Author's Note: This chapter features an enormous amount of discussion about sexual assault and domestic violence, which some readers may find extremely triggering.
"Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad." -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
228 days sober
I’m too attuned to the movements of Travis’s body to sleep through him getting out of bed in the morning. All of my muscles are aching, and my eyelids are too heavy to stay up for longer than a few seconds at time, but I do my best to watch him while he gets dressed. The view is more than worth the effort.
When he looks up from buttoning his hideous-as-hell khakis and sees that I’m awake, the corner of his mouth tips up into a gentle half-smile. “Hey,” he says. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s fine. ’m glad I got to see you before you left,” I say. “You feeling any better than you were last night?”
I can tell from the sudden stiffening in his posture that he doesn’t want to talk about last night, but he says, “I’ll be okay,” and even that acknowledgment feels like a victory. I reach for him, and he kneels on the edge of the bed to give me a kiss, says against my lips, “My shift ends at noon, and then I’m heading home to let Omelette out. Give me a call when your train gets to Pelham Station this afternoon, and I’ll come pick you up.”
I nod, but my eyes are already drifting shut again. Considering we only fell asleep a few hours ago, I have no clue how he has the energy to go to work right now, even if it’s just a half-shift. The threat of having to wake up again in two hours so I can take the train to Connecticut is enough to make me want to blow off therapy altogether and—I dunno, hang myself instead. It’s even worse when I remember that I’ve got another six-hour shift at Rush tonight.
The next time I open my eyes, it’s eight o’clock, and Travis is gone. I roll onto my back and stretch, then immediately wish I hadn’t. All that does is show me exactly how enormous and empty the bed is, and loneliness stabs into my gut, so sudden and sharp that I sit up, breathless.
I’ve always been a needy person. At least, I think I always have been. Things feel kind of blurry whenever I think too much about what I was like before I went to Patton, or dated Dave, or started using. Doc Howard says it’s common for people who’ve gone through traumatic things to develop a bit of a selective memory, even if that means we end up cherry-picking our own personality traits, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve hated being alone. It doesn’t usually hit me like this, though—an all-consuming sinkhole opening up in the middle of my chest when I’ve only been awake for a few seconds.
It’s more than I’m prepared to deal with when I’ve still got a whole day ahead of me. I pull a sweatshirt on over my bare chest and haul myself out from under the covers and down the hall to the main living area of the apartment, where I’m surprised to find… everybody, actually. Jamie is in the kitchen—sipping a cup of tea, and wearing his reading glasses, and skimming the morning paper, and generally providing a strong argument for the idea that being a real adult can be sexy. Stohler is still on the sofa bed, sleepily thumbing through her Instagram feed, and Ben is lying next to her, bundled up in Jamie’s sweatpants and an eye-searingly teal hoodie that I hope to god he stole from Stohler.
I crawl into the gap between them, bite down on Ben’s shoulder until he makes a noise of mild displeasure, then roll over to face Stohler. “We should get going soon. If I miss the 9:02 train, I’m going to be late for my therapy session.”
“’Kay,” she says, but makes no move to get off the sofa bed. I turn over to face Ben. He looks like he might be dozing again. It’s no wonder he and Jamie have been having dates that span full weekends. That’s probably how much time they have to spend together before they’re both fully awake at the same time.
I creep closer and carefully set my teeth to his shoulder once more.
“Garen,” he says warningly, still not opening his eyes. Last night, I had a club full of strangers staring at me for six hours. This morning, it feels like even my best friends can’t be bothered to have a real conversation with me. I increase the pressure of the bite. He makes a noise like an angry cat, then says, “Stohler, can you pull him off me?”
“’Kay,” she says again, unmoving.
Jamie appears at the corner of my vision and reaches out to cup one hand gently under my jaw. “Garen, darling. Let go of him.”
With Jamie’s hand on my face and attention focused on me, there isn’t much of an excuse for bullying my friend anymore. I spit out my mouthful of Ben-or-Stohler’s hoodie and say, “I need to leave soon. You should come cuddle with me before I go.”
“Why is it that you insist on behaving like an ill-tempered puppy instead of a man?” Jamie sighs. His exasperation doesn’t stop him from climbing onto the sofa bed with the rest of us and insinuating himself as gracefully as possible between me and Ben.
Being James Goldwyn’s big spoon is one of the great and unending joys of my life, but a tiny, childish part of me is a little bit annoyed that Ben is the one he faces, pulls closer, and kisses on the forehead. No matter how much I try to pretend that I’m this totally chill proponent of casual relationships and free love or whatever, I’m still the spoiled, selfish product of an only-child upbringing. I never had to share anything--especially attention—when I was younger, and I fucking hate being expected to learn how to do it now, as an adult.
I even the playing field by letting my slightly parted lips linger against the soft skin at the nape of Jamie’s neck. It’s one of his more sensitive spots, which I’ve never hesitated to take advantage of in bed, and while this is technically a sofa-bed, I think it still counts. Sure enough, it’s a matter of seconds before he lets out a noise close to a purr and tips his head forward to allow me better access. Triumphant, I sneak a glance over his shoulder at Ben, but the fucking midget doesn’t even have his eyes open.
“Tell me you love me, Jamie,” I demand. If Ben’s not going to see me claiming my place as Jamie Goldwyn’s main dude, he’s sure as hell going to hear it.
“My god, you’re annoying,” Stohler says from behind me. “How has Goldwyn put up with you for five years? Did you pull this kind of horseshit the whole time you shared a dorm room?”
“Every single morning,” I lie. “Jamie—”
“Yes, I love you,” Jamie says. He lifts his hand from Ben’s waist so that he can blindly reach back and thread his fingers into my hair.
“More than Ben, right?” I wheedle. It feels like an idiotic, obnoxious thing to say even as the words are coming out of my mouth. Behind me, Stohler lets out a huff of irritation, and on Jamie’s other side, Ben lazily opens one eye to look at me. I press my lips harder to the back of Jamie’s neck, mostly to keep myself from speaking again.
But Jamie seems entirely unconcerned. The gentle caress of his fingertips against my scalp turns into more of a reassuring pat. “Of course I love you more than him. Everyone knows that he’s only here because I’d like to tie someone to the bed later, and it would be impossible for me to get the knots done if I did it to myself.”
Ben chuckles, and I roll onto my back, mollified. He’s not pissed at me for being a brat, and Jamie still loves me better than he loves anyone else, and ow, Stohler is digging an elbow into my ribs.
“Get up. We’re going to miss the train,” she says, like I didn’t say that to her five minutes ago.
We don’t miss the train, though. We leave Jamie and Ben to whatever their plans for the day might be, and we manage to find ourselves one of the amazing, vicious cabbies who weaves through the hellscape that constitutes Manhattan traffic and gets us to Grand Central with enough spare time to grab two cups of coffee before we have to board our train to New Haven.
We settle ourselves into a pair of seats in the back of the train car, and Stohler is just settling in to nap against the window when my cell phone rings. The screen is lit with Declan’s name. I tuck myself against Stohler’s side and answer the call with a half-yawned, “Not today.”
There’s a pause before Declan says, “What do you mean, not today?”
“I mean, I’m not sucking your dick today. That’s why you’re calling, right?” I say. A few seats ahead of me, a man in a suit turns to give me a side-eye. I stick my tongue out at him. He turns quickly back around. I add, “That’s always the reason you call me on weekends. ‘Cause you want me to come to Patton and suck your dick, and then you want me to run through the obstacle course until I die, and then you probably want my corpse to suck your dick, too.”
“Actually,” he says, and there is so much cool disdain in his voice that each syllable comes out like its own sentence. Ac. Tu. All. Y. “I was going to ask you if you wanted to come help me coach the rest of the squad through the course. They’ve been telling me for months that they’d like to cut down their times before Sergeant Smitth has us start the official practice next week.”
I snort. “The rest of the guys on the squad are idiots, then. You’re more of a drill sergeant than our real drill sergeant.”
“I figured it would be easier to offer advice if one of us was keeping track of time, and the other was only concentrating on the person running the course,” Declan says, and his voice is so cold now, I bet it’s frosting over the screen of his phone. “But if you don’t feel like driving up here—”
“It’s not that I don’t feel like it,” I interrupt, more sober now that I think he’s starting to actually get annoyed with me. “It’s that I can’t. I’m on a train back to Connecticut right now. I’m seeing my shrink at eleven, and then my dad’s gonna give me a lift back to the train station in New Haven, but I don’t think I’ll be getting back to my house until almost three. Got another shift at the club tonight, too. Figure I’ll probably use those six and a half hours in the middle to snag a few extra hours of sleep, maybe hang with Travis some, get my homework done.”
Declan doesn’t reply.
It takes me a minute to realize what I’ve said. I clear my throat. “It’s been a while, Dec. Like, I’ve barely gotten to hang out with him at all lately, and—”
“That’s fine. I didn’t realize you were busy,” Declan says. His voice is entirely neutral now, and that makes me cringe even more than the bad attitude did.
“Dec,” I begin, but he cuts me off with, “It’s not like I need help rounding up the guys for course training. I had just figured you’d get a kick out of stealing the bullhorn out of Smitth’s office and torturing the rest of the squad with it, and this seemed like the best excuse you’d ever have for that. Anyway, I’ll see you on Monday, yeah?”
I suck in a deep breath to start rambling my way through another string of excuses, but he hangs up on me before I get a chance. Scowling, I shove my phone back into my pocket.
The phone call seems to have ruined Stohler’s nap aspirations. She takes a long sip of coffee before tucking the cup between her knees so that she can pull her tangled blond curls into a topknot, then clears her throat and says to me, “So. Your first real night at the club. What’d you think?”
What I think is, I don’t want to talk about this. What is I say is, “It was harder than I thought it would be.”
“Harder as in, more physically taxing? Or harder to handle psychologically?” she asks.
My eyes—which had been drifting sideways, attention span too short to focus on anyone for an extended period of time—snap back to meet Stohler’s. Her gaze is sharp, hawk-like. She’s been a stripper for years, and it stands to reason that she’d have some idea of what my first night at the club was like, but that doesn’t do anything to reassure me. The fact that feeling so drained after working is normal enough to be predictable only makes me wonder what kind of emptiness I should expect from the second night, and the third, and the fourth…
“Did you like it?” Stohler presses.
A heavy no rolls up in my throat before I can give it any real consideration. I pinch the tip of my tongue between my front teeth to keep the word in until I’ve formulated something to say that won’t make me feel like a little kid. “I didn’t hate it. But I don’t think this is the type of job that anyone does because they really enjoy it.”
Stohler twists in her seat just enough to rest the back of her head against the window. Her eyes are still half-lidded, with smears of mascara caked under her bottom lashes. “What makes you say that?”
“Come on, Stohls. I only went for this job because I wouldn’t have been able to get anything else. And even if I had managed to trick someplace legit into giving me a job, I would’ve gotten fired in, like, two days.” When that doesn’t prompt any reply, I roll my eyes and tilt my coffee cup towards Stohler, half-hoping the smell of it will wake her up enough to get a real response. “Being a cage dancer wasn’t exactly my first choice of careers. Are you telling me that being a stripper was yours?”
She hitches a shoulder up slightly and lets it fall. “With where I’m at right now? You bet your ass it is. I’ve been doing this for, what, two years? First in New York, when I was still in college, and now in New Haven. I’m a week away from turning twenty-three, and I’ve made enough money doing this to have already paid off all my student loans and my Mustang. I work four days a week, I choose my own hours, and I pay my rent and all my bills on-time every month, with plenty left over to keep me in beer and cigarettes and still pad my savings account. I’m in the best shape of my life, and I don’t hate the girls I work with, and most of the regulars at my club are nice enough guys. I like stripping at least as much as Ben likes working at the bookstore, and a hell of a lot more than Travis likes being a barista. Why the hell wouldn’t it be my first choice right now?”
The same reasons it’s not really my first choice—because it’s more awkward and nerve-wracking than I’d thought. Because I expected it to be easy, but it’s actually grueling, and my whole body aches the morning after, and I only averaged about two bucks an hour in profit. Because I flinch whenever a stranger touches me, and because it doesn’t seem to be acceptable to stop a guy from putting his hands wherever he wants to put them, even if it’s somewhere that makes me feel sick.
When I try to explain this to Stohler, her posture changes. She sits up a little straighter, lifting her head off the window, and blinks her way back to alertness, bordering on wariness.
“Anderson… most of my focus has been on helping you get this job and making sure you get through your first shift okay, but you know that’s not the only thing that matters, right? I think I must have been too harsh about this whole thing, because you have to understand—”
“Stohler, don’t,” I sigh. “It’s fine.”
“It’s fucking not, dude. Look, there are some things I need to make clear to you right now,” she says. She stuffs her coffee cup into my hand and digs around in her bag until she surfaces with a purple glitter gel pen and an alarmingly long Starbucks receipt. She turns it over and starts scribbling. “Okay. Number one. If somebody starts grabbing at you, and it makes you uncomfortable, tell the bouncers and have that person thrown the fuck out. The whole point of having security there is to make sure you’re safe. And number two: if you want to stop, you’re allowed to fucking stop. Like, I get that people are paying you to be sexy for them, but they’re not paying you to have sex with them. And because apparently this is something I need to fucking clarify with you, you little weirdo, even if these people were paying you to have sex with them, you’d be allowed to stop, too.”
Bullshit, I want to say. I’ve never been allowed to stop—not when I was fucking around for the hell of it, and definitely not when I was getting paid for it. I couldn’t stop Seth Hayden when he was paying me in drugs, and I couldn’t stop any of the guys who paid me in cash, and I couldn’t stop Dave when he was paying me in cold sweat and nightmares. I can’t say no to people who want that from me. I’m not sure I even know how.
Something of this must show on my face, because when Stohler glances up from her scribbled notes, she freezes. And stares at me. I stare mulishly back at her. She leans back against the window again and says, “Maybe this isn’t the right job for you.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m serious, maybe we should find you a gig doing something else. Those pictures your ginger took for your portfolio were pretty fuckin’ good, actually. You can ask him to take another set, but with more clothing this time—we’ll get Goldwyn to pick out a couple of looks for you, fill your book up with some fashion shots, maybe something a little more artistic. We can see about getting you some legit modeling work. You’re good-looking enough for it, you’ve got the body, you’ve got that scowly bad boy thing that a lot of male models try to pull off. When I lived in New York, I had some friends who went to Parsons, a couple at FIT. Some of them are doing wicked good for themselves now. I can see if they’re looking for dudes to do some runway—”
“I don’t want to be a fucking fashion model,” I snap at her.
“Yeah, and from what I can see, you don’t want to be a fucking cage dancer, either,” she snarls back. Halfway up the train car, the man who stared at me when I was on the phone with Declan turns around to blink at us for a second time. Stohler narrows her eyes at him and spits out, “Can I help you with something?” He scrambles to face forward again. Stohler heaves a sigh and returns her attention to me. “I’m not trying to offend you, Garen. I’m trying to help.”
“Prove it,” I say. “Help me get good at this. If you could teach me how to get more tips when I’m in the cage, or how to get the owners’ attention so they’ll move me to one of the better spots in the club, I could make all my money dancing in the main room. I could cover the cashout from my regular tips, and I wouldn’t have to do any private dances in the lounge, and nobody would get a chance to touch me. I’d be okay.”
Stohler rubs her fingertips against her closed eyelids, smearing the residue of her mascara even more. “It could probably be argued that, for you, even the cage dancing falls into the realm of ‘not okay.’ In fact, I’m gonna go ahead and strongly suggest that you mention it to your shrink today. See what she thinks about this whole mess.”
“If I promise to ask Doc about it, will you agree to help me get better at the dancing part?” I ask immediately.
Stohler drops her hands and rolls her eyes at me. “Come on. Like I can trust you to actually tell her the shit you swear you’ll tell her. Everybody lies to their friends and family about what they say to their shrink. Come to think of it, everybody lies to their shrink, too.”
“What do you know about it?” I demand.
“Considering how many cutters you’ve taken to bed, I’m not sure how this could possibly have escaped your awareness, but Garen? Sweetie? You’re not the only person in the world with issues. Yours just happen to manifest in the most dramatic and exciting ways.” She snatches her coffee back out of my hand, swallows down an enormous gulp of it, and sighs. “Jesus. Fine. I’ll help you with the dancing. Can you stay in town tonight, or did I hear you telling your guy that you’ve got another shift?”
“I’m supposed to work again,” I say, blinking down at the knees of my jeans. I’ll have to hit the bank on my way to the club tonight. There isn’t much hope of me learning how to hustle guys out of all their money within the next twelve hours, so I’m facing another night of covering my payout with my own cash.
“Well, I don’t know what your plans for tomorrow are—you might have homework, or something. But if you think you’ve got a couple hours to spare, drive back out to New Haven and pick me up. I’ll take you to the club where I work, and you can meet some of the girls, watch some of their sets. If you don’t want to do any private dances, you might be able to pick up some tips from seeing girls who know how to get paid when they’re doing a stage set.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “Are there really going to be that many people at a strip club on a Sunday afternoon?”
“Sure there are. But the number of people in a club isn’t that important. What matters is how well the people who are there are tipping their dancers,” Stohler says. “Keep that in mind when you’re deciding which club patrons to pay attention to. Big groups—birthday parties, bachelor ’n bachelorette parties are all notoriously stingy. People pool their cash and buy a couple of private dances for the guest of honor, but they never tip at the rail, and you end up spending an hour with assholes for maybe thirty bucks. Good patrons are usually alone. Sometimes you can make good money off of couples, but only if they’re both obviously into it, you know, buying dances for each other and whatnot. Other times, it’s obvious that one person is only doing it to appease the other, and that’s the worst. You don’t get much in the way of tips, and the whole thing is awkward. Nah, you want single guys, sometimes a little bit older, but not the creepy ones, or anybody wearing track pants.”
I snort. Stohler whacks me in the chest, hard.
“I’m fucking serious. Never, ever give a dance to a guy wearing track pants. All they’ll wanna do is dry-hump you until they come in their pants, ‘cause they’re bored of jerking off alone at home, but they’re too cheap to shell out for a prostitute.”
A picture I’ve tried to keep out of my mind rises to the surface—the boy I saw frotting with a patron in the VIP, the one who cleaned come off himself with a baby wipe in the locker room as he told me about the dancers who suck off clubgoers to get real money.
“You alright, Anderson?” Stohler asks sharply.
I try to force a smile even as I’m trying to blink away the image of the boy in the locker room, and I think I manage to pull off both. “Sure. Once I get the hang of it, once I learn all the tricks… I’ll be totally fine. There’s just a learning curve.”
That’s the line of bullshit I feed Stohler for the rest of the train ride to New Haven, and the last lie I tell her as I’m climbing out of her Mustang when she drops me off in front of the Lakewood Rehabilitation Center. It forms the bulk of the nonsense I sling at Doc Howard when she asks me how my new job is going, and I do a decent job of twisting the same idea into a series of suitable, but mostly noncommittal answers when Doc asks about Patton, my friends, living with Travis, Jamie’s parents’ death, my plans for college, my relationship with my parents.
I’ve got a lot going on, but I’m doing okay.
Things won’t always be this tough.
It’s fine, I’m fine, it’s fine, I’m fine.
“Garen,” my dad says warmly the moment I open the passenger door to his car. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I say automatically. Dad looks so happy to see me, though, and it suddenly hits me that this is the first time we’ve actually seen each other in a month. The last time we spoke face to face was the morning after I slept in my old bedroom with Jamie and Travis, and before that, it was the weekend of George and Melissa Goldwyn’s funeral service. Since then, we’ve had two or three phone calls, and that’s it. A handful of conversations over the course of a month and a half.
I lean over and throw an arm around his neck to give him the biggest, tightest hug I can manage with the center console between us. “Hi, Dad,” I mumble against the shoulder of his jacket. “It’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too, G,” Dad says, clapping me on the bicep. When I sink back into my own seat, he’s beaming at me. “I checked the train schedule, and I think we’ve got time to stop somewhere before we head to the station. Have you eaten anything yet today?”
“No. I’m starving. Nobody feeds me in New York, it’s terrible,” I say.
He snorts. “Because God forbid you feed yourself, like an adult would. We’re only a few minutes away from that cafe downtown. We’ll pick up some sandwiches and coffees to go, alright?”
That cafe downtown is the Daily Grind. I haven’t been there in ages, which isn’t entirely accidental. Most weekends, I down a couple mugs of coffee while I’m still in session with Doc, and then I put my caffeine consumption on hold until I’ve cleared the boundaries of Lakewood. It isn’t anything serious— mostly, it’s a stupid ritual I go through so I can be sure to avoid the awkwardness of running into anyone I hated at LHS, or having to pretend I’ll keep in touch with the people I liked well enough. I’ve never really been scared that I’d see anyone I knew.
Apparently, I fucking should have been.
When I follow my dad through the front door of the Grind, I’m greeted by a shriek of delight that startles me so much, I trip over my boots and almost faceplant right there on the linoleum. I look around, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.
Half the Lakewood High School Drama Club is sitting in a cluster around three small tables that they’ve shoved together. All my favorites and least favorites are there—Annabelle, and Riley, and Miranda, and Christine, and John, and Nate Holliday, and Josslyn fucking Pryce. It’s this last person I can’t stop staring at, and she seems to be having the same problem.
I cannot deal with this today. I just can’t.
“Dad,” I whisper urgently. “Dad. I need you to pretend that I got into a horrible car accident and sustained a traumatic brain injury, and now I have amnesia and don’t recognize anyone I’ve met in the last nine months.”
Dad clicks his tongue in maybe-mocking disappointment and says, “Garen, be serious. You know that the only people your mother and I raised you to lie to are the police.”
It’s such a pointed comment that it snaps me out of my deer-in-headlights terror. I blink away from the staring contest Joss and I have stumbled into and meet my dad’s eyes instead. He raises a brow and turns to wander off towards the counter, saying over his shoulder, “Go say hello to your friends. I’ll get the food.”
“Yeah, but—wait a second. Did Mom tell you about… have you talked to Mom this week? Did she tell you something?” I ask. He doesn’t look back at me, and I guess it doesn’t matter, because suddenly I’ve got a overexcited redhead plastered to my front, and it’s not even the overexcited redhead I’ve gotten used to having plastered to my front.
Annabelle is clinging to me, practically vibrating with delight and saying over and over, “Oh my god, Garen. Oh my god. I didn’t know you were back in town! Why didn’t you call one of us? This is amazing. Riley, look, it’s—”
“It’s Garen, yeah,” Riley says, raising his eyebrows at her, but unable to hold back a small laugh. “We can all see that, Annie.”
“I’m not back back,” I find myself saying. My eyes drift towards Joss once more, but I promised myself months ago that I’d never have to look at her again. Instead, I try to focus on the person sitting furthest away from her, who turns out to be… Nate. Not much better. The moment our eyes meet, I can tell he feels just as fucked up as I do about all of us meeting up right now. I clear my throat and say again, “I’m not really back. I mean, it’s not like I moved back to Lakewood, or anything like that. I had an appointment at the LRC earlier this morning, and I’m, uh… I’m just grabbing something to eat. With my dad.” I gesture stupidly towards the cash register. “That’s my dad, over there.”
He must be able to hear me from this distance, because he turns and gives a faint, polite smile. There’s a bit of awkward waving from the drama club.
Annabelle seizes my arm and drags me closer to the table. “But you can hang out for a few minutes, though, right? Come on, we haven’t seen you in months. Tell us about your new school. Tell us about New York.”
I huff out a laugh and let myself be shoved into an empty chair that John drags over from another table. “It’s not really a new school. I went there for three years. But it, uh… it’s good. Mostly. I’ve gotta be there at five in the morning for physical training every day, which sucks more than probably anything or anyone has ever sucked in the entire world. Only a few more weeks, though, and then I’m done.”
“You figure out what you’re doing after you graduate?” Riley asks.
“Well, I’ve got a job,” I say without thinking. Fuck. Work is the last thing I should be talking about with these people. They tore into Stohler when they found out she was a stripper, and that was the first night any of them had even met her. I can’t stomach the thought of what they might say to me if I dare to tell them the truth.
Miranda claps her hands to her cheeks in a comical display of shock, and I stick my tongue out at her. She blows me a kiss and drops her hands. “Where do you work?”
Somehow, despite my bone-deep conviction that I need to lie to them, I can’t come up with anything they might believe. Worse yet, I’m sure my dad can still hear us, and I don’t dare say anything that he’d know right off the bat was bullshit. Everyone who really knows me is already aware of exactly how unemployable I am; it was part of the reason my Patton buddies had such a blast suggesting jobs I could apply for weeks ago.
A single comment from that conversation with the Whitman squad bursts into my mind, and I say, “A friend of mine got me a job doing security at this venue in the city on weekends. It’s kind of boring, honestly. All I do is check IDs at the door and occasionally help some of the other guys throw people out if they get too sloppy. Pay is decent, though.”
“And let’s be honest, that’s what really counts,” Riley says.
I grin at him, even though I’m picturing the sixteen crumpled singles I was left with last night and thinking to myself, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. I can almost hear the words in Joss’s voice, even though she hasn’t said a single word the entire time I’ve been here.
Annabelle grips my hand in both of hers, like she wants to make sure I know we’re about to have A Serious Talk. “Have you heard back from all your schools? Have you decided where you’re going in the fall?”
A few seats away, Nate Holliday makes an involuntary sort of movement, as if he wants to lean into the conversation, but isn’t quite sure he has the right anymore. I meet his eyes, and a delicate flush blooms in his cheeks. When I found out that he’d told Joss about Dave hitting me, I was so fucking positive that I wanted Nate to hate himself for betraying me. I wanted him to know, without the slightest bit of ambiguity, that our friendship was over, and I’d never forgive him. Right now, he is trying to desperately to keep an even expression, but regret is still managing to seep through the cracks in the facade.
Part of me thinks I should feel vindicated. Most of me just feels like shit.
“Yeah, I got my replies a month ago. I applied to five colleges, got into four, ‘cause I guess Northwestern wasn’t too keen on that whole expulsion situation last spring.” I swallow, square my shoulders, and say, right to his face, “Nate, I should thank you again for all the help you gave me with my applications. The audition pieces you suggested were great, so, uh… thanks. I owe you.”
“You really, really don’t,” Nate says, mouth tipping into a miserable slant. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a smile. Instead of looking at it any longer, trying to figure that out, I gesture to the collection of highlighted scripts and scribbled notes scattered all over the tables.
“What’s this semester’s play?”
“The Wizard of Oz,” John sighs.
I raise my eyebrows. “Not a fan, I take it?”
“Well, we wanted to do Hairspray, but considering it’s about segregation in 1960s Baltimore, and I’m the only black person in the drama club…” Miranda trails off, rolling her eyes.
“And then we wanted to do West Side Story, but, you know,” Annabelle says.
“No Puerto Ricans in the drama club?” I guess.
Riley snorts. “No Puerto Ricans in Lakewood, more like.”
“Nate made like, two sentences of an argument for Rent, but Ms. Markland shot that down like—” Annabelle snaps her fingers. “We all knew that was a crapshoot, anyway. If you still went to school here, we might’ve gotten further with it. Because like, for one thing, even Ms. Markland would’ve loved to have seen you playing Roger, which is pretty much a part you were born to play. And for another, you’re a gay, Jewish, recovering addict, and your mom’s a lawyer, and I think the school would’ve been shitting themselves in fear that you would sue them for discrimination if they refused to let us perform it. But seeing as how you abandoned us…”
“In the end, we didn’t have much of a choice. It was either The Wizard of Oz or Bye Bye Birdie, and it seemed weird to do two retro-themed musicals in a row,” Miranda says.
Personally, I think it was a little weird to do even one retro-themed musical, but we’re long past the time when I can get away with saying things like that to this group of people. Nate’s eyes narrow like he can hear me saying it anyway.
“So, which parts did you all end up getting?” I ask, even though it’s not that difficult to guess. The majority of my assumptions are concerned when they all start speaking at once—Christine is playing Glinda the Good Witch, Miranda is playing the Wicked Witch of the West. Joss is playing Dorothy, which I would have known even if John hadn’t said it for her. John himself is playing the Cowardly Lion, and Gabe, who is thankfully absent from this little outing, is playing the Tin Man. The only thing that surprises me is the news that Nate is playing the Scarecrow, part of the cast instead of just helping direct and choreograph.
A hip bumps my arm. I glance over my shoulder. Dad is standing there with a coffee in each hand and a bag hanging from his wrist. He lifts these items slightly and says, “Garen, we should get going.”
“Yeah, just… one minute?” I say. I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, and I didn’t really want to talk to the drama club, but now that it’s time for me to leave, I don’t really want to do that either.
Dad gestures towards the door with one of his coffee-clutching hands. “Alright. I’ll be in the car.”
The moment he has cleared the door, Christine says, “So, your dad is kind of hot.”
For the past four years, Jamie has periodically reminded me that he would absolutely sleep with either or both of my parents, given the chance. Hearing it from someone else isn’t any less disturbing. I adopt a look of outrage and say, “Christine, how dare you? I thought those scripted, incredibly public kisses during Grease meant something to you, and now I find out that you’ll take any Anderson man who’ll have you. The nerve of you. The betrayal.”
Everyone laughs, and that seems like a nice enough end note. I stand and push the chair back in the direction of the table John dragged it away from.
“Well, if I don’t leave now, I’m going to miss my train back to the city. It was cool seeing you guys again. Good luck with your play.”
I try to take a step back, but Annabelle grabs my arm again. “You should come see one of the performances. They start pretty soon, actually. Our dress rehearsal is a week from today, and we open on Thursday of the week after that.”
I’d rather swallow, digest, and shit a ziploc bag full of thumbtacks. It feels like it would be inappropriate to admit that, though. Smiling widely, I say, “Yeah, maybe. I’ve got work on Friday nights and Saturday nights, and that’s right in the middle of the performances you guys’ll be doing, so I’m not sure—”
“Our first performance is at seven o’clock on Thursday, May tenth. It’ll be over before nine thirty, so you’ll have plenty of time to drive back to New York,” Riley cuts me off. He makes a note in the margin of the crumpled, coffee-stained script he uses to reference his lighting cues, then grins sharply up at me. “We’ll put you down for two tickets for that night.”
“Two tickets?” I echo.
“Yeah, one for you, one for Tr—uh…” Riley stops speaking abruptly. It sounds like someone might have just stomped on his foot under the table. Everyone in the group looks over at Joss, but they all do it shiftily, like they’re trying (and failing) to be subtle about it.
For the first time in several minutes, Joss actually looks at me again. There’s a long moment of painful, grating silence, and then she hitches a shoulder up and lets it fall. “One for you, one for Travis. He’ll want to see the performance.”
“You mean, he’ll want to see the sets. And he’ll want to passive-aggressively make suggestions about how he would have constructed them,” I say, and Joss laughs. There’s a brief flash of unbearable fondness across her face, and it’s probably for Travis, but it looks like it could be for me, too. I don’t know which of those would be more surprising. Someone shifts, making their chair creak, and Joss’s smile twists into something less genuine. I try to mirror it.
“How’s he doing, anyway?” she asks me.
Better than he ever was when he lived here, I want to say, even though I’m not sure it’s true. Happier with me than he ever could have been with you, even if I’d left you two alone, I think, even though I know that’s not true. “He’s doing really well. He’s, you know… busy with school, busy with his job. All that mature Travis-y stuff.” I look down at my hands, and I don’t even fucking know why I say it, because it feels so unbelievably personal and secret and important in a way none of them will understand. But I just blink at my knuckles and say quietly, “We got a dog.”
Christine lights up. “I saw that on Facebook! He’s so adorable, I die every time you post a picture of him.”
She’s not wrong—Omelette is easily one of the top five cutest dogs who has ever lived. But I feel like I’ve just stripped all my skin off and let them see my insides. They’ve seen my dad, and they’re talking about my dog, and they’re asking about Travis. If they found a way to bring up my mom and Jamie, they’d have laid claim to my entire family, and I feel so exposed because of it.
“I really do have to go. I’m going to miss my train,” I say, backing up. “I’ll see you guys around, yeah?”
I tumble through the front door before any of them can reply, but I don’t get much further.
“Wait! Garen, please don’t leave yet. I have to say something to you.”
My dad is looking at me through the Mercedes windshield. I widen my eyes and mouth oh my god at him before I turn to face Nate Holliday, who has just darted through the front door of the Daily Grind after me.
“Nate,” I say, “I don’t want to miss—”
“You won’t miss your train, I promise. This will only take a few seconds. But I just need to…”
His face gets all wobbly for a second, and I feel a bite of panic at the idea that he’s about to burst into tears or something. Before I can fling myself back into Dad’s car and demand that he drive me to safety, though, Nate squares his shoulders. He looks older than I remember him being. Taller, too. Stronger.
“I need to apologize to you, for the way I acted last semester. I should never have told Josslyn that your ex-boyfriend abused you. It was awful of me to treat something painful that happened to you like it was nothing more than gossip. And even once I’d made that mistake, I made everything so much worse when I tried to justify it to you.”
I shrug. At least, I think I shrug. I can’t really feel my shoulder moving. “You had your reasons.”
Nate’s eyes spark with defiance. “No, I didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There were no acceptable reasons for me to do what I did, and I know that now. At the time, I said it was because I was trying to help, and I wanted Joss to stop judging you, and I wanted her to understand you like I… like I wanted to understand you. But those were terrible excuses. Selfish ones. If I really understood you—as a person, as a friend—I would have understood how wrong it was for me to talk about what happened with anyone else. I would have respected your privacy, and I would have…” He breaks off and swallows hard. The tears seem a lot closer now than they did a minute ago. “I would have earned the trust that you showed me when you told me about what happened to you in the first place. You deserved a better friend than I think I knew how to be at that point. You deserved to have better people in your life.”
His words are gnawing a hole in the center of my chest. One more sentence, and I’m afraid he’ll be able to see every desperate, bloody, terrified pulse of my heart. I cross my arms, just in case. “You’re a good person, Nate,” I finally manage. “I, uh… I’ve got this friend, actually. He’s one of my favorite people in the world, and he’s a lot like you. Grew up in this shitty town, had to deal with plenty of homophobic assholes, but still turned out… kind. And loyal.” Those two adjectives feel like they’re vastly underselling the all-consuming goodness I’m attempting to explain. I try again. “You have to understand, this friend—at the risk of sounding like a total tool, there’s this honesty to him, this integrity in his heart that’s just—”
Nate raises a hand to cut me off. “This is touching, Garen, it truly is, but if I can remind you? I spent all of last semester totally failing to hide an embarrassing crush on you. So, if you could refrain from falsely comparing me to Travis—who I have literally nothing in common with—just so that you have an excuse to talk about how much you love him, that would be spectac—”
“I wasn’t talk about Travis,” I interrupt, and Nate goes silent. “I was thinking of my friend Ben. He’s—it’s a small town, and he was only two grades ahead of you, so you probably know who I mean. Ben McCutcheon?” I hold my hand up level with my shoulder to indicate (and possibly exaggerate) Ben’s height. Curious frown on his face, Nate nods once. I scrub my hand through my hair. “Yeah, so. Ben. He’s probably the best, most kind-hearted person I know, but he does this, uh. He does this thing where he lets people treat him like shit. Mostly, he lets guys treat him like shit. They…” Fuck, now I feel like I’m going to be the one to cry. “We hook up with him, and we act like it doesn’t matter that much, and we drop him when someone else comes along, and he ends up thinking that he doesn’t matter much. He’s such an amazing guy, Nate, and he doesn’t—he doesn’t even like himself most of the time. And he feels that way because a bunch of dickheads made him feel that way.”
“And you think that’s what I do, too?” Nate asks.
It takes me a long time to choose my words, and an even longer time to pronounce each one of them carefully, precisely the way I mean them. “I think that you should never, ever let a guy like me make you feel that you aren’t good enough. Because you are, Nate. You’re a good person, and you were a good friend, even if you made a couple of mistakes.”
“They were pretty big mistakes,” he says doubtfully.
“Nowhere near as big as the ones I’ve made, but I bet you’d still say that I don’t deserve to hate myself for that,” I say. He concedes the point with a tilt of his head. I sigh. “If you need me to say that I forgive you for talking to Joss, I can say it. But if you can tolerate a moment of philosophical bullshit, I think the fact that you apologized for it at all matters more than whether or not I say you’re forgiven.”
“Leaving Lakewood has had a dramatic impact on your personality,” Nate says, cocking an eyebrow.
I make a face at him and say, “The same thing’ll happen to you when you leave Lakewood, too. And Christ, dude, I really hope you leave Lakewood. You’ve got too much of a spark in you to get stuck here for the rest of your life.”
Judging by the flush that creeps up from the collar of Nate’s sweater, that little crush of his hasn’t been wiped out as thoroughly as he claimed.
“Are you really going to come to our opening night performance?” he presses.
I wince. “Well, after this little heart-to-heart, I kind of feel like I have to.”
Nate gives me a haughty look that’s probably cuter and more ridiculous than he intends it to be. “You do. And if you really want me to feel like I matter, it wouldn’t kill you to bring me roses, too. If you even bother to show up, which you probably won’t. Don’t you miss us at all?”
“’Course I do,” I say. After the high drama of a few minutes ago, I can’t stop one side of my mouth from quirking up into a smile as I lean in, press a lingering kiss to his cheek, and say, “I miss you most of all, Scarecrow.”
Nate tries to slap my arm, but I dodge it and hop off the sidewalk. Neither of us says goodbye before he returns to the Grind and I climb back into my dad’s car.
There’s a wrapped-up chicken panini waiting on the dashboard for me. I rip open the wrapper and tear an enormous bite out of it. When I glance sideways, I find that Dad is frowning down at my hands. I blink at them.
They’re trembling.
The food in my mouth feels like it’s made of lead all of a sudden. I force myself to swallow it, set the rest of the sandwich down on the center console, and brush the crumbs off my hands. Part of me is convinced that, if I keep moving, we won’t have to talk about the fact that I’m shaking.
“It was kind of weird seeing old Lakewood people again,” I admit. Not entirely a lie, either. It was weird seeing them, but it was worse having to suffer through a whole conversation about Nate and Joss, the whole reason I left Lakewood in the first place.
“I can imagine,” Dad says.
I’m expecting something more than that, but nothing else comes. Finally, I gesture towards the clock on the dashboard. “I’m probably going to miss the train.”
Dad blinks at the clock. It’s twenty after twelve, my train leaves at quarter to one, and we’re at least half an hour away from Union Station in New Haven. On a normal day, Dad would peel out of the parking lot and gun it for New Haven, swearing all the while. Instead, he shakes his head and says, “Why don’t I just drive you back to your house?”
“What?” I say, brow wrinkling. “Dad, no. It’s two and a half hours, round-trip. You’ll waste your entire afternoon.”
“And it’s almost an hour and a half round-trip to New Haven, if you consider the traffic I’m likely to hit. I didn’t have plans today, anyway. What difference does one extra hour make to me?”
I want to argue, but it’s not like my mom’s the only stubborn-as-fuck parent I’ve got. Dad’s face is set, and it would be pointless to try to change his mind, especially when he’s already pulling out of the parking lot and turning us in the direction of New York, not New Haven.
“Besides,” he adds, “I have something I’d like to discuss with you.”
He might as well say, I have something I want to ground you for even though you live in your own house. My upper lip curls back. “Is it about school?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Are you sure? Because if you’re about to pull a Mom move and bitch at me for ‘not choosing a college yet,’ that counts as a school thing. Like, college is school,” I point out. Dad looks to be working very hard to contain an eyeroll. Suspicion flares in the back of my mind. “Wait, are you dating somebody? Is that what you’re going to tell me?”
“Well, you’re getting warmer,” Dad says, “but you’re still pretty far off.”
“You can tell me if you’re dating somebody. I’m not going to be weird about it,” I say. “Though, if I can make two really small suggestions, before you decide to move her into your house? First, introduce us, and if she hates me, maybe don’t, like, make her my step-mom. Second, if she’s got a son around my age, make sure he’s straight. And I mean really straight, not closet-case-virgin-Travis-McCall-straight. ‘Cause, you know, you move a hot dude into the house and I can’t stop myself from seducing him once, shame on me. You move a hot dude into the house and I can’t stop myself from seducing him twice, shame on y—”
“I’m not dating anyone, Garen. But based on what I’ve heard, the same cannot be said for you,” Dad says.
I squint. “Excuse me?”
“Your mother tells me that you’re seeing a boy named Declan,” Dad says. Christ. We haven’t even gotten on the highway yet, and the interrogation is already starting up.
To put off replying, I take a sip of my scalding hot coffee. I wince at the sting spreading over my tongue, set the cup down in the cupholder, and say, “I guess that depends on how you define ‘seeing.’ I mean, we’re not boyfriends. He’s—”
“Cut the shit, Garen,” Dad interrupts, and I blink over at him. His eyes are locked on the road. When I glance down, I see that his knuckles are white with how tightly he’s gripping the steering wheel. “I let you get away with that we’re-not-really-boyfriends garbage in October, when you decided that you wanted to get involved with Ben McCutcheon. I let you get away with it in December, when you decided to get back together with Travis. You’ve used the same lie to try and talk your way through two boyfriends in the last eight months, even though you swore up and down that you’d stay single and focus on yourself during this first year of recovery. It’s not going to work a third time. I don’t care what label you do or don’t use for your relationship. You’re seeing a new boy, and I want to meet him.”
“Ew,” I blurt out without meaning to. “Look, Dad, that’s… that’s just not going to happen. I mean, I like Declan, but he’s not really a take-him-home-and-meet-the-parents kind of guy. That’s not the kind of relationship we’ve got.”
“From what I’ve heard, the ‘kind of relationship you’ve got’ isn’t exactly something to celebrate,” Dad says.
“What did Mom tell you?” I ask. “Come on. I know she spun it to make him sound like he’s a terrible person. That’s such a fucking her thing to do. The only reason she hates him is because she knows Travis hates him, and Mom is, like, desperate to see me and Travis get married and ride off into the sunset because she knows that’d make Evelyn McCall absolutely ripshit.”
“There was a time when you were desperate to see you and Travis get married and ride off into the sunset,” Dad says mildly.
I blink over at him, momentarily stunned. It’s sort of stupefying that anyone could know me and Travis, could see us interact with one another, could see the way I look at him, and not realize that I still ache for him as much as I ever have. I say, “I still want that. More than anything. If he wanted us to get back together for real, I’d be his in an instant. But he’s more obsessed than you and Mom are with the idea of me not being in a real relationship until I’m more than a year sober, and I… don’t think I should have to be lonely for another four and a half months just because it’s what everybody else thinks is best for me.”
“And that aversion to loneliness is the reason you’ve found yourself another new boy?” The words come out at the same time that the car rolls up to a stop sign. Dad takes the opportunity to turn and give me a careful, searching look before he decides, “So, this boy, this Declan. He’s essentially a bedwarmer.”
Yes, I want to say, but what comes out is, “No, he’s not. He’s my friend, and he’s good to me. I don’t care what Mom told you.”
“She told me that he’s a criminal,” Dad says shortly. “She told me that she has explicit knowledge of a felony he has recently committed, presumably involving you.”
I can’t help it—I laugh. “So, that’s what that comment in the Grind was about. The lying to police thing. Did she even tell you what he did?”
Dad’s mouth twitches, like he’s trying to stop a scowl. “No. She didn’t tell me what it was. She told me that she couldn’t discuss it in detail because the goddamn police had already gotten involved, and as your lawyer, she was bound to keep your confidence. And honestly, doesn’t that tell me everything I need to know? There isn’t a good kind of felony, Garen. Whatever this boy dragged you into—”
“He set David Walczyk’s car on fire,” I say, and Dad stops speaking so suddenly, there’s a full ten seconds where his mouth is just hanging open. I raise my eyebrows at him, but he doesn’t look over at me, and he doesn’t try to say anything else. It seems like a good enough excuse to keep going. “Mr. and Mrs. Walczyk were on campus this past Monday for Parents Day. Their younger son, Charlie is in my squadron. He and Declan used to be best friends, right up until his parents lit into me for ruining their kid’s life, and I laid all Dave’s shit bare in front of this whole group of people. I took off to Dec’s dorm room, and when they all tracked me down, Charlie started foaming at the mouth about how I was lying, and Declan threw him out of the room and ended their friendship. Over me.”
It feels awful to acknowledge that out loud. Nobody wants to be the piece of shit who ruins their friends’ other friendships. Somehow, I always end up doing it anyway.
“I was—I was fucked up about it. You know I don’t like talking about what happened with… him. You know I can’t deal with it. I was so fucked up, and I was scared, and I wanted Declan to just… fix it. Not like I had any fucking clue how he could. But I wanted him to do something, and I told him that the car was where it all started, and I said I wished it could be burned off the face of the earth. And I guess he took that literally. So, if you’re going to blame anybody for this shit, it should be me, not Declan. And you can tell Mom I said that, too.”
Dad makes a noise that’s somewhere between a considering hum and a dejected sigh. “I’m not going to tell your mother anything.”
If he’s expecting to win points for that, he’s going to be disappointed. My mom already knows all of the details of the arson, and she also knows I’ll go to my grave defending what Declan did for me. She already knows everything.
“Garen… when you said that David’s care was where everything started, what exactly did you mean by that?” Dad asks me carefully.
Correction: Mom knows everything except for that.
It’s a good thing I put my sandwich down a few minutes ago, because I really don’t need to be eating anything right now. I already feel like I’m going to choke. Lying about my job when I was talking to the drama club seemed so important fifteen minutes ago, and it’s fucking nothing compared to this.
“The first time Dave hit me last spring, we were sitting in his car,” I say, grasping at something that’s technically true, even if it’s not what I was talking about. Dad doesn’t say anything, and now I’m not just choking, I’m dying. “I’m serious. You can ask Travis, if you don’t believe me. He saw me after it happened. I-I had a split lip. I told him what happened.”
“I wish you felt like you could be honest with me,” Dad says softly.
The silence that hangs in the car after that is as delicate as glass. My hoarse, panicked voice shatters it a minute later. “I am being honest.”
“What really happened in David’s car?” Dad asks me, and I dig my fingers into the leather of my seat.
“What do you mean? Dad. Dad, what do you know?” I demand.
We hit two intersections during the time I spend waiting for the reply I’m terrified of. When the traffic light turns green at the second, my father takes a long, steadying breath before he presses the gas pedal and begins to speak.
“When you were brought to the hospital last spring, all any of us knew was that you’d been beaten. You weren’t conscious to tell us anything more than that, and Travis was swearing up and down that the person who had assaulted you was your boyfriend. In cases like that, where domestic violence charges are going to be brought up, the police are concerned with preserving any evidence that might secure a conviction. They asked your doctors to document all of your injuries with photographs, x-rays, and written descriptions. And then they asked them to do a rape kit to see if you had been sexually assaulted.”
It has been three years, four months, and eighteen days since the first time Dave Walczyk raped me, and it has been eleven months and twenty-four days since the last time Dave Walczyk raped me. At no point during either of those time periods did it occur to me that strangers might have been rooting around my naked, unconscious body for proof of this. Something they could show the cops. Something they could show the courts.
Something they could show my father.
A decent amount of time has passed since I suffered through a memory so potent I could taste it, but right now, there are ghosts rising up in the back of my throat. Well liquor in a nightclub. Hospital food sipped from a spoon because my face was too bruised to chew. Salt sweat beading up in the crook of Dave’s elbow as he held me facedown on my bed, one arm hooked around my neck. And then suddenly, very much in the present, the bitter tang of stomach acid.
“Pull over,” I blurt out, already reaching for the door handle. The car is still rolling to a stop in the shoulder when I fling the door open, lean halfway out of my seat, and vomit into the gravel. I don’t have much in me except coffee and bile, but every time I think I’ve gotten it under control, I remember that my unconscious body had been touched and prodded and examined by more people than I’d ever thought, and Dad knows, and I gag again.
It takes at least five minutes for me to stop heaving. Even then, I can’t stomach the idea of facing my father. I clamber out of the car and stumble a few feet further from the road. Behind me, the Mercedes engine cuts off, and I hear the driver’s side door opening, then closing.
“Garen,” Dad says. I want to turn away from him, but my vision is blurry, and I can’t tell where he’s standing, or if he’s coming closer. The only way I can think to hide my face is to lean into the side of the car, my arms folded together against the top of the rear passenger door, my brow pressed hard to my forearms. A hand lands on my shoulder, and I flinch away from it.
“Don’t. Don’t, Dad, please, I can’t—”
I don’t know what the rest of the sentence would be. I hadn’t managed to form any thought beyond I can’t, I can’t, I can’t before I started speaking. It doesn’t matter, though. My protest is drowned out by my dad’s soft shushing as he carefully maneuvers me around and folds me into his arms. I wanted to believe that I could still be stoic about this. I wanted to believe that my objections would resolve themselves into something sharp and Spartan and powerful. Instead, my words ball up in my throat, and I choke, and then my dad has to kind of prop me up against the side of the car because he can’t support my weight and I’m sobbing too hard to spare any energy for keeping myself upright.
Standing there at the side of the road, crying into my dad’s shoulder while he strokes my hair and tells me he’s there… it feels like the end of something. I’m not sure what. It’s not like my parents were under the illusion that I was some unsullied Nate Holliday type. I was fifteen when I came out to them, sixteen when they realized I was sleeping my way through all of Patton Military Academy, seventeen when they found out I’d taken a break from screwing around to fuck my stepbrother, and eighteen when they found out I’d dabbled in hooking to support my drug habit. They know that I’m working with a rode hard and put up wet kind of virtue, and after last spring, they know that Dave Walczyk ruined me every way he knew how. But a terrified, desperate part of me had still believed that I could keep this one last thing secret—that this was one horrible, broken piece of me that I wouldn’t have to show off to everyone who loves me.
I was stupid. I was wrong.
The moment I can move without collapsing into the gravel, I pry myself out of my dad’s grip and lean back against the side of the Mercedes. I rub the backs of my wrists against my face to wipe away some of the tears, but when I try to take a deep breath, the air rattles in my throat and ends in a soft hiccup. Shit. I’ve always cried too much and too easily, and once I get going, it’s so fucking hard to stop. The fact that I know Dad is used to dealing with this from me doesn’t make it any less embarrassing.
He’s patient about it. Doesn’t push me to talk before I’m ready, doesn’t set me off again by trying to give me another hug. When I can finally get a few words out, the first thing I can think to ask is, “Does—does Mom know, too? W-Was she there when the, when the doctor told you about the… or did you tell her?”
Dad scrubs at his face with both hands for a long, silent moment. Then he sighs, gives a helpless shrug, and says, “Your mother doesn’t know. She was still on her way to the hospital when the doctor spoke to me last spring, and I… chose not to tell her that particular detail when she arrived.”
“Why?” I whisper. If the doctors knew, and the cops knew, and my dad knew, it would’ve been a hell of a lot easier to let my mom know, too. They could’ve told me, so that I didn’t spend the last year of my life thinking I had actually managed to hide this from everyone.
“Because I was afraid that she would be so concerned with trying to save you from something that had already happened, she would lose sight of how important your immediate recovery was,” Dad says. “Marian is a wonderful mother, and she only wants the best for you. But I was concerned that, were she to find out that your assault was physical and sexual, she would become irrevocably convinced that the only course of action was to pursue charges against Dave Walczyk. I couldn’t let her push you into the trauma of a trial, especially one that might not end in a conviction. I didn’t think you could stand something like that.”
I ball my hands up into fists and try to scrub the remaining tears from my cheeks. “Yeah, ‘cause I did such a fucking bang-up job of keeping my shit together anyway. God. Is this why you always go so easy on me? Do you pity me so much that you can’t even handle the idea of telling me to grow the fuck up?”
“I’d prefer to think that I tell you what you need to hear, when you need to hear it,” Dad says. “And I don’t pity you, Garen. You don’t need to be pitied. To suffer in the ways that you have suffered, and to survive it—how could I ever be anything but awestruck by you? Your strength, your bravery—”
“Stop,” I croak. For once, he actually obeys me, and that feels important right now. That I can say stop, and still have someone stop.
It’s the most pathetic, ridiculous bit of nothing in the world, but I cling to it like driftwood in a hurricane.
229 days sober
I’m camped out in the living room and slogging through the last of my AP Government homework when I get a text from Steven. can u come 2 campus now? like right NOW now? I frown down at the text, but I don’t have to respond. Barely ten seconds pass before Steven texts again, theres a declan emergency.
I dump my homework on the couch and stuff my feet into the nearest pair of shoes, which turn out to be Travis’s sneakers. The rest of me is sporting a pair of plaid flannel pajama pants and the Jesus-in-wayfarers shirt I borrowed from Riley last fall and never got around to giving back. All things considered, it’s not my best look, but it seems trivial to worry about getting dressed if there’s an emergency at school.
And of course there’d be an emergency this weekend, I find myself thinking as I peel out of the driveway and speed off towards campus. Right, because my life hasn’t sucked enough for the past few days. I’m not even sure what would constitute “a Declan emergency,” especially given the recent standards for non-emergencies. In the past month, he has gotten picked up by the cops for trespassing at Ward (a situation handled by me and my heretofore undiscovered talent for car theft), gotten his ass kicked for banging some other guy’s girlfriend (handled by me, again, and an unloaded handgun), nearly overdosed on Parents Day in an attempt to avoid having a conversation with his mom (handled by me, again, and my ability to make a scene big enough to distract anyone), and committed arson (handled by me, again, and my mom the lawyer, and our family tradition of telling bald-faced lies to cops).
Considering the fact that I seem to be the only person on the planet who can be trusted to keep Declan alive and out of prison, I know exactly why Steven would call me in to handle another Declan situation. But after everything that has happened lately, I’m fucking terrified of what that situation might be.
Steven doesn’t text again until I’m pulling into the senior parking lot, and then it’s just GAAAAREN. I fall out of my car and text back, on campus now, where are you???
He calls instead of texting, but once I answer, all he gets out is, “Dude,” before Declan’s voice cuts over his with a furious, “Put the fucking phone away, Ramsey.”
I hear it twice: once through the phone and once from a hundred yards away. I head towards the real voice.
“Shit, G, I’ve gotta go,” Steven whispers. “Come to the obstacle course. Please, it’s Campbell, he’s—”
“Put the fucking phone away—” I hear in an echo, and then the call cuts out, leaving me with just the distant, real-world snarl of, “—or I will drag you off into the woods, break every bone in your legs, and leave you there so you have to either claw your way back to Whitman, or get eaten alive by wild animals.”
I start jogging towards the course.
“Pretty sure the wildest thing on campus is a squirrel,” Taylor says. I catch up to the group just in time to see Declan turn his borderline murderous stare on Taylor. Taylor’s usually pretty unflappable, but there’s something in Declan’s eyes now that seems to have even him looking wary.
“Now, we all know that’s not true,” I announce.
Declan turns around and blinks at me. His expression is blank, but that’s a nice change from the way he has been looking at everyone else. “Anderson. What are you doing here?”
“Wildest animal on campus,” I say, spreading my arms out to the sides. “Speak of the devil, the devil appears, and so on. Also, Steve said there was an emergency.”
“An emergency,” Declan repeats.
“Yeah. A you emergency,” I say.
“A me emergency,” Declan says, turning slowly to look at Steven, who seems to be seconds away from literally pissing himself in front of us.
To spare everyone the awkwardness of that happening, I grab Declan’s jaw between my palms and turn his sweat-damp face back to me. “I hate it when you do this echo thing. I say things so you can hear them, not so that I can hear them two seconds later in someone else’s voice. But yeah, a you emergency. What was it?”
“Mostly, the fact that he has been acting like a gigantic twat for going on—” Taylor twists his wrist to check his watch, “—twenty-eight hours.”
“We’ve only been out here for three hours,” Declan says. All the muscles in his face feel tight under the grip I’ve got on his jaw. It’s a little alarming.
“Yeah, and you’ve been completely intolerable since you woke up yesterday,” Taylor argues. “Besides, the fuck are you even talking about? Only been out here three hours—you dragged us all out here after breakfast and said you wanted us to run the obstacle course until one of us passed out!”
Declan narrows his eyes at Taylor over my shoulder. “And since that hasn’t happened yet, why are you all standing around doing nothing?”
Steve turns tail and sprints back towards the course. Declan looks satisfied by that, but only barely. Taylor, Javi, and Sam are still lingering nearby. Charlie is nowhere to be seen, and… oh.
“Are you being mean to everyone because you and Charlie are fighting?” I ask. Please, please, please let him deny it. It sucks enough having to deal with the guilt of having ruined their friendship without having to talk about it, too.
Behind Declan, Javi raises his arms and pantomimes wrapping them around someone in a big, warm hug. It’s hard to communicate I’m not fucking stupid enough to try that right now without moving or making a face, but I hope he’s picking up on the vibes I’m sending his way.
“No,” Declan spits out. “I’m being mean to them because it’s the only way to motivate them to do this fucking course. They’ve been asking me to train them on it all semester, but whenever I come out here, nobody wants to join. Our official test date is in two and a half weeks. It’s now or never.”
I take my hand off his face just long enough to gesture to the other guys, including Steve, who is stuck halfway over the top of the climbing wall, possibly dead. “I mean, from the look of things, it seems like they would prefer ‘never.’”
“They’re weak,” Declan says flatly.
“They’re also standing, like, right there,” I say, pointing. “So, maybe you could dial down the disdain until they’re out of earshot.”
Safely out of Dec’s line of sight, Javi is still embracing his own invisible partner. He reaches up and strokes its invisible hair.
I grimace. “If I hug you right now, will you stab me?”
“He keeps a knife in a sheath tucked into his boot sometimes,” Sam offers. “So, probably. But if you want to try it anyway, I applaud your bravery. We’ll see if we can get Patton to build a memorial to you outside Whitman.”
“The knife is in our dorm room. I saw him put it in his desk drawer before we went down to the dining hall for breakfast. Go for it!” Javi urges.
“Oh god. Oh god, I’m going to die,” I say, gingerly sliding my hands off Declan’s jaw, down his neck, and over his shoulders so that I can draw him in. He doesn’t seem to want to move much, so I have to shuffle forward until our chests bump and I can loop my arms around him properly. “Oh god. Am I dead? Did he kill me? Seriously, am I dead?”
“You’re alive,” Javi says, way too encouragingly. “It’s a pretty weak hug, though. Maybe squeeze him a little?”
Declan makes a horrifying noise, a pitbull rumble deep in his throat. I crush him harder against me and clamp my hand over the back of his head so I can shove his face against my neck. At this point, I know he wouldn’t ever actually try to hurt me, but I’m not sure I trust him not to spring free and take a swing at Javi. I mouth run at the other guys, and they sneak off towards the course to find Steve, who seems to have resorted to hiding between some of the obstacles.
“Why are you being mean to the squad?” I ask Declan.
“You can let go of me anytime now,” he says.
“Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll let you go when I fucking feel like it,” I say. He doesn’t exactly give me permission to keep hugging him, but he does sigh and grab my ass with both hands, which is probably the closest he gets to knowing how to return a hug. I gentle the grip I’ve got on the back of his head, settling into something a lot closer to stroking his short hair. “Why are you being mean to the squad?”
“They listen better when they’re scared,” he says sullenly. “And it’s not like you were here to help me keep them in line.”
I scoff. “Keep them in line? Dec, you’ve got about four years left before you’re an officer. Nobody has to listen to you yet.” I pause. “If you wanted me here to help, maybe you should have asked me to come here.”
Declan lets go of me immediately and takes a step back, turning to approach the squad again. “Yeah, well, last time I asked you to come here, you were busy. Didn’t see the point in asking again.”
Taylor said he’s been like this for twenty-eight hours—since nine yesterday morning. Right around the time he called me. I grab his wrist to keep him from taking another step towards the other guys. “Wait, that’s why you’re cunting out on everybody? ‘Cause you’re jealous that I spent yesterday with Travis instead of you?”
I think Declan intends for his glare to mean that’s ridiculous and I refuse to dignify it with a response, but it mostly comes across as that’s absolutely correct but I’m going to be a stubborn piss-baby and pretend it’s not.
“Dude. I’m sorry if you felt jilted, or whatever, but I’m not going to apologize for staying home yesterday. You have no fucking clue what I’ve had to deal with in the last two days, and I’m not going to beg forgiveness for the fact that I needed to spend some time with Travis in order to feel okay again. I wanted it. I needed it. But that doesn’t—I mean, I still like you. I don’t want—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Declan orders. It’s loud enough that I listen to him. It’s also loud enough that the other guys shoot us apprehensive looks from the obstacle course. Declan spares them a glance, then takes a step closer so that I can still hear him when he says quietly, “I don’t need a patronizing speech about how great you think I am, and I’m not jealous of that cheap imitation of Captain America you’ve got waiting for you at home. This—” he flattens a hand to his own chest, “—isn’t me being jealous. It’s me being confused. When I called you yesterday and asked you to come over, I thought you’d want to say yes.”
“I did! I mean, I did want to,” I say quickly.
“Bullshit. If you wanted to, you would have. Call me crazy, but after I told my best friend to piss off because of things he said to you, and committed a felony so that you could feel safer, and told you how into you I am, and spent four days wanting you like burning but having to keep my distance so that everything seemed normal to anybody who might come after us for the car thing, I thought you’d want to hang out, if I asked. But instead, all you wanted to do was spend more time with the guy who already sees you every single night. You said you blew him on Friday morning, and you went out on that stupid dinner date with him before you went to work that night, and you probably got off with him after your shift ended and again once you woke up. And I’ve barely gotten to speak to you, let alone actually touch you.”
I wonder how Declan would react if I told him that the only touching Travis did to me yesterday involved holding me while I sobbed hysterically on our living room floor because, despite all reassurances to the contrary, there’s still an enormous part of me that’s convinced my father will never be able to love me or respect me the way he did before he knew that I was raped. Even the best parts of my personality are obnoxious and aggressive and too much for any one person to handle, and I’ve forced so many horrible things on Travis and Declan lately that I’m sure they’re both on the knife’s edge of abandoning me completely. The only way I can hope to get through this is to fall back on that wonderful Garen-Anderson-standby of pretending that everything is okay until it becomes okay.
And if that fails, get naked.
“You can touch me now, though, babe,” I say. Declan looks like he wants to roll his eyes, but fuck Declan. I’ve still got a decent grip on his wrist. I only have to wait maybe half a minute until he closes his eyes and lets me use that grip to tug him in close. He still kind of sucks at hugging—his spine is rigid, and his hands end up on my ass again—but he gets better at it once my mouth finds his.
The noise he makes when our tongues touch almost breaks me. It’s like a soft, delicate version of the rumbling he made earlier; I’m not sure he meant for it to be audible, and the fact that I can get him to make involuntary sounds of—I don’t fucking know, pleasure, or gratitude or whatever, the fact that I can get that out of him makes me so fucking nervous. The thing is, Declan was never supposed to care about me. He was supposed to sleep with me, and it was supposed to be fun, but I never, ever bargained for sounds and moments like this.
I break away from the kiss and say, “Dismiss your troops. Don’t work them to death just because you were mad at me.”
“Because I was mad at you?” Declan says. “You think you’re off the hook after one kiss?”
No, I think the fact that I’m even on the hook because of a single afternoon spent with someone else when Declan spends most of his nights deep-dicking any girl who’ll lift her skirt for him is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. I know I’m just nineteen years old, and even on my best days, I have the maturity and emotional stability of a twelve-year-old girl who just read Twilight for the first time, but there are some days when still being in high school is so much more suffocating than others.
If Declan’s got a bug up his ass today, I doubt that saying this will win me any points with him. Instead, I wind my arms around his neck and say, “Of course not. But I bet I can find a way to make you like me again.” I lean in and lick the sweat from the hinge of his jaw. He breathes in deeply through his nose, and I move closer still so I can nip at his earlobe. Declan’s grip on my ass goes a little tighter, drawing me in just enough that I can feel him hardening up in his athletic shorts. It’s not the same as convincing him to get over my refusal to come over yesterday, but it’s definitely a start.
“Fine. Let’s go up to my dorm, yeah?” he says.
Shit. I lean back enough that I can flash him a bright, apologetic smile. “I’d love to. But I’m supposed to be heading out to New Haven to meet my friend, Stohler. My first night at work didn’t go exactly as I’d planned, and she already knows the industry really well. She’s going to show me around her club—well, it’s a strip club, not a nightclub, but we’re going to, you know. Talk shop. She’s going to help me.”
Declan’s hands fall to his sides. I kind of want to grab them and put them back on my ass.
“Alright. I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” he says flatly. God, the attitude on this kid today is killing me.
I narrow my eyes at him. “No, you’ll see me later tonight. I’m going to go to New Haven now, and I’m going to hang out with Stohler for a little while, and then I’m going to drive back up here and spend the night with you.”
“I didn’t invite you,” Declan says. His whiskey-amber eyes are narrowed into slits, too. He looks mad enough to mean it, which makes me nervous enough to feel like I’ve got to convince him. I take him by the shoulders and steer him right over to the obstacle course.
The rest of the boys in the squad are clustered behind the climbing wall, speaking in low tones. I think they’re planning a mutiny. Steven jolts at the sight of me and Declan, then scuttles back a few steps, like he’s thinking of making a run for it again. Before he can embarrass himself, I say to them all, “Go back to Whitman. You’re dismissed for the day.”
“They are not,” Declan objects.
I fist my hands around the front of his t-shirt and shove him up against the climbing wall. “They are. Because you’re about to be too busy to give them any further instructions.” I drop to my knees.
The other Patton boys scatter like roaches with the light on. I can hear them chattering and jeering even as they bolt in the general direction of Whitman Hall, but one of the best things about Declan is how absolutely shameless he is. Without any further urging from me, he hooks his thumbs over the top of his shorts and pushes them down enough to get out his mostly erect cock. His skin is slick and salty with sweat from three hours’ physical activity on a warm spring day, and the scent of him is thick and musky. I press my face to his hip and breathe him in, and he shudders at the feel of it. He lets me take him in my mouth, lets me suck him to full hardness before he says, “What’s the point of having you come back here later, if you’re so willing to blow me right now?”
I take his dick out of my mouth long enough to scoff and say, “Please. Like you won’t be looking for another orgasm in a few hours.”
Declan steers my mouth back onto him and says, in a low voice that is tinged with as much satisfaction as cruelty, “Fair point. That’s how things went yesterday.” He rolls his hips up, and I relax my throat to accommodate the depth of his thrust. “Do you think that when you said you wouldn’t come over, I just wasted away in my dorm room, pining for you? Do you really believe that, when you’re off with your precious Trevor, I’m not still working my way through as many Ward girls as I can get to before graduation?”
Slut, slut, slut, I chant in my head, not knowing if the words are directed towards Delcan or myself. You’re a jealous fucking slut.
But I’d be lying to myself if I pretended that I didn’t sort of like it. Declan is being a jealous, greedy brat right now, but he cradles my jaw in his hands, and he fucks my mouth, and he wants me so much that it’s turning him into an asshole.
It’s not perfection. It’s power. And if I can’t have the first, then I’ll happily settle for the second.
By the time I drag myself away from Declan, go home, get ready, and leave for New Haven, it’s closing in on six thirty; by the time I make it to her apartment and coax her downstairs by hammering on the door buzzer for two minutes, Stohler seems ready to strangle me.
“Took your sweet time getting here, didn’t you?” she says, throwing herself into the passenger seat of my Ferrari. “I figured you’d show up around four, and when you didn’t, I assumed that meant I was free to make other plans.”
I blink down at her plain t-shirt, then back up to her makeup-free face. “And… did you?”
“That depends on whether you think ordering yourself a gross amount of Chinese food and watching Netflix documentaries about serial killers counts making plans.”
“I do.”
“In that case, fuck yeah, I made plans.”
I exaggerate a pout. “Can you pretty please take me to your club anyway? I promise Netflix will still be there when you get home.”
Stohler twists in her seat to glower at her apartment building as I pull away from the choice parking spot I managed to snag in front of it. “Yeah, but my fucking Chinese food probably won’t be. God, I hate my roommates. When you get to this intersection up here, take a right, I want to avoid Chapel Street. The second the weather starts to get nice, all the Yale kids crawl out of their caves and start wandering all over the streets, like nobody would dare to mow down an Ivy League student.”
“I think Ben might take offense to that,” I say, flicking on my turn signal and steering the car wherever Stohler directs me. I wouldn’t mind getting off the busiest roads, anyway. The asshole behind me has their high-beams on for absolutely no reason, and I’ll have an easier time losing them if we find our way out of the heavy traffic.
“No, he wouldn’t. He knows enough to use a goddamn sidewalk,” Stohler says. She shakes out her hair and starts to finger-comb it into a ponytail, using one of her flailing elbows to point me down less crowded streets. We’re out of luck; the car with the high-beams turns after us. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you—I have this idea. About Ben. But I want to get somebody else’s input before I bring it up with him, in case he wouldn’t be into it.”
I raise my eyebrows. “If you’re wondering if he’d be down for letting you peg him, I’m about ninety percent sure the answer is ‘yes.’ But you’ll have to wait until he and Jamie break up.”
Stohler scoffs. “Please. If I promised to pull his hair during it, he’d let me peg him now, whether he and James are together or not. But that’s not what I’m thinking about.”
“That’s probably for the best,” I concede. Stohler rolls her eyes.
“Be serious for five seconds, asshole.” She moves as if to pick up a purse from the car floor, then realizes she didn’t bring one with her. She pats her pockets, probably searching for a pack of cigarettes. Finding none, she frowns, then turns to face me more directly. “What do you think about the idea of me and Ben getting an apartment together? Oh, take this turn up here. Left. And then you’re gonna wanna go two more stoplights, and then the road’s going to fork, and you’ll wanna go right.” Once I’ve executed the left turn, Stohler shrugs. “Anyway. Yeah. I’ve just been thinking about it, and it seems like a reasonable suggestion. I hate all my roommates, and things are still awful between him and Alex after what went down last week. We could both use a new place to live, and we get along really well. But I’ve only known the guy for something like six months, so if he’s hiding some horrible defect that makes him impossible to live with, tell me right now, and I won’t ask him. Like, tell me if he’s one of those people who gets off on popping balloons, and he’s going to be doing all his balloon fetish-y things in the living room.”
“Dude, if he had a balloon fetish, I’m pretty sure I would have mentioned that by now. I’ve told you about all his other fetishes, so, why not?” I roll to a stop at a red light and take the opportunity to crack my back. My whole body feels sore from my second shift last night, but I managed to walk away with a whopping twenty-five dollars in profit, so at least the pain feels more justified than it did after my first shift. To Stohler, I add, “I think you guys would be great as roommates. Way better than the shitty situations you’re both stuck in now, you know? You should ask him about it the next time you guys—”
A flash of light in my rearview mirror nearly blinds me, and I glance up to see a pair of headlights racing closer and closer, without even the suggestion that the driver plans to stop. The only thing I can think to do is gun it. We’re at an intersection, and the light’s still red, but there’s nobody in cross traffic, and besides, that’s physics, right? Better to be hit when I’m moving away from them than if I’m at a dead stop with my foot on the brake.
My Ferrari can go from zero to sixty in just over five seconds, but it’s not enough.
In movies, car crashes always look like they take a really long time. The squealing brakes, the screech of tires on asphalt, glass shattering everywhere, metal shredding dramatically as the car goes rolling along the street before coming to a reluctant, fiery stop. There’s always some big swell of music or sound effects. Everything is in slow motion.
The reality is nothing like that.
The reality is one solid crunch as the entire ass-end of my Ferrari folds in on itself. My head snaps back and then forward, without any time for me to even take a breath between movements. The rest of the air in my lungs gets knocked clear out by my seatbelt, which is the only thing keeping me from going through the windshield or bashing my skull open on the steering wheel—my car doesn’t have airbags. Jamie has called me about it four times in the last month and a half. The third time, he cried, said I was going to get myself or one of our friends killed, if I didn’t get a car that was less of a death trap.
Everything is so, so quiet and still. Dazed, numb, I reach over and feel around for Stohler’s hand, give it a tight squeeze. “Stohls, you hurt?”
She doesn’t say anything. I want to look over at her, but my entire spine is screaming, from the base of my skull all the way down to the small of my back, and the idea of turning my head right now seems laughable. I squeeze her hand again. “Stohler. Are you--Lindsey. Are you hurt?”
“I-I’m fine,” she says shakily. “I’m… Jesus fuck, what the—we should, we should get out of the car.”
Since the first moment I met her, Stohler has never sounded less than perfectly composed. The tremble in her voice is what makes me finally turn to face her, no matter how much it aches. Her eyes are wide, and there’s blood on her forehead. It looks like she might have smacked her head against the window or dash. I reach for her. “You said you weren’t hurt.”
“I’m not, I’m not. It’s just a scrape.” She reaches down, then pauses. “Shit. I left my purse in my apartment. You’ve got your phone, though, right? You should call the cops. That driver’s wasted, crazy, or both, and you’re going to need an accident report to file an insur—”
I feel the second crash more than I hear it. I don’t know if that’s because the back of my car is already so flattened that it doesn’t make much of a noise, or if it’s because I’m turned towards Stohler, so I’m jolted around at a much more painful angle. But sheer size enables the Tahoe that hit us to push my car—still in gear, with my stupid, panicking foot not even pressed to the brake—out through the rest of the still-empty intersection, right up onto the curb across the street, and into a low brick wall at the edge of a parking lot. A loud and presumably endless stream of swears is coming out of my mouth. Same for Stohler, except she’s screaming them, the tips of her long, purple nails digging into the back of my hand.
“Crazy,” I say, “crazy, they’re definitely crazy, shit.”
The Tahoe backs up a few yards, then guns it into the back of my car again. Reverse, drive, crash. Reverse, drive, crash.
“Fucking drive, Anderson!” Stohler shrieks. “Put your hands on the fucking wheel and—”
“I can’t!” I scream right back at her. “They took out the fucking engine, it’s in the boot of the car, not the front!”
Jamie was right. This car really is going to be the death of me. It’s built for speed and sex appeal, not to stand up in a collision. The front end of the Tahoe is pretty fucked up, but their car isn’t totaled, which is more than can be said for mine. The engine’s scrap metal, at this point. The whole back half of it is destroyed. The front is all caved in and half-buried under the rubble of the low wall.
It’s only then, when it seems like Stohler and I won’t even be able to get out of the car, let alone drive it anywhere, that the Tahoe backs up one last time, twists back onto the road, and zooms off.
“What the fuck,” Stohler says, for at least the tenth time.
I set the brake and cut the engine, but the silence after that is almost worse. I’m still clinging to her hand, and my breathing is so shallow that I’m worried I won’t be able to get enough air into my lungs to say, “We need… we need to call 911. Can you see where my phone went? I had it in the cupholder, I think, but it’s—”
“Here. Hang on, I can get it,” Stohler says. She has to pretzel herself up a little bit to reach my Blackberry, which has fallen down near her feet. The screen is cracked, but the keys still work well enough for me to make the call.
Once the cops are on their way, I try to open my door, but it’s jammed. Cursing, I throw my weight against it a couple of times. All that does is make my neck hurt more. I look over at Stohler. “Can you get your door open?”
“No. I think it folded in too much at the seam during that last collision. But I can still get out, just give me a minute.” With one last wild-eyed look around the still deserted intersection, she unbuckles her seatbelt and slithers out through her open window. She looks a little unsteady on her feet, and I find myself hoping that they might dispatch an ambulance, too.
Getting me out of the car takes a little more work. I’m a hell of a lot bigger than Stohler, and my car is… or, was, I guess, pretty fuckin’ small. By the time I manage to wriggle my way out through the driver’s side window, I can hear sirens in the distance.
My Ferrari is a mangled wreck. My neck is killing me. My friend is bleeding from the head. I have almost convinced myself that things could not possibly get any worse when the inside of my car is illuminated by a new message arriving on the cracked screen of my phone. I don’t recognize the number—I’d bet anything it’s a burner phone—but I don’t have to recognize it. As soon as I read it, I know who it’s from.
A car for a car, babe. I thought you’d learned not to piss me off.
I’m too attuned to the movements of Travis’s body to sleep through him getting out of bed in the morning. All of my muscles are aching, and my eyelids are too heavy to stay up for longer than a few seconds at time, but I do my best to watch him while he gets dressed. The view is more than worth the effort.
When he looks up from buttoning his hideous-as-hell khakis and sees that I’m awake, the corner of his mouth tips up into a gentle half-smile. “Hey,” he says. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s fine. ’m glad I got to see you before you left,” I say. “You feeling any better than you were last night?”
I can tell from the sudden stiffening in his posture that he doesn’t want to talk about last night, but he says, “I’ll be okay,” and even that acknowledgment feels like a victory. I reach for him, and he kneels on the edge of the bed to give me a kiss, says against my lips, “My shift ends at noon, and then I’m heading home to let Omelette out. Give me a call when your train gets to Pelham Station this afternoon, and I’ll come pick you up.”
I nod, but my eyes are already drifting shut again. Considering we only fell asleep a few hours ago, I have no clue how he has the energy to go to work right now, even if it’s just a half-shift. The threat of having to wake up again in two hours so I can take the train to Connecticut is enough to make me want to blow off therapy altogether and—I dunno, hang myself instead. It’s even worse when I remember that I’ve got another six-hour shift at Rush tonight.
The next time I open my eyes, it’s eight o’clock, and Travis is gone. I roll onto my back and stretch, then immediately wish I hadn’t. All that does is show me exactly how enormous and empty the bed is, and loneliness stabs into my gut, so sudden and sharp that I sit up, breathless.
I’ve always been a needy person. At least, I think I always have been. Things feel kind of blurry whenever I think too much about what I was like before I went to Patton, or dated Dave, or started using. Doc Howard says it’s common for people who’ve gone through traumatic things to develop a bit of a selective memory, even if that means we end up cherry-picking our own personality traits, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve hated being alone. It doesn’t usually hit me like this, though—an all-consuming sinkhole opening up in the middle of my chest when I’ve only been awake for a few seconds.
It’s more than I’m prepared to deal with when I’ve still got a whole day ahead of me. I pull a sweatshirt on over my bare chest and haul myself out from under the covers and down the hall to the main living area of the apartment, where I’m surprised to find… everybody, actually. Jamie is in the kitchen—sipping a cup of tea, and wearing his reading glasses, and skimming the morning paper, and generally providing a strong argument for the idea that being a real adult can be sexy. Stohler is still on the sofa bed, sleepily thumbing through her Instagram feed, and Ben is lying next to her, bundled up in Jamie’s sweatpants and an eye-searingly teal hoodie that I hope to god he stole from Stohler.
I crawl into the gap between them, bite down on Ben’s shoulder until he makes a noise of mild displeasure, then roll over to face Stohler. “We should get going soon. If I miss the 9:02 train, I’m going to be late for my therapy session.”
“’Kay,” she says, but makes no move to get off the sofa bed. I turn over to face Ben. He looks like he might be dozing again. It’s no wonder he and Jamie have been having dates that span full weekends. That’s probably how much time they have to spend together before they’re both fully awake at the same time.
I creep closer and carefully set my teeth to his shoulder once more.
“Garen,” he says warningly, still not opening his eyes. Last night, I had a club full of strangers staring at me for six hours. This morning, it feels like even my best friends can’t be bothered to have a real conversation with me. I increase the pressure of the bite. He makes a noise like an angry cat, then says, “Stohler, can you pull him off me?”
“’Kay,” she says again, unmoving.
Jamie appears at the corner of my vision and reaches out to cup one hand gently under my jaw. “Garen, darling. Let go of him.”
With Jamie’s hand on my face and attention focused on me, there isn’t much of an excuse for bullying my friend anymore. I spit out my mouthful of Ben-or-Stohler’s hoodie and say, “I need to leave soon. You should come cuddle with me before I go.”
“Why is it that you insist on behaving like an ill-tempered puppy instead of a man?” Jamie sighs. His exasperation doesn’t stop him from climbing onto the sofa bed with the rest of us and insinuating himself as gracefully as possible between me and Ben.
Being James Goldwyn’s big spoon is one of the great and unending joys of my life, but a tiny, childish part of me is a little bit annoyed that Ben is the one he faces, pulls closer, and kisses on the forehead. No matter how much I try to pretend that I’m this totally chill proponent of casual relationships and free love or whatever, I’m still the spoiled, selfish product of an only-child upbringing. I never had to share anything--especially attention—when I was younger, and I fucking hate being expected to learn how to do it now, as an adult.
I even the playing field by letting my slightly parted lips linger against the soft skin at the nape of Jamie’s neck. It’s one of his more sensitive spots, which I’ve never hesitated to take advantage of in bed, and while this is technically a sofa-bed, I think it still counts. Sure enough, it’s a matter of seconds before he lets out a noise close to a purr and tips his head forward to allow me better access. Triumphant, I sneak a glance over his shoulder at Ben, but the fucking midget doesn’t even have his eyes open.
“Tell me you love me, Jamie,” I demand. If Ben’s not going to see me claiming my place as Jamie Goldwyn’s main dude, he’s sure as hell going to hear it.
“My god, you’re annoying,” Stohler says from behind me. “How has Goldwyn put up with you for five years? Did you pull this kind of horseshit the whole time you shared a dorm room?”
“Every single morning,” I lie. “Jamie—”
“Yes, I love you,” Jamie says. He lifts his hand from Ben’s waist so that he can blindly reach back and thread his fingers into my hair.
“More than Ben, right?” I wheedle. It feels like an idiotic, obnoxious thing to say even as the words are coming out of my mouth. Behind me, Stohler lets out a huff of irritation, and on Jamie’s other side, Ben lazily opens one eye to look at me. I press my lips harder to the back of Jamie’s neck, mostly to keep myself from speaking again.
But Jamie seems entirely unconcerned. The gentle caress of his fingertips against my scalp turns into more of a reassuring pat. “Of course I love you more than him. Everyone knows that he’s only here because I’d like to tie someone to the bed later, and it would be impossible for me to get the knots done if I did it to myself.”
Ben chuckles, and I roll onto my back, mollified. He’s not pissed at me for being a brat, and Jamie still loves me better than he loves anyone else, and ow, Stohler is digging an elbow into my ribs.
“Get up. We’re going to miss the train,” she says, like I didn’t say that to her five minutes ago.
We don’t miss the train, though. We leave Jamie and Ben to whatever their plans for the day might be, and we manage to find ourselves one of the amazing, vicious cabbies who weaves through the hellscape that constitutes Manhattan traffic and gets us to Grand Central with enough spare time to grab two cups of coffee before we have to board our train to New Haven.
We settle ourselves into a pair of seats in the back of the train car, and Stohler is just settling in to nap against the window when my cell phone rings. The screen is lit with Declan’s name. I tuck myself against Stohler’s side and answer the call with a half-yawned, “Not today.”
There’s a pause before Declan says, “What do you mean, not today?”
“I mean, I’m not sucking your dick today. That’s why you’re calling, right?” I say. A few seats ahead of me, a man in a suit turns to give me a side-eye. I stick my tongue out at him. He turns quickly back around. I add, “That’s always the reason you call me on weekends. ‘Cause you want me to come to Patton and suck your dick, and then you want me to run through the obstacle course until I die, and then you probably want my corpse to suck your dick, too.”
“Actually,” he says, and there is so much cool disdain in his voice that each syllable comes out like its own sentence. Ac. Tu. All. Y. “I was going to ask you if you wanted to come help me coach the rest of the squad through the course. They’ve been telling me for months that they’d like to cut down their times before Sergeant Smitth has us start the official practice next week.”
I snort. “The rest of the guys on the squad are idiots, then. You’re more of a drill sergeant than our real drill sergeant.”
“I figured it would be easier to offer advice if one of us was keeping track of time, and the other was only concentrating on the person running the course,” Declan says, and his voice is so cold now, I bet it’s frosting over the screen of his phone. “But if you don’t feel like driving up here—”
“It’s not that I don’t feel like it,” I interrupt, more sober now that I think he’s starting to actually get annoyed with me. “It’s that I can’t. I’m on a train back to Connecticut right now. I’m seeing my shrink at eleven, and then my dad’s gonna give me a lift back to the train station in New Haven, but I don’t think I’ll be getting back to my house until almost three. Got another shift at the club tonight, too. Figure I’ll probably use those six and a half hours in the middle to snag a few extra hours of sleep, maybe hang with Travis some, get my homework done.”
Declan doesn’t reply.
It takes me a minute to realize what I’ve said. I clear my throat. “It’s been a while, Dec. Like, I’ve barely gotten to hang out with him at all lately, and—”
“That’s fine. I didn’t realize you were busy,” Declan says. His voice is entirely neutral now, and that makes me cringe even more than the bad attitude did.
“Dec,” I begin, but he cuts me off with, “It’s not like I need help rounding up the guys for course training. I had just figured you’d get a kick out of stealing the bullhorn out of Smitth’s office and torturing the rest of the squad with it, and this seemed like the best excuse you’d ever have for that. Anyway, I’ll see you on Monday, yeah?”
I suck in a deep breath to start rambling my way through another string of excuses, but he hangs up on me before I get a chance. Scowling, I shove my phone back into my pocket.
The phone call seems to have ruined Stohler’s nap aspirations. She takes a long sip of coffee before tucking the cup between her knees so that she can pull her tangled blond curls into a topknot, then clears her throat and says to me, “So. Your first real night at the club. What’d you think?”
What I think is, I don’t want to talk about this. What is I say is, “It was harder than I thought it would be.”
“Harder as in, more physically taxing? Or harder to handle psychologically?” she asks.
My eyes—which had been drifting sideways, attention span too short to focus on anyone for an extended period of time—snap back to meet Stohler’s. Her gaze is sharp, hawk-like. She’s been a stripper for years, and it stands to reason that she’d have some idea of what my first night at the club was like, but that doesn’t do anything to reassure me. The fact that feeling so drained after working is normal enough to be predictable only makes me wonder what kind of emptiness I should expect from the second night, and the third, and the fourth…
“Did you like it?” Stohler presses.
A heavy no rolls up in my throat before I can give it any real consideration. I pinch the tip of my tongue between my front teeth to keep the word in until I’ve formulated something to say that won’t make me feel like a little kid. “I didn’t hate it. But I don’t think this is the type of job that anyone does because they really enjoy it.”
Stohler twists in her seat just enough to rest the back of her head against the window. Her eyes are still half-lidded, with smears of mascara caked under her bottom lashes. “What makes you say that?”
“Come on, Stohls. I only went for this job because I wouldn’t have been able to get anything else. And even if I had managed to trick someplace legit into giving me a job, I would’ve gotten fired in, like, two days.” When that doesn’t prompt any reply, I roll my eyes and tilt my coffee cup towards Stohler, half-hoping the smell of it will wake her up enough to get a real response. “Being a cage dancer wasn’t exactly my first choice of careers. Are you telling me that being a stripper was yours?”
She hitches a shoulder up slightly and lets it fall. “With where I’m at right now? You bet your ass it is. I’ve been doing this for, what, two years? First in New York, when I was still in college, and now in New Haven. I’m a week away from turning twenty-three, and I’ve made enough money doing this to have already paid off all my student loans and my Mustang. I work four days a week, I choose my own hours, and I pay my rent and all my bills on-time every month, with plenty left over to keep me in beer and cigarettes and still pad my savings account. I’m in the best shape of my life, and I don’t hate the girls I work with, and most of the regulars at my club are nice enough guys. I like stripping at least as much as Ben likes working at the bookstore, and a hell of a lot more than Travis likes being a barista. Why the hell wouldn’t it be my first choice right now?”
The same reasons it’s not really my first choice—because it’s more awkward and nerve-wracking than I’d thought. Because I expected it to be easy, but it’s actually grueling, and my whole body aches the morning after, and I only averaged about two bucks an hour in profit. Because I flinch whenever a stranger touches me, and because it doesn’t seem to be acceptable to stop a guy from putting his hands wherever he wants to put them, even if it’s somewhere that makes me feel sick.
When I try to explain this to Stohler, her posture changes. She sits up a little straighter, lifting her head off the window, and blinks her way back to alertness, bordering on wariness.
“Anderson… most of my focus has been on helping you get this job and making sure you get through your first shift okay, but you know that’s not the only thing that matters, right? I think I must have been too harsh about this whole thing, because you have to understand—”
“Stohler, don’t,” I sigh. “It’s fine.”
“It’s fucking not, dude. Look, there are some things I need to make clear to you right now,” she says. She stuffs her coffee cup into my hand and digs around in her bag until she surfaces with a purple glitter gel pen and an alarmingly long Starbucks receipt. She turns it over and starts scribbling. “Okay. Number one. If somebody starts grabbing at you, and it makes you uncomfortable, tell the bouncers and have that person thrown the fuck out. The whole point of having security there is to make sure you’re safe. And number two: if you want to stop, you’re allowed to fucking stop. Like, I get that people are paying you to be sexy for them, but they’re not paying you to have sex with them. And because apparently this is something I need to fucking clarify with you, you little weirdo, even if these people were paying you to have sex with them, you’d be allowed to stop, too.”
Bullshit, I want to say. I’ve never been allowed to stop—not when I was fucking around for the hell of it, and definitely not when I was getting paid for it. I couldn’t stop Seth Hayden when he was paying me in drugs, and I couldn’t stop any of the guys who paid me in cash, and I couldn’t stop Dave when he was paying me in cold sweat and nightmares. I can’t say no to people who want that from me. I’m not sure I even know how.
Something of this must show on my face, because when Stohler glances up from her scribbled notes, she freezes. And stares at me. I stare mulishly back at her. She leans back against the window again and says, “Maybe this isn’t the right job for you.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m serious, maybe we should find you a gig doing something else. Those pictures your ginger took for your portfolio were pretty fuckin’ good, actually. You can ask him to take another set, but with more clothing this time—we’ll get Goldwyn to pick out a couple of looks for you, fill your book up with some fashion shots, maybe something a little more artistic. We can see about getting you some legit modeling work. You’re good-looking enough for it, you’ve got the body, you’ve got that scowly bad boy thing that a lot of male models try to pull off. When I lived in New York, I had some friends who went to Parsons, a couple at FIT. Some of them are doing wicked good for themselves now. I can see if they’re looking for dudes to do some runway—”
“I don’t want to be a fucking fashion model,” I snap at her.
“Yeah, and from what I can see, you don’t want to be a fucking cage dancer, either,” she snarls back. Halfway up the train car, the man who stared at me when I was on the phone with Declan turns around to blink at us for a second time. Stohler narrows her eyes at him and spits out, “Can I help you with something?” He scrambles to face forward again. Stohler heaves a sigh and returns her attention to me. “I’m not trying to offend you, Garen. I’m trying to help.”
“Prove it,” I say. “Help me get good at this. If you could teach me how to get more tips when I’m in the cage, or how to get the owners’ attention so they’ll move me to one of the better spots in the club, I could make all my money dancing in the main room. I could cover the cashout from my regular tips, and I wouldn’t have to do any private dances in the lounge, and nobody would get a chance to touch me. I’d be okay.”
Stohler rubs her fingertips against her closed eyelids, smearing the residue of her mascara even more. “It could probably be argued that, for you, even the cage dancing falls into the realm of ‘not okay.’ In fact, I’m gonna go ahead and strongly suggest that you mention it to your shrink today. See what she thinks about this whole mess.”
“If I promise to ask Doc about it, will you agree to help me get better at the dancing part?” I ask immediately.
Stohler drops her hands and rolls her eyes at me. “Come on. Like I can trust you to actually tell her the shit you swear you’ll tell her. Everybody lies to their friends and family about what they say to their shrink. Come to think of it, everybody lies to their shrink, too.”
“What do you know about it?” I demand.
“Considering how many cutters you’ve taken to bed, I’m not sure how this could possibly have escaped your awareness, but Garen? Sweetie? You’re not the only person in the world with issues. Yours just happen to manifest in the most dramatic and exciting ways.” She snatches her coffee back out of my hand, swallows down an enormous gulp of it, and sighs. “Jesus. Fine. I’ll help you with the dancing. Can you stay in town tonight, or did I hear you telling your guy that you’ve got another shift?”
“I’m supposed to work again,” I say, blinking down at the knees of my jeans. I’ll have to hit the bank on my way to the club tonight. There isn’t much hope of me learning how to hustle guys out of all their money within the next twelve hours, so I’m facing another night of covering my payout with my own cash.
“Well, I don’t know what your plans for tomorrow are—you might have homework, or something. But if you think you’ve got a couple hours to spare, drive back out to New Haven and pick me up. I’ll take you to the club where I work, and you can meet some of the girls, watch some of their sets. If you don’t want to do any private dances, you might be able to pick up some tips from seeing girls who know how to get paid when they’re doing a stage set.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “Are there really going to be that many people at a strip club on a Sunday afternoon?”
“Sure there are. But the number of people in a club isn’t that important. What matters is how well the people who are there are tipping their dancers,” Stohler says. “Keep that in mind when you’re deciding which club patrons to pay attention to. Big groups—birthday parties, bachelor ’n bachelorette parties are all notoriously stingy. People pool their cash and buy a couple of private dances for the guest of honor, but they never tip at the rail, and you end up spending an hour with assholes for maybe thirty bucks. Good patrons are usually alone. Sometimes you can make good money off of couples, but only if they’re both obviously into it, you know, buying dances for each other and whatnot. Other times, it’s obvious that one person is only doing it to appease the other, and that’s the worst. You don’t get much in the way of tips, and the whole thing is awkward. Nah, you want single guys, sometimes a little bit older, but not the creepy ones, or anybody wearing track pants.”
I snort. Stohler whacks me in the chest, hard.
“I’m fucking serious. Never, ever give a dance to a guy wearing track pants. All they’ll wanna do is dry-hump you until they come in their pants, ‘cause they’re bored of jerking off alone at home, but they’re too cheap to shell out for a prostitute.”
A picture I’ve tried to keep out of my mind rises to the surface—the boy I saw frotting with a patron in the VIP, the one who cleaned come off himself with a baby wipe in the locker room as he told me about the dancers who suck off clubgoers to get real money.
“You alright, Anderson?” Stohler asks sharply.
I try to force a smile even as I’m trying to blink away the image of the boy in the locker room, and I think I manage to pull off both. “Sure. Once I get the hang of it, once I learn all the tricks… I’ll be totally fine. There’s just a learning curve.”
That’s the line of bullshit I feed Stohler for the rest of the train ride to New Haven, and the last lie I tell her as I’m climbing out of her Mustang when she drops me off in front of the Lakewood Rehabilitation Center. It forms the bulk of the nonsense I sling at Doc Howard when she asks me how my new job is going, and I do a decent job of twisting the same idea into a series of suitable, but mostly noncommittal answers when Doc asks about Patton, my friends, living with Travis, Jamie’s parents’ death, my plans for college, my relationship with my parents.
I’ve got a lot going on, but I’m doing okay.
Things won’t always be this tough.
It’s fine, I’m fine, it’s fine, I’m fine.
“Garen,” my dad says warmly the moment I open the passenger door to his car. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I say automatically. Dad looks so happy to see me, though, and it suddenly hits me that this is the first time we’ve actually seen each other in a month. The last time we spoke face to face was the morning after I slept in my old bedroom with Jamie and Travis, and before that, it was the weekend of George and Melissa Goldwyn’s funeral service. Since then, we’ve had two or three phone calls, and that’s it. A handful of conversations over the course of a month and a half.
I lean over and throw an arm around his neck to give him the biggest, tightest hug I can manage with the center console between us. “Hi, Dad,” I mumble against the shoulder of his jacket. “It’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too, G,” Dad says, clapping me on the bicep. When I sink back into my own seat, he’s beaming at me. “I checked the train schedule, and I think we’ve got time to stop somewhere before we head to the station. Have you eaten anything yet today?”
“No. I’m starving. Nobody feeds me in New York, it’s terrible,” I say.
He snorts. “Because God forbid you feed yourself, like an adult would. We’re only a few minutes away from that cafe downtown. We’ll pick up some sandwiches and coffees to go, alright?”
That cafe downtown is the Daily Grind. I haven’t been there in ages, which isn’t entirely accidental. Most weekends, I down a couple mugs of coffee while I’m still in session with Doc, and then I put my caffeine consumption on hold until I’ve cleared the boundaries of Lakewood. It isn’t anything serious— mostly, it’s a stupid ritual I go through so I can be sure to avoid the awkwardness of running into anyone I hated at LHS, or having to pretend I’ll keep in touch with the people I liked well enough. I’ve never really been scared that I’d see anyone I knew.
Apparently, I fucking should have been.
When I follow my dad through the front door of the Grind, I’m greeted by a shriek of delight that startles me so much, I trip over my boots and almost faceplant right there on the linoleum. I look around, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.
Half the Lakewood High School Drama Club is sitting in a cluster around three small tables that they’ve shoved together. All my favorites and least favorites are there—Annabelle, and Riley, and Miranda, and Christine, and John, and Nate Holliday, and Josslyn fucking Pryce. It’s this last person I can’t stop staring at, and she seems to be having the same problem.
I cannot deal with this today. I just can’t.
“Dad,” I whisper urgently. “Dad. I need you to pretend that I got into a horrible car accident and sustained a traumatic brain injury, and now I have amnesia and don’t recognize anyone I’ve met in the last nine months.”
Dad clicks his tongue in maybe-mocking disappointment and says, “Garen, be serious. You know that the only people your mother and I raised you to lie to are the police.”
It’s such a pointed comment that it snaps me out of my deer-in-headlights terror. I blink away from the staring contest Joss and I have stumbled into and meet my dad’s eyes instead. He raises a brow and turns to wander off towards the counter, saying over his shoulder, “Go say hello to your friends. I’ll get the food.”
“Yeah, but—wait a second. Did Mom tell you about… have you talked to Mom this week? Did she tell you something?” I ask. He doesn’t look back at me, and I guess it doesn’t matter, because suddenly I’ve got a overexcited redhead plastered to my front, and it’s not even the overexcited redhead I’ve gotten used to having plastered to my front.
Annabelle is clinging to me, practically vibrating with delight and saying over and over, “Oh my god, Garen. Oh my god. I didn’t know you were back in town! Why didn’t you call one of us? This is amazing. Riley, look, it’s—”
“It’s Garen, yeah,” Riley says, raising his eyebrows at her, but unable to hold back a small laugh. “We can all see that, Annie.”
“I’m not back back,” I find myself saying. My eyes drift towards Joss once more, but I promised myself months ago that I’d never have to look at her again. Instead, I try to focus on the person sitting furthest away from her, who turns out to be… Nate. Not much better. The moment our eyes meet, I can tell he feels just as fucked up as I do about all of us meeting up right now. I clear my throat and say again, “I’m not really back. I mean, it’s not like I moved back to Lakewood, or anything like that. I had an appointment at the LRC earlier this morning, and I’m, uh… I’m just grabbing something to eat. With my dad.” I gesture stupidly towards the cash register. “That’s my dad, over there.”
He must be able to hear me from this distance, because he turns and gives a faint, polite smile. There’s a bit of awkward waving from the drama club.
Annabelle seizes my arm and drags me closer to the table. “But you can hang out for a few minutes, though, right? Come on, we haven’t seen you in months. Tell us about your new school. Tell us about New York.”
I huff out a laugh and let myself be shoved into an empty chair that John drags over from another table. “It’s not really a new school. I went there for three years. But it, uh… it’s good. Mostly. I’ve gotta be there at five in the morning for physical training every day, which sucks more than probably anything or anyone has ever sucked in the entire world. Only a few more weeks, though, and then I’m done.”
“You figure out what you’re doing after you graduate?” Riley asks.
“Well, I’ve got a job,” I say without thinking. Fuck. Work is the last thing I should be talking about with these people. They tore into Stohler when they found out she was a stripper, and that was the first night any of them had even met her. I can’t stomach the thought of what they might say to me if I dare to tell them the truth.
Miranda claps her hands to her cheeks in a comical display of shock, and I stick my tongue out at her. She blows me a kiss and drops her hands. “Where do you work?”
Somehow, despite my bone-deep conviction that I need to lie to them, I can’t come up with anything they might believe. Worse yet, I’m sure my dad can still hear us, and I don’t dare say anything that he’d know right off the bat was bullshit. Everyone who really knows me is already aware of exactly how unemployable I am; it was part of the reason my Patton buddies had such a blast suggesting jobs I could apply for weeks ago.
A single comment from that conversation with the Whitman squad bursts into my mind, and I say, “A friend of mine got me a job doing security at this venue in the city on weekends. It’s kind of boring, honestly. All I do is check IDs at the door and occasionally help some of the other guys throw people out if they get too sloppy. Pay is decent, though.”
“And let’s be honest, that’s what really counts,” Riley says.
I grin at him, even though I’m picturing the sixteen crumpled singles I was left with last night and thinking to myself, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. I can almost hear the words in Joss’s voice, even though she hasn’t said a single word the entire time I’ve been here.
Annabelle grips my hand in both of hers, like she wants to make sure I know we’re about to have A Serious Talk. “Have you heard back from all your schools? Have you decided where you’re going in the fall?”
A few seats away, Nate Holliday makes an involuntary sort of movement, as if he wants to lean into the conversation, but isn’t quite sure he has the right anymore. I meet his eyes, and a delicate flush blooms in his cheeks. When I found out that he’d told Joss about Dave hitting me, I was so fucking positive that I wanted Nate to hate himself for betraying me. I wanted him to know, without the slightest bit of ambiguity, that our friendship was over, and I’d never forgive him. Right now, he is trying to desperately to keep an even expression, but regret is still managing to seep through the cracks in the facade.
Part of me thinks I should feel vindicated. Most of me just feels like shit.
“Yeah, I got my replies a month ago. I applied to five colleges, got into four, ‘cause I guess Northwestern wasn’t too keen on that whole expulsion situation last spring.” I swallow, square my shoulders, and say, right to his face, “Nate, I should thank you again for all the help you gave me with my applications. The audition pieces you suggested were great, so, uh… thanks. I owe you.”
“You really, really don’t,” Nate says, mouth tipping into a miserable slant. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a smile. Instead of looking at it any longer, trying to figure that out, I gesture to the collection of highlighted scripts and scribbled notes scattered all over the tables.
“What’s this semester’s play?”
“The Wizard of Oz,” John sighs.
I raise my eyebrows. “Not a fan, I take it?”
“Well, we wanted to do Hairspray, but considering it’s about segregation in 1960s Baltimore, and I’m the only black person in the drama club…” Miranda trails off, rolling her eyes.
“And then we wanted to do West Side Story, but, you know,” Annabelle says.
“No Puerto Ricans in the drama club?” I guess.
Riley snorts. “No Puerto Ricans in Lakewood, more like.”
“Nate made like, two sentences of an argument for Rent, but Ms. Markland shot that down like—” Annabelle snaps her fingers. “We all knew that was a crapshoot, anyway. If you still went to school here, we might’ve gotten further with it. Because like, for one thing, even Ms. Markland would’ve loved to have seen you playing Roger, which is pretty much a part you were born to play. And for another, you’re a gay, Jewish, recovering addict, and your mom’s a lawyer, and I think the school would’ve been shitting themselves in fear that you would sue them for discrimination if they refused to let us perform it. But seeing as how you abandoned us…”
“In the end, we didn’t have much of a choice. It was either The Wizard of Oz or Bye Bye Birdie, and it seemed weird to do two retro-themed musicals in a row,” Miranda says.
Personally, I think it was a little weird to do even one retro-themed musical, but we’re long past the time when I can get away with saying things like that to this group of people. Nate’s eyes narrow like he can hear me saying it anyway.
“So, which parts did you all end up getting?” I ask, even though it’s not that difficult to guess. The majority of my assumptions are concerned when they all start speaking at once—Christine is playing Glinda the Good Witch, Miranda is playing the Wicked Witch of the West. Joss is playing Dorothy, which I would have known even if John hadn’t said it for her. John himself is playing the Cowardly Lion, and Gabe, who is thankfully absent from this little outing, is playing the Tin Man. The only thing that surprises me is the news that Nate is playing the Scarecrow, part of the cast instead of just helping direct and choreograph.
A hip bumps my arm. I glance over my shoulder. Dad is standing there with a coffee in each hand and a bag hanging from his wrist. He lifts these items slightly and says, “Garen, we should get going.”
“Yeah, just… one minute?” I say. I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, and I didn’t really want to talk to the drama club, but now that it’s time for me to leave, I don’t really want to do that either.
Dad gestures towards the door with one of his coffee-clutching hands. “Alright. I’ll be in the car.”
The moment he has cleared the door, Christine says, “So, your dad is kind of hot.”
For the past four years, Jamie has periodically reminded me that he would absolutely sleep with either or both of my parents, given the chance. Hearing it from someone else isn’t any less disturbing. I adopt a look of outrage and say, “Christine, how dare you? I thought those scripted, incredibly public kisses during Grease meant something to you, and now I find out that you’ll take any Anderson man who’ll have you. The nerve of you. The betrayal.”
Everyone laughs, and that seems like a nice enough end note. I stand and push the chair back in the direction of the table John dragged it away from.
“Well, if I don’t leave now, I’m going to miss my train back to the city. It was cool seeing you guys again. Good luck with your play.”
I try to take a step back, but Annabelle grabs my arm again. “You should come see one of the performances. They start pretty soon, actually. Our dress rehearsal is a week from today, and we open on Thursday of the week after that.”
I’d rather swallow, digest, and shit a ziploc bag full of thumbtacks. It feels like it would be inappropriate to admit that, though. Smiling widely, I say, “Yeah, maybe. I’ve got work on Friday nights and Saturday nights, and that’s right in the middle of the performances you guys’ll be doing, so I’m not sure—”
“Our first performance is at seven o’clock on Thursday, May tenth. It’ll be over before nine thirty, so you’ll have plenty of time to drive back to New York,” Riley cuts me off. He makes a note in the margin of the crumpled, coffee-stained script he uses to reference his lighting cues, then grins sharply up at me. “We’ll put you down for two tickets for that night.”
“Two tickets?” I echo.
“Yeah, one for you, one for Tr—uh…” Riley stops speaking abruptly. It sounds like someone might have just stomped on his foot under the table. Everyone in the group looks over at Joss, but they all do it shiftily, like they’re trying (and failing) to be subtle about it.
For the first time in several minutes, Joss actually looks at me again. There’s a long moment of painful, grating silence, and then she hitches a shoulder up and lets it fall. “One for you, one for Travis. He’ll want to see the performance.”
“You mean, he’ll want to see the sets. And he’ll want to passive-aggressively make suggestions about how he would have constructed them,” I say, and Joss laughs. There’s a brief flash of unbearable fondness across her face, and it’s probably for Travis, but it looks like it could be for me, too. I don’t know which of those would be more surprising. Someone shifts, making their chair creak, and Joss’s smile twists into something less genuine. I try to mirror it.
“How’s he doing, anyway?” she asks me.
Better than he ever was when he lived here, I want to say, even though I’m not sure it’s true. Happier with me than he ever could have been with you, even if I’d left you two alone, I think, even though I know that’s not true. “He’s doing really well. He’s, you know… busy with school, busy with his job. All that mature Travis-y stuff.” I look down at my hands, and I don’t even fucking know why I say it, because it feels so unbelievably personal and secret and important in a way none of them will understand. But I just blink at my knuckles and say quietly, “We got a dog.”
Christine lights up. “I saw that on Facebook! He’s so adorable, I die every time you post a picture of him.”
She’s not wrong—Omelette is easily one of the top five cutest dogs who has ever lived. But I feel like I’ve just stripped all my skin off and let them see my insides. They’ve seen my dad, and they’re talking about my dog, and they’re asking about Travis. If they found a way to bring up my mom and Jamie, they’d have laid claim to my entire family, and I feel so exposed because of it.
“I really do have to go. I’m going to miss my train,” I say, backing up. “I’ll see you guys around, yeah?”
I tumble through the front door before any of them can reply, but I don’t get much further.
“Wait! Garen, please don’t leave yet. I have to say something to you.”
My dad is looking at me through the Mercedes windshield. I widen my eyes and mouth oh my god at him before I turn to face Nate Holliday, who has just darted through the front door of the Daily Grind after me.
“Nate,” I say, “I don’t want to miss—”
“You won’t miss your train, I promise. This will only take a few seconds. But I just need to…”
His face gets all wobbly for a second, and I feel a bite of panic at the idea that he’s about to burst into tears or something. Before I can fling myself back into Dad’s car and demand that he drive me to safety, though, Nate squares his shoulders. He looks older than I remember him being. Taller, too. Stronger.
“I need to apologize to you, for the way I acted last semester. I should never have told Josslyn that your ex-boyfriend abused you. It was awful of me to treat something painful that happened to you like it was nothing more than gossip. And even once I’d made that mistake, I made everything so much worse when I tried to justify it to you.”
I shrug. At least, I think I shrug. I can’t really feel my shoulder moving. “You had your reasons.”
Nate’s eyes spark with defiance. “No, I didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There were no acceptable reasons for me to do what I did, and I know that now. At the time, I said it was because I was trying to help, and I wanted Joss to stop judging you, and I wanted her to understand you like I… like I wanted to understand you. But those were terrible excuses. Selfish ones. If I really understood you—as a person, as a friend—I would have understood how wrong it was for me to talk about what happened with anyone else. I would have respected your privacy, and I would have…” He breaks off and swallows hard. The tears seem a lot closer now than they did a minute ago. “I would have earned the trust that you showed me when you told me about what happened to you in the first place. You deserved a better friend than I think I knew how to be at that point. You deserved to have better people in your life.”
His words are gnawing a hole in the center of my chest. One more sentence, and I’m afraid he’ll be able to see every desperate, bloody, terrified pulse of my heart. I cross my arms, just in case. “You’re a good person, Nate,” I finally manage. “I, uh… I’ve got this friend, actually. He’s one of my favorite people in the world, and he’s a lot like you. Grew up in this shitty town, had to deal with plenty of homophobic assholes, but still turned out… kind. And loyal.” Those two adjectives feel like they’re vastly underselling the all-consuming goodness I’m attempting to explain. I try again. “You have to understand, this friend—at the risk of sounding like a total tool, there’s this honesty to him, this integrity in his heart that’s just—”
Nate raises a hand to cut me off. “This is touching, Garen, it truly is, but if I can remind you? I spent all of last semester totally failing to hide an embarrassing crush on you. So, if you could refrain from falsely comparing me to Travis—who I have literally nothing in common with—just so that you have an excuse to talk about how much you love him, that would be spectac—”
“I wasn’t talk about Travis,” I interrupt, and Nate goes silent. “I was thinking of my friend Ben. He’s—it’s a small town, and he was only two grades ahead of you, so you probably know who I mean. Ben McCutcheon?” I hold my hand up level with my shoulder to indicate (and possibly exaggerate) Ben’s height. Curious frown on his face, Nate nods once. I scrub my hand through my hair. “Yeah, so. Ben. He’s probably the best, most kind-hearted person I know, but he does this, uh. He does this thing where he lets people treat him like shit. Mostly, he lets guys treat him like shit. They…” Fuck, now I feel like I’m going to be the one to cry. “We hook up with him, and we act like it doesn’t matter that much, and we drop him when someone else comes along, and he ends up thinking that he doesn’t matter much. He’s such an amazing guy, Nate, and he doesn’t—he doesn’t even like himself most of the time. And he feels that way because a bunch of dickheads made him feel that way.”
“And you think that’s what I do, too?” Nate asks.
It takes me a long time to choose my words, and an even longer time to pronounce each one of them carefully, precisely the way I mean them. “I think that you should never, ever let a guy like me make you feel that you aren’t good enough. Because you are, Nate. You’re a good person, and you were a good friend, even if you made a couple of mistakes.”
“They were pretty big mistakes,” he says doubtfully.
“Nowhere near as big as the ones I’ve made, but I bet you’d still say that I don’t deserve to hate myself for that,” I say. He concedes the point with a tilt of his head. I sigh. “If you need me to say that I forgive you for talking to Joss, I can say it. But if you can tolerate a moment of philosophical bullshit, I think the fact that you apologized for it at all matters more than whether or not I say you’re forgiven.”
“Leaving Lakewood has had a dramatic impact on your personality,” Nate says, cocking an eyebrow.
I make a face at him and say, “The same thing’ll happen to you when you leave Lakewood, too. And Christ, dude, I really hope you leave Lakewood. You’ve got too much of a spark in you to get stuck here for the rest of your life.”
Judging by the flush that creeps up from the collar of Nate’s sweater, that little crush of his hasn’t been wiped out as thoroughly as he claimed.
“Are you really going to come to our opening night performance?” he presses.
I wince. “Well, after this little heart-to-heart, I kind of feel like I have to.”
Nate gives me a haughty look that’s probably cuter and more ridiculous than he intends it to be. “You do. And if you really want me to feel like I matter, it wouldn’t kill you to bring me roses, too. If you even bother to show up, which you probably won’t. Don’t you miss us at all?”
“’Course I do,” I say. After the high drama of a few minutes ago, I can’t stop one side of my mouth from quirking up into a smile as I lean in, press a lingering kiss to his cheek, and say, “I miss you most of all, Scarecrow.”
Nate tries to slap my arm, but I dodge it and hop off the sidewalk. Neither of us says goodbye before he returns to the Grind and I climb back into my dad’s car.
There’s a wrapped-up chicken panini waiting on the dashboard for me. I rip open the wrapper and tear an enormous bite out of it. When I glance sideways, I find that Dad is frowning down at my hands. I blink at them.
They’re trembling.
The food in my mouth feels like it’s made of lead all of a sudden. I force myself to swallow it, set the rest of the sandwich down on the center console, and brush the crumbs off my hands. Part of me is convinced that, if I keep moving, we won’t have to talk about the fact that I’m shaking.
“It was kind of weird seeing old Lakewood people again,” I admit. Not entirely a lie, either. It was weird seeing them, but it was worse having to suffer through a whole conversation about Nate and Joss, the whole reason I left Lakewood in the first place.
“I can imagine,” Dad says.
I’m expecting something more than that, but nothing else comes. Finally, I gesture towards the clock on the dashboard. “I’m probably going to miss the train.”
Dad blinks at the clock. It’s twenty after twelve, my train leaves at quarter to one, and we’re at least half an hour away from Union Station in New Haven. On a normal day, Dad would peel out of the parking lot and gun it for New Haven, swearing all the while. Instead, he shakes his head and says, “Why don’t I just drive you back to your house?”
“What?” I say, brow wrinkling. “Dad, no. It’s two and a half hours, round-trip. You’ll waste your entire afternoon.”
“And it’s almost an hour and a half round-trip to New Haven, if you consider the traffic I’m likely to hit. I didn’t have plans today, anyway. What difference does one extra hour make to me?”
I want to argue, but it’s not like my mom’s the only stubborn-as-fuck parent I’ve got. Dad’s face is set, and it would be pointless to try to change his mind, especially when he’s already pulling out of the parking lot and turning us in the direction of New York, not New Haven.
“Besides,” he adds, “I have something I’d like to discuss with you.”
He might as well say, I have something I want to ground you for even though you live in your own house. My upper lip curls back. “Is it about school?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Are you sure? Because if you’re about to pull a Mom move and bitch at me for ‘not choosing a college yet,’ that counts as a school thing. Like, college is school,” I point out. Dad looks to be working very hard to contain an eyeroll. Suspicion flares in the back of my mind. “Wait, are you dating somebody? Is that what you’re going to tell me?”
“Well, you’re getting warmer,” Dad says, “but you’re still pretty far off.”
“You can tell me if you’re dating somebody. I’m not going to be weird about it,” I say. “Though, if I can make two really small suggestions, before you decide to move her into your house? First, introduce us, and if she hates me, maybe don’t, like, make her my step-mom. Second, if she’s got a son around my age, make sure he’s straight. And I mean really straight, not closet-case-virgin-Travis-McCall-straight. ‘Cause, you know, you move a hot dude into the house and I can’t stop myself from seducing him once, shame on me. You move a hot dude into the house and I can’t stop myself from seducing him twice, shame on y—”
“I’m not dating anyone, Garen. But based on what I’ve heard, the same cannot be said for you,” Dad says.
I squint. “Excuse me?”
“Your mother tells me that you’re seeing a boy named Declan,” Dad says. Christ. We haven’t even gotten on the highway yet, and the interrogation is already starting up.
To put off replying, I take a sip of my scalding hot coffee. I wince at the sting spreading over my tongue, set the cup down in the cupholder, and say, “I guess that depends on how you define ‘seeing.’ I mean, we’re not boyfriends. He’s—”
“Cut the shit, Garen,” Dad interrupts, and I blink over at him. His eyes are locked on the road. When I glance down, I see that his knuckles are white with how tightly he’s gripping the steering wheel. “I let you get away with that we’re-not-really-boyfriends garbage in October, when you decided that you wanted to get involved with Ben McCutcheon. I let you get away with it in December, when you decided to get back together with Travis. You’ve used the same lie to try and talk your way through two boyfriends in the last eight months, even though you swore up and down that you’d stay single and focus on yourself during this first year of recovery. It’s not going to work a third time. I don’t care what label you do or don’t use for your relationship. You’re seeing a new boy, and I want to meet him.”
“Ew,” I blurt out without meaning to. “Look, Dad, that’s… that’s just not going to happen. I mean, I like Declan, but he’s not really a take-him-home-and-meet-the-parents kind of guy. That’s not the kind of relationship we’ve got.”
“From what I’ve heard, the ‘kind of relationship you’ve got’ isn’t exactly something to celebrate,” Dad says.
“What did Mom tell you?” I ask. “Come on. I know she spun it to make him sound like he’s a terrible person. That’s such a fucking her thing to do. The only reason she hates him is because she knows Travis hates him, and Mom is, like, desperate to see me and Travis get married and ride off into the sunset because she knows that’d make Evelyn McCall absolutely ripshit.”
“There was a time when you were desperate to see you and Travis get married and ride off into the sunset,” Dad says mildly.
I blink over at him, momentarily stunned. It’s sort of stupefying that anyone could know me and Travis, could see us interact with one another, could see the way I look at him, and not realize that I still ache for him as much as I ever have. I say, “I still want that. More than anything. If he wanted us to get back together for real, I’d be his in an instant. But he’s more obsessed than you and Mom are with the idea of me not being in a real relationship until I’m more than a year sober, and I… don’t think I should have to be lonely for another four and a half months just because it’s what everybody else thinks is best for me.”
“And that aversion to loneliness is the reason you’ve found yourself another new boy?” The words come out at the same time that the car rolls up to a stop sign. Dad takes the opportunity to turn and give me a careful, searching look before he decides, “So, this boy, this Declan. He’s essentially a bedwarmer.”
Yes, I want to say, but what comes out is, “No, he’s not. He’s my friend, and he’s good to me. I don’t care what Mom told you.”
“She told me that he’s a criminal,” Dad says shortly. “She told me that she has explicit knowledge of a felony he has recently committed, presumably involving you.”
I can’t help it—I laugh. “So, that’s what that comment in the Grind was about. The lying to police thing. Did she even tell you what he did?”
Dad’s mouth twitches, like he’s trying to stop a scowl. “No. She didn’t tell me what it was. She told me that she couldn’t discuss it in detail because the goddamn police had already gotten involved, and as your lawyer, she was bound to keep your confidence. And honestly, doesn’t that tell me everything I need to know? There isn’t a good kind of felony, Garen. Whatever this boy dragged you into—”
“He set David Walczyk’s car on fire,” I say, and Dad stops speaking so suddenly, there’s a full ten seconds where his mouth is just hanging open. I raise my eyebrows at him, but he doesn’t look over at me, and he doesn’t try to say anything else. It seems like a good enough excuse to keep going. “Mr. and Mrs. Walczyk were on campus this past Monday for Parents Day. Their younger son, Charlie is in my squadron. He and Declan used to be best friends, right up until his parents lit into me for ruining their kid’s life, and I laid all Dave’s shit bare in front of this whole group of people. I took off to Dec’s dorm room, and when they all tracked me down, Charlie started foaming at the mouth about how I was lying, and Declan threw him out of the room and ended their friendship. Over me.”
It feels awful to acknowledge that out loud. Nobody wants to be the piece of shit who ruins their friends’ other friendships. Somehow, I always end up doing it anyway.
“I was—I was fucked up about it. You know I don’t like talking about what happened with… him. You know I can’t deal with it. I was so fucked up, and I was scared, and I wanted Declan to just… fix it. Not like I had any fucking clue how he could. But I wanted him to do something, and I told him that the car was where it all started, and I said I wished it could be burned off the face of the earth. And I guess he took that literally. So, if you’re going to blame anybody for this shit, it should be me, not Declan. And you can tell Mom I said that, too.”
Dad makes a noise that’s somewhere between a considering hum and a dejected sigh. “I’m not going to tell your mother anything.”
If he’s expecting to win points for that, he’s going to be disappointed. My mom already knows all of the details of the arson, and she also knows I’ll go to my grave defending what Declan did for me. She already knows everything.
“Garen… when you said that David’s care was where everything started, what exactly did you mean by that?” Dad asks me carefully.
Correction: Mom knows everything except for that.
It’s a good thing I put my sandwich down a few minutes ago, because I really don’t need to be eating anything right now. I already feel like I’m going to choke. Lying about my job when I was talking to the drama club seemed so important fifteen minutes ago, and it’s fucking nothing compared to this.
“The first time Dave hit me last spring, we were sitting in his car,” I say, grasping at something that’s technically true, even if it’s not what I was talking about. Dad doesn’t say anything, and now I’m not just choking, I’m dying. “I’m serious. You can ask Travis, if you don’t believe me. He saw me after it happened. I-I had a split lip. I told him what happened.”
“I wish you felt like you could be honest with me,” Dad says softly.
The silence that hangs in the car after that is as delicate as glass. My hoarse, panicked voice shatters it a minute later. “I am being honest.”
“What really happened in David’s car?” Dad asks me, and I dig my fingers into the leather of my seat.
“What do you mean? Dad. Dad, what do you know?” I demand.
We hit two intersections during the time I spend waiting for the reply I’m terrified of. When the traffic light turns green at the second, my father takes a long, steadying breath before he presses the gas pedal and begins to speak.
“When you were brought to the hospital last spring, all any of us knew was that you’d been beaten. You weren’t conscious to tell us anything more than that, and Travis was swearing up and down that the person who had assaulted you was your boyfriend. In cases like that, where domestic violence charges are going to be brought up, the police are concerned with preserving any evidence that might secure a conviction. They asked your doctors to document all of your injuries with photographs, x-rays, and written descriptions. And then they asked them to do a rape kit to see if you had been sexually assaulted.”
It has been three years, four months, and eighteen days since the first time Dave Walczyk raped me, and it has been eleven months and twenty-four days since the last time Dave Walczyk raped me. At no point during either of those time periods did it occur to me that strangers might have been rooting around my naked, unconscious body for proof of this. Something they could show the cops. Something they could show the courts.
Something they could show my father.
A decent amount of time has passed since I suffered through a memory so potent I could taste it, but right now, there are ghosts rising up in the back of my throat. Well liquor in a nightclub. Hospital food sipped from a spoon because my face was too bruised to chew. Salt sweat beading up in the crook of Dave’s elbow as he held me facedown on my bed, one arm hooked around my neck. And then suddenly, very much in the present, the bitter tang of stomach acid.
“Pull over,” I blurt out, already reaching for the door handle. The car is still rolling to a stop in the shoulder when I fling the door open, lean halfway out of my seat, and vomit into the gravel. I don’t have much in me except coffee and bile, but every time I think I’ve gotten it under control, I remember that my unconscious body had been touched and prodded and examined by more people than I’d ever thought, and Dad knows, and I gag again.
It takes at least five minutes for me to stop heaving. Even then, I can’t stomach the idea of facing my father. I clamber out of the car and stumble a few feet further from the road. Behind me, the Mercedes engine cuts off, and I hear the driver’s side door opening, then closing.
“Garen,” Dad says. I want to turn away from him, but my vision is blurry, and I can’t tell where he’s standing, or if he’s coming closer. The only way I can think to hide my face is to lean into the side of the car, my arms folded together against the top of the rear passenger door, my brow pressed hard to my forearms. A hand lands on my shoulder, and I flinch away from it.
“Don’t. Don’t, Dad, please, I can’t—”
I don’t know what the rest of the sentence would be. I hadn’t managed to form any thought beyond I can’t, I can’t, I can’t before I started speaking. It doesn’t matter, though. My protest is drowned out by my dad’s soft shushing as he carefully maneuvers me around and folds me into his arms. I wanted to believe that I could still be stoic about this. I wanted to believe that my objections would resolve themselves into something sharp and Spartan and powerful. Instead, my words ball up in my throat, and I choke, and then my dad has to kind of prop me up against the side of the car because he can’t support my weight and I’m sobbing too hard to spare any energy for keeping myself upright.
Standing there at the side of the road, crying into my dad’s shoulder while he strokes my hair and tells me he’s there… it feels like the end of something. I’m not sure what. It’s not like my parents were under the illusion that I was some unsullied Nate Holliday type. I was fifteen when I came out to them, sixteen when they realized I was sleeping my way through all of Patton Military Academy, seventeen when they found out I’d taken a break from screwing around to fuck my stepbrother, and eighteen when they found out I’d dabbled in hooking to support my drug habit. They know that I’m working with a rode hard and put up wet kind of virtue, and after last spring, they know that Dave Walczyk ruined me every way he knew how. But a terrified, desperate part of me had still believed that I could keep this one last thing secret—that this was one horrible, broken piece of me that I wouldn’t have to show off to everyone who loves me.
I was stupid. I was wrong.
The moment I can move without collapsing into the gravel, I pry myself out of my dad’s grip and lean back against the side of the Mercedes. I rub the backs of my wrists against my face to wipe away some of the tears, but when I try to take a deep breath, the air rattles in my throat and ends in a soft hiccup. Shit. I’ve always cried too much and too easily, and once I get going, it’s so fucking hard to stop. The fact that I know Dad is used to dealing with this from me doesn’t make it any less embarrassing.
He’s patient about it. Doesn’t push me to talk before I’m ready, doesn’t set me off again by trying to give me another hug. When I can finally get a few words out, the first thing I can think to ask is, “Does—does Mom know, too? W-Was she there when the, when the doctor told you about the… or did you tell her?”
Dad scrubs at his face with both hands for a long, silent moment. Then he sighs, gives a helpless shrug, and says, “Your mother doesn’t know. She was still on her way to the hospital when the doctor spoke to me last spring, and I… chose not to tell her that particular detail when she arrived.”
“Why?” I whisper. If the doctors knew, and the cops knew, and my dad knew, it would’ve been a hell of a lot easier to let my mom know, too. They could’ve told me, so that I didn’t spend the last year of my life thinking I had actually managed to hide this from everyone.
“Because I was afraid that she would be so concerned with trying to save you from something that had already happened, she would lose sight of how important your immediate recovery was,” Dad says. “Marian is a wonderful mother, and she only wants the best for you. But I was concerned that, were she to find out that your assault was physical and sexual, she would become irrevocably convinced that the only course of action was to pursue charges against Dave Walczyk. I couldn’t let her push you into the trauma of a trial, especially one that might not end in a conviction. I didn’t think you could stand something like that.”
I ball my hands up into fists and try to scrub the remaining tears from my cheeks. “Yeah, ‘cause I did such a fucking bang-up job of keeping my shit together anyway. God. Is this why you always go so easy on me? Do you pity me so much that you can’t even handle the idea of telling me to grow the fuck up?”
“I’d prefer to think that I tell you what you need to hear, when you need to hear it,” Dad says. “And I don’t pity you, Garen. You don’t need to be pitied. To suffer in the ways that you have suffered, and to survive it—how could I ever be anything but awestruck by you? Your strength, your bravery—”
“Stop,” I croak. For once, he actually obeys me, and that feels important right now. That I can say stop, and still have someone stop.
It’s the most pathetic, ridiculous bit of nothing in the world, but I cling to it like driftwood in a hurricane.
229 days sober
I’m camped out in the living room and slogging through the last of my AP Government homework when I get a text from Steven. can u come 2 campus now? like right NOW now? I frown down at the text, but I don’t have to respond. Barely ten seconds pass before Steven texts again, theres a declan emergency.
I dump my homework on the couch and stuff my feet into the nearest pair of shoes, which turn out to be Travis’s sneakers. The rest of me is sporting a pair of plaid flannel pajama pants and the Jesus-in-wayfarers shirt I borrowed from Riley last fall and never got around to giving back. All things considered, it’s not my best look, but it seems trivial to worry about getting dressed if there’s an emergency at school.
And of course there’d be an emergency this weekend, I find myself thinking as I peel out of the driveway and speed off towards campus. Right, because my life hasn’t sucked enough for the past few days. I’m not even sure what would constitute “a Declan emergency,” especially given the recent standards for non-emergencies. In the past month, he has gotten picked up by the cops for trespassing at Ward (a situation handled by me and my heretofore undiscovered talent for car theft), gotten his ass kicked for banging some other guy’s girlfriend (handled by me, again, and an unloaded handgun), nearly overdosed on Parents Day in an attempt to avoid having a conversation with his mom (handled by me, again, and my ability to make a scene big enough to distract anyone), and committed arson (handled by me, again, and my mom the lawyer, and our family tradition of telling bald-faced lies to cops).
Considering the fact that I seem to be the only person on the planet who can be trusted to keep Declan alive and out of prison, I know exactly why Steven would call me in to handle another Declan situation. But after everything that has happened lately, I’m fucking terrified of what that situation might be.
Steven doesn’t text again until I’m pulling into the senior parking lot, and then it’s just GAAAAREN. I fall out of my car and text back, on campus now, where are you???
He calls instead of texting, but once I answer, all he gets out is, “Dude,” before Declan’s voice cuts over his with a furious, “Put the fucking phone away, Ramsey.”
I hear it twice: once through the phone and once from a hundred yards away. I head towards the real voice.
“Shit, G, I’ve gotta go,” Steven whispers. “Come to the obstacle course. Please, it’s Campbell, he’s—”
“Put the fucking phone away—” I hear in an echo, and then the call cuts out, leaving me with just the distant, real-world snarl of, “—or I will drag you off into the woods, break every bone in your legs, and leave you there so you have to either claw your way back to Whitman, or get eaten alive by wild animals.”
I start jogging towards the course.
“Pretty sure the wildest thing on campus is a squirrel,” Taylor says. I catch up to the group just in time to see Declan turn his borderline murderous stare on Taylor. Taylor’s usually pretty unflappable, but there’s something in Declan’s eyes now that seems to have even him looking wary.
“Now, we all know that’s not true,” I announce.
Declan turns around and blinks at me. His expression is blank, but that’s a nice change from the way he has been looking at everyone else. “Anderson. What are you doing here?”
“Wildest animal on campus,” I say, spreading my arms out to the sides. “Speak of the devil, the devil appears, and so on. Also, Steve said there was an emergency.”
“An emergency,” Declan repeats.
“Yeah. A you emergency,” I say.
“A me emergency,” Declan says, turning slowly to look at Steven, who seems to be seconds away from literally pissing himself in front of us.
To spare everyone the awkwardness of that happening, I grab Declan’s jaw between my palms and turn his sweat-damp face back to me. “I hate it when you do this echo thing. I say things so you can hear them, not so that I can hear them two seconds later in someone else’s voice. But yeah, a you emergency. What was it?”
“Mostly, the fact that he has been acting like a gigantic twat for going on—” Taylor twists his wrist to check his watch, “—twenty-eight hours.”
“We’ve only been out here for three hours,” Declan says. All the muscles in his face feel tight under the grip I’ve got on his jaw. It’s a little alarming.
“Yeah, and you’ve been completely intolerable since you woke up yesterday,” Taylor argues. “Besides, the fuck are you even talking about? Only been out here three hours—you dragged us all out here after breakfast and said you wanted us to run the obstacle course until one of us passed out!”
Declan narrows his eyes at Taylor over my shoulder. “And since that hasn’t happened yet, why are you all standing around doing nothing?”
Steve turns tail and sprints back towards the course. Declan looks satisfied by that, but only barely. Taylor, Javi, and Sam are still lingering nearby. Charlie is nowhere to be seen, and… oh.
“Are you being mean to everyone because you and Charlie are fighting?” I ask. Please, please, please let him deny it. It sucks enough having to deal with the guilt of having ruined their friendship without having to talk about it, too.
Behind Declan, Javi raises his arms and pantomimes wrapping them around someone in a big, warm hug. It’s hard to communicate I’m not fucking stupid enough to try that right now without moving or making a face, but I hope he’s picking up on the vibes I’m sending his way.
“No,” Declan spits out. “I’m being mean to them because it’s the only way to motivate them to do this fucking course. They’ve been asking me to train them on it all semester, but whenever I come out here, nobody wants to join. Our official test date is in two and a half weeks. It’s now or never.”
I take my hand off his face just long enough to gesture to the other guys, including Steve, who is stuck halfway over the top of the climbing wall, possibly dead. “I mean, from the look of things, it seems like they would prefer ‘never.’”
“They’re weak,” Declan says flatly.
“They’re also standing, like, right there,” I say, pointing. “So, maybe you could dial down the disdain until they’re out of earshot.”
Safely out of Dec’s line of sight, Javi is still embracing his own invisible partner. He reaches up and strokes its invisible hair.
I grimace. “If I hug you right now, will you stab me?”
“He keeps a knife in a sheath tucked into his boot sometimes,” Sam offers. “So, probably. But if you want to try it anyway, I applaud your bravery. We’ll see if we can get Patton to build a memorial to you outside Whitman.”
“The knife is in our dorm room. I saw him put it in his desk drawer before we went down to the dining hall for breakfast. Go for it!” Javi urges.
“Oh god. Oh god, I’m going to die,” I say, gingerly sliding my hands off Declan’s jaw, down his neck, and over his shoulders so that I can draw him in. He doesn’t seem to want to move much, so I have to shuffle forward until our chests bump and I can loop my arms around him properly. “Oh god. Am I dead? Did he kill me? Seriously, am I dead?”
“You’re alive,” Javi says, way too encouragingly. “It’s a pretty weak hug, though. Maybe squeeze him a little?”
Declan makes a horrifying noise, a pitbull rumble deep in his throat. I crush him harder against me and clamp my hand over the back of his head so I can shove his face against my neck. At this point, I know he wouldn’t ever actually try to hurt me, but I’m not sure I trust him not to spring free and take a swing at Javi. I mouth run at the other guys, and they sneak off towards the course to find Steve, who seems to have resorted to hiding between some of the obstacles.
“Why are you being mean to the squad?” I ask Declan.
“You can let go of me anytime now,” he says.
“Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll let you go when I fucking feel like it,” I say. He doesn’t exactly give me permission to keep hugging him, but he does sigh and grab my ass with both hands, which is probably the closest he gets to knowing how to return a hug. I gentle the grip I’ve got on the back of his head, settling into something a lot closer to stroking his short hair. “Why are you being mean to the squad?”
“They listen better when they’re scared,” he says sullenly. “And it’s not like you were here to help me keep them in line.”
I scoff. “Keep them in line? Dec, you’ve got about four years left before you’re an officer. Nobody has to listen to you yet.” I pause. “If you wanted me here to help, maybe you should have asked me to come here.”
Declan lets go of me immediately and takes a step back, turning to approach the squad again. “Yeah, well, last time I asked you to come here, you were busy. Didn’t see the point in asking again.”
Taylor said he’s been like this for twenty-eight hours—since nine yesterday morning. Right around the time he called me. I grab his wrist to keep him from taking another step towards the other guys. “Wait, that’s why you’re cunting out on everybody? ‘Cause you’re jealous that I spent yesterday with Travis instead of you?”
I think Declan intends for his glare to mean that’s ridiculous and I refuse to dignify it with a response, but it mostly comes across as that’s absolutely correct but I’m going to be a stubborn piss-baby and pretend it’s not.
“Dude. I’m sorry if you felt jilted, or whatever, but I’m not going to apologize for staying home yesterday. You have no fucking clue what I’ve had to deal with in the last two days, and I’m not going to beg forgiveness for the fact that I needed to spend some time with Travis in order to feel okay again. I wanted it. I needed it. But that doesn’t—I mean, I still like you. I don’t want—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Declan orders. It’s loud enough that I listen to him. It’s also loud enough that the other guys shoot us apprehensive looks from the obstacle course. Declan spares them a glance, then takes a step closer so that I can still hear him when he says quietly, “I don’t need a patronizing speech about how great you think I am, and I’m not jealous of that cheap imitation of Captain America you’ve got waiting for you at home. This—” he flattens a hand to his own chest, “—isn’t me being jealous. It’s me being confused. When I called you yesterday and asked you to come over, I thought you’d want to say yes.”
“I did! I mean, I did want to,” I say quickly.
“Bullshit. If you wanted to, you would have. Call me crazy, but after I told my best friend to piss off because of things he said to you, and committed a felony so that you could feel safer, and told you how into you I am, and spent four days wanting you like burning but having to keep my distance so that everything seemed normal to anybody who might come after us for the car thing, I thought you’d want to hang out, if I asked. But instead, all you wanted to do was spend more time with the guy who already sees you every single night. You said you blew him on Friday morning, and you went out on that stupid dinner date with him before you went to work that night, and you probably got off with him after your shift ended and again once you woke up. And I’ve barely gotten to speak to you, let alone actually touch you.”
I wonder how Declan would react if I told him that the only touching Travis did to me yesterday involved holding me while I sobbed hysterically on our living room floor because, despite all reassurances to the contrary, there’s still an enormous part of me that’s convinced my father will never be able to love me or respect me the way he did before he knew that I was raped. Even the best parts of my personality are obnoxious and aggressive and too much for any one person to handle, and I’ve forced so many horrible things on Travis and Declan lately that I’m sure they’re both on the knife’s edge of abandoning me completely. The only way I can hope to get through this is to fall back on that wonderful Garen-Anderson-standby of pretending that everything is okay until it becomes okay.
And if that fails, get naked.
“You can touch me now, though, babe,” I say. Declan looks like he wants to roll his eyes, but fuck Declan. I’ve still got a decent grip on his wrist. I only have to wait maybe half a minute until he closes his eyes and lets me use that grip to tug him in close. He still kind of sucks at hugging—his spine is rigid, and his hands end up on my ass again—but he gets better at it once my mouth finds his.
The noise he makes when our tongues touch almost breaks me. It’s like a soft, delicate version of the rumbling he made earlier; I’m not sure he meant for it to be audible, and the fact that I can get him to make involuntary sounds of—I don’t fucking know, pleasure, or gratitude or whatever, the fact that I can get that out of him makes me so fucking nervous. The thing is, Declan was never supposed to care about me. He was supposed to sleep with me, and it was supposed to be fun, but I never, ever bargained for sounds and moments like this.
I break away from the kiss and say, “Dismiss your troops. Don’t work them to death just because you were mad at me.”
“Because I was mad at you?” Declan says. “You think you’re off the hook after one kiss?”
No, I think the fact that I’m even on the hook because of a single afternoon spent with someone else when Declan spends most of his nights deep-dicking any girl who’ll lift her skirt for him is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. I know I’m just nineteen years old, and even on my best days, I have the maturity and emotional stability of a twelve-year-old girl who just read Twilight for the first time, but there are some days when still being in high school is so much more suffocating than others.
If Declan’s got a bug up his ass today, I doubt that saying this will win me any points with him. Instead, I wind my arms around his neck and say, “Of course not. But I bet I can find a way to make you like me again.” I lean in and lick the sweat from the hinge of his jaw. He breathes in deeply through his nose, and I move closer still so I can nip at his earlobe. Declan’s grip on my ass goes a little tighter, drawing me in just enough that I can feel him hardening up in his athletic shorts. It’s not the same as convincing him to get over my refusal to come over yesterday, but it’s definitely a start.
“Fine. Let’s go up to my dorm, yeah?” he says.
Shit. I lean back enough that I can flash him a bright, apologetic smile. “I’d love to. But I’m supposed to be heading out to New Haven to meet my friend, Stohler. My first night at work didn’t go exactly as I’d planned, and she already knows the industry really well. She’s going to show me around her club—well, it’s a strip club, not a nightclub, but we’re going to, you know. Talk shop. She’s going to help me.”
Declan’s hands fall to his sides. I kind of want to grab them and put them back on my ass.
“Alright. I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” he says flatly. God, the attitude on this kid today is killing me.
I narrow my eyes at him. “No, you’ll see me later tonight. I’m going to go to New Haven now, and I’m going to hang out with Stohler for a little while, and then I’m going to drive back up here and spend the night with you.”
“I didn’t invite you,” Declan says. His whiskey-amber eyes are narrowed into slits, too. He looks mad enough to mean it, which makes me nervous enough to feel like I’ve got to convince him. I take him by the shoulders and steer him right over to the obstacle course.
The rest of the boys in the squad are clustered behind the climbing wall, speaking in low tones. I think they’re planning a mutiny. Steven jolts at the sight of me and Declan, then scuttles back a few steps, like he’s thinking of making a run for it again. Before he can embarrass himself, I say to them all, “Go back to Whitman. You’re dismissed for the day.”
“They are not,” Declan objects.
I fist my hands around the front of his t-shirt and shove him up against the climbing wall. “They are. Because you’re about to be too busy to give them any further instructions.” I drop to my knees.
The other Patton boys scatter like roaches with the light on. I can hear them chattering and jeering even as they bolt in the general direction of Whitman Hall, but one of the best things about Declan is how absolutely shameless he is. Without any further urging from me, he hooks his thumbs over the top of his shorts and pushes them down enough to get out his mostly erect cock. His skin is slick and salty with sweat from three hours’ physical activity on a warm spring day, and the scent of him is thick and musky. I press my face to his hip and breathe him in, and he shudders at the feel of it. He lets me take him in my mouth, lets me suck him to full hardness before he says, “What’s the point of having you come back here later, if you’re so willing to blow me right now?”
I take his dick out of my mouth long enough to scoff and say, “Please. Like you won’t be looking for another orgasm in a few hours.”
Declan steers my mouth back onto him and says, in a low voice that is tinged with as much satisfaction as cruelty, “Fair point. That’s how things went yesterday.” He rolls his hips up, and I relax my throat to accommodate the depth of his thrust. “Do you think that when you said you wouldn’t come over, I just wasted away in my dorm room, pining for you? Do you really believe that, when you’re off with your precious Trevor, I’m not still working my way through as many Ward girls as I can get to before graduation?”
Slut, slut, slut, I chant in my head, not knowing if the words are directed towards Delcan or myself. You’re a jealous fucking slut.
But I’d be lying to myself if I pretended that I didn’t sort of like it. Declan is being a jealous, greedy brat right now, but he cradles my jaw in his hands, and he fucks my mouth, and he wants me so much that it’s turning him into an asshole.
It’s not perfection. It’s power. And if I can’t have the first, then I’ll happily settle for the second.
By the time I drag myself away from Declan, go home, get ready, and leave for New Haven, it’s closing in on six thirty; by the time I make it to her apartment and coax her downstairs by hammering on the door buzzer for two minutes, Stohler seems ready to strangle me.
“Took your sweet time getting here, didn’t you?” she says, throwing herself into the passenger seat of my Ferrari. “I figured you’d show up around four, and when you didn’t, I assumed that meant I was free to make other plans.”
I blink down at her plain t-shirt, then back up to her makeup-free face. “And… did you?”
“That depends on whether you think ordering yourself a gross amount of Chinese food and watching Netflix documentaries about serial killers counts making plans.”
“I do.”
“In that case, fuck yeah, I made plans.”
I exaggerate a pout. “Can you pretty please take me to your club anyway? I promise Netflix will still be there when you get home.”
Stohler twists in her seat to glower at her apartment building as I pull away from the choice parking spot I managed to snag in front of it. “Yeah, but my fucking Chinese food probably won’t be. God, I hate my roommates. When you get to this intersection up here, take a right, I want to avoid Chapel Street. The second the weather starts to get nice, all the Yale kids crawl out of their caves and start wandering all over the streets, like nobody would dare to mow down an Ivy League student.”
“I think Ben might take offense to that,” I say, flicking on my turn signal and steering the car wherever Stohler directs me. I wouldn’t mind getting off the busiest roads, anyway. The asshole behind me has their high-beams on for absolutely no reason, and I’ll have an easier time losing them if we find our way out of the heavy traffic.
“No, he wouldn’t. He knows enough to use a goddamn sidewalk,” Stohler says. She shakes out her hair and starts to finger-comb it into a ponytail, using one of her flailing elbows to point me down less crowded streets. We’re out of luck; the car with the high-beams turns after us. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you—I have this idea. About Ben. But I want to get somebody else’s input before I bring it up with him, in case he wouldn’t be into it.”
I raise my eyebrows. “If you’re wondering if he’d be down for letting you peg him, I’m about ninety percent sure the answer is ‘yes.’ But you’ll have to wait until he and Jamie break up.”
Stohler scoffs. “Please. If I promised to pull his hair during it, he’d let me peg him now, whether he and James are together or not. But that’s not what I’m thinking about.”
“That’s probably for the best,” I concede. Stohler rolls her eyes.
“Be serious for five seconds, asshole.” She moves as if to pick up a purse from the car floor, then realizes she didn’t bring one with her. She pats her pockets, probably searching for a pack of cigarettes. Finding none, she frowns, then turns to face me more directly. “What do you think about the idea of me and Ben getting an apartment together? Oh, take this turn up here. Left. And then you’re gonna wanna go two more stoplights, and then the road’s going to fork, and you’ll wanna go right.” Once I’ve executed the left turn, Stohler shrugs. “Anyway. Yeah. I’ve just been thinking about it, and it seems like a reasonable suggestion. I hate all my roommates, and things are still awful between him and Alex after what went down last week. We could both use a new place to live, and we get along really well. But I’ve only known the guy for something like six months, so if he’s hiding some horrible defect that makes him impossible to live with, tell me right now, and I won’t ask him. Like, tell me if he’s one of those people who gets off on popping balloons, and he’s going to be doing all his balloon fetish-y things in the living room.”
“Dude, if he had a balloon fetish, I’m pretty sure I would have mentioned that by now. I’ve told you about all his other fetishes, so, why not?” I roll to a stop at a red light and take the opportunity to crack my back. My whole body feels sore from my second shift last night, but I managed to walk away with a whopping twenty-five dollars in profit, so at least the pain feels more justified than it did after my first shift. To Stohler, I add, “I think you guys would be great as roommates. Way better than the shitty situations you’re both stuck in now, you know? You should ask him about it the next time you guys—”
A flash of light in my rearview mirror nearly blinds me, and I glance up to see a pair of headlights racing closer and closer, without even the suggestion that the driver plans to stop. The only thing I can think to do is gun it. We’re at an intersection, and the light’s still red, but there’s nobody in cross traffic, and besides, that’s physics, right? Better to be hit when I’m moving away from them than if I’m at a dead stop with my foot on the brake.
My Ferrari can go from zero to sixty in just over five seconds, but it’s not enough.
In movies, car crashes always look like they take a really long time. The squealing brakes, the screech of tires on asphalt, glass shattering everywhere, metal shredding dramatically as the car goes rolling along the street before coming to a reluctant, fiery stop. There’s always some big swell of music or sound effects. Everything is in slow motion.
The reality is nothing like that.
The reality is one solid crunch as the entire ass-end of my Ferrari folds in on itself. My head snaps back and then forward, without any time for me to even take a breath between movements. The rest of the air in my lungs gets knocked clear out by my seatbelt, which is the only thing keeping me from going through the windshield or bashing my skull open on the steering wheel—my car doesn’t have airbags. Jamie has called me about it four times in the last month and a half. The third time, he cried, said I was going to get myself or one of our friends killed, if I didn’t get a car that was less of a death trap.
Everything is so, so quiet and still. Dazed, numb, I reach over and feel around for Stohler’s hand, give it a tight squeeze. “Stohls, you hurt?”
She doesn’t say anything. I want to look over at her, but my entire spine is screaming, from the base of my skull all the way down to the small of my back, and the idea of turning my head right now seems laughable. I squeeze her hand again. “Stohler. Are you--Lindsey. Are you hurt?”
“I-I’m fine,” she says shakily. “I’m… Jesus fuck, what the—we should, we should get out of the car.”
Since the first moment I met her, Stohler has never sounded less than perfectly composed. The tremble in her voice is what makes me finally turn to face her, no matter how much it aches. Her eyes are wide, and there’s blood on her forehead. It looks like she might have smacked her head against the window or dash. I reach for her. “You said you weren’t hurt.”
“I’m not, I’m not. It’s just a scrape.” She reaches down, then pauses. “Shit. I left my purse in my apartment. You’ve got your phone, though, right? You should call the cops. That driver’s wasted, crazy, or both, and you’re going to need an accident report to file an insur—”
I feel the second crash more than I hear it. I don’t know if that’s because the back of my car is already so flattened that it doesn’t make much of a noise, or if it’s because I’m turned towards Stohler, so I’m jolted around at a much more painful angle. But sheer size enables the Tahoe that hit us to push my car—still in gear, with my stupid, panicking foot not even pressed to the brake—out through the rest of the still-empty intersection, right up onto the curb across the street, and into a low brick wall at the edge of a parking lot. A loud and presumably endless stream of swears is coming out of my mouth. Same for Stohler, except she’s screaming them, the tips of her long, purple nails digging into the back of my hand.
“Crazy,” I say, “crazy, they’re definitely crazy, shit.”
The Tahoe backs up a few yards, then guns it into the back of my car again. Reverse, drive, crash. Reverse, drive, crash.
“Fucking drive, Anderson!” Stohler shrieks. “Put your hands on the fucking wheel and—”
“I can’t!” I scream right back at her. “They took out the fucking engine, it’s in the boot of the car, not the front!”
Jamie was right. This car really is going to be the death of me. It’s built for speed and sex appeal, not to stand up in a collision. The front end of the Tahoe is pretty fucked up, but their car isn’t totaled, which is more than can be said for mine. The engine’s scrap metal, at this point. The whole back half of it is destroyed. The front is all caved in and half-buried under the rubble of the low wall.
It’s only then, when it seems like Stohler and I won’t even be able to get out of the car, let alone drive it anywhere, that the Tahoe backs up one last time, twists back onto the road, and zooms off.
“What the fuck,” Stohler says, for at least the tenth time.
I set the brake and cut the engine, but the silence after that is almost worse. I’m still clinging to her hand, and my breathing is so shallow that I’m worried I won’t be able to get enough air into my lungs to say, “We need… we need to call 911. Can you see where my phone went? I had it in the cupholder, I think, but it’s—”
“Here. Hang on, I can get it,” Stohler says. She has to pretzel herself up a little bit to reach my Blackberry, which has fallen down near her feet. The screen is cracked, but the keys still work well enough for me to make the call.
Once the cops are on their way, I try to open my door, but it’s jammed. Cursing, I throw my weight against it a couple of times. All that does is make my neck hurt more. I look over at Stohler. “Can you get your door open?”
“No. I think it folded in too much at the seam during that last collision. But I can still get out, just give me a minute.” With one last wild-eyed look around the still deserted intersection, she unbuckles her seatbelt and slithers out through her open window. She looks a little unsteady on her feet, and I find myself hoping that they might dispatch an ambulance, too.
Getting me out of the car takes a little more work. I’m a hell of a lot bigger than Stohler, and my car is… or, was, I guess, pretty fuckin’ small. By the time I manage to wriggle my way out through the driver’s side window, I can hear sirens in the distance.
My Ferrari is a mangled wreck. My neck is killing me. My friend is bleeding from the head. I have almost convinced myself that things could not possibly get any worse when the inside of my car is illuminated by a new message arriving on the cracked screen of my phone. I don’t recognize the number—I’d bet anything it’s a burner phone—but I don’t have to recognize it. As soon as I read it, I know who it’s from.
A car for a car, babe. I thought you’d learned not to piss me off.