“I was fine, though. Obviously.” Lark laughs at this, the inevitability of his own survival.

Oli smiles. “Spoiler alert.”

“Fine except for the hospital bills. And not having a job or a place to live.”

“Sounds like a disaster,” Oli tells him, glad Lark has enough perspective to joke about it when he’d seemed so sad before, so regretful. “But it all turns out okay?”

“Sure, I guess,” Lark says. The idea seems to settle over him, a little surprising. “I guess it did?”

Lark doesn’t know if he’d say he always got a happy ending, but sitting there with Oli, it feels almost ungrateful to think otherwise. He is warm and safe; he’s maybe making a new friend.

The possibilities of any new relationship still seem fraught to him, though. His intuitions are never strong and rarely right. Jules and Quinn were the best friends he could have asked for and couldn’t deserve. Max, who he clung to for years, was the worst. It took Lark a long time to see it, but there was nothing Max had to offer him, no part of himself he had ever given over. Lark hadn’t known to expect anything better, and hadn’t known, when he was younger, what secrets he had to share. His inner landscape was a mystery, sometimes, and it had surprised him to discover that this was not the case for everyone.

Lark thinks he knew more intimate facts about Jules and Quinn after a week than he did about Max after four years. There was the reality of Quinn’s chronic pain, Jules’ defiant androgyny, and the almost aggressive quality of their love for each other, a defensive sensuality. All of these were shown to Lark from the beginning. The unspoken question (is it okay?) drowned out by a louder message: this is who we are.

Lark appreciates what Oli has shared with him already, though he wishes he didn’t feel so split open, wishes he could talk himself into security, tell a story that paints him as someone else. Wishes the boundaries between what should and should not be shared we clearer.

“Can you tell me something?” Lark asks.

Oli hesitates. “What do you mean?”

“Just, something important. I don’t know.”

“Reed did tell me about you,” Oli says eventually. “About what you tried to do. And I can’t stop thinking about it.”

I was spirited to a room straight from triage. I wasn’t sure if it was just a quiet night in the ER or if they didn’t want me gagging in the waiting room. It was a relief to be allowed to lie down and submit to how sick I felt.

Jules said they stayed with me until they were thrown out, but I was asleep by then. I was woken to answer a nurse’s questions, to have a doctor’s gloved hands pressing into the points of pain over my stomach, but I dropped off again. My veins were shriveled up from dehydration and they needled my arm black and blue trying to get an IV started. Even the throbbing couldn’t keep me up for long.

The rehydration helped, though, and I woke up the next morning still nauseous but more sensible. My tests came back fairly innocuous. My liver was inflamed but they expected it was just from the mono and my yellow eyes would clear to white in a few weeks’ time. I was given a stern talking to by a middle-aged doctor who seemed to think I had made myself worse in the pursuit of youthful hijinks, a cross country road trip.

I know it must feel like you’re missing out, she said, instructing me to rest until the jaundice cleared. It would take a couple weeks.

Later, I’d make a joke about it. Missing out on my day job? Missing out on rent? At the time, though, I nodded and felt nothing but the shock of the word weeks again. Bed rest and the impossibility of weeks.

I went back to sleep until the phone next to my bed rang and Jules was in my ear, asking for news. I did a poor job of explaining what was wrong and they said they’d come to pick me up when I was discharged in the late afternoon.

You don’t have to, I said, though I wasn’t sure what else I would do. My cell phone was out of batteries, and no one else had come to check on me.

Jules asked: Have you heard from Max?

They arrived around 2 in the afternoon with cheery balloons and a kind of grim expression, looking around the room like they couldn’t believe the emptiness of it.

Sorry, I’m so late. I couldn’t reach, Max. They sighed and cleared the annoyance from their face. When they sat in the chair next to my bed, they leaned forwards with their elbows on the bed, looked up into my face. But how are you? Tell me everything.