Dex has three siblings. An older brother, named after their father. He left for college when Dex was 11, he came back to the small town outside of Portland when Dex was 16, with a degree in fisheries and wildlife sciences and a minor in business that their uncles paid for.
Family pays each other back for stuff like that, so work on their boat for the rest of his life, picked the most useful major to make their lives easier.
His younger brother plays soccer and works in an auto shop, he’s adamant that he’ll retire with the same job he got when he was 16.
They’re not leaving. And if they leeave, they’ll come back. Family is family and family stays together, family looks out for each other, family doesn’t leave, family comes back every Christmas.
Dex’s uncles made him the same offer, they could help him with college, add a couple thousand to what his dad was offering. Dex didn’t take any of it, because if he took it, he knew he’d have to come back. Because family pays each other back for that kind of stuff, because he loves computer science and he doesn’t know how useful a couple of lobster fishermen are going to find his knowledge of JavaScript and preference for C#.
Because Dex doesn’t know how much he wants to come back, how much longer he can be family. Because Dex grew up with an older brother who was perfect, who did everything right, who got married last summer and bought his first house three years out of college. He grew up with an older brother who made it hard to be anything less than perfect.
Dex grew up with a younger brother who was an absolute shithead, who rolled joints in the back of math class and made substitute spanish teachers leave classrooms in tears, who drove a car without a muffler. His little brother knew exactly what buttons to push to get Dex red in the face, to get him angry and ready to throw a punch. He was the kind of kid who challenged Dex to a fight and then screamed for their mother when Dex hit back. His parents didn’t give up on his little brother, not exactly, family is family after all. But after a while they just sighed, boys will be boys, he’ll grow out of it. He was cool, in the way that 16 year old dickheads are cool to everyone
And so when Dex worked hard, it wasn’t enough to be as good as his older brother, but it was too much to be cool like his little brother. Neither of his brothers ever seemed like they were trying, in different ways, albeit, but god, Dex wishes it could be that easy for him, that he didn’t fall asleep in first period biology almost every day senior year because he spent his afternoons working on the lobster boat, stayed up all night to get his homework done, and then went to hockey practice in the morning.
When people looked at Dex, they didn’t see his brothers, they saw someone trying harder, someone trying to fight his way through his life. Someone who kept giving everything and getting so little in return.
Dex will not take money from his family, and he says it’s so they can save it, because can get a scholarship anyway and he’ll be fine. And yeah, it’s a little bit of that, but if he takes their money, then he has to come home every holiday, every summer, he has to come back when he graduates. And Dex knows he wants to leave, knows he at least wants the option.
So Dex is the captain of a hockey team that nobody in Maine really gives a shit about in his senior year, but he sends his highlights to every school on the east coast. And any time something goes wrong, he gets angry and he fights, if he has to punch his way out of this town then he will. Family is family and he needs to get as far away from his as possible.
He gets into Samwell and it’s on a full ride and the first thing he sees on his tour is a pride flag in the window of the student alumni centre and that puts a lump in his throat, he crosses his fingers that his dad doesn’t see it and scoff. Family is family and he needs to get away from his.
It takes him time to get used to Samwell, to his new teammates, his new classes. He’s still angry and he still tries his ass off for everything, he still struggles to balance all-nighters with hockey practice and the first time he falls asleep in a lecture he’s expecting the worst.
He used to get a phone-call home, a teacher with a “your brother would have never done this” look on her face and a lecture from both of his parents. He used to get shouted at. It’s not that they were telling him to try harder, they knew he tried hard, but showing that it was tiring? Showing that he was exhausted from all the work he was putting in? That was a no.
The first time he falls asleep in a lecture he’s sitting next to Chowder in 100 level CompSci class, they’ve been there for 10 minutes, taking notes. He wakes up three hours later, only because Chowder has his hand on his shoulder and the other students are shuffling towards the doors. He starts to apologize, looks frantically for a professor about to yell at him, but Chowder just shakes his head, he tells Dex to give him his email and he sends him the notes from the lecture. And it’s… fine. He’s fine.
The first time he loses his temper, it’s in front of Ransom and Holster, he punches a wall after practice, knuckles bruising immediately. And no one laughs at him. Ransom, if anything, looks worried. Holster gets him ice to hold against his knuckles and Ransom tells him that he’s fine, that his practice was fine, asks if he’s alright.
It’s not like home and he loves it. And he has stuff to work on, he knows that, he realizes that a few months into his first semester. But no one’s making him feel like shit for trying, not at hockey, not in his classes. And that’s the difference. He doesn’t mind his roommate and he revels in Haus parties, the ability to get drunk and not be laughed at, looked at with malice when he wakes up hungover.
He kisses a boy. And although he thinks about how his family might freak out if they ever found out, he knows that they can’t get to him here, they can’t scoff, just another way Will’s fucked up. And god, he loves it.
And he wants to just live, without feeling guilty about it. He wants to leave and not come back. And fuck his older brother for setting the bar so high, for never looking out at him, fuck his younger brother for just strolling under the bar while Dex was trying to hoist himself over it. Fuck his parents for the house that he never felt at home in, that he always felt alone and cold in. He’s perfectly happy not to go back.
William Poindexter loves Samwell and he’s going to be a better person here, he is a better person here. He loves his friends and he loves his team and he learns to bake and the first people he tells he’s gay are his two best friends, a goalie from Silicon Valley and a D-Partner from Manhattan, private school kids who know he isn’t really down to be hugged yet, but can see how much he wants someone to hold him. Friends who put their hands on the back of his shoulder while they walk, who rest their heads against his chest late at night on the couch, all of them studying.
But will has three siblings, remember.
Two brothers and a sister.
His sister was 12 when he got into Samwell, 13 when they moved him into his dorm. And man, he feels guilty every single time he thinks about her. She’s a teenager, doesn’t have a lot of friends, wears glasses held together with electrical tape and she reminds Dex of himself in every conceivable way. She tries so hard. She pushes and pushes and still nothing comes, and she’s not like her brothers, she’s not like their parents and she’s so angry, she wanted to know why it’s so hard and Dex never had an answer for her. What he did have for her, that no one seemed to have for him, was gentleness.
When she would cry at the dinner table because she didn’t like what they were eating, or because her vegetables touched her potatoes and she couldn’t eat them and “please mom can’t I just trade plates with Will, he said I could and he doesn’t mind when his beans touch his potatoes” and then got sent to her room for it, it was Dex who crept down to the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed, carefully grabbed two slices of white bread and the jar of peanut butter. It was him who cut the crusts off those sandwiches and snuck into her bedroom to make sure she didn’t go to sleep upset and hungry. It was also him who didn’t pack his own lunch for school the next morning so that their mother didn’t notice the missing food.
Every time he comes home he tries to give her something gentle, to make macaroni and cheese for dinner, to try to tell her that everything is going to be okay, that she just has to find a way to get out, that she just has to wait and everything will be okay. He wants to promise that, but he knows he can’t.
Dex never feels guilty for leaving Maine, he never feels guilty for leaving his parents or his brothers. He doesn’t feel guilty when he stops returning their calls after they find out that he’s going out with Nursey in his senior year. Poindexter men don’t fall in love with other men, especially not poets from New York, that’s fucking laughable. So Dex doesn’t need to be one of them, he doesn’t need to go back.
And he’s happy.
He has it, the feeling of belonging and happiness that he was chasing for so many years.
But fuck.
It keeps him up at night knowing that he had to leave her there to get it for himself.
