Cam shuffled in closer to me, put the phone on speaker, and held it between us while he made the call. 

“Oh, hey, what’s up?” Flynn said when he answered. He always had a little kick to his voice, like he was constantly a little buzzed. No like he was on drugs—more like you’d just caught him coming out of a work out that’d got his blood pumping.

“Hey, Flynn,” Cam said. “We didn’t catch you in the middle of dinner or anything, did we?”

“Nah, I—oh, wait, hold on.” A pause. “Sorry, had to take my noodles off the cooker. Not that it really matters if you cook them too long. They just get kinda mushy. I tried to cook some carrot with them the other night, but the carrot just kept on not cooking and the noodles cooked too much.”

“Carrots do take a lot longer to cook than noodles,” Cam said.

“Yeah, I guess so!” Flynn said. “Anyway, how can I help?”

“Well, we were hoping we could help you,” Cam said. “We’d like to offer you the room.”

“Oh, shit, uh…”

Cam and I exchanged a glance. That wasn’t the response we’d been expecting.

“Did you already find somewhere else?” Cam asked.

“No, no, just, uh,” Flynn said. “Well, I can’t actually afford it. Sorry. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing when it comes to budgeting, and I was trying to cast a wider net because I wasn’t getting any hits. When I actually saw the house, I knew there was no chance, but it’s not like I had any better plans for the day.”

“Wait,” Cam said. “So why did you keep helping us?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well—thank you,” Cam said. “Can you hold for a minute?”

“Sure.”

Cam muted the call and turned to me. “What do you want to do? We could take this as a sign that it wasn’t meant to be and pick someone else.”

“My sister died before she reached her sixteenth birthday,” I said. “I know some people find comfort in the idea that there’s some divine meaning behind all that shit, but I don’t. I spend enough time being mad at my mum and stepdad for the medical neglect that left her without a fighting chance. I am going to lose my goddamn mind if I ever get it in my head that her dying was part of some cosmic plan. That some fuckhead agent of fate used cancer to murder her.”

Cam considered me for a long moment. “You’re very dramatic sometimes.”

I shrugged. “It was never about the money anyway, right? You said we were doing this because it was the right thing to do in a housing crisis. Which was bullshit, obviously, but still—it’s not about the money.”

“So we offer him a lower price?”

“Why wouldn’t we?” I asked, intentionally echoing Flynn’s words.

Cam flashed me a grin and unmuted the call. “Flynn, you there?”

“Yup. Noodles are done, but they’ll keep.”

“We’re flexible on price. What would work for you?”

“Oh, I dunno. It’d have to be, like, a hundred dollars less or something crazy.”

“Just to be clear, do you actually want to live here? If you don’t, that’s perfectly fine. We won’t be offended.”

“No, totally, I do,” Flynn said. “You guys are great and your place is great too, but I can’t afford great. I work part time and I’m on the tail end of a government subsidised work readiness program. I’m not bringing in the big bucks.”

“We can do a hundred dollars off the price,” I cut in. “Do you have a reference from your old place?”

“Oh, hey Justin,” Flynn said. “Uhh, so, here’s the thing. I don’t have a reference, and I know nobody’s gonna believe me when I say it’s not my fault, but it really isn’t! My last place was crazy. Like, super bad. I got kicked out, but not because I did anything wrong. Because someone else did something wrong—like, really wrong—and I called the police. So… I don’t really know what to do about that, because it makes me seem really sus.”

“Do you have anyone else who can do a character reference for you?” I asked.

“Uh… yeah, okay. I can figure something out. I’ll see if I can find someone and text you their number, okay?”

“Sounds good.”

Cam watched me as he ended the call and set his phone aside. “He’s got the room no matter what his reference says, doesn’t he?”

“Pretty much.”

“It’s a gamble.”

“I was a bigger one.”

“Yeah, okay,” Cam said, coming just short of rolling his eyes. “You had a bit of black cat energy, sure, but we’ve known each other since we were kids. By the time you really needed me, there was no question.”

“Not for you. For your parents. I avoided them so hard I wouldn’t have blamed them if they started thinking I was your imaginary friend, but they didn’t freak out about me climbing in your bedroom window at night like a depressed Peter Pan.”

“Finding me in bed with another boy was a lot cuter and more innocent when I was eleven.”

“Yeah, but your parents thought it stayed cute and innocent a lot longer than it actually did,” I said. “Remember when we started dating officially and they tried to put me on an air mattress on the floor like that was going to stop anything?”

“I remember jerking you off on that air mattress because it was easier to clean than my bed sheets.”

“Sometimes I get these moments where I realise, with a blinding flash of clarity, that our relationship is really weird.”

“It wasn’t that weird. Even straight boys give each other the occasional handjob at sleepovers.”

“It’s the part where we’re now in a position to reminisce that’s weird. You’re not supposed to settle down with your teenage jerk off buddy.”

Cam snorted. “Let’s not start measuring our relationship up against supposed to’s. We both know how that’ll go.”

The ding of a text message drew our attention. Flynn had sent through a number.

Cam tapped the digits to bring up the call screen. “His boss, maybe?”

I shrugged. “Or a family member.”

He tapped the call button. “Let’s find out.”

The call connected, but the only sound from the other end of the line was breathing.

“Hello?” Cam said.

Another beat of silence, then came a reluctant, “Hi.”

“Ethan, right?”

A pause. “Yeah.”

“Flynn gave us your number to call as a reference. Is that okay?”

“Yeah, he just called me and asked me, so—I know,” Ethan said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, though. Do you ask me questions, or…?”

“Anything you can tell us about what kind of person Flynn is would be really helpful.”

“Well… he’s my best friend,” Ethan said. “I mean, other than my boyfriend. And yeah, he’s my only friend other than my boyfriend, but still. I’m not desperate for friends. It’s easier to not have a friend than to have one, so I wouldn’t be friends with him if it wasn’t really worth it. He can be a lot for me sometimes, but most people aren’t like me, so you’ll probably be fine. You met him, so you know what he’s like already. Except, uh—do you want to hear something?”

Cam had to press his lips together for a second to keep his smile from turning into a laugh. “Yes, of course.”

“I used to think Flynn was kind of dumb, but I realised recently that I was wrong. Yeah, he missed a lot of school, and it shows, but that’s not the same as being dumb. And he has a lot of bad ideas that he acts on, but that’s not being dumb either. I think that’s actually being smart.” Ethan paused to take a few deep breaths. His sentences were coming out quickly, jammed together, like he wasn’t quite sure how to pace himself. 

“My boyfriend has uni friends, and sometimes I go to visit them with him to be supportive, which means I hang out with his friend’s cats,” Ethan continued. “She has two cats. One who only thinks about food and laying in sunbeams and never does anything wrong, or really anything at all, and one who’s affectionately nicknamed Sweet Little Idiot who eats fridge magnets and gets tangled in the blinds. But here’s the thing—Sweet Little Idiot isn’t a stupid cat. He’s the smart cat. Smart enough to have ideas. If you think about dogs or birds or any animal, it’s not the stupid ones that find all kinds of ways to get themselves into trouble. It’s the smart ones. That’s Flynn. He’s plenty smart if you teach him to do anything, but in his life nobody has done that almost ever.”

“That’s an interesting insight,” Cam said. “So would you recommend living with him?”

“No,” Ethan said, and then corrected unconvincingly, “I mean, yes. Look, the thing about Flynn is that I don’t know how he’s survived regular life up to this point, but if there was a zombie apocalypse, I bet he’d live. He’d do great. And he wouldn’t leave anyone behind, ever, even if they were useless. I don’t think he’d be an easy person to live with, and if I lie and you go in expecting him to be, that doesn’t help him. So… now you know what Flynn is like, and I hope it was helpful.”

“It was very helpful,” Cam said. “Thank you, Ethan.”

Ethan made a quiet sound of acknowledgement. “Okay. I’m going to hang up now,” he said, and then he did.

“Well,” I said into the silence that followed. “That was interesting.”