. "It's not like she doesn't have the memory of your high school graduation to console herself with." He turns toward you, his eyes wide in the worst exaggerated way. "Oh, wait," he says.

And there's not much you can say to that because there's just -- there's not. Brian, at least, seems to get that he's hit below the belt and so he makes a plastic smile. "Besides," he says. "You're going to have a party."

*

This is the truth:

You spent your high school graduation in a coma.

It sounds like hyperbole, like a melodramatic over-stating of the case, but it's basically what happened.

*

On Wednesday afternoon, you decide to pop into Kinnetik before your shift at the diner. On your way to the steam room, Ted calls from his office, "Hey, Justin!"

You pause and stick your head in. Ted's office used to be the sling room, and Brian insisted that the bolts stay in the ceiling, so they're all you ever look at.

"So, how's it goin'?" Ted says.

Ted rates the sling room for an office because he's the Executive VP of Finance, which is a fancy way of saying Ted's in enough debt to Brian that Brian trusts him. Cynthia is Executive VP of Operations, which is a fancy way of promoting his assistant beyond all possible assistant-related promotions. Apparently they're going to fight it out for the right to be in charge when Brian goes to New York.

"Um, it's goin' good," you say, already feeling stilted and awkward, because Ted's married. To a woman. Who's not a tranny. This has nothing to do with anything, it's just that it's all you think about whenever you see Ted.

"Yeah?" Ted says, twisting a pencil in one hand. "Good."

Nobody really talks about how Ted ended up marrying a woman, but Brian nailed it when he said, during the wedding toast, "Well, I always thought Theodore was boring enough to be straight."

You're about to excuse yourself when Ted adds, "So, are you excited for the big day?"

"Yeah, um," you say, adjusting your bag from one hip to the other, "it's Saturday, but it's not really a big deal--"

"No," Ted says, "I meant the big move." He raises his eyebrows a little bit in his totally unsubtle Ted way.

You swing yourself out of the doorframe and say, "I should go find Brian, I'm going to be late."

Brian's in his office with this girl Emily who's new in the art department. She's younger than you but already out of school and being around her is awkward because she's young enough to realize just how young her boss's boyfriend actually is.

"Hey," you say. "Is this is a bad time? I could come back later."

"No," Brian says, "we're finished," and he leans back in his chair in a way that's really sexy and also means that Emily just got ripped a new asshole. She throws you a nervous smile and hustles out.

Brian looks at you. You look at Brian. He doesn't say anything, but you shrug like he's asked you the question and say, "I got an 'A'."

"And?"

"And," you pause, trying to find the lead. "And you were right?"

Brian keeps looking at you, and doesn't say anything and this time you don't even have anything to say. "How's it going?" you ask, and you feel like Ted. Maybe you should get a pencil to twirl in lieu of anything intelligent to say.

"There's a chance," Brian says, "that they might just be able to hold their own dicks to piss while I'm gone."

*

This is the truth:

Kinnetik was ranked one of the five fastest growing boutique agencies in the last five years by AdWeek. So suddenly opening a New York office was a necessity and not a pipe dream.

Apparently, Cynthia was the one who brought it up in the first place.

*

Friday morning, you've got the ass crack of dawn shift at the diner, and you're schlepping eggs and bacon while still half-asleep. It's hardly painful and mostly effortless because you've been working at the diner six months longer than the six thousand years you've been in college.

Deb's shirt says "It takes balls to be a fairy!" and it's pink and orange in a loud way that makes your half-open eyes hurt. She catches you at the back door balancing the knob and six trash bags and says, "Hey there, hold it!"

You stop, but gesture with the trash bags as if to say that you're trying to work here.

"So," she says, gum snapping, "how's it feel, your last day at the diner?"

"Um, what do you mean? I didn't quit."

Deb puts her hands on her hips. "You're gonna be a college graduate," she says. "I fuckin' fired you."

You drop the garbage bags.

"You need to figure out what to do with your life," Deb says. "You need to figure out what you're going to do about Brian." Which, ouch, because you can always count on Deb for blunt honesty that tastes like sawdust lasagna going down. "I love you like my own son and this will always be your home, but you're fuckin' fired."

So you take out the garbage and you finish your shift and you walk home even though you'd usually call Brian and make him pick you up. Because Deb says you're fired and Brian's setting up to celebrate your six years in the making, short bus achievement and now you're supposed to figure out what to do with your life.

*

You wake up the morning after the party, Brian half on top of you, on the pile of pillows on the floor near the window, right where the desert island drop cloth oasis used to be. There's an oppressive rhythmic thumping coming from somewhere, but it might just be in your head. You try to shift, but you're pinned. "Hey," you squeak. "Get off me."

"Just a second," he mutters, "First I have to kill whoever's fucking in my bed." And you realize that, yes, there's a thumping noise inside your head but there's also a thumping noise coming from the bed, and neither you nor Brian is in it.

And there's also a knocking. Someone's knocking on the door.

Brian makes straight for the bed and you can see, out of the corner of your eye, that two twinks who paint the walls at Babylon are sucking each other's dicks on the $1,200 duvet. You move for the door but stop to find a pair of pants, anyone's pants, and the details filter into your brain like wet cement: the earlier parts when your mom and Deb and Lindsay and Ted and his wife and Mel were there, then the part with the strippers in boarding school uniforms, and the way that part and the first part overlapped for an uncomfortable twenty minutes or so.

The rest is a blur of noise and light and color, and Brian fucked you up against the window like no one or maybe everyone was watching and your nipples were tight and cold which must be why they feel sore. When Brian was pulling out, taking his time, he cupped your chin with his other hand and turned you so you were eye to eye and not muttering, not casting his gaze toward the window, not coughing to cover it up, he said, "I'm proud of you."

It pretty much all fades to black after that. You just hope it was before your mother left.

It seems like it took six or eight hours to walk to the door, but it might just be the way the room is sort of spinning. You pull back on the handle and you are, oh my god, so glad you took the time to put some pants on and also that Molly is doing her senior year abroad in Finland because it's your mother standing at the door and she's wearing a nice suit and she's ready to go to your college graduation.

"Justin, why aren't you--"

"Wait, uh, just a minute," you say, interrupting her. "Um. Out here."

It's maybe the first time the two of you have showered together without even a hand job or some grab ass. You stumble out of the shower and mentally take back every complaint you made yesterday afternoon when Brian insisted on picking out your clothes and arranging them all on a clothes hanger. You grab the clothes and try not to notice the places where they stick to your body thanks to your less than adequate toweling-off and you're both out in the door in less than five minutes, the four remaining tricks who were littering up the floor trailing behind you.

Your mother averts her eyes from the one who's holding his underwear over his dick.

*

When it's time for you to ebb away with the rest of the graduates in your stupid polyester robe, your mother pulls you in for a messy buss of lipstick against your cheek. Over her shoulder, you see Brian watching you, holding out a gathered fist. You stretch out your palm and he slips you four Advil.

So you're dry-mouthing four Advil and shuffling into place when you realize that if you don't get your act together soon you're going to be so fucked.

There are speeches, but you don't hear them. There's some kind of musical interlude, but it barely registers. You almost forget to cross the podium and accept your empty portfolio equivalent of a diploma when they call your name. It's like you're still asleep except that it's all so real that you expect the air to have sharp points. It's too real, even. It's like believing that you weren't quite really going to graduate meant that you could completely block out thinking about anything that was going to come next and now what's next is here and you are so completely fucked.

*

This is the truth:

You spent six years and someone else's money getting a fine arts degree.

You don't have a job.

In lieu of a very understanding subletter, you're not going to have a place to live.

Brian's going to move to New York and you haven't said that you want to go with him.

*

The next day, Brian goes into work early and stays late, and you sleep until almost three in the afternoon, exhausted and also nervous.

The university makes you stop by the day after graduation to pick up your real diploma, once they've made sure that everyone's student accounts are squared away. You can't imagine anything worse than returning immediately after the ritual d?©nouement, so you go and pick up your diploma and your transcript and your laughably useless alumni discount card.

"Oh," says the girl at the register's office absently, "do you want to pick up your final project, too?"

The project. It provided you so many hours and days of sublimated agony and in the end you forgot all about it. You shrug and she gives you a ticket that you use to retrieve the unwieldy canvas from your department secretary. When you look at the project again, it's not with the same critical eye you used to pick out flaws that would tell you whether or not you'd be able to delay the inevitable. It's just a painting, just the sum of six years of work.

You take it home and carefully wrap it in a map of newspapers and scotch tape. You take another shower because you look like shit. You walk, with the canvas held out in front of you in a cumbersome sort of way, downtown, and to Kinnetik.

Everyone else has gone home, but you know the security codes. You see Brian through the glass from the hallway, bent over his desk, making notes on a report. He looks up when you reach the doorway, sidestepping through so the canvas will fit.

"What are you doing here?"

"I brought you something."

"Let me guess. It's a going away present. I can," he says, switching to a sour sing-song, "hang it in my new office." He smiles like his mouth is made of paper. "Thanks, Sunshine."

You were so wrapped up in your own avoidance you didn't even notice that Brian had been swinging around like a divining rod, throwing a party when he was scared, acting angry when he was unhappy. It's a wonder he didn't try to throw you out of the loft this morning, for old time's sake.

"You know, I just graduated from college," you say.

Brian raises an eyebrow and knits his hands together. "Did you now?"

"I figure I'm due for a couple years of trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my life."

You're not sure what it's going to be like. Maybe you won't be able to get a job and you'll spend all day cooped up in whatever Manhattan version of the loft Brian's leased for his purposes and you'll feel like more of a faker than that kid who spent six years dropping out and in of PIFA. Maybe Brian will feel like you followed him and you'll fight all the time. Maybe you'll be the one in a thousand who grabs the city by the balls and becomes a big fat fucking success in spite of everything. It wouldn't exactly be the first time.

"So, I thought maybe I could move to New York."

Maybe it's the right decision and maybe it isn't, but it's the one that you were supposed to make weeks ago, you just let yourself get distracted with a bunch of inevitability and now it's time to show up for tomorrow. You've been revising down to absolutes and now this is the truth.

Brian smiles at his desk, and something drops out of his shoulders. "You could do that," he says. "You could do that."

*

This is the truth:

Five weeks to the day after you graduate from PIFA, you and Brian will leave for New York. When the two of you drive away, you won't look back, only forward, and sometimes to the side.