Fic: The Quintessential First-Timer's Cookbook [The Social Network][3/5]

[antistar_e]

| The Quintessential First-Timer's Cookbook |
Recipe 3

3. egg drop soup
American Chinese food is about as far from authentic Chinese as you can get while still incorporating the same tastes and cooking styles. Of all recipes to try at home, egg drop soup is one of the simplest and most versatile; its flavors are only as bland as you want it to be, and it can be served as an appetizer or as a main course -- hot and direct is best, because it doesn't keep very well after serving. Straight-up warm comfort food, it's a perfect dish for cold and flu season.

1. Pour 4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock into a pan and bring to a simmer on medium-high.
2. OPTIONAL: if you want any flavoring extras, now would be the time to put them in a tea ball or strainer and add them; let simmer for 10 minutes or so and then remove the tea ball. Suggested flavoring extras include: a half-inch of cut ginger, 1/2 teaspoon peppercorn, 1 stem lemongrass, 2 tablespoons miso, or 1 tablespoon soy sauce.
3. Scoop out 1/4 of the stock and whisk it with 1 tablespoon cornstarch. At this point, you can add extra ingredients to your soup stock: tofu, mushrooms, onions, whatever. Add your cornstarch mixture back into the main stock, and stir. Whisk two to four eggs in your extra bowl with 1 teaspoon cornstarch.
4. Turn off heat. Take a fork and hold it high above the soup. Pour egg through the tines of the fork, moving in a circle -- this will create a ribbon effect with your eggs. Ideally, you'll stir the soup as you pour, but that's too difficult unless you happen to have three hands. Be sure to stir immediately; slowly and carefully and always in the same direction.
5. Top with cut scallions and serve.

This is Dustin Moskovitz.

At this moment in time, he is twenty years old. He buys all of his shirts from Threadless and he's never had a fake ID -- he can't lie worth beans, and guilt shines through on his face like bird shit on a windshield, so there was really no point, especially not when it was so easy to get other people to buy beer for him -- and his actual driver's license says his eyes are grey, because he checked the wrong box on accident while filling out the form. They are, in fact, a very dark brown.

His favorite things in the world are: the instant oatmeal packets that come with Did You Knows about dinosaurs, quiet afternoons with nothing pressing to do except look at cat macros, and McDonalds Mighty Kids Meals.

There aren't a lot of things he dislikes, but. The one thing he hates above all other things (excluding, of course, rapists and people who cut other people off in traffic without signaling, for whom not even Dante could even create a level of hell deep enough) are guys who tell crude stories about their girlfriends for a laugh, like somehow girls aren't the most amazing thing ever put on this earth.

Right now, he is incredibly nervous, bouncing his leg underneath the formica tabletop in a tic he's unable to control.

Awkwardness seems to have become the permanent fourth phantom at their table: there'd been an incredibly pointed moment earlier, when they tried to figure out the politics of who was going to sit next to who and what kind of message it would send. Wordlessly, they'd shuffled around each other so that Eduardo and Dustin sat together on one side of the booth, Amy across from them, an independent element all her own; the overenthusiastic air conditioning makes her shiver, and she scoots further down the booth to get out from under the vent.

Eduardo wants to unzip his jacket and hand it over to her, but he doesn't know if he's allowed. Should Dustin do it, because Dustin is Amy's boyfriend, or should he do it, because he's her date?

The buzzing sign on the door of the Chinese restaurant advertises that it's open until 1am. The only other customers here sit on the other side of the room, by the drink fountain; a man and a woman in khakis and polos with "Google" etched onto the breast, trading words back and forth in a comfortable slipstream. Eduardo fidgets in his seat, folding down the corner of his paper napkin and then smoothing it flat again.

At his elbow, Dustin picks up a clementine from the complimentary bowl at the end of the table, and starts to peel it.

He's horrible at it. It comes off inexpertly, in little chunks, like he's picking at a stubborn price sticker on a new piece of dishware. Amy -- who's a Cali girl and has been able to peel a clementine in one unbroken reel since the age of seven -- and Eduardo -- who knows tropical fruit the way Peter Jackson might know complimentary greetings in Elvish -- go still and watch him, amused. The smell of citrus wafts up from Dustin's digging thumbs.

"I can feel you judging me," he says without looking up.

"It's like watching a little kid try to tie his shoelaces," Eduardo replies, kneejerk, because it's always been easiest to banter with Dustin than it ever was to just sit in silence with him: he makes everyone feel better just by being around him. "Hilarious in an inept kind of way."

"So totally judging," Dustin confirms. "Judging is bad for your health, you should stop that." He manages to get all of the peel off, and immediately breaks it into quarters. "Want a slice?"

They pass the clementine between them. The erratic bouncing of Dustin's leg is making the whole bench quiver.

It hadn't taken much conversation to persuade them to do this on neutral ground, instead of in the tiny, cramped, celebratory space of Chris's Menlo Park studio. Eduardo had dropped off his card and his graduation gift, clapped Chris on the shoulder while he was deep in conversation with a small, thoughtful-looking group of people all dressed in knit caps with hemp satchels over their shoulders, and then exited right back into the brisk, chilly Bay Area night. Dustin directed them here, saying they had the best soup this far inland from the coast.

The girl who took their orders when they came in is sitting behind the counter, feet tucked up underneath her thighs. She twirls a pen around in a dance across her knuckles, enormous textbook propped open on her lap. From this distance, Eduardo can't tell what she's studying; anything from o-chem to economics to world history, high school to college level to graduate student. She could be any one of these things.

From the back, the cook yells something. She yells back without lifting her eyes, completely unperturbed.

Out of the three of them, Eduardo has the most practice confronting awkward situations, so eventually, he's the one who takes a deep breath, sitting up and squaring his shoulders in order to say to Amy, "You know what I find most ironic about this whole thing?" He spreads his hands open. "That out of all the people in the whole world you could have met without them being aware of each other, and it was us."

She tilts her head at that, brushing a lock of her hair behind her ear. It just tumbles loose again.

"Now that I'm unraveling everything backwards," she returns, addressing her hands as they spread out the cutlery on her placemat, which is covered with factoids about the Chinese horoscope. "It really isn't that surprising."

"How ..." starts Eduardo, and then picks one of the hundreds of questions swirling around inside his skull. "How did you two meet?"

She does meet his eyes then, saying solemnly, "Same way I met you," and Dustin answers simultaneously with a chorus of: "She sent me flowers!"

It takes a moment for the implications of both remarks to sink in, and when it does, Eduardo double-takes, rocking back in his seat a little bit, because it really does feel like this information has skewed the whole planet just a few inches to the left. Dumbfounded and a little lost, he stares at Amy, and neither of them look at Dustin when she amends, impassive, "Dustin and I remember the chronology of the events a little differently."

"I can see that," Eduardo manages.

Dustin side-eyes him, a frown beginning between his brows. "Same way ..." he echoes, confused. "Wait. When were you in the hospital here?"

"It really isn't that surprising," Amy repeats, before Eduardo can answer him. "I would have met you eventually, I think. Birds of a feather and all of that."

"Hey," Dustin pokes at Eduardo's shoulder demandingly. "When were you in --"

"I wasn't," Eduardo answers, turning to face him at last. "In the hospital, I mean. I was ..." he falters, only managing another heartbeat of eye contact before he diverts his gaze, rubbing at the heels of his hands with his thumbs. Suddenly, it's like it's too hard to say: it hadn't been hard telling Mark, not at all, using the information to twist the knife, but it's different with Dustin. With Dustin, he feels like he needs to protect him from the truth, which curdles inside his chest, feeling a lot like the hot, initial spikes of shame that had plagued him in the days following the night he was diluted out.

Dustin's opinion matters, which is why he doesn't think he can be honest, and it's a horrible thing to feel.

Amy takes pity on him, and explains in an abridged way, "I took a jog and met him on the bridge."

"The bridge?" Dustin echoes.

"The big one," Amy adds, drier. "The landmark. Red. Hard to miss."

"She saved my life," Eduardo confesses, murmuring now.

"I did not," she replies by rote, just as quiet.

He flashes her a brief smile, and she smiles back, and just as Dustin is tracking the progress of that smile, eyes sliding from one of them to the other with the comprehension close by not quite there, Eduardo shoulders up his last store of bravery, turns to him, and says, "The night I was diluted out of Facebook, I took a walk on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amy stopped me before I did what I intended to do -- she said it would be a shame to die, I hadn't even gotten a chance to kiss her yet."

Amy pipes up, "Everyone should --"

"Get one last kiss," Eduardo finishes for her. She nods back.

Dustin's reaction is as immediate as it is unexpected; he shoves into Eduardo's personal space, accidentally bumping his chin in his haste to get his arms around him. It's at an awkward angle, jutting sideways in the booth, but Dustin still gets a strong enough grip on him to hug him so tight Eduardo can feel the pressure of it all the way down to his bones. He manages to snake his arms around Dustin to return the hold, because what else are you going to do?

"I had no idea," he says on a wobbling, mournful note, clutching harder at Eduardo. "I had no idea it was that bad -- the dilution happened and then you were gone and it was bad for a while, sure, but I -- I didn't know," and his voice changes, like he's saying something else entirely. "Eduardo, I didn't know."

"It's okay, Dustin," Eduardo manages to get out, because it is. It really is.

The student waitress comes by, cradling a big communal bowl balanced on a tray. She blinks a little as she takes in Eduardo and Dustin, who probably look like they're made of nothing but arms, their faces all mushed up against each other like two gummy bears stuck together, but she recovers and sets down individual bowls on their placemats. She sets the big bowl of soup down in the middle of the table, and Eduardo straightens up at the smell, thick and salty and good.

"Dustin," Eduardo wheedles, after his first attempt to disengage from Dustin's stranglehold on his limbs results in a protesting squeak. "Dustin, I'm hungry, you should let me go."

Predictably, this just earns him a squeeze and a, "No."

Across the table, Amy pours herself some soup. Steam rises from the surface of her bowl, wisps curling in the air in a way that makes him think atmospherically; low-pressure and high-pressure systems playing out on top of one woman's soup like it's all there is on the globe. As he watches, she swirls her spoon around in it, testing, and egg whites drip off the edges when she lifts it, gingerly taking a sip. She grimaces and mouths, hot.

"Dustin --" Eduardo tries again.

"Nope. I am hugging you to make up for the hundreds of thousands of hugs that the universe owes you."

"Dustin," says Amy in exasperation, but when Eduardo glances back at her, her entire face is fond. "You're delaying the inevitable question."

Dustin's voice goes even quieter. "I know."

Amy purses her lips; the soup ripples as she blows across it. One moment, and then another, and finally, Dustin sits back.

"I met Amy because she sent me flowers while I was in the hospital," he says.

"I saw the ad on one of my friend's Xangas, back when that was the thing," Amy explains. She pulls their bowls towards her and fills them to the brim with soup; little flecks of spring onions float to the top. Across the room, the Google employees are tugging the bill back and forth between them, arguing with the good-natured generosity of the recently paid. "A cheerful little pick-me-up thing. So I sent flowers to everybody on suicide watch at the hospital. Dustin here," she hands him his bowl and he beams, unselfconscious, and Eduardo closes his eyes; there's a sharp prickle of pain, because this news is what he was dreading. "Was the only one who tracked me down to thank me."

"And here we are," says Dustin, and the way he looks at Amy then makes her duck her chin, smiling so her cheeks plump up, apple-red and flushed.

-

One evening, In the early start of 2005, four things happened simultaneously.

On one end of the country, Eduardo Saverin stood in the center of Harvard Square the night before the beginning of his last semester at Harvard, swallowing down one cold gulp of air after the other until his lungs felt dry and cracked, brittle autumn leaves curled inside his chest. Finally, one of the Phoenix guys spotted him and crossed the lawn, calling out, "Jesus fuck, Saverin, put on some fucking gloves or something!" and Eduardo turned towards him, blinking, having forgotten that anyone in the world knew who he was.

Somewhere in one of those states in the middle that nobody could tell apart except for the people who lived there, a fertilized egg made a mad rush along one of Annalise Miller's fallopian tubes, as she panted and then laughingly shoved her husband out of the shower so she could finish getting ready for her graveyard shift. The resulting zygote would become Infinity Miller, who, twenty-six years from now, would discover a hitherto unknown beneficial element to Stachybotrys atra, more commonly known as black mold.

In Montana, Terrence Boyd's 1971 red Saab made a worrying noise, but he bit his lip and kept driving, because Montana was fucking big and he didn't really know where he was.

At the opposite end of the country from Eduardo, Dustin Moskowitz twisted off the lid on a bottle of sleeping pills, his mind buzzing too heavy in his head. The next time he woke was when the paramedic unceremoniously shoved a catheter down his throat.

It's August now.

Annalise Miller is enormously pregnant, the grass is thickly viridian on top of Terrence Boyd's grave, and Dustin Moskowitz's still here, making a face at the memory of choking on a tube. His elbow brushes against Eduardo Saverin with every inhale.

"I mean," he says, jabbing his spoon at midair to punctuate his point. "She was a real nice lady, but I don't think I impressed her very much, vomiting up all those pills. She petted my hair as I hurled, though," he adds wistfully, and laughs when both Amy and Eduardo reach for his head, kneejerk, and submits to being patted like a well-loved housecat.

-

Why, though?

Why is both the easiest and the hardest question to answer, and in turn, the answer is always the easiest and the hardest to understand.

How did Dustin Moskowitz wind up staring at a palm full of pearly-coated sleeping tablets with the worst kind of well-deep apathy? Why did he swallow them?

"You don't have to tell me," says Eduardo instantly, catching the way Dustin's jaw clenches. "I mean, that's personal, man, none of my business." It was months before Eduardo could properly and sensibly articulate what happened to him on that bridge.

"It's not that," Dustin's quick to reply. He fidgets back and forth. "I just -- I'm just afraid to tell you, is all. Like, you're just going to laugh and tell me what it's like to have some real problems."

"Nobody wants real problems," Amy chimes in, beating Eduardo to it.

"She's right," he nods to her, as she slides her hands across the table, folding them around Dustin's in a familiar manner. "Everybody just likes to complain really loudly about the problems they do have, because they're very real to them at the time. Everybody has problems, and everybody's fighting a hard battle, and they think that if they consume themselves with those, then the so-called 'real' problems won't show up."

"Yes, but ..." starts Dustin, and trails off into a shrug.

Amy gets it. "Sweetheart," she goes, rubbing her thumbs over his knuckles. "Don't do that to yourself. One person's reason for wanting to kill himself doesn't make any other person's less legitimate. It doesn't make you insipid, or stupid, or petty, no matter how trivial your reasons might seem when you put them up against somebody else's."

"The last thing I want the dilution to be," Eduardo nudges at Dustin's ribs, gentle. "Is a competition."

Dustin's eyes flutter closed.

"I'm twenty years old," he says, finally. "And I thought my life was over."

And for all intents and purposes, it was. He's so young, and nobody asked him if this was what he wanted. Nobody asked him if this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Nobody asked him if he was going to stay: it was just sort of implied that he was. Taken for granted, is another good way of putting it.

He'd gotten into Facebook just to be a bro, you know, is the thing. Help Mark out? Sure, Dustin's perfectly capable of that and has the time on his hands, no reason not to. Spend a summer in California in a house with a pool and all his best friends? Oh, please, like you were going to have to twist his arm very hard.

Except then a summer turned into a semester, and a semester turned into a company with a corner office and a million members and an engraved invitation to Oracle's yearly awards banquet, and Dustin ...

Dustin just kind of wanted to go home.

Like, you understand, right? He never intended to drop out of Harvard. He's just twenty -- he feels like there's a step he missed in there somewhere, the one where he gets to worry about things like how he's going to spend his three-day weekends when they're too short to merit a trip home, or if there's enough steak at the caf tonight, or whether Stephenie Attis from Mark's Art History class is ever going to get a Facebook so he can ask her out. But no, here he is, already sitting on a gross capital that makes him richer than both his middle-class working-outside-the-home parents, eating lunch with lawyers twice his age instead of the guys from AEPi.

He felt so fucking out of his depth and he just didn't want it anymore, but there was nobody to tell.

Not Mark. Definitely not Mark, because he did all of this for Mark, and these days, he's lucky if Mark has the time to acknowledge him at all.

Which, yes, is a very selfish thing to think, that's fine, Dustin beats himself up enough over wanting more than his fair share of Mark's attention already. He's very good at rationalizing things from Mark's perspective, because Mark's his best friend and all he does is rationalize Mark's behavior, both to himself and to other people. Mark started Facebook with Eduardo and Sean and Dustin, and now all he has is Dustin.

And Dustin tries. Dustin tries to be enough, but the pressure of running a company like Facebook completely partnerless is cracking right through Mark's veneer of competence, and he needs somebody.

So here's Dustin. Trapped and too tired to be twenty years old anymore, and yeah, that's enough to tip just a couple more pills into anybody's palm.

Eduardo gnaws at the skin inside his lips, a nasty kind of guilt souring and curdling inside his stomach, because he'd always glanced right over Mark and Dustin's friendship. It had seemed so effortless. It was easy to assume they were going to grow old together, because it would be more work to try and separate them than it would to keep them together, and Eduardo just assumed that whatever way Mark was going, Dustin was sure to follow.

Not once had he stopped to think that even a friendship like Mark and Dustin's might occasionally be complicated. Eduardo wasn't the only one occupying rent space in that regard.

"But!" Dustin says, sitting up straight and clapping his hands together, grinning. "Here I am, recovering in the hospital, right? They have me under 24 hour surveillance to make sure I don't, like, try to finish the job, and in comes this delivery guy with this huge thing of flowers, and my hand to God, it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever laid eyes on. Like, I think the only reason why I didn't propose marriage to the guy on the spot was because he told me the delivery was from a secret admirer."

Eduardo tilts his head at Amy, curious.

"Everyone deserves to feel like there's someone out there who adores them," is all she says in explanation. "Everyone deserves someone who thinks they hung the moon."

"Nobody would tell me who sent the flowers, though," continues Dustin. "But dude! I couldn't just let something like that go! I had to find who it was! Just to say thank you, you know?"

Which, admittedly, could have crossed the boundary into creepy ("quit stalking people, Dustin, the last thing I need is a Facebook programmer with a restraining order," three guesses who had the most to say about his quest,) except then he managed to track the order back to Amy, and introduced himself.

"Good thing I really fucking suck at killing myself, right?" he goes with some over-the-top saucy wink in Amy's direction.

She rolls her eyes good-naturedly, and a nudge of her toe into Eduardo's ankle is his cue to fish an ice cube from the bottom of his empty glass. Dustin yelps when it goes down the back of his shirt, almost bolting right up out of the booth like a cat whose tail just got trod on.

While he wiggles around, squirming and trying to get the ice cube out, Eduardo and Amy exchange a smile that's half a dozen things at once; fond and wistful and guilty and apologetic and amused and understanding.

-

They take Amy's car back up to the city. Eduardo sits in the back seat, watching the street lights catch at their faces in intermittent swoops, highlighting them in a sun-like halo of gold before plunging them into darkness again, fast as heartbeats.

His eyes track over the stretch of Dustin's cheeks, the pale highlights in Amy's hair, the way she drums on the bottom of the steering wheel in tune to whatever's playing in her head, the way Dustin scratches at his hairline and watches her with undisguised affection. Eduardo feels something close to profound, sitting there with a sleepy brain and a full stomach, like he's witnessing the dramatic turning point of a novel, something bigger that what could possibly be contained in their skins, in this car.

Dustin needs to go back to his apartment to let his dogs out, he says, and Amy obliges, which is how Eduardo learns that Dustin has pets.

Eduardo doesn't know the layout of San Francisco well enough yet to understand the significance of the streets they drive down, Amy's car valiantly put-putting its way up each steep hill, but he can guess that the apartment complex they pull up to is closer to Amy's than it is to Facebook; that might be on purpose, or Dustin might have just really liked the neighborhood. Either way, the commute would be at least forty-five minutes every day. Amy slides into an open parking space, throwing the car into park and cranking up the parking brake with the ease of someone who's done it dozens of times before.

Dustin has two dogs; Eduardo can hear the ecstatic clicking of their nails rushing to the door before they've even reached the landing -- and two identical thumps! as their bodies collide with the doorframe, their momentum too eager to be checked for something so ridiculous as physical boundaries.

A pair of labs shove their snouts through the door as soon as Dustin wrestles it open, the ferocious wagging of their tails making their whole bodies teeter precariously back and forth.

This is Dumb Thing 1 and Dumb Thing 2, and they are jaggernauts of affection. Collectively between them, they have a brain the size of a walnut.

"They have real names, of course," Dustin explains, and pulls a face. "I just don't remember what they are. We voted on them in an interdepartment poll at Facebook, so I'm sure they're very clever names. I just call them this because it's easier."

Dumb Thing 1 is gingerbread-colored all over, from his eyes to the pads of his paws to his nose. His favorite thing in the world is the vowel sound "oo" in conjunction with a hard consonant, usually the letter d, like the combinations found in the word "food." Everything, he believes with a level of faith only comparable to Joan d'Arc, is food up until it disappears down somebody else's throat.

Dumb Thing 2 is blonde, big and droolingly stupid, and her favorite things in the world are long walks on the beach and the musty smell of old books.

"Go for a --" starts Dustin, and both dogs freeze, faces turned up to him and whole bodies poised on the edge of movement. When he finishes with "walk?" they freak out, careening around the furniture and skittering for the door.

Dustin tosses him a leash, so Eduardo kneels down to clip it to Dumb Thing 2's collar. She turns to him, snuffling eagerly at the smell of Chinese food on his clothes and who-knows-what in his hair, so excited by the new sensory information that she almost knocks herself over, and Eduardo has to put a bracing hand on her back, telling her, "Hold still!" which only makes her vibrate harder, a whine catching in the back of her throat like she's gone into overload.

Amy grabs a jacket out from under a pile of laundry that's growing like a cancerous lump on Dustin's sofa; the rest of the pile tips like a Jenga tower, spilling several loose socks to the floor. She slips the jacket on over her dress, zipping it to her chin, but her legs are still bare underneath the hem of her skirt.

Eduardo tries not to remember what it was like to wake up and watch those legs traipse back and forth across his line of sight.

He tries not to remember what it was like to kiss her, because then it's just too easy to remember what it was like to stand there and watch Dustin do the same.

It's at least ten degrees colder in the city than it was back in the southern Bay Area, even in the middle of August; the wind cuts straight through the shirt Eduardo's wearing, making him hunch his shoulders up around his ears like a bird. Dumb Thing 2 tangles her leash around his legs, and just stands there and waves her tail, completely enjoying the spectacle of Eduardo trying to untangle them again.

For a moment, they stand at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Traffic moves steadily, the sweep of headlights catching them intermittently. The power line pole between them has a single sign on it -- an ad for a responsible babysitter, after-school hours listed, with a fringe of rip-off scraps of phone numbers at the bottom. The rest of the post is covered in a thick armor of nail heads, remnants of notices long torn off; all the lost dogs and vaccuums for sale and garage-band concert advertisements that have come before.

Finally, when Eduardo can't stand the quiet a moment longer, he turns to Amy and just bluntly asks, "Why didn't ever tell me you had a boyfriend?"

There's no accusation in his voice, not really, because there were enough context clues that he could have guessed a boyfriend existed, but Amy flinches anyway. All those long-distance IM conversations, Eduardo thinks, and she never once mentioned sending flowers to everybody on suicide watch. She never mentioned any boy who chased her, asked her out, became her boyfriend; a boy who just happened to be named Dustin Moskowitz and once stuck his hand down the back pocket of Eduardo's pants in the middle of Harvard Square to scandalize the volunteers handing out Are You Going to Hell pamphlets on the steps.

Eduardo's friendships mostly happen to him by accident, so he's not the best judge on how they work, but he thinks that might be the kind of thing friends share with each other.

"I wasn't expecting --" she starts, and then cuts herself off, looking down at the pavement, her jaw working furiously.

Dustin looks between them, uncomfortable, and the dogs are oblivious.

Eduardo's imagination can finish that sentence in any number of ways. I wasn't expecting you to actually pursue me. I wasn't expecting to ever have to introduce you two. I wasn't expecting to have to say no to you, Eduardo.

I wasn't expecting you to fall in love with me.

I wasn't expecting to fall in love with you.

(That last one can't just be wishful thinking, can it?)

"Maybe," she tries again. "If I'd thought it was relevant --" she shakes her head, dismissing that thought, and continues almost angrily, "It would have helped if you guys ever just, like, talked about each other. I can't connect all the dots by myself, you know. 'Oh, hey, my friend Dustin used to say stuff like that.' 'Funny, that's my boyfriend's name!' 'Hey, would you look at that, that guy Eduardo you know? Yeah, when I was talking about how our last CFO got diluted out, I was kind of talking about him.' No big deal or anything."

Eduardo opens his mouth to retort, but Dustin talks over him.

"It's a good thing this isn't the last time we'll all get to act like idiots, then, is it?" He lifts his eyebrows pointedly.

It distracts Amy, because she lifts her chin and steps off the curb as soon as the walk sign illuminates. "Speak for yourself," she goes loftily, the need to respond to Dustin with a sarcastic rejoinder outweighing her annoyance. "I'm never an idiot."

"Says the girl who slept with Sean Parker," Dustin remarks, dry.

Amy's mouth drops open in comical horror, all how dare you?, and Eduardo feels a sick plunging swoop in his stomach, like missing the last stair in the dark. His emotions seesaw in every direction.

"You -- you slept with Sean Parker?" he manages.

She tossed him an unimpressed look over her shoulder, like she can feel him judging her life choices from back there. "I slept on him," she corrects. "And -- and I didn't really know who he was until we woke up. Shhh with the judging," she adds severely, after a pause. "I thought we agreed not to do that."

-

They walk a loop around the neighborhood, and are on their way back up, the dogs trailing lackadaisical and delighted at the ends of their leashes, when Dustin's phone rings.

He pulls it out, checking the caller ID. His phone is electric blue and micro-thin -- a Razor, so new it can only be a couple weeks off the assembly line. They're not even open for nationwide sale yet, if Eduardo remembers the press release correctly. "Yallo?" he goes. "Which of my incredibly annoying siblings is this?"

A pause, and then Dustin says cheerfully, "I know I don't have any siblings, Mom, just checking your memory."

He makes an apologetic face at Eduardo and Amy as he hands off Dumb Thing 1's leash before sliding out of earshot, saying as he goes, "No, Mother dearest, I'm not dead in a ditch, though I appreciate that you called the area hospitals before you thought to double-check with me. That was nice. No, I was at Chris's graduation party --"

When Eduardo glances at Amy, he finds her smiling after him; a taffy-like pull of affection at the corners of her mouth. She burrows her hands into the warmth of the fleece's pockets, and comes up with a starlight mint.

Eduardo knows that if you gave Dustin a laundry list of adjectives, he would pick dysfunctional to describe his own family, the way most everybody who has ever wanted to tear their hair out because of their family does, but Eduardo can't shake the feeling that Dustin just walked into a shop at one point and picked them off a shelf, because his parents are unreal.

This one time at Harvard, Mr. and Mrs. Moskowitz showed up the day after Dustin got put on academic suspension for underage possession and disruptive behavior and had a row right in the middle of the Ad Board, saying that yeah, their son was a bit off and maybe also a little inappropriate, but if he wanted to be crazy, he could jolly well be crazy and nobody got hurt by it, so the whole fucking Ivy League could suck on that.

Up until that point, Eduardo had never heard an adult say 'suck on that' before, and he's still deeply impressed and a little wistful about the whole thing, even years later.

Dustin comes from an extremely functional family, who actually, like, communicate, and love almost without thought. Maybe the reason Eduardo always enjoyed Dustin's company was because he needed to bask in that -- the idea that it really could be as simple as that.

He nudges Amy's shoulder with his. "Is this what it's like, being you?" he asks, when she tilts her head up to him, curious.

"I don't know any other way to be," she responds, shoving the mint into the pouch of her cheek to reply. "But yes. La vie d'Amy et Dustin, mais oh, how exciting it is. I don't know," she corrects herself a beat later. "In the spirit of how we met, we now have this hobby of doing at least one nice thing a day."

"How very Amelie Poulain," he says, and she ribs him.

"It makes us feel better," she says. "Which maybe isn't the true altruistic reason to be doing it, or whatever, but it works for us. Have you ever just wanted to be kind? For no other reason than you wanted to?"

-

Sunday morning, and Eduardo has a flight to catch later this afternoon. Tomorrow is Monday and his work won't look too favorably on it if he calls in with a bad case of being on the wrong side of the country.

But not right at this second. He doesn't need to do anything particularly pressing right this second, which is how he finds himself sitting on the bench in Gate Park, watching a group of tourists huddle on the vista with their disposable cameras, looking like a bunch of candy-colored terns clinging to a cliff face. In the daylight, the Golden Gate Bridge doesn't look like anything but what it really is -- majestic against the sky, incongruently red, and not at all like the number one suicide point in America.

It might be closure, if Eduardo's willing to let himself feel that way. The last time he was here, he'd just lost everything and looked out over a bleak nothingness, and there's something cathartic in being able to stand on this side of something like that and think, Look how far I've come.

He hears a familiar laugh behind him, bright as broken glass, and then Amy and Dustin throw themselves down onto the bench, crowding into him from either side. Dustin's hair is flat against his skull, still wet from his shower, and the breeze coming up off the water makes him shiver all the way down to his toes.

Amy has a twist-tied bag of stale toaster bagels in her lap, which had been sitting in the passenger foot well of her car for the whole duration of Eduardo's stay. She tears off too-big chunks, which she then uses to lure in the seagulls, just to see them squabble. The ensuing commotion attracts the attention of a couple of the tourists, but nobody comes over.

Eduardo watches Dustin, who watches Amy gloat as the seagulls fight over moldy bread. Dustin's arm stretches across the back of the bench, forearm to Eduardo's spine and fingers drifting across Amy's shoulder.

"Are you mad?" Eduardo asks him, unable to help himself. "That I fell in love with your girlfriend?"

Amy straightens up, looking over, but Dustin just smiles and drops his head back, sunlight highlighting the blue veins underneath his skin and washing the rest of the color out.

When he speaks, his voice is warmer even than the light.

"Who are we kidding, Wardo, man," he goes, smiling up at the sky. "I was never angry. Let's face it. Out of all the people in the world who could have kissed my girlfriend, I don't think I could have picked a better person for it than you."

He meets Eduardo's eyes, questing, and whatever he finds there makes him nod. Eduardo doesn't mind; he thinks that Dustin might just be the strongest and most powerful out of everybody he knows. He has the single most useful quality that the rest of them, Mark and Sean included, only wished that they had -- a thick skin. Dustin can take any kind of verbal abuse, and has, because nobody ever bothered to tell him that words broke bones faster than sticks and stones and diluted shares.

"And you?" It's Amy's turn. She ignores the riled-up seagulls completely, studying him. "Are you mad? Are you hurt?"

Eduardo shakes his head. "No," he says honestly. It's stupid to have expected her to tell him about Dustin when he didn't tell her the truth about the dilution; he kept Facebook's name out of it, so she had just as few context clues to go on as he did. If he's serious about the lawsuit, he's going to have to be more forthcoming.

And, because it feels like he should say it, he adds, "Sorry I didn't give you a chance to explain. Sorry if I pressured you."

For this, she hits him across the shoulder, hard enough to hurt.

"Dummy," she says, but she's smiling.

Eduardo nudges both of them at the soft part of their ribs, grinning when they squirm away. "Come on, we should go back to Chris's, since we kind of ditched his party to --"

"-- have drama?" Amy offers, wry.

"Work things out like adults," Dustin corrects.

Eduardo grins. "He did pay for my plane ticket. The least I can do is bring him some greasy hangover food."

Dustin flings his arms up like he's announcing a goal. "Oh my god, magic words!" He leaps up. "I don't even need a hangover for that to sound good. Greasy food, let's go!"

-

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