Release

  “Call me in the morning.”

  “Before I call Kurt, that’s for sure.”

  She never dated Kurt. He wasn’t a bad guy, he didn’t spread anything around. Angela forever referred to it as an “anthropological excursion”, one she remembered fondly but more for the scientific notes she’d gathered than for the experience itself.

  Notes that he found unconvincing in their ongoing debate the next day about his own virginity loss. “There are levels if you’re a boy,” he’d argued. “Especially one who likes other boys.”

  “There are levels for girls, too.”

  “You can say that all you want, but the world thinks your virginity is one thing and one thing only.”

  “Which is completely arbitrary and unfair.”

  “Agreed, but when do you think you lost your virginity?”

  “Last night… Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh. So when do I lose mine? Is a handjob enough?”

  “When did you get a handjob?”

  “Ah, see, now that’s another question. What if I just give one?”

  “When did you give a handjob?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You haven’t, have you?” Angela said, though it came out less a question than an assertion.

  “You mean aside from to myself?”

  “There’s also a word the entire world gives that.”

  “Well, when would I have had the chance?”

  And this was true. Compared to teens in movies and books and on TV, he and Angela weren’t especially oversexed throughout most of early high school. Which was probably just as well, as everyone around them – and them, too – was too busy actually growing into their bodies to want very much to show them naked to anyone else.

  It was harder for Adam due to lack of availables. Still, Linus was somehow the fourth person he’d had sex with, Enzo the second. A fumble with a sweetly geeky and astonishingly pale guy named Larry in his teen group at the church had been between them. That was after a music rehearsal when Big Brian Thorn had invited the teen choir over to the house for fellowship. Adam found Larry crying in his bedroom. Seven minutes and an ejaculation later, Larry was crying again, but for different reasons: gratitude and guilt. Larry had studiously avoided him at church ever since, though to be honest, it had all been so unexpected, Adam occasionally forgot it had ever happened.

  He never forgot his actual virginity loss, though.

  Philip Matheson, a name almost as English as Angela Darlington. He was a junior when Adam was finishing his freshman year, though the age difference was only eighteen months, and he was a rare member of the Frome High School Cross-Country Team who was taller than Adam. Broader, too, but like a lot of fairly massive people, quite shy with it. They only started talking because Philip – never Phil, never – was glad to have someone he could hide behind during the team photo.

  “We both should have really been swimmers,” Philip had said, that day outside the school, the short members of the team holding the school banner down front.

  “I hate swimming,” Adam said. “Though my feet are flat enough.”

  “It’d be nice if you could always get a pool to yourself. I only really like a sport you can do completely alone.”

  At that, Adam had looked up at him, the first person in a long, long time he could actually look up at. Philip had darker hair than Adam, darker stubble – though Adam still barely had anything that could pass for stubble at all, to be fair – and he blushed when Adam caught his eye, actually blushed.

  Three months later, at a party much like tonight’s at Philip’s own house, Philip had a beer, Adam had a beer, Philip had another, Adam had another, and out by the indoor pool Philip’s father had built, Philip had completely avoided looking Adam in the face when he said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we, like, kissed?”

  The next ninety-three minutes that Adam waited for the party to clear while calculating how worth it the damage would be from parents who had expressly forbidden he stay over with “this friend we haven’t met”, were the longest ninety-three minutes of his life.

  “Is it okay if I haven’t kissed anyone before?” Adam had asked, finally up in Philip’s bedroom.

  “Anyone at all?” Philip said. “Or just another guy?”

  “Anyone at all. Sorry.”

  “Whoa. Really, whoa.” And Philip had kissed him. He tasted of beer and tongue and beery tongue and smelled of sweat and of faint cologne and of boy. Just that, he smelled of another boy, so much that the ache in Adam’s body was almost palpable and he couldn’t keep from shaking. Then Philip had started unbuttoning Adam’s shirt and every die was cast. Adam was so stunned, he didn’t actually move until Philip had undressed him completely, with the strange intent of someone who was, by God, going to finish a job he had started, lest he notice what he was doing and stop. When Adam was finally completely naked – and Philip still completely not – Philip had run fingers down the flesh of Adam’s arms and said, “There.” Just, “There.”

  This was the moment Adam always remembered, even more than that first incredible kiss: the first time being naked and, well, hard in front of someone else. There was no going back from this, no joke that would cover it, there was only this moment when someone was actually looking at it, at him, was actually reaching out to touch it, take it in their hand, and that … that was the impossible going right ahead and happening.

  There was naked and then there was naked.

  “There,” Philip said.

  Everything was new. Everything was a first. He’d seen it all on porn, obviously, but Philip had been hairier than that in surprising places, everything less perfect, but that was so much more exciting than perfect could ever, ever be. And the skin. Angela was so right about the skin that Adam couldn’t stop looking, even when they were kissing, until Philip had put up a gentle hand and closed his eyes. “You’re staring,” he’d whispered.

  “Sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It really is your first time, isn’t it?” Philip had smiled back then leaned away into the light so that Adam could take a long, long look, just seeing everything. Philip wasn’t the most beautiful guy in the whole wide world, no, but right then, he was the most beautiful thing Adam had ever seen. Ever seen all of.

  “I’m sorry I’m a little hefty,” Adam said.

  “I’m not.”

  They’d carried on, but looking back and knowing more, Adam couldn’t imagine the experience had been all that interesting for Philip, as Adam had mostly just lain there, half in shocked inexperience, half trying not to let it finish at every desperate second.

  Then Philip had whispered a request in his ear. “Can I…” was all he got out, as if too embarrassed to say the verb.

  “I’ve never done that either.”

  “That’s okay then–”

  “But yeah. Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.”

  Philip had looked him in the eye. “I’ll go slow,” he said, and put on a condom.

  He went slow. It didn’t help.

  “I can stop any time,” Philip said.

  “Can you just … not move for a second?”

  “Of course. It always hurts like this first time.”

  “Then why do people do it?” Adam managed to say.

  “Because wait for it. Just wait.”

  Adam waited. The initial pain subsided. It grew tolerable. Then it grew completely remarkable. Physically, sure, but mentally, too. They were face to face still, and Adam could see the ferocious concentration Philip was putting himself through, wondered if he was thinking the same thing as Adam. I am having sex. I’m having actual sex with an actual man.

  I am having sex.

  I am having sex.

  He said embarrassing sex things. He said them probably quite loudly. But Philip did, too. And when they were done, and they were stil
l together, still connected, before they even started cleaning up, Philip had kissed him again, holding his lips and tongue for a long, long moment, then saying, “I wish we’d done this sooner.”

  Because it turned out Philip, like Enzo, like Angela for that matter, was about to move away. They’d never got together again. They’d texted a few times, but mostly it was Philip wishing him well and saying goodbye in various ways, as he took off for a senior year in Omaha. Adam was disappointed, of course, but also smart enough to know it might never have happened if Philip hadn’t been going. Would he have risked it? Would he have said nothing at all, leaving Adam quite clueless?

  But it had happened. Twenty-seven days after Angela. And he’d called her at three o’clock that morning, sitting on the edge of the bathtub in Philip’s house, feeling tired, sore, spent, and different, different, different.

  “Oh, my God,” Angela had sleepily whispered.

  “I know,” he’d whispered back.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “My parents are going to murder me and I don’t even care. That’s how okay I am.”

  “I have so many questions.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Like … so many.”

  His parents didn’t quite murder him, but he’d been grounded for the next month and made to clean the church every single Wednesday of that summer. And Angela had asked many, many, many, many questions, most of them eye-wateringly anatomical.

  “I didn’t ask this much about Kurt.”

  “Well, you totally could.”

  “You’re not taking my hint here.”

  “Oh, you love me, and you know it.”

  And he did. Love her. With all his aching heart.

  The faun finds her kneeling by the body of a large woman. He thinks his way into the woman’s chest and finds a heart still beating – albeit in a flawed, laborious way that can surely not be long for this world.

  “Wake up, Mom,” he hears his Queen say. “It’s your Katie.”

  He has already erased the memories of those he’s passed: the neighbours of this house; the man who’d been driving by, ready to throw a newspaper over the short fence; the two little girls with dirty faces who had stopped their own argument – about something called “mango candy lip dazzle” – and stared at him as he approached, neither of them screaming, not just yet. He held his hands over their eyes, and returned them to their dazzle.

  And now here is his Queen, kneeling over her mother, when it is the Queen who is the Mother, the Mother of them all–

  He sees her look around at the house beyond the darkened doorway where the woman fainted. “I know this place.”

  She stands, leaving the woman behind, entering the house. The faun steps over the large woman, searching her mind, finding the right things to erase. He ducks under the lintel of the door – he is far too tall to be comfortable inside any dwelling these creatures make for themselves – and he follows the Queen in a crouch. The house smells not of death, like the cabin did, but of grief, a cold and heavy scent that slows him down, even in the short entryway.

  The house is quiet. No one else is at home, though the unconscious woman is not the only one who resides here. He can smell an older man and two other younger women who were here this morning, their scents lingering like ghosts walking up and down these rooms.

  The spirit’s smell has components of these, as they have components of hers. The physical ties of families.

  But he stops as he smells that the grief here works two ways. They feel the grief of her loss. But her grief is here as well. There was loss before her loss. There was emptiness, which is the same as loss.

  Blinking in this corporeal body, he moves on.

  He finds her in front of a hearth, though no fire has been lit there for some months. On the mantel above, there are photographs.

  There are photographs of her.

  “What are you smiling about?” Angela said, poking her head into the back room.

  “I was just remembering Kurt Miller,” Adam said.

  “Sweet guy. I was sad when he moved away.”

  “Not sad enough to be friends on social media.”

  “I’m not desperate.”

  “I was thinking of Philip Matheson, too.”

  “The boy who took Adam’s flower.” She nodded, understanding. “Someone’s looking for physical consolation.”

  “Might help wash Wade off me.”

  She sat down next to him again. “I’ve got to get back on the floor, but… It’s okay to not be okay, you know.”

  “I know. I’m happy for you. But selfish enough to be sad for me.”

  “And Wade?”

  “I’m not sad for him at all.”

  “Adam–”

  “I can’t lose my job. Paying for college was going to be iffy anyway–”

  His phone buzzed. A text from Marty. Angela read it with him over his shoulder. You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy, Micah 7:18.

  “Who quotes Micah?” Adam said.

  “And who’s the ‘you’ in that sentence?” Angela said.

  “He’s saying sorry. I think? Maybe? He believes some awful shit, but at heart, he’s not the worst person I know.”

  Angela sighed. “Go to Linus. Wash Wade off. Get some loving. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “For a going-away party that suddenly has more people going away?”

  “We can just eat all three dozen pizzas over at my house if you want.”

  Adam grinned at her, sadly.

  She grinned back, sadly, too. “You can’t miss me yet. Now, seriously, go. We’ll figure this shit out, but you’ve got Linus waiting.” And then she said something he knew her mother had always said to her. “Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It’s the worst kind of regret.”

  She reaches out to touch the photographs, but stops short. “This is me,” she hears herself whispering, amazed. “This is who I was.”

  This is who she was, thinks the Queen, and for a moment the separation is clear, for a moment she can almost step behind this body and see it, looking at the photos of itself. She feels her own power, restless, churning, the power of the waters of the world, the power that answers to the moon and the moon alone, the power that could level this house, destroy this body, destroy this town, if such a thing were ever to be allowed again–

  “What–?” says the Queen in her own voice. “How have I–?”

  And this fleeting spirit, this weak, fleeting spirit that should have no hold on her, this spirit surrounds her again, binds her, seems even unaware of her presence except as a vehicle for itself, and the Queen forgets, as she steps back into the body that welcomes her.

  Her glance moves from photo to photo. There are none of her with the hands that killed her. None showing the bruises around her throat.

  “I was unhappy here,” she says. And from that unhappiness she went out and found, not happiness, but numbness, which is what she thought her only option was.

  She knows why she came here. It is home. It drew her. Even as Tony’s hands were choking her, even as she could feel the blood boiling in her temples in a way that spoke only of irreversible damage, even when she woke for the last few seconds of her life in the silt of the lake, drowning, her lungs filled, even then, she thought of home. She thought of here.

  She realizes her mistake.

  “This was my home,” she says, “but it is not my home now.”

  The faun barely has time to get out of her way as she turns and leaves, still not seeing him–

  (Though for a moment there, for a moment–)

  She steps past him, back out the front door, over the woman–

  The woman now waking–

  “Katie?” asks the woman, certain she is dreaming.

  “Katie is dead,” says his Queen, not looking back, heading out into the world.

  The faun has no choice but to follow.

&n
bsp; LINUS AT 2 O’CLOCK

  Second shower of the day. Adam stood under the spray in Linus’s bathroom, breathing in the steam, washing the smell of the Evil International Mega-Conglomerate, the smell of Wade’s office, the smell of Wade – though, to be fair, also the smell of pizza and bulgogi – out of his hair.

  Linus poked his head around the shower curtain, his glasses immediately steaming up. “You okay in here?”

  “Yeah,” Adam said.

  “Angela’s right, you know,” Linus said, taking off his glasses, blinking his big, half-blind eyes in a way that Adam found impossibly adorable. “You have to report him.”

  “Can we talk about it another time?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s just,” Adam said, “I’m naked and you’re too cute for me to believe right now.”

  Linus smiled his gleaming, toothy smile that looked all Broadway but had actually happened naturally, no braces ever needed. “Not so bad yourself,” he said. “In a blurry, steamy way. You sure you don’t want company?”

  “Not yet, but soon.” Adam let the water run off his shoulders and down his pale belly, already a little plump. A lifetime of negotiating with it beckoned. “Angela’s going to spend senior year in Holland in a programme her aunt runs.”

  Linus’s mouth opened in surprise. “You’ve had a busy morning.”

  “In one amazing way I’m really happy for her.”

  “And in another?”

  Adam looked up from the spray and the steam into Linus’s still-blinking eyes. “Maybe don’t move away any time soon?”

  “Not planning on it.”

  “Good. And I’ll be in Frome for the rest of my life, I think, so, you know, if either of you ever want to visit–”

  “You’ll get out. We all will. Every gay has to have their years in a huge coastal city. It’s like a law.”

  Adam just breathed again. “I’m kinda using up all your hot water.”

  “We’re in the rainiest state in the Union. We’ll struggle through.”

  “Is there something wrong with me, Linus?”