Lance stood in front of a mirror in the middle of the desert, listening to someone cover Freedom '90 on the radio. It was hot, hot like soup in summer, and he couldn't breathe right, not from his diaphragm like he was supposed to. He was tired of looking at himself in this damn mirror. The radio station was staticy, as if a thunderstorm hovered over the broadcast tower, but Lance thought he should recognize the guy singing. He couldn't place him. This troubled him immensely.
Also troubling was the fact that it couldn't be a radio, which Lance knew in some deep way he couldn't express, because this was the middle of the desert and they didn't make extension cords long enough for anyone to bring a radio all the way out here. Then he was staring at a shelf of extension cords in the extension cord aisle at the Home Depot, which his dad always insisted on pronouncing 'deh-po,' like they did in the army, even though it made his mother roll her eyes heavenward and say, "Jim. Please," every single time. Or maybe that's why his dad kept doing it.
The floor and the ceiling slanted away at divergent angles that violated the laws of physics in a way that made Lance squirm with embarrassment. Then he squirmed again, because he'd rubbed up against something the first time and it felt kind of good. There was something wrong about that, but time skipped ahead and Lance couldn't stop to think or the Home Depot would close and he'd be left without an extension cord, and then how would he listen to the guy on the radio? Then the PA system clicked on with a squawk of feedback, and the manager was saying, "Lance. Lance! Yo, wake up already."
Lance rolled over and opened his eyes. Justin sat down on the edge of the bed, making the mattress, which was elderly and in delicate health, list dramatically in his direction. Lots of inanimate objects did dramatic things in Justin's presence. The other bed in the room, which usually had JC lying in it, was empty. Justin had the cordless phone in one hand, a pair of sweatpants covering his hips and legs, and was otherwise naked.
"Why aren't you wearing anything?" Lance asked. He closed his eyes. He was sure that when he'd been fourteen he hadn't spent this much time walking around half-exposed. Of course, when he'd been fourteen he hadn't been in a pop group living in a ranch house in Orlando's suburbs trying to get good enough to be signed.
"It's hot. I don't get how you can sleep with a sheet and a blanket and everything. Are you ever gonna get up?"
"I'm tired, Justin. Some of us get tired."
"Some of us need to be nicer after sleeping all morning, and it ain't me. Here, your mom's on the phone." Justin poked Lance in the forehead with the antenna.
Opening his eyes again, Lance snatched the phone from Justin's hand. "Momma?"
Justin clasped his hands under his chin and sighed, "Oh, Momma," in a high, nasal voice. There was an excessive amount of eyelash fluttering involved. Lance grabbed his pillow and threw it at Justin's head.
"Hey, sweetie." His mom's voice was neither high nor nasal, but kind of smooth and calm, which was something Lance hadn't ever noticed before. Of course, he'd never gone a week without talking to her, either. "I didn't mean to get you up."
Whatever sugar-coated things Justin had eaten for breakfast had kicked in. He fidgeted and made the mattress vibrate, sitting on Lance's blanket so that it pulled tight across Lance's hips. Oh, Lance was up, all right. Up, up, up, and Justin was all kinds of messed up, the way he had to crawl on top of a guy first thing in the morning when he was still out of it.
"It's okay," Lance said into the phone, even though it completely wasn't. Listen to him: living in Orlando for not even a month and he was lying to his own mother. "Go away!" he hissed at Justin. He tried to knee Justin's butt off his bed without losing his covers in the process.
Instead of falling like a normal person, Justin bounced to his feet. "Lance misses his mommy," he sang, walking his laughing, half-naked self out of the bedroom.
"Sorry, mom. I'm, um." He pulled the covers away from his body, very carefully, so as not to brush or agitate or even think about anything underneath. "Is everything okay?"
"Don't you steal my lines," his mom said. Lance could all but see her smiling, sitting at her big cherry desk up in the middle room where she liked to make her phone calls because there was always a pen and a calendar nearby if she had to write something down. It almost hurt. But it was an okay kind of hurt. It was okay that he missed her, and he should've thrown something harder at Justin. His alarm clock, maybe. "Do you want me to call back later?"
"No, that's okay." There he went again with the lying. "I wanted to ask you something, I just. How's dad?"
"He's fine. He went up to the nursery to get me a flat of begonias. I want to put red ones in the planters on the porch. Were you all up late?"
Yes, Lance wanted to say, yes, because what else could you call being awake in a warehouse at two in the morning, jumping around the same rectangular space over and over again, waiting for it to be your turn for the choreographer to point at you while Lynn Harless sat on a folding chair in the corner and paged through a magazine? Lance found it hard to believe there were kids who intentionally went out to dance at warehouses until the sun came up. But there'd been a report about raves on the local news one night, and the next evening Chris'd shown up to rehearsal and shoved a handful of glowsticks down Justin's shirt, so it must be true. It must be different without the choreographer and Miz Lynn and the folding chair and all.
But he was getting used to being up when everyone normal was asleep. Plus, his mom would worry if he said yes.
"Not really. Not more late than usual. I'm just being lazy." Justin, obviously, was already up. Chris was almost certainly at work, this being a Saturday and Saturdays being busy at the park, and Joey would be there by now, too. Even JC was somewhere that was not in bed.
Then the singing started again, and Lance squirmed before he realized what he was doing, wishing his mom had called at night like the moms on long-distance commercials did. Wasn't long distance supposed to be cheaper at night? JC was in the shower. JC was in the shower, and singing, and had been singing before, except now he'd switched to some song that Lance didn't recognize. He couldn't make out the words. The melody was kind of low, though, straining the bottom edge of JC's range, so that his voice came out under the bathroom door kind of husky. Kind of rough, you could say.
Lance was not going to say it. Lance was not even going to think about JC and anything rough and definitely nothing wet while on an open line with his mom. Especially when she was talking and he'd missed the first part.
"...anything I can send you from home?"
"No?" Lance cleared his throat. "No, I think I remembered everything."
"Well, if you think of something, write it down. I'll bring it next time I drive out. Lynn said she'd cash a check for you, so I'm mailing one today."
"Mom, you don't have to send me money."
"Too bad. We still give your sister money, so you're getting some, too. You can use it to buy movie tickets and pizza for everyone if you can't think of anything else."
His mother wanted Lance to take the guys out on a date. This was not normal. Lance wondered when his life had gotten so very strange. Singing used to be something he did after school in the chorus room. Singing was something fun, something extra-curricular; it was something that was supposed to look good on his college applications. It was not a thing that was supposed to be more important than everything else. It was not something that made him move three states and a time-zone away.
"Do you think..." Lance said. He stared at the other bed and wondered how JC managed to kick out the hospital corners in his sleep without waking Lance.
"Do I think what?"
"Do you think this is going to work?"
"Lance," his mom said, and then she didn't say anything for a while. There was a thonk from the bathroom, like the sound something made when it was dropped in a tub, followed by long measures of rest between verses.
"Lance. You said you were sure you wanted to do this."
"I am! I do. We do." He was sure of that. They wanted to, even if they didn't all want to for the same reasons. Joey wanted to be on a stage because that's where he was most Joey. Chris wanted to be rich, and he would say it to everyone who would listen, but he didn't really mean he wanted to be rich just for himself, which is what made it okay. Justin was going to be famous, no matter what. JC was going to sing, no matter what. He even sang in the shower, even when Lance was the only one who could hear him. He sang just the same there as he did last week, when they went to an honest-to-God recording studio, just for a couple of hours so they could get used to what it was like to sing for real. JC always sang for real.
Lance had never sung for real in his life.
"Are you sure you do?"
"Yeah, I really do. It's not that it's too hard," Lance said. "I mean, it is hard, but I knew that. Everyone said it was going to be. It's just. It's different."
"Different good, or different bad?"
"Different, like it's different from anything. Like I think I'm different."
"Of course you are," his mom said, so gently and so mom-like, so understanding and so not getting it all at the same time that Lance sank back down between the sheets, picking his pillow up from the floor. JC was singing something that sounded a little like Walkin' After Midnight, but that might just be Lance's brain dredging up memories of last autumn's show choir. He still remembered his part, but he couldn't sing it right now. It might come out more like moaning. That would be bad.
Really spectacularly bad.
"Mom, I'm okay. Really. I just woke up, is all, and I'm kind of tired still." Tired. Right. Three strikes, he was out, but his mom didn't need to know this. "I'll call you in a couple of days, okay?"
"Okay, sweetie. I love you," she said.
He said it back, then thumbed off the power and set the phone on the floor.
Hello, Lance tried to tell his body, hello, you have a stupid dream about a home improvement store and you're worried and everything about stuff you already signed contracts saying you'd do, and here you are, wanting this right after you wake up anyway. After you talked to your mom. With JC ten feet away, splashing around in the shower.
Yes, his body said.
You're sick, he told it. You're sick and twisted and disturbed. He licked at his palm, then turned his face into the pillow and slid his hand in through the front of his boxers.
Nothing that made him feel like this could be expected to last very long. It didn't. Lance had time to think about how dumb this was, with JC about to finish in there any second. He squeezed his fingers up and around and off, getting them wetter, and thought about how it was really a very good thing that Chris was the oldest, which meant he got the small room on the other side of the bathroom to himself, while JC and Lance shared this bigger one because they both slept lightly and Lance wasn't afraid to exaggerate it to get out of rooming with Justin.
Then he thought about JC meaning it whenever he sang, and had to choke his fist down hard, because quick was one thing but he'd just got to the point where he was close enough to let himself wonder how JC looked in the shower. He'd be wet and slippery and, um. Maybe JC was hard, too. He could have lathered up and rinsed off and done everything in between without using a washcloth, soaping up his hands and skimming them over himself. Against himself. Maybe into, into, into... oh. Oh.
The last thing Lance thought of was JC asking him last night for a kleenex, then chucking the box over to his bed which is where it was still, and how Lance was going to feel like an idiot in about twenty seconds.
He felt like a total moron when JC walked out of the bathroom in ten.
"Hey," JC said. He had a towel around his hips. They needed to make another house rule or something: no walking around without a shirt. Not in front of Lance. Especially when he was still breathing hard.
When JC turned around and dropped the towel to pull on boxers and jeans, Lance did not look. He didn't. Oh, lord.
JC yanked a yellow t-shirt with a decal of a big blue bird over his head. "You feeling okay?"
"I'm fine." That was good; not too breathy. JC might notice breathy. "Why?"
"I dunno. You look a little like you're not okay."
"I'm fine." Oh, no. JC was not walking over. He was not stepping over the phone and lifting his hand like he was going to check Lance for a fever, like he was his mom, and oh, no more thinking about JC and his mom that close together.
But JC didn't quite touch Lance before he said, "Oh," and then, with more force, "Oh." JC could be expressive when he wanted to be. "You, uh. The door was open, so I. Didn't think."
Lance was going to die. "Justin was in here--"
JC's eyes grew wide.
"No! He wasn't just-- it was before, I mean, earlier. He was in here earlier and woke me up because of the phone, and I guess when he left he left the door open, too. Before. Earlier."
"Um. Lance, you know how I, like, have a brother? And everything?"
"And a sister," Lance said, the logical part of his brain breaking through the mortified rest of his brain.
"Yeah, but, I'm thinking more about how I have a brother. And Joey, he has a brother, too. Chris, he only has sisters, but that doesn't matter so much with Chris. He's Chris."
"Okay."
"Yes, so we all either have a brother or we know what it's like to have a brother. Even Chris."
"Justin--" Lance started, but he didn't know where to go with it, so he just stopped.
"Justin's not really going to be much help. Not really. I'm just saying, me and Joey and Chris, you can ask. You can say, 'Hey, I'll be there in a minute,' or you can say, 'Be right out,' and they'll tease you and everything, but you can tease them back. Or me, I'll knock before I ever open the door, okay?"
"Okay." Lance was not dead. Since he was alive, he should probably say something more. "I'll, um, I'll knock, too. When the door's closed."
"Okay," JC said, and smiled liked he had that first day, right after they'd finished singing a bunch of chords together and were about to launch into a song. "This is going to work. It'll be good, I think."
"I know," Lance said, breathing deep from his gut as JC touched his hand, then picked up the phone and walked out the door.