For Lance, it all started because of Justin. It was right, somehow, that it ended because of him too.

The first few weeks felt like sleepwalking. Get up every morning. Throw out the newspaper without so much as glancing at it. Turn on the TV, to HGTV or the Game Show Network or something to provide noise without reminding. Drink the coffee that tasted like bitterness. Eat the food that tasted like nothing. Step outside, when there was no other choice, and try to ignore the flashbulbs and the shouted questions. Go to sleep every night desperately praying the phone would ring at three AM and provide an answer, any answer, just to ease the endless waiting.

It felt like a dream. All of it; not just the part at the end when Justin had left a message on Chris's answering machine saying "call me, you fucker, I know you're screening" and driven home from Joey's and fallen off the face of the fucking earth. Sometimes Lance woke up in the middle of the night, fumbling frantically for a phone that was not ringing, and then had to lie awake and stare into the darkness, just breathing and wondering when the hell he'd fallen down the rabbit hole.

He knew, of course. It had been the night his mother knocked on his door and came in holding the cordless phone and said, "We need to talk about something."

It had started with Justin. That much, Lance had never forgotten.

Joey buried himself in family and JC ran away and Chris just ran. Johnny gave them all six months and then called Lance. It took him ten minutes to work his way around it, but the essence of it was the label wanted them to get back together, get one last struggling gasp out of the band they'd considered not even sponsoring another album from. Lance listened for that ten minutes, listened to Johnny's tactful and circumspect suggestions, and looked out the window to see the last few tabloid reporters who hadn't given up the story yet, camped outside his gates.

"It's bullshit," Lance said, cutting off Johnny in mid-word. "Tell me this wasn't your idea."

Johnny sighed. "No, it wasn't. But I have to at least bring up the possibility. It could -- it could be good for you guys. If you have plans to --"

"It hasn't even been six fucking months yet, Johnny. One hundred and seventy-four fucking days. You can't -- they can't expect us to fucking turn right around and go back to it like that. That's wrong."

Johnny was their friend, but he was their manager too. "That's the business, Lance." He was sympathetic, but when it was laid out like that, the cold equations, Lance's vision suddenly shifted and he was looking at it all from an angle he hadn't seen in years.

"Fuck the business," he said. To have the most dramatic weight, it should have come out low and vicious, but real life wasn't drama and it wound up tiny and broken instead. "I'm out. I'm out of it all."

"Lance, you really shouldn't --"

"They know where to send my royalty checks," Lance said, and hung up the phone.

Joey said of course we won't without him and Chris said fuck until they all wondered if he had any other words left and nobody could find JC, so that was a vote delivered de facto and by proxy. Lance stood in his bathroom and caught himself staring at the tile while the shower hissed the room into a rain forest. "I will not be a washed-up B-list celebrity for the rest of my life," he said. It came back to his ears all twisted and distorted. In that moment, in the echo sounding like someone else's voice, he knew.

UCLA took him for the fall quarter under protests about the irregularity of it all, but one thing Lance had learned was money opens all doors. His first quarter was equally split between the people who looked at him with sympathy and the people who looked at him with condescension. All those years, though, had taught him nothing if not how to smile pretty and grit his teeth. The photographers caught him a couple of times in the first few weeks, before he started wearing the hat that Joey had given him years ago, the one that said "fuck paparazzi", and after a while it died down. Calculus kicked his sorry ass and there was one bad week where he spent every night on the phone with Joey, threatening to walk out of freshman comp and go become a plumber. He made it to midterms on coffee and Maalox, and his therapist bill was in the six figures, but after that it started to almost seem normal.

"You've always adapted well to new situations," his mother said to him after a while. He thought she was wrong, it wasn't a new situation at all, it was just an old situation he'd forgotten about for a while. It felt sometimes as though Justin had been the spotlight that shone on them all and washed out everything other than what was right under their noses in plain sight. With him gone, they all had to squint and blink their eyes when the room suddenly seemed implausibly dark, until after a while their eyes started to adjust and they could see the subtle shades of color once more.

Chris came by to see him, a stop on the tour that was selling out every damn club he played to an audience who'd never even heard of N'Sync. He looked around the apartment Lance had bought after selling the house and sniffed. "I'd say you're slumming, but you're still about a thousand light-years ahead of my college digs, so I'll refrain."

Lance was tempted to throw a physics textbook at his head. "There's a screening of a student film tonight at seven. Are you coming with me, or are you just going to be an ass?"

"Oh, no, let's go. It'll be fun. Will you hold my hand when the lights go down?"

"Jesus," Lance said. His head was throbbing. "I'm trying to remember why I like you."

"It's because of my winning personality, of course," Chris said, and bared his teeth.

One of the campus a-capella groups sent their director to make tentative inquiries and Lance told them to fuck right off, using words he'd borrowed from Joey and attitude he'd learned from Chris. His GPA started out at a 2.7 and then climbed, slowly and steadily, in a linear progression. In the spring of his sophomore year, he met a nice graduate student named David and there might have been something there for a little while, but the reporters caught wind of it and David took off, muttering "sorry, man, my grandmother" in the wake of his departure. Lance kicked Physics 115 in the teeth, fired his therapist when she suggested that he might want to take a less intensive schedule, and startled everyone, including himself, when three and a half years later, they put the diploma in his hand and it had the words "cum laude" written on the bottom.

In the middle of the night, when there was no one there to listen to but himself -- and there was never anywhere there to listen but himself -- he knew that the twenty-one credit quarters had been to keep him from having to think about it.

He took a job with an astronomy lab and spent his days buried in non-Euclidean geometry and trig. The director of the lab had him writing requests for funding as soon as he realized Lance hadn't lost any of his schmoozing skill. His coworkers stopped looking at him like he was an interloper after he corrected a flaw in the positioning of the radio telescope that would have cost them hundreds of thousands, if not millions. He got his pilot's license and spent his weekends at thirty thousand feet, not flying anywhere in particular, just flying. He drank a little too much, and worked out on Mondays and Thursdays and alternating Wednesdays, and considered taking up smoking, except California was a bad place to be a smoker. He sent his goddaughter a Superman lunchbox for her first day of kindergarden. He cleaned his own house and did his own laundry and sometimes, rarely, he'd sing in the shower, when no one else could hear him.

He wasn't happy, but he was doing something. Justin had said to him once, after reading some self-help book or another, "The meaning of life is, do the next thing."

It had all started with Justin. Justin had been the one to sweep into his life, pick it up, turn it on its ear. Justin had held out the bottle marked "drink me" and waited for Lance to knock it back in a single shot. Justin had been Lance's first crush and the first person he'd ever come out to and the first person to give him the "like a brother" speech. There were three songs no one would ever sing, with pronouns that couldn't give anything away, tucked in the bottom of Lance's safe, along with a copy of the first album JC had done A.J. After Justin. Lance had never been able to listen to it again.

It had all started with Justin; Justin had been the one to drag his life into a geosynchronous orbit. Justin had had the gravitational pull of a hundred stars. Sometimes Lance went outside at night, squinting to find the pinpricks of light through the smog, and wondered how much mass a person had to have to still be causing tides after so long.

. : | back | : .