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Harry is not quite sure about his new living situation.“Hello,” he remembers offering in the buggy roommate-finder app. “My name, as you’ve probably seen on my profile, is Harry. My pronouns are he/they. I’m a graduate student. I saw your post and that you’re looking for someone to room with and I think that we will be a good match!”Cornelius had replied “OK” at 2am, and, the next morning, followed it up with “im neil.” The lack of proper communication was probably a red flag, but he took it anyway.How bad could it be?—[A portion of the transcript of “You are a SLAVE to your own negativity: Here’s Why” by EveryoneCan]HICKEY: And, you know, people always say they’re trapped by the circumstances they’re born into, and they go ‘Oh, this can never happen to ME because I’m… I’m depressed, because I’ve got trauma from my parents spanking me or whatever, I’m not born rich,’ etcetera, etcetera, and it’s just… Like, for fuck’s sake, everyone is depressed these days. You can’t walk down a city block without bumping into someone who’s got five pills a day pushed onto them just because they’re a little sad.He grabs a large, garish can of energy drink from offscreen and takes a sip. He has displayed the same brand of drink in three videos consecutively so far, though he has never clarified if he was sponsored.HICKEY: It’s ridiculous. ‘Cause depression isn’t even real. I’m not kidding. There’s papers on this, you’ve gotta read up on it, and then come back to me and try to argue to me that there isn’t an epidemic of doctors just waving their hands whenever some blue-haired college student whines to them, like, ‘fine, jesus, there’s something wrong with your brain, now give me money.’ We have a whole generation of-A thud is heard in the background. HICKEY flinches so hard he spills his drink, before his face shifts into a frown. The video then cuts. HICKEY now has a new energy drink in hand, of a limited edition flavor. He sighs to the camera.HICKEY: Sorry. My neighbors were… I dunno what they were doing, actually, but it sure wasn't quiet. Anyways, I have no idea how this generation will survive- people are all so sensitive these days.—Behind the door, Harry sighs. He knows just how real depression is, from himself, from Henry, from all the friends who he was trusted by enough to be open with about their troubles. For a second, he fantasizes- what will he say, if he pushes the door open? But he doesn’t. He turns around, walks into his own room, and tucks himself to bed with the background noise of one-sided chatter muffled only partially by thin drywall.—The third night there, Harry comes home after a grueling day at the lab to several strangers in the living room, the distinct smell of marijuana, some kind of rap/techno/unidentifiable fusion beat, and Mario Kart running on the TV.“Hey,” says a man in a football team hoodie who Harry very much does not know.“Uh, Hello. And you are…?”“I’m Sol.” the guy waves his joint in his hand. “Wanna-”“No thank you. Where’s Cornelius?”“Bathroom,” says a tall, curly-haired guy also on the sofa. His eyes are a kind of scary level of bloodshot.“Alright, thank you.”Harry braces himself before knocking on the bathroom door. No answer. Maybe the music drowned him out? He tries again- “Neil,” he yells, “I know you’re in there!”No response again. The pile of boys in the living room looks at him oddly, but he swallows his instinctual fear of embarrassing himself to knock again.“I’M TAKING A PISS,” yells the voice in the room, which is obviously Neil’s. When Harry presses his ear to the cold wooden door he can hear the shifting and grinding of various cabinets and drawers and no sound of, well, pissing.“No, you’re not.”“NO YOU’RE NOT,” yells someone else in the back- Sol, probably. “YOU’VE BEEN THERE FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES.”“I’VE GOT AN STD,”“You need to go to the hospital, Cornelius.”“I’M FINE. MY DICK IS FINE. STOP WORRYING ABOUT MY DICK. WHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF FAG OR SOMETHING?”He gives himself one second to balk at the slur and another to feel angry at it. And then he takes a deep breath and counts to five. “As a matter of fact,” Harry says, “Yes, I am. Can you please get out of the bathroom? We need to have a talk about roommate privacy.”There is some more shuffling, and then the door unlocks. Harry swings it open to see Neil, standing over the toilet, with his dick peeking out from his unzipped jeans. The drawer where Harry keeps his medications is wide open in the back.“I told you,” he says, looking Harry in the eye. “Now give me my privacy.”Harry shuts the door with such a ferocity that its echoing bang emanates throughout the small apartment. Turning around, he finds several of the guys looking at him with wide eyes. “So,” one of them asks, “uh, are you just gonna kick us all out?”—Aside from the whole "inviting random guests over to party and smoke weed in the middle of the night and then justifying it by saying, ‘well, technically we didn’t have a contract or anything like that’ even though it should be common sense” thing, Harry’s sure that Neil is stealing from him. The milk in the fridge has been depleting at an abnormally high rate, his tools (scissors, nail clippers, etc.) mysteriously disappear only to reappear somewhere else, and one time he’s found the man storing his leftover sandwich in Harry’s specimen containers. He had decided against telling him that there used to be dead animals in the box that he was eating his lunch out of, but it did give him the beginnings of a good idea.Two weeks in their shared residency is when he saw Neil’s first weakness. It’s 6, and he was deep into another Wikipedia rabbit hole (about the Belgian Antarctic expedition) with soft jazz anime lofi beats playing in his cheap headphones when he heard a yelp coming from the kitchen. He assumed the worst, because that’s what he tended to do sometimes, only to see Neil backed into the corner, staring intently at something on the ground.“That’s a spider,” he says, matter of factly.“Yes,” Neil has a strange look in his eyes. “Can you kill it?”“Why can’t you do it?”“I’m holding my dinner,” he says. It’s a bowl of froot loops in orange juice.“Can’t you… set it down?”“No. Kill it. Kill it. Kill it-”Harry thinks on it for a while. He’s got plenty of bugs already- a great big collection of them, beetles and spiders and a bunch of rather unusual insects that aren’t unidentifiable unless one is an amateur entomologist like he is. This one’s probably a brown widow, Latrodectus geometricus. He has two of them pinned on his board.He turns right on his heels. “Give me a second,” he instructs. “I’ll trap it and take it outside.”“What?”“I don’t want to kill it.”He takes his sweet time to grab a class and a newspaper leaflet. He takes his even sweeter time to get the little guy to crawl onto the paper, whispering encouragement in the meanwhile. If Neil is bothered by him calling the spider a sweetheart, he doesn’t verbalize it. He just opens the window and watches.—BoneGirl02 slides into his DMs on a cold winter night, 3 in the morning.The profile picture is that of a pale woman with frizzy blondish-brown hair wearing a dark slip. The low angle makes her thin, severe features even more imposing.She opens with one sentence:BoneGirl02: Is Cornelius bothering you?Harry eloquently responds with:> ?????And then, a minute later:> Who are you? How did you know my roommate?BoneGirl02: He’s my ex.Really, now, Harry thinks. Mostly because he couldn’t understand why any woman, especially one that looks like her, would settle with him. As if reading his mind, she sends him several videos.BoneGirl2: Ask him about Billie, will you? I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten about me.The first thumbnail is a blur of pale flesh against a dark background. He clicks on it with trepidation.In the frame is Billie, dressed in a crochet star bikini and a black leather skirt, bobbing her head to the beat of obnoxiously loud electronic music, earrings swinging with the movement. She dances with the slight awkwardness of a girl who perhaps isn’t used to 6’ leather heels yet, but there is an elegance nonetheless to her sinuous body as she waves her long arms and somehow avoids spilling the colorful drink she’s holding in one hand. A veritable constellation of bruises dots her pale neck. Then, stepping into the frame, almost a head shorter: Cornelius.His coppery hair is cut closer to his nape than shoulder length, yes, and his beard is a little less full, but it’s undoubtedly him in all his ratty glory, dressed in a Hawaiian button up and a bass pro shop cap, looking so out of place besides this gorgeous, gorgeous woman that it’s comedic, really.The video is blurry. The darkness of the light club is mainly cut through by fuzzy neon lights. And yet, very clearly, Harry sees Billie bend down for a kiss, allowing herself to be maneuvered onto a barstool by Cornelius, who slides a hand below her top and fondles her small breast as they devour each other with drunken ravenousness.It lasts uncomfortably long. He thinks he can hear the wet noises of them licking into each other and moaning despite the music. By the time they finish pawing at each other with increasingly lowering hands and separate, Billie has a bit of a tent in her skirt, and Hickey has the remnants of her glittery lipstick smeared all over his lips and up in his mustache. He looks smug under the multicolored lights, and Billie, one strap of her bikini falling off of her thin, freckled shoulder, reaches for the camera.Harry is left reeling, looking at the final frame with an overlaid replay button for about thirty seconds before he could think straight. It takes him five more minutes to think of a good response to Billie. In the meanwhile, he downloads every video- just in case, he thinks. It’s for leverage.Harry: Alright. I believe you.Harry: What do you want?It takes her several days to answer.—One morning, Harry finds his morning routine interrupted. There’s some unidentifiable foul substance smeared on his toothbrush. It is immediately obvious who did it. He does not look Neil in the eye as he goes to work and buys a replacement on the bus ride home. Along the way, he makes a very particular purchase. And he makes sure that Cornelius is looking at him before he slides the box beneath his bed, and leaves his room unlocked when he goes out for work.He allows himself the satisfaction of ignoring Neil’s calls and comes home to a fuming roommate.“Well,” Harry shrugs, “it says live cockroaches. What did you expect?”Neil shakes his hands, almost incandescent with rage and panic. “For you to not have live fucking cockroaches in our apartment???”“I think that if you look at a box that says live cockroaches,” Harry argues, “It makes sense to expect that there’s live cockroaches in there. At least you didn’t release them- thank goodness there’s a second container, right?”Neil gives him A Look. It promises a lot of horrible and nasty things in the future. And then he turns on his heels and leaves.—“And you know, the woke mob isn’t ever going to be satisfied with this. You bend to their demands and all you’re going to get is an audience of- Oh, hey, Harry.”Neil swivels in his gaming chair to face his bleary roommate. On the screen, his PNGtuber avatar, a round-faced anime girl with bluish hair, briefly glitches out as he leaves his seat. It’s the third persona that he’s seen this man take in the past few months. Harry doesn’t cut much of a figure in his polka-dotted pajama set, but he hopes that there’s some authority in his voice.“It’s two in the morning,” Harry says. And then, a bit more loudly, “Mom says it’s way past your bedtime!”Neil glances between him and the screen. In his chat, someone is spamming racial slurs.“What are you talking about?”“You know,” Harry presses, “The bedtime? That we have to enforce, since you failed your precalc test?”“What the fuck are you talking about?”“You can’t keep doing this. Your mother and I are very worried about you, Jimmy. You need to focus on your future.”Neil closes the stream. “Why are you doing this? What’s the point of you trying to… to humiliate me in front of my audience?”“Well, Jimmy,” Harry says, trying his best to remain somber despite his obvious amusement, “I don’t know, maybe you should stop being such a snowflake.” And then he turns around, locks the door to his own room, puts on his noise-cancelling headphones, and tries his best to fall asleep.—For two whole days he does not see Neil at all. On the night of the third, he wakes up in the middle of the night from a dream that he cannot recall, and, in the middle of stumbling into the bathroom, finds Hickey already there. There’s a half empty vial of something on the sink counter that he’s injecting into himself. He rubs his eyes and tries to squint at the label.“...Are you doing drugs?”“No,” Hickey says, screwing his face into a scrunchy little frown.“Then what’s this?”“Uh,” he pauses. “Insulin?”“... You are not fooling me with this one.”“T?”“Like, testosterone?”Neil nods. He discards the syringe tip into the trash can and Harry cringes at his blatant disregard for safe sharps disposal.“Ah,” he said. “Right, figures.” If there were two things he knows about his roomate, it’s that he likes taking the easy way, and that he has no respect, especially for any sort of authority. He’s not surprised that the little ferret of a man has been involved in this sort of stuff; he probably boasts to his followers about his nonexistent gym regimen or something, too. It speaks to his laziness that he’s still this skinny, despite resorting to doping up, though to be honest he never quite understood the appeal of a bodybuilder’s physique. “But considering that you're probably getting it via less than legal means,” he bluffs, “I'd be careful if I were you.”“You don’t know if I’m committing a crime or not.”“Cornelius,” he deadpans. “I’ve seen you commit half a dozen crimes already.”“Such as?”“At least three kinds of fraud. Pirating. Uhhh… I don’t think you’re allowed to give weed to teens.”“There are no teens that I’m handing weed out to.”“Bobby?”“You have no evidence.”Harry opens his mouth. Closes it. Realizes that he’s being baited to steer the conversation away, and then gives himself a metaphorical pat on the head for realizing that.“Alright, alright, Jesus. No need to be threatening.” He held his hands up and threw out the most insincere, unthreatened expression ever, and then left. Harry blinks for a while and then remembers that there is an entire conversation that they should be having that they haven’t had yet, but by then, Neil had already walked out the door.—BoneGirl2: Here’s something you might want to see.[A portion of the transcript for the LobsterTalks Podcast episode 18: ”What is ‘Toxic Masculinity,’ Really? Ft. EveryoneCan”]Two long sofas are placed at a 90% angle, half facing each other and half facing the camera, each with two guys manspreading on them. Only HICKEY, sitting next to TOZER on the left sofa, is not wearing a red hoodie.TOZER: …So you get all these boys who all whine in their parents’ basements that they’re, like, not masculine enough because they’re 5’7 and shit, so they’re doomed to a life of being subhuman.HICKEY: Well some of them splinter off and say that they’re actually the real men.TOZER: What?HICKEY: It’s like the warrior king vs the philosopher king. They say that the, uh, “chads” are not real manly men or whatever because they don’t embody their values of masculinity, which is, like, stoicism, and having some arbitrarily high IQ and being “on the grind” as it is. Kind of like the opposite of these alpha gym rat bros I guess?TOZER: So basically we’ve got various subgroups of men who say that other men these days aren’t even real men.BRYANT: I mean, some of them aren’t wrong.PILKINGTON: Hm?BRYANT: Like with all the gender shit these days.Here, one can practically hear the record screech. There is a chill in the air felt even beyond the confines of the screen. BRYANT continues, unperturbed by the side glances he is receiving.BRYANT: I mean I don’t even know what real man’s supposed to be! You’ve got men who have periods. They, uh… they Men-strate. Well I guess that’s-Unintelligible mumbles are in the background. Then, ARMITAGE, the editor, steps into frame and whispers into TOZER’s ear.[end of clip]Harry: I don’t get why you’re sending me this.BoneGirl2: I don’t either tbhBoneGirl2: I’m like super high rn lolHarry: ?????BoneGirl2: god this is a fucking mistakeBoneGirl2: I missed him so badHarry: Are you alright?Harry: ?????—
When Neil comes back there’s a strange look on his face. Harry corners him in the kitchen.“What happened to your ex?”“Who- Billie?”“Yes, Billie?”“What the fuck didn’t happen to her?”“I mean- why is she texting me? While on drugs?”“Fuck if I know. Why would I care?”“Because you’re a misogynist. I know your type. You treat women like objects.”“Wha- since when was I misogynistic?”“Have you listened to the things you’re saying online? All that Andrew Tate, toxic masculinity stuff?”“Ohhh my god,” Neil says. “Jesus christ. First of all. I never, like, talked about women at all. I don’t even want anything to do with women. I’m not a misogynist. I’m so against objectifying women that when Billie transitioned I broke up with her. Second of all. Did you actually think I bought into that whole…. Alpha male grindset culture wars bullshit?”Harry, mouth open, wonders if it will be worth it to make him elaborate on the shit he’s saying about women. He decides against it. “Yes.”“Look, it’s a grift. I don’t believe any of it. I’m scamming them for money. I’m literally trans.”“I don’t believe you.”“What do you mean you don’t believe me? What- what??”“I’ve seen this all the time- you know, like, right wing guys who pretend to be trans women to-”Neil sighs. He reaches towards his shorts, and Harry panics before he sees that he didn’t whip his cock out- instead, he pulls it down, and then pulls down his boxers, too, and produces his packer. Now that he's got a better look at it, Harry can see that its color is slightly paler than Cornelius' actual skin tone. The shaft is about 4’ long, circumcised, and with a realistic pinkness to the tip. There’s a very nice vein molded into the silicone (or at least he presumes it’s silicone) and it makes his mouth water a bit.“Alright,” Harry says, “Alright, erm, look, I get it, I’m sorry for not believing you-” And Neil just doesn’t listen, he just keeps on taking his clothes off, until he’s completely fucking naked and Harry is trying his very best not to look at him at all. It’s rather difficult.“Seriously,” Neil says, “You are so fucking judgemental.”“You called me a slur on like my third day here!”“I call everyone slurs! I can use them!”“Well, I didn’t know!”“Well, now you do,” Neil says.Harry pauses. “Sorry.”“Alright.”“But also why are you doing this? There are thousands of other jobs where you don’t have to hate your own people-”“It’s easy,” he shrugs. “And also I need to save up for a real dick. Alright. Invasive question time’s over. My turn- You wanna keep your tits?”Harry looks down at his own chest, and actually thinks for a moment despite his instincts telling him to exit the conversation. Somehow, he’s never quite felt that distressed over them. They were a man’s breasts, plain and simple; hirsute, dusky-nippled, and, though not particularly attractive by conventional standards, they were his, and he liked them just fine. “Yes,” he decided. “But don’t call them tits.” Not now, anyhow; he’s not in the right headspace for that.“What about chest? Breasts? Badonkers, tatas, bosom, knockers, jugs, melons, milk-”“Can you please shut up?” He realizes the mistake a second too late.“Sure,” Hickey smiled lecherously. “There are far better things to do with my mouth. If you’re up to that, I mean.”“... Are you trying to fuck me now?”“Are you declining?”Harry looks up and down (naked!!!) man in front of him. “... No.” He's made several bad ideas already. What's one more?Cornelius cocks his head. "Good."—
“C'mon," Hickey murmurs into his ear, "let
papi
take care of you.”
“Ew. Gross. Is this what you told your ex?"
"Can we not talk about her right now I literally have my fingers in you.""No wonder why you two broke up, wow."