Literature
by Helen

This was why he'd kept it secret in the first place, he thought, because he knew this would happen. Well, not this, exactly, but something bad, something he'd rather not deal with, and even that first day two and half months ago when Joey had first found out, he'd known it wouldn't turn out well.

"What's this?" Joey had said, holding up the glossy course catalogue he had thought he'd hidden in his bunk.

"Nothing."

"Doesn't look like nothing," Joey had said, flipping it open.

"It's nothing," he had said, snatching it back out of Joey's hands "I'm just thinking about taking a class is all."

"Isn't that whole band thing we have going to interfere with that?"

"It didn't last semester. It's a correspondence thing. You can get the lectures over the internet and you write papers and—things," he had finished, because Joey was looking at him strangely "Look, I wouldn't expect you to understand—" which was the reason he'd kept it secret last semester, because he'd known. Chris and Lance wouldn't care, and Justin wouldn't understand, and Joey would make fun of him, and he'd done the homework on the sly, pleading tiredness, sleep, and then climbing into his bunk and reading until he really did fall asleep.

"Oh, because I'm so dumb—" Joey said flatly.

"I didn't—"

"Well fuck you, anyway, JC. Just because you were the valedictorian of Mickey Mouse high school, you think you're hot intellectual stuff. Maybe I'll just go ahead and take a class, too."

"Whatever," he said, stung. He had been the best student on the set, true, but there were some smart people there. He'd worked hard. Joey had gone to a real high school, which he was privately envious of, although he would never say so.

"What are you taking?" Joey said.

"19th Century British Novel," JC snapped, although he had been planning on taking a class on modern poetry. The novel class seemed sufficiently intimidating, the kind of class that would make Joey shut up and leave him alone, but Joey had only narrowed his eyes and said "Fine."

"You're not serious."

"It sounds fucking terrific, JC," Joey had said.

JC had half expected him to lose interest, but Joey carefully filled out the application and sent it off, tagged along with JC when he went to the bookstore to buy the required reading and then started in doggedly on Persuasion. He bought a laptop and got Lance to help him set it up so he could see the lectures.

He'd stopped feeling angry about the time that Joey was shambling around the bookstore with the syllabus in his hand, obviously biting back a comment about the number of books they had to read, not to mention the fact that all of them were by dead people. And not choked-on-vomit at thirty dead people, but dead for a while people. He felt sort of daunted himself, to tell the truth. He'd been planning to spend a pleasant semester reading Ann Sexton and Robert Pinsky, maybe a little William Carlos Williams or Frost or Plath or something, and now he was stuck with this mountain of books, the majority of which seemed to take place almost entirely in drawing rooms, with people saying one polite-ass thing and meaning something else entirely.

The one consolation was that he knew that Joey was going to crumble, and he'd pegged it for about chapter ten of Persuasion. Joey finished it two days after he did, throwing it down on the floor of the bus with a satisfied smirk.

"What'd you think?" he asked.

Joey shrugged. "Wasn't so bad, I guess. She got with what's-his-bucket at the end. That was nice."

And it had been nice, but it wasn't quite the disgusted "This is crap and I'm quitting," reaction he'd been expecting.

The others found it vaguely amusing, if inexplicable.

"Dude, I read that!" Chris tended to shout, jumping over the back of the couch and narrowly missing stepping on someone.

"Don't tell me what happens—" he'd say.

"They all die," Chris would say. "Horribly. Kidding! Man, what're you so sour-faced about, anyway?"

Justin read the first four pages of Dracula because he thought it would be cool and bloody, and pronounced it "Fucking awful," and Chris and Lance had a bet about who would get the better grade, although he didn't know who had money on him.

And then they had to read David Copperfield, which was pretty long, and by the time he started noticing the world around him again, he noticed that something was going on with Joey.

Most of the time Joey was regular Joey, old Joey, but there was also this new guy, weird freaky new Joey, who had these preposterously small silver rimmed glasses, because "I'm a little far-sighted okay, Josh, Jesus. The print was swimming all around," who spent a lot of his time on the bus hunched over a book, who owned a highlighter for Christ's sake, who used the highlighter, because JC checked, picking up Joey's copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles one day and finding the pages an occasional hodgepodge of yellow lines, and cryptic notes penciled in the margins that said things like "Tess=earth/fertile but also virg.?" and "Angel-literal?" and also, not so cryptically, "Tess, you're a fucking moron."

Weird freaky new Joey was so upset about getting a B on the paper they wrote about The Portrait of Dorian Grey that he called up the professor and talked for a half an hour, going in the bathroom and closing the door so they couldn't hear him. New Joey wrote a eight page essay about how Dracula was about the fear of deviant sexuality, and weird freaky new Joey had a really nice mouth, JC noticed, and didn't want to go out to a club one night because he hadn't finished Wings of the Dove.

It was weird, and it wasn't fair, he thought, because Joey came across like a complete fucking doofus, to the point where they had a running joke about it, where Lance would read out loud the particularly moronic things that Joey had said in interviews and Chris would smack him on the back of the head and say things like

"really? 'Bye Bye Bye' is about breaking up with a girl? is that, like, the deeper meaning to the song?"

He found himself thinking, fleetingly, of what Joey might look like in one of those tweedy jackets with the leather elbow patches.

He found himself, a little less fleetingly, wondering what would happen if told Joey that he just didn't get Henry James, and he wondered what the fuck he was doing, what the fuck he was trying to prove, because, frankly, he'd always gotten further by being stupid, and he imagined leaning over the novel with Joey, pressed thigh-to-thigh in the booth at the table on the bus, Joey's soft voice against his cheek, thought about how the lighting wasn't very good over the table, and how dark and quiet it was on the bus when the others were asleep.

He thought about Joey kneeling in front of him on the couch, yanking him forward, big hands on his hips, kneeling up to kiss him, Joey sitting on the edge of his bed in the morning, putting on his shirt, eyes crinkling with a smile, which didn't have a whole hell of a lot to do with literature, but so what, he thought. So fucking what, he thought, giving up on Henry James and going into the bathroom to jerk off.

His final paper was about the way that adherence to duty and the role one played in public life always precluded carnal love and sexual gratification in the 19th century British novel. It was a really good paper.

---

Their grades came in thin envelopes with perforations along the edges. Joey stared at his for a long time, eyes narrowed, before getting up and walking through to the lounge. Lance raised his eyebrows and wandered off to his bunk. "What crawled up your ass, Fatone?" Chris yelled, from the lounge, and he heard Joey say something unintelligible before he came back through the partition.

"So." Joey said.

"So." He wasn't going to say anything but Joey was right there, the carbon paper crumpled in his hand. "What'd you get," he asked.

Joey's mouth twisted, and he said unwillingly, "B+"

"Oh."

"You?"

"A-."

"Oh."

"Okay," JC said, standing. "I was going to eat something, if—"

"Hey," Joey said, "that's it?"

"I'm hungry."

"Oh, don't. You're not even gonna gloat?"

"No."

"I know you want to," Joey said,

"C'mon Joey—," he said,

"You want to," Joey said, poking him in the shoulder. He took a step back. "You've been waiting to for months—I've seen you looking at me." Joey stepped closer to him and he couldn't move back any further without backing into the couch.

"That's not—"

"You want to rub it in," Joey said, leaning over him, and he was so close, close enough to touch. JC closed his eyes.

"You want to—" Joey said again, and JC kissed him: opened his eyes, leaned forward, pressed his mouth up against Joey's, and it was a bad kiss, too dry, too quick, too hard, his upper lip bumping nearly painfully against Joey's teeth. Joey stared at him

"well," he said, and started to step away, but Joey caught him, one hand on the small of his back, and "Maybe a little," JC mumbled, right before Joey leaned down and kissed him for real, a good kiss, nuzzling his mouth gently open, and sliding his body along JC's in a way that made his stomach tighten.

"What?" Joey said, when he lifted his head.

"Maybe I want to, um. rub it in, a little—" JC admitted.