Hooligans

by Chloe Garner

  “So where’s your dad, now?” she asked after a while.

  “Don’t know,” he answered. “I left home and never thought about it again.”

  “Warm,” she said. He laughed.

  “Says the one whose parents didn’t go to her brother’s wedding.”

  “Just my dad,” she said. “My mom died a few years ago.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said.

  “Cancer,” she told him. “Dad wouldn’t let Robbie come to the hospital or the funeral. I told him that Robbie was better, but…”

  “He blamed Robbie for making her sick.”

  She shrugged.

  “A lot of them do,” Trevor said. “Parents. Or siblings. Blame us for the bad things that happen.”

  “Dad tried,” Lizzie said. “We tried everything, but after that, Dad was done with it. None of it helped, so why keep trying, you know?”

  “And your mom kept at it, trying everything she could think of. Mental wards with white pajamas and no shoelaces.”

  Lizzie swallowed hard. Those had been really, really hard.

  “Kept at it,” she echoed.

  “Your dad was the one who showed mercy, ironically,” Trevor said. “Not that he’d ever understand that. He thought he cut and ran, and he resents Robbie for making him do it.”

  “You see it a lot,” Lizzie said.

  “All the time. Not many of us with family we’re in touch with, anymore.”

  “That’s sad,” Lizzie said. “I mean, they have various levels of functionality, and it’s hard to remember the person they would have been, before, but it’s sad to just lose them.”

  “Best for everyone involved, for us,” Trevor said. “Lara made him do it, but you saw how bad Robbie wanted you gone. Wanted to keep you out of the mess.”

  She thought about it from Robbie’s perspective, from Trevor’s, and nodded to herself in the darkness.

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Easier if they cut us off, rather than the other way,” Trevor said. “I mean, it never bothered me, but that way it’s on them.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” Lizzie said with a laugh. “They have to live with the guilt, not you.”

  “Exactly,” he said cheerfully. His hand found hers in the dark and his fingers wound through hers like they’d always matched that way, and then he stopped walking. She waited, and he cursed softly, just under his breath.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Bastards,” he whispered. “Bastards. Gotta make your point.”

  “What is it?” Lizzie asked again, louder.

  “I flipped,” he said. He shook her hand in his. “This. I’m looking at you, but you’re dying. They’re killing you.”

  “They’re not killing me,” she said.

  “Not right now, obviously,” he said darkly. “It’s a warning.”

  “They’re not going to kill me,” she said. He squeezed her hand, then harder. Grunted a strangled, angry noise.

  She stepped closer to him, put her hand to his forehead and ran her little finger along his hairline. He shivered.

  “Hear me,” she said. “I don’t care if they’re real or if they’re not. Nothing is going to make a victim out of me, for your benefit or anyone else’s. I know you think this story is about you, but it’s about me, and no one is going to make an example out of me.”

  He laughed, insecure, reaching up to take her wrist in his hand.

  “I can feel the mark here,” he said. “It’s hot, like the sun coming up in the morning.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s just a tattoo.”

  “It’s so much more than that.”

  He was back with her, now, his breath on her face, letting go of her wrist to run his fingertips up her arm, cornering at her elbow and continuing up to her shoulder. He let go of her other hand and cupped her jaw. He had strong hands.

  The wind picked up, blowing her hair flat against the back of her head. He put his fingers up through her hair and closed his fist tight, pulling her head back a fraction, and touched his face, his nose, against the base of her neck, hot breath against her skin as he rolled his head back, pushing the side of his face against her jaw. Her eyes fell closed, and he put an arm around her waist without letting go of her hair. There was a long, low noise that might have been a moan, then he was gone, there with her, but no longer touching her.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Not yet.”

  She felt like she’d been cut loose at sea. What happened?

  “What are you…? What?” she asked.

  He brushed the backs of his fingers across the back of her hand.

  “We should turn back, unless you’re going to call Robbie to come get us when he gets up. That would make him good and angry.”

  She was having a hard time catching her breath. There was another stiff gust of wind that almost knocked her off her feet. Trevor stepped out of the way.

  “Come on, darling,” he said. “The night just turned dangerous.”

  ***

  The sky wasn’t so much getting lighter as the stars were getting dimmer as they got back to the house. Her legs were tired and her feet were sore, and she felt lost. Trevor hadn’t talked to her much, on the way back, and he hadn’t even gotten off the bus. She was going to have to figure out the way back into the window on her own.

  He hadn’t been cold, and perhaps that was the part that was the most shocking to her. For him to just dismiss her like that, she would have thought that she’d have had to do something bad, unacceptable, but he’d been cheerful, if silent, the entire walk back in and then he’d talked her back onto the bus again after a long wait on a bench at the stop. Like it was any other day, like nothing had happened, not like it was five in the morning and he had very nearly kissed her.

  Why hadn’t he?

  What was wrong with him?

  Was it all some big game? All rules and consequences? He didn’t seem the type, really, to wait for something he wanted.

  She picked her way through the plants, trying not to fall as clouds crossed the moon and the space went dead dark around her. She growled at nothing, angry at everything and wanting something to spring out so she could blame it.

  What had tonight been about, anyway? That terrible place that he was, even now, going back to sleep? Curled up next to each other in the back seat of the bus? Sitting under a tree at the end of the street…

  He put her off balance. She didn’t know what to expect, not even what to want. She missed simple. Except that she didn’t. She didn’t want to go back to her apartment, she discovered with some surprise. To her job. Her laptop, waiting for her on the bed, felt like a weight that she just wanted to bury and forget. She liked Trevor’s sense of adventure, of pure, simple conflict.

  For everything, the way that he’d chosen to explain the world to himself was nothing if not simple.

  She got back to the back corner of the house and turned it, looking at the window, still open, spilling light onto the giant cactus below it.

  Sucked on a back tooth, trying to work it out, how she was supposed to get back in. The drainpipe for the gutter was just around the corner, but there wasn’t anything in this house that she was going to trust to climb unless it was made out of wood or stone. It was far too likely that the downspout would be rusted through, and she’d just break it loose and land in the cactus anyway.

  There was nothing to stand on that she could see. Just the cactus itself.

  Robbie stuck his head out the window.

  “Just come around,” he said. “I’ll let you in.”

  Suppressing the instinct to dodge back around the corner in hopes that he would unsee her, she dropped her head. It was reflexive. She had no idea why she felt like he’d caught her at something.

  Well, okay, she did. He’d found her sneaking back into her room at dawn, and would doubtless know who she’d been with. She was going to have to make it perfec
tly clear to him that nothing had happened, or else he’d think she’d gone back to that horrid place that Trevor called home to sleep with him.

  Her skin crawled at the thought.

  She suspected that wouldn’t be the only thing crawling, around there. She rubbed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, trying to flee the gag reflex at the thought, and picked her way back through the plants to the front door, grateful for the light Robbie cast across the front yard as she got close.

  “Nothing happened,” she said.

  “Don’t want to hear it,” he said, closing the door behind her and going back to bed.

  She looked at the closed door to his bedroom, wanting him to fight with her, rather than just ignore her. For him to tell her that she needed to go home, that she shouldn’t be here. To let her fight back. This was… unacceptable.

  And yet.

  It was beginning to go light outside, and her body was exhausted. Her mind caught up rapidly enough at the sight of her bed, and she moved her work stuff out of the way and turned off the light, falling into the bed already asleep.

  ***

  She woke up around lunchtime with a headache and regrets.

  She’d dreamed dark, steamy dreams about Trevor that made little to no sense. She’d woken up frequently and forced herself to go back to sleep because she couldn’t imagine getting up yet. She wasn’t used to that much time on her feet, and everything from her toes to her shoulders ached. She went and took a long shower, once she got the showerhead to run clean, and then went to make herself breakfast, finding that the refrigerator was no better stocked than it had been the night before. So she had a slice of cold pizza that only tasted a little bit off, and, with a sense that she should have been ashamed, a beer. She needed to run the dishwasher again with a cleaning solvent for it. It left the dishes spotted, at best. All of the appliances needed attention, and if Robbie wasn’t going to do anything about it, she would.

  Why had he turned her down?

  She couldn’t stop picking at it. He’d been there, in the dark, right there, and he’d just turned away and let the moment drop.

  Not yet. What did that mean?

  She gritted her teeth and tried to push the thoughts away. She needed to make a plan.

  How much longer was she staying?

  The weekend was coming up - she checked her phone to verify what day of the week it actually was - and she’d originally planned on being back in the office on Monday.

  Was Robbie ready to be on his own?

  She didn’t feel like she’d really helped him yet. He still hadn’t dealt with Lara being gone in any meaningful way that she could see, nor had he given her any confidence that he was going to be able to deal with his delusions and episodes on his own for very long.

  He was surrounded with people who sincerely believed that everything he saw was real. What did that do to someone like Robbie, other than give him space to stay down the rabbit hole and never come up again? Was it calming, a stabilizing influence, or did it make him more likely to experience more, worse delusions as his mind completely lost track of reality?

  She needed to check her reference material, though she knew better than to try to diagnose or treat him entirely on her own. That was what therapy was for - getting a real professional involved in helping you to make decisions that you didn’t have the expertise to make.

  Trevor wouldn’t go with her to therapy.

  Robbie. Robbie wouldn’t go with her to therapy. She knew that. He’d long rejected therapy, and no wonder, having met Trevor. It was like he had a false-reality role model to pattern on, something to aspire to within his own awareness of the world. How could she fight that?

  She couldn’t.

  She couldn’t fight with Trevor. He’d won.

  She was falling in love with him.

  He’d won with her, too.

  A cult of personality, if nothing else. If she wanted Robbie to do anything else than what he was going to do, now, she was going to have to get him out of here.

  But he was doing better here than he’d ever done anywhere.

  Was it because of Lara? Or was it because of everything else?

  Could he stay healthy, without her? It occurred to Lizzie again that it was possible that, with Lara dead, there was absolutely nothing she could do to keep him from slipping back into the worst of his worst days. Either he was going to make it or he wasn’t.

  It was possible.

  She didn’t like it. She had always admired her mother’s willingness to try anything, to never give up. There had to be a solution. That was her mother’s mantra, all the way to her death. There had to be something that would work. They just hadn’t found it yet, hadn’t tried it yet.

  What if it weren’t true? What if there were no path open to her that helped at all, and she was just pulling him away from the one place where he felt best?

  Was it evil? Or was it abandoning him to the least required effort to even think such a thing?

  She looked moodily at her beer.

  She needed to go back to her apartment and get some new clothes. She hadn’t packed for staying as long as she had, and she admitted to herself that she didn’t trust the washer and dryer here to not destroy her clothes.

  She could do a laundromat, she supposed. That would be faster and, considering the cost of mileage, cheaper. She decided on that - it wasn’t a plan for Monday, but it was at least a plan - and she went to go get her clothes and a bag to put them in. There was a tug at her hair, there at the base of her neck, and she ignored the sensation. Dwelling on it wasn’t helping anything. As much as she wanted to twitch her head to the side, just to feel it again. That rush. Even the memory was potent.

  Washing clothes.

  She was going to find a laundromat and wash her clothes.

  She found detergent - that couldn’t possibly be bad, could it? - and loaded everything up into her car, frowning at the dust on the carpet in the back and feeling very guilty about it again, then forced herself to move forward, looking up a laundromat and setting her phone to navigate her there.

  This was doable. She liked doable, right now.

  And so she did.

  She sat at the laundromat and read news on her phone until it complained that the battery was nearly dead - it hadn’t gotten enough time to charge overnight - and then she just sat and watched the dryers run.

  It was calm.

  It was simple.

  It produced clean clothes.

  She went to the grocery store on the way home, looking for things that were going to tolerate a refrigerator that went out routinely, and she got another bag of bug killers, rat killer, glass cleaner, surface cleaner, and dishwasher purging goop.

  She was going to beat that house into submission.

  It was going to happen.

  She let herself in the front door and found Robbie on the couch watching television.

  “Can you help me with groceries?” she asked. “I’ve got another carload, and then I’m going to make dinner.”

  He glanced at her and looked back at the TV for a few seconds before getting up and starting for the door.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, going back and coming in with the rest of the groceries. She started unloading them into the pantry and the refrigerator. Something in the pantry smelled funny.

  “Then why aren’t you talking to me?” she asked. He shrugged.

  “Don’t have anything to say.”

  She frowned.

  “I’m thinking about going back to work on Monday. That would mean I’d leave Sunday after dinner.”

  He blinked at her for a moment, then drew a breath and nodded.

  “That’s good.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You’re going to be okay? You could come stay with me for a few days, if you wanted. I’ve got a couch that’s pretty nice.”

  “You know I’m staying, Liz,” he said. She nodded.

  “I know. I just wor
ry.”

  “I’ll be glad when you’re gone,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, when I’m gone,” she said. “And I’m glad I’ve gotten to understand your world… some. I’m glad you’re doing better. And… I’m hoping that you’ll keep doing well after I go. That…” She almost couldn’t say it. Almost. “That you can be okay without Lara.”

  “Can you take some of her stuff with you?” he asked. Her heart broke. She nodded quickly, anyway.

  “Anything you want. I’ll just hold onto it until you’re ready to go through it.”

  “You can do anything you want with it. I just…” He shrugged. “I don’t know what else to do with it.”

  “Okay,” she said. He wandered back toward their room and Lizzie hesitated, then followed. She’d been through all of it, looking for drugs, but now it felt invasive, even to go with him to look at Lara’s things. He went to the bathroom and pulled her jewelry box off of a shelf by the sink and handed it to her.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to keep any of it?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “No. I want you to take it. If you want it, you can keep it, or else… just sell it. Throw it away. Whatever.”

  She took custody of the box carefully, not sure she really wanted to do this, then followed him back into the room. He pulled a nice suitcase out of the closet and started packing other things into it. No clothes, but a bottle of perfume and a hairbrush off of the dresser, and the slippers from beside the bed.

  “I’m going to give you some space,” Lizzie said.

  “Stay,” he answered without looking at her. Desperately as she didn’t want to be there, she had never left Robbie when he’d asked her to be there, and she wasn’t going to start, now. She held the jewelry box out in front of her and she waited.

  A pair of reading glasses and a pair of sunglasses. Nail polish and a metal nail file. A handful of hairbands from in front of her mirror and a wide-brimmed hat hanging from it. It went on. The bag eventually filled, and he zipped it up and pulled the handle up and gave it to her.

  “I’ll let Sybil and Cory go through her clothes,” he said distantly, without looking at her. “The rest I can get rid of. She didn’t love her clothes.”