Content Warnings: Discussion of eating disorders; addiction and relapse; and domestic violence. References to past character death and past abortion. One brief mention of incest between off-screen, unnamed characters.
"Before their death, I shall forgive them all the wrongs they did me in their lifetime. One must forgive one's enemies-- but not before they have been hanged." - Heinrich Heine
235 days sober
There are exactly four restaurants in the entire city of New Haven where Stohler will agree to eat lunch, a different three where she will agree to eat dinner, and one where she will consume any breakfast besides a cup of black coffee. When I first pointed this out back in October, she informed me that she was a picky eater and pinned me under a narrow-eyed stare that promised there would be slashed tires in my future if I ever brought it up again. It took another month for me to realize she doesn’t eat meat, which seemed like the kind of thing she could have just told me. It took another three months and one moderately awkward conversation with Ben before I realized there was more to it than that.
Today, the three of us—me, Stohler, and Ben—are sitting at a picnic table outside a gastrodive on Elm Street, and Stohler is studying her menu with more care than I’ve managed to muster for my AP Government and Politics notes, even though my exam is in two days.
“If I get fried pickles with vegan ranch, will you guys have some?” she asks.
“No, because I’m getting my own, with real ranch,” I say. “And stuffed jalapenos. And wings. And probably a burger. But I’m sure Ben will have some pickles.”
“I will,” Ben agrees slowly, “but I am equally suspicious of the vegan ranch. I thought ranch dressing was made with some combination of buttermilk, mayonnaise, sour cream, and spices. That’s almost entirely dairy.”
“This one is probably made with, like… almond milk and cashew cream and a bunch of other things that I’m supposed to pretend aren’t just nuts ground up in water,” I say.
Stohler scoffs. “You drink gallons of coffee every day, and that’s just beans ground up in water. Anyway, don’t talk shit about my food.”
A waiter with a Pokemon half-sleeve and a bridge piercing appears at the end of our table, spares a micro-second glance at me and Ben, and then says to the deep V of Stohler’s thrift store top, “Hi. Can I get you guys some drinks to start?”
Stohler’s eyes narrow. She unrolls her silverware from its napkin, picks up the knife, and taps the very tip of the blade against the rim of her glass. “We already have drinks. See?”
The waiter blinks at Stohler’s tits, then her face, and finally at the knife in her hand. He clears his throat and quickly redirects his attention to the middle of the table. “Right. Sorry. Uh, what else can I get for you today?”
Ben orders some fish tacos, which is normal enough, but then the waiter looks to Stohler, and she says, “I’ll have the roasted beet reuben, please.”
I stare at her. “Are you having a stroke? Reubens are made with roast beef, not beets.”
“Can you read?” Stohler asks, holding up her menu and tapping one of her purple acrylics against the line that says, yep—roasted beet reuben. “It’s vegetarian.”
“It’s gross,” I decide. I look back up at the waiter. “Can I get a Cuban sandwich with extra mustard? And we’re gonna do two orders of fried pickles, one with vegan ranch and one with good ranch, and fried jalapenos, and,” I glance back at the vegan options on the menu for something else that’s Stohler-friendly, “buffalo cauliflower. Wait. I want fried zucchini sticks, too.”
“Right. You want the apps first, or with the meal?” the waiter asks.
“First, please,” Stohler answers in the voice of someone who will eat half my zucchini and most of my cauliflower, but would never have ordered her own. The waiter leaves to put the order in, and Stohler turns her attention back to Ben next to her. “So, how’d the big apartment talk with Alex go?”
“Perfectly,” Ben says flatly. There’s a beat in which Stohler and I exchange wary glances, and then Ben huffs a laugh and amends, with something other than his usual monotone, “No, really. It went great. I barely even had a chance to raise the subject before he cut me off and said that some of his friends from SCSU want to get a house together right at the edge of campus in the fall. He’s going to be living with three or four other guys, plus one guy’s girlfriend.”
Stohler grabs the straw out of her cocktail and starts stabbing it into the glass to break the ice apart. “That’s cool, but I already told my roommates-from-hell that I’m moving out at the end of the month, so I hope he has a plan for where he’s gonna stay this summer. I’m not above rallying the girls at work to help me dump all his shit in the middle of the park. We did it for Veronika when she found out her fiancé was cheating on her with his cousin.”
“You mean cheating on her with her cousin,” I correct, and Stohler grimaces.
“Bitch, I wish I meant that.”
“You don’t need to rally anyone,” Ben says before I can ask any of the questions I suddenly find myself with. “As soon as exams are over, Alex is moving to spend the summer back in Lakewood, at his dad’s place.”
I raise my eyebrows and clarify, “The homophobic drunk who disappears for days at a time with no warning?” Ben hums his agreement, and I shake my head. “Right. Sounds like a blast.”
“He says that living together hasn’t been good for our friendship.”
“Know what else wasn’t good for your friendship?” Stohler asks, stabbing a piece of ice so viciously that she almost upends her glass. “That time he punched you in the face and told your dad you were a slut.”
“Alex can get fucked,” I agree.
Even after everything, I’m still expecting Ben to offer a half-hearted defense of his former best friend. He sees good in everyone, whether it’s there or not, and god knows I’ve benefited from his overly forgiving nature on more than one occasion. But instead, Ben squares his shoulders and says, “Honestly, I think he’s leaving so soon out of self-preservation. Last week, James left him a two-minute voicemail explaining that he has absolutely no intention of continuing to reserve hotel rooms when he comes to visit, that we will be”—he slips into an only slightly exaggerated version of Jamie’s genteel Southern drawl—“sharing a bed and doing whatever we goddamn please in it, no matter how thin the walls in that apartment are”—he drops back into his own crisp New England tones—“and that if Alex even looks twice at me in his presence, Jamie will not hesitate to beat his ass right there in the middle of our living room.”
“That could be fun to watch,” Stohler muses. “Who do you think would win?”
“Jamie,” I say immediately. “That refined gentleman schtick goes out the window the second he gets really pissed. He’s scrappier than he looks. Plus, I told you he shot a guy once, right?”
Ben rolls his eyes. “For the sake of my security deposit, I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. Alex has final exams this week, same as me. I’m hoping he’ll have most of his shit moved out by the time I get home from New York on Saturday night.”
“You’re still coming up on Thursday, though, right?” I say.
“James and I are on Omelette duty while you and Travis go to Lakewood for the school play, yes,” Ben confirms.
I do some incredibly half-hearted jazz hands. I’m grateful that they’ve agreed to dogsit for the night, even though it means taking time away from their presumably naked celebration of Ben finishing his freshman year at Yale on Wednesday, but I’d be lying my ass off if I pretended that I’m looking forward to returning to Lakewood for the opening night of Wizard of Oz. Miranda and Annabelle have been texting me for the last three days, soliciting promise after promise that I won’t bail on them, and Nate has been liking more of my instagram posts than usual, and I think they’ll actually be upset if I don’t show up to claim the tickets they reserved for me.
Except for Joss, who I can only guess is hoping I die in a fire before Thursday night.
“So, do you get a dogsitter on the weekends while you’re at work?” Ben asks me.
I shake my head. “No. Travis is usually home before I leave the house, and I’m still only working Fridays and Saturdays. But I’m going to talk to somebody at the club soon, see if I can take on more days after I graduate in a few weeks. I’m going to need the money.” I peer into my glass of water at the lemon wedge that has sunk below the ice, like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world. Really, I just don’t want to look at either of my friends as I say, “Last week, Travis told me he wants to move into the city when our lease ends in July and get a one-bedroom apartment.”
Ben and Stohler both wait for me to offer more of a story to go along with that sentence, and when I don’t, I glance up just long enough to see them exchange a brief, but significant look. Finally, Ben carefully points out, “You seem less than thrilled by that prospect.”
I make a vague noise of assent. Stohler asks, “Do you not want to move into the city, or do you not want to get a one-bedroom?”
From the minute I found out my dad wanted me to leave Patton and come to Lakewood with him, I wanted to move to the city. From the minute I kissed Travis McCall, I wanted to share his bed every night for the rest of my life. I don’t know how to explain that, now that I can have both, I’m not sure I want either. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
“Living in New York is expensive,” I say quietly. “Right now, my parents are paying my rent and all my bills, but my mom says that stops at graduation, unless I agree to go to college in the fall. I can keep living with her or my dad, if I need to, but they’re not going to pay for me to live somewhere else.”
“And you’re not making enough at your new job to afford rent?” Ben asks.
The embarrassment of the truth overwhelms me so much, I have to close my eyes before I can make myself spit it out. “I’m not making anything at my new job.”
Neither of them responds, and I can’t tell if it’s because they’re too surprised to react, or because the waiter has arrived with a tray full of appetizers. As he unloads them, I find myself thinking—maybe for the first time in my life—that I ordered way too fucking much food. I’ve got four plates of various fried vegetables, and a knot in my throat that is going to make it impossible for me to get anything down.
Once the waiter has been thanked and sent on his way, Stohler leans in and assures me, “There’s a learning curve to any job, especially one that doesn’t come with a set hourly wage. Have you seen your earnings increase as you learn the ropes over the past two weeks?”
I shake my head. Now that I’m finally talking about this, now that I see that Stohler’s brow is furrowed like she’s determined to help me figure this shit out and that Ben is just nodding along like he gets exactly what a nightmare it is to be fucking broke, I can’t stop myself from blurting it all out. “Cashing out eats up at least a hundred right off the bat. I pay sixty to the club, and I tip the bouncers and DJ like you said. And there are so many more expenses than I thought to factor in—gassing up my car to get there and back, parking fees, maintaining this.” I lean back in my seat to gesture at my body. “Those waxing appointments cost a fucking mint, and my buzzcut has grown out enough that I know I have to start getting regular haircuts, and Jamie finally convinced me to develop a skincare regimen, and do you have any idea how insanely expensive a single pair of booty shorts can be?”
“Yes, I do,” Stohler says seriously, and Ben tries not to smile as he adds, “I don’t, but I remain sympathetic to your situation.”
I try to slump down in my seat, forgetting it’s a picnic table bench until I almost eat shit on the sidewalk. I end up propping an elbow up on the table and starting to pick at my zucchini sticks. “I’m not kidding when I say I’m making nothing at this job. And I can’t tell how much of it is the club versus how much is just me sucking at this.” I scoop up a few sticks and drop them on the small plate in front of Stohler. She eats half of one, then washes it down with a long sip from her cocktail. I ask, “Is this what stripping was like when you first got into it?”
“You want the truth?” she asks. I nod, and she sets her glass down again. “I’ve never made that little. Even when I started, I was pulling in a few hundred a night. That’s not a dig at you, though. Remember, we’re doing similar jobs, but we’re not doing the same job. I make more during a lapdance than you do because I’m getting more naked than you are, and I make more doing a stage set than you make in your cage because I’m doing a full solo dance routine. People who come into your club are there to dance and drink, and they might tip you as an afterthought, but the people who come into my club are there to see, you know—” She shows me both her palms and pulses her hands on each word as she declares, “Live! Nude! Girls!”
Ben shrugs. “Plus, you’re an incredibly attractive blond woman, and a fat bank account is God’s way of making up for the fact that you get catcalled on the sidewalk every time you go to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.”
“That, too,” Stohler agrees. “Besides, I started pole-dancing between my junior and senior years of college, but I didn’t start stripping as a job until my final semester. By the time I got into that, I was already comfortable with the performative aspects of the job. You’re still getting your sea legs for the most part.”
“Why did you start pole-dancing? Did you already know you wanted to do it for cash after you graduated?” I ask.
“No, it was sort of a, like… mental illness slash trauma thing,” Stohler says, fiddling with one of her earrings and looking away from me casually, like that’s the type of thing she can say without either me or Ben expecting a more elaborate explanation.
I wait. Ben waits. Stohler stares stubbornly out into the middle of Elm Street, seemingly content to let the rest of this meal pass in absolute silence. The tattooed waiter reappears to take our plates, sees that we’ve eaten three zucchini sticks and a small handful of fried pickle slices between the three of us, and stomps back into the bar with an exasperated sigh. I eat one buffalo cauliflower bite, put another on Ben’s plate, and a third on Stohler’s. They both eat instead of saying anything, though Ben is staring over at Stohler next to him the entire time he chews.
Unsurprisingly, I’m the one who snaps and breaks the silence. I kick Stohler gently under the table and say, “Hey, bitch. In case you haven’t noticed, our friendship was built on oversharing about mental illness slash trauma things. And if I had to tell you all mine, you’ve gotta tell me yours.”
“You don’t have to tell us anything you’re not comfortable with,” Ben corrects me.
I give him the finger and say to Stohler, “Yeah, actually, you do. You think I was comfortable telling you all about my cocaine addiction and the times I literally sold my ass for drug money? Tit for tat, trauma for trauma.”
Stohler finally turns to face me again and wiggles her perfectly arched brows. “Sounds like a party. Someday we’ll have to have a heart-to-heart about the abortion I had when I was nineteen.”
“Someday can be now, if you start talking,” I say.
Stohler leans back and rolls her head in a circle, like she’s got to limber up for this conversation. She blows out an enormous breath and begins, “Okay, fine. So. My third year of college was a mess. The guy I was dating sucked. He was fucking half my friends, who also sucked. I had no idea how to balance dance as schoolwork, dance as a hobby, and dance as a career, and the pressure of that—”
She makes a prompting gesture, and Ben and I supply together, “—sucked.”
“Precisely. But my body was the only thing I felt like I had a real handle on. What I put in it, what I made it do, what it looked like. So, I sort of started, you know… starving myself. Well, started isn’t the most accurate word. I’d been doing ballet since I was a toddler, and I was a cheerleader in high school, so I was pretty entrenched in the fun and exciting world of body image issues and eating disorders. But it kind of blew up that year. And I got really sick. And then my parents came to see me in New York, right before the end of the semester, and the shit hit the fan.”
“Yeah,” I say quietly, “I get that.”
The matching expressions of quiet panic and devastation my parents wore the first weekend they came to see me in rehab have been seared into my brain for almost eleven months. It isn’t hard to picture another, blonder couple from Massachusetts looking at their needle-thin daughter the same way.
Stohler nods at me as if she’s grateful for my understanding, and continues, “Instead of staying in the city for the summer, like I usually did, my parents made me go home to Worcester and start seeing a counselor. I was too tired to argue, so I agreed. The counselor told me to leave my shitty boyfriend and cut off my shitty friends, and I agreed to that, too. But then everyone started telling me that I should take a leave of absence from school, and I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t an option, as far as I was concerned. Dancing was all I had ever wanted to do, and I had sacrificed my body and my happiness and my fucking sanity to be the best dancer I thought I could be. I couldn’t let that be for nothing.”
The conversation triggers something in her, and she frowns down at the spread of food between the three of us. She picks up a fork and starts spearing vegetables, moving them from the shared plates to her own. In the end, she has a nice little pile of cauliflower bites and zucchini sticks and fried pickles. She starts to make her way through the food, taking bites between sentences, but never abandoning the story entirely.
“The house was kind of a warzone that summer. The basement had always been my studio space, but they moved in all these storage boxes and old furniture so I couldn’t practice. Family dinners were mandatory, and I wasn’t allowed to be alone after meals, just so my parents and brothers could be sure I wasn’t throwing up. I couldn’t go out alone because they didn’t trust me not to go for a jog. And come on, you know me. I fought that shit viciously. I’d sneak out in the middle of the night and practice ballet on the back deck, until they realized what I was doing. My younger brother, Tyler…” She pauses and coughs, but I can’t tell if it’s the name or the food that’s stuck in her throat. She swallows several times, takes a deep breath, and tries again. “Tyler moved into my bedroom and slept in a sleeping bag on the floor in front of the door so that I couldn’t get out without waking him. We were all so angry at each other all the time, and I was so sure that a summer of this would ruin my dancing and get me kicked out of school in my final year. I hated being sick, but I hated my family more for trying to make me get better.”
I have to look away. There’s a sharp pinch behind my eyes, like I might be about to cry, but I don’t want to interrupt Stohler’s story, not when it feels so familiar to me. I know all too well the bone-deep resentment it’s possible to feel for anyone who loves you enough to want you to stop slowly killing yourself.
“One day, my mom dragged me out of the house for an afternoon of errands, ‘cause I couldn’t be left home by myself. We stopped at a post office, and I begged out of waiting in line with her because standing still for too long made me dizzy. When I got outside, I realized that the post office happened to be in the same shopping plaza as a dance studio, so I booked it straight over there. I was so fucking stir-crazy, it could have been a kiddie hip-hop class, and I would’ve eaten that shit up.”
“I’m going to go ahead and guess that it wasn’t, though,” I say.
“If it was, that would be a wicked weird segue in a story about pole-dancing, wouldn’t it?” Stohler says, and Ben makes a face. “Anyway, there wasn’t a class going on at the time, but there was an instructor who was working on a routine of her own. I was captivated. She was beautiful and graceful, and when she pulled herself up onto the pole and started to work on her aerials… shit. I’d never seen anything like that. She was so strong, and suddenly, I wanted that more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. More than my shitty boyfriend and shitty friends, more than my life in New York, more than ballet. More than being thin. All I wanted was to be as powerful as that woman on the pole.
My mom found me a few minutes later and started herding me back out to the car. I told her that if I couldn’t do ballet, I wanted to try this, and my mom scoffed—not because it was pole-dancing, she doesn’t give a shit about that. We Stohlers are a fully sex-positive family. But my mom pointed at the pole, at this woman lifting herself up and spinning around it with nothing more than a hooked elbow and a locked hip supporting her entire body weight, and she said, ‘Be serious, Lindsey. Even if we did let you sign up for a class here, you wouldn’t be able to do that. You aren’t strong enough right now.’”
“Well, shit,” I say.
Stohler’s answering smile is sharp. “Exactly. Don’t tell me what to do. So, in the course of a ten-minute car ride back to the house, I got my mom to make me a deal: I’d give up ballet and contemporary and gymnastics and all that other shit, but the day I proved that I was physically strong enough to get myself up on the pole and support my own weight for at least thirty seconds, I would get to sign myself up for classes.”
“How long did it take you to get there?” Ben asks.
“Six weeks,” Stohler answers. “I practiced on a street light on the block, which the neighbors fucking hated—looking out their front windows and seeing this skinny idiot trying to climb her way up a hot metal lamppost every afternoon for half the summer. But I realized I needed to build muscle to have any shot at doing this, so I finally agreed to see a dietitian and committed to a new meal plan. Ate a little bit, gained a little bit, cried a little bit. Even once I was able to lift myself up, it hurt like a motherfucker. You can’t grip a pole properly when your body is more bone than muscle and fat. So, I had to keep going. Ate a little bit more, gained a little bit more, cried a little bit more. But I got there in the end. I made it up the pole, I stayed there, I took my classes, I practiced, and eventually, I was able to do exactly what I saw that instructor doing on the first day.”
My friendship with Stohler isn’t really built on talking about our emotions and trading compliments, but right now, all I can think to blurt out is, “You’re such a bad bitch.”
She slaps a hand down on the picnic table, almost smacking the few remaining fried pickles, and says, “Exactly. And when I’m dancing, I feel like a bad bitch. Stripping is just”—she waves a hand dismissively—“a job. I like it, and it makes some serious coin, but pole is the part I really care about. It makes me feel powerful and sexy and free, like I’m the absolute best, coolest version of myself. I’m proud of my body, but it’s not about being thin anymore. It’s about being physically able to do what I do, because anybody who can get up on a pole or”—she gestures to me now—“in a cage, on a platform, fucking wherever. Anybody who can do that is a bad bitch, Garen. And when you first got into this job, I kind of hoped it would make you feel like that, too.”
The waiter returns to clear the appetizer plates and lay out our entrees, and I’m grateful for the distraction. The end of Stohler’s story and the arrival of the meal means I have a few minutes in which I can shovel fries and a sandwich into my mouth instead of having to actually respond.
The truth is, my body doesn’t always feel like it’s mine anymore. I sometimes think that I’ve broken off little pieces of it and left them scattered all over the state. A handful of pieces in the house on Maple Street—one that’s forever the little spoon in Travis’s bed, fully-clothed and respectably chaste, never asking for more than he feels like giving; one piece lying broken and bloody on the floor of my old bedroom, right where Dave left me. Pieces that I left in the LRC, taking supervised drug tests in bathroom stalls, being prodded by doctors to see how damaged I am, staring up at the ceiling in a bedroom with no door because I’m on suicide watch. Pieces on the stage in the Lakewood High auditorium, where I put on a costume and slicked my hair back like someone told me to and sang someone else’s songs, where everyone called me a different name and I kissed Christine because it was in the script.
From the day I first moved to Lakewood to the day I left, my body didn’t really feel like something I had ownership of, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to claim it now, just because I moved back to New York.
“I want that,” I say quietly. “I used to feel like that all the time, back when I was still just this… this wild little monster running around Patton with Jamie. I was confident and fun and hot, and I was so fucking happy, and I don’t really feel like that often.”
“Do you feel like that ever?” Ben asks. “Now that you’re back at Patton, out of LHS and all the associated baggage, I mean. Does it help?”
I have a sudden flash of being in the front seat of a cop car, my hands tight on the steering wheel, red and blue lights casting everything into primary color chaos. My heart pounding in my chest like there’s a wild animal stuck in my ribcage, trying to get out. Glancing up at the rear view mirror and seeing Declan staring at me from the backseat like I’m the strangest and most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his life.
“I feel like that sometimes,” I admit.
“That’s a start,” Stohler says encouragingly.
I shrug and say, “Maybe.”
237 days sober
Patton Military Academy’s “two Advanced Placement courses before graduation” policy for seniors sucks on a lot of levels, but AP exam week itself isn’t one of them. The sheer number of scheduling conflicts created by a dozen two-hour exams spread out over the week means that our regularly scheduled classes are replaced by mandatory study hours. I’m not good with mandatory anything, so I’m planning to spend most of the week at home, watching TV and hanging out with my dog. The exceptions to this plan are Monday, when I’m scheduled to take my AP Government & Politics exam, and Thursday, when I’m taking AP English. Travis will be joining me on Thursday, and I’ve persuaded Jamie and Ben to come up from the city hours before their play date with Omelette—ostensibly to help us study beforehand, but really to keep me company before and get lunch with me after. I don’t have a distraction planned for today, so I’m sprawled on one of the couches in the Whitman Hall common room, browsing Instagram on my phone.
“You could at least pretend to study,” Taylor suggests, gesturing to the heap of papers spread across the floor between us.
I shrug. “Don’t need to. I test well. Besides, I’m working.”
“You’re not, actually. You’re dicking around,” Steven says. I give him the kind of look that observation deserves when it’s coming from someone who is widely acknowledged to be one of the dumbest, highest people on campus. He glowers stubbornly back at me. His dab pen has gone missing, and he has been bitching about it all morning. Sobriety makes him irritable, it turns out, but today is the first time I’ve gotten to witness it all semester.
“No, I’m not. I’m researching,” I say. I turn my phone so they can see Rush’s account as I scroll through. “My friend told me that I should work on building a social media presence if I want to establish a regular clientele at the club, instead of trying to get tips from complete strangers every shift.”
I don’t add the truth—that even after trying to implement all of Stohler’s advice during my last shift, getting tips from random club-goers has remained as much of a crapshoot as it was on my first night. After cashout and expenses, I’m basically breaking even. Getting a job as a go-go boy isn’t exactly what I’d planned to do for a career, but that doesn’t mean I want to suck at it so badly that I’d make just as much money sitting on my ass at home.
“If you make an entire Instagram account that’s just pictures of you in a thong, I will follow it to be a supportive friend, but I will immediately mute you so I don’t have to see that shit on my feed,” Taylor says. Steven mutters his vague agreement.
“I don’t wear a thong to work,” I say, tilting my chin up slightly so that I level them both with my most imperious expression. “Ken says we’re not allowed to show our asscheeks to the patrons.”
Taylor snorts. “Ken has a higher opinion of his club than he should, ‘cause I’ve definitely seen a lot more than cheek at that club.”
“Who’s Ken?” Steven asks me.
“The only one of my bosses who doesn’t suck,” I answer. “Jonathan’s a mean son of a bitch, Mikael doesn’t care about his job enough to look up from his phone, and as far as I can tell, neither of them actually does anything except bully the staff into blowing them in exchange for nights off. Ken is alright, though. He’s the talent manager, and he’s the one we usually deal with.”
“Maybe you should talk to him about the social media thing,” Steven says. I blink at him. Taylor puts down his notebook. Steven shrugs and continues, “If he’s the only one there who actually does any work, he probably either handles the club’s online presence himself or can put you in touch with the person who does it. He probably also knows what the most successful dancers do to build their own fan base, or whatever. He might have some advice.”
In the four months I’ve been back at this school, I have never heard Steven express anything that could be described as “an idea,” much less one worth listening to. If Taylor’s baffled expression is any indication, the same is true for the four years he and Steve have shared a dorm room.
“Do you mean to tell me,” I say, when I can manage to get the words out, “that you’ve been having coherent thoughts this whole time, but you’ve been so fucking stoned you haven’t bothered to verbalize any of them?”
“Fuck you,” Steven grumbles.
“But seriously, that’s a good idea. I’ll head in early this Friday and see if I can hunt Ken down for a conversation. Thanks.”
“Whatever. You’re still a dick. And pretty judgmental, for a drug addict.” He slouches down in his chair and declares over Taylor’s laughter, “I want my fucking pen!”
“Garen Anderson?” a voice from the doorway calls suddenly. “There a Garen Anderson in here?”
I poke my head up over the back of the couch. One of the dorm monitors is leaning into the common room, scanning the guys gathered here. I raise my hand, and the monitor beckons. “Great, come on. You’re wanted in the office.”
The last time I was summoned to the administrative building, it was because Melissa and George Goldwyn were dead, and right now, all the blood in my own body suddenly feels corpse-cold too. I reach for my backpack, distantly aware that I need to pack my shit and go, but more focused on the fact that my phone is in one of the zippered pockets. Someone must have tried to call me, right? There’s no way anyone who knows me would let me find out about some new catastrophe through the Patton Military Academy receptionist again.
When I finally get my messages open, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. An automated text from a restaurant confirming a brunch reservation I made for Mom and me this Sunday. A mirror selfie from Jamie, showing me an outfit that has been carefully curated to be virtually indistinguishable from every other outfit he has ever worn in his life. An unsolicited and unfamiliar dick pic from a number I don’t recognize. A short voice memo of Ben testing out a new melody on the piano. The same kind of messages I always have, with nothing to suggest that someone I love is lying in a morgue.
“Anderson. C’mon. Guidance office, now,” the dorm monitor says impatiently, and I finally look at him again.
“Guidance office,” I echo.
The monitor is looking genuinely annoyed now. “Yes. Mr. Bell wants to see you as soon as possible. I’m going to call back and let him know you’re on your way, so you’d better get a move-on. He’ll expect you there within five minutes.”
“Mr. Bell isn’t even my assigned counselor,” I try to protest, but the monitor is already disappearing back into the stairwell. I look around at my friends. “Quick, help me out. What do we think I’m in trouble for now?”
“Maybe they figured out you were the one who stole the cop car at Ward,” Steven says. “I bet they’ve got security footage somewhere. Or they heard about you pulling a gun on that guy at the party before spring break. Or they found out you’re a go-go dancer at an infamously sketchy nightclub in the city. Or—”
I cut him off with a swift kick to the shins and stand up, hauling my backpack onto my shoulder. “Eat shit.”
“Are you coming back here before the exam?” Taylor asks. Something in his voice is off, and when I make eye contact with him, I realize that he’s looking more tense than he was before the dorm monitor came into the common room a minute ago.
“Probably not?” I guess. “Exam starts in less than an hour, and I can’t imagine this meeting will be short enough to make it worth the effort of coming all the way back. I’ll see you there, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he echoes, looking back down at his notes in a way that feels like it’s more about avoiding eye contact than returning to studying. His reaction to the whole situation is weird, but I don’t have time to question it further right now.
On some level, I’m still expecting to arrive at the administrative building to discover that the world is collapsing in on me again. When I walk through the door, Lisa is in her usual place at the reception desk, clacking away at her computer. She barely glances up at me. “Garen. Couldn’t make it through your last month here without another visit to the headmaster, could you?”
The snottiness of her reply is exactly what I need right now. When George and Melissa were dead, she spoke in hushed tones and brief, gentle assurances. If she’s back to being judgmental of my poor life choices, that must mean everyone is okay.
Right?
“I knew you’d miss me too much if I graduated without another of these fun visits,” I say. “But I’m not here for the Headmaster. Somebody in Whitman Hall told me that I’m supposed to be meeting Mr. Bell in the guidance office.”
Lisa frowns. “Mr. Bell? He’s not your counselor, is he?”
“Nope,” I say, shrugging.
She mirrors the movement, then gestures to the stairwell. “Alright. Guidance offices are on the third floor with the infirmary.”
Two floors up, I search out the office door bearing a brass nameplate etched with Mr. C. Bell. The door itself is open, but I bang my knuckles against the frame twice before leaning in anyway. “Hi. I was told you wanted to see me?”
The man at the desk smiles with teeth that look a little too big for his mouth. It could be an optical illusion, though. The motherfucker is lean--like, stick bug type of lean—and has massive, dark eyebrows. He actually looks kind of like a Muppet, and to stop myself from grinning like an asshole, I look quickly down at his desk nameplate. It’s a plastic twin to the one on the door, except this one says Mr. Colin Bell, MPH, which is… super fucking weird, ‘cause I don’t think a Master of Public Health actually counts as a counseling degree.
I once asked Doc Howard to tell me what all the letters on her door stood for, and it took her at least ten minutes to run through the list of degrees she has, plus all of the additional training and certification programs she’s been through. All things considered, I’m not feeling too optimistic about this guy’s public health degree.
“Garen Anderson, I presume,” Mr. Bell says, drawing my attention back to him. “Good to meet you! My name is Mr. Bell, I’m one of the counselors here at Patton. Now, if you just shut that door behind you and have a seat, there are some things I’d like to discuss with you.”
I don’t move. Neither does he, except to keep beaming back at me with those giant fucking teeth of his. After a minute, I nudge the door closed with the toe of my boot and sink onto the very edge of the chair that has been indicated for me.
“Fantastic! Thanks for taking the time to come here and have this conversation with me. I know you must be under a lot of pressure, what with final exams coming up.”
I stare at him, not saying a word. There’s no way he pulled me away from mandated study hours for small talk. We sit in silence for nearly a minute while Mr. Bell waits for me to respond, and I wait for him to realize I have no intention of doing so.
“Are you?” he eventually asks me.
“Am I taking my finals? Didn’t think I had a choice,” I say.
Mr. Bell lets out a booming laugh, too hearty to be genuine. “Of course. No, Garen, I meant to ask if you were under a lot of pressure at the moment.”
I tip a shoulder upwards, let it fall again. “No more than anyone else around here.”
“Sure,” Mr. Bell concedes, “but exams can be a lot to deal with, especially for people who are doing”—he leans forward slightly in his chair, and I just know he’s about to spout some bullshit phrase he picked up at a seminar within the last month—“the difficult work of learning healthy coping mechanisms. Wouldn’t you say that’s true?”
It’s another non-question, something I can’t agree or disagree with without feeling like I’m giving the wrong answer. Instead, I make the most non-committal sound I can manage without actually opening my mouth.
“Do you feel that you have a strong support system?” he presses. “I believe you’re registered as a day student this semester, and that you’ve been assigned to the Whitman Hall squadron under Sergeant Smitth. How’s that working out?”
“Fine,” I say curtly. Nobody at Patton calls the squads our squadrons except the clueless administrators. But Mr. Bell scoots his chair closer, like the single word I’ve just uttered is actually important, and I’m beginning to feel like this is all a trap.
“Do you spend a lot of time with the other members of your squadron?” he asks.
Yep. Definitely a trap.
“We have physical training, a few classes, lunch, and MLEP together every day,” I say.
“I meant socially.”
“I socialize in class. I’m sure that’s in my file, too.”
We both glance down at the folder on the desk between us. After a brief pause, Mr. Bell flicks it open and reads several lines of the papers that I can’t make out upside down. All I can see is that they aren’t all typed—some are scribbled notes, like he jotted down reminders in another appointment before this one. Whatever information he’s got in there must be useful, because when he meets my gaze again, suddenly we’re in full interrogator-and-hostile-witness mode, volleying back and forth with barely a breath between words.
“Would you say that you have a lot of friends at Patton?”
“Some.”
“Who are they?”
“A few guys in my squad.”
“I was asking for names, actually.”
“I know you were.”
A sharp exhale through his nose, like he’s getting frustrated, and then he changes tactics. “Do you spend a lot of time on campus?”
“Only as much as I’m required.”
“In the dorms?”
“I’m not required to be there.”
“But you do spend time in Whitman Hall, though. You just told me that’s where you were when I asked to have you sent down.”
Fuck.
“I spend time there occasionally,” I say carefully.
“With whom?”
“My friends.”
“What do you and your friends do when you’re on campus?”
Play with unregistered firearms, throw keg parties in the woods, steal police cars, fuck. “We have a book club. And an interfaith prayer group. And a knitting circle where we make sweaters for my dog.”
“That’s a lot of activities,” Mr. Bell observes.
“Yeah, I’m a real joiner.”
“They say that knitting can be an excellent stress reliever for people who are dealing with mental health issues.”
“Cut the shit.”
Mr. Bell’s bushy eyebrows dart upward. “Excuse me?”
“You didn’t yank me away from studying during one of the last weeks of the school year so that we could have a chat about my coping mechanisms. I’ve got a real therapist for that, and she”—I reach out and tap the nameplate on his desk—“has a lot more letters after her name than you do. So, thanks for the offer, you unqualified joke, but I’m good. And I have an exam to study for.”
I only make it halfway out of my chair before he says, “Why don’t you sit back down and tell me when you relapsed again?”
The question hits me like a punch to the gut. Fuck that, it hits me harder, hard enough to knock my ass back into the seat and leave me staring, stunned, at this guy who I’ve never met before, but who sounds so goddamn sure of my failure that all I can say in response is a soft, “What?”
“There’s been some talk lately. A few of your teachers have expressed concerns about how you’re handling the deaths of some close family friends.” He actually has to check his notes for the names, and I swear I almost lunge across the desk at him. “George Goldwyn and Melissa Goldwyn. They were the parents of your best friend, Jam—”
“I know who they are,” I interrupt. Are. Were. Whatever, shit. “I’m sad, okay? They were wonderful people, and they didn’t deserve what happened to them. James sure as hell didn’t deserve to lose both of his parents, either. He’s devastated, and so am I, but not so devastated that I needed to go back to using.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Mr. Bell says, in an encouraging, genial tone that seems to roughly translate to I think you’re full of shit. “But I did ask some of your teachers if any of them had noticed a change in your attitude or behavior recently. Anything that might suggest you were having… trouble.”
The echo of his earlier word hangs so heavily between us, it might as well be written on the desk. Relapsed. Relapsed. Relapsed.
“I’m sober,” I grit out. My skin feels like it’s on fire, but I hope I’m not really blushing. I don’t want to give anyone, even a stranger, the satisfaction of seeing how humiliated I am by the idea that someone asked my teachers if they thought I was doing cocaine again. He probably asked Sergeant Smitth, too, and I can only imagine the response that garnered. No, Anderson doesn’t seem like he’s high, but it’s hard to imagine that someone can be that irritating while sober, so who knows?
Mr. Bell picks up his pen and holds it poised over his notepad. “Really? How long now?”
“It’ll be eight months this coming Sunday.” Write that down, motherfucker. “Shouldn’t that be somewhere in my file? I know you guys have a record of my last hospitalization.”
“We do, yes,” he says. He pokes a line in his notes with the tip of his pen. “Wednesday, September thirteenth. You were admitted to the Lakewood Rehabilitation Center for a forty-eight hour evaluation before proceeding with your outpatient therapy. And that was your second stay there, yes? You spent some time there over the summer, from…” He scans his notes again, making an annoying little clicking noise with his tongue as he searches for the information. “Ah! There it is. Monday, June twelfth. You were checked—”
“I checked myself into a sixty-day treatment program for my drug and alcohol addiction on June twelfth,” I interrupt. “I had daily group therapy sessions with licensed counselors and individual sessions with Dr. Emilie Howard, who I still see for dialectical behavior therapy every weekend, and whose name should be in that fucking file you clearly didn’t bother to read before you called me in here. After sixty days of inpatient treatment, and after establishing my outpatient treatment plan with my doctors, I checked myself out on Friday, August eleventh. I was sober for ninety days, until I relapsed on September eleventh and went on a twenty-four hour bender, after which I returned to treatment and have been sober ever since.”
Mr. Bell leans back in his chair and laces his fingers together, resting them on the edge of his desk. “And would you be willing to prove that? The school nurse is just down the hall.”
The second he says those words, an image flickers through my mind—Declan in his truck on his birthday, holding a blue glass pipe and saying, “Are you sure you can smoke?” It didn’t feel like a big deal in that moment. I haven’t smoked since then, and I’ve barely even thought about that afternoon, beyond the mild annoyance that it took another week and a half after that for me to get a chance to fuck Declan in his truck. But that was less than a month ago, and I don’t know if the THC is still detectable in my system.
“You want me to take a drug test?” I ask, half hoping I’ve misunderstood him.
Mr. Bell beams at me. “I think that’s a great idea.”
“Well, you would. It was your idea,” I say, standing up. Between his telephone and his nameplate is a mug of what looks to be the weakest coffee ever brewed. I tap the handle of it. “They got a sample cup for me down the hall, or should I go ahead and give you one right here?”
When this conversation started, Mr. Bell’s smile was fake because he didn’t really give a shit about me one way or another. Now, it’s fake in a way that suggests he’d like to fight me in the faculty parking lot after this appointment. “The nurse’s office will take care of you just fine.”
“Standard five-panel test?” I guess.
“You know what, Mr. Anderson? Let’s go all out. Tell Nurse Gumby I’d like to have you do the twelve-panel drug test. I believe that’s her most comprehensive option.”
“Sounds great,” I say, turning to the door but not bothering to lower my voice as I add, “you infected taint-scrape.”
The nurse doesn’t seem surprised by the request, but I don’t know whether that’s because she gives these tests out too regularly to be fazed or because my reputation precedes me enough that she always assumed she’d administer one for me eventually. I am handed a cup and directed to a single-occupancy bathroom, where I get to lock myself in and fill the cup in privacy. It’s both novel and beyond stupid; every drug test I’ve ever taken at the LRC has involved someone standing in the restroom with me to make sure I wasn’t tampering with my sample. I could probably make a mint selling clean piss to every guy who suspected he was going to be tested in here, as long as I used some sort of thermos system to keep the sample warm enough to beat the temperature gauge in most test kits.
I amuse myself with the possibilities for a minute or two, but it’s a poor distraction from the steady refrain of please be negative, please be negative, please be negative, with the even more depressing downbeat of I shouldn’t be this nervous about a drug test.
I bring the sample cup back out to Nurse Gumby—and god, lady, change your name, that’s embarrassing—and she plunks the test strip down into it without ceremony. There is a very long pause.
“How long before you can read the results?” I ask.
“Another”—she checks her watch—“four minutes and twenty seconds.”
We both keep staring at the cup of piss. There’s a clock ticking on the wall, and the longer we wait, the louder it sounds. The kid-on-a-road-trip urge to ask about the time again is almost overwhelming. I press my lips together to keep quiet, and we both just keep staring at the cup.
“You should drink more water,” Nurse Gumby says.
“Don’t be fucking weird,” I say, and she shrugs. We keep staring, and the clock keeps pounding onward, and I don’t really buy into the idea of an afterlife, but I’m pretty positive that this is what hell would be. Finally, after one more glance at the loudest clock in existence, Nurse Gumby turns the test kit so that she can read it properly.
“Negative for any of the controlled substances in this panel,” she announces. “Give me a moment, and I’ll get this all typed up for you and Mr. Bell.”
Five minutes later, I’m being handed a letter on Patton Military Academy stationery attesting to the results, and all the anxiety in my body has been replaced with a renewed feeling of impotent rage. I return to the guidance offices, scuffing the soles of my boots against the floor as loudly and obnoxiously as I can. Mr. Bell’s office door is still open, but I don’t actually make it through. Taped just below the letters spelling out his name is a single sheet of paper I hadn’t paid attention to on my way in, but now, I’m really wishing I had.
The sign-in sheet is a long list of first names and last initials, as though that’s enough to keep anyone’s presence here private in a school where everybody knows everybody else’s business. The lack of a complete last name sure as hell doesn’t stop me from finding four lines scattered throughout last week’s appointments, each one making my heart sink deeper and deeper into my stomach. I reach up and touch last Monday’s Declan C. — 5:15pm appointment notation, the first of a series of daily appointments.
“That’s confidential,” Mr. Bell says, loudly and firmly, the same way I talk to Omelette when I’m trying to get him to stop molesting other dogs at the park.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tape it to your office door, then,” I say. I let my hand fall back to my side and turn to meet Mr. Bell’s gaze again. “So, you’re the counselor Declan has been meeting with for the past week.”
“You know I can’t discuss another student with you, Garen,” he chides me.
“But you can discuss me with any dickhead who wanders into your office and says they’re worried about me?” I can feel my mouth twisting mockingly around those words, and I know I’m close to crossing a line with how I’m talking to a member of the faculty here, but I can’t stop myself. I feel hot all over with anger and embarrassment and the reckless urge to do something. Hit Bell, flip a desk, go back to Whitman Hall and shake a confession out of Declan, find out why the fuck he would tell a guidance counselor he thinks I’m going to relapse instead of just talking to me about.
Mr. Bell holds out a hand, and it takes me a few seconds to realize he wants the test results. I slap the paper down on his desk.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m clean,” I say.
“That’s great news,” he says, obviously lying through his fucking teeth.
“Yeah, I’m so sure you mean that,” I retort. “Next time you want to have a chat with a Whitman Hall headcase, pick somebody else. Ask Campbell about his mommy and daddy issues. Or ask Steven Ramsey why he and his goddamn disgusting dorm room haven’t been on an episode of Extreme Hoarders yet. Or ask Charlie Walczyk about his—”
I stop. I have to. This meeting is bad enough; I don’t want to sit through a repeat of the guidance session I had at Lakewood High last fall, after I blurted out the truth about my past in front of half the drama club because I was too mad to keep my mouth shut.
Mr. Bell’s attention is razor sharp now. “Go on, Mr. Anderson. What would you like me to ask Charles Walczyk about?”
That’s some Making a Murderer, leading question shit, if ever I heard some. I don’t know why he says Charlie’s name like that, like I’ve been caught in a lie. Maybe he heard about the brief fight we had during PT last week. Maybe the entire faculty knows about the detectives who were here last week.
Maybe Declan told him about Dave.
I snatch the paper back off the desk and turn towards the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mr. Bell move like he wants to grab the paper away from me and, finding me just out of reach, he says, “Please leave that here. I’d like to add it to your file.”
“Ask the nurse to print you another copy,” I say as I stuff the paper into my backpack.
“Mr. Anderson,” Mr. Bell says warningly, like there’s actually anything he can do to me. I shoot him a disgusted look and a hand gesture that should probably get me suspended, and before he can say a word to stop me, I’m out the door.
Putting in my earbuds and blasting Beartooth on my walk across campus gets me out of having to talk to anyone, but it’s just white noise. I can’t really hear the music, can’t think clearly enough to string a sentence together, can’t do anything except spiral deeper down into a pit of fury and embarrassment and confusion and unbearable fucking shame.
Seven months, three weeks, and three days of sobriety. And what the fuck has it gotten me? Drug tests in the school infirmary, and the guy I like telling his guidance counselor he’s worried about me.
And speak of the redheaded, about-to-get-his-ass-beat devil--
Declan is sitting on the floor outside of my AP Government classroom, but he stands when he sees me coming towards him. The Patton Military Academy student handbook states that students aren’t ever supposed to enter the academic buildings unless they’re in standard uniform, but Declan is wearing a pair of shorts and a sweat-dampened t-shirt, straight from the gym. He says something I can’t hear over my music. I stare at him. Impatience flickers over his features, and he tugs my earbuds out and repeats himself more firmly, “Taylor told me you got called in to see Bell.”
“Yeah. I think that’s probably what happens when you spend a week telling your guidance counselor that I’ve relapsed,” I say. I swing my backpack off my shoulder suddenly enough that Declan has to take a quick step backward to avoid getting hit with it. I yank the zipper open, crumple the paper from the guidance office in my fist, and thrust it out at him. He doesn’t take it, so I pin it against his chest with more and more pressure until he finally snatches it away from me. “He made me take a drug test, you fucking dick. Don’t you want to know the results? Aren’t you worried about me, Campbell?”
“No, I’m not,” he snaps. “And I don’t need to see this paper, I already know you’re sober. I didn’t tell him to drug test you. I didn’t even think he’d call you in for a meeting.”
My hand is still on Declan’s chest, and that just makes it easier for me to shove him. He’s built like brick wall, so he barely even shifts on his feet. That only makes me more pissed. “Then what the fuck was the point of all this? Is it because of what you walked in on, after that… that thing with the Walczyks on Parents’ Day? Are you, like—is this a punishment because I almost—”
The rest of the sentence crumbles in my mouth, and I look quickly away. It’s miserable enough knowing that I was low enough to hunt down Declan’s stash and cut a line of cocaine on his desk. I don’t need to rehash it in a hallway right before I’m supposed to take an exam.
“It’s not a punishment,” Declan says. “At least, not for you.”
I blink back around at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means,” he says, voice dropping low enough that I find myself leaning in without meaning to. “You can barely set foot in the state of Connecticut without Dave Walczyk trying to hunt you down in the streets, and that’s at least partly Charlie’s fault. The car crash sure as hell was. He nearly got you and your friend killed because he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut about where you were, and I can’t just forget that happened. If he wants to make New Haven dangerous for you, I’m gonna make damn sure Patton feels just as dangerous for him.”
What the fuck am I supposed to say to that? Half of me still wants to tell him he’s a piece of shit, and the other half of me wants to skip my AP Government exam so we can go jerk each other off in a broom closet somewhere. I settle for the midpoint, which turns out to be, “You can’t do this psycho revenge shit without telling me about it first.”
“I know,” Declan says with an abashed expression that I don’t buy for a second. I shove him semi-gently, just so he knows I’m onto him.
“You obviously don’t know, dude. You never have. You didn’t tell me you were going to pair up with Barrington for PT drills that time you wrenched his arm out of the socket for talking shit about Jamie’s parents. You didn’t tell me that I was supposed to be your alibi when you torched the Lexus. You didn’t tell me—you still haven’t told me what the fuck you’ve been doing with Bell. Why would Charlie give a shit if your guidance counselor thinks I’m going to relapse?”
“I already told you, I never said you were going to relapse. I told Bell that—” Declan cuts himself off abruptly, eyes over my shoulder. I twist around and see Taylor Lewis heading towards us, hands jammed in his pockets. He nods in acknowledgment, and Declan touches my forearm to bring my focus back around to him. “Come back to Whitman after your exam. We can go to my room, where we won’t be overheard, and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Promise,” I demand.
He rolls his eyes. “We’re not on a playground, Anderson.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me everything—not just today, but from now on, whenever you do something like this—or I’m not coming back to the dorm,” I say.
“Fine. I promise,” Declan relents.
“Fine,” I echo his snotty little attitude, “I’ll come.”
“Gross,” Taylor declares, only arriving at my side in time to catch the last words. He hitches his chin at Declan and says, “I found it last night after Steve went to sleep. I thought he was going to clutch it in his hand the whole night like a security blanket.”
“Would you be surprised?” Declan says.
Taylor snorts and pulls one hand out of his pocket, revealing a thin, metal cylinder with a single button on the side and a cartridge on one end. Steven’s missing dab pen. Declan takes it and slips it into the pocket of his gym shorts.
“You better give that back in a few days, or he’s going to go apeshit,” Taylor warns.
Declan shakes his head. “I don’t think we’ll have to wait that long. My guess would be this afternoon.”
He tilts his head towards me, like that means something. I guess it does, because Taylor grimaces knowingly and says, “That’s rough. You good, though?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I say, not knowing what else I can possibly offer to this exchange beyond annoyance at the fact that Taylor is clearly more involved with Declan’s plans than I am.
Like he’s trying to soothe my ego before I can go into full brat mode, Declan says, “You two go do your exam thing, I’ll see you after. Good luck.” And then, to my utter bewilderment, he leans in and presses a brief but deliberate kiss to my lips.
“Weird,” Taylor announces, which is at least a slight improvement over the earlier gross. Before I can say anything else, he lets himself into the exam room, and Declan heads off down the hall, Steven’s pen hidden in his pocket.
The exam goes as well as I expected it to. I fly through the multiple choice questions, most of which are things we’ve already talked to death in class and require zero thought. The essay portions are a little more grueling, if only because I don’t actually give a shit about any of this. Still, I think I manage to put together an argument that’ll get me a decent score, and ninety minutes later, Taylor and I are both on our way back to Whitman Hall.
The rest of the squad has foregone lunch in the dining hall and ordered pizza in our absence. I’ve barely taken two steps into the common room before Declan piles a few slices onto a paper plate and stands.
“My room?” he suggests.
“You’re not eating with us?” Javi says, sounding outraged.
“I think they’re gonna do some sex shit with the pizza,” Steven says, still wearing this morning’s scowl. I’m fucking glad Taylor stole his dab pen, honestly. He doesn’t deserve it.
Declan grabs my arm and tows me down the hallway, as Javi yells after us, “If you burn your dick with melted cheese, I’m not taking you to the hospital!”
“Sometimes I miss living in the dorms,” I sigh.
“That’s probably something you should talk to your shrink about,” Declan says. He lets us into his room, closes the door behind us, and locks it. He sets the plate down on his desk and gestures for me to help myself, but I just dump my backpack on the ground and sit on the edge of his bed.
“So. What’s the plan?” I ask.
As much as I may have wanted to drown Declan in a lake this morning, I have to give him credit now. Finally bullied into agreeing to tell me everything, he seems inclined to keep his promise. He sits down in his desk chair, tips it onto its back legs, and says, “The morning after your car got totaled, I made an appointment to talk to Bell. He’s my assigned counselor, and he’s basically fucking useless, but I had to work with him a lot during my West Point application process, so he thinks I’m an upstanding citizen and an all-around nice young man.”
“Sure. You’re a walking, talking Precious Moments figurine, halo and all,” I say dryly.
“As far as most of the administrators here are concerned, I am,” Declan says. “Sometimes, that works to my advantage. So, I met with Bell, and I told him I was having problems with some members of the squad because I thought one of them was putting other people in dangerous situations. That was all I’d give him the first day. He tried to get names or details out of me, and I acted like I’d gotten skittish and cut the meeting short by a few minutes. The next day, I came back, full of apologies, and ‘reluctantly admitted’”—he crooks his fingers in quotation marks—“that someone in Whitman Hall was dealing drugs.”
“Yeah, Dec,” I say slowly. “You.”
“Me?” Declan gasps, flattening a hand to his own chest and looking so genuinely scandalized that I might buy it, if I didn’t know him. He drops his hand and the ruse at once. “I didn’t tell him that, dumbass. As far as Mr. Bell knows, I’ve never had so much as a drop of beer in my life, and I’m not stupid enough to have left anything in this room that could lead him to believe otherwise. When I came back for the third session, he’d clearly done some kind of research. He started asking me about the squad by name, even though I hadn’t gotten that specific until then. Mostly, he wanted to talk about you.”
I make a face and finally reach for one of the slices of pizza. It’s kind of cold, but I fold it in half and take a large bite anyway. After I swallow, I say, “Not surprising. The school has my medical records, including everything from rehab. Did he think I was the big bad dealer?”
“He got maybe two words of that question out of his mouth before I shut him down,” Declan says flatly. “You’re sober, and I told him as much. You haven’t done all this work so that some dickhead counselor can accuse you of dealing drugs you don’t take out of a dorm you don’t live in.”
My second bite of pizza feels like it’s gluing my mouth shut. I force myself to swallow, but my throat is too raw for me to say anything, so I just nod, hoping Declan understands what his words mean to me after that shitty meeting this morning.
“It was obvious that he cared more about figuring out who he could bust for dealing than he did about anything else. He kept asking these leading questions, and over sessions three and four, I started leaving breadcrumbs for him to follow. I didn’t say who he should suspect, but I did say enough to tell him who he shouldn’t suspect, until there was only one person left who he could guess I was talking about.”
I dump the rest of the pizza slice back on the plate and say impatiently, “That’s fine, except he should suspect every bitch in this building, Dec. Everybody on this floor must have half a dozen illegal substances hidden in their rooms, and the people in the security office get thorough during room searches. If you gave them enough reason to suspect that someone is dealing out of here, you’re about to get every guy in this dorm expelled.”
“Short of first-degree murder in the middle of the quad, there’s nothing anybody in this school could do to get expelled this close to graduation,” Declan says. “The administrators don’t want the drama or the scandal. But finding a massive stash of drugs in someone’s dorm room is something they’d have to report to the colleges that person applied to, and that probably means acceptances are going to get rescinded.”
Every inch of my skin feels like it’s overheated and buzzing.
“Where is Charlie going this fall?” I ask.
“Yale,” Declan says. “At least, that’s what he thinks right now. I’ll be surprised if they still want him, after Patton tells them what he gets up to in his dorm room.”
“Declan,” I breathe.
“Fuck Charlie.” Declan’s voice is low enough to almost be a snarl right now. “Fuck Dave, too. They don’t get to turn the entire city of New Haven into a landmine for you. We’re taking it back from them.”
I make another desperate noise that might be Declan’s name, and I reach for him, but I don’t get to do anything more than clench the collar of his shirt in my fist before the door bangs open and Javi spills in.
“Uh, hey, sorry to interrupt,” he says, “except not really, ‘cause the dorm monitors just came upstairs and told us all to get ready for room searches. So, I guess, put your lube away, unless you want it confiscated.”
Declan’s whiskey-brown eyes are practically glittering with excitement. He stands, pulls me to my feet, and nudges me towards the door. Right before I clear the frame, he leans in to say quietly in my ear, “Be cool, okay?”
“I’m the fucking coolest,” I say, and he laughs.
Dorm searches are always a pain in the ass, especially since the dorm monitors expect us all to be present for them. Everyone stands against the wall directly outside their rooms, one person on each side of the door frame, and we all get to watch as the campus rent-a-cops make their way from room to room, searching every viable hiding spot for drugs or alcohol or weapons.
When I lived in the dorms, I liked to have a little fun with it, if I heard about a search before it happened. One time, I filled my pillowcase with three dozen bags of Haribo gummy bears and insisted that the crinkle of plastic was the only way I could fall asleep. Another time, I printed out reams of tentacle porn and stuffed it under Jamie’s mattress so he’d get written up for possession of sexually explicit materials.
Now, I just hover in the middle of the hallway while everyone else lines up, then bound up to the first security officer I see. “Hey. I don’t actually, I was just visiting a friend. Can I go?”
“Are you a student at this school?” the officer asks. I nod, and he points to the wall across from Declan and Javi’s room. “You can wait with everyone else. Did you bring a bag with you?”
“Yeah. It’s in my friends’ room,” I say.
“Alright. You can point it out when we get there, and it will need to be searched as well.”
Shit. Really hoping I don’t have my switchblade buried in the bottom of my backpack right now.
I move to the wall where indicated and find myself standing between Taylor and his next-door-neighbor, Ryan Marten. I nudge Ryan with my elbow and say, “Think they’re going to confiscate all your sex toys?”
“I think the closest thing I have to a sex toy in this dorm is attached to you,” Ryan says, his eyes flickering down to my crotch. I open my mouth to retort, but he cuts me off in a voice dropped to a murmur, “I got the warning this morning and moved everything worth confiscating out to my car. Believe me, I owe Campbell a favor, just like everyone else on this floor.”
I look quickly over at Declan, who is directly opposite me, but he’s watching with mild interest as the first rooms on the floor get turned over by the security officers. They don’t find anything good. A couple copies of Maxim Magazine, some snacks purloined from the dining hall, a stolen street sign. They’re all things we’re not technically supposed to have in the dorms, but nothing that’ll even earn anyone a detention. No liquor. No cigarettes or vapes. No drugs, prescription or otherwise. None of the Whitman Hall staples.
The same goes for the second pair of rooms, and the third. Then, they get to Ryan’s room.
“What is this?” one of the security officers demands, stepping into the hall and brandishing a bottle of Rush. I try to hide my snort of laughter in my sleeve, but I don’t think I succeed.
“Leather cleaner. It says so on the bottle,” Ryan says blandly.
The officer frowns at him, then me, then brings the bottle closer to peer at the label. “It also says isopropyl nitrite mixture. That doesn’t sound like something you should have in a school dormitory.”
“Poppers are totally legal in New York, actually,” I offer. Ryan stomps on my foot. I can’t feel it through my boot, but I can tell he was planning to ride that ‘leather cleaner’ train as far as it would take him. As an apology, I add, “The student handbook doesn’t even mention them. He’s not doing anything against the rules by keeping it in his room.”
The officer gives me a suspicious look, but returns to the room anyway.
“Thank you,” Ryan says primly.
I nudge him with my elbow again and linger at the point of contact. “You really want to thank me? Keep that bottle at the ready and invite me over after the rent-a-cops clear out.”
Quick as a flash of lightning, Declan shifts his weight to one foot and kicks out at me across the hall, almost nailing me in the balls with the toe of his boot. I swear and dodge it as best I can, accidentally crashing into Ryan’s side. Ryan starts to whine, but the officer barks at us to knock it off, and I end up just glowering across the hall at Declan, who is smirking at me.
Jealous, I mouth at him.
Bite me, is his silent reply.
I tip my head to indicate the ongoing search and mouth, After.
“Oh,” Ryan says loudly. I look over and find him staring back and forth between me and Declan, his face blooming with shocked delight. “Oh, it’s like that.”
“Shut the fuck up, Marten,” I warn, but he isn’t even paying attention to me anymore. He’s just grinning at Declan, who is staring stubbornly back at him in silence.
“So it’s like… that,” Ryan repeats, cocking his hip to the side. A stern look from the security officer quiets him for a few seconds, but then he just shuffles down the wall closer to me and whispers, “Declan Campbell enjoying my sloppy seconds. Who would have thought?”
“More like you and Campbell both enjoying James Goldwyn’s sloppy twenty-ninths,” I hiss back. “Now shut the fuck up, Ryan. I’m serious.”
He surveys my expression, and the longer he examines me, the more his smirk starts to melt away, until he’s left with something approaching a sulk. “Well, if you actually have feelings about it, it’s not funny. Whatever.” He mimes zipping his mouth shut and turns his attention to inspecting his nails.
The security officers clear the rooms they’re on and move to the next pair. On one side, Declan and Javi; on the other, Taylor and Steven. I hear an intake of breath from somewhere to my right, then a pointed cough from someone else.
I stare past Declan into the doorway of his room. He’s not stupid. He wouldn’t set this up if he knew it would come back to bite him or anyone he likes. It’s hard to believe that, though, when I can see one of the officers reaching up into the top shelf of his closet, where I know there’s normally an unregistered handgun and a bag full of drugs.
The officer pulls down the camera bag and carries it to the bed, where he begins unloading the side pockets onto the bedspread. Two weeks ago, there were film canisters of pills. Now, there are just extra memory cards and a few USB cables. The camera bag is replaced, the rest of the space searched, including my backpack, and the room cleared. A few seconds later, an officer steps through the doorway between Taylor, who is gazing impassively at the floor, and Steven, who is sweating through his shirt, and declares their room check complete as well. I watch as Taylor’s eyes flicker to meet Declan’s, but neither of them says anything.
A movement further down the hallway catches my attention. Charlie is shifting in place as the officers enter his and Sam’s room, and his brow is furrowed with what could be confusion or nerves. Either way, I don’t think I can watch.
One of the few good things about being so completely and utterly fucked in the head is that it’s easy for me to check out when things get bad. In my mind, I’m not even standing in this hallway anymore. I’m somewhere happy and fun and stress-free, and I’m surrounded by people I like instead of fake cops and my rapist’s kid brother. I’m… on a sailboat cutting through the waves at Jamie’s summer house in Martha’s Vineyard. The air smells like suntan lotion and salt water, and when I wobble my way across the deck to plant a quick kiss on my best friend as he steers, his mouth tastes like champagne and sunshine.
“We’re going to need another pair of eyes in here,” one of the cops calls, and two more officers abandon their search of one room to join the search of Charlie and Sam’s.
But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not here. I’m in Ben’s parents’ backyard, chasing his little sisters through piles of fallen leaves. Their sweet, old Golden Retriever, Lucy, is wuffing at us from under a nearby tree. I scoop Izzy up in my arms and heave her gently into a mountain of leaves so enormous, she sinks almost completely out of sight, shrieking with glee.
“Whose room is this?” an officer asks loudly. “I’m going to need both of these boys in here, now.”
But I’m still not here. I’m in the kitchen of my mom’s apartment, fully butchering a recipe for hamantaschen that she got off Pinterest. She’s trying to convince me through her laughter that our fuck-ups are fine, this is just a practice batch, and we’ll definitely have it figured out before Purim next week. Then she’s beating the air with a baking sheet, trying frantically to waft the clouds of smoke away from her fire alarm before the beeping starts. I’m googling best bakeries upper west side ny and eating apricot jam with a spoon.
“That’s not mine,” Charlie blurts out. “None of this is mine, someone planted all of this.”
“Make a call down to faculty housing,” one of the officers instructs a dorm monitor. “Tell Sergeant Smitth that we’re going to need him to meet us in the security office as soon as possible for a disciplinary matter.”
“No. I’m not getting disciplined for something I didn’t do,” Charlie snaps.
The coldness in his voice is what brings me back. I’m not on a boat, I’m not in the leaves, I’m not in an apartment. I’m here in this dorm, listening to Charlie Walczyk spilling icicles and broken glass from his lips, in a voice so much like his older brother’s.
The officers don’t give a shit about what he has to say, though. One of them is steering him down the hall, while another guides a shell-shocked Sam after him. Two stay at the door to the room, one of them muttering a question about how they’re going to collect so much contraband without going back down to their office for more bags.
When he gets level with Declan, Charlie plants his feet and refuses to let the officers nudge him any further down the hall. “You did this. All of it. You put that shit in my room, you got them to do a raid.”
“Me?” Declan says, and it’s such a perfect imitation of his feigned shock from twenty minutes ago that I almost laugh. But this time, instead of dropping it, he blinks at the officers with doe eyes and says, “That’s insane. You all just searched my room. You know I don’t have anything like that.”
“Yeah, because you put it all in my fucking room!” Charlie says. The coldness in his voice is gone now, replaced by something closer to hysteria. “Come on, tell them it’s not mine. This isn’t funny, Dec, this is—are you trying to ruin my life? Are you serious?”
“Enough. Move,” the officer at his back commands, but Charlie lunges forward to shove Declan back against the wall.
“All this shit because I don’t like your fucking boyfriend?” he spits. Then, like saying even that much is enough to remind him of who his real enemy is, he swings around and pins me under a look of pure loathing. “Fuck you, Anderson. Next time you go begging my brother to take you back, I hope he really does fucking kill you.”
“Charlie!” Sam yelps, at the same time that Javi says, “What the actual fuck, man,” and Declan pushes off the wall, muscles wound tight and eyes on fire.
The closest dorm monitor leaps between them and says, “Stop it! Everyone, back to your rooms, now! You, day student.” He points at me. “Go home. The rest of you, in your rooms!”
The officers finally manage to drag Charlie bodily from the hallway, but I can hear him protesting all the way down the stairs. The dorm monitors are still trying to get everybody back into their rooms, but there’s no way that’s happening right now. People are clustering together, chattering excitedly about what just went down. I haven’t moved from the exact spot I was standing when Charlie last spoke to me--I hope he really does fucking kill you—and I don’t know that I’ll be ready to leave anytime soon.
Declan, Javi, Taylor, and Steven close ranks around me.
“Think they’ll get kicked out?” Javi wonders idly.
“Too close to graduation,” Declan says. “Besides, Charlie’s parents are too rich. If the Headmaster starts threatening expulsion, they’ll just buy him off.”
Taylor snorts. “Who wants to take bets on whether there will suddenly be a Walczyk Reading Room in the library next fall?”
“I’m glad I’ll be off campus, then,” I say. Maybe I mumble it. It’s hard to tell; my whole body feels a little numb, and that includes my lips.
Declan moves as if to put an arm around me, then seems to think better of it. He leans a forearm against my shoulder instead and asks, “You okay?”
“I’m the fucking coolest,” I say again, and his mouth twitches into a small smile.
Steven clears his throat. “So, when do I get my vape back?”
There are exactly four restaurants in the entire city of New Haven where Stohler will agree to eat lunch, a different three where she will agree to eat dinner, and one where she will consume any breakfast besides a cup of black coffee. When I first pointed this out back in October, she informed me that she was a picky eater and pinned me under a narrow-eyed stare that promised there would be slashed tires in my future if I ever brought it up again. It took another month for me to realize she doesn’t eat meat, which seemed like the kind of thing she could have just told me. It took another three months and one moderately awkward conversation with Ben before I realized there was more to it than that.
Today, the three of us—me, Stohler, and Ben—are sitting at a picnic table outside a gastrodive on Elm Street, and Stohler is studying her menu with more care than I’ve managed to muster for my AP Government and Politics notes, even though my exam is in two days.
“If I get fried pickles with vegan ranch, will you guys have some?” she asks.
“No, because I’m getting my own, with real ranch,” I say. “And stuffed jalapenos. And wings. And probably a burger. But I’m sure Ben will have some pickles.”
“I will,” Ben agrees slowly, “but I am equally suspicious of the vegan ranch. I thought ranch dressing was made with some combination of buttermilk, mayonnaise, sour cream, and spices. That’s almost entirely dairy.”
“This one is probably made with, like… almond milk and cashew cream and a bunch of other things that I’m supposed to pretend aren’t just nuts ground up in water,” I say.
Stohler scoffs. “You drink gallons of coffee every day, and that’s just beans ground up in water. Anyway, don’t talk shit about my food.”
A waiter with a Pokemon half-sleeve and a bridge piercing appears at the end of our table, spares a micro-second glance at me and Ben, and then says to the deep V of Stohler’s thrift store top, “Hi. Can I get you guys some drinks to start?”
Stohler’s eyes narrow. She unrolls her silverware from its napkin, picks up the knife, and taps the very tip of the blade against the rim of her glass. “We already have drinks. See?”
The waiter blinks at Stohler’s tits, then her face, and finally at the knife in her hand. He clears his throat and quickly redirects his attention to the middle of the table. “Right. Sorry. Uh, what else can I get for you today?”
Ben orders some fish tacos, which is normal enough, but then the waiter looks to Stohler, and she says, “I’ll have the roasted beet reuben, please.”
I stare at her. “Are you having a stroke? Reubens are made with roast beef, not beets.”
“Can you read?” Stohler asks, holding up her menu and tapping one of her purple acrylics against the line that says, yep—roasted beet reuben. “It’s vegetarian.”
“It’s gross,” I decide. I look back up at the waiter. “Can I get a Cuban sandwich with extra mustard? And we’re gonna do two orders of fried pickles, one with vegan ranch and one with good ranch, and fried jalapenos, and,” I glance back at the vegan options on the menu for something else that’s Stohler-friendly, “buffalo cauliflower. Wait. I want fried zucchini sticks, too.”
“Right. You want the apps first, or with the meal?” the waiter asks.
“First, please,” Stohler answers in the voice of someone who will eat half my zucchini and most of my cauliflower, but would never have ordered her own. The waiter leaves to put the order in, and Stohler turns her attention back to Ben next to her. “So, how’d the big apartment talk with Alex go?”
“Perfectly,” Ben says flatly. There’s a beat in which Stohler and I exchange wary glances, and then Ben huffs a laugh and amends, with something other than his usual monotone, “No, really. It went great. I barely even had a chance to raise the subject before he cut me off and said that some of his friends from SCSU want to get a house together right at the edge of campus in the fall. He’s going to be living with three or four other guys, plus one guy’s girlfriend.”
Stohler grabs the straw out of her cocktail and starts stabbing it into the glass to break the ice apart. “That’s cool, but I already told my roommates-from-hell that I’m moving out at the end of the month, so I hope he has a plan for where he’s gonna stay this summer. I’m not above rallying the girls at work to help me dump all his shit in the middle of the park. We did it for Veronika when she found out her fiancé was cheating on her with his cousin.”
“You mean cheating on her with her cousin,” I correct, and Stohler grimaces.
“Bitch, I wish I meant that.”
“You don’t need to rally anyone,” Ben says before I can ask any of the questions I suddenly find myself with. “As soon as exams are over, Alex is moving to spend the summer back in Lakewood, at his dad’s place.”
I raise my eyebrows and clarify, “The homophobic drunk who disappears for days at a time with no warning?” Ben hums his agreement, and I shake my head. “Right. Sounds like a blast.”
“He says that living together hasn’t been good for our friendship.”
“Know what else wasn’t good for your friendship?” Stohler asks, stabbing a piece of ice so viciously that she almost upends her glass. “That time he punched you in the face and told your dad you were a slut.”
“Alex can get fucked,” I agree.
Even after everything, I’m still expecting Ben to offer a half-hearted defense of his former best friend. He sees good in everyone, whether it’s there or not, and god knows I’ve benefited from his overly forgiving nature on more than one occasion. But instead, Ben squares his shoulders and says, “Honestly, I think he’s leaving so soon out of self-preservation. Last week, James left him a two-minute voicemail explaining that he has absolutely no intention of continuing to reserve hotel rooms when he comes to visit, that we will be”—he slips into an only slightly exaggerated version of Jamie’s genteel Southern drawl—“sharing a bed and doing whatever we goddamn please in it, no matter how thin the walls in that apartment are”—he drops back into his own crisp New England tones—“and that if Alex even looks twice at me in his presence, Jamie will not hesitate to beat his ass right there in the middle of our living room.”
“That could be fun to watch,” Stohler muses. “Who do you think would win?”
“Jamie,” I say immediately. “That refined gentleman schtick goes out the window the second he gets really pissed. He’s scrappier than he looks. Plus, I told you he shot a guy once, right?”
Ben rolls his eyes. “For the sake of my security deposit, I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. Alex has final exams this week, same as me. I’m hoping he’ll have most of his shit moved out by the time I get home from New York on Saturday night.”
“You’re still coming up on Thursday, though, right?” I say.
“James and I are on Omelette duty while you and Travis go to Lakewood for the school play, yes,” Ben confirms.
I do some incredibly half-hearted jazz hands. I’m grateful that they’ve agreed to dogsit for the night, even though it means taking time away from their presumably naked celebration of Ben finishing his freshman year at Yale on Wednesday, but I’d be lying my ass off if I pretended that I’m looking forward to returning to Lakewood for the opening night of Wizard of Oz. Miranda and Annabelle have been texting me for the last three days, soliciting promise after promise that I won’t bail on them, and Nate has been liking more of my instagram posts than usual, and I think they’ll actually be upset if I don’t show up to claim the tickets they reserved for me.
Except for Joss, who I can only guess is hoping I die in a fire before Thursday night.
“So, do you get a dogsitter on the weekends while you’re at work?” Ben asks me.
I shake my head. “No. Travis is usually home before I leave the house, and I’m still only working Fridays and Saturdays. But I’m going to talk to somebody at the club soon, see if I can take on more days after I graduate in a few weeks. I’m going to need the money.” I peer into my glass of water at the lemon wedge that has sunk below the ice, like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world. Really, I just don’t want to look at either of my friends as I say, “Last week, Travis told me he wants to move into the city when our lease ends in July and get a one-bedroom apartment.”
Ben and Stohler both wait for me to offer more of a story to go along with that sentence, and when I don’t, I glance up just long enough to see them exchange a brief, but significant look. Finally, Ben carefully points out, “You seem less than thrilled by that prospect.”
I make a vague noise of assent. Stohler asks, “Do you not want to move into the city, or do you not want to get a one-bedroom?”
From the minute I found out my dad wanted me to leave Patton and come to Lakewood with him, I wanted to move to the city. From the minute I kissed Travis McCall, I wanted to share his bed every night for the rest of my life. I don’t know how to explain that, now that I can have both, I’m not sure I want either. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
“Living in New York is expensive,” I say quietly. “Right now, my parents are paying my rent and all my bills, but my mom says that stops at graduation, unless I agree to go to college in the fall. I can keep living with her or my dad, if I need to, but they’re not going to pay for me to live somewhere else.”
“And you’re not making enough at your new job to afford rent?” Ben asks.
The embarrassment of the truth overwhelms me so much, I have to close my eyes before I can make myself spit it out. “I’m not making anything at my new job.”
Neither of them responds, and I can’t tell if it’s because they’re too surprised to react, or because the waiter has arrived with a tray full of appetizers. As he unloads them, I find myself thinking—maybe for the first time in my life—that I ordered way too fucking much food. I’ve got four plates of various fried vegetables, and a knot in my throat that is going to make it impossible for me to get anything down.
Once the waiter has been thanked and sent on his way, Stohler leans in and assures me, “There’s a learning curve to any job, especially one that doesn’t come with a set hourly wage. Have you seen your earnings increase as you learn the ropes over the past two weeks?”
I shake my head. Now that I’m finally talking about this, now that I see that Stohler’s brow is furrowed like she’s determined to help me figure this shit out and that Ben is just nodding along like he gets exactly what a nightmare it is to be fucking broke, I can’t stop myself from blurting it all out. “Cashing out eats up at least a hundred right off the bat. I pay sixty to the club, and I tip the bouncers and DJ like you said. And there are so many more expenses than I thought to factor in—gassing up my car to get there and back, parking fees, maintaining this.” I lean back in my seat to gesture at my body. “Those waxing appointments cost a fucking mint, and my buzzcut has grown out enough that I know I have to start getting regular haircuts, and Jamie finally convinced me to develop a skincare regimen, and do you have any idea how insanely expensive a single pair of booty shorts can be?”
“Yes, I do,” Stohler says seriously, and Ben tries not to smile as he adds, “I don’t, but I remain sympathetic to your situation.”
I try to slump down in my seat, forgetting it’s a picnic table bench until I almost eat shit on the sidewalk. I end up propping an elbow up on the table and starting to pick at my zucchini sticks. “I’m not kidding when I say I’m making nothing at this job. And I can’t tell how much of it is the club versus how much is just me sucking at this.” I scoop up a few sticks and drop them on the small plate in front of Stohler. She eats half of one, then washes it down with a long sip from her cocktail. I ask, “Is this what stripping was like when you first got into it?”
“You want the truth?” she asks. I nod, and she sets her glass down again. “I’ve never made that little. Even when I started, I was pulling in a few hundred a night. That’s not a dig at you, though. Remember, we’re doing similar jobs, but we’re not doing the same job. I make more during a lapdance than you do because I’m getting more naked than you are, and I make more doing a stage set than you make in your cage because I’m doing a full solo dance routine. People who come into your club are there to dance and drink, and they might tip you as an afterthought, but the people who come into my club are there to see, you know—” She shows me both her palms and pulses her hands on each word as she declares, “Live! Nude! Girls!”
Ben shrugs. “Plus, you’re an incredibly attractive blond woman, and a fat bank account is God’s way of making up for the fact that you get catcalled on the sidewalk every time you go to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.”
“That, too,” Stohler agrees. “Besides, I started pole-dancing between my junior and senior years of college, but I didn’t start stripping as a job until my final semester. By the time I got into that, I was already comfortable with the performative aspects of the job. You’re still getting your sea legs for the most part.”
“Why did you start pole-dancing? Did you already know you wanted to do it for cash after you graduated?” I ask.
“No, it was sort of a, like… mental illness slash trauma thing,” Stohler says, fiddling with one of her earrings and looking away from me casually, like that’s the type of thing she can say without either me or Ben expecting a more elaborate explanation.
I wait. Ben waits. Stohler stares stubbornly out into the middle of Elm Street, seemingly content to let the rest of this meal pass in absolute silence. The tattooed waiter reappears to take our plates, sees that we’ve eaten three zucchini sticks and a small handful of fried pickle slices between the three of us, and stomps back into the bar with an exasperated sigh. I eat one buffalo cauliflower bite, put another on Ben’s plate, and a third on Stohler’s. They both eat instead of saying anything, though Ben is staring over at Stohler next to him the entire time he chews.
Unsurprisingly, I’m the one who snaps and breaks the silence. I kick Stohler gently under the table and say, “Hey, bitch. In case you haven’t noticed, our friendship was built on oversharing about mental illness slash trauma things. And if I had to tell you all mine, you’ve gotta tell me yours.”
“You don’t have to tell us anything you’re not comfortable with,” Ben corrects me.
I give him the finger and say to Stohler, “Yeah, actually, you do. You think I was comfortable telling you all about my cocaine addiction and the times I literally sold my ass for drug money? Tit for tat, trauma for trauma.”
Stohler finally turns to face me again and wiggles her perfectly arched brows. “Sounds like a party. Someday we’ll have to have a heart-to-heart about the abortion I had when I was nineteen.”
“Someday can be now, if you start talking,” I say.
Stohler leans back and rolls her head in a circle, like she’s got to limber up for this conversation. She blows out an enormous breath and begins, “Okay, fine. So. My third year of college was a mess. The guy I was dating sucked. He was fucking half my friends, who also sucked. I had no idea how to balance dance as schoolwork, dance as a hobby, and dance as a career, and the pressure of that—”
She makes a prompting gesture, and Ben and I supply together, “—sucked.”
“Precisely. But my body was the only thing I felt like I had a real handle on. What I put in it, what I made it do, what it looked like. So, I sort of started, you know… starving myself. Well, started isn’t the most accurate word. I’d been doing ballet since I was a toddler, and I was a cheerleader in high school, so I was pretty entrenched in the fun and exciting world of body image issues and eating disorders. But it kind of blew up that year. And I got really sick. And then my parents came to see me in New York, right before the end of the semester, and the shit hit the fan.”
“Yeah,” I say quietly, “I get that.”
The matching expressions of quiet panic and devastation my parents wore the first weekend they came to see me in rehab have been seared into my brain for almost eleven months. It isn’t hard to picture another, blonder couple from Massachusetts looking at their needle-thin daughter the same way.
Stohler nods at me as if she’s grateful for my understanding, and continues, “Instead of staying in the city for the summer, like I usually did, my parents made me go home to Worcester and start seeing a counselor. I was too tired to argue, so I agreed. The counselor told me to leave my shitty boyfriend and cut off my shitty friends, and I agreed to that, too. But then everyone started telling me that I should take a leave of absence from school, and I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t an option, as far as I was concerned. Dancing was all I had ever wanted to do, and I had sacrificed my body and my happiness and my fucking sanity to be the best dancer I thought I could be. I couldn’t let that be for nothing.”
The conversation triggers something in her, and she frowns down at the spread of food between the three of us. She picks up a fork and starts spearing vegetables, moving them from the shared plates to her own. In the end, she has a nice little pile of cauliflower bites and zucchini sticks and fried pickles. She starts to make her way through the food, taking bites between sentences, but never abandoning the story entirely.
“The house was kind of a warzone that summer. The basement had always been my studio space, but they moved in all these storage boxes and old furniture so I couldn’t practice. Family dinners were mandatory, and I wasn’t allowed to be alone after meals, just so my parents and brothers could be sure I wasn’t throwing up. I couldn’t go out alone because they didn’t trust me not to go for a jog. And come on, you know me. I fought that shit viciously. I’d sneak out in the middle of the night and practice ballet on the back deck, until they realized what I was doing. My younger brother, Tyler…” She pauses and coughs, but I can’t tell if it’s the name or the food that’s stuck in her throat. She swallows several times, takes a deep breath, and tries again. “Tyler moved into my bedroom and slept in a sleeping bag on the floor in front of the door so that I couldn’t get out without waking him. We were all so angry at each other all the time, and I was so sure that a summer of this would ruin my dancing and get me kicked out of school in my final year. I hated being sick, but I hated my family more for trying to make me get better.”
I have to look away. There’s a sharp pinch behind my eyes, like I might be about to cry, but I don’t want to interrupt Stohler’s story, not when it feels so familiar to me. I know all too well the bone-deep resentment it’s possible to feel for anyone who loves you enough to want you to stop slowly killing yourself.
“One day, my mom dragged me out of the house for an afternoon of errands, ‘cause I couldn’t be left home by myself. We stopped at a post office, and I begged out of waiting in line with her because standing still for too long made me dizzy. When I got outside, I realized that the post office happened to be in the same shopping plaza as a dance studio, so I booked it straight over there. I was so fucking stir-crazy, it could have been a kiddie hip-hop class, and I would’ve eaten that shit up.”
“I’m going to go ahead and guess that it wasn’t, though,” I say.
“If it was, that would be a wicked weird segue in a story about pole-dancing, wouldn’t it?” Stohler says, and Ben makes a face. “Anyway, there wasn’t a class going on at the time, but there was an instructor who was working on a routine of her own. I was captivated. She was beautiful and graceful, and when she pulled herself up onto the pole and started to work on her aerials… shit. I’d never seen anything like that. She was so strong, and suddenly, I wanted that more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. More than my shitty boyfriend and shitty friends, more than my life in New York, more than ballet. More than being thin. All I wanted was to be as powerful as that woman on the pole.
My mom found me a few minutes later and started herding me back out to the car. I told her that if I couldn’t do ballet, I wanted to try this, and my mom scoffed—not because it was pole-dancing, she doesn’t give a shit about that. We Stohlers are a fully sex-positive family. But my mom pointed at the pole, at this woman lifting herself up and spinning around it with nothing more than a hooked elbow and a locked hip supporting her entire body weight, and she said, ‘Be serious, Lindsey. Even if we did let you sign up for a class here, you wouldn’t be able to do that. You aren’t strong enough right now.’”
“Well, shit,” I say.
Stohler’s answering smile is sharp. “Exactly. Don’t tell me what to do. So, in the course of a ten-minute car ride back to the house, I got my mom to make me a deal: I’d give up ballet and contemporary and gymnastics and all that other shit, but the day I proved that I was physically strong enough to get myself up on the pole and support my own weight for at least thirty seconds, I would get to sign myself up for classes.”
“How long did it take you to get there?” Ben asks.
“Six weeks,” Stohler answers. “I practiced on a street light on the block, which the neighbors fucking hated—looking out their front windows and seeing this skinny idiot trying to climb her way up a hot metal lamppost every afternoon for half the summer. But I realized I needed to build muscle to have any shot at doing this, so I finally agreed to see a dietitian and committed to a new meal plan. Ate a little bit, gained a little bit, cried a little bit. Even once I was able to lift myself up, it hurt like a motherfucker. You can’t grip a pole properly when your body is more bone than muscle and fat. So, I had to keep going. Ate a little bit more, gained a little bit more, cried a little bit more. But I got there in the end. I made it up the pole, I stayed there, I took my classes, I practiced, and eventually, I was able to do exactly what I saw that instructor doing on the first day.”
My friendship with Stohler isn’t really built on talking about our emotions and trading compliments, but right now, all I can think to blurt out is, “You’re such a bad bitch.”
She slaps a hand down on the picnic table, almost smacking the few remaining fried pickles, and says, “Exactly. And when I’m dancing, I feel like a bad bitch. Stripping is just”—she waves a hand dismissively—“a job. I like it, and it makes some serious coin, but pole is the part I really care about. It makes me feel powerful and sexy and free, like I’m the absolute best, coolest version of myself. I’m proud of my body, but it’s not about being thin anymore. It’s about being physically able to do what I do, because anybody who can get up on a pole or”—she gestures to me now—“in a cage, on a platform, fucking wherever. Anybody who can do that is a bad bitch, Garen. And when you first got into this job, I kind of hoped it would make you feel like that, too.”
The waiter returns to clear the appetizer plates and lay out our entrees, and I’m grateful for the distraction. The end of Stohler’s story and the arrival of the meal means I have a few minutes in which I can shovel fries and a sandwich into my mouth instead of having to actually respond.
The truth is, my body doesn’t always feel like it’s mine anymore. I sometimes think that I’ve broken off little pieces of it and left them scattered all over the state. A handful of pieces in the house on Maple Street—one that’s forever the little spoon in Travis’s bed, fully-clothed and respectably chaste, never asking for more than he feels like giving; one piece lying broken and bloody on the floor of my old bedroom, right where Dave left me. Pieces that I left in the LRC, taking supervised drug tests in bathroom stalls, being prodded by doctors to see how damaged I am, staring up at the ceiling in a bedroom with no door because I’m on suicide watch. Pieces on the stage in the Lakewood High auditorium, where I put on a costume and slicked my hair back like someone told me to and sang someone else’s songs, where everyone called me a different name and I kissed Christine because it was in the script.
From the day I first moved to Lakewood to the day I left, my body didn’t really feel like something I had ownership of, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to claim it now, just because I moved back to New York.
“I want that,” I say quietly. “I used to feel like that all the time, back when I was still just this… this wild little monster running around Patton with Jamie. I was confident and fun and hot, and I was so fucking happy, and I don’t really feel like that often.”
“Do you feel like that ever?” Ben asks. “Now that you’re back at Patton, out of LHS and all the associated baggage, I mean. Does it help?”
I have a sudden flash of being in the front seat of a cop car, my hands tight on the steering wheel, red and blue lights casting everything into primary color chaos. My heart pounding in my chest like there’s a wild animal stuck in my ribcage, trying to get out. Glancing up at the rear view mirror and seeing Declan staring at me from the backseat like I’m the strangest and most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his life.
“I feel like that sometimes,” I admit.
“That’s a start,” Stohler says encouragingly.
I shrug and say, “Maybe.”
237 days sober
Patton Military Academy’s “two Advanced Placement courses before graduation” policy for seniors sucks on a lot of levels, but AP exam week itself isn’t one of them. The sheer number of scheduling conflicts created by a dozen two-hour exams spread out over the week means that our regularly scheduled classes are replaced by mandatory study hours. I’m not good with mandatory anything, so I’m planning to spend most of the week at home, watching TV and hanging out with my dog. The exceptions to this plan are Monday, when I’m scheduled to take my AP Government & Politics exam, and Thursday, when I’m taking AP English. Travis will be joining me on Thursday, and I’ve persuaded Jamie and Ben to come up from the city hours before their play date with Omelette—ostensibly to help us study beforehand, but really to keep me company before and get lunch with me after. I don’t have a distraction planned for today, so I’m sprawled on one of the couches in the Whitman Hall common room, browsing Instagram on my phone.
“You could at least pretend to study,” Taylor suggests, gesturing to the heap of papers spread across the floor between us.
I shrug. “Don’t need to. I test well. Besides, I’m working.”
“You’re not, actually. You’re dicking around,” Steven says. I give him the kind of look that observation deserves when it’s coming from someone who is widely acknowledged to be one of the dumbest, highest people on campus. He glowers stubbornly back at me. His dab pen has gone missing, and he has been bitching about it all morning. Sobriety makes him irritable, it turns out, but today is the first time I’ve gotten to witness it all semester.
“No, I’m not. I’m researching,” I say. I turn my phone so they can see Rush’s account as I scroll through. “My friend told me that I should work on building a social media presence if I want to establish a regular clientele at the club, instead of trying to get tips from complete strangers every shift.”
I don’t add the truth—that even after trying to implement all of Stohler’s advice during my last shift, getting tips from random club-goers has remained as much of a crapshoot as it was on my first night. After cashout and expenses, I’m basically breaking even. Getting a job as a go-go boy isn’t exactly what I’d planned to do for a career, but that doesn’t mean I want to suck at it so badly that I’d make just as much money sitting on my ass at home.
“If you make an entire Instagram account that’s just pictures of you in a thong, I will follow it to be a supportive friend, but I will immediately mute you so I don’t have to see that shit on my feed,” Taylor says. Steven mutters his vague agreement.
“I don’t wear a thong to work,” I say, tilting my chin up slightly so that I level them both with my most imperious expression. “Ken says we’re not allowed to show our asscheeks to the patrons.”
Taylor snorts. “Ken has a higher opinion of his club than he should, ‘cause I’ve definitely seen a lot more than cheek at that club.”
“Who’s Ken?” Steven asks me.
“The only one of my bosses who doesn’t suck,” I answer. “Jonathan’s a mean son of a bitch, Mikael doesn’t care about his job enough to look up from his phone, and as far as I can tell, neither of them actually does anything except bully the staff into blowing them in exchange for nights off. Ken is alright, though. He’s the talent manager, and he’s the one we usually deal with.”
“Maybe you should talk to him about the social media thing,” Steven says. I blink at him. Taylor puts down his notebook. Steven shrugs and continues, “If he’s the only one there who actually does any work, he probably either handles the club’s online presence himself or can put you in touch with the person who does it. He probably also knows what the most successful dancers do to build their own fan base, or whatever. He might have some advice.”
In the four months I’ve been back at this school, I have never heard Steven express anything that could be described as “an idea,” much less one worth listening to. If Taylor’s baffled expression is any indication, the same is true for the four years he and Steve have shared a dorm room.
“Do you mean to tell me,” I say, when I can manage to get the words out, “that you’ve been having coherent thoughts this whole time, but you’ve been so fucking stoned you haven’t bothered to verbalize any of them?”
“Fuck you,” Steven grumbles.
“But seriously, that’s a good idea. I’ll head in early this Friday and see if I can hunt Ken down for a conversation. Thanks.”
“Whatever. You’re still a dick. And pretty judgmental, for a drug addict.” He slouches down in his chair and declares over Taylor’s laughter, “I want my fucking pen!”
“Garen Anderson?” a voice from the doorway calls suddenly. “There a Garen Anderson in here?”
I poke my head up over the back of the couch. One of the dorm monitors is leaning into the common room, scanning the guys gathered here. I raise my hand, and the monitor beckons. “Great, come on. You’re wanted in the office.”
The last time I was summoned to the administrative building, it was because Melissa and George Goldwyn were dead, and right now, all the blood in my own body suddenly feels corpse-cold too. I reach for my backpack, distantly aware that I need to pack my shit and go, but more focused on the fact that my phone is in one of the zippered pockets. Someone must have tried to call me, right? There’s no way anyone who knows me would let me find out about some new catastrophe through the Patton Military Academy receptionist again.
When I finally get my messages open, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. An automated text from a restaurant confirming a brunch reservation I made for Mom and me this Sunday. A mirror selfie from Jamie, showing me an outfit that has been carefully curated to be virtually indistinguishable from every other outfit he has ever worn in his life. An unsolicited and unfamiliar dick pic from a number I don’t recognize. A short voice memo of Ben testing out a new melody on the piano. The same kind of messages I always have, with nothing to suggest that someone I love is lying in a morgue.
“Anderson. C’mon. Guidance office, now,” the dorm monitor says impatiently, and I finally look at him again.
“Guidance office,” I echo.
The monitor is looking genuinely annoyed now. “Yes. Mr. Bell wants to see you as soon as possible. I’m going to call back and let him know you’re on your way, so you’d better get a move-on. He’ll expect you there within five minutes.”
“Mr. Bell isn’t even my assigned counselor,” I try to protest, but the monitor is already disappearing back into the stairwell. I look around at my friends. “Quick, help me out. What do we think I’m in trouble for now?”
“Maybe they figured out you were the one who stole the cop car at Ward,” Steven says. “I bet they’ve got security footage somewhere. Or they heard about you pulling a gun on that guy at the party before spring break. Or they found out you’re a go-go dancer at an infamously sketchy nightclub in the city. Or—”
I cut him off with a swift kick to the shins and stand up, hauling my backpack onto my shoulder. “Eat shit.”
“Are you coming back here before the exam?” Taylor asks. Something in his voice is off, and when I make eye contact with him, I realize that he’s looking more tense than he was before the dorm monitor came into the common room a minute ago.
“Probably not?” I guess. “Exam starts in less than an hour, and I can’t imagine this meeting will be short enough to make it worth the effort of coming all the way back. I’ll see you there, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he echoes, looking back down at his notes in a way that feels like it’s more about avoiding eye contact than returning to studying. His reaction to the whole situation is weird, but I don’t have time to question it further right now.
On some level, I’m still expecting to arrive at the administrative building to discover that the world is collapsing in on me again. When I walk through the door, Lisa is in her usual place at the reception desk, clacking away at her computer. She barely glances up at me. “Garen. Couldn’t make it through your last month here without another visit to the headmaster, could you?”
The snottiness of her reply is exactly what I need right now. When George and Melissa were dead, she spoke in hushed tones and brief, gentle assurances. If she’s back to being judgmental of my poor life choices, that must mean everyone is okay.
Right?
“I knew you’d miss me too much if I graduated without another of these fun visits,” I say. “But I’m not here for the Headmaster. Somebody in Whitman Hall told me that I’m supposed to be meeting Mr. Bell in the guidance office.”
Lisa frowns. “Mr. Bell? He’s not your counselor, is he?”
“Nope,” I say, shrugging.
She mirrors the movement, then gestures to the stairwell. “Alright. Guidance offices are on the third floor with the infirmary.”
Two floors up, I search out the office door bearing a brass nameplate etched with Mr. C. Bell. The door itself is open, but I bang my knuckles against the frame twice before leaning in anyway. “Hi. I was told you wanted to see me?”
The man at the desk smiles with teeth that look a little too big for his mouth. It could be an optical illusion, though. The motherfucker is lean--like, stick bug type of lean—and has massive, dark eyebrows. He actually looks kind of like a Muppet, and to stop myself from grinning like an asshole, I look quickly down at his desk nameplate. It’s a plastic twin to the one on the door, except this one says Mr. Colin Bell, MPH, which is… super fucking weird, ‘cause I don’t think a Master of Public Health actually counts as a counseling degree.
I once asked Doc Howard to tell me what all the letters on her door stood for, and it took her at least ten minutes to run through the list of degrees she has, plus all of the additional training and certification programs she’s been through. All things considered, I’m not feeling too optimistic about this guy’s public health degree.
“Garen Anderson, I presume,” Mr. Bell says, drawing my attention back to him. “Good to meet you! My name is Mr. Bell, I’m one of the counselors here at Patton. Now, if you just shut that door behind you and have a seat, there are some things I’d like to discuss with you.”
I don’t move. Neither does he, except to keep beaming back at me with those giant fucking teeth of his. After a minute, I nudge the door closed with the toe of my boot and sink onto the very edge of the chair that has been indicated for me.
“Fantastic! Thanks for taking the time to come here and have this conversation with me. I know you must be under a lot of pressure, what with final exams coming up.”
I stare at him, not saying a word. There’s no way he pulled me away from mandated study hours for small talk. We sit in silence for nearly a minute while Mr. Bell waits for me to respond, and I wait for him to realize I have no intention of doing so.
“Are you?” he eventually asks me.
“Am I taking my finals? Didn’t think I had a choice,” I say.
Mr. Bell lets out a booming laugh, too hearty to be genuine. “Of course. No, Garen, I meant to ask if you were under a lot of pressure at the moment.”
I tip a shoulder upwards, let it fall again. “No more than anyone else around here.”
“Sure,” Mr. Bell concedes, “but exams can be a lot to deal with, especially for people who are doing”—he leans forward slightly in his chair, and I just know he’s about to spout some bullshit phrase he picked up at a seminar within the last month—“the difficult work of learning healthy coping mechanisms. Wouldn’t you say that’s true?”
It’s another non-question, something I can’t agree or disagree with without feeling like I’m giving the wrong answer. Instead, I make the most non-committal sound I can manage without actually opening my mouth.
“Do you feel that you have a strong support system?” he presses. “I believe you’re registered as a day student this semester, and that you’ve been assigned to the Whitman Hall squadron under Sergeant Smitth. How’s that working out?”
“Fine,” I say curtly. Nobody at Patton calls the squads our squadrons except the clueless administrators. But Mr. Bell scoots his chair closer, like the single word I’ve just uttered is actually important, and I’m beginning to feel like this is all a trap.
“Do you spend a lot of time with the other members of your squadron?” he asks.
Yep. Definitely a trap.
“We have physical training, a few classes, lunch, and MLEP together every day,” I say.
“I meant socially.”
“I socialize in class. I’m sure that’s in my file, too.”
We both glance down at the folder on the desk between us. After a brief pause, Mr. Bell flicks it open and reads several lines of the papers that I can’t make out upside down. All I can see is that they aren’t all typed—some are scribbled notes, like he jotted down reminders in another appointment before this one. Whatever information he’s got in there must be useful, because when he meets my gaze again, suddenly we’re in full interrogator-and-hostile-witness mode, volleying back and forth with barely a breath between words.
“Would you say that you have a lot of friends at Patton?”
“Some.”
“Who are they?”
“A few guys in my squad.”
“I was asking for names, actually.”
“I know you were.”
A sharp exhale through his nose, like he’s getting frustrated, and then he changes tactics. “Do you spend a lot of time on campus?”
“Only as much as I’m required.”
“In the dorms?”
“I’m not required to be there.”
“But you do spend time in Whitman Hall, though. You just told me that’s where you were when I asked to have you sent down.”
Fuck.
“I spend time there occasionally,” I say carefully.
“With whom?”
“My friends.”
“What do you and your friends do when you’re on campus?”
Play with unregistered firearms, throw keg parties in the woods, steal police cars, fuck. “We have a book club. And an interfaith prayer group. And a knitting circle where we make sweaters for my dog.”
“That’s a lot of activities,” Mr. Bell observes.
“Yeah, I’m a real joiner.”
“They say that knitting can be an excellent stress reliever for people who are dealing with mental health issues.”
“Cut the shit.”
Mr. Bell’s bushy eyebrows dart upward. “Excuse me?”
“You didn’t yank me away from studying during one of the last weeks of the school year so that we could have a chat about my coping mechanisms. I’ve got a real therapist for that, and she”—I reach out and tap the nameplate on his desk—“has a lot more letters after her name than you do. So, thanks for the offer, you unqualified joke, but I’m good. And I have an exam to study for.”
I only make it halfway out of my chair before he says, “Why don’t you sit back down and tell me when you relapsed again?”
The question hits me like a punch to the gut. Fuck that, it hits me harder, hard enough to knock my ass back into the seat and leave me staring, stunned, at this guy who I’ve never met before, but who sounds so goddamn sure of my failure that all I can say in response is a soft, “What?”
“There’s been some talk lately. A few of your teachers have expressed concerns about how you’re handling the deaths of some close family friends.” He actually has to check his notes for the names, and I swear I almost lunge across the desk at him. “George Goldwyn and Melissa Goldwyn. They were the parents of your best friend, Jam—”
“I know who they are,” I interrupt. Are. Were. Whatever, shit. “I’m sad, okay? They were wonderful people, and they didn’t deserve what happened to them. James sure as hell didn’t deserve to lose both of his parents, either. He’s devastated, and so am I, but not so devastated that I needed to go back to using.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Mr. Bell says, in an encouraging, genial tone that seems to roughly translate to I think you’re full of shit. “But I did ask some of your teachers if any of them had noticed a change in your attitude or behavior recently. Anything that might suggest you were having… trouble.”
The echo of his earlier word hangs so heavily between us, it might as well be written on the desk. Relapsed. Relapsed. Relapsed.
“I’m sober,” I grit out. My skin feels like it’s on fire, but I hope I’m not really blushing. I don’t want to give anyone, even a stranger, the satisfaction of seeing how humiliated I am by the idea that someone asked my teachers if they thought I was doing cocaine again. He probably asked Sergeant Smitth, too, and I can only imagine the response that garnered. No, Anderson doesn’t seem like he’s high, but it’s hard to imagine that someone can be that irritating while sober, so who knows?
Mr. Bell picks up his pen and holds it poised over his notepad. “Really? How long now?”
“It’ll be eight months this coming Sunday.” Write that down, motherfucker. “Shouldn’t that be somewhere in my file? I know you guys have a record of my last hospitalization.”
“We do, yes,” he says. He pokes a line in his notes with the tip of his pen. “Wednesday, September thirteenth. You were admitted to the Lakewood Rehabilitation Center for a forty-eight hour evaluation before proceeding with your outpatient therapy. And that was your second stay there, yes? You spent some time there over the summer, from…” He scans his notes again, making an annoying little clicking noise with his tongue as he searches for the information. “Ah! There it is. Monday, June twelfth. You were checked—”
“I checked myself into a sixty-day treatment program for my drug and alcohol addiction on June twelfth,” I interrupt. “I had daily group therapy sessions with licensed counselors and individual sessions with Dr. Emilie Howard, who I still see for dialectical behavior therapy every weekend, and whose name should be in that fucking file you clearly didn’t bother to read before you called me in here. After sixty days of inpatient treatment, and after establishing my outpatient treatment plan with my doctors, I checked myself out on Friday, August eleventh. I was sober for ninety days, until I relapsed on September eleventh and went on a twenty-four hour bender, after which I returned to treatment and have been sober ever since.”
Mr. Bell leans back in his chair and laces his fingers together, resting them on the edge of his desk. “And would you be willing to prove that? The school nurse is just down the hall.”
The second he says those words, an image flickers through my mind—Declan in his truck on his birthday, holding a blue glass pipe and saying, “Are you sure you can smoke?” It didn’t feel like a big deal in that moment. I haven’t smoked since then, and I’ve barely even thought about that afternoon, beyond the mild annoyance that it took another week and a half after that for me to get a chance to fuck Declan in his truck. But that was less than a month ago, and I don’t know if the THC is still detectable in my system.
“You want me to take a drug test?” I ask, half hoping I’ve misunderstood him.
Mr. Bell beams at me. “I think that’s a great idea.”
“Well, you would. It was your idea,” I say, standing up. Between his telephone and his nameplate is a mug of what looks to be the weakest coffee ever brewed. I tap the handle of it. “They got a sample cup for me down the hall, or should I go ahead and give you one right here?”
When this conversation started, Mr. Bell’s smile was fake because he didn’t really give a shit about me one way or another. Now, it’s fake in a way that suggests he’d like to fight me in the faculty parking lot after this appointment. “The nurse’s office will take care of you just fine.”
“Standard five-panel test?” I guess.
“You know what, Mr. Anderson? Let’s go all out. Tell Nurse Gumby I’d like to have you do the twelve-panel drug test. I believe that’s her most comprehensive option.”
“Sounds great,” I say, turning to the door but not bothering to lower my voice as I add, “you infected taint-scrape.”
The nurse doesn’t seem surprised by the request, but I don’t know whether that’s because she gives these tests out too regularly to be fazed or because my reputation precedes me enough that she always assumed she’d administer one for me eventually. I am handed a cup and directed to a single-occupancy bathroom, where I get to lock myself in and fill the cup in privacy. It’s both novel and beyond stupid; every drug test I’ve ever taken at the LRC has involved someone standing in the restroom with me to make sure I wasn’t tampering with my sample. I could probably make a mint selling clean piss to every guy who suspected he was going to be tested in here, as long as I used some sort of thermos system to keep the sample warm enough to beat the temperature gauge in most test kits.
I amuse myself with the possibilities for a minute or two, but it’s a poor distraction from the steady refrain of please be negative, please be negative, please be negative, with the even more depressing downbeat of I shouldn’t be this nervous about a drug test.
I bring the sample cup back out to Nurse Gumby—and god, lady, change your name, that’s embarrassing—and she plunks the test strip down into it without ceremony. There is a very long pause.
“How long before you can read the results?” I ask.
“Another”—she checks her watch—“four minutes and twenty seconds.”
We both keep staring at the cup of piss. There’s a clock ticking on the wall, and the longer we wait, the louder it sounds. The kid-on-a-road-trip urge to ask about the time again is almost overwhelming. I press my lips together to keep quiet, and we both just keep staring at the cup.
“You should drink more water,” Nurse Gumby says.
“Don’t be fucking weird,” I say, and she shrugs. We keep staring, and the clock keeps pounding onward, and I don’t really buy into the idea of an afterlife, but I’m pretty positive that this is what hell would be. Finally, after one more glance at the loudest clock in existence, Nurse Gumby turns the test kit so that she can read it properly.
“Negative for any of the controlled substances in this panel,” she announces. “Give me a moment, and I’ll get this all typed up for you and Mr. Bell.”
Five minutes later, I’m being handed a letter on Patton Military Academy stationery attesting to the results, and all the anxiety in my body has been replaced with a renewed feeling of impotent rage. I return to the guidance offices, scuffing the soles of my boots against the floor as loudly and obnoxiously as I can. Mr. Bell’s office door is still open, but I don’t actually make it through. Taped just below the letters spelling out his name is a single sheet of paper I hadn’t paid attention to on my way in, but now, I’m really wishing I had.
The sign-in sheet is a long list of first names and last initials, as though that’s enough to keep anyone’s presence here private in a school where everybody knows everybody else’s business. The lack of a complete last name sure as hell doesn’t stop me from finding four lines scattered throughout last week’s appointments, each one making my heart sink deeper and deeper into my stomach. I reach up and touch last Monday’s Declan C. — 5:15pm appointment notation, the first of a series of daily appointments.
“That’s confidential,” Mr. Bell says, loudly and firmly, the same way I talk to Omelette when I’m trying to get him to stop molesting other dogs at the park.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tape it to your office door, then,” I say. I let my hand fall back to my side and turn to meet Mr. Bell’s gaze again. “So, you’re the counselor Declan has been meeting with for the past week.”
“You know I can’t discuss another student with you, Garen,” he chides me.
“But you can discuss me with any dickhead who wanders into your office and says they’re worried about me?” I can feel my mouth twisting mockingly around those words, and I know I’m close to crossing a line with how I’m talking to a member of the faculty here, but I can’t stop myself. I feel hot all over with anger and embarrassment and the reckless urge to do something. Hit Bell, flip a desk, go back to Whitman Hall and shake a confession out of Declan, find out why the fuck he would tell a guidance counselor he thinks I’m going to relapse instead of just talking to me about.
Mr. Bell holds out a hand, and it takes me a few seconds to realize he wants the test results. I slap the paper down on his desk.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m clean,” I say.
“That’s great news,” he says, obviously lying through his fucking teeth.
“Yeah, I’m so sure you mean that,” I retort. “Next time you want to have a chat with a Whitman Hall headcase, pick somebody else. Ask Campbell about his mommy and daddy issues. Or ask Steven Ramsey why he and his goddamn disgusting dorm room haven’t been on an episode of Extreme Hoarders yet. Or ask Charlie Walczyk about his—”
I stop. I have to. This meeting is bad enough; I don’t want to sit through a repeat of the guidance session I had at Lakewood High last fall, after I blurted out the truth about my past in front of half the drama club because I was too mad to keep my mouth shut.
Mr. Bell’s attention is razor sharp now. “Go on, Mr. Anderson. What would you like me to ask Charles Walczyk about?”
That’s some Making a Murderer, leading question shit, if ever I heard some. I don’t know why he says Charlie’s name like that, like I’ve been caught in a lie. Maybe he heard about the brief fight we had during PT last week. Maybe the entire faculty knows about the detectives who were here last week.
Maybe Declan told him about Dave.
I snatch the paper back off the desk and turn towards the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mr. Bell move like he wants to grab the paper away from me and, finding me just out of reach, he says, “Please leave that here. I’d like to add it to your file.”
“Ask the nurse to print you another copy,” I say as I stuff the paper into my backpack.
“Mr. Anderson,” Mr. Bell says warningly, like there’s actually anything he can do to me. I shoot him a disgusted look and a hand gesture that should probably get me suspended, and before he can say a word to stop me, I’m out the door.
Putting in my earbuds and blasting Beartooth on my walk across campus gets me out of having to talk to anyone, but it’s just white noise. I can’t really hear the music, can’t think clearly enough to string a sentence together, can’t do anything except spiral deeper down into a pit of fury and embarrassment and confusion and unbearable fucking shame.
Seven months, three weeks, and three days of sobriety. And what the fuck has it gotten me? Drug tests in the school infirmary, and the guy I like telling his guidance counselor he’s worried about me.
And speak of the redheaded, about-to-get-his-ass-beat devil--
Declan is sitting on the floor outside of my AP Government classroom, but he stands when he sees me coming towards him. The Patton Military Academy student handbook states that students aren’t ever supposed to enter the academic buildings unless they’re in standard uniform, but Declan is wearing a pair of shorts and a sweat-dampened t-shirt, straight from the gym. He says something I can’t hear over my music. I stare at him. Impatience flickers over his features, and he tugs my earbuds out and repeats himself more firmly, “Taylor told me you got called in to see Bell.”
“Yeah. I think that’s probably what happens when you spend a week telling your guidance counselor that I’ve relapsed,” I say. I swing my backpack off my shoulder suddenly enough that Declan has to take a quick step backward to avoid getting hit with it. I yank the zipper open, crumple the paper from the guidance office in my fist, and thrust it out at him. He doesn’t take it, so I pin it against his chest with more and more pressure until he finally snatches it away from me. “He made me take a drug test, you fucking dick. Don’t you want to know the results? Aren’t you worried about me, Campbell?”
“No, I’m not,” he snaps. “And I don’t need to see this paper, I already know you’re sober. I didn’t tell him to drug test you. I didn’t even think he’d call you in for a meeting.”
My hand is still on Declan’s chest, and that just makes it easier for me to shove him. He’s built like brick wall, so he barely even shifts on his feet. That only makes me more pissed. “Then what the fuck was the point of all this? Is it because of what you walked in on, after that… that thing with the Walczyks on Parents’ Day? Are you, like—is this a punishment because I almost—”
The rest of the sentence crumbles in my mouth, and I look quickly away. It’s miserable enough knowing that I was low enough to hunt down Declan’s stash and cut a line of cocaine on his desk. I don’t need to rehash it in a hallway right before I’m supposed to take an exam.
“It’s not a punishment,” Declan says. “At least, not for you.”
I blink back around at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means,” he says, voice dropping low enough that I find myself leaning in without meaning to. “You can barely set foot in the state of Connecticut without Dave Walczyk trying to hunt you down in the streets, and that’s at least partly Charlie’s fault. The car crash sure as hell was. He nearly got you and your friend killed because he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut about where you were, and I can’t just forget that happened. If he wants to make New Haven dangerous for you, I’m gonna make damn sure Patton feels just as dangerous for him.”
What the fuck am I supposed to say to that? Half of me still wants to tell him he’s a piece of shit, and the other half of me wants to skip my AP Government exam so we can go jerk each other off in a broom closet somewhere. I settle for the midpoint, which turns out to be, “You can’t do this psycho revenge shit without telling me about it first.”
“I know,” Declan says with an abashed expression that I don’t buy for a second. I shove him semi-gently, just so he knows I’m onto him.
“You obviously don’t know, dude. You never have. You didn’t tell me you were going to pair up with Barrington for PT drills that time you wrenched his arm out of the socket for talking shit about Jamie’s parents. You didn’t tell me that I was supposed to be your alibi when you torched the Lexus. You didn’t tell me—you still haven’t told me what the fuck you’ve been doing with Bell. Why would Charlie give a shit if your guidance counselor thinks I’m going to relapse?”
“I already told you, I never said you were going to relapse. I told Bell that—” Declan cuts himself off abruptly, eyes over my shoulder. I twist around and see Taylor Lewis heading towards us, hands jammed in his pockets. He nods in acknowledgment, and Declan touches my forearm to bring my focus back around to him. “Come back to Whitman after your exam. We can go to my room, where we won’t be overheard, and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Promise,” I demand.
He rolls his eyes. “We’re not on a playground, Anderson.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me everything—not just today, but from now on, whenever you do something like this—or I’m not coming back to the dorm,” I say.
“Fine. I promise,” Declan relents.
“Fine,” I echo his snotty little attitude, “I’ll come.”
“Gross,” Taylor declares, only arriving at my side in time to catch the last words. He hitches his chin at Declan and says, “I found it last night after Steve went to sleep. I thought he was going to clutch it in his hand the whole night like a security blanket.”
“Would you be surprised?” Declan says.
Taylor snorts and pulls one hand out of his pocket, revealing a thin, metal cylinder with a single button on the side and a cartridge on one end. Steven’s missing dab pen. Declan takes it and slips it into the pocket of his gym shorts.
“You better give that back in a few days, or he’s going to go apeshit,” Taylor warns.
Declan shakes his head. “I don’t think we’ll have to wait that long. My guess would be this afternoon.”
He tilts his head towards me, like that means something. I guess it does, because Taylor grimaces knowingly and says, “That’s rough. You good, though?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I say, not knowing what else I can possibly offer to this exchange beyond annoyance at the fact that Taylor is clearly more involved with Declan’s plans than I am.
Like he’s trying to soothe my ego before I can go into full brat mode, Declan says, “You two go do your exam thing, I’ll see you after. Good luck.” And then, to my utter bewilderment, he leans in and presses a brief but deliberate kiss to my lips.
“Weird,” Taylor announces, which is at least a slight improvement over the earlier gross. Before I can say anything else, he lets himself into the exam room, and Declan heads off down the hall, Steven’s pen hidden in his pocket.
The exam goes as well as I expected it to. I fly through the multiple choice questions, most of which are things we’ve already talked to death in class and require zero thought. The essay portions are a little more grueling, if only because I don’t actually give a shit about any of this. Still, I think I manage to put together an argument that’ll get me a decent score, and ninety minutes later, Taylor and I are both on our way back to Whitman Hall.
The rest of the squad has foregone lunch in the dining hall and ordered pizza in our absence. I’ve barely taken two steps into the common room before Declan piles a few slices onto a paper plate and stands.
“My room?” he suggests.
“You’re not eating with us?” Javi says, sounding outraged.
“I think they’re gonna do some sex shit with the pizza,” Steven says, still wearing this morning’s scowl. I’m fucking glad Taylor stole his dab pen, honestly. He doesn’t deserve it.
Declan grabs my arm and tows me down the hallway, as Javi yells after us, “If you burn your dick with melted cheese, I’m not taking you to the hospital!”
“Sometimes I miss living in the dorms,” I sigh.
“That’s probably something you should talk to your shrink about,” Declan says. He lets us into his room, closes the door behind us, and locks it. He sets the plate down on his desk and gestures for me to help myself, but I just dump my backpack on the ground and sit on the edge of his bed.
“So. What’s the plan?” I ask.
As much as I may have wanted to drown Declan in a lake this morning, I have to give him credit now. Finally bullied into agreeing to tell me everything, he seems inclined to keep his promise. He sits down in his desk chair, tips it onto its back legs, and says, “The morning after your car got totaled, I made an appointment to talk to Bell. He’s my assigned counselor, and he’s basically fucking useless, but I had to work with him a lot during my West Point application process, so he thinks I’m an upstanding citizen and an all-around nice young man.”
“Sure. You’re a walking, talking Precious Moments figurine, halo and all,” I say dryly.
“As far as most of the administrators here are concerned, I am,” Declan says. “Sometimes, that works to my advantage. So, I met with Bell, and I told him I was having problems with some members of the squad because I thought one of them was putting other people in dangerous situations. That was all I’d give him the first day. He tried to get names or details out of me, and I acted like I’d gotten skittish and cut the meeting short by a few minutes. The next day, I came back, full of apologies, and ‘reluctantly admitted’”—he crooks his fingers in quotation marks—“that someone in Whitman Hall was dealing drugs.”
“Yeah, Dec,” I say slowly. “You.”
“Me?” Declan gasps, flattening a hand to his own chest and looking so genuinely scandalized that I might buy it, if I didn’t know him. He drops his hand and the ruse at once. “I didn’t tell him that, dumbass. As far as Mr. Bell knows, I’ve never had so much as a drop of beer in my life, and I’m not stupid enough to have left anything in this room that could lead him to believe otherwise. When I came back for the third session, he’d clearly done some kind of research. He started asking me about the squad by name, even though I hadn’t gotten that specific until then. Mostly, he wanted to talk about you.”
I make a face and finally reach for one of the slices of pizza. It’s kind of cold, but I fold it in half and take a large bite anyway. After I swallow, I say, “Not surprising. The school has my medical records, including everything from rehab. Did he think I was the big bad dealer?”
“He got maybe two words of that question out of his mouth before I shut him down,” Declan says flatly. “You’re sober, and I told him as much. You haven’t done all this work so that some dickhead counselor can accuse you of dealing drugs you don’t take out of a dorm you don’t live in.”
My second bite of pizza feels like it’s gluing my mouth shut. I force myself to swallow, but my throat is too raw for me to say anything, so I just nod, hoping Declan understands what his words mean to me after that shitty meeting this morning.
“It was obvious that he cared more about figuring out who he could bust for dealing than he did about anything else. He kept asking these leading questions, and over sessions three and four, I started leaving breadcrumbs for him to follow. I didn’t say who he should suspect, but I did say enough to tell him who he shouldn’t suspect, until there was only one person left who he could guess I was talking about.”
I dump the rest of the pizza slice back on the plate and say impatiently, “That’s fine, except he should suspect every bitch in this building, Dec. Everybody on this floor must have half a dozen illegal substances hidden in their rooms, and the people in the security office get thorough during room searches. If you gave them enough reason to suspect that someone is dealing out of here, you’re about to get every guy in this dorm expelled.”
“Short of first-degree murder in the middle of the quad, there’s nothing anybody in this school could do to get expelled this close to graduation,” Declan says. “The administrators don’t want the drama or the scandal. But finding a massive stash of drugs in someone’s dorm room is something they’d have to report to the colleges that person applied to, and that probably means acceptances are going to get rescinded.”
Every inch of my skin feels like it’s overheated and buzzing.
“Where is Charlie going this fall?” I ask.
“Yale,” Declan says. “At least, that’s what he thinks right now. I’ll be surprised if they still want him, after Patton tells them what he gets up to in his dorm room.”
“Declan,” I breathe.
“Fuck Charlie.” Declan’s voice is low enough to almost be a snarl right now. “Fuck Dave, too. They don’t get to turn the entire city of New Haven into a landmine for you. We’re taking it back from them.”
I make another desperate noise that might be Declan’s name, and I reach for him, but I don’t get to do anything more than clench the collar of his shirt in my fist before the door bangs open and Javi spills in.
“Uh, hey, sorry to interrupt,” he says, “except not really, ‘cause the dorm monitors just came upstairs and told us all to get ready for room searches. So, I guess, put your lube away, unless you want it confiscated.”
Declan’s whiskey-brown eyes are practically glittering with excitement. He stands, pulls me to my feet, and nudges me towards the door. Right before I clear the frame, he leans in to say quietly in my ear, “Be cool, okay?”
“I’m the fucking coolest,” I say, and he laughs.
Dorm searches are always a pain in the ass, especially since the dorm monitors expect us all to be present for them. Everyone stands against the wall directly outside their rooms, one person on each side of the door frame, and we all get to watch as the campus rent-a-cops make their way from room to room, searching every viable hiding spot for drugs or alcohol or weapons.
When I lived in the dorms, I liked to have a little fun with it, if I heard about a search before it happened. One time, I filled my pillowcase with three dozen bags of Haribo gummy bears and insisted that the crinkle of plastic was the only way I could fall asleep. Another time, I printed out reams of tentacle porn and stuffed it under Jamie’s mattress so he’d get written up for possession of sexually explicit materials.
Now, I just hover in the middle of the hallway while everyone else lines up, then bound up to the first security officer I see. “Hey. I don’t actually, I was just visiting a friend. Can I go?”
“Are you a student at this school?” the officer asks. I nod, and he points to the wall across from Declan and Javi’s room. “You can wait with everyone else. Did you bring a bag with you?”
“Yeah. It’s in my friends’ room,” I say.
“Alright. You can point it out when we get there, and it will need to be searched as well.”
Shit. Really hoping I don’t have my switchblade buried in the bottom of my backpack right now.
I move to the wall where indicated and find myself standing between Taylor and his next-door-neighbor, Ryan Marten. I nudge Ryan with my elbow and say, “Think they’re going to confiscate all your sex toys?”
“I think the closest thing I have to a sex toy in this dorm is attached to you,” Ryan says, his eyes flickering down to my crotch. I open my mouth to retort, but he cuts me off in a voice dropped to a murmur, “I got the warning this morning and moved everything worth confiscating out to my car. Believe me, I owe Campbell a favor, just like everyone else on this floor.”
I look quickly over at Declan, who is directly opposite me, but he’s watching with mild interest as the first rooms on the floor get turned over by the security officers. They don’t find anything good. A couple copies of Maxim Magazine, some snacks purloined from the dining hall, a stolen street sign. They’re all things we’re not technically supposed to have in the dorms, but nothing that’ll even earn anyone a detention. No liquor. No cigarettes or vapes. No drugs, prescription or otherwise. None of the Whitman Hall staples.
The same goes for the second pair of rooms, and the third. Then, they get to Ryan’s room.
“What is this?” one of the security officers demands, stepping into the hall and brandishing a bottle of Rush. I try to hide my snort of laughter in my sleeve, but I don’t think I succeed.
“Leather cleaner. It says so on the bottle,” Ryan says blandly.
The officer frowns at him, then me, then brings the bottle closer to peer at the label. “It also says isopropyl nitrite mixture. That doesn’t sound like something you should have in a school dormitory.”
“Poppers are totally legal in New York, actually,” I offer. Ryan stomps on my foot. I can’t feel it through my boot, but I can tell he was planning to ride that ‘leather cleaner’ train as far as it would take him. As an apology, I add, “The student handbook doesn’t even mention them. He’s not doing anything against the rules by keeping it in his room.”
The officer gives me a suspicious look, but returns to the room anyway.
“Thank you,” Ryan says primly.
I nudge him with my elbow again and linger at the point of contact. “You really want to thank me? Keep that bottle at the ready and invite me over after the rent-a-cops clear out.”
Quick as a flash of lightning, Declan shifts his weight to one foot and kicks out at me across the hall, almost nailing me in the balls with the toe of his boot. I swear and dodge it as best I can, accidentally crashing into Ryan’s side. Ryan starts to whine, but the officer barks at us to knock it off, and I end up just glowering across the hall at Declan, who is smirking at me.
Jealous, I mouth at him.
Bite me, is his silent reply.
I tip my head to indicate the ongoing search and mouth, After.
“Oh,” Ryan says loudly. I look over and find him staring back and forth between me and Declan, his face blooming with shocked delight. “Oh, it’s like that.”
“Shut the fuck up, Marten,” I warn, but he isn’t even paying attention to me anymore. He’s just grinning at Declan, who is staring stubbornly back at him in silence.
“So it’s like… that,” Ryan repeats, cocking his hip to the side. A stern look from the security officer quiets him for a few seconds, but then he just shuffles down the wall closer to me and whispers, “Declan Campbell enjoying my sloppy seconds. Who would have thought?”
“More like you and Campbell both enjoying James Goldwyn’s sloppy twenty-ninths,” I hiss back. “Now shut the fuck up, Ryan. I’m serious.”
He surveys my expression, and the longer he examines me, the more his smirk starts to melt away, until he’s left with something approaching a sulk. “Well, if you actually have feelings about it, it’s not funny. Whatever.” He mimes zipping his mouth shut and turns his attention to inspecting his nails.
The security officers clear the rooms they’re on and move to the next pair. On one side, Declan and Javi; on the other, Taylor and Steven. I hear an intake of breath from somewhere to my right, then a pointed cough from someone else.
I stare past Declan into the doorway of his room. He’s not stupid. He wouldn’t set this up if he knew it would come back to bite him or anyone he likes. It’s hard to believe that, though, when I can see one of the officers reaching up into the top shelf of his closet, where I know there’s normally an unregistered handgun and a bag full of drugs.
The officer pulls down the camera bag and carries it to the bed, where he begins unloading the side pockets onto the bedspread. Two weeks ago, there were film canisters of pills. Now, there are just extra memory cards and a few USB cables. The camera bag is replaced, the rest of the space searched, including my backpack, and the room cleared. A few seconds later, an officer steps through the doorway between Taylor, who is gazing impassively at the floor, and Steven, who is sweating through his shirt, and declares their room check complete as well. I watch as Taylor’s eyes flicker to meet Declan’s, but neither of them says anything.
A movement further down the hallway catches my attention. Charlie is shifting in place as the officers enter his and Sam’s room, and his brow is furrowed with what could be confusion or nerves. Either way, I don’t think I can watch.
One of the few good things about being so completely and utterly fucked in the head is that it’s easy for me to check out when things get bad. In my mind, I’m not even standing in this hallway anymore. I’m somewhere happy and fun and stress-free, and I’m surrounded by people I like instead of fake cops and my rapist’s kid brother. I’m… on a sailboat cutting through the waves at Jamie’s summer house in Martha’s Vineyard. The air smells like suntan lotion and salt water, and when I wobble my way across the deck to plant a quick kiss on my best friend as he steers, his mouth tastes like champagne and sunshine.
“We’re going to need another pair of eyes in here,” one of the cops calls, and two more officers abandon their search of one room to join the search of Charlie and Sam’s.
But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not here. I’m in Ben’s parents’ backyard, chasing his little sisters through piles of fallen leaves. Their sweet, old Golden Retriever, Lucy, is wuffing at us from under a nearby tree. I scoop Izzy up in my arms and heave her gently into a mountain of leaves so enormous, she sinks almost completely out of sight, shrieking with glee.
“Whose room is this?” an officer asks loudly. “I’m going to need both of these boys in here, now.”
But I’m still not here. I’m in the kitchen of my mom’s apartment, fully butchering a recipe for hamantaschen that she got off Pinterest. She’s trying to convince me through her laughter that our fuck-ups are fine, this is just a practice batch, and we’ll definitely have it figured out before Purim next week. Then she’s beating the air with a baking sheet, trying frantically to waft the clouds of smoke away from her fire alarm before the beeping starts. I’m googling best bakeries upper west side ny and eating apricot jam with a spoon.
“That’s not mine,” Charlie blurts out. “None of this is mine, someone planted all of this.”
“Make a call down to faculty housing,” one of the officers instructs a dorm monitor. “Tell Sergeant Smitth that we’re going to need him to meet us in the security office as soon as possible for a disciplinary matter.”
“No. I’m not getting disciplined for something I didn’t do,” Charlie snaps.
The coldness in his voice is what brings me back. I’m not on a boat, I’m not in the leaves, I’m not in an apartment. I’m here in this dorm, listening to Charlie Walczyk spilling icicles and broken glass from his lips, in a voice so much like his older brother’s.
The officers don’t give a shit about what he has to say, though. One of them is steering him down the hall, while another guides a shell-shocked Sam after him. Two stay at the door to the room, one of them muttering a question about how they’re going to collect so much contraband without going back down to their office for more bags.
When he gets level with Declan, Charlie plants his feet and refuses to let the officers nudge him any further down the hall. “You did this. All of it. You put that shit in my room, you got them to do a raid.”
“Me?” Declan says, and it’s such a perfect imitation of his feigned shock from twenty minutes ago that I almost laugh. But this time, instead of dropping it, he blinks at the officers with doe eyes and says, “That’s insane. You all just searched my room. You know I don’t have anything like that.”
“Yeah, because you put it all in my fucking room!” Charlie says. The coldness in his voice is gone now, replaced by something closer to hysteria. “Come on, tell them it’s not mine. This isn’t funny, Dec, this is—are you trying to ruin my life? Are you serious?”
“Enough. Move,” the officer at his back commands, but Charlie lunges forward to shove Declan back against the wall.
“All this shit because I don’t like your fucking boyfriend?” he spits. Then, like saying even that much is enough to remind him of who his real enemy is, he swings around and pins me under a look of pure loathing. “Fuck you, Anderson. Next time you go begging my brother to take you back, I hope he really does fucking kill you.”
“Charlie!” Sam yelps, at the same time that Javi says, “What the actual fuck, man,” and Declan pushes off the wall, muscles wound tight and eyes on fire.
The closest dorm monitor leaps between them and says, “Stop it! Everyone, back to your rooms, now! You, day student.” He points at me. “Go home. The rest of you, in your rooms!”
The officers finally manage to drag Charlie bodily from the hallway, but I can hear him protesting all the way down the stairs. The dorm monitors are still trying to get everybody back into their rooms, but there’s no way that’s happening right now. People are clustering together, chattering excitedly about what just went down. I haven’t moved from the exact spot I was standing when Charlie last spoke to me--I hope he really does fucking kill you—and I don’t know that I’ll be ready to leave anytime soon.
Declan, Javi, Taylor, and Steven close ranks around me.
“Think they’ll get kicked out?” Javi wonders idly.
“Too close to graduation,” Declan says. “Besides, Charlie’s parents are too rich. If the Headmaster starts threatening expulsion, they’ll just buy him off.”
Taylor snorts. “Who wants to take bets on whether there will suddenly be a Walczyk Reading Room in the library next fall?”
“I’m glad I’ll be off campus, then,” I say. Maybe I mumble it. It’s hard to tell; my whole body feels a little numb, and that includes my lips.
Declan moves as if to put an arm around me, then seems to think better of it. He leans a forearm against my shoulder instead and asks, “You okay?”
“I’m the fucking coolest,” I say again, and his mouth twitches into a small smile.
Steven clears his throat. “So, when do I get my vape back?”