Read as: The Guy Who Used To Bang Branley and His Occasionally Violent Girlfriend Who Doesn’t Know Branley Still Sends Nudes To Him, Peekay’s Ex-Boyfriend Who She Might Not Be Over and The Girl Who Still Sends Nudes To The Guy Who Used To Bang Her, and The Girl Who Almost Punched Branley In The Face Not That Long Ago and A Pretty Clueless Guy Who Thinks This Is A Good Idea.
It’s a small town. There aren’t a lot of dating options, but this is still its own special kind of mess.
It’s okay because I have my own ideas about how to handle tonight. The six of us all together can only be nonnuclear for so long, so Alex and I are going for a walk after about an hour. We’ll be alone, the way we both like it, and I have a surprise for her, and if I said that to Branley she’d think it was my dick even though it’s, like, five degrees outside and I am human after all.
Tonight I’m going to tell Alex that I love her. It’s been like a pressure inside of me, a combination of words that wants to erupt at the wrong times, sounds that might escape on their own if I’m not concentrating. I swear to God I can feel I love you in my throat like a physical thing, and I need to make sure that when it finally gets out there it happens in the right way.
Because this is special, because Alex is special. And I need to make tonight special, too.
It doesn’t start out great.
Park is big on planning, but execution is another thing, and lighting a fire with nothing but soaked wood is not easy.
“Son of a bitch,” he says, as yet another match flares out before catching.
Alex is watching him with her eyebrows crunched slightly together. I know she’s trying not to embarrass him by taking over, but it’s freaking cold and our basic needs are going to overcome being polite really soon.
Peekay has her hands jammed into her armpits and starts stomping her feet, which makes her boobs jiggle. Park doesn’t even try to act like he’s not staring and Alex smoothly takes the matches from his hand while he’s distracted.
“Christ, it’s cold,” Branley says as she walks in, Adam trailing behind her. She’s wearing the thinnest jacket possible; it hugs her tiny waist and accents the explosion of her boobs. She looks fantastic, but there’s a reason she’s freezing.
“I brought body heat,” Adam says, and Park makes a gagging noise onto Alex’s shoulder. She knocks him onto his ass with her elbow as flames flick to life under her hands.
“Good thing Alex got the fire started then,” Branley says, clearly finding her boyfriend as lame as the rest of us do.
Park drags a couple of bigger rocks over to the fire, and I help him with a pew, our combined muscles still not enough to get the damned thing off the ground, so we’re making a horrible screeeech as oak that hasn’t budged in years scratches its way across stone.
It’s accomplished eventually. We’ve got a fire that gives off heat, and seats and beer for everyone. Peekay claims a spot next to Park on the pew so fast that I know this entire thing didn’t need to happen in the first place, but we’re here now. Branley sits on one of the rocks, her cold hands jammed into her pockets so that the best thing Adam can do is take a rock next to her and put his arm in the crook of her elbow. They look like an awkward prom photo and it’s pretty clear if there’s dancing she’ll be the one taking the lead.
It’s kind of funny and my eyes meet Bran’s and she somehow finds a way to shrug with one eyebrow and I’m trying not to laugh because secret communication across a fire with a girl who sends you nudes is probably not cool when your girlfriend is right next to you.
Except Alex is not right next to me. She decided to sit on the ground for some reason, which leaves me sitting on an old aluminum lawn chair that someone dragged here in the nineties and never reclaimed. We’re still close. She’s by my knee and she does rest her temple against my kneecap for just a second after I sit, which is nice and all, but I like seeing her face and now I don’t get to. I settle for running a strand of her hair through my fingers as I crack open a beer.
The fire is hot and the beer is cold enough to have ice chips floating in it, and I’m settling into a comforting haze when Peekay’s phone goes off. She jumps, and nobody can miss her face collapsing when she reads her text.
“Sorry,” Peekay says, disentangling herself from Park. She’s dialing as she walks away from us, her silhouette lost in the shadows. But her words float in the darkness and the ones her voice cracks on might as well be said to our faces they’re so loud.
What? . . . I thought he was . . . your parents . . . okay? . . . about you? . . . of a bitch . . . the cops? . . . don’t think . . . fucking terrible . . . so sorry . . .
Nothing good is happening here and the rest of us are all looking at one another, not polite enough to pretend we can’t hear it and too curious to talk over her so that we actually don’t. Peekay comes back to us, flopping down next to Park but not leaning into him, and he looks like a puppy that was told he was being adopted but then someone changed their mind. It’s dead quiet and he looks at me because he has no idea what to say or do, and then Branley saves him by being a pushy bitch because that’s what she’s good at.
“What was that about?”
I expect Peekay to tell her to fuck off, but there are three empty beer cans at her feet and the fire’s light only extends so far, making it seem like our faces are the only ones in the world.
So instead Peekay looks up from her phone, dark and silent now in her hands, and says, “You guys know about Sara’s uncle, right?”
And we do, so it’s not like Peekay really has to say anything else. You can’t mow your yard here without someone knowing when you started and how long it took, so if you like kiddie porn we will know. We will know and it won’t be talked about openly, but whispered behind hands, texted from one mom to the next, auto-correct not picking up on the words we don’t use often because they’re too horrible. Kids will be kept a little closer when we’re in the same grocery store and smiles will be stretched tighter or dropped entirely. But we will know. And you’ll know we know.
Except Alex doesn’t, because she’s just now crawling out of that black hole of a house to become a part of us. So when Branley says, “Sara has a little sister, doesn’t she?” and Peekay just starts crying and Park says motherfucker like he means it, Alex doesn’t know what to do. She looks back at me, so very lost, and I don’t want to be the one to fill her in but someone has to. So I grab her hand and we take the walk I’ve been planning, the heat from the fire leaking out of our bodies the second we leave the light, her fingers in mine as cold as naked bones.
It’s been snowing a little, so my tracks from earlier are filled in, and this could be the most romantic thing I’ve ever done except it’s not going to be, because I don’t think I can very well follow up a conversation that has the word molester in it with my first declaration of love.
But the dew has frozen and the moon is so bright it looks like the entire woods is made out of shadows covered in diamonds. So maybe I can salvage this thing after all, and I’m trying to reset my brain when Alex says, “What’s that?”
She breaks away from me, her feet punching through the snow.
“Hold up,” I call, wanting to be there with her, but she’s ahead of me, so when I catch up she’s in the little clearing, a solitary Scotch pine standing sentinel in the middle.
I found it last week after work, when Dad told me Mom said it’s time for a tree to go up. Only we can’t afford the twenty bucks to go buy one at a lot, so I thought if I could sneak one out of the woods without getting arrested for trespassing that would be all right. And I found this one, the right size, no gaping holes. Like it’s auditioning for the role of Christmas tree. So I went to the car and I got my ax, but when I came back I couldn’t do it.
There had been a light snow that day, and the branches held on to millions of tiny flakes. Flakes that would be dislodged by the first swing of my ax, then destroyed under my muddy boots as I tore into the trunk, the steel bite ripping through a life liv
ed longer than my own just to die in the living room and be hauled to the street on December twenty-sixth.
I couldn’t do it. But I also know it’s my last Christmas at home and that’s why Mom is insisting on a tree even though everyone knows there won’t be many presents under it. So I stayed out until two in the morning and drove to the lot and stole a tree, creeping away with my lights off and the weirdest feeling in my heart. Because what I’d just done was technically wrong, but it felt more right than cutting down the pine in the clearing, and the tree strapped to my car was going to die anyway so I might as well take it.
And I lay in bed all that night and thought about trees. Dumbest thing in the world. And I wasn’t sure what was keeping me up until I realized it wasn’t my mom’s face (crying; she’s that way about holidays) I kept seeing in my head but Alex’s, and how she’d told me once she hadn’t had a tree since their dad left. And that’s when the whole thing came together: the woods, the words I love you waiting to be said, and all the things I can’t give her because I’m poor and she’s not.
I could do this thing, though, and I tried so hard to make it right, and Alex is looking at it now. Ornaments so old that not even my mom can justify using them are transformed by the frozen dew and the moon, every inch screaming with a beauty that will dissolve in the sunlight. Dime-store ribbon tied into bows, razor-sharp with ice, will be wilted trash in a few hours when reality steps in. But this isn’t reality and this isn’t the morning. It’s now and it’s my moment and I reclaim Alex’s hand and take a deep breath and she says—
“Tell me about Sara’s uncle.”
41. ALEX
It shouldn’t be this easy.
There are laws in place that stop us from doing things. This is what we tell ourselves. In truth we stop ourselves; the law is a guideline for how to punish someone who is caught.
Claire’s dad likes to say that everything happens for a reason. He must say it a lot because I’ve been at her house only a handful of times and have heard the phrase at least twice. And if he’s right then maybe I’m supposed to hear him.
Maybe Claire was supposed to get that text from Sara tonight when I would see her face. Maybe she was supposed to have too much to drink and cry in the car, sharing memories of the times she’d been with Sara at her uncle’s house. Maybe she was supposed to point it out as I drove past, choking on words so harsh she can’t say them even with beers slicking her throat. Guess I was lucky, she says.
I live in a world where not being molested as a child is considered luck.
A fire has been lit inside of me, and if everything happens for a reason, then the kindling has been laid for years, piled nicely as it waited for a spark. And tonight was steel on flint, a heat pulsing within that keeps me warm even in the cold.
Even as I stand outside his home in the dead of night.
After I dropped Claire off, I tried to do the right thing, tried to be normal. I checked my phone for texts. I walked to the side door. I reached for the doorknob and then I was running, my feet punching through snow and leaving a dark path behind me. Now it’s his door in front of me, not my own. People don’t lock up here. They call it trust but I say it’s arrogance, an assumption that nothing bad will happen.
Not to them.
I let myself in.
He’s asleep on the couch. The lamp on the side table illuminates his half-eaten dinner, now decorated with a fat winter fly bogged down in the mashed potatoes. It’s still struggling a little, threadlike legs pushing against gravy.
He fell asleep with the TV on, the colors flickering across his face as I watch him. The steady rise and fall of his chest, his bare feet on the floor, nails that need to be clipped. The awkward angle of his neck, head resting to the side.
He’ll have a crick in the morning. Maybe.
I could leave now. There are reasons why I should. There are reasons to stay, too. I take my time, touching things, moving through the small rooms of his life to see what he keeps. And he does keep things. Things no one should have. I go through pictures, grainy but with enough detail to know what I’m looking at.
Now I can’t leave.
He burns wood for warmth, the iron stove in the center room emitting heat like a wall that I move through as I walk toward it. There’s a small shovel for cleaning out ash, leaning against the stove, cocked toward me as if in invitation.
It really shouldn’t be this easy.
When I dump the embers in his lap, his clothing ignites. His eyes fly open, but he does not see me. There is only confusion, a lack of comprehension so great that it trumps even the pain. The elasticized band of his underwear liquefies and runs across his skin, the tiny hairs on his belly flaming for a brief fiery moment before becoming ash.
His hands go immediately to the pain, wanting to cup it and cover the hurt, but there is no comfort in the movement. Blisters open and break in a moment and his sleeves catch, fire creeping up his arms as he staggers to his feet. He wants to run now—the second instinctive reaction to pain—but he doesn’t know where to go and the coffee table is in his way, cracking against his shins hard enough to break skin, but even that does not stop him as he bolts.
He heads for the bedroom, liquid flame lighting the carpet in his wake as parts of his sweater drip to the floor. That room calls to him even as he burns, a black hole that he flies toward, his melting hands providing mutual destruction for the pictures I laid out on the bed. I don’t follow, because I don’t need to see.
I can hear.
Animals die in the woods all the time. I’ve heard their screams, startlingly human as they fight something stronger, faster, bigger. But there’s a final moment when they know the battle is lost, when the prey goes still and accepts fate, a passive agreement with the predator that they have been bested.
That silence follows the smoke down the hallway, and I know it’s over. The small fires that dropped around him have grown, licking up the carpet fibers and now searching for more.
They creep toward me and I’ve spent too much time watching. I head for the door, my eyes watering against the smoke and my throat tightening against the fumes of the smoldering carpet. Yet I can’t move fast because there’s an unfamiliar weight in my stomach and I fight against it as I hit the cold, clear air, my feet finally picking up speed as I run down the driveway, to the road, past the woods, places I can’t leave footprints.
What was his home is now a pillar of smoke, bits of ash falling from the sky, all that’s left of any number of horrific acts. But that’s not what puts me on my knees. That’s not what makes me vomit, the steam from it rising back up in my face as I retch again and again.
The weight in my gut is gone, leaving behind a dark pit and strained muscles. I lie back in the snow, my body quivering. I don’t know what to do, for the first time in a long time. I don’t know what I think.
Because that empty space inside me, it feels like guilt.
42. JACK
Sound travels when the air is freezing. Even with the storm windows I can hear a train, though the tracks are so far away I can’t see the lights. Its thrum supersedes the constant sound of the breeze moving through the pines near the house, the low grunt of a deer that had been passing through the yard as it sees something it doesn’t like. I hear it bolt, hooves breaking through the frozen snow as it flees.
I can’t sleep, and it’s got nothing to do with noises. I’ve been hearing these things my whole life, same as I’ve been staring at this crack in the ceiling my whole life. For some people the constant things are reassurance; they find comfort in the fact that nothing ever changes. But I’m not like that, and right now I hate the crack in my ceiling, I hate the train for existing, and I especially hate the wind for moving the pines outside and reminding me that I’m going to have to go back to the clearing and get all the stupid fucking decorations off that tree.
I curl my fist under my head, fighting the urge to punch the wall. I told Alex that I love her, right after explaining about Sara’s un
cle. Her eyes did the right thing, lit up as bright as the snow all around us. But her mouth was all wrong, still fused shut with an inexpressible anger. She actually said thank you, which was worse than saying nothing at all. We stared at each other for a few seconds after that, another awkward silence like the one after she attacked Ray Parsons descending around us.
I hate not knowing what to say to Alex, and of course here in my bed I’ve come up with all kinds of great things, words that would’ve smoothed over my bad timing and loosened some of the muscles around her lips. But those things didn’t come to me when I needed them, so we walked back to the church, Alex with her hands in her pockets, eyes on the ground and her face as cold as the wind. Peekay’d had too much to drink and Alex drove her home, giving me a halfhearted wave as she got into the car.
The train is gone, taking its vibrant hum with it. I’m left with the wind and the crack on my ceiling and all the things I could’ve done differently tonight when there’s a tap on my window. I ignore it, focused on the crack, wondering if there’s any old caulk out in the garage, and if I can sneak out and get it without my parents wondering what the hell I’m doing fixing my ceiling at four in the morning.
The sound comes again, followed quickly by another, more insistent. I roll over and push the curtain aside to see Alex standing in the driveway, arm pulled back to throw another stone. I wave to her and she drops it, motioning for me.
I know how to dress quickly and quietly, know which spots on the stairs creak loudly, and how to open the screen door just right without making a sound. But I don’t know how to do any of these things with my heart beating so hard I can see it in my chest, or with my blood rushing so fast there are dark corners in my vision.