“You still think you can salvage this.” Mr. Fromme’s attention had refocused, raptly, on his son. Julian did something Paul had never seen him do before—he broke eye contact, as if he couldn’t endure it any longer, and fixed his gaze unseeingly on the water.
“I’m going back to Pittsburgh.” He retreated to their script as if its flimsy words still had any power. “It’s my life, I can decide where I want to go to school and who my friends are. You’ve no right to stop me, and you aren’t going to try. I know you don’t want me to embarrass you in front of your guests—”
“Let me tell you how that plays out for you, Julian,” his father interrupted, “because I think you’re under the misapprehension that we would continue to be as patient as we’ve been up till now.” That struck Julian silent. If he felt anything at all, all evidence of it had emptied from his face. “Has it not occurred to you how much more difficult we can make this for you?” said his father. “Ungrateful, as always, for every unpleasantness we’ve worked so hard to spare you.”
“Poor Julian. You’ve always been so emotional.” The word was no less jarring the second time Mrs. Fromme said it. Paul might have used it to describe himself, in a moment of self-loathing, but never Julian. “The way you reacted to that little incident at boarding school, you were nearly hysterical—all our friends were concerned, and it was terribly difficult to explain. So if there were to be a public outburst, well . . . it would be uncomfortable for us, of course, but everyone knows how you are.”
“You were always too spiteful to even pretend to be normal,” his father cut in. “Naturally you’ll never appreciate how much effort it’s taken to try to mitigate the damage.”
“He’s delicate. Since the accident, I think—he’s never been the same.” Mrs. Fromme wasn’t quite correcting him. “No one,” she told Julian kindly, “would ever fault us for sending you somewhere quiet to recuperate.”
“You’re damned lucky we didn’t do it years ago.”
Mrs. Fromme flashed her husband a warning smile and reached, once more, for Julian’s face.
“It is what any loving parent would do.”
There was supposed to be another layer to the plan. It should be like one of Julian’s favorite games between grandmasters, every apparent flaw a strategic feint. But Julian said nothing. Paul might have been able to hold himself steady if Julian had looked at him, given him even an empty reassurance that he knew what he was doing. But he appeared to have forgotten that Paul was there. He looked so blank and faraway that it might have passed for calm. There was no backup plan. Paul had been right—there had barely been a plan at all.
Mr. Fromme checked his watch. He smiled at them and offered his wife his arm.
“I think you know what your options are, Julian. I trust you’ll choose sensibly. As for you—” Here he paused, as if to remind Paul that he hadn’t bothered to commit his name to memory. “—I’ll hold on to the check till morning, I think,” he said with a thin smile. “After that the offer will be less generous.”
“Be a good host, Julian,” said his mother. “Your friend looks a little pale. Perhaps you should fetch him a drink.”
They ascended the hill arm in arm, not a hair out of place between them. Paul watched Julian’s mother pause to pull her shoes back on by their ankle straps, while his father waited at her side and chivalrously held her hand. Paul could pick up a stone while their backs were turned and throw it before anyone could stop him. But he didn’t know which skull he would rather crack, and before he could decide, they had disappeared into the party again. There was nowhere for the impulse to go.
“Tell me what the plan is. Tell me what we do next.”
But Julian still wouldn’t look at him. He sank down to sit in the tall grass by the edge of the strand, bracing his forearms on his knees. He didn’t seem to register that Paul had spoken. He held a cigarette between his lips and tried fruitlessly to light the match.
Paul stood in front of him, bay water bleeding into the heels of his shoes. When Julian didn’t look up, Paul pulled the cigarette out of his hand and snapped it in two.
He didn’t know, once he had Julian’s attention, why he had wanted it in the first place. He could see his every flaw reflected in Julian’s face, every insecurity and weakness and insatiable need.
“There’s more to the plan.” His stammer grew more severe with every word until he could barely understand himself. “Tell me there’s more to the plan, because otherwise this was the plan, to bring me all this way to prove to me that it wasn’t your idea and you didn’t have a choice—of course it’s not that you’re sick of me, you have to leave me, it’s not your fault this way, how fucking convenient for you.”
Something elusive and terrifying moved through Julian’s face, and he raised one hand as if to conceal it. Paul caught his wrist and wrenched it away and didn’t let go. He wanted to watch Julian hate him.
“I’ll die without you,” Paul said. Even he didn’t know if it was a plea or a threat. “You know that, that’s what’s always been in this for you. I never understood it till now, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. You don’t need me, you never did, you just get off on knowing you could kill me and I’d thank you for it, it’s a story you can tell yourself whenever you want to feel special—”
“Paul, that hurts.”
Regret flooded through him even before he realized how hard he was twisting Julian’s arm—the unnatural angle at his wrist and elbow, as if Paul were just at the verge of breaking them.
He let go. He wanted to cut his own throat and spare them both the disgust of enduring him any longer. Julian covered his face again; it was frightening and repellent to think that he might cry.
“I’m sorry.” Paul dropped to his knees and reached forward, but Julian batted his hand away. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”
A sharp, bitter laugh. “I know you are.”
“I didn’t mean any of it, I was just—”
“Yes, you did. You know damn well.”
Julian let his hand fall and lifted his eyes. Even in the dim light, Paul could tell they were dry.
“I always worry you’re going to kill yourself,” he said. “You’re just the type, I’ve always known. Sometimes I wish you’d get it over with.”
He had all but pleaded for it, the precision and scalpel-sharp intimacy of Julian’s cruelty. He had needed to remember that they were monstrous together, merciless, twins conjoined at the teeth.
“I want to go inside.” He traced the line of Julian’s jaw with his fingertips and took hold of his neck. “Please, I need to kiss you.”
Julian was breathless with fury. He lifted his face as if to bare his throat for a sacrifice.
“I couldn’t care less what you need,” he said, and he yielded to the kiss just long enough that it stung all the more when he shoved Paul away.
6.
The party dragged late. Julian shut his window, but they could still hear voices, muffled by humidity and glass. Well after the clock struck one, the imperfect hush was punctured now and then by a woman’s high liquory laugh.
Neither of them wanted to open the window until the voices were gone, though the room was stifling. In the moments before Julian pushed him over the dresser, Paul caught sight in the mirror of their fever-shining faces—how the heat chafed their skin, blood swelling just beneath the surface like ink blotting through thin paper. He looked away before he could find any differences between them; he wanted only to remember how heat and despair and delirium made them look, just for a moment, as if they shared the same face.
There was no forgiving one another after, but there never was. The anger didn’t ebb, or even turn away from each other completely, but it held them together against the siege. Julian became tender and soft-spoken; Paul allowed him to kiss his forehead and murmur patient reassurances, as if either of them could believe they were true. But Paul also listened for the sharp scar-burned notes in Julian’s breathing—the effort it too
k to hold the fury tight inside him.
They’d migrated to the floor, half dressed and restless. Their only light was a lamp on the desk, and the bulb burned unbearably hot. The small fan angled uselessly toward them on the floor.
Paul lay with his head on Julian’s lap, trying to map constellations into the sun-darkened freckles on his knees, while Julian combed his fingertips gently through Paul’s hair. Two stories below, the voices were finally ebbing. Before Paul could stop himself from recognizing it, he identified one voice as Julian’s mother—too indistinct at a distance to parse the words, but adopting the unmistakable cadence of a goodbye.
“They aren’t going to come up here, are they?”
The question made the movement of Julian’s hands stumble, just barely, out of rhythm. Henry had done so, hours earlier, before he and his friends headed out to a second party they’d been priming for with the first. He left soon when Julian didn’t answer the knock, but the intrusion had reminded Paul how visible they were to people who didn’t deserve to see them. He doubted either of Julian’s parents would ever show them the same mercy Henry had.
“No,” said Julian after a pause. “Mother likes people to stew for a while.”
“And then what?”
“We make our goodbyes, preferably acrimonious,” said Julian. “And in the morning you’re supposed to go see Father in his study and accept the—how much did he offer you, anyway?”
Paul didn’t want to answer the question, so he decided to be irritated that Julian hadn’t answered his.
“I mean in reality. You haven’t told me what’s going to happen, because you never do. You told me I was coming here to help you, but you haven’t told me anything I need to know in order to do it. You just keep pushing me into the deep end and then acting like I’m drowning to spite you.”
“You didn’t need to know,” said Julian, as if the argument already bored him. “I’m leaving; you’re helping me. Nothing’s changed. All I need to do is work up my nerve.”
A mosquito had bitten Paul behind his ear, unnoticed until the itch became too shrill to ignore. Both Julian’s shins were flecked pink with remnants of the same stings.
“You still haven’t said what we’re going to do,” Paul said, but Julian just gave a low, brittle laugh and didn’t reply.
Paul couldn’t be still any longer. The last few voices had moved inside, perilously close; he felt like an animal shivering off a tranquilizer and finding itself in a cage. He stalked into the adjoining bathroom and drenched two washcloths in cold water, but by the time he emerged, they were already beginning getting tepid. He opened the window in time to see the Frommes coming inside, the string lights clicking dark above their heads; neither looked up. When they were finally gone, a breeze came in off the bay, but it was humid and warm and brought no relief.
Julian had settled in the director’s chair, holding the cloth against his neck. Paul leaned against the foot of one of the beds and watched him, measuring Julian’s latent energy and imagining how it would snap. Working up his nerve. But Julian’s bravery was absolute; nothing lay beyond its reach.
“Tell me more about them,” said Paul, and Julian winced before looking up to meet his eyes. “I want to hate them as much as you do.”
“You already do, probably.” Expressionless, Julian turned his gaze toward the night sky. “It’d be easier for you—they aren’t yours.”
Paul was sick of his evasions. He was sick of doubting that their hold on each other was unbreakable.
“They don’t know how much you matter,” said Paul. “They don’t see it, you’re the most brilliant person I’ve ever met and they don’t even notice, they should be . . .” His own stammering sincerity frightened him, but he forced himself to keep speaking. He had to give Julian something of himself that wasn’t needy and grasping, something that burned itself alive to exalt him.
“. . . They should be in awe of what they’ve been given in you,” he said desperately, “but they aren’t, they want you to be just as petty and small as they are and they can’t even conceive of how much you matter already.”
Paul didn’t recognize the guardedness in Julian’s face until after it had fallen away. It was the first time Paul had ever seen such a stark echo of his own need in him. Julian devoured the adoration as if it might be the last he ever received—as if he didn’t trust it not to disappear.
Julian took a moment to summon his voice. He drew a deep breath, released it in a trembling exhale.
“You’re sweet when you want to be,” he said quietly. Then, with a frayed smile, “It’s all right, Pablo. You don’t have to convince me of what they are.”
But Paul was convincing himself—working up his own nerve. When he spoke again, even he wasn’t sure whether he dared take himself seriously.
“Do you want me to kill them?”
Julian froze. He watched Paul’s face with wide eyes. Then he burst into wild laughter.
“I mean it.” Paul laughed too, anxious and grave. “They deserve it. Then you’d have your freedom back, and they couldn’t hurt you for it. Isn’t that why I’m here, to help you get out of this place in one piece?”
“Good god, Pablo.” There was still a trace of a laugh in Julian’s voice, but he spoke with a horror that was very close to eagerness. “You’d really do it, wouldn’t you?”
When Paul couldn’t answer, Julian turned in his chair to face him head-on, pulling one knee to his chest. His smile wavered, but it didn’t fade.
“How do you want to do it?” he said. “I want to line them up all in a row and clock them between the eyes with a cattle gun—or how about a Helter Skelter kind of thing, wouldn’t that be fun? We could paint gibberish in blood on the walls.”
After the unbreaking fever of the last two days, Paul was ready for them to find solace in one of their thought experiments, to strike and parry until their thoughts spiraled into revelation. Offer an idea, find its flaws, build it into something better.
His solemn consideration, his very earnestness, was part of the joke. Julian had always been fascinated by his sincerity, after all, and the object of the game—the object of all their games—was to find each other fascinating.
“They’ll suspect us right away,” Paul said, “especially if neither of us is hurt. We’d have to slice each other up a bit, too.”
“You could do it without blinking,” said Julian with affection. “Just try to miss all the important arteries—I’ve nearly bled out once before, it’s a drag.”
“It still wouldn’t be a sure thing, though, even if it looked like the hippies roughed us up . . . Oh, hell, and I forgot about the kids. Did you want to do them in, too?”
“Probably not Oliver,” Julian conceded. “He’s not too bad, and he’s only ten—it might do him good to be an orphan.”
“But the older one?”
“Edmund I’d be happy to kill myself.” His grin was merciless. “He fits right in at my old school.”
Paul remembered being the same age. He didn’t need Julian to elaborate.
“Okay,” he said, “that’s three we have to get through—”
“Four,” Julian corrected shortly, “if Henry comes home and tries to stop us.”
“Four. If necessary. So we’ll put the kid in the basement—”
“Wine cellar, actually, I wish I was kidding—”
“Oh god, of course it’s a wine cellar. How do you put up with these people?”
“Not well,” said Julian pleasantly, “hence the stabbing.”
Paul dissolved into hysterics, and Julian clambered over the foot of the bed and pinned him facedown in the blankets. “You’ll give us away,” he said, covering Paul’s mouth with both hands, “you’re going to spoil it, all our careful planning—”
He let go when Paul elbowed him hard. They lay side by side, hands clasped tight, shaking with silent laughter. Nothing could dampen their euphoria, not even the soft indistinct threat of the things outside their walls.
/> Eventually Julian’s lungs betrayed him in a spasm of coughing, and once it had ended they finally lay still. Somewhere in the floor beneath them, a pipe sighed with water; in spite of the late hour, someone slammed a door.
“It still doesn’t work,” Paul said. He didn’t want the moment to end—he wanted to pitch it higher, drive them both mad with it. But the flaws were too glaring. “It’s just—implausible, there’s no way to avoid suspicion. You never want them to bleed if you’re doing it properly, blood gets everywhere and blood is evidence. There’s no way we don’t get caught.”
In the dim light, Julian smiled, an indulgent and affectionate smile that Paul had always hated.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Pablo. You’re just so sincerely creepy.”
In the long, aching months of being able to agonize over every word at leisure, Paul had forgotten how this felt—the humiliating realization that he couldn’t keep pace. He was too meticulous, too literal-minded and laboriously slow, two steps behind every joke except the ones he then ruined by explaining them. There was no reason for Julian to take him seriously, because Paul took himself so seriously that no one else possibly could. He was an ungainly, inherently ridiculous thing, and he shouldn’t expect to be seen as anything better. He was lucky to be allowed near Julian at all. Paul’s body, briefly forgotten, had become more expansive than should have been allowed. He folded himself back into his usual small shape, shoulders curled in, arms wrapped around himself.
Julian watched him with impassive eyes, then sighed and turned away. He dug through the drawer of the nightstand and found a cigarette, nestled amid childhood yo-yos and packs of ossified gum. Paul’s idea only took shape when he saw Julian strike the match.
He forgot his doubts as suddenly as he’d been crushed by them. Understanding moved over him like frost over glass.
“There could be a house fire,” he said. “It happens all the time.”
Julian didn’t laugh this time. His spine straightened. He shook the match dead and set his cigarette aside.
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