“You don’t know anything about us,” Michael said. “About her.”
Dalton’s eyes darted back and forth between Mike’s like he was reading every intimate line of personal narrative on his face. “Holy shit. Holy shit,” he said, smiling. “She told you you were her first.”
“Fuck you,” Michael said.
“Do I look like I’m lying?”
All of the frequencies in the house hummed down to one buzzing note—it was the house’s beating heart in the basement. It was Matty breathing through her nose. It was the murmur of music and conversations from the porch.
Michael turned toward us. “It’s true, though. Right? Matty?”
Matty winced her eyes shut for half a second.
“Mike…” Faisal said, his hands half-raised and his head shaking back and forth in a “just shut up, man” motion.
“No, I just want to make sure. Matty?”
Dalton let out a short, humorless laugh and Michael spun on him. “You shut up.” He turned back.
“I know the baby’s yours,” she said, rubbing her stomach. She tried to smile but there was something nervous in her eyes.
“No, I’m not kidding. Forget the pregnancy pouch. I don’t care that you slept—” He took a breath. “That’s your business. But you told me I was your first. You lied.”
“Mike…” she said.
“I thought that was our thing. Honesty and transparency. Whatever. I thought that was our thing. Why would you lie?”
“But he’s a stormtrooper,” I said, which I felt was the most obvious and important fact in the room.
“I’m sorry. I just— I need some air.”
He walked out.
“Michael, wait—” she said to his back as he left, slamming the door in his wake. She didn’t go after him; she turned her attention to Dalton. It only lasted a millionth of a second, but there was wrath in her eyes.
Then it was gone.
“We’re leaving,” she said to us.
“What? Fuck you, you don’t get to keep walking away from me, Matty.”
As we walked after Michael, I unclenched my fist and realized I was still holding the tablet. I held it up and caught his attention because I was still drunk and if I didn’t do something, I knew I was going to start crying because I couldn’t stop seeing the worst parts of my life replaying in front of me all the time. Whether it was a house show or a campfire story, everything brought me back to Charlie and it was exhausting. Right when you think you can escape your moment, you realize that it will always be able to hurt you.
He scoffed and, after a second, said, “Thanks,” holding his hand out. I pulled it back.
“Is this what you were trying to give Sexy Tree Girl, stormtrooper?”
Matty stopped at the door and looked over her shoulder. “What were you doing over there?” she asked before he had a chance to respond to me.
“What do you mean ‘what was I doing’? You don’t get to be jealous of me, Matty. We broke up. You broke up with me, remember? And you, that’s mine; give it back.”
“Tree Girl’s drunk,” I said, less careful with my enunciation.
“So am I,” he said like a smug son of a bitch.
“Not as drunk as her,” I said.
“I asked you a question,” Matty said.
“Matty, that’s enough. This is starting to piss me off, okay? I was just having a good time with my friend.”
“I don’t think she wanted to be friends with you. Which is why she kept not wanting to touch your penis,” I said, pointing between his legs in case he didn’t know what I meant.
“Moses, can you hand me that?” she asked, pointing at my hand holding the pill.
“Oh come on, Matty, don’t. Would you just let it go? And you,” he said, pointing at me, “would you just fucking shut up?”
I handed it to her.
“What is this?” she asked.
“It is ecstasy,” I said. “Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. MDMA and a shitload of syllables.” I blinked a couple of times and then opened my eyes as wide as I could because my vision kept getting all blurry. We’d had to make anti-drug PSAs freshman year; it made sense at the time to read up on every illegal substance I could. “In 2007 it was ranked the 16th most addictive and 13th—no, 12th most harmful recrea—”
“Thanks, Rain Man. I sell to her all the time, I wasn’t doing anything she didn’t want. Don’t make this something it isn’t,” Dalton said.
Even as drunk as I was, I could see the wrath coming back. It flooded in from whatever oceanic depths were behind Matty’s eyes and she said, calmly and unwaveringly, “What would your mother think?”
Matty was still standing, and it made me laugh in relief.
The parrot squawked, “Squeeze the universe! Bitten off with a smile!”
But I didn’t squeeze the universe, and all I’d done for the last ten months was bite everything off with a smile; even now, as my guts warmed, as I realized how awake I was for the first time in months and months, I chose to simply bite the matter off with a smile and refuse to really tell them who I was. But the more I watched Matty, ceaseless against her clawing past, the more I wanted to.
Faisal inconspicuously reached over and tapped me on the elbow. When I looked over at him he whispered, “Watch this,” then nodded toward Matty.
Dalton raised his eyebrows. “What? Whatever, Matty, it’s good to see you,” he said, the corner of his lip twisting into a faint smile, and he didn’t go anywhere. “Good luck with your little brood.”
She looked at the blue tablet in her hand before dropping it into a not-quite-empty, boot-shaped cup on the table next to us.
He sighed, tapped his finger against the rim of his cup, and said, “Great, good. Those aren’t cheap. You win, I guess. Are you happy now?”
“I said, ‘What would your mother think?’”
Nobody had thought to ask me that kind of question after the bowling alley. They were always much more interested in what God thought than what my mother and father thought.
“What? Look, I’m sorry I said that stuff in front of Mike. Probably shouldn’t ha—”
“What the fuck made you think it was okay to put your hands on her?”
He laughed and his eyes were watery. “I already told you, she’s a friend and I sell to her all the time.”
“You still didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“What? What question?”
“About what your mom would think.”
“So now you want to talk, huh? Can we talk about what we’re really talking about? The little bundle of joy you and Mike made? Because it’s my business too. Do you know how fucking ruined I was after you? You were the bomb that went off in my life, Matty.”
She dropped her hand to her side, her fingers hovering over her pocket. As soon as the obviously-garbage-picked grandfather clock against the wall chimed midnight, she drew out her phone. “I forgot about you.”
If her breaking up with him was the bomb that had gone off in his life, this was the nuclear winter that followed. “No you didn’t,” he said. He was drowning in her.
“I did. And I forgot about the pressure—I forgot about all the degrading little comments and the jokes and the secrets, all of the little weapons you used because you wanted to get off.”
She used her words like a prizefighter uses haymakers, swinging heavy blows that pushed him against the ropes.
“They were jokes. I was hurt. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made jokes. I mean, you did break up with me at my grandma’s funeral.”
I snorted.
“Something funny?” he asked me.
“It wasn’t at her funeral,” Matty said. “It was after. When I wouldn’t have sex with you and you called me a cocktease.”
“I was mourning!”
“You were horny. That’s not an excuse. And that was how you did it every time: shame and guilt.”
“I loved you. I never mea—”
“Stop mak
ing excuses.”
“Matty, come on. I said I’m sorry, okay? If it helps, I’m not mad at you anymore. I forgive you. I just want you to forgive me too.”
She pressed a button on the phone and placed it to her head before saying, “I don’t need forgiveness.”
Faisal grabbed an anticipatory handful of my sleeve.
“You gonna try to call Mike back? Fine. Good idea,” Dalton said. “Give him a call. Great. Look, he’s right: transparency is the key to relationships.”
A college student dressed either like a pirate or a poet came in with a staggeringly drunk and exquisitely bearded wizard. The wizard kept leaning on him and mumbling into his ear, gesturing grandly with his staff made entirely of taped-together beer cans. Several cups and pictures were knocked off of shelves.
Matty held up a “hang on, I’m on the phone” finger.
“Hi, Mrs. Emmory?” Faisal and I both realized what she was doing at the same instant and both snapped our entirely undivided attention toward the stormtrooper; we saw all of the air come out of him. All of the bluster, all of the fire—he’d never stood a chance. “Hi. Sorry to wake you. I just wanted to let you know that Dalton still sells ecstasy. He used to keep it in the urn on the mantle. And he probably still does.” She nodded, locked her eyes on him and said, “Yeah: that urn.”
The things in her haunted past never stood a goddamn chance, and I wished I could be like her. I wished I could lay atomic waste to all of the footnotes of my life.
The tiny blue tablet with an anchor on it in the boot-shaped cup had dissolved to almost nothing.
“I—I’m on probation. Matty, what are you—what are you doing?”
He started to move toward her. He moved like he was dreaming. Like he was watching all of his bad decisions catching up to him. Matty’s eyes went fierce. She stared deep into his devastation and pulled the trigger one more time, just for good goddamn measure.
“Mrs. Emmory? Your son treats women’s sexuality like it’s something to be ashamed of. He treats sex like a weapon and I know you raised him better.” She hung up without looking at the phone or breaking eye contact with Dalton.
“Pardon me,” the pirate/poet said, stepping between them. He had a piece of folded paper in his hands. “Sorry. I was told to read this to the … stormtrooper?” He pointed at the punch-drunk Dalton.
Dalton blinked a few times. “What?”
The parrot in the other room fluttered around and said, “I am Lazarus!”
“It says…” He squinted and unfolded the paper, leaning his head back to read through his glasses. “Faisal: dick punch.”
Directly behind Dalton, the drunk wizard pulled his beard down and said, “Bluff clause, motherfucker,” and in one fluid, downward motion twisted the stormtrooper helmet down and pantsed the awful asshole.
Faisal was a blur. The noise his fist made when he punched Dalton Emmory in the penis was not the sound of ham getting slapped, but the sound of victory. Dalton Emmory twisted around and tripped over the space pants around his ankles as he curled into a ball on the floor.
The trio bounded toward the door.
I knelt in front of Dalton.
First song that came to mind: “Back in the Saddle Again” by Aerosmith.
“In their defense, you were being churlish. And you have a really stupid fucking name.” I let the words slur where they needed to slur and stay in focus where they needed to be in focus. I just smiled.
“Moses! Come on!”
As I ran for the door, I yelled at the bird, “Fuck you, Prufrock!” with as many extra syllables as I could fit before I ran out of breath.
THIRTY-FOUR: SNOW
WE EXPLODED INTO THE NIGHT, clearing the porch steps three at a time, and went running back the way we came. The crowd of students and monsters faded behind us.
We skidded to a stop in front of the beige truck with all the tools in it.
“Holy shit,” Faisal said.
There was a pickaxe sticking out of its hood. Faisal pulled his phone out of his pocket and took a picture of the truck’s new hood ornament.
“I realized whose truck it was when he started talking to us,” Michael said. He pulled the wizard robe off and tossed it in the bed of the truck, followed by the beard. “We should get out of here.”
Every part of Michael’s plan felt like something Charlie would have put together. From the bluff clause to the disguise to sinking a garden tool into some asshole’s engine block.
Seeing Charlie back was like seeing a mountain of black thunderheads on the horizon after a drought: it would be a solution until it was a problem.
“You came back. As a wizard,” Matty said.
He shrugged. “I love you.”
She smiled. “I know.”
They were holding hands. Behind us, hidden by the town’s skyline, behind the buildings mottled with bright windows, a pair of lights climbed up and into the night. The lights grew like someone had punctured the night’s pressure and was letting the dark drain away; they grew until they were over us and the small plane droned past, pushing its sound and light toward the wilderness we were headed for.
“That was the most gangster shit I have ever seen,” Faisal said. “Mike! It was the most gangster shit I have ever seen! You missed it because you were off organizing your own gangster shit, but Matty was the most gangster of all gangsters.”
Matty nodded and said “Nice,” and then high-fived herself.
When we reached the Dairy Mart, Faisal asked for the time and asked if we needed to get any cabin supplies.
“I spent the last of my money paying off that wizard,” Mike said.
I turned my phone on to check the time and the home screen showed a small backlog of texts: the first text message I’d missed, two hours previous, read:
Hi moses its lump! Reminder that thing that went missing?? I have a plan. Cant talk about it here. Msg me back!!
“Thank God,” Faisal said to Michael. “I thought it was some kind of twist ending where you’d been the wizard the whole time. Plus I don’t think that clerk wants to see us anymore.”
The next message, sent fifteen minutes after the first, read:
[page 1/2]Hi moses! My phone has automatic correct on it so I didn’t mean to say reminder when I meant remember. Okay. That is all. You might be asleep which
[page 2/2]is okay because it is getting late but I made a up a code so we can talk about the plan. Just like the underground railroad!!
“No, he was super okay with it. Probably because he was really drunk. And probably broke.”
The next message, forty-five minutes after the last, said:
Hi moses! My phone is about to die but I am going to look for the thing. Don’t tell Mr. Test and don’t be mad!
112 518 447 9826 55 3119 421
“Moses, you got the time?” Faisal asked me.
The final message, sent thirty minutes after that, was a voicemail. I hit play and shoved the phone against my head.
The message was just crunching and static.
“Oh, shit,” I said, staring at my phone.
They didn’t hear me because Faisal had started reenacting hitting Dalton Emmory in the penis by crouching down and punching his open palm before shaking his head and saying, “No no no. That wasn’t it, that wasn’t it.” I heard him punch his palm again and say, “There! That was the noise! That was the noise when my fist touched his penis!”
“Guys.”
The swimming, floating feeling in the pit of my stomach was nothing new. It was the same feeling I’d had when Harper saw us steal his Jesus, the same as any of the innumerable times Charlie and I found ourselves getting deeper into trouble than we’d meant to.
They looked at me, still laughing a little.
“Something’s up.”
They went serious and I clicked through the menus on my phone until it asked if I wanted to call the number that had texted me. I hit “call.”
A mom-sounding adult’s voice immedi
ately answered. Sobriety wild-fired through my body, bouncing off the blurry, drunken sludge writhing around in my head.
“Hi, this is Allison’s cell phone that her parents are generously allowing her to use while she is away at camp. Leave a message and I’m sure she will get back to you in a timely fashion whenever she is done with her important and stately business or decides to charge her phone.”
Just beyond the familiar feeling of Oh Shit, though, just past the final semblance of order, floating around my periphery was a quiet, heavy darkness that insisted we no longer had any control. And that was a feeling I’d only felt twice, both times marked with a gunshot.
“Moses?” Matty asked.
“Lump is out looking for the deer.”
The sky settled on snow.
THIRTY-FIVE: MONSTER LIGHTS
WE INCHED UP TO the tree line of the shotgun farmer’s house. The house of Browning and his beast was dark and silent. The wind kept slapping into our backs and ushering us toward the house that we no longer had the option of going around.
“This is stupid. This is so stupid,” Matty kept saying.
“She said she’s trying to find the deer,” I said. Any time any of us said anything, there was a distinct feeling that the calm in our voices was entirely manufactured.
She glared at me. “Call her. Again.” Then she added, more softly, “Please.”
“Her phone’s dead,” I said, sounding more abrasive than I’d meant to. I tried to tell myself that if Lump was calm enough to write out a secret code, then she had to be all right.
“Shit, this is so stupid,” Matty said.
“I thought she was your Cabin Guardian,” Faisal said.
“Not tonight. I got Nara to do it since Lump wanted to spend the night in the infirmary,” she said, before breathing out through her teeth and trying to get a better view of the house.
“Because of her ear?” I asked, trying to retrace Lump’s hypothetical steps.
“We have to go. Fuck,” she said. She blinked hard and shook her head. “What? Sorry, no, not because of her ear. She said she wasn’t feeling good and wanted to spend the night making deer posters. She got the all-clear from Test. Cabin’s empty anyway since Shelly’s doing the rec-center camp-in tonight for the girls. I think we got played by a child.”
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