by T. J. Klune
“Wow. That’s not a real thing at all.”
“They said it on the news.”
“I think that might be the cold medicine talking. And no, he hasn’t hit on me. His wife is also here.”
“Please,” I snorted. “I had a girlfriend once. Still kissed you.”
“Oh boy.”
“You’re a home-wrecker.”
“I’m not a—”
“Came in and wrecked that home. Couldn’t let me think of anyone else, no matter how much I tried.”
“How much cold medicine did you take?”
“Stop trying to change the subject.” I sneezed. “Excuse me. Stuff came out. Gross. Wow, that almost looks alive—”
Otter groaned. “I take it back. I’m never coming home.”
“Bullshit,” I’d said with a sniff. “You love me. That’s why you wrecked the home and seduced me and ruined me for anyone else.”
“I pretty much did all that, didn’t I?”
“You don’t get to sound all smug about that. I contributed to the wrecking.”
He’d sounded like he was smiling when he’d said, “It all worked out in the end.”
“Ugh. You’re getting sappy. Go away.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah, yeah. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
And then I’d shut down, the TV squawking in the background, waiting for that one specific moment when my nose would clear and I’d be able to breathe again. I was convinced it would be the greatest thing I’d ever experienced, and I’d—
The doorbell rang.
I opened my eyes, unsure of what the hell had just happened.
It rang again a moment later.
“I don’t want any!” I shouted at the door. “I’m dying, so I wouldn’t even be able to taste your Girl Scout cookies or hear you talk about your lord and savior Jesus Christ!”
The doorbell rang again.
Fucking persistent Girl Scouts and/or lovers of Christ.
Or maybe it was a robber. With a knife.
Had I remembered to lock the door?
I didn’t know.
I was going to get stabbed by a robber.
They’d find my body, snot on my upper lip, used tissues on the ground, and say, “Well, he looks gross.”
Otter and the Kid would be sad for a little bit, sure. Maybe they’d cry at the funeral, but they’d both move on. Otter would get married to the Martha Stewart reject and they’d have kids with perfectly coiffed hair, and Tyson would get hired on by PETA and eventually stage a military coup and force vegetarianism on everyone else.
“I can’t let that happen,” I muttered. “I can’t get stabbed and die.” I tried to get up, but that turned out to be a bad idea, so I sat back down with a groan. “Okay. Fine. Come in. You can kill me. Just make it quick. And tell Otter that when he gets remarried to Phinneus Van der Woods the fourth, he’s not allowed to have his engagement announcement in the New York Times say anything about how the happy couple likes to go yachting in their spare time, because that’s just fucking stupid. Seriously. Yachting? They might as well also play croquet using mallets made out of wood repurposed from the old Summer House that had been built by Jebediah Van der Woods in the late 1800s.”
“Wow,” a voice I didn’t recognize said. “That was… specific.”
I opened my eyes. Standing awkwardly near the door was a kid I’d never seen before. He was thin and wearing tight jeans (skinny jeans, I thought the youths called them—fucking millennials). His skin was dark and lovely, and he was watching me with a curious expression.
He didn’t seem threatening, but then I was sure murder victims sometimes thought the same thing. “Are you here to kill me?”
“Should I be? Are we role-playing? Like, you’re the spy and I’m the FBI agent bent on revenge who has finally caught up with you. You’ve been shot and are coughing up blood, and I have to decide if my morals are firmly planted in the gray or if I have some hope for redemption. I’d have to go buy new dress shoes before we do this. I feel I’d wear expensive ones. Did you know that a pair of Testoni dress shoes cost almost forty grand? They have gold and jewels inlaid in them.”
Dammit. I liked my potential murderer. “Well, make it quick. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to last.”
“Yeah, it looks like—oh my god, there is a used Kleenex stuck to my non-Testoni shoe. What is wrong with you? How could you do this to me?”
The stranger in my house was hopping on one foot, scraping his shoe against the wall, a look of disgust on his face. His thick black hair was tied back, held in place by a leather strap.
“As fun as this is,” I said, voice hoarse, “if you’re not here to kill me or bring me cookies, who the hell are you and what do you want?”
He grimaced as the Kleenex stuck to the wall. “My name is Corey. Corey Ellis. I’m a student at Dartmouth.”
“Oh-kay? And what do you want?”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “This is probably going to seem weird, but—hell. You know Tyson, right? Tyson Thompson?”
That caught my attention. I sat up quickly. “He’s my brother. What happened? Is he okay? Did he get hurt—”
Corey’s eyes went wide. “No. No, no, no, he’s fine. I swear. It’s not—man, you are so not going to believe me on this.”
“Are you a friend of his?” I asked, confused.
He shook his head. “We’ve never met.”
That… didn’t sound right. “Uh-huh,” I said slowly. “And you know who he is because….”
“Everyone knows who he is,” Corey said, pulling his bag up higher on his shoulder. “Smart kid, right? Got a lot of attention when he came here.”
I squinted at him. “Are you like… a groupie? Or something?”
“Wow. Absolutely not. I am so not a groupie. Are you being offensive? Because I think you’re being offensive. First, I come in here and you automatically assume I’m going to murder you, which, do I even need to tell you how racist that is?”
“I’m not racist—”
“And now you’re accusing me of stalking your brother.”
“How did you know where we live?”
Corey sighed. “I followed him home yesterday.”
“You were saying about stalking accusations?”
“Okay. Point to you. But I swear that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Maybe you should quickly explain why you’re here before I call my husband to tell him I’m being accosted by my little brother’s stalker.”
He looked startled. “Husband?”
I glared at him. “You have a problem with that? Yes, husband. And he’s big and strong and vascular, and he will totally kick your—”
“Trust me. I have no problem with that whatsoever. Is that him with you in the picture on the wall? Holy hell. Way to land that one. Talk about a DILF—”
“Corey.”
“Right. Sorry. Look. I’m doing this because I think it’s the right thing to do, okay? Just… don’t tell your brother I was here. I don’t want to get more involved than I already am.”
“Okay,” I said. Then I sneezed again. “Gross.”
“Ugh,” Corey said. “I wish I hadn’t just seen that.”
“Eh. If it makes you feel better, I wish you hadn’t either.”
“I would get you a tissue, but I’ll be honest here. I don’t want to come any closer.”
“It’s fine. I got plenty.”
“Maybe I should come back later.”
I blew my nose before I looked blearily back at him. “It doesn’t get much better than this. Spit it out.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, and he looked nervous about standing in front of me. I didn’t know what was wrong, but it couldn’t have been anything good. I almost didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
I remembered what he’d said before. “Why can’t the Kid know you were here?”
“The Kid?”
“A nickname
—it doesn’t matter.”
He shrugged. “I don’t—look. I’m here because I want to do the right thing, okay? And I told myself that maybe it was nothing. Maybe I was just… seeing things. But then I couldn’t stop thinking what if it was something? And I just couldn’t get it out of my head. Because if it is something, then it’s not good. And as much as I hate going behind another person’s back, sometimes it’s the right thing to do.”
“Going behind his back,” I said slowly. “By… coming here?”
He nodded, head jerking up and down. He bit his bottom lip, looking down at the floor.
I felt clammy, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with my cold. “What is it? Is he okay?”
He hesitated. “Is he… taking anything? Any medications?”
I blinked, unsure of where the hell this was going. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because he’s buying pills on campus.”
Everything pretty much stopped. “What?”
He told me a story then. About a guy he used to date, a real fucking scumbag that Corey had thought had the whole bad boy thing going on. Turned out that underneath the leather and swagger and cheap cologne was an asshole who made bank selling Klonopin and Adderall and Xanax to stressed-out frat boys and sorority chicks, people looking for a way to de-stress in ways that alcohol couldn’t provide. It’d taken Corey longer than he cared to admit to dump the asshole, but he’d done it and was better off because of it.
But Corey stressed he wasn’t a snitch, okay? He didn’t like getting involved in shit that didn’t concern him. It was just… Tyson. There was something about him. Corey had seen him around campus, at first a little unimpressed with this kid who was supposed to be some big shit.
He was smart, sure. Of course he was. He was Tyson Thompson, after all. His IQ was high, he’d skipped grades, he’d graduated early, he’d gone to college at sixteen, and yeah, his grades had sloughed off a little, but then he’d turned seventeen, and asked us to trust him. I got this, Papa Bear, he’d said to me. I can handle this on my own. Let me do this on my own. And sure as shit, I’d said okay, okay, okay, because I had trusted him. He’d never given any indication otherwise, he’d never lied to me, never held anything back, or so I’d thought.
And yeah, maybe we weren’t in each other’s back pocket like we’d once been. There were years when he’d been my sole focus, when all I could think about was making sure he was fed and bathed and happy and whole, and even though it felt wrong at first, I’d slowly backed off, because he was his own person. He didn’t always need me hovering over his shoulder forever, no matter how much I wanted to be. And it was hard at first, hard to let him go out into the big and scary world on his own, knowing there were people out there that could hurt him, that would hurt him. Otter had held me close, had whispered in my ear that mistakes were going to be made—it was inevitable, after all—but we’d be here to help him, we’d never leave him behind. Things are changing, Otter had said. But it’ll be okay, Bear. I promise.
So I’d let him go.
I’d trusted him.
And I had other things going on, didn’t I? I had a job. I had other kids in my life that I cared about, other kids that were exasperating and fascinating all at the same time. I had a house in a town that was almost starting to feel like home, no matter how much the call of the ocean tugged on the back of my mind. I had friends, and maybe they were the type that I’d only meet up with once every couple of months for a beer, but they were mine. They weren’t Creed and Anna, they weren’t lifelong and forever, but they were good.
And Otter, of course. I had Otter. For the longest time, the Kid and I had been a package deal, just like it should have been. We were Bear, Otter, and the Kid, and that’s the way it was. Every choice I made had Ty in mind. Everything I did, I did for him, and when I let him go, when I trusted him to know his limits, I was able to see—maybe for the first time—what it meant to be Bear and Otter, just the two of us. Because that was what it was going to be, eventually. I knew that one day, and maybe one day soon, Ty would take that next step. Maybe he’d find a roommate. Maybe he’d get a place on his own. Maybe we’d stay here. Maybe we’d go back to Seafare and he’d stay here. Maybe he’d follow us home. I didn’t know. I tried not to think about it.
But for the first time in a very long time, I felt settled in my skin. We were making plans for the future instead of day by day. We weren’t just surviving.
We were living.
Or so I thought.
It was the little things, wasn’t it? The little things I hadn’t put together to see the picture as a whole. The glassy eyes. The robotic movements. The indifference. The Kid was brash. The Kid was sarcastic. The Kid was fire and outrage and noise and vital.
But he hadn’t been that way in a while. Maybe a long while.
And here it was now. Being dragged into the light by some kid I didn’t know.
Hindsight is a fucking bitch, because now that I could see it, I thought maybe it went back months and months, and as Corey spoke, as he told me what he’d seen, I couldn’t help but feel a mounting sense of horror that I’d never seen it. That I’d missed all of this.
Mostly.
Yeah. That was my bad. I was getting my dose yesterday while brushing my teeth. They fell in the sink. Faucet was running. They melted fast. Forgot to say anything.
I gritted my teeth, pressing my palms into my eyes, shoulders shaking.
“I… saw him,” Corey said. “Talking to my ex. I told myself it was nothing. That it didn’t—I don’t know. I just—needed to see, you know? For myself. I thought maybe I was overreacting. Or that it was none of my business what this kid I didn’t know did. His life, right? Not mine. I have my own shit to worry about. But… I just couldn’t let it go. I don’t know why. I just… I remember reading about him. In the Dartmouth paper. It was so… gushing and talking about how shitty he’d had it and all that he’d overcome to get where he was, and it just wasn’t fair that he would do this. So I followed them.”
Corey had seen it happen, from a distance.
Money changed hands.
A little bottle went into the side pocket of Ty’s backpack.
It was familiar, this. He’d dated his ex for almost eight months. He knew what it looked like.
And later he’d followed the Kid to the library, bumping into him in the stacks hard. Ty’s backpack fell. The bottle popped open. Pills of varying shapes and sizes and colors spilled on carpet. Corey had apologized profusely when the Kid went down on his knees but had managed to do one thing when my brother wasn’t looking.
“I took a picture of them,” Corey said, looking down at his hands. “On my phone. So I could see what they looked like when I looked them up later. The numbers and the letters.”
“What were they?” I asked in a calm voice.
Klonopin. Xanax. Ativan. Valium. All benzodiazepines. A couple of Adderall. There was a single Percocet too, but we’d find out later that narcotics were a place he’d only dabbled in, never going too far for reasons even he couldn’t explain.
“And you’re sure about this?” I asked.
Corey nodded, looking away. “It’s none of my business, I know. It’s just—I’ll never know what he went through, you know? Or what you did. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t deal with my own shit. I remember, okay? What it was like. Stuff like this. And it’s just… he seems like a nice guy. And if he’s going to be some kind of savior like everyone thinks he is, then he doesn’t need to be doing this shit.”
“Thank you for doing this.”
He looked up, and his eyes were wet. “You won’t tell him? That I was here?”
I shook my head slowly. “No. He’ll never hear it from me. My husband will, but I can promise you Ty won’t. From either of us.”
He was grateful at that, and I felt terrible because of it.
“Can you send me the picture?”
He nodded. He pulled out his phone, and I rattled off my number. A
moment later, my phone buzzed with a text. I ignored it.
He was at the door when he stopped and turned back around. “I didn’t even ask you your name.”
“Derrick,” I told him quietly. “My name is Derrick.”
His smile was fragile. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
I nodded and he left, the door closing behind him.
I sat there for a long time.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another, it whispered. Isn’t that right? Because that’s the way it goes for you. Just when you think you’re getting somewhere, just when you think things are finally going your way for once in your miserable life, shit just seems to blow right the fuck up, doesn’t it? Oh, Bear. This is your life!
He’d been stupid, in the end.
I’d torn his room apart, not caring about how it looked, especially not after I’d found the first empty bottle. And the second. The third. The fourth. And on and on and on, stashed in nooks and crannies, in drawers and boxes underneath his bed. Yeah, one or two still had a couple of pills in them. Those I pocketed, tossing the empty bottles into the pile that was gradually growing. My stomach was twisting and turning, and it was laughing at me, laughing every time I found another bottle, every time I found a little plastic bag with residue in it. He’d kept them, stupidly, for reasons I didn’t understand. After I kicked his ass, I would have to remember to ask him.
And I would.
By the time I finished, his room was in shambles, drawers hanging open haphazardly, clothes strewn across the floor, mattress tipped off the bed. There was a small hole in the wall behind a poster of Einstein sticking his tongue out.
It was ridiculous, really, almost like he’d wanted to get caught.
I did three things, after.
I texted Ty: Can you stop by the store on your way home and get me more Kleenex?
Kk, was the response. It’ll be late. Library.
That’s fine. Seven thirty?
Yeah. Should be. Feeling better?
I didn’t answer.
I found a screwdriver in the garage and used it to take off the door to his bedroom. I carted it to our bedroom, grunting and sweating, breath harsh in my chest.