Content Warnings: Brief sexual content. Discussion of drug use. Brief references to past domestic violence, past sexual assault, past abortion, past gun violence.
240 days sober
Travis finishes writing his AP English exam before I finish weeping onto mine. Since he isn’t a Patton student, the proctor lets him leave as soon as he’s done, while the rest of us wait for time to be officially called. I expect him to be waiting in the hallway when I’m finally released from the classroom. I’m even bracing myself for round two of the argument.
The hallway is empty.
I look to the fire exit on my right, then down towards the breezeway on my left that leads back into the rest of the building, but all I see are other Patton boys. I take my phone out of my pocket, power it on, and sure enough, there’s a text from Travis, sent about ten minutes ago.
Hey. You’re still taking the test, but I have to go. I forgot that I agreed to take someone else’s shift at work this afternoon. I’ll see you back at the house this evening. We can still go to the play in Lakewood if you want. I think we should talk first, though. I’m sorry for what I said earlier. I didn’t mean it, and I shouldn’t have said it. I love you. See you tonight.
“I love you, I’ll see you tonight,” I mimic aloud. “Fuck you. Fucking coward.”
“Me?” says some guy I’ve never spoken to in my life, who happens to be leaving the classroom behind me. He looks ready to square up, but his friend elbows him and says, “No, dude, I think he’s just talking to himself again.”
I make a face. My reputation isn’t the best, but I didn’t realize it had gotten to the casual hallucination level. Rather than feed into the mythos of my own psychosis further, I bury my phone in my backpack and set off to find Jamie and Ben. It only takes me about fifteen minutes to hunt them down on a walking path between the science building and one of the lesser-used admin offices. It’s one of Jamie’s favorite places for a semi-public hook-up, and sure enough, the two of them are lazily necking against the bricks, like they don’t have a perfectly good Cadillac to screw in halfway across campus.
I slump against the wall next to Ben, and Jamie detaches himself from his boyfriend’s mouth to say, “I’m sorry, are you waiting your turn? Give us some breathing room, you pervert.”
“Fuck off,” I say. “Can you guys stop sucking on each other’s tongues long enough to leave campus sometime soon?”
“Don’t be a bitch.” Jamie smacks my shoulder, and I shove him back, and we squabble for a few seconds before the pent-up bitterness in me reaches a peak and one of my pulled punches lands a little too hard in his ribs. We break apart, him in surprise, me in embarrassment.
“Sorry,” I say, not sure if I mean it. “That last one was an accident.”
“Where’s Travis?” Ben asks. He says it like he’s already guessed the answer, and that just makes me want to hit him, too. I make an ugly face at him instead of answering, but if there’s one thing Ben can beat me at, it’s a silent standoff.
After a few seconds that feel like actual hours, I turn away and start searching my pockets for my cigarettes. “He left.”
“After the exam?” Jamie questions.
I nod. My hands are shaking as I light my cigarette, but I think I probably get my Zippo put away again before anyone notices. “Yeah, he said he had to cover somebody’s shift at work. He’s going to meet me at the house later, if we still end up going to the play.”
Jamie raises his eyebrows. “Did you two—”
“Jamie, please. I am fucking begging you to stop asking me questions and just come get something to eat with me, before I start crying again.”
“Why were you crying in the first place?” Jamie demands. “What the hell did he do to you?”
“James,” Ben says sharply. “If he doesn’t want to talk about it, drop it.”
My throat is too tight to thank him, or to actually take a drag off the cigarette that is burning in my hand. I stub the tip out on the wall, flick the butt into the grass, and head for the parking lot.
Shockingly, Ben’s words are enough to put Jamie in check for a while. We drive into town for a relatively subdued lunch at a cafe, and between the three of us, we manage to keep up enough of a conversation to seem almost normal. I pretend I care about the archival preservation of Julia Ward Howe’s personal correspondence, they pretend not to notice that I’m spiraling into a depressive episode right there in front of them, and we all pretend that our spines aren’t locked straight from the tension of everything left unsaid. The situation is complicated by the fact that I change the subject every time James mentions Travis, James changes the subject every time I try to ask why he made those weird comments about his schoolwork earlier, and Ben sneers every time either of us tries to diffuse the awkwardness with an obscene comment. We manage to make it through the meal, but it’s not one of our better outings.
Even that tentative peace falls apart later, as Jamie eases his car into my driveway next to the Mercedes. Travis’s car is nowhere in sight, and I feel the stiffness start to leech out of my bones. I must make some sort of sound—a sigh of relief, maybe—because when I reach for my door handle, Jamie flicks the lock button to keep me right where I am and twists around in his seat to address me face-to-face. “I understand that you don’t want to talk about it, but I still need to know. What exactly is the plan for when Travis gets home?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I try to unlock the door, but the child safety must be engaged, because it doesn’t budge. I wonder if he planned that before we got back in the car after lunch. “Let me out.”
“I’m talking about whatever argument the two of you quite clearly had after your exam,” Jamie says. Ben reaches over to touch his leg, maybe in warning, but Jamie doesn’t react to it at all. Instead, he keeps pushing. “Do you want me and Ben to leave so that you can continue fighting it out? Should we pack up your clothes, guitars, and dog so that you can come stay in my guest room until things blow over? Is it a permanent split this time?”
I give the still-locked door handle one last yank for the hell of it, and then fuck it. I go out the moon roof. They’re both so busy yelling at me—Jamie because I’m going to dent his car, Ben because I’m going to break my neck—that neither of them thinks to grab my legs and actually stop me from slithering up between the seats. From the roof of the car, I toss my backpack down onto my lawn, then hop down after it.
Mrs. Katz, the Brooklyn expat who sometimes joins me and Omelette on our walks so she can talk shit about a bunch of ladies I don’t know from her synagogue, is watching me from across the street. I salute her, and she waves back. “You staying out of trouble, Garen?”
“Yes, Mrs. Katz.”
“You getting yourself kidnapped over there?”
“No, Mrs. Katz.”
“You sure? I got a baseball bat in the mudroom. You need me to bring it out for you?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. Katz.”
My friends catch up to me right as I’m unlocking the front door of my house, and even though I try to close them out, Jamie throws an arm across the threshold to block me. Briefly, the idea flits through my mind--if I break Jamie’s arm in the door, they’ll probably leave me alone. As soon as the impulse is there, it’s gone again, replaced by a bolt of shock and self-loathing that any part of me would consider doing something like that to my best friend. I stagger backward, and the two of them follow me into the house.
Omelette has trotted out of the living room to howl a greeting to us, and I collapse onto the floor to embrace him. Jamie remains upright and rigid.
“I don’t like this,” he says.
It’s exactly what Declan said to me earlier today, delivered with the same core of concern wrapped in a grim shell and for some reason, that makes me laugh. Whatever irritation or tension has been toying around Jamie’s expression is gone in an instant, replaced by genuine, naked anger.
“It isn’t funny, Garen. Things were going well for you for months. You and Travis weren’t together, and I know you must have missed that, but you were fine as roommates. No fighting, no fits of jealousy, no arguments with your friends. You seemed like you were actually happy. And then two weeks ago, we all get together for your first night at work, and suddenly you two are kissing, you’re saying you love each other, you’re spending the night in the same bed.”
And that—that’s disgust. I stare at him. Jamie has had problems with some of my dating choices before, but with the exception of those involving Dave Walczyk, he has never sounded outright disgusted by them. By me.
“So, I figure, fine. Fine, you two got back together, and you didn’t want to tell me, for whatever reason, but that’s alright. I can deal with you making a decision that I don’t particularly love. I can even deal with you keeping it from me, despite the fact that I tell you everything. But what I can’t deal with is you getting back together with him, only to have it be the same shit it was before!” Jamie throws an arm out to the side, like he can physically point to the moment in time where everything fell apart. “The drama, the obsession. Twisting yourself into knots because you’re trying to make a relationship work when it’s obvious that you both—”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” I interrupt. Omelette barks at me in reproach. He gets antsy whenever he can tell I’m in a bad mood, and right now, his ears have leveled out across the top of his skull, airplane wings instead of butterflies. I rub his wolfy face between my hands to reassure him, then stand up again. He parks his furry little ass right on the toe of my boot so that he can face Jamie, too. It’s a little like having back-up, and that’s enough to get me to try to keep my voice even when I say, “You don’t know anything about my relationship with Travis. We never even had a conversation about it until after it was over, and besides, you’ve always been here, in New York. You weren’t in Lakewood when Travis and I dated for real.”
“If you’re trying to make an argument in favor of your relationship with Travis, you might not want to base it on what happened those first few months you lived in Lakewood,” Ben says mildly. My attention snaps to him, but he’s making eye contact with my dog instead of me.
“The hell does that mean?” I demand.
“It means that you don’t get to rewrite history so that you can pretend you lived out a love story,” he says. His voice is so calm, so matter-of-fact, like he’s not ripping my guts right out of my torso and grinding them into a humiliating pile of dust. “Maybe you two were happy together. I can’t say for sure, because he mostly pretended you didn’t exist when we were at school. He didn’t hang out with us. He didn’t sit with us at lunch. He didn’t even make eye contact with you in the hallways. The only time I remember him talking to you in front of other people was when people started to spread rumors that he might be queer, so he called you a faggot and didn’t talk to you for two weeks.”
Jamie turns and walks out of the room at that. I think it’s the only way he can stop me from seeing his rage, but I close my eyes anyway. “He was in the closet, and our parents were engaged. It was a complicated situation.”
“I don’t think that treating you poorly made it any less complicated.”
“He didn’t—”
“He did, Garen!” Jamie snarls, storming right back into the entryway. “Do you even remember that afternoon you came back to town? It was the first time I ever saw the two of you together, and I swear to God, I came this close”—he holds up forefinger and thumb, pinched an eighth of an inch apart—“to beating the crap out of him myself. You said hello to him, and his first words were I fucked Ben.”
Ben looks around at him in surprise. “Wait, really?”
“Yes, and when Garen reminded him that such an achievement didn’t exactly make him unique—”
“Fuck off.”
“—Travis smashed a mug of hot coffee on Garen’s hands and said he’d beat the shit out of him if he ever said something about that again. Then he told him he hated him and wished he would die,” Jamie finishes.
It’s almost funny, because hey, this whole conversation is making me wish I would die, too.
The surprise on Ben’s face has ratcheted up into actual disbelief now as he turns to me and says, “Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened?”
“Because I didn’t want to tell you anything. I hated you then,” I say.
“That doesn’t matter. I loved you then, and I love you now, and I never would have stayed with Travis if I had known he acted like that.”
I can feel my expression twisting into a mockery of a smile, something forced and ugly that I don’t seem to have any control over. “If I’d known it was that easy to split you two up, I would’ve told you sooner. We could have all saved ourselves a lot of trouble.”
“Stop it,” Jamie says flatly. “Stop doing that, that thing where you turn into a cunt because you feel cornered and you want to bully everyone into leaving you alone with your misery. It’s not going to work. Ben and I both know you too well to put up with that shit today.”
Omelette starts barking again. I think he’s starting to figure out which words count as profanity, but I can’t tell whether he loves or hates it.
I grab his harness and leash from the hook by the door and get him clipped in. “I’m taking my dog for a walk,” I say. “Feel free to get the fuck out of my house while we’re gone.”
I slam the front door behind myself, but my bravado fades before I’ve even made it down the driveway. Omelette and I head north for a few blocks, and my anger dissipates more with each step, like I’m leaving a trail of emotional breadcrumbs behind us. We turn east, and now I just have embarrassment and resentment keeping me company for two blocks until we reach the dog park.
Nobody else is here. Omelette does a few high-speed circuits of the park to see if anyone is hiding from him, but when he is forced to accept that there are no other dogs for him to play with, he starts howling despondently. I’m able to distract him with a game of fetch, using one of the loaner toys from the bin. The sign next to the bin requests that visitors clean toys before returning them to the bin, so I take the toy with me when we leave. It’s kind of hard to be full of righteous indignation when you’re holding a nasty, hot pink, rubber pig that’s covered in dog spit. By the time I make it back to my house and see that Jamie’s car is still in the driveway, I can’t even be mad. I’m just tired.
As soon as Omelette has been released into the house, he goes tearing off to find another toy to play with. I bring the pink pig to the sink to clean it and, more importantly, my hands. James and Ben are both sitting at my kitchen table. None of us speak while I’m washing up, but once the pig has been thoroughly scrubbed and propped up in the drying rack, I turn around and find Jamie standing right in front of me.
“I was harsh,” he says, which is very much not an apology.
“Yeah,” I say, “fucker.”
He pulls me into a hug that only ends when he realizes I’m drying my wet hands on the back of his shirt, and then he squirms free and returns to the table. Instead of joining them, I pull myself up to sit on the counter.
“Here’s the thing,” I say carefully. “I know that my relationship with Travis… is and has always been a mess. But a lot of that is my mess. He got outed to his awful, homophobic mom, and I left town for four months. He had every right to be furious with me when I came back. Maybe… maybe he expressed it in a way that scared you, Jamie.” It scared me, too, I don’t add. “But the way you guys were talking about him made it sound like he’s violent with me, and that’s not fair. It isn’t fair to him, because he has never hurt me like that, and it isn’t fair to me, because someone did hurt me like that, and I’m fucking sick of hearing people compare the other men in my life to David.”
Jamie’s elbows are uncharacteristically propped on the table, his long fingers steepled together and resting against his lips. Across the table from him, Ben is hunched over, hands on his lap, posture as shitty as ever. They’re both looking at me, not each other, and for once, it feels like they’re actually hearing me.
“I don’t think that Travis is violent,” Jamie finally says, “but I do think he’s volatile.”
“Travis says the same thing about Declan,” I say.
“Declan isn’t volatile. He’s a dick. There’s a difference,” Jamie points out. “And since he’s not being a dick to you, me, or Ben, I don’t have much of an opinion on the matter.”
“My point,” I bite out, “is that you talk shit about Travis, and Travis talks shit about Declan, and Declan talks shit about everyone, but it’s my life, and these are my decisions, and I’m going to be with whoever I want to be with.”
Jamie opens his mouth to respond, but Ben makes a soft, barely audible noise that might just be James. Their eyes meet across the table, and whatever silent conversation they share in that moment ends with Jamie taking a long, deep breath in through his nose and exhaling, “Fine. I trust your judgment.”
I literally cannot remember a time when someone has said that to me before. I must be letting that show on my face, because Ben glances up at me and stifles a laugh.
The three of us manage to go another two hours without an incident. Ben and I spend most of that time playing with Omelette in the yard, while Jamie makes himself comfortable on the back deck—“cat-owner territory,” he calls it—and fucks around on his phone. Omelette happens to be in between barking episodes when Travis gets home, so even from the backyard, we can all hear the sound of an engine cutting off, followed by the slam of a car door.
Jamie gestures towards the sliding glass door to the living room and offers, “Should we…?”
“Give me a minute. I want to talk to him first,” I say, dropping a frisbee on his lap on my way past. Omelette makes a beeline for the toy, and Jamie hastily flings the frisbee across the yard before the dog can lunge for his crotch. Ben’s laughter follows me into the house.
I slide the back door shut at very nearly the same moment Travis closes the front one. He’s wearing the same clothes he wore to campus this morning, not the black shirt, khaki trousers, and green apron he wears for work, and I wish I were more surprised to discover that he lied about needing to take someone else’s shift. But considering how this morning went, I can’t really blame him, either.
We meet at the living room doorway, but he takes my hand and tows me into the entryway so that we’re out of sight of the back door.
“Hi,” he says softly. “Can we talk?”
I nod, but before he says anything, he slips an arm around my waist and pulls me into a tight hug. I’m not completely sure how to react to it. Half of me is desperately relieved that he isn’t pissed at me, that we’re not arguing, that Jamie and Ben were wrong about us only ever treating each other like shit. The other half of me still can’t stop thinking about the fact that we’re three days away from me being eight months sober, but on some level, Travis still doesn’t believe—and might not ever have believed—in my ability to stay this way for a full year at a time.
As if he can hear my thoughts, Travis says into my shoulder, “I’m sorry for what I said before the exam. It was stupid and mean and—and not even true. I know you can stay sober, I know how strong you are. I was just pissed about the situation with Declan, and I lashed out like a complete asshole. I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I say, because telling him it’s okay would feel like a lie. There’s a voice in the back of my mind whispering—in a Georgia drawl--it can’t be the same shit it was before. I swallow and say, “I need more than that, though.”
One of Travis’ hands had been trailing back and forth across the small of my back, almost like he was petting me. It goes still now, and he leans away from our embrace so that we can make eye contact. “I’m sorry, Garen. I didn’t mean what I said to you.”
“I think you did. Parts of it, at least,” I say carefully. I really, really don’t want another fight. “Even if you do believe I can stay sober”--which you fucking don’t--“I don’t think you trust anybody else to let me stay that way.”
“That isn’t true,” Travis protests. “I trust plenty of the people in your life. I trust James, I trust Ben—”
“No, you don’t,” I interrupt. “Do you remember that fight you guys had in October, after you found out that he and I were hooking up? You said that he was prioritizing his own need to be needed over my sobriety, and that he—Ben McCutcheon, patron saint of saving screwed-up men from their own worst impulses—was toxic for me to be around. You didn’t trust him then.”
Travis blows out a harsh breath of air and takes another step back so that we aren’t touching at all. “That’s an exaggeration. I never said you couldn’t be around him. You guys are friends.”
“Yeah, but the second I become more-than-friends with a guy, you think he can’t be trusted. You think I can’t be trusted. That’s what you did with Ben last fall, and it’s what you’re doing with Declan now.”
“I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from us talking about Declan,” Travis says, and goddamn it, it sounds like a warning.
I’m the one to step back this time. It takes me back into the living room, and Travis remains where he is, in the entry way. He doesn’t look pissed, necessarily. There’s no scowl, no tightness to his jaw, no crossed arms or petulant, locked stance. But there’s a kind of defiant hardness to his eyes, like he thinks that what he has just said means that the conversation is over, and if there’s one thing I don’t fuck with, it’s somebody trying to tell me what to do.
“Really? Because I think we can gain some clarity.” I raise my thumb, starting to count off. “First thing we should be clear on: I’m responsible for my own sobriety. Unless you think my friends are going to roofie me, you need to stop acting like me hanging out with people you don’t like is a threat to my health.” I add an index finger to my count, making an L-shape. “Second thing: you’re not part of my sobriety team. You’re not my shrink. You’re not my doctor. You’re not my sponsor. You’re not even the guy in my NA group who hands out the keychains when we reach our milestones. So, respectfully, stop fucking telling me how to handle my own addiction. You’ve been doing this since before I even went to rehab, telling me who I should or shouldn’t spend time with, who I should or shouldn’t hook up with, where I should or shouldn’t go. I get that you think you’re helping me, and I love you so much for wanting to take care of me, but you have no idea what this whole experience—addiction, rehab, relapse, recovery—has been like for me. You haven’t lived it, and you aren’t in a position to tell me how to deal with it.”
I add my middle finger to the count, which is fitting, because this is the one that I think is most likely to make Travis tell me to fuck off.
“Last thing: you and I have so much history built into our relationship, but I was single when I met Declan. He and I have been a thing”--since the first morning he smirked across the breakfast table at me, since I stood between his legs outside a hookah bar and took a drag off his cigarette, since those dirty rhymes on the back of valentines, since the cop car—“since before my birthday. It’s not a monogamous relationship, but it is a relationship, and you knew about it before you decided to get involved with me again. I didn’t cheat on you with him, I didn’t hide him from you, I didn’t do this behind your back. You knew what you were getting into.”
“If you were monogamous, would you have chosen to stay with him over getting back together with me two weeks ago?”
“Don’t make me deal with hypotheticals. I’m not in that kind of relationship. I don’t want to be in that kind of relationship.”
“With Declan?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, with anyone!” I burst out. “I don’t like it, and I’m not good at it. The only time I ever managed to be fully monogamous was when I was with David, and that wasn’t because I was suddenly hot for fidelity. It was because he beat me for so much as looking at another guy, and he would’ve killed me if I ever cheated on him. That’s what monogamy is to me, Travis. That’s what it feels like. A fucking death trap.”
Travis is staring at me with this awful, stunned expression, like he’s about to crumple to the floor. I feel physically sick that I’ve made him look at me like that, I wish so badly I could say something to take it back, but beneath the instinctive rush of love and misery, I can’t help but think… dude, you’ve cheated on everyone you’ve ever dated. I’m not the only one with a problem here.
“Travis,” I say instead, feeling completely fucking helpless. I don’t know where to go from here, but thankfully, he cuts off anything else I could manage to string together.
“So, all those times we talked about being together in September, you were just saying what you thought I wanted to hear?”
“No. I want to be with you, Travis, I love you. But ‘September’”—I do air quotes around the word and immediately feel like a goddamn idiot—“is like, this fucking fantasy you talk about in the abstract. You act like September will come, and I’ll be a year sober, so all my issues will be cured and you won’t ever have to deal with the messiness of dating an addict again. September will come, and suddenly we’ll be this perfect, Hallmark Movie couple that never fights or struggles or looks at anyone else. And then you make everything else, all the shit that has happened or is gonna happen right up until eleven fifty-nine at night on September twelfth, you make that my fault. Like I’m supposed to be in stasis until I reach a milestone that makes me good enough for you. Like I had to be celibate and lonely for a year, even though you—” I punctuate the word by jabbing a finger at him. I don’t come even close to making contact, but he still skitters back to dodge it.
“Don’t touch me—”
“You had a girlfriend before I’d even sobered up, and I’m pretty sure she was knocked up before I was out of rehab. You can’t act like I’m an asshole for having other people in my life when you’d be having a kid next month if Joss hadn’t been smart enough to have that thing vacuumed out of her after you—”
Travis is suddenly rightthefuckthere in front of me, his eyes blazing and his mouth in something like a snarl. “Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you, Garen? That thing vacuumed out of her? It was supposed to be my child, and that’s how you want to talk about the situation?”
He’s right there in front of me, he’s so close I can feel the stutter of his breath on my face, and I can’t do this, I can’t, I didn’t mean for him to be so mad, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Instinctively, I flinch to put my arms up, anything to get some space, something between our bodies, but he’s so close that my clenched fists accidentally collide with his chest, and I don’t want to be touched right now, I can’t fucking stand the thought of any furious man putting his hands on me, so I straighten my arms to get more space between us, but that’s wrong, because Travis just knocks my hands out of the way and says, “I fucking told you not to touch me,” and he put his palms on my shoulders and shoves me back, hard.
There’s a loud crash as the door to the backyard is thrown open. For a second, I think it came off the slider track or even shattered, but when I look around, I see that the glass is fine; it’s just been flung wide by Ben, who is striding into the house, five feet and six inches of unbridled rage.
“Tell me I didn’t just see you put your hands on him,” he demands.
Jamie is still outside, scrambling to his feet on the deck and cursing as he almost trips over Omelette, who is bounding back into the living room. Travis half-turns to face Ben, looking down at him like he’d forgotten there were other people in the house.
I don’t know who out of the whole group is most surprised when Ben draws back a fist and sucker punches Travis right in the stomach, but it isn’t me. I can’t feel surprised when I’m too busy feeling like I might die. My throat is constricted, breathing is shallow, whole body is wracked with a sudden chill that leaves me trembling. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to block out all the sounds of yelling and swearing and fighting and barking. There’s a possibility I’m swaying slightly, but I can’t tell if that’s just some weird vertigo from having my eyes closed. Or I’m going to pass out. Or I’m having a heart attack. I reach up to touch my chest through my shirt and realize that I’m still wearing my stupid school uniform, so I loosen my tie with one hand and start unbuttoning my collar with the other. I can’t tell if it helps, but I tuck my hand into the neckline of my shirt anyway, just to feel my heart hammering away through my sternum.
It’s fine. I’m going to be fine. Dr. Howard and I have been working together, we’ve been preparing for this.
Breathe in through your nose and count one, two, three, four, five, breathe out through your mouth and count one, two, three, four, five. Keep going. Slow breaths. Slow. Tense your muscles with each inhale, relax them on the exhale. Focus on the feeling. Just focus, and breathe.
I open my eyes. It’s a fist fight, a real one. Ben and Travis are on the floor now, but a framed print Jamie gave me months ago is crooked and cracked on the wall, like someone was shoved into it. Omelette is going wild, making so much noise you’d think he got paid by the bark, and dancing around the floor like he wants to get a swing in, too. Jamie is the only other person standing, and he’s got the back of Travis’ t-shirt clenched in his fists as he tries to drag the two of them apart. I should step in, I know that. I’m the strongest one here, and I could separate them in an instant. I could probably just scoop Ben up and walk out of the room with him in a fireman’s carry, if I wanted to.
But I can’t do that. I can’t touch any of them right now, and more importantly, I can’t have them touch me. So I just close my eyes again and continue my deep breathing until the shaking stops.
By the time I’m ready to clock back into reality, the fight has gotten messy. Kind of literally. Travis is bigger and stronger and has probably won more fights in his life, but Ben is scrappy and angry and wholly unafraid of his own pain. That much becomes apparent as I open my eyes again just in time to see him biting into the split in his own lip just enough to get a mouthful of blood, which he spits in Travis’s face.
Travis reels back in disgust, and that creates the inch more space that Jamie needs to wrench the two of them apart and drag Travis several feet back across the floor. Ben staggers to his feet and tries to lunge after them, but I’m finally here again, finally aware of how urgently I need to get involved, and I catch him around the waist and haul him, kicking and snarling, out into the kitchen. I have to pin him to the counter with my body to keep him from going back for more. He struggles against my grip for a second, but I think his own reluctance to push me wins out in the end, because he finally puts his hands up in a show of surrender and says, “Fine. Fine, I’m done. Get off me,” and I release him and turn to look at the scene of the fight. There’s blood everywhere. So much more than makes sense. It’s still dribbling from the slash in Ben’s lip down into his beard, but that doesn’t explain why there’s an enormous streak of it across the entryway floor, unless…
I abandon Ben at the counter and move to the doorway so that I can peer over into the living room. James is right near the doorway, torn between wanting to check on his boyfriend and wanting to stand in the middle ground between them to keep everyone separate. Travis is sitting on the couch with one hand cupped over the lower half of his face. One of his eyes is already starting to swell shut under a splotch of dark pink that’ll be a bruise by tomorrow morning. He moves his hand away from his face to look down at the blood smeared over his palm, finally revealing the split skin at the bridge of his nose and the red-purple bruises rising around it. There’s no question: his nose is broken. I’ve broken mine twice before, both significantly worse than his right now, but he still should probably let someone look at it. Despite that, I can’t make myself move towards him. I retreat a few steps further back into the kitchen with Ben.
Omelette is slam-dancing in the entryway, skipping around and slapping his paws on the floor, tail wagging furiously. At first, I think he has just gone full Jack the Ripper and is trying to splash in the blood streak. Then I realize he has something that he’s batting around, something small and white that skitters across the wood like a dropped Tic-Tac. Jamie stoops to shoo him away and pick up whatever he’s playing with, and stares down at the object on his palm for a long moment.
“What,” I rasp out. “What is it.”
Jamie clears his throat and asks delicately, “Which one of you two gentlemen is missing a molar?”
“Damn it,” Ben says, and he ducks down to examine his reflection in the side of the espresso machine. “My insurance doesn’t cover dental, either.” He hooks a finger into his mouth and pulls it wider, revealing the spot where blood is still pooling up in the gap where one of his teeth used to be.
I stagger sideways and barely make it to the sink before I start throwing up. Ben makes a concerned noise and tries to move closer to me, but I put up a hand to keep him back, ‘cause the last thing I need right now is to be tenderly nursed by a guy who just lost a tooth and then attempted to self-cannibalize part of his own face just so he had enough blood to spit in someone’s eyes.
The slightly deranged and deeply unserious part of my brain has gotta be in the driver’s seat right now, because in between retches, I manage to gulp down enough air to whisper to him, “That’s so fucking punk, dude.”
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Travis says from the other room. He can’t be talking to me, can he? It’s my house, too. He adds, “I’m serious. Both of you. Get the fuck out.”
“We’re not leaving Garen alone with you,” Ben says flatly. He’s talking to Travis, but his eyes are locked on Jamie’s, trying urgently to communicate their shared stance on the subject. I start rinsing my mouth, then the sink, just so I don’t have to see the look on Jamie’s face when he hears Ben accuse Travis, “I fucking saw you shove him. I saw you put your hands on him, and I’m not leaving Garen here with you so you can try your hand at domestic violence.”
“You came into my house and fucking sucker punched me, but I’m the violent one?” Travis snaps. “Christ, you’re delusional. I’m serious, Ben, get the fuck out of my fucking house!”
I don’t know what Travis is doing in the other room, if he moves or what, but Ben comes up off the counter like he’s about to go for round two. Jamie intercepts him, turns him around, and pushes him back towards me.
“Stop. We’re done, we’re not doing this again. Garen,” Jamie starts. Our eyes meet, and he hesitates, then nods once, like he’s made up his mind. “Upstairs, please.”
I know what he’s telling me to do, and I don’t even want to protest. I’d walk into traffic if he told me to right now, as long as it gets me the fuck out of this situation.
Up in my room, I start shoving my shit into my backpack. Some clothes, my journal, my phone charger. I collect my toothbrush, razor, and some other toiletries from the bathroom and add those to the bag. My acoustic guitar gets moved from stand to case, and almost as an afterthought, I grab the duffel with my work clothes and cash box.
James is on his hands and knees, scrubbing the blood off the floor in the entryway when I return. Travis and Ben have switched rooms; Ben is in the living room, gathering up an armful of Omelette’s toys, and Travis is in the kitchen, gingerly cleaning his face at the sink.
I crouch down in front of the cabinet where Omelette’s kibble bin is stored and start scooping the food into a ziploc bag. “You should probably go to Urgent Care and have somebody set your nose,” I say quietly.
There’s movement in the corner of my vision, possibly from Travis nodding along in agreement. We’re silent for a minute, and then he says, “You don’t have to go anywhere. I’m not going to hurt you, Garen. You fucking know me. You know I would never do that to you.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” I say. My words do nothing to cover up Ben’s muttered bullshit from the other room. It doesn’t really matter what I say, anyway. My shoulders still feel heavy under the ghost of Travis’ hands on them. He says he won’t hurt me, but for the first time since I met him, I don’t… know that I believe him. Because Dave promised me that, too. The only difference is that when he snapped, it was a punch instead of a shove. And I tried to make things work with Dave, I really did. I tried so hard, and I forgave him so many times, and I stayed for so, so long.
I’m not staying this time.
Once the bag of dog kibble is secured within my backpack, I straighten up and turn to face Travis completely. “I’ll be back in a couple of days,” I tell him. “We can figure out a plan then. There’s only another seven weeks on the lease, so maybe the landlord won’t be too much of a dick about letting us out early.”
“Garen,” Travis says. His voice cracks, but I don’t let myself flinch. I don’t even let myself blink.
“I’m done with school in four weeks. Three, if I can convince my parents to let me skip graduation practice and the ceremony. My mom’s place is only an hour away from campus, so I can commute from there until the semester is over. It won’t be a big deal.”
“Garen,” he repeats, and this time, I break just enough to shake my head, hard.
“No. Don’t you fucking dare ask me to stay. Don’t pretend we can work this out. Not after today.” I raise my shoulders in a helpless half-shrug, arms stretched out to the sides for the barest of moments before I let them fall limp again. “It’s done, Travis. This isn’t healthy. This isn’t good for either of us, not anymore.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but can’t seem to find anything to say. Instead, we’re just stuck there, struggling through the silence together. Finally, he swallows and licks his lips, and when he starts to speak this time, all I can think is that I haven’t even kissed him today.
“My last exam is on Wednesday,” he says. “I can be out of the house the next day. You and the dog can stay here, maybe get somebody to take over the other half of the lease next month. You don’t have to move in with your mom.”
“Thanks.”
There’s nothing left to say. I shoulder my backpack, clip Omelette back into his harness and leash, and walk out of the house.
“When we get to my building, you and the dog will need to hang back for a moment,” Jamie tells me as I’m loading my bags and my guitar into the trunk of my dad’s Mercedes. “Zooey has never met a dog before, and I can’t imagine she’ll be pleased to do so now. We might have to introduce them slowly. I can put her in my bedroom for the time being.”
I slam the trunk shut. “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to go stay at my dad’s house tonight.”
Ben frowns at me. “You’re going all the way back to Lakewood?”
“Yeah. I want to get away from here, for real. Clear my head.” I open the passenger door, and Omelette leaps up into the seat. There’s a strap attached to the headrest that I can clip onto his harness so he doesn’t try to fling himself into the backseat or out the window while I’m driving. With the door shut again, I turn to face my friends. “I’ll spend the night in Connecticut, but I’ll be back by tomorrow afternoon. Om and I can stay with my mom this weekend, since her place is only like, a twenty-minute walk from Rush. She can watch him and put him to bed while I’m at work. Then, um… I might just talk to his doggie daycare and see if I can board him there for a few nights. Declan and Javi will let me crash at their dorm, and while I’m pretty sure I could sneak a dog into the dorm, I’m not sure I trust this one to be quiet enough that I get away with it.” I rap a knuckle against the window, and true to form, Omelette barks so loudly that even he looks startled by the sound.
“And then?” Jamie prompts.
I shrug. “Then we’ll come back to the house once Travis moves out next week, and I’ll figure out what to do for the last month of the lease.”
It sounds so… final. It’s strange. Travis and I have had so many breakups, or arguments that felt like breakups, but it never really felt like it was done for good. Not when he told me our first kiss was a one-off, or called me a slur and stopped talking to me, or even when I left Lakewood. For going on two years now, I was always so sure that we’d get back together and work through our problems.
There’s nothing to work through now. It’s just over.
Jamie and Ben and I say our goodbyes, and then they set off for the city, hopefully to put some ice on Ben’s swollen jaw. I set a course for Lakewood, Connecticut. With my phone linked to the stereo system, I spend the first part of the trip making all the phone calls I need to make. First, my dad, who is thrilled with the idea of an impromptu visit. He offers to order pizza for dinner and tells me he’ll happily watch Omelette while I go to see the play. I try to point out that having tickets to see a play and actually seeing that play are two completely separate, not necessarily inclusive things, but by the time we hang up, he’s on his way to TJ Maxx to buy new squeaky toys for “his grandson,” and it seems like a lost cause.
Next, I talk to my mom, who tells me I’m more than welcome to stay at her apartment this weekend, but seems wary. At first I think it’s because I’m bringing the dog with me, but then she says, “And when you get here tomorrow, I look forward to hearing all about this job of yours, whatever it may be,” and I realize I’m a fucking idiot who still hasn’t told my parents where I work. There’s a slim possibility that my dad overheard me lying to the Lakewood Drama Club about working security outside a venue, but if he did, he hasn’t passed that along to Mom. I reluctantly agree to tell her all about it when I see her.
My third call is to the doggie daycare people, who let me book Omelette for a four-night stay. He’ll get dropped off on Sunday afternoon, and I’ll pick him up on Thursday after school so we can head home together. My fourth and final call should be to Declan, but I’m a little worried that communicating directly with him will lead to me blurting out a bunch of emotional shit that I’m not even remotely ready to get into. Better to make a joke about it all. So, instead, I record a voice message and send it to the group chat with him, Javi, Taylor, and Steven.
“Hello, dickwads,” I declare. Omelette barks, so I add. “Omelette says hi, too. Anyway, I know this will come as an immense shock to all of you, based on how excellent and stable and totally, totally normal everything seemed in my life this morning, but Travis and I just had an extremely messy breakup. Like, the breakup. James and Ben were present for the whole thing, so if you want the full play-by-play, I’m sure they’d be happy to give that to you. My favorite part was when Ben and Travis got into a fist-fight, and Travis knocked out one of Ben’s teeth—which, I’m realizing right now as I say this to you all, I think Jamie kept? He found it on the floor, and I’m pretty sure he put it in his pocket. What the fuck is that about? Oh, and Ben broke Travis’s nose. Very exciting.” I drum my hands on the steering wheel for a minute, trying to think what to say next, then just shrug. “I’m gonna be out of town for a few days, staying with my parents. Travis is moving out of the house exactly one week from today, but if one of you—or, I guess, two of you?—could let me crash on your dorm room floor from like, Sunday night through Wednesday night, that would be dope. Alright. Somebody text me back. Don’t call, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Despite that final comment, I get a phone call barely a minute after I’ve sent the message. I decline the call, plus the next three, then push the button to have my car read me the text message that finally comes in.
“One new text message from Javi Santos,” the car’s frosty, feminine robot voice informs me. She pronounces his first name with a hard J and a long A, like the start of Jamie’s name, so I guess she’s a white robot. The actual text itself is read without pause or inflection, so it seems that Javi’s punctuation is not making a guest appearance today. “Dude what the fuck are you good question mark question mark question mark we can all be at your house in twenty-five if we have to beat someone’s ass I’m so serious right now.”
“I hate the way you read that,” I tell the car. She doesn’t respond. A few seconds go by, and my phone chimes again. I sigh and press the button once more.
“One new text message from Steven Ramsey,” the car says.
“It’s racist that you pronounced his name right, but not Javi’s,” I tell her.
“That sucks man. Like he seemed like a dick or whatever Beth but—”
“Wait, who is Beth?” I ask. “Did he say ‘tbh’ and you think that’s him typing Beth?”
“—it sucks that you got into it. You can def crash here if you need to I will even clean the room so you have someplace to sleep,” the car finishes. Almost before she’s done, there’s another chime, and she says, “One new text message from DC don’t fuckin steal Charlie’s phone again.”
“I really need to change that,” I tell Omelette. He barks at the stereo, because he’s a good boy, and he understands that we cut Charlie out of our lives weeks ago.
Declan’s text is so simple that even the car robot voice can’t fuck it up. “Call me when you can.”
Not now, not immediately, not even tonight—just when I can. That sounds doable. With all my other hands-free phone calls complete, there’s not much I can do while driving, so I drop my phone in the center console and let a monstrously depressing Noah Kahan playlist keep me company for the rest of the trip to Lakewood.
Dad is waiting outside on the front steps of his house when I pull into the driveway. Seeing a human he’s never had the pleasure of harassing before, Omelette starts barking and pawing at the car window. Once we’re parked and the car is off, I go around to let him out. He heads straight for my dad, who kneels down and cheers, “Look at you! What a handsome little man you are. Hi, Omelette! I’m your grandpa!”
“You’re so weird,” I say. Omelette is flat on his back now, bicycle-kicking all four limbs while my dad scratches his belly. “I can’t believe you’re this excited to meet him, but you never let me have a dog when I was a kid.”
“Blame your mother,” Dad suggests.
“Bullshit. She’s letting us stay with her all weekend,” I say.
That finally gets Dad’s attention off the dog and onto me. He glances at the car, like he’s expecting to see someone else coming out of it now, then back at me. “Just you this weekend?”
“Just me, full-stop,” I sigh. “Travis and I are, um…” I pause, because I’m realizing in this moment that I don’t think I told either of my parents that Travis and I got back together a few weeks ago. The idea of letting Dad know this now just to tell him about a breakup is kind of embarrassing, so I try something else. “We’ve been having some problems.”
“Mm,” is all Dad says at first. When I don’t continue, he asks, “Friend problems, roommate problems, or boyfriend problems?”
“Sort of a mix,” I admit. “I don’t really want to get into the details right now, but we basically reached the point that all your divorces eventually got to—”
“There have only been two!”
“Irreconcilable differences,” I finish. “There’s no way for us to move forward as any of the things you mentioned before—friends, roommates, or boyfriends. So, we’re just going to go our separate ways.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I’m keeping the dog, for one.” I shoo Omelette towards the front door, and even though he has no idea where he’s going, he cheerfully bounds up the steps. “Also, I’m staying with you, then Mom, then some friends on campus while Travis finishes his final exams and moves out of the house.” My dad looks like he’s about to ask another question, so I cut him off. “Like I said, I don’t want to get into it.”
His mouth snaps closed again. We both watch Omelette zoom through the house, sniffing shoes and nudging doors open with his nose and jumping on or over the furniture. By the time he starts to calm down, Dad seems to have accepted that the conversation has reached a natural conclusion, and he’s not going to get anything else out of me. He gives Omelette one last scritch on the head and goes to order the pizza.
Omelette is a lot like me, in that his affection is intense, but pretty indiscriminate. He doesn’t so much as whine when Dad sends me off to the high school. On my way into town, the likelihood of me actually going to see some people I only hung out with for one semester in The Wizard of Oz was holding steady at about twenty percent. Within the realm of possibility, but definitely not something I would have written into the schedule in pen. Once I’ve been banished from the house, though, it seems pointless to avoid it.
“Hi, Garen! I can’t believe you actually came,” chirps the girl who is working the ticket table outside the Lakewood High School auditorium. I’m drawing a blank on her name, but I definitely know her. She’s a freshman on the crew, mostly costumes and props, and she was the one who figured out how to make realistic-looking ice cream sundaes out of spray foam insulation. She said she saw it on Pinterest, and I remember thinking that was fitting, because she has a Pinterest kind of name.
“Everleigh,” I remember. “Hi. Good to see you again. Excited for opening night?”
“Of course! And here, there are two tickets saved under your name.” She hands me the envelope from the cash box, then peers around me. “Is Travis, like, parking the car or something?”
“Uh, no. He couldn’t make it tonight.” I trust that news to make its way through the whole cast and crew before the curtain opens. In case it does, I make sure my phone is off off, not just set to vibrate.
The seat that was reserved for me is in the second row, right along the center aisle. The aisle has been overlaid with a bright yellow, brick-patterned carpet, so I’m guessing the cast finally bullied Ms. Markland into letting them come off the stage. We wanted to do it last semester during the “Hand Jive” scene, and Riley swore that the lights adjusted fast enough that he could follow Joss and John with a spot, but in the end, the whole thing was deemed a hazard. Mostly, I think Ms. Markland was worried that I’d go rogue and start tormenting the audience members.
With the curtain closed, the only visible set pieces right now are the yellow brick road and boxy gray lumps stacked near the front of the stage. I spend a solid five minutes staring at them, trying to figure out what they are, and just as the house lights dim, I realize they’re bales of hay that have been spray painted a matte gray. The music starts up, the curtain rattles open, and suddenly, it all makes perfect sense.
Kansas is all in grayscale. The landscape backdrop, all of the set pieces, even—holy shit, the cast. Joss Pryce is the first actor to step onto the stage. Her gingham-patterned dress is white and gray instead of blue, her shoes are plain black, and her face is only halfway made-up. The heavy, pale base is on, and her lashes look a mile long, but there’s no lipstick or blush. When we did Grease, everyone had to wear a full face of heavy makeup. I complained endlessly about how gross it felt and how I was definitely going to have an allergic reaction (I didn’t, though I did break out pretty bad for a week after) and that still wasn’t enough to get me out of it. I finally understand why: Joss looks completely washed out, as close as a human can get to looking monochromatic. She stays that way through the first few scenes, including a performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that she kills so hard, she might as well have taken the sheet music behind the gymnasium and shot it.
When it’s time for her to be taken away to Oz, that’s when everything gets really wild. The music swells as Joss staggers, convincingly windblown, to a small bed at the corner of the stage. The lights cut out, and a projection alights on the backdrop, showing a small model of a farmhouse swirling in the air. The projection cuts to a view from within the house, quartered in shadow like it’s being viewed through a windowpane. There is footage of cows edited to look like they’re zooming by, Miranda pedaling on a bicycle as Miss Gultch and morphing suddenly into the Wicked Witch on a broomstick. I glance down to where Joss is still hidden in the shadows. There’s just enough light from the projection for me to see that she’s moving; she unsnaps the back of her dress, which I guess is more of a hidden overcoat situation, because she whips it off and stuffs it under the blanket on the bed. She does something else, but I can’t see what it is until the house “lands.” All at once: the projection stops, the stage lights come on, there’s a loud bang, and Joss pops upright on the bed, clad in a white and blue dress, with rosy cheeks and a fresh coat of bright red lipstick. It fucking kills. The audience cheers, and I even find myself putting my fingers in my mouth to let out a piercing whistle.
The rest of the play is equally impressive. Every time the main group takes off down the yellow brick road, they do so right through the audience, carrying focus with them so that the crew can swap out the set dressing and props without ever having to really pause between scenes. Instead of slopping on a pound of green face paint as the Witch, Miranda has just done elaborate green eye makeup, green lipstick, and deep green contour to her cheeks. Her hair, which had been tucked conservatively under a ladylike hat when she was playing Miss Gultch, is revealed to be waist-length box braids in black and half a dozen different shades of green. The stage remains mostly bare of major set pieces, I can’t help but notice, and I guess that makes sense; last semester, the jukebox and the spinning cars and the carnival set were all designed by Travis, and he’s not here to make any of the mechanical parts this time. It doesn’t matter, though. The acting, the music, the choreography, the costumes, the direction… it all goes together seamlessly, and when the play ends and I get to my feet in the second row to join the rest of the audience in a standing ovation, all I can think is that I wish I could have been part of this show, ‘cause god, it looked like a blast.
I don’t get a chance to slip out of the auditorium unnoticed. The people around me have barely started leaving when Ms. Markland comes over and greets me with, “I thought I saw you from the wings! It’s so good to see you, Garen.”
As a rule, teachers don’t express excitement at the prospect of interacting with me. I think that’s why I’m stunned enough to stay. Unfortunately, staying to talk to Ms. Markland turns into letting her lead me backstage to see the rest of the cast, which turns into hugs and chatting and a thousand different questions about where Travis is.
“He couldn’t make it,” I say every time someone asks. It feels less awkward than admitting that he’s probably busy figuring out where he’s going to live after next week.
I make the rounds, complimenting the cast on their performances and the crew on the work they did for the set. Gabe Alberti is in a corner of one of the rooms, scrubbing his Tin Man makeup off with a damp washcloth that doesn’t seem up to the job. Last semester, I overheard him refusing a makeup wipe from John because it was “too faggy,” so I kind of hope the face paint stains his skin silver for the next month.
Josslyn is nowhere to be seen, which is proving to be a real point of contention for Miranda. “I’m supposed to be giving her a ride home,” she says, swinging the lanyard with her car keys like it’s a weapon. “I have no idea where she is, but if she’s hiding just to avoid you, Garen, I’m going to leave her ass here.”
“Don’t worry, I’m gonna head out,” I assure her. “And you can text Joss and tell her as much.”
Being around all the old Lakewood people has been a strange combination of refreshing and exhausting, and when I finally manage to get away from them, I know there’s no way I can go straight home. I need something to break the tension.
Honestly, I need a smoke.
I cut through a side door halfway between the cafeteria and the auditorium, slip through the kitchen, and let myself out onto what should be an abandoned loading dock.
Still a loading dock. Not so much abandoned.
Joss has replaced her ruby slippers and flouncy gingham get-up with a pair of sneakers, leggings, and a Lorde tour t-shirt. Her immaculate mask of stage paint is still in place and will probably stay that way for a while longer; I remember scrubbing my skin with a thick, oily makeup-remover that Stohler promised would save me after every performance of Grease last fall, and even then, I was never completely sure I’d gotten everything off.
She is in the process of untwisting her hair from her tightly braided pigtails, but she stops and turns to look at me when the door bangs shut behind me. For a minute, we just stare at each other. I think we’re both waiting for the other to flee. Then I realize two things at nearly the same second.
One: this is her school and her play, not mine, and she was here first. If either of us should take off, it’s me.
Two: I still really, really need a cigarette.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I watch her eyebrows creep towards her hairline. She probably didn’t think I was capable of saying that phrase. I take a step closer to her and repeat, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anybody would be out here. Do you mind if I hang out for a minute, though? I, uh… I could use a smoke.”
“You can’t smoke in New York?” she says. It’s not go back to your own state and leave me alone, but it’s pretty close. For some reason, that makes me grin. Joss has always been a bitch, but it’s kind of funny that she’s still somehow polite about it.
“I’m staying at my dad’s house tonight, and he doesn’t let me smoke there. It’s kind of now or never.”
Joss looks away and begins to unbraid her hair once more. “Fine.”
I drop onto the concrete next to her, taking care to leave a distance of about three feet between us. Any more than that, and I’ll fall off the edge of the loading dock. My cigarettes are in my jacket pocket, right where they should be, but I spend a solid two minutes looking for my lighter before I conclude that it must still be in the car. I tip my head back and sigh out some profanity. Overall, this isn’t even close to the worst day of my life, but in this exact moment, it feels like it’s creeping higher up the list.
Silently, Joss reaches to the waistband of her leggings, takes something from a hidden pocket, and holds out her hand to me. Frowning, I offer my own hand, and she drops a Juul onto my palm. I raise my eyebrows. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t,” she says, despite me holding evidence to the contrary. She still isn’t looking at me, but that’s probably for the best, because the next thing she says is, “I went through a phase a couple of months ago where I tried some different things out. I wasn’t in a great place emotionally, and you always made self-destruction look so cool. I thought it was worth a shot.”
What the fuck am I supposed to say to that? I hit the Juul instead of saying anything at all. It tastes like mangoes. Joss finishes untangling her first braid and moves on to the second. Silences stretches out between us as she works, until she finishes her task, and we’re both just sitting here like a couple of idiots. I hate being quiet. I hate it.
“You guys were great tonight,” I say. “Sets, costumes, the whole production. It was all on point. And you did an amazing job on that first song.”
“Thank you,” Joss says. I’m terrified that she’s going to leave it at that, and I’m going to have to think of some other bullshit to say, but eventually, she asks, “If you had stayed in Lakewood, do you think you would have auditioned?”
Fuck no. All the conflict and backstabbing with the drama club last semester had me in a miserable headspace, and if I had still been a Lakewood student when auditions were held in January, I’m sure I would have bowed out as loudly and angrily as possible, and then I would have regretted it afterward and made it everyone else’s problem when I felt left out and lonely.
I don’t want to get into that now, though. I’m too tired. Instead, I say, “Of course. I would’ve taken John’s part and been the Lion, except I would’ve had them make me a costume like in Cats. Skintight and shiny, with the big fluffy shoulder pieces. What’s the name of that one cat who like, fucks?”
“The Rum Tum Tugger,” Joss answers. I blink. Seemingly against her will, she huffs out a little laugh. “Seriously. That’s his name.”
“Fine. I would’ve been the Cowardly Lion, but I would’ve dressed up like the Rum Tum Tugger. Emphasis on both the rum and the tug.” I make a jerking-off gesture that she ignores.
“I’m not sure Ms. Markland would’ve let you wear a costume that tight. At least not without a merkin glued on there.”
“What the fuck is a merkin?”
“You should google image search it later,” she suggests. That’s how I know she’s got to be talking about something fucked up, and I can’t help it—it kind of makes me like her a little more, even if I still mostly hate her.
I clear my throat. “Miranda is looking for you, by the way.”
“I know. She texted me.”
“And Travis isn’t here.”
Joss shoots me an exasperated look. “She could’ve told me that.”
“So, I’m guessing you didn’t want to see him tonight.”
“Why do you think I’m hiding on a loading dock?” Joss says, and I try to cover my grin with another pull off the Juul.
“Probably a smart idea. If he came tonight, I bet he would’ve wanted to talk to you. Not to make a big thing out of it, necessarily. But I know he always thought that you two needed, you know… closure.”
“Closure is a big thing,” Joss says. “It’s also not—I don’t want closure. Or I don’t need it. Or I already got it.”
“I’m not exactly an expert, but I think you have to pick which one of those is true.”
“They’re all true. I got my closure when he left Lakewood. I don’t want or need any more of it, and he doesn’t deserve it,” she retorts. “When I found out I was pregnant, I told Travis because it seemed like the fair thing to do, and because it made a pretty solid argument for us being more proactive about safety if we kept hooking up in the future. Not because I wanted to keep it. That was always on him.”
“Had you guys not… been safe from the start?” I ask. She gives me another exasperated look, like I might be the actual dumbest man alive. Hastily, I add, “I mean, I know you weren’t successful with it. Fucking duh. But when he told me you were pregnant, I, like… asked. He told me you guys used condoms. And I guess I just figured that one broke or came off or whatever.”
The irritation remains frozen on Joss’s face for a few more seconds before it starts to melt. Then we’re just sitting there staring at each other, both using every ounce of dramatic talent we have to keep our faces blank.
“I don’t know what I can say,” she says slowly, “except that it’s not true. We never used condoms. Mostly, he just, um—” She raises a hand to make some sort of gesture, then seems to realize she’d rather die than make a gesture that encompasses Travis pulling out before he nuts. Her hand falls back to her lap. “Not a great strategy, clearly. And eventually we didn’t even do that, because what the hell, I was already pregnant. But, no, Garen. If he told you we were safe, he was lying.”
The thing is, I know I’m not really a paragon of safe sex. Sure, I always wrap it up before I fuck somebody, and I make guys use condoms for oral if they’re total strangers. But if I’m hooking up with a friend or somebody I know and have at least a general feel for who else they’ve slept with and how often they get tested, I’m usually more than happy to swallow. I haven’t even always been as proactive about the issue as I am now. Back in the day, when Jamie and I were first figuring out sex and had only ever fooled around with each other, we went bareback for months before we bothered to get condoms from the student health office on campus so that we could hook up with other people. I’ve made my share of bad decisions when it comes to unprotected sex. But they were always my bad decisions, and until this moment, I thought the only exception to that was… well, when I was assaulted.
Dave had always had a hostile relationship with the concept of safe sex. Early on, after I’d blown him once or twice but before he forced it further, I asked him if he wanted us to go get tested together, just to make sure everything was good. He asked me if I was really such a nasty slut that I needed to get checked for diseases, and I never brought it up again. He never wore condoms when he fucked me. Ever. The one time he found them in my nightstand drawer, he declared them evidence that I was cheating on him and beat me until I managed to gasp through a mouthful of blood that they were Jamie’s, and that they’d ended up in my nightstand by accident while I was cleaning the room. Two weeks ago, when my dad finally admitted that he knew I’d been raped because of the exams that were performed on me during my coma, I went home and read through my hospital records until I found it. There, in some nurse’s neat, swoopy handwriting, were the details of all the bruising and tearing and—the phrase made me sick when I read it, but for some reason, I laughed when I repeated it to Doc at my last therapy session--evidence of trauma. The section was topped off with a list of the post-exposure prophylaxis I would need to take in case I’d been exposed to HIV, as well as a note about the semen sample they’d taken from inside of me. Elsewhere in the records were the results of my STI screenings, which had come back negative. By the time I had my health exams at the LRC last summer, though, I tested positive for chlamydia. I didn’t know then whether it was something I caught when I blew that guy at the truck stop for money, or when I let Seth fuck me for drugs. I still don’t know. It’s not like either of them told me.
I was so sure—like, really fucking positive—that I was past the point in my life where other people got to make decisions about my sexual health without consulting me. Apparently not.
“Are you okay?” Josslyn asks me.
I nod, but I can’t get a more convincing lie out right now. The phrase informed consent is stuck in my throat like a tonsil stone, and if I try to say anything else, I might be sick. So, I smile tightly and just keep nodding.
“Whatever happened with me and Travis doesn’t really matter anymore. We split up. You guys are together,” Joss says. I can tell she means for that statement to be a lifeline for me, but all it does is dislodge whatever is blocking me from protesting.
“No, we aren’t. We broke up this afternoon. That’s why he didn’t come to the play. He’s still in New York, getting ready to move out of our house.”
“Why?” Joss asks. I kind of admire her for not bothering to wrap the question up in fake concern or apology—just straight-up nosiness.
“Short answer? We were arguing, and it got out of control. He shoved me. Ben McCutcheon saw it and popped the fuck off, and they had a fist-fight in the front entryway of my house while I had a panic attack in the living room.”
Joss is staring at me. I smile tightly, hit the Juul, and pass it to her. She takes it and, instead of putting it back in her pocket, hits it too. So much for I don’t really smoke, I just tried it a few months ago.
“Trauma responses are a blast, I know,” I say. “Anyway, the longer version is that Travis and I had separated when we moved to New York back in January. He didn’t want to be my boyfriend until I’d logged a year of sobriety, and I didn’t want commitment without the title, so we cut our losses. I met a guy, somebody I really like. We’ve been seeing each other for about two months now, but neither of us is into monogamy, so we’ve been hooking up with other people the whole time. Then about two weeks ago, Travis suddenly tells me he wants to get back together with the same casual, poly situation I have with Declan, and like a fucking idiot, I went along with it. I think he figured this was the first step to getting Dec out of the picture later, but he was acting like such a jealous dick about everything that we’ve just been fighting constantly. He swore he was fine with me dating someone else, but it was pretty much a crock of shit.”
“Wow. Travis McCall told a lie? That’s so crazy,” Joss says sarcastically. I shoot her a warning look, but she shakes her head and keeps going as we both avert our gaze to the darkness off the edge of the loading dock.
“Come on, Garen. Travis says whatever he thinks he has to say in order to get what he wants. I told him I wanted an abortion that first night, but he begged me to keep it because he wanted a family. And when I agreed to go along with what he wanted, even though it wasn’t what I wanted to happen with my body and my life, how did he treat me? He cheated on me. He made a show out of it in front of all our friends. He spent lunch breaks and play rehearsals flirting with you in front of me, and he made jokes about hooking up with you, and he got lapdances from your friends and licked your chest on a stage while all of my friends laughed and catcalled and acted like it was the coolest thing they’d ever seen. Garen, it was embarrassing.”
Her voice cracks on that last word, and when I look over at her, she is scrubbing the heel of her hand into her eyes like she thinks she can force the tears back inside if she just gets mad enough.
“Joss,” I start to say, but she shakes her head furiously and keeps going.
“I don’t care if you were in love with him. He was a terrible boyfriend, and h-he treated me like shit. The only reason he even admitted to cheating on me was because I asked him about it after he broke up with me, and then he avoided me for days. I tried to tell him again that I wanted an abortion, but he wouldn’t pick up my calls. He wouldn’t talk to me at school. So I just—I did it. I got the procedure. It went fine. I was so fucking relieved, you have no idea. But I was scared to tell him afterward, because he had been completely opposed to it any time I mentioned it before then, and I brought this pamphlet home from the clinic b-because I didn’t know what to say or how to answer any questions he might have, and when I finally found him at play practice and tried to tell him, I couldn’t say it. He took the pamphlet out of my hand, and he was so upset, and he—and you—”
She breaks off, choking on a misery that is too big to be contained any longer. She starts to crumble in on herself, sobbing, and I move without thinking. I close the three foot gap between us, and she makes an angry noise in her throat and tries to flinch away from me, but I haul her back in. Her small frame fits easily into my embrace, curling around the arm that I’ve flung across her chest, while the other settles around her back. She buries her face against my shoulder and still manages to shudder out the next sentence. “You told me I strung him along, and that I was a piece of shit for letting him think he could be a dad. He told all—all my friends that I killed his baby, that I was a—that I was a murderer.”
“You’re not,” I say into a faceful of her dark hair. My heart is pounding in my chest, and I’m sure she must be able to hear it, with how close she is to me. I don’t even care. I just cradle her thin, trembling shoulders and keep talking in the same gentle tones I’d use to settle Omelette during a thunderstorm. “Joss, you’re not a murderer, or a piece of shit, I’m so fucking sorry I said that. I’m sorry I let…”
I falter, because so much of this is only hitting me now, one miserable, regretful realization after another. I can’t believe I got this far out from last fall without ever understanding how selfish and single-minded I had been, or how much I’d taken my jealousy and resentment out on Joss when she was just trying to survive a difficult situation, same as I was.
“I should never have treated you like I did, and I shouldn’t have let Travis do it, either,” I blurt out. I’m talking too fast, but now that I finally fucking get it, the only thing that matters is making sure that the devastated girl clinging to my arm understands how much of this is really on me. “I’m sorry that I acted like your feelings about what was happening to you—the pregnancy, and your relationship, and the cheating, and the breakup, and the abortion, and everyone knowing about it—I’m sorry I acted like it was all a speedbump in what I had with Travis. I’m sorry I had such blinders on. The second you guys got together, I should have backed off and let you do what you wanted. He wasn’t my property, and I shouldn’t have acted like I had some kind of claim to him, because if… if he wanted to be with me, he would have been with me. I should have respected that. And when he came to me that first night and told me you were pregnant, he said you wanted to get an abortion. He said it that first night, he always knew, I always knew, and I should have told him to be a goddamn adult and support your decision. I shouldn’t have ever bought into his fantasies of having a kid to fix his own family drama, especially when it came at a cost to you. When he started showing interest in me, I should have shut it down. When he flirted with me, when he asked me to kiss him, when he wanted me to share a bed with him, when he wanted me to help him cheat on you? I should’ve told him to piss off. That wasn’t what your relationship was. I might not be interested in monogamy, and Travis might not be capable of it, but you agreed on that, and it was fucked up for me to get in the middle of it. And when you had the abortion, I should have kept my fucking mouth shut because it wasn’t my business. It was your decision, Joss. It was always your decision, and you didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m so fucking sorry I’ve been acting like you’re just this villain in my love story instead of acknowledging that you’re actually, like, a whole entire person who’s been going through some really heavy shit.”
When I run out of apologies, a sudden stillness falls over us. Joss isn’t sobbing anymore, but her face is still hidden, and she’s still quivering, like she’s a small, wounded animal. Not the kind that lashes out, like me; the kind that hunkers down and tries to get through the pain in terrified silence. I keep rubbing her back until she finally manages to sit up properly, detaching herself from me.
“I’m sorry, too,” she says softly. She bunches up the sleeve of her t-shirt and uses it to dry the tears on her face. “I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have last semester, especially the stuff about your sobriety and your mental health. The fact that we dated the same guy didn’t give me the right to act like I knew you or what you were dealing with.”
“Can you apologize for that time you vandalized my Ferrari, too?” I suggest. “’Cause I just had to tell you I was sorry for like, twenty different things, and I’m gonna feel like a complete asshole if the only thing you had to reciprocate with was I’m sorry that I was sometimes rude about the unfortunate reality of your drug addiction.”
Joss laughs, and it’s a wet, shaky sound. “Okay. Yes. I’m sorry for the time I vandalized your Ferrari. In my defense, though—”
“If you tell me that was the day you found out you were pregnant or some other extenuating circumstances that make even that into something I feel bad about, I’m gonna throw myself off this loading dock.”
“What? No. I was just going to say that in my defense, Gabe Alberti had already keyed it and broken all the lights and mirrors and smashed in those ugly stripe parts on the side. So, it was kind of already destroyed before I got there.”
“Fuck off. My car wasn’t ugly, it was a classic.”
“Was?”
“Oh. Yeah. My abusive ex-boyfriend tried to murder me and my friend, Stohler. You met her, remember? The blond I brought to Nate Holliday’s birthday party? And you were like, weird and dramatic about the fact that she’s a stripper. You should apologize for that, too.”
“What the fuck?”
“That’s not an apology. Anyway, yeah, my ex hunted us down and crashed a massive Chevy into my car six times. It sucked.”
“Were you hurt?” Joss demands. “Was your friend hurt? When did this happen?”
“Week and a half ago. We’re both fine. I had whiplash, she needed some stitches. Nobody died.” I pluck the Juul out of Josslyn’s hand and take another hit off it, then frown down. “I’m pretty sure you need to replace the cartridge in this thing. It’s doing fuck-all for my need to smoke a real cigarette.”
“That’s because there’s no nicotine in it. It’s just a flavor cartridge.”
I blink at Joss. “What the fuck was the point of giving it to me, then?”
“I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice, and I thought it would be funny if you got annoyed,” she admits.
I drop the Juul next to her, stand up, and brush off my jeans. “Always knew you were a bitch. Come on. Miranda probably left already, so I can give you a ride home.”
Out in the Mercedes, I’m still feeling the weight of our lopsided apologies and how truly unbalanced—in every sense of the word—my treatment of her was last semester. As the smallest of gestures, I offer her the aux cord and say, “You can play whatever you want.”
“Thanks,” she says. She queues up a Taylor Swift song, then cuts a glance in my direction and warns, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t even think about saying anything bad about her. You can be an anti-pop snob on your own time.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything!” I protest, steering the car out of the Lakewood High lot and onto the one main road in town. “Some of her stuff is good, especially the albums where she works with Jack Antonoff.”
Joss looks skeptical. “Garen Anderson, closet Taylor stan? I don’t buy it.”
“Garen Anderson, uncloseted Bleachers stan,” I correct.
“Hmm,” is all she says to that.
She still doesn’t seem like she believes a word of what I’m saying, so I give her the finger, crank up the volume, and start singing along. She joins in a few seconds later, and I shouldn’t be surprised to find that our voices sound good together. In between giving me directions to her house, she skips around her playlist to favor songs by the producers I like.
I’m not really sure how it gets out of hand. One minute, we’re both singing quietly along to the stereo, totally normal, and the next, we’re fully parked at a stop sign, both of us belting out some stupid, sad song at the top of our lungs, and she’s kind of crying again, which gets me started crying a little bit. Except, I don’t really know how to cry a little bit, especially on a day like today, so before this godforsaken fifteen-or-however-many-minute song is done playing, Joss and I are both openly sobbing and screaming the bridge at each other, our hands clutched together on the center console. I don’t know if it’s the music itself that’s getting to me, or if I just needed some sort of catharsis. Either way, by the time we get to the outro, we’re both drained and wiping our faces, then kind of laughing at each other, a little embarrassed.
“What the fuck,” she says, not for the first time tonight. I don’t remember her swearing this much last semester. I wonder if it’s new, or if it’s just another thing I forgot to notice because the only thing that mattered to me then was Travis.
“This whole night is some Twilight Zone shit,” I agree, putting the car back into drive and continuing along the winding back roads in the direction we were originally headed. The next song is just a middling bop, so we don’t get sucked into another emotional sing-along.
Eventually, we come to an enormous carved and painted wooden sign that reads “Pryce Family Farm,” and Joss needlessly indicates that I should turn into the driveway. It’s insanely long, probably close to a quarter mile, with turn-offs that all have their own signs—farm stand, pick-your-own berry patches, pumpkin patch, orchards, apiary. At the very end of the driveway, we come to a stop. To the right, there’s an hulking, two-story red barn, lit up with strings of lights. To the left, there’s a farmhouse of roughly the same size with a single light on the porch. Between them, straight ahead and stretching further than I can hope to see in the dark, is a field of mid-sized, still-growing Christmas trees.
“This is so fucking cool,” I breathe. “I had no idea you lived on a farm.”
Joss looks pleased by my reaction. She twists in her seat to indicate the turn-offs in the driveway behind us and says, “My whole family works here, too. My younger brother is in charge of the farm stand, and my sister takes care of all the animals. I mostly help my mom with the baking for the farmer’s market. And I take care of the apiary.”
“Right,” I say, “and an apiary is…?”
“The beehives,” she answers, turning back to face forward. “Of course, they’re going to have to bring somebody in to take over in the fall when I go to college.”
“Not sticking around?”
“God, no. I’m going to Emerson College in Boston, stage production and management major.” She closes her eyes and lets her head roll back onto the headrest. “Lakewood isn’t a bad place to grow up, I guess. I had a nice childhood, and I love my family. But there’s something comforting about the idea of moving to a new city where I don’t know anyone and where I don’t feel like I’m haunted by every mistake I’ve made. It just feels like… getting to breathe for the first time.”
I don’t realize that I’ve let my eyes close too, until I hear her move next to me. We both turn our heads to look at each other, still slumped in our seats.
“You know what that’s like, though,” she says. “I mean, isn’t that why you went to New York?”
“If so, I fucked it up,” I admit. “Going to New York was never going to be a fresh start for me. For one, Travis came with me. For another, I had my mom and my best friend half an hour away in Manhattan, and Ben and Stohler an hour and a half away in New Haven. And I was going back to Patton. My original group of friends might have graduated, but people still knew me on campus. Even with my new friends and my new guy, I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch.”
“Maybe you can go somewhere else for college,” Joss says. Then, when my mouth twitches into an involuntary smirk, she warily adds, “What?”
“I got into Berklee College of Music,” I tell her.
She’s silent for a long minute before she says, “Right. And that’s…”
“About eleven blocks down Boylston Street from Emerson, yeah.”
And then we just sit there, staring at each other. We’re sizing each other up, but I think it’s more to gauge the other’s reaction to this information than because we’re actually in conflict. Finally, she shakes her hair out of her face and says, “I could probably still breathe with someone eleven blocks away. Thanks for the ride home.” She opens the door and climbs out of the car, then pauses and leans down before closing it. “See you in Boston.”
“See you in Boston,” I echo. She shuts the door and disappears into the darkness leading to the farmhouse.
At the other end of that long driveway, I stop to connect my phone to the stereo again. There’s no way I’m bringing up another Taylor Swift album now, but I don’t know that I’m looking for the same desperately sad playlist I listened to on the way into town. I think I might just want something that feels okay. I roll down all the windows, point my car towards home, and set a random playlist to shuffle. Sometimes, surprises can be okay.
Travis finishes writing his AP English exam before I finish weeping onto mine. Since he isn’t a Patton student, the proctor lets him leave as soon as he’s done, while the rest of us wait for time to be officially called. I expect him to be waiting in the hallway when I’m finally released from the classroom. I’m even bracing myself for round two of the argument.
The hallway is empty.
I look to the fire exit on my right, then down towards the breezeway on my left that leads back into the rest of the building, but all I see are other Patton boys. I take my phone out of my pocket, power it on, and sure enough, there’s a text from Travis, sent about ten minutes ago.
Hey. You’re still taking the test, but I have to go. I forgot that I agreed to take someone else’s shift at work this afternoon. I’ll see you back at the house this evening. We can still go to the play in Lakewood if you want. I think we should talk first, though. I’m sorry for what I said earlier. I didn’t mean it, and I shouldn’t have said it. I love you. See you tonight.
“I love you, I’ll see you tonight,” I mimic aloud. “Fuck you. Fucking coward.”
“Me?” says some guy I’ve never spoken to in my life, who happens to be leaving the classroom behind me. He looks ready to square up, but his friend elbows him and says, “No, dude, I think he’s just talking to himself again.”
I make a face. My reputation isn’t the best, but I didn’t realize it had gotten to the casual hallucination level. Rather than feed into the mythos of my own psychosis further, I bury my phone in my backpack and set off to find Jamie and Ben. It only takes me about fifteen minutes to hunt them down on a walking path between the science building and one of the lesser-used admin offices. It’s one of Jamie’s favorite places for a semi-public hook-up, and sure enough, the two of them are lazily necking against the bricks, like they don’t have a perfectly good Cadillac to screw in halfway across campus.
I slump against the wall next to Ben, and Jamie detaches himself from his boyfriend’s mouth to say, “I’m sorry, are you waiting your turn? Give us some breathing room, you pervert.”
“Fuck off,” I say. “Can you guys stop sucking on each other’s tongues long enough to leave campus sometime soon?”
“Don’t be a bitch.” Jamie smacks my shoulder, and I shove him back, and we squabble for a few seconds before the pent-up bitterness in me reaches a peak and one of my pulled punches lands a little too hard in his ribs. We break apart, him in surprise, me in embarrassment.
“Sorry,” I say, not sure if I mean it. “That last one was an accident.”
“Where’s Travis?” Ben asks. He says it like he’s already guessed the answer, and that just makes me want to hit him, too. I make an ugly face at him instead of answering, but if there’s one thing Ben can beat me at, it’s a silent standoff.
After a few seconds that feel like actual hours, I turn away and start searching my pockets for my cigarettes. “He left.”
“After the exam?” Jamie questions.
I nod. My hands are shaking as I light my cigarette, but I think I probably get my Zippo put away again before anyone notices. “Yeah, he said he had to cover somebody’s shift at work. He’s going to meet me at the house later, if we still end up going to the play.”
Jamie raises his eyebrows. “Did you two—”
“Jamie, please. I am fucking begging you to stop asking me questions and just come get something to eat with me, before I start crying again.”
“Why were you crying in the first place?” Jamie demands. “What the hell did he do to you?”
“James,” Ben says sharply. “If he doesn’t want to talk about it, drop it.”
My throat is too tight to thank him, or to actually take a drag off the cigarette that is burning in my hand. I stub the tip out on the wall, flick the butt into the grass, and head for the parking lot.
Shockingly, Ben’s words are enough to put Jamie in check for a while. We drive into town for a relatively subdued lunch at a cafe, and between the three of us, we manage to keep up enough of a conversation to seem almost normal. I pretend I care about the archival preservation of Julia Ward Howe’s personal correspondence, they pretend not to notice that I’m spiraling into a depressive episode right there in front of them, and we all pretend that our spines aren’t locked straight from the tension of everything left unsaid. The situation is complicated by the fact that I change the subject every time James mentions Travis, James changes the subject every time I try to ask why he made those weird comments about his schoolwork earlier, and Ben sneers every time either of us tries to diffuse the awkwardness with an obscene comment. We manage to make it through the meal, but it’s not one of our better outings.
Even that tentative peace falls apart later, as Jamie eases his car into my driveway next to the Mercedes. Travis’s car is nowhere in sight, and I feel the stiffness start to leech out of my bones. I must make some sort of sound—a sigh of relief, maybe—because when I reach for my door handle, Jamie flicks the lock button to keep me right where I am and twists around in his seat to address me face-to-face. “I understand that you don’t want to talk about it, but I still need to know. What exactly is the plan for when Travis gets home?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I try to unlock the door, but the child safety must be engaged, because it doesn’t budge. I wonder if he planned that before we got back in the car after lunch. “Let me out.”
“I’m talking about whatever argument the two of you quite clearly had after your exam,” Jamie says. Ben reaches over to touch his leg, maybe in warning, but Jamie doesn’t react to it at all. Instead, he keeps pushing. “Do you want me and Ben to leave so that you can continue fighting it out? Should we pack up your clothes, guitars, and dog so that you can come stay in my guest room until things blow over? Is it a permanent split this time?”
I give the still-locked door handle one last yank for the hell of it, and then fuck it. I go out the moon roof. They’re both so busy yelling at me—Jamie because I’m going to dent his car, Ben because I’m going to break my neck—that neither of them thinks to grab my legs and actually stop me from slithering up between the seats. From the roof of the car, I toss my backpack down onto my lawn, then hop down after it.
Mrs. Katz, the Brooklyn expat who sometimes joins me and Omelette on our walks so she can talk shit about a bunch of ladies I don’t know from her synagogue, is watching me from across the street. I salute her, and she waves back. “You staying out of trouble, Garen?”
“Yes, Mrs. Katz.”
“You getting yourself kidnapped over there?”
“No, Mrs. Katz.”
“You sure? I got a baseball bat in the mudroom. You need me to bring it out for you?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. Katz.”
My friends catch up to me right as I’m unlocking the front door of my house, and even though I try to close them out, Jamie throws an arm across the threshold to block me. Briefly, the idea flits through my mind--if I break Jamie’s arm in the door, they’ll probably leave me alone. As soon as the impulse is there, it’s gone again, replaced by a bolt of shock and self-loathing that any part of me would consider doing something like that to my best friend. I stagger backward, and the two of them follow me into the house.
Omelette has trotted out of the living room to howl a greeting to us, and I collapse onto the floor to embrace him. Jamie remains upright and rigid.
“I don’t like this,” he says.
It’s exactly what Declan said to me earlier today, delivered with the same core of concern wrapped in a grim shell and for some reason, that makes me laugh. Whatever irritation or tension has been toying around Jamie’s expression is gone in an instant, replaced by genuine, naked anger.
“It isn’t funny, Garen. Things were going well for you for months. You and Travis weren’t together, and I know you must have missed that, but you were fine as roommates. No fighting, no fits of jealousy, no arguments with your friends. You seemed like you were actually happy. And then two weeks ago, we all get together for your first night at work, and suddenly you two are kissing, you’re saying you love each other, you’re spending the night in the same bed.”
And that—that’s disgust. I stare at him. Jamie has had problems with some of my dating choices before, but with the exception of those involving Dave Walczyk, he has never sounded outright disgusted by them. By me.
“So, I figure, fine. Fine, you two got back together, and you didn’t want to tell me, for whatever reason, but that’s alright. I can deal with you making a decision that I don’t particularly love. I can even deal with you keeping it from me, despite the fact that I tell you everything. But what I can’t deal with is you getting back together with him, only to have it be the same shit it was before!” Jamie throws an arm out to the side, like he can physically point to the moment in time where everything fell apart. “The drama, the obsession. Twisting yourself into knots because you’re trying to make a relationship work when it’s obvious that you both—”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” I interrupt. Omelette barks at me in reproach. He gets antsy whenever he can tell I’m in a bad mood, and right now, his ears have leveled out across the top of his skull, airplane wings instead of butterflies. I rub his wolfy face between my hands to reassure him, then stand up again. He parks his furry little ass right on the toe of my boot so that he can face Jamie, too. It’s a little like having back-up, and that’s enough to get me to try to keep my voice even when I say, “You don’t know anything about my relationship with Travis. We never even had a conversation about it until after it was over, and besides, you’ve always been here, in New York. You weren’t in Lakewood when Travis and I dated for real.”
“If you’re trying to make an argument in favor of your relationship with Travis, you might not want to base it on what happened those first few months you lived in Lakewood,” Ben says mildly. My attention snaps to him, but he’s making eye contact with my dog instead of me.
“The hell does that mean?” I demand.
“It means that you don’t get to rewrite history so that you can pretend you lived out a love story,” he says. His voice is so calm, so matter-of-fact, like he’s not ripping my guts right out of my torso and grinding them into a humiliating pile of dust. “Maybe you two were happy together. I can’t say for sure, because he mostly pretended you didn’t exist when we were at school. He didn’t hang out with us. He didn’t sit with us at lunch. He didn’t even make eye contact with you in the hallways. The only time I remember him talking to you in front of other people was when people started to spread rumors that he might be queer, so he called you a faggot and didn’t talk to you for two weeks.”
Jamie turns and walks out of the room at that. I think it’s the only way he can stop me from seeing his rage, but I close my eyes anyway. “He was in the closet, and our parents were engaged. It was a complicated situation.”
“I don’t think that treating you poorly made it any less complicated.”
“He didn’t—”
“He did, Garen!” Jamie snarls, storming right back into the entryway. “Do you even remember that afternoon you came back to town? It was the first time I ever saw the two of you together, and I swear to God, I came this close”—he holds up forefinger and thumb, pinched an eighth of an inch apart—“to beating the crap out of him myself. You said hello to him, and his first words were I fucked Ben.”
Ben looks around at him in surprise. “Wait, really?”
“Yes, and when Garen reminded him that such an achievement didn’t exactly make him unique—”
“Fuck off.”
“—Travis smashed a mug of hot coffee on Garen’s hands and said he’d beat the shit out of him if he ever said something about that again. Then he told him he hated him and wished he would die,” Jamie finishes.
It’s almost funny, because hey, this whole conversation is making me wish I would die, too.
The surprise on Ben’s face has ratcheted up into actual disbelief now as he turns to me and says, “Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened?”
“Because I didn’t want to tell you anything. I hated you then,” I say.
“That doesn’t matter. I loved you then, and I love you now, and I never would have stayed with Travis if I had known he acted like that.”
I can feel my expression twisting into a mockery of a smile, something forced and ugly that I don’t seem to have any control over. “If I’d known it was that easy to split you two up, I would’ve told you sooner. We could have all saved ourselves a lot of trouble.”
“Stop it,” Jamie says flatly. “Stop doing that, that thing where you turn into a cunt because you feel cornered and you want to bully everyone into leaving you alone with your misery. It’s not going to work. Ben and I both know you too well to put up with that shit today.”
Omelette starts barking again. I think he’s starting to figure out which words count as profanity, but I can’t tell whether he loves or hates it.
I grab his harness and leash from the hook by the door and get him clipped in. “I’m taking my dog for a walk,” I say. “Feel free to get the fuck out of my house while we’re gone.”
I slam the front door behind myself, but my bravado fades before I’ve even made it down the driveway. Omelette and I head north for a few blocks, and my anger dissipates more with each step, like I’m leaving a trail of emotional breadcrumbs behind us. We turn east, and now I just have embarrassment and resentment keeping me company for two blocks until we reach the dog park.
Nobody else is here. Omelette does a few high-speed circuits of the park to see if anyone is hiding from him, but when he is forced to accept that there are no other dogs for him to play with, he starts howling despondently. I’m able to distract him with a game of fetch, using one of the loaner toys from the bin. The sign next to the bin requests that visitors clean toys before returning them to the bin, so I take the toy with me when we leave. It’s kind of hard to be full of righteous indignation when you’re holding a nasty, hot pink, rubber pig that’s covered in dog spit. By the time I make it back to my house and see that Jamie’s car is still in the driveway, I can’t even be mad. I’m just tired.
As soon as Omelette has been released into the house, he goes tearing off to find another toy to play with. I bring the pink pig to the sink to clean it and, more importantly, my hands. James and Ben are both sitting at my kitchen table. None of us speak while I’m washing up, but once the pig has been thoroughly scrubbed and propped up in the drying rack, I turn around and find Jamie standing right in front of me.
“I was harsh,” he says, which is very much not an apology.
“Yeah,” I say, “fucker.”
He pulls me into a hug that only ends when he realizes I’m drying my wet hands on the back of his shirt, and then he squirms free and returns to the table. Instead of joining them, I pull myself up to sit on the counter.
“Here’s the thing,” I say carefully. “I know that my relationship with Travis… is and has always been a mess. But a lot of that is my mess. He got outed to his awful, homophobic mom, and I left town for four months. He had every right to be furious with me when I came back. Maybe… maybe he expressed it in a way that scared you, Jamie.” It scared me, too, I don’t add. “But the way you guys were talking about him made it sound like he’s violent with me, and that’s not fair. It isn’t fair to him, because he has never hurt me like that, and it isn’t fair to me, because someone did hurt me like that, and I’m fucking sick of hearing people compare the other men in my life to David.”
Jamie’s elbows are uncharacteristically propped on the table, his long fingers steepled together and resting against his lips. Across the table from him, Ben is hunched over, hands on his lap, posture as shitty as ever. They’re both looking at me, not each other, and for once, it feels like they’re actually hearing me.
“I don’t think that Travis is violent,” Jamie finally says, “but I do think he’s volatile.”
“Travis says the same thing about Declan,” I say.
“Declan isn’t volatile. He’s a dick. There’s a difference,” Jamie points out. “And since he’s not being a dick to you, me, or Ben, I don’t have much of an opinion on the matter.”
“My point,” I bite out, “is that you talk shit about Travis, and Travis talks shit about Declan, and Declan talks shit about everyone, but it’s my life, and these are my decisions, and I’m going to be with whoever I want to be with.”
Jamie opens his mouth to respond, but Ben makes a soft, barely audible noise that might just be James. Their eyes meet across the table, and whatever silent conversation they share in that moment ends with Jamie taking a long, deep breath in through his nose and exhaling, “Fine. I trust your judgment.”
I literally cannot remember a time when someone has said that to me before. I must be letting that show on my face, because Ben glances up at me and stifles a laugh.
The three of us manage to go another two hours without an incident. Ben and I spend most of that time playing with Omelette in the yard, while Jamie makes himself comfortable on the back deck—“cat-owner territory,” he calls it—and fucks around on his phone. Omelette happens to be in between barking episodes when Travis gets home, so even from the backyard, we can all hear the sound of an engine cutting off, followed by the slam of a car door.
Jamie gestures towards the sliding glass door to the living room and offers, “Should we…?”
“Give me a minute. I want to talk to him first,” I say, dropping a frisbee on his lap on my way past. Omelette makes a beeline for the toy, and Jamie hastily flings the frisbee across the yard before the dog can lunge for his crotch. Ben’s laughter follows me into the house.
I slide the back door shut at very nearly the same moment Travis closes the front one. He’s wearing the same clothes he wore to campus this morning, not the black shirt, khaki trousers, and green apron he wears for work, and I wish I were more surprised to discover that he lied about needing to take someone else’s shift. But considering how this morning went, I can’t really blame him, either.
We meet at the living room doorway, but he takes my hand and tows me into the entryway so that we’re out of sight of the back door.
“Hi,” he says softly. “Can we talk?”
I nod, but before he says anything, he slips an arm around my waist and pulls me into a tight hug. I’m not completely sure how to react to it. Half of me is desperately relieved that he isn’t pissed at me, that we’re not arguing, that Jamie and Ben were wrong about us only ever treating each other like shit. The other half of me still can’t stop thinking about the fact that we’re three days away from me being eight months sober, but on some level, Travis still doesn’t believe—and might not ever have believed—in my ability to stay this way for a full year at a time.
As if he can hear my thoughts, Travis says into my shoulder, “I’m sorry for what I said before the exam. It was stupid and mean and—and not even true. I know you can stay sober, I know how strong you are. I was just pissed about the situation with Declan, and I lashed out like a complete asshole. I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I say, because telling him it’s okay would feel like a lie. There’s a voice in the back of my mind whispering—in a Georgia drawl--it can’t be the same shit it was before. I swallow and say, “I need more than that, though.”
One of Travis’ hands had been trailing back and forth across the small of my back, almost like he was petting me. It goes still now, and he leans away from our embrace so that we can make eye contact. “I’m sorry, Garen. I didn’t mean what I said to you.”
“I think you did. Parts of it, at least,” I say carefully. I really, really don’t want another fight. “Even if you do believe I can stay sober”--which you fucking don’t--“I don’t think you trust anybody else to let me stay that way.”
“That isn’t true,” Travis protests. “I trust plenty of the people in your life. I trust James, I trust Ben—”
“No, you don’t,” I interrupt. “Do you remember that fight you guys had in October, after you found out that he and I were hooking up? You said that he was prioritizing his own need to be needed over my sobriety, and that he—Ben McCutcheon, patron saint of saving screwed-up men from their own worst impulses—was toxic for me to be around. You didn’t trust him then.”
Travis blows out a harsh breath of air and takes another step back so that we aren’t touching at all. “That’s an exaggeration. I never said you couldn’t be around him. You guys are friends.”
“Yeah, but the second I become more-than-friends with a guy, you think he can’t be trusted. You think I can’t be trusted. That’s what you did with Ben last fall, and it’s what you’re doing with Declan now.”
“I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from us talking about Declan,” Travis says, and goddamn it, it sounds like a warning.
I’m the one to step back this time. It takes me back into the living room, and Travis remains where he is, in the entry way. He doesn’t look pissed, necessarily. There’s no scowl, no tightness to his jaw, no crossed arms or petulant, locked stance. But there’s a kind of defiant hardness to his eyes, like he thinks that what he has just said means that the conversation is over, and if there’s one thing I don’t fuck with, it’s somebody trying to tell me what to do.
“Really? Because I think we can gain some clarity.” I raise my thumb, starting to count off. “First thing we should be clear on: I’m responsible for my own sobriety. Unless you think my friends are going to roofie me, you need to stop acting like me hanging out with people you don’t like is a threat to my health.” I add an index finger to my count, making an L-shape. “Second thing: you’re not part of my sobriety team. You’re not my shrink. You’re not my doctor. You’re not my sponsor. You’re not even the guy in my NA group who hands out the keychains when we reach our milestones. So, respectfully, stop fucking telling me how to handle my own addiction. You’ve been doing this since before I even went to rehab, telling me who I should or shouldn’t spend time with, who I should or shouldn’t hook up with, where I should or shouldn’t go. I get that you think you’re helping me, and I love you so much for wanting to take care of me, but you have no idea what this whole experience—addiction, rehab, relapse, recovery—has been like for me. You haven’t lived it, and you aren’t in a position to tell me how to deal with it.”
I add my middle finger to the count, which is fitting, because this is the one that I think is most likely to make Travis tell me to fuck off.
“Last thing: you and I have so much history built into our relationship, but I was single when I met Declan. He and I have been a thing”--since the first morning he smirked across the breakfast table at me, since I stood between his legs outside a hookah bar and took a drag off his cigarette, since those dirty rhymes on the back of valentines, since the cop car—“since before my birthday. It’s not a monogamous relationship, but it is a relationship, and you knew about it before you decided to get involved with me again. I didn’t cheat on you with him, I didn’t hide him from you, I didn’t do this behind your back. You knew what you were getting into.”
“If you were monogamous, would you have chosen to stay with him over getting back together with me two weeks ago?”
“Don’t make me deal with hypotheticals. I’m not in that kind of relationship. I don’t want to be in that kind of relationship.”
“With Declan?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, with anyone!” I burst out. “I don’t like it, and I’m not good at it. The only time I ever managed to be fully monogamous was when I was with David, and that wasn’t because I was suddenly hot for fidelity. It was because he beat me for so much as looking at another guy, and he would’ve killed me if I ever cheated on him. That’s what monogamy is to me, Travis. That’s what it feels like. A fucking death trap.”
Travis is staring at me with this awful, stunned expression, like he’s about to crumple to the floor. I feel physically sick that I’ve made him look at me like that, I wish so badly I could say something to take it back, but beneath the instinctive rush of love and misery, I can’t help but think… dude, you’ve cheated on everyone you’ve ever dated. I’m not the only one with a problem here.
“Travis,” I say instead, feeling completely fucking helpless. I don’t know where to go from here, but thankfully, he cuts off anything else I could manage to string together.
“So, all those times we talked about being together in September, you were just saying what you thought I wanted to hear?”
“No. I want to be with you, Travis, I love you. But ‘September’”—I do air quotes around the word and immediately feel like a goddamn idiot—“is like, this fucking fantasy you talk about in the abstract. You act like September will come, and I’ll be a year sober, so all my issues will be cured and you won’t ever have to deal with the messiness of dating an addict again. September will come, and suddenly we’ll be this perfect, Hallmark Movie couple that never fights or struggles or looks at anyone else. And then you make everything else, all the shit that has happened or is gonna happen right up until eleven fifty-nine at night on September twelfth, you make that my fault. Like I’m supposed to be in stasis until I reach a milestone that makes me good enough for you. Like I had to be celibate and lonely for a year, even though you—” I punctuate the word by jabbing a finger at him. I don’t come even close to making contact, but he still skitters back to dodge it.
“Don’t touch me—”
“You had a girlfriend before I’d even sobered up, and I’m pretty sure she was knocked up before I was out of rehab. You can’t act like I’m an asshole for having other people in my life when you’d be having a kid next month if Joss hadn’t been smart enough to have that thing vacuumed out of her after you—”
Travis is suddenly rightthefuckthere in front of me, his eyes blazing and his mouth in something like a snarl. “Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you, Garen? That thing vacuumed out of her? It was supposed to be my child, and that’s how you want to talk about the situation?”
He’s right there in front of me, he’s so close I can feel the stutter of his breath on my face, and I can’t do this, I can’t, I didn’t mean for him to be so mad, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Instinctively, I flinch to put my arms up, anything to get some space, something between our bodies, but he’s so close that my clenched fists accidentally collide with his chest, and I don’t want to be touched right now, I can’t fucking stand the thought of any furious man putting his hands on me, so I straighten my arms to get more space between us, but that’s wrong, because Travis just knocks my hands out of the way and says, “I fucking told you not to touch me,” and he put his palms on my shoulders and shoves me back, hard.
There’s a loud crash as the door to the backyard is thrown open. For a second, I think it came off the slider track or even shattered, but when I look around, I see that the glass is fine; it’s just been flung wide by Ben, who is striding into the house, five feet and six inches of unbridled rage.
“Tell me I didn’t just see you put your hands on him,” he demands.
Jamie is still outside, scrambling to his feet on the deck and cursing as he almost trips over Omelette, who is bounding back into the living room. Travis half-turns to face Ben, looking down at him like he’d forgotten there were other people in the house.
I don’t know who out of the whole group is most surprised when Ben draws back a fist and sucker punches Travis right in the stomach, but it isn’t me. I can’t feel surprised when I’m too busy feeling like I might die. My throat is constricted, breathing is shallow, whole body is wracked with a sudden chill that leaves me trembling. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to block out all the sounds of yelling and swearing and fighting and barking. There’s a possibility I’m swaying slightly, but I can’t tell if that’s just some weird vertigo from having my eyes closed. Or I’m going to pass out. Or I’m having a heart attack. I reach up to touch my chest through my shirt and realize that I’m still wearing my stupid school uniform, so I loosen my tie with one hand and start unbuttoning my collar with the other. I can’t tell if it helps, but I tuck my hand into the neckline of my shirt anyway, just to feel my heart hammering away through my sternum.
It’s fine. I’m going to be fine. Dr. Howard and I have been working together, we’ve been preparing for this.
Breathe in through your nose and count one, two, three, four, five, breathe out through your mouth and count one, two, three, four, five. Keep going. Slow breaths. Slow. Tense your muscles with each inhale, relax them on the exhale. Focus on the feeling. Just focus, and breathe.
I open my eyes. It’s a fist fight, a real one. Ben and Travis are on the floor now, but a framed print Jamie gave me months ago is crooked and cracked on the wall, like someone was shoved into it. Omelette is going wild, making so much noise you’d think he got paid by the bark, and dancing around the floor like he wants to get a swing in, too. Jamie is the only other person standing, and he’s got the back of Travis’ t-shirt clenched in his fists as he tries to drag the two of them apart. I should step in, I know that. I’m the strongest one here, and I could separate them in an instant. I could probably just scoop Ben up and walk out of the room with him in a fireman’s carry, if I wanted to.
But I can’t do that. I can’t touch any of them right now, and more importantly, I can’t have them touch me. So I just close my eyes again and continue my deep breathing until the shaking stops.
By the time I’m ready to clock back into reality, the fight has gotten messy. Kind of literally. Travis is bigger and stronger and has probably won more fights in his life, but Ben is scrappy and angry and wholly unafraid of his own pain. That much becomes apparent as I open my eyes again just in time to see him biting into the split in his own lip just enough to get a mouthful of blood, which he spits in Travis’s face.
Travis reels back in disgust, and that creates the inch more space that Jamie needs to wrench the two of them apart and drag Travis several feet back across the floor. Ben staggers to his feet and tries to lunge after them, but I’m finally here again, finally aware of how urgently I need to get involved, and I catch him around the waist and haul him, kicking and snarling, out into the kitchen. I have to pin him to the counter with my body to keep him from going back for more. He struggles against my grip for a second, but I think his own reluctance to push me wins out in the end, because he finally puts his hands up in a show of surrender and says, “Fine. Fine, I’m done. Get off me,” and I release him and turn to look at the scene of the fight. There’s blood everywhere. So much more than makes sense. It’s still dribbling from the slash in Ben’s lip down into his beard, but that doesn’t explain why there’s an enormous streak of it across the entryway floor, unless…
I abandon Ben at the counter and move to the doorway so that I can peer over into the living room. James is right near the doorway, torn between wanting to check on his boyfriend and wanting to stand in the middle ground between them to keep everyone separate. Travis is sitting on the couch with one hand cupped over the lower half of his face. One of his eyes is already starting to swell shut under a splotch of dark pink that’ll be a bruise by tomorrow morning. He moves his hand away from his face to look down at the blood smeared over his palm, finally revealing the split skin at the bridge of his nose and the red-purple bruises rising around it. There’s no question: his nose is broken. I’ve broken mine twice before, both significantly worse than his right now, but he still should probably let someone look at it. Despite that, I can’t make myself move towards him. I retreat a few steps further back into the kitchen with Ben.
Omelette is slam-dancing in the entryway, skipping around and slapping his paws on the floor, tail wagging furiously. At first, I think he has just gone full Jack the Ripper and is trying to splash in the blood streak. Then I realize he has something that he’s batting around, something small and white that skitters across the wood like a dropped Tic-Tac. Jamie stoops to shoo him away and pick up whatever he’s playing with, and stares down at the object on his palm for a long moment.
“What,” I rasp out. “What is it.”
Jamie clears his throat and asks delicately, “Which one of you two gentlemen is missing a molar?”
“Damn it,” Ben says, and he ducks down to examine his reflection in the side of the espresso machine. “My insurance doesn’t cover dental, either.” He hooks a finger into his mouth and pulls it wider, revealing the spot where blood is still pooling up in the gap where one of his teeth used to be.
I stagger sideways and barely make it to the sink before I start throwing up. Ben makes a concerned noise and tries to move closer to me, but I put up a hand to keep him back, ‘cause the last thing I need right now is to be tenderly nursed by a guy who just lost a tooth and then attempted to self-cannibalize part of his own face just so he had enough blood to spit in someone’s eyes.
The slightly deranged and deeply unserious part of my brain has gotta be in the driver’s seat right now, because in between retches, I manage to gulp down enough air to whisper to him, “That’s so fucking punk, dude.”
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Travis says from the other room. He can’t be talking to me, can he? It’s my house, too. He adds, “I’m serious. Both of you. Get the fuck out.”
“We’re not leaving Garen alone with you,” Ben says flatly. He’s talking to Travis, but his eyes are locked on Jamie’s, trying urgently to communicate their shared stance on the subject. I start rinsing my mouth, then the sink, just so I don’t have to see the look on Jamie’s face when he hears Ben accuse Travis, “I fucking saw you shove him. I saw you put your hands on him, and I’m not leaving Garen here with you so you can try your hand at domestic violence.”
“You came into my house and fucking sucker punched me, but I’m the violent one?” Travis snaps. “Christ, you’re delusional. I’m serious, Ben, get the fuck out of my fucking house!”
I don’t know what Travis is doing in the other room, if he moves or what, but Ben comes up off the counter like he’s about to go for round two. Jamie intercepts him, turns him around, and pushes him back towards me.
“Stop. We’re done, we’re not doing this again. Garen,” Jamie starts. Our eyes meet, and he hesitates, then nods once, like he’s made up his mind. “Upstairs, please.”
I know what he’s telling me to do, and I don’t even want to protest. I’d walk into traffic if he told me to right now, as long as it gets me the fuck out of this situation.
Up in my room, I start shoving my shit into my backpack. Some clothes, my journal, my phone charger. I collect my toothbrush, razor, and some other toiletries from the bathroom and add those to the bag. My acoustic guitar gets moved from stand to case, and almost as an afterthought, I grab the duffel with my work clothes and cash box.
James is on his hands and knees, scrubbing the blood off the floor in the entryway when I return. Travis and Ben have switched rooms; Ben is in the living room, gathering up an armful of Omelette’s toys, and Travis is in the kitchen, gingerly cleaning his face at the sink.
I crouch down in front of the cabinet where Omelette’s kibble bin is stored and start scooping the food into a ziploc bag. “You should probably go to Urgent Care and have somebody set your nose,” I say quietly.
There’s movement in the corner of my vision, possibly from Travis nodding along in agreement. We’re silent for a minute, and then he says, “You don’t have to go anywhere. I’m not going to hurt you, Garen. You fucking know me. You know I would never do that to you.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” I say. My words do nothing to cover up Ben’s muttered bullshit from the other room. It doesn’t really matter what I say, anyway. My shoulders still feel heavy under the ghost of Travis’ hands on them. He says he won’t hurt me, but for the first time since I met him, I don’t… know that I believe him. Because Dave promised me that, too. The only difference is that when he snapped, it was a punch instead of a shove. And I tried to make things work with Dave, I really did. I tried so hard, and I forgave him so many times, and I stayed for so, so long.
I’m not staying this time.
Once the bag of dog kibble is secured within my backpack, I straighten up and turn to face Travis completely. “I’ll be back in a couple of days,” I tell him. “We can figure out a plan then. There’s only another seven weeks on the lease, so maybe the landlord won’t be too much of a dick about letting us out early.”
“Garen,” Travis says. His voice cracks, but I don’t let myself flinch. I don’t even let myself blink.
“I’m done with school in four weeks. Three, if I can convince my parents to let me skip graduation practice and the ceremony. My mom’s place is only an hour away from campus, so I can commute from there until the semester is over. It won’t be a big deal.”
“Garen,” he repeats, and this time, I break just enough to shake my head, hard.
“No. Don’t you fucking dare ask me to stay. Don’t pretend we can work this out. Not after today.” I raise my shoulders in a helpless half-shrug, arms stretched out to the sides for the barest of moments before I let them fall limp again. “It’s done, Travis. This isn’t healthy. This isn’t good for either of us, not anymore.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but can’t seem to find anything to say. Instead, we’re just stuck there, struggling through the silence together. Finally, he swallows and licks his lips, and when he starts to speak this time, all I can think is that I haven’t even kissed him today.
“My last exam is on Wednesday,” he says. “I can be out of the house the next day. You and the dog can stay here, maybe get somebody to take over the other half of the lease next month. You don’t have to move in with your mom.”
“Thanks.”
There’s nothing left to say. I shoulder my backpack, clip Omelette back into his harness and leash, and walk out of the house.
“When we get to my building, you and the dog will need to hang back for a moment,” Jamie tells me as I’m loading my bags and my guitar into the trunk of my dad’s Mercedes. “Zooey has never met a dog before, and I can’t imagine she’ll be pleased to do so now. We might have to introduce them slowly. I can put her in my bedroom for the time being.”
I slam the trunk shut. “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to go stay at my dad’s house tonight.”
Ben frowns at me. “You’re going all the way back to Lakewood?”
“Yeah. I want to get away from here, for real. Clear my head.” I open the passenger door, and Omelette leaps up into the seat. There’s a strap attached to the headrest that I can clip onto his harness so he doesn’t try to fling himself into the backseat or out the window while I’m driving. With the door shut again, I turn to face my friends. “I’ll spend the night in Connecticut, but I’ll be back by tomorrow afternoon. Om and I can stay with my mom this weekend, since her place is only like, a twenty-minute walk from Rush. She can watch him and put him to bed while I’m at work. Then, um… I might just talk to his doggie daycare and see if I can board him there for a few nights. Declan and Javi will let me crash at their dorm, and while I’m pretty sure I could sneak a dog into the dorm, I’m not sure I trust this one to be quiet enough that I get away with it.” I rap a knuckle against the window, and true to form, Omelette barks so loudly that even he looks startled by the sound.
“And then?” Jamie prompts.
I shrug. “Then we’ll come back to the house once Travis moves out next week, and I’ll figure out what to do for the last month of the lease.”
It sounds so… final. It’s strange. Travis and I have had so many breakups, or arguments that felt like breakups, but it never really felt like it was done for good. Not when he told me our first kiss was a one-off, or called me a slur and stopped talking to me, or even when I left Lakewood. For going on two years now, I was always so sure that we’d get back together and work through our problems.
There’s nothing to work through now. It’s just over.
Jamie and Ben and I say our goodbyes, and then they set off for the city, hopefully to put some ice on Ben’s swollen jaw. I set a course for Lakewood, Connecticut. With my phone linked to the stereo system, I spend the first part of the trip making all the phone calls I need to make. First, my dad, who is thrilled with the idea of an impromptu visit. He offers to order pizza for dinner and tells me he’ll happily watch Omelette while I go to see the play. I try to point out that having tickets to see a play and actually seeing that play are two completely separate, not necessarily inclusive things, but by the time we hang up, he’s on his way to TJ Maxx to buy new squeaky toys for “his grandson,” and it seems like a lost cause.
Next, I talk to my mom, who tells me I’m more than welcome to stay at her apartment this weekend, but seems wary. At first I think it’s because I’m bringing the dog with me, but then she says, “And when you get here tomorrow, I look forward to hearing all about this job of yours, whatever it may be,” and I realize I’m a fucking idiot who still hasn’t told my parents where I work. There’s a slim possibility that my dad overheard me lying to the Lakewood Drama Club about working security outside a venue, but if he did, he hasn’t passed that along to Mom. I reluctantly agree to tell her all about it when I see her.
My third call is to the doggie daycare people, who let me book Omelette for a four-night stay. He’ll get dropped off on Sunday afternoon, and I’ll pick him up on Thursday after school so we can head home together. My fourth and final call should be to Declan, but I’m a little worried that communicating directly with him will lead to me blurting out a bunch of emotional shit that I’m not even remotely ready to get into. Better to make a joke about it all. So, instead, I record a voice message and send it to the group chat with him, Javi, Taylor, and Steven.
“Hello, dickwads,” I declare. Omelette barks, so I add. “Omelette says hi, too. Anyway, I know this will come as an immense shock to all of you, based on how excellent and stable and totally, totally normal everything seemed in my life this morning, but Travis and I just had an extremely messy breakup. Like, the breakup. James and Ben were present for the whole thing, so if you want the full play-by-play, I’m sure they’d be happy to give that to you. My favorite part was when Ben and Travis got into a fist-fight, and Travis knocked out one of Ben’s teeth—which, I’m realizing right now as I say this to you all, I think Jamie kept? He found it on the floor, and I’m pretty sure he put it in his pocket. What the fuck is that about? Oh, and Ben broke Travis’s nose. Very exciting.” I drum my hands on the steering wheel for a minute, trying to think what to say next, then just shrug. “I’m gonna be out of town for a few days, staying with my parents. Travis is moving out of the house exactly one week from today, but if one of you—or, I guess, two of you?—could let me crash on your dorm room floor from like, Sunday night through Wednesday night, that would be dope. Alright. Somebody text me back. Don’t call, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Despite that final comment, I get a phone call barely a minute after I’ve sent the message. I decline the call, plus the next three, then push the button to have my car read me the text message that finally comes in.
“One new text message from Javi Santos,” the car’s frosty, feminine robot voice informs me. She pronounces his first name with a hard J and a long A, like the start of Jamie’s name, so I guess she’s a white robot. The actual text itself is read without pause or inflection, so it seems that Javi’s punctuation is not making a guest appearance today. “Dude what the fuck are you good question mark question mark question mark we can all be at your house in twenty-five if we have to beat someone’s ass I’m so serious right now.”
“I hate the way you read that,” I tell the car. She doesn’t respond. A few seconds go by, and my phone chimes again. I sigh and press the button once more.
“One new text message from Steven Ramsey,” the car says.
“It’s racist that you pronounced his name right, but not Javi’s,” I tell her.
“That sucks man. Like he seemed like a dick or whatever Beth but—”
“Wait, who is Beth?” I ask. “Did he say ‘tbh’ and you think that’s him typing Beth?”
“—it sucks that you got into it. You can def crash here if you need to I will even clean the room so you have someplace to sleep,” the car finishes. Almost before she’s done, there’s another chime, and she says, “One new text message from DC don’t fuckin steal Charlie’s phone again.”
“I really need to change that,” I tell Omelette. He barks at the stereo, because he’s a good boy, and he understands that we cut Charlie out of our lives weeks ago.
Declan’s text is so simple that even the car robot voice can’t fuck it up. “Call me when you can.”
Not now, not immediately, not even tonight—just when I can. That sounds doable. With all my other hands-free phone calls complete, there’s not much I can do while driving, so I drop my phone in the center console and let a monstrously depressing Noah Kahan playlist keep me company for the rest of the trip to Lakewood.
Dad is waiting outside on the front steps of his house when I pull into the driveway. Seeing a human he’s never had the pleasure of harassing before, Omelette starts barking and pawing at the car window. Once we’re parked and the car is off, I go around to let him out. He heads straight for my dad, who kneels down and cheers, “Look at you! What a handsome little man you are. Hi, Omelette! I’m your grandpa!”
“You’re so weird,” I say. Omelette is flat on his back now, bicycle-kicking all four limbs while my dad scratches his belly. “I can’t believe you’re this excited to meet him, but you never let me have a dog when I was a kid.”
“Blame your mother,” Dad suggests.
“Bullshit. She’s letting us stay with her all weekend,” I say.
That finally gets Dad’s attention off the dog and onto me. He glances at the car, like he’s expecting to see someone else coming out of it now, then back at me. “Just you this weekend?”
“Just me, full-stop,” I sigh. “Travis and I are, um…” I pause, because I’m realizing in this moment that I don’t think I told either of my parents that Travis and I got back together a few weeks ago. The idea of letting Dad know this now just to tell him about a breakup is kind of embarrassing, so I try something else. “We’ve been having some problems.”
“Mm,” is all Dad says at first. When I don’t continue, he asks, “Friend problems, roommate problems, or boyfriend problems?”
“Sort of a mix,” I admit. “I don’t really want to get into the details right now, but we basically reached the point that all your divorces eventually got to—”
“There have only been two!”
“Irreconcilable differences,” I finish. “There’s no way for us to move forward as any of the things you mentioned before—friends, roommates, or boyfriends. So, we’re just going to go our separate ways.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I’m keeping the dog, for one.” I shoo Omelette towards the front door, and even though he has no idea where he’s going, he cheerfully bounds up the steps. “Also, I’m staying with you, then Mom, then some friends on campus while Travis finishes his final exams and moves out of the house.” My dad looks like he’s about to ask another question, so I cut him off. “Like I said, I don’t want to get into it.”
His mouth snaps closed again. We both watch Omelette zoom through the house, sniffing shoes and nudging doors open with his nose and jumping on or over the furniture. By the time he starts to calm down, Dad seems to have accepted that the conversation has reached a natural conclusion, and he’s not going to get anything else out of me. He gives Omelette one last scritch on the head and goes to order the pizza.
Omelette is a lot like me, in that his affection is intense, but pretty indiscriminate. He doesn’t so much as whine when Dad sends me off to the high school. On my way into town, the likelihood of me actually going to see some people I only hung out with for one semester in The Wizard of Oz was holding steady at about twenty percent. Within the realm of possibility, but definitely not something I would have written into the schedule in pen. Once I’ve been banished from the house, though, it seems pointless to avoid it.
“Hi, Garen! I can’t believe you actually came,” chirps the girl who is working the ticket table outside the Lakewood High School auditorium. I’m drawing a blank on her name, but I definitely know her. She’s a freshman on the crew, mostly costumes and props, and she was the one who figured out how to make realistic-looking ice cream sundaes out of spray foam insulation. She said she saw it on Pinterest, and I remember thinking that was fitting, because she has a Pinterest kind of name.
“Everleigh,” I remember. “Hi. Good to see you again. Excited for opening night?”
“Of course! And here, there are two tickets saved under your name.” She hands me the envelope from the cash box, then peers around me. “Is Travis, like, parking the car or something?”
“Uh, no. He couldn’t make it tonight.” I trust that news to make its way through the whole cast and crew before the curtain opens. In case it does, I make sure my phone is off off, not just set to vibrate.
The seat that was reserved for me is in the second row, right along the center aisle. The aisle has been overlaid with a bright yellow, brick-patterned carpet, so I’m guessing the cast finally bullied Ms. Markland into letting them come off the stage. We wanted to do it last semester during the “Hand Jive” scene, and Riley swore that the lights adjusted fast enough that he could follow Joss and John with a spot, but in the end, the whole thing was deemed a hazard. Mostly, I think Ms. Markland was worried that I’d go rogue and start tormenting the audience members.
With the curtain closed, the only visible set pieces right now are the yellow brick road and boxy gray lumps stacked near the front of the stage. I spend a solid five minutes staring at them, trying to figure out what they are, and just as the house lights dim, I realize they’re bales of hay that have been spray painted a matte gray. The music starts up, the curtain rattles open, and suddenly, it all makes perfect sense.
Kansas is all in grayscale. The landscape backdrop, all of the set pieces, even—holy shit, the cast. Joss Pryce is the first actor to step onto the stage. Her gingham-patterned dress is white and gray instead of blue, her shoes are plain black, and her face is only halfway made-up. The heavy, pale base is on, and her lashes look a mile long, but there’s no lipstick or blush. When we did Grease, everyone had to wear a full face of heavy makeup. I complained endlessly about how gross it felt and how I was definitely going to have an allergic reaction (I didn’t, though I did break out pretty bad for a week after) and that still wasn’t enough to get me out of it. I finally understand why: Joss looks completely washed out, as close as a human can get to looking monochromatic. She stays that way through the first few scenes, including a performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that she kills so hard, she might as well have taken the sheet music behind the gymnasium and shot it.
When it’s time for her to be taken away to Oz, that’s when everything gets really wild. The music swells as Joss staggers, convincingly windblown, to a small bed at the corner of the stage. The lights cut out, and a projection alights on the backdrop, showing a small model of a farmhouse swirling in the air. The projection cuts to a view from within the house, quartered in shadow like it’s being viewed through a windowpane. There is footage of cows edited to look like they’re zooming by, Miranda pedaling on a bicycle as Miss Gultch and morphing suddenly into the Wicked Witch on a broomstick. I glance down to where Joss is still hidden in the shadows. There’s just enough light from the projection for me to see that she’s moving; she unsnaps the back of her dress, which I guess is more of a hidden overcoat situation, because she whips it off and stuffs it under the blanket on the bed. She does something else, but I can’t see what it is until the house “lands.” All at once: the projection stops, the stage lights come on, there’s a loud bang, and Joss pops upright on the bed, clad in a white and blue dress, with rosy cheeks and a fresh coat of bright red lipstick. It fucking kills. The audience cheers, and I even find myself putting my fingers in my mouth to let out a piercing whistle.
The rest of the play is equally impressive. Every time the main group takes off down the yellow brick road, they do so right through the audience, carrying focus with them so that the crew can swap out the set dressing and props without ever having to really pause between scenes. Instead of slopping on a pound of green face paint as the Witch, Miranda has just done elaborate green eye makeup, green lipstick, and deep green contour to her cheeks. Her hair, which had been tucked conservatively under a ladylike hat when she was playing Miss Gultch, is revealed to be waist-length box braids in black and half a dozen different shades of green. The stage remains mostly bare of major set pieces, I can’t help but notice, and I guess that makes sense; last semester, the jukebox and the spinning cars and the carnival set were all designed by Travis, and he’s not here to make any of the mechanical parts this time. It doesn’t matter, though. The acting, the music, the choreography, the costumes, the direction… it all goes together seamlessly, and when the play ends and I get to my feet in the second row to join the rest of the audience in a standing ovation, all I can think is that I wish I could have been part of this show, ‘cause god, it looked like a blast.
I don’t get a chance to slip out of the auditorium unnoticed. The people around me have barely started leaving when Ms. Markland comes over and greets me with, “I thought I saw you from the wings! It’s so good to see you, Garen.”
As a rule, teachers don’t express excitement at the prospect of interacting with me. I think that’s why I’m stunned enough to stay. Unfortunately, staying to talk to Ms. Markland turns into letting her lead me backstage to see the rest of the cast, which turns into hugs and chatting and a thousand different questions about where Travis is.
“He couldn’t make it,” I say every time someone asks. It feels less awkward than admitting that he’s probably busy figuring out where he’s going to live after next week.
I make the rounds, complimenting the cast on their performances and the crew on the work they did for the set. Gabe Alberti is in a corner of one of the rooms, scrubbing his Tin Man makeup off with a damp washcloth that doesn’t seem up to the job. Last semester, I overheard him refusing a makeup wipe from John because it was “too faggy,” so I kind of hope the face paint stains his skin silver for the next month.
Josslyn is nowhere to be seen, which is proving to be a real point of contention for Miranda. “I’m supposed to be giving her a ride home,” she says, swinging the lanyard with her car keys like it’s a weapon. “I have no idea where she is, but if she’s hiding just to avoid you, Garen, I’m going to leave her ass here.”
“Don’t worry, I’m gonna head out,” I assure her. “And you can text Joss and tell her as much.”
Being around all the old Lakewood people has been a strange combination of refreshing and exhausting, and when I finally manage to get away from them, I know there’s no way I can go straight home. I need something to break the tension.
Honestly, I need a smoke.
I cut through a side door halfway between the cafeteria and the auditorium, slip through the kitchen, and let myself out onto what should be an abandoned loading dock.
Still a loading dock. Not so much abandoned.
Joss has replaced her ruby slippers and flouncy gingham get-up with a pair of sneakers, leggings, and a Lorde tour t-shirt. Her immaculate mask of stage paint is still in place and will probably stay that way for a while longer; I remember scrubbing my skin with a thick, oily makeup-remover that Stohler promised would save me after every performance of Grease last fall, and even then, I was never completely sure I’d gotten everything off.
She is in the process of untwisting her hair from her tightly braided pigtails, but she stops and turns to look at me when the door bangs shut behind me. For a minute, we just stare at each other. I think we’re both waiting for the other to flee. Then I realize two things at nearly the same second.
One: this is her school and her play, not mine, and she was here first. If either of us should take off, it’s me.
Two: I still really, really need a cigarette.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I watch her eyebrows creep towards her hairline. She probably didn’t think I was capable of saying that phrase. I take a step closer to her and repeat, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anybody would be out here. Do you mind if I hang out for a minute, though? I, uh… I could use a smoke.”
“You can’t smoke in New York?” she says. It’s not go back to your own state and leave me alone, but it’s pretty close. For some reason, that makes me grin. Joss has always been a bitch, but it’s kind of funny that she’s still somehow polite about it.
“I’m staying at my dad’s house tonight, and he doesn’t let me smoke there. It’s kind of now or never.”
Joss looks away and begins to unbraid her hair once more. “Fine.”
I drop onto the concrete next to her, taking care to leave a distance of about three feet between us. Any more than that, and I’ll fall off the edge of the loading dock. My cigarettes are in my jacket pocket, right where they should be, but I spend a solid two minutes looking for my lighter before I conclude that it must still be in the car. I tip my head back and sigh out some profanity. Overall, this isn’t even close to the worst day of my life, but in this exact moment, it feels like it’s creeping higher up the list.
Silently, Joss reaches to the waistband of her leggings, takes something from a hidden pocket, and holds out her hand to me. Frowning, I offer my own hand, and she drops a Juul onto my palm. I raise my eyebrows. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t,” she says, despite me holding evidence to the contrary. She still isn’t looking at me, but that’s probably for the best, because the next thing she says is, “I went through a phase a couple of months ago where I tried some different things out. I wasn’t in a great place emotionally, and you always made self-destruction look so cool. I thought it was worth a shot.”
What the fuck am I supposed to say to that? I hit the Juul instead of saying anything at all. It tastes like mangoes. Joss finishes untangling her first braid and moves on to the second. Silences stretches out between us as she works, until she finishes her task, and we’re both just sitting here like a couple of idiots. I hate being quiet. I hate it.
“You guys were great tonight,” I say. “Sets, costumes, the whole production. It was all on point. And you did an amazing job on that first song.”
“Thank you,” Joss says. I’m terrified that she’s going to leave it at that, and I’m going to have to think of some other bullshit to say, but eventually, she asks, “If you had stayed in Lakewood, do you think you would have auditioned?”
Fuck no. All the conflict and backstabbing with the drama club last semester had me in a miserable headspace, and if I had still been a Lakewood student when auditions were held in January, I’m sure I would have bowed out as loudly and angrily as possible, and then I would have regretted it afterward and made it everyone else’s problem when I felt left out and lonely.
I don’t want to get into that now, though. I’m too tired. Instead, I say, “Of course. I would’ve taken John’s part and been the Lion, except I would’ve had them make me a costume like in Cats. Skintight and shiny, with the big fluffy shoulder pieces. What’s the name of that one cat who like, fucks?”
“The Rum Tum Tugger,” Joss answers. I blink. Seemingly against her will, she huffs out a little laugh. “Seriously. That’s his name.”
“Fine. I would’ve been the Cowardly Lion, but I would’ve dressed up like the Rum Tum Tugger. Emphasis on both the rum and the tug.” I make a jerking-off gesture that she ignores.
“I’m not sure Ms. Markland would’ve let you wear a costume that tight. At least not without a merkin glued on there.”
“What the fuck is a merkin?”
“You should google image search it later,” she suggests. That’s how I know she’s got to be talking about something fucked up, and I can’t help it—it kind of makes me like her a little more, even if I still mostly hate her.
I clear my throat. “Miranda is looking for you, by the way.”
“I know. She texted me.”
“And Travis isn’t here.”
Joss shoots me an exasperated look. “She could’ve told me that.”
“So, I’m guessing you didn’t want to see him tonight.”
“Why do you think I’m hiding on a loading dock?” Joss says, and I try to cover my grin with another pull off the Juul.
“Probably a smart idea. If he came tonight, I bet he would’ve wanted to talk to you. Not to make a big thing out of it, necessarily. But I know he always thought that you two needed, you know… closure.”
“Closure is a big thing,” Joss says. “It’s also not—I don’t want closure. Or I don’t need it. Or I already got it.”
“I’m not exactly an expert, but I think you have to pick which one of those is true.”
“They’re all true. I got my closure when he left Lakewood. I don’t want or need any more of it, and he doesn’t deserve it,” she retorts. “When I found out I was pregnant, I told Travis because it seemed like the fair thing to do, and because it made a pretty solid argument for us being more proactive about safety if we kept hooking up in the future. Not because I wanted to keep it. That was always on him.”
“Had you guys not… been safe from the start?” I ask. She gives me another exasperated look, like I might be the actual dumbest man alive. Hastily, I add, “I mean, I know you weren’t successful with it. Fucking duh. But when he told me you were pregnant, I, like… asked. He told me you guys used condoms. And I guess I just figured that one broke or came off or whatever.”
The irritation remains frozen on Joss’s face for a few more seconds before it starts to melt. Then we’re just sitting there staring at each other, both using every ounce of dramatic talent we have to keep our faces blank.
“I don’t know what I can say,” she says slowly, “except that it’s not true. We never used condoms. Mostly, he just, um—” She raises a hand to make some sort of gesture, then seems to realize she’d rather die than make a gesture that encompasses Travis pulling out before he nuts. Her hand falls back to her lap. “Not a great strategy, clearly. And eventually we didn’t even do that, because what the hell, I was already pregnant. But, no, Garen. If he told you we were safe, he was lying.”
The thing is, I know I’m not really a paragon of safe sex. Sure, I always wrap it up before I fuck somebody, and I make guys use condoms for oral if they’re total strangers. But if I’m hooking up with a friend or somebody I know and have at least a general feel for who else they’ve slept with and how often they get tested, I’m usually more than happy to swallow. I haven’t even always been as proactive about the issue as I am now. Back in the day, when Jamie and I were first figuring out sex and had only ever fooled around with each other, we went bareback for months before we bothered to get condoms from the student health office on campus so that we could hook up with other people. I’ve made my share of bad decisions when it comes to unprotected sex. But they were always my bad decisions, and until this moment, I thought the only exception to that was… well, when I was assaulted.
Dave had always had a hostile relationship with the concept of safe sex. Early on, after I’d blown him once or twice but before he forced it further, I asked him if he wanted us to go get tested together, just to make sure everything was good. He asked me if I was really such a nasty slut that I needed to get checked for diseases, and I never brought it up again. He never wore condoms when he fucked me. Ever. The one time he found them in my nightstand drawer, he declared them evidence that I was cheating on him and beat me until I managed to gasp through a mouthful of blood that they were Jamie’s, and that they’d ended up in my nightstand by accident while I was cleaning the room. Two weeks ago, when my dad finally admitted that he knew I’d been raped because of the exams that were performed on me during my coma, I went home and read through my hospital records until I found it. There, in some nurse’s neat, swoopy handwriting, were the details of all the bruising and tearing and—the phrase made me sick when I read it, but for some reason, I laughed when I repeated it to Doc at my last therapy session--evidence of trauma. The section was topped off with a list of the post-exposure prophylaxis I would need to take in case I’d been exposed to HIV, as well as a note about the semen sample they’d taken from inside of me. Elsewhere in the records were the results of my STI screenings, which had come back negative. By the time I had my health exams at the LRC last summer, though, I tested positive for chlamydia. I didn’t know then whether it was something I caught when I blew that guy at the truck stop for money, or when I let Seth fuck me for drugs. I still don’t know. It’s not like either of them told me.
I was so sure—like, really fucking positive—that I was past the point in my life where other people got to make decisions about my sexual health without consulting me. Apparently not.
“Are you okay?” Josslyn asks me.
I nod, but I can’t get a more convincing lie out right now. The phrase informed consent is stuck in my throat like a tonsil stone, and if I try to say anything else, I might be sick. So, I smile tightly and just keep nodding.
“Whatever happened with me and Travis doesn’t really matter anymore. We split up. You guys are together,” Joss says. I can tell she means for that statement to be a lifeline for me, but all it does is dislodge whatever is blocking me from protesting.
“No, we aren’t. We broke up this afternoon. That’s why he didn’t come to the play. He’s still in New York, getting ready to move out of our house.”
“Why?” Joss asks. I kind of admire her for not bothering to wrap the question up in fake concern or apology—just straight-up nosiness.
“Short answer? We were arguing, and it got out of control. He shoved me. Ben McCutcheon saw it and popped the fuck off, and they had a fist-fight in the front entryway of my house while I had a panic attack in the living room.”
Joss is staring at me. I smile tightly, hit the Juul, and pass it to her. She takes it and, instead of putting it back in her pocket, hits it too. So much for I don’t really smoke, I just tried it a few months ago.
“Trauma responses are a blast, I know,” I say. “Anyway, the longer version is that Travis and I had separated when we moved to New York back in January. He didn’t want to be my boyfriend until I’d logged a year of sobriety, and I didn’t want commitment without the title, so we cut our losses. I met a guy, somebody I really like. We’ve been seeing each other for about two months now, but neither of us is into monogamy, so we’ve been hooking up with other people the whole time. Then about two weeks ago, Travis suddenly tells me he wants to get back together with the same casual, poly situation I have with Declan, and like a fucking idiot, I went along with it. I think he figured this was the first step to getting Dec out of the picture later, but he was acting like such a jealous dick about everything that we’ve just been fighting constantly. He swore he was fine with me dating someone else, but it was pretty much a crock of shit.”
“Wow. Travis McCall told a lie? That’s so crazy,” Joss says sarcastically. I shoot her a warning look, but she shakes her head and keeps going as we both avert our gaze to the darkness off the edge of the loading dock.
“Come on, Garen. Travis says whatever he thinks he has to say in order to get what he wants. I told him I wanted an abortion that first night, but he begged me to keep it because he wanted a family. And when I agreed to go along with what he wanted, even though it wasn’t what I wanted to happen with my body and my life, how did he treat me? He cheated on me. He made a show out of it in front of all our friends. He spent lunch breaks and play rehearsals flirting with you in front of me, and he made jokes about hooking up with you, and he got lapdances from your friends and licked your chest on a stage while all of my friends laughed and catcalled and acted like it was the coolest thing they’d ever seen. Garen, it was embarrassing.”
Her voice cracks on that last word, and when I look over at her, she is scrubbing the heel of her hand into her eyes like she thinks she can force the tears back inside if she just gets mad enough.
“Joss,” I start to say, but she shakes her head furiously and keeps going.
“I don’t care if you were in love with him. He was a terrible boyfriend, and h-he treated me like shit. The only reason he even admitted to cheating on me was because I asked him about it after he broke up with me, and then he avoided me for days. I tried to tell him again that I wanted an abortion, but he wouldn’t pick up my calls. He wouldn’t talk to me at school. So I just—I did it. I got the procedure. It went fine. I was so fucking relieved, you have no idea. But I was scared to tell him afterward, because he had been completely opposed to it any time I mentioned it before then, and I brought this pamphlet home from the clinic b-because I didn’t know what to say or how to answer any questions he might have, and when I finally found him at play practice and tried to tell him, I couldn’t say it. He took the pamphlet out of my hand, and he was so upset, and he—and you—”
She breaks off, choking on a misery that is too big to be contained any longer. She starts to crumble in on herself, sobbing, and I move without thinking. I close the three foot gap between us, and she makes an angry noise in her throat and tries to flinch away from me, but I haul her back in. Her small frame fits easily into my embrace, curling around the arm that I’ve flung across her chest, while the other settles around her back. She buries her face against my shoulder and still manages to shudder out the next sentence. “You told me I strung him along, and that I was a piece of shit for letting him think he could be a dad. He told all—all my friends that I killed his baby, that I was a—that I was a murderer.”
“You’re not,” I say into a faceful of her dark hair. My heart is pounding in my chest, and I’m sure she must be able to hear it, with how close she is to me. I don’t even care. I just cradle her thin, trembling shoulders and keep talking in the same gentle tones I’d use to settle Omelette during a thunderstorm. “Joss, you’re not a murderer, or a piece of shit, I’m so fucking sorry I said that. I’m sorry I let…”
I falter, because so much of this is only hitting me now, one miserable, regretful realization after another. I can’t believe I got this far out from last fall without ever understanding how selfish and single-minded I had been, or how much I’d taken my jealousy and resentment out on Joss when she was just trying to survive a difficult situation, same as I was.
“I should never have treated you like I did, and I shouldn’t have let Travis do it, either,” I blurt out. I’m talking too fast, but now that I finally fucking get it, the only thing that matters is making sure that the devastated girl clinging to my arm understands how much of this is really on me. “I’m sorry that I acted like your feelings about what was happening to you—the pregnancy, and your relationship, and the cheating, and the breakup, and the abortion, and everyone knowing about it—I’m sorry I acted like it was all a speedbump in what I had with Travis. I’m sorry I had such blinders on. The second you guys got together, I should have backed off and let you do what you wanted. He wasn’t my property, and I shouldn’t have acted like I had some kind of claim to him, because if… if he wanted to be with me, he would have been with me. I should have respected that. And when he came to me that first night and told me you were pregnant, he said you wanted to get an abortion. He said it that first night, he always knew, I always knew, and I should have told him to be a goddamn adult and support your decision. I shouldn’t have ever bought into his fantasies of having a kid to fix his own family drama, especially when it came at a cost to you. When he started showing interest in me, I should have shut it down. When he flirted with me, when he asked me to kiss him, when he wanted me to share a bed with him, when he wanted me to help him cheat on you? I should’ve told him to piss off. That wasn’t what your relationship was. I might not be interested in monogamy, and Travis might not be capable of it, but you agreed on that, and it was fucked up for me to get in the middle of it. And when you had the abortion, I should have kept my fucking mouth shut because it wasn’t my business. It was your decision, Joss. It was always your decision, and you didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m so fucking sorry I’ve been acting like you’re just this villain in my love story instead of acknowledging that you’re actually, like, a whole entire person who’s been going through some really heavy shit.”
When I run out of apologies, a sudden stillness falls over us. Joss isn’t sobbing anymore, but her face is still hidden, and she’s still quivering, like she’s a small, wounded animal. Not the kind that lashes out, like me; the kind that hunkers down and tries to get through the pain in terrified silence. I keep rubbing her back until she finally manages to sit up properly, detaching herself from me.
“I’m sorry, too,” she says softly. She bunches up the sleeve of her t-shirt and uses it to dry the tears on her face. “I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have last semester, especially the stuff about your sobriety and your mental health. The fact that we dated the same guy didn’t give me the right to act like I knew you or what you were dealing with.”
“Can you apologize for that time you vandalized my Ferrari, too?” I suggest. “’Cause I just had to tell you I was sorry for like, twenty different things, and I’m gonna feel like a complete asshole if the only thing you had to reciprocate with was I’m sorry that I was sometimes rude about the unfortunate reality of your drug addiction.”
Joss laughs, and it’s a wet, shaky sound. “Okay. Yes. I’m sorry for the time I vandalized your Ferrari. In my defense, though—”
“If you tell me that was the day you found out you were pregnant or some other extenuating circumstances that make even that into something I feel bad about, I’m gonna throw myself off this loading dock.”
“What? No. I was just going to say that in my defense, Gabe Alberti had already keyed it and broken all the lights and mirrors and smashed in those ugly stripe parts on the side. So, it was kind of already destroyed before I got there.”
“Fuck off. My car wasn’t ugly, it was a classic.”
“Was?”
“Oh. Yeah. My abusive ex-boyfriend tried to murder me and my friend, Stohler. You met her, remember? The blond I brought to Nate Holliday’s birthday party? And you were like, weird and dramatic about the fact that she’s a stripper. You should apologize for that, too.”
“What the fuck?”
“That’s not an apology. Anyway, yeah, my ex hunted us down and crashed a massive Chevy into my car six times. It sucked.”
“Were you hurt?” Joss demands. “Was your friend hurt? When did this happen?”
“Week and a half ago. We’re both fine. I had whiplash, she needed some stitches. Nobody died.” I pluck the Juul out of Josslyn’s hand and take another hit off it, then frown down. “I’m pretty sure you need to replace the cartridge in this thing. It’s doing fuck-all for my need to smoke a real cigarette.”
“That’s because there’s no nicotine in it. It’s just a flavor cartridge.”
I blink at Joss. “What the fuck was the point of giving it to me, then?”
“I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice, and I thought it would be funny if you got annoyed,” she admits.
I drop the Juul next to her, stand up, and brush off my jeans. “Always knew you were a bitch. Come on. Miranda probably left already, so I can give you a ride home.”
Out in the Mercedes, I’m still feeling the weight of our lopsided apologies and how truly unbalanced—in every sense of the word—my treatment of her was last semester. As the smallest of gestures, I offer her the aux cord and say, “You can play whatever you want.”
“Thanks,” she says. She queues up a Taylor Swift song, then cuts a glance in my direction and warns, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t even think about saying anything bad about her. You can be an anti-pop snob on your own time.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything!” I protest, steering the car out of the Lakewood High lot and onto the one main road in town. “Some of her stuff is good, especially the albums where she works with Jack Antonoff.”
Joss looks skeptical. “Garen Anderson, closet Taylor stan? I don’t buy it.”
“Garen Anderson, uncloseted Bleachers stan,” I correct.
“Hmm,” is all she says to that.
She still doesn’t seem like she believes a word of what I’m saying, so I give her the finger, crank up the volume, and start singing along. She joins in a few seconds later, and I shouldn’t be surprised to find that our voices sound good together. In between giving me directions to her house, she skips around her playlist to favor songs by the producers I like.
I’m not really sure how it gets out of hand. One minute, we’re both singing quietly along to the stereo, totally normal, and the next, we’re fully parked at a stop sign, both of us belting out some stupid, sad song at the top of our lungs, and she’s kind of crying again, which gets me started crying a little bit. Except, I don’t really know how to cry a little bit, especially on a day like today, so before this godforsaken fifteen-or-however-many-minute song is done playing, Joss and I are both openly sobbing and screaming the bridge at each other, our hands clutched together on the center console. I don’t know if it’s the music itself that’s getting to me, or if I just needed some sort of catharsis. Either way, by the time we get to the outro, we’re both drained and wiping our faces, then kind of laughing at each other, a little embarrassed.
“What the fuck,” she says, not for the first time tonight. I don’t remember her swearing this much last semester. I wonder if it’s new, or if it’s just another thing I forgot to notice because the only thing that mattered to me then was Travis.
“This whole night is some Twilight Zone shit,” I agree, putting the car back into drive and continuing along the winding back roads in the direction we were originally headed. The next song is just a middling bop, so we don’t get sucked into another emotional sing-along.
Eventually, we come to an enormous carved and painted wooden sign that reads “Pryce Family Farm,” and Joss needlessly indicates that I should turn into the driveway. It’s insanely long, probably close to a quarter mile, with turn-offs that all have their own signs—farm stand, pick-your-own berry patches, pumpkin patch, orchards, apiary. At the very end of the driveway, we come to a stop. To the right, there’s an hulking, two-story red barn, lit up with strings of lights. To the left, there’s a farmhouse of roughly the same size with a single light on the porch. Between them, straight ahead and stretching further than I can hope to see in the dark, is a field of mid-sized, still-growing Christmas trees.
“This is so fucking cool,” I breathe. “I had no idea you lived on a farm.”
Joss looks pleased by my reaction. She twists in her seat to indicate the turn-offs in the driveway behind us and says, “My whole family works here, too. My younger brother is in charge of the farm stand, and my sister takes care of all the animals. I mostly help my mom with the baking for the farmer’s market. And I take care of the apiary.”
“Right,” I say, “and an apiary is…?”
“The beehives,” she answers, turning back to face forward. “Of course, they’re going to have to bring somebody in to take over in the fall when I go to college.”
“Not sticking around?”
“God, no. I’m going to Emerson College in Boston, stage production and management major.” She closes her eyes and lets her head roll back onto the headrest. “Lakewood isn’t a bad place to grow up, I guess. I had a nice childhood, and I love my family. But there’s something comforting about the idea of moving to a new city where I don’t know anyone and where I don’t feel like I’m haunted by every mistake I’ve made. It just feels like… getting to breathe for the first time.”
I don’t realize that I’ve let my eyes close too, until I hear her move next to me. We both turn our heads to look at each other, still slumped in our seats.
“You know what that’s like, though,” she says. “I mean, isn’t that why you went to New York?”
“If so, I fucked it up,” I admit. “Going to New York was never going to be a fresh start for me. For one, Travis came with me. For another, I had my mom and my best friend half an hour away in Manhattan, and Ben and Stohler an hour and a half away in New Haven. And I was going back to Patton. My original group of friends might have graduated, but people still knew me on campus. Even with my new friends and my new guy, I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch.”
“Maybe you can go somewhere else for college,” Joss says. Then, when my mouth twitches into an involuntary smirk, she warily adds, “What?”
“I got into Berklee College of Music,” I tell her.
She’s silent for a long minute before she says, “Right. And that’s…”
“About eleven blocks down Boylston Street from Emerson, yeah.”
And then we just sit there, staring at each other. We’re sizing each other up, but I think it’s more to gauge the other’s reaction to this information than because we’re actually in conflict. Finally, she shakes her hair out of her face and says, “I could probably still breathe with someone eleven blocks away. Thanks for the ride home.” She opens the door and climbs out of the car, then pauses and leans down before closing it. “See you in Boston.”
“See you in Boston,” I echo. She shuts the door and disappears into the darkness leading to the farmhouse.
At the other end of that long driveway, I stop to connect my phone to the stereo again. There’s no way I’m bringing up another Taylor Swift album now, but I don’t know that I’m looking for the same desperately sad playlist I listened to on the way into town. I think I might just want something that feels okay. I roll down all the windows, point my car towards home, and set a random playlist to shuffle. Sometimes, surprises can be okay.