Chapter Text
Darren got sent home early from work for ignoring customers while they fiddled with their university essay. Which was, on the one hand, fine—Chaya was desperate, no one wanted to work at Harry’s. If she thought she was going to scare Darren by sending them home, they’d gladly take the night off.
It felt pretty cringe to be putting so much work into school, though. Darren wanted to go for journalism, there were a couple of options and they’d rather have just sent in their applications and put it out of their head—but journalism programs wanted a personal statement, and that was what stopped them in their tracks. They had to write this essay explaining why they wanted to go, in the process portraying themself as a model student but also uniquely fascinating and creative. This was a mindfuck for Darren, who spent fifty percent of their time thinking they were the coolest, smartest, sexiest person alive and the other half thinking they were a total loser. They rewrote their statement a thousand times, each time convinced they were finally conveying their brilliance, each time finishing with ripping the page out of their notebook or deleting their Notes app draft (and then emptying the trash, so they couldn’t dig up the statement and torture themself with how basic they were).
“It’s sick, Darren,” Cash said, fishing the latest notebook page out of the bin. “It’s fucking good, like, you’re brilliant. I don’t see what you’re on about.”
“No offense, but you’re not applying to university, so I don’t see how your opinion is relevant.”
“Fuck off,” Cash said, still scanning the draft. “But what kind of shithole university wouldn’t want you? And anyway”—he gently balled up the paper and returned it to the bin—“what’d Quinni say?”
“About which one? With every one I show her she’s like, ‘it’s really good, Darren, if you’d let me give you some edits to make your ideas really pop’—because obviously she thinks it’s shit!” Darren, who’d been sitting on the couch, slid off into a heap on the floor next to Cash and the rubbish bin.
Cash looked down at them. “What about Harper?”
“Ugh, she just gives me empty praise like you and Amerie do.”
Cash shook his head.
“Really!”
“Empty praise,” Cash repeated. He put his hand on their cheek, leaned down to kiss them, and said, “Hey, what about your writing is sick because you’re so fucking smart it’s scary.”
“Really?” Darren said. They could believe it for a second, when he was an inch from their face.
“Really.”
“Oh. Well, as I said, you wouldn’t really know if it’s good or not,” Darren said.
“Okay,” Cash said. He kissed them again.
They felt like Cash just stopped listening to them at a certain point, and maybe that wasn’t so bad. Sometimes Darren wished they could stop hearing their own thoughts.
///
“Have you tried Ethan, though,” Cash said out of nowhere, during dinner.
“What?” Harper said.
“About their statement.”
“Who’s Ethan? The other boyfriend?”
“Ethan is not my boyfriend, he’s my sex friend,” Darren said as fast as they could.
“Sorry, can’t keep up with the times,” Harper said. "Sex friend, okay. It’s just unfairly luxe, that you get to have two guys when some of us have nothing going on.”
“It’s luxe indeed,” Darren said. “I’m very lucky.” They looked at Cash to make sure this conversation wasn’t upsetting him. They’d had Ethan over, so they couldn’t very well not tell Harper, but they just needed her to not call Ethan their boyfriend.
Cash didn’t look like he was bothered by Harper’s words at that particular moment. “Ethan’s like, a genius,” he told her. “He goes to UNSW. He could help them with their thing!”
“He already helps them with their thing, ba-dum-tish.”
“Harper, stop,” Darren said. They thought about it. “And come off it, Cash—I can’t show my statement to an actual genius.”
“Nah, you have to show him because he’s a genius. You keep saying I can’t have an opinion because I’m dumb.”
“Rude,” Harper said.
“I didn’t!” Darren protested.
“Okay, but he can tell you if it’s good or not, yeah?”
“And then you can leave everyone else alone,” Harper added.
Cash started doing a throat-cutting sign at her, at which point Darren realized all their friends must have been complaining about them behind their back. “Fine,” they said.
///
They just tacked it on to their next hookup, which seemed efficient until they kept thinking about the statement during sex. They tried to power through, but Ethan was a nice guy who paid attention, which was why Cash approved of him, ugh. He stopped and asked if they were all right.
“I’m stellar,” Darren said. “Keep going.”
“Am I doing something wrong?” Ethan asked. His brow furrowed. He looked so nervous, so worried about Darren’s disapproval, that it put them at ease.
“You’re doing great, sweetie,” Darren said. “Really.” They petted his face. “I’m just wondering, did you get a chance to read what I sent you?”
“Your statement? Yeah. It’s good. But statements aren’t really important in admissions these days.”
“What?”
Ethan’s eyes widened. “Didn’t you know? It’s done by an algorithm. They just want the statement to make sure you’re human and you can string a sentence together. It’s a checkbox.”
“Agggh,” Darren sighed, swooning as much as they could swoon when they were already on their back. “Are you saying there’s no panel of old white men in suits sitting around a table judging me?”
“Not really,” Ethan said.
Darren was consumed with lust.
///
“I need to start paying that guy,” Cash said when Darren bounced back into their apartment and started shedding accessories. “Don’t leave your shit all over the place, please. I put those hooks up so you’d stop.”
“Sorry, Mum.” Darren picked their bag back up. They kissed Cash and went to hang their things on the hooks. “For your information, it was great sex, but the reason it was great was the conversation.”
“He had a great conversation with you? I didn’t agree to that.” Cash looked at them accusingly. They judged he was ninety percent joking and ten percent actually worried that Ethan would turn into a great conversationalist.
“Hey, I only hang my shit up for you, babe,” Darren said. They pulled him in for a long kiss, which they would have mentally categorized as a dirty kiss, except they knew Cash wasn’t like that. He probably thought they were massaging the knots out of each other’s tongues. After a significant amount of time, Darren released him, still holding him by the shirt. “You jealous dog! We were talking about my statement. He said universities don’t look at statements anymore.”
“And that’s…good,” Cash said tentatively.
“Obvs.”
“But they’re not going to see how good it is.”
“Right, yeah, but no one’s judging me and inspecting my very soul and seeing how I’m just not quite good enough for their program,” Darren explained. “They’ll just look at my marks and exams, which are none too impressive, but that’s fine. I’ll get in somewhere.”
“Oh, wow,” Cash said. He got his phone out.
“Excuse me?” Darren said.
“I’m telling the chat you’re going to finally stop talking about your statement.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Darren said. They shoved his shoulder and he gave them a look for jostling him while he was texting. “I wasn’t that bad about it.”
"Ha!" Cash said.
“I wasn’t really bad, was I?”
He gave them another look.
“Cash, am I annoying?"
Cash looked like he was trying not to laugh. He finished his message, put his phone in his pocket, and put his arm around them, kissing them on the temple. “Darren, I love you so much. We all love you. And...we’re all so fucking glad you’re going to shut up about this."
"Some friends," Darren scoffed. They put their head on his shoulder for a minute, then picked it back up. “What if I don’t get in anywhere?”
“Like, we’ll get jobs,” Cash said.
He wasn’t planning on going to university, after all. This probably all seemed insane to him, even more so than it did to everyone else. The two of them working and living together—the three of them, depending where Harper went—didn’t seem so bad. “I do hope I get in, though,” Darren said.
“You’ll get in,” Cash said. “You really are brilliant. I wasn’t just saying that to get in your pants.”
He laughed at his own joke.