Content Warnings: Mild/attempted physical violence. Graphic sexual content. Extensive discussion of past domestic violence, past sexual assault, and past childhood sexual abuse.
8 months sober
My first weekend now that I’ve decided I can’t have Travis McCall in my life anymore is mostly spent fighting with Travis McCall.
His first pair of texts shows up on Friday morning, when I’m making breakfast in Dad’s kitchen: a simple apology, followed by a request to call him if I feel like talking later. I turn my ringer off and busy myself with making an omelet for myself, and a mini omelet for Omelette. The next message comes early in the afternoon, when I’m packing my shit to head to Mom’s house for the rest of the weekend: I gave notice at work, but I’m still on the schedule through part of next week. I’ll still be at the house overnight on Wednesday, and then I can leave New York after my shift.
I make a face at my phone. I never said he had to leave the state; moving out was his idea in the first place, not mine. I was fully prepared to ride out the rest of my semester at my mom’s place. I don’t respond to that text, either.
The next message comes at the start of that night’s shift at Rush, right as I’m about to close my locker. I know that what happened yesterday was beyond fucked up, and I’m sorry it played out like that, but I still love you, Garen. I want to work this out.
Right. I’m standing here in the locker room of a sketchy nightclub, wearing nothing but skintight, metallic, camo-print trunks and a pair of boots, getting ready to bounce my ass for money, but the guy who can’t handle me dating one of my friends from school definitely wants to work things out. I send him a message telling him as much, and then we’re off to the races. For the rest of the night, every single one of my trips upstairs to unload money into the cashbox in my locker includes a vicious volley of texts with Travis. He doesn’t understand why I spent all these months trying to get him back if I wasn’t prepared to commit to him; I don’t understand why he’s pretending to want commitment just because he’s jealous. He says he doesn’t trust Declan; I say I don’t give a shit, because I’m the one dating Dec, and I trust him just fine. Travis says he would never hurt me; I say he already did.
Blah, blah, blah. Same argument, different night. It doesn’t mean anything has changed.
Saturday night is worse. I don’t know if he’s alone in the house or if he went out with some of his friends from Columbia, but either way? Dude is toasted. It’s sort of a downward spiral, with his spelling getting worse, his texts getting angrier and then suddenly sadder. I tell him that it’s fucked up and triggering for him to be drunk-texting a recovering alcoholic, and he tells me that it’s fucked up for me to date anyone else after getting him to graduate high school early, destroy his relationship with his mother, move to a new state, and get a new job. I tell him I never asked him to do any of that, and he tells me I ruined his life. I tell him to go to bed, and he tells me he can’t sleep without me.
Now it’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m camped out in the Whitman Hall common room with Javi’s girlfriend, and Travis and I are back to apologies that sound a little bit like threats.
I’m sorry for last night. I don’t even remember sending half of those texts, but I know that’s not an excuse. This whole thing is just really hard, G.
did being an asshole to me make it any easier?
No. Nothing is going to make this easier, and you know that. But I need to know if this is really it.
try using a noun or 2. i don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
I need to know if this is A fight or THE fight. Because if this is really the end of us, I want you to know that we can’t come back from it again. Not in a week, not in a month, not in a year. If you really want to choose the fucking drug dealer who’s leaving for boot camp in two months, you can’t come crying to me after he’s gone. If I leave this house on Thursday, I’m done with you.
the fact that you still think this whole situation is about declan is fucking sad.
No, the fact that you still think Declan is worth destroying everything we’ve had for almost two years is what’s fucking sad. But okay, cool. Message received. I’ll be out by Thursday morning.
A few seconds later, when I don’t reply, I get one more message from Travis. I want you to remember that you asked for this.
I sink as deep down into the couch cushions as my big, stupid body will allow and let out an exasperated groan so loud and drawn out that I catch a few sophomores turning around to stare at me. Across the coffee table, Vanessa raises her eyebrows at me.
“You okay, honey?”
Vanessa is nice. Too nice, actually, the same way Javi is too nice, so they’re lucky they found each other instead of getting stuck with assholes like the rest of us. Right now, she’s killing time waiting for Javi to get back from his meeting with the writing center tutor who’s supposed to make his final paper for English stop sucking. She was in his and Declan’s dorm room, where she’s apparently sleeping tonight, but once she realized I was doing the same thing out here, waiting for Declan to get back from his baseball game, she came out with a big bin of craft supplies to keep me company.
“I’m fine,” I grumble.
“Sure. You sound fine,” she agrees. She’s doing something with a shitload of colored string tacked down to a clipboard, her fingers weaving through so fast I can’t figure out how she’s doing it. Whatever it is, it’s in the Julia Ward Howe Academy colors.
I shrug and say, “It’s just guy shit.” She shoots me an unimpressed glance, so I clarify, “Not guy shit as in, I’m a guy, I won’t talk about it. Guy shit as in, I’m so fucking sick of having this argument with this guy, maybe I should try going straight.”
There go the eyebrows again. “Who, Declan?” I don’t say anything, and she snorts. “Oh, come on, it’s not like it’s a secret. Javi texted me freaking out about how he almost saw your dick on Parents’ Day, like, five seconds after it happened. He was scared that Dec might just be experimenting and that you might get hurt if it didn’t go well, and then the whole group would be fucked, and then that night, he’s like, nevermind, the whole group is fucked, but it’s because Charlie is the asshole, Declan is totally in love. So, like, good riddance to snotty little homophobes from Connecticut, and everything’s golden. Unless it’s not, because guy shit?”
If Declan ever finds out that Javi has been telling people that Declan is totally in love with me, he’s gonna burn down the dorm. Which would be kind of hilarious, because fuck it, I don’t live here anyway.
“Different guy,” I say. Then, feeling a little weird about how label-heavy this sounds even as I say it, I add, “Dec and I are together, I guess, but I’m not really interested in sexual monogamy right now. And I don’t think he has been interested in sexual monogamy, like, ever. So, our, uh… relationship is still open, and we’re both free to fuck other people, and there was a guy I got involved with.” I gesture to my phone. “My ex, who I was living with. Shit kinda hit the fan last week, so I’m bunking here while he gets his stuff out of the house. Or at least that was the plan, except he has been texting me all weekend, trying to see if there’s some way we can work things out.”
“Is there?” Vanessa asks.
I shrug like I don’t know, but I definitely know. Over the past three days, Stohler has sent me the same video seventeen times—her and all of her friends at the strip club throwing ass in their locker room and chanting what she has since informed me is the breakup motto of their workplace. Block his number, change the locks! Block his number, change the locks! Block his number, change the locks!
I don’t know if I’m there yet. I don’t know if I can be, until I pick up our dog from the daycare on Thursday, walk into our house, and have to settle into the reality that it’s my dog and my house. Until then, I’d rather lean into a distraction.
“What are you working on?” I ask, gesturing towards the strings.
Vanessa, saint that she is, lets me get away with the subject change. “Making bracelets for the girls. I thought about buying them and getting them engraved instead, but I decided it was cuter to make them myself. Just like, a fun little graduation moment before we all split up for the summer and then college.”
She pauses her weaving and knotting long enough to pass me one of the already completed bracelets, and I turn it over in my hands, examining the tiny braided pattern.
“When I was in rehab, the eating disorder girls used to make these all the time,” I say. “We had free time to do whatever we wanted after evening group sessions, and they’d get this huge bucket of thread and beads and stuff from the art therapy room and set it up in the common room. It looked fun, but I wasn’t allowed to join because I was on suicide watch when I first arrived, and I guess they thought I’d, you know”—I tilt my head to the side and hold one of the bracelets up to my neck—“make the world’s shortest and most useless noose.”
“Not sure what to say to that,” Vanessa says cheerfully. “But if you promise not to kill yourself with my string, I can show you how to do a cute little chevron bracelet.”
“Deal.”
She cuts me a few lengths of thread in shades of blue and gray—the Patton Military Academy colors—and tapes the end to the coffee table in front of me. The knots she shows me are simple and not dissimilar to the ones I’ve had to learn in MLEP anyway, and it only takes about ten minutes for the angled design to start taking shape. I get why the girls in the LRC liked this so much; the loop-and-tug motions are soothing in their repetitiveness, and it’s easy to keep a conversation going throughout.
Vanessa is halfway through a story about Javi and Steven getting stuck in a well during their sophomore year when she goes abruptly silent. I glance up from my bracelet to see what’s wrong, and find her staring up at Charlie, who is standing right by the arm of my couch and chewing on his own tongue like he’s gotta stop himself from saying something shitty.
Which is wild, considering the last thing he said to me was that he hopes his brother kills me. The bar for shittiness is pretty high.
“Something I can help you with?” I ask.
Charlie crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah, actually. There is.” His eyes cut sideways to Vanessa, who blinks up at him, then at me.
“You don’t have to go anywhere,” I assure her.
“It might be better if you did,” Charlie says.
“Okay, well, why don’t we compromise?” Vanessa says carefully. She digs around in her bag and surfaces with a giant pair of headphones. “So, I’ll just put these on, and then I won’t hear anything you’re saying. And you can have all the privacy you want. And I don’t have to pack up my craft supplies. Wins for everyone.” Before Charlie can protest, she plonks her headphones in place, fucks around with her phone for a second, and goes right back to making her friendship bracelets.
Charlie frowns at her, but once he’s satisfied that she’s ignoring us completely, he turns his attention to me again and says flatly, “My parents want my brother to come to the Patton graduation ceremony. I told them I would talk to you about it.”
“Be so fucking for real right now, bro.”
“Don’t be a selfish asshole for once in your life,” Charlie snaps. “I realize that you have issues with David, but it’s important to my parents that he be there for my graduation. They want us to spend the day together, as a family, and we can’t do that if you’re going to call the cops the second you see him, even if it’s across an auditorium.” When I just continue to stare at him in total disbelief, he must take that as hesitation, because he quickly continues, “You might not even see him. He doesn’t want to go near you, and he would still stay at least a hundred feet away from you the entire time. But he isn’t supposed to come on campus either. My parents said, maybe if I talked to you, you would agree to just… let it slide for one day.”
“Did anyone in your family bother to read the paperwork after court last year? That’s not how restraining orders work. You don’t get to press a pause button on it. We had an agreement—I said I wouldn’t testify against David, the prosecution dropped charges against him once they no longer had a complaining witness, and in return, that restraining order meant that he was supposed to leave me the fuck alone until I turned twenty-one. He couldn’t even make it nine months, dude. He showed up at my house with roses and candy on Valentine’s Day. He saw me at a Starbucks in New Haven, and he told me he missed me and gave me a kiss on the fucking forehead. And when you”—I point in Charlie’s face, and a muscle ticks in his jaw like he wants to bite my finger off at the knuckle—“told him that I was going to be in Connecticut and that you thought I torched his car, he stalked me from my friend’s apartment and plowed into the back of my Ferrari six times, and he texted me right after to say that I deserved it.” If the expression on Charlie’s face is any indication, that little detail didn’t make it into whatever story Dave has been feeding him. Perfect; everybody likes finding a weak spot to dig into. I press harder. “I mean, you know it was him, right? Sam heard me say that I was going to be in New Haven, and he told you. You scurried off to Big Bro like the fucking rat you are, and you told him—what, to be careful? To watch his back? You told him where Stohler lived, because she’d already mentioned that when we all went to laser tag together. Then you find out that someone ran me off the road and nearly killed me, and you’re trying to say you never connected that shit? You never even questioned it? ‘Cause even if he didn’t tell you what he did, I bet he didn’t try to hide it. He sure as hell didn’t when he sent me that text after.”
“He didn’t send you shit,” Charlie says. I’d almost believe he meant that, if his voice didn’t crack in the middle of the sentence.
I dig my phone out of the couch cushions and scroll back through my messages until I find the one from the night of April twenty-ninth. Wordlessly, I turn the screen to face Charlie, and he takes it right out of my hand. The glow of the screen is reflected in his glasses. I can’t make out the words there, but I don’t need to; they’ve been stuck in my mind ever since. A car for a car, babe. I thought you’d learned not to piss me off.
I don’t realize how scared Charlie looks until the exact moment where his fear fades into relief. He hands back my phone and says, “That’s not his number.”
“It’s a burner phone, you dickhead. Whatever. I don’t care if you believe me or not. Your brother can get fucked, and your parents can die mad. I’m not dropping the restraining order so you guys can have a nice family photo at graduation.”
“He won’t touch you,” Charlie tries to promise.
“He won’t be able to stop himself,” I snap. “He never has been.”
Charlie sneers at that. “Like you’re so irresistible?”
All of the frustration boils up inside me, and for a brief second, I consider just getting up and leaving. It isn’t worth it. But then the dumbest part of my little rat brain thinks, I need to try to explain it right, just one more time. “It’s not about me being irresistible. It’s not about him wanting to be with me, or thinking I’m hot, or even wanting to fuck me. All David cares about is having control over me, and the second he remembers he doesn’t have that anymore, something inside of his brain snaps. If he comes to graduation, he’s going to come find me. And if he doesn’t get the reaction he wants, he’s going to hurt me. I’m not putting myself in that position.”
“You owe me,” Charlie spits out, words so full of blunted fury that I wonder if this is what he has been leading up to this entire time. “You and Campbell. I can’t go to my own prom because you planted drugs in my dorm. Kaitlyn said she didn’t want to hook up anymore because she was afraid of getting caught in the middle of squad drama. Patton contacted Yale and said they’d be completely within their rights to rescind my acceptance.”
It’s a list of grievances so petty, I almost laugh. Prom and canceled hookups? That’s what he thinks matters in this conversation? The Yale thing might be bad, except—“Did they rescind it?”
“Almost.”
Almost doesn’t mean yes. In fact, it’s a hell of a lot closer to no. “Mommy and Daddy write a fat check to the Parents Annual Fund so they’d turn a blind eye?” I guess. He gives me an ugly look that might as well be an answer. “Anyway, I don’t owe you shit. If you got caught with contraband in your room, that’s on you, not me and Declan.”
“You know he put it there.”
I open my mouth to say something, but suddenly, Vanessa makes her first non-bracelet-making move. She snatches up her phone and started tapping away at it. For a second, I think she’s texting someone, but then I realize that her eyes are on me, not the screen. She gives a single, almost imperceptible shake of her head, and I change direction and commit myself wholeheartedly to the first awkward and distracting thing I can think to say.
“Ever since you found out about me and Declan hooking up, you’ve been so fucking weird about it, dude. Anytime something goes wrong, anytime something happens that pisses you off, you blame it on us. At first, I didn’t get it. Your brother’s gay. Taylor was one of your best friends, up until you started this crap, and he’s gay. Belated homophobia seemed like a really bizarre choice. But now, I’m just—like, are you jealous? Is that what this is? Did I encroach on your territory and steal too much of Dec’s attention? Have you spent the past four years hoping that he would decide to try it out with another guy, and you’re pissed that it was me instead of you? I mean, hey, it’s not like you’d be the first guy at this school to—”
“You’re fucking gross,” Charlie spits, and I shrug. I’ve been called worse. But then he adds, “You know what, though? You’re right about one thing. I’ve been hanging out with Dec for the past four years—and that’s four years of parties, and drinking, and drugs, and all kinds of illegal shit. Four years of pictures, videos, and text messages, too. You can look down on me all you want for letting my parents cover my ass with Yale, but how do you think the fucking United States military would react if I sent them all the dirt I’ve got on Declan?”
I don’t know what my face does in response to that. Whatever it is, I fucking hate it, because it makes Charlie smile.
“That’s what I thought,” he says. “Whatever you say Dave did, whatever you think I might have said to him, whatever I know Declan did—we square it. You let my brother come to graduation without calling the cops. Dave stays away from you the whole time, I give you my word on that. Declan doesn’t fuck with my life for the rest of the semester. I keep my mouth shut about all the shit that could land him in jail, let alone get him kicked out of West Point. And then after graduation, we go our separate ways. Deal?”
It isn’t much of a deal, if I’m making it with a gun to my head.
But as much as I want to tell Charlie to choke on my nuts, I can’t do that. He’s got that crazy Walczyk look in his eyes right now, and I know if I refuse to take him up on this offer, he’s going to have his phone out in seconds, and there goes Declan’s education, his career, his life, every plan he made for himself.
There isn’t much I can say, but I lower my eyes back to this ugly fucking friendship bracelet I’m still halfway through making and say to the knots, “You keep him the fuck away from me, Charlie. I mean it. He can go to the ceremony, and I won’t call the cops or tell my parents he’s on campus, but if he comes near me or tries to talk to me—”
“He won’t,” Charlie says quickly.
He will, though. I know it, and the weight of that knowing sits so heavily in my chest, I wonder if my ribs will break between now and June tenth.
There’s nothing left for me or Charlie to say, and after a minute of silence, he just walks away. Vanessa takes her headphones off and asks, “Are you okay, honey?”
Her kindness is unbearable in this moment; I’d rather have her tell me the truth—that I’m an idiot and a coward for letting Charlie Walczyk talk me into anything, and I should’ve beaten the crap out of him right here in the middle of the common room. Failing that, I’d at least like to get a laugh out of her.
“Sure,” I say breezily as I finish tying off another row on the bracelet. “Everybody likes a little bit of Sunday afternoon shit-talking with somebody they hate, right?”
Vanessa doesn’t laugh. Instead, she picks up her phone again and starts tapping away as she says, “Right. So, blackmail is a crime, obviously. But I’m pretty sure that asking you to get rid of a restraining order might be one, too? Like, the charge for Charlie’s brother disobeying the restraining order would be contempt of court, so if Charlie’s trying to get you to go along with that, isn’t that some sort of conspiracy charge? Or witness tampering? Whatever. Your mom can figure that out, if we’re handling this the legal way, or you and the boys and a few bars of soap stuffed in some socks can figure that out, if we’re handling this the Patton way.”
I stare at her, trying to figure out how to unpack all that—the criminal accusations, the idea that she even knows what a blanket party is, let along the possibility she’d suggest one. I settle for, “I didn’t realize you were listening. You had your headphones on the whole time.”
Even with all her usual sweetness, Vanessa manages to give me a look like I’m the dumbest person she’s ever met in her whole life. “That doesn’t mean they were playing anything. There’s literally a button to disconnect the Bluetooth from my phone. Anyway, I didn’t just listen, I took a voice memo. Hang on, I’ll send it in the chat.”
That last bit doesn’t fully register with me until my phone buzzes, and I glance down to see that an audio file has arrived not in my regular individual messages, but in a group chat with me, Vanessa, Javi, and Declan. A sense of horror washes over me as the file is immediately followed up with Vanessa’s text saying Hi boys! Charlie Walczyk just blackmailed Garen into letting his brother come to your graduation. I recorded it in case there’s a lawsuit! She adds a pink heart emoji, then changes the group chat name to “patton-ward powercouples” with a brown arm muscle emoji, a lipstick kiss, and a rainbow flag.
Javi responds first. I’m not sure he even had time to listen to the whole recording, but it doesn’t matter, because his first two texts are in Spanish, so he’s gotta be talking to just Vanessa. Then he switches back to English to say, that’s fucked up, though. Are we calling a lawyer or doing a felony? Either way, I’m gonna need time to change my clothes first.
we’re not doing anything, I reply. it’s done, i already agreed. stop talking about it.
Javi sends back half a dozen emojis, most of which suggest sadness or irritation. Vanessa is making a pretty similar face at me in real life. Declan says nothing.
“It’s fine,” I mutter, tugging the next knot in the bracelet so tight, I almost snap the thread. “I don’t care.”
“Okay,” is all Vanessa says in response. We go back to working on our stupid little crafts in silence.
Hanging out in the Patton dorms lately has really fucked with a lot of my jock fantasies. In porn, guys spend a lot more time in the locker room after their games, taking steamy showers and bending each other over the benches. In reality, nobody from the Patton baseball team bothers to change out of their uniforms until they get back to their own dorms. When Declan returns to Whitman, he shows up sweaty and grass-stained and so tired that he just drops his duffel on the ground, tips over the arm of the couch, and face-plants on the cushion next to my thigh. He’s wearing his cap backwards like a total fuckboy. I knock it off so that I can run my fingers through his hair, then immediately regret it when I feel how damp he is. “You need a shower, like, immediately.”
“I know,” he grumbles against a mouthful of crusty upholstery. “Need a nap, too. And a cheeseburger.”
“You sound like me. Did you win?” I ask. He shakes his head. “Fucking loser.”
I can see just enough of his cheek to know that he’s hiding a smile in the cushion. “Bite me.”
“Did you get my text?” Vanessa says. I give her an exasperated look, which she returns. That’s… fair. It’s not like avoiding a conversation about the voice message can somehow un-send it.
Declan shakes his head again. “Left my phone in my room. Why, what’s up?”
Vanessa brings up the group chat on her phone and hands it over. Declan rolls over onto his back and raises the screen to read it. This means I get to watch his face go completely blank as he finishes reading, then lifts the phone to his ear to listen to the recording. I try to take it from him, but he steers my hand away again and again until I give up and just go back to making my bracelet.
We finish at the same time.
Declan sits up and hands the phone back to Vanessa, but his attention is really on me. “You didn’t have to tell him yes.”
“I kind of did.” Now that the bracelet is finished, I don’t really know what to do with it. I bunch it up in my fist and quietly add, “You and Charlie are already at each other’s throats because of me. I don’t want to give him another reason to go after you.”
“Charlie’s a little bitch, and I’m not bothered by anything he could try to do to me. But I am bothered by what his brother might try to do to you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“So can I.”
“Personally, I don’t think either of you can,” Vanessa offers. “Maybe it’s better if you just stick together for now.”
She would say that. Patton-Ward powercouples, what the fuck.
Instead of responding, Declan takes my phone from my hand and goes to my texts so he can listen to the voice memo again. I think it might piss him off more the second time around; a muscle in his jaw ticks, and when I lean closer to listen, I can hear my own faint voice saying, I’m not putting myself in that position.
Except I am. I have to.
After his second listen is complete, Dec sets the phone screen-down between us, but doesn’t let go of it. His forefinger is tapping out a quick, manic beat against the back of the case. He’s either trying to rein in his anger, or he’s anxious, and I don’t like the thought of him feeling either of those things. I uncrumple the bracelet that I’ve been clutching in my palm, smooth the strings out on my thigh, and then hold it out in silent offering. Wordlessly, Declan releases the phone and extends his arm. I glance at his face, but he’s still staring unblinkingly at the back of my phone. I loop the bracelet around his left wrist and secure it with a double knot. He lets his hand fall again and finally says, “Last week, you told me that I can’t do shit without talking to you first.”
When I said that, doing shit encompassed a solid range of misdemeanors and felonies—dislocating people’s limbs, planting drugs in dorm rooms, making up sob stories for mandated reporters. It probably doesn’t mean anything better than that right now.
“This is me talking to you first,” Declan adds. “I’m going to go have a conversation with Charlie about what he just did. I don’t want you to feel blindsided by that.”
“A conversation,” I echo. He nods stiffly. “Right. Are you leaving any details out? Because like, technically, waterboarding someone is also a type of conversation. And I think I need you to promise me you’re going to be chill about this before I can be okay with you talking to him.”
“I’ll be chill,” Declan says. It is so clearly a lie, and we’re definitely gonna have to work on that. I can’t date a guy who telegraphs his bullshit so obviously. But I can’t really bring myself to give a damn about the idea that Charlie Walczyk might get a punch in the mouth for trying to blackmail me and Declan. It’s kind of in play stupid games, win stupid prizes territory.
“Okay,” I finally say. Without another word, Declan stands up and swings his duffel bag onto his shoulder. He takes two steps towards the door before he changes his mind, comes back, and leans down to press one firm kiss to my temple. And then he leaves for real.
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk to someone else about this?” Vanessa asks me. “Javi told me your mom is a lawyer. I think she’d want to know that Charlie is trying to get you to do this, especially since I bet it wasn’t really his idea. Or his parents’ idea.”
I shrug. “I doubt Dave came up with it. If he wanted to break the restraining order, he’d do it, just like he has all the other times. He wouldn’t go through his brother or the legal system.”
A rhythmic clunk, clunk, clunk begins to echo down the hall. It’s a muffled, kind of metallic sound, and something about the beat of it sounds so goddamn ominous that I almost don’t want to move because it fills me with such a creeping sense of dread. Vanessa stands, though, and I’m not going to let her go wandering to investigate without me, so I edge past her and out of the common room.
At the far end of the hall, Declan is standing in front of Charlie and Sam’s room. His duffel bag is lying unzipped at his feet, and he’s tapping the end cap of an aluminum baseball bat against the door. The clunk, clunk, clunk is ringing off the walls like something out of a horror movie where a ghost or a poltergiest or some shit pounds on the floorboards in the middle of the night and you keep yelling get the fuck out, why are you still living in this house at the screen.
To their credit, the rest of the guys in the dorm don’t seem to find Declan’s behavior disturbing, or even particularly noteworthy. A guy named Moreno comes out of the bathroom wearing just a towel, and he mutters a blushing apology to Vanessa as he passes her to get to his room, but he doesn’t even blink at the baseball bat. Someone else politely excuses himself as he steps over Declan’s duffel on the way to the vending machine. The only thing that even constitutes a reaction is the arrival of Ryan Marten and some guy I don’t know, who pause outside Ryan’s door. The guy whispers something questioningly, but Ryan shakes his head and whispers back, “Wait a second, I wanna see if this gets weirder.”
And it sure does.
“Chaaaaaarlie,” Declan says in a low, sing-song voice. “Open the door, Charlie.”
“Get away from my room, you freak!” Charlie yells from inside, and yep, that’s panic right there. No judgment, though. He could wet his pants in terror right now, and it would still be an appropriate reaction to that tone in Declan’s voice. Or, you know, to the actual words he’s saying.
“Open the door and talk to me, Charlie, or I’m going to break it down and skin you alive. I’m going to gut you like a mule deer. I’m going to barbecue your corpse and force-feed your organs to your big brother and make him shit them back into your hollowed-out rib cage.”
Vanessa says something to me—my guess is she’s either asking me to intervene, or she’s just commenting on how disgusting Declan’s threats are—but I can’t hear her. All I hear is the blood rushing in my ears, the pounding of my own heartbeat, and I think to myself: this is probably the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me, except the time he committed arson.
The door next to me swings inward, and Taylor is there, arms stretched out in a gesture of pure bewilderment. “Campbell. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Declan flinches and turns to him with the same look Omelette gets when I catch him trying to steal food off the counter. “Nothing. I’m trying to talk to Charlie.”
“No, man, you’re trying to cannibalize Charlie, and the whole fucking dorm can hear it. And put the bat down.” Taylor casts an exasperated look in my direction and says, “Can you get him in check before he bashes Charlie’s head in?”
“The bat isn’t for Charlie. It’s for the door.”
“Okay, Jack Torrance. Werk,” Ryan says quietly, and his friend offers up some soft, nearly silent finger snaps of approval. It underlines the absurdity of the situation so neatly that I find myself finally urged into actually doing something.
“Dec,” I say. “Do you remember two minutes ago, when you told me that you were going to be chill about this?”
“I’m perfectly chill,” Declan says, with fucking zero awareness of how smoothly this whole moment would cut into a trailer for a serial killer docuseries on Netflix.
I move further down the hall to where he’s standing and hold out my hand. “Come on. Bat.”
He narrows his eyes at me and chokes up on the bat. “No. I need it.”
“You really don’t,” I say, and since he doesn’t seem inclined to listen, I nudge my way between him and Charlie’s door and get my wallet out of my back pocket. “It’s a friggin’ knob lock. It takes like, two seconds and zero effort to break in.”
“That is not what I meant when I asked you to get involved,” Taylor says loudly. It’s more of an alibi than an actual intervention.
I pause with my student ID in hand and say again to Declan, “Bat.”
He glowers. I don’t move. Finally, he sighs and holds out the bat. I tuck it under my arm and return to the door, wedge my ID between the strike and the face plate, and jimmy the latch bolt until there’s a little click.
Declan reaches around me and flings the door open, but doesn’t go inside or do a murder, and I feel a swell of pride at that. Look at us. Five whole seconds, and not a single crime. Except the part where I broke in. Is it still breaking and entering if you don’t enter? Whatever, I’m not counting it.
Charlie is frozen in place at the far side of his room, standing with one of his legs partially wedged between his nightstand and his bed, like he was considering trying to hide. “Get out of my room, or I’m calling campus security.”
“Go ahead and call ‘em, you rat bitch,” Declan says. “You’re still going to have to listen to me until they get here.”
There’s a chorus of wheezing and chittering from down the hall, and I turn to see that Ryan and his friend are clutching each other, barely upright from the effort of restraining their delight. The friend has his phone out and is filming us, and Ryan is whispering you rat bitch over and over like it’s a prayer, like he wants to build a shrine to this moment right here, where Declan Campbell called somebody a rat bitch.
I put a hand between Declan’s shoulderblades, right over the navy letters spelling out CAMPBELL on the back of his jersey. “If he calls security, we’re leaving. You don’t need a complaint filed against you this close to graduation.”
“Stay out of it, Garen!” Charlie snaps. Fucking idiot. He doesn’t want Declan to attack him any more than I do, but I guess getting a snide comment in matters more than that.
Declan stoops down to snatch one of his baseball cleats out of his bag and pitches it into the room. It catches Charlie right in the middle of his stomach, and he doubles over with a yelp that I barely hear over Declan saying, “Don’t fucking talk to him like that. Matter of fact, don’t even look at him. If you think I owe you something, and if you’re so goddamn stupid that you think you can get what you want by threatening me, at least have the balls to do it to my face. Don’t come after my boyfriend just because you made the mistake of thinking that’s the safer option.”
“Boyfriend!” Ryan shrieks down the hall, and I’m having a very similar reaction inside my own head, so I can’t really blame him. Declan must disagree, ‘cause he goes for the other cleat, and I have to clench a fist around the embroidered letters on his shirt to stop him from killing two gays with one shoe.
“I didn’t come after anybody,” Charlie says. Crusty little liar. I narrow my eyes at him, but whether it’s because he hates me too much to stand the sight of me or because he’s actually heeding Declan’s orders not to look at me, he doesn’t see my reaction as he adds, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I had a conversation, that’s it. Did he tell you something different?”
“No, I did,” Vanessa pipes up.
She’s still most of the way down the hall, lingering outside Javi and Declan’s room. Charlie can’t see her from where he is right now, and he must have forgotten she was even present earlier, because he stalks towards me and Declan to peer out around his door frame so he can see who spoke. I loop my free arm around Declan’s middle and shuffle both of us backwards a few steps until my back bumps into the opposite wall. There’s no reason to let the two of them get within striking distance of each other right now.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Vanessa,” Charlie scoffs. “You weren’t even part of the conversation.”
“Except I was, and I literally recorded it, and Declan knows every word you said,” Vanessa counters. “Maybe you should try apologizing instead of lying to cover your ass.”
“Maybe you should try minding your own business, you dumb bitch.”
There’s probably some alternate universe where Charlie saying those words is the worst thing that happens in this moment. Not this universe, though—because in this universe, he says those words right as Javi Santos rounds the corner from the stairwell into the hallway. If I thought Declan was pissed two minutes ago, it’s nothing compared to the mask of sheer rage that comes over Javi’s face now.
“Oh, shit,” I whisper.
“Oh, shit,” Taylor echoes, and that’s all he gets out before Javi comes barreling down the hall towards Charlie. It takes Taylor’s and my strength combined to keep Javi away, but that just means that Declan’s crazy ass is running loose in the halls, and he goes for the baseball bat again. I shove Javi more fully into Taylor’s grip and tackle Declan to the ground, and all the while, Charlie is all puffed up in his doorway like he thinks he’s gonna actually do something. It’s a fucking joke, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.
“Oh my god, get in your room and lock the door, girl!” Ryan’s friend screams, and Ryan himself adds, “You rat bitch!” They collapse into giggles again, and that about does it in terms of their usefulness, but who gives a shit, because it’s enough to make Charlie realize this is a losing battle. He retreats into his room and slams the door. The lock clicks, and then there’s a scrape and a squeal of heavy furniture across floorboards as he starts to barricade himself inside.
Without a readily-accessible potential murder victim, Javi and Declan both stop trying to fight their way free from the pile of bodies we’ve created in the middle of the hallway. Javi’s attention is immediately averted to Vanessa, who helps him to his feet so they can coo and cuddle and grope each other like they always do.
Declan tips me off of him and onto the floor. He doesn’t stand up, but he does wriggle around so that he can stamp the sole of his shoe against Charlie’s door a few times. “Give me back my fucking cleat!”
“I threw it out the window!” Charlie yells through the door. “It’s in the res quad, go get it yourself!”
Declan clambers upright, swearing under his breath, and stomps off down the hallway towards the stairs.
“I love you guys,” Taylor declares, kind of to all of us even though I’m the only one who is listening and still on the floor with him, “but I cannot fucking wait for graduation.”
244 days sober
I know I’m dreaming, because the version of Dave Walczyk that is standing in front of me is the same height I am, and that hasn’t been true for years. When we first met, he had an inch on me, maybe an inch and a half, because I was only fifteen years old and hadn’t gone through my last growth spurt yet. When we met up again last year, he still had the weight advantage—I was pretty much living off coffee, cigarettes, and whiskey at that point, and two years of keggers at Yale instead of PT at Patton had softened his muscles and thickened his belly, which I remember thinking would have been hot on someone who didn’t terrify me as much—but I had gotten a lot taller, and he… well, hadn’t. His driver’s license probably would have labeled him as five foot ten, and it would have been generous to the point of being dishonest.
The Dave standing in my living room is six feet and three quarters of an inch tall, exactly my height, and he probably lies and says he’s six one, just like I do.
“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,” I tell him. That can’t be right, though. Dave is as unambiguously gay as I am. He’s never had a girlfriend in his life, I don’t think he’s ever even kissed a girl, let alone knocked one up. I push the next sentence out through what feels like a mouth full of cotton balls, and it feels wrong, wrong, wrong, but I don’t know what else I can possibly say except, “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… if…”
Dave’s mouth is twisted into a snarl, which is pretty much the only way I can remember it anymore, but the rage in his blue eyes is borrowed. Wait. So is the blue, come to think of it. Aren’t his supposed to be hazel? There’s something else I’m supposed to be saying. Something else I said. I let my mouth fall open, and I don’t think I’m speaking, but somebody must be, because the rest of the sentence drops out and lands between us. “If Joss hasn’t been smart enough to have that thing vacuumed out of her.”
Dave rocks back on his heels like I’ve struck him, and the movement shrinks him down, down, down, right back to five feet and nine inches, but he gathers his fury and surges towards me again, and suddenly he’s right there in my face, and he’s five foot eleven, barely shorter than me, and his eyes are still blue, and he’s blond, and he’s not Dave at all, because he’s Travis now, and he’s so fucking angry with me.
“Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you, Garen?” he hisses, and there’s blood in his teeth even though he hasn’t gotten into a fight with anybody yet. “That thing vacuumed out of her? It was supposed to be my child, and that’s how you want to talk about the situation?”
His breath is on my face, and his body is so close to mine that, when I raise my arms to shield myself, I touch his chest. Travis knocks my hands down and snaps, “I fucking told you not to touch me,” and he shoves me.
I look to the sliding door, but where there should be a backyard and two friends and a dog, there’s nothing but inky darkness swirling up against the glass. I turn to Travis again, and there’s a sort of grim satisfaction on his face, like he hadn’t realized it would feel so good to put his hands on me. His right palm settles over my sternum, steadying me, getting ready for another push.
“Travis,” I say. “Stop.”
Something ugly flickers across his expression, something I’ve only ever seen on Dave before, but right now, it’s impossible to tell them apart, and I don’t think it would make a difference anyway. The hand on my chest tightens up, clutching my shirt, and the other comes up in a fist, and Travis says, “I want you to remember that you asked for this.”
I startle awake before the punch lands, because what the fuck, I kind of have to—Declan has an arm thrown around my middle, squeezing me tight, and he’s muttering in my ear, “Garen, Garen, stop, you’re gonna end up on the floor.”
It’s only in that moment that I realize I’m thrashing around, trying to escape his hold. I freeze, which is enough to let him drag me back towards the middle of his shitty, twin-sized bed, but not enough to stop my stomach from roiling like I’m still trapped under another man’s hands.
“Let go of me,” I gasp out, and to his credit, he does so without hesitation. I fling the sheet back and stagger out into the middle of the dorm room. Someone in the other bed makes a curious, sleepy sound, and I want to be quiet, but I don’t trust myself with even that simple of a task right now. I clamp a trembling hand over my own mouth like that’ll help me keep it together, but it won’t. It feels too much like having Travis’s hands on me, and that feels too much like having Dave’s hands on me, and I fucking hate myself for thinking those two things are similar right now.
“Bad dream?” Declan guesses, his voice thick with sleep. Those two words sound so petty that I want to burn down this entire dorm so I can feel a little less small.
“It’s fine,” I whisper. “I didn’t… I’m going to go sleep in the common room.”
“What?” Declan says, sitting up and digging the heels of his hands against his eyes for a few seconds before blinking up at me in the dark once more.
I shake my head, whether he can see me do it or not, and repeat. “It’s fine.”
Except it’s not, actually, because when I’m reaching for the doorknob to let myself out, I remember that I’m naked. My shorts are probably still tangled in the sheets at the foot of the bed, right where I kicked them off last night as Dec and I, and Javi and Vanessa were getting ready for the absurd Patton ritual of getting off while pretending your roommate isn’t doing the same thing less than six feet away. My work duffel is closer than the bed, so I fish a pair of sweatpants out, pull them on, and reach for the door again. I think I hear Declan say my name, but if he does, it gets lost behind the closing door.
The hallway is empty—no shit, it’s gotta be close to three o’clock in the morning. The common room is probably empty, too, but I don’t actually want to go sleep there. I don’t think I want to sleep anywhere ever again.
All of the side doors in Whitman are supposed to be emergency exits, but they haven’t been properly alarmed since before I got to campus. I dip down to the ground floor to let myself out of one and into the cool, night air, but I only manage a few steps before exhaustion and embarrassment and anger overwhelm me, and I have to sink down onto the concrete steps leading down to the sidewalk.
Fuck this. Fuck this. Travis might have put his hands on me in a way he shouldn’t have, and he might have broken my goddamn heart when he did it, but he didn’t hit me. It isn’t fair for my brain to twist this all around and conflate what he did one time in the heat of an argument with what Dave did a hundred times over.
Except, well…
Isn’t one time enough? We were arguing, sure, and I said a lot of things that upset him. Telling him that I wouldn’t be monogamous or stop seeing Declan even after I hit a full year of sobriety hurt him, and talking about Joss’s abortion in a gruesome, flippant way pissed him off, I know that. But if I caught somebody’s hands every time I shot my mouth off, I’d be a walking bruise every day of my life. It doesn’t feel like an excuse.
I hear the scrape and squeal of the door opening behind me, but I don’t look around. Best case scenario, it’s Whitman Hall’s overnight desk attendant, coming out to write me up for breaking curfew. Worst case scenario, it’s Declan coming to drop off my clothes so he can kick me out for being a traumatized loser who has nightmares about all his ex-boyfriends.
My boots land on the step in front of me. I blink at them. I hadn’t really expected the worst case scenario, but alright. I can deal with this. Then a rolled up pair of socks lands next to the boots, bounces down to the step below.
“Put them on,” Declan says. “It’s freezing out here.”
“No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s chilly. There’s a difference.”
Something touches my bare arm, and I flinch away from it before I realize that it’s a familiar piece of leather—Declan brought my jacket downstairs with him, and he’s draping it over my shoulders even as he continues to talk shit. “Is there enough of a difference to stop you from bitching when your toes fall off?”
“Fuck you,” I mutter. I unroll the socks and pull them on one by one, stuffing my feet into my boots but unable to hold back my piss-poor attitude for long enough to stop myself from adding, “You only care ‘cause you’re into foot stuff, and you’re afraid you’ll have to find a new fetish if I don’t have a full set of toes for you to fondle. Fucking pervert.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m the pervert. Says the guy who sometimes calls me Daddy in bed.” Declan sinks down onto the step next to me and leans back on his elbows, like this is a totally normal chat between buddies.
We sit in silence for a while. Declan is more patient than I am, less prone to babbling. He’s waiting me out, and the fact that I can tell that’s what he’s doing is the only thing that keeps my mouth screwed shut for so long. Eventually, though, I can’t take the quiet anymore, and I clear my throat.
“I don’t have them every night, just so you know.”
“The night terrors?” Declan clarifies. Hearing him call it that instead of the phrase he used back in his room--bad dream--is almost as much of a relief as the first phrase was an embarrassment.
I nod. “Yeah. They’re, um… one of the symptoms of my PTSD. Night terrors, flashbacks, panic attacks, dissociation. And I have borderline personality disorder, so it’s hard to tell which part of my, you know, fucked-up-ness is from which condition, but it’s… my point is, my reactions aren’t constant or predictable. They happen sometimes, but not every night, and they’re mostly triggered by”—I don’t realize what I’m going to say until the words are coming out—“things that guys do to me.”
Declan sits up sharply at that. “Did I do something yesterday that—”
“Not you, and not yesterday. I’m talking about Travis, the night I left the house.” I explain briefly what happened on Thursday: Travis’s furious revelation that Declan sells drugs, and my heartbreaking one that Travis doesn’t think I can stay away from them; the monogamy disagreement; what I said about Joss, with a brief detour to explain who Joss is, how Travis treated both of us last fall, and what was said between us after the Lakewood play; finally, Travis coming at me, my panicked attempt to keep him back, the shove, and my complete breakdown over it while Ben all but kicked the door down in his haste to beat Travis’s ass. When I’ve finished, I look around at Declan and find him staring back, his mouth a grim line that I try to break with my own stilted, humorless grin. “Told you it was a bad breakup.”
“It was a breakup, though, right?” Declan says. “You aren’t going back?”
I shake my head. “There’s no point. It’s… ruined. You know? Even if we got back together and never had another fight and stayed blissfully happy until we were ninety years old, I’d still always know what it felt like to have him get so mad that he put his hands on me.”
We’re both quiet for a while after that. I’m not sure what Declan is thinking, but I know that my head is still a mess of nightmares and flashbacks and quiet, worn-down sadness. This weekend’s session with Doc Howard was supposed to help me process everything that was happening, and maybe it did, a little bit. But it also got me so fixated on this subject, so ready to overanalyze every single interaction I’ve ever had with Travis, or Dave, or any other man, that now I’m getting really fucking nervous about what I think my conclusions should be.
“At this point, I think there are two possibilities,” I say, mostly to break the silence, but also because I’m afraid I’ll choke if I try to hold these words back any longer. “Either there’s something about me that makes me exclusively attracted to bad men who treat me like shit, sometimes to the point of violence, or there’s something about me that makes otherwise good men want to treat me like shit, sometimes to the point of violence. I don’t know which would be worse.”
Declan doesn’t even have a chance to open his mouth. I sense the barest shift in his posture, the start of an inhale that might lead to words, and then I blurt out the rest of what I’m thinking over whatever he was going to say.
“Because it can’t be a fucking coincidence, right? Meeting Dave Walczyk could have been a fluke, sure, and I don’t think what he did to me when I was fifteen was my fault. A lot of people end up in abusive relationships. A lot of people get… get assaulted. They’re not asking for it, and they don’t deserve it, and I didn’t either. But then I’m single for years, and then I get with Travis, and he’s just, he’s fucking sunshine in a human body, Dec. He’s such a good guy, and he’s smart, and he’s popular, and he’s polite, and he’s got everything going for him, and then he meets me. And he turns into somebody with all this anger inside him. He turns into somebody who throws shit when he’s angry, who breaks dishes because that’s the only thing that sounds like how much he wants to hit me. He tells me he hates me, and he fucks with my head, and apparently, when it goes too far, he pushes me. I can’t compare what he did to what Dave did, because there’s a pretty obvious difference in scale here, but I think it all comes down to the same thing. Because maybe there’s a part of me that only wants to be with a guy who hates me, which is concerning. But maybe there’s part of me that is just easy to hate, which is… worse.”
“It’s bullshit, is what it is,” Declan interrupts. “I get why you feel that way, and I get why you think that having this kind of thing happen to you over and over again means something about your… you know, your nature, or whatever. I’m not trying to downplay what you’re saying here. But I do want to be very clear about the fact that it’s a fucking crock, and there’s no part of you that I, or anyone else with a brain in their skull and a heart in their chest, could ever hate.”
I tip forward so that I can rest my forehead against my knees. “I think you’re saying that because you feel like you have to, on account of me sucking your dick all the time. And I’m probably not even explaining it properly anyway, but I just, like… I want you to understand. I want you to get it.”
“I’m disagreeing with you because you’re wrong, not because I don’t get how you feel. Anderson, I get it.”
I look around at him. He’s staring so intently at a nearby lamppost that you’d think he was watching the ninth inning of a tied-up Yankees versus Red Sox game. That’s the thing about Declan, though; his ability to emotionally detach himself from a conversation he’s actively having is totally unparalleled.
“Because of your parents?” I guess. “And how the only times they showed up when you were a kid, it was to treat you like shit?”
“Mm,” is all Declan says, which gives the illusion of sounding like an affirmative response without actually being one. And that right there, a fake yes instead of a real one, is how I know what he means.
“You know you can tell me anything, right?” I say through a throat that feels all the more constricted because of how violently my heart is pounding in my chest. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. But I-I’ve said shit to you that I’ve never said to anyone else, and I trust you to keep it between us. I trust you with my life, Dec. And I want you to know that you can do the same.”
He drags his attention away from the lamppost and finally meets my gaze. His eyes are slightly narrowed, like he’s expecting me to make a stupid joke. I guess I can’t fault him, given how prone I am to that exact response when shit gets fucked up. But this isn’t funny to either of us, so for once, I keep my idiot mouth shut and wait him out, just like he did when we first got out here.
Abruptly, Declan stands, reaches over, and plucks at the collar of my jacket. “Put that on for real.”
“What?” I say.
“Put that on, please,” he amends, though the politeness is cut by how impatiently he says it. “Can we got for a walk? This isn’t the sort of conversation I want to have right outside the dorm.”
I feed my arms into the jacket sleeves, and let Declan pull me to my feet and lead me away from the glow of the building’s light. We head for the parking lot, and I half expect us to go to Declan’s truck, but he steers me past it, towards the woods. We end up on the same cross-county path we took on the night I stole the cop car. I doubt we’re heading anywhere in particular, so the place where Declan stops and turns to face me is as good as any.
We’re standing maybe two feet apart from each other, both of us shrouded in the darkness of tree cover. It takes Declan a little while to decide if he’s going to keep talking, but when he does, the story starts to unfurl like a music roll from a player piano.
“When I first went into the system, I was in a group home, kind of like a holding tank for wards of the state. They try to find relatives who can take you in, or they wait to see if your parents can get it together enough to reclaim custody, but that wasn’t going to happen for me. I wasn’t taken from Bryan, my biological father; I was surrendered. He didn’t want me, he wasn’t coming back to get me, and he told the social workers who processed my intake that I had no other living relatives, so they weren’t trying to contact Alicia or her parents. I was just kind of killing time, waiting to see if anybody felt like adopting a seven-year-old, white trash ginger.”
The word seven lodges in my brain like shrapnel. I knew that’s how old he was when he went into foster care, but it hits different, knowing what we’re talking about and where this story must be going. Ben’s sister Izzy turns seven next month, and the last time I was at their house, she had me help her stage a pool party with her Barbies in the kitchen sink.
I feel sick already.
“Like a month after my intake, I got placed with this family. A couple, their bio son, and two other fosters, both girls. It was a small house. One bedroom for the couple, a den that got converted into a bedroom for the girls, and an attic that got turned into a kind of loft bedroom for the son. That’s where I was, too.”
Declan’s voice is even, like he’s reading a passage from a textbook in science class. It’s too dark out for me to see if the expression on his face matches.
“I don’t know how old the son was. He was a teenager, but when you’re a little kid, that all kind of blurs together. He could’ve been thirteen, or he could have been the same age we are now. I don’t think it makes much of a difference.” Declan takes a step back and starts patting his hips, a familiar gesture. I pull a pack of cigarettes from my jacket pocket and tap one out, offering it up along with my lighter. He takes them from me with one sharp nod, lights up, and continues, “Anyway, he used to climb into my bed at night. The first time it happened, he said he was doing it to keep me company, in case I got scared or had a nightmare or whatever. But he abandoned that pretense pretty quickly, and then he was just… doing shit to me. It went on for a month, maybe more. And eventually he started telling me what he was going to do next, what he wanted me to do to him, and it was, uh… that was when I told his parents what was happening.”
“Baruch hashem,” I mutter, briefly but completely possessed by the spirit of my dead bubbe.
Declan snorts. “If that means something good, I think it’s up for debate. They didn’t believe me. Or they did, but they didn’t want to admit it. They sent me back to the group home and told my social worker that I was violent and sexually inappropriate towards the other kids in their house, and they were afraid for their other kids’ safety.”
“What the fuck?”
Declan shrugs. “Yeah. It was kind of hard to find a placement for me after that. The good families don’t want a kid who has a record like that, and it’s not like I could really talk about what had happened. I didn’t even know what was going on. I just knew that it scared me, and I wanted it to stop.” He pauses, flicks the ash off his cigarette. “About a year after that, I was in a different placement, and the woman—my foster mom, whatever—said I could only take baths, not showers, and she insisted on being in the room with me to make sure I didn’t drown—”
“When you were eight?”
“I know. I was like, four feet tall, sitting in water up to my waist, and she would just… sit there on the bath mat next to the tub and stare at me. Then came the day when she said I needed help washing up, and she got handsy.” Declan reaches out, aiming low, making it horrifically clear exactly what part of him got handled. “That was the only time in my life that I’ve ever hit a woman. She groped me, I panicked and popped her in the face, and she sent me back to a group home the next day, with another note in my record about me being violent.” He tips his head back like he’s thinking and sighs, “Damn, what was next?”
“Dec, how many other times have you—”
“Oh. My first kiss. I don’t know if that counts. This was after my grandparents adopted me, but I should probably tell you, adopting me doesn’t mean they gave a shit about me. I think it was more of a pride thing than anything else, like they had to take care of me to cover for the fact that their daughter was a shitty mom. But they didn’t want taking care of me to interfere with their regularly scheduled bar visits, so they’d bully the girls in the neighborhood—the trailer park—into babysitting me. One night, the girl watching me asked if I’d ever kissed a girl before, and I said no. She told me I could practice on her, and I said I didn’t really want to, so she started making fun of me, calling me a pussy and a queer and whatever, until I gave in. She taught me how to kiss, with tongue, and how to take off her bra. She said it was practice, and that she was doing me a favor, but I couldn’t ever tell anyone, or she’d have her brothers kill me. She was seventeen, and I was nine.” Declan finally looks at me and adds, “That’s it. Sort of.”
I echo, “Sort of,” and he presses his lips together, thinning them out into a line. For a long moment, we just stare at each other. Then he takes a drag from the cigarette, holds it in his lungs for long enough that I know it must start to burn, and speaks on the exhale.
“Do you remember,” he says slowly, “what Javi said about me before Parents’ Day a few weeks ago? Right when he came back from spring break, in our room.”
I would give anything on this planet to be able to honestly say that I don’t remember, but I do. I swallow and say, “He told me you fucked somebody in the squad’s mom.”
“Yeah,” Declan agrees. “The thing is, that wasn’t the only time I fucked her. See, I don’t go back to Nebraska for the holidays, ‘cause it’s far and expensive and full of people I hate. I go there for the summer, but for the rest of our breaks, the guys in the squad alternate who invites me home with them. And ever since sophomore year, I’ve spent Thanksgiving with… this one family, the guy whose mom I fucked. That’s when it started. Friend’s dad took him and—took him to the country club one morning that weekend for golf and cigars or some other rich people shit, and I wasn’t invited, and neither was the mom, so we were alone in the house for a few hours, and it just… happened. Kept happening. That weekend, and every Thanksgiving since, and last year on Parents’ Day, and uh, a few other times. She comes to town and doesn’t tell… her son. She calls me and has me meet her at the inn in town.” He looks down at his cigarette and says, very quietly, “It hasn’t happened since you and I started hanging out. Second week in February, I told her I wasn’t into it anymore.”
The moment he says that, I know who he’s talking about and why he’s adding that. It’s an apology in the form of the caveat, and I feel something burbling in my chest that might be vomit, might be hysterical laughter.
When he said he understood me earlier, I didn’t realize he meant because we’d both gotten fucked by members of the same family.
“The first time it happened, I was fifteen, and she was, like… forty-five, I think. Maybe older. I knew it was fucked up that I was sleeping with my friend’s mom, but I don’t think I realized how fucked up she was, a forty-five-year-old adult sleeping with kid one-third her age. I knew it was illegal, but fuck it, so is half the shit I do for fun. It just wasn’t something I thought about, until I met you.”
“What did I have to do with it?” I ask. “I mean, apart from the obvious.”
Declan looks quickly around at me, and I just shrug. I don’t really want to talk about this part. I don’t want to say Dave’s name, or Charlie’s, or their mom’s. The whole Walczyk family can fucking rot. But it’s all out there now, every ugly piece of it, and we know —Declan knows about me and Dave, and I know about him and Grace, and neither of us can change any of it or take it back.
It’s just… there.
Declan jerks suddenly—his cigarette has burned down to his fingertips, and he drops it before it can burn him too badly. I take a step closer to him so I can crush the tiny dot of glowing orange into the dirt and say, “Tell me.”
“You wouldn’t fuck me,” Declan blurts out. “You’re barely a year older than me, we were both already over the age of consent, and I knew you were into me, but you still wouldn’t fuck me until I was eighteen years old and stone cold sober and desperate to have you. You wanted me, but only if I wanted you just as badly.” He throws his arms out in a bewildered, questioning gesture. “What the fuck was I supposed to do with that? Until you, I’d never had a meaningful conversation about consent before in my life. The guy in that first foster home just crawled into my bed, the woman in the bathroom just grabbed me, the babysitter just tormented me until I let her do what she wanted, and my friend’s—fuck it, you know who I’m talking about. Grace Walczyk hates her scumbag husband, and she’s obsessed with her dickhead sons in a way that borders on Oedipal, and she’s so rich and entitled and bored and miserable that she thinks she can do anything she wants, no matter how fucked up it is, as long as it makes her feel good, and I just happened to be there. I started sleeping around when I was thirteen years old, and even when I want it, even when I fucking love it, it’s still just… something that happens. I’m just there. It’s not about me, it’s about my—my dick, and my hands, and my tongue, and my muscles, and nobody ever treated me like I was more than just a body until I met you.”
I get a fistful of his shirt and yank him closer, half-expecting him to push me away, but he comes to me so easily, his hands rising to cup my face for just a few seconds before he seems to get embarrassed by the gesture, and lets them drop to my shoulders instead.
I’m not as easily discomfited. My free hand curls neatly to his jaw, the pad of my thumb rubbing absently over his bottom lip.
“Don’t get me wrong, Dec. The body is nice,” I allow. “The rest is better, though.”
He lunges for me. That move, out here in the woods, is so reminiscent of the first time, but we know each other now, right down to the bone, and he can’t catch me off guard. I meet him with the same intensity, kissing with teeth and tongue and hands gripping so tight they’re sure to leave marks. We don’t manage to stay steady for long, but we also don’t manage to find our way to a tree to lean against, like we did the first time we were out here.
We fuck right there in the middle of the forest floor, on hands and knees in the dirt. Thankfully, Declan grabbed my jacket with its life-saving, ever-ready inside pocket of condoms and lube, but that’s pretty much the only part that isn’t a mess. There are twigs snapping under us, tiny rocks embedding themselves mercilessly into every inch of exposed skin. Declan gets the brunt of it. At first it’s just knees and palms, but after a while, I can’t hold back, I need more of him than I’m getting with my hands pulling at his hips, and I stretch out over his back, letting him take my full weight with my chest to his back. He hisses out a breath and lets us ride right into the dirt, even though it means his face, his chest, his shoulders are all getting rubbed raw on the ground, though he still has the sense to stuff his discarded sweatshirt under his hips so he has something, anything but rocks and sticks to rub off against.
And he’s talking. Like, so much more than he ever does in bed. I usually can’t shut up unless I’ve got a dick in my mouth, and this time is no exception, but for once, he’s actually answering me. Fuck me, touch me, right there, god I love that. Every affirmation, every one of his yeses is like straight-up crack to me. I know he said he never really had to talk about this kind of thing before, and I know it’s probably a mark of just how fucked in the head we both are that I’m going wild for enthusiastic verbalized consent, but I swear, it hits fucking different for me tonight.
He comes with a wild, strangled moan, mouth open against the pathway and probably swallowing some dirt. His hole is clenched brutally, perfectly tight on my cock, but I start to pull out of him so I can finish with my hand, like I always do whenever he comes first; Declan’s whole body gets over-sensitized after he gets off, and sometimes it’s too much for us to keep going. This time, though, too much seems to be just what he’s looking for, because he throws an arm back and digs his fingers into my ass cheek, trying to pull me back in.
“Don’t stop,” he says, words almost slurring together. “Keep going, wanna feel you come while you’re fucking me.”
I mean, shit. How can I turn that down?
It takes about two more pumps and four seconds, and then I’m coming hard, buried as deep in his ass as I can get, face tucked against his neck. I don’t actually know if he can feel me coming with the condom on, but the idea that he wants to feel it makes me feel…
I don’t know what it makes me feel.
I do know that I fumble in the dark until I find his hand, and I squeeze it as hard as I can, and he squeezes back.
Standing isn’t an option for me right now. I roll off him and sprawl out across the walking path, and he turns over onto his back. We lie there, breathing hard, sweatpants tangled around our knees and softening dicks just fully out in the breeze. After a minute, I raise a loose fist and hold it out in his direction.
“Good game, bro.”
He laughs and bumps his knuckles against mine. “You, too. Thanks for the dick.”
“Any time.”
Our fists are still resting together, long after we probably should have let them fall. His index finger twitches a little, and before I can talk myself out of it, I hook mine around his so that we’re twisted together at that one spot. It isn’t super comfortable, but it’s still kind of nice.
Until something that definitely feels like a moth lands low on my hip, right near my junk, and I wrench my hand away, swearing and slapping at my skin and tugging my sweatpants back up and generally hating this woodsy, country bullshit, even as Declan laughs so hard I think he’s going to pass out.
When we get back to Whitman Hall, I run us a single hot shower while Declan slips back into his room for soap and towels. It takes a long time to wash all of the path dirt off our bodies, and an even longer time to check ourselves and each other for damage from all the gravel and twigs and shit that tried to implant themselves in our knees. Declan has one scrape on his leg that has bled a little, so I break open the first aid kit bolted to the hallway wall above the water fountain so we can disinfect it, though he refuses a bandage on the grounds of not being a pussy.
Daylight is starting to creep through the blinds by the time we make it back to bed. Fortunately, PT has been canceled for the week so the senior squads can do their obstacle course testing—Whitman Hall isn’t doing ours until Thursday, and we have a couple more hours of sleep ahead of us. Or more than a couple, if I can convince Dec to skip first period with me.
I’m just starting to drift off to sleep when I hear Declan whisper, “Garen?”
Tonight is full of anomalies, because he pretty much never calls me by my first name. Usually it’s Anderson, sometimes it’s dude or man or asshole. He also pretty much never faces me in bed, preferring to sleep with his back to me, which is pretty great, because it means I can lie on my back without feeling like he’s watching me. But he is watching me when I look over at him now.
“Yeah?” I whisper back.
“Is it okay if I touch you?”
His hand is hovering over me, separated from my hip by a blanket and two inches of empty air. I open my mouth to make a stupid fucking joke about how should have gotten his fill of touching me in the woods or the shower, but then it hits me that he’s not really asking like that.
He’s asking because sometimes, other people haven’t asked at all. They haven’t asked either of us.
“Yes,” I say, meaning it.
Instead of my hip, where I thought he was aiming, his hand drifts down to settle on top of mine. One by one, his fingers slot down between my knuckles like the teeth of one gear catching in the pitch circles of another, and he tightens his grip before scooting closer, away from the wall. I realize what he’s going for and let myself be rolled onto my side, and he spoons up behind me so that our bodies are aligned, from his toes against my heels to his chest against my back, with our interlocked hands tucked to my sternum.
I sleep soundly after that.
246 days sober
“Okay, dude. We’re almost there,” I announce. “Do we need to have a talk about your behavior before I stop the car, or can I trust you?”
Silence answers me from the passenger seat. It isn’t a particularly trustworthy silence, either. I roll my eyes and reach over to put a hand on the back of his neck.
“Look, I get it. This is a weird situation for all of us. But Travis texted me a few hours ago to let me know he was leaving, so it’s not like we need to have any awkward confrontation. We’re just going to go inside, hang out, have some dinner, and get on with our lives. This is a good thing, us moving forward like this, just the two of us.”
He loses the plot at the word “good,” and the next thing I know, I’ve got a tongue in my ear.
“Omelette, what the fuck,” I grimace, fending him off with one hand. “Yes, you’re a good boy, you’re a very good boy, but get a grip. This is serious shit.”
That concept is totally beyond his understanding, if the deafening bark he lets out is any indication. I’ve never been more grateful to pull into my driveway and open the car door, even though it means getting my nuts stomped on when Omelette scrambles over my lap to get out of the car.
When I let him into the house, he goes tearing off like it’s a brand new place he has never seen before. “We’ve only been gone for six nights!” I call after him, but he’s already up the stairs, into my bedroom, down the hall, into Travis’s—into the second bedroom, back into the hall to bark at the bathroom door, down the stairs again, full zoomies around the kitchen and knocking over one of the dining chairs, through the entryway and into the living room to jump onto the couch, except he almost barrels into the wall instead, because there’s nothing to jump on.
“What the fuck,” I whisper to a man who isn’t there. “You took our couch?”
The coffee table is gone too, and even thinking that phrase sends a spike of dread through my heart, because if I walk into this kitchen and I don’t see…
“Oh god,” I moan.
The coffee machine is gone. So is the fancy espresso machine, and the toaster, and the blender, and half the cookware we hardly used anyway, but the fucking coffee machine? This feels like a hate crime.
There’s a white envelope on the table, propped up against the side of a small cardboard moving box. The envelope bears my name in Travis’s handwriting, so the box probably bears a bomb. I can’t decide which one I’m less excited to open.
My phone chimes an alert from within my jacket pocket, and I grin when I take it out and see what Declan has texted me: I can’t believe how quiet whitman is rn without you singing & talking shit & yelling for no fuckin reason.
Coming from him, that’s dangerously close to an “I miss you already,” and I haven’t even been gone from campus for two hours. Instead of writing anything back, I do a voice memo of me singing a Christina Aguilera-style vocal run, ending in a fully unnecessary whistle note that makes Omelette start howling like he’s trying to find the same key, and I start laughing so hard that I almost choke up my lungs. It’s all on the voice memo, too. Whatever, I send it anyway. Declan knows who he’s talking to, so he won’t be surprised. He responds with a string of highly predictable complaints. Blah blah, he was wearing headphones and now his ears are leaking blood, he hates me and never wants to hear from me again, blah blah. I send back, stop flirting with me, and drop the phone on the table.
This box isn’t going to open itself, and neither is the letter. I tear open the flap of the envelope like I’m ripping off a bandaid.
Garen,
Enclosed is an itemized list of all common-area items that are no longer in the house. Anything that you or your parents purchased is still wherever you left it. Anything I purchased by myself (espresso machine, etc.) is coming with me. I took the liberty of selling any jointly purchased items (sofa, coffee table, multiple kitchen appliances, see next page). The resulting funds covered my portion of the security deposit on the house, so you can keep whatever the landlord returns when you move out. I have submitted a change of address form with the post office, but if any of my mail makes it to the house in spite of that, please forward it to the address listed on the next page. The box contains some of your belongings that were in my bedroom.
Regards,
Travis
It’s not like I expected a love letter. First, Travis isn’t a love letter kind of guy, and second, this whole breakup has sucked ass from start to finish. But this still feels somehow… colder than I expected. I flip to the second page, and yep, that’s a handwritten chart of all the items he sold, the original purchase price, the resell price, and which app he used to sell it. The dividing lines even look like he used a ruler. At the bottom, his forwarding address is listed: 115 Maple Street, Lakewood, CT.
No fucking way.
I grab my phone again and bring up my text thread with Travis, where his I want you to remember that you asked for this is still glaring up at me like something out of my literal nightmares. I ignore that and type, are you really back at Evelyn’s house after everything she has said?
I watch three dots appear and disappear as he types and deletes however many responses he needs to before he eventually sends what I’m assuming is the shittiest thing he could come up with.
Yes. I called her last weekend and we talked things out. Reconciled. She’s my mom, and she loves me, and that’s the only thing that really matters. Besides, I can’t blame her for anything she said now that it turns out she was right about a lot of it.
How much is “a lot of it”? That’s what I want to fucking know. Which things was Evelyn McCall right about?
When she said that I was a predator who manipulated Travis into being with me because I wanted to replicate my own patterns of sexual abuse?
When she called me and my mom anti-Semitic slurs?
When she said that Dave Walczyk should have done everyone a favor and murdered me when he had a chance?
When she said that my dad didn’t love me anymore because my addiction ruined his life?
When she told Travis that he was confused and sick, and that “it never would have occurred to him to experiment with a homosexual lifestyle” if I hadn’t somehow tricked him into it?
My hands are shaking as I type out my next message to Travis. I get maybe a paragraph of rage out before I realize how pointless this is. If he wants to believe he’s a victim, or if he wants to believe his homophobic Nazi mom really cares, fine. He can believe whatever he has to.
I delete everything I’ve typed and just send back, cool. good luck with that. And then I block his number.
The bright side of all this is that at least I don’t cry when I see what’s inside the box. There’s a neatly folded stack of clothing—t-shirts and hoodies that have migrated from my wardrobe to his, my body to his, things that would probably still smell like him if I let myself bury my face in the fabric and breathe deep. There are photos and handwritten notes and then, right on top, a stack of all the CDs I burned for him over a year and a half ago, when he said he didn’t really listen to music and I thought that making some old-school mixes would snap him out of that. The disc on top is labeled I want you so bad I’ll go back on the things I believe in.
No the fuck I won’t.
I pick up the CD and snap it in half. The next one is named I can keep a secret if you can keep me guessing, and I don’t get why the fuck I called it that, or why I thought it was okay that he wanted to keep me a secret, that he didn’t want his friends to ever know about me, that he was ashamed of me. I snap that disc in half, too. My eyes drift shut, and I do the rest of the stack by touch; I don’t want to look at them. When I reach back into the box, there aren’t any more CDs, but there is… oh.
I slip the ring onto my index finger, just up to the first knuckle so it’s still loose enough for me to turn it in place with my thumb. The Hebrew inscription is shallow enough that I can barely feel it, but if I aim just right, I can dig the edge of my thumbnail into the grooves of the lettering. We’ve gone back and forth with this ring a hundred times, it feels like. I gave it to him, he threw it in my face, I abandoned it in the LHS music room when I skipped town a year ago, he wore it on a chain for the next six months, I took it away from him when Joss was pregnant. I can’t even remember how he got it back this last time. Part of me wants to throw it in the trash, but I know I’d just fish it back out in the middle of the night. I could pawn it, make it somebody else’s problem, but with my luck, Travis would walk into that same pawn shop a month later and buy it back. At this point, maybe it’s cursed. Maybe we’re doomed to just trade it back and forth between us, trying to win this same symbolic argument until we die.
Or maybe I can just move on.
My phone chimes again, and I look down at the screen. It’s another text from Declan.
there’s a decent burger stand not too far from you. outdoor seating only so they allow animals. i could be at your place in half an hour to scoop you & the dog, we could do dinner? maybe hang out after?
I turn to Omelette and ask, “Do you want a cheeseburger?” He cocks his head to the side, and I try again, in my most excited voice, “Do you want a cheeseburger?” Next-level zoomies. I grin and send Declan a text that says, omelette says yes please.
give me 5mins to pack a bag & i’ll head over, Declan responds, and a minute later, he adds, that’s my way of telling u im staying the night.
Garen says yes please, I say.
It’s as simple as that. No tears, no fighting, no pushing, no angst. Just me, and a guy I really fucking like, and a cheeseburger date with my dog.
I carry the cardboard box down the hall to the utility closet and dump the clothes into the washing machine. I add detergent, fabric softener, and some of those little bead things that will hopefully make my clothes smell like a chemical rain storm instead of my ex-boyfriend. The photos and notes and shitty letter all get torn up and stuffed in the trash, along with the broken halves of the CDs.
“Come on, Om,” I announce, grabbing my wallet, keys, and a frisbee. “We’re going outside to play until it’s cheeseburger time.”
Omelette leads the way out to the front yard, thrilled as fuck to be somewhere that isn’t doggie day care. I fling the frisbee, and he tries some sort of complicated twisty flip for it, misses like an idiot, and has to go hunting around the bushes near the porch to find it.
While he’s doing that, I jog down to the curb. There’s a storm drain about a foot away from the mailbox. I drop to one knee in front of it and take the silver ring out of my pocket. It feels like I’m laying something to rest, like maybe I should say something poignant. Shit, maybe I should be saying the fucking Mourner’s Kaddish. Instead, I just say, “Goodbye, Travis,” and I flick the ring down the storm drain, where I can never find it again.
My first weekend now that I’ve decided I can’t have Travis McCall in my life anymore is mostly spent fighting with Travis McCall.
His first pair of texts shows up on Friday morning, when I’m making breakfast in Dad’s kitchen: a simple apology, followed by a request to call him if I feel like talking later. I turn my ringer off and busy myself with making an omelet for myself, and a mini omelet for Omelette. The next message comes early in the afternoon, when I’m packing my shit to head to Mom’s house for the rest of the weekend: I gave notice at work, but I’m still on the schedule through part of next week. I’ll still be at the house overnight on Wednesday, and then I can leave New York after my shift.
I make a face at my phone. I never said he had to leave the state; moving out was his idea in the first place, not mine. I was fully prepared to ride out the rest of my semester at my mom’s place. I don’t respond to that text, either.
The next message comes at the start of that night’s shift at Rush, right as I’m about to close my locker. I know that what happened yesterday was beyond fucked up, and I’m sorry it played out like that, but I still love you, Garen. I want to work this out.
Right. I’m standing here in the locker room of a sketchy nightclub, wearing nothing but skintight, metallic, camo-print trunks and a pair of boots, getting ready to bounce my ass for money, but the guy who can’t handle me dating one of my friends from school definitely wants to work things out. I send him a message telling him as much, and then we’re off to the races. For the rest of the night, every single one of my trips upstairs to unload money into the cashbox in my locker includes a vicious volley of texts with Travis. He doesn’t understand why I spent all these months trying to get him back if I wasn’t prepared to commit to him; I don’t understand why he’s pretending to want commitment just because he’s jealous. He says he doesn’t trust Declan; I say I don’t give a shit, because I’m the one dating Dec, and I trust him just fine. Travis says he would never hurt me; I say he already did.
Blah, blah, blah. Same argument, different night. It doesn’t mean anything has changed.
Saturday night is worse. I don’t know if he’s alone in the house or if he went out with some of his friends from Columbia, but either way? Dude is toasted. It’s sort of a downward spiral, with his spelling getting worse, his texts getting angrier and then suddenly sadder. I tell him that it’s fucked up and triggering for him to be drunk-texting a recovering alcoholic, and he tells me that it’s fucked up for me to date anyone else after getting him to graduate high school early, destroy his relationship with his mother, move to a new state, and get a new job. I tell him I never asked him to do any of that, and he tells me I ruined his life. I tell him to go to bed, and he tells me he can’t sleep without me.
Now it’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m camped out in the Whitman Hall common room with Javi’s girlfriend, and Travis and I are back to apologies that sound a little bit like threats.
I’m sorry for last night. I don’t even remember sending half of those texts, but I know that’s not an excuse. This whole thing is just really hard, G.
did being an asshole to me make it any easier?
No. Nothing is going to make this easier, and you know that. But I need to know if this is really it.
try using a noun or 2. i don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
I need to know if this is A fight or THE fight. Because if this is really the end of us, I want you to know that we can’t come back from it again. Not in a week, not in a month, not in a year. If you really want to choose the fucking drug dealer who’s leaving for boot camp in two months, you can’t come crying to me after he’s gone. If I leave this house on Thursday, I’m done with you.
the fact that you still think this whole situation is about declan is fucking sad.
No, the fact that you still think Declan is worth destroying everything we’ve had for almost two years is what’s fucking sad. But okay, cool. Message received. I’ll be out by Thursday morning.
A few seconds later, when I don’t reply, I get one more message from Travis. I want you to remember that you asked for this.
I sink as deep down into the couch cushions as my big, stupid body will allow and let out an exasperated groan so loud and drawn out that I catch a few sophomores turning around to stare at me. Across the coffee table, Vanessa raises her eyebrows at me.
“You okay, honey?”
Vanessa is nice. Too nice, actually, the same way Javi is too nice, so they’re lucky they found each other instead of getting stuck with assholes like the rest of us. Right now, she’s killing time waiting for Javi to get back from his meeting with the writing center tutor who’s supposed to make his final paper for English stop sucking. She was in his and Declan’s dorm room, where she’s apparently sleeping tonight, but once she realized I was doing the same thing out here, waiting for Declan to get back from his baseball game, she came out with a big bin of craft supplies to keep me company.
“I’m fine,” I grumble.
“Sure. You sound fine,” she agrees. She’s doing something with a shitload of colored string tacked down to a clipboard, her fingers weaving through so fast I can’t figure out how she’s doing it. Whatever it is, it’s in the Julia Ward Howe Academy colors.
I shrug and say, “It’s just guy shit.” She shoots me an unimpressed glance, so I clarify, “Not guy shit as in, I’m a guy, I won’t talk about it. Guy shit as in, I’m so fucking sick of having this argument with this guy, maybe I should try going straight.”
There go the eyebrows again. “Who, Declan?” I don’t say anything, and she snorts. “Oh, come on, it’s not like it’s a secret. Javi texted me freaking out about how he almost saw your dick on Parents’ Day, like, five seconds after it happened. He was scared that Dec might just be experimenting and that you might get hurt if it didn’t go well, and then the whole group would be fucked, and then that night, he’s like, nevermind, the whole group is fucked, but it’s because Charlie is the asshole, Declan is totally in love. So, like, good riddance to snotty little homophobes from Connecticut, and everything’s golden. Unless it’s not, because guy shit?”
If Declan ever finds out that Javi has been telling people that Declan is totally in love with me, he’s gonna burn down the dorm. Which would be kind of hilarious, because fuck it, I don’t live here anyway.
“Different guy,” I say. Then, feeling a little weird about how label-heavy this sounds even as I say it, I add, “Dec and I are together, I guess, but I’m not really interested in sexual monogamy right now. And I don’t think he has been interested in sexual monogamy, like, ever. So, our, uh… relationship is still open, and we’re both free to fuck other people, and there was a guy I got involved with.” I gesture to my phone. “My ex, who I was living with. Shit kinda hit the fan last week, so I’m bunking here while he gets his stuff out of the house. Or at least that was the plan, except he has been texting me all weekend, trying to see if there’s some way we can work things out.”
“Is there?” Vanessa asks.
I shrug like I don’t know, but I definitely know. Over the past three days, Stohler has sent me the same video seventeen times—her and all of her friends at the strip club throwing ass in their locker room and chanting what she has since informed me is the breakup motto of their workplace. Block his number, change the locks! Block his number, change the locks! Block his number, change the locks!
I don’t know if I’m there yet. I don’t know if I can be, until I pick up our dog from the daycare on Thursday, walk into our house, and have to settle into the reality that it’s my dog and my house. Until then, I’d rather lean into a distraction.
“What are you working on?” I ask, gesturing towards the strings.
Vanessa, saint that she is, lets me get away with the subject change. “Making bracelets for the girls. I thought about buying them and getting them engraved instead, but I decided it was cuter to make them myself. Just like, a fun little graduation moment before we all split up for the summer and then college.”
She pauses her weaving and knotting long enough to pass me one of the already completed bracelets, and I turn it over in my hands, examining the tiny braided pattern.
“When I was in rehab, the eating disorder girls used to make these all the time,” I say. “We had free time to do whatever we wanted after evening group sessions, and they’d get this huge bucket of thread and beads and stuff from the art therapy room and set it up in the common room. It looked fun, but I wasn’t allowed to join because I was on suicide watch when I first arrived, and I guess they thought I’d, you know”—I tilt my head to the side and hold one of the bracelets up to my neck—“make the world’s shortest and most useless noose.”
“Not sure what to say to that,” Vanessa says cheerfully. “But if you promise not to kill yourself with my string, I can show you how to do a cute little chevron bracelet.”
“Deal.”
She cuts me a few lengths of thread in shades of blue and gray—the Patton Military Academy colors—and tapes the end to the coffee table in front of me. The knots she shows me are simple and not dissimilar to the ones I’ve had to learn in MLEP anyway, and it only takes about ten minutes for the angled design to start taking shape. I get why the girls in the LRC liked this so much; the loop-and-tug motions are soothing in their repetitiveness, and it’s easy to keep a conversation going throughout.
Vanessa is halfway through a story about Javi and Steven getting stuck in a well during their sophomore year when she goes abruptly silent. I glance up from my bracelet to see what’s wrong, and find her staring up at Charlie, who is standing right by the arm of my couch and chewing on his own tongue like he’s gotta stop himself from saying something shitty.
Which is wild, considering the last thing he said to me was that he hopes his brother kills me. The bar for shittiness is pretty high.
“Something I can help you with?” I ask.
Charlie crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah, actually. There is.” His eyes cut sideways to Vanessa, who blinks up at him, then at me.
“You don’t have to go anywhere,” I assure her.
“It might be better if you did,” Charlie says.
“Okay, well, why don’t we compromise?” Vanessa says carefully. She digs around in her bag and surfaces with a giant pair of headphones. “So, I’ll just put these on, and then I won’t hear anything you’re saying. And you can have all the privacy you want. And I don’t have to pack up my craft supplies. Wins for everyone.” Before Charlie can protest, she plonks her headphones in place, fucks around with her phone for a second, and goes right back to making her friendship bracelets.
Charlie frowns at her, but once he’s satisfied that she’s ignoring us completely, he turns his attention to me again and says flatly, “My parents want my brother to come to the Patton graduation ceremony. I told them I would talk to you about it.”
“Be so fucking for real right now, bro.”
“Don’t be a selfish asshole for once in your life,” Charlie snaps. “I realize that you have issues with David, but it’s important to my parents that he be there for my graduation. They want us to spend the day together, as a family, and we can’t do that if you’re going to call the cops the second you see him, even if it’s across an auditorium.” When I just continue to stare at him in total disbelief, he must take that as hesitation, because he quickly continues, “You might not even see him. He doesn’t want to go near you, and he would still stay at least a hundred feet away from you the entire time. But he isn’t supposed to come on campus either. My parents said, maybe if I talked to you, you would agree to just… let it slide for one day.”
“Did anyone in your family bother to read the paperwork after court last year? That’s not how restraining orders work. You don’t get to press a pause button on it. We had an agreement—I said I wouldn’t testify against David, the prosecution dropped charges against him once they no longer had a complaining witness, and in return, that restraining order meant that he was supposed to leave me the fuck alone until I turned twenty-one. He couldn’t even make it nine months, dude. He showed up at my house with roses and candy on Valentine’s Day. He saw me at a Starbucks in New Haven, and he told me he missed me and gave me a kiss on the fucking forehead. And when you”—I point in Charlie’s face, and a muscle ticks in his jaw like he wants to bite my finger off at the knuckle—“told him that I was going to be in Connecticut and that you thought I torched his car, he stalked me from my friend’s apartment and plowed into the back of my Ferrari six times, and he texted me right after to say that I deserved it.” If the expression on Charlie’s face is any indication, that little detail didn’t make it into whatever story Dave has been feeding him. Perfect; everybody likes finding a weak spot to dig into. I press harder. “I mean, you know it was him, right? Sam heard me say that I was going to be in New Haven, and he told you. You scurried off to Big Bro like the fucking rat you are, and you told him—what, to be careful? To watch his back? You told him where Stohler lived, because she’d already mentioned that when we all went to laser tag together. Then you find out that someone ran me off the road and nearly killed me, and you’re trying to say you never connected that shit? You never even questioned it? ‘Cause even if he didn’t tell you what he did, I bet he didn’t try to hide it. He sure as hell didn’t when he sent me that text after.”
“He didn’t send you shit,” Charlie says. I’d almost believe he meant that, if his voice didn’t crack in the middle of the sentence.
I dig my phone out of the couch cushions and scroll back through my messages until I find the one from the night of April twenty-ninth. Wordlessly, I turn the screen to face Charlie, and he takes it right out of my hand. The glow of the screen is reflected in his glasses. I can’t make out the words there, but I don’t need to; they’ve been stuck in my mind ever since. A car for a car, babe. I thought you’d learned not to piss me off.
I don’t realize how scared Charlie looks until the exact moment where his fear fades into relief. He hands back my phone and says, “That’s not his number.”
“It’s a burner phone, you dickhead. Whatever. I don’t care if you believe me or not. Your brother can get fucked, and your parents can die mad. I’m not dropping the restraining order so you guys can have a nice family photo at graduation.”
“He won’t touch you,” Charlie tries to promise.
“He won’t be able to stop himself,” I snap. “He never has been.”
Charlie sneers at that. “Like you’re so irresistible?”
All of the frustration boils up inside me, and for a brief second, I consider just getting up and leaving. It isn’t worth it. But then the dumbest part of my little rat brain thinks, I need to try to explain it right, just one more time. “It’s not about me being irresistible. It’s not about him wanting to be with me, or thinking I’m hot, or even wanting to fuck me. All David cares about is having control over me, and the second he remembers he doesn’t have that anymore, something inside of his brain snaps. If he comes to graduation, he’s going to come find me. And if he doesn’t get the reaction he wants, he’s going to hurt me. I’m not putting myself in that position.”
“You owe me,” Charlie spits out, words so full of blunted fury that I wonder if this is what he has been leading up to this entire time. “You and Campbell. I can’t go to my own prom because you planted drugs in my dorm. Kaitlyn said she didn’t want to hook up anymore because she was afraid of getting caught in the middle of squad drama. Patton contacted Yale and said they’d be completely within their rights to rescind my acceptance.”
It’s a list of grievances so petty, I almost laugh. Prom and canceled hookups? That’s what he thinks matters in this conversation? The Yale thing might be bad, except—“Did they rescind it?”
“Almost.”
Almost doesn’t mean yes. In fact, it’s a hell of a lot closer to no. “Mommy and Daddy write a fat check to the Parents Annual Fund so they’d turn a blind eye?” I guess. He gives me an ugly look that might as well be an answer. “Anyway, I don’t owe you shit. If you got caught with contraband in your room, that’s on you, not me and Declan.”
“You know he put it there.”
I open my mouth to say something, but suddenly, Vanessa makes her first non-bracelet-making move. She snatches up her phone and started tapping away at it. For a second, I think she’s texting someone, but then I realize that her eyes are on me, not the screen. She gives a single, almost imperceptible shake of her head, and I change direction and commit myself wholeheartedly to the first awkward and distracting thing I can think to say.
“Ever since you found out about me and Declan hooking up, you’ve been so fucking weird about it, dude. Anytime something goes wrong, anytime something happens that pisses you off, you blame it on us. At first, I didn’t get it. Your brother’s gay. Taylor was one of your best friends, up until you started this crap, and he’s gay. Belated homophobia seemed like a really bizarre choice. But now, I’m just—like, are you jealous? Is that what this is? Did I encroach on your territory and steal too much of Dec’s attention? Have you spent the past four years hoping that he would decide to try it out with another guy, and you’re pissed that it was me instead of you? I mean, hey, it’s not like you’d be the first guy at this school to—”
“You’re fucking gross,” Charlie spits, and I shrug. I’ve been called worse. But then he adds, “You know what, though? You’re right about one thing. I’ve been hanging out with Dec for the past four years—and that’s four years of parties, and drinking, and drugs, and all kinds of illegal shit. Four years of pictures, videos, and text messages, too. You can look down on me all you want for letting my parents cover my ass with Yale, but how do you think the fucking United States military would react if I sent them all the dirt I’ve got on Declan?”
I don’t know what my face does in response to that. Whatever it is, I fucking hate it, because it makes Charlie smile.
“That’s what I thought,” he says. “Whatever you say Dave did, whatever you think I might have said to him, whatever I know Declan did—we square it. You let my brother come to graduation without calling the cops. Dave stays away from you the whole time, I give you my word on that. Declan doesn’t fuck with my life for the rest of the semester. I keep my mouth shut about all the shit that could land him in jail, let alone get him kicked out of West Point. And then after graduation, we go our separate ways. Deal?”
It isn’t much of a deal, if I’m making it with a gun to my head.
But as much as I want to tell Charlie to choke on my nuts, I can’t do that. He’s got that crazy Walczyk look in his eyes right now, and I know if I refuse to take him up on this offer, he’s going to have his phone out in seconds, and there goes Declan’s education, his career, his life, every plan he made for himself.
There isn’t much I can say, but I lower my eyes back to this ugly fucking friendship bracelet I’m still halfway through making and say to the knots, “You keep him the fuck away from me, Charlie. I mean it. He can go to the ceremony, and I won’t call the cops or tell my parents he’s on campus, but if he comes near me or tries to talk to me—”
“He won’t,” Charlie says quickly.
He will, though. I know it, and the weight of that knowing sits so heavily in my chest, I wonder if my ribs will break between now and June tenth.
There’s nothing left for me or Charlie to say, and after a minute of silence, he just walks away. Vanessa takes her headphones off and asks, “Are you okay, honey?”
Her kindness is unbearable in this moment; I’d rather have her tell me the truth—that I’m an idiot and a coward for letting Charlie Walczyk talk me into anything, and I should’ve beaten the crap out of him right here in the middle of the common room. Failing that, I’d at least like to get a laugh out of her.
“Sure,” I say breezily as I finish tying off another row on the bracelet. “Everybody likes a little bit of Sunday afternoon shit-talking with somebody they hate, right?”
Vanessa doesn’t laugh. Instead, she picks up her phone again and starts tapping away as she says, “Right. So, blackmail is a crime, obviously. But I’m pretty sure that asking you to get rid of a restraining order might be one, too? Like, the charge for Charlie’s brother disobeying the restraining order would be contempt of court, so if Charlie’s trying to get you to go along with that, isn’t that some sort of conspiracy charge? Or witness tampering? Whatever. Your mom can figure that out, if we’re handling this the legal way, or you and the boys and a few bars of soap stuffed in some socks can figure that out, if we’re handling this the Patton way.”
I stare at her, trying to figure out how to unpack all that—the criminal accusations, the idea that she even knows what a blanket party is, let along the possibility she’d suggest one. I settle for, “I didn’t realize you were listening. You had your headphones on the whole time.”
Even with all her usual sweetness, Vanessa manages to give me a look like I’m the dumbest person she’s ever met in her whole life. “That doesn’t mean they were playing anything. There’s literally a button to disconnect the Bluetooth from my phone. Anyway, I didn’t just listen, I took a voice memo. Hang on, I’ll send it in the chat.”
That last bit doesn’t fully register with me until my phone buzzes, and I glance down to see that an audio file has arrived not in my regular individual messages, but in a group chat with me, Vanessa, Javi, and Declan. A sense of horror washes over me as the file is immediately followed up with Vanessa’s text saying Hi boys! Charlie Walczyk just blackmailed Garen into letting his brother come to your graduation. I recorded it in case there’s a lawsuit! She adds a pink heart emoji, then changes the group chat name to “patton-ward powercouples” with a brown arm muscle emoji, a lipstick kiss, and a rainbow flag.
Javi responds first. I’m not sure he even had time to listen to the whole recording, but it doesn’t matter, because his first two texts are in Spanish, so he’s gotta be talking to just Vanessa. Then he switches back to English to say, that’s fucked up, though. Are we calling a lawyer or doing a felony? Either way, I’m gonna need time to change my clothes first.
we’re not doing anything, I reply. it’s done, i already agreed. stop talking about it.
Javi sends back half a dozen emojis, most of which suggest sadness or irritation. Vanessa is making a pretty similar face at me in real life. Declan says nothing.
“It’s fine,” I mutter, tugging the next knot in the bracelet so tight, I almost snap the thread. “I don’t care.”
“Okay,” is all Vanessa says in response. We go back to working on our stupid little crafts in silence.
Hanging out in the Patton dorms lately has really fucked with a lot of my jock fantasies. In porn, guys spend a lot more time in the locker room after their games, taking steamy showers and bending each other over the benches. In reality, nobody from the Patton baseball team bothers to change out of their uniforms until they get back to their own dorms. When Declan returns to Whitman, he shows up sweaty and grass-stained and so tired that he just drops his duffel on the ground, tips over the arm of the couch, and face-plants on the cushion next to my thigh. He’s wearing his cap backwards like a total fuckboy. I knock it off so that I can run my fingers through his hair, then immediately regret it when I feel how damp he is. “You need a shower, like, immediately.”
“I know,” he grumbles against a mouthful of crusty upholstery. “Need a nap, too. And a cheeseburger.”
“You sound like me. Did you win?” I ask. He shakes his head. “Fucking loser.”
I can see just enough of his cheek to know that he’s hiding a smile in the cushion. “Bite me.”
“Did you get my text?” Vanessa says. I give her an exasperated look, which she returns. That’s… fair. It’s not like avoiding a conversation about the voice message can somehow un-send it.
Declan shakes his head again. “Left my phone in my room. Why, what’s up?”
Vanessa brings up the group chat on her phone and hands it over. Declan rolls over onto his back and raises the screen to read it. This means I get to watch his face go completely blank as he finishes reading, then lifts the phone to his ear to listen to the recording. I try to take it from him, but he steers my hand away again and again until I give up and just go back to making my bracelet.
We finish at the same time.
Declan sits up and hands the phone back to Vanessa, but his attention is really on me. “You didn’t have to tell him yes.”
“I kind of did.” Now that the bracelet is finished, I don’t really know what to do with it. I bunch it up in my fist and quietly add, “You and Charlie are already at each other’s throats because of me. I don’t want to give him another reason to go after you.”
“Charlie’s a little bitch, and I’m not bothered by anything he could try to do to me. But I am bothered by what his brother might try to do to you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“So can I.”
“Personally, I don’t think either of you can,” Vanessa offers. “Maybe it’s better if you just stick together for now.”
She would say that. Patton-Ward powercouples, what the fuck.
Instead of responding, Declan takes my phone from my hand and goes to my texts so he can listen to the voice memo again. I think it might piss him off more the second time around; a muscle in his jaw ticks, and when I lean closer to listen, I can hear my own faint voice saying, I’m not putting myself in that position.
Except I am. I have to.
After his second listen is complete, Dec sets the phone screen-down between us, but doesn’t let go of it. His forefinger is tapping out a quick, manic beat against the back of the case. He’s either trying to rein in his anger, or he’s anxious, and I don’t like the thought of him feeling either of those things. I uncrumple the bracelet that I’ve been clutching in my palm, smooth the strings out on my thigh, and then hold it out in silent offering. Wordlessly, Declan releases the phone and extends his arm. I glance at his face, but he’s still staring unblinkingly at the back of my phone. I loop the bracelet around his left wrist and secure it with a double knot. He lets his hand fall again and finally says, “Last week, you told me that I can’t do shit without talking to you first.”
When I said that, doing shit encompassed a solid range of misdemeanors and felonies—dislocating people’s limbs, planting drugs in dorm rooms, making up sob stories for mandated reporters. It probably doesn’t mean anything better than that right now.
“This is me talking to you first,” Declan adds. “I’m going to go have a conversation with Charlie about what he just did. I don’t want you to feel blindsided by that.”
“A conversation,” I echo. He nods stiffly. “Right. Are you leaving any details out? Because like, technically, waterboarding someone is also a type of conversation. And I think I need you to promise me you’re going to be chill about this before I can be okay with you talking to him.”
“I’ll be chill,” Declan says. It is so clearly a lie, and we’re definitely gonna have to work on that. I can’t date a guy who telegraphs his bullshit so obviously. But I can’t really bring myself to give a damn about the idea that Charlie Walczyk might get a punch in the mouth for trying to blackmail me and Declan. It’s kind of in play stupid games, win stupid prizes territory.
“Okay,” I finally say. Without another word, Declan stands up and swings his duffel bag onto his shoulder. He takes two steps towards the door before he changes his mind, comes back, and leans down to press one firm kiss to my temple. And then he leaves for real.
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk to someone else about this?” Vanessa asks me. “Javi told me your mom is a lawyer. I think she’d want to know that Charlie is trying to get you to do this, especially since I bet it wasn’t really his idea. Or his parents’ idea.”
I shrug. “I doubt Dave came up with it. If he wanted to break the restraining order, he’d do it, just like he has all the other times. He wouldn’t go through his brother or the legal system.”
A rhythmic clunk, clunk, clunk begins to echo down the hall. It’s a muffled, kind of metallic sound, and something about the beat of it sounds so goddamn ominous that I almost don’t want to move because it fills me with such a creeping sense of dread. Vanessa stands, though, and I’m not going to let her go wandering to investigate without me, so I edge past her and out of the common room.
At the far end of the hall, Declan is standing in front of Charlie and Sam’s room. His duffel bag is lying unzipped at his feet, and he’s tapping the end cap of an aluminum baseball bat against the door. The clunk, clunk, clunk is ringing off the walls like something out of a horror movie where a ghost or a poltergiest or some shit pounds on the floorboards in the middle of the night and you keep yelling get the fuck out, why are you still living in this house at the screen.
To their credit, the rest of the guys in the dorm don’t seem to find Declan’s behavior disturbing, or even particularly noteworthy. A guy named Moreno comes out of the bathroom wearing just a towel, and he mutters a blushing apology to Vanessa as he passes her to get to his room, but he doesn’t even blink at the baseball bat. Someone else politely excuses himself as he steps over Declan’s duffel on the way to the vending machine. The only thing that even constitutes a reaction is the arrival of Ryan Marten and some guy I don’t know, who pause outside Ryan’s door. The guy whispers something questioningly, but Ryan shakes his head and whispers back, “Wait a second, I wanna see if this gets weirder.”
And it sure does.
“Chaaaaaarlie,” Declan says in a low, sing-song voice. “Open the door, Charlie.”
“Get away from my room, you freak!” Charlie yells from inside, and yep, that’s panic right there. No judgment, though. He could wet his pants in terror right now, and it would still be an appropriate reaction to that tone in Declan’s voice. Or, you know, to the actual words he’s saying.
“Open the door and talk to me, Charlie, or I’m going to break it down and skin you alive. I’m going to gut you like a mule deer. I’m going to barbecue your corpse and force-feed your organs to your big brother and make him shit them back into your hollowed-out rib cage.”
Vanessa says something to me—my guess is she’s either asking me to intervene, or she’s just commenting on how disgusting Declan’s threats are—but I can’t hear her. All I hear is the blood rushing in my ears, the pounding of my own heartbeat, and I think to myself: this is probably the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me, except the time he committed arson.
The door next to me swings inward, and Taylor is there, arms stretched out in a gesture of pure bewilderment. “Campbell. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Declan flinches and turns to him with the same look Omelette gets when I catch him trying to steal food off the counter. “Nothing. I’m trying to talk to Charlie.”
“No, man, you’re trying to cannibalize Charlie, and the whole fucking dorm can hear it. And put the bat down.” Taylor casts an exasperated look in my direction and says, “Can you get him in check before he bashes Charlie’s head in?”
“The bat isn’t for Charlie. It’s for the door.”
“Okay, Jack Torrance. Werk,” Ryan says quietly, and his friend offers up some soft, nearly silent finger snaps of approval. It underlines the absurdity of the situation so neatly that I find myself finally urged into actually doing something.
“Dec,” I say. “Do you remember two minutes ago, when you told me that you were going to be chill about this?”
“I’m perfectly chill,” Declan says, with fucking zero awareness of how smoothly this whole moment would cut into a trailer for a serial killer docuseries on Netflix.
I move further down the hall to where he’s standing and hold out my hand. “Come on. Bat.”
He narrows his eyes at me and chokes up on the bat. “No. I need it.”
“You really don’t,” I say, and since he doesn’t seem inclined to listen, I nudge my way between him and Charlie’s door and get my wallet out of my back pocket. “It’s a friggin’ knob lock. It takes like, two seconds and zero effort to break in.”
“That is not what I meant when I asked you to get involved,” Taylor says loudly. It’s more of an alibi than an actual intervention.
I pause with my student ID in hand and say again to Declan, “Bat.”
He glowers. I don’t move. Finally, he sighs and holds out the bat. I tuck it under my arm and return to the door, wedge my ID between the strike and the face plate, and jimmy the latch bolt until there’s a little click.
Declan reaches around me and flings the door open, but doesn’t go inside or do a murder, and I feel a swell of pride at that. Look at us. Five whole seconds, and not a single crime. Except the part where I broke in. Is it still breaking and entering if you don’t enter? Whatever, I’m not counting it.
Charlie is frozen in place at the far side of his room, standing with one of his legs partially wedged between his nightstand and his bed, like he was considering trying to hide. “Get out of my room, or I’m calling campus security.”
“Go ahead and call ‘em, you rat bitch,” Declan says. “You’re still going to have to listen to me until they get here.”
There’s a chorus of wheezing and chittering from down the hall, and I turn to see that Ryan and his friend are clutching each other, barely upright from the effort of restraining their delight. The friend has his phone out and is filming us, and Ryan is whispering you rat bitch over and over like it’s a prayer, like he wants to build a shrine to this moment right here, where Declan Campbell called somebody a rat bitch.
I put a hand between Declan’s shoulderblades, right over the navy letters spelling out CAMPBELL on the back of his jersey. “If he calls security, we’re leaving. You don’t need a complaint filed against you this close to graduation.”
“Stay out of it, Garen!” Charlie snaps. Fucking idiot. He doesn’t want Declan to attack him any more than I do, but I guess getting a snide comment in matters more than that.
Declan stoops down to snatch one of his baseball cleats out of his bag and pitches it into the room. It catches Charlie right in the middle of his stomach, and he doubles over with a yelp that I barely hear over Declan saying, “Don’t fucking talk to him like that. Matter of fact, don’t even look at him. If you think I owe you something, and if you’re so goddamn stupid that you think you can get what you want by threatening me, at least have the balls to do it to my face. Don’t come after my boyfriend just because you made the mistake of thinking that’s the safer option.”
“Boyfriend!” Ryan shrieks down the hall, and I’m having a very similar reaction inside my own head, so I can’t really blame him. Declan must disagree, ‘cause he goes for the other cleat, and I have to clench a fist around the embroidered letters on his shirt to stop him from killing two gays with one shoe.
“I didn’t come after anybody,” Charlie says. Crusty little liar. I narrow my eyes at him, but whether it’s because he hates me too much to stand the sight of me or because he’s actually heeding Declan’s orders not to look at me, he doesn’t see my reaction as he adds, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I had a conversation, that’s it. Did he tell you something different?”
“No, I did,” Vanessa pipes up.
She’s still most of the way down the hall, lingering outside Javi and Declan’s room. Charlie can’t see her from where he is right now, and he must have forgotten she was even present earlier, because he stalks towards me and Declan to peer out around his door frame so he can see who spoke. I loop my free arm around Declan’s middle and shuffle both of us backwards a few steps until my back bumps into the opposite wall. There’s no reason to let the two of them get within striking distance of each other right now.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Vanessa,” Charlie scoffs. “You weren’t even part of the conversation.”
“Except I was, and I literally recorded it, and Declan knows every word you said,” Vanessa counters. “Maybe you should try apologizing instead of lying to cover your ass.”
“Maybe you should try minding your own business, you dumb bitch.”
There’s probably some alternate universe where Charlie saying those words is the worst thing that happens in this moment. Not this universe, though—because in this universe, he says those words right as Javi Santos rounds the corner from the stairwell into the hallway. If I thought Declan was pissed two minutes ago, it’s nothing compared to the mask of sheer rage that comes over Javi’s face now.
“Oh, shit,” I whisper.
“Oh, shit,” Taylor echoes, and that’s all he gets out before Javi comes barreling down the hall towards Charlie. It takes Taylor’s and my strength combined to keep Javi away, but that just means that Declan’s crazy ass is running loose in the halls, and he goes for the baseball bat again. I shove Javi more fully into Taylor’s grip and tackle Declan to the ground, and all the while, Charlie is all puffed up in his doorway like he thinks he’s gonna actually do something. It’s a fucking joke, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.
“Oh my god, get in your room and lock the door, girl!” Ryan’s friend screams, and Ryan himself adds, “You rat bitch!” They collapse into giggles again, and that about does it in terms of their usefulness, but who gives a shit, because it’s enough to make Charlie realize this is a losing battle. He retreats into his room and slams the door. The lock clicks, and then there’s a scrape and a squeal of heavy furniture across floorboards as he starts to barricade himself inside.
Without a readily-accessible potential murder victim, Javi and Declan both stop trying to fight their way free from the pile of bodies we’ve created in the middle of the hallway. Javi’s attention is immediately averted to Vanessa, who helps him to his feet so they can coo and cuddle and grope each other like they always do.
Declan tips me off of him and onto the floor. He doesn’t stand up, but he does wriggle around so that he can stamp the sole of his shoe against Charlie’s door a few times. “Give me back my fucking cleat!”
“I threw it out the window!” Charlie yells through the door. “It’s in the res quad, go get it yourself!”
Declan clambers upright, swearing under his breath, and stomps off down the hallway towards the stairs.
“I love you guys,” Taylor declares, kind of to all of us even though I’m the only one who is listening and still on the floor with him, “but I cannot fucking wait for graduation.”
244 days sober
I know I’m dreaming, because the version of Dave Walczyk that is standing in front of me is the same height I am, and that hasn’t been true for years. When we first met, he had an inch on me, maybe an inch and a half, because I was only fifteen years old and hadn’t gone through my last growth spurt yet. When we met up again last year, he still had the weight advantage—I was pretty much living off coffee, cigarettes, and whiskey at that point, and two years of keggers at Yale instead of PT at Patton had softened his muscles and thickened his belly, which I remember thinking would have been hot on someone who didn’t terrify me as much—but I had gotten a lot taller, and he… well, hadn’t. His driver’s license probably would have labeled him as five foot ten, and it would have been generous to the point of being dishonest.
The Dave standing in my living room is six feet and three quarters of an inch tall, exactly my height, and he probably lies and says he’s six one, just like I do.
“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,” I tell him. That can’t be right, though. Dave is as unambiguously gay as I am. He’s never had a girlfriend in his life, I don’t think he’s ever even kissed a girl, let alone knocked one up. I push the next sentence out through what feels like a mouth full of cotton balls, and it feels wrong, wrong, wrong, but I don’t know what else I can possibly say except, “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… if…”
Dave’s mouth is twisted into a snarl, which is pretty much the only way I can remember it anymore, but the rage in his blue eyes is borrowed. Wait. So is the blue, come to think of it. Aren’t his supposed to be hazel? There’s something else I’m supposed to be saying. Something else I said. I let my mouth fall open, and I don’t think I’m speaking, but somebody must be, because the rest of the sentence drops out and lands between us. “If Joss hasn’t been smart enough to have that thing vacuumed out of her.”
Dave rocks back on his heels like I’ve struck him, and the movement shrinks him down, down, down, right back to five feet and nine inches, but he gathers his fury and surges towards me again, and suddenly he’s right there in my face, and he’s five foot eleven, barely shorter than me, and his eyes are still blue, and he’s blond, and he’s not Dave at all, because he’s Travis now, and he’s so fucking angry with me.
“Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you, Garen?” he hisses, and there’s blood in his teeth even though he hasn’t gotten into a fight with anybody yet. “That thing vacuumed out of her? It was supposed to be my child, and that’s how you want to talk about the situation?”
His breath is on my face, and his body is so close to mine that, when I raise my arms to shield myself, I touch his chest. Travis knocks my hands down and snaps, “I fucking told you not to touch me,” and he shoves me.
I look to the sliding door, but where there should be a backyard and two friends and a dog, there’s nothing but inky darkness swirling up against the glass. I turn to Travis again, and there’s a sort of grim satisfaction on his face, like he hadn’t realized it would feel so good to put his hands on me. His right palm settles over my sternum, steadying me, getting ready for another push.
“Travis,” I say. “Stop.”
Something ugly flickers across his expression, something I’ve only ever seen on Dave before, but right now, it’s impossible to tell them apart, and I don’t think it would make a difference anyway. The hand on my chest tightens up, clutching my shirt, and the other comes up in a fist, and Travis says, “I want you to remember that you asked for this.”
I startle awake before the punch lands, because what the fuck, I kind of have to—Declan has an arm thrown around my middle, squeezing me tight, and he’s muttering in my ear, “Garen, Garen, stop, you’re gonna end up on the floor.”
It’s only in that moment that I realize I’m thrashing around, trying to escape his hold. I freeze, which is enough to let him drag me back towards the middle of his shitty, twin-sized bed, but not enough to stop my stomach from roiling like I’m still trapped under another man’s hands.
“Let go of me,” I gasp out, and to his credit, he does so without hesitation. I fling the sheet back and stagger out into the middle of the dorm room. Someone in the other bed makes a curious, sleepy sound, and I want to be quiet, but I don’t trust myself with even that simple of a task right now. I clamp a trembling hand over my own mouth like that’ll help me keep it together, but it won’t. It feels too much like having Travis’s hands on me, and that feels too much like having Dave’s hands on me, and I fucking hate myself for thinking those two things are similar right now.
“Bad dream?” Declan guesses, his voice thick with sleep. Those two words sound so petty that I want to burn down this entire dorm so I can feel a little less small.
“It’s fine,” I whisper. “I didn’t… I’m going to go sleep in the common room.”
“What?” Declan says, sitting up and digging the heels of his hands against his eyes for a few seconds before blinking up at me in the dark once more.
I shake my head, whether he can see me do it or not, and repeat. “It’s fine.”
Except it’s not, actually, because when I’m reaching for the doorknob to let myself out, I remember that I’m naked. My shorts are probably still tangled in the sheets at the foot of the bed, right where I kicked them off last night as Dec and I, and Javi and Vanessa were getting ready for the absurd Patton ritual of getting off while pretending your roommate isn’t doing the same thing less than six feet away. My work duffel is closer than the bed, so I fish a pair of sweatpants out, pull them on, and reach for the door again. I think I hear Declan say my name, but if he does, it gets lost behind the closing door.
The hallway is empty—no shit, it’s gotta be close to three o’clock in the morning. The common room is probably empty, too, but I don’t actually want to go sleep there. I don’t think I want to sleep anywhere ever again.
All of the side doors in Whitman are supposed to be emergency exits, but they haven’t been properly alarmed since before I got to campus. I dip down to the ground floor to let myself out of one and into the cool, night air, but I only manage a few steps before exhaustion and embarrassment and anger overwhelm me, and I have to sink down onto the concrete steps leading down to the sidewalk.
Fuck this. Fuck this. Travis might have put his hands on me in a way he shouldn’t have, and he might have broken my goddamn heart when he did it, but he didn’t hit me. It isn’t fair for my brain to twist this all around and conflate what he did one time in the heat of an argument with what Dave did a hundred times over.
Except, well…
Isn’t one time enough? We were arguing, sure, and I said a lot of things that upset him. Telling him that I wouldn’t be monogamous or stop seeing Declan even after I hit a full year of sobriety hurt him, and talking about Joss’s abortion in a gruesome, flippant way pissed him off, I know that. But if I caught somebody’s hands every time I shot my mouth off, I’d be a walking bruise every day of my life. It doesn’t feel like an excuse.
I hear the scrape and squeal of the door opening behind me, but I don’t look around. Best case scenario, it’s Whitman Hall’s overnight desk attendant, coming out to write me up for breaking curfew. Worst case scenario, it’s Declan coming to drop off my clothes so he can kick me out for being a traumatized loser who has nightmares about all his ex-boyfriends.
My boots land on the step in front of me. I blink at them. I hadn’t really expected the worst case scenario, but alright. I can deal with this. Then a rolled up pair of socks lands next to the boots, bounces down to the step below.
“Put them on,” Declan says. “It’s freezing out here.”
“No, it’s not,” I say. “It’s chilly. There’s a difference.”
Something touches my bare arm, and I flinch away from it before I realize that it’s a familiar piece of leather—Declan brought my jacket downstairs with him, and he’s draping it over my shoulders even as he continues to talk shit. “Is there enough of a difference to stop you from bitching when your toes fall off?”
“Fuck you,” I mutter. I unroll the socks and pull them on one by one, stuffing my feet into my boots but unable to hold back my piss-poor attitude for long enough to stop myself from adding, “You only care ‘cause you’re into foot stuff, and you’re afraid you’ll have to find a new fetish if I don’t have a full set of toes for you to fondle. Fucking pervert.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m the pervert. Says the guy who sometimes calls me Daddy in bed.” Declan sinks down onto the step next to me and leans back on his elbows, like this is a totally normal chat between buddies.
We sit in silence for a while. Declan is more patient than I am, less prone to babbling. He’s waiting me out, and the fact that I can tell that’s what he’s doing is the only thing that keeps my mouth screwed shut for so long. Eventually, though, I can’t take the quiet anymore, and I clear my throat.
“I don’t have them every night, just so you know.”
“The night terrors?” Declan clarifies. Hearing him call it that instead of the phrase he used back in his room--bad dream--is almost as much of a relief as the first phrase was an embarrassment.
I nod. “Yeah. They’re, um… one of the symptoms of my PTSD. Night terrors, flashbacks, panic attacks, dissociation. And I have borderline personality disorder, so it’s hard to tell which part of my, you know, fucked-up-ness is from which condition, but it’s… my point is, my reactions aren’t constant or predictable. They happen sometimes, but not every night, and they’re mostly triggered by”—I don’t realize what I’m going to say until the words are coming out—“things that guys do to me.”
Declan sits up sharply at that. “Did I do something yesterday that—”
“Not you, and not yesterday. I’m talking about Travis, the night I left the house.” I explain briefly what happened on Thursday: Travis’s furious revelation that Declan sells drugs, and my heartbreaking one that Travis doesn’t think I can stay away from them; the monogamy disagreement; what I said about Joss, with a brief detour to explain who Joss is, how Travis treated both of us last fall, and what was said between us after the Lakewood play; finally, Travis coming at me, my panicked attempt to keep him back, the shove, and my complete breakdown over it while Ben all but kicked the door down in his haste to beat Travis’s ass. When I’ve finished, I look around at Declan and find him staring back, his mouth a grim line that I try to break with my own stilted, humorless grin. “Told you it was a bad breakup.”
“It was a breakup, though, right?” Declan says. “You aren’t going back?”
I shake my head. “There’s no point. It’s… ruined. You know? Even if we got back together and never had another fight and stayed blissfully happy until we were ninety years old, I’d still always know what it felt like to have him get so mad that he put his hands on me.”
We’re both quiet for a while after that. I’m not sure what Declan is thinking, but I know that my head is still a mess of nightmares and flashbacks and quiet, worn-down sadness. This weekend’s session with Doc Howard was supposed to help me process everything that was happening, and maybe it did, a little bit. But it also got me so fixated on this subject, so ready to overanalyze every single interaction I’ve ever had with Travis, or Dave, or any other man, that now I’m getting really fucking nervous about what I think my conclusions should be.
“At this point, I think there are two possibilities,” I say, mostly to break the silence, but also because I’m afraid I’ll choke if I try to hold these words back any longer. “Either there’s something about me that makes me exclusively attracted to bad men who treat me like shit, sometimes to the point of violence, or there’s something about me that makes otherwise good men want to treat me like shit, sometimes to the point of violence. I don’t know which would be worse.”
Declan doesn’t even have a chance to open his mouth. I sense the barest shift in his posture, the start of an inhale that might lead to words, and then I blurt out the rest of what I’m thinking over whatever he was going to say.
“Because it can’t be a fucking coincidence, right? Meeting Dave Walczyk could have been a fluke, sure, and I don’t think what he did to me when I was fifteen was my fault. A lot of people end up in abusive relationships. A lot of people get… get assaulted. They’re not asking for it, and they don’t deserve it, and I didn’t either. But then I’m single for years, and then I get with Travis, and he’s just, he’s fucking sunshine in a human body, Dec. He’s such a good guy, and he’s smart, and he’s popular, and he’s polite, and he’s got everything going for him, and then he meets me. And he turns into somebody with all this anger inside him. He turns into somebody who throws shit when he’s angry, who breaks dishes because that’s the only thing that sounds like how much he wants to hit me. He tells me he hates me, and he fucks with my head, and apparently, when it goes too far, he pushes me. I can’t compare what he did to what Dave did, because there’s a pretty obvious difference in scale here, but I think it all comes down to the same thing. Because maybe there’s a part of me that only wants to be with a guy who hates me, which is concerning. But maybe there’s part of me that is just easy to hate, which is… worse.”
“It’s bullshit, is what it is,” Declan interrupts. “I get why you feel that way, and I get why you think that having this kind of thing happen to you over and over again means something about your… you know, your nature, or whatever. I’m not trying to downplay what you’re saying here. But I do want to be very clear about the fact that it’s a fucking crock, and there’s no part of you that I, or anyone else with a brain in their skull and a heart in their chest, could ever hate.”
I tip forward so that I can rest my forehead against my knees. “I think you’re saying that because you feel like you have to, on account of me sucking your dick all the time. And I’m probably not even explaining it properly anyway, but I just, like… I want you to understand. I want you to get it.”
“I’m disagreeing with you because you’re wrong, not because I don’t get how you feel. Anderson, I get it.”
I look around at him. He’s staring so intently at a nearby lamppost that you’d think he was watching the ninth inning of a tied-up Yankees versus Red Sox game. That’s the thing about Declan, though; his ability to emotionally detach himself from a conversation he’s actively having is totally unparalleled.
“Because of your parents?” I guess. “And how the only times they showed up when you were a kid, it was to treat you like shit?”
“Mm,” is all Declan says, which gives the illusion of sounding like an affirmative response without actually being one. And that right there, a fake yes instead of a real one, is how I know what he means.
“You know you can tell me anything, right?” I say through a throat that feels all the more constricted because of how violently my heart is pounding in my chest. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. But I-I’ve said shit to you that I’ve never said to anyone else, and I trust you to keep it between us. I trust you with my life, Dec. And I want you to know that you can do the same.”
He drags his attention away from the lamppost and finally meets my gaze. His eyes are slightly narrowed, like he’s expecting me to make a stupid joke. I guess I can’t fault him, given how prone I am to that exact response when shit gets fucked up. But this isn’t funny to either of us, so for once, I keep my idiot mouth shut and wait him out, just like he did when we first got out here.
Abruptly, Declan stands, reaches over, and plucks at the collar of my jacket. “Put that on for real.”
“What?” I say.
“Put that on, please,” he amends, though the politeness is cut by how impatiently he says it. “Can we got for a walk? This isn’t the sort of conversation I want to have right outside the dorm.”
I feed my arms into the jacket sleeves, and let Declan pull me to my feet and lead me away from the glow of the building’s light. We head for the parking lot, and I half expect us to go to Declan’s truck, but he steers me past it, towards the woods. We end up on the same cross-county path we took on the night I stole the cop car. I doubt we’re heading anywhere in particular, so the place where Declan stops and turns to face me is as good as any.
We’re standing maybe two feet apart from each other, both of us shrouded in the darkness of tree cover. It takes Declan a little while to decide if he’s going to keep talking, but when he does, the story starts to unfurl like a music roll from a player piano.
“When I first went into the system, I was in a group home, kind of like a holding tank for wards of the state. They try to find relatives who can take you in, or they wait to see if your parents can get it together enough to reclaim custody, but that wasn’t going to happen for me. I wasn’t taken from Bryan, my biological father; I was surrendered. He didn’t want me, he wasn’t coming back to get me, and he told the social workers who processed my intake that I had no other living relatives, so they weren’t trying to contact Alicia or her parents. I was just kind of killing time, waiting to see if anybody felt like adopting a seven-year-old, white trash ginger.”
The word seven lodges in my brain like shrapnel. I knew that’s how old he was when he went into foster care, but it hits different, knowing what we’re talking about and where this story must be going. Ben’s sister Izzy turns seven next month, and the last time I was at their house, she had me help her stage a pool party with her Barbies in the kitchen sink.
I feel sick already.
“Like a month after my intake, I got placed with this family. A couple, their bio son, and two other fosters, both girls. It was a small house. One bedroom for the couple, a den that got converted into a bedroom for the girls, and an attic that got turned into a kind of loft bedroom for the son. That’s where I was, too.”
Declan’s voice is even, like he’s reading a passage from a textbook in science class. It’s too dark out for me to see if the expression on his face matches.
“I don’t know how old the son was. He was a teenager, but when you’re a little kid, that all kind of blurs together. He could’ve been thirteen, or he could have been the same age we are now. I don’t think it makes much of a difference.” Declan takes a step back and starts patting his hips, a familiar gesture. I pull a pack of cigarettes from my jacket pocket and tap one out, offering it up along with my lighter. He takes them from me with one sharp nod, lights up, and continues, “Anyway, he used to climb into my bed at night. The first time it happened, he said he was doing it to keep me company, in case I got scared or had a nightmare or whatever. But he abandoned that pretense pretty quickly, and then he was just… doing shit to me. It went on for a month, maybe more. And eventually he started telling me what he was going to do next, what he wanted me to do to him, and it was, uh… that was when I told his parents what was happening.”
“Baruch hashem,” I mutter, briefly but completely possessed by the spirit of my dead bubbe.
Declan snorts. “If that means something good, I think it’s up for debate. They didn’t believe me. Or they did, but they didn’t want to admit it. They sent me back to the group home and told my social worker that I was violent and sexually inappropriate towards the other kids in their house, and they were afraid for their other kids’ safety.”
“What the fuck?”
Declan shrugs. “Yeah. It was kind of hard to find a placement for me after that. The good families don’t want a kid who has a record like that, and it’s not like I could really talk about what had happened. I didn’t even know what was going on. I just knew that it scared me, and I wanted it to stop.” He pauses, flicks the ash off his cigarette. “About a year after that, I was in a different placement, and the woman—my foster mom, whatever—said I could only take baths, not showers, and she insisted on being in the room with me to make sure I didn’t drown—”
“When you were eight?”
“I know. I was like, four feet tall, sitting in water up to my waist, and she would just… sit there on the bath mat next to the tub and stare at me. Then came the day when she said I needed help washing up, and she got handsy.” Declan reaches out, aiming low, making it horrifically clear exactly what part of him got handled. “That was the only time in my life that I’ve ever hit a woman. She groped me, I panicked and popped her in the face, and she sent me back to a group home the next day, with another note in my record about me being violent.” He tips his head back like he’s thinking and sighs, “Damn, what was next?”
“Dec, how many other times have you—”
“Oh. My first kiss. I don’t know if that counts. This was after my grandparents adopted me, but I should probably tell you, adopting me doesn’t mean they gave a shit about me. I think it was more of a pride thing than anything else, like they had to take care of me to cover for the fact that their daughter was a shitty mom. But they didn’t want taking care of me to interfere with their regularly scheduled bar visits, so they’d bully the girls in the neighborhood—the trailer park—into babysitting me. One night, the girl watching me asked if I’d ever kissed a girl before, and I said no. She told me I could practice on her, and I said I didn’t really want to, so she started making fun of me, calling me a pussy and a queer and whatever, until I gave in. She taught me how to kiss, with tongue, and how to take off her bra. She said it was practice, and that she was doing me a favor, but I couldn’t ever tell anyone, or she’d have her brothers kill me. She was seventeen, and I was nine.” Declan finally looks at me and adds, “That’s it. Sort of.”
I echo, “Sort of,” and he presses his lips together, thinning them out into a line. For a long moment, we just stare at each other. Then he takes a drag from the cigarette, holds it in his lungs for long enough that I know it must start to burn, and speaks on the exhale.
“Do you remember,” he says slowly, “what Javi said about me before Parents’ Day a few weeks ago? Right when he came back from spring break, in our room.”
I would give anything on this planet to be able to honestly say that I don’t remember, but I do. I swallow and say, “He told me you fucked somebody in the squad’s mom.”
“Yeah,” Declan agrees. “The thing is, that wasn’t the only time I fucked her. See, I don’t go back to Nebraska for the holidays, ‘cause it’s far and expensive and full of people I hate. I go there for the summer, but for the rest of our breaks, the guys in the squad alternate who invites me home with them. And ever since sophomore year, I’ve spent Thanksgiving with… this one family, the guy whose mom I fucked. That’s when it started. Friend’s dad took him and—took him to the country club one morning that weekend for golf and cigars or some other rich people shit, and I wasn’t invited, and neither was the mom, so we were alone in the house for a few hours, and it just… happened. Kept happening. That weekend, and every Thanksgiving since, and last year on Parents’ Day, and uh, a few other times. She comes to town and doesn’t tell… her son. She calls me and has me meet her at the inn in town.” He looks down at his cigarette and says, very quietly, “It hasn’t happened since you and I started hanging out. Second week in February, I told her I wasn’t into it anymore.”
The moment he says that, I know who he’s talking about and why he’s adding that. It’s an apology in the form of the caveat, and I feel something burbling in my chest that might be vomit, might be hysterical laughter.
When he said he understood me earlier, I didn’t realize he meant because we’d both gotten fucked by members of the same family.
“The first time it happened, I was fifteen, and she was, like… forty-five, I think. Maybe older. I knew it was fucked up that I was sleeping with my friend’s mom, but I don’t think I realized how fucked up she was, a forty-five-year-old adult sleeping with kid one-third her age. I knew it was illegal, but fuck it, so is half the shit I do for fun. It just wasn’t something I thought about, until I met you.”
“What did I have to do with it?” I ask. “I mean, apart from the obvious.”
Declan looks quickly around at me, and I just shrug. I don’t really want to talk about this part. I don’t want to say Dave’s name, or Charlie’s, or their mom’s. The whole Walczyk family can fucking rot. But it’s all out there now, every ugly piece of it, and we know —Declan knows about me and Dave, and I know about him and Grace, and neither of us can change any of it or take it back.
It’s just… there.
Declan jerks suddenly—his cigarette has burned down to his fingertips, and he drops it before it can burn him too badly. I take a step closer to him so I can crush the tiny dot of glowing orange into the dirt and say, “Tell me.”
“You wouldn’t fuck me,” Declan blurts out. “You’re barely a year older than me, we were both already over the age of consent, and I knew you were into me, but you still wouldn’t fuck me until I was eighteen years old and stone cold sober and desperate to have you. You wanted me, but only if I wanted you just as badly.” He throws his arms out in a bewildered, questioning gesture. “What the fuck was I supposed to do with that? Until you, I’d never had a meaningful conversation about consent before in my life. The guy in that first foster home just crawled into my bed, the woman in the bathroom just grabbed me, the babysitter just tormented me until I let her do what she wanted, and my friend’s—fuck it, you know who I’m talking about. Grace Walczyk hates her scumbag husband, and she’s obsessed with her dickhead sons in a way that borders on Oedipal, and she’s so rich and entitled and bored and miserable that she thinks she can do anything she wants, no matter how fucked up it is, as long as it makes her feel good, and I just happened to be there. I started sleeping around when I was thirteen years old, and even when I want it, even when I fucking love it, it’s still just… something that happens. I’m just there. It’s not about me, it’s about my—my dick, and my hands, and my tongue, and my muscles, and nobody ever treated me like I was more than just a body until I met you.”
I get a fistful of his shirt and yank him closer, half-expecting him to push me away, but he comes to me so easily, his hands rising to cup my face for just a few seconds before he seems to get embarrassed by the gesture, and lets them drop to my shoulders instead.
I’m not as easily discomfited. My free hand curls neatly to his jaw, the pad of my thumb rubbing absently over his bottom lip.
“Don’t get me wrong, Dec. The body is nice,” I allow. “The rest is better, though.”
He lunges for me. That move, out here in the woods, is so reminiscent of the first time, but we know each other now, right down to the bone, and he can’t catch me off guard. I meet him with the same intensity, kissing with teeth and tongue and hands gripping so tight they’re sure to leave marks. We don’t manage to stay steady for long, but we also don’t manage to find our way to a tree to lean against, like we did the first time we were out here.
We fuck right there in the middle of the forest floor, on hands and knees in the dirt. Thankfully, Declan grabbed my jacket with its life-saving, ever-ready inside pocket of condoms and lube, but that’s pretty much the only part that isn’t a mess. There are twigs snapping under us, tiny rocks embedding themselves mercilessly into every inch of exposed skin. Declan gets the brunt of it. At first it’s just knees and palms, but after a while, I can’t hold back, I need more of him than I’m getting with my hands pulling at his hips, and I stretch out over his back, letting him take my full weight with my chest to his back. He hisses out a breath and lets us ride right into the dirt, even though it means his face, his chest, his shoulders are all getting rubbed raw on the ground, though he still has the sense to stuff his discarded sweatshirt under his hips so he has something, anything but rocks and sticks to rub off against.
And he’s talking. Like, so much more than he ever does in bed. I usually can’t shut up unless I’ve got a dick in my mouth, and this time is no exception, but for once, he’s actually answering me. Fuck me, touch me, right there, god I love that. Every affirmation, every one of his yeses is like straight-up crack to me. I know he said he never really had to talk about this kind of thing before, and I know it’s probably a mark of just how fucked in the head we both are that I’m going wild for enthusiastic verbalized consent, but I swear, it hits fucking different for me tonight.
He comes with a wild, strangled moan, mouth open against the pathway and probably swallowing some dirt. His hole is clenched brutally, perfectly tight on my cock, but I start to pull out of him so I can finish with my hand, like I always do whenever he comes first; Declan’s whole body gets over-sensitized after he gets off, and sometimes it’s too much for us to keep going. This time, though, too much seems to be just what he’s looking for, because he throws an arm back and digs his fingers into my ass cheek, trying to pull me back in.
“Don’t stop,” he says, words almost slurring together. “Keep going, wanna feel you come while you’re fucking me.”
I mean, shit. How can I turn that down?
It takes about two more pumps and four seconds, and then I’m coming hard, buried as deep in his ass as I can get, face tucked against his neck. I don’t actually know if he can feel me coming with the condom on, but the idea that he wants to feel it makes me feel…
I don’t know what it makes me feel.
I do know that I fumble in the dark until I find his hand, and I squeeze it as hard as I can, and he squeezes back.
Standing isn’t an option for me right now. I roll off him and sprawl out across the walking path, and he turns over onto his back. We lie there, breathing hard, sweatpants tangled around our knees and softening dicks just fully out in the breeze. After a minute, I raise a loose fist and hold it out in his direction.
“Good game, bro.”
He laughs and bumps his knuckles against mine. “You, too. Thanks for the dick.”
“Any time.”
Our fists are still resting together, long after we probably should have let them fall. His index finger twitches a little, and before I can talk myself out of it, I hook mine around his so that we’re twisted together at that one spot. It isn’t super comfortable, but it’s still kind of nice.
Until something that definitely feels like a moth lands low on my hip, right near my junk, and I wrench my hand away, swearing and slapping at my skin and tugging my sweatpants back up and generally hating this woodsy, country bullshit, even as Declan laughs so hard I think he’s going to pass out.
When we get back to Whitman Hall, I run us a single hot shower while Declan slips back into his room for soap and towels. It takes a long time to wash all of the path dirt off our bodies, and an even longer time to check ourselves and each other for damage from all the gravel and twigs and shit that tried to implant themselves in our knees. Declan has one scrape on his leg that has bled a little, so I break open the first aid kit bolted to the hallway wall above the water fountain so we can disinfect it, though he refuses a bandage on the grounds of not being a pussy.
Daylight is starting to creep through the blinds by the time we make it back to bed. Fortunately, PT has been canceled for the week so the senior squads can do their obstacle course testing—Whitman Hall isn’t doing ours until Thursday, and we have a couple more hours of sleep ahead of us. Or more than a couple, if I can convince Dec to skip first period with me.
I’m just starting to drift off to sleep when I hear Declan whisper, “Garen?”
Tonight is full of anomalies, because he pretty much never calls me by my first name. Usually it’s Anderson, sometimes it’s dude or man or asshole. He also pretty much never faces me in bed, preferring to sleep with his back to me, which is pretty great, because it means I can lie on my back without feeling like he’s watching me. But he is watching me when I look over at him now.
“Yeah?” I whisper back.
“Is it okay if I touch you?”
His hand is hovering over me, separated from my hip by a blanket and two inches of empty air. I open my mouth to make a stupid fucking joke about how should have gotten his fill of touching me in the woods or the shower, but then it hits me that he’s not really asking like that.
He’s asking because sometimes, other people haven’t asked at all. They haven’t asked either of us.
“Yes,” I say, meaning it.
Instead of my hip, where I thought he was aiming, his hand drifts down to settle on top of mine. One by one, his fingers slot down between my knuckles like the teeth of one gear catching in the pitch circles of another, and he tightens his grip before scooting closer, away from the wall. I realize what he’s going for and let myself be rolled onto my side, and he spoons up behind me so that our bodies are aligned, from his toes against my heels to his chest against my back, with our interlocked hands tucked to my sternum.
I sleep soundly after that.
246 days sober
“Okay, dude. We’re almost there,” I announce. “Do we need to have a talk about your behavior before I stop the car, or can I trust you?”
Silence answers me from the passenger seat. It isn’t a particularly trustworthy silence, either. I roll my eyes and reach over to put a hand on the back of his neck.
“Look, I get it. This is a weird situation for all of us. But Travis texted me a few hours ago to let me know he was leaving, so it’s not like we need to have any awkward confrontation. We’re just going to go inside, hang out, have some dinner, and get on with our lives. This is a good thing, us moving forward like this, just the two of us.”
He loses the plot at the word “good,” and the next thing I know, I’ve got a tongue in my ear.
“Omelette, what the fuck,” I grimace, fending him off with one hand. “Yes, you’re a good boy, you’re a very good boy, but get a grip. This is serious shit.”
That concept is totally beyond his understanding, if the deafening bark he lets out is any indication. I’ve never been more grateful to pull into my driveway and open the car door, even though it means getting my nuts stomped on when Omelette scrambles over my lap to get out of the car.
When I let him into the house, he goes tearing off like it’s a brand new place he has never seen before. “We’ve only been gone for six nights!” I call after him, but he’s already up the stairs, into my bedroom, down the hall, into Travis’s—into the second bedroom, back into the hall to bark at the bathroom door, down the stairs again, full zoomies around the kitchen and knocking over one of the dining chairs, through the entryway and into the living room to jump onto the couch, except he almost barrels into the wall instead, because there’s nothing to jump on.
“What the fuck,” I whisper to a man who isn’t there. “You took our couch?”
The coffee table is gone too, and even thinking that phrase sends a spike of dread through my heart, because if I walk into this kitchen and I don’t see…
“Oh god,” I moan.
The coffee machine is gone. So is the fancy espresso machine, and the toaster, and the blender, and half the cookware we hardly used anyway, but the fucking coffee machine? This feels like a hate crime.
There’s a white envelope on the table, propped up against the side of a small cardboard moving box. The envelope bears my name in Travis’s handwriting, so the box probably bears a bomb. I can’t decide which one I’m less excited to open.
My phone chimes an alert from within my jacket pocket, and I grin when I take it out and see what Declan has texted me: I can’t believe how quiet whitman is rn without you singing & talking shit & yelling for no fuckin reason.
Coming from him, that’s dangerously close to an “I miss you already,” and I haven’t even been gone from campus for two hours. Instead of writing anything back, I do a voice memo of me singing a Christina Aguilera-style vocal run, ending in a fully unnecessary whistle note that makes Omelette start howling like he’s trying to find the same key, and I start laughing so hard that I almost choke up my lungs. It’s all on the voice memo, too. Whatever, I send it anyway. Declan knows who he’s talking to, so he won’t be surprised. He responds with a string of highly predictable complaints. Blah blah, he was wearing headphones and now his ears are leaking blood, he hates me and never wants to hear from me again, blah blah. I send back, stop flirting with me, and drop the phone on the table.
This box isn’t going to open itself, and neither is the letter. I tear open the flap of the envelope like I’m ripping off a bandaid.
Garen,
Enclosed is an itemized list of all common-area items that are no longer in the house. Anything that you or your parents purchased is still wherever you left it. Anything I purchased by myself (espresso machine, etc.) is coming with me. I took the liberty of selling any jointly purchased items (sofa, coffee table, multiple kitchen appliances, see next page). The resulting funds covered my portion of the security deposit on the house, so you can keep whatever the landlord returns when you move out. I have submitted a change of address form with the post office, but if any of my mail makes it to the house in spite of that, please forward it to the address listed on the next page. The box contains some of your belongings that were in my bedroom.
Regards,
Travis
It’s not like I expected a love letter. First, Travis isn’t a love letter kind of guy, and second, this whole breakup has sucked ass from start to finish. But this still feels somehow… colder than I expected. I flip to the second page, and yep, that’s a handwritten chart of all the items he sold, the original purchase price, the resell price, and which app he used to sell it. The dividing lines even look like he used a ruler. At the bottom, his forwarding address is listed: 115 Maple Street, Lakewood, CT.
No fucking way.
I grab my phone again and bring up my text thread with Travis, where his I want you to remember that you asked for this is still glaring up at me like something out of my literal nightmares. I ignore that and type, are you really back at Evelyn’s house after everything she has said?
I watch three dots appear and disappear as he types and deletes however many responses he needs to before he eventually sends what I’m assuming is the shittiest thing he could come up with.
Yes. I called her last weekend and we talked things out. Reconciled. She’s my mom, and she loves me, and that’s the only thing that really matters. Besides, I can’t blame her for anything she said now that it turns out she was right about a lot of it.
How much is “a lot of it”? That’s what I want to fucking know. Which things was Evelyn McCall right about?
When she said that I was a predator who manipulated Travis into being with me because I wanted to replicate my own patterns of sexual abuse?
When she called me and my mom anti-Semitic slurs?
When she said that Dave Walczyk should have done everyone a favor and murdered me when he had a chance?
When she said that my dad didn’t love me anymore because my addiction ruined his life?
When she told Travis that he was confused and sick, and that “it never would have occurred to him to experiment with a homosexual lifestyle” if I hadn’t somehow tricked him into it?
My hands are shaking as I type out my next message to Travis. I get maybe a paragraph of rage out before I realize how pointless this is. If he wants to believe he’s a victim, or if he wants to believe his homophobic Nazi mom really cares, fine. He can believe whatever he has to.
I delete everything I’ve typed and just send back, cool. good luck with that. And then I block his number.
The bright side of all this is that at least I don’t cry when I see what’s inside the box. There’s a neatly folded stack of clothing—t-shirts and hoodies that have migrated from my wardrobe to his, my body to his, things that would probably still smell like him if I let myself bury my face in the fabric and breathe deep. There are photos and handwritten notes and then, right on top, a stack of all the CDs I burned for him over a year and a half ago, when he said he didn’t really listen to music and I thought that making some old-school mixes would snap him out of that. The disc on top is labeled I want you so bad I’ll go back on the things I believe in.
No the fuck I won’t.
I pick up the CD and snap it in half. The next one is named I can keep a secret if you can keep me guessing, and I don’t get why the fuck I called it that, or why I thought it was okay that he wanted to keep me a secret, that he didn’t want his friends to ever know about me, that he was ashamed of me. I snap that disc in half, too. My eyes drift shut, and I do the rest of the stack by touch; I don’t want to look at them. When I reach back into the box, there aren’t any more CDs, but there is… oh.
I slip the ring onto my index finger, just up to the first knuckle so it’s still loose enough for me to turn it in place with my thumb. The Hebrew inscription is shallow enough that I can barely feel it, but if I aim just right, I can dig the edge of my thumbnail into the grooves of the lettering. We’ve gone back and forth with this ring a hundred times, it feels like. I gave it to him, he threw it in my face, I abandoned it in the LHS music room when I skipped town a year ago, he wore it on a chain for the next six months, I took it away from him when Joss was pregnant. I can’t even remember how he got it back this last time. Part of me wants to throw it in the trash, but I know I’d just fish it back out in the middle of the night. I could pawn it, make it somebody else’s problem, but with my luck, Travis would walk into that same pawn shop a month later and buy it back. At this point, maybe it’s cursed. Maybe we’re doomed to just trade it back and forth between us, trying to win this same symbolic argument until we die.
Or maybe I can just move on.
My phone chimes again, and I look down at the screen. It’s another text from Declan.
there’s a decent burger stand not too far from you. outdoor seating only so they allow animals. i could be at your place in half an hour to scoop you & the dog, we could do dinner? maybe hang out after?
I turn to Omelette and ask, “Do you want a cheeseburger?” He cocks his head to the side, and I try again, in my most excited voice, “Do you want a cheeseburger?” Next-level zoomies. I grin and send Declan a text that says, omelette says yes please.
give me 5mins to pack a bag & i’ll head over, Declan responds, and a minute later, he adds, that’s my way of telling u im staying the night.
Garen says yes please, I say.
It’s as simple as that. No tears, no fighting, no pushing, no angst. Just me, and a guy I really fucking like, and a cheeseburger date with my dog.
I carry the cardboard box down the hall to the utility closet and dump the clothes into the washing machine. I add detergent, fabric softener, and some of those little bead things that will hopefully make my clothes smell like a chemical rain storm instead of my ex-boyfriend. The photos and notes and shitty letter all get torn up and stuffed in the trash, along with the broken halves of the CDs.
“Come on, Om,” I announce, grabbing my wallet, keys, and a frisbee. “We’re going outside to play until it’s cheeseburger time.”
Omelette leads the way out to the front yard, thrilled as fuck to be somewhere that isn’t doggie day care. I fling the frisbee, and he tries some sort of complicated twisty flip for it, misses like an idiot, and has to go hunting around the bushes near the porch to find it.
While he’s doing that, I jog down to the curb. There’s a storm drain about a foot away from the mailbox. I drop to one knee in front of it and take the silver ring out of my pocket. It feels like I’m laying something to rest, like maybe I should say something poignant. Shit, maybe I should be saying the fucking Mourner’s Kaddish. Instead, I just say, “Goodbye, Travis,” and I flick the ring down the storm drain, where I can never find it again.