The next morning wasn’t too bright; in the sky hung dense gray clouds, and in the streets carbon slush was drooling toward the gutters. Despite a nervous glance out the window at this unappealing world, Stan awoke feeling sunny.

It wasn’t that he had never liked Loren — he liked him fine, even now. His feathery wrists and the way he had the filthiest (and biggest) mouth in the drama department … Stan sighed as he sat up in bed, relieved that it was his own and not some stranger’s. Not that Ike was a stranger.

There was one thing he rather appreciated about this whole Ike debacle, if one could call it that. Actually, in Stan’s opinion, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Because if he hadn’t drunkenly fucked his friend’s — crush’s, whatever — brother, maybe he would never have been able to break the draining pattern of sleeping with Loren and then sleeping with other guys and just waiting for him to find out. Stan hated confrontation; the idea of being frank with Loren terrified him. But rejecting Ike had been easy; where he’d been expecting a battle, he found none.

If Loren had just caught Stan cheating, the issue might have been forced. But Loren was kind of dim; his grandfather was on the Northwestern board of trustees, and Stan always felt a little superior for getting into the school on his own merits. A personal statement about growing up closeted and fearful in a redneck mountain town had been worth more to him than his SAT scores, although it definitely helped that Kyle had studied with him late Saturday nights during junior year, because neither of them could manage dates to dances anyhow. As much as Stan had always wanted to choke out, “Well, maybe we should just go together,” he knew that the outcome of studying instead of dancing was Northwestern, and he hadn’t wanted for a piece of ass for a bit over three years now.

Stan thought of himself as a nice guy — he felt waiting to dump Loren, sparing him that cruelty, was the decent thing to do. It was a workable arrangement, actually — the poor guy was too stupid to ever figure it out, and just stupid enough to be heartbroken if Stan had actually dumped him. Really, what he should have done was refuse to return Loren’s calls after the first time they did it, in the bathroom of a bar down on Sherman the same night they’d met at some friend’s horrible graduation get-together last May. (Stan did not mention to Loren at any point before or afterward that said friend was actually a former fling, although that guy at least had been smart enough to leave well enough alone.)

The jarring thing about it was that after he’d bothered to return one of Loren’s many calls, he’d had a devastating phone conversation with Kyle, who’d reprimanded him in his most strangled tone. “Having unprotected sex in a fucking bathroom!” Kyle kept repeating. “Don’t you have any judgment at all? Who knows what this guy has? You could have AIDS, dude, AIDS!”

“Oh, he doesn’t have AIDS,” Stan had said. “And even if he did, there’s very little evidence of being able to get AIDS while topping.”

Kyle sounded very hurt when he replied, “Do you know what some people would give to be able to control themselves? To be able to choose where and when to have sex and not just do it with anyone in some fucking bathroom?”

“Like you’ve never fucked in a bathroom!”

“I wish I hadn’t.” Kyle had never sounded more sober than when he’d admitted this. “Anyway, I have to go.” And after they hung up, Stan went back to writing some conclusion for some final paper about ethics and media and ... he didn’t remember. It was ridiculous, to have been in college for so long that he could no longer remember what his paper was on or which class he’d been writing it for.

In the present, he spat out his toothpaste and twisted the faucet knob off. He looked up, and stared his reflection in the eyes. He could do this.

XXX

Loren:

I hope you had a good Christmas. Mine was fine. I would like to be able to say that I miss you, but the truth is, I don’t.

I don’t mean to be cruel, but I think it’s unfair to keep this relationship going. Our time together has been great, and I can honestly say I’ve never dated someone for this long, or who seemingly cared for me so much. But we’re not compatible, and I don’t love you, and I think the best way to show how much I respect you is to just be honest.

It’s not practical for us to keep this alive, either. You’ll be going out to LA in May, and as much as I would like to accept your family’s generous offer to share an apartment, you know I cannot commit to moving out there. At this time, I’m not even sure if I should stay in Chicago, or move home. I miss my friends, and I don’t know if moving to yet a third place and starting yet a third life would be productive for me.

I’m very sorry. I’m especially sorry I did this via e-mail, which is perhaps the most graceless way to do it. But when you look back on this, I think you’ll understand that it’s for the best, and that I’m only trying to protect your best interests.

Thank you for everything.

Sincerely,

Stan Marsh

XXX

After Stan had hit “send,” he’d actually stopped and just sat there rubbing his eyes for about five minutes. He hadn’t wanted to end it with “Marsh,” but something made him want to keep it professional, or maintain whatever semblance of professionalism was due to a man whom he’d falsely professed to love mid-coitus on more than one occasion.

At least you ended it, Stan thought to himself. You did the right thing. He snorted. “Yeah,” he said aloud. “Eventually.” He wondered if this was a bad sign, talking to himself in his head and then responding verbally. No matter. Getting back into his unmade bed, the one he’d fallen asleep on every night between ages 3 and 18, he reached to the nightstand for his cell phone, and hit speed-dial No. 1.

“Hello?” was Kyle’s drowsy greeting.

Stan bit his lip. “Why do you always answer the phone like you’re not sure it’s me calling?”

One breath. Two breaths. “What?”

Regretting his words, Stan got on with it. “I broke up with Loren,” he announced. He felt awkward talking in this position, on his belly with a pillow smashed under his chest, so he turned over, pressing the moist plastic of his phone against his cheek. He realized when he was done adjusting that Kyle hadn’t said anything. “Kyle?”

There was a moment of silence. “I’m here.”

Stan felt his lips stick together when he opened his mouth to continue. “And?”

“I think that’s great. I mean, I know I never met the guy, but…”

“But what?”

“…but, I don’t know, you never talked about him in very flattering terms. I really didn’t know what you saw in him.”

“Me neither,” Stan lied. “Me neither.”

“Well, so now that’s over with? How’d he take the news?”

“News? Oh, the news. Um, I don’t know. I kind of … I sort of, you know, just sent him an e-mail.”

“Really?” Kyle’s voice was straining under the weight of incredulity. “I mean, really, Stan, really? An e-mail? Nearly a year of dating you and all he gets is a so-long e-mail?”

“Well, I’d like you to suggest a better option!” Stan cried. And then he added, in a diminished voice, “And it was more like half a year.”

Kyle gave a short laugh, and then his voice very suddenly steadied: “I don’t date, you know that. I have anonymous liaisons under the flickering bathroom lights, one after another. I’m addicted to the instability. Do you know what I mean?”

“Who do you have these liaisons with?” was all Stan wanted to know.

Laughing again, Kyle could only manage, “I really wish I knew!”

“Well.” Stan’s voice tightened. “I’m going to get the fuck rid of this iPod he gave me. There’s an Apple store in Denver, isn’t there?”

“Oh, like you don’t know. There’s like three.”

“Are there really?”

“Don’t know. Never been to one.”

“All right, well, let’s say I’ll meet you in an hour?”

“Jesus,” Kyle moaned. “How am I supposed to kill an hour?”

Stan asked, “How long have you been up?”

“Oh, you know. I can’t really sleep.” Kyle paused. “Maybe I haven’t slept since Butters’ party. Or before that,” he added in a very small voice.

“Kyle!” Stan exclaimed. “You have to sleep. It’s not … that’s not a very good thing.”

“Well, sorry. I can’t sleep. Maybe we should shoot you full of drugs and see how much rest you get, hmmm?”

“Sorry I asked. I’m just concerned.”

“Concern yourself with being here in one hour,” Kyle said, a distinct air of finality in his voice. “I don’t know what I’ll do, read some blogs or something.”

“Or something,” Stan said. “Just stay away from craigspicturesofdrunkpeople-dot-com.”

“Excuse me?”

“Forget I said anything.”

“One hour,” Kyle said ominously, and he hung up the phone.

XXX

Kyle had been manic depressive since eighth grade; or rather, he had been diagnosed as manic depressive in eighth grade. Stan had formed most of his conception of manic depression through the media, and until his very peculiar best friend was given this label, he’d always thought of those people as sullen, emo, crying, cutters. Depressed to the point of suicide. It was all very glamorous, and very morose. When Kyle called Stan from the juvenile psychiatry ward to inform him of the diagnosis, Stan refused to believe it. Kyle wasn’t sad — just crazy.

In short order, Stan visited.

“I think they like to give labels to the craziness,” Kyle explained, the soft plastic of his hospital bracelet making scraping-clicking noises against the metal table they were seated at. “I think they don’t know how else to explain it.”

Stan didn’t want to explain Kyle’s behavior. It had been getting weirder and weirder, riskier and riskier. One weekend he pierced his own ears with a push pin; the next he ran down Main Street naked, just because Kenny dared him too.

“Well, why would you ever listen to Kenny?” Stan remembered Sheila Broflovski screaming in the police station after that incident. Kyle was shivering in a wool blanket that was too short even on his diminutive frame, and did not conceal very much at all.

“Seemed like a good idea,” Kyle chattered through his blue lips.

“What is wrong with you, Kyle?” Sheila asked again. She was so happy to get that diagnosis, manic-depressive. Despite the laborious task of medicating her 13-year-old son, Stan had never seen her happier than going through Kyle’s room pulling knives and packages of cigarettes out of Kyle’s underwear drawer. “A danger to himself,” she sniffed, but when Sheila was angry her lips would tense, and they were very relaxed right now. “Think of it, my son is a danger to himself.”

“But not to society,” Kyle filled in, cheek pressed against Stan’s shoulder.

Stan remembered Ike’s little black eyes watching this scene intensely from the doorway. Poor Ike didn’t know what bipolarity was, and Stan did feel bad that the first definition of mania he was ever given was his older brother streaking through the town with infected holes in his ears. Ike was only 7.

At the hospital, Stan had tried to remain on-point. “I have to tell you something.” He began carefully, but the weight of his friend’s condition and the frigid temperature in the common room of the hospital and the clicking of Kyle’s bracelet against the metal table put him off. “I’m sorry,” he garbled, tears choking his words. “I can’t tell you.”

“Don’t cry!” Kyle exclaimed. “Seriously, Stan, you’re scaring me.”

“I have to go.” Stan pushed down on the table as he stood up, and looked down at Kyle. His best friend had always been petty, angry, intolerant in his own way. What Stan wanted to say is, “There’s a label that describes who I am, too, and I’m in awe of how okay you are with letting one term define your life.” But when he opened his mouth he could only sob, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Stan.” Kyle reached out meekly, but the drugs were pinning him down. “Don’t leave me?”

“I can’t stay here. I have to go.”

“I’m lonely, Stan, my family can only come for so many times and no one else visits me and I’m all alone—”

“Tomorrow,” Stan cried to himself as he left the hospital. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.”

During high school, Kyle was hospitalized for manic behavior three times; twice during the summer between his sophomore and junior years.

Stan didn’t come out to Kyle until the night before he left for college.

XXX

All things catch up to us. We think we can escape them, and this is what Stan thought. In eight years of manic episodes, Kyle had never lashed out at him. Once he’d been suspended from school for coming to gym class naked, and had been asked to leave his dorm freshman year of college for setting fire to his bed after a disagreement with his roommate. (He was allowed to stay in the dorm after petitioning on the basis of his mental illness, and was moved to a single in a suite with his RA.) Kyle often turned his anger inward, performing minute acts of self-harm without a second thought — tugging at his toenails until they ripped right out of his flesh; rubbing sandpaper against his lips absent-mindedly. At 15, Stan once spent the night, only to come downstairs in the morning to find Kyle making eggs in a skillet over the red-burning electric coils of the Broflovski family stove.

“Are you allowed to do that?” Stan has asked.

“Please,” Kyle had scoffed. “I’m just making you breakfast.” Since he’d been calm lately, Stan had left Kyle alone while he peed, and came back to witness his best friend smashing the underside of the searing pan into his left hand. Slimy pieces of pastel-yellow egg splattered when the skillet clattered against the floor; Kyle did not flinch, but smiled serenely as bulbous welts began to bloom across his knuckles.

“Holy shit!” Stan rushed to cradle Kyle’s raw hand in both of his. “Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to.” Kyle didn’t struggle, or show any signs of pain. Was he immune to it? “Just be glad I didn’t hit you.” At the time this had seemed an idle threat. Why would Kyle hurt Stan? Stan immediately called for Sheila; Sheila immediately had Kyle institutionalized for two weeks, during which he’d missed their unit on Italian Baroque art. Upon his return he handed in a five-page, double-spaced, 12-point essay on Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina.

“You’re so smart,” Stan had marveled, tracing the red-ink A on the back of the essay with his finger pads.

“Yes, I am, so smart,” Kyle agreed. “But it’s easy to waste your time on these things when you’re imprisoned. I mean, it’s either this, or talk to doctors.” He had narrowed his eyes here: “Besides.” Kyle took a significant pause. “I can relate.”

XXX

All things considered, Stan had been lucky; it was too bad that luck is not a promise.

It was Ike who answered the door on that late December afternoon, and he shoved Stan back outside, slamming it behind him. “You’ve got to get out of here,” he hissed.

“Yeah, good morning, Ike.”

“I’m serious! Kyle knows, okay? He knows.”

Stan’s eyes widened. His throat went dry. He creaked out, “He knows?”

“Yeah,” was all Ike said.

“Well, how’d he find out?” Stan squeaked, voice tightening.

“It’s my fault, I—” Ike was interrupted by heavy, quick footsteps. “Get out of here!” said Ike, who pushed Stan backward.

“I can explain,” Stan stammered, his words not quick or easy enough to halt Kyle’s rage.

“You bastard!”

“Kyle.” Ike grabbed for his brother’s sleeve, but Kyle shook him off, and kept marching toward Stan.

“I can’t fucking believe you!” he cried, pointing at Stan. “You’re a fucking rapist, do you hear me!? You’re a fucking child fucking rapist!”

“Don’t yell that,” Ike said, attempting to grab Kyle around his shoulders. Ike was taller than Kyle, but not by much, really; they were both shorter than Stan, and to Stan all things were relative to his own underwhelming measurements. It wasn’t because Kyle was any stronger than Ike, but he was … feistier, sort of, or at least more determined. Kyle may have looked effeminate, but Stan was honestly scared of him as he fought off his younger brother and screamed, “Get the fuck out of here! This is between me and Stan!”

“Oh, like hell it is,” Ike scoffed. “This is my mess, Ky, let me deal—” Kyle, however, wasn’t interested in what Ike had to say. He approached Stan and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket.

“You monster.” Kyle shook him. “To think, every time I looked in your eyes and tried to find you in there I was searching for the soul of a rapist.”

This didn’t even make sense to Stan, so she choked out, “Kyle!” attempting to shield himself. “I didn’t rape anyone!”

“Tell that to my baby brother!” Kyle hissed in a very low voice.

“He was quite happy about it,” Stan attempted, but a slap caught him off guard on ‘happy.’ And then another after he choked out ‘it.’

“This is absurd!” Ike shouted. He was trying to pull Kyle away from Stan again, this time from the side. “You can’t act like this!”

Kyle grunted in dissatisfaction as he shoved his younger brother off of him. He seemed to be completely focused on Stan, not caring that the 15-year-old boy had fallen into the snow. Getting up and brushing off his striped sleeves, Ike moaned softly, and shook his head. “I’ll be back,” he panted, and before Stan could ask him where he was going, Ike was out of sight, and Kyle was slugging him.

“Jesus Christ!” Stan shouted as he stumbled. “Don’t hit me!”

With a laugh, Kyle grabbed Stan around the neck. “Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!” he mimicked. “You’re pathetic! You’re man enough to rape a kid but not man enough to take a beating from a mentally ill weakling?” Stan pushed on Kyle’s arms, lamely. He wanted to say, “Well, you’re obviously not a weakling,” but he couldn’t get it out, because he was being strangled.

Giving up, Stan collapsed to his knees. He hardly believed Kyle was going to hurt him, not for real. This was Kyle. He wasn’t a danger to others. … But then, he remembered Sheila taking him aside the afternoon Kyle came home from that gray place, and speaking to him very softly. “If he ever does anything violent, or acts out, you should tell me, yes?”

Honestly, Kyle’s attempts to murder him weren’t a real threat. But somehow, Stan’s body locked up in a weird, numbing way, and all he could focus on while his best friend kneed him in the chest was how bad he felt that this was actually making him hard.

While he was trying to think about anything else, he listened to Kyle’s absurd, hollow sobs as he continued to squeeze the life out of Stan. Before long, however, he heard a voice, an older man’s, disapprovingly cry, “Kyle!” Stan felt himself let loose, and he tumbled backward. He looked up and saw his best friend being restrained by his brother and father.

“Let me go!” Kyle was shrieking. “You can’t do this to me! You’ll thank me when he’s dead!”

“That’s no way to treat Stan,” Gerald said disapprovingly, trying to keep Kyle in his grasp.

“You don’t know! He’s a fucking monster, he’s...” At this point, Stan realized that, more than anything, Kyle was genuinely upset.

Ike, who was trying his pathetic best to help his father restrain Kyle, looked right at Stan. “Are you an idiot?” he asked. Kyle was really crying now, and Stan noticed his knees scraping against the pavement, like he didn’t care how bloody they got — which they would, if he kept struggling. “Get the fuck out of here,” Ike said miserably. Then some of his dark, dark hair fell out of place and into his eyes.

“He’s probably right,” Gerald said in defeat, finally somehow managing to get Kyle to stop sobbing, although he was still pretty agitated. “Go home, Stan.”

Stan got up. He thought about home. Where was home? He wasn’t sure. He looked down at this ridiculous scene: Kyle’s face still flush as he dragged his palms against the pavement; Ike glaring at him like he was the worst person on the planet; Gerald was trying to pull Kyle’s hands off of the ground. It was Ike’s resentful look that bothered Stan the most, the downturn of Ike’s lips reminding him of … well, Ike’s lips.

There were too many crosscurrents to handle. Stan took a breath, and bolted.

I'm so sorry for the delay in posting this! I hope you liked this well enough to make up for it. To be honest, I was slightly worried about this chapter because -- well, I guess it was tricky. I really like the next chapter, though, so look for that sooner rather than later. Thank you for reading, and be sure to let me know if you enjoyed this (or hated it).