Author's Note: This chapter contains underage drinking, graphic sexual content, mentions of past sexual assault, purging, victim-blaming (mostly self-imposed and somewhat based in sexism), and biphobia.
"We are not punished for our sins, but by them." -Elbert Hubbard
The flask is emptied and refilled before I even walk into the building. For good measure, I pour a generous amount of the rum into an empty water bottle I find in my backseat, and tuck that into my backpack. I manage to make it through half of the morning announcements during homeroom before I ask permission to run out to my locker—I suck down another half of the flask right there in the hallway, because no one’s around, and I’m not sure I’d care, even if someone was here. The process repeats during AP Government, and by the time second period starts, I’m shitfaced. I actually have to leave the room at one point to take a ten-minute trip to the water fountain because I’m drunk enough to giggle at some term definition that’s not even remotely funny.
I sober up a little bit, metaphorically speaking, for trial law, but only because the idea of having Travis sit down next to me draws me out of my stupor. It isn’t as if I’ve paid attention during any of the seven previous sessions of this class, but I still take out my notebook and pen so that I can sit in silence and pretend I’m not just killing ten months until graduation.
My plan is mildly fucked when Mr. Esteves announces, “I’m sure you’ll all be absolutely thrilled to hear that you’ll be getting your mock trial team assignments today.” He makes a vague celebratory gesture that none of us return. “Alright. I briefly explained the mock trial process on your first day, but I’m sure that a lot of you have forgotten since then. So, can I get a volunteer to remind us all? Anyone? How ‘bout you, Anderson?”
“I respect you way too much to lie to you, sir, so let me take this moment to admit that I wasn’t paying attention at all when you explained it,” I say, not lifting neither my gaze nor my pen from my notebook. The comment earns me a few snickers from my classmates, even though—last time I checked—they all hate me. In fairness to myself, though, this is how I made almost all of my friends at Patton; a penchant for inappropriate humor and drunken ramblings.
“And are you paying attention now?” Mr. Esteves asks.
“Uh, barely.”
I don’t realize he’s in front of my desk until he reaches down to tap the edge of my paper. “Is that a kangaroo you’re drawing there?”
“Nah, it’s a wallaby. Kangaroos have way longer legs than wallabies, ‘cause they need to be able to hop on open terrain, not in forests and shit. Wallabies live in forests. And have short legs.” I twist around in my seat to face Travis, who has been glaring at the back of my head and steadily jamming the cap of his pen between my shoulder blades in what I can only assume is an attempt to silence me. “McCall, I swear to god, if you don’t stop trying to shut me up by stabbing me in the spine with your pen, it is going to join my dick on the list of ‘things that have been shoved up your ass.’”
“Anderson!” Mr. Esteves barks over the shocked and delighted noises my classmates are making.
Travis is staring at me, red-faced and open mouthed. Unable to stop myself from getting in one last dig, I reach out, hook a finger under his chin, and says, “You look like an idiot like that. Close your mouth; I’ll tell you when I need it open again.”
“Anderson, turn around and shut up. I don’t want you to say another word for the rest of this class. Or after the class, during the minute it will take me to write up your detention slips for the rest of this week. Your comments are completely inappropriate, and the only reason I’m not sending you to the main office for the rest of the day is because your mock trial scores make up a large portion of your grade, so you need to hear this. Understood?”
I straighten up in my seat and give him my best former-military-school-brat salute. He rolls his eyes, but continues with the explanation of the trial process—he’ll be passing out summaries and testimonies of a fictional trial we’re supposed to be studying. We’ll all be divided into four groups of six, with two teams arguing for the prosecution, two for the defense. On each team, three people will be acting as attorneys, three will be acting as witnesses, but it’s everyone’s job to prepare their own statements and take this as seriously as possible, blah blah blah.
In the end, I’m assigned to one of the prosecuting teams as a witness, along with five randoms I’ve never met. I glance around, expecting them to be annoyed to have to work with me, but I’m surprised to find that some of them actually look… what, pleased? Tentatively hopeful, at least. It takes me until the end of class to realize that they’re probably hoping that my previously demonstrated ability to make a scene and keep attention on myself will work out in our team’s favor.
After class, while I’m hanging around waiting for Mr. Esteves to finish writing up my four detention slips, Travis bolts from the room, still avoiding my eyes. Whatever. Like I even fucking want him to look at me, after what I had to see him doing yesterday with Joss. Like I ever want to speak to him again.
I skip lunch to sneak out to my car and drink some more—security around this building is seriously lacking—but discover that afternoon that Travis is still studiously ignoring me throughout English. Good. The only thing that means to me is that I don’t have to worry about trying to hide how drunk I am. When the last bell rings that afternoon, I shuffle off to detention with Mr. Esteves, which just involves a lot of me sitting at my desk and trying to look like I’m disappointed in myself. He eventually dismisses me around three o’clock, and that’s when I realize I’ve backed myself into a bit of a corner. Rehearsal doesn’t start until seven, but I can’t exactly drive anywhere before that. I’m not drunk—more like buzzed, but still not sober enough that I want to go out on the road. Instead, I make my way out to the parking lot, like everyone else, then climb into my backseat and spend the next four hours alternately napping and drinking rum. It’s one of the worst and best afternoons I’ve had in a while. When I wake up again, sometime around six forty-five, my head is starting to pound. I force myself to finish off what’s left in a too-warm water bottle I find under the passenger seat before I allow myself to have some more of the rum.
It still burns going down, which I’m grateful for. I don’t want this—drinking, the rum, the relapse, any of it—to stop hurting. I don’t know what I’ll do if I let it stop hurting too soon.
I refill my flask, tuck it away in my jacket, and stagger in the general direction of rehearsal. Though I’m drunk as hell, I have the sense to stop off at a bathroom, splash some cold water on my face, chew some gum so I don’t reek of booze, and try not to look too hammered when I finally step into the auditorium. There are less people than I expect there to be—oh, right. This is only half a rehearsal, isn’t it? Still, there’s a little collection of people milling around. Travis is one of them. So is Joss Pryce.
God. If ever I were to suddenly turn into someone who throws up after drinking too much, this would probably be that moment. It’s not, though. Glaring around at everyone, I make my way up the aisle towards the stage. Travis must finally be over his embarrassment at what I said during trial law, because he glances up and actually has the balls to fucking smirk at me as he says, “Hey, Garen. Done being a bitch to me yet?”
“Don’t talk to me, slut.” The words fall out of my mouth before I can even process them, but I’m not sorry for them. He may be over it, but I’m not.
There’s a half-second of hurt on Travis’ face—I still don’t feel guilty—followed by irritation. “What the hell is your problem?”
“My problem is with you,” I say shortly. “And if you’re too stupid to figure out why, that’s not my issue.”
“Is everything alright?” says an uncertain voice behind me. I rock back on my heels to turn around—almost stumble, but steady myself with a hand to the stage, whatever—and find Nate watching me with worried eyes.
Eyes like that put me in more detentions, and suspension, and rehabilitation. Everyone who worries about me always ends up trying to save me, or fix me, and I can’t do that right now. I can’t be fixed, and I need to make him too distracted to try. Smiling as brightly as I can, I take a few steps forward to invade his personal space. He’s already blushing when I reach up to card my fingers through his hair—I can tell it takes everything in him not to bat my hand away, he’s so gay about his hair—and he stops breathing when I duck down a few inches to press a kiss to his temple. I drop my voice a half-octave to murmur, “Everything’s perfect, Nate. Why do you ask?”
“No, I, um—” He pauses, takes a deep breath—even though I’m still standing too close—and tries again, “I just wanted to make sure. It sounded like you and Travis were fighting.”
I fake a laugh as convincingly as I can, then brush my thumb over his lower lip. “It’s cute that you were worried.” He tries to smile. I step back. “So, what song are we starting with?”
“Well, first you should warm up. You know, with some runs or something? And then you can pick whatever song you want. That’s how we generally do our music rehearsals. Everybody sings one song of their choosing—it can be something modern, something old-school, it doesn’t have to be from the play—so that we can loosen up, and then we start work on the songs from the play.”
I cock my head to the side. “Do you want me to sing a capella? Or should I grab my guitar?”
Nate lights up like the world’s gayest Christmas tree. “Actually, neither! Riley—that’s the head of our tech crew—compiled a database of instrumental versions of almost every song you can imagine. It’s all hooked up to the main sound system, so all you have to do is search it on the laptop in the sound booth, and if it’s there, you can cue it up and sing along.”
“Cool,” I say, because it sort of is. I pause until he blushes and points me in the direction of the sound booth. Once I’m up there, I realize there’s already someone sitting at the sound board—some guy wearing a backwards baseball cap, like this is a frat party. Or, you know, the nineties. I blink at him. He blinks back. I say, “I’m Garen.”
He snorts. “Kinda know who you are, man. Pretty sure everyone does. I’m Riley, I’m in charge of tech. So, what song do you want?”
“Some angsty alt-rock or pop-punk song that’ll annoy my ex-boyfriend,” I say.
Another snort, but he scrolls through his laptop a bit and says, “What are your thoughts on Sugarcult?”
“What are your thoughts on being awesome? ‘Cause my thoughts are that you’re great at it.”
He rolls his eyes, gestures back towards the stage and says, “Whenever you’re ready.”
I trudge back down to the stage and take my place behind the microphone onstage. Nate is set up in the front row, clutching his clipboard like he’s really going to take notes on my performance. Most of the other people are seated near him. Travis is in the second row back, sitting next to Joss. She leans in to whisper something in his ear, and he allows her a quick smile. My blood fucking boils. I jerk my head at the sound booth, and Riley cues up the song.
I sober up a little bit, metaphorically speaking, for trial law, but only because the idea of having Travis sit down next to me draws me out of my stupor. It isn’t as if I’ve paid attention during any of the seven previous sessions of this class, but I still take out my notebook and pen so that I can sit in silence and pretend I’m not just killing ten months until graduation.
My plan is mildly fucked when Mr. Esteves announces, “I’m sure you’ll all be absolutely thrilled to hear that you’ll be getting your mock trial team assignments today.” He makes a vague celebratory gesture that none of us return. “Alright. I briefly explained the mock trial process on your first day, but I’m sure that a lot of you have forgotten since then. So, can I get a volunteer to remind us all? Anyone? How ‘bout you, Anderson?”
“I respect you way too much to lie to you, sir, so let me take this moment to admit that I wasn’t paying attention at all when you explained it,” I say, not lifting neither my gaze nor my pen from my notebook. The comment earns me a few snickers from my classmates, even though—last time I checked—they all hate me. In fairness to myself, though, this is how I made almost all of my friends at Patton; a penchant for inappropriate humor and drunken ramblings.
“And are you paying attention now?” Mr. Esteves asks.
“Uh, barely.”
I don’t realize he’s in front of my desk until he reaches down to tap the edge of my paper. “Is that a kangaroo you’re drawing there?”
“Nah, it’s a wallaby. Kangaroos have way longer legs than wallabies, ‘cause they need to be able to hop on open terrain, not in forests and shit. Wallabies live in forests. And have short legs.” I twist around in my seat to face Travis, who has been glaring at the back of my head and steadily jamming the cap of his pen between my shoulder blades in what I can only assume is an attempt to silence me. “McCall, I swear to god, if you don’t stop trying to shut me up by stabbing me in the spine with your pen, it is going to join my dick on the list of ‘things that have been shoved up your ass.’”
“Anderson!” Mr. Esteves barks over the shocked and delighted noises my classmates are making.
Travis is staring at me, red-faced and open mouthed. Unable to stop myself from getting in one last dig, I reach out, hook a finger under his chin, and says, “You look like an idiot like that. Close your mouth; I’ll tell you when I need it open again.”
“Anderson, turn around and shut up. I don’t want you to say another word for the rest of this class. Or after the class, during the minute it will take me to write up your detention slips for the rest of this week. Your comments are completely inappropriate, and the only reason I’m not sending you to the main office for the rest of the day is because your mock trial scores make up a large portion of your grade, so you need to hear this. Understood?”
I straighten up in my seat and give him my best former-military-school-brat salute. He rolls his eyes, but continues with the explanation of the trial process—he’ll be passing out summaries and testimonies of a fictional trial we’re supposed to be studying. We’ll all be divided into four groups of six, with two teams arguing for the prosecution, two for the defense. On each team, three people will be acting as attorneys, three will be acting as witnesses, but it’s everyone’s job to prepare their own statements and take this as seriously as possible, blah blah blah.
In the end, I’m assigned to one of the prosecuting teams as a witness, along with five randoms I’ve never met. I glance around, expecting them to be annoyed to have to work with me, but I’m surprised to find that some of them actually look… what, pleased? Tentatively hopeful, at least. It takes me until the end of class to realize that they’re probably hoping that my previously demonstrated ability to make a scene and keep attention on myself will work out in our team’s favor.
After class, while I’m hanging around waiting for Mr. Esteves to finish writing up my four detention slips, Travis bolts from the room, still avoiding my eyes. Whatever. Like I even fucking want him to look at me, after what I had to see him doing yesterday with Joss. Like I ever want to speak to him again.
I skip lunch to sneak out to my car and drink some more—security around this building is seriously lacking—but discover that afternoon that Travis is still studiously ignoring me throughout English. Good. The only thing that means to me is that I don’t have to worry about trying to hide how drunk I am. When the last bell rings that afternoon, I shuffle off to detention with Mr. Esteves, which just involves a lot of me sitting at my desk and trying to look like I’m disappointed in myself. He eventually dismisses me around three o’clock, and that’s when I realize I’ve backed myself into a bit of a corner. Rehearsal doesn’t start until seven, but I can’t exactly drive anywhere before that. I’m not drunk—more like buzzed, but still not sober enough that I want to go out on the road. Instead, I make my way out to the parking lot, like everyone else, then climb into my backseat and spend the next four hours alternately napping and drinking rum. It’s one of the worst and best afternoons I’ve had in a while. When I wake up again, sometime around six forty-five, my head is starting to pound. I force myself to finish off what’s left in a too-warm water bottle I find under the passenger seat before I allow myself to have some more of the rum.
It still burns going down, which I’m grateful for. I don’t want this—drinking, the rum, the relapse, any of it—to stop hurting. I don’t know what I’ll do if I let it stop hurting too soon.
I refill my flask, tuck it away in my jacket, and stagger in the general direction of rehearsal. Though I’m drunk as hell, I have the sense to stop off at a bathroom, splash some cold water on my face, chew some gum so I don’t reek of booze, and try not to look too hammered when I finally step into the auditorium. There are less people than I expect there to be—oh, right. This is only half a rehearsal, isn’t it? Still, there’s a little collection of people milling around. Travis is one of them. So is Joss Pryce.
God. If ever I were to suddenly turn into someone who throws up after drinking too much, this would probably be that moment. It’s not, though. Glaring around at everyone, I make my way up the aisle towards the stage. Travis must finally be over his embarrassment at what I said during trial law, because he glances up and actually has the balls to fucking smirk at me as he says, “Hey, Garen. Done being a bitch to me yet?”
“Don’t talk to me, slut.” The words fall out of my mouth before I can even process them, but I’m not sorry for them. He may be over it, but I’m not.
There’s a half-second of hurt on Travis’ face—I still don’t feel guilty—followed by irritation. “What the hell is your problem?”
“My problem is with you,” I say shortly. “And if you’re too stupid to figure out why, that’s not my issue.”
“Is everything alright?” says an uncertain voice behind me. I rock back on my heels to turn around—almost stumble, but steady myself with a hand to the stage, whatever—and find Nate watching me with worried eyes.
Eyes like that put me in more detentions, and suspension, and rehabilitation. Everyone who worries about me always ends up trying to save me, or fix me, and I can’t do that right now. I can’t be fixed, and I need to make him too distracted to try. Smiling as brightly as I can, I take a few steps forward to invade his personal space. He’s already blushing when I reach up to card my fingers through his hair—I can tell it takes everything in him not to bat my hand away, he’s so gay about his hair—and he stops breathing when I duck down a few inches to press a kiss to his temple. I drop my voice a half-octave to murmur, “Everything’s perfect, Nate. Why do you ask?”
“No, I, um—” He pauses, takes a deep breath—even though I’m still standing too close—and tries again, “I just wanted to make sure. It sounded like you and Travis were fighting.”
I fake a laugh as convincingly as I can, then brush my thumb over his lower lip. “It’s cute that you were worried.” He tries to smile. I step back. “So, what song are we starting with?”
“Well, first you should warm up. You know, with some runs or something? And then you can pick whatever song you want. That’s how we generally do our music rehearsals. Everybody sings one song of their choosing—it can be something modern, something old-school, it doesn’t have to be from the play—so that we can loosen up, and then we start work on the songs from the play.”
I cock my head to the side. “Do you want me to sing a capella? Or should I grab my guitar?”
Nate lights up like the world’s gayest Christmas tree. “Actually, neither! Riley—that’s the head of our tech crew—compiled a database of instrumental versions of almost every song you can imagine. It’s all hooked up to the main sound system, so all you have to do is search it on the laptop in the sound booth, and if it’s there, you can cue it up and sing along.”
“Cool,” I say, because it sort of is. I pause until he blushes and points me in the direction of the sound booth. Once I’m up there, I realize there’s already someone sitting at the sound board—some guy wearing a backwards baseball cap, like this is a frat party. Or, you know, the nineties. I blink at him. He blinks back. I say, “I’m Garen.”
He snorts. “Kinda know who you are, man. Pretty sure everyone does. I’m Riley, I’m in charge of tech. So, what song do you want?”
“Some angsty alt-rock or pop-punk song that’ll annoy my ex-boyfriend,” I say.
Another snort, but he scrolls through his laptop a bit and says, “What are your thoughts on Sugarcult?”
“What are your thoughts on being awesome? ‘Cause my thoughts are that you’re great at it.”
He rolls his eyes, gestures back towards the stage and says, “Whenever you’re ready.”
I trudge back down to the stage and take my place behind the microphone onstage. Nate is set up in the front row, clutching his clipboard like he’s really going to take notes on my performance. Most of the other people are seated near him. Travis is in the second row back, sitting next to Joss. She leans in to whisper something in his ear, and he allows her a quick smile. My blood fucking boils. I jerk my head at the sound booth, and Riley cues up the song.
It’s a good choice, and I’ll have to remember to thank him later, if I can remember any part of this day. It’s a slow enough start that I can warm up my throat a little bit before the soaring screams that I know come later. By the time I get to the chorus, even Travis can’t ignore me anymore, which is fucking fantastic, because god knows I haven’t taken my eyes off him since this song started. I do make one allowance, though; I turn ever so slightly to lock eyes with a somewhat confused-looking Joss as I sing, Pretty soon she’ll figure out, you can never get him out of your head. And then I launch into the last chorus. It’s the way that he makes you cry
It’s the way that he’s in your mind
It’s the way that he makes you fall in love
It’s the way that he makes you feel
It’s the way that he kisses you
It’s the way that he makes you fall in love
The second the lyrics have run out, before the song itself has drawn to a close, I hop off the edge of the stage and take a seat in the far end of the front row. Once there, I dig my script out of my back pocket and thumb through it, just for something to do.
“That was um, that was good,” Nate says. He must be somewhat reluctant to criticize me, because his tone is dull when he says, “Did you warm up before you sang, or did you just go right into the song?” I shake my head no, and he correctly interprets which part I’m denying. “You should make sure you do some vocal runs before you sing in the future. Especially on a song that’s that… I don’t know. Loud? You could hurt yourself. I mean, your voice sounds a little hoarse already.”
I shift around so that I’m upside-down in my chair; back to the seat, head lolling over the edge of it, thighs to the back of the chair, and knees bent over it. I say, “My voice isn’t hoarse because I don’t warm up. My voice is hoarse because I let some guy fuck my throat in a public restroom last night. Tends to aggravate the whole area a little, even for somebody as lacking as I am in the gag reflex department.”
No one really knows what to say to that. I didn’t exactly expect them to. Once enough time has passed for the moment to become sufficiently uncomfortable, Nate clears his throat and says softly, “Okay. Well. You should still rest your throat a little. Have something to drink.”
“I’m on it, boss,” I say, saluting him with one hand and extracting my flask from my jacket with the other. I’ve barely had time to raise it to my mouth—which is a process in and of itself, considering I’m still upside down—before the flask is knocked hard from my hand. I look up.
Travis is standing over me, practically vibrating with fury. “What the fuck is that?”
“That was a delicious treat for me, but it now is a stain that the janitorial staff is going to be none too pleased about,” I say, scrambling upright once more and going to retrieve the flask. A joke. That’s what I have to do—I can make this a joke, and then it will be okay. Everyone will laugh. Everything will be funny. It won’t be scary and pathetic anymore, if I can just make them laugh. But he isn’t laughing. He’s just staring at me, wide-eyed and shaking. He knows. Obviously he knows, how could he not? I swallow hard and say the first—and dumbest, most illogical—thing that comes to mind. “Stop pretending you know me.”
“I know you well enough to know that you’re completely wasted right now,” he says. I fumble my script. No one says anything. I haven’t protested, but Travis still continues, “Don’t lie to me, either, because you spent all last spring trying to convince me that you were fine, but you weren’t. Not then, and not now. I don’t understand what’s going on, why you would do this to yourself.” He waits again for a response that my tongue won’t let me give, and when he speaks next, his voice is almost desperate. “You were getting better, Garen. You’ve been so good for so long, you’ve been sober for ninety days—”
I explode, “Oh my god, Travis. You’re not my mom. You’re not my fucking boyfriend anymore, and you’re not my brother either, and you’re barely my friend, so how the fuck is this your business? If I want to have a drink, I can do that. It’s my life, not yours. So, whatever, fuck you. I’m leaving.” Leaving the building, maybe, but not the property. I’m too drunk to drive, and just sober enough to realize it. When rehearsal officially ends at nine o’clock and the cast and crew make their way out to the front parking lot, they find me hanging out in the driver’s seat of my car, dangling my feet out the window and singing along to angry girl rock from the nineties. It might be either embarrassing, or maybe funny, under other circumstances. Under these, though, it’s probably just sort of depressing.
It’s the way that he’s in your mind
It’s the way that he makes you fall in love
It’s the way that he makes you feel
It’s the way that he kisses you
It’s the way that he makes you fall in love
The second the lyrics have run out, before the song itself has drawn to a close, I hop off the edge of the stage and take a seat in the far end of the front row. Once there, I dig my script out of my back pocket and thumb through it, just for something to do.
“That was um, that was good,” Nate says. He must be somewhat reluctant to criticize me, because his tone is dull when he says, “Did you warm up before you sang, or did you just go right into the song?” I shake my head no, and he correctly interprets which part I’m denying. “You should make sure you do some vocal runs before you sing in the future. Especially on a song that’s that… I don’t know. Loud? You could hurt yourself. I mean, your voice sounds a little hoarse already.”
I shift around so that I’m upside-down in my chair; back to the seat, head lolling over the edge of it, thighs to the back of the chair, and knees bent over it. I say, “My voice isn’t hoarse because I don’t warm up. My voice is hoarse because I let some guy fuck my throat in a public restroom last night. Tends to aggravate the whole area a little, even for somebody as lacking as I am in the gag reflex department.”
No one really knows what to say to that. I didn’t exactly expect them to. Once enough time has passed for the moment to become sufficiently uncomfortable, Nate clears his throat and says softly, “Okay. Well. You should still rest your throat a little. Have something to drink.”
“I’m on it, boss,” I say, saluting him with one hand and extracting my flask from my jacket with the other. I’ve barely had time to raise it to my mouth—which is a process in and of itself, considering I’m still upside down—before the flask is knocked hard from my hand. I look up.
Travis is standing over me, practically vibrating with fury. “What the fuck is that?”
“That was a delicious treat for me, but it now is a stain that the janitorial staff is going to be none too pleased about,” I say, scrambling upright once more and going to retrieve the flask. A joke. That’s what I have to do—I can make this a joke, and then it will be okay. Everyone will laugh. Everything will be funny. It won’t be scary and pathetic anymore, if I can just make them laugh. But he isn’t laughing. He’s just staring at me, wide-eyed and shaking. He knows. Obviously he knows, how could he not? I swallow hard and say the first—and dumbest, most illogical—thing that comes to mind. “Stop pretending you know me.”
“I know you well enough to know that you’re completely wasted right now,” he says. I fumble my script. No one says anything. I haven’t protested, but Travis still continues, “Don’t lie to me, either, because you spent all last spring trying to convince me that you were fine, but you weren’t. Not then, and not now. I don’t understand what’s going on, why you would do this to yourself.” He waits again for a response that my tongue won’t let me give, and when he speaks next, his voice is almost desperate. “You were getting better, Garen. You’ve been so good for so long, you’ve been sober for ninety days—”
I explode, “Oh my god, Travis. You’re not my mom. You’re not my fucking boyfriend anymore, and you’re not my brother either, and you’re barely my friend, so how the fuck is this your business? If I want to have a drink, I can do that. It’s my life, not yours. So, whatever, fuck you. I’m leaving.” Leaving the building, maybe, but not the property. I’m too drunk to drive, and just sober enough to realize it. When rehearsal officially ends at nine o’clock and the cast and crew make their way out to the front parking lot, they find me hanging out in the driver’s seat of my car, dangling my feet out the window and singing along to angry girl rock from the nineties. It might be either embarrassing, or maybe funny, under other circumstances. Under these, though, it’s probably just sort of depressing.
Someone grabs my boot and says, “What are you doing?”
“Alanis Morissette is my spirit animal. She understands my pain,” I grumble, shaking whoever it is off. I slump sideways so that my head is in the passenger’s seat and the gearshift is digging into my ribcage. When I peer up at the person who’s hovering outside the window, surprise, surprise—it’s Travis. I scowl. “Oh. It’s you. Go away.” He doesn’t move. I feel around on the floor until I find the iPod that’s hooked up to the retromodded stereo and start the song from the beginning. I point my flask at him and sing along, “I want you to know that I’m happy for you. I wish nothing but the best for you both.”
“How much have you had to drink?” he asks.
“--is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a—”
“Garen, I’m fucking talking to you.”
I drain what’s left in the flask and toss it into the backseat. The rest of the booze is around here somewhere… I dig around under the passenger seat until I surface with the bottle of 151, now halfway empty. When he reaches for it, I shrug away and crank the volume of my stereo, singing-slash-yelling, “And I’m here to remind you of the mess you left when you went away--”
“Give me the bottle,” Travis says, though he has to shout a little to be audible over the music. I stop singing long enough to take a pull from the bottle, and it burns so perfectly. He leans in the car to try to take it away from me; I plant my boot in the center of his chest to hold him at bay. That’s too much for him to abide by. He yanks open the driver’s side door—with my legs no longer supported by the window, I overbalance and tumble out of the car. Now finally within reach, Travis grabs the bottle out of my hands, turns, and pitches it towards the lawn nearby. My throat tightens. Five hundred milliliters of over-proof Puerto Rican rum, wasted on a school parking lot. But no—the bottle hits the grass with a thunk, but the earth must still be somewhat soft from Sunday night’s rain, because the glass doesn’t shatter.
“You seem very well, things look peaceful,” I keep singing, “I’m not quite as well, I thought you should know.”
Travis leans over me into the car and cuts the engine; the music shuts off abruptly enough to leave my ears ringing. He drops my keys on the floor mat and says, “Enough.”
There’s no music, and I’m not so much singing as speaking the lyrics, but I look up at him with dead eyes and finish the verse anyway. “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”
“Stand up, Garen.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Stand up right now, and talk to me like a man. You’re eighteen years old, and you’re sitting in the middle of a parking lot, drunk as shit, slurring song lyrics at me. I want you to stand up and tell me what the fuck is going on,” he orders.
Reluctantly, I move to stand up, but—oh, this is going to be so much harder than I expected it to be. I crawl back up into the driver’s seat, then use the door to pull myself out and onto my feet. The rum has all gone to my head. At the very least, it’s gone to my nerve endings, because I can barely stand. I try to steady myself, but almost topple over, and have to settle for leaning against the side of the car. I point at him—I hope I point at him, the real him, because there are at least three of him swimming in front of me right now. I hedge my bets, focus on the middle Travis, and say, “What’s going on… is that you now owe me a bottle of Bacardi. Because you’re a selfish little life-ruiner. Which, I am assuming, is also the reason why you’re wrecking Joss Pryce.”
Travis is silent for a very long, very tense moment. Then, he licks his lips and says, “I’m not ‘wrecking’ Joss. All we did was kiss. Now, first, you’re going to tell me how you know that. And then, you’re going to tell me how it’s any of your business.”
“I know because I was there, Travis!” I burst out. “You know, maybe the next time you decide to just start making out with some random girl who should be studying her lines, you might want to take a fucking look around and make sure your ex-boyfriend isn’t studying his script in the scaffolding above your head.”
He has the grace to look ashamed of himself. Good. One of us needs to start feeling some shame, and it’s sure as hell not going to be me. I start to fall over again, and he grabs me by the shoulders to steady me. It doesn’t work; I hit the ground anyway, and Travis goes to his knees to… what, keep me company on the pavement? He says something, but I’m too out of it to listen at this point. I’m vaguely aware of his hands leaving my shoulders, and then of more talking. When I manage to remember which direction is up, I blink at him—he’s now standing a few feet away, looking upset and talking into his cell phone. That is so like him, to ask for help from other people when he really needs it. What a quitter.
Since he’s no longer focused entirely on me, I crawl across the pavement to the edge of the lawn. The change of terrain does nothing for my sense of balance, and I faceplant at least once before I manage to find the bottle of rum that Travis tossed. I take a long slug from it, hoping that maybe for once, my body will do the right thing and make itself sick. That’s the problem with drinking—I never, ever get drunk to the point of throwing up. I pass out, sure, but that takes so much longer, and by the time it happens, I’ve usually already gotten alcohol poisoning. I think I might be in that stage right now. But even now, my body refuses to actually reject the booze. The only way I can make that happen is by forcing myself to do it, like I did this morning.
That’s what I’m contemplating doing when Travis finally ends his phone call—and really, where are his priorities?—and comes over to say, “Where’s all your stuff? I need to move it to my car.”
“You need to suck a dick,” I say, though my words are muffled by the fact that I’m still facedown on the grass. He sighs and walks away. Good. He should just go find Joss. I bet Joss never gets drunk in public. I bet Joss never causes a scene at play rehearsal, or drinks anything that’s seventy-five-point-five percent alcohol by volume, or listens to music sung by people who have been hurt. Because Joss, with her cute, delicate features and her dark hair and her stupid leading role in the play and her way of making Travis’ breath hitch when she kisses him… Joss is just too fucking perfect to ever do any of the screwed up shit I’ve done today.
There are hands on my arms now, hauling me to my feet. “Come on. Your backpack and guitar are in my car. I’ve got your keys. You’re coming with me, let’s get you into my car.”
I don’t protest this time. I must be fading in and out of consciousness, though, because one moment, I’m standing on the lawn, and then I’m stumbling on the sidewalk, and then I’m slumped over in the passenger’s seat of Travis’ car. Bree’s car, actually, maybe. The glass of the closed window is cool against my face, and I may actually make a noise of appreciation. Travis must mistake it for a noise of impending vomit, because he says, “If you’re going to throw up, I’d appreciate some warning so I can at least roll the window down for you.”
“I don’t throw up when I’m drunk,” I mumble. “’s a waste of alcohol, and I’d rather keep it all inside my body, where it belongs. But if you’re paranoid about it, you can pull over again, and I’ll jam a couple fingers down my throat and make myself hurl on the side of the road. Then you don’t have to worry about there being anything in my stomach.”
“Is that what you do after you drink? You make yourself vomit?” he asks. It feels like a trick question, but I don’t have the energy to lie.
I nod. “Sometimes. It’s—I did it this morning, when I woke up at um…” Fuck. What was her name? “Um. I did it this morning, so my hangover wouldn’t make me feel sick. ‘Cause last night, after I saw you and Joss, I went to New Haven, ‘cause I was gonna hang out with Alex? But then, on my way there, I found this nightclub that doesn’t card people who wanna drink. And I—” I look around, and it occurs to me that we’ve definitely left Lakewood. We’re at least one town over. I find it hard to make myself care. “I had twelve shots and a huge line of coke. And Travis? Ask me how I paid for it. Ask me what I did to get the money for the shots.”
He doesn’t ask, and I don’t tell him. I fade out, at least for a little while, until I’m suddenly aware that the car is no longer moving, and that there are people arguing right outside it. I look over at where Travis should be, in the driver’s seat, but he’s gone. Slowly, I turn my attention in the other direction, towards the noise on the sidewalk. Travis is outside, looking like he’s losing his mind. His face is flushed, and he’s maybe yelling, but he’s mostly just trying not to cry and letting himself by hugged by—oh.
Ben.
And then, I’m still in a car, and still shitfaced. The signs speeding by on the side of the highway tell me that I’m on Interstate 86, somewhere in Pennsylvania. Ben is in the driver’s seat, not saying a word as I whisper to him, “I’m never going to forgive you for this. Ben. Ben, are you listening to me? I’m never going to fucking speak to you again after today. You should have just let me go, you should have left me there. This is none of your fucking business, okay? It’s my life, I can do whatever I want to do. If I want to go to New York, I can go to fucking New York. If I want to go to Cleveland, I can fucking well go to Cleveland. If I want to fill my body with so much coke I can’t remember my own goddamn name, I can do it. Who the hell do you think you are to try to stop me?”
“I’m your friend, Garen,” he says evenly. “I’m your friend, and I’m trying to help you, because I love you.”
My reply is sharp, “Well, I hate you.” No response. I need him to respond, though. I need him to get mad enough that he’ll pull over and ditch me somewhere, so I can get out of this car, because if he takes me back to Lakewood, everything is over for me. “Did you hear me?” Still nothing, and then I’m yelling, my voice painfully loud in the otherwise silent car. “Benjamin Brendon McCutcheon, I fucking hate you. Meeting you was the worst thing that ever happened to me in Lakewood. Worse than getting kicked out, worse than losing Travis, worse than Dave almost killing me. Seriously, if I could change one thing about my entire time in that pathetic waste of a town, it would be you. I can’t believe you were actually stupid enough to believe I’d be friends with a piece of shit like you. It was all bullshit, and you made it even worse, because you had no idea how much you were embarrassing yourself. Do you think I really ever gave a shit about any of your stupid problems? Do you think I actually liked spending time with those obnoxious little shits you call sisters? Do you think I ever enjoyed fucking you? Because I didn’t. I was just pretending, about all of it, because I fucking felt sorry for you. I pitied you, because you’re a self-loathing little faggot who has to slash your wrists every time you get hard for another guy, because you’re too fucking dumb to realize that everyone—your friends, your family, your fucking God—everybody hates you. Even being in this car with you is making me want to kill myself. You should just pull over right now, because I’d honestly rather get out and get hit by an eighteen-wheeler than have to sit here for one more second.”
“One day, you’re going to be clean,” Ben says softly, and I’m already laughing, because how can he possibly think that anything about me will ever be clean again after this? He continues, stubborn as ever, “You’re going to be clean, and I’m going to have my friend back… and you’re going to remember this conversation. And you’re going to be so fucking sorry, and you’re going to hate yourself for all the things you’re saying to me right now. And I’m going to forgive you. Because that’s what you do for people you love, and who love you. You forgive them for the things they say that hurt you when you know that the only person they’re really interested in hurting is themselves.”
Forgive, sure, but never forget. Now, Ben has his back to me, but I want him to know that I’m still so sorry for the things I said to him that day. I fling the door open and hit the sidewalk. Ben’s at my side in a second, pulling me upright and saying, “It’s okay, Garen, you’re alright. Travis and I are here, he’s going to help me get you upstairs.”
“I don’t want to go upstairs,” I mutter.
Ben swallows and pulls at my arms. “I know that, I do, but we need to get you off the street, okay? You’re really fucking drunk right now, and you’re underage. I don’t want anyone to call the cops. Can you stand up for me?”
I don’t respond, but I do allow him to hoist me upright. I’m aware of another pair of hands on me, but I’m not one hundred percent sure that it’s Travis, even though I hear his voice saying, “Calm down, G. It’s just me. Can you walk?”
The answer to that question is a resounding ‘no.’ It doesn’t matter; Travis slings my arm across his shoulders and grips my waist, allowing me to rest most of my weight on him as he guides me up the stairs, into Ben’s apartment. In his haste to come downstairs, Ben hadn’t even bothered to close the door. I let the pair of them drag me inside and deposit me on the couch; they move away to talk in the kitchen, and I accidentally roll off the couch, onto the floor. Ben scurries back into the room. “Are you okay?”
Isn’t that the million-dollar question? I crack a smile and say, “I’m absolutely fantastic, gorgeous. How are you?”
“He’s not fantastic, he’s drunk,” Travis says.
Ben’s eyes are sharp and his tone is flat as he says, “Thanks, Travis, I realize that. But in case you haven’t been paying attention for the last, I don’t know, five months? He’s an alcoholic. He has a goddamn problem, and you freaking out and being mean to him isn’t going to make that any easier to deal with.” Travis turns away. He still looks like he’s going to cry. Ben sighs. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to take this out on you, okay? But we can’t take it out on him either, at least not right now. I can’t snap my fingers and make him sober right now, so all I can do is take care of him tonight, and address the bigger issue in the morning.”
He extends a hand to me, and when I take it, he hauls me to my feet. The world goes one hundred percent lopsided, and it takes both of them to get me upright. They start to lead me down the hall, but once we’ve made it to Ben’s room, I am allowed to flop unceremoniously onto the bed with a loud groan.
Ben shoots an alarmed look at his bedspread and says, “Are you going to be sick?”
I drag both hands through my hair and mutter, “I really fucking wish people would stop asking me that. I’ve told you, I don’t get sick. Pretty sure that the two of you can testify to the fact that it’s almost impossible to trigger my gag reflex.”
Travis sighs and heads for the door. Part of me—a tiny, vulnerable, useless part of me—panics and I say, “You’re not staying?”
That sounds pathetic, even to me. Especially to Travis, I guess, because there’s pity in his eyes when he turns to look at me. “Garen… I can’t,” he says, voice so soft I can barely hear him. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be your motivation to stay sober, and I sure as hell can’t be the reason you relapse. I want to help you, but the longer I know you, the more I realize that even… god, just knowing me is hurting you. I’m done. This—this friendship, or whatever it is, everything between you and I? It’s over. It has to be over. I can’t do it anymore.”
I want to argue with him, and I may be drunk enough to do so, but I’m not an idiot. I know that there’s no convincing argument that can be made right now, considering how drunk and awful I am. There’s nothing I can say that will make anyone believe it’s right for him to stay. Without bothering to say goodbye to him—I’m so, so bad at saying goodbye to him—I roll onto my side and close my eyes.
There’s a shuffling of footsteps, then faint voices down the hall. I’m not alone for long, though; only a few minutes pass before I hear the faint click of the bedroom door shutting again, and then Ben is slipping into the bed behind me, curling an arm around my waist and brushing the back of my neck with kisses I don’t deserve.
“You’re going to stay with me?” I practically croak.
I feel him nodding on our shared pillow, and then another kiss touches my skin. “All night, G. Now go to sleep. If you wake up during the night and need me for anything, just shake me, okay? I want to help you.”
Help me, I think, already halfway sucked into what I’m sure will be the deepest sleep I’ve experienced in ages. Everybody wants to help me. I want to help me. I wish it were possible to help me. I can’t be helped. I am helpless.
When I wake up, the glowing red numbers on the alarm clock tell me that it’s one fifty-six. Ben is asleep, curled up next to me with one arm draped across my chest; he doesn’t seem to have moved in hours. Probably not even to greet Alex, who must be home by now, because I can hear music playing down the hall, in his room. I don’t think I can sleep anymore, but I don’t feel completely awake, either. It takes me longer than a couple of hours to sober up, especially when I’ve downed most of a bottle of 151 with no chaser or mixer. I’m still… kind of shitfaced, but with all the aching in my head and my stomach that comes with a hangover. I very carefully lift Ben’s arm just enough to slip out from under it, then make my way down the hall to the bathroom. I still haven’t eaten all day, unless rum is (finally) considered a food group, so it’s not too hard to force myself to throw it all up again. After I’m done, I feel a little better, but not by much. I manage to find a spare, still-packaged toothbrush in the cabinet under the sink, so I curl up on the tile floor and spend a good ten minutes trying to scrub the taste of vomit and booze out of my mouth. Once I’ve finished, I move back out into the hall, but that’s as far as I go for now.
I know what I need—I know the only way to find the absolution I need right now—but I don’t know how to get it. Ben won’t help me; he’s too pissed, too upset, too asleep. A whole bunch of things that aren’t conducive to me getting my needs met at this moment. Alex, though… if Ben has been in bed with me for the entire night, then Alex has no idea I’m here. He has no idea that I’ve relapsed, he has no idea that I’m drunk right now. He has no reason to refuse to help a friend out. If I can stay upright, if I can stop slurring my words, if I don’t mention it, I can convince him I’m sober, can’t I? Without stopping to consider the prospect of this turning out even remotely badly, I turn and approach the second bedroom door.
“Alanis Morissette is my spirit animal. She understands my pain,” I grumble, shaking whoever it is off. I slump sideways so that my head is in the passenger’s seat and the gearshift is digging into my ribcage. When I peer up at the person who’s hovering outside the window, surprise, surprise—it’s Travis. I scowl. “Oh. It’s you. Go away.” He doesn’t move. I feel around on the floor until I find the iPod that’s hooked up to the retromodded stereo and start the song from the beginning. I point my flask at him and sing along, “I want you to know that I’m happy for you. I wish nothing but the best for you both.”
“How much have you had to drink?” he asks.
“--is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a—”
“Garen, I’m fucking talking to you.”
I drain what’s left in the flask and toss it into the backseat. The rest of the booze is around here somewhere… I dig around under the passenger seat until I surface with the bottle of 151, now halfway empty. When he reaches for it, I shrug away and crank the volume of my stereo, singing-slash-yelling, “And I’m here to remind you of the mess you left when you went away--”
“Give me the bottle,” Travis says, though he has to shout a little to be audible over the music. I stop singing long enough to take a pull from the bottle, and it burns so perfectly. He leans in the car to try to take it away from me; I plant my boot in the center of his chest to hold him at bay. That’s too much for him to abide by. He yanks open the driver’s side door—with my legs no longer supported by the window, I overbalance and tumble out of the car. Now finally within reach, Travis grabs the bottle out of my hands, turns, and pitches it towards the lawn nearby. My throat tightens. Five hundred milliliters of over-proof Puerto Rican rum, wasted on a school parking lot. But no—the bottle hits the grass with a thunk, but the earth must still be somewhat soft from Sunday night’s rain, because the glass doesn’t shatter.
“You seem very well, things look peaceful,” I keep singing, “I’m not quite as well, I thought you should know.”
Travis leans over me into the car and cuts the engine; the music shuts off abruptly enough to leave my ears ringing. He drops my keys on the floor mat and says, “Enough.”
There’s no music, and I’m not so much singing as speaking the lyrics, but I look up at him with dead eyes and finish the verse anyway. “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”
“Stand up, Garen.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Stand up right now, and talk to me like a man. You’re eighteen years old, and you’re sitting in the middle of a parking lot, drunk as shit, slurring song lyrics at me. I want you to stand up and tell me what the fuck is going on,” he orders.
Reluctantly, I move to stand up, but—oh, this is going to be so much harder than I expected it to be. I crawl back up into the driver’s seat, then use the door to pull myself out and onto my feet. The rum has all gone to my head. At the very least, it’s gone to my nerve endings, because I can barely stand. I try to steady myself, but almost topple over, and have to settle for leaning against the side of the car. I point at him—I hope I point at him, the real him, because there are at least three of him swimming in front of me right now. I hedge my bets, focus on the middle Travis, and say, “What’s going on… is that you now owe me a bottle of Bacardi. Because you’re a selfish little life-ruiner. Which, I am assuming, is also the reason why you’re wrecking Joss Pryce.”
Travis is silent for a very long, very tense moment. Then, he licks his lips and says, “I’m not ‘wrecking’ Joss. All we did was kiss. Now, first, you’re going to tell me how you know that. And then, you’re going to tell me how it’s any of your business.”
“I know because I was there, Travis!” I burst out. “You know, maybe the next time you decide to just start making out with some random girl who should be studying her lines, you might want to take a fucking look around and make sure your ex-boyfriend isn’t studying his script in the scaffolding above your head.”
He has the grace to look ashamed of himself. Good. One of us needs to start feeling some shame, and it’s sure as hell not going to be me. I start to fall over again, and he grabs me by the shoulders to steady me. It doesn’t work; I hit the ground anyway, and Travis goes to his knees to… what, keep me company on the pavement? He says something, but I’m too out of it to listen at this point. I’m vaguely aware of his hands leaving my shoulders, and then of more talking. When I manage to remember which direction is up, I blink at him—he’s now standing a few feet away, looking upset and talking into his cell phone. That is so like him, to ask for help from other people when he really needs it. What a quitter.
Since he’s no longer focused entirely on me, I crawl across the pavement to the edge of the lawn. The change of terrain does nothing for my sense of balance, and I faceplant at least once before I manage to find the bottle of rum that Travis tossed. I take a long slug from it, hoping that maybe for once, my body will do the right thing and make itself sick. That’s the problem with drinking—I never, ever get drunk to the point of throwing up. I pass out, sure, but that takes so much longer, and by the time it happens, I’ve usually already gotten alcohol poisoning. I think I might be in that stage right now. But even now, my body refuses to actually reject the booze. The only way I can make that happen is by forcing myself to do it, like I did this morning.
That’s what I’m contemplating doing when Travis finally ends his phone call—and really, where are his priorities?—and comes over to say, “Where’s all your stuff? I need to move it to my car.”
“You need to suck a dick,” I say, though my words are muffled by the fact that I’m still facedown on the grass. He sighs and walks away. Good. He should just go find Joss. I bet Joss never gets drunk in public. I bet Joss never causes a scene at play rehearsal, or drinks anything that’s seventy-five-point-five percent alcohol by volume, or listens to music sung by people who have been hurt. Because Joss, with her cute, delicate features and her dark hair and her stupid leading role in the play and her way of making Travis’ breath hitch when she kisses him… Joss is just too fucking perfect to ever do any of the screwed up shit I’ve done today.
There are hands on my arms now, hauling me to my feet. “Come on. Your backpack and guitar are in my car. I’ve got your keys. You’re coming with me, let’s get you into my car.”
I don’t protest this time. I must be fading in and out of consciousness, though, because one moment, I’m standing on the lawn, and then I’m stumbling on the sidewalk, and then I’m slumped over in the passenger’s seat of Travis’ car. Bree’s car, actually, maybe. The glass of the closed window is cool against my face, and I may actually make a noise of appreciation. Travis must mistake it for a noise of impending vomit, because he says, “If you’re going to throw up, I’d appreciate some warning so I can at least roll the window down for you.”
“I don’t throw up when I’m drunk,” I mumble. “’s a waste of alcohol, and I’d rather keep it all inside my body, where it belongs. But if you’re paranoid about it, you can pull over again, and I’ll jam a couple fingers down my throat and make myself hurl on the side of the road. Then you don’t have to worry about there being anything in my stomach.”
“Is that what you do after you drink? You make yourself vomit?” he asks. It feels like a trick question, but I don’t have the energy to lie.
I nod. “Sometimes. It’s—I did it this morning, when I woke up at um…” Fuck. What was her name? “Um. I did it this morning, so my hangover wouldn’t make me feel sick. ‘Cause last night, after I saw you and Joss, I went to New Haven, ‘cause I was gonna hang out with Alex? But then, on my way there, I found this nightclub that doesn’t card people who wanna drink. And I—” I look around, and it occurs to me that we’ve definitely left Lakewood. We’re at least one town over. I find it hard to make myself care. “I had twelve shots and a huge line of coke. And Travis? Ask me how I paid for it. Ask me what I did to get the money for the shots.”
He doesn’t ask, and I don’t tell him. I fade out, at least for a little while, until I’m suddenly aware that the car is no longer moving, and that there are people arguing right outside it. I look over at where Travis should be, in the driver’s seat, but he’s gone. Slowly, I turn my attention in the other direction, towards the noise on the sidewalk. Travis is outside, looking like he’s losing his mind. His face is flushed, and he’s maybe yelling, but he’s mostly just trying not to cry and letting himself by hugged by—oh.
Ben.
And then, I’m still in a car, and still shitfaced. The signs speeding by on the side of the highway tell me that I’m on Interstate 86, somewhere in Pennsylvania. Ben is in the driver’s seat, not saying a word as I whisper to him, “I’m never going to forgive you for this. Ben. Ben, are you listening to me? I’m never going to fucking speak to you again after today. You should have just let me go, you should have left me there. This is none of your fucking business, okay? It’s my life, I can do whatever I want to do. If I want to go to New York, I can go to fucking New York. If I want to go to Cleveland, I can fucking well go to Cleveland. If I want to fill my body with so much coke I can’t remember my own goddamn name, I can do it. Who the hell do you think you are to try to stop me?”
“I’m your friend, Garen,” he says evenly. “I’m your friend, and I’m trying to help you, because I love you.”
My reply is sharp, “Well, I hate you.” No response. I need him to respond, though. I need him to get mad enough that he’ll pull over and ditch me somewhere, so I can get out of this car, because if he takes me back to Lakewood, everything is over for me. “Did you hear me?” Still nothing, and then I’m yelling, my voice painfully loud in the otherwise silent car. “Benjamin Brendon McCutcheon, I fucking hate you. Meeting you was the worst thing that ever happened to me in Lakewood. Worse than getting kicked out, worse than losing Travis, worse than Dave almost killing me. Seriously, if I could change one thing about my entire time in that pathetic waste of a town, it would be you. I can’t believe you were actually stupid enough to believe I’d be friends with a piece of shit like you. It was all bullshit, and you made it even worse, because you had no idea how much you were embarrassing yourself. Do you think I really ever gave a shit about any of your stupid problems? Do you think I actually liked spending time with those obnoxious little shits you call sisters? Do you think I ever enjoyed fucking you? Because I didn’t. I was just pretending, about all of it, because I fucking felt sorry for you. I pitied you, because you’re a self-loathing little faggot who has to slash your wrists every time you get hard for another guy, because you’re too fucking dumb to realize that everyone—your friends, your family, your fucking God—everybody hates you. Even being in this car with you is making me want to kill myself. You should just pull over right now, because I’d honestly rather get out and get hit by an eighteen-wheeler than have to sit here for one more second.”
“One day, you’re going to be clean,” Ben says softly, and I’m already laughing, because how can he possibly think that anything about me will ever be clean again after this? He continues, stubborn as ever, “You’re going to be clean, and I’m going to have my friend back… and you’re going to remember this conversation. And you’re going to be so fucking sorry, and you’re going to hate yourself for all the things you’re saying to me right now. And I’m going to forgive you. Because that’s what you do for people you love, and who love you. You forgive them for the things they say that hurt you when you know that the only person they’re really interested in hurting is themselves.”
Forgive, sure, but never forget. Now, Ben has his back to me, but I want him to know that I’m still so sorry for the things I said to him that day. I fling the door open and hit the sidewalk. Ben’s at my side in a second, pulling me upright and saying, “It’s okay, Garen, you’re alright. Travis and I are here, he’s going to help me get you upstairs.”
“I don’t want to go upstairs,” I mutter.
Ben swallows and pulls at my arms. “I know that, I do, but we need to get you off the street, okay? You’re really fucking drunk right now, and you’re underage. I don’t want anyone to call the cops. Can you stand up for me?”
I don’t respond, but I do allow him to hoist me upright. I’m aware of another pair of hands on me, but I’m not one hundred percent sure that it’s Travis, even though I hear his voice saying, “Calm down, G. It’s just me. Can you walk?”
The answer to that question is a resounding ‘no.’ It doesn’t matter; Travis slings my arm across his shoulders and grips my waist, allowing me to rest most of my weight on him as he guides me up the stairs, into Ben’s apartment. In his haste to come downstairs, Ben hadn’t even bothered to close the door. I let the pair of them drag me inside and deposit me on the couch; they move away to talk in the kitchen, and I accidentally roll off the couch, onto the floor. Ben scurries back into the room. “Are you okay?”
Isn’t that the million-dollar question? I crack a smile and say, “I’m absolutely fantastic, gorgeous. How are you?”
“He’s not fantastic, he’s drunk,” Travis says.
Ben’s eyes are sharp and his tone is flat as he says, “Thanks, Travis, I realize that. But in case you haven’t been paying attention for the last, I don’t know, five months? He’s an alcoholic. He has a goddamn problem, and you freaking out and being mean to him isn’t going to make that any easier to deal with.” Travis turns away. He still looks like he’s going to cry. Ben sighs. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to take this out on you, okay? But we can’t take it out on him either, at least not right now. I can’t snap my fingers and make him sober right now, so all I can do is take care of him tonight, and address the bigger issue in the morning.”
He extends a hand to me, and when I take it, he hauls me to my feet. The world goes one hundred percent lopsided, and it takes both of them to get me upright. They start to lead me down the hall, but once we’ve made it to Ben’s room, I am allowed to flop unceremoniously onto the bed with a loud groan.
Ben shoots an alarmed look at his bedspread and says, “Are you going to be sick?”
I drag both hands through my hair and mutter, “I really fucking wish people would stop asking me that. I’ve told you, I don’t get sick. Pretty sure that the two of you can testify to the fact that it’s almost impossible to trigger my gag reflex.”
Travis sighs and heads for the door. Part of me—a tiny, vulnerable, useless part of me—panics and I say, “You’re not staying?”
That sounds pathetic, even to me. Especially to Travis, I guess, because there’s pity in his eyes when he turns to look at me. “Garen… I can’t,” he says, voice so soft I can barely hear him. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be your motivation to stay sober, and I sure as hell can’t be the reason you relapse. I want to help you, but the longer I know you, the more I realize that even… god, just knowing me is hurting you. I’m done. This—this friendship, or whatever it is, everything between you and I? It’s over. It has to be over. I can’t do it anymore.”
I want to argue with him, and I may be drunk enough to do so, but I’m not an idiot. I know that there’s no convincing argument that can be made right now, considering how drunk and awful I am. There’s nothing I can say that will make anyone believe it’s right for him to stay. Without bothering to say goodbye to him—I’m so, so bad at saying goodbye to him—I roll onto my side and close my eyes.
There’s a shuffling of footsteps, then faint voices down the hall. I’m not alone for long, though; only a few minutes pass before I hear the faint click of the bedroom door shutting again, and then Ben is slipping into the bed behind me, curling an arm around my waist and brushing the back of my neck with kisses I don’t deserve.
“You’re going to stay with me?” I practically croak.
I feel him nodding on our shared pillow, and then another kiss touches my skin. “All night, G. Now go to sleep. If you wake up during the night and need me for anything, just shake me, okay? I want to help you.”
Help me, I think, already halfway sucked into what I’m sure will be the deepest sleep I’ve experienced in ages. Everybody wants to help me. I want to help me. I wish it were possible to help me. I can’t be helped. I am helpless.
When I wake up, the glowing red numbers on the alarm clock tell me that it’s one fifty-six. Ben is asleep, curled up next to me with one arm draped across my chest; he doesn’t seem to have moved in hours. Probably not even to greet Alex, who must be home by now, because I can hear music playing down the hall, in his room. I don’t think I can sleep anymore, but I don’t feel completely awake, either. It takes me longer than a couple of hours to sober up, especially when I’ve downed most of a bottle of 151 with no chaser or mixer. I’m still… kind of shitfaced, but with all the aching in my head and my stomach that comes with a hangover. I very carefully lift Ben’s arm just enough to slip out from under it, then make my way down the hall to the bathroom. I still haven’t eaten all day, unless rum is (finally) considered a food group, so it’s not too hard to force myself to throw it all up again. After I’m done, I feel a little better, but not by much. I manage to find a spare, still-packaged toothbrush in the cabinet under the sink, so I curl up on the tile floor and spend a good ten minutes trying to scrub the taste of vomit and booze out of my mouth. Once I’ve finished, I move back out into the hall, but that’s as far as I go for now.
I know what I need—I know the only way to find the absolution I need right now—but I don’t know how to get it. Ben won’t help me; he’s too pissed, too upset, too asleep. A whole bunch of things that aren’t conducive to me getting my needs met at this moment. Alex, though… if Ben has been in bed with me for the entire night, then Alex has no idea I’m here. He has no idea that I’ve relapsed, he has no idea that I’m drunk right now. He has no reason to refuse to help a friend out. If I can stay upright, if I can stop slurring my words, if I don’t mention it, I can convince him I’m sober, can’t I? Without stopping to consider the prospect of this turning out even remotely badly, I turn and approach the second bedroom door.
I knock once softly, then push open the door without bothering to wait for permission to enter. The light is off, but the room is illuminated by the glow of Alex’s computer on the desk. Some cover of a Led Zeppelin song is playing on the stereo. Alex himself is sprawled out on his bed, texting someone even though he looks like he’s half asleep. That makes sense—it’s almost two in the morning, isn’t it? This is when normal people are letting themselves fall asleep, isn’t it? He looks up at me, a lazy smile on his face. “G, you spend so much time here, we should start making you pay rent.” “Okay,” I say, because whatever, it’s not like I couldn’t afford it. “Do you want to fuck?”
That gets his attention, because, well, how could it not? He sits up, moving jerkily enough to seem a little spastic, and says, “Do I… wait, what?”
“Do you want to fuck?” I repeat. He’s still just staring at me, wide-eyed, so I clarify, “Me, that is. Do you want to fuck me?”
“Uh. Now?” he says, looking at the clock, then at his phone.
I roll my eyes and say, “It’s not like I’m asking you on a fucking date, bro. I’m asking you to put your dick in my ass. That’s not the sort of offer I need to make a few days in advance.”
“I thought you were a top,” he says slowly.
“I am, usually,” I say. I don’t tell him that there hasn’t been much of a point to that lately, that the main reason I’m offering myself up in this way is because I think I’m drunk enough to trick my body into getting hard, but not necessarily sane enough to stay hard, and it will be so much simpler to get through this if I’m facedown on a mattress and he’s too busy fucking me from behind to notice what I’ve got going on in front. I add, “Sometimes, I change my mind though. Like tonight. Tonight, I think you should get your goddamn cock out, because it’s two in the morning, and we’re both single, and we’re both hot, and your roommate is asleep, and I want you to fuck me. If you don’t have condoms, that’s fine, because I do. If you don’t have lube, that’s fine, because I don’t care if you’re rough, okay? You can just use a little spit or something, it’s fine, I just really want you to fuck me. Are you cool with that or what?”
“I, um…” Alex hesitates, still looking at his phone. Even if he hasn’t agreed yet, I know he will; I can see from here in the doorway that he’s shifting a little, probably because he’s starting to get hard. Not many eighteen-year-olds would refuse such a direct offer, not even ones who still spend most of their time claiming to be straight, like Al does. Since I assume it can only help my case, I reach behind myself to shut the door before I take a step towards the bed and strip off my—or, Stohler’s, I guess—Sex Pistols shirt. Not a bad idea, since it still kind of smells like the rum I must have spilled on myself at some point. But I know I have a nice body, and I know that, if there’s any chance of Alex saying yes to me, this can only kick that into high gear. His eyes are fixed on my abs even as he says, “I’m, um… I’m sort of involved with someone, is the thing. We’re not exclusive, or anything, but we’ve been hooking up for a few months now, and I don’t want to make him—”
“Good,” I interrupt, even though a not-too-small part of me is surprised to realize he’s not still a virgin. It’s good to know that someone around here knows how to keep quiet about his sex life. I continue, “If you’ve been hooking up for a few months, you should be pretty decent at this by now.”
“I’m making progress,” he agrees.
Unable to bite back my frustration, I kneel on the edge of the bed and order, “Then take your fucking clothes off, Alex. It, it’s not weird. It doesn’t have to be a thing. People hook up with their friends all the time, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. Look at you and Travis, or me and Ben. We’re all fine. For fuck’s sake, I’ve been completely wrecking Jamie since we were fifteen. He and I are best friends, and we’ve had literally days of sex, and it’s not a big—”
He surges up to meet me. We kiss clumsily at first, both of us unsure of how to fit our mouths together. I’m still so drunk, and I’m hoping he can’t tell, but he doesn’t exactly have any experience kissing me to notice if it’s different now. I shove him flat onto the bed—his head narrowly misses connecting with the headboard—and fumble my way through unbuttoning his shirt. He must notice my gracelessness, because he frowns and says, “Dude, are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say shortly, curving a hand over the back of his neck and lifting him up slightly so he can yank his arms free of the shirt. “I’m fine, I just haven’t gotten laid in a while.”
“You got laid Saturday,” he says, almost laughing as he reaches for my belt.
“I haven’t bottomed in a while.”
Before Seth in June, the only guy who had ever topped me was Dave. Sometimes, it wasn’t that bad. Sometimes, I came—I think maybe fifteen out of the hundred times we slept together. If it was the perfect combination of him giving me a reach-around and putting the right amount of pressure against my prostate and not beating me until I was almost unconscious right before, I could actually enjoy it; even if that didn’t get me off, he’d usually compensate by getting me off with a blowjob or something after he came. It’s not like Dave was a bad lover—between beatings or assaults or whatever—but we were both very definitely tops, so it was never going to work out well for me. I don’t like having things inside of me; the very nature of the act makes me feel uncomfortable, too exposed, violated.
Jamie says it’s because my first experience with it was so bad. He says it’s no wonder I can’t stand getting topped, considering that the first time it ever happened, I was fifteen years old, terrified and struggling against the heated backseat of a Lexus. He says I might never be able to enjoy it, because almost all of my experience with being on the bottom has been in the context of violence. Before a fight, after a fight, sometimes (and these were the worst ones) while a fight was happening—the times when I’d be yelling and swearing and shoving and hitting and then suddenly I’d be facedown on the floor with my ex-boyfriend behind me, shoving into me and murmuring, “For fuck’s sake, Garen, stop struggling, it’s fine, we do this all the time, you’ll like it in a minute,” against the back of my neck. I’m usually inclined to let Jamie rant, up until he inevitably uses the ‘R’ word, and then the conversation always ends immediately.
And I don’t care what Jamie says--that never happened to me. I don’t care if I fought, I don’t care if I refused, I don’t care if I didn’t want any of it. I’m a full-grown, adult man, not some teenage girl at a frat party or a scared housewife in a dark alley. I had a fucking choice—I could have fought harder, I could have made it stop, I could have done something, so it’s not… that. That doesn’t happen to guys like me, that doesn’t happen to men who are six-foot-one and a hundred and seventy pounds of hard muscle, that doesn’t happen to people who everyone knows would never say no. I’m not a victim; I never have been.
By now, I can feel that Alex is fully hard where he’s pressed against the thigh I have slipped between his legs. I rock down against him—I should write a ‘thank you’ letter to the fine folks at Bacardi, because I’m hard, too—and he lets out a gentle noise of approval. But I don’t want gentle. I shift off him to pull his jeans roughly down over his hips, and usually, I’d start in with the foreplay. Jerk him off, maybe give a little head. That’s not what’s going to make me feel better, though. That’s not how you earn forgiveness; you earn forgiveness by letting someone fuck you until you feel like you’re going to die.
Not wanting or knowing how to verbalize this, I grab Alex’s hand and push it down the back of my jeans. He must get the hint, because we quickly finish undressing, and then he’s rolling onto his side to reach towards the milk crate he uses in lieu of a nightstand. Guess he does have condoms and lube after all. I bury my face against his neck and sink my teeth into his skin, drawing a quiet groan from his throat. When I murmur his name against his jawline, he give a brief shake of his head and says, “Don’t.”
I pull back slightly, resentment already curling up inside my brain. “Don’t what? Don’t say your name?” Every guy who has ever asked me not to say his name has turned into an asshole about hooking up, the second it’s over. It’s a way of distancing himself from me, from the fact that he’s actually sunk low enough to get with me, like me avoiding his name might mean he’s not slumming it like he really is.
But Alex shakes his head again and adds, flushing a little like he knows what he’s about to say is stupid, “Don’t, um… look, guys tend to call me by my real name when I’m, you know, hooking up with them, or whatever. Ben always did, when we used to make out. And the guy I’ve been sleeping with, he does it too, always. So, could you…?”
I’m shitfaced enough that it actually takes me a second to figure out what the hell he’s even talking about, but once I do, I say, somewhat tentatively, “What, you want me to call you Alexander?” He gives a quick, embarrassed little nod, and I duck back in to repeat the name as a whisper against his collarbone. That earns me another sound of approval, and I allow him to roll me onto my back. The second he settles himself between my legs and reaches for the lube, though, I scramble out from under him. He gives me a confused look, and I turn onto my stomach, reaching back with one arm to pull him down on top of me. “Like this,” I whisper. “I don’t—I mean, it feels better this way, I like it better than face-to-face. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, it’s okay. Whatever you want,” he says, pressing a kiss to my shoulder and sort of rutting up against the back of my thigh as he reaches down again. Getting fingered is sort of my least favorite part of getting fucked; it feels like it should be intimate, but it’s not, it’s always just too tight and painful and uncomfortable, which is actually sort of ironic, considering I love fingering other people. But I realize it’s sort of a necessity, so I don’t complain while Alex does it. I even make a few sounds that might imply I’m enjoying it. Still, it’s not what I’m after, so the second I’m pretty sure he’s opened me enough to be safe, I pick up the condom he left on the pillow, tear open the package, and reach behind myself to roll it onto him. He pauses, fingers still inside me, and says, “Will it make things weird if I tell you I’m impressed that it takes you less than five seconds to open and put condom on another guy, without even facing him?”
“Will it make things weird if I tell you I’m impressed with your sort of gigantic dick? Stop making casual conversation and fuck me,” I order. I vaguely hear him say something that sounds like, it’s proportionate to my body and I’m just really tall, and I’m muttering into the pillow, oh my god, now is really not the time, man, and then he’s slipping an arm around my middle to hold me in place while he presses into me. The last time this happened, I was so fucked up on coke that I barely knew what was going on; this time, I’m not drunk enough to ignore the fact that it hurts a little. I don’t try to hold back my noises, but I do try to make them sound more pleasure-based than pain-based. I reach up with one hand to brace myself against the headboard so that I can fuck back onto Alex’s dick.
He must not be lying about having been hooking up with someone for the past few months, because he’s actually pretty good at this, objectively speaking. One arm is wrapped tight around my waist to hold me against him, and his other hand is braced against the mattress so that he’s holding at least some of his weight off of me. It takes a little bit, but he eventually manages to find a good angle at which to thrust into me. I twist in place a bit so that I can kiss him over my shoulder. His eyes have long since rolled shut, but I keep mine open. Close up, I can only see the fuzzy outline of his face, but holding onto that image, reaching back to tangle my hand in his soft blond hair, whispering his name over and over… it’s the only thing that keeps me here. It’s the only thing that reminds me who he is, and that it’s okay that he’s doing this to me.
It’s Alex. It’s okay. It’s Alex, I like Alex, Alex is my friend. It’s okay. I want this. I want this. I want this. It’s okay.
I slip a hand between my hips and the mattress so that I’ve got something to fuck down into. Between the buzz of rum in my bloodstream, and the hand I’ve got wrapped tight around my dick, and the pinch of Alex’s teeth on my shoulder, I’m almost able to surrender to the sensations. I can almost forget how much I hate bottoming—Alex isn’t bad in bed, not really, it’s just that his dick is a lot bigger than I’d anticipated, and it’s kind of hard to ignore something that long when it’s actually inside you, which is making it really fucking difficult to pretend I’m not in the middle of a sex act I hate—and I can almost forget how painful this relapse is going to be for everyone who thought I could be better, and I can almost forget about the freckled, “bisexual” little slut who drove me to this point in the first place.
That’s all good, but that’s not what gets me off.
What gets me off is the moment where I call up the memories of last night, in the bathroom stall at that club. What gets me off is remembering that first instant of having cocaine back in my bloodstream, of having those drugs deeper inside me than Alex is now. What gets me off is thinking about that beautifulsexypainfulperfect thrum under my skin when I finally had my chance to go back to using. What gets me off is pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth and imagining that I can still taste the 151. What gets me off is knowing that there’s still a fake ID in my wallet, in case I decide I want to go buy myself something else from the liquor store when I leave here. What gets me off is knowing that I don’t have to stop.
I come with a broken, desperate groan of something that might sound like please, or maybe yes, or possibly even Alexander, since he’s there too. He arches forward to keep kissing me over my shoulder, swallowing up my moans as I ride out my orgasm, spilling onto his sheets—not my bed, not my problem. I’m lying sated and boneless on the bed when he comes a few minutes later, his forehead pressed to the back of my neck and his breath hot and shaky against my spine. He rolls off me a minute later to dispose of the condom, and when he returns to the bed, I have the presence of mind to lean in and kiss him, slow and dirty. There’s a half-smile on his face, like it’s been a while since he’s had a quality orgasm with anyone but his own hand, so I figure he won’t mind too much if I stay here. That, and I’m not sure I can actually move to leave. I know I should head back to Ben’s room and pretend this hasn’t happened, but it’s so much easier to just bury my face in the pillows and let my body dissolve back into unconsciousness.
First day sober
The next morning, I wake up to a splitting headache and Ben’s harsh, low voice as he says, “What the fuck is going on?”
Next to me, Alex is upright in an instant, a blush in his cheeks and more than a few bite marks sucked into the skin of his neck. I’m guessing those are from me. Oops. He says, “Ben, I—”
“Did you guys fuck?” Ben interrupts.
I try to crawl back under the blankets to block out the sunlight streaming in through the window and say, “Well, obviously.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he says.
For half a second, I want to laugh, because really. Shouldn’t it be obvious by now that everything is wrong with me? But when I roll over to face him, I realize that his words are directed at Alex, not at me. Alex, who is still looking embarrassed, but now uncertain, upset. He says, very carefully, “What do you mean?”
Ben’s words are too loud in the small room, and I cover my ears instinctively when he repeats in a yell, “What the hell is wrong with you? For god’s sake, Alex. How could you do this to him, knowing what kind of condition he was in last night?”
“Knowing… wait, what? What are you talking about?” Alex says. His uncertainty is rapidly dissolving into panic. Ben doesn’t say anything; neither do I. Alex turns to look at me, and I can tell he’s taking in all the bits of my appearance he didn’t seem able to process last night. My bloodshot eyes. My flinching away from the light. The way I’m cradling my head in my hands to try to calm the pounding. The deep sense of regret and shame that I’m sure must be filling the room now. He whispers, “G, are you hungover?” I don’t say anything, which is probably exactly the same as saying, Yes. “Oh my god. You—You were drunk last night? That’s why you came in here, that’s why you wanted us to have sex?”
“Does it matter why I wanted it?” I hedge. When he doesn’t immediately respond, I resort to my usual method of distraction and reach for him, voice low as I say, “It’s—Alex, it’s fine. It was good sex, okay? It—”
“No,” Alex says very slowly, very carefully. “No, I’m pretty sure that ‘good sex’ is only possible when both parties are going into it with a clear head and a full understanding of what the fuck is going on.”
I want to hit him, I really do. It’s only by clenching my hands into fists around the bedsheets that I’m able to stop myself from belting him across the face, because how dare he say this? I snap, “So, what, I didn’t put a warning label on my dick that said, ‘caution: drunk,’ and you’re saying I fucking assaulted you? Is that it?”
He retorts, “Kind of the opposite, actually. I’m saying that the fact that I fucked you while you were in the middle of a relapse is making my skin crawl like you wouldn’t believe, because I’m pretty sure that means I assaulted you.”
I shove the blankets off, not caring that it means both of them are getting a serious eyefull of my naked body, and clamber off the bed to get dressed. Neither of them tries to stop me, or talk to me, or whatever. I pull on my shirt, my jeans, but my hands are shaking too badly to button them. I look around for my boots, but realize they must be back in Ben’s room, or out in the living room; it’s not like I remember the part of the evening where I took them off. The odds of Alex following me out of the room while still undressed are unlikely, and I’m still so furious at him, so it seems as good a time as any to turn to him and say, “You didn’t assault me, Baker. Believe me, I know the fucking difference. I know I was drunk, and maybe I should have told you that, or warned you or whatever, but I know what happened between us, and I know from way too much personal goddamn experience that that’s not what that feels like, okay? So, fuck you, and fuck what you think happened last night, because you’re an idiot, and I’m leaving.”
Only belatedly do I realize that I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally fucked up enough to acknowledge that. Even that passing phrase is too much, and I stumble out of the bedroom, refusing to look either of them in the eyes. I make it down the hall, into the living room where my boots are, and halfway down the building stairs before Ben catches up to me, still trying to tie his Converse and almost pitching down the stairs in his haste. My life—more specifically, the conversation I know we’re about to have—would be so much easier if I just let him fall, but I grab his arm to steady him. He nods his thanks, and for a long moment, we just stare at each other. When I turn to continue down the stairs, he squeezes in front of me and says over his shoulder, “I’ll drive you back.”
“I can—”
“No, you can’t,” he interrupts, “Travis brought you here in his car yesterday, so unless you’re planning to walk all the way back to Lakewood, shut up and get in my car.”
I don’t point out that I could easily call a cab and put the fare on my card, and he doesn’t point out that I can’t really call anyone else I know for a ride, on account of how I only have two friends other than him, and Jamie lives in New York and Alex might not want to keep hanging out with me after this. Instead, we both walk around the building to the parking lot and get into his car.
Most of the drive from New Haven to Lakewood passes in silence. Only when he keeps going straight on the town’s one main road do I point out, “You missed the turn for the school. I have homeroom in half an hour, and anyway, my car’s still in the lot.”
“I have your keys, I can figure out how to get the car back to your house later. You’re going home,” he says.
My hands tighten on the leather of the passenger seat. “Ben, I have school.”
“No, Garen, what you have is a fucking problem. I mean, are you seriously not getting the severity of this situation?” he demands. I look around at him, but he refuses to blink away from the road. His bright blue eyes are stone cold. “Do you want to know the worst part?”
“No, I don’t. Ben, can you just shut—”
He continues over me, “The worst part is that you were doing so well. I guess that’s why the rest of us stopped worrying about you, you know? You’d been fine since going into rehab, and you were adjusting so perfectly to sobriety, and I took it for granted. I just assumed that if you could make it to ninety days, you’d be good for the rest of your life. Only, that’s not really how it turned out. You’re not good, Garen. You’re not sober. And you’re not putting yourself or anyone else through another relapse. So, I’m bringing you home, and you’re going to talk to your dad, and you two are going to figure out how to get through this. Because you need to fix this again. You’re not okay.”
The entire speech is so similar to what I’m sure he must have said when he was dragging me back from Cleveland this past summer. But the truth is, my entire recollection of that experience is still only so-so. I have a vague understanding of it, and I have half-memories, and I have his version of events, but that’s it. I’m so fucking tired of not remembering things. Especially important things.
“Okay,” I whisper, turning to stare out the window. “Okay, I’ll, um… I’ll tell Dad what happened. We’ll work something out with the LRC, I guess. They have like, emergency check-ins and stuff. Forty-eight hours, or a week, or whatever you need. You know, for people who get off track. I’ll tell him I need it.”
“Okay,” Ben echoes, and that’s that. We don’t say anything for the rest of the drive to my house, and when he pulls into my driveway, the only goodbye I offer is a muttered, I’m really sorry. Pass it along to Alex. And Travis. Dad’s car is still in the driveway, so I can only assume that he hasn’t left for work yet this morning. I take a deep, steadying breath and push open the front door.
“Garen,” is the immediate, reproachful greeting from the kitchen. “I’ve told you before, if you’re going to be staying out all night, you need to call me or send a text message so I know you’re safe. Where have you been?”
“I was at Alex and Ben’s apartment,” I say, shocked at how normal my voice sounds. I step into the kitchen; Dad is standing near the counter, loading all of the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher. He pauses long enough to give me a long stare. His eyes settle on my neck, and the marks that I know Alex bit into me last night while we were fucking.
“Alex and Ben’s apartment,” Dad echoes, then adds, “Again. You’ve been spending a lot of time there lately.” I nod. He hesitates. “I’m pretty certain that Doctor Howard was clear with you. It’s not a good idea for you to get involved with anyone before you’ve been sober for a year.” I don’t say anything. He sighs. “Garen. I know that you were involved with Ben once upon a time—you made that abundantly, uncomfortably clear last summer, when you took the liberty of discussing your… relations with him at the dinner table, when he and your stepbrother were dating. I know that you’re grateful to him for all he’s done in the past few months, and I know he’s become a very good friend to you. So, I want a straight answer: is Ben your boyfriend?”
I want to laugh, but I don’t. Maybe I should, though; I mean, it is sort of funny, that Dad would assume that I’m dating Ben, when we both know that someone as sweet and loyal as Ben is way too good for me. It’s funny that he would guess that I’m involved with the guy whose bed I left last night so that I could go down the hall and get fucked by his roommate. Instead of laughing, though, I shake my head no and move to stand in front of my sobriety board.
Monday’s writing is still up on the board. 92 days clean/sober. Dad knows enough not to touch my board, even if it’s just to help me change the day or clean it or something. I can hear him moving at the sink behind me, and he can hear me not moving at all, so that means I can hear him eventually stop in the middle of loading the dishwasher. I know he’s watching me. Neither of us speaks. Finally, I take a step towards the board. There’s a tiny eraser on the ledge of the board, but I just smear the letters away with the side of my fist. I pick up the marker, uncap it, and very carefully print first day clean/sober in the center of the board.
When I turn around, I can’t meet Dad’s eyes, can’t bring myself to see the anger and disappointment I know will be written all over his face. All of it—seeing the resentment in Dad’s eyes when he found out about me and Travis all those months ago, waking up in the hospital after I let Dave kick my ass, Ben’s confusion and Alex’s sneer when they first saw me after I dyed my hair black and hacked half of it off, Bree’s tears when she saw the gun Travis had wrestled away from me, the taunts at school, the bitchy comments from Jack Thorne and Gabe Alberti and everyone else. It all pales in comparison to this moment right here.
I have never been this ashamed in my entire life.
And when Dad drops a plate back into the sink, not caring when it shatters, and folds me into his bone-crushing embrace, I know I don’t deserve his comfort, but all I have left in me to do is bury my face against the lapel of my father’s suit jacket and try not to die.
That gets his attention, because, well, how could it not? He sits up, moving jerkily enough to seem a little spastic, and says, “Do I… wait, what?”
“Do you want to fuck?” I repeat. He’s still just staring at me, wide-eyed, so I clarify, “Me, that is. Do you want to fuck me?”
“Uh. Now?” he says, looking at the clock, then at his phone.
I roll my eyes and say, “It’s not like I’m asking you on a fucking date, bro. I’m asking you to put your dick in my ass. That’s not the sort of offer I need to make a few days in advance.”
“I thought you were a top,” he says slowly.
“I am, usually,” I say. I don’t tell him that there hasn’t been much of a point to that lately, that the main reason I’m offering myself up in this way is because I think I’m drunk enough to trick my body into getting hard, but not necessarily sane enough to stay hard, and it will be so much simpler to get through this if I’m facedown on a mattress and he’s too busy fucking me from behind to notice what I’ve got going on in front. I add, “Sometimes, I change my mind though. Like tonight. Tonight, I think you should get your goddamn cock out, because it’s two in the morning, and we’re both single, and we’re both hot, and your roommate is asleep, and I want you to fuck me. If you don’t have condoms, that’s fine, because I do. If you don’t have lube, that’s fine, because I don’t care if you’re rough, okay? You can just use a little spit or something, it’s fine, I just really want you to fuck me. Are you cool with that or what?”
“I, um…” Alex hesitates, still looking at his phone. Even if he hasn’t agreed yet, I know he will; I can see from here in the doorway that he’s shifting a little, probably because he’s starting to get hard. Not many eighteen-year-olds would refuse such a direct offer, not even ones who still spend most of their time claiming to be straight, like Al does. Since I assume it can only help my case, I reach behind myself to shut the door before I take a step towards the bed and strip off my—or, Stohler’s, I guess—Sex Pistols shirt. Not a bad idea, since it still kind of smells like the rum I must have spilled on myself at some point. But I know I have a nice body, and I know that, if there’s any chance of Alex saying yes to me, this can only kick that into high gear. His eyes are fixed on my abs even as he says, “I’m, um… I’m sort of involved with someone, is the thing. We’re not exclusive, or anything, but we’ve been hooking up for a few months now, and I don’t want to make him—”
“Good,” I interrupt, even though a not-too-small part of me is surprised to realize he’s not still a virgin. It’s good to know that someone around here knows how to keep quiet about his sex life. I continue, “If you’ve been hooking up for a few months, you should be pretty decent at this by now.”
“I’m making progress,” he agrees.
Unable to bite back my frustration, I kneel on the edge of the bed and order, “Then take your fucking clothes off, Alex. It, it’s not weird. It doesn’t have to be a thing. People hook up with their friends all the time, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. Look at you and Travis, or me and Ben. We’re all fine. For fuck’s sake, I’ve been completely wrecking Jamie since we were fifteen. He and I are best friends, and we’ve had literally days of sex, and it’s not a big—”
He surges up to meet me. We kiss clumsily at first, both of us unsure of how to fit our mouths together. I’m still so drunk, and I’m hoping he can’t tell, but he doesn’t exactly have any experience kissing me to notice if it’s different now. I shove him flat onto the bed—his head narrowly misses connecting with the headboard—and fumble my way through unbuttoning his shirt. He must notice my gracelessness, because he frowns and says, “Dude, are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say shortly, curving a hand over the back of his neck and lifting him up slightly so he can yank his arms free of the shirt. “I’m fine, I just haven’t gotten laid in a while.”
“You got laid Saturday,” he says, almost laughing as he reaches for my belt.
“I haven’t bottomed in a while.”
Before Seth in June, the only guy who had ever topped me was Dave. Sometimes, it wasn’t that bad. Sometimes, I came—I think maybe fifteen out of the hundred times we slept together. If it was the perfect combination of him giving me a reach-around and putting the right amount of pressure against my prostate and not beating me until I was almost unconscious right before, I could actually enjoy it; even if that didn’t get me off, he’d usually compensate by getting me off with a blowjob or something after he came. It’s not like Dave was a bad lover—between beatings or assaults or whatever—but we were both very definitely tops, so it was never going to work out well for me. I don’t like having things inside of me; the very nature of the act makes me feel uncomfortable, too exposed, violated.
Jamie says it’s because my first experience with it was so bad. He says it’s no wonder I can’t stand getting topped, considering that the first time it ever happened, I was fifteen years old, terrified and struggling against the heated backseat of a Lexus. He says I might never be able to enjoy it, because almost all of my experience with being on the bottom has been in the context of violence. Before a fight, after a fight, sometimes (and these were the worst ones) while a fight was happening—the times when I’d be yelling and swearing and shoving and hitting and then suddenly I’d be facedown on the floor with my ex-boyfriend behind me, shoving into me and murmuring, “For fuck’s sake, Garen, stop struggling, it’s fine, we do this all the time, you’ll like it in a minute,” against the back of my neck. I’m usually inclined to let Jamie rant, up until he inevitably uses the ‘R’ word, and then the conversation always ends immediately.
And I don’t care what Jamie says--that never happened to me. I don’t care if I fought, I don’t care if I refused, I don’t care if I didn’t want any of it. I’m a full-grown, adult man, not some teenage girl at a frat party or a scared housewife in a dark alley. I had a fucking choice—I could have fought harder, I could have made it stop, I could have done something, so it’s not… that. That doesn’t happen to guys like me, that doesn’t happen to men who are six-foot-one and a hundred and seventy pounds of hard muscle, that doesn’t happen to people who everyone knows would never say no. I’m not a victim; I never have been.
By now, I can feel that Alex is fully hard where he’s pressed against the thigh I have slipped between his legs. I rock down against him—I should write a ‘thank you’ letter to the fine folks at Bacardi, because I’m hard, too—and he lets out a gentle noise of approval. But I don’t want gentle. I shift off him to pull his jeans roughly down over his hips, and usually, I’d start in with the foreplay. Jerk him off, maybe give a little head. That’s not what’s going to make me feel better, though. That’s not how you earn forgiveness; you earn forgiveness by letting someone fuck you until you feel like you’re going to die.
Not wanting or knowing how to verbalize this, I grab Alex’s hand and push it down the back of my jeans. He must get the hint, because we quickly finish undressing, and then he’s rolling onto his side to reach towards the milk crate he uses in lieu of a nightstand. Guess he does have condoms and lube after all. I bury my face against his neck and sink my teeth into his skin, drawing a quiet groan from his throat. When I murmur his name against his jawline, he give a brief shake of his head and says, “Don’t.”
I pull back slightly, resentment already curling up inside my brain. “Don’t what? Don’t say your name?” Every guy who has ever asked me not to say his name has turned into an asshole about hooking up, the second it’s over. It’s a way of distancing himself from me, from the fact that he’s actually sunk low enough to get with me, like me avoiding his name might mean he’s not slumming it like he really is.
But Alex shakes his head again and adds, flushing a little like he knows what he’s about to say is stupid, “Don’t, um… look, guys tend to call me by my real name when I’m, you know, hooking up with them, or whatever. Ben always did, when we used to make out. And the guy I’ve been sleeping with, he does it too, always. So, could you…?”
I’m shitfaced enough that it actually takes me a second to figure out what the hell he’s even talking about, but once I do, I say, somewhat tentatively, “What, you want me to call you Alexander?” He gives a quick, embarrassed little nod, and I duck back in to repeat the name as a whisper against his collarbone. That earns me another sound of approval, and I allow him to roll me onto my back. The second he settles himself between my legs and reaches for the lube, though, I scramble out from under him. He gives me a confused look, and I turn onto my stomach, reaching back with one arm to pull him down on top of me. “Like this,” I whisper. “I don’t—I mean, it feels better this way, I like it better than face-to-face. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, it’s okay. Whatever you want,” he says, pressing a kiss to my shoulder and sort of rutting up against the back of my thigh as he reaches down again. Getting fingered is sort of my least favorite part of getting fucked; it feels like it should be intimate, but it’s not, it’s always just too tight and painful and uncomfortable, which is actually sort of ironic, considering I love fingering other people. But I realize it’s sort of a necessity, so I don’t complain while Alex does it. I even make a few sounds that might imply I’m enjoying it. Still, it’s not what I’m after, so the second I’m pretty sure he’s opened me enough to be safe, I pick up the condom he left on the pillow, tear open the package, and reach behind myself to roll it onto him. He pauses, fingers still inside me, and says, “Will it make things weird if I tell you I’m impressed that it takes you less than five seconds to open and put condom on another guy, without even facing him?”
“Will it make things weird if I tell you I’m impressed with your sort of gigantic dick? Stop making casual conversation and fuck me,” I order. I vaguely hear him say something that sounds like, it’s proportionate to my body and I’m just really tall, and I’m muttering into the pillow, oh my god, now is really not the time, man, and then he’s slipping an arm around my middle to hold me in place while he presses into me. The last time this happened, I was so fucked up on coke that I barely knew what was going on; this time, I’m not drunk enough to ignore the fact that it hurts a little. I don’t try to hold back my noises, but I do try to make them sound more pleasure-based than pain-based. I reach up with one hand to brace myself against the headboard so that I can fuck back onto Alex’s dick.
He must not be lying about having been hooking up with someone for the past few months, because he’s actually pretty good at this, objectively speaking. One arm is wrapped tight around my waist to hold me against him, and his other hand is braced against the mattress so that he’s holding at least some of his weight off of me. It takes a little bit, but he eventually manages to find a good angle at which to thrust into me. I twist in place a bit so that I can kiss him over my shoulder. His eyes have long since rolled shut, but I keep mine open. Close up, I can only see the fuzzy outline of his face, but holding onto that image, reaching back to tangle my hand in his soft blond hair, whispering his name over and over… it’s the only thing that keeps me here. It’s the only thing that reminds me who he is, and that it’s okay that he’s doing this to me.
It’s Alex. It’s okay. It’s Alex, I like Alex, Alex is my friend. It’s okay. I want this. I want this. I want this. It’s okay.
I slip a hand between my hips and the mattress so that I’ve got something to fuck down into. Between the buzz of rum in my bloodstream, and the hand I’ve got wrapped tight around my dick, and the pinch of Alex’s teeth on my shoulder, I’m almost able to surrender to the sensations. I can almost forget how much I hate bottoming—Alex isn’t bad in bed, not really, it’s just that his dick is a lot bigger than I’d anticipated, and it’s kind of hard to ignore something that long when it’s actually inside you, which is making it really fucking difficult to pretend I’m not in the middle of a sex act I hate—and I can almost forget how painful this relapse is going to be for everyone who thought I could be better, and I can almost forget about the freckled, “bisexual” little slut who drove me to this point in the first place.
That’s all good, but that’s not what gets me off.
What gets me off is the moment where I call up the memories of last night, in the bathroom stall at that club. What gets me off is remembering that first instant of having cocaine back in my bloodstream, of having those drugs deeper inside me than Alex is now. What gets me off is thinking about that beautifulsexypainfulperfect thrum under my skin when I finally had my chance to go back to using. What gets me off is pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth and imagining that I can still taste the 151. What gets me off is knowing that there’s still a fake ID in my wallet, in case I decide I want to go buy myself something else from the liquor store when I leave here. What gets me off is knowing that I don’t have to stop.
I come with a broken, desperate groan of something that might sound like please, or maybe yes, or possibly even Alexander, since he’s there too. He arches forward to keep kissing me over my shoulder, swallowing up my moans as I ride out my orgasm, spilling onto his sheets—not my bed, not my problem. I’m lying sated and boneless on the bed when he comes a few minutes later, his forehead pressed to the back of my neck and his breath hot and shaky against my spine. He rolls off me a minute later to dispose of the condom, and when he returns to the bed, I have the presence of mind to lean in and kiss him, slow and dirty. There’s a half-smile on his face, like it’s been a while since he’s had a quality orgasm with anyone but his own hand, so I figure he won’t mind too much if I stay here. That, and I’m not sure I can actually move to leave. I know I should head back to Ben’s room and pretend this hasn’t happened, but it’s so much easier to just bury my face in the pillows and let my body dissolve back into unconsciousness.
First day sober
The next morning, I wake up to a splitting headache and Ben’s harsh, low voice as he says, “What the fuck is going on?”
Next to me, Alex is upright in an instant, a blush in his cheeks and more than a few bite marks sucked into the skin of his neck. I’m guessing those are from me. Oops. He says, “Ben, I—”
“Did you guys fuck?” Ben interrupts.
I try to crawl back under the blankets to block out the sunlight streaming in through the window and say, “Well, obviously.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he says.
For half a second, I want to laugh, because really. Shouldn’t it be obvious by now that everything is wrong with me? But when I roll over to face him, I realize that his words are directed at Alex, not at me. Alex, who is still looking embarrassed, but now uncertain, upset. He says, very carefully, “What do you mean?”
Ben’s words are too loud in the small room, and I cover my ears instinctively when he repeats in a yell, “What the hell is wrong with you? For god’s sake, Alex. How could you do this to him, knowing what kind of condition he was in last night?”
“Knowing… wait, what? What are you talking about?” Alex says. His uncertainty is rapidly dissolving into panic. Ben doesn’t say anything; neither do I. Alex turns to look at me, and I can tell he’s taking in all the bits of my appearance he didn’t seem able to process last night. My bloodshot eyes. My flinching away from the light. The way I’m cradling my head in my hands to try to calm the pounding. The deep sense of regret and shame that I’m sure must be filling the room now. He whispers, “G, are you hungover?” I don’t say anything, which is probably exactly the same as saying, Yes. “Oh my god. You—You were drunk last night? That’s why you came in here, that’s why you wanted us to have sex?”
“Does it matter why I wanted it?” I hedge. When he doesn’t immediately respond, I resort to my usual method of distraction and reach for him, voice low as I say, “It’s—Alex, it’s fine. It was good sex, okay? It—”
“No,” Alex says very slowly, very carefully. “No, I’m pretty sure that ‘good sex’ is only possible when both parties are going into it with a clear head and a full understanding of what the fuck is going on.”
I want to hit him, I really do. It’s only by clenching my hands into fists around the bedsheets that I’m able to stop myself from belting him across the face, because how dare he say this? I snap, “So, what, I didn’t put a warning label on my dick that said, ‘caution: drunk,’ and you’re saying I fucking assaulted you? Is that it?”
He retorts, “Kind of the opposite, actually. I’m saying that the fact that I fucked you while you were in the middle of a relapse is making my skin crawl like you wouldn’t believe, because I’m pretty sure that means I assaulted you.”
I shove the blankets off, not caring that it means both of them are getting a serious eyefull of my naked body, and clamber off the bed to get dressed. Neither of them tries to stop me, or talk to me, or whatever. I pull on my shirt, my jeans, but my hands are shaking too badly to button them. I look around for my boots, but realize they must be back in Ben’s room, or out in the living room; it’s not like I remember the part of the evening where I took them off. The odds of Alex following me out of the room while still undressed are unlikely, and I’m still so furious at him, so it seems as good a time as any to turn to him and say, “You didn’t assault me, Baker. Believe me, I know the fucking difference. I know I was drunk, and maybe I should have told you that, or warned you or whatever, but I know what happened between us, and I know from way too much personal goddamn experience that that’s not what that feels like, okay? So, fuck you, and fuck what you think happened last night, because you’re an idiot, and I’m leaving.”
Only belatedly do I realize that I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally fucked up enough to acknowledge that. Even that passing phrase is too much, and I stumble out of the bedroom, refusing to look either of them in the eyes. I make it down the hall, into the living room where my boots are, and halfway down the building stairs before Ben catches up to me, still trying to tie his Converse and almost pitching down the stairs in his haste. My life—more specifically, the conversation I know we’re about to have—would be so much easier if I just let him fall, but I grab his arm to steady him. He nods his thanks, and for a long moment, we just stare at each other. When I turn to continue down the stairs, he squeezes in front of me and says over his shoulder, “I’ll drive you back.”
“I can—”
“No, you can’t,” he interrupts, “Travis brought you here in his car yesterday, so unless you’re planning to walk all the way back to Lakewood, shut up and get in my car.”
I don’t point out that I could easily call a cab and put the fare on my card, and he doesn’t point out that I can’t really call anyone else I know for a ride, on account of how I only have two friends other than him, and Jamie lives in New York and Alex might not want to keep hanging out with me after this. Instead, we both walk around the building to the parking lot and get into his car.
Most of the drive from New Haven to Lakewood passes in silence. Only when he keeps going straight on the town’s one main road do I point out, “You missed the turn for the school. I have homeroom in half an hour, and anyway, my car’s still in the lot.”
“I have your keys, I can figure out how to get the car back to your house later. You’re going home,” he says.
My hands tighten on the leather of the passenger seat. “Ben, I have school.”
“No, Garen, what you have is a fucking problem. I mean, are you seriously not getting the severity of this situation?” he demands. I look around at him, but he refuses to blink away from the road. His bright blue eyes are stone cold. “Do you want to know the worst part?”
“No, I don’t. Ben, can you just shut—”
He continues over me, “The worst part is that you were doing so well. I guess that’s why the rest of us stopped worrying about you, you know? You’d been fine since going into rehab, and you were adjusting so perfectly to sobriety, and I took it for granted. I just assumed that if you could make it to ninety days, you’d be good for the rest of your life. Only, that’s not really how it turned out. You’re not good, Garen. You’re not sober. And you’re not putting yourself or anyone else through another relapse. So, I’m bringing you home, and you’re going to talk to your dad, and you two are going to figure out how to get through this. Because you need to fix this again. You’re not okay.”
The entire speech is so similar to what I’m sure he must have said when he was dragging me back from Cleveland this past summer. But the truth is, my entire recollection of that experience is still only so-so. I have a vague understanding of it, and I have half-memories, and I have his version of events, but that’s it. I’m so fucking tired of not remembering things. Especially important things.
“Okay,” I whisper, turning to stare out the window. “Okay, I’ll, um… I’ll tell Dad what happened. We’ll work something out with the LRC, I guess. They have like, emergency check-ins and stuff. Forty-eight hours, or a week, or whatever you need. You know, for people who get off track. I’ll tell him I need it.”
“Okay,” Ben echoes, and that’s that. We don’t say anything for the rest of the drive to my house, and when he pulls into my driveway, the only goodbye I offer is a muttered, I’m really sorry. Pass it along to Alex. And Travis. Dad’s car is still in the driveway, so I can only assume that he hasn’t left for work yet this morning. I take a deep, steadying breath and push open the front door.
“Garen,” is the immediate, reproachful greeting from the kitchen. “I’ve told you before, if you’re going to be staying out all night, you need to call me or send a text message so I know you’re safe. Where have you been?”
“I was at Alex and Ben’s apartment,” I say, shocked at how normal my voice sounds. I step into the kitchen; Dad is standing near the counter, loading all of the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher. He pauses long enough to give me a long stare. His eyes settle on my neck, and the marks that I know Alex bit into me last night while we were fucking.
“Alex and Ben’s apartment,” Dad echoes, then adds, “Again. You’ve been spending a lot of time there lately.” I nod. He hesitates. “I’m pretty certain that Doctor Howard was clear with you. It’s not a good idea for you to get involved with anyone before you’ve been sober for a year.” I don’t say anything. He sighs. “Garen. I know that you were involved with Ben once upon a time—you made that abundantly, uncomfortably clear last summer, when you took the liberty of discussing your… relations with him at the dinner table, when he and your stepbrother were dating. I know that you’re grateful to him for all he’s done in the past few months, and I know he’s become a very good friend to you. So, I want a straight answer: is Ben your boyfriend?”
I want to laugh, but I don’t. Maybe I should, though; I mean, it is sort of funny, that Dad would assume that I’m dating Ben, when we both know that someone as sweet and loyal as Ben is way too good for me. It’s funny that he would guess that I’m involved with the guy whose bed I left last night so that I could go down the hall and get fucked by his roommate. Instead of laughing, though, I shake my head no and move to stand in front of my sobriety board.
Monday’s writing is still up on the board. 92 days clean/sober. Dad knows enough not to touch my board, even if it’s just to help me change the day or clean it or something. I can hear him moving at the sink behind me, and he can hear me not moving at all, so that means I can hear him eventually stop in the middle of loading the dishwasher. I know he’s watching me. Neither of us speaks. Finally, I take a step towards the board. There’s a tiny eraser on the ledge of the board, but I just smear the letters away with the side of my fist. I pick up the marker, uncap it, and very carefully print first day clean/sober in the center of the board.
When I turn around, I can’t meet Dad’s eyes, can’t bring myself to see the anger and disappointment I know will be written all over his face. All of it—seeing the resentment in Dad’s eyes when he found out about me and Travis all those months ago, waking up in the hospital after I let Dave kick my ass, Ben’s confusion and Alex’s sneer when they first saw me after I dyed my hair black and hacked half of it off, Bree’s tears when she saw the gun Travis had wrestled away from me, the taunts at school, the bitchy comments from Jack Thorne and Gabe Alberti and everyone else. It all pales in comparison to this moment right here.
I have never been this ashamed in my entire life.
And when Dad drops a plate back into the sink, not caring when it shatters, and folds me into his bone-crushing embrace, I know I don’t deserve his comfort, but all I have left in me to do is bury my face against the lapel of my father’s suit jacket and try not to die.