Chapter Text
A yellowing lace curtain let in stripes of grey-white November sun, illuminating the billion specks of dust floating around the Chaplain’s office. Every last part of the room was covered in mismatched wood; probably handmade from the acres of forest directly outside, visible from the window. Barnaby Dale’s oak chair creaked with every uncomfortable fidget he made and he tried his best to stay still whilst staring deep into the light birch floor.
His mother was crying into a handkerchief. She had barely stopped for a whole week since she found out. That, Barnaby had decided, was the worst part of this whole thing. He could volley his father’s anger with more anger but seeing his mother cry like that was killing him inside. His little brother, Oscar, playfully rolled his eyes at Mom’s loud nose blowing. He was trying to make Barnaby smile. Oscar could always make Barnaby smile with the tiniest of expressions. It hadn’t been working recently though.
“We just don’t know what to do,” Mom said through sobs. Chaplain Willet looked on in sympathy. He had a halo of white, fluffy hair and a round, understanding face. Barnaby’s case was likely nothing new for him. “Everyone at school would stare. And Oscar, we can’t put him through that too, he did nothing wrong.”
He did nothing wrong. Mom hadn’t directly blamed Barnaby for what was happening, but that slip of the tongue was the closest she had come so far.
“I don’t get it,” Dad shrugged. “He was a straight-A student, star of the basketball team, the girls loved him – the amount of attention he got from the cheerleaders, I mean…”
Barnaby had never realized how warped his dad’s perception of his was. Yes, he was a good student, but he was hardly the star of the basketball team; he was just really tall. And the reason the girls loved him so much was that he was so obviously a gay non-threat that they could fawn over him risk-free. Poor Dad. No wonder the whole thing was such a shock to his system. It was a really nice double whammy too; your son’s gay and pregnant. At least Oscar could see him day-to-day in high school; he’d trust Barnaby to be his wingman for the same girls who hagged over his big brother. It’s Oscar he felt most sorry for in all this. He hoped no one would give him a hard time about it.
Chaplain Willet rested his chin on his clasped hands. “I understand Mr. Dale. You’ve done the right thing by coming here. We are but lambs and God is our shepherd. We can all be led astray at times, what’s important is that we find our way back onto the path of righteousness. Don’t you agree, Barnaby?”
Barnaby, who was so unused to being addressed by his proper name, snapped back to attention. “Uh yeah- yes. I agree.”
Willet reached out and grabbed Barnaby’s hand. “You will be allowing a poor barren couple to have the family they’ve always dreamed of. You can stay in a safe place away from the prying eyes of the outside world and then return to your normal life. Isn’t that what we all want? A normal life?”
Nothing felt like his normal life anymore. He hadn’t taken the news stories seriously, all the buzzings over the past two years, it sounded like fake news urban legend crap. It was always someone who went to school with someone’s cousin in another state, or the threatening fables of their Pastor on a Sunday morning warning about the “dangers of sodomy.” It didn’t even register as a thought when Theo told Barnaby that if he really loved him…
“We just want what’s best for our Barney,” Mom said, her voice still shaky. “Even if that means… he’ll be away from us for a few months.”
She buried her face in her handkerchief again. Barnaby slid further down into his chair. Oscar followed suit, trying to be as loud and creaky as possible as he did so. Okay, this did make Barnaby smile a little bit.
A soft rap at the door broke the tension. Willet briskly got up from his chair.
“Please come in.” He gestured for the Dales to look to the door. “Claude will show you to your room.”
The door gently swung open and in waddled Claude. He was maybe a year or two older than Barnaby with a ruddy farm-boy face and a pageboy haircut. Even under his loose linen smock, Barnaby could tell that this boy was ready to give birth any week, if not any minute now.
“I’ll have your parents sign the papers and you can say your goodbyes.” Willet slid the paper over to Mom and Dad. Dad grabbed the pen without hesitation, printing, signing and dating Barnaby’s freedom away.
“I’ll let you have some privacy,” Willet said as he took the paper and pen back. He stood up and walked out of the office, contract in hand.
Mom tried to smile through her tear-stained face. “Thank you, Chaplain.”
“Have a blessed day.”
As soon as Willet was gone, she threw herself around Barnaby. She only came up to his ribcage.
“Promise me you’ll be good.”
“I promise, Mom.” He wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to do.
“And you’ll write to us when you can.”
“You too.”
“I’ll make you your favorite dinner when you come home.”
This wasn’t that momentous a task; his favorite meal was box mac and cheese.
“I love you, Barney.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
She started crying again as soon as she let go. His father didn’t hug him. His eyes darted from Claude to Barnaby and then from Claude’s huge round stomach to Barnaby’s still flat one. He glowered.
“See you in the summer,” he said gruffly before tending to Mom.
Oscar pulled a face. “You’re the lucky one, I have to put up with this all the way home.”
“Sucks to be you.”
“I know you’re already writing to Mom, but…”
“Oh, you bet we’re having a brother’s only line-“
Oscar threw himself at Barnaby, his arms so tightly around him it was hard to breathe.
“I’m gonna miss you,” Oscar said, displaying a rare hint of sincerity.
“I’ll miss you too.” Barnaby’s chin rested on the top of Oscar’s messy brown hair. It was the one thing they shared. Barnaby was tall, skinny and quiet where Oscar was short, stocky and loud, but they had the same mousy, moppish excuse of a hairstyle. He wondered if Oscar had the mutation too. He tried to imagine being on the other side of this hug a year from now. He held Oscar tighter.
After another minute, Oscar let go. “Can I use your Steam account?”
Barnaby smiled. Properly this time. “As long as you don’t buy a bunch of shit on it.”
“Deal.” He backed up, joining Mom and Dad at the open door leading towards the front entrance. “See you later.”
“Later,” Barnaby said, waving the three of them goodbye as they walked with Willet through one door and then another as they returned to the real world, leaving Barnaby behind.
Claude, who had been pretending to be fascinated by a landscape painting on the wall, turned his attention back to Barnaby. “Let’s get you some supplies.”
Claude, walking like some sort of pendulum to keep balanced, retraced Mom, Dad and Oscar’s steps back out of the office, and down the hallway further into the retreat. He stopped at a storage closet from which he pulled out a gigantic plastic ziplock bag containing folded bedsheets and several pairs of clothes. He struggled as he bent down to also collect two pairs of shoes.
“I can get those,” Barnaby offered, holding out his hands to take the clothes and bedsheets.
“No trouble at all,” Claude insisted, holding onto the closet’s door handle to pull himself back to a standing position. “You’re new.”
“Yes, but you’re-“
“-Pregnant?” Claude grinned before leading the way down a hall of empty dorm rooms. “You can place your current clothes in this bag. You won’t be needing them. We value modesty here. The smocks hide our stomachs. Well, up to a certain point.”
He patted his own unmistakably pregnant belly and chuckled.
Barnaby tried to work out how to ask the question. “How, erm, when are you… when are you going to-“
“Three more weeks to go,” Claude sighed, using the top of his stomach as a resting place for Barnaby’s clothes and shoes. “But I can tell that things are already starting to happen. See how I’m having to hold the top of this pile?” He patted the top shelf-like part of his stomach. “I used to just be able to let things balance here like a table – it stuck straight out. But now everything slides off unless I hold it in place.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’ve dropped.”
Barnaby felt himself gulp. Dropped. It sounded gross. No, worse than gross. It sounded ominous. He didn’t ask what dropped meant. Instead, he chose to follow Claude the rest of the way in silence. Barnaby’s room was up a flight of stairs and down the very end of a long hall, this alongside Claude’s slow, lumbering waddle made the journey excruciatingly long.
“You’ll be staying here.” Claude said, placing Barnaby’s new belongings on a stripped bed. “Gabriel’s your dorm mate. He arrived last week. Lessons end in about twenty minutes, you can meet him then.”
“Cool.” Barnaby said, uselessly. “Thanks.”
Claude pushed both on his hand onto the small of his back and stretched it out. He looked severely uncomfortable. Barnaby wondered how long it would be before he felt like that.
“If you need anything, let me know,” Claude said. “I’m in room six, it’s on the first floor.”
He awkwardly lumbered back out of the room and disappeared from sight.
Barnaby sat on the mattress. He emptied out the ziplock and looked at the clothes he had been assigned: two tent-like billowing smocks, brown linen pants with a bizarrely high, stretchy legging-like waistline, a white tennis shirt and matching shorts which Barnaby took to be gym clothes, a pair of too-white tennis shoes, and a pair of button up sky blue pajamas. There was also a pair of ugly brown slip-on moccasin shoes. He took off his own beat up converse and put them in the plastic bag. His plaid shirt followed and his too-large Star Wars t-shirt after that. Most of his clothes were too loose on him, but it was the only way he could ensure that they would be long enough for his tall frame. There were no mirrors anywhere in the room so he tried to use the reflection from his room’s glass window to get a good look at his body. It looked the same as it always had; long and lanky. No lumps or bumps indicated that there was anything different about him. He struggled to imagine what he would look like when he started to grow. He threw the flowy smock on. He could shove a basketball under there and no one would be any the wiser. On a normal-sized person he imagined the smock would reach down past their ass, but on Barnaby, it only just successfully covered his entire midriff. He shimmied his baggy jeans off and pulled on the pant-legging hybrid. They were supremely comfortable, as were the piss-ugly shoes. He folded the rest of his real clothes, along with his cellphone, into the plastic bag and sealed it shut.
He wasn’t Barney Dale anymore. He was Jesus’ missing sheep or whatever Chaplain Willet was talking about.
Just as he was about to put on his bedsheets, the door burst open and in stormed (Barnaby could only assume) his roommate Gabriel, pulling his own smock up over his head and throwing it on the floor, not even stopping as he made a determined beeline to the window.
Barnaby wasn’t certain that the other boy even saw him. “H-hello there, you must be Gabriel. I’m Barnaby.”
“Great,” Gabriel muttered swinging one leg out of the window and reaching out to the tree directly outside their room. He slouched into the window frame and pulled a cigarette out of a packet that must have been stashed on a branch somewhere. “Do me a favor and make sure no one comes down this far will you? They like to check in on the new ones.”
He ran a match against the wall outside, lit the cigarette and inhaled as if it was giving him life itself. The smoke blew out of his mouth as he let out a sigh of relief.
Barnaby cleared his throat. “Should you really be smoking?”
“You got a problem with it?”
“Well isn’t it bad for your baby?”
Gabriel rolled his eyes, still staring out of the window. “What baby?”
As much as Barnaby could have continued having a conversation consisting of only questions, he decided to pause and revaluate the situation. Maybe this shirtless smoker dangling out of a window wasn’t his roommate Gabriel at all. But if not, then who was he? Barnaby looked at the boy properly; tanned, short blond hair, shorter than Barnaby and more sinewy to Barnaby’s gangly. He didn’t look pregnant, but then again neither did Barnaby and yet there he was dressed like a body-conscious pirate at a slumber party.
“You’re staring.”
He was finally looking at Barnaby now, an unimpressed expression across his face as he crookedly blew more smoke out of the outdoorsier side of his mouth.
“What? Oh.” Barnaby turned away. “Sorry, I-“
“What did you say your name was?” The boy asked.
“Barnaby. Barnaby Dale.”
“I’m Gabriel.” He tapped ash onto the ground and took another long, desperate draw. “How far along are you?”
“I don’t know if that’s-“
Gabriel glared. “Look. Barnaby. You’re about to get asked this dozens of times when you get to know people here. It’s like an icebreaker, don’t be weird about it. How far along are you?”
Barnaby stared down at his lap. “Nine weeks.”
Gabriel laughed. Smoke puffed out of his nostrils. “You must’ve really fucked up to get caught that quickly.”
“My parents found the tests I did.”
“Shit.”
“So, erm…” Barnaby started to say, staring at this boy who didn’t have an ounce of fat on him “how far along are-“
Gabriel wasn’t listening to him. Leaning further out, he rapped on the glass of the window next door. Barnaby could hear it open slightly.
“I can’t believe you still haven’t quit” said a low voice.
“I ain’t no quitter. They gave me a roommate.”
“He’s there now?” The neighboring window slammed shut and seconds later two other boys entered the room, both dressed in the same smock that Gabriel had thrown off. The two couldn’t have been more of a mismatch: a tiny, bespectacled black kid and a giant, jacked Latino with a buzzcut. They both looked pleased to see a new face though.
“You must be the newest member of the birthing industrial complex,” the tiny one said. “I’m Vincent.”
He offered his hand for Barnaby to shake. He stood up from the bed and returned in kind. “Barnaby.”
“Edmund,” the large one grabbed Barnaby’s hand and pulled him in for a bearhug. The hug revealed a growing bump that the smock did a good job of concealing. “It’s good to have another giant here.”
“Aw, Edmund,” Gabriel sighed from his windowsill. “Where’s my hug?”
“I’m not going near you until you put that thing out,” Edmund said, pointing to Gabriel’s shrinking cigarette.
Gabriel rolled his eyes. “I’m down to my last pack, you’d better believe I’m savoring them.”
Vincent smirked, leaning over to both Barnaby and Edmund. “Which habit do you think he’s going to lose first? His smoking or his clothing allergy?”
“I can hear you!”
“I want you to.” Vincent laughed. “I think he’ll start wearing clothes again the second his six pack begins to disappear.”
“No way, man,” Gabriel said, his cigarette almost down to the filter. “I’m not losing my tan while I’m here.”
“I give it another two months before you stop prancing around shirtless all the time.”
Gabriel sucked the very last white section of his cigarette away, throwing the filter part out into the woods below him. “Nah, bullshit. You’re way ahead of me and you’re still flat as a pancake."
“Want to bet?” Vincent laughed, shaking his head and lifting up his smock to reveal a small, but still protruding belly. “I’m only sixteen weeks genius. You’ll be where I am by Christmas.”
“How far along are you, Barnaby?” Edmund asked. This time the question didn’t completely startle him. Gabriel slid off the window giving Barnaby a smirk that screamed: “I told you so.”
“Nine weeks.” Weeks seemed to be the unit of time pregnant people lived on.
“Ah, so just one week ahead of Gabriel,” Vincent said, slapping Gabriel’s back as he joined the circle.
Barnaby let out a low whistle. “Wow. You must’ve really fucked up to get caught that quickly.”
Gabriel rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, the morning sickness gave me away. Plus all the sleeping around I guess… my brother made me piss in a cup.”
“Amateurs! You’re all amateurs!” Edmund said, breaking though any tension. “31 weeks. Homestretch here I come.”
“Stretch marks here you come,” Vincent jibed playfully.
“$40,000 here I come,” Edmund added loudly over Vincent before quietly adding. “And you’re a bit too late with the stretchmarks prediction. You a sophomore like us?”
“Uh, yeah, I just turned sixteen. Happy Birthday to me.” Barnaby laughed hollowly. No one joined in.
“Hey, at least you arrived on cauliflower pizza day!” Edmund said brightly.
“They don’t give us real pizza,” Gabriel said flatly.
“Oh god, only nine more weeks,” Edmund sighed, closing his eyes.
Vincent gave him the side-eye. “You don’t need to rub it in, dude-“
“Just in time for the Superbowl…”
“Oh god,” Barnaby said, a horrible realization crashing over him. “I’m gonna miss the Superbowl.” He ran his hands through his hair, letting out an involuntary groan.
Edmund tried to give him a reassuring pat on the back. “Hey, it’s okay. You’ll be home for the NBA playoffs, probably.” He began to do the math in his head. “The tail end anyway.”
Barnaby groaned again.
“So…” Vincent said loudly, cutting off Barnaby’s despair. “Cauliflower pizza?”
“Cauliflower pizza,” the others all agreed as they walked out of the dorm room and down the hall, Gabriel pulling his smoke-free smock back on as they went.
The cafeteria was down on the first floor. Again, everything was made of mismatched wood. Half a dozen picnic tables lined the room; some of them already occupied with smock-laden teenaged boys eating and animatedly talking to one another, but most still empty so soon after class.
“I’m starving,” Edmund sighed, making a beeline for the serving counter where two boys in chef aprons that accentuated their large bumps delivered everyone their meals. “I haven’t eaten in, like, two whole hours.”
“The good news is, they like to feed us here,” Gabriel whispered into Barnaby’s ear. “The bad news is they only feed us healthy shit.”
Barnaby groaned. He could really do some damage to a box of mac and cheese right about now. He joined Edmund and Vincent at the serving counter.
“How many?” One of the aproned boys asked.
“Uh…” Barnaby looked over at Vincent and Edmund’s full plates to get an idea. Vincent, just over five feet tall, had two slices on his plate. Edmund, as tall as Barnaby but twice as broad and three times as pregnant, had at least eight stacked high.
“I’ll take three, I guess?”
“Here you go, and two balls of four-to-five rice?”
“Two balls of what?”
“Enjoy!”
Barnaby nodded before following Edmund and Vincent over to their own bench in the back corner of the cafeteria. Edmund carefully put his tray on the table before slowly sinking into a sitting position, letting out an old-man sigh as he got off his feet. He and Vincent both happy tucked into their floppy, made-of-vegetables “pizza.” It was topped with peppers and broccoli. Broccoli. On a pizza.
“Looks delicious, right?” Gabriel had filled his own plate and was scootting next to Barnaby on the bench. He picked up one of his two slices and pretended to enjoy every bite despite his grimace. “Tastes just like a Dominos. I don’t know if I’ll even have room for my four-to-five rice.”
“What the hell is four-to-five rice?” Barnaby asked, pointing at the two ping-pong-sized balls of brown rice on the side of his plate.
“That stuff right there,” Gabriel pointed to Barnaby’s plate unhelpfully.
“I get that that’s the rice, but why do they call it four-to-five rice?”
“It’s fortified rice,” Vincent explained. “It’s got all the vitamins and nutrients a growing boy could ever need.”
“It’s pretty much the only thing we get that isn’t a vegetable.”
“Oh,” Barnaby scooped one of the balls onto his fork, carefully chewed on it for a while before deciding it was safe to swallow. “But why do they call it four-to-five rice?”
“Because it’s four-to-five hundred calories a spoonful.”
“What the- did I just swallow, like, five hundred calories in one go!?”
“Relax,” Edmund shrugged. “They just want you to make weight.”
“Without having any sugar.”
“Or trans-fats.”
“Or sodium”
“Or joy.”
“That’s really fucked up,” Barnaby said, suddenly feeling the lump of rice traveling down his throat. He left the second ball on his plate uneaten.
“Mind if we join you?”
Two more boys were standing at the table, trays in hand. Gabriel and Vincent shuffled over to give them both room to sit down.
Edmund gestured to the two boys with his knife. “Meet the rest of the gang; this is Johan and Henry, guys this is Barnaby.”
“Welcome to our tribe, Barnaby,” Johan said in a slow vocal fry, his hand pressed together like he was praying. He gave a small bow as if he were about to start teaching Barnaby karate or something. His earlobes were hollow and drooping; they had taken away his ear stretchers but obviously couldn’t do anything about the giant holes left behind. It was hypnotic to watch them dangle freely from the side of his face. Apparently, the uniform rules didn’t extend to haircuts, though, because otherwise there was no way he’d still be allowed to have his sandy-colored dreads, tied back behind his mesmerizingly floppy ears.
“It’s great to have you here,” the other boy, Henry, said, taking Barnaby’s hand and shaking it. The boy was a living dress code; a cherubic, permanently happy face, black hair in an immaculate side part, even his smock somehow looked pressed and crisp. “I’m Henry Jeung, I’m the sophomore representative. If you have any questions or concerns, any at all, I’m the guy you see. How far along are you?”
The question didn’t even phase him anymore. Less than two hours in and he had already normalized such a weird thing to ask someone. “Nine weeks.”
“Cool beans!” Henry beamed. “I’m nineteen and Johan’s twenty – we’re practically twins!”
“It’s like a perfect alignment that allowed us to have this, like, shared experience together. It’s really beautiful, man.” Johan said dreamily.
Edmund flicked his orange juice at the pair. “Yeah, the planets wanted you to share this experience or whatever, but the matrons had to put you in separate rooms, you fucking pervs.”
“Companionship isn’t a crime, Edmund.” Henry said defensively.
“Our kind of companionship is,” Vincent replied looking around at all the boys around them. “That’s a warning to you Barnaby, don’t hook up with anyone while you’re here. They’ll give you a warning and separate you if you’re rooming, but if you get caught again, you’re out of here: no matrons, no money, no adoption – out on your ass.”
“And you don’t want to be out on your, uh, butt,” Henry said carefully. “The doctors on the outside don’t know how to deliver in our circumstances. We wouldn’t make it out alive.”
Henry punctuated this fairly horrific statement by shoving his mouth full of one of his own scoops of four-to-five rice. “Fo ip’f juft beft t'hoo follow the rulvs.”
Vincent raised his eyebrows at Henry, “you say that like it’s going to be easy.”
Henry swallowed. “Why wouldn’t it be easy?”
Vincent peered over his glasses, his eyes darting to Gabriel. “Well for starters, have you seen who he’s rooming with?”
“So, what part of the state are you from?”
Barnaby was lying on his finally made-up bed. Someone had been in the room while they were eating and taken away his belongings. He was feeling a little bit naked without his phone. Gabriel was a little bit naked too, meaning that he was sitting shirtless on the windowsill again. He turned his head away from the window at Barnaby’s question.
“Do you know where Hawk Springs is?”
Barnaby raised his head off the pillow a little. “No way, I’m in Chugwater! Hawk Springs is only about 30 miles west from there, it’s probably the neighboring town!”
“Probably. Only in Wyoming.”
“Yeah,” Barnaby added, trying to keep some sort of conversation going. “So, uh… what do your parents do?”
“Meth mostly,” Gabriel answered nonchalantly. “I stay with my brother, we run an auto shop.”
“Cool. The shop, I mean – not the meth, I wouldn’t-”
“- I got it,” Gabriel said, stopping Barnaby from retching up any more word vomit. “Being here was the first time I’ve ever seen people freak out over a couple of cigarettes.”
Barnaby was tempted to explain that it was probably the being pregnant that caused people to worry about the cigarettes more than anything else, but he resisted. He forced himself to shut up and let the room sit in silence for a while.
After what seemed like an eternity, Gabriel spoke up again. “What about you?”
“Hm?” It had been so long since anyone had spoken that Barnaby wasn’t sure what the question was.
“What do your parents do?”
“Oh,” Barnaby rolled onto his stomach to face the window and Gabriel sitting on it. It was dark now, but Gabriel was still in his lazy sunbathing position. “My dad’s a bus driver. The I-25. My mom does pet portraiture.”
Gabriel swung both his legs around so that he was facing Barnaby. “Wait, what?”
“She does paintings of peoples cats and dogs and stuff,” Barnaby explained. “People email her pictures and she does portraits.”
“And people pay for that?” Gabriel asked incredulously.
“Yeah, lots of people.”
Gabriel sighed, sliding off the window ledge and retreating to his own bed. “Well, that’s just weird.”
Barnaby rolled back onto his back, pulling the covers over himself to get ready for sleep. “We’re in a woodland retreat for pregnant boys, Gabriel. I don’t think we get to call out other stuff as weird anymore.”
Gabriel didn’t respond, the only sound he made was the slow, rhythmic breathing of someone fast asleep. Barnaby shut his eyes, trying to follow suit, but he still hadn’t processed his new reality and his mind was racing too fast. He was trapped in a cabin in Bighorn Forest and the only way out was to endure something his body was never, ever supposed to. He would meet with the cabin matrons during his first full day. What would they tell him? Was it going to hurt? Was it going to be worth giving a $40,000 baby over to some rich couple wanting a family of their own? Why him? Why now?
Gabriel turned in his sleep. Barnaby chanced turning his bedside lamp on. Gabriel didn’t even stir.
Barnaby reached out for the spiral notebook he assumed was for classes and began to write:
Dear Mom and Dad,
My first day here has been fine. I’ve settled in well and made lots of new friends.
My roommate is a boy called Gabriel. He’s my age and helps his brother run an auto shop as a mechanic. They have their shop just a few miles away from us in Hawk Springs, so if we ever have car trouble, I know a guy! I’ve also made friends with the boys who room next door. They’re called Edmund and Vincent. Edmund is the quarterback on his school’s football team and has a bunch of provisional scholarship offers as long as he keeps up his record in his senior year. He’ll be back and finishing his sophomore year by the end of January. Just remember to keep an eye out for Edmund Mendoza during the NFL draft in a few years’ time. Vincent is an actual genius, He’s does mathletes and scholastic decathlon and he won the national spelling bee the year I got to the state finals. He wants to be on Battle Bots when he gets home.
I have five classes a day plus an hour of gym. The food is really healthy and I can’t wait to have a big bowl of mac and cheese when I get home. I miss you all already.
Barney
His eyes finally began to feel heavy. He tore the first page out and started writing on a blank sheet.
Oscar,
How’s school. Tell me everything. Did Theo tell anyone why I’m gone? Does everyone know? They better not be giving you shit (tell me if they are. I’ll sit on them.)
I was planning on cool things we can do with the 40 grand. Some of it will go to college I guess, but I still think we could use 10k to have some fun. I was thinking about the following:
- Universal Studios (Butterbeer! Rollercoasters!)
- Break into the sneakerhead business (hoard some Jordans, sell them for triple their value, live like kings.)
- Convert it to singles and make it rain
- Something something bitcoin (I don’t have internet so you’ll need to do the research bro)
- How much is a Lambo. We can maybe get a tenth of a Lambo.
I’ll be home before you know it,
Keep me in the loop,
Barney
He tried to imagine Oscar reading the letter. He smiled. His head started to feel heavy on his neck and he dropped the notebook onto the floor, allowing himself to sink into the pillow as sleep washed over him.