by Sean Olin
Up ahead, he saw a shape in the sand. A boulder of darkness. It wasn’t moving.
When he got closer, he saw that it was a person, sitting with legs curled up. He wondered who else could be out here at this hour.
Then, when he was closer still, he saw the blond waves and the posture of the body and realized, with a sinking dread, that it was Nathaniel, staring, as though in a daze, out at the water.
Jake didn’t think he’d seen him yet. He considered turning back. But something about that idea felt like defeat. He had just as much right to be on this beach as Nathaniel did.
He wandered on.
Even when Jake was right on top of him, Nathaniel didn’t seem to see him. The guy was crying. Or he’d been crying. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. He’d propped his silver inlaid flask in the sand next to him and Jake wondered how much he’d had to drink tonight. Nate had never seemed the type to drink himself to tears. He was more the wicked, angry drunk.
Despite everything that had happened between them, Jake sort of felt for the guy. He wanted to believe his mother about Cameron—he trusted her ability to see through to the hearts of other people—but the guy had been so uncompromising with Nathaniel at Christmas and throughout the week things had just gotten worse between them. They’d barely been able to sit in the same room together. It must be hard to feel like you’ve so profoundly failed your father.
“Hey,” he said, a gesture of goodwill.
Nathaniel looked up at him, and it was like he was seeing through him. There was something vacant in his eyes, like wherever he was in his head was more real than being in the world.
Jake noticed now that he had something in his hands. A slip of crumpled paper. Or no. It was an origami swan like the ones Jake had found all over the bedroom. Nate cradled it almost like it was alive, a baby chick in need of warmth and care.
“What’s going on?” Jake said. He slid the guitar off his shoulder and plopped down next to Nathaniel. “You okay?”
Nathaniel didn’t answer. He twirled the swan between his two forefingers. He pushed his finger against its beak in a gesture that contained more love than Jake had thought Nate capable of. Finally, when he did speak he seemed to be talking to himself more than to Jake.
“My mom made this,” he said. “She made one every day. A single swan. Sometimes out of an envelope. Sometimes out of tissue paper. Each one was a little bit different from the others. She’d hide them around the house and it was my job to find them. If I did I’d get a cookie. It was a game we played. I’d get home from school and while she did her housework or put away the groceries or whatever, I’d search under pillows and behind the bedposts, inside the flower pots, until I found the swan. It was . . .”
He rubbed his eyes. He was crying again.
“That’s a sweet memory,” Jake said, not knowing how else to respond. When someone was this distraught, he felt, you had to respect the depths of that person’s feelings. Even someone so annoying as Nathaniel.
“She died today,” Nathaniel said abruptly, wiping his eyes.
“What?”
“Or not today, but today’s the anniversary. New Year’s Eve. 2008. We were in the Bahamas. Staying at the resort Cameron owns down there. She jumped off the helipad on the roof of the hotel. Fifteen stories. She didn’t have a chance.”
Jake wasn’t sure if he was supposed to gently pat Nathaniel on the back or give him a hug or what. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear—”
Nathaniel turned on him with a sudden, barely suppressed rage. “Why would you know? Tell me why you would know! It’s not like Cameron would have told you about it.” His eyes went far away again for a moment, and then he continued spitefully, “Cameron’s the reason she’s dead.”
What an accusation. Cameron was domineering and self-involved, sure. Jake had figured that out, but to drive someone to suicide? It didn’t seem possible that this could be true. Whatever his attitude toward Nathaniel, he’d shown nothing but devotion to Jake’s mother. Still, Jake didn’t want to disrespect Nathaniel’s feelings. He tried to project through his body language that he was listening, that he cared in some way.
“You don’t think so?” Nathaniel said, as though Jake, through his silence, had accused him of lying. “You think, Oh, Cameron. He couldn’t do something like that. He’s so charming. He bought me a car. But the dude’s a total prick. He’s got women hidden in every hotel he owns. Every city in the world. He likes them young and spacey. And psychologically damaged. And my mom . . . He might have been married to her, but he treated her like the hired help. Like the maid who lets you take advantage of her because she’s afraid of losing her job.”
It was like with every new thought, Nathaniel grew angrier at Jake, even though Jake had nothing to do with any of this. Trying to be both diplomatic and compassionate, Jake placed a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder and said, “It must be really hard, man. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my mother that way.”
Nathaniel slapped him away with a violent chop to the arm. The rage on his face had curdled into hatred. Jake felt it burning toward him.
“You’ll see,” he said. “It won’t take that long for Cameron to drive your mom insane, too. He does it to everyone. And then what will you have? Nothing. Nada. You’ll have jack shit, brother. Don’t think Cameron’s going to think you’re the golden boy once your mom’s gone. That trust fund you think you’re going to steal out from under me, you can kiss that baby good-bye. It won’t go to me, I’ll give you that. He’ll find some new woman to make promises to. And he’ll roll all that money forward to her kid, just like he did from me to you.”
Nathaniel had worked himself up into such a lather that he’d inadvertently crushed the origami swan in his fist.
“I’m not your enemy, Nathaniel,” said Jake. “You know? I’m not asking for anything from Cameron. I just think it’s all very sad. And if I see him behave toward my mom like that, I’ll—”
“Why are you still here?” Nathaniel said in response, his top lip curling malevolently. “Did I ask you to sit here and pretend to care? You’re not as sensitive as you pretend to be. You know that? You just like the idea of people thinking you are. Go find someone else to smear your pity all over. Go find that hottie of yours with the cute little strawberry mark on her thigh. She probably needs you to cheer her up. Or is she not yours anymore? You fucked that up already, didn’t you? Too bad. Would have been nice to have her around when Cameron takes everything away from you.”
That was it. Jake had had enough. He’d tried, he’d really tried to be the bigger person and separate his feelings about Nathaniel from the guy’s obvious pain. But there was no way he’d let that be an excuse for this abuse.
“Nathaniel,” he said, looking the guy dead in the eye, “you don’t know anything about Elena. You don’t know anything about me. So do yourself a favor and shut the fuck up.”
For a second, neither of them said a word. They just stared at each other, calling each other’s bluff.
“Or what?” said Nathaniel. “What you gonna do?” He smoldered, his eyes boring through Jake like he’d kill him if he could.
The adrenaline rushed to Jake’s head, blotting out all thought.
And before he knew what was happening, Nathaniel had leaped over him, grabbed his guitar, and spun in a circle, holding it out in front of him. He brought it smashing down on the sand, and when it didn’t break, he brought it down again. And again and again, kicking up a cloud of sand around him, busting the neck, and then, still not satisfied, shoving his bare foot through the hollow basin of its body.
Turning to Jake, Nathaniel broke out the smirk he’d been hiding all night. “What you gonna do now, brother? Go tell mommy again?”
Jake didn’t think. He couldn’t think. He didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t even know what he was trying to do. He could only react.
He leaped at Nathaniel, swinging his fists, but Nathaniel pushed back with a stiff arm, sen
ding Jake down into the sand. Scrambling to his feet, Jake charged again.
Nathaniel lowered his shoulder and, using his forearms as clubs, he shoved Jake back again with an elbow to the jaw.
On his knees in the sand, Jake felt the coppery taste of blood filling his mouth. He jumped to his feet and charged toward Nathaniel like a wild animal, leaping and grabbing him around the waist. They grappled, each of them stretching for leverage, until Nate buckled and went down on his chest in the sand.
Jake spun and straddled Nathaniel’s back. He dug both hands into Nathaniel’s hair, and he smashed his face against the sand over and over again, just like Nate had done to his guitar.
For a second, Jake thought, My God, I could kill this guy.
All at once he was horrified with what he was doing. He let Nathaniel go, struggled to his feet, and stumbled back toward the house.
31
SUPERNOVA
A pulsing, pounding techno beat.
A strobe light illuminates the heavens.
In short bursts of stop action caught in the strobe, a slick red-and-white racing cycle roars across the universe along a ribbon of starlight. It passes stars and planets, weaves through fields of asteroids. As it dodges and turns, it throws up sparks, leaving a trail of flames in its wake.
The motorcycle jumps over the moon. Landing hard on the trail of starlight, it wobbles but doesn’t fall.
It roars on.
As it gets closer, we can see a stylized Harlow hunched over the handlebars. He wears aerodynamic shades and his full leather gear. His hair is a mess of wavy blond spikes. Behind him, holding on for dear life, sits Electra. She smiles maniacally, with a bright joy that glows all over her body.
Harlow skids to a stop. He reaches into the breast pocket of his leather jacket and pulls out a silver flask inlaid with an image of a stalking tiger carved in ivory. Twisting the cap off, he takes a swig and hands it to Electra. She takes a swig of her own and hands it back to Harlow. He puts the flask back in his pocket and pulls Electra in for a kiss.
Stars explode around them.
Then he opens the throttle and the cycle races onward.
Harlow points to something up ahead. The sun. They’re headed right for it. It looms larger and larger.
And suddenly, it’s right in front of them, glowing orange, yellow, white hot. Harlow doesn’t slow down. He digs in lower over his handlebars and guns it.
Electra, seeing what’s about to happen, grapples with him, attempting to peel his hands off the bike, to save them both, but he’s too strong, too determined. He shakes her off.
She goes flying, and as she floats away, spinning in the cold cold gravity-less void of space, he surges forward straight into the sun. Sparks and leaping flames and for a moment, he and the cycle can be seen burning up, a singed black silhouette of what they once were.
Then Harlow is gone.
Electra lets loose a silent scream as she floats off into the black nothingness.
32
In the three days since New Year’s, Jake had hardly left the house. He’d hardly even left his room. Lurking around in the gloomy darkness, he picked at his guitar—his secondary guitar, a crappy old Crescent that fell out of tune every ten minutes—and brooded over all the ways his life had gone wrong since moving with his mother into this ridiculously opulent house.
There was Elena, first, of course, and the sad, swift deterioration of his relationship with her. It used to be that he could intuit what she was thinking just by glancing at her. Now it seemed like he barely knew her. She been so distant when he’d seen her at StarFish, like one of those kids at school who tolerates you but keeps his in-jokes to himself, leaving you to wander away feeling less connected to him than you were when you first said hi. He hadn’t heard from her since and he’d been so demoralized by the experience that he hadn’t dared reach out to her himself. The whole thing had upset him so much that he couldn’t even write a song about it. He just felt sad and confused.
That would have been bad enough, but there was also Nathaniel.
The thing that really got him, the thing that, if he was being honest, had been sticking in his gut and making him sick all week was the way Nathaniel had sneeringly talked about Elena during the argument they’d had on the beach. “Go find that hottie of yours with the cute little strawberry mark on her thigh.”
That’s what he’d said. Jake would never forget it. And how did he know about Elena’s strawberry mark? He’d never seen it. He’d never met Elena.
By the time Jake had worked himself up enough to consider confronting Nathaniel about it, the guy had left town, headed back up to the Roderick School with Cameron to pay them off and get himself reinstated. Cameron was back and he’d left Nathaniel up there, which was a relief, but even so, every time Jake ventured out of his room, it was like he could feel Nathaniel’s presence, anyway. His oily sheen, like the trail of a slug, clung to every square inch of the house.
Better to keep himself locked in, out of sight, alone with his wounds and his pride.
But even here, the world came rushing in. He couldn’t avoid checking the internet. Especially now that Elena had posted a new video. Electra and Harlow on a motorcycle, racing through the universe.
He’d watched it at least a hundred times, and each time just made his stomach knot tighter. It didn’t even matter that the ending implied that there might be some trouble between the two of them. What mattered was the way it sparked and clarified so many associations that Jake had been sensing but not really understanding. A question had begun to form in his mind:
What if Harlow was really Nathaniel?
He watched the video again, now, with a notebook in front of him, pausing it every time he saw something new.
Harlow’s spiky blond hair. Pause. He jotted down a note: “Blond Short and Wavy = Nathaniel.”
The flask. Pause. “Stalking Tiger = Nathaniel. Is this a coincidence? How many flasks can there be like that?”
Not many. And if there were more of them, how many of them would be owned by a blond guy who lived in Dream Point?
He stopped the video before it got to the part where Electra reaches out to futilely try and save Harlow. He didn’t want to see her yearning for someone else. Instead, he cued it up again and studied what he saw.
That crotch-rocket motorcycle. Pause. He’d never seen Nathaniel riding one of those. He wrote, “Cycle. Does Nathaniel have one? Where does he hide it?”
So, one point against, two points for.
He tapped the tip of his pen rapid-fire against the notebook page, trying to think of other relationships he may not have noticed before.
There was that ronin video Harlow had stolen from the Japanese site. Could that have been Nathaniel? Was he savvy enough with editing programs to strip out the sound track and replace it with a new one? Maybe, maybe not. If nothing else, it was proof that Harlow wasn’t who he presented himself as being. Best to note it either way. Jake wrote in his notebook, “Ronin? False pretenses? Possible purposeful targeting of Elena? But . . . motive?”
Realizing that there was no way to connect the stolen clip to Nathaniel, Jake backed away from the thought. Too much speculation would lead him down a rabbit hole. But how else to untangle his gut feelings? He doodled in the margins of his notebook. A rabbit peering over a hole. A crappy version of Elena’s stylized Harlow character. Then, annoyed both by his lack of drawing talent and the fact that this Harlow was staring up from his notebook, he scribbled it out.
Unless he had, which—yes. He had. He must have.
Jake was barely able to get the trash can out from under the desk in time to catch the vomit burning up his throat. He pressed his forehead against the sharp edge of the desk and spit the residual bile out of his mouth.
Harlow. Nathaniel. They were the same person. He knew it. He just knew it. Even if he couldn’t prove it.
His mind wandered back to various times Nathaniel had disappeared.
New Year’s Eve. H
e’d run into Jake on the beach, that was true, but where had the guy been earlier in the evening? And was it possible that he had something to do with Elena’s weird mood that night? Come to think of it, why would Elena have been at StarFish at all if she hadn’t been dragged there by someone like Nathaniel?
And what about Christmas Eve? He knew Elena had seen Harlow—she’d told him about it. Was it possible that this was why Nathaniel was so late for their dinner at The Spanish Armada? Hell yeah, it was possible.
Jake grabbed his cell phone off the bed, where he’d thrown it. He couldn’t help noticing that he had no new text messages. No word from Elena. Still. It had been three days now. His imagination flashed on what would happen when they returned to school on Monday. More awkwardness. More rejection. He couldn’t bear to think about it.
Anyway, he wasn’t about to call her now. He had work to do. He dialed Arnold Chan.
“Jake! Wow! I was just thinking about you,” Arnold said, answering on the first ring.
“Oh? I was thinking about you, too, Arnold.”
“We should hang out. Do you like BioShock? I got the new BioShock for Christmas. You should come over. We can play it one-on-one.”
“I can’t, Arnold. I’m really busy right now.”
“Writing new songs.” Arnold said this with a kind of dusting of pride.
“Yeah. Exactly,” Jake responded. “But, listen, have you made any headway on that thing we discussed? Any idea what the IP address is or where it’s located?”
“The dog,” Arnold said darkly. “We will hunt him down. We will put an end to his dastardly adventures.”
Jake didn’t have the energy for Arnold’s autistic melodrama right then. “Yeah,” he said. “But have you learned anything yet?”
For a long minute, Jake heard nothing but silence.
“I’ve learned a lot of things,” Arnold finally said.