Eleven-thirty on New Year’s Eve, George Carver, naked except for his boxers and the silver necklace he always dangled around his neck, lay supine on his bed with the covers toppled over his sweaty body. Shuddering, he hacked out a cough which felt like a razor shredded from his lungs. Then he turned his head to stare listlessly at the curtained window. The sounds of Chicago's holiday nightlife were non-existent to his ears as a knife-sharp ringing carved into his brain.
    George felt another one of those chest-wrenching coughs forced out of his throat, and he moaned loudly into the darkness. It was New Year’s Eve, and he was in bed, for God’s sake. With his ragged breathing magnified in the empty apartment, he seriously wondered whether he was going to make it to the New Year. Then he contemplated what it would be like if Louise were to get back with him gone—gone from what she’d said was merely a bad cold. At first oblivious, his girlfriend would still open the door to the apartment softly because she would remember right before fumbling the key into the hole that he was asleep. Then she would step in quietly, or do it as quietly as she could after the countless Budweiser’s she’d have consumed over the course of five hours. At last she would stumble into their room to give him a kiss tinted with cherry lipstick and alcohol.
    George tried to imagine her expression when she tasted his cold flesh, but he couldn’t. I’m so stupid, he laughed sourly to himself, but silently, because he could feel another one of those coughs coming.
    He groaned. This time he coughed so hard there must have been blood.
    George shot out of bed and into the freezing heated air, then careened to the bathroom to spit into the sink. Under the buzzing of the neon light on the ceiling, which he had just turned on, he looked into the porcelain basin, gripping its sides for support. A thick yellow substance floated eerily around the clean drain. Staring for a few seconds, his silver necklace dangling inches over the mucus, George turned back to his room to impulsively pull on gray sweatpants and a UChicago sweatshirt. Then he headed to the kitchen where, panting and shaking, he groggily twisted the cap off of a bottle of Bourbon Whiskey.
    Suddenly, the screen to his phone flickered to life. He grabbed for it. Louise.
    Hey I’m staying out past midnight. How r u?
    George coughed once, clearing his throat. God, that cough was terrible, but she couldn’t hear it. He shivered twice.
    ok
    He pressed send and waited. That’s it, he thought. Okay. A few seconds later, his screen lit up again.
    Some people asked me where u were and how ur doing
    George jiggled his foot through the chilly air, shivering hard. How he was doing? Yeah, he was doing great. He wasn’t partying or laughing or even writing that ------- essay for his film producing class, which was due after break. Just alone in his apartment, sick to ---- and back. He almost considered telling her that. But in a sudden burst of guilt, he fingered the silver necklace draped over the nape of his sweatshirt, feeling the smooth groove of the letters “high school varsity” carved into the flat bead.
    im fine babe
    As he hit the send button with his shaking thumb, George forced himself to think about Louise tucking him into bed earlier that evening. She had whispered into his ear that she was just going to meet with their friends to celebrate the start of a new year, and that she was going to only be there for a few hours. He didn’t have to come. George then remembered grabbing her wrist, moaning something desperate along the lines of “But I feel terrible” or “Please don’t go to your friends, baby” while coughing incoherently. Maybe he hadn’t been clear enough. It was like sophomore year here, when he hadn’t been clear enough with that phone call with Sam.
    F***. George drained the last of his whiskey, which went down like nails and stomach acid and tears.
    A few minutes passed in the empty apartment, and by now, a faint wheeze escaped his lungs each time in inhaled or exhaled. George stared at an invisible spot on the wall. The paint before him seemed to ripple, and for a moment he felt the bright white color open up and swallow him. What was he doing here on New Year’s Eve? He should be with his girlfriend, or even back in Texas. Why the ---- did he tell his parents he wanted to stay up here to celebrate? Because this was home, or he couldn’t stand home?
He tried clearing his voice, and when he couldn’t, he just closed his eyes and slouched there, feeling needles jabbing into his tongue, spiking throughout his face, and going all the way down his chest and straight into his heart.

*    *    *

    Alex Carver was hurrying to his apartment with a 24-pack of Coca-Cola in his arms when the phone in his coat pocket buzzed. He paused. It must be Hiroko or Sasha or Scott, calling to say they needed something else from the drugstore before it closed in a few minutes at midnight. On the deserted snow-dotted street, Alex steadily placed the large pack of scarlet bottles on the sidewalk, his left side illuminated neon pink by the words “Sophie’s Hair Salon” flashing on the building to the side. Then he reached his gloved fingers for his phone. He barely registered the bold letters of the caller before he immediately answered, his eyes wide.
    “Hey, what’s up?” Alex’s breath furled sharp gray against the black air that was tinted bright pink.
    “Hey. What are you up to?”
    “Hey! What happened to you?” Alex exclaimed, his voice ringing with alarm as his eyes grew even wider. “George, you sound like—I don’t know—you’ve been gagging on coal or sandpapering your voice every single day—look, what happened?”
    “Just sick, don’t worry…”
    “How sick? You’re not in the hospital, are you?”
    “No, just alone in my apartment. I wanted to wish you a Happy New Year…”
    Alex’s expression wrinkled. “Happy New Year, bro…”
    “Happy freakin’ New Year…”
    There was another awkward pause. Alex scraped his foot against a patch of ice, waiting for his brother to elaborate. It sure was cold. He shot a glance at the packs of Coca-Cola sitting on the sidewalk, wondering if they would freeze.
    After another moment of silence, he realized George really didn’t have anything else to say. Even after six months. It would be more interesting to try and ingest frozen soda, he told himself. Strolling over to Sophia’s Hair Salon, Alex leaned against the glass, smudging it with his leather coat.
    “How’re you doing?” he asked.
    “I’m doing okay. How about you?”
    “Well, I was buying some coke for my buddies. We’re celebrating the New Year in my newly rented apartment. Scott—my roommate—just had surgery last Saturday on his right heel because he stepped on a nail after giving a speech on gay rights. Since he can’t walk very well yet, my friends and I decided not to go out, so we’re celebrating at my place. Oh, I also just finished a major essay for my Greek Lit class, so that’s out of the way.” He paused, waited, then tried reaching for a name. “How’s your girlfriend? What was it? Was it—Louise? You still dating her?”
    “She’s out—partying—”
    “W-what? You’re coughing like crazy and your voice is also hoarse.”
    “I said she’s out partying…”
    Alex shook his head. “Man, you should go see a doctor. I can barely hear what you’re saying. It honestly sounds like you’re drunk or sick or dy….”
    “Dying? I told you, I’m fine. Just sick right now. That’s why I’m not out.”
    Alex inhaled a ribbon of icy air. Then he let it out, his dense blue eyes, now reflected pink from the sign, focused intensely on a patch of air. For some reason, his mind blanked on what other questions to ask him—except for the one that he often thought about at night.    

    "George, are you okay?”
    “Fine, fine, doing great. Just bored right now.”
Alex scrunched his eyes shut, then opened them and ripped out the question. “How do you feel about Sam?”
    There was only the rough scraping of Alex’s boot against ice.
    “George? Hello? Are you still on?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I said...what about Sam? I mean, after you told Mom and Dad and I the news, you kinda completely cut communication with us. We assumed that his death hit you hard, but we weren’t sure, you know what I mean?”
    Coughs lashed out from phone, and Alex’s rate of speaking sped up, matching his heart rate. His visible breath came out faster. If he didn’t get it out of his mind now, he didn’t know when else.
     “We didn’t know what to do. At the funeral, you didn’t say much, but then again, you didn’t say a lot after you’d gone to Chicago. I called home once a week. But when you left for college, Mom and Dad told me that even before...Sam’s death...you didn’t call that often. Whenever they called you, you would snap at them to quit bothering you. Remember what you said to me one time? ‘Stop calling and go back to what you’re doing. We have different lives now.’ I mean, what? We have different lives now?! Did I not spend the first eighteen years of my life with you, no matter how rocky?” I hate this, Alex thought, shoving his left hand into his jacket pocket.
    “I-I-I’m sorry,” George coughed, and Alex’s expression hardened, then stayed that way.
    “I mean, why didn’t you call more often? Mom and dad are sad, to be honest. And I’m mad. You must’ve been having the time of your life to be so busy, they thought. But then Sam’s funeral hit us, and you looked like a corpse when you got off the plane. Your face was slack and yellow and—we didn’t know what to think!”
    “Alex…”
    “And then you left that night! Yeah, that night! You literally stayed for one afternoon, one funeral. Mom and dad didn’t even know about your plans. We assumed you only went to his burial because you two had been best friends before, and that you didn’t really care about Sam or anything from high school anymore, including Mom and Dad.”
    “Alex…”
    “What!” he snapped, exasperated. “Look, I have to go…”
    “Alex, I’m bored…”
    “Bored?”
    “Bored and lonely…”
    God, I hate that word, Alex automatically thought. His eyes focused on the empty streets before him leading to his warm apartment, and shivers spiked up his back. “What does that have to do with Sam? Why would you be lonely? Is that why you’re calling me now?”
    “College hasn’t been all that great…”
    “How so?”
    “I don’t feel as close to people as I did in high school.”
    “Well, that’s normal.” Alex felt himself scoff, angry at the way the way George sounded so stupid and sick. If George’s voice hadn’t sounded like it had been grinded over by a train, if he didn’t spew out a series of coughs every few seconds, Alex would’ve jabbed the red button on his phone and gone to bring the coke back to the apartment. How long had he been out? Half an hour? God, Hiroko would be annoyed. She was probably counting the seconds he had been gone. But he continued talking, thinking bitterly about the six months George had been “gone,” as their mom would sigh, tears leaking down her wrinkled cheeks. “Of course you weren’t as popular as you were in high school. Practically all the girls idolized you. All the guys hoped to be your friend. You don’t know a thing about being alone. It’s why you didn’t care that—that—”
    —Sam died alone. Alex abruptly cut his sentence short. He cleared his throat to make up for the sudden silence. “It’s just normal to not know as much people in college, okay? You go to a pretty large university. You can’t expect everyone to know your name.”
    He waited for some type of sharp remark, but was met by an unusual silence.
    “George? Hello?”
    “I’m here.”
    “Well?”
    “Look, I feel awful a-a-bout Sam. It’s the truth, and I don’t know how genuine I’m going to sound. But h-he told me he was having a rough time. I guess he felt the same as me because I’ll admit it, we were both pretty popular back home. He called me and told me he he was feeling depressed and alone—”
     What? Alex’s eyes, which had been wandering toward the sidewalk, snapped up. He called you?
     “—but that Friday night, a couple of people in my dorm—this was sophomore year, before Louise and I moved out—were planning to have a night out after final exams. I was invited to be the driver because I d-didn’t drink, so I was looking for my keys when my phone rang. I saw his caller ID and answered. I was going to tell him to call me back, since everybody was yelling at me to hurry up and stuff, but he didn’t want me to leave. He insisted. He told me some things. How he couldn’t relate to other people at his college. How he was failing. How he wouldn’t be able to make his aunt proud. How he had come to a realization. Everything wrong with his life, from his ADHD to the way people at college glared at him to his mom abandoning him when he was just born, was all his fault. That there had always been something wrong with him, and it was finally starting to show.” On the other end of the phone, George took a shuddering breath, and Alex blinked rapidly. Alex began to numbly speak.
    “I—”
    “No, listen to me, Alex! Do you know what I told him?”
    “What?” Alex’s knuckles shook against the phone. He shut his eyes, spots of pink floating behind his eyelids before they faded. In the dark street, he felt an insidious memory creep up his legs all the way up to his fingers, making him unable to move. God, this was so familiar...
    George kept forcing his hoarse voice to carve out words. “I told him ‘Okay.’ That’s it, just ‘Okay’! Then I asked him to call me in the morning, but he obviously didn’t. And it was...it was my fault!—okay?! Afterward, I started thinking about what he said. I’ve been musing it over for y-years. And I’ve been feeling so guilty and sick about ignoring everyone at home, you know? You know?”
     Sam called you? “Y-yeah.”
      “I was just so ready to live my own life, without you guys, because I thought everything was going to be new and exciting. But that was a mistake, because when I needed someone to talk to, there was no one there, you get it? That I was awful to people?”

    George’s muddled voice cracked loudly through the phone, tearing into the silence of the New Year. Alex gulped for the invigorating cold night air, but instead choked on the bitter taste of salt. His mind lurched, and suddenly he was sixteen again and sitting in his steamy unair-conditioned bedroom, the bright sunlight cutting into his flesh like razors. Why was everything so shiny, so full of summer, so saturated with life? Outside, the laughter coming from a next-door pool party scraped against his eardrums like knives, especially George’s loud voice.
    “Hey, Sam, pass me that beach ball! I want to see if I kick it over the pool!”
    “Yeah, sure, man! But wait! I have a question. Is it true that your brother is gay? He likes other boys? Like seriously?”
    An explosion of laughter, leaving Alex cringing in his room.
    “Yeah, he’s such a ------ freak!”
    More bullets of laughter, and Alex gasped at the way his heart seized up with those words. This had been coming for a long time. It didn’t matter what his parents said. They were wrong when they said it was society’s prejudice and not him, it was him, it was always him, and he reached for the tiny bottle of sleeping pills on his nightstand, shoving them into his mouth like they were medicine—
     Squeezing his eyes shut, Alex could only go through the exercises h-he had learned that year a-at the h-h-hospital. B-breathe in for one, two, thr-ree, four, five, six, seven, eight. H-hold his breath for one, two, three, four, five, six. Breathe out one, two, three, four. God, he hadn’t repeated those numbers in years. He hadn’t thought about the past in years. He visualized Scott’s wide grin beneath his rainbow-colored hair, Hiroko’s loud and whiny voice, and Sasha’s clueless expression whenever she held a paper map. He pulled into mind walking across campus and taking in the trees filled to the brim with greenness in June. He remembered his professor pulling him aside one day after class to ask him to become his teaching assistant next year. And Scott, Scott standing at that podium just last week giving a speech as thousands of people shrieked and cheered. Here he was. Alex felt the tears keep on sliding, but he slowly felt the explosions in his chest steady to a pound.
    “George, George, you have to believe things will get better.”
    “I mean, what the ---- was Sam thinking?” George’s voice seemed to be shredded out of a grater. “I mean, how f***ing alone did he feel?”
    “Stop it! Stop blaming yourself!”
    “I’m SORRY!” George cried hoarsely through the phone. “I was wrong! What was I thinking? That I was—God, t-that I was cool? I’m sorry I ignored Sam, I’m sorry I-I ignored you when I was with other people—”
    What an understatement! But Alex hadn’t known he had made this choice long ago until the moment came now and he replied in the way he did. “I’m telling you, you have to believe things will get better!”
    “But I’m a guilty man! Convicted!”
    “Look, you’re not the only one who’s done wrong, okay? You’re just the only one who’s realized your mistake. What about you and Sam’s other friends? Daniel, Kacey, Leslie, Tom, your high school crew. What about Sam’s dorm friends? What about his aunt? And...I don’t hate you for what you did. I mean, what about Cheryl? Peter, Ursula, Jake? And...Sam? It was their fault too that people…” Alex sucked in a breath, then let it out. “...weren’t so nice to me. But I don’t hate them either. Honest, I don’t, because I’ve realized that everyone’s going through their own things. You just have to realize your flaws, your hamartia….is your fault...and then forgive...”
     George’s voice broke into what sounded like laughter, yet it came too jagged and sharp from the phone. “Yeah, that’s so easy to believe—”
    “Things will get better.” Alex began laughing into the night air too, and his laugh felt so heavy, much heavier than the pack of coke that he had been carrying. So this was catharsis. “I know it’s hard. I’ve been there before. You’ll just have to suffer and suffer and suffer until you think you can’t suffer anymore. By the end you’ll have wasted a good percentage of your life because of the people around you and who you were in relation to them and how you felt about yourself. It’s true. Those years will have been wasted. But then you’ll just have to start again.”
    A pause, this time without the laughter. “Are you sure you don’t hate me?”
“No. I swear to God I don’t. That was years ago. I mean, I still remember how close we were when we were younger, you know?”
     There was silence in the New Year cold air. Alex was shivering, but he waited for George to continue. Finally, George did, his voice still rough and muffled and slightly slurred. “All right. It’s late. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’m tired.”
    “Okay.” Alex bent down and easily scooped the pack of Coca-Cola with one arm, the other still holding onto the phone. “But I just want to say one more thing.”
    “What?”
    “This conversation isn’t going to change your current situation.”
    “I knew as much.”
    “It’s not. But just know that no matter how long it’s going to take, things will change for the better.”
    “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
    “And I love you.”
    “Y-yeah, yeah, thanks.”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay. Bye.”
    “Bye.”
*    *    *

    A thousand miles away, shaking and trembling, George poured into the bathroom sink the bottle of whiskey he had dissolved a container of thick pearly white pills in, a bottle he had been a few inches from pouring down his throat.