Clusterfuck

ii

Toby isn't sure how much time he spends staring at the wall, lost in thought. He doesn't take another sip of his water until there's a knocking at his door, and it tastes a bit less tart at this point than it did before. Shame.

"Yeah?" Toby asks, shifting his position in bed. He hadn't realized how uncomfortably he'd been splayed out on the mattress, and now his abdomen aches ever so slightly.

Reggie cracks open the door and pokes his head in, a loopy smile on his face. It suits him, Toby thinks. Reggie's a cute guy, with bright orange hair and freckles galore—far more so than Leo. But he would never dare tell Reggie that.

"I'm going out tonight," Reg informs Toby, not dropping his grin.

"Okay."

"Probably won't come home tonight."

Toby raises his eyebrows. "What, you got a hot date?"

"I do indeed, as a matter of fact. After all, it is Friday night, and I have a life to tend to. Not that you would know anything about that, dear Tobias."

Toby launches a pillow at Reggie's face, but he swiftly ducks to avoid it, so it goes flying into the hallway instead. "Shut the fuck up."

(Also, Tobias is not his name. Dear God. That would be a whole different grudge to hold against his parents.)

"Aww, is little Toby-Woby jealous?"

Another pillow, another dodge.

"You're not funny," Toby says, but he can't resist the smile that slithers onto his face. That often happens when Reggie's around. It's probably contagious.

"I beg to differ, but, you know, agree to disagree."

"That sounds like something a person who knows they're not funny would say."

This time, Reggie sends one of the pillows flying right back at Toby, and it nails him square in the face. He squawks out in surprise, wrestles the pillow into the corner of his bed, and flips Reggie off, who's cackling to himself in the doorway.

"Anyway," Reg says after the laughter has died down, extending his arms over the top of his head to stretch. He does that a lot, stretching out of nowhere. Toby assumes it's probably the gymnast in him. "She's coming to meet me here before we head out, and I want to introduce you guys, so. Don't act like a dick."

Toby scoffs. "Out of the two of us, you really think I'm the one who'd act like a dick?" he demands incredulously.

"Yep, I do. Ta-ta, now, I have business to attend to."

Reggie closes the door behind him, narrowly avoiding yet another pillow Toby sends flying just half a second too late.

Toby allows a breath to pass through his nostrils before he sets his LaCroix on the bedside table and wrestles his phone out of his pocket. 3:50. He has work from six to midnight, and then he can come home and sleep to celebrate the weekend's official beginning.

He finds his fingers inching toward his other pocket, and then pulling out the crumpled Post-It note. Toby unfolds it, and reads the digits scrawled out against their hot pink background. Then he reads them again. And again. He reads those digits until they begin to float off the paper, swirl around in front of his eyes, eventually becoming a black mass of illegible scribbles. Then he blinks, and they're laid flat against the Post-It again.

Leo had said to text him later. Well, it's been about twenty minutes since class got out, so Toby doesn't exactly have much time left to text him, never mind meet him at the library, before he has to go to work. Biting the inside of his cheek, Toby inputs the seven numbers into his phone and begins constructing a message.