I reached behind myself and closed the door to the dorm room. Nina eyed me, but I just leaned back against it and crossed my arms, waiting for her to make another move.
“I don’t get it,” Nina said finally. “You’re in the same position as me. You probably don’t want a girl hanging around in your dorm room, so why would you agree to something like this?”
I shrugged. “I have my reasons.”
In truth, I had just one reason—I owed Henry everything, including my life. He wasn’t just my best friend. He was the only person who stepped out of a fray of people who could give less than two shits about me to hold out a hand and pull me up out of a deep, dark hole that I’d dug myself into. We’d known each other since we were toddlers. We grew up in the same neighborhood, and as a result, we always played together. There were several kids in the neighborhood, and my brother and I were two of the many.
Everyone always loved my brother, Dante, more than me. He was my twin brother, so we looked exactly alike, and by five, it wasn’t like he’d made amazing strides in the world that I hadn’t made, but it didn’t stop people from leaning in his direction. In fact, those isolated accomplishments a five-year-old could claim, I did first. I started walking first and started talking first. None of that mattered. Dante was the golden child, and I was covered in soot. I couldn’t call my parents bad parents by any means, but if it was against the parenting creed to have a favorite child, my parents failed around the globe and back again. They fawned over him, and the neighborhood kids all wanted to hang out with him. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong, but evidently, something.
The only exception to that rule was Henry. When he came to the door to ask for friends to play with, he asked for me. When we picked teams to play kickball on hot summer nights, Henry picked me. He was the only one who was really and truly my friend, but as such a young kid, I didn’t understand how wonderful that was. I still saw all the favoritism my brother got, and I wanted it. I chased it relentlessly. I fought for good grades, I joined tons of clubs, and I tried to keep good people around me all the time, but none of it ever made a difference. Dante was favored simply because he was Dante, and when I finally realized that nothing I did was going to change that, I crashed and burned.
Hard.
I was thirteen at the time, and I started getting the kind of attention that I was looking for from some of the older guys in my new high school. They noticed that I always kept to myself and approached me, looking to make friends. No one but Henry had ever wanted to be friends with me, and I’d long since abandoned Henry, so when they proposed friendship, I scooped it up without question. They weren’t good guys, though. Some of them did drugs, and some of them dealt. They would take me to the mall on the weekends and have me distract store clerks so that they could shoplift, and the oldest one, Matthew, had a car that was stolen that he drove us all around in.
I didn’t care.
My parents weren’t going to pay attention to me, and I was never going to be the coveted Dante in their eyes. What was the point of working hard and staying on the straight and narrow if I was always going to be in his shadow? In the new world I discovered, Dante didn’t exist. There was no comparison of him to me because he wasn’t there. I was just Devon, standing on my own two feet, even if I couldn’t quite see that my feet were covered in muck.
Then came that fateful day.
It was a weekend day near the end of my senior year. I’d done what I had to in order to graduate, though my grades were barely enough. I’d dropped all the clubs I’d once maintained and spent any free time I had running around with my friends. My parents didn’t seem to notice nor care, so I had total freedom with my actions. Matthew picked us all up and said we were just going to get something to eat, but then the car was pulled over. If it wasn’t enough that the car was stolen, it was also full of drugs. The police pulled us out of the car, and there must have been some unspoken rule that I didn’t know because the second everyone was out of the car, they bolted, leaving me behind with a stolen car full of drugs, packaged to sell.
I was fucked.
The police took me to jail, and because I was already eighteen, I wasn’t entitled to having my parents around before any questioning or processing. It wasn’t even required that they were contacted. I was offered a phone call but didn’t know anyone’s number to call. They let me see my cell phone long enough to get a phone number out of it, but very few of them were helpful. It was a toss-up as to whether or not my parents would even answer if I called, and I wouldn’t dare call my brother. I had all my friends’ numbers, but they were the same jackasses who’d taken off and left me to carry the weight of their crimes. I scrolled through the phone nervously, being constantly badgered by the officer holding the phone to pick a number, and I landed on the only number that felt like it wouldn’t make things worse.
It was Henry’s.
I called, and not only did Henry answer, but he responded much like a superhero would. He told me he’d get his dad, who was a lawyer, to help me, and he happened to have a large sum of money in his savings account that he’d saved up over the years for school. He used the bulk of this to bail me out. That one little boy, the only one who’d been my real friend in my entire life—and after years of not speaking to each other—dropped everything to come and save me. I owed him my life. Henry’s dad was able to see me through the process of getting charged, and ultimately, he earned me a deal after proving I was simply a passenger. If I did some community service over the summer, the minor charge would be expunged. It was a second chance that I didn’t deserve, and it came at the hands of a man who had every reason to leave me behind.
Henry had been my best friend, nearly inseparable, ever since.
He refused to let me pay him back for the bail money. Instead, he told me that if I went to college with him, he’d consider us even. I didn’t like it, even if I went to school with him, which I’d already been considering, because he deserved to be paid back the money he’d shelled out to save my ass. Any attempts to argue this fell on deaf ears. Again, Henry extended a hand. Me simply improving my life would be enough repayment for him. I was grateful. I did as he asked and applied at Presper. It took hard work to get my grades to a good spot with such little time left until graduation, but I did it, and with a recommendation letter from a former club teacher and Henry’s dad, I got accepted. I became Henry’s roommate, and the rest was history.
“Are you listening to me?”
Nina’s shrill voice pulled me from my memories. “Huh?”
She crossed her arms. “Honestly. I’m trying to talk to you, and you’re zoning out.”
“Maybe I don’t care a whole lot about what you have to say.”
“What reason could be strong enough to make you want to go through all this, just to let them be in the same room? Sydney’s my best friend, too, but I’d still rather not risk my entire college career so that she can get laid anytime she wants.”
I wondered how much of their relationship Sydney had shared with Nina. Evidently, not much if she was just finding this all out today. I knew Henry had bumped into something different the night he came back to the dorm after Presper’s preview night. He’d been the chosen pre-law school representative for the night and came fluttering back through the door afterward like he’d met a unicorn. I’d never seen him so dazed and happy in my entire life, and he spent the entire night texting back and forth on his phone like a school kid. I later found out he was all sparkly because he’d met Sydney. She became a regular part of our summer get-togethers, and when Henry mentioned that he wished he’d met her soon enough to move in with her instead of living in the dorms, I was presented with an opportunity to pay back a modicum of the kindness that Henry had shown me.