When Lron met Viral at the formica table top he looked haggard, disheveled, and spent. A blue jumpsuit hung from his frame like an avante Instagram piece of fashion cinched at his waist; his feet shuffled across the linoleum in what looked like off-brand, south-of-the-border Croqs called Croquas.  Viral had ever only seen Lron with tight ridges in his closely cropped hair. The two days in jail had rubbed from him the sheen Viral had for as long as he’d known him considered part and parcel of Lron's glow.  If Lron was the lion, his finger waves had been his mane.

Viral stood as Lron approached him.  The smile on his face told Viral that he too remembered the prison visitation guidelines repeated in episodes of the Arrested Development DVD’s Lron had forgotten to return to the campus media library.  The two boys performed their ritualistic handshake without touching.  

"How are things going in here?" Viral asked, waiting for Lron to sit.

"Really good, actually," Lron said. "The water pressure is surprisingly robust and my cellmate has a subscription to O magazine.”

Viral was honest-to-God shocked. He'd assumed jail time would be a burden on Lron's affliction for the finer things, like iTunes and Starbucks.

"Psht, we get that stuff in here," Lron said. "There are so many cell phones floating around. It's like a T-Mobile pop up. And Starbucks is the only bean they're serving in the canteen. One of the TV's even has a hookup for IFC."

Viral nodded with appreciation. The Independent Film Channel was one of Lron's more exclusive passions. Though all it ever seemed to show was repeats of Reservoir Dogs when Viral watched, Lron had managed to work out a skill through which he could tune to the tier 2 cable channel just in time to catch the beginning of any John Waters picture.

"Where have they been keeping you?" Lron asked. "You look like shit."

Viral flushed. He tapped at his psoriasis. "Oh, well -- uh -- do you remember that lady agent with the gun outside Tyler's?"

"The lezzy?"

"Yeah, she and -- wait, the what?"

"The woman with the washboard titties, broken L23, and bum-bum that looks like a Foreman grill?"

"Well yeah, but lezzy -- I mean, lesbian. She's married. To a man."

Lron baw-haw-hawed. "And I'm Donald Glover."

*Arrested Development voice* “He wasn’t.”

"It's what she said. I'm wearing her husband's clothes," Viral added.

Lron caught himself mid cackle. Hm, he seemed to be saying, as he scratched the growing fuzz on the butt of his chin. Viral could see a bit of grey coming in.

"Those threads are atrocious enough to be from a non-homo, but they're also throwback IDGAF enough to be super lezzed out."

Viral peeked over his shoulder, around him. He was not comfortable being seen around Lron's post-identity-politics-hate-speech-appropriation talk-a-do's.

"So what, she's keeping you at her husband's?" Lron asked. He reached into the hip pocket of his jumpsuit, pulling out rolling papers and a baggie of tobacco grounds.

"Well, no, that's the thing," Viral said. "After leaving you I spent the night in holding, but the next morning, shit, this morning she took me to her place to change, and then this college, and then here."

Lron licked the edge of a paper the size of a tissue. "You got to go back to the school? Did you water Princess Hydrangea?"

"No, not our college. This other one, down the street a bit actually. The Bethany Women's College."

"Never heard of it."

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"So yeah we were there, then I asked her to bring me here, to see you."

Hunched at the table top, Lron studied the sprinkle of his tobacco into his doob. He said, "So why are you just visiting and I'm locked in?"

Viral stammered. "Well, they offered me a deal."

Lron stopped what he was doing and met Viral's eye. Straightening his back, he nodded, smiled. "Ah, I see what's happening," he said, "a Prisoner's Dilemma."

"No, that's not true," Viral said, raising his hand in defense.

"So what, you snitch me out in exchange for, what, some early 2000's street wear from the Ali G collection?"

Lron was getting heated and Viral wanted to cool his jets. "No, no. There wasn't anything to tender. What was I going to say? I had just been following you. If anything, I'm the one who could be a bit pissy about how and why we ended up where we did."

"Oh, so I'm being pissy now?"

"No, that's not what I --"

"Oh, so I'm being piiiiiissssssyyyy now?" Lron said, standing from his bench, his hips swinging like a cobra dancing to the charm of his own horn.

Viral reached for Lrons's arm to pull him down, but an armed guard with a jaw like a toaster stepped forward, and Viral refrained. "Shhh, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that it was a bit inconvenient for you to take me to the loft for someone who had just happened to be on the radar for 2/3 of the federal government's police force," he said.

"I didn't drag you by the pigtails, Mami," Lron said, retaking his seat at the table. He flexed his fingers and resumed his rolling.

"Sure, yes, I know, but I'm just saying there was no way for me to snitch on you because I literally had no idea what we were getting into."

"I'm just hearing a lot of woe is me when I'm the one in this jumpsuit giving coarse-haired dudes twists all night to score some EZ's from the commissary," Lron said, jerking his head toward the paper he grooved between his fingers like a tiny crepe.

The guilt came crawling back into Viral's belly. "That's why I came. To see how you were doing, to say sorry --"

"For snitching."

"No!"

"Then for what, VR? What are you doing here? Why?"

"I just...I just thought..."

"You just thought about yourself," Lron spat.

"I knew you were going to get like this," Viral said. He felt himself becoming defensive. He had never known what that word meant in relation to his emotions, but sensory awareness was a gift afforded by proximity to humanities majors. "I had the chance to turn you in, but I didn't take it, so you --"

"Oh, thank you master Chodha for deigning not to snitch me out for giving you a place to stay when your parents rejected you," Lron said dramatically.

Viral felt his forehead getting hot. "That's not at all -- see, this is you playing the victim --"

"Excuse me?" Lron said.

"You're turning this all around like I'm the bad guy when you have no idea what I am dealing with -- and these agents -- and YOU -- accusing me of turning you in as if you have any sort of value at all as leverage..."

Viral ran out of steam. He was sweating now, and the adrenaline pumping through his heart had sucked the breath out of his alveolus.

"I get it," Lron said softly. "I'm not even worth snitching on."

"I don't get it. You want me to tell on you? I don't even know what to say. She just wants to know where Tyler is."

Lron hit his fist on the table, startling Viral. The Toaster Jaw left his post from the wall and refastened Lron's wrists in white, plastic cuffs. Lron kept his eyes on Viral as the officer did his work. The contempt that Viral saw revealed a boy sinister and seething beyond his years. There was a timeless, smouldering rage in Lron's look that Viral couldn't tell meant vengeance or disappointment. What he knew for sure, though, was that the man who looked at him like that was not the Wknd loving college student who'd kept him up nights before midterms with Google Hangout dance parties in the dorm room. The man the guard led away from the formica tabletop in the visitors center of the Howie Young Correctional Facility of Wilmington, Delaware was dang near a stranger to Viral now, and Viral couldn't tell if the hole in his gut came from sorrow or fear. He wondered if he'd just lost a friend or made an enemy.

"Lron," he shouted as he watched the blue backside of his former roommate be led away. "You forgot your cigarette."

The gun-metal door to the cages buzzed open, and Lron threw an indifferent look back over his shoulder. "I don't smoke," he said.

When the door shut, Viral looked around him to see if any of the other visitors had picked up on the tension of his and Lron's exchange. Nope, it was just mums and babies holding half-hearted conversations with men whose jumpsuits joined the curves in their shoulders as traits they shared. To the others in the white linoleum floored, cement grey walled common room, Viral was just another body from the outside leaving a visit with a loved one disappointed. He wondered if they knew the answer any better than he did: had Lron changed, or had Viral?

The daze in which he found himself followed him into the waiting room where Delorean was no longer sitting. In her place Viral saw Monica, legs crossed, lips smacking over a piece of white gum she cradled on the center of her tongue. She was holding out a phone to Viral. He recognized it as his own. He also recognized the name he read on the screen. It said Mom.

Monica said, "She wants to talk to you."