Fisherman’s Friend - The most powerful throat lozenge known to man, and also the most foul tasting. In grade seven, we played a game that involved seeing who could hold a Fisherman’s Friend in their mouth the longest before they had to spit it out.

Melted snow ran sluggishly from Erik’s damp hair, down his face and into his eyes. He blinked the cold moisture away rapidly as small groups of loud students moved past him, impatient to be somewhere else. He knocked a foot against the wall, ridding one damp boot of a clump of dirty slush, and, irrationally cursed his friends. It had been their idea to meet in the bowels of the Physics Building, a place Erik never had to enter, in a lounge Erik didn’t know the location of. Erik wouldn’t even know the location of the student lounge in the Arts Building, except for the fact that it was right next to his and Ray’s English class. He passed it every day. Sometimes Ray napped on one of the couches.

Erik’s Greek civilization class had finished twenty minutes ago. Fifteen of those minutes had been spent wandering around in a daze, trying to find the Physics’ lounge. A lot of time would have been saved if they’d met at Ash and Dustin’s dorm. That was where they were going to end up, after all. But Ash had not-so-subtly implied that with Ray as a lab partner, the three would be lucky to finish their experiment within the time limit. That wasn’t even taking the write up into account. So Erik had caved in and agreed. As usual.

Ray said Erik was too agreeable, even by Canadian standards, and he let everybody walk all over him. Erik denied this, mostly because Ray being right about such things was a terrifying thought. As he peeled off his gloves, Erik vowed to prove Ray wrong.

Some other time.

Right now, Erik was more worried about the sheet of damp pink paper that he had in one hang. It was the nagging reminder about the upcoming need for lease renewal in King Place. Like they were somehow psychically connected, it’s arrival had quickly followed the phone call from his parents telling him he had to decide for himself what he wanted to do about living arrangements in the coming year. The chance to finally escape a lunatic roommate without filling out fifty different forms. Not getting into stupid discussions with Ray at the moment was key if he was actually going to talk about the situation with his roommate and explain things.

But first, to find said roommate.

He pushed the door to the lounge open and entered with a sigh. It was essentially deserted, probably because of how difficult it was to find, and seemed to have all the same trappings the Arts lounge had, so Erik didn’t know why they couldn’t have met somewhere else. Somewhere that was located on a campus map. There was a small fridge, padlocked, and the usual array of vending machines: salt and sugar, sugar and caffeine, caffeine and mud. A couple of cheap, torn couches with fake leather upholstery in such appetizing and soothing colours as shit brown, vomit orange, and pus yellow.

Ash O’Hara was lounging on the vomit orange one, using his jacket as a pillow. He was flipping through a physics textbook that was probably his own, since it showed no sign of having been thrown out the apartment window during a snow storm by an irate Ray.

Dustin and Ray were sitting on the floor by a low table. They were absorbed in the task of building something that looked like a cross between a castle, a spaceship, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Out of Lego. Erik was fairly certain Lego did not lie around in most student lounges.

The sight of his best friend sitting on the floor playing silently with plastic blocks in brilliant primary colours was, he suspected, not nearly as strange as it should have been. Nor was it that odd to see his roommate, the self-proclaimed ninja, doing the same. Possibly there was another eighteen-year-old, somewhere on campus at that very moment, who went to classes and out with girls and to parties, for whom the sight of Dustin McCloud and Ray Fujimoto playing with Lego would have been surprising and maybe even a bit disturbing.

Some days, Erik really envied him.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Erik asked as he crumpled the notice and shoved it into his back pocket, temporarily put aside in favour of understanding the odd assembly of Lego.

“A pre-historic flying death citadel,” Ray answered absently as he attached a bright blue block to the construct.

Of course.

Ash rolled his eyes expressively and sat up, closing his textbook. He looked put upon, which Erik thought was rather unfair, since Ash only lived with Dustin, who was quiet, and not Ray, who was . . . the opposite of quiet. “You’re late,” said Ash, in a tone of voice that made it clear he blamed Erik for the pre-historic flying death citadel.

“We’ve been done lab for ages,” Ray added unnecessarily. Unless there was an ongoing project powered by the lunatics who frequented the Physics lounge, the pre-historic flying death citadel gave Erik a very good idea of how long his friends had been done their lab.

“Lucky you,” Erik responded sourly.

“What kept you?” Ray asked, prying two blocks apart by digging his fingernails underneath.

“I got lost.”

“What, on campus?” Ray asked with disbelief at the same time Ash said, “Moron.”

Dustin’s eyebrows rose.

Erik ignored him. “Some of us don’t have classes down here,” he said simply.

“Your loss,” Ash said, standing up smoothly and grabbing his bag from the floor.

“Poor Thor,” Ray said with a grin. He stood up, abandoning the pre-historic flying death citadel. After he picked up his bag and jacket in one hand, he clapped Erik sympathetically on one shoulder. Erik looked down at Ray warily and leaned as far from his roommate as he could without falling over. “Have mercy on our poor Thor– ”

Our? Erik’s eyebrows rose, skepticism and paranoia increasing.

“He’s young– ”

“I’m only six months younger than you, moron.”

“He’s innocent– ”

Erik glared.

“Clueless– ”

“Could you not defend me, Ray?”

“And it would be horrible if he got lost down here like that poor engineering major.” Ray turned soulful brown eyes on Ash. “Still wandering around, trying to find his class, after all these years– ”

“That’s just a stupid campus legend. Where do you pick this shit up, Ray?”

“That’s another building, anyway,” Ash put in. His tone was wearied. Ray had that effect on people sometimes and Ash most of the time.

“And it doesn’t matter because it’s just a legend,” Erik said, finally shaking off Ray’s hand and moving to tap the top of Dustin’s head. Dustin pressed three red blocks onto what Erik thought was the Tyrannosaurus’ head before standing up, empty handed. Notes were a foreign concept to Dustin.

“Legends have to start somewhere,” Ray persisted, apparently unaware that Ash’s increasing irritation was moving further from sharp words and closer to punching people.

“Yes. Bad architectural design,” Ash growled, slinging his bag over his neck and shoulder. This left his hands dangerously free.

“All the more reason we should make Thor a map next time.” Ray was warming to his subject. “A really good one, with helpful arrows and lots of pretty colours. We could laminate it. I know this art major– ”

“Next time we can meet in the Cove,” Erik said firmly, clamping a hand around Ray’s mouth. Meeting in the campus arcade might mean it would take all three of them to drag Ray out, but at least it was easy to find.

Ash nodded approvingly, probably because of Erik’s method for shutting Ray up. His disdain toward the Cove was well known. “Let’s go,” he said simply.

Erik set down the controller, which he hadn’t needed for the last twenty minutes anyway, and accepted the bag of microwave popcorn from Dustin. Hanging out in Ash and Dustin’s dorm invariably involving two things: videogames and snack food. The videogames tended to be the sort that could be played by at least four people simultaneously, because Ash liked to play even though he said games rotted the brain and encouraged inactivity, if only so he could kick everyone’s ass. This, he said, was further evidence of brain rot on their part. As far as Erik was concerned, basing an argument about videogames on titles which involves words like Smash, Smackdown, Xtreme, and Mega Death Explosion was a little weak. Especially when Ash was playing against Dustin, who fell asleep in the middle of games, Ray, who often took a kamikaze approach to fighting games, and war games, and racing games, and essentially ever kind of game imaginable, and himself, an obsessive and clumsy button masher.

Sensibly, Erik pointed none of this out to Ash. He wanted the use of both arms when it was time for a rematch. He ate a piece of popcorn while he waited.

It tasted like Styrofoam.

Working a bit of popcorn out of his teeth with his tongue, Erik looked in the bag. Inside the yellow-spotted paper were nothing but bleak white popped kernels. He shook the bag a bit, trying to mix the contents and plucked another piece without much hope. This one was white on one side and sickly orange on the other. The orange couch in the physics’ lounge was a more appetizing colour. If he squinted, the brownish vomit orange was almost the same colour as the marmalade his Welsh grandmother made. While Erik was personally of the opinion that being forced to eat toast and marmalade was his grandmother’s way of punishing him for being a massive disappointment, his own mother ate the stuff without so much as a twitch. That made the marmalade technically food.

The only thing he could think of that might be the same shade of orange as the one half of the popcorn would require being approached while wearing radiation suits.

He ate it anyway.

It tasted like lubricated Styrofoam.

Unlike the videogames, there was nothing predictable about the snack food provided during gaming sessions.

Erik chewed slowly, swallowed, and passed the bag to Ray.

Ray had also been knocked out of the game, after driving his car through a stack of oil barrels and off the bridge. His loss hadn’t put him in a foul mood, because he had lasted longer than Erik. He was content to sit on the floor, between Erik’s right foot and Dustin’s left, and watch Dustin and Ash speed forward, dodging around tempting and combustible obstacles. He took the bag of popcorn from Erik with his usual grin and ate with gusto.

It was about six months since Erik and Ray had become roommates, and Erik still couldn’t decide if Ray’s enthusiastic appetite suggested a universal appreciation for all food after having lived in several different countries or that Ray had absolutely no sense of taste. There was the incident with the grass jelly, after all.

When the next attack of cold and flu blew through Saskatoon, Erik planned on trying Ray on Fisherman’s Friend. A last ditch attempt to gauge his roommate’s taste buds. Until that lucky opportunity presented itself, Erik was content to sit on the couch watching the television screen, and didn’t ask for the popcorn bag back.

Ash and Dustin were still playing, Dustin presumably kept awake by the infrequent explosions of AI controlled cars, when someone knocked loudly on the door. As usual, none of the boys made a move for the door, although Ash’s gaze flickered away from the game long enough to look menacingly in the general direction of the sound.

The knock came again. Still no one moved. Ash swore under his breath, but Erik knew it was just preparatory cursing. He wouldn’t really get up until the fifth or sixth knock.

Between the fourth and fifth knock, the door to the bedroom that wasn’t shared by Dustin and Ash opened, and an impatient looking First Nations girl came out. She was barefoot, wearing a long brown skirt and a thin top that was on backwards. Her hair was done in a collection of skinny braids, with multicoloured ribbons twined in with the dark strands of hair. She flicked half-a-dozen over her shoulder irritably as she walked loudly from the bedroom to the door and flung it open.

Erik watched her with his jaw hanging open as she spoke impatiently with a lethargic pizza boy. Of course, there was always a girl coming out to get a stack of pizza boxes none of the boys had ordered –

“I didn’t know Bob had ordered pizza,” Ash said.

– and the source of the pizza was always Bob Mackenzie.

“You were out,” the girl said as she shut the door. Ribbons in pastel pink, neon yellow, and peacock green flew over her shoulder. “Bob ordered these for you anyway,” she added, dumping two boxes unceremoniously on the floor.

“Hi, Justine,” Erik said, after the pizza boxes landed with a muted thump.

From the floor, Ray’s attention left the artificial carnage and focussed on the scene behind him with a curious expression on his round face.

Ash, having less attention to spare, simply arched one eyebrow and didn’t bother to look at Erik or the impatient, hair-flipping Justine.

Dustin executed an impossible manoeuver over a car that had just burst into flames.

“Oh,” said Justine in a flat voice. “Hi Erik. Dustin.” She had shown more emotion talking to the pizza boy.

“I like what you’ve done with your hair,” Erik said.

“Yeah, well.” Flip. “Later.” With another hair flip, this one full of orange and mauve, Justine returned to the bedroom with her pizzas.

After a minute, Erik said, “That was Justine.”

“Really?” said Ash and Ray at the same time, with the same degree of dryness. They shot each other startled looks, and Ash’s car went into a ditch.

“And what’s a Justine?” Ray asked, clearing his throat and watching Ash for signs of an echo.

“Justine Ratt. She was in school with me and Dustin. Since kindergarten.”

Dustin’s eyebrows rose as he finally looked away from the game.

Erik glared. “And I asked her to be my date for grad,” he said darkly.

Dustin coughed.

“Shut the hell up! I was not!”

“Ah, young love,” Ray said with his thickest Italian accent, and sighed over-dramatically.

Erik threw a piece of popcorn that had fallen between the cushions at Ray’s head. It bounced off harmlessly, but Ray didn’t try something gross like catching it on the rebound with his tongue.

“So, what happened? Crazy grad partying, getting intimate in the back seat of your – no, wait, check – her car, only to be torn apart by an irate father?”

Erik stared at Ray in disbelief.

“Danni went through a trashy romance novel phase when she was eleven,” Ray said. “I used to steal them and read passages aloud to piss her off.” He smiled benignly at Erik and waved a hand. “Carry on, carry on.”

“She said no,” Erik said oppressively, giving Ray’s grinning face a dirty look.

There was a sharp exhalation from Dustin that might almost have been a snort of amusement.

“There were only seventeen guys in our graduating class. Twenty-nine girls. She went with Dan Sheephook.”

“Rugged,” said Ray irrepressibly.

“He lost an eye in grade five. Had to wear an eyepatch.”

“Never underestimate the appeal of a pirate,” Ray said.

Erik kicked him.

Ash laughed, but it was hard to tell if it was because of Ray’s pirate comment, or the subsequent sight of Ray rolling away from Erik’s kick, holding his side and laughing.

“So she’s Justine who turned you down for a pirate/lumberjack hybrid,” Ray said when he’d regained his breath. “She’s hot,” he added, as though that was somehow going to be consoling. “In a folky, New Agey kind of way.”

Erik inhaled, counted to ten, and exhaled. Then he turned to look across Dustin at Ash. “What’s she doing here?”

“Bob,” Ash said.

Erik went red and Ray burst into gales of laughter again. “Bob,” Erik echoed. “Bob who buys you pizza and keeps you in beer. Bob the third year. Bob living in that room.” He pointed at the door Justine had shut loudly behind her when she left.

Dustin nodded, his face blank.

“That’s the guy,” Ash said, putting his controller down and standing up. “Ar we done with this? Because I want to get some homework done before I go teach.” Ash had a part-time job teaching small children – and everyone pointedly did not comment on this – karate at a dojo on Broadway. He made a substantial amount of money doing so, but since he rarely socialized, no one knew what he did with it. One night Ray had theorized that the money all went to help fund Ash’s ultimate project – a machine to make people grow taller. Erik had recognized this as jealousy on Ray’s part, because no one in their right mind would ever let Ray teach impressionable children anything, especially if it involving hitting people or anything remotely ninja-like. Leaving this unvocalized, Erik had simply said that if Ray brought this theory up around Ash, nothing in the world would move Erik to save Ray’s life.

“Invisible Bob,” Ray said, once Ash was sitting at the desk and out of immediate punching radius.

“Huh?” Ash said without looking up.

“That guy’s Invisible Bob,” Ray persisted. “That’s what Thor and I always call him.”

“Invisible Bob,” Ash said flatly as he opened a textbook.

Dustin reached behind the couch and picked up one of the pizza boxes, flipping it open. Erik surveyed the greasy cheese, the unrecognizable curls of vegetables, and the charred bits of beef before taking a piece and chewing slowly. It might not provide much in the way of nourishment, unless it was being compared to microwave popcorn, but it would provide a good excuse not to get involved if Ray’s persistent comments about Invisible Bob provoked Ash to violence.

“It’s true, though. I mean, there aren’t any pictures of him or anything out here.”

“How do you know that?” Ash asked repressively, wrestling with his calculator and some graph paper.

“Well,” Ray mused as he grabbed a piece of pizza. “I know those ones can’t be him because Thor and Dustin are in them, and Thor thinks Bob’s invisible too.”

Erik took another bite of pizza.

“Those ones– ” Ray pointed to a couple pictures near the desk. “– have no one who could possibly be named Bob in them. That one has you in it . . .” He tilted his head and stood up, chewing on his slice of pizza, and moved closer to look at the photos. “I guess the guy in this one could be a Bob,” he pointed to a photo containing, among other things, a tall boy with sandy hair and a charming smile.

“It’s not,” Ash growled, and Ray made a quick retreat to the couch, perching on the arm next to Erik.

Erik resisted the urge to push Ray over.

“Bob’s a private person.”

“He never comes out of his bedroom.”

“Really private.”

“Not that private,” said Ray as a girl who definitely wasn’t Justine came out of Bob’s room and left in silence.

“It’s really none of our business what he does. We just share the place. Just because random chance sees fit to assign you to living quarters with a guy doesn’t mean you even have to talk to him,” Ash glared pointedly at Erik as he said this.

Erik scowled and ate his pizza.

“I’m just saying it’s kind of suspicious, that’s all. Creepy. Unnatural,” Ray said calmly, either oblivious to or choosing to cheerfully ignore Ash’s heavily implied insult.

“Ray’s right,” Erik said after he swallowed a particularly painful lump of pizza. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Erik regretted them. Ash turned a killing glare on him, and he only continued after assuring himself that Ash would never kill someone in front of witnesses. Probably. “It’s weird enough that it is kind of like he’s invisible.” The look on Ash’s face suggested that now was not the time to admit that he and Ray had been making references to Invisible Bob since October.

“There’s no such thing as invisible people,” Ash said. The pencil poised above the graph paper was beginning to bend dangerously, clenched in Ash’s tense fingers.

“Ash, we didn’t mean– ” Erik began, exasperated with Ash’s obtuseness when it came to Ray’s absurd sense of humour.

“Good point. The man has a good point, Thor.” Ray drummed his fingers on the top of Erik’s head until Erik swatted the gloved hand away. The drumming fingers moved innocently to the back of the couch as Ray thought. “Invisible Bob is a silly theory. It’s far more sensible to assume that there is no Bob. He’s obviously a front for the lesbian orgy webcam business you and Dustin– ”

The pencil snapped. Ash hurled one half at Ray’s head and the other half, the half with the sharpened lead, at Erik. “Get out you fucking morons,” Ash said pleasantly. He reached for another pencil and took aim.

Erik began protesting. “Ash, I didn’t– ”

Ash pulled his arm back in warning. “Out,” he reminded, teeth bared in the parody of a grin.

Lethargically, Dustin got off the couch. He moved slowly to the door while Ray grabbed Erik, who was still trying to put together a coherent defence of his sanity, with one hand and their bags and jackets with the other. Dustin opened the door for them and handed Erik their boots just as Ray dodged into the hallway and Ash let the pencil fly. It flew between Erik and Dustin and embedded itself in the side of the door, vibrating. Erik ran.

“If you wouldn’t provoke him like that,” Erik grumbled as he and Ray trudged through the snow. Their escape from Ash and the dormitory, with Ray laughing as he ran and Erik swearing, had earned them dozens of strange looks from the dormitory residences. They had gotten at least five more when they had realized they were running outside in the snow, Erik still carrying their boots, and had sprinted back inside, shivering.

“I wasn’t provoking. I was speculating. Legitimate speculation. Ash is just wound too tight. Tighter than you, sometimes.” Ray grinned, walking intentionally through drifts as high as his knees.

“Ash had to put up with you for a three hour lab. That would excuse anyone being a bit tense.”

“You make it sound like a stressful thing, Thor. It was an easy lab. We were just measuring the half-life of a barium isotope.”

Erik frowned, grabbing a tree branch for balance as he crossed a patch of well-trodden snow made nearly frictionless by the feet of hundreds of students. Fuzzy memories of high school chemistry that didn’t involve the robot chicken floated through his mind. “Doesn’t that mean it’s radioactive or something?”

In the darkness, Ray’s teeth reflected the gleam of a nearby streetlight as he grinned hugely.

“Shit, man, a saint would be ready to snap if they had to be in the same room as you and a radioactive substance.”

Ray hummed something that sounded like the Spider-man theme song, linking his arms behind his head.

“Dork,” Erik said, and gave Ray a shove that, unfortunately, wasn’t strong enough to send him toppling into the snow.

“Harsh words, Thor, harsh words.” Ray clucked his tongue disapprovingly.

Erik snorted with laughter, mis-stepped, and went crashing to the ground with a yelp.

“And that’s why I walk in the snow,” Ray said as he helped Erik up. “Snow’s fun. Ice is like a deadly frost ninja. A lot less fun than snow, especially when you fall on it. You okay?”

“Eh,” Erik shrugged, brushing snow off the back of his coat and pants.

“You’re welcome to join me in the drifts,” Ray offered, kicking a bit of snow onto the sidewalk to clear himself a path.

“No thanks, man.”

“Your socks are already wet,” Ray said, but they’re already started walking again, Erik on the icy sidewalk and Ray in the snow that had gathered in high piles beside it. Occasionally Ray balanced on a hard chunk of snow mixed with dirt and gravel that had been scraped off the road which inevitably collapsed under his weight.

“So, if he isn’t invisible, what is he?”

“Eh?”

“Bob. If he isn’t invisible, there must be some reason why we never see him.”

“Ray– ”

“You don’t think it’s the lesbian orgy webcam thing, do you? Because if Dust and Ash were hiding something like that from us, I’d be hurt.”

In the darkness, Erik grinned helplessly. “I don’t think it’s a lesbian orgy webcam business, Ray.”

“Although that would explain how they could afford all that stuff . . .”

“Dustin’s rich, that’s how they can afford it. I don’t suppose it’s possible that this Bob guy is just very private?” Erik asked, dry for the sake of playing Ray’s straight man.

“If it weren’t for all those girls, I’d believe it. But what kind of quiet, private guy has girls going in and out of his bedroom all day?”

“A lucky one?”

“No, there’s some other explanation.” Ray stumbled, caught himself against a tree, and gathered a handful of snow before continuing. “Something that explains their constant supply of alcohol.”

“Maybe they bumped the real Bob off and now they’re running some kind of all-female study group from his room. And they get paid in beer – some of those girls look old enough to be graduate students.” A bicycle approached, going slowly on the slippery sidewalk, and Erik reluctantly moved into the snowdrifts next to Ray.

“Now you’re thinking!” Ray exclaimed delightedly. “Except there’s not nearly enough sex in your idea.”

Erik, already red from the cold air, went redder. “Does everything have to involve sex, Ray?”

“You have seen what the girls who come out of there look like, right?”

Erik swallowed loudly. “Yeah.”

“There you are, then. Sex. But your idea started out good, with the whole Bob-killing thing– ”

“Thanks,” Erik said, his dryness a bit more real at his roommate’s approval of this gruesome prospect. He stepped back onto the sidewalk, trailing snow behind him for several steps.

“– and Dust could easily figure out a way to kill Bob and dispose of the body without anyone finding out. I mean, he’s an eccentric genius, right? That’s what they do.”

“Riiight,” Erik said. “So after the body’s been, I dunno, hidden in a kiln in the Art Building or something– ”

“Yeah!” Ray pumped a fist delightedly in the air.

“– what do they use his room for?”

“An orgy room for the lesbian girls in the dorm?” Ray suggested brightly.

Erik smacked Ray in the back of the head. “No more playing in the gutter for you.”

Ray laughed. “Maybe we’re looking in entirely the wrong direction. Maybe there never was a Bob.”

“No lesbian orgy webcam, remember Ray?”

“I know that!” Ray said indignantly. “Give me some credit, Thor. I’m thinking way bigger than a webcam.” He spread his arms wide, trying to indicate just how big his new theory was.

“Oh?” Erik asked warily, stepping to the side to avoid being hit by Ray’s hand.

“I’m thinking secret spy organization! The KGB! James Bond! Mission Impossible! The Man from U.N.C.L.E.– ”

“Get Smart?”

Ray ignored him. “Only with hot girls – ”

“Instead of Sean Connery or Don Adams?”

“Would you stop interrupting, Thor?”

Erik grinned. “Sorry.”

“A secret spy organization made up of hot girls, and the entryway to their secret base of operations under Place Riel.”

Erik tactfully didn’t point out that there were already a lot of things under Place Riel.

“Obviously, B.O.B. is just an acronym for their organization.”

‘What kind of acronym?”

For a moment, Ray was stymied. Then he shrugged. “A sexy spy one, obviously.”

“Bouncing Otherworldly Beauties?” Erik offered helpfully.

“That sounds like something involving aliens. B.O.B. doesn’t involve aliens. Bedding Over the Border, maybe.”

“That sounds like we’re getting into lesbian orgy territory again. Or at least international hookers.”

“Well, obviously there’s a lot of unresolved sexual tension of the lesbian variety between hot female spies.”

“You didn’t get out much as a kid, did you, Ray?”

“Just don’t talk to me about television in Moscow.”

Erik mulled B.O.B. over in his mind for a few minutes. Dustin could have come up with the perfect explanation in seconds. “Beautiful and Overpowering Bounty Hunters?” he tried.

“Is bounty hunter one word?” Ray asked critically.

“Dunno. Might be.”

“But they’re spies, not bounty hunters.’

“Hot female spies probably don’t appreciate being put into boxes like that.”

“Good point,” Ray nodded slowly. “I guess it’ll do for now. It’s not like we need to know what it stands for or anything. The important thing is we know the truth now.” He tossed the chunk of snow from hand to hand.

“And I suppose we can never let Ash and Dustin know we know?”

“Are you kidding? We’d be killed by a couple of hot female spies before we even blinked. And while that certainly isn’t a bad way to go, I’d kind of like to get into law school before someone kills me.”

“And if you could choose, you’d die at the hands of a hot ninja chick.”

“Naturally.” Ray turned and walked backwards, grinning up at Erik.

Erik grinned back, marvelling at Ray’s ability to walk backwards in knee-high snow without falling on his ass or stumbling into an innocent pedestrian.

Then Ray let the ball of snow he’d been playing with fly, hitting Erik in the face.

Erik spluttered. He spat out snow. He wiped snow off his face with the sleeve of his jacket and blinked snow frantically off his eyelashes.

Ray was running through the snow, dodging other, less insane, pedestrians. He went past the path that turned off toward King Place.

Erik considered his options as people walked around him. Then, he bent, gathered a handful of snow dirtied with road sludge, and ran after Ray.

Ray’s supposed ninja training carried him through the snow with remarkable speed, but Erik had the advantages of an extra foot of height that made the snow drifts less of a hindrance and seventeen years worth of northern winters. He steadily overtook his roommate. When Ray was within arm’s reach, Erik grabbed him and shoved the dirty snow down the back of Ray’s jacket. He tackled the shorter boy into the heaps of snow around Diefenbaker Place’s playground, laughing. Ray, after his initial, snow-induced yelp, laughed too, and wrestled with Erik fiercely until Erik was lying on his back, red-faced and gasping for breath.

“Pax?” Ray offered, holding out his hand. His head was bare – his toque had fallen off when Erik tackled him and now lay a few feet away in the snow.

“Pax?” Erik echoed weakly, taking Ray’s hand.

“It means ‘peace’, dumbass. Latin.” Ray looked smug and straightened, sitting on Erik’s stomach.

“They don’t teach Latin in schools here.” Erik gasped as Ray’s weight drove the air out of his lungs. “But pax, definitely pax. Now let me up. You’re heavy.”

Ray grinned, releasing Erik’s hand and standing up. He swayed slightly, but he looked exhilarated. His eyes positively gleamed in the darkness. “I expected more from you, Northern boy.”

“I expected better aim from a ninja,” Erik countered faintly as he scrambled to his feet.

“I got you right in the face!” Ray protested.

“But a good ninja would have been able to knock my toque off.” Erik bent and picked Ray’s red and black toque off the ground, shaking snow from it. He tossed it lightly to Ray, who caught it and put it in his pocket.

“I haven’t been trained in the fine art of snowball throwing.”

“You lived in Moscow. I know there’s snow in Russia.”

Ray grinned. He affected a Russian accent and said, “In Soviet Russia, snowball– ”

“Don’t finish that, or I’ll make you eat the stuff that went down your back.”

“Like you could.” Ray grinned impishly at Erik and made his way to the plain swing set. Unlike the rest of the playground equipment set up for the kids living in Diefenbaker, it and a lone, snow-covered basketball hoop weren’t fenced in.

“We should probably go inside and change, or this stuff won’t dry,” Erik said, following Ray.

“We have time,” said Ray, and fell lazily into one of the dirty, snow-covered canvas swings.

Erik snorted in disbelief, but wrapped an arm around one leg of the swing set’s metal frame and slithered into a crouching position in the snow. He was staring at the barely visible outlines of snowmen and half-demolished forts made by the kids in Diefenbaker or drunken students, when Ray said, “Did you see the notices about lease renewal?”

Erik blinked. Aside from the copy still crumpled in his back pocket, the bright pink notices had been slipped under every apartment door and were posted on every floor. There were copies on the laundry room door, inside the elevators, in the hall, and, almost as an afterthought, on the main notice board. There, it was nearly hidden by lists of used textbooks and furniture for sale, requests for roommates, advertisements for bands playing in the University bar, flyers offering to teach English while studying the Bible and saving one’s immortal soul, and twice as many papers written in languages Erik didn’t read and Ray never translated. “Of course,” he said. It was impossible to miss them, even if you got distracted by someone selling a printer-scanner combo for fifteen dollars, as the notice in his pocket showed.

“You thought about it at all?” Ray asked, pushing his feet lightly against the ground and releasing, but never gaining enough momentum to swing for long.

“Dunno. Sort of, a bit. But not that much,” he lied. “I mean, our lease doesn’t expire until April. It feels like a long way away.” Erik pushed some of the snow in front of him into a little mountain.

“I guess we could go on Friday or something, and you could opt out so you and Dustin could get a place and I could put in for a new roommate.” Ray scuffed a boot on the ground, kicked a bit, but the swing didn’t really move.

“That wouldn’t work,” said Erik firmly.

“Why not? You and Dust are best friends, right, and you say he’s loaded . . .” Ray trailed off, waving one hand vaguely in a way that was apparently meant to indicate Dustin’s vast fortune.

“Not independently wealthy, moron. It’s his parents’ money.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“His parents would never let us share a place. I’m a Bad Influence.”

Ray snorted loudly and leaned back in the swing so his head brushed the ground. “You?”

“So they say.” Erik made a face, flicking a bit of snow at Ray’s pant leg.

“And Ash and Invisible B.O.B. are so much better?”

“They’ve never met Ash or Bob. And Ash and Bob never nearly burned their house down.”

Ray swung upright and stared at Erik in disbelief.

“It was an accident. We were seven!”

“Arson, Thor? And at such a young age, too. Here I was, all ready to put those stories about you eating babies to rest, and you admit to something like this. I should have known.” Ray leaned forward, poking Erik between the eyes. “You have the facial structure of a born criminal, Thor.”

“Ray!” Erik half-groaned, half-laughed, and brushed Ray’s hand away. He gave the swing Ray was on a shove to send his roommate in the opposite direction.

“So Dustin’s out of the question, then.”

“Yeah.”

“And I suppose you can’t afford your own place.”

“There’s a reason I’m living in the Park, Ray. The only way to get cheaper is by living in a cardboard box.”

“You could put in for a single. Every other floor has them, I think,” Ray suggested. “If you’re fast, you might get lucky.”

Erik thought about the one time he’d been given a room to himself, when visiting his grandparents in Ontario. Collin had been put in the same room as their parents, because he was only three, and Rowen had gotten a room by herself. In the quiet, unfamiliar room, thousands of kilometres from home, Erik had been restless and miserable, unable to sleep without the sound of someone else breathing in the same room. He’d been forced to creep through the dark hallway and go into Rowen’s room, climbing into her bed and sleeping there, with her grumbling disparaging remarks the entire time. He shook his head. “That . . . really wouldn’t work, I think.”

“You want to flip for 306, then? One of us can renew the lease, the other one can get assigned a new apartment?”

Erik looked at Ray out of the corner of one eye. Ray who said he was a ninja. Ray who stole food and damaged apartment property. Ray who rarely attended classes, got perfectly acceptable marks, and was prone to attacks of nearly catatonic depression. Ray who was, in a word, insane. But insane in a familiar way, like the uncle everyone politely doesn’t talk about at family gatherings, but who you’d miss anyway if he died or finally got committed to an asylum. “Actually, if it’s cool with you, I was thinking we could just keep things as they are.”

Ray’s feet dragged in the snow, bringing his swing to a stop. “Really?”

“If you want.”

After a long pause, Ray said, “Cool. It’s a plan.”

“Great,” Erik stood up and stretched, his neck cracking. “Let’s go inside, then. My feet are about to freeze in place.”

“Some Canadian,” Ray laughed, hopping off the swing.

Somehow the two roommates managed to cover the snow-filled distance between the swings and King Place without any mishaps beyond Ray stealing Erik’s toque and putting it on a crumbling snowman. Inside, Erik wrestled with his key and the security doors while Ray examined the notice board.

“Got it!” Erik announced, and turned to find Ray scribbling something on the maintenance sheet. “What did you break this time?” he sighed.

“Nothing!” Ray tossed the pen into his pocket and made for the door. “Let’s go. I want tea.”

“Yeah,” agreed Erik absently as he held the door and scanned the maintenance sheet. The latest entry read ‘305: Too many zombies . . . eaten . . . brains and . . . sanity . . .’ Erik choked. “Ray!”

“I’m just looking out for our neighbours. If we aren’t alert to the zombie threat, who will be?” Ray wore an expression of deep concern as he stepped into the elevator.

Erik ran after him, sticking his foot in the elevator door before it had a chance to close. Ray whistled innocently and held the door as Erik got in, then stabbed the button for the third floor. “You think she’s renewing her lease?”

“Raven Mirkwood? Jesus, I hope not.”

“I thought she was Temperance Pedestal this week.”

“No, I saw her yesterday on the stairs. It’s Raven Mirkwood now.”

Erik snorted. “I’ll try to remember,” he said as they got off the elevator. They walked to apartment 306 and Erik pointed to the paper taped to their door. “This is all her fault, you know.”

“‘Repent, sodomizing sinners, and be saved from eternal Hell as Satan’s whores’,” Ray read. “Is that canon?”

“Good alliteration, even if it isn’t,” said Erik as he pulled the paper off the door with a resigned sigh and crumpled it into a ball.

“She’s hot for me, you know,” Ray said as Erik unlocked the door.

“Raven Mirkwood?” Erik asked in confusion, throwing the sheet of paper at the wall and stripping off his jacket.

“No, stupid. Susan.” Ray pointed in the direction the paper had fallen.

“Susan the fundamentalist who thinks you spend every night fucking guys?” Erik said with disbelief, shutting the door.

“Every night fucking you,” Ray corrected with a smirk. Erik went red and glared. “But yeah, completely. Why else would she be so keen about me repenting?” Ray sat on the floor, pulling his boots off.

“Because that’s what fundamentalists do with their free time. Tell other people that they’re going to hell and should repent. And sing hymns and junk. And have bake sales.”

“She wants me,” Ray maintained, “because she thinks I’m gay. Women love gay guys.”

Erik groaned. “We’ve been over this, Ray. Being gay doesn’t magically make you more attractive to women, and this especially true in the case of someone like Susan.”

Ray dumped his jacket, mittens, toque, and scarf in a pile on the floor, and went to lie on the couch. “You’re just jealous.”

“Whatever, Ray,” Erik said and went to the kitchen to wrestle with the electric kettle and teapot, resigning himself to more than a year to go in the company of Ray and his delusions.