You’re a filthy traitor and I hate you forever.” Then, because lies always burnt on his tongue, “Or at least until lunchtime.”

“Sorry, man.” Em, apparently, had no such issues with untruths. “But the shrink moved my appointment to Friday. I can’t miss it, so . . . gotta pike on camping. Sorry.”

Sigmund groaned, slumping down across the table. Nine forty-six a.m. and they were at the café across the road from the office, having coffees and skipping work. Sigmund’s favorite pastime.

Em’s favorite, meanwhile, was ruining people’s days.

“God, I don’t wanna gooooo! ’Specially not by myself. Em!” The table muffled Sigmund’s pleas. When he looked up, Em was taking another bite of muffin, thick, dark eyebrows raised above thick, dark-rimmed glasses.

“Then don’t go,” she said, “if you hate the idea that much.”

“Dad will kill me.” Sigmund drew out the relevant verb. “You know how he loves all this corporate team-building stuff.”

Next weekend, LB’s IT department was holding its annual camping trip. Sigmund could probably think of things he’d less rather be spending a long weekend doing, but it would be a short list. Which is why, three months ago, Em had taken pity on his suffering and agreed to join him. That was before she’d decided to be a dirty piking traitor.

“Dude, you’re a grown-ass man,” Em said. “Daddy doesn’t have to make your decisions for you anymore.”

“Piss off,” said Sigmund, without much enthusiasm. “I live in his house.”

“So move out.” This, at least, was an old argument.

“I can’t, man. Housing is expensive—”

“Come move in with us. We’ve got a spare room.”

“—and it’s not like Dad’s got anyone else. I don’t want him to be all alone.” Because that’s how it was, how it’d always been, in Sigmund’s memory. Just him and his dad. And maybe if Dad had found someone in the last twenty years, started dating or whatever, then Sigmund would’ve been long gone. But he hadn’t. So neither had Sigmund.

Net result: Sigmund was going camping. Alone. Goddamnit.

Em sighed, picked at her muffin, and said, “Well . . . why don’t you ask your new ranga mate?”

Sigmund blinked. “You mean Lain?”

“Yeah. I mean, you’re off to the forest, right? So it’ll basically be like coming home for him.”

“Har, har,” said Sigmund. He tried to imagine Lain cavorting, orangutan-style, through the trees. “I don’t think he’s really the camping type.” He seemed more the lattes-and-fixies type. The Noguchi-coffee-table-and-skinny jeans type.

Em shrugged. “Just puttin’ it out there. You say he’s not an asshole, right? So ask him. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Sigmund stared down into his half-empty cup like it held the answer to Em’s question, not just the dregs of an entirely mediocre cappuccino. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

What’s the worst that could happen?

----------------------------------------

When Sigmund got back to the cubicle, Lain was staring at something on his monitor, drumming his fingers on the desk. He looked up at Sigmund’s approach, and gave a sharp-toothed smile.

“Hey, man,” he said. “Do you know anything about this?” He pointed at the screen.

“About what?” Sigmund stepped around until he could see. A page from the company intranet. Advertising—

Oh.

“This ‘adventure weekend’ thing. Camping. You going?”

Well. Sigmund supposed that solved that problem.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I, uh . . . Dad’s kinda into that sort of thing. Company man. He’ll be cut if I don’t, so . . .”

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“You don’t sound thrilled about it.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not really a camper, y’know? Outdoors . . .” Sigmund demonstrated his distaste with a shudder.

“I was thinking of going,” Lain said. “Outdoors stuff . . . I mean, it’s been a while, but all those treks with my brother and his mate when we were younger, y’know? They usually ended badly.” And here he gave a dark-edged laugh. “But I kinda miss it.”

That wasn’t a lie, but only just. Sigmund wondered what it was that Lain was really longing for: camping, or his apparently dead, possibly criminal brother.

“Well,” Sigmund said, “you should come, then. I’ve got a tent. It’s small, but . . . I don’t snore. Too much.” Not after a decade of sleepovers with Emily “You-Snore-I-Kick” Ivanovich.

For a moment, Lain just stared. Sigmund thought he was going to say no. Sigmund thought he was going to make some excuse because, ew, spending a weekend with Sigmund? No thanks. Except Lain was too smooth to be that cruel straight-up, so he’d have some slick cover story. One Sigmund would know was a lie, and then he’d have to go crawl under his desk and die of—

“Really? Cool. Thanks, man. Yeah, that’d be awesome.” Lain smiled. Not his usual razor grin, but an actual honest-to-god smile. Like sharing Sigmund’s (dad’s) shitty two-man tent from circa 1970 was the nicest thing anyone had ever offered him and the coolest way he could imagine spending a weekend.

Sigmund smiled back. It was hard not to, the way Lain’s odd-bright eyes seemed to almost glow.

“Cool,” said Sigmund, ever the dork.

“Camping,” Lain said. He turned back to his screen, still smiling. “It’s sure been a while. Let’s go sign this bad boy up.” He glanced up at Sigmund one last time. “Thanks again, man,” he said. “This weekend’s gonna be sweet. I can just feel it.”

----------------------------------------

After that, camping didn’t seem like such a death sentence. Sure, they’d have to do shitty games and outdoors stuff of the kind that Sigmund hated, but Lain sounded like maybe he was more the type. So maybe he’d be able to give instructions, and Sigmund could do his best to follow, and maybe the weekend wouldn’t be a total clusterfuck. Maybe.

Lain was looking forward to it, even if Sigmund was still fence sitting, and Lain’s enthusiasm was infectious. All his moods were. He was handsome and charming and loved life. Meaning, when he was happy, it was hard not to be the same.

Sigmund didn’t think about it much, just sort of rolled with it. At least until the following Tuesday, when Katia from Gateway cornered him in the tearoom.

“So I hear Lain asked you out camping.”

Sigmund looked up from where he was washing his coffee mug. The one in grave danger of gaining sentience.

“Huh?” Sentience not shared by Sigmund, apparently.

“Lain,” Katia said. “Asking you out. Everyone is sooooo jealous.”

Sometimes, when he was younger, Sigmund had imagined himself to be an alien. Maybe his mum, too, fleeing on one last trip to escape a dying planet. Or maybe Sigmund had been abandoned on Earth as a baby, and his parents had adopted him, tried their best to raise him as a human. Except, being an alien, there would always be some things Sigmund just didn’t get about humanity.

Like this one.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh. My. God.” Katia looked like Sigmund had just confessed to stabbing puppies. “It’s true. You have no idea.”

Sigmund felt his fingers tightening around the handle of his mug. “No idea about what?”

Katia rolled her eyes. “You,” she said. “And Lain. And the camping. And him liking you. Like, like liking you.”

It took Sigmund a moment, but he got it.

“Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. No. No way. It’s not like that. Lain isn’t . . . He’s not—”

“Gay?” Katia said. She was leaning forward across the kitchen island, mischief sparking in her expression. “I hate to break it to you, but that guy makes Stephen Fry look straight.”

“Wait. Stephen Fry is gay?”

“Ohmigod, how are you alive?”

“I thought he was just British!”

Katia rolled her eyes again. Sigmund tried not to break the handle off his cup. “Stephen Fry is gay,” she said, voice pitched at schoolchildren. “Lain is even gayer. And he totally has a crush on you.”

Sigmund blinked. “No,” he said. “No way.”

“Look.” Katia was scowling now, all teasing gone. “He likes you, okay? Just trust me. People have been trying to ask him out since he got here, but the only person he’s ever shown any kind of interest in is you. The rest of us may as well not exist. You make him laugh. He smiles at you. Whenever anyone else tries to talk to him it’s always, ‘Oh, Sigmund this . . . ,’ or, ‘Well, Sig says that . . . ’ ”

“No. Way.”

“Way,” said Katia, who’d apparently watched the same films as a kid. “If you’re not into that sort of thing, that’s your business. But let him down gently, okay? Otherwise things are gonna get pretty rough for you ’round here.”

There was a chip in the side of Sigmund’s mug. His favorite mug. The Aperture Science one. Funny how he’d never noticed that before.

Katia was wrong. She had to be wrong. People didn’t get crushes on Sigmund. Sigmund was a loser, he knew that. He was fat and nerdy and had bad hair. All his jokes referenced video games or comic books or shitty cartoons from the ’90s. And it was okay. It was. He’d gotten used to it after twenty-odd years.

High school had sucked. But high school was over. And the people like Lain . . . after high school, things had evened out a bit. It wasn’t like the Cool Kids blew spitballs at him in class or tried to trip him in the corridor anymore. Because Cool Kids grew up, too. And some of them got MBAs and some of them worked at McDonald’s, but it was different, being an adult. There were workplace harassment lawsuits, for one thing.

Still. People like Lain didn’t get crushes on people like Sigmund.

“Look,” said Katia, and, when Sigmund did, she was giving him a tight and awkward smile. “He likes you. Just . . . be kind, okay?”

Sigmund nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”