Chapter Twenty-Five
WALTER WAS GLAD to be back at Hope, but at the same time he wasn’t.
Being with the Davidsons had been a good break from his usual family chaos and the hell that waited because of Williams’s job debacle, but at the same time seeing such a happy family reminded him how messed up his own was. It was hard to watch them be so connected. And Kelly—Walter didn’t even know where to start thinking about Kelly. Walter loved him, more every day, which was a huge fucking problem. Because Kelly didn’t just want, he expected his life to end up like that damn Disney movie. He failed to see how removed from reality that storyline was. Reality was the only thing Walter knew, and he’d learned long ago never to turn his back on it.
Where that left the two of them, he didn’t know. Happily, once they got back to Hope, he was too busy going to war to think about that too much.
Classes had always been something that happened vaguely on the side of Walter’s life, but they were pushed so far to the periphery now they were an annoyance when they had to be dealt with. Skipping was never an option at Hope—even the “large” lecture classes of one hundred students took attendance and cast penalties for too many absences—so Walter had to work them in around writing letters, staging demonstrations, and pounding campus pavement as he and Rose and the rest of the communications students did their best to enlist soldiers.
Kelly was one of their recruits, and he proved to be a surprisingly good one. He had better personal-relations instincts than most of the communications majors—give him a few years and he’d be able to help someone run for office. While Rose and Walter huddled over laptops, consulting spreadsheets, and arguing over what would be their next move, Kelly visited the student lounges with other volunteers, shaking hands and handing out flyers and sample letters to the editor. When their team held a Google Hangout with interested alumni, Kelly became the spokesperson in their window, passing forward information.
He was a great face for the movement because one, he was still the super-cute good boy from Mayberry, and two, unlike most of the upperclassmen, he wasn’t angry. Well, he was, but not so far down into his core that it came out in cold fury. Best of all, though, Kelly had a great backstory. At the Occupy Hope rallies that popped up on the main lawn, Kelly stood on the speaker’s bench—wearing the super-hot leather jacket, always—and turned the random rage at an overly mothering college back to the matter at hand. Yes, he was prepped for hours by Rose, given key words and sound bites, but it was Kelly’s authenticity and, frankly, downright Disney charm that kept winning the day.
“I came to Hope because it promised to be a community that took care of me. I was just coming out and wanted somewhere safe to practice being publicly authentic to myself. I have allergies, so I wanted somewhere that respected my health needs. I’m from a small town, so I wanted somewhere that felt intimate and not overwhelming. Hope seemed all of that to me. Sure, it came with a high sticker price. My family and I decided it was worth changing our budget to make it work.
“Yet being here in person has not always been what was promised. I’m in an allergy-friendly room, but it’s a single being used as a double in the one dorm known for being unfriendly to gay men. I’ve had a lot of near-misses in the cafeteria with foods that would send me to the hospital. Now I’m finding out Hope is cutting a whole department, a department I was considering settling my major in. Hope for me looks less and less every day like a family that supports me and more and more like an institution eager to take my money but unwilling to deliver its promises.”
He gave variations on the same speech to the paper and letters to the editor, and every time it was a hit. Everyone knew Kelly now. He was the campus celeb, and if he weren’t already spoken for on the dating front, he’d be skimming the cream of the crop and sampling all the wares.
Occasionally Walter felt bad that he was in the way of that, but if he even hinted at that guilt, Kelly either got angry or got them both naked. The latter was more usual, especially as Kelly learned how quickly it shut Walter up.
This became Walter’s life: working to rile up the student body and alumni, strategizing with Rose, skating through on classes, making out with Kelly. Every moment he was out of his dorm room, he was working. Before break, he and Kelly had gone out to movies, gone to Moe’s, but now all they did was rally, plan, and come back to the room to crash.
They’d opened the futon to share it as a bed, using the loft as storage. They were still two sardines wedged into a sliver of space, but they made it work. Walter had wanted to try and find them a bigger room, somewhere away from Porter, because while their heightened profiles might make them the toast of Hope in most places, this was not the case on their floor. Kelly was against the move, though.
“The administration is so angry at us. If we try to get anything out of them right now, they’ll either squash it for spite or use it as leverage against us. We’re fine how we are.”
They were lying on the futon, naked and spooned together, Kelly’s head on Walter’s shoulder. Walter stroked Kelly’s hair and trailed fingers down his back. “Are things okay with our resident meatheads? No one’s giving you any shit?”
Kelly shrugged. “Sure they are. I’m not worried, though. It’s as you said. They’re just teasing me. They can’t do anything. There’s a lot of power in knowing they can only taunt me, not act. I’ve finally figured that out, and it’s changed how I deal with them and let them affect me.”
“If they so much as make you sweat—”
Kelly lifted his face to kiss Walter’s chin. “You’ll hit them with a frying pan, Flynn Rider. I know.”
Walter worried, though, about more than simply Porterhouse. He did want to keep a frying pan handy when it came to Kelly, at least metaphorically.
He hugged Kelly tighter. “Just be careful.”
You’re the only sure thing in my life right now. Everything else is going to shit, and I can’t bear to lose you too.
It made him feel raw to even think that, and he knew he couldn’t ever say it. Kelly seemed to hear it anyway, because he kissed Walter’s cheek tenderly and stroked his face with a reassuring gesture.
Then he slid his hand beneath the covers, teasing Walter’s belly, then his cock, and Walter surrendered, letting himself be distracted from his fears.
KELLY WOULD HAVE been the last person to peg himself as a rabble-rouser, but lately at Hope, that shoe definitely fit.
Since he barely knew Williams, being a mouthpiece for him sometimes felt odd. It helped that he’d picked up some communications classes at the semester switch. It helped even more that he enjoyed them. The classes were smaller than his gen-ed and business courses, and the heightened intensity around the department’s consolidation with humanities made everything feel more alive. Williams led his Introduction to Communication Theory class, which was about the logic of small group and interpersonal communications. It felt like a more formal version of Philosophy Club with different textbooks. Suddenly Kelly thought he had a pretty good idea how that group had been started.
In his two communications courses—he had small group communication too—Kelly felt at home and oddly happy despite the cloud hanging over Ritche Hall. He’d shied away from education courses, wanting to explore gen-ed first to see what stuck. What he found weird, though, was that he also enjoyed the management class his advisor had made him keep. “A liberal education is good,” Dr. Lindon insisted. “I applaud the communication studies, especially the two you’ve chosen. Combined with Introduction to Psychology, you’re well set. Keep the Fundamentals of Management, though. You have an excellent head for business, and you’re a natural leader. Try it one more semester, and if you still feel it isn’t what you want when we sign you up for the fall, we’ll put you in whatever new direction you want to go.”
This had all been in December, before Kelly couldn’t read through an issue of The Hope Journal without seeing himself quoted. Lindon wasn’t the only one who thought Kelly had leadership potential. One of the student senators had asked him to run for office. Kelly was considering it.
He did enjoy the management class, though. It wasn’t as boring as the econ class had been, or the math. It was kind of fun, thinking about how systems worked. It was slightly surreal to have that course, plus the comm theory course, running alongside the Williams campaign. Kelly felt as if he didn’t need to write his weekly essays. He only needed to direct Lindon to YouTube.
On a dreary Tuesday morning in early February, while Kelly headed back toward Porter, his phone rang. Nodding hello to someone who recognized him and waved, he ducked into the Sandman overhang to escape the light drizzle and pulled out his cell. It was his dad, which was weird. Wasn’t his dad at work at this time of day?
The dark thought about what this call could be resonated in Kelly’s brain, and his heart sank. No. Shit, no. Except he knew, even before he answered, that he’d guessed right.
“Hey there, Dad,” he said, trying to sound bright. “Good to hear from you. What’s going on?”
The heavy sigh confirmed the truth before the words did. “Your mom got her notice today. By the first of April, she won’t have a job.”
The wind blew around Kelly, rattling the door to the dorm, but the chill Kelly felt had nothing to do with it. “Oh no.”
“She’s looking into positions in Mankato, because there’s nothing around here.”
Mankato was over an hour’s drive from Windom, and it could be hellacious in the winter. “Does she have any leads?”
“Nothing yet, unfortunately. But we’re going to keep looking until she finds something.”
Kelly clutched the phone tighter. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Don’t spend any money you don’t have to.”
“I won’t.” He already wasn’t. “Tell Mom to stop sending me meal bars. That’ll save fifty dollars a month right there.”
“I’ll try, but I bet you’ll still get them. She has to feed her boy.”
“Tell her that her boy is doing pretty well.” Kelly shifted to the side to let someone pass, and they nodded and waved at him with a smile. He smiled back.
“You still fighting for that professor? How’s it going? We keep seeing you in the online paper.”
“Pretty well, I think. They’re talking about going to the board of regents over spring break. They’re hoping they can get them to call a special meeting over this issue.”
“Well, we wish them luck. Just don’t get your name so muddied you get in trouble, you hear me?”
Kelly smiled, missing his dad so much. “I’m always careful, Dad.”
“Do well at school, son. I don’t want you feeling guilty about what education costs. So long as you use your time wisely and well, whatever we have to do to make it work will be worth it.”
“Okay, Dad.” He swallowed, but his throat was lumpy. “I love you.”
“Love you too, Kelly.”
Hunching into his coat and cutting across the green to Porter, Kelly felt the reality of his father’s message sink in. No job. He didn’t know how his mother would get a new one, and he hated that it might be out of town. He knew his dad did too. Despite what his father said, Kelly did feel bad, because he was a huge part of the cost. He was the expense that put the family on the edge.
As he climbed the stairs to Porter 4, gaze to the floor and ears closed to the cockroach comments, Kelly thought about the speeches he made for Walter and Rose, about how he’d questioned Hope and what it stood for. Those had been his words, and Rose and Walter had declared him brilliant, saying he had a career as a speech writer if he wanted it.
The thing was, Kelly did wonder if Hope was worth it. As he bore hallway insults—again—as he faced his too-small room, as he dwelled on the fact that his tuition alone was thirty-six thousand dollars, not to mention the four grand for room and five for board…he had to wonder, was Hope worth it?
No, Kelly admitted to himself. The only things he cared about at Hope were Williams, Rose, and Walter.
As two football players swore and fought in the hall, slamming hard into his locked dorm door, Kelly pulled out his laptop. He opened the browser and navigated to the University of Minnesota at the Twin Cities and started to click around. He looked at the academic majors, at the colleges, and the grad programs. He looked at the dorms, and he read the Equity and Diversity document he’d glimpsed last year but dismissed because it wasn’t as intensive as Hope’s.
He read the tuition and fees, which including room, board, and books were less than flat tuition at Hope. There wasn’t one word about having to live on campus.
Someone slammed into his door again, but it didn’t even make Kelly jump. He closed the laptop, put on his iPod and lay in bed, listening to the soundtrack to Tangled as he tried, in vain, to think of what he should do.