Free Lonely Hearts by Heidi Cullinan Page A

is the best. Get her for anything you can.”
    â€œI’ll bear it in mind. Thanks.”
    Elijah would have gone inside, but Lewis passed over another cigarette, and Elijah hated to turn down nicotine.
    Lewis pocketed the lighter once more after Elijah finished with it. “You do any of the music groups?”
    Elijah shuddered around an inhale. “Fuck, no. A lot of my friends are into it, though.”
    â€œChoir or orchestra?”
    â€œBoth. My roommate last year was Aaron Seavers.”
    Lewis lit up. “The tenor? He’s amazing .”
    â€œYeah, he’s all right. His boyfriend is in orchestra. And they both do stuff for Salvo, the girl group. My friend Mina is in it.”
    Lewis had seemed carefully vague before, but now he dropped all pretense and nearly backed Elijah into the corner in his excitement. “I want to try out. But I’m not in choir. Salvo, though. And—and the Ambassadors. They’re the best.”
    â€œGo for it.” Elijah did his best to skirt away from Lewis without being obvious. “The Ambassadors are hell to get into, I know.”
    â€œSure.” Lewis ran a hand through his hair—hair which was noticeably not gaily tousled, just shaggy—and averted his gaze. “Salvo’s probably not as bad, right? Since it’s only in its second year?”
    â€œWell—yes and no. Mina says there are a zillion girls interested, but they were mostly upperclassmen last year, so they have a lot of spaces. Except they’re girls only, you know that, right?”
    â€œOf course. I was only…asking.”
    Elijah got a weird buzzy feeling from the tone in Lewis’s voice, making Elijah feel like he’d stepped on something wriggling and alive and desperate to grab on to his leg. He pulled out his phone to check the time. “I better get back. This wasn’t my official break. Thanks for the smokes.”
    Lewis waved this concern away, and Elijah hustled out of the alley into the relative comfort of other people’s discarded food.
    Baz’s birthday was the last night he was with Damien and Marius in the White House.
    Technically their leases were up the night before on June 30, but Aaron and Giles weren’t moving in until Friday, Mina until Saturday. Her roommate Jilly would drop off her things but not be fully moved in until August. Brian, Giles’s old roommate, wasn’t yet sure exactly when he was coming. Elijah had never been clear about when he’d arrive.
    Sid, the only other returning housemate from the year before, was there the night of Baz’s birthday too, though he was in and out, helping Karen and Marion with the last of their things from the garage apartment. While he was home for the summer, a crew would do some repairs and upgrades to turn the first-floor practice room into a bedroom for Sid, since Baz had elected to turn his room into a single now that Marius was leaving. Sid stopped to have pizza with them when it arrived, and a beer once he’d done all he could for the girls.
    â€œWhen do you leave in the morning?” Marius asked him as he passed over the bottle opener.
    â€œFive.” Sid cracked the cap and sank into his corner of the couch in a fluid motion Baz had seen him do a million times. “It’s four hours to Door County, and I told my mom I’d be there by noon to help man the store.”
    Damien leaned over the coffee table to pick up the opener as Sid discarded it. “I’ll be out of here shortly after you. We want to get the Saint Paul apartment scrubbed but good before Stevie comes Saturday.”
    â€œWhen does your job start?” Sid asked.
    â€œThe fifteenth.” Damien popped his beer open but didn’t drink it right away, rolling the sweating brown bottle between his palms instead.
    Marius reached around Baz to give Damien a reassuring pat on his thigh. “You’ll be great. Stop worrying.”
    With a grunt,