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Bart never slept for very long at night.
Usually, he’d fall asleep at around ten, wake up at three in the morning, go back to sleep around six, wake up at seven, and then be awake for the rest of the day, sometimes taking five or ten minutes throughout the day to sleep—usually during class, much to his teachers’ dismay. Robin called it “micro-sleeps.” Bart called it naps.
All this was to say, it was four in the morning, and Bart was awake. He had been for close to a half hour now, if his watch was right.
It felt like a year.
The thing no one ever talks about when it comes to having super-speed is all the waiting. Waiting for the light to come on, waiting for the TV to change channels after you press the button, waiting for everyone else to catch up to you. Right now, Bart was waiting for Preston to wake up. It would probably be a few hours. A few lifetimes, more like.
This was all stupid, anyways. The party they’d gone to was stupid, spin the bottle was really stupid, and going back to Preston’s house afterward to sleep over was mega-ultra-stupid. But Preston had really talked up going to a “boy-girl party,” so Bart figured he should go. He thought maybe it’d be cooler than going to parties with just guys like normal. Big mistake. At parties with the guys, everyone would just play video games and watch television and maybe make gross stuff out of food in the pantry or prank-call some girls or something. At boy-girl parties, they played party games. Some of it was kinda cool, like “light as a feather, stiff as a board” and never have I ever, but then the girl who was hosting the party—her name was Valerie, Bart remembered—made everyone sit down in a circle and finished the rest of her bottle of Soder—the kind they import from Mexico, with real cane sugar, because her family was totally loaded—and put it on the ground in the middle. She announced, loud enough over the music that it made Bart flinch a little, that everyone needed to shut up because they were playing spin the bottle. Bart didn’t know what that was, but he figured he could learn by observing. Osmosis. He did that a lot. People got annoyed when he asked too many questions. Being shushed was one of the worst feelings in the world.
So Bart watched.
Valerie spun the bottle and everyone watched in anticipation, giggling, until it stopped with the cap facing a boy on the opposite side of the circle from her. Some of the girls said “Ooooh,” and the boy’s friend punched him in the shoulder—jokingly, not hard. Valerie got up from her seat, walked across the circle, and crouched down to kiss the boy. Once she went back to her seat, the girl next to her leaned into the middle to spin the bottle next.
So that was the game. Kissing. That sounded lame.
It continued on like this until about three people later, when a girl spun the bottle and it landed on another girl. They both looked around, and then they looked at Valerie, who shrugged and said “I don’t make the rules. You gotta kiss whoever it is,” so they did. Both of them acted exaggeratedly grossed-out afterwards, like it was unthinkable that they’d ever actually kiss each other.
Here’s where things got real messed up: Bart was next. Now, he’d been mentally preparing himself to kiss a girl and only a girl. He wasn’t—he wasn’t gay. He just didn’t see what people saw in girls. Sure, they were pretty and all, but that didn’t mean he wanted to kiss one. And now, faced with the possibility that he might end up kissing a guy, he couldn’t help but look at Preston, five people down from him, and wonder what it might be like. He’d never really thought about the way Preston looked before, but he looked… good, he guessed. His nose was always kinda red, ’cause he was allergic to dust, and messing around outside all summer had made his blond hair even blonder and given him a few light freckles on his cheeks. Bart realized he’d been staring for a solid fifteen seconds of everyone-else time, and he leaned forward to spin the bottle.
You can probably guess who it landed on.
There was some wild, panicked look in Preston’s eyes, wide, unblinking, too blue for Bart not to notice. Bart mouthed sorry as the people between them scooted back so Bart could get over to Preston easier.
Other people might say seconds felt like hours in this situation. To Bart, they always did.
He decided to full-send it. He got up on his knees and before he knew it he had one hand on Preston’s arm and the other on the back of his head and then they were kissing and then they weren’t. And then Preston was pulling away, and then he was running up the basement stairs, and then Bart was following after him, and then Preston said he was sick of the party. Bart was sick of it too.
Preston’s house was only a ten-minute walk away. Ten minutes in everyone-else time, of course. Neither of them talked during the walk. Bart listened to the cicadas buzzing and the crickets chirping and the distant sounds of cars rushing by on the main road two blocks away. The August air was humid, and it always made his hair frizz up. Bart considered not going with Preston to his house to sleep over like they’d planned, but he almost thought that might make it weirder. Better to pretend nothing out of the ordinary happened, right?
So now Bart was in a sleeping bag on the floor of Preston’s living room, wide awake, while he watched Preston’s chest rise and fall with his breaths.
Bart could run away. He wanted to. He really, really wanted to. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t. Maybe it would just make things weirder. Maybe that’s why he stayed.
Bart was getting very, very good at being bored. Being the way he was, he was bored almost all the time. But sleepovers were boredom like nothing else. When he was bored at home, or in school, or anywhere else, there was stuff to do. Even if there were no video games to play or TV to watch, there were bound to be people to talk to, or books to read, or paper to doodle on, or something. Even when Max sent him to bed at nine every night (and how cruel—nine, like a kid!), he could entertain himself. Sometimes he’d make up stories, fantastical adventures where he—or someone like him—got to save the day every time, and tell them to himself. Sometimes he’d sing songs he heard on the radio over and over again, or try to make one up himself. But during a sleepover, he had to be as quiet as possible in a dark room and not do anything. Being bored like this was a skill, he decided, and he was practicing it. Every sixty seconds of everyone-else time, he gave himself a point. The points didn’t mean anything, but every time he got a point he still felt like he was winning a little bit.
He earned one hundred and seven points before Preston finally woke up. The sun was starting to rise, and Bart tried to look normal and not gay and not like he had been watching Preston this whole time and not gay and—
“What time’s it?” Preston asked, eyes sleep-heavy and words a little slurred.
“Five forty-five,” Bart answered immediately, “and twenty-two seconds.”
“Why’re you awake?”
Bart never had a good answer to questions like that. Why was he awake? He didn’t know! He just was! “Dunno. Woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep.”
Then Preston was quiet for a long time.
The other thing no one talks about when it comes to having super-speed is that while you do all that waiting for everyone and everything, you have a lot of time to think. And when you have all that time to think, you start thinking too much. Everyone thought that Bart never thought about anything, that he was pure emotion, pure action, never a plan to be had. Maybe it was true that he never planned for anything. Maybe it was right that he always acted on impulse, true to his namesake. But never let it be said that Bart didn’t think. Right now, the majority of his thoughts were things like everything’s all fucked now and Preston will never want to talk to me again and I should leave, shouldn’t I? Should I leave?
“You liked it, didn’t you?” Preston asked.
The kiss, he meant. Of course he meant the kiss. Bart tried, for once in his life, to choose his words carefully. “I’m not… like that. I mean, I’m not—”
“Me neither,” Preston interrupted him. “Of course not.”
“Of course not,” Bart echoed.
In the soft light of dawn, it was hard to see. But Bart saw everything he needed to. That same panicked look that Preston had had the night before. He was sitting up now, knees pulled up to his chest, arms around them. Bart was criss-cross applesauce, facing—what was the word? Not towards Preston, but not away—whatever. Preston was facing toward him, and Bart was facing toward the wall. “But you liked it, though,” Preston said. Not as a question, as a statement of fact.
“Did you?”
Preston hesitated. “...I think so.” Then he quickly added on “But I don’t think that means anything. I mean, one kiss doesn’t make you a queer.”
“Yeah,” Bart said, trying to reassure himself as much as Preston, “just one kiss doesn’t mean anything. Plus, it wasn’t our choice. It was spin the bottle. We had to do it.”
After another long silence, Preston asked “Do you think it’s queer if you do it twice?”
Bart mulled it over. He wasn’t really sure what the big deal was about being gay or queer or whatever, if he was honest. But everyone else thought it was weird, so it must be, right? But… well… just one kiss for sure wasn’t gay. Even if you liked it. And, well, lots of things come in threes. So maybe if you kiss three times it’s gay, but if you do it twice, that’s fine. “No. But it is if you do it a third time.”
Preston nodded. “Makes sense.” He looked at Bart expectantly, but Bart wasn’t sure what he wanted. Finally, he spoke again. “Do you wanna do it again? Just once. So it isn’t gay.”
Bart said “Sure,” and this time, Preston came to him. He put his hand on the back of Bart’s head like Bart had done to him last night, but he didn’t kiss him right away. They spent a while just kind of sitting there with their foreheads touching, which was weird, but kind of nice. Preston still looked a little fidgety, but Bart guessed that was to be expected. When Preston finally kissed him, it wasn’t like how everyone always talks about kisses on TV. The first time he had barely registered it, so he hadn’t had much to say about it. This time, it was slower, and it was purposeful, and it was good, even though it wasn’t like Bart thought it’d be. Everyone made kissing out to be one of the most exciting things in the whole world, and Bart didn’t really think that was true. It felt normal, pretty much. Like doing anything else he liked. Like running, or beating a big boss, or finishing a mission without anyone getting mad at him. It felt, really, like something he should’ve been doing all along. He was kind of sad when it was over.
Preston seemed less nervous now, brave enough to say “I think maybe three times isn’t gay, actually. Maybe four.”
Bart agreed. “Definitely four. Or five.”
Bart was pretty sure that at some point that morning before they fell back asleep, it happened enough times that it was gay. He didn’t think he cared very much at all anymore.