At three in the morning, the redheaded skater from LA who lives in room 307 gets back from a party. He goes into the bathroom and wrinkles his nose; there’s the usual piss and Clorox smell but also the unmistakable waft of puke. Standing at the urinal, he thinks he hears something, a hitched breath, which surprises him because he assumed the bathroom was empty; nobody’s showering, and the doors to all the stalls are open, except for the handicap one at the end, but that door always swings closed.
Then he hears a barely audible moan, and the redhead stifles a laugh. What the fuck? Someone’s jacking off in the stall? He thinks he knows who it is: Shawn’s roommate, David. Always studying, keeps to himself, nice enough guy, but everyone knows he’s queer as fuck. The other weekend, Shawn and his frat brothers caught David watching gay porn. Everyone knows because the next day at dinner, Shawn mimicked the whole thing. It was cruel, but if you’re dumb enough to get caught with your dick in your hand, you kind of deserve it. The redhead had laughed because everyone else was laughing, but he also scanned the cafeteria, hoping David wasn’t in earshot.
Done pissing, the redhead zips and walks over to the handicap stall. Sure enough, it’s locked. He knocks on the door. “Yo, weirdo, go do that in your room. Nobody wants to hear it.” The other guys on the floor use worse names than “weirdo.” Most times, the redhead thinks it’s funny, but not always.
David moans again, but this time, there’s pain in his voice. The redhead peers through the gap between the door and the walls and sees David’s sneakered feet. “Go away,” David whispers, and the hair on the back of the redhead’s neck goes up.
“You okay, man?” the redhead asks, his smile disappearing. He pushes his eye against the gap, trying to catch more of a glimpse of David. Instinctively, David’s feet shrink from view, curling in like the legs of a smashed spider.
“Go away,” David says, louder this time.
“Yo, David, let me in,” the redhead says, “I can help. Please?”
The lock slides, and the door opens. David’s upper right side – arm, shoulder, pec, and face, but thankfully not his eye – is covered with one-inch cactus spines. The ones sticking out of his t-shirt are each the center of a tiny, red bullseye. David has a pair of tweezers in his right hand, which shakes violently. “Dude!” the redhead says, stunned, “What the fuck happened to you?” But the redhead knows. “I’m gonna get the RA! Don’t go anywhere!” As he races down the stairs to the RA Duty Office, he rips into himself: What a dumb-ass thing to say! Like David’s going anywhere. But he also hears echoes of his dad that time he was grinding some rails at an office park and broke his collarbone — Okay, son, I’m on my way! Don’t move, stay put! He remembers hanging up the phone and lying on the concrete, unable to move, gritting his teeth, inexplicably wanting his dad.
Back in the bathroom, the redhead watches from the bank of sinks as two RAs gently hoist David up by either armpit and walk him down the row of toilets. As the three of them pass, the redhead hears their soft back and forth: I was coming back from a movie, and I tripped and fell into some cactuses. Did someone push you? No, no one else was there. The redhead suspects otherwise, but David won’t make eye contact.
When the bathroom is silent again, the redhead goes back into the handicap stall. He sees the glint of David’s tweezers on the floor and puts them in his pocket. Then, unable to resist, he peers into the toilet. He sees cactus spines floating in water, tinged pink.
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Dawn Tasaka Steffler (she/her) is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and was selected for both the 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 long list and 2025 Best Small Fictions. Her stories appear in Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, The Forge, and more. She is working on a novella-in-flash that explores the huge impact, both negative and positive, that communities can have on transgender teens. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on X, BlueSky and Instagram.