I hadn’t escaped anything. They let me go.

Worse, they thought I’d come crawling back after failing to make it in the real world.

Before Nick got home that night, I paid a visit to Dill Weed downstairs. He lived with his eighty-year-old grandmother and sold weed out of his bedroom when he wasn’t changing adult diapers.

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Dill said, blowing smoke from his lips.

His bedroom was too cloudy to see the door, much less my hand in front of my face. The air was thick with weed and old carpet funk. A lava lamp pulsed in the corner like a dying heartbeat.

“Two brothers,” I corrected, taking the joint from his hands and pacing back and forth.

“T-Dog, I need you to calm down. You’re killing my buzz,” he said from the comfort of his bed, which was covered in bedsheets featuring porn stars eating hot dogs. I didn’t ask.

After passing back the grass, I told him, “I should probably head back anyway.”

But before I left, he sat up and said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. You miss your family; your family misses you. Why not be together?”

“Because I have a new family,” I said.

By eight or nine o’clock, I was back upstairs. Of course, Nick was home by then. When I walked through the door, I could feel his presence even before I saw him. The apartment was quiet, but not empty.

On my way to our bedroom, I found him in the office, sitting at his desk. I tried to walk by without disturbing him, but when he looked up, I froze.

“You were with Dill,” he laughed.

I laughed too, stepping into the room.

“I was,” I said.

“What happened?” Nick asked, then clarified, “You only smoke without me when something happens.”

River. That’s what happened. But I didn’t want to say his name.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“Did Rick threaten to fire you again? He should know by now that place wouldn’t last a week without you.”

“It wasn’t Rick,” I answered without answering.

“Then what was it?”

Nick was working on his comic again, even though he’d told me it was finished. Maybe he was adding superpowers. Maybe he was adding color. Either way, the pages under his hands gave me a chance to change the subject.

“How was your day? You talked to Yellow Vest about your comic, right?” I asked, walking around the desk to stand behind him.

I rested my head atop his head and looked over what seemed to be new pages.

“Don’t call him that,” Nick laughed, starting to put away the pages before I got a good look.

He stood up and slid the papers into the filing cabinet, but I was there to hold him up against the wall when he was done.

“I could call him Shit Head Pervert if that’s better,” I joked, running a hand up under his shirt.

“Tom,” he said, protesting just enough to make me stop.

“Tell me what happened with your comic,” I said, stepping back and sitting on the edge of the desk.

Nick hesitated, like he always did when it came to his comic stuff. But eventually, he said, “Lance liked it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He said I have good line work, and pacing, and...” he stumbled.

“And?”

“He can’t sell it. He doesn’t have room for new comics by amateur artists... and... and it was too gay.”

I blinked. “The comic—Lance won’t sell it because it’s too gay?”

Nick nodded.

“Isn’t Lance gay?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“He is, but...” Nick struggled to explain. “He said if I changed one of the main characters into a girl...”

The book was based on our lives.

“So you’d have to either take me or you out of a story about us?” I said.

“I don’t want to change anything... but—”

“It would get you on the shelf,” I finished.

“The story doesn’t make sense without the both of us,” he said.

He was about to spiral into all the reasons why, but I took his hand before he could.

“But it would get you on the shelf. Wouldn’t it?”

“It would.”

Suddenly I understood why he was working on a finished comic. It was sad. And a little disappointing. We had moved to Washington to get away from stuff like that. To be ourselves. To be free. Twice, on the same day, I was shown how impossible it was to escape the world.

“My brother came to see me today,” I said, half-smiling.

Nick didn’t say anything. He just held my hand tighter.