hardcover boys

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i.

He's watching Ellen Page cry on the screen. Her face was crinkled up like the plastic bags under the couch and she was crying like it meant everything. Like she could cry for everyone. Like everyone's bad days, everyone's little fuck-ups and mishaps were being brought to Ellen Page for her to cry out in a moderate indie film for everyone to see.

You think about the way Axel cries, or the way he says he doesn't. Axel's been clearing six feet since he was fifteen, and he says the last time he cried was when he had to go to court to see his parents finalize their divorce. That was years ago, and Axel likes to say that he had his tear ducts surgically removed. Taped 'em shut, battened down the hatches.

You pressed your nose against his and sneered, "Yeah, right."

"It's true." Axel laughed around the edge of your chin. "It's truer than true."

"You're full of it."

He's watching Ellen Page pretend to absolve everyone's sins by crying over some rank old man, the pamphlet from the funeral clutched in his hand. The screened photograph is blotted with coffee and left-over tomato sauce, and Axel's eyes are heading straight towards pretty little Ellen and past the curve of your head.

On the screen, Ellen is talking about everything being past her emotional maturity. You sigh and dig your head between his collarbone and throat, your eyebrow brushing against his jugular vein.

You say, "Do you ever-?"

"Leave it," Axel says. He's not looking at you and he's making such a big deal out of this, like he's had his heart torn out. Like he's Ellen Page, crying for all the lonely people.

You sneer. "Yeah, right."

ii.

Axel used to wear fishnets, strutting around like it was some radicalized mating call. They bagged slightly his knees, showing more fabric than skin. It made him look a little sexy and a little ridiculous, his eyes ringed with kohl and flirting with the businessman next to him. He'd say something, stoop, pull his fishnets up to the hemline of his shorts.

You ask him, "Do you have to do that in public?"

Axel smiles, seventeen and stupid. "Makes them think of me takin' it off, yanno?"

Everyone else went along with it. Axel likes to wear fishnets, so what? Weirder things have happened. Larxene could be persuaded to lend a pair easily enough, even had a dozen with glittery little sequins and ribbon-adorned doodads. She'd bend him backwards over the arm of the couch, helping fasten the garters, giggling herself halfway to cardiac arrest.

She'd clap him on the shoulder, cackling. "You look nice, homo-of-mine." She'd turn to you, her thin eyebrows raised. "Doesn't he just look fab, Dem?"

Axel, still bent over on the couch, would kick his legs up into the air. He was a regular daddy long-leg's, legs like most women in the movie industry, shaved and prettied up by Larxene's vast supply of skin oils. "I feel pretty," he'd screech, "oh so pretty! I feel pretty—"

"And witty," Larxene would chime in. She'd rest her head on your shoulder and roar with Axel for a rousing finale, "And gay!"

You'd shrug. "Fab. Pretty. Gay. Whatever." And you'd leave, 'cause Axel in fishnets had you seeing red. Purple. Green. Whatever.

You'd head to Larxene's room to maybe wreck havoc on something feminine, and you'd hear Axel whine desperately, "I don't look too Magenta in these, right?"

iii.

Larxene's trouble. She wears dresses like Audrey Hepburn, styles her hair like Sid Vicious, and bites like a mad dog. She has a tendency to shock everyone she meets, flash unsuspecting neighbors, and dig her stilettos into any subway-side groper's toes who thought he might get lucky.

She's poison, that girl.

Larxene's also nosy as hell, which makes you think that you wouldn't mind all of her bad habits doubled—the messy one-night stands, the girls and boys and men and women leaving sob-stories on your voicemail about how "You said you'd call me back, baby!", the fact that Larxene, in all honesty, in hell on wheels—if her nosiness could be expelled.

She says bluntly over the rim of her mug, "Do you ever find Axel annoying?"

There's a lipstick stain on the side of the rim, where it says cheerily, "World's Best Mom". Larxene is the only one you know who drinks wine from ceramic Mother's Day mugs, complete with doe-eyed kittens prancing on the front.

"Um."

"You ever want to just, I don't know, haul off and just punch him out? Wanna Rocky Balboa him, or anything?"

These are questions you can't answer in any possible sense, so you say quickly, "Larxy, darling, is this about Yuffie again?"

Larxene slams down the mug, snarling, "Demyx, you're an asshole," before whirling off in her Hepburn dress.

There's Sinatra on the radio.

The mug falls apart.

iv.

You smile with your mouth closed, like Grace Kelly. Your teeth are crooked and Zexion, an old flame who practices dentistry when he's not exhorting money from flabby old men at the local gay bar, has been on you for years about fixing them. He says he'll charge less because you're an 'old friend'.

You and he fucked in his dentist's chair once. It had been funny until Axel had gone in for a check-up and Yuffie had found out because she worked with Zexion and subsequently told Kairi, who told Sora, who told Larxene who told pretty much everyone else.

Zexion still kisses your left temple every time he sees you. You tell him he can't do that anymore, and he smiles. Says, "Indulge me just this once."

(but it's more than once, even when Larxene snarls don't fuck it up and Yuffie sighs you're all lost, aren't you, baby, and even though Zexion says it's not going to happen again)

You're missing a tooth. It got knocked out in fourth grade (courtesy of Larxene) and you didn't bother getting a new one.

Axel sticks his tongue through the space and grins, "Real cute, Demyx."

He kisses your snaggletooth by the very back of your row of less than perfect teeth and laughs, "It's kinda hot, in some out-back-the boonies, PawPaw-hit-me-with-an-axe-while-choppin'-up-squirrel way."

v.

The pamphlet's pinned to the table by thumbtacks. Axel doesn't cry and watches Kat Dennings talk about having sex in a car. He forgets to blink and has to rub at his eyes with the curve of his knuckles.

You say, "It's not just you."

The pamphlet's smeared with coffee and toast crumbs. The screened picture was awful, and sitting Shiva was boring as hell.

You say, louder, "You're not the only one who's sad."

Kat Dennings is singing on the screen and you're pointing at the shoddy funeral picture of Larxene and Yuffie sitting together, like sisters, like lovers, like best friends. You're seeing red, like when you were seventeen and listened to The Sex Pistols and Axel wore fishnets and you spent two hours styling your hair to look like boys from punk magazines and Larxene drank diluted wine from dollarstore mugs and you had always thought, I'm so happy, I could cry.

You think and you hurt and you breathe and you cry. You shake-shudder-snarl, throw the remote at the TV, scream, "She loved me, too."

Axel watches Kat Dennings lay into her victim of choice. He sits Shiva little a good boy, mourning the dead.

You say, "Cry, goddamn it."

And right on cue, Axel bursts into tears.