i got no idea what i'm doing but i can't sleep

Elias spent the rest of the night blasting music in his ears, reading one of his pirated e-books and browsing the internet. At some point, he'd sat on his windowsill and lit a cigarette. He knew they were bad for you, he knew he should stop before he got something chronic, but couldn't. It was funny to him how much he fit into the stereotype of the Model Disappointment for his parents. He was gay, he had barely any sense of direction in his life or the motivation to find one, and he smoked. He never knew he'd pick that last one up, though, especially that he had only known one other person who smoked when he'd started (Madison). He only knew he was feeling really winded one day, bought a pack from said person, and it stuck.

Madison was the oldest person in their friend group and in Elias' grade because he failed a year in grade school. Not because he was dumb or lazy, but because his dad had kicked him and his mother out of the house in a fit of drunken rage, so Madison and his mom were on the streets for nearly two months before she had gotten ahold of some uncle who had been willing to help. By then, the dad had changed the locks and thrown most of their things in the trash, so when they'd come back, Madison couldn't find most of his books and had already missed a huge chunk of school, so his mother told him he could get an "early summer vacation" and try again the following year. Although Madison's stepdad was a good person who treated him with unconditional kindness, and despite having earned Madison's respect, you couldn't really get Madison telling that story with getting a broken nose in the process. The only reason anyone knew what happened with him was because Elias' other friend, Gavin, had cornered him when he was drunk, and squeezed the story out of him. Stuff like that simply couldn't get erased.

For that reason, in an almost cliché way, the whole friend group considered Madison an older brother. He was nowhere near group leader (that was Zayd), but he was essentially one of the only thinking heads in their gang.

The "gang" in question had been an item for almost five years, starting with Elias, Zayd and Gavin when they had gotten grouped up for a science project back in sixth grade. It felt like a decade ago to Elias just thinking about it. Gavin had complained about the group having no girls, so Zayd showed up the next day in a bright, blonde wig and red lipstick. Zayd was Zayd-a then.

"Better?" He'd asked Gavin, who had had laughed himself to tears.

"Way better." Gavin had gasped through his giggles. Elias had laughed the hardest out of them all, toppling over a chair and falling face-first onto the ground, landing them all week-long detention. Even then, they'd used the extra time to mess around even more and going to each other's places after escaping school to play video games and annoy their families and bully the neighborhood pets. They had been inseparable since.

Until tenth grade, at least. 

Since seventh grade, it was no longer just them. Boys did not want to spectate the notorious troublemakers of the school; more often than not, they wanted a piece of the action themselves. First, it was Ben Jefferson, then Leroy Hamtrack. Dave. Harry. Lloyd and Jerry. There had been some drifters, too. Those were people who only wanted the association, not the trouble: Mike, Theo and Jayden. In tenth grade, Gavin joined those drifters, popping in and out of the group like a Jack-in-the-Box as soon as people (except Elias and Zayd) would start to forget about him. Finally, Merlin, the kid from Zayd's grade school, the kid Elias would give his right arm (Elias was a leftie) to take out. The kid (guy?) who had a "spot in mind".

Their friend group spanned across three American public high schools and five scattered neighborhoods, but their meetings were consistent, mostly. Some people started calling them a cult.

The curiosity was killing Elias slowly. As he lay in bed at one in the afternoon, he could only wonder where the day would take him, if he was strong enough or smart enough or even brave enough to go where it led him. He counted down the seconds for his mom to materialize at his door to scream at him for sleeping in, feeling somehow discouraged from beginning the day at all. He knew things would end badly with Merlin because, come on, it would be too obvious, even it was just a friendly hangout superficially. Elias simply did not trust himself around Merlin. The way Elias' demeanor had shifted from indifference to fascination to unreserved, borderline obsession in the span of a couple of months didn't add up, and it would certainly alert the object of such obsession that something was amiss.