Sweatshirt
by Helen

Sometimes he just felt too big. Not too big, fat, like some fucking girl on a Lifetime movie, which he shouldn't even know about except that Chris and JC had invented a drinking game about Lifetime movies, where you had to take a drink every time someone got date-raped or had a special talk or was stalked, and a bunch of other things that he couldn't really remember because Lifetime had been having a marathon of movies of the week that they were driving across Wyoming, which was fucking empty except for the merciful appearance of state run liquor stores every five hundred miles or so, and they'd all been completely blitzed by the third movie in, which he thought might be about bulimia, or maybe secret cutting.

Anyhow, it wasn't that kind of too big, it was the kind of too big where he felt clumsy, because JC and Justin were so fucking skinny, and he'd never been that skinny. He wondered what it must be like to be more or less the same size as the girls you were dating, like Chris, who never seemed bothered by his height, and had dissolved into giggles when he saw the official press release, on which he was listed as 5'10". Joey thought it might bother him if he were that short, but sometimes he wished he was so he would blend in a little better. Sometimes in pictures, his head—his head, for Christ's sake—was twice as big as JC's, and he knew that heads couldn't be fat, so that wasn't it, but sometimes he felt like he was ruining the whole aesthetic of the band by being some kind of hulking guy way at the back.

And, sure, Justin was taller than he was, but didn't seem to count because Justin was so narrow, and also because he'd gotten used to thinking Justin as little, from when he really was little, and it was still a surprise to him sometimes, especially when he saw pictures of them, how tall Justin was, how old.

So thank God for Lance, especially after he grew up a little, because it was nice to be around him; it reminded him of home, Lance's slightly bulky body, the fact that Lance's hips also didn't do that insane shit that JC and Justin took for granted. Except for the hair and the skin and the eyes and the clothes and the country music, Lance could have been his cousin.

The best thing about it was that he could borrow Lance's clothes—just t-shirts and stuff, but it was great because Lance was the only one of all of them that had clean laundry on any sort of regular basis. The rest of them, even JC, tended to haul around dufflebags full of dirty clothes, forgetting to get the hotel staff to clean them. The last time Britney had hung out with them, on a bus trip from Atlanta to Athens, she'd wrinkled her nose and announced

"This bus smells like dirty boys. and moldy ass towels."

"Sorry, your highness," Chris said.

"I'm just saying you stink," she said. "What? It's so hard to put your clothes in a fucking hamper?"

But Lance almost always had an extra shirt—and not just clean, but fabric softened and folded and a decent size, not those skinny little tanktops that JC and Justin wore, and not Chris' shirts, which were always tight through the shoulders.

It worked out, though, because Lance got cold a lot, especially when they were doing the leg of the tour that Justin insisted on calling the Buttfuck Nowhere leg, which consisted of a lot of cold towns that all looked the same and never had any twenty-four hour drug stores, which was a pain in the ass because they all liked to stop at drugstores at three in the morning and get magazines and candy and Chris liked to buy Dani stupid regional crafts as gifts, and sometimes Joey thought she must have the largest collection of whittled hickory sticks and crocheted toilet paper covers of anyone ever, and the best thing about twenty-four hour drugs stores at three in the morning was the basic lack of fourteen year olds, or anyone else who might give a shit who they were. Clerks who were on at three in the morning inevitably gave them bored stares and rang up their purchases, even the time when Chris announced at the top of his lungs that he'd like to buy a round of condoms, the largest size they had, for the whole store, which was, at that point, the clerk, a tired looking man buying diapers, and a guy stocking the soft drink case.

Lance had been cold all the time then, and Joey could tell because his cheeks would be a funny mottled color and his knuckles would get red, and Lance's hands were chapped forever on that tour, and Joey had spent a lot of time pulling off his sweatshirt and handing it to Lance, against his protests. Joey didn't get cold much; when he was a kid it was cool not to wear a coat, really, to go bareheaded in the winter. He hadn't even owned a raincoat.

Lance usually gave him his clothes back, leaving them on his bunk, almost always folded and washed, even though he'd told Lance that he didn't need to do that. There was one sweatshirt that Lance kept though—just an old zip-up he had, dark grey and soft and with the wrists starting to fray a little, and he didn't really notice that Lance hadn't given it back until Lance wore it again, on one of their off days, when he and Joey went to some martial arts movie that Chris had loved and Lance had hated, even though he had insisted that he'd had a great time and laughed when Chris re-enacted the movie for JC and Justin on one of the hotel beds that night.

He'd worn the sweatshirt when they were doing soundcheck in Pennsylvania and again in Vermont when they were taking publicity pictures for some magazine that was coming out in May, and were freezing their asses off in a barn that had been filled with hay to make it look like summer, and after they'd gotten done jumping around in t-shirts and looking summery, whatever the hell that meant, and Justin was lying in a pile of hay looking soulfully into the camera, Lance had put the sweatshirt on again, pulling the cuffs down over his hands, and snickered with Joey while JC tried to explain to the magazine editors that it wasn't necessary for him to take his shirt off to look summery.

He'd worn it the morning after JC had walked in on Justin doing a line of cocaine at some club and they woke up and locked themselves in the hotel room with him while Chris yelled
"It's just fuckin' cocaine? you idiot, you fucking jackass—are you doing heroin too, because so help me fucking god, I'm going to kill you—" and Justin ended up punching JC in the face and crying, and they all got a little choked up, and Lance wrapped his arms around himself and looked tired and freaked out and didn't say much, and Joey, what with finding ice for JC's eye, and hugging Justin, didn't even notice until the end, when JC was getting some aspirin and Justin, sniffling a little still, had admitted that he could go for a sandwich, and he and Chris were hunched over the room service menu, Chris already embarking on his apology, which involved threatening to order a peanut-butter and spinach sandwich, and Justin laughing waterily.
"You okay?" Joey had said, because Lance had said barely anything, and Lance had said "yeah," and Joey had squeezed his shoulder, and then given him a real hug, Lance's body long and solid in his arms, and noticed that the shirt beneath his hands was his own.

For reasons he didn't like to examine too closely, he liked it when Lance wore his clothes. It seemed to make it okay to touch him more, and Joey liked that. Nothing serious—just punching him on the shoulder a bit, poking him in the ribs. Lance was very ticklish and tended to make a sort of Pillsbury doughboy noise, only really low, when poked. Well, hell, he liked Lance, and he didn't want him to be cold, and that was all, mostly.

Lance wore the sweatshirt when they had to get up at six to go to WKBN to give an interview in Ohio, and again in Iowa when they were waiting for it to be time to put on their costumes, sprawled out in a dressing room, wore it when Chris and Justin and JC all got food poisoning and spent half the night on the bus vomiting while he and Lance took turns rubbing people's backs while they hunched over the toilet and handing them washcloths, and again when he and Lance had been delegated to buy Chris' birthday present because JC and Justin had some photoshoot, just the two of them,
"because they're so dreamy," Lance said when he picked Joey up.
"If he marries Britney, I'm gonna die," Joey said.

He had worn it when they hit a deer at five o'clock in the morning, and they all piled off the bus and waited for the sheriff to show up, standing around, averting their eyes from the mangled carcass, watching their breath in the early morning air, feeling sad. It seemed disrespectful to just get back on the bus and go to sleep.

He'd stopped thinking of it as his, really, so he didn't notice when Lance didn't give it back when they finished the tour and went home to visit their families, didn't even think of it until they were all back in Orlando to brush back up on the routines, work out a few new ones, because Chris was getting tendonitis in his wrists from some of the flips he did, and Justin had finally broken down and told the choreographer that he felt like a retard doing the funky chicken, and there were some new songs. The first Friday back, Joey invited them over for dinner and made a truly massive eggplant parmesan. Lance showed up early with a six pack of beer and Joey's sweatshirt, neatly folded.

"I was doing laundry," Lance said, "and. well," he handed the sweatshirt to Joey, and it was not just clean, but fabric softened and folded and all that shit that Joey knew how to do, but never bothered with, because who was going to go to the store and fucking linger through that aisle to try to figure out which products weren't going to stink, and it seemed like all of them had puffy little butterflies or bears or some shit on them that seemed to predict a girly smell.

"You don't have to—" Joey said.

"No, it's fine, I have sweatshirts."

"I meant, you can. um." Joey handed it back to him. Lance took it, and looked down at it, and then looked at Joey, confused.

"I'm sorry, what?" he said.

"um—" Joey said, reaching for the sweatshirt, but Lance moved back a step. "Lance—"

"oh," Lance said "Oh."

Joey looked at the floor.

"oh, God," Lance said softly.

"It's not—"

"I mean," Lance said. He was holding the sweatshirt tightly in his hands, looking at the floor, blinking. "I don't—"

"It's okay," Joey said desperately. "You—" but Lance was kissing him by then, winding one arm around his neck, smelling of fabric softener and want and bleach and Joey let himself get pushed up against the wall and let Lance pull up his shirt and slide his hands underneath, because Lance was almost as big as he was and he'd always liked that.