daisysusan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
daisysusan) wrote2011-06-02 07:34 pm
daisysusan) wrote2011-06-02 07:34 pm
[fic] still your song, 1/2
Title: still your song
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daisysusan
Fandom: The Social Network
Genre: Romance
Paring: Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG-13 for language (technically, I think, the language in here would get it an R from the MPAA, but let's not split hairs)
Word Count: ~14,000
Summary: Sometimes Eduardo thinks about his life, because that's the only way to make sense of it all.
Notes: (1) There is a soundtrack to go with this, because apparently that is something I do now. You can download it here. The cover art is from this flickr photostream. (2) Title of the fic is shamelessly, shamelessly stolen from the Goo Goo Dolls'—wait for it—"Still Your Song," which is, unsurprisingly, on the soundtrack. (3) I am eternally grateful tolanewinree for putting up with more than a month of crazy-hands while I tried to figure out what was happening in my life with the this, hm_yrie for being a lovely test audience and answering my inane questions about legal technicalities, and moogle62 for generally being a sexy pudding boar. (4) I am always, always open to constructive criticism.
Disclaimer: This story is about the fictional representations of these characters from the movie The Social Network, and is in no way a reflection on these actual people. I am making no money from this and am in no way affiliated with the movie itself. Also, seriously, if you found this by googling yourself, abort now, this is not a drill.
still your song
(continued here)
Author:
daisysusan Fandom: The Social Network
Genre: Romance
Paring: Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG-13 for language (technically, I think, the language in here would get it an R from the MPAA, but let's not split hairs)
Word Count: ~14,000
Summary: Sometimes Eduardo thinks about his life, because that's the only way to make sense of it all.
Notes: (1) There is a soundtrack to go with this, because apparently that is something I do now. You can download it here. The cover art is from this flickr photostream. (2) Title of the fic is shamelessly, shamelessly stolen from the Goo Goo Dolls'—wait for it—"Still Your Song," which is, unsurprisingly, on the soundtrack. (3) I am eternally grateful to
lanewinree for putting up with more than a month of crazy-hands while I tried to figure out what was happening in my life with the this, hm_yrie for being a lovely test audience and answering my inane questions about legal technicalities, and moogle62 for generally being a sexy pudding boar. (4) I am always, always open to constructive criticism.Disclaimer: This story is about the fictional representations of these characters from the movie The Social Network, and is in no way a reflection on these actual people. I am making no money from this and am in no way affiliated with the movie itself. Also, seriously, if you found this by googling yourself, abort now, this is not a drill.
still your song
It started as a quiet rebellion, a murmured fuck you behind a dutiful smile.
(Rebellion had never really occurred to him before, the ambitious perfectionist; he had always been happy to live up to—exceed—expectations. Prep school, Harvard, suits and economics and investment and a four-point-oh come hell or high water; he’d never considered rebellion because he likes those things.)
But he’d been sent off to school with congratulations and best wishes and the unspoken direction to meet people who would do things and go places. And it’s Harvard, where everything is doing things and going places, but he knew the right people—old money and wood-paneled walls and mansions in the Hamptons.
Except, and he hides this so well behind designer clothes and impeccable manners and three hundred thousand dollars in oil futures, he’s kind of a nerd. A dweeb. A loser. He actually honest-to-God loved his econ classes (and maybe that’s okay, but he also loved his humanities and social science requirements, and pretty much any class where he got to learn). He likes quiet nights with video games and Discovery channel marathons, and he can’t dance, and he even secretly enjoys the calmness of bad parties with only a few guests.
He sits up halfway, leans against his pillow, lets his head fall back but catches it before it bangs against the wall. Any other time, any other circumstances, and he wouldn’t let his thoughts take this path, but, well, it’s the middle of the night and he’s not particularly interested in moving (and sleep is looking less likely by the minute; he’s wired and happy and still a little perplexed that it all ended up here).
For the first year, he followed his orders to the letter and the spirit, the perfect dutiful son. He studied hard and made straight A’s, went to all the right networking parties, sucked up to his professors with their fingers in the Wall Street pie. And he didn’t make friends, not really. A few acquaintances here and there, the people he lived with or studied with, but no real friends. On his breaks, his father asked about the people he’d met, how they would help him take the world by storm; he answered dutifully and truthfully but without heart. (It was a lonely year.)
A couple weeks into his first-semester economics class the next year, he started passing notes with the (freshman) boy who sat next to him; at first, it was sarcastic commentary on an especially dry lecture, but at the beginning of the next one, he saw that the first thing scribbled in the corner of the boy’s notes was hi, I’m Dustin. Without a thought, he wrote back I’m Eduardo, nice to meet you.
Over the next few weeks, the corners and spaces of Dustin’s notes filled up with more sarcastic comments, then games of tic-tac-toe, then epic stick figure battles with swords and catapults and once, memorably, a shark, the participants hanging off graphs and filling every square inch of the page. (He started having fun, then, not paying perfect attention every moment—but his notes were still impeccable, color-coded and free of doodles, and he still aced all his tests and set the curve on most of them and, well, what his father didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him because everything still looked perfect.)
So when Dustin nudged him and pointed to a corner of his notebook where he’d scribbled wanna come over and play Halo tonight with some guys, he thought for just a moment about cool parties and mixers and networking before adding in the omitted question mark and his response of sure, what time?
(And he consoled himself just a little bit by thinking that it’s Harvard where everyone is doing something exciting and Dustin’s kind of brilliant anyway, studying economics even though there are bits of code scribbled in his notebook between the graphs and the anatomically-incorrect doodles of dinosaurs, and acing the all tests despite his apparent lack of attention.)
Hours later, when he knocked on Dustin’s door, it was answered not by Dustin but by a curly-haired guy. “I’m Mark,” he said perfunctorily, “And Dustin’s too busy wrestling Chris for the remote to answer the door.” He introduced himself as he stepped into the room, noting that someone he didn’t know—presumably Chris—was pinning Dustin to the sofa and holding a remote control just out of his reach.
They spent the night flopped messily around the room, buzzed off cheap beer and trying to teach him to be slightly less hopeless at Halo and arguing cheerfully about everything that came up.
And then it became a regular thing, the four of them. Sometimes they stayed in and sometimes they went out, but mostly he and Mark just spent half their lives in Dustin’s room, even if they were just studying or coding (Mark) or reading (him). (Chris spent his whole life there, half because he and Dustin got along like a house on fire and half because his roommate had a lot of noisy sex.) It was so easy to be with them, practically joined at the hip (they coordinated their second semester schedules so they could all get lunch together on Fridays), that he stopped worrying about connections and getting in with the right crowd.
So maybe it wasn’t all rebellion, not really. His first decision, a fuck you to his father that would never be heard, maybe that was rebellion. But after that, it was just about having friends—Dustin, who could make a rock laugh; Chris, who understood his love of learning and also Dustin’s absurd sense of humor.
And Mark. Mark, who was everything he himself wasn’t—sloppy and careless with his appearance, obsessive and single-minded in his interests, caustically witty to the point of meanness. But they clicked, fit better than he’d ever fit with someone else; with Mark, he let some of the sarcastic commentary that had been running in his head for years bubble to the surface. And Mark was smart; smarter than he was himself, smarter than anyone he’d ever known.
(It’s hard, now, to look back and not see that Mark beat him at his own game as well, a shrewd and calculating businessman, friendship be damned. The understanding, universal as it is, stings his perfectionist soul: there’s always someone better.
It still hurts a little, knowing his father would be proud of Mark.)
Starved for intellectual challenges as he was, it’s hard to blame his past self for diving headlong into their friendship. Certainly, he hadn’t been alone in doing so—they were both staying up until the wee hours absorbed in ideas and video games and crazy schemes to change the world (because they were young and at Harvard and the world was their oyster). Watching the sun rise over the Yard, laughing, so tired that their wild ideas had delusions and their delusions made sense. Having a best friend was a weird feeling, having someone who listened and kept up when he babbled about meteorology, who had his own passions to ramble about. (In another life, he remembers thinking, he would have liked coding; meticulous and logical and full of formulas and algorithms.)
Maybe he should learn, he thinks, grinning to himself at the wildness (the absurdity) of the idea. But he’s a billionaire and he’s smart and, well, the world is still his oyster because what the latter can’t get him, the former can.
(He tries not to think about it too much, that Caribbean night and a thousand dollars—and one insane, perfect idea—turned into six hundred million users and fifty billion dollars and a Wikipedia page for fucking Facebook stalking. He tries not to think too hard that they may well have changed the goddamn world.)
When he went home for the summer after sophomore year, he realized what he’d done that time around; followed his father’s instructions to the letter while completely missing the point. His struggle to keep a shit-eating grin off his face while his father grilled him about connections—not friends, connections—was incredible.
(With a detached sort of surprise, he realizes that he’s never thought through that part of the story before. Gretchen, Sy, they never asked. For all that the depositions were an unraveling of his friendship with Mark, no one cared why they were friends in the first place.)
Of course, the next year and a half is a different situation entirely. He’s rehashed it too many times, most of them with lawyers hanging on his every word; it’s like reading Romeo and Juliet—everything starts out wonderfully but he knows it’s going to go to shit before the end.
The first semester of his last year, he took a lighter-than-average course load—his father objected, but in the end the promise of money, success, renown won out. Unfortunately, that left him with less to concentrate on when it all went bad and he wanted nothing so much as the chance to dive into anything that might distract him.
He stumbled into his favorite coffee shop the morning he got back from California, jetlagged and angry and hurt (wishing for more classes to bury himself in, for more term papers to write), and seeing Chris’s familiar blond head drooping over his laptop at the big table in the corner. (He remembered Dustin begging Chris to come out, for the party, telling him it would be amazing; he remembered Chris’s protestations that he had three exams that week, that he needed to study.) Papers covered the table around the laptop. Chris looked frantic and worried, even while mostly asleep. Wedged between his shoulder and his sagging head was a cell phone.
Crossing the room quickly (or as quickly as his fuzzy, sleep-deprived mind allowed), he grabbed Chris’s phone and closed his laptop without looking at the work on the screen. As he tilted Chris towards the table, he shoved the sweatshirt that had previously been thrown haphazard on the table under his cheek. His face buried in the sweatshirt, Chris mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “Leemee lone, Duttin.”
From Chris’s cell, still in his hand, he heard a tinny “Chris? … Chris? Chris, are you okay?” Looking at the phone’s screen, he saw that Chris was on a four-and-a-half hour call with “D-MAN.”
(He’s pretty sure that Chris has never changed that contact, that he’s now a responsible, mature adult who gets phone calls from what is probably the only person saved in his phone as anything other than mundane the first-name-last-name.)
He gritted his teeth and said into the phone, “He fell asleep, Dustin.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Then, “Eduardo?”
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Shit,” Dustin said flatly.
“Well put. Look, I’m not dealing with you. I just … I’m not. I just didn’t want you to worry about Chris. I’ll keep an eye on him, but I’m not talking to you.”
Without waiting for an answer (or an apology or an explanation or, god forbid, for Dustin’s easy camaraderie to tempt him into a conversation), he hung up.
(It’s not worth feeling guilty about that; Dustin, for all his absurd behavior, is surprisingly good at getting people. Their mutual forgiveness—for misplaced anger, for collusion, for a fight that was kind of stupid in the first place—was easy and uncomplicated. He likes that, Dustin’s easy optimism about friendship and life.)
He rubs his eyes absently, reminding himself it’s no use crying over (metaphorical) spilled milk. Besides, he’s not really inclined to complain about where it’s landed him now.
A few days later, Chris showed up outside his room, knocking softly. He was seriously considering not opening it when Chris yelled, “Wardo, open up. Mark is a fucking asshole; just because I’m still working for him doesn’t mean I’m actually speaking to him!”
Against his better judgment, he opened the door.
Chris promptly launched into what could best be described as a monologue (it was very Shakespearean; god he sometimes wished Chris weren’t a lit major).
“Look, I’m still working for Facebook, but only because it’s a job and a damn impressive job and I’m not entirely sure anyone else could even put up with Mark’s shit, much less keep it from blowing up in his face, but I have not spoken a word to him since Dustin told me what happened. He’s pissed at me for it, because Sean got caught doing coke with some underage interns, but I’m doing everything through Dustin cause if I actually had to talk to him I’d probably end up fired.”
He paused for breath.
“And Dustin … I’m pretty sure he told Mark to go fuck himself. Probably in those exact words, possibly in more detail. Honestly, I’m not sure how he didn’t get fired for that.”
(He knows, knew even then, how Dustin kept his job, because Mark likes smart people and, more than that, he likes smart people who speak their minds and stick up for themselves, and he knows that Mark trusts Dustin as much as he’s ever trusted anyone—
Except him.)
It floats across his mind, unbidden but not entirely unwelcome, the recollection that Mark wasn’t just his best friend, but he was Mark’s. He thinks about that less than he should, maybe, less than Mark deserves. But he knows, he’s always known, because pragmatic—always so very pragmatic—Mark came to him with thefacebook even though the Winklevosses had money. And Mark was smart enough to know what the eighteen thousand dollars meant, not this is a good idea but you’re my best friend and I trust your vision. (Even if he didn’t, even if he kept looking for advertisers, that was still what the money meant.)
He’s glad, as he sits in the darkness, teasing the corner of the sheet between idle fingers, that they’ve never lied, tried to say it was just business (not after Mark’s first feeble attempt, anyway).
But he’s getting ahead of himself, he thinks, taking a deep breath.
“Fuck, Wardo,” Chris said, leaning against the doorframe. “I haven’t even … fuck.”
There were huge bags under Chris’s eyes, he noticed, and he looked unsteady.
“Are you okay?” he asked (before he remembered that he shouldn’t care so much).
Chris looked hesitant. “I haven’t been sleeping much. It’s not a big deal.”
“At least sit down. You look like you’re about to fall over.”
Flopping gratefully into the couch, Chris nodded. “Yeah, I feel like it. I had a big history paper, and then Sean got fucking arrested with cocaine and underage fucking interns, Wardo, what the fuck is wrong with him? And then, even when I’ve had time to sleep, I’ve too pissed off to close my eyes.”
Chris sighed. “I hate him so much.”
He sank into the couch next to Chris, and muttered “Which one?” only a little resentfully.
“I don’t even know. I honestly don’t know if I hate Mark or Sean more right now.”
(He knew then, just as he knows know, that the answer was Sean. Because Chris, for all his anger and commiseration and exhaustion, was and is too loyal to really despise Mark forever.)
Things got better from there, just a little bit. And slowly. But they got a little better just for having Chris around, a friend who appreciated quiet nights spent reading or watching TV or studying in the not-stressful way. (It was probably a good thing that he was in the Phoenix or his general homebody-ness and unhappiness would have kept him from leaving his room for anything but class.) It was easy to be friends with Chris, they always fit so comfortably together even without Mark’s brilliance (and cutting humor) and Dustin’s perpetually mood-lightening silliness.
But he still struggled. Seeing his friendship with Mark boiled down to that number, that Mark didn’t value him at thirty percent or thirty-five percent, that he was worth less than one percent of this stupid project that was his best friend’s life, it stuck with him for a long time. And sometimes Chris’s phone would ring and he’d look up guiltily from the caller ID and mutter that he needed to take it, then disappear into the hall for a long stretch, because it was Dustin (or maybe Mark, maybe they were speaking again, he never asked).
And he didn’t exactly tell his lawyers, either, that he was spending weeknights with Facebook’s PR guy sprawled across his couch muttering viciously about his history professor (and he justified it to himself by saying that they never talked about Facebook anyway, and to the part of him still pleasing his father by saying that Chris was brilliant and motivated and wouldn’t work for Facebook forever because it didn’t fit into his grand schemes and world-changing plans).
So he hung out with Chris and made connections through the Phoenix (his father liked that) and worked on the counter-suit against his best friend, and then he was graduating, because time has a funny way of passing quickly even when every moment feels deathly slow. (He remembers pointedly not thinking, as he returned to his seat, about how Mark should have been sitting in the audience, uncomfortable and bored, because that’s what people do for their best friends.)
(Things got better after Harvard, for all that the depositions hurt him down to his soul. It was easier not walking past places that reminded him of Mark, of the best friend he’d ever had, of the thrill of seeing something amazing and knowing that he’d helped.)
But even before that, before he left for good, things started looking up a tiny bit (thanks, as usual, to Chris).
He pressed through the crowd after the ceremony, looking his parents or—well, for anyone, really. Craning his neck, he saw someone who looked like Chris (damn mortarboards really did make everyone look the same). Before he could head towards maybe-Chris, though, he was halted by a slew of backslaps and shouts of “Congratulations, man!” from his fellow Phoenix members.
By the time he managed to extricate himself and head towards maybe-Chris (who had taken off his mortarboard and was definitely Chris), the crowd was beginning to thin and a few determined guests had forced their way in. He was within ten feet of his destination when a figure not dressed in crimson robes shouted, “Chris, dude, you left out the magna cum laude part! Congrats! Even though it doesn’t count because it’s liberal arts, I’m proud of you!” (He could practically hear Chris’s eyes rolling.) The yelling figure then proceeded to hug Chris enthusiastically, attempting to spin him around like the happy couple at the end of a bad movie. (It failed rather spectacularly, both because their heights were all wrong and because there was not nearly enough space for the maneuver.)
He shouldn’t have been surprised, he reflects. Dustin and Chris had always been inseparable; being on opposite coasts for the better part of two years was probably torturous for them. (During the time they were both in Palo Alto, he remembers how much more Chris carried himself, how much more easily he smiled.) Now, looking back, he is ashamed of how tempted he was to leave, to let his resentment keep him from congratulating his good friend. But he pushed forward despite his misgivings.
“Hey, Chris,” he began once he was within earshot for not-yelled words. (Chris still looked shellshocked and a little dizzy, Dustin grinning manically.)
“Wardo!” Chris called, walking towards him. “How does it feel to be a graduate?”
He smiled. (It was the face-splitting one he used to wear constantly around Mark; a year later, his muscles are unused to it.) “I don’t know, you tell me.”
Instead of answering, Chris grabbed him in a tight hug, saying “We did it” gleefully.
When they broke apart, he noticed Dustin watching them, discomfort radiating from his face (and the rest of him as well). Dustin approached them slowly, clearly worried that he would leave or punch him or … (Well, Dustin’s fears weren’t entirely unfounded, given that they hadn’t spoken since Chris fell asleep in the coffee shop, and their last face-to-face meeting had ended with Mark’s computer in pieces and almost-thrown punches and a lawsuit that was still underway).
Dustin stepped forward. “Congratulations, Eduardo,” he said cautiously.
“Thanks, Dustin,” he said with a smile that was only a tiny bit forced.
“Look, man, I know the last year has been rough, but you just graduated from Harvard, so I’m going to hug you now.”
And before he could have protested (not that he was going to), Dustin hugged him. It wasn’t the bone-crushing tackle of a hug Chris had received, but it wasn’t half-hearted, either. That was something, he knew, a step in the right direction, towards recovering and moving on and all those things that healthy people did.
Dustin spoke again. “Look, I know it’s not enough, but for what little it is worth, I didn’t know until they’d already drawn up the papers, until it was too late to stop anything. And I’m sorry. So sorry. If it’s any comfort at all, I didn’t speak a word to Mark outside of work for months, and Chris didn’t talk to him at all.”
He swallowed hard and gave the answer that he knew was wrong. “Thanks. That’s worth something. But I, uh, can’t talk about it with you. Or anyone, really, but especially not anyone who works for Mark.”
“Oh, because you’re …” Dustin said, his face closing off slightly.
“Yeah, I …”
Chris cut in, thank goodness, before it got any more uncomfortable. “Look, I know it’s weird right now, but you guys are my best friends and I know that you were friends before either of you met Mark. So Eduardo and his parents are going to go out tonight, and Dustin, you’re going to come out with me and my parents. And then tomorrow all three of us are going to go get burgers for dinner to celebrate that Wardo and I graduated from Harvard. Got it?”
Cowed, he and Dustin nodded.
(He should send Chris a note or flowers or a present worth more than the GDP of one of the smaller countries in Africa. If it weren’t for Chris’s steadfast resolution not to let the problems with him and Mark tear all four of them apart, he’s certain he wouldn’t have Dustin’s comforting silliness or Chris’s steady understanding or much of anything else. His last year at Harvard without Chris’s easy empathy and laughter and constant, constant support are not something he particularly wants to contemplate at length, not when everything is so much better now, when he is happy and curled up in bed and grinning like the dopiest idiot who ever lived even as he considers the worst years of his life.)
And dinner the next night was good, full of smiles and memories and Chris’s stories about the awful people on his hall (who, among other things, thought three in the morning during finals week was a good time to get blazed and blast the Grateful Dead); apropos of nothing at all, Dustin related that, the week before, he’d had a nightmare in code and then they were laughing because really, was there anyone other than Dustin who would dream about being chased around his room by a run-time error?
That night, before they drifted apart on the sidewalk, Dustin hugged him (again) and said, seriously, “I know you can’t talk about the stuff, but I’m your friend, and if you ever need something, I will absolutely be there for you.”
Almost against his will, he smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Dustin.”
So things got a little better.
Of course, they didn’t stay better for long, because the next phase of his life was the depositions and all the agony of rehashing every painful moment of his ruined friendship with Mark. And he was avoiding Chris and Dustin for the most part, since they were too close to the other side, to Mark and Facebook. He didn’t speak to either of them for the duration of the depositions, not until he was on the other side with money and shares and a non-disclosure agreement and, he hoped (at the time, anyway, he thinks with a smile he can just feel is fond), no reason to ever talk to Mark again.
It wasn’t a good time for him (unsurprisingly), he remembers, curling in on himself a little bit. But he’s past the two low points of his middle-of-the-night retracing of his life. He started talking to Chris and Dustin again as soon as the lawsuit was over (and, as it turned out, having friends was a big boost to his emotional stability).
He was a lot of things during the years between when he was cut out of Facebook and when he managed to get his life sort of mostly together again; he was hurt, he was sad, he was lonely. But he spent surprisingly little time being angry. (The stinging bitterness that edged, sometimes, into hatred was there, but it rarely had the force of ire behind it.)
Anger was never something he was particularly comfortable feeling. It was out-of-control and consuming and tiring. More than anything, it was tiring. And his father was angry, sometimes it felt like he was angry all the time. He didn’t want to be like his father.
(Maybe he shouldn’t have spent as much as he did trying not to be like his father while still wanting to please him. It was a bad combination of rebellion and submission and, really, it only made them both unhappy. He should have picked rebellion, perhaps, severed himself completely from his father’s wishes and, with the same breath, stopped trying to impress him. And he should have done it years ago, before his inability to choose between the two split him in half and left him stranded in New York without his best friend.)
(Self-flagellation isn’t health, he reminds himself.)
But he wasn’t angry, not really, even sitting in the deposition room staring at Mark’s hoodie-over-tie getup (what the fuck was he even doing with that?), just hurt and confused. He’d been so angry that summer in Palo Alto and when he saw the papers, but anger like that burns itself out quickly and by the time he was staring at Mark across the table, it no longer made his stomach seize up to think about everything they’d accomplished together. Instead, it just left him feeling empty, blank even. Like being told that Santa Claus wasn’t real, only a hundred times worse.
(The feeling of blank emptiness wasn’t fun, but it worked out for the best, because when they did run into each other, he managed to refrain from punching Mark in the face.)
It was bound to happen eventually, he was too smart to not have realized it. An investor and an Internet visionary; they both attended networking parties thinly disguised as charity events. But he did hope that Mark would have the decency to ignore him, or something.
No such luck, he realized with a sinking feeling. Mark was walking towards him with purpose.
“Um, hi,” Mark began, standing shiftily in front of him. “We … um, I …”
He tried to resist the urge to smirk. (Because for all that he wasn’t angry, per se, asking him not to take a little pleasure in Mark’s obvious discomfort was just too much.)
(He’s glad he didn’t, because he thinks that he would regret that more than anything else in his messed-up life, that he would regret taking Mark’s attempt to be a decent person and throwing it back in his face.)
“We can’t just ignore each other,” Mark managed to force out. “It’s too weird. Too many people know that we know each other, and that you’re a Facebook shareholder.” He extended his hand, launching into the line that some intern had clearly made him recite so as not to botch it. “It’s good to see you, Mr. Saverin. I hope all your business ventures are going well.”
He nodded once, shaking Mark’s hand quickly and trying not to grin a little meanly at his uncharacteristic formality. “Okay. I can handle civil.”
Mark smiled wanly, hesitantly. (The urge to smile at his nervousness was nearly unbearable. He resisted; it was the urge of a best friend. They lost the privilege of laughing at each other a long time ago.)
Instead, he said, “Don’t worry, civil entails me not breaking any more of your possessions,” and Mark’s smile became a little truer.
So they were civil. They didn’t seek each other out, but nor did they avoid each other (except being alone, they both avoided that). Though inane conversations were not unusual (weather, uncontroversial current events, Chris and Dustin’s hijinks), the norm was nods and a quiet “Mark”—“Eduardo” exchange. But Silicon Valley has a short memory, and their lawsuit never made headlines, not the way the Winklevosses’ did, so the next development was as inevitable as ending up at the same cocktail party.
It happened like something out of a bad romantic movie, or maybe just a screwball comedy. James Alway—whose start-up he’d just invested in—introduced him to an app developer named Alex Branson, who promptly turned away and tapped a man who turned out to be Mark on the shoulder, saying “You have got to meet these guys.” Before he even processed what was happening, Alex had said, “Mark, this is James Alway, and his chief investor, Eduardo Saverin. James, Eduardo, this is Mark Zuckerberg.”
He looked at Mark, and Mark looked back at him, and all of a sudden they were laughing, clutching at the hor d'oeuvre table to stay upright, because apparently they were so good at civil that people didn’t even realize they knew each other. He felt tears building up in his eyes, and it was clear that the universe wasn’t on his side because he could not stop laughing and neither could Mark. Their respective acquaintances were staring at them, clearly not getting the joke (mostly because there wasn’t one). Finally, James said, “I think there’s something we’ve missed.” (Could James and Alex know less about the people they were working with, he wondered.)
Wiping his eyes, he forced out, “We went to Harvard together.”
Mark gave him an almost-withering glare. (It would have been more effective if he hadn’t clearly been struggling to keep a straight face.) “That’s the understatement of the century. Wardo used to do my laundry when I was too spaced out to remember it. Which was pretty much all the time.”
He smiled at that (and it was real, he felt it in his stomach—and if he were feeling poetic, in his soul). “I also used to put him to bed when he would stay up coding for thirty-six hours. It was a lot like being his mother.” (Mark looked like he wanted to punch him, but in a good-natured way, not an I-hate-your-breathing-guts way.)
“And he’s a co-founder of Facebook,” Mark said.
Then the whole mood twisted into awkwardness, and they kind of looked at each other sideways before Mark muttered something about needing to go talk to someone who conveniently happened to be all the way across the room.
But it also changed everything, like some sort of strange switch flipped in his mind. It was absurd and maybe a little twisted, but he felt so much more comfortable around Mark, like just knowing Mark was in the same room no longer made his stomach shift unpleasantly now that they’d successfully interacted (however briefly) without shifting uncomfortably and glaring daggers at each other.
He felt immeasurably lighter, knowing that maybe his grudge wasn’t worth holding (just because they weren’t friends didn’t mean they had to seethe silently every time they were in the same room). So he relaxed, a little, which led to him drinking more freely, which, in turn, led to him draping himself across the sofa in Chris’s living room.
It was far too easy to forget, after a couple of cocktails, that he still hated Mark (just a little bit, as much as he was ever capable of hating Mark and as much as it was worth his time and energy to bother). He probably shouldn’t have had the last drink, he thought at the time, because he was just buzzed enough to agree that crashing in Chris’s guest room would be easier than getting a hotel after the horrifyingly dull charity … thing. But he did agree, and he ended up sitting on Chris’s couch playing whatever the newest version of Halo was, with Chris kicking his ass (as always) and Dustin cheering them both on enthusiastically. (“Go, Chris! You can get him!” he yelled, and “Wardo, actually use your controller, you can do it!”)
And Jesus Christ, it was so much like the suite in Kirkland that hadn’t even been his but he’d basically lived there anyway (except Mark wasn’t sitting next to him, drunk and sarcastic and hilarious, giving them all commentary on their gaming skills). Chris and Dustin were so similar, sitting half on top of each other, poking and ribbing each other and he’s always been pretty sure that poking on Facebook was added when Dustin just would not stop actually physically poking Chris (usually when Chris needed to actually be concentrating, because Dustin wouldn’t be Dustin otherwise). And when they all fell asleep like drunken college students, piled together, it felt just a little empty because Mark wasn’t there to kick him in the shins at four in the morning.
(He’s always been a slightly nostalgic drunk.)
Life kept on going, after his surprisingly-not-awkward encounter with Mark. He went back to work and went out with his friends and talked to Chris and Dustin frequently.
(The day Chris called him, voice low but excited, to say that he was going to work for Senator Obama, he thought a lot of things. He thought of Dustin, left to the wilds of Silicon Valley by his best friend and left alone to handle Mark. He thought, briefly, of Mark, with his best friends drifting away one by one. Mostly he thought of Chris, finally pursuing his dream of shaping the future though people not technology. He’s proud of him, for taking the risk and going after something he’s always wanted.
Dustin was less enthusiastic, a few hours later, speaking soft and unusually serious about being torn between wanting Chris to be happy and wanting him to stay in California, and feeling guilty about the latter.)
When he sat and thought for too long, sometimes, on long flights or when he couldn’t sleep, it felt off to be close with Chris and Dustin but not Mark, given how clearly the four of them had been split at Harvard, inseparable Chris and Dustin, and inseparable him and Mark. But life goes on and people grow up and seeing Mark, then, still made his heart hurt with betrayal and the thought of what might have been.
He smiles at that recollection. He’s so happy with where everything ended up now, that regretting the steps (even the most painful) is difficult.
(Growing up changes everything.)
The next time he and Mark were at a dinner together, Mark sought him out again. He was standing on the porch outside the blandly forgettable dining room, drinking a glass of mediocre wine and staring sightlessly over the unimpressive landscaping. Mark tapped him once on the shoulder, nodding slightly and saying “Hello, Eduardo.”
“What do you want, Mark?” he replied, terse (and perhaps, in hindsight too harsh; at the time, he still would have considered ignoring Mark—or punching him—somewhat justified. But he knows, now, what Mark approached him to say and that changes his perspective on everything.)
“Hey, I, um,” Mark trailed off, picking at his shirtsleeves, before squaring his shoulders and taking a deep breath.
“I ... Chris and Dustin made me swear I wouldn't ask you to forgive me because that's emotional manipulation. I guess. But I'm sorry I handled everything like, well, like a nineteen-year-old jackass.”
The short laugh that escaped him wasn’t entirely voluntarily. “Yeah,” he replied to fill the lengthening silence. “Thanks. That means something.”
Mark nodded once and turned to walk away, pausing before he took a step. “Thanks for not punching me, or, I don’t know, calling me a bitch on the Internet. I would have deserved it.”
Before he could answer (not that he had any idea what to say), Mark disappeared into the flow of the party.
He stood out on the balcony for a long time after that, reeling from the idea that Mark would apologize, and for something real, a true admission of error on his part (with the words spelled out, not through implication and acknowledgement).
He was glad the next time they ran into each other and he was glad it didn’t take long to happen. Seizing his opportunity when Mark was standing alone, he walked over and said, shortly, “This doesn’t mean I forgive you, but I’m sorry, too.”
Then he walked away.
(Cowardice, he knows, to not wait and see how that conversation played out. But he thinks that after everything, after the messy mixture of friendship and business that led both to even messier ends, he was entitled to a bit of cowardice. Not putting himself out there for Mark to gut viciously again, he doesn’t regret that.)
After the settlement, he never intended to be friends with Mark again. (Hell, he never intended to Mark to speak again.) It never occurred to him, as he signed the papers, full of hurt and heartbreak and bitterness, that there was anything Mark could do, that he himself could do, to overcome left behind and point-zero-three percent and lawyer up, asshole and you had one friend.
(It was a stupid thing to say, he knows. It wasn’t true, he knew it, Mark knew it, Chris and Dustin—such good friends they managed to stay on speaking terms with both parties—knew it. But sitting there in the deposition room, rehashing exactly how he ended up suing his best friend, it just hurt so goddamn much. All he wanted in that moment was to piss Mark off, to make him hurt just as much.
He regrets it a little, now. But mostly he doesn’t think about it, because dwelling on things he can’t take back isn’t worth his time; life lessons from Dustin Moskovitz.)
But the next time he saw Mark, after the apologies, their customarily cursory exchange … wasn’t.
“Mark,” he said.
“Eduardo,” Mark said. Then, “How’s Singapore?”
He gaped for a moment. (Small talk, he thought, like it was a new concept entirely.) “It’s, um, it’s good. The weather is nice, it reminds me a bit of São Paulo.”
Mark smiled. “I’ve always wanted to go, but there hasn’t been time.”
Before he even processed the thoughts in his head, his mouth opened. (Oh God, he remembers thinking, do I not even have a filter anymore?) “You would like it; it’s all very modern.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.” Mark paused for a moment, hesitated. “How’s the food?”
(The small talk about trivialities was another change, he realized later, in addition to Mark’s new ability to apologize.)
“It’s really good,” he answered.
“Have you had bubble tea?” Mark asked. “I know it’s Chinese, but Singapore is close. And it’s really good. There’s a place near Stanford …”
“Yeah, I have,” he said. “I’ve been on a couple of trips to China, but there are some places in Singapore, too.”
And then, before Mark can continue with his slightly awkward attempts at conversation, he cut in. “We should talk. Somewhere without cheap wine and people from Valleywag.”
Mark frowned.
“Because we apologized that but doesn’t begin to cover everything, Mark,” he said.
“Oh,” came the soft reply. Then, “You want to cover the other things, too?” Mark sounded so terrified, so desperately hopeful in that moment, that it took all of his willpower not to smile reassuringly like they were back at Harvard, like they were still friends.
“Yeah, I do,” he answered instead. “But in the meantime, how’s California?”
Mark responded easily, and though some process (or fluke) that he still doesn’t understand, it turned into a real conversation (nothing world-shaking, but more than trivialities). He was surprised, then, by how comfortable he was talking to Mark. Just the knowledge of mutual repentance changed a lot, allowed them to talk about their lives (which were and are mostly business; they had both always been workaholics).
After, Chris dragged him aside, his mouth a thin line.
“What are you doing?” he asked harshly, almost angry.
When there was no answer (really, he had no idea what was he was doing), Chris continued, “That was a 40-minute conversation, and, if you didn’t notice, you were talking to Mark.”
“Jesus, Chris,” he replied with a shrug, “I have no idea. At least we managed it without killing each other?”
Chris shook his head and rubbed his temples. “Eduardo,” he said flatly, “It’s Mark. The last time you two were speaking, it ended with vandalism, your friends being forced to choose between you—which sucked, by the way—and a six hundred million dollar lawsuit. You are a very good friend, and I’d rather not have to pick up those pieces again. I don’t want you to go through that again.”
“Believe me,” he answered, “I never want to feel that way again, either.”
“Look, I just want you to be happy.”
He’s glad of Chris’s caution, keeping him grounded and making it hard to throw himself into the friendship the way he had at Harvard. There were other factors making that level of single-minded devotion difficult, of course; distance, and their devotion to their jobs, and his own reluctance to trust Mark again.
But despite all that, a few weeks later, he found himself sitting in a New York coffee shop across from Mark, who was speaking low but surprisingly confident.
“I really am sorry,” he said. “I was so pissed, though. I got so angry that I made a business decision personal. When you froze the account, I think I decided that you were trying to screw Facebook over, and me by extension. So I screwed you over.”
Silence lingered for a moment.
“I’m so fucking sorry, Wardo. It was such a shitty thing to do. You earned more than point-zero-three percent of Facebook and I’m glad you have more now.”
“Yeah,” he said, resisting the urge to gape, “Yeah. I was kind of trying to screw you over. I was mad at you for listening to Sean instead of me and for saying I was getting left behind.”
(He had been, young and arrogant and maybe a little jealous that someone else was stealing his best friend even if he didn’t know it at the time, convinced that he could do no wrong, that three years of college had taught him everything he needed to know.)
Mark nodded.
“We’re both guilty of being immature jackasses,” he added.
Mark laughed wryly. “That we are.”
Silence gathered around them, until Mark broke it by saying “Did we really just have a whole conversation about our feelings?”
“I think we did,” he answered, laughing, “Well, I can add that to the list of things I thought you’d never do that you’ve proven me wrong about.”
“Oh really? What else is on that list, may I ask?”
He grins deviously. “I definitely never imagined you of all people would revolutionize interpersonal communication. Or be able to do your own laundry. Do you even do your own laundry?”
Mark threw a napkin at him, but then sobered. “If screwing over my best friend is on that list … I really am sorry. You weren’t the right CFO for Facebook—”
“I know,” he cut in.
“But still,” Mark continued, ignoring him, “I only diluted your share that much because I was pissed off and I never should have done it. It was the business equivalent of getting drunk and saying offensive things about your bra size on my blog.
“Except, of course,” Mark finished awkwardly, “You don’t have a bra size.”
When he burst out laughing at that, it occurred to him for the first time that they might actually be able to salvage a friendship from the wreckage they created. Sitting at a cramped coffee shop table, he felt a comfort he hadn’t felt since nights at Harvard, falling asleep on the couch in Kirkland and making fun of Dustin’s inability to contain his exuberance while drunk.
(Things weren’t perfect after that, but it was a beginning, a foundation. It was something that could hold up the rest of their cautious, hesitant new friendship.)
And that was exactly how they built it up again, slow and meticulous and so painfully careful that sometimes he just wanted to go all in and have his best friend back, no questions asked, but he didn’t trust Mark, didn’t trust himself. So they took their time.
(Rebellion had never really occurred to him before, the ambitious perfectionist; he had always been happy to live up to—exceed—expectations. Prep school, Harvard, suits and economics and investment and a four-point-oh come hell or high water; he’d never considered rebellion because he likes those things.)
But he’d been sent off to school with congratulations and best wishes and the unspoken direction to meet people who would do things and go places. And it’s Harvard, where everything is doing things and going places, but he knew the right people—old money and wood-paneled walls and mansions in the Hamptons.
Except, and he hides this so well behind designer clothes and impeccable manners and three hundred thousand dollars in oil futures, he’s kind of a nerd. A dweeb. A loser. He actually honest-to-God loved his econ classes (and maybe that’s okay, but he also loved his humanities and social science requirements, and pretty much any class where he got to learn). He likes quiet nights with video games and Discovery channel marathons, and he can’t dance, and he even secretly enjoys the calmness of bad parties with only a few guests.
He sits up halfway, leans against his pillow, lets his head fall back but catches it before it bangs against the wall. Any other time, any other circumstances, and he wouldn’t let his thoughts take this path, but, well, it’s the middle of the night and he’s not particularly interested in moving (and sleep is looking less likely by the minute; he’s wired and happy and still a little perplexed that it all ended up here).
For the first year, he followed his orders to the letter and the spirit, the perfect dutiful son. He studied hard and made straight A’s, went to all the right networking parties, sucked up to his professors with their fingers in the Wall Street pie. And he didn’t make friends, not really. A few acquaintances here and there, the people he lived with or studied with, but no real friends. On his breaks, his father asked about the people he’d met, how they would help him take the world by storm; he answered dutifully and truthfully but without heart. (It was a lonely year.)
A couple weeks into his first-semester economics class the next year, he started passing notes with the (freshman) boy who sat next to him; at first, it was sarcastic commentary on an especially dry lecture, but at the beginning of the next one, he saw that the first thing scribbled in the corner of the boy’s notes was hi, I’m Dustin. Without a thought, he wrote back I’m Eduardo, nice to meet you.
Over the next few weeks, the corners and spaces of Dustin’s notes filled up with more sarcastic comments, then games of tic-tac-toe, then epic stick figure battles with swords and catapults and once, memorably, a shark, the participants hanging off graphs and filling every square inch of the page. (He started having fun, then, not paying perfect attention every moment—but his notes were still impeccable, color-coded and free of doodles, and he still aced all his tests and set the curve on most of them and, well, what his father didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him because everything still looked perfect.)
So when Dustin nudged him and pointed to a corner of his notebook where he’d scribbled wanna come over and play Halo tonight with some guys, he thought for just a moment about cool parties and mixers and networking before adding in the omitted question mark and his response of sure, what time?
(And he consoled himself just a little bit by thinking that it’s Harvard where everyone is doing something exciting and Dustin’s kind of brilliant anyway, studying economics even though there are bits of code scribbled in his notebook between the graphs and the anatomically-incorrect doodles of dinosaurs, and acing the all tests despite his apparent lack of attention.)
Hours later, when he knocked on Dustin’s door, it was answered not by Dustin but by a curly-haired guy. “I’m Mark,” he said perfunctorily, “And Dustin’s too busy wrestling Chris for the remote to answer the door.” He introduced himself as he stepped into the room, noting that someone he didn’t know—presumably Chris—was pinning Dustin to the sofa and holding a remote control just out of his reach.
They spent the night flopped messily around the room, buzzed off cheap beer and trying to teach him to be slightly less hopeless at Halo and arguing cheerfully about everything that came up.
And then it became a regular thing, the four of them. Sometimes they stayed in and sometimes they went out, but mostly he and Mark just spent half their lives in Dustin’s room, even if they were just studying or coding (Mark) or reading (him). (Chris spent his whole life there, half because he and Dustin got along like a house on fire and half because his roommate had a lot of noisy sex.) It was so easy to be with them, practically joined at the hip (they coordinated their second semester schedules so they could all get lunch together on Fridays), that he stopped worrying about connections and getting in with the right crowd.
So maybe it wasn’t all rebellion, not really. His first decision, a fuck you to his father that would never be heard, maybe that was rebellion. But after that, it was just about having friends—Dustin, who could make a rock laugh; Chris, who understood his love of learning and also Dustin’s absurd sense of humor.
And Mark. Mark, who was everything he himself wasn’t—sloppy and careless with his appearance, obsessive and single-minded in his interests, caustically witty to the point of meanness. But they clicked, fit better than he’d ever fit with someone else; with Mark, he let some of the sarcastic commentary that had been running in his head for years bubble to the surface. And Mark was smart; smarter than he was himself, smarter than anyone he’d ever known.
(It’s hard, now, to look back and not see that Mark beat him at his own game as well, a shrewd and calculating businessman, friendship be damned. The understanding, universal as it is, stings his perfectionist soul: there’s always someone better.
It still hurts a little, knowing his father would be proud of Mark.)
Starved for intellectual challenges as he was, it’s hard to blame his past self for diving headlong into their friendship. Certainly, he hadn’t been alone in doing so—they were both staying up until the wee hours absorbed in ideas and video games and crazy schemes to change the world (because they were young and at Harvard and the world was their oyster). Watching the sun rise over the Yard, laughing, so tired that their wild ideas had delusions and their delusions made sense. Having a best friend was a weird feeling, having someone who listened and kept up when he babbled about meteorology, who had his own passions to ramble about. (In another life, he remembers thinking, he would have liked coding; meticulous and logical and full of formulas and algorithms.)
Maybe he should learn, he thinks, grinning to himself at the wildness (the absurdity) of the idea. But he’s a billionaire and he’s smart and, well, the world is still his oyster because what the latter can’t get him, the former can.
(He tries not to think about it too much, that Caribbean night and a thousand dollars—and one insane, perfect idea—turned into six hundred million users and fifty billion dollars and a Wikipedia page for fucking Facebook stalking. He tries not to think too hard that they may well have changed the goddamn world.)
When he went home for the summer after sophomore year, he realized what he’d done that time around; followed his father’s instructions to the letter while completely missing the point. His struggle to keep a shit-eating grin off his face while his father grilled him about connections—not friends, connections—was incredible.
(With a detached sort of surprise, he realizes that he’s never thought through that part of the story before. Gretchen, Sy, they never asked. For all that the depositions were an unraveling of his friendship with Mark, no one cared why they were friends in the first place.)
Of course, the next year and a half is a different situation entirely. He’s rehashed it too many times, most of them with lawyers hanging on his every word; it’s like reading Romeo and Juliet—everything starts out wonderfully but he knows it’s going to go to shit before the end.
The first semester of his last year, he took a lighter-than-average course load—his father objected, but in the end the promise of money, success, renown won out. Unfortunately, that left him with less to concentrate on when it all went bad and he wanted nothing so much as the chance to dive into anything that might distract him.
He stumbled into his favorite coffee shop the morning he got back from California, jetlagged and angry and hurt (wishing for more classes to bury himself in, for more term papers to write), and seeing Chris’s familiar blond head drooping over his laptop at the big table in the corner. (He remembered Dustin begging Chris to come out, for the party, telling him it would be amazing; he remembered Chris’s protestations that he had three exams that week, that he needed to study.) Papers covered the table around the laptop. Chris looked frantic and worried, even while mostly asleep. Wedged between his shoulder and his sagging head was a cell phone.
Crossing the room quickly (or as quickly as his fuzzy, sleep-deprived mind allowed), he grabbed Chris’s phone and closed his laptop without looking at the work on the screen. As he tilted Chris towards the table, he shoved the sweatshirt that had previously been thrown haphazard on the table under his cheek. His face buried in the sweatshirt, Chris mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “Leemee lone, Duttin.”
From Chris’s cell, still in his hand, he heard a tinny “Chris? … Chris? Chris, are you okay?” Looking at the phone’s screen, he saw that Chris was on a four-and-a-half hour call with “D-MAN.”
(He’s pretty sure that Chris has never changed that contact, that he’s now a responsible, mature adult who gets phone calls from what is probably the only person saved in his phone as anything other than mundane the first-name-last-name.)
He gritted his teeth and said into the phone, “He fell asleep, Dustin.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Then, “Eduardo?”
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Shit,” Dustin said flatly.
“Well put. Look, I’m not dealing with you. I just … I’m not. I just didn’t want you to worry about Chris. I’ll keep an eye on him, but I’m not talking to you.”
Without waiting for an answer (or an apology or an explanation or, god forbid, for Dustin’s easy camaraderie to tempt him into a conversation), he hung up.
(It’s not worth feeling guilty about that; Dustin, for all his absurd behavior, is surprisingly good at getting people. Their mutual forgiveness—for misplaced anger, for collusion, for a fight that was kind of stupid in the first place—was easy and uncomplicated. He likes that, Dustin’s easy optimism about friendship and life.)
He rubs his eyes absently, reminding himself it’s no use crying over (metaphorical) spilled milk. Besides, he’s not really inclined to complain about where it’s landed him now.
A few days later, Chris showed up outside his room, knocking softly. He was seriously considering not opening it when Chris yelled, “Wardo, open up. Mark is a fucking asshole; just because I’m still working for him doesn’t mean I’m actually speaking to him!”
Against his better judgment, he opened the door.
Chris promptly launched into what could best be described as a monologue (it was very Shakespearean; god he sometimes wished Chris weren’t a lit major).
“Look, I’m still working for Facebook, but only because it’s a job and a damn impressive job and I’m not entirely sure anyone else could even put up with Mark’s shit, much less keep it from blowing up in his face, but I have not spoken a word to him since Dustin told me what happened. He’s pissed at me for it, because Sean got caught doing coke with some underage interns, but I’m doing everything through Dustin cause if I actually had to talk to him I’d probably end up fired.”
He paused for breath.
“And Dustin … I’m pretty sure he told Mark to go fuck himself. Probably in those exact words, possibly in more detail. Honestly, I’m not sure how he didn’t get fired for that.”
(He knows, knew even then, how Dustin kept his job, because Mark likes smart people and, more than that, he likes smart people who speak their minds and stick up for themselves, and he knows that Mark trusts Dustin as much as he’s ever trusted anyone—
Except him.)
It floats across his mind, unbidden but not entirely unwelcome, the recollection that Mark wasn’t just his best friend, but he was Mark’s. He thinks about that less than he should, maybe, less than Mark deserves. But he knows, he’s always known, because pragmatic—always so very pragmatic—Mark came to him with thefacebook even though the Winklevosses had money. And Mark was smart enough to know what the eighteen thousand dollars meant, not this is a good idea but you’re my best friend and I trust your vision. (Even if he didn’t, even if he kept looking for advertisers, that was still what the money meant.)
He’s glad, as he sits in the darkness, teasing the corner of the sheet between idle fingers, that they’ve never lied, tried to say it was just business (not after Mark’s first feeble attempt, anyway).
But he’s getting ahead of himself, he thinks, taking a deep breath.
“Fuck, Wardo,” Chris said, leaning against the doorframe. “I haven’t even … fuck.”
There were huge bags under Chris’s eyes, he noticed, and he looked unsteady.
“Are you okay?” he asked (before he remembered that he shouldn’t care so much).
Chris looked hesitant. “I haven’t been sleeping much. It’s not a big deal.”
“At least sit down. You look like you’re about to fall over.”
Flopping gratefully into the couch, Chris nodded. “Yeah, I feel like it. I had a big history paper, and then Sean got fucking arrested with cocaine and underage fucking interns, Wardo, what the fuck is wrong with him? And then, even when I’ve had time to sleep, I’ve too pissed off to close my eyes.”
Chris sighed. “I hate him so much.”
He sank into the couch next to Chris, and muttered “Which one?” only a little resentfully.
“I don’t even know. I honestly don’t know if I hate Mark or Sean more right now.”
(He knew then, just as he knows know, that the answer was Sean. Because Chris, for all his anger and commiseration and exhaustion, was and is too loyal to really despise Mark forever.)
Things got better from there, just a little bit. And slowly. But they got a little better just for having Chris around, a friend who appreciated quiet nights spent reading or watching TV or studying in the not-stressful way. (It was probably a good thing that he was in the Phoenix or his general homebody-ness and unhappiness would have kept him from leaving his room for anything but class.) It was easy to be friends with Chris, they always fit so comfortably together even without Mark’s brilliance (and cutting humor) and Dustin’s perpetually mood-lightening silliness.
But he still struggled. Seeing his friendship with Mark boiled down to that number, that Mark didn’t value him at thirty percent or thirty-five percent, that he was worth less than one percent of this stupid project that was his best friend’s life, it stuck with him for a long time. And sometimes Chris’s phone would ring and he’d look up guiltily from the caller ID and mutter that he needed to take it, then disappear into the hall for a long stretch, because it was Dustin (or maybe Mark, maybe they were speaking again, he never asked).
And he didn’t exactly tell his lawyers, either, that he was spending weeknights with Facebook’s PR guy sprawled across his couch muttering viciously about his history professor (and he justified it to himself by saying that they never talked about Facebook anyway, and to the part of him still pleasing his father by saying that Chris was brilliant and motivated and wouldn’t work for Facebook forever because it didn’t fit into his grand schemes and world-changing plans).
So he hung out with Chris and made connections through the Phoenix (his father liked that) and worked on the counter-suit against his best friend, and then he was graduating, because time has a funny way of passing quickly even when every moment feels deathly slow. (He remembers pointedly not thinking, as he returned to his seat, about how Mark should have been sitting in the audience, uncomfortable and bored, because that’s what people do for their best friends.)
(Things got better after Harvard, for all that the depositions hurt him down to his soul. It was easier not walking past places that reminded him of Mark, of the best friend he’d ever had, of the thrill of seeing something amazing and knowing that he’d helped.)
But even before that, before he left for good, things started looking up a tiny bit (thanks, as usual, to Chris).
He pressed through the crowd after the ceremony, looking his parents or—well, for anyone, really. Craning his neck, he saw someone who looked like Chris (damn mortarboards really did make everyone look the same). Before he could head towards maybe-Chris, though, he was halted by a slew of backslaps and shouts of “Congratulations, man!” from his fellow Phoenix members.
By the time he managed to extricate himself and head towards maybe-Chris (who had taken off his mortarboard and was definitely Chris), the crowd was beginning to thin and a few determined guests had forced their way in. He was within ten feet of his destination when a figure not dressed in crimson robes shouted, “Chris, dude, you left out the magna cum laude part! Congrats! Even though it doesn’t count because it’s liberal arts, I’m proud of you!” (He could practically hear Chris’s eyes rolling.) The yelling figure then proceeded to hug Chris enthusiastically, attempting to spin him around like the happy couple at the end of a bad movie. (It failed rather spectacularly, both because their heights were all wrong and because there was not nearly enough space for the maneuver.)
He shouldn’t have been surprised, he reflects. Dustin and Chris had always been inseparable; being on opposite coasts for the better part of two years was probably torturous for them. (During the time they were both in Palo Alto, he remembers how much more Chris carried himself, how much more easily he smiled.) Now, looking back, he is ashamed of how tempted he was to leave, to let his resentment keep him from congratulating his good friend. But he pushed forward despite his misgivings.
“Hey, Chris,” he began once he was within earshot for not-yelled words. (Chris still looked shellshocked and a little dizzy, Dustin grinning manically.)
“Wardo!” Chris called, walking towards him. “How does it feel to be a graduate?”
He smiled. (It was the face-splitting one he used to wear constantly around Mark; a year later, his muscles are unused to it.) “I don’t know, you tell me.”
Instead of answering, Chris grabbed him in a tight hug, saying “We did it” gleefully.
When they broke apart, he noticed Dustin watching them, discomfort radiating from his face (and the rest of him as well). Dustin approached them slowly, clearly worried that he would leave or punch him or … (Well, Dustin’s fears weren’t entirely unfounded, given that they hadn’t spoken since Chris fell asleep in the coffee shop, and their last face-to-face meeting had ended with Mark’s computer in pieces and almost-thrown punches and a lawsuit that was still underway).
Dustin stepped forward. “Congratulations, Eduardo,” he said cautiously.
“Thanks, Dustin,” he said with a smile that was only a tiny bit forced.
“Look, man, I know the last year has been rough, but you just graduated from Harvard, so I’m going to hug you now.”
And before he could have protested (not that he was going to), Dustin hugged him. It wasn’t the bone-crushing tackle of a hug Chris had received, but it wasn’t half-hearted, either. That was something, he knew, a step in the right direction, towards recovering and moving on and all those things that healthy people did.
Dustin spoke again. “Look, I know it’s not enough, but for what little it is worth, I didn’t know until they’d already drawn up the papers, until it was too late to stop anything. And I’m sorry. So sorry. If it’s any comfort at all, I didn’t speak a word to Mark outside of work for months, and Chris didn’t talk to him at all.”
He swallowed hard and gave the answer that he knew was wrong. “Thanks. That’s worth something. But I, uh, can’t talk about it with you. Or anyone, really, but especially not anyone who works for Mark.”
“Oh, because you’re …” Dustin said, his face closing off slightly.
“Yeah, I …”
Chris cut in, thank goodness, before it got any more uncomfortable. “Look, I know it’s weird right now, but you guys are my best friends and I know that you were friends before either of you met Mark. So Eduardo and his parents are going to go out tonight, and Dustin, you’re going to come out with me and my parents. And then tomorrow all three of us are going to go get burgers for dinner to celebrate that Wardo and I graduated from Harvard. Got it?”
Cowed, he and Dustin nodded.
(He should send Chris a note or flowers or a present worth more than the GDP of one of the smaller countries in Africa. If it weren’t for Chris’s steadfast resolution not to let the problems with him and Mark tear all four of them apart, he’s certain he wouldn’t have Dustin’s comforting silliness or Chris’s steady understanding or much of anything else. His last year at Harvard without Chris’s easy empathy and laughter and constant, constant support are not something he particularly wants to contemplate at length, not when everything is so much better now, when he is happy and curled up in bed and grinning like the dopiest idiot who ever lived even as he considers the worst years of his life.)
And dinner the next night was good, full of smiles and memories and Chris’s stories about the awful people on his hall (who, among other things, thought three in the morning during finals week was a good time to get blazed and blast the Grateful Dead); apropos of nothing at all, Dustin related that, the week before, he’d had a nightmare in code and then they were laughing because really, was there anyone other than Dustin who would dream about being chased around his room by a run-time error?
That night, before they drifted apart on the sidewalk, Dustin hugged him (again) and said, seriously, “I know you can’t talk about the stuff, but I’m your friend, and if you ever need something, I will absolutely be there for you.”
Almost against his will, he smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Dustin.”
So things got a little better.
Of course, they didn’t stay better for long, because the next phase of his life was the depositions and all the agony of rehashing every painful moment of his ruined friendship with Mark. And he was avoiding Chris and Dustin for the most part, since they were too close to the other side, to Mark and Facebook. He didn’t speak to either of them for the duration of the depositions, not until he was on the other side with money and shares and a non-disclosure agreement and, he hoped (at the time, anyway, he thinks with a smile he can just feel is fond), no reason to ever talk to Mark again.
It wasn’t a good time for him (unsurprisingly), he remembers, curling in on himself a little bit. But he’s past the two low points of his middle-of-the-night retracing of his life. He started talking to Chris and Dustin again as soon as the lawsuit was over (and, as it turned out, having friends was a big boost to his emotional stability).
He was a lot of things during the years between when he was cut out of Facebook and when he managed to get his life sort of mostly together again; he was hurt, he was sad, he was lonely. But he spent surprisingly little time being angry. (The stinging bitterness that edged, sometimes, into hatred was there, but it rarely had the force of ire behind it.)
Anger was never something he was particularly comfortable feeling. It was out-of-control and consuming and tiring. More than anything, it was tiring. And his father was angry, sometimes it felt like he was angry all the time. He didn’t want to be like his father.
(Maybe he shouldn’t have spent as much as he did trying not to be like his father while still wanting to please him. It was a bad combination of rebellion and submission and, really, it only made them both unhappy. He should have picked rebellion, perhaps, severed himself completely from his father’s wishes and, with the same breath, stopped trying to impress him. And he should have done it years ago, before his inability to choose between the two split him in half and left him stranded in New York without his best friend.)
(Self-flagellation isn’t health, he reminds himself.)
But he wasn’t angry, not really, even sitting in the deposition room staring at Mark’s hoodie-over-tie getup (what the fuck was he even doing with that?), just hurt and confused. He’d been so angry that summer in Palo Alto and when he saw the papers, but anger like that burns itself out quickly and by the time he was staring at Mark across the table, it no longer made his stomach seize up to think about everything they’d accomplished together. Instead, it just left him feeling empty, blank even. Like being told that Santa Claus wasn’t real, only a hundred times worse.
(The feeling of blank emptiness wasn’t fun, but it worked out for the best, because when they did run into each other, he managed to refrain from punching Mark in the face.)
It was bound to happen eventually, he was too smart to not have realized it. An investor and an Internet visionary; they both attended networking parties thinly disguised as charity events. But he did hope that Mark would have the decency to ignore him, or something.
No such luck, he realized with a sinking feeling. Mark was walking towards him with purpose.
“Um, hi,” Mark began, standing shiftily in front of him. “We … um, I …”
He tried to resist the urge to smirk. (Because for all that he wasn’t angry, per se, asking him not to take a little pleasure in Mark’s obvious discomfort was just too much.)
(He’s glad he didn’t, because he thinks that he would regret that more than anything else in his messed-up life, that he would regret taking Mark’s attempt to be a decent person and throwing it back in his face.)
“We can’t just ignore each other,” Mark managed to force out. “It’s too weird. Too many people know that we know each other, and that you’re a Facebook shareholder.” He extended his hand, launching into the line that some intern had clearly made him recite so as not to botch it. “It’s good to see you, Mr. Saverin. I hope all your business ventures are going well.”
He nodded once, shaking Mark’s hand quickly and trying not to grin a little meanly at his uncharacteristic formality. “Okay. I can handle civil.”
Mark smiled wanly, hesitantly. (The urge to smile at his nervousness was nearly unbearable. He resisted; it was the urge of a best friend. They lost the privilege of laughing at each other a long time ago.)
Instead, he said, “Don’t worry, civil entails me not breaking any more of your possessions,” and Mark’s smile became a little truer.
So they were civil. They didn’t seek each other out, but nor did they avoid each other (except being alone, they both avoided that). Though inane conversations were not unusual (weather, uncontroversial current events, Chris and Dustin’s hijinks), the norm was nods and a quiet “Mark”—“Eduardo” exchange. But Silicon Valley has a short memory, and their lawsuit never made headlines, not the way the Winklevosses’ did, so the next development was as inevitable as ending up at the same cocktail party.
It happened like something out of a bad romantic movie, or maybe just a screwball comedy. James Alway—whose start-up he’d just invested in—introduced him to an app developer named Alex Branson, who promptly turned away and tapped a man who turned out to be Mark on the shoulder, saying “You have got to meet these guys.” Before he even processed what was happening, Alex had said, “Mark, this is James Alway, and his chief investor, Eduardo Saverin. James, Eduardo, this is Mark Zuckerberg.”
He looked at Mark, and Mark looked back at him, and all of a sudden they were laughing, clutching at the hor d'oeuvre table to stay upright, because apparently they were so good at civil that people didn’t even realize they knew each other. He felt tears building up in his eyes, and it was clear that the universe wasn’t on his side because he could not stop laughing and neither could Mark. Their respective acquaintances were staring at them, clearly not getting the joke (mostly because there wasn’t one). Finally, James said, “I think there’s something we’ve missed.” (Could James and Alex know less about the people they were working with, he wondered.)
Wiping his eyes, he forced out, “We went to Harvard together.”
Mark gave him an almost-withering glare. (It would have been more effective if he hadn’t clearly been struggling to keep a straight face.) “That’s the understatement of the century. Wardo used to do my laundry when I was too spaced out to remember it. Which was pretty much all the time.”
He smiled at that (and it was real, he felt it in his stomach—and if he were feeling poetic, in his soul). “I also used to put him to bed when he would stay up coding for thirty-six hours. It was a lot like being his mother.” (Mark looked like he wanted to punch him, but in a good-natured way, not an I-hate-your-breathing-guts way.)
“And he’s a co-founder of Facebook,” Mark said.
Then the whole mood twisted into awkwardness, and they kind of looked at each other sideways before Mark muttered something about needing to go talk to someone who conveniently happened to be all the way across the room.
But it also changed everything, like some sort of strange switch flipped in his mind. It was absurd and maybe a little twisted, but he felt so much more comfortable around Mark, like just knowing Mark was in the same room no longer made his stomach shift unpleasantly now that they’d successfully interacted (however briefly) without shifting uncomfortably and glaring daggers at each other.
He felt immeasurably lighter, knowing that maybe his grudge wasn’t worth holding (just because they weren’t friends didn’t mean they had to seethe silently every time they were in the same room). So he relaxed, a little, which led to him drinking more freely, which, in turn, led to him draping himself across the sofa in Chris’s living room.
It was far too easy to forget, after a couple of cocktails, that he still hated Mark (just a little bit, as much as he was ever capable of hating Mark and as much as it was worth his time and energy to bother). He probably shouldn’t have had the last drink, he thought at the time, because he was just buzzed enough to agree that crashing in Chris’s guest room would be easier than getting a hotel after the horrifyingly dull charity … thing. But he did agree, and he ended up sitting on Chris’s couch playing whatever the newest version of Halo was, with Chris kicking his ass (as always) and Dustin cheering them both on enthusiastically. (“Go, Chris! You can get him!” he yelled, and “Wardo, actually use your controller, you can do it!”)
And Jesus Christ, it was so much like the suite in Kirkland that hadn’t even been his but he’d basically lived there anyway (except Mark wasn’t sitting next to him, drunk and sarcastic and hilarious, giving them all commentary on their gaming skills). Chris and Dustin were so similar, sitting half on top of each other, poking and ribbing each other and he’s always been pretty sure that poking on Facebook was added when Dustin just would not stop actually physically poking Chris (usually when Chris needed to actually be concentrating, because Dustin wouldn’t be Dustin otherwise). And when they all fell asleep like drunken college students, piled together, it felt just a little empty because Mark wasn’t there to kick him in the shins at four in the morning.
(He’s always been a slightly nostalgic drunk.)
Life kept on going, after his surprisingly-not-awkward encounter with Mark. He went back to work and went out with his friends and talked to Chris and Dustin frequently.
(The day Chris called him, voice low but excited, to say that he was going to work for Senator Obama, he thought a lot of things. He thought of Dustin, left to the wilds of Silicon Valley by his best friend and left alone to handle Mark. He thought, briefly, of Mark, with his best friends drifting away one by one. Mostly he thought of Chris, finally pursuing his dream of shaping the future though people not technology. He’s proud of him, for taking the risk and going after something he’s always wanted.
Dustin was less enthusiastic, a few hours later, speaking soft and unusually serious about being torn between wanting Chris to be happy and wanting him to stay in California, and feeling guilty about the latter.)
When he sat and thought for too long, sometimes, on long flights or when he couldn’t sleep, it felt off to be close with Chris and Dustin but not Mark, given how clearly the four of them had been split at Harvard, inseparable Chris and Dustin, and inseparable him and Mark. But life goes on and people grow up and seeing Mark, then, still made his heart hurt with betrayal and the thought of what might have been.
He smiles at that recollection. He’s so happy with where everything ended up now, that regretting the steps (even the most painful) is difficult.
(Growing up changes everything.)
The next time he and Mark were at a dinner together, Mark sought him out again. He was standing on the porch outside the blandly forgettable dining room, drinking a glass of mediocre wine and staring sightlessly over the unimpressive landscaping. Mark tapped him once on the shoulder, nodding slightly and saying “Hello, Eduardo.”
“What do you want, Mark?” he replied, terse (and perhaps, in hindsight too harsh; at the time, he still would have considered ignoring Mark—or punching him—somewhat justified. But he knows, now, what Mark approached him to say and that changes his perspective on everything.)
“Hey, I, um,” Mark trailed off, picking at his shirtsleeves, before squaring his shoulders and taking a deep breath.
“I ... Chris and Dustin made me swear I wouldn't ask you to forgive me because that's emotional manipulation. I guess. But I'm sorry I handled everything like, well, like a nineteen-year-old jackass.”
The short laugh that escaped him wasn’t entirely voluntarily. “Yeah,” he replied to fill the lengthening silence. “Thanks. That means something.”
Mark nodded once and turned to walk away, pausing before he took a step. “Thanks for not punching me, or, I don’t know, calling me a bitch on the Internet. I would have deserved it.”
Before he could answer (not that he had any idea what to say), Mark disappeared into the flow of the party.
He stood out on the balcony for a long time after that, reeling from the idea that Mark would apologize, and for something real, a true admission of error on his part (with the words spelled out, not through implication and acknowledgement).
He was glad the next time they ran into each other and he was glad it didn’t take long to happen. Seizing his opportunity when Mark was standing alone, he walked over and said, shortly, “This doesn’t mean I forgive you, but I’m sorry, too.”
Then he walked away.
(Cowardice, he knows, to not wait and see how that conversation played out. But he thinks that after everything, after the messy mixture of friendship and business that led both to even messier ends, he was entitled to a bit of cowardice. Not putting himself out there for Mark to gut viciously again, he doesn’t regret that.)
After the settlement, he never intended to be friends with Mark again. (Hell, he never intended to Mark to speak again.) It never occurred to him, as he signed the papers, full of hurt and heartbreak and bitterness, that there was anything Mark could do, that he himself could do, to overcome left behind and point-zero-three percent and lawyer up, asshole and you had one friend.
(It was a stupid thing to say, he knows. It wasn’t true, he knew it, Mark knew it, Chris and Dustin—such good friends they managed to stay on speaking terms with both parties—knew it. But sitting there in the deposition room, rehashing exactly how he ended up suing his best friend, it just hurt so goddamn much. All he wanted in that moment was to piss Mark off, to make him hurt just as much.
He regrets it a little, now. But mostly he doesn’t think about it, because dwelling on things he can’t take back isn’t worth his time; life lessons from Dustin Moskovitz.)
But the next time he saw Mark, after the apologies, their customarily cursory exchange … wasn’t.
“Mark,” he said.
“Eduardo,” Mark said. Then, “How’s Singapore?”
He gaped for a moment. (Small talk, he thought, like it was a new concept entirely.) “It’s, um, it’s good. The weather is nice, it reminds me a bit of São Paulo.”
Mark smiled. “I’ve always wanted to go, but there hasn’t been time.”
Before he even processed the thoughts in his head, his mouth opened. (Oh God, he remembers thinking, do I not even have a filter anymore?) “You would like it; it’s all very modern.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.” Mark paused for a moment, hesitated. “How’s the food?”
(The small talk about trivialities was another change, he realized later, in addition to Mark’s new ability to apologize.)
“It’s really good,” he answered.
“Have you had bubble tea?” Mark asked. “I know it’s Chinese, but Singapore is close. And it’s really good. There’s a place near Stanford …”
“Yeah, I have,” he said. “I’ve been on a couple of trips to China, but there are some places in Singapore, too.”
And then, before Mark can continue with his slightly awkward attempts at conversation, he cut in. “We should talk. Somewhere without cheap wine and people from Valleywag.”
Mark frowned.
“Because we apologized that but doesn’t begin to cover everything, Mark,” he said.
“Oh,” came the soft reply. Then, “You want to cover the other things, too?” Mark sounded so terrified, so desperately hopeful in that moment, that it took all of his willpower not to smile reassuringly like they were back at Harvard, like they were still friends.
“Yeah, I do,” he answered instead. “But in the meantime, how’s California?”
Mark responded easily, and though some process (or fluke) that he still doesn’t understand, it turned into a real conversation (nothing world-shaking, but more than trivialities). He was surprised, then, by how comfortable he was talking to Mark. Just the knowledge of mutual repentance changed a lot, allowed them to talk about their lives (which were and are mostly business; they had both always been workaholics).
After, Chris dragged him aside, his mouth a thin line.
“What are you doing?” he asked harshly, almost angry.
When there was no answer (really, he had no idea what was he was doing), Chris continued, “That was a 40-minute conversation, and, if you didn’t notice, you were talking to Mark.”
“Jesus, Chris,” he replied with a shrug, “I have no idea. At least we managed it without killing each other?”
Chris shook his head and rubbed his temples. “Eduardo,” he said flatly, “It’s Mark. The last time you two were speaking, it ended with vandalism, your friends being forced to choose between you—which sucked, by the way—and a six hundred million dollar lawsuit. You are a very good friend, and I’d rather not have to pick up those pieces again. I don’t want you to go through that again.”
“Believe me,” he answered, “I never want to feel that way again, either.”
“Look, I just want you to be happy.”
He’s glad of Chris’s caution, keeping him grounded and making it hard to throw himself into the friendship the way he had at Harvard. There were other factors making that level of single-minded devotion difficult, of course; distance, and their devotion to their jobs, and his own reluctance to trust Mark again.
But despite all that, a few weeks later, he found himself sitting in a New York coffee shop across from Mark, who was speaking low but surprisingly confident.
“I really am sorry,” he said. “I was so pissed, though. I got so angry that I made a business decision personal. When you froze the account, I think I decided that you were trying to screw Facebook over, and me by extension. So I screwed you over.”
Silence lingered for a moment.
“I’m so fucking sorry, Wardo. It was such a shitty thing to do. You earned more than point-zero-three percent of Facebook and I’m glad you have more now.”
“Yeah,” he said, resisting the urge to gape, “Yeah. I was kind of trying to screw you over. I was mad at you for listening to Sean instead of me and for saying I was getting left behind.”
(He had been, young and arrogant and maybe a little jealous that someone else was stealing his best friend even if he didn’t know it at the time, convinced that he could do no wrong, that three years of college had taught him everything he needed to know.)
Mark nodded.
“We’re both guilty of being immature jackasses,” he added.
Mark laughed wryly. “That we are.”
Silence gathered around them, until Mark broke it by saying “Did we really just have a whole conversation about our feelings?”
“I think we did,” he answered, laughing, “Well, I can add that to the list of things I thought you’d never do that you’ve proven me wrong about.”
“Oh really? What else is on that list, may I ask?”
He grins deviously. “I definitely never imagined you of all people would revolutionize interpersonal communication. Or be able to do your own laundry. Do you even do your own laundry?”
Mark threw a napkin at him, but then sobered. “If screwing over my best friend is on that list … I really am sorry. You weren’t the right CFO for Facebook—”
“I know,” he cut in.
“But still,” Mark continued, ignoring him, “I only diluted your share that much because I was pissed off and I never should have done it. It was the business equivalent of getting drunk and saying offensive things about your bra size on my blog.
“Except, of course,” Mark finished awkwardly, “You don’t have a bra size.”
When he burst out laughing at that, it occurred to him for the first time that they might actually be able to salvage a friendship from the wreckage they created. Sitting at a cramped coffee shop table, he felt a comfort he hadn’t felt since nights at Harvard, falling asleep on the couch in Kirkland and making fun of Dustin’s inability to contain his exuberance while drunk.
(Things weren’t perfect after that, but it was a beginning, a foundation. It was something that could hold up the rest of their cautious, hesitant new friendship.)
And that was exactly how they built it up again, slow and meticulous and so painfully careful that sometimes he just wanted to go all in and have his best friend back, no questions asked, but he didn’t trust Mark, didn’t trust himself. So they took their time.
(continued here)
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Okay, going to read part two now. :D
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<-- this is my official *chinhands* icon
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(It’s hard, now, to look back and not see that Mark beat him at his own game as well, a shrewd and calculating businessman, friendship be damned. The understanding, universal as it is, stings his perfectionist soul: there’s always someone better.) <--- Something about this hit me particularly hard - just fantastic!
Seeing his friendship with Mark boiled down to that number, that Mark didn’t value him at thirty percent or thirty-five percent, that he was worth less than one percent of this stupid project that was his best friend’s life, it stuck with him for a long time. <--- This too. Wow. Just. Wow.
*scurries to next part*
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