He cast another glance over his shoulder at the forest, half tempted to venture back in to try to negotiate a ride with the boys if they hadn’t buggered off already. But the risk of getting them all riled up and trigger-happy again didn’t sit well, so he discarded the idea.
“We need to go that way,” Zeke suddenly said.
David turned to face him, surprised at the confident tone. “How do you…” His voice trailed off as he followed Zeke’s gaze to the other side of the road.
Signboard. Genius.
“Okay. Let’s get moving.”
David started striding forward but halted again after three steps. He looked down at Zeke, who had stalled alongside him, and they shared a glance.
“We should change first,” David said.
Zeke nodded sullenly.
They moved back to the forest border and ducked behind a row of bushes, where they stripped to their underwear and exchanged clothes. As sodden and sticky as Zeke’s were, they were infinitely more comfortable in size, and David emerged from the bushes a happier man.
Happier—but not exactly happy.
“Any guesses how long it’ll take to walk?” David asked, his voice tight, as they resumed their brisk pace along the sidewalk.
Zeke let out a long breath, looking equally, if not more, stressed. “Um. I-I don’t know.” He dug a hand into his disheveled hair. “I think I have passed this area on a bus before, but walking…perhaps an hour.”
David increased his pace. “I need to be back in half an hour—or less if we can manage it.” He’d been pressed for time even before his housemates had snatched him. It killed him to think how much this was setting him back.
“You’re not the only one who needs to get back,” Zeke replied, his voice suddenly pitchy. “All this socializing is going to mess up my midterms. And if that happens, I swear, my parents will literally disown me.” He cursed, his breath becoming sharp and uneven. “You have no idea how hard they worked to get me here. All the after-school tuition. Practically their life savings—” His voice choked up, and David turned to stare at his friend in surprise.
He’d known Zeke was under a lot of pressure. The guy had a large and highly ambitious family back home—and he often griped about the lofty expectations they had of him. David was used to his mood swings, too, and his habit of looking mournful and depressed almost every time he sat down to work.
But he’d never seen Zeke looking quite this…flustered. Judging from the glisten at the corners of his eyes and the slight tremor of his lower lip, he was close to tears.
David reached out to grip his shoulder. “Hey, man. It’s okay. You’ll pull through this. We both will.”
Zeke bit down hard on his lip, his eyes fixing stoically ahead, and David tried to think of what more he could say—or even if he should say more, at this point.
David wasn’t exactly in the same boat as Zeke, performance-wise. Because he had no family pressure. No family at all, actually…
He’d been adopted by a middle-aged British-Israeli couple when he was only a month old and raised by them until his late teens. His mother had passed away after a stroke when David was seventeen, and his father had died of lung cancer a couple of years later.
And he didn’t know who his birth parents were, because it had been a closed adoption. The only thing his adoptive parents knew was that he’d been born in Boston, where they had been living at the time. They’d brought David back to London when he was two, and England had been his home for the rest of his childhood and adolescence.
That was one of the reasons David had worked so hard to get a scholarship at Harvard. He’d wanted to get back to America. He’d planned to take economics as his major, anyway, and he had never been one to settle for second best when a bit more effort would get him to first. His adoptive father had always encouraged him to push for greatness, and David had worked hard to make him proud. But more than that, now that the parents who’d raised him were gone, the UK no longer held enough for him.
Once he got a better handle on his classes, David wanted to try to pick up his birth parents’ trail. He was profoundly grateful for the parents who’d raised him and the incredible start to life they’d given him, but now, he just…wanted to know who he was.
His mother had always said he was probably Jewish, but he knew it had been out of affection, that she didn’t have any solid reason for assuming it. He’d been brought up in an ethnic Jewish background, but was that his culture? Who was David Rosen, actually?
He wanted to understand. He wanted to know whose ocean-blue eyes he had. Why his skin was a pale shade of olive. Why his hair was a dark mocha brown, and where he got his height from—his mother, his father, both? At six feet, he’d towered over Mr. and Mrs. Rosen. Did he share any personality traits with his birth parents? Or was every little part that made him him solely a product of his environment?
Why had his parents given him away? Had they ever wanted him, or had he been a burden from the start?
As uncomfortable as the answers might be, they were his story. His truth, which he’d been deprived of for the past twenty-one-years.
More than anything, he wanted to finally stop feeling secretly jealous of people like Zeke, who knew exactly where they came from and whose blood ran so clearly through their veins. And he wanted to fill the hole that had been growing steadily larger since he lost both his adoptive parents. They’d grounded him with a sense of belonging as a child, and while he’d never felt a true sense of identity, they’d loved him fiercely, and that had been enough.
But now they were gone, and he felt like a bit of a drifter, honestly. He’d lost that grounding, and he wanted…needed…to find it again. Without knowing his roots, the people who had brought him into this world, he struggled to make sense of his place in it. A part of him would always be restless, forever wondering. Never feeling quite full.
David rarely bothered to bring the subject up with anyone and kept things simple by sticking with the identity he’d inherited from his adoptive parents. It was hard to explain his conflicting feelings to someone who’d grown up surrounded by their birth family, knowing exactly who they were.
Well, that, and he worried he’d sound melodramatic…
“Maybe I’ll just drop out,” Zeke said after a long stretch of silence, his voice low and still a touch uneven. “It might be less painful for everyone than staying on and making a spectacle of myself…”
David cast a glance at his friend, whose hands had clenched into balls of tension, and sighed. “Come on, Zeke. You’re not doing that badly. Like I said, we’ll both bitch about the stress, but we’ll get through it. Besides, you’ve got to stick around for Primal Scream. Nur would never forgive you if you don’t.”
Zeke slanted him a coy look. “Shut up. She doesn’t like me.”
David grinned at the rising flush in Zeke’s cheeks, glad that this tactic seemed to be working. “How are you so sure of that?” he wondered aloud. “I saw her checking you out yesterday when we were in the lunch line.”
Zeke groaned. “Oh, stop it. She was probably looking at somebody else.”
David shrugged. “Alright. If you insist. I’m just saying, there’s stuff to hang on for. Good times to come.”
Zeke went quiet, once more turning his gaze to the road ahead, and after examining him for a couple more seconds, David took the opportunity to do the same. They’d made fairly good progress, and they were already back in familiar territory—which made it easier to travel faster.
Fifteen minutes of speed-walking later, and they were only a block away from home.
As they reached the end of their road, Zeke cleared his throat, and David looked over at him again. His expression wasn’t quite as ashen as before, to David’s relief, and when he caught David’s eye, a smile slowly unfurled on his lips, brightening his round face.
