by Patrick Ness
“They’re paying for it,” Adam said, though now that he thought about it, he couldn’t recall any mechanism being discussed as to how that would actually happen. Had he heard them say they’d pay? “I volunteered,” he said, pondering it.
“That was good of you,” Karen said, not looking at him.
“Karen,” Renee warned, gently.
“What?” Karen said. “If he wants to keep doing stuff for someone and getting nothing back, that’s totally not my business, is it?”
“I don’t–” Adam started. “He doesn’t–” He unnecessarily shelved an end table. “Anyway, he’s leaving town so there’s no point talking about it. And who says there’s anything to talk about?”
“Ain’t no shame in a broken heart,” Karen sang under her breath. Adam pretended not to hear.
Why was he bringing all the pizza? And maybe paying for it. (No. No, the Garcias were nice people. Busy but nice.) He was Enzo’s friend, wasn’t he? Isn’t that what friends did? Friends with an aching chasm of pain between them that only one of them seemed able to see?
“You don’t take any of this seriously, do you?” Enzo had said on their last night together before they became “friends”. It was some months after Enzo had told Adam he loved him for the last time. And two seconds after Adam said it for what he didn’t know was his last time.
“We’re just messing around,” Enzo said, not meeting Adam’s eyes. “That’s all.”
At first he thought Enzo was kidding, had to be kidding. What had sixteen months been if not serious? What, if not love? “Just teenage experimental shit,” Enzo said now. That’s what.
It was a moment where Adam could have saved … what? His self-respect at least. An ending that was true. But he’d seen the panic on Enzo’s face, a face he knew so well, a mouth he’d kissed, eyes he’d seen laugh and cry. Enzo was terrified and that threw Adam, just enough.
“Yeah.” He’d forced a laugh. “Just messing around.” He forced another laugh. “All that I love you stuff, ha, ha, ha.”
“I mean,” Enzo said, “I’m not against doing it now and then, but it’s just friends helping each other out before we get girlfriends, yeah?”
“I don’t want a girlfriend,” Adam had at least managed to say.
“Yeah, well, I do,” Enzo said, not looking at him again.
Because if Adam was honest, was this actually so much of a surprise? If he really gathered all the things Enzo had said to him, had he really ever said “I love you” or had he only ever said “I love you, too”?
He was different than Adam, is what Adam always told himself. Adam used words. Enzo used affection, didn’t he? And he had been affectionate. If he hadn’t said the words out loud much, he’d said them over and over again with a touch, with a kiss, with sex that was hardly just going in one direction.
“Why do we have to label it?” Enzo had asked, all along, it was true. “Why can’t we just be?”
And Adam had said, “Okay.” He’d said, “Okay.” He hadn’t even tried the it’s-not-a-label-it’s-a-map thing he’d sold to Angela. Why not? Why hadn’t he? Why the hell did he just take whatever Enzo offered? Without argument or demand. Without even apparent self-respect.
Because he loved Enzo. Maybe there didn’t have to be any other reasons. Maybe love made you stupid.
Maybe loneliness did.
Because: the day Adam got his driver’s licence. That day.
It was two months after Adam turned sixteen, six months in with Enzo. Adam assumed he’d failed his test after bumping a kerb while parallel parking, but the examiner – a rumpled man who seemed genuinely on the edge of tears, so perhaps was nursing some fresh private grief – hadn’t seemed to notice or much care about anything. He passed Adam without even looking up from his clipboard.
Adam had taken Enzo out in his mom’s car – after promising not to go near any freeway and to call every hour to reassure her that he hadn’t wrecked anything and was, incidentally, not dead. They had ignored the state law that said new licensees could only drive their siblings for the first six months. “We look like brothers anyway,” Enzo said. They didn’t.
They’d gone to Denny’s, celebrating the good news with deep-fried mozzarella sticks and Moons Over My Hammy.
“Let’s go to the lake,” Enzo had said, when they finished.
“We go to the lake all the time,” Adam said.
“Not on our own. Not to the far side.”
“There’s nothing on the far side.”
At which Enzo smiled.
The far side of the lake was officially state park. Unofficially, mostly due to budget cuts, it was a place where less-than-legal fields of pot were grown, and there were lurid and preposterous rumours of a forest cult and sightings of half-naked men in the furs of who knew what animals.
“It’s daylight,” Enzo said. “We’ll be fine.”
“Not daylight for much longer.” Adam hated that the thought of driving out there made him nervous, but it did. If not the actual danger, then for what would happen if his parents found out. Though that was true of a lot of things these days.
“I know,” Enzo said. “That’s what I want to show you.”
So they’d gone, Enzo directing him along lakeside roads that looked a lot less dangerous than legend made them out to be, though they did drive past the cabin where Katherine van Leuwen would eventually be murdered, so perhaps legend was on to something.
“Where are we going?” Adam asked.
“A secret place.”
“Which you know about how?”
“I don’t for sure. I found it online.” He glanced over at Adam. “When I was thinking about what to get you.”
“You were thinking about me?” Adam’s chest lightened at even the thought. He also got half a hard-on and had to fight to keep from giggling.
Ridiculous.
“Turn here,” Enzo said, “and it should be…”
“Whoa,” Adam said, pulling to a stop in a small parking lot that looked all but forgotten. Ahead of them, a quirk in the trees made a perfect frame for Mount Rainier, bold as a tomcat, turning an unseemly, intimate pink as it stared across at the sunset.
“Best secret view around here,” Enzo said. “Apparently.”
“Cool,” Adam said, a wholly inadequate word for the unexpected beauty of it, almost as if the mountain – a source of justifiable vanity for everyone who lived here – had been gathered for a private view, just for the eyes of Adam. Given to him by Enzo.
That was love, wasn’t it? Enzo had taken time to think of him, taken time to do something as a gift to celebrate the new licence, thought ahead to the time he’d spend with Adam.
“I love you,” Adam said, eyes firmly on the mountain.
“I know,” Enzo replied, not unkindly, not unlovingly, just stating a simple fact.
“My mom and dad,” Adam said, swallowing a knot away. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Enzo.”
“I know that, too.” And he’d put a hand on Adam’s arm, then up to his head, bringing him over for a kiss, then another, and if he said, “There’s something else this parking lot is famous for”, and if Enzo had also thought ahead to bring condoms and if they then did the famous thing right there in the front seat of Adam’s mother’s Kia, if all that was true, it remained true that Enzo had thought about the view of the mountain, had saved it for Adam, had said to Adam when they were undressed, “You are so beautiful”, with the face of someone looking past the physical.
How could that not be love?
“I love you,” Adam said again, pale and naked under Enzo’s darker, amusingly hairier body.
“And oh how I love you, too, Adam Thorn,” Enzo said, kissing Adam’s eyelids, deep in his rhythm.
Oh how I love you, too. Adam held on to that embarrassingly long in the months that followed, the months that somehow led to “We’re just messing around.”
Because evidently that’s all Enzo had talked himself into thinking they wer
e doing.
Adam hadn’t even told Angela exactly how it had ended, and he told her everything. He’d hinted instead that it was sixty–forty mutual when it was really one hundred to zero. Even then, Angela had been ready to burn the earth Enzo walked on.
“I’ll kill him,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“You are clearly not okay.”
“It’s just … disappointment, that’s all. We’ll still be friends. It’s cool.”
“I don’t know why you’re lying to me.” She took his hand and held it, just like that day they’d turned over in the car. “But maybe that’s what you have to do to stay alive right now, so that’s okay. If you ever fall, I’m here to catch you. Or not, actually, you’re a giant, but I’m here to at least watch you fall and then get bandages.”
He couldn’t tell her that if he spoke the truth aloud, if he revealed everything he’d invested in Enzo, all that hope and possibility, all the life that was his own and no one else’s, if he even cried, that would really mean it was over. Enzo went away, maybe he was scared, maybe he was screwed up a little in the head over the seriousness of it, or maybe he was going through some other stuff; his parents were pretty regular Catholics after all.
He would come back. He might come back. And so that bridge could never burn.
That last night had been more than ten months ago. Angela had tolerated him remaining friendly with Enzo, but it gradually became less of an issue for all of them, not just because of time passing – though mostly because of time passing – but also because of Linus. Who Adam loved. Who he wanted to love. Who maybe it was too early to love, but still, they said it. The bridge to Enzo hadn’t burned, but it had been closed for use and, for some decent stretches of time, not thought of much at all.
Except when it was. Except when the bridge needed pizza before it moved to Atlanta.
Is this what Marty meant? When he said it wasn’t real love? Did all this prove him wrong? Or did it prove him right?
Adam felt his eyes fill, was surprised, but maybe not. That wound in his chest, that thorn that seemed stuck there, however much it was real love or it wasn’t (it was), none of that stopped it from hurting when Enzo left.
“He broke my heart,” Adam said, out loud, to Karen and Renee.
They stared at him in the hanging dust of the stockroom. It was the most direct he’d ever been, the most he’d ever said to them.
“We know,” Renee said.
“Stupid,” Adam whispered to himself, thumbing away the tears that perched in his eyes.
“But he’s leaving,” Karen said. “Which is probably good and bad.”
“Probably,” Adam said.
“And you’ve got Linus Bertulis,” Renee said, “don’t you?”
“We like Linus,” Karen said. “He’s a nerd.”
“A cute nerd,” Renee said.
“Maybe that’s enough of my private life for today–”
“I would sure as shit hope so,” Wade said, coming around the corner. “If it’s a bad idea for me to let friends work together, let me know and I can reduce everyone’s hours.”
Karen and Renee got right back to work, scanning the last of the end tables. Adam went to help them, but Wade grabbed his elbow. “After you get through the guns, I need to see you in my office.”
Adam held the grasped arm away from himself like it was about to get a vaccination. “I’m off at one, Wade. I’ve got things to do.”
“Then you’d better finish the guns pretty darn fast, don’t you think?” He play-hit Adam in the stomach a little too hard and left them there.
“Asshole,” Karen said under her breath.
“Has he talked to you guys in his office?” Adam asked.
They shook their heads. Karen holstered the stock-taking scanner. “Let’s do guns now, get it over with. Nobody gives a damn if unscented candle stock is missing anyway.”
“Man,” Renee said, “I hate guns.”
She sees her death, feels the hands around her neck, feels the bruises reappear on her grey skin. She presses her palm into the spot where it happened. The smoke rises from between her splayed fingers and her throat closes again, remembering the breath that would not come, the unbearable need to swallow that would not be satisfied. The fear was an increasing thing, rising in her gullet – though where would it go with her throat closed off?
She can remember no argument, no hostility even, from, from, from, from–
“Tony,” she says, aloud, as the first flames lick up from her fingertips.
He was a mess, all meth heads were a mess, but he had mostly been a benign one. She was afraid of the boyfriend before Tony – Victor, all neck and rage – but not Tony, never Tony.
You took my stash, Tony said, hands around her neck.
“I didn’t,” she says now, the fire spreading out from her in a circle along the dried wood. “I didn’t.”
They had shot up together. He had given her the drugs himself. She hadn’t gone near–
You took my stash, Tony said again, and that was when the fear cut through the thousand beats per minute of the meth.
“I am going to die,” she says.
You did, you took it.
“I didn’t.”
You did.
She had. She wanted to tell him, now, at last. She had put it in her pocket when he closed his eyes as the meth first hit, but she wanted to tell him she was going to share it, that it was only because he lost it the last time, that it was for safe keeping–
“And I believe these things to be true as I think them,” she says. She wonders if they were.
Tony moved his thumbs to the base of her throat for a clearer grip, a harder one that made her gag, made her vomit into the small glimpses of airway she had when Tony moved. There was no breath now. Not a chance of it.
She could distantly see Tony crying.
I loved you, he wept, as he killed her. I loved you.
Did you? she had thought as the oxygen left her brain, as a kind of smouldering hole sunk through her consciousness, taking everything down with it.
All the goatmen, Tony said, bafflingly. Don’t think I don’t see them. Out there by the lake. And it’s gone when you look.
The fire spreads to the drug detritus littering the floor. It catches quickly, filling the room with smoke, but she does not notice.
She sees the vision of Tony leaning up from her body, his dumb rage slipping from him slowly, even with the meth.
Kate? he says. Katie?
She watches him fumble backwards, his movements slow, clumsy, a kind of idiot shock taking over his features. Shit, he says. Oh, shit.
She watches as he scrambles for his needle, takes another hit of meth, waits for it, checks her again.
She is still dead.
“But oh,” she says now. “Oh, oh, oh. That’s it, is it not? Oh, oh, oh.”
She watches Tony stand, watches him weep as he puts his hands under her arms, hefting her weight – so light, so frightfully light – over his shoulder. He weeps as he searches the cabin and finds one, two scavenged bricks to stuff into the pockets of her dress. He weeps as he steps through the flames that have become an inferno in the cabin and out the front door, carrying her body to the water.
“No,” she says now. “No.”
One wall of the cabin suddenly falls away, then a second, taking the roof with it. She watches as the third and fourth similarly fall, leaving her now on a burning foundation, at the centre of a fire she cannot feel and that does not touch the rags of the clothes she still wears.
She looks up at nothing. “I was not yet dead. I was alive when he put me in the lake.”
“Yes, my Queen,” says the faun, unheard, winded from the controlled destruction of the cabin. “And that is why you are in such danger.”
They were nearly finished with the guns. The actual pieces themselves were, of course, chained, locked, kept “safe”, with the ammunition stored in another part of the vast warehouse. St
ill, anyone with the will and half an hour could break in here and easily find enough for a medium-sized massacre.
Adam and Renee handled the double-key locks, while Karen leaned in the cages with the scanning wand, trying to get through them as fast as possible. For once, they had to be meticulous. If anything was missing, it was a police matter. Then again, it would also be a police matter if they found out three minors were doing this stock-taking, so it was all a bit of a grey area, really.
“I hate guns,” Renee said, again.
“We’ve got about six in the house,” Adam said. Renee looked up at him, wide-eyed. Adam shrugged. “My dad and brother both hunt.”
“But you don’t,” Renee said, more of an order than a question.
“Do I seem like the kind of son you want around if you’re trying to kill something? They left me at home after I cried the first four times.”
“Your family is messed up,” Karen said.
Adam sighed. “Found out this morning Marty got a girl pregnant.”
This stopped them both.
“At the super-Christian college?” Karen asked.
“Yep.”
“People with really stiff morals are easier to tip over,” Renee said. “That’s what my mom always says.”
“She’s actually a black girl,” Adam said. “Really, really pretty.”
“Oh, man, their babies are going to be beautiful,” Karen said, sounding almost disgusted. Marty’s physical attractiveness had a small legend status, even in the grades that had followed his graduation.
“Or really ugly,” Adam said. “Sometimes prettiness cancels itself out.”
“What are they going to do?” Renee asked.
“What do you think they’re going to do? Get married, have more pretty or ugly babies, preach at a church that thinks he’s really boring but still likes to look at him in the pulpit every Sunday.” He locked up the last handgun cage with Renee and they moved to the hunting bows. “Everything’s easier when you’re beautiful.”
Karen and Renee both mm-hmmed in solemn agreement. Neither of them had dated much, swearing they were waiting for college boys who’d “grown up a little”. He didn’t know how to tell them that the only college boy he knew in any depth was his own brother, and that didn’t bode well for their romantic years ahead.