Release

  “Lack of willingness to manscape?”

  “Ugh, no, I hate that stuff. I’m not Barbie.”

  “No, you’re really, really not Barbie.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “And a little self-pitying.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Forgiven. You’ve had a remarkably shit day and it’s only two o’clock,” Linus said. “Look, there’s nothing more wrong with you than there is with anyone else. And nothing so wrong that I don’t spend all my time thinking about great big ungroomed naked you wasting hot water in my shower while my parents are out playing softball.”

  Adam smiled, slightly, then leaned forward and gave Linus a wet kiss.

  “Nothing so wrong,” Linus said, “that I wasn’t able to fall in love with you.”

  Adam used the tip of his tongue to touch the faint coffee taste Linus always left on his lips and said, “I love you, too.”

  The girl they have found is clearly under the influence of a drug. Her eyes are open, she is breathing, but she sees neither the Queen nor the faun as they approach the sofa where she lies.

  “You are Sarah,” the Queen says to her, not a greeting, a fact.

  The girl hears this – or some form of it – and her eyes swim to the Queen, though who could say what she actually sees?

  The Queen has led the faun on an unerring straight line that took notice of no boundary or landscape. They crossed roads and houses, only going around an obstacle when going through it would have taken too much time. All this in broad daylight, on a day when these creatures were mostly at their leisure. There are still memories upon memories he needed to erase. He begins to despair. What can it matter if they see? If he can’t save the Queen, all is lost anyway.

  They came to a house. This house. One that smells of a sickness so powerful the faun had to force himself to go inside.

  “You are Sarah,” the Queen says again, kneeling in front of the sofa, taking the hand of the girl–

  And unexpectedly, from nowhere, the faun sees a chance.

  She feels such love for this girl, it almost makes her stumble. Sarah. This person, this friend, this home–

  She had known after seeing her mother, after returning to that place that had offered silences or screaming but little in between, a place where more than one of her mother’s boyfriends had put hands on her over the years, a place where – after she told her mother about the first boyfriend who did so – her mother had beaten her for a liar. These images come to her now in a kind of swimming clarity. Because she was inside it all those years, it had still somehow always looked like home.

  It has taken death to finally see it for what it was. The mouth of a predator.

  But here, this house, this girl, this Sarah, even seen from the outside, even from beyond the borders of the sickness and blindness that bind her here–

  This, this is her home. This is where love had been found, even refuge when necessary. Oh, that she had been able to see it sooner. Maybe she could have saved her friend. Maybe she could have saved herself.

  The Queen reaches forward, takes Sarah’s hand.

  Sarah wakes. And sees the Queen.

  Linus Bertulis, a Lithuanian name, even though his ancestors had been in America longer than the Thorns. Linus Bertulis, at the top of all the College Prep classes, taking half his subjects at the local university extension because he was so far ahead of anyone else. Linus Bertulis, who Adam wanted to love so much it almost physically hurt.

  Linus was cute, and that was a fact. He was a nerd, like Renee and Karen said, but nerdiness – like a big nose, like a belly – was never any barrier to cuteness. He wore black-rimmed glasses, had a thick swoop of brown hair that was already showing signs of handsome recession, and dressed with an old-fashioned formality that mostly, but not always, stopped just short of a bow tie.

  Adam would never be able to introduce Linus to his parents. He was polite, friendly, smiley, and would raise so many suspicions, Adam’s mom and dad would probably send Adam on a year-long mission trip to Turkmenistan just to get him out of town until graduation.

  Linus liked the same horror movies Adam and Angela did, almost exclusively read three-inch thick fantasies with sexy elves on the covers, while also somehow being a competitive ballroom dancer. Seriously. He danced with an Italian girl called Marta and they sometimes even won things. It also meant that under the vintage blazers and tailored trousers, he had an absolutely extraordinary butt. Just extraordinary. Adam frequently marvelled at it when he held it in his hands.

  Like now.

  “I thought we were going to eat first,” Linus said, as they lay on his bed.

  “I had bulgogi. Your butt is extraordinary.”

  “If you don’t got core strength, you ain’t a ballroom dancer.”

  “You have more muscles than I do. Like, by a lot.”

  “It’s always a surprise to the boys in PE. But you can run sixteen miles at a stretch if you have to.”

  “Which has given me thighs but no butt.”

  “Your thighs could snap one of my arms off, though.”

  “They should add that to ballroom competitions. Thigh clamping.”

  “I have no idea where this train of thought is heading, Adam,” Linus said, but he was smiling.

  Linus, to Adam’s astonishment, had made the first move. Like damn near everyone else in Frome, they’d known each other at least distantly since about the second grade, but they’d hung out with different crowds. If you could call Angela a “crowd”. Defying stereotype, Linus was in chess club but not drama club, though he did have about a zillion girl best friends. He also had a name that people over forty seemed to find amusing but that other teenagers took in their stride. You had to, in a world of Briannas and Jaydens, but also because of how Linus wore it. If anyone was going to carry off the name Linus in a small town, it was Linus.

  Linus never even had to come out. As a sophomore, he took a boy – from another school, but a boy nonetheless – to the Junior Prom (having charmed his way into a ticket) and the only person at Frome High who even batted an eyelid was FHS’s very Christian front office secretary, who wrote a note to Linus’s parents, who in turn wrote a note back explaining in great detail how she and the school district would be sued if she ever tried to discriminate against their son again.

  This was a world, an intoxicating and possible world, which Adam saw as if through a veil, unreachable. Desperately close, but impossibly far… Because the Junior Prom had caused a (very) minor furore among the evangelical preachers of Frome, of which there were a fair number. It was Big Brian Thorn, though – eyeing as ever the crowds at The Ark of Life – who saw an opening in staking out a position extreme enough to get people’s attention. For ninety minutes Adam sat through a sermon that could only have been directed at him, though no one in the entire building, not least his father, would admit it. “I would sit outside that dance in sackcloth and cover myself in manure if that were my child.” He really said that. Which probably shouldn’t have made Adam think that, in order to sit outside in protest, his father would have had to let him go to the dance with a boy in the first place. Still, the car ride home had been particularly silent.

  It was also the main reason (of many) Adam’s parents didn’t know how Linus existed in Adam’s life. Fortunately, they’d never quite caught Linus’s name, and God bless Angela for months of cover stories.

  Linus had found Adam alone in a Red Robin, where Angela was coming to meet him from the farm. It was only a few weeks after Enzo had declared an annulment of their relationship. Which was an especially difficult way to be broken up with, as now Adam was in the position of mourning something that had allegedly never been.

  “You all right?” Linus had asked out of nowhere. Adam hadn’t even seen him come in. He’d sat facing away from the restaurant with a raspberry lemonade, in a kind of limbo of non-movement until Linus was suddenly across the table from him. “You look a little upset. Lost, kind of.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, I’m okay,” Adam had said, a little taken aback that a boy was speaking to him like this, when they were only ever phrases he heard from girls or himself. “Waiting for someone.”

  “Angela Darlington?”

  Adam was surprised, as he always was, when someone knew even a minor fact about him. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Anything you want to talk about before she gets here?” Linus said, kindly. “You really don’t look very happy.”

  “We don’t even know each other, Linus.”

  Linus hesitated, but Adam saw him decide to push ahead. “I think maybe we do. Don’t you?”

  Adam wondered at the depth of this, how far down into the still pond this stone had been meant to fall. Linus gave him a moment and glanced around the restaurant, at the brass rails, the brown shiny leather of the booths slick with the accumulated grease of a thousand nights of burgers and fries, checking that they couldn’t be overheard. He leaned closer to Adam, his face concerned, his voice gentle. “I know why you’re sad. I know why you’re afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Liar,” he said, still gentle. “I’m afraid. Every day. And if it’s that hard for me–”

  “Then how hard must it be for pathetic Adam Thorn?” Adam’s voice had some heat in it.

  “Well,” Linus said, “yes. Except the pathetic part. We don’t pick our families. Or the sermons they preach.”

  Adam winced. “Oh, God, you know about that?”

  “You honestly think social media would have kept me in ignorance?” He made a dismissive hand. “It passed in a week, but the whole time, all I thought about was how you were taking it.”

  “Linus–”

  “And we also,” he pressed on, “don’t pick who we fall for. We don’t make them turn out to be complete dickheads.”

  Adam’s stomach was tumbling with how much Linus knew and how he’d found it all out (it would turn out he knew as much as nearly everyone else in the school, which was a lot, but it also turned out that – in that unreachable, possible world – most of them actually liked Adam or at least didn’t actively wish him harm, so they’d given his sorrow some space; when Adam thought about it now, it still made his head swim, still made him blush, still made him wish he could crawl under a blanket and die there forever) – but looking at Linus, he saw no malice, no gossip, saw instead someone who might actually know. He’d heard once that the only people who could effectively treat the trauma of surviving an airplane crash were other survivors of airplane crashes. You could only instinctively trust someone who had been there, who had seen it first-hand.

  Then Linus – and he actually did this, he really actually did – reached across the table and put his hand on Adam’s, a strangely old-fashioned gesture that went with everything else strangely old-fashioned about Linus Bertulis.

  “No,” he said, “I guess we don’t really know each other. But maybe…”

  He fell silent. Adam could feel himself holding his breath. “I’m kind of waiting for Angela here,” he said.

  Linus smiled again. “Angela is a bit awesome.”

  “She is.”

  “And if she’s your friend, that makes you a bit awesome, too.”

  “I’m not in third grade, Linus.”

  Linus laughed. “This is coming across all Schoolhouse Rock, isn’t it?”

  “A little.”

  “Adam.” For the first time, Linus looked away, moving his hand and tapping his fingers in pretend interest on the side of Adam’s lemonade. “You–” he looked up on “you” then looked away again– “are a big, beautiful guy. You give off this vibe of somebody trying to hide their wounds, wounds you didn’t deserve but maybe you think you did.” He looked up again. “I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet you money.”

  But Adam had started blushing furiously at “beautiful” and was only thinking of how he could keep Linus from noticing.

  “I’m not swooping in on someone vulnerable,” Linus said. “I want to be clear on that. That’s not me.” He shrugged. “But you’ve always seemed nice. Always seemed cute. And I just…” He tapped Adam’s lemonade glass again, and Adam was surprised to hear Linus’s voice do a little wobble. “I know what it’s like. I know what all of it’s like.”

  “Hello,” Angela said, in a particular way, standing at the end of the table. “Hi, Linus.” But she was looking squarely at Adam.

  “Hey, Angela,” Linus said, scooting back out.

  “What are you doing?” Angela asked him.

  He stopped, took a breath, looked at Adam. “Asking Adam out on a date. When he’s ready. Or, you know, just to hang out.”

  With a little wave, he left them, not even sitting back at his own table. Turned out he’d been there waiting for his sister to finish a job interview to be a waitress. She got the job. Linus, eventually, got his date.

  “My eyes are burning,” Sarah says, and she means it literally. She gazes now upon the unfiltered glory of the Queen, something no one is meant to see, certainly none of Sarah’s kind, not this close. She will be blind in moments if she does not look away.

  For now, the faun does not care what happens to this clearly doomed mortal.

  For here is his Queen, here she is.

  “My Queen,” he asks, “can you hear me?”

  “Where am I?” she answers, and his heart rejoices. “What is this place?”

  “You are trapped, my Queen. This spirit holds you here–”

  “This spirit holds me here.” She gazes still on Sarah, who is starting to whine at the pain. “This spirit holds me to this place, this body.”

  The Queen looks to the faun. Sarah gasps with relief. “How dare they?” says the Queen. “By what presumption do they–”

  And she is suddenly gone again as she lets go of Sarah’s hand.

  For a moment there–

  For a moment, she was herself again, but she cannot fully remember who that was or is. She is back in the company of this spirit, this one who has bound her.

  This one who has come looking for her proper home.

  In hopes that– thinks the Queen. In hopes that it will free her.

  But is she the only one who needs freeing? And why this place? Why this person, rubbing her eyes and moaning on this foul-smelling couch in clothes that have gone too long without washing? What seemed so clear moments ago is now muddied.

  “Why am I here?” she says aloud, and this person, this human, this Sarah, hears her.

  “To punish me?” Sarah asks, fear covering her voice.

  “It wasn’t you who killed me,” the Queen says.

  “Oh, Katie.” Sarah begins to cry, wincing at how the tears sting her injured eyes. “I should never have got you into this. It’s my fault. It’s my stupid fault.”

  “You were my home,” the Queen says, remembering the fact of it, trying, struggling to remember the feeling that had been attached to it. “You were my best friend.”

  “You were mine, Katie,” Sarah says, weeping now, then she says again, “I should never have got you into this.”

  The question rises in the Queen, in the spirit, twisting around the braid the two of them make together, this new third being their combination has created, the question rises and rises until it must be spoken, until it absolutely must–

  “Are you to blame?” the Queen asks Sarah, and she genuinely doesn’t know.

  But she will kill whoever is there to take it.

  Here. Now. Again. The whole reason for the two o’clock visit in the first place. Well, not the whole reason, but the opportunities and locations were still more infrequent than most people would think, so they took them when they found them.

  And it was different with Linus in so many ways.

  There were their respective heights, to start – it couldn’t be ignored, so they didn’t – but it was much more easily managed than Angela’s questions would ever make it seem. “How do you keep from hitting your head? Doesn’t he just fall off sometimes?”

 
“You went out with Chester Wallace,” Adam would reply. “He’s almost three feet taller than you.”

  “Yeah,” Angela said, “but I just looked at it as a kind of obstacle course. You jump over some parts, you duck under others, then you climb the rope at the end and everyone gets a Diet Coke.”

  “What are you smiling at?” Linus whispered to him now, smiling a little himself.

  “Nothing, just … what a picture we must make.”

  “No pictures. Not ever.”

  “I don’t want a picture–”

  “Because those things never go away. We’re going to have a president one day and she’s going to be called Hayden and she’s going to have a sun tattooed on the back of her neck and she would be the best president we’ve ever had ever except on day four of her term, someone finds those pictures she took after a peace rally with that nice beardy activist who said he didn’t believe in mementos but that taking pictures ‘got him in the mood’ and he’d totally erase them later because he respected her too much.”

  And here was another difference. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Concentrate on two things at once.”

  Linus stretched forward awkwardly to kiss him on the lips. “I’m only concentrating on one thing, Adam.”

  Compared with Enzo, sex with Linus was a whole other world. Enzo wasn’t a talker. Linus really, really was, and it turned out Adam quite liked it. The vibe was completely different, too. With Enzo, there were moments of what Adam could only describe as desperation. They had to do it, they had to get each other’s clothes off, Enzo had to get inside Adam (the few times Adam had topped Enzo, there had been no had to about it, just lengthy negotiations and a process so clinical Adam hadn’t even ended up enjoying it which, looking back, may have been Enzo’s plan all along).

  But with Linus, there was always a smile. Always. Like a kiss was something enjoyably secret. Like a hand on Adam’s bottom was an almost old-fashioned advance (just like the word “bottom”). Like Linus was enlisting Adam in the funnest, funniest thing two people could do together.