#tom delonge

That was six months ago. The garage still smells like old amp.

You are sixteen and Tom DeLonge is, in your professional opinion, the most irritating person in Southern California.

"Hey," he says, appearing in the kitchen doorway like he was summoned. He's wearing a shirt that says something on it that you don't bother reading. His hair is doing the thing. It's always doing the thing. "You're Mark's sister, right?"

"You've met me fourteen times."

"I know." He grins. "I just like making you say it."

You close the refrigerator and walk past him without another word.

Behind you, he says, "see you around," in a voice like he thinks this is a promise.

You don't answer.

The problem with Tom DeLonge is not actually that he thinks everything is funny. The problem is that he's been saying see you around for six months and he keeps being right about it.

Mark doesn't notice, is the thing.

Or rather — Mark notices, and files it under Tom being Tom, which is a folder that contains roughly everything Tom has ever done, up to and including the time he called your house at midnight to tell Mark he'd figured out the bridge to a song they'd been working on and could Mark come over right now, and Mark had gone, because it was Tom, and that's just how it was.

"He flirts with everyone," Mark tells you once, in the car, after Tom has spent twenty minutes leaning in a doorway being infuriating at you in front of at least three other people. "It doesn't mean anything."

"I know that," you say.

"Just don't take it personally."

"I don't take it personally."

"Good."

"I take it annoyingly."

Mark laughs, which is the wrong response. You look out the window. In the wing mirror, Tom is still standing in the driveway with his hands in his pockets, watching the car leave, and you make a point of not looking at the wing mirror.

You look at the wing mirror.

He's still there.

You face forward.

two. the part where he stops being easy to dismiss (1995)

It happens slowly, which is annoying, and then all at once, which is worse.

The slow part is this: you start noticing that Tom is actually good at things. Not just guitar, which you already knew in the abstract way you knew the sky was blue — obvious, background, irrelevant — but other things. He's good at listening, when he feels like it. He remembers things people say offhand, and brings them up three weeks later like he's been turning them over. He's good with your mom in a way that's different from how Mark's other friends are with your mom, less performative, more like he actually wants to be there, and she lights up around him in a way that should annoy you and sort of does and sort of doesn't.

He's funny, actually. When he's not being infuriating, which is not that often, but often enough.

The all-at-once part happens on a Tuesday in October.

You're at a show — a small one, a venue that's really just a room with a PA system and too many people in it — and you're standing near the back because Mark's on stage and you've heard these songs enough times that you don't need to be in the crush to appreciate them. Tom's up there too, shirt already half-soaked, moving around like the stage is both too small and exactly the right size, and you're watching in the detached way you've trained yourself to watch things that involve Tom DeLonge.

Then something goes wrong with the monitor. Mark makes a face at the sound guy. And Tom, without missing a lyric, steps back, puts his hand on Mark's shoulder, and says something in his ear that makes Mark immediately laugh and stop being annoyed, and then they're both just — playing, like nothing happened, like they've been doing this their whole lives, which they sort of have.

It's such a small thing.

You watch Tom grin at the crowd and the crowd grin back like they can't help it, and somewhere between the bridge and the chorus of a song you've heard forty times, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not with any kind of announcement.

Just — oh, you think. Quietly. And then immediately: no.

The flirting doesn't stop. If anything, it gets worse, because you stop being able to brush it off as automatically as you used to and he seems to sense this the way cats sense which person in the room is least interested in them and beelines for them.

"You look nice," he says, outside a 7-Eleven in December, for no reason.

"I look the same as I always do."

"Yeah," he says, like that settles it.

You go inside. He follows you in and spends four minutes deliberating over chips with the gravity of a man making a serious decision, and when he finally picks one and comes to stand next to you in the checkout line he's close enough that you can see the stripe of sunburn across the back of his neck from last weekend's beach thing.

You look at the sunburn. You look away.

"You could just say thank you," he says.

"To what?"

"When I said you looked nice."

"I could," you agree. "Thanks, Tom."

He looks over at you. Something in his face does something you don't look at long enough to categorize.

"Sure," he says.

You pay for your drink. He pays for his chips. Outside, you go in different directions, and you spend the whole drive home arguing with yourself about nothing, which you are furious about.

three. how it starts (1996)

How it starts is like this:

Your car won't start. It's nine-thirty at night, the parking lot of a diner three miles from your house, and your car will not start, and you've called Mark and gotten his voicemail, which means he's either already asleep or still at practice and has left his phone somewhere inconvenient. You're about to call your mom when a truck pulls up next to you that you recognize by sound before you recognize by sight.

Tom leans out the window. "Need a jump?"

"Maybe." You look at him. "What are you doing here?"

"Eating at the diner. Was eating at the diner. Just left." He nods toward the building. "I saw your car when I came in. Figured I'd see if you were still here when I left."

"And if I hadn't been?"

"Then I'd have assumed you figured it out." He shrugs. "Do you want a jump or not?"

He has cables. Of course he has cables. They're in a heap in the truck bed under a flannel shirt and a broken drumstick that isn't his and what looks like half a textbook, and he untangles them with the calm of someone who has dealt with worse and does the whole thing without any unnecessary commentary, which is new and slightly disorienting. When your engine turns over he says there it is under his breath like he's satisfied, personally, and then he's rolling the cables back up.

"Thanks," you say, through the window.

"Don't worry about it." He looks at you for a second. In the parking lot light, the shadows fall differently on his face. He's been growing out whatever hair phase this is and it's — it's fine. It's whatever. "Tell Mark I say hey."

"You'll see him in like two days."

"I know. Tell him anyway."

He drives away before you do. You sit in your car for a moment with the engine running and think about nothing in particular very hard.

Two months later.

Practice at Mark's — at your house, technically, the garage — and you've been in your room with the door mostly shut listening to them work through something that's almost a song, the same eight bars over and over with small changes each time. You've been doing homework. You've been doing homework at it, the way you do homework at the TV, not exactly watching but not exactly not watching either.

When they break you go downstairs for water. Tom is sitting on the hood of the car your parents keep in the driveway, which he does sometimes, and you don't ask why because asking why things about Tom means getting an answer that raises more questions.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey." You fill your glass. Through the screen door, you can see him.

"How's school?"

"Fine." You pause. "How's the song?"

"Almost." He tilts his head. "You've been listening?"

"Hard not to. I can hear it."

"And?"

You look at him through the screen. "The bridge is good. The ending's not there yet."

A beat.

"Yeah," he says. "I know." He sounds like he means it. He sounds like he's been thinking about this and you've said the exact thing he was thinking and he doesn't know what to do with that. "The ending's not there yet."

You go back upstairs with your water.

But you stand at the top of the stairs for a minute, for no reason.

The first time it's anything is not planned.

Late January. Mark is — Mark is somewhere, out, at a thing with Travis, and you're home alone except Tom had left his jacket here three days ago and apparently needed it tonight and said he'd swing by, and you said fine, I'll leave it on the porch, and you had not left it on the porch because you forgot.

So Tom is at your door at eight o'clock looking for his jacket.

You find it. You hand it to him. He's in the doorway, and you're holding the jacket out, and he takes it but doesn't immediately go, because this is Tom, he doesn't do things immediately.

"It's cold," he says, which is relative, because it's California, but also sort of true tonight.

"Yeah."

"You seem like you were in the middle of something."

"I was watching something."

"What?"

"Does it matter?"

"No." He leans against the doorframe. "What?"

You tell him. He says he hasn't seen it. You say it's good. He says you've said that about things before and been wrong. You say name one time. He names a time. You tell him that doesn't count, and why. He argues the point. You argue back. It goes on for a while.

At some point he's inside, because you've opened the door wider in the automatic way you open doors when you're in the middle of a conversation that needs to continue, and he's on the other end of the couch from you and whatever you were watching is on and neither of you are particularly watching it.

At some point the conversation narrows down, the way late-night conversations do, into something quieter.

"You used to hate me," he says, not accusing, just noting.

"I didn't hate you."

"You tolerated me."

"Same thing."

He laughs softly. He's looking at the TV. "What changed?"

You think about the show in October. The parking lot in December. Eight bars of a song through your bedroom floor, over and over and over.

"You're less annoying," you say.

He looks at you sideways. "Just less?"

"Don't push it."

He's quiet for a second. Something on the TV changes color. Outside, a car passes.

"For what it's worth," he says, "I never thought you were annoying."

"You just liked annoying me."

"Yeah." He doesn't deny it. "Yeah, I did." He turns to look at you properly. "Still do, kind of."

You should say something deflecting. You have a whole catalog of deflections where Tom is concerned, built up over years, reliable, well-maintained.

You don't say any of them.

He leans in just slightly, the way you lean in when you're going to say something, except he doesn't say anything. He's close enough that you could count his eyelashes if you wanted to.

You don't want to. You want to, slightly. This is the problem.

"Tom," you say.

"Yeah."

"Mark would kill you."

"Probably." He doesn't move. "Are you going to tell him?"

You should. Obviously you should. That's the right answer. Mark is your brother and Tom is his best friend and this is the beginning of something that is clearly going to be a whole thing, and the right thing to do is to create some distance and say something sensible and—

"No," you say.

Tom kisses you with one hand on your jaw, carefully, like you're something he's been thinking about for a long time.

You have been thinking about it for a while too. You don't tell him that.

(He probably already knows.)

four. sneaking around (1996–1997)

Here is what it looks like from the outside, which is to say, from Mark's perspective:

Nothing.

Tom still flirts with you, because Tom flirting with you is so well-established at this point that stopping would be suspicious. You still roll your eyes. Mark still says he does it to everyone in that unbothered older-brother way, and you say I know, and that's the whole conversation, the same conversation you've been having for two years.

Here is what it looks like from the inside:

Tom's truck, parked two streets over. Texts that are mostly normal, except for the ones that aren't. A night in March where you're at a show with a group and Tom is across the room, and you catch his eye once, and he looks away, and you look away, and you're both extremely normal about it. The drive home where he takes the long way. His hand on the gearshift. The radio on low.

"This is insane," you tell him, once.

"Yeah," he agrees, cheerfully.

"I mean it. This is actually insane."

"I know." He looks over at you. "You want to stop?"

You look at him. He looks at you. He has the best face for looking at, which you've been cataloguing privately for years without meaning to. There's the thing he does when something surprises him. The thing he does when he's about to say something stupid. The thing he does, which is the most dangerous thing, when he's actually being sincere.

"No," you say.

"Okay," he says, like it's simple.

(It's not simple. It's extremely not simple.)

He's better at keeping it a secret than you expected, which says something about Tom DeLonge that you file away and don't think about too hard. He doesn't overcompensate. He doesn't avoid you ostentatiously or go out of his way to be normal, he just — is normal, with a layer under it that only you know is there, and somehow that's worse and better simultaneously.

He brings you coffee once, when you're at a practice — not Mark's coffee, not Travis's, specifically yours, your order, set down next to you without commentary and then he's gone back to his guitar like it's nothing.

Mark doesn't notice.

You wrap your hands around the cup.

He notices you noticing. He doesn't look up from his guitar. But something in his shoulders does something.

You drink the coffee. You don't say anything. Outside, the California sun does its relentless thing.

"Does he actually —" your friend asks once, meaning Tom, because you have mentioned approximately zero of this but she knows you well enough to have noticed the coffee thing, the way you track him in a room, the frequency with which his name comes up in your internal monologue and therefore occasionally your external one.

"Don't," you say.

"I'm just asking."

"He's Mark's best friend."

"I know, I'm just—"

"And he's annoying."

"You said less annoying, actually, last time."

You don't say anything.

"Oh," she says.

"Nothing is happening."

"Sure."

"Genuinely."

She looks at you. "Okay," she says, in the voice of someone who is not going to push it but also is going to remember this conversation.

You look at your hands. Somewhere across town, Tom DeLonge is probably doing something ridiculous that someone is finding inexplicably charming. This is his constant state.

You are not, currently, charmed. You are categorically not charmed.

You are so charmed it's embarrassing.

May, 1997. Warm already, the way Southern California just decides it's summer before summer has the decency to officially arrive.

You're in the bed of Tom's truck in a parking lot that belongs to a closed hardware store, which is where you've been going sometimes because it's quiet and it's nowhere that anyone would look for either of you specifically. He's got the tailgate down and the radio on inside the cab, turned up just enough to reach you through the back window. The sky is doing the California thing where it holds the last of the light longer than feels reasonable.

Tom is lying on his back next to you, close enough to be warm, looking at that sky. His arm is almost touching yours. You've been here an hour. You should probably go.

You don't go.

"What happens," you say, to the sky, "if this turns into something."

Tom turns his head to look at you. "What do you mean."

"You know what I mean."

He does. Of course he does. What happens when it's not just parking lots and the long way home, when it's real enough that it needs a word, when there's no version of giving it a word that doesn't involve Mark.

"We'd tell him," Tom says, like this is simple.

"He'd lose his mind."

"He'd get over it."

"Tom—"

"Eventually." He's still looking at you. "He would, eventually."

"You're really not worried about this."

"I'm worried about it," he says. "I'm worried about it a lot. I just—" He stops. He does the thing with his jaw that means he's figuring out how to say something that isn't a joke. "I've been thinking about you since I was seventeen, okay? And I know that's—"

"What?"

He says it again. Simply. "Since I was seventeen. Since that first summer. You acted like I was the most irritating thing that had ever happened to you and I was—" He laughs, a little self-deprecating. "I was down bad. I've been down bad this whole time."

The hardware store parking lot is very quiet. The radio plays something faint and indistinct through the back window.

"You hid it well," you say, finally.

"I really didn't," he says. "Mark just wasn't looking."

You think about Mark not looking. Mark with his he does it to everyone and his comfortable certainty that Tom's interest in you was weather — present, recurring, ultimately inconsequential.

He props himself up on one arm. You look at each other for a second in the long California evening light, and then he leans down and kisses you, and you let him, and the tailgate is cold under your palms but everything else is warm.

You stay another hour.

five. travis barker knows (1997)

The thing about Travis is that he doesn't miss much.

He's quiet about it — that's the trick of it. He doesn't editorialize or announce. He just absorbs information and files it somewhere, and occasionally he'll say something that reveals he's had the file open for a while, and by then it's too late to deny anything convincingly.

It's early June. After practice, everyone's out back — Mark inside on the phone, you on the back steps with a soda, Tom on the grass doing something with a broken guitar strap that he keeps insisting he can fix. Travis is sitting on an overturned milk crate doing nothing in particular, which is his neutral state.

Tom says something to you, quietly, just to you — something that isn't remarkable in content but has a frequency to it, a between-you-and-me frequency — and you answer in kind, and there's a half-second of eye contact that probably lasts one beat too long.

Travis looks at his hands.

Then he looks at Tom.

Then he looks at you.

Then he looks at the middle distance like a man who has just calculated something and is reviewing his arithmetic.

"Huh," he says.

"What," you say.

"Nothing." He picks up a drumstick from somewhere, turns it over. "Nothing."

Tom does not look up from the guitar strap. His ears, you notice, have gone slightly red.

After Mark comes back outside and the conversation moves on, Travis catches your eye once more. He tilts his head about a millimeter toward Tom. His expression is completely neutral. His eyebrows convey the entire meaning.

You look at the sky.

Two nights later. Practice is over and Mark has gone inside and Travis is loading things into his car and Tom is helping, and you go out to say goodbye, and Travis looks at you over the roof of his car with a very specific expression.

"He's terrible at secrets," Travis says, conversationally.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The coffee thing. The show in October. That parking lot off Pomerado." He raises an eyebrow. "There's a hardware store."

Tom, who has appeared from around the other side of the car, freezes.

"Travis—" you start.

"I'm not going to say anything." He takes the case from Tom's hands and puts it in the trunk himself. "I'm saying Mark's going to figure it out. I'm saying when that happens you both want to be the ones who told him, not the ones he caught." He looks at Tom directly. "He'll be weird about it."

"I know," Tom says.

"For a bit."

"I know."

"And then he'll get over it." Travis closes the trunk. He looks at you both, briefly, with the expression of a man who is categorically not involved in this and would like that on the record. "I'm just saying. Sooner is better." He gets in the car. "Good talk."

He drives away.

You and Tom stand in the driveway.

"He's known for a while," Tom says, not a question.

"Yeah," you say.

Tom blows out a breath. "We should probably—"

"Yeah," you say again.

You don't, quite yet. But you both know the clock has started.

six. the part where mark finds out (1997)

You don't plan the part where Mark finds out.

You were going to plan it. Genuinely. The conversation with Travis lit something responsible in both of you, and you'd agreed in the parking lot of the hardware store three days ago that you'd tell him properly, soon, before it came out sideways. You'd shaken on it. Tom had made it into a slightly bit, and you'd told him to stop, and he'd stopped.

The intention was there.

What actually happens is a Tuesday in late June, after everyone's gone home from another practice at your house, and you've said goodnight to Travis and watched Mark head for the shower, and Tom has lingered, because Tom always lingers. You're in the kitchen. He's theoretically getting a glass of water for the road.

Theoretically.

"You should go," you tell him, leaning against the counter.

"I know." He's very close. He sets the glass down. "I will."

"Tom."

"In a second."

He's looking at you the way he looks at you when he thinks no one is watching, which is different from every other way he looks, and you are so tired of hiding it, you realize. You have been tired of it for a while. You want to not hide it. You want to say this is the thing, this is what it is and have it just be true in the open air without the logistics of the conversation around it.

Tom kisses you in your kitchen with the overhead light on like it's nothing, like you do this all the time, which you do but never here, never in the house, and it's different somehow. More real. More like something that isn't going anywhere.

You don't hear the shower stop.

You don't hear the footsteps.

You do hear: "What."

It's not a question. It's the removal of a question's punctuation entirely.

You separate. Tom steps back. Mark is standing in the kitchen doorway in socks and an old t-shirt, hair damp, holding a glass that he presumably came down to fill, staring at the two of you with an expression that is working through several stages simultaneously.

Nobody says anything for a moment.

"Hi," Tom says.

"Don't," Mark says.

Another moment.

"How long," Mark says.

"A while," you say.

He closes his eyes. Opens them. He looks at Tom with the specific expression of a man doing arithmetic he did not consent to. "A while."

"Mark—"

"My little sister."

"I know," Tom says.

"My little sister, Tom—"

"I know."

"—who I have watched you flirt with for three years—"

"I know, and I know how that—"

"—and I said don't worry about it, that's just how Tom is—" Mark's voice has reached the flat register that means he is genuinely trying to hold it together— "and the whole time you were—"

"Not the whole time," you say. "Only—"

"Don't give me a timeline right now." He looks at the ceiling. He puts the glass down on the counter. He runs a hand through his damp hair. He looks at Tom again. "Does this — is this just—"

"No," Tom says, immediately, with no hesitation at all, in the voice he uses when he isn't performing anything.

Mark reads this. Mark has known Tom since they were teenagers; he speaks Tom fluently. He goes quiet.

"He told me," you say, carefully, "that he's been—" You stop. That's Tom's thing to say. "It's not nothing. That's all."

Mark looks at you. He looks at Tom. Tom holds eye contact in the way Tom does when he's decided something — squared, no deflection, the version of him that doesn't reach for a joke.

Mark picks up his glass. He fills it at the sink. He drinks it. He puts it in the dish rack.

He turns around.

"You're both impossible," he says, "and I need about three days."

"That's fair," Tom says.

"After which," Mark continues, with the controlled energy of someone filing a formal grievance, "you are going to have a real conversation with me, DeLonge. About intentions. And—" he points at you "—you and I are going to talk too, because you absolutely could have just told me—"

"We were going to—"

"—and instead I had to find out in my own kitchen on a Tuesday—"

"Mark, genuinely, we had a plan—"

"You're both impossible," he says again. He walks past you. He stops in the doorway and looks back at Tom, who is still standing in the exact spot he was in when this started, as if movement might make things worse. Mark's expression does something complicated. Then it does something else, something underneath the complicated part, which is maybe the thing Travis knew about — the he'll get over it — starting to surface.

"You should go home," Mark tells Tom.

"Yeah," Tom says.

"And you—" to you "—we're talking tomorrow."

"Okay," you say.

Mark goes upstairs. His footsteps cross the ceiling. His door, pointedly but not violently, closes.

You look at Tom. Tom looks at you.

"That went—" he starts.

"Don't."

"I was going to say okay."

"It went okay," you agree, in the voice of someone who is not fully sure of this yet but is choosing it.

Tom picks up his keys from the counter where he left them. He pauses next to you. He doesn't push it — no jokes, no dramatics, just his hand on your arm for a second, the kind of contact that's been the real language of this whole thing, all these months.

"Tomorrow," he says.

"Tomorrow," you say.

He goes.

You stand in your kitchen alone for a minute, under the overhead light, listening to the ordinary sounds of the house settling. Somewhere upstairs, Mark is definitely sitting on his bed staring at nothing. Somewhere across Poway, Travis Barker is getting ready for bed, completely unsurprised.

You lean against the counter and press your hand over your mouth and laugh — not a lot, just a little, just enough. The quiet kind.

You had the parking lots. You had the long way home. You had since I was seventeen in a quiet voice in the front seat of his truck.

Three days, Mark had said.

You can wait three days.