by Lisa Henry
“Nick!” Chris glares at him. “Are you—”
“I’m gonna have to call you back.” Nick ends the call and shoves his phone back in his pocket, and then meets Chris’s gaze. “Devon was just making sure I got home okay.”
He shuffles a little closer to Jai, and Jai straightens up.
He can’t quite read the tension here. Nick’s obviously seeking protection, but Jai doesn’t know if that’s because this is terrible and mortifying, or if it runs deeper than that. How did Nick describe his dad? Boring? That doesn’t seem to fit with any ideas Jai is formulating that Chris Stahlnecker is a bully or abusive or a homophobe, but how can he be sure? Just because Nick is funny and ridiculous and outgoing doesn’t mean it’s not a mask.
It doesn’t mean Chris Stahlnecker isn’t beating the hell out of him behind closed doors.
How long was it before Kat told anyone about Caden’s piece-of-shit dad?
“She’s left him,” his mom told him over the phone.
“She what?” He had to go outside to hear properly. The hostel was party central.
“Kat’s left Gary.” Something in Janice’s voice sounded strangely fragile.
“Why?” Jai asked, already dreading the answer.
The guilt was something they both had to come to terms with afterward. Kat had never given any indication that anything was wrong, but still, shouldn’t they have known? Shouldn’t they have been able to tell?
Is Jai supposed to be able to tell now?
He puts an arm around Nick’s shoulders, and meets Chris Stahlnecker’s gaze. Not staring him down exactly, not challenging him, just . . . holding his ground?
Nick draws in a deep breath. “Dad, I’m eighteen, and Jai’s my boyfriend. I’m really sorry you saw that, but I’m not sorry we did it.”
Chris’s expression shifts, and Jai relaxes. Okay, so he misread this. Chris is pissed still, but he’s not violently angry. He looks almost vulnerable for a moment, like a man out of his depth, and then he nods sharply and turns away. He walks toward the back of the house without another word.
“Oh Jesus.” Nick sags a little, his breath wheezing out of him. “Jai, you should probably go. I’ll talk to you in the morning, okay?”
“Are you sure?” Jai asks him.
“Yeah.” Nick steps away from him. He crouches down and picks up his wet trunks. He squeezes them out, and water splatters on the ground. “You’ve already rescued me once tonight. Any more and I’ll start feeling like a Disney princess.” His smile seems forced. “So, yeah, it’s cool.”
“Are you sure?” Jai asks him again.
“Um, yeah?” Nick looks puzzled for a second. His jaw drops. “Oh! No, I mean, he’s pissed, but that’s, like, the extent of it. My dad has never raised a hand to me, like, ever. I’m pretty sure that’s where most people think he went wrong, actually.”
Jai snorts and fights to keep his tone serious. “Okay, but if you need me, call me, okay?”
“Yes.” Nick steps close to Jai again, and pushes himself up onto his toes to kiss him. When he steps back, his eyes are bright in the moonlight. Still largely unfocused, but bright. “Because you’re my boyfriend, and you care about me.”
“Yeah,” Jai says, reaching down to twine his fingers through Nick’s.
Nick smiles like everything is right in the universe. “Yeah,” he echoes. “Good night, Jai.”
“Good night.” Jai squeezes Nick’s hand quickly, and then heads down the side of the house. The squeaky gate clangs shut behind him.
It’s almost three by the time Jai gets home. He has to backtrack to Devon’s place to pick up his bike first, and he heads downtown to get takeout after that. It’s late enough that he’s surprised to see the light on in the living room once he makes it home.
“Hey,” he says, leaning on the doorjamb with his helmet in one hand and his takeout bag in the other.
Kat blinks up at him from the couch. “Holy shit, please tell me you have fries in there.”
Jai tosses her the bag, sets his helmet on the coffee table, and slumps onto the couch beside her. “What are you doing up at this hour?”
Kat digs through the bag. “Caden woke me up to tell me he couldn’t sleep. Twenty minutes later he’s snoring like a bear, and I’m the one with insomnia.” She waves a hand at the television. “So I’m mainlining Breaking Bad, since I’m the only person in the universe who missed it the first time around.”
“How is it?”
“It’s okay.” Kat shoves some fries in her mouth. “How was the party?”
“Fine. Nick got drunk, I took him home, and then his dad busted us naked in their pool.”
Kat snorts so hard she sprays him in half-chewed fries.
“Gross!”
“Oh, Jai!” Kat starts laughing, and doesn’t stop until she’s gasping for breath. “What is it with you and Nick? It’s an exhibitionist kink, right? Right?”
“It’s really not, I promise.” Jai pulls the cheeseburger out of the bag and unwraps the greasy paper. “I don’t know what the hell it is though.”
“How’d his dad take it?” Kat asks, wiping her eyes.
“About as well as anyone would, I guess.” Jai opens his cheeseburger up so Kat can steal the pickles. “I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get an invitation to dinner anytime soon, but I don’t think he’s going to go ballistic on Nick or anything.”
“You were worried about that?”
Jai shrugs. “Stuff like that happens.”
“You bet your ass it does,” Kat says wryly. She looks at him with her head tilted to the side when he struggles not to react. “You don’t need to walk on eggshells around me, Jai. I can talk about abuse without breaking down in a hysterical mess, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Good.” Kat eats another fry. “So. Nick. Where are you going with this?”
“Nowhere,” Jai says around a mouthful of cheeseburger. He shrugs. “He’s got college, and I’ve got Argentina. It was only ever a short-term thing. I mean, we’ll stay in contact, I suppose. See where it goes if we’re both back in town at the same time next summer. If he’s still single and it’s something he wants to do.”
Kat raises her eyebrows.
“We haven’t talked about it, okay? But I can’t ask a college kid to be exclusive, can I?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about being exclusive with anyone before.”
“Yeah.” Jai scrubs his knuckles over his scalp. “This is all uncharted territory. Tonight we decided we were boyfriends.”
Kat’s jaw drops. “Seriously?”
“It doesn’t change anything.”
“Sure.” Kat punches him in the shoulder. “You keep telling yourself that, little brother.”
Jai balls up the burger wrapper and throws it at her head. “Jesus, I’m tired. Enjoy your show.”
“Leave the fries,” she commands.
Jai flips her the bird, leaves the fries, and heads down to bed.
Jai’s tired, but he can’t sleep. He texts Nick to see if he’s okay, even though he doesn’t really expect an answer at this hour. He ends up reaching for his laptop and going online. He checks out the reviews for a few hostels in Buenos Aires, and then finds himself looking at pictures of Iguazú Falls. The falls look like one of those places too beautiful to actually exist, and he wonders if the reality will match his expectations. Often it doesn’t, but that doesn’t really matter. There’s always something about a new place, even if it’s just the fact Jai has never been there before, that is still magical.
He finds himself thinking of Nick again, and the look of wonder on his face when he was watching the opening scenes of The Fellowship of the Ring, as the camera panned over the Shire and the music swelled. Magic is however you find it, Jai supposes.
When he was a kid, Jai had a globe. It had been his grandpa’s, he thinks. It was old enough that the USSR was still a thing. His mom had wanted to throw it out, but Jai had insisted o
n keeping it. A globe felt like something important. It was the sort of thing he’d seen in movies. Important people in important offices always seemed to have globes. Big, shiny globes set in dark wooden frames; nothing like the dusty, dented, plastic thing Jai had inherited. Still, he liked it. Nobody else he knew had a globe.
One night after his dad died, Jai found the globe at the back of his closet where he’d been looking for his weed. He took it up onto the roof—it was the only safe place to get high without his mom smelling the smoke—and spun it lazily around on its squeaky axis underneath the stars. He’d been itching to escape. Not to see the world, not at that time, but to put Franklin and his mom’s tears and Kat’s anger and this small, stale house that he sometimes imagined still carried the scent of his dad’s aftershave behind him.
He spun the globe and jabbed his finger on it.
Portugal.
Okay. Well, at least he’d heard of Portugal.
A strange sort of excitement filled him in that moment. In the months since his dad’s death, he’d been unanchored, restless, torn apart by grief, the remaining pieces not large enough to paper over the holes his dad’s death had left in him. But now he had a purpose. Now he had something. He was getting the hell out of Franklin, and he was going to Portugal.
A decision made all those years ago shaped him, and is still shaping him. He isn’t running anymore, isn’t thinking about what lies behind him. He has his eyes fixed forward these days, open to the wonders of the world. Maybe he’ll never settle anywhere—he feels restless just thinking about it—but that isn’t important, because the world is an amazing place, and he needs to experience everything it has to offer.
He glances over to the corner of the basement. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth when he sees his backpack and remembers Nick’s astonishment at the size of it. He can only imagine the look of horror on Nick’s face if he ever tells him about that time in Laos when he wore the same pair of pants for nine days straight.
Good times.
Jai stretches, yawns, and finds himself googling backpacks, even though he doesn’t really need a new one. Shit, though, that one looks comfortable. And the detachable daypack has a fuck-load of extra pockets.
He may accidentally buy it.
Jai closes his laptop. When he’s checking out backpacks like they’re porn, it’s way past the time to sleep.
He dozes off looking at his backpack in the corner.
It’s also way past time to be sticking around Franklin.
Pauly: Can you pick up an extra shift today? Devon called in sick.
Jai: Sure. What time?
Pauly: As soon as you can get here?
Jai: Ok. On my way.
Pauly: Thanks, dude! You’re a lifesaver.
Jai: It’s no problem.
Pauly: Goddamn unreliable teenagers.
The kitchen light is on when Nick gets inside the house. He takes a deep breath and walks toward it. His dad is filling a glass of water from the sink. He turns when he hears Nick.
“Jai,” his dad says. “Harvey mentioned that name.”
Whoops. Nick reflexively squeezes the sodden trunks he’s still holding, and water drips onto his toes and the floor.
“Your boyfriend is the guy you got fired with.”
Nick nods slowly.
“Jesus, Nick!” Chris upends his glass in the sink, then rakes a hand through his thinning hair. “You said you met someone at the pizza place. Why is everything with you a goddamn lie?”
“Because you don’t want to hear the truth, Dad!” The words are out before Nick can stop them, and then they just keep coming. “Because you don’t want to hear that I’m more of a fuckup than you know, and I do dumb things all the time, and I don’t know how to grow up, and I don’t want to go to college to get a degree that I’m going to mess up anyway, and end up with a job I hate!”
Chris flinches back. “You don’t want to go to college?”
“No!” Nick flounders. “I don’t know! I don’t know anything, okay? I don’t know anything!”
He’s angry at his dad for making him say these things, but he’s angrier at himself for feeling them. He knows he’s a fuckup, but he’s been trying so hard to pretend he’s not, and of course he fucked that up too, because he’s Nick Stahlnecker, and that’s what he does. He fucks things up. It’ll probably be on his headstone one day: Nick Stahlnecker, fuckup. He’s like Holden Caulfield, but at least ten times more annoying. And also he doesn’t have a cool hat. But other than that they could be twins. Whining little bitch twins.
God. He really should never have read that book.
He just . . . Nick just wanted to be special. He wanted to be Luke, with a destiny. He wanted to be Frodo, with a quest. He wanted to be an unlikely hero and do something that mattered, but there are no quests in the real world, where everything is much bigger and more tangled and complex than in the stories he loves. In the real world, small people don’t get to be heroes, and Nick is the smallest person he knows.
“Nick,” his dad says.
Nick waits for him to say something else, but apparently his dad’s got nothing either.
“Sorry,” he mutters. “I’m drunk and stupid. Sorry.”
He turns and heads upstairs. A part of him imagines what it would feel like if his dad stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder, maybe pulled him into a hug. And maybe Nick would say something like how he doesn’t really think his dad is boring, just that what his dad does isn’t for him, and maybe they’d actually talk stuff out, and things would be better.
But his dad doesn’t reach out for him, so Nick guesses he’ll never know.
He wipes the water off his face as he reaches his bedroom. If he’s crying, he can’t tell.
Nick: My dad caught me and Jai naked in the pool.
Devon: DUDE!!!!!!
Nick: That’s why I couldn’t talk when u called.
Devon: He mad?
Nick: Not really. I don’t think he cares enough to be mad.
Devon: He’s probabbly still in shock tho?
Nick: Maybe. IDK.
Devon: R u ok?
Nick: Yeah. Going to bed now. Talk tomorrow?
Devon: For sure, bro. Call me.
Nick falls asleep to The Two Towers. He doesn’t even make it to the part where Aragorn and the others meet Éomer and the Rohirrim, which is legit his favorite scene in the whole movie. Beards. It’s the beards. And all the manly posturing. And the leather pants. Really, it’s a scene that works on every level. A fucking cinematic masterpiece.
He wakes up a little past dawn, hungover, feeling like every orc and cave troll from the Mines of Moria has taken a shit down his throat. He stumbles to the bathroom and is sick in the toilet. Then he crawls into the shower cubicle and sits under the hot spray until he feels like he’s a tiny bit human again.
When he finally drags himself back to his bedroom, he finds a glass of water and a pack of Tylenol on his nightstand. He swallows two of the Tylenol and burrows under his comforter again. Sleep gradually softens the pounding in his skull.
It’s morning proper by the time he resurfaces. The loudest birds in the world are shrieking in the tree outside his window, and the sun is unnecessarily bright. Nick hates everything, mostly himself. He thinks briefly about getting some breakfast, but his stomach warns him not to go there. Hell no. But more water would be good.
Nick slinks downstairs, only almost tripping down the stairs twice. He’s going to count not breaking his neck as a win. He figures it’s the best win he’s going to get today, right? He tries to remember exactly what he yelled at his dad last night, and if it was as horrible as he suspects.
“What is even wrong with me?” he mutters to Scooter when she meets him at the bottom of the steps. She thumps her tail against the wall in answer. Scooter doesn’t care if he’s an idiot or an asshole. Dogs are the best.
Nick makes it halfway to the kitchen, and stops. He can hear the kettle burbling. The dull squeak of th
e fridge seal popping open and squeezing shut again. He can hear the low murmur of his parents’ conversation. The sound of their voices makes Nick’s churning stomach flip. Did he really yell at his dad?
It’s not fair that’s the flashback he keeps getting instead of the part where he was naked with Jai in the pool. If Nick could replay that in his sad, aching brain—cutting out the way it ended, of course—that would be just great.
He takes a deep breath and steps into the kitchen.
He regards his parents warily. “Hey.”
It’s weird. Nick thought he was used to the way his parents are disappointed in him. He thought it was nothing he couldn’t handle. But this morning even his mom is looking at him like she isn’t quite sure what she sees. Like somehow Nick is someone they don’t know, as though just one more dumb decision—or the trifecta of his being drunk, naked, and humping a guy in the pool—is all it takes to push Nick from someone his parents don’t really get and can’t quite connect with, into someone who is a total stranger to them.
His sudden dizziness, Nick thinks, doesn’t all come from his hangover.
“So, um,” Nick says, glancing from his mom to his dad and back again. “I’m sorry about last night. It was hot and we were taking a swim and we got a little carried away. I’m sorry I was drinking, and I’m sorry I never told you that Jai was the guy from the site.”
Mostly, Nick thinks, he’s sorry that he has disappointed them. He hates how he’s always saying sorry, then going and lying and getting busted all over again. It’s such a stupid, obvious trap, but every time he turns around, he’s still caught in it, and he knows he has nobody to blame except himself. Why is it so hard to tell the truth? It’s just like whenever Nick tells himself that he’s going to eat healthy and start doing crunches and get abs and stuff, but when he looks down again, he’s somehow gotten his hand stuck in a bag of Cheetos. The truth shouldn’t be so difficult. It shouldn’t be so weak.
In stories, truth is always so big. It has the power to shatter the earth and reshape whole universes.