Broken Carts ✔️

Aisle 18: Accidents

It started with a joke, I think. Some offhand comment from Ezra about my future in the music industry now that I had a hit single featuring his lyrics. I took his comedic set-up and ran with it– this is all while we're drunkenly feeling each other up, by the way, so you can imagine how in-depth this conversation was– and I started kidding around about how Ezra had given me the confidence to pursue a career in music and change majors yet again.

The mention of going back to school was the breaking point. I remember it so vividly, the way Ezra's grip loosened, how his eyes got wide and he seemed to lose color in his face. It was like he realized I'd died in his arms and he'd been fondling a corpse this whole time.

My smile faded as he stared blankly at me. "'Sup?" I asked.

"Nothing," he murmured.

I leaned in to kiss him again. He barely reciprocated. "Okay, for real, what's going on?" I insisted.

"Nothing."

"You just, like, froze." He looked away and didn't move. I didn't move either. We endured a long silence with our hands up each other's shirts. "Uhm," I said after a minute.

"I'm just confused, I guess," Ezra said, retracting his hands from my body. "Not to be a buzzkill or anything."

"Huh?"

"I didn't realize you were still planning on going back to school."

My heart sank but I didn't know why. "Well, yeah," I said. "It was always my plan."

"No, like, I knew it was your plan at some point, but next semester? You haven't talked about it at all." His expression was amused, but his tone was stoic.

Still drunk enough to not fully process emotions, I laughed loudly. "I just wanna get a degree."

"In what?"

"Huh?"

"Degree in what?" His stare locked onto mine.

"To... be... determined?" I offered. Then I started mumbling. "I mean, the music production thing isn't a bad idea, but I don't think my school offers a major–"

"Seriously?"

The hint of disgust in Ezra's tone took me by surprise. "Uh, yeah, seriously."

"You don't need a degree for that," Ezra told me. "You don't need a degree for anything, technically. I never got a degree and I'm doing just about the same as if I had one, you know?" He chuckled.

"Yeah," I agreed, wanting his rant to end.

To my dismay, he pressed on, his cadence quickening. "See, you get me. You don't wanna go back anyway. It's fuckin' weird, the way we're pressured into going to college and shit. It's a money-suck, that's all. Fuck, I'm glad I got out. I'm glad we got out. God, Milo, sometimes I swear you and I are the same person."

A chill crept up my spine. "What d'you mean by that?" I murmured.

There was a gleam in Ezra's eyes, like he'd been waiting forever to bring this up. "We're the same in a lot of ways. Think about it, think of the crazy-ass stuff we both did to make dropping out look like an accident. We're insane, right?"

My throat was too tight to get the right words out. "I... don't..."

Ezra glanced at the ceiling. A small smile formed on his lips. "Well, my way was definitely more fuckin' clear-cut, yours was an impulse–"

"What are you saying?" I blurted out.

Ezra looked puzzled. "I'm summarizing why you're here right now," he said, straightening his posture. "You got in that car crash on purpose."