Some strange, animalistic noise is torn from my throat, a sort of growling whimper I didn’t even know I was capable of making. I stumble forward a few steps, but my legs are shaking so much that I end up on my knees and have to crawl the last two or three feet. “Garen?” I try to whisper, but no sound comes out. I try again, and now, almost too loudly, “Garen! Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I scramble in my pockets for my cell phone, but my vision keeps going in and out of focus too much for me to actually identify the “nine” and “one” keys. Whatever, they’re just the opposite corners, right?
“Shut up, please.”
My head snaps back up, just in time to see Garen’s head roll to the side. Even though he’s facing me now, I can’t make out his eyes under all the puffy, bloody skin.
“Garen! Oh my god, I-I can’t believe, I’m so sorry, I should—”
“Shut up,” he groans again. He sounds like he’s speaking around a mouthful of cotton balls. “Fuck, you’re so annoying. Why are you speaking, why is there any noise right now? This shit is worse than a hangover.”
“Do you have a concussion?” I ask.
“I don’t know. My brain just hurts so fucking bad, man. He kicked me in the head like… I don’t know. Twice? Maybe three times?”
I’m going to vomit, oh God, I’m going to vomit. “S-So how long have you been like this? Did it happen right after I left?”
He gives his head an almost imperceptible shake, wincing at even that tiny movement. When he coughs a few seconds later, a light spray of blood comes out of his mouth. Fuck, he looks like an extra in Fight Club. “It wasn’t… I left. After you went to prom, I left, and I was out, and I got mugged. Some guy, a big guy, he—”
“Don’t lie to me!” Am I actually screaming as loudly as I think I am? “Don’t fucking lie to me about this, because I don’t believe you. I didn’t believe you before, and now, when you’re like this, you can’t expect me to actually be that stupid.”
I am fairly certain that Garen is fixing me with a glare, but I still can’t tell. Does it count as a glare if his eyes are swollen shut? Eventually, he gives a small nod. “Fine. Fine, yeah, it happened right after you left. I came up, and it happened, and he left. I don’t, I mean, my bones aren’t broken. At least, I don’t think so. So I’ve just been lying here, I guess. Figured eventually someone would come home and maybe get me some peroxide and bandaids. Some Neosporin or something.”
“Bullshit,” I say harshly. “I’m calling a fucking ambulance.”
“No!” he exclaims, finally sitting up in one sharp movement. He hisses in pain, and I let him grab the front of my shirt to stabilize himself. God, even his knuckles are all torn up. “No, Travis, you can’t call anyone. You have to wait, we have to work out our stories.”
This had better be a joke. I stare at him in disbelief, but he seems to actually mean what he’s saying. “Yeah, our story is that you’ve been dating a complete fucking monster, and he just beat you within an inch of your life.”
“You can’t tell them that!”
“You’re sick,” I say, standing on shaky legs and backing towards the door. “You’re so unbelievably fucked up. I’m calling an ambulance right now, and while you’re there, I’m going to tell them to check you into a psych ward, because you’ve lost it if you think I’m going to—”
Garen shakes his head again. “If you tell them the truth, I’ll tell them it was your fault he did it. I’ll tell everyone you threatened him, you goaded him into it, and it’s all your fault. And I’ll tell them you’ve known it was going on this whole time, that you’ve known since Christmas that Dave was abusive. I’ll tell them all you’ve been covering for me ‘cause you didn’t care if I got beat up. It’s not like you’ll get arrested, but your mom and your sister will never look at you the same way again. My dad will hate you for the rest of your life. It’s not like you’d deny it, anyway. Do you really think you could cover your ass at my expense, even under the best of circumstances?”
I freeze just inside the door, feeling like he has stabbed me in the stomach. “That’s how it’s going to be? You’re going to blackmail me into covering for you?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” he murmurs. “My dad can’t know about this, alright? So you’re going to lie for me.”
Slowly, I lean back against the door frame, debating the pros and cons of this particular catastrophe. If I tell Bill the truth, Garen might lie anyway and say I’m just making it up. Even if he tells the truth, he’s right; everyone will be furious with me for covering for him this long. But if I lie for him… what’s next? Will I come home a week from now to find him just like this again? Will I come home in a month and find him dead? Just thinking that thought makes my stomach churn.
“Fine,” I say after a few moments. “We’ll work out a story. But that’s it. And I don’t just mean ‘no more lying after this.’ I mean ‘no more David.’ You can’t see him, you can’t call him, you can’t text him, you can’t do anything. If you ever make contact with him again, I’ll tell your dad everything, and then I’ll go to the police and have him arrested for assault. Those are my terms. Take it or leave it.”
I can’t tell if he’s glaring at me, but his tone sure as hell seems to imply it as he says, “Fine. Deal. Now get me a change of clothes. Jeans and a t-shirt, please.”
“What for?” I ask, even as I cross the room to his bureau and fish around in it for fresh clothes.
“We’re going with the mugging story; I was out, I got mugged, I came back home, you found me. And if I were actually out of the house, I’d be dressed,” he replies, swinging his legs gingerly off the bed and shifting shakily to his feet. He can barely even stand, let alone change his clothes. Gritting my teeth together, I step forward and shake out the shirt, helping him carefully feed his arms into the sleeve holes.
When I reach for the drawstring on his sweatpants, he snickers. “It’s probably a good thing that I’m in too much pain right now to actually think like myself, because otherwise I’d probably be getting hard right now.”
“Seriously, Garen? Seriously, you’re thinking about getting a boner? Right now?”
“Yeah, well, I’m not getting one, am I? So shut up. Though if you’re disappointed, I can see if I can will one into existence. You know, by picturing your boyfriend’s dick-sucking lips or something.”
It takes every ounce of my willpower not to put a hand right on his bloody, bruised chest and shove him as hard as I can. “Don’t talk about Ben like that.”
“Or I could picture the face you make right before you come, which is probably the sexiest thing anyone’s ever seen,” he continues conversationally as he pulls his jeans on. He pauses to steady himself while they sit low on his hips, and I reach out to button and zip them up.
“Interesting. Because a few weeks ago, all you could talk about was how I’m incredibly bad in bed,” I say. He coughs.
“Yeah… that was a lie, I assume you now know. I’m—”
“It’s cool, I’m over it. And can we just focus on the issue at hand, please?” I snap. “L-Look, I don’t understand how you expect everyone to believe you got mugged. This is fucking Lakewood, Connecticut. Nobody gets mugged in Lakewood. There are like, five thousand people in this town.”
“We won’t say I was in Lakewood. We’ll say… I was going to New York to see James, he’s still living there for another week or two before he heads back to Georgia. So, after you and your sister left, I drove to one of the train stations. New Haven, maybe? Bridgeport? It doesn’t matter—”
“It does matter. They’re going to ask, so you have to have your story straight!” I hiss.
“Fine, New Haven! I went to New Haven! It’s closer, it’s more believable. So, I went to the train station, and I went into the parking garage—”
I shake my head. “No, no, you can’t say you were in the garage. You’d have some type of parking stub or something.”
“I’ll say I had the stub, but I dropped it, okay?” Garen says, and I nod. “Alright, I parked in the garage, I got out of my car, and I got jumped by a guy. Fuck it, make it two guys. I got jumped by two guys, who weren’t armed, but were big.”
“You need to come up with a description of them,” I order.
“I don’t fucking know! Two white guys, kinda shady looking, wearing like, hats or something so I couldn’t see their hair color. So, they beat the shit out of me, they took everything I had.”
I cross the room to his desk and pick up his wallet, rifling through it. “You’ve got like sixty bucks here, a debit card, your license, your Patton ID, and your Lakewood ID. They wouldn’t bother taking the school IDs, right? You can leave those, but they’d take your money and your debit card. Maybe your license?”
Without me to lean on, Garen wobbles a little, and slumps against his bureau. “Yeah, I guess. Take it. Like, really take it. I know my dad, he’ll think I’m lying and he’ll search my room. If he finds any of this shit, he’ll know it’s all made up. So take my license and my card, just hide them somewhere in your room where nobody will find them. I’ll get rid of them eventually, because Dad’ll probably want to take me to go get new ones soon enough.”
I dart across the hall into my own bedroom and shove the two pieces of plastic under my mattress. When I return, Garen looks as if he’s about to pass out. “Can I please call the ambulance now?” I beg. “You’re going to fucking die. Look how much blood you’ve lost already.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Garen says, twisting to survey the wreckage on his bed. “I guess that’d make sense, though. If I came home and got right into bed?”
“I don’t care about the cover story anymore, Garen! I’m worried about you. Look, let me call nine-one-one, then we can figure out the rest,” I say. He scowls, but says nothing, so I pull my phone out once more and dial. After a few seconds, someone picks up.
“Nine-one-one, please state your emergency.”
“Yeah, my stepbrother’s been beaten up, he got mugged. He’s home now, but he’s hurt really badly, and he’s lost a lot of blood already.”
“Can you please tell me where your brother is right now?”
I give her my address, and she tells me that an ambulance is on its way. I thank her, and she asks my name. When I tell her, she starts quizzing me. “Travis, is your stepbrother conscious? Is he breathing? Does he know where he is?” I answer each of her questions, and once she has responded to each of my answers, she asks me to stay on the line with her. When I mouth this to Garen, he begins to shift in place, suddenly alarmed. I blink at him, and he eventually grabs a pen from his desk drawer and scrawls on the back of a receipt, there’s no blood in my car, we need to get outside now and set something up or no one will believe it. I shake my head furiously and crumple up the paper. No way am I carting him down those stairs with the operator still asking me about how he’s doing. That’s insane.
However, he seems determined to do it with or without my help. When he stumbles towards the bedroom door, I hook an arm around his waist, still cradling the phone between my ear and my shoulder, and we slowly make our way downstairs. The street outside is completely deserted, which is good; no nosy neighbors peer over their fences in shock when Garen climbs into the driver’s seat of his car, presses his palms to his still-bleeding face, and then runs them over the steering wheel. God, it must be killing him to have to mess up his perfect car like this. When he reaches up to dot some blood on his seatbelt, a flash of silver on his finger catches my eye. Without bothering to say anything else to the emergency operator, I snap the phone shut.
“Garen,” I say sharply, “give me the ring.”
He flinches. “What?”
“The ring, my class ring. You’re still wearing it. If you were mugged, they’d take it and pawn it. But if you give it to me, I can go clean the blood off it and just put it on. It’s mine, anyway,” I say. He seems to mull it over for much longer than necessary, and I have to wonder if keeping the ring is really important enough to him to risk blowing the story. Eventually, though, he pulls it off over his scraped knuckles and hands it to me. I take a step towards the house, but he quickly reaches for his own neck.
“Wait. There’s more,” he says. He finally manages to open the clasp of a chain I hadn’t realized he was wearing, and drops it onto my palm. It’s a small golden Star of David hanging on a very long chain. “It was my grandfather’s. He bought it after he got out of Dachau. Take this, too.”
I don’t have time to consider the significance of this object in my hand. I clench my fist around both pieces of jewelry and help him out of the car and over to the front steps. I mutter, “I’ll be right back,” and duck back into the house. I can already hear a siren coming closer and closer, so I just dart into the kitchen, rinse the blood off the jewelry, and slide the ring on. When the red and blue ambulance lights start flashing through the front windows, I sprint back outside, slipping the chain over my head and tucking the Star of David under my shirt.
Garen is lying sprawled out on the porch, and two paramedics are leaning over him, asking him questions and checking his injuries over. They end up strapping him down onto a gurney and loading him into the back of the ambulance. I watch from the driveway. As the doors start to close, Garen twists to look at me with a panicked expression on his face. “Aren’t you coming with me?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I need to call Bill. He’ll probably go straight to the hospital, but Bree’ll be home soon, and I can have her bring me. I’ll see you later.”
As the doors swing shut, he locks eyes with me and mouths, I still love you. I look away quickly, not moving again until the ambulance has raced off down the street.
“Shut up, please.”
My head snaps back up, just in time to see Garen’s head roll to the side. Even though he’s facing me now, I can’t make out his eyes under all the puffy, bloody skin.
“Garen! Oh my god, I-I can’t believe, I’m so sorry, I should—”
“Shut up,” he groans again. He sounds like he’s speaking around a mouthful of cotton balls. “Fuck, you’re so annoying. Why are you speaking, why is there any noise right now? This shit is worse than a hangover.”
“Do you have a concussion?” I ask.
“I don’t know. My brain just hurts so fucking bad, man. He kicked me in the head like… I don’t know. Twice? Maybe three times?”
I’m going to vomit, oh God, I’m going to vomit. “S-So how long have you been like this? Did it happen right after I left?”
He gives his head an almost imperceptible shake, wincing at even that tiny movement. When he coughs a few seconds later, a light spray of blood comes out of his mouth. Fuck, he looks like an extra in Fight Club. “It wasn’t… I left. After you went to prom, I left, and I was out, and I got mugged. Some guy, a big guy, he—”
“Don’t lie to me!” Am I actually screaming as loudly as I think I am? “Don’t fucking lie to me about this, because I don’t believe you. I didn’t believe you before, and now, when you’re like this, you can’t expect me to actually be that stupid.”
I am fairly certain that Garen is fixing me with a glare, but I still can’t tell. Does it count as a glare if his eyes are swollen shut? Eventually, he gives a small nod. “Fine. Fine, yeah, it happened right after you left. I came up, and it happened, and he left. I don’t, I mean, my bones aren’t broken. At least, I don’t think so. So I’ve just been lying here, I guess. Figured eventually someone would come home and maybe get me some peroxide and bandaids. Some Neosporin or something.”
“Bullshit,” I say harshly. “I’m calling a fucking ambulance.”
“No!” he exclaims, finally sitting up in one sharp movement. He hisses in pain, and I let him grab the front of my shirt to stabilize himself. God, even his knuckles are all torn up. “No, Travis, you can’t call anyone. You have to wait, we have to work out our stories.”
This had better be a joke. I stare at him in disbelief, but he seems to actually mean what he’s saying. “Yeah, our story is that you’ve been dating a complete fucking monster, and he just beat you within an inch of your life.”
“You can’t tell them that!”
“You’re sick,” I say, standing on shaky legs and backing towards the door. “You’re so unbelievably fucked up. I’m calling an ambulance right now, and while you’re there, I’m going to tell them to check you into a psych ward, because you’ve lost it if you think I’m going to—”
Garen shakes his head again. “If you tell them the truth, I’ll tell them it was your fault he did it. I’ll tell everyone you threatened him, you goaded him into it, and it’s all your fault. And I’ll tell them you’ve known it was going on this whole time, that you’ve known since Christmas that Dave was abusive. I’ll tell them all you’ve been covering for me ‘cause you didn’t care if I got beat up. It’s not like you’ll get arrested, but your mom and your sister will never look at you the same way again. My dad will hate you for the rest of your life. It’s not like you’d deny it, anyway. Do you really think you could cover your ass at my expense, even under the best of circumstances?”
I freeze just inside the door, feeling like he has stabbed me in the stomach. “That’s how it’s going to be? You’re going to blackmail me into covering for you?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” he murmurs. “My dad can’t know about this, alright? So you’re going to lie for me.”
Slowly, I lean back against the door frame, debating the pros and cons of this particular catastrophe. If I tell Bill the truth, Garen might lie anyway and say I’m just making it up. Even if he tells the truth, he’s right; everyone will be furious with me for covering for him this long. But if I lie for him… what’s next? Will I come home a week from now to find him just like this again? Will I come home in a month and find him dead? Just thinking that thought makes my stomach churn.
“Fine,” I say after a few moments. “We’ll work out a story. But that’s it. And I don’t just mean ‘no more lying after this.’ I mean ‘no more David.’ You can’t see him, you can’t call him, you can’t text him, you can’t do anything. If you ever make contact with him again, I’ll tell your dad everything, and then I’ll go to the police and have him arrested for assault. Those are my terms. Take it or leave it.”
I can’t tell if he’s glaring at me, but his tone sure as hell seems to imply it as he says, “Fine. Deal. Now get me a change of clothes. Jeans and a t-shirt, please.”
“What for?” I ask, even as I cross the room to his bureau and fish around in it for fresh clothes.
“We’re going with the mugging story; I was out, I got mugged, I came back home, you found me. And if I were actually out of the house, I’d be dressed,” he replies, swinging his legs gingerly off the bed and shifting shakily to his feet. He can barely even stand, let alone change his clothes. Gritting my teeth together, I step forward and shake out the shirt, helping him carefully feed his arms into the sleeve holes.
When I reach for the drawstring on his sweatpants, he snickers. “It’s probably a good thing that I’m in too much pain right now to actually think like myself, because otherwise I’d probably be getting hard right now.”
“Seriously, Garen? Seriously, you’re thinking about getting a boner? Right now?”
“Yeah, well, I’m not getting one, am I? So shut up. Though if you’re disappointed, I can see if I can will one into existence. You know, by picturing your boyfriend’s dick-sucking lips or something.”
It takes every ounce of my willpower not to put a hand right on his bloody, bruised chest and shove him as hard as I can. “Don’t talk about Ben like that.”
“Or I could picture the face you make right before you come, which is probably the sexiest thing anyone’s ever seen,” he continues conversationally as he pulls his jeans on. He pauses to steady himself while they sit low on his hips, and I reach out to button and zip them up.
“Interesting. Because a few weeks ago, all you could talk about was how I’m incredibly bad in bed,” I say. He coughs.
“Yeah… that was a lie, I assume you now know. I’m—”
“It’s cool, I’m over it. And can we just focus on the issue at hand, please?” I snap. “L-Look, I don’t understand how you expect everyone to believe you got mugged. This is fucking Lakewood, Connecticut. Nobody gets mugged in Lakewood. There are like, five thousand people in this town.”
“We won’t say I was in Lakewood. We’ll say… I was going to New York to see James, he’s still living there for another week or two before he heads back to Georgia. So, after you and your sister left, I drove to one of the train stations. New Haven, maybe? Bridgeport? It doesn’t matter—”
“It does matter. They’re going to ask, so you have to have your story straight!” I hiss.
“Fine, New Haven! I went to New Haven! It’s closer, it’s more believable. So, I went to the train station, and I went into the parking garage—”
I shake my head. “No, no, you can’t say you were in the garage. You’d have some type of parking stub or something.”
“I’ll say I had the stub, but I dropped it, okay?” Garen says, and I nod. “Alright, I parked in the garage, I got out of my car, and I got jumped by a guy. Fuck it, make it two guys. I got jumped by two guys, who weren’t armed, but were big.”
“You need to come up with a description of them,” I order.
“I don’t fucking know! Two white guys, kinda shady looking, wearing like, hats or something so I couldn’t see their hair color. So, they beat the shit out of me, they took everything I had.”
I cross the room to his desk and pick up his wallet, rifling through it. “You’ve got like sixty bucks here, a debit card, your license, your Patton ID, and your Lakewood ID. They wouldn’t bother taking the school IDs, right? You can leave those, but they’d take your money and your debit card. Maybe your license?”
Without me to lean on, Garen wobbles a little, and slumps against his bureau. “Yeah, I guess. Take it. Like, really take it. I know my dad, he’ll think I’m lying and he’ll search my room. If he finds any of this shit, he’ll know it’s all made up. So take my license and my card, just hide them somewhere in your room where nobody will find them. I’ll get rid of them eventually, because Dad’ll probably want to take me to go get new ones soon enough.”
I dart across the hall into my own bedroom and shove the two pieces of plastic under my mattress. When I return, Garen looks as if he’s about to pass out. “Can I please call the ambulance now?” I beg. “You’re going to fucking die. Look how much blood you’ve lost already.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Garen says, twisting to survey the wreckage on his bed. “I guess that’d make sense, though. If I came home and got right into bed?”
“I don’t care about the cover story anymore, Garen! I’m worried about you. Look, let me call nine-one-one, then we can figure out the rest,” I say. He scowls, but says nothing, so I pull my phone out once more and dial. After a few seconds, someone picks up.
“Nine-one-one, please state your emergency.”
“Yeah, my stepbrother’s been beaten up, he got mugged. He’s home now, but he’s hurt really badly, and he’s lost a lot of blood already.”
“Can you please tell me where your brother is right now?”
I give her my address, and she tells me that an ambulance is on its way. I thank her, and she asks my name. When I tell her, she starts quizzing me. “Travis, is your stepbrother conscious? Is he breathing? Does he know where he is?” I answer each of her questions, and once she has responded to each of my answers, she asks me to stay on the line with her. When I mouth this to Garen, he begins to shift in place, suddenly alarmed. I blink at him, and he eventually grabs a pen from his desk drawer and scrawls on the back of a receipt, there’s no blood in my car, we need to get outside now and set something up or no one will believe it. I shake my head furiously and crumple up the paper. No way am I carting him down those stairs with the operator still asking me about how he’s doing. That’s insane.
However, he seems determined to do it with or without my help. When he stumbles towards the bedroom door, I hook an arm around his waist, still cradling the phone between my ear and my shoulder, and we slowly make our way downstairs. The street outside is completely deserted, which is good; no nosy neighbors peer over their fences in shock when Garen climbs into the driver’s seat of his car, presses his palms to his still-bleeding face, and then runs them over the steering wheel. God, it must be killing him to have to mess up his perfect car like this. When he reaches up to dot some blood on his seatbelt, a flash of silver on his finger catches my eye. Without bothering to say anything else to the emergency operator, I snap the phone shut.
“Garen,” I say sharply, “give me the ring.”
He flinches. “What?”
“The ring, my class ring. You’re still wearing it. If you were mugged, they’d take it and pawn it. But if you give it to me, I can go clean the blood off it and just put it on. It’s mine, anyway,” I say. He seems to mull it over for much longer than necessary, and I have to wonder if keeping the ring is really important enough to him to risk blowing the story. Eventually, though, he pulls it off over his scraped knuckles and hands it to me. I take a step towards the house, but he quickly reaches for his own neck.
“Wait. There’s more,” he says. He finally manages to open the clasp of a chain I hadn’t realized he was wearing, and drops it onto my palm. It’s a small golden Star of David hanging on a very long chain. “It was my grandfather’s. He bought it after he got out of Dachau. Take this, too.”
I don’t have time to consider the significance of this object in my hand. I clench my fist around both pieces of jewelry and help him out of the car and over to the front steps. I mutter, “I’ll be right back,” and duck back into the house. I can already hear a siren coming closer and closer, so I just dart into the kitchen, rinse the blood off the jewelry, and slide the ring on. When the red and blue ambulance lights start flashing through the front windows, I sprint back outside, slipping the chain over my head and tucking the Star of David under my shirt.
Garen is lying sprawled out on the porch, and two paramedics are leaning over him, asking him questions and checking his injuries over. They end up strapping him down onto a gurney and loading him into the back of the ambulance. I watch from the driveway. As the doors start to close, Garen twists to look at me with a panicked expression on his face. “Aren’t you coming with me?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I need to call Bill. He’ll probably go straight to the hospital, but Bree’ll be home soon, and I can have her bring me. I’ll see you later.”
As the doors swing shut, he locks eyes with me and mouths, I still love you. I look away quickly, not moving again until the ambulance has raced off down the street.