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There’s a kid rooting around in the dumpster behind the science block when Dennis rolls up, squeezing the bank notes in his jeans pocket and not feeling scared at all. The grey bricks of the school building that looks like a jail and the grey sky and the great, grey sun and his white sneakers scuffing on the grey concrete. Dooley had told him the guy who hangs around with Dirtgrub is the guy to go to to get hooked up and Dirtgrub is always under the bleachers or in a dumpster, so he’s easy to find, Dooley had said that the dealer kid was called Ronnie (Ronnie the Rat, you’ve probably seen him, kid who did ‘karate’ at the talent show, but call him Mac if you wanna get a sweet deal, Dooley had said, and then Adriano had said, overhearing from the other table, Nah, call him Ronnie the fuckin Rat, that’s what he fuckin is: a rat).
“Hey,” calls Dennis, waving a hand, and Dirtgrub lifts his grey, dirty face and cocks it. “Uh, hey, man, where’s Ronnie, I mean, where’s Mac?”
Dirtgrub stares at him and then says over his shoulder, “Mac, buddy, someone wants something?”
There’s a sound from the dumpster and then a kid is standing up in the mess, where the lab teacher Mr Browns probably unsafely disposes of chemicals because he’s a dick and he’s hoping to create some genetic monsters in the gene pool, shaking crap out of his hair. He jumps out of the dumpster, messy dark hair, boots too big for him clumping on the ground. “Hey, dude, you need something?” He ruffles Dirtgrub’s hair and then looks up at Dennis.
Dennis stares at him. His hair is dark, but it’s sort of light and warm and somehow Dennis knows that must be what brown is, his eyes are wide but he’s not close enough to see the colour of them, he wants to — but — and — he can’t have a — “Oh, shit,” says Dennis. The sky isn’t grey either, the sky is cold and bright and something Dennis has never seen before in his life.
“Shit,” says Ronnie, Mac, he darts a look at Dirtgrub but he’s still poking about by the wheel of the dumpster, the moment he looks away the colour starts to slowly ebb away, back to the grey Dennis has known his whole life. He doesn’t know if he wants Mac to look back, but he needs Mac to look back. “Uh…” He looks at Dennis, his face kind of slack and absolutely fucking terrified. The colour comes rushing back in a tide, so bright and obnoxious and beautiful, like the world given texture. “Let’s… let’s go over here and have a… a private drugs consultation,” says Mac and he jerks his head.
They leave Dirtgrub in the dirt and Dennis follows Mac, staring at the back of his head as colour leaks out of the world again. Look over your shoulder , he thinks, please look back at me .
Mac squeezes them in the gap between the bikeshed and the science block, it’s so quiet here you can hardly hear the other kids in the yard. He has his eyes tight shut, knocking his head back against the corrugated iron of the bikeshed. “Oh fuck ,” he hisses.
Please look at me . “Dude…”
“What’s uh… what’s your name?” he asks into the grey space between them.
“Dennis, Dennis Reynolds.”
“Oh,” says Mac, “yeah, the Aluminium Monster’s brother.”
Dennis clenches his jaw. “She’s a bitch, it’s not — I’m like — it’s — I’m not my sister’s —! I’m a popular guy!”
The guy, Mac, with his floppy hair and cut-off sleeves, turns his head to roll his eyes at Dennis, and the world becomes this bright hot ball of radiance again, the bricks of the school are this warm, baked colour, like warmth and bruising, and the sky is so blue like they always say in soulmate songs, that’s what blue is! Mac’s face falls again into that stricken, terrified stare, like he might close his eyes.
“Don’t you dare close your eyes,” says Dennis, before he knows he’s saying it.
Mac rubs a hand over his mouth. “I’m not a fucking — This can’t be… I —”
“I don’t give a shit what you are,” he says. You’re mine, he thinks, that’s what you fucking are. Mine, mine, mine. “This is insane.” He runs his fingers along the brick, glancing back to catch Mac’s gaze again to keep the colour as vivid and bright as the world is when his and Mac’s eyes meet.
“What did you want?”
“Huh?”
“Drugs, dude. You wanna do this deal?”
Dennis stares at him, incredulous. “ Really ?”
“I gotta pay to eat somehow. I’ll cut you a little deal.”
This can’t be real. The first thing Dennis has always imagined his soulmate saying to him is something about how beautiful his eyes are, he’s always wondered if they’re green or blue, it feels silly to ask Mac. “Because I’m your soulmate you’ll cut me a deal ?”
Mac winces. “Nah dude, I always cut my first time customers a deal.”
“There is no possible way you are my soulmate, I refuse —”
“— We’re what God makes us,” snaps Mac, and even with all the colour in the world bursting around him he looks grey and sick, sad like this is something he’s thought about a lot, “unfortunately you can’t refuse shit. Now, you wanna buy something or not?”
*
Now it’s there, he keeps catching Mac’s eye. In the corridor the world will become technicolour and he’ll see mismatching outfits and the colour of socks he chose this morning and the warm slope of Mac’s shoulders and the way a girl’s lips are pink but not as pink as Mac’s pout when he refuses to meet Dennis’s eyes again. At the track after school he’ll make eye contact with Mac, selling under the bleachers, and his knees almost buckle as the grass turns this vivid blue that isn’t blue, the grass is green, as the songs say, and daisies have a yellow spot in the middle, not grey. He looks over his shoulder in class to find Mac already staring at him, and colour blooms from Mac in brilliant, vibrant swirls.
*
“I wanna buy some weed.” Under the bleachers it’s cool and dark, grass springs green under their trainers, a ladybird so deep red it’s like a drop of blood walks across Mac’s shirt that reads: South Philly Crack Crackdown.
Mac swallows, glances at Dirtgrub (Charlie, Dennis has gathered from not eavesdropping on his drug dealing, not gay, idiot soulmate) standing a little away with a pair of binoculars pointed at the school, for some reason. “Have you told anyone?”
“No, why would I? You’re — you’re you. How about you? Been telling anyone about me?”
“No,” says Mac, scowling, “you think I wanna get beat down for literally seeing the fucking rainbow shining out of your ass? No fucking thank you.” He’s smoking, the point of it hot and red as the ladybird. His hand is shaking. “It’s… it doesn’t matter, because it’s not like there’s anything we can do about it.”
Dennis swallows. “That’s… yeah, that’s what I thought too.” Mine . “I just — Well, I was thinking we could be friends.”
Mac raises an eyebrow, his freckles are the same kind of red as bricks, but maybe paler. They dot his shoulders, Dennis has been looking. “You wanna be friends with me? Dennis Reynolds who wants to suck off Adriano Calvanese?”
“I don’t want to suck Adriano off. What? Are you jealous?” He sneers. “I just — I’m addicted to seeing the colours, man. Is that so hard to believe? I like the world not being grey.”
He tips his head to the side like a dog, sucking on the inside of his cheek. That’s going to drive Dennis fucking insane, he can feel it. “Guess I get that.” He drags on his cigarette and checks on Charlie again. “Wish it wasn’t you. Wish it was your sister.”
Dennis stares at him, feeling like he’s going to be sick or scream. “ What ? You want to fuck my sister?”
“No,” says Mac, quietly, “that’s the whole problem.”
Dennis walks away from the bleachers with a few grams in his pocket and the world going grey, he glances over his shoulder once and the world flashes back to colour so fast Dennis almost trips. Mac was watching him walk away.
*
Everyone meets their soulmate. (For blind people there’s some kinda hearing or taste thing, Dennis doesn’t know or care, ask a blind person.) If you didn’t meet your soulmate, they wouldn’t be your soulmate. The whole point of a soulmate is that you meet them. Dennis never thought he’d meet his so young, Dennis never thought his would be a guy, and definitely not a guy like Mac. Dennis always thought he’d be twenty-something, just on the cusp of giving up entirely, when a girl would walk into his life and the world would become whatever colour was and she’d say, “I love your eyes they’re so —” And she would be beautiful.
Instead he gets a boy who climbs out of a dumpster the first time Dennis meets him and doesn’t even give him a soulmate’s discount, who wishes Dennis was his sister, who watches him walk away, who watches him in class, who watches him smoke weed under the bleachers, who catches his eye and always looks so fucking sad about it all.
*
They both have their first kisses at Adriano’s fifteenth. Dennis refuses to admit that he was only invited because Mac was invited to supply the party, refuses to admit he’s on par with fucking Charlie Kelly — fucking Dirtgrub — on the social hierarchy. It isn’t true .
“You’re only here ‘cus I’m here,” whispers Mac, grinning at him and leaning against the wall.
“Don’t you hate what Mrs Calvanese has done with this room?” Dennis hisses back. “This yellow for the walls his atrocious with those orange settees.”
Mac glares witheringly, he always hates when Dennis brings it up in a crowded place, or any place at all. “I could stop inviting you to these things, dude.”
He sips on his beer and ignores Mac.
He kisses Emily Something-or-other in Adriano Calvanese’s kitchen, his lips taste like punch and hers like cherry chapstick. When he wanders away from her, the world swimming and grey, he sees Mac on those ugly couches, making out with Leona Marches, objectively hotter than Emily, his hand on her breast, and he feels so angry he could cry, something great and heaving and grey in his chest like a tsunami of TV static. Mac opens his eyes, still kissing her, half-lidded and stoned, and the world bleeds colour like it’s been gutted. Emily’s hand slips into Dennis’s back pocket and he has to close his eyes and kiss her and forget how the world looks when Mac tilts his head back to a blue, blue sky, smoke pouring from his lips, the grey slowly creeping in, but not quite yet.
They walk home together, lips kiss-bitten and sore red. Their arms knock together and every time they glance at each other the amber pools of street light burn like stars.
“I hate you,” Dennis whispers as they stop outside his house. He realises Mac has to walk in the other direction into the shitty part of town to get home, he’s probably going to get mugged. “Fuck you.”
“You kissed Emily first.”
“You don’t want to kiss me, why shouldn’t I kiss Emily?” The world is hot and bright even in the middle of the night, with Mac. He’s slurring drunk, still. Everything is too full and spilling over. “Huh?”
Mac sighs. “Dude. You can kiss Emily, I can kiss Leona, it’s fucking whatever. We’re not — So. We’re just not, dude.”
“We could,” says Dennis, balefully.
He glares, cheeks red and angry. “No. No we fucking couldn’t. Say that shit again and I swear, I swear I’ll gouge out my fucking eyes.”
“I love you,” spits Dennis.
“Of course you love me,” says Mac, “we’re soulmates. It doesn’t have to mean shit, okay. It doesn’t.”
“So, you love me too, then.”
Mac stares at him, that terrible, awful stare that makes Dennis feel like his heart is breaking. “Fuck off, Den.” And he walks away and the night goes grey and dark as Dennis watches him go, he doesn’t look back.
*
They have a lot of fights like that, drunk and sober, whenever they’re left alone too long where the colours get too bright. “I wish you were mine ,” Dennis says one time and Mac looks at him and it’s like he says, “ I already am ” but he doesn’t, he just gets angry and walks away.
*
“Are we all best friends now?” Charlie’s basement is not improved in full colour, at least in greyscale you can’t tell what the stains are.
“Sure, Charlie,” says Dennis, opening his eyes to grab the bag of glue.
“Yeah, sure we are, dude.” Mac looks at Dennis and the damp turns brown and Mac’s lips pink and the carpet mossy green.
*
First time Dennis bangs a girl he doesn’t know what colour her bra is or her bedsheets and the whole time he’s thinking about stupid things like a red ladybird and the orange of Mac’s lighter and brick-red freckles. She gasps his name and Dennis has to stop himself from saying Mac , it makes him want to hurt and be hurt and see the red of blood.
*
“What colour are my eyes?”
Mac looks away from the TV, startled. Dennis likes watching TV with Mac, he likes finding a whole new dimension to the pictures on screen, they just have to keep a little mirror leant up beneath the screen so they can keep eye contact, keep the colour bleeding. It feels like something sore in his ribcage he can’t fathom out. “Blue,” says Mac and then looks back at the TV. “Just look in the mirror, dude.”
“I can’t tell from this far away.”
Mac snorts. “What do you want? Me to stroke your ego? They’re a nice blue, dude.”
Dennis crosses his arms and glares at the screen.
It’s quiet except the guns and explosions.
“Don’t get pissy,” he says, breathes, “I meant it.” It makes him sick when Mac says shit like that, it makes him want to cry, a lot of things make Dennis want to cry.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Dennis trembles. “Don’t fucking say shit like that to me when you won’t — when we won’t…”
“Okay,” whispers Mac and their eyes meet in the mirror below the TV and Dennis wants to scream.
*
“I don’t know what colour my dorm room is,” he says down the phone line, tapping his pen on the edge of his textbook.
“Yeah, dude. It’s weird here without you, too.”
Dennis bites his lip, hard enough to hurt. “Yeah?”
“Don’t say it like that,” says Mac, so low it sounds like he’s in pain. “All breathy and shit, like a girl.”
“How would you like me to say it?”
“Don’t, Den.” But he stays on the line. Dennis can hear him swallow. “You invite me up there I can tell you what colour your walls are.”
“Don’t say — That’s so rom-com, dude,” says Dennis with a groan.
“You know what I meant.”
“It’s like that one with Hugh Grant and the girl from Fifteen Colour Wedding,” he complains, “where they keep having phone… well not phone sex, like phone romance, and then it turns out he’s actually soulmates with her sister.”
“Dude, I haven’t seen that one, now you’ve spoiled it.”
“Oh, were you going to watch a rom-com, Mac? I’m sorry, honey.”
“Don’t start with the ‘honey’ shit again, dude, I’m serious.”
“Have we seen honey?” Dennis muses. “I feel like we’ve seen it in a movie but like… that’s not the same as the real thing.”
“Add it to the colour list,” says Mac.
He looks out of his dorm window at the grey sky. “I wish you were here with me at college.”
“Fuck off,” he says, “I’ll be there next weekend, stop being whiny.”
*
Dee lies about finding her soulmate every other month when they’re at Penn. Dennis sometimes gets so close to wringing her neck or telling her about Mac just to lord it over her, he gets a little jumpy around the subject. Telling Dee would be suicide because everyone else would know about it in about ten seconds flat because she would repeat what he said at such a high pitch they would hear it all across the state.
Whenever Mac comes up (occasionally with Charlie in tow, though Charlie doesn’t really like to leave the couple of blocks of Philly he likes) he hides him away from her, terrified even after all this time that she’ll smell it out of them. There must be something about the way they look at the world, at each other’s eyes, and at the beautiful skies and flowers, and eyes again that screams these guys are soulmates, they’re queers! There must.
*
He stands with his soulmate in their apartment — mine, mine, mine — and talks about bringing girls back here, even as the sky is blue and the walls sage green. Mac looks so sad about it, Dennis feels like his chest is caving inwards, neither of them do shit about it. It’s the worst kind of torture, the stupidest fucking shit. I’m here, I’m right here . It doesn’t mean shit.
*
There’s another kind of torture, which is knowing someone’s outfit looks like shit or that their new bar’s colour scheme is trash, and not being able to fix it without revealing you’re in love with your best friend. He picks at some of the peeling paint and pulls a face at Mac who rolls his eyes. They’re all a few beers deep, celebrating the purchase of the bar, Dennis doesn’t remember how Dee wheedled her way into this seeing as she’s a failed actor grovelling for a job at their bar, but here she is drinking for free and celebrating like she’s an owner too.
“It looks like shit,” Dennis murmurs.
Mac shrugs. “It’s green, it’s Irish, it’s on theme .”
He knocks back more of his beer. “Whatever, you know it’s ugly.”
“What is?” says Dee, appearing by the booth with Charlie and more beers.
“You,” says Mac, “you dumb fucking bird.”
Dennis snorts, leaning against Mac’s side and hoping no one can tell. He glances at him and the bar thrums a hideous green and Mac’s eyes crinkle all warm and brown. “Dumb, ugly bird.”
“Ha ha ha, boners,” she says, dropping down across from them. “So funny and original.”
It feels funny and original, when Mac looks at him like that and the world is this radiant and no one knows fuck all about them. He wants it so bad, so, so bad. He lets his hand drift down under the table as Dee keeps talking about something she and Charlie found in the toilets, and lets his hand rest on Mac’s knee, he’s so warm even through his jeans it feels miraculous.
He can feel Mac looking at the hand, he doesn’t move it.
*
At monthly dinner they sit across from each other, there’s nowhere else to look but each other’s eyes, and the world seems heady with colour. There’s always something new to see about Mac, sunburn on his nose and windburn on his cheeks, pale chapped skin on his lips, hickey bruises on his neck from girls Dennis wants to kill, his tongue on a spoon of tiramisu, the pearl pink of his fingernails.
There’s a love Dennis can’t bear, some days, for the way Mac looks at him. Looks like Dennis hung the moon and then tore it down again and ripped it apart between his jaws. Looks at Dennis like this is Dennis’s fault, like the snapping bright fireworks that burst every morning they see each other in the honeyed sunlight of their kitchen are his fault , like he would engineer falling in love with Mac.
“I hate you,” he says, pressing his foot against Mac’s under the table at Guigino’s. The food always tastes better when Mac’s there, when he can see the colour of it. “I really do.”
Mac closes his eyes tight and the world goes grey. “Yeah. I know.”
*
“I wish it wasn’t you,” he breathes, “but please. You have to give me this once. I have to have you once.”
“You already have me,” says Mac into the space between them, “you know that.”
“You’re mine?”
“Yeah, dude. Always. Soulmates,” he says, like it’s something to hate.
Dennis snaps forwards another inch, feeling like his skin is burning. They’re outside their apartment, standing under a street light, like they were the night they kissed girls at Adriano’s party. “Will you hate me after?”
“I already do,” says Mac, his voice tight and low and hoarse, “always.”
The night air is so cold, biting, like the colour blue and the way kiss-bitten looks on Mac. “Will you love me?” asks Dennis against his lips.
“You know,” says Mac, and Dennis can see tears in his eyes, dark and brown and lit like fireflies below the golden street light. “You know it’s always.”
Dennis sighs and kisses Mac, slow like the colours aren’t, deep like the colours are . “Just this once, let me,” he says into every kiss, “or more than once, or forever.” He drags Mac up to their apartment, hands warm and grabbing like the red of a ladybird and the yellow centre of a daisy. He can’t stop grabbing and touching everywhere the colour has stained them. It’s such a normal day , he thinks, so normal and perfect, just the bar and the gang and getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon. “Please.”
Mac’s hand slips up the back of his shirt, big and gentle and all the colours Dennis has ever loved (the brown of his eyes, and the red-brick of his freckles, and the warm tan of his skin). “It’s okay, Den,” he says, and he sounds like he’s crying as they push through the front door, “it’s okay.”
*
Mac gets angry after. On Sunday he spends the whole day in confession annoying the priests, probably.
It feels like despair, watching the grey Sunday drift past the windows of the apartment.
*
It happens again and again, normally when they’re drunk, a lot when they’re high, once when they’re sober and Mac spends the whole time angry and Dennis loves it more than the first time he saw the colour lilac. He schemes different ways to get Mac in his bed, sometimes he thinks Mac knows what he’s doing (Mac always falls for it, purposefully or otherwise, anyway).
*
“This can’t be a thing you take back, dude,” says Dennis as the ship sinks.
Mac leans forwards and hides his face from the rest of the gang and whispers so quiet, “It’s like a storm, a big grey storm I can’t escape.” And Dennis thinks of the static tsunami crashing through his veins. “But I want to, I want to with you.”
Mine, mine, mine , he thinks. “Okay. Fucking finally,” he chokes out.
Mac sits back, grinning at him a little fondly and the big, big emotions feel like gale force winds and the first time he saw colour — a dumpster and the boy who climbed out of it — and the first time he told Mac he loved him and the first time they kissed.
As the ship fills with water around them, deep blue water, Dennis knows they’re going to survive. He knows because he and Mac are soulmates and they wouldn’t be soulmates if they worked it out only minutes before they died.
“Your eyes are the most beautiful blue in the world,” Mac tells him just before he goes under and he smiles like he wants to bite Dennis and keep him somewhere the world can’t touch and he’s crying and he’s never, ever been prettier.
The whole gang hears him say it, probably, but Dennis doesn’t care, he follows Mac under and holds his breath in the blue .