We had a party down there. By unspoken agreement, the housemates didn’t advertise the extent of the place: I put police caution tape from the dollar store across all the doorways out of the big room, as a joke, though I suspected I wasn’t really joking. It was fine if everyone just saw a chill basement hangout spot. Much levity was made from the fact that you had to climb in and out of my bed to get there, or to go back up and take a piss.

We brought down a foosball table, some Christmas lights, lots of booze, and the stereo. I protested that my record collection was for archival purposes, not playing at parties, but I was overruled. It was an okay turnout and everyone, for all the usual reasons, focused on getting good and drunk. My usual social ineptness kept me from truly enjoying myself. Some girl tried to hit on me; I was so startled by this I blurted “Actually, I’m gay,” which was even more awkward out loud than it sounds written down, and she laughed noisily and commiserated about the tragic ironies of dating for a few embarrassing seconds before vanishing, and only too late did I think to ask what the hell had compelled her to talk to me in the first place, because certainly whatever it was had never worked on any guys.

Not that I’d figured out how to go to parties where guys who’d be interested would hang out, anyway. I hated dance clubs and the couple gay bars I’d stepped into had made my skin crawl; I still felt a rush of anxiety when I thought about stepping into the tiny campus LGBT center even after years of passing it on the way to classes. I’d always thought things would get easier in college. At my massive high school there hadn’t been a single out queer person, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the first. Not only because of crippling shyness, self-image issues, and fear for my actual life, but because I literally did not know how to come out. Ellen hadn’t done it on national TV yet when I was in high school; Kevin Kline hadn’t done it at the movies, let alone sultry-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal; not enough gay teens had been famously killed or killed themselves to inspire anyone to tell us It Gets Better. Gay people basically did not exist in my universe, and yet there was I, somehow, gay regardless. College would surely be an improvement. But once I got there, I failed to blossom into a beautiful flower. Maybe I should have moved farther away, to an actual big city, rather than somewhere close by and familiar and still red-state as fuck: but the problem wasn’t really my environment, I came to realize, it was me. It wasn’t that I had issues with being gay: the internet had given me plenty of opportunities to come to terms and feel okay about it. I just didn’t know how to be it in public, with other people, on any level but especially a romantic one. I’d never dated anyone or even asked anyone out, and it increasingly felt like it was getting too late to start.

Meanwhile the straight people were having a nice party. Niko, wearing a blue bowling shirt with “My Name is BONG” stitched into the lapel and a pair of tight-fitting lime-green jeans, whose only virtue was the tight-fitting part, was shadowing some girl he’d been trying to hit it off with. It wasn’t going well. They got into an argument early in the evening (Dear Diary: I tune out when I hear the phrase “That’s not what Marx said”) and she ended up storming off up the stairs. Niko fumed, then stormed off too, reappearing minutes later in a Linkin Park t-shirt and torn jeans and carrying a bottle of tequila, which he used like a police baton to corral me into a corner to do shots with him.

“Said I dress too fucking weird for her,” he said with a hollow Ashes to Ashes sort of intonation. “Is this fucking normal enough? Whatever. The hell with everyone.” I could drink to that. We threw back a shot, sitting on the carpet with our backs to the paneled wall. Niko was always swinging between extremes: at high ebbs he wanted to be friends with everyone, at low ebbs I was the only person in the universe. He was busy furiously ignoring the rest of the party, which I didn’t feel especially connected to, either.

He sniffed. “You know when we first moved over here I didn’t speak any English?” I nodded; I’d heard this story before. “My parents thought it’d be cute to dump me into third grade like that. You know, full immersion.” His face twisted.

I poured him another shot, thinking I probably shouldn’t, but by then I already had.

He leaned back against the wall, looking worn down. “I tried so fucking hard to fit in. To get to where just opening my mouth didn’t mark me out as a freak. By the time junior high started none of the new kids even knew. Master fucking performance.” He tugged at the t-shirt, a corner of his mouth twitching. “Meanwhile the fam all expects things to be exactly like we’d never left. Like America’s just a little rest stop, like of course I’ll want to go back to Greece and have a million kids as soon as I graduate. My aunt asked me at Thanksgiving why I wasn’t married yet. I reminded her I only turned twenty-one this year and am still in the middle of fucking college. I didn’t say fucking.” He sipped at the shot, winced. “Urgh. Never sip tequila.” He held it up to the light, squinted at it suspiciously. “Anyway. She said neither of those things stopped my uncle.”

I was staring idly at a dark-haired girl and a bearded jock flirting on the couch across the room, words swallowed up by the thumping of the stereo. Thinking about the music echoing down all those empty halls. “I can’t even imagine getting married.”

“Yeah, neither can the government.”

“Not just that, asshole.” I side-kicked him, then frowned, trying to figure out what I wanted to say, how deep I wanted to go. Fuck it. I let the tequila talk. “I don’t know. I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend the rest of their life with me. Or that I could believe someone would say yes, if I wanted to with them.”

I closed my mouth, feeling stupid, but he was nodding. “Yeah, I dig you. Thinking you could be that for someone. Believing in yourself that much.” He was frowning. “I can’t believe in anything they fucking want me to be.”

He tilted his head back, eyes closed. “Well, you ever make it there, you got a best man lined up at least.” He opened one eye, peered at me skeptically. “Or are there two best men? How would all that even work?”

“I don’t know.” I closed my eyes, too. Dear Diary. Figure out how all that even works.

We listened to the music for a minute, surrounded by people who naturally knew how to Saturday night, without training. It was kind of nice being near them, at least.

Niko said, very quiet: “You think there’s something wrong with me?”

I opened my eyes, looked at him. His were still closed. The flashing Christmas lights were lost in his black curls, more swallowed up than reflected by them.

A corner of his mouth lifted. “Stupid question.”

“You’ll make it,” I said, more because I wanted him to believe it than because I’d given it any real thought.

I’d rarely seen his face at rest like this, without its usual mask of social engagement—he liked to play gracious host, loudmouthed philosopher—and the strong curves of his prominent jaw, his sharp nose, seemed fragile in the shifting light. Sharp, but delicate. Able to be shattered.

“Not fucking likely.” His brow furrowed, but then his face relaxed. He downed the rest of the shot, clinked his empty glass against mine, and leaned into me, just a little. “Nice to have someone around to humor me, though. Keep doing that, yeah?”

“No problemo,” I said, leaning into him, too.

We stayed like that for a few minutes.

Then some friends of his tromped down the stairs and he leapt up, pulling out a sparkling smile and manic laugh from somewhere, pouring drinks and giving high fives, and dragged me with him into the noise, and one of his friends talked me into getting trounced at foosball, and everyone kept drinking, especially me. And the moment between us faded into ephemera and lost any possible significance, even to me.

Not long after, Niko disappeared. I figured maybe he’d gone back to his room to be alone: despite appearances, his social energy was limited, had to be rationed. I didn’t think anything of it, focused on getting drunk with everyone else because it seemed like the thing to do.

Midnight passed, unnoticed.

Some time later the party started winding down. Soon it had winnowed to a couple hardcore foosballers, the girl and the beardy dude making out on the couch, and a few sozzled, earnest conversations in corners. I extracted myself from one of these, but on my way upstairs to take a leak I noticed that the flashlight we’d left by the hall—the one that led to the octagon room, the long stairs, and the pool—was gone.

Had he gone exploring? Tonight?

If he had, he’d been gone a long time.

An hour later the party had just about wrapped. Still no sign of Niko. I’d checked his bedroom—empty—and polled a few housemates. No one had seen him since the start of the night. I felt a stab of guilt for getting so wasted, for not looking out for him; pushed down vague resentments at feeling like I had to.

I was standing at the hallway wondering if I should go look for him, when a shadow appeared at its end and my body tried to jump out of my skin.

It was him, of course. But my relief only lasted for a second. As he got closer, a prickling sense crept into my bones that something was wrong.

He was stepping carefully, like over ice, deliberate, head turned down to the carpet. For a moment I wasn’t sure it was him at all.

He noticed me, gave me the thinnest of smiles. Sweat beaded on his face, which was ashen, like he’d been throwing up. He grabbed my arm as if to keep from falling over. His hand was cold.

“You okay?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. Just need to go to bed.”

“Did you—” I wanted to say see something down there, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. “—have too much to drink or something?”

He chuckled, weak. “Bed.” He brushed passed me, and headed, wobbly, up the stairs.

This is just one way the story can go. In the final version of Subcutanean, no two stories will ever be quite the same. Find out more at https://igg.me/at/subcutanean