Hooligans

by Chloe Garner

  The bag got heavier.

  She opened her mouth, wanting to say something about how she wished she could… something, then she just hugged him and left, going to stash the bag and the box with her own things in the guest room.

  She closed the door behind her and started back toward the living room to go make dinner, when she saw Trevor standing against the couch, waiting for her.

  Shaved.

  Dressed.

  Wearing brown loafers, his legs crossed at the ankle.

  She stopped dead.

  It was too much of a pivot. She didn’t know what to do.

  “There’s a stranger her expecting you to feed him,” Robbie called from the living room as the TV turned on.

  “I see that,” Lizzie muttered, going to the kitchen and getting out the chicken breasts she’d just bought. With the fridge as bad as it was, she wouldn’t have trusted them in there for more than a few hours, but she’d bought them planning on cooking them tonight.

  “I’ve got a man coming tomorrow morning to look at the fridge, if that’s okay,” she said.

  “Whatever,” Robbie said without making any effort to prove he’d listened to her.

  Trevor hadn’t moved, apart from turning his head to watch her walk by. He was clearly amused, and she was very uncomfortable.

  The first instinct she’d had was to kiss him.

  The second had been to send him away.

  He wasn’t a traditionally handsome man, but he had great, clean features, when he wasn’t so scruffy, and there was no sign of the life he lead on his hands, his face, his skin. Just intelligent eyes, sharp lines everywhere, and a mouth that couldn’t have possibly communicated anything other than humor, dark or otherwise.

  She was staring.

  While he was looking right at her.

  She went back to the chicken, taking it out and starting to clean it, then putting a pan on the stove and getting oil in it heating.

  She couldn’t remember what she’d planned on doing with it. She’d gotten things to go with it, but she couldn’t remember what they were.

  “Should I have him look at the dishwasher while I’m at it?” she asked.

  “Whatever,” Robbie said again. The corner of Trevor’s mouth twisted up, and her temper spiked with her adrenaline.

  How dare he?

  How dare he?

  He blinked once, slowly, like he could hear her thoughts, and she threw the chicken at the pan, sloshing oil onto the stove.

  It was nowhere near hot enough to cook, and it was going to make soggy, weird chicken if she left it like that.

  She left it like that.

  “I owed you a dinner,” Trevor said.

  “A week of them,” she answered.

  “She’s leaving on Monday,” Robbie said without turning. He changed the station to something noisy, sports of some kind. Trevor nodded slowly.

  “Back to your normal life, then?”

  “I thought it was time,” she said. “I don’t feel like I’m doing any more good here.”

  “Shouldn’t have come in the first place,” Robbie said.

  “You mind giving us a few minutes?” Trevor asked.

  “My house,” Robbie said, getting up and walking out the front door anyway. Trevor tipped his head to the side, crossing his arms.

  “Monday. What’s today?”

  “Friday,” she said. He nodded.

  “I see.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked unbothered.

  That might have enraged her more, except that her hands were shaking, and that had already made her about as mad as she could imagine being.

  He sighed.

  “You don’t think you’re doing any good, then.”

  She shrugged.

  “Don’t see that I’m changing anything. I can’t help Robbie. I mean, I wish I could, but I don’t see a way to be a part of the world that he’s in, and it’s working for him. The only thing I could come up with would be to take him with me, and…”

  Trevor shook his head, agreeing with her.

  “No, that’s a really bad idea.”

  “I can tell. He’s got his best shot, here, with you guys, and I’m not helping that at all. So as much as I wish I could take this back with me and figure out how to make it work for other people…”

  “You’re just going to head out,” Trevor said.

  “I have a life,” she said. “Here, I’m just… observing.”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I’ll have to find a way to take a bus up north, then, once you’re gone, so I can pay off the rest of my debt,” he said. Her stomach twinged in a way that suggested it would have leapt out of her throat if it hadn’t been attached to something.

  “Would you?” she asked.

  “I don’t see why I wouldn’t,” he answered. “Pick a day when I feel like it. Robbie would have to pay for it, though.” He gave her another crooked smile. “Since I don’t have any money, really.”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re all going to starve without her here to feed you, aren’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “It might happen.”

  “That would be a shame.”

  “I agree.”

  She gritted her teeth, willing him to say something meaningful. Open up some kind of conversation that led where she wanted it to go.

  This was stupid.

  “The refrigerator doesn’t work,” she said. What was wrong with her?

  “I gathered,” he answered. “Hope your guy can fix it.”

  “You think that it’s gremlins running around inside of it,” she said. He shrugged.

  “Don’t know what it matters, what I think.”

  “I care,” Lizzie said. He nodded.

  “But you don’t believe me.”

  “No.”

  It was quiet for a moment and then the chicken started to sizzle in the pan.

  She’d bought seasonings and had planned on baking it. That’s what it was. She frowned and went digging through the drawers, looking for a spatula to flip it. She found a wooden spoon that would have to manage. She frowned at the chicken for a second, then went back to the fridge to get the makings for a salad. She’d read online about how to make your own vinaigrette, and she’d wanted to try that, but she was too distracted right now, and the bottled dressing would have to do.

  “You’re angry,” he said, coming to lean against the counter.

  “I’m going home,” she said, some of the energy drained out of it. She didn’t believe him. That was really all there was to it. She thought his entire experience of reality was faulty, and in the long term, she wasn’t going to stay with a man who thought that it was normal to sleep in a drug den and who believed that monsters controlled the world around him. Not any more than he was going to stay with a woman who thought that his perception of reality was faulty and that he was fundamentally not well.

  Which she did.

  It was simple.

  “I heard,” Trevor answered after a minute. “I thought you’d stay a little longer.”

  “So did I,” Lizzie said, taking a breath and forcing the slurry of emotions down and away. She was a grown-up and she could handle this like a grown-up. “I think I understand a little better than I did, what he’s going through. And I can see why intervening hurt as much as it did. I still think that the right meds probably exist out there somewhere, but this is working. Just… would you promise to call me if he relapses?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  She frowned. He was being intentionally obtuse and they both knew it.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, and he shrugged.

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him.”

  “If he’s going to lay down in the middle of the street and scream, that’s just Robbie being Robbie?”

  Trevor shifted against the counter. They had a short staring contest, and she threw her hands u
p.

  “If he goes missing, and I can’t find him, it’s going to feel like it was my fault,” she said. “Just give me a heads up if he starts acting like he’s going to walk away and never come back, okay? I need my brother to be as okay as he can be, and… Trevor, we had a police officer tell my parents when he was in high school that if he kept up doing what he was doing, he probably wouldn’t see twenty-five. I don’t want my brother to die.”

  “I’m sorry,” Trevor said. “I’m sorry. I know. You…” He sighed. “If I think his life is in danger, and I know in advance, I’ll call you.”

  She nodded, wiping at her eyes. She flipped the chicken, just to have something to do with her hands. Trevor was still watching her.

  “I can’t believe Robbie was right,” he said.

  “I spent my entire life around this,” she said, feeling sad, feeling sorry for both herself and Trevor. He wasn’t showing any real disappointment, but she held the belief that he felt it. He had to feel it. “I… I can’t believe that what you’re talking about is real, because I’ve known my entire life that it wasn’t. I know it hasn’t damaged you the way it has Robbie, but look at what it did to him. It ate seven years of his life, maybe more. It destroyed my family. I can’t just jump on board and play the game. I don’t see it and I don’t believe it.”

  He nodded.

  “It was fun,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she answered. It had been. It had felt alive in a way that made going home feel like dying. She didn’t say it, but she suspected he could see it in her eyes.

  Why hadn’t he kissed her?

  She tightened her mouth and returned to cooking.

  “I like the way you look,” she said, not allowing herself so much as a glance.

  “I knew you would,” he answered. Laughed. “The angel likes order. No surprise there.”

  She glowered at the chicken, but he didn’t push it any further, going to sit in the chair in the corner. When she looked up, he had his eyes closed.

  Dinner was quiet. The food all turned out, and Trevor ate ravenously, going back for more chicken, more salad, more bread. Robbie looked from Lizzie, on the side couch, to Trevor in the corner the entire meal, but there wasn’t much else to say.

  So they didn’t.

  After he swept his fork across his plate to pick up the random scraps of food that were left there, Trevor put his plate on the counter, came and kissed Lizzie’s cheek platonically, and then left.

  “You’re leaving,” Robbie said.

  “Yeah,” Lizzie answered. “I’m still leaving.”

  He nodded and added his plate to the counter, then turned the TV back on, volume up high enough that she understood he didn’t want to talk.

  Neither did she.

  ***

  The repairman came a little after eight. Robbie was gone; she hadn’t heard him leave, so she sat on the counter and watched the man as he worked, pulling out the fridge and working his way through the components underneath of it with an ease of familiarity. About ten minutes in, he sat back and whistled, holding up something metal and full of wires and tubes, like an electronic heart.

  “Your compressor is gummed up like I’ve never seen before,” he said. “Last guy who serviced this thing musta put oil in here instead of coolant.”

  “Can you fix it?” Lizzie asked.

  “Not this one,” he said, tossing it into his tool box. “It’s a standard part, though. I have another one out in my truck.”

  She nodded, and he stood, letting himself out.

  Gremlins.

  The compressor was broken. The nice man would fix it, for a price, and then Robbie’s food would stop spoiling so fast.

  There was a perfectly reasonable explanation.

  There would be a reason why the dishwasher couldn’t manage to get anything clean, and why the water in the guest shower always ran dirty at first. She expected there was something in the vents that was gradually breaking down and distributing dust all over the house and that if Robbie or Lara had ever thought to have someone in to look at it, they would have found it and fixed it.

  The house wasn’t that old, but it hadn’t been maintained well by the previous owner, and it was possible that Lara and Robbie hadn’t known anything about maintaining it, either, and it was falling down around them.

  It wasn’t magical or mysterious.

  Robbie had caused a car accident by standing in the middle of the road. And one of Trevor’s degenerate friends had left the gas on in the chemistry lab when they’d finished destroying the school, and they hadn’t owned up to it.

  Lizzie felt bad about even having been there to watch that one. She should have done something to stop it, not just stood by. She’d spend some time thinking about it when she got home, but she might need to turn herself in, just because it was the right thing to do.

  And this was where she was going to be leaving Robbie.

  She didn’t like the thought of it, as she stood here waiting for the repairman to get back.

  What was worse? Robbie struggling through yet more treatment, or going on like he had been, here, until he eventually got himself into trouble he couldn’t get out of and ended up in jail, getting treatment at state institutional hands, regardless of whether he wanted it?

  She needed to go. She couldn’t stay here and babysit him any more, not if he didn’t want her help. She’d been determined to not let him regress, and he hadn’t, but he wasn’t as well-off as she’d hoped he was. Was better better than nothing?

  It was going to have to be.

  She was going home, and she wasn’t going to try to make him come with her.

  Before Lara, he would have been just another one of Trevor’s sycophants, sleeping in the dark in the abandoned building. As much as she’d always wanted to know where he’d been and what had happened to him when he disappeared, she felt like she’d learned something she didn’t want to know, seeing that place.

  The repairman returned and set to work cleaning out the rest of the system and installing a shiny new compressor. If she did nothing else, she’d have done this. He finished and started wiping his hands and she hopped down.

  “You mind taking a look at this while you’re here?” she asked, indicating the dishwasher. He squatted to look at it.

  “It isn’t one of my brands,” he said, “but I’ll see if there’s anything obvious I can do to help you out. What’s wrong with it?”

  “It doesn’t clean,” she said and he laughed.

  “Fridge doesn’t cool, dishwasher doesn’t wash. You got anything around here that works?”

  “The freezer out in the garage,” she said. “Other than that, pretty much no.”

  He laughed again, pulling out the drawers and looking at each of them and then setting them on the floor next to him. He laughed.

  “Yup. That’ll do it.”

  He eased away from the dishwasher, pulling a long train of hair out of the dishwasher.

  “What’d you do, wash a cat?” he asked.

  “I don’t live here,” Lizzie said mirthlessly, watching the tangle of hair, like dingy yarn, as he pulled. It stopped and he gave it a hard tug, then went back in and drew another long pull out.

  “Geez,” he said, going back into the dishwasher again. “That was around your main sprayer bar axis,” he said. “It wasn’t spinning. No way it was spinning. That ought to make a world of difference.”

  “Thank you,” she said. He threw a wad of hair onto the floor next to him, then worked for another moment and sat back on his heels again.

  “I didn’t check the mechanicals, obviously, but that would certainly do it. I’ll clean this up and write you up a bill.”

  She got a trash can out from under the sink and held it out for him to dump the hair into then went to get her checkbook.

  He was rinsing his hands in the sink when she came back.

  “You got anything else you need me to look at?”

  “No, I need a general contractor,” she sai
d. “Thank you, though. That’s going to make a big difference.”

  “I bet,” he said, drying his hands on his rag and packing his tools into a leather bag. Eventually, he stood, pulling a clip board out of his bag and scratching on it for a minute. He told her the total and she wrote out her check. It was a lot to just walk away from, but it was worth it for Robbie, and the cost of the food she’d lost to the refrigerator already was getting close to that, anyway.

  “Thank you,” she said, shaking his hand and walking him to the door. She looked around the house after he’d left and sighed, then got her keys and drove herself to the gym, where she got the bag of Robbie’s drugs out of the locker there. She nearly dumped them in the trash on the way out, but reconsidered and went and put them under the seat in her car instead. She didn’t want someone there to have to deal with Robbie’s mess.

  She went back to the house, leaving the pills in the car because throwing them away in the house was the definition of pointless and she didn’t trust the toilet to flush them. Heaven forbid she have to call someone out to fix the toilet because she’d plugged it with illegal drugs.

  She did some more straightening and cleaning, and then she sat down on the couch and ate lunch while she watched a movie. It wasn’t a very good movie, but she was exhausted, just overwhelmed with everything that had happened in the past couple of weeks, and she wanted to sit and watch something dumb.

  About halfway through, Robbie came home again. His shirt was torn.

  “You’re still leaving,” he said, going to the fridge and coming back with a beer.

  “Tomorrow night,” she agreed. They didn’t fight. What would the point have been?

  She got up and made popcorn a while later, and they ate that companionably enough, then she started on dinner.

  “Do you want anything special for dinner tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Will you make Mom’s ravioli?” he asked. From scratch. She nodded at the pan where she was getting ready to fry eggs.

  “I can do that,” she said. “I’ll go shopping again in the morning. What will you cook for yourself?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll get you bread and sandwich meat,” she said. “Just take care of yourself, okay?”