That was the moment when I was stung with a disquieting realization: I was in love with Thom. I couldn’t deny it—I wouldn’t be able to fool myself just because I knew it was a different love from what I felt for Eric. No, it was the “in love” variety of love I felt for Thom, and I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it before. Now when I considered my relationship with him, it was all I could see, in everything we shared. How long had I carried this around, refusing to acknowledge it?
I fell back asleep before I could think about anything else.
“You’re right. About Thom,” I told Eric. “How I feel about him.”
“I know. It’s been clear for a long time,” he answered calmly. Cheerfully, even. It hadn’t been so clear to me, but I didn’t argue.
Eric wasn’t wearing a shirt. I stroked the upper part of his left arm, enjoying the shape of it, the warmth of it, and the perfectness of it. I didn’t quite understand how we could be talking about me loving Thom while I wanted the man beside me so desperately. Should there be guilt involved? It was a relief to know I wasn’t going through this with Matthew too—what a mess that would be!
Eric put his arms around me.
“I don’t feel like there’s anything missing from what we have,” I said.
“I know.”
“And I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t know what I want to do; I don’t know what I should do. I don’t even know whether to talk with Thom about it. I don’t want it to change us. It shouldn’t—”
“Shh. I’m seriously okay with this, whatever you decide,” he murmured into my hair.
“Do you have any idea how much I love you?”
“Yeah,” he said, slowly drawing his lips to mine.
He unbuttoned the top half of my shirt and touched the mark he’d given me. I wriggled my body contentedly beneath his fingers.
“What would make you happiest now?” I asked as my hands roamed over his skin.
“Right now?” he asked with a grin.
“Immediately.”
“Yeah, this.” He tore my shirt off, popping the few remaining buttoned buttons from their stitching.
“This is why people OD on pills and jump from the Golden Gate Bridge/Anything to feel weightless again.” The Handsome Family, “Weightless Again”
“‘Hauntingly Beautiful Melody’ isn’t a song name,” Matthew teased in the afternoon.
“‘Hauntingly Beautiful Melody’ is the greatest song name,” I told him, punching lightly at his ribs and standing up.
“Oh yeah? You really think so?”
“I do.”
Our battle was on. We propelled the dirt around us into clouds of dust as we kicked and punched and ducked and feinted. It was a good fight. Finally, panting, sweaty, and caked with dirt, we agreed it was a draw.
“I want… to dive… with you.” He gasped at the air. “Have… for a while now,” he heaved out. “Wasn’t ready.” Another breath. “Am now.”
No one else from camp had ever taken the leap from the cliff to the water, though I did so fairly regularly now, falling without Falling.
We hiked to the top of the cliff and looked down at the water. Clear.
We backed several feet from the edge, and then we ran for it. Matthew whooped the whole way down.
We swam out to the float and hauled ourselves up. Matthew sat beside me.
“That was awesome!” He held up a fist. It got bumped.
We watched how the waves caught sunlight and we got our legs and toes nibbled by fish. Then by fishes.
“When did you guys find this camp?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. It all kind of blends together. Maybe one, two weeks before you?” Matthew kicked his feet around in the water. “Three? Keeping track of time didn’t seem important. Still doesn’t. It’s such a nice spot. And we didn’t have a plan. No deadline, no schedule. Figured we’d try it for a while and move on, or not.”
“It’s a good setup.”
“Yeah. Eric and Thom—Thom especially—they kinda need to be around people, or they get weird.”
“Weird?”
“Weird sad. And weird weird. You’ve got a bit of it.”
I picked at a splintering piece of board, not trying to deny the truth of his words. I appreciated his talent for understatement.
He continued, “They want all this space from people, and they need it, but they also need to not be alone, too. You know?”
I nodded. “Being alone too much makes people…” I fumbled for the word.
“Eccentric?”
“Yeah.”
We waved to Eric and Thom, who were on the shore, preparing to join us. I blew kisses and we giggled.
“What’s with the under-the-lean-to thing?” Matthew asked.
“The under-the-lean-to thing?” I asked back, playing dumb.
“The corner, small spaces, the P.P.”
“Safe.”
He gave a long, slow nod which seemed to indicate he’d been working at understanding for quite some time.
Eric and Thom arrived and hauled themselves onto the float with us. Eric asked Matthew which women he had his eyes on in camp at the moment, and my attention shifted solely to Thom as Matthew nonchalantly boasted.
Thom relaxed back, propped on his hands on the float. He looked so peaceful, I felt an impulse to hug him. I wanted to be enveloped in his sereneness. The impulse got followed, for once. I crawled to him on my hands and knees and knelt beside him, hanging my arms around his shoulders with my hands clasped together. I kissed the side of his head and sat myself down. I’d landed with his hand underneath the inside of my upper leg. We both noticed it at the same time. We looked at it and didn’t move, silently challenging each other to see who could hold out longest over this issue of touching that was a little over the line.
“Are you going to look to your woman, or shall I?” Matthew teased Eric.
“Let ‘em be,” Eric said. “Don’t they look happy to you?”
“They do at that.”
I pressed the side of my head to Thom’s and I nuzzled him a little—if they were going to talk about us in front of us, we might as well show off a bit. Thom laughed, nuzzling me back and wrapping his arms around me. I leaned against him, feeling content.
“Do you see a downside to that? I haven’t found one,” Eric observed. “I’m going to allow this.”
“Exactly how much are you going to allow, Your Honor?” Matthew asked for us all.
“Whatever keeps them happy,” Eric said, after letting the question hang in the air for a moment. And he meant it.
hen I was out with Eric one day, we drove into a small, practically rotter-free town. We took some time exploring a few houses, finding treasures.
“Present?” Eric asked, pulling me into a bedroom.
“Present,” I agreed, tugging at his neck so he’d lean in to kiss me. He grinned and threw me down on the bed.
Later, Eric settled on the couch in the living room, thumbing through a stack of pictures he’d found.
“These are fabulously creepy,” he told me.
I perched on the arm of the couch, next to him, and he handed me a thick, old photo. It was a black-and-white picture of a baby sitting next to a ghost-shaped carpet. I looked at Eric quizzically.
“‘Hidden mother’ photographs!” he exclaimed.
“What? Why is there a human-shaped lump behind that child?” I asked mirthfully.
“Unsettling, no?” he asked, holding up another. “Exposure time took so long back then, the only way they could keep the babies still enough for pictures was to have the mothers hold the kids. And I guess they really didn’t want the mothers in the pictures.”
“Seriously!” I laughed. “Those are awesome! Scoot.”
He moved over a little and I dropped down onto the cushion beside him. He pulled out another picture: A couple of kids sitting on a person-shaped floral tablecloth.
We leaned together and studied the odd photos. We too
k them home and displayed them on the wall of the lean-to.
Matthew and I were fighting again. We practiced a lot, now that I’d healed enough, always away from the curious eyes of the camp. He shoved a hand out toward my shoulder, and I darted in under his arm, elbowing him in the back on the way by.
“Oof!” he exclaimed, whipping about.
“Hold,” I said, seeing Sam entering the clearing, distress showing on her face since she’d viewed us punching and kicking at each other.
Matthew immediately dropped his hands to his sides. “Hi, Sam!”
“SammyJo!” I called cheerfully.
Sam exhaled with relief, realizing we weren’t actually out for blood and were merely practicing. She and I hadn’t worked on her fighting skills yet. She’d gotten pretty good at escaping from various holds, and she knew how to protect herself enough to get away from an attacker in numerous situations. But we still hadn’t gotten to teaching her to fight, because being able to get away seemed more important. We’d been working on other projects and camp duties as well.
She looked at us and said shyly, “I want to learn how to do that.”
It was a gray day and the barometric pressure was fluctuating in a way that caused my scar tissue to twinge—I wouldn’t mind a break. I looked to Matthew, realizing he’d be able to teach her better than I could. I asked him with a look, and he nodded.
“Come on, Sam. I’ll give you the first lesson,” he said.
Seeing me rubbing at my arm, where he’d kicked me when I hadn’t moved fast enough, Matthew chivalrously asked, “Draw?”
“No, you win this round.” I flexed my arm. I could feel a large bruise would soon be spreading across it. Ah, well. He’d owed me at least one.
“Get your ass back home and take some drugs,” he advised.
“I’ll get you next time,” I teased. To Sam, I said, “You’re in good hands.”
I ambled away, listening to him instructing her. As their voices faded with distance, I heard Matthew issue a gentle correction: “Not quite. Like this. Wait, I’m going to touch your foot, okay? To show you what I mean.”
“Okay,” she said.
I couldn’t hear them beyond that, but felt pleased with the exchange.
Eric and I had enjoyed such success on the outing where we found the “hidden mother” pictures, we decided to go picking again a few days later. This time, we rummaged through a suburban high school that had clearly seen some sort of rotter crisis (which had been cleared out before we arrived, leaving only a handful of active rotters to take down). I pried open a locker and a yellow notebook fell out, along with a wadded-up windbreaker. I searched the coat’s pockets and found a dead MP3 player. Awesome! Thom would be able to revive it, for sure.
I put the windbreaker and MP3 player into the shopping cart I was pushing along, and then turned my attention to the notebook. The word “CHEMISTRY” was scrawled across the front, along with the name “Byron Crawley” and some deeply embossed ballpoint pen renderings of various punk bands’ logos. When I noticed the kid’s adorably egg-shaped attempt at drawing the Ramones’ seal, I cried, “Aww!” which drew Eric out of a nearby classroom. I sat on the floor, against the lockers, and patted the spot beside me. He plopped down and put an arm around me, and we pawed through the notebook.
Though only about a quarter of the book had been written in—and some of the content was just dry notes from high school science lectures (occasionally enlivened by profane commentary like, “Covalent bonding: makes no fucking sense”)—it was a beautiful glimpse into the mind of its adolescent author. Eric and I were held rapt by the pages of would-be trenchant teenage song lyrics (“Be good little consumers and buy, buy, buy/To ignore the fact that your lives are lies,” and many more too embarrassing to reproduce), grotesque doodles of unloved teachers, and stream-of-consciousness journaling. On the very last used page, there was an undelivered letter to the boy’s girlfriend, which I read aloud to Eric (all spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors [sic]):
Hey Angie,
I’m in Chem and thought I’d write, because I can’t pay attention today. I really hope their going to cancel school pretty soon, with all the shit going down out there. I’m so jealous, Tristan and Skyler get to stay home, but my parents said as long as school’s open, I have to go. They’re such tools of the media!!! You know this virus is a lot bigger than we’re hearing about, but because our corporate overlords can’t sell useless products like jewelery and Kenmore Smart Stoves when people are panicing, they’ve gotta pretend everything’s under control. How does that jive with all the attacks!
I read a rumor online that there’s just one guy whose behind this, who released the virus into the world. Remember those commercials for America’s First Choice Water, with that guy who was going on about how drinking his water was a victory for the community? I read Homeland Security thinks he might somehow be responsible for it, but he’s vanished. But you can’t trust anything you read, so who knows what the real answers are.
I paused. Eric looked at me.
“Gareth,” I said. “I fucking knew it.”
“Go on,” Eric urged.
I rolled my eyes and continued reading:
Sorry for ranting. I know you know. I’ve been thinking a lot about when you were talking about running away together to Mr. DePauw’s cabin. I know you said it was just a Romeo & Juliet fantasy, but why couldn’t we? I could take my parent’s car and pick you up in the middle of the night, and we could stock up on food and supplies with my parent’s credit cards to tide us over until we could figure out a reasonable way of sustainance up there. (Maybe I could even bring Funyun along! He’d love sniffing around in the forest I bet, and he’d be a good guard dog to protect us.) We could get away from all of this and be together.
I need you, Ang. I need to be with you. You are all that makes sense to me right now. Your love and your beauty and how safe I feel when we’re together. I’m scared and I admit it. It’s like we’re just supposed to go on like normal, even after Cory, and Jemma, and Haylee got bit. I didn’t even like them, except Jemma a little, but I am SCARED SHITLESS by this weirdness. That’s why I’ve been wanting to get drive-through and eat in the car instead of going inside when we go to get food lately, and why I haven’t wanted to go to movies or any public place, because what if someone in there suddenly changes? Hell, what if someone HERE changes?
School is awful enough to begin with, full of assholes and Taylor Swift wannabe’s and so called authority figures, that when you add in the possibility of someone actually BITING AND KILLING YOU, I can’t take it. I can’t take it. I just want to be naked with you, not even in a sexual way, but jus neccesarily, but just in your arms, feeling your skin against mine, and tuning out the rest of the world forever. I love you, and you are all I need or want in life, so can we maybe start to think about that seriously? Please?
Oh, it’s almost time to go to English. I’ll give you this at lunch. Well, I guess I didn’t need to write that, since you will already know that by the time you read this. I guess you didn’t really need that last sentence either. I should just stop, huh? [Crude smiley face drawing.] Writing and thinking of you makes me feel less hopeless, though. We can beat this life together, babe.
Love you all the love,
By.
I smirked, “You know, you don’t see many anti-capitalist punk kids complaining about Kenmore appliances as examples of bourgeois excess.” But then I noticed that Eric was silently crying. I rubbed his back and he started sobbing.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“No,” I said, kissing his cheek. “What is it?”
“It’s stupid.”
“No,” I repeated.
Eric turned to me and slowly extracted the words. “I feel bad for Funyun.” He emitted a small puff of a laugh in spite of himself, sending a tear leaping from his bottom lip onto my nose. We both smiled, but his mouth quickly turned back down and he started weeping again.
“Why
do you feel bad for Funyun?”
“Because he lost his best friend. This kid never had a chance to give his girlfriend this note, so something bad clearly happened. He probably got bit, and then Funyun had to wonder why his buddy never came home, and it broke his heart.” Great, heaving sobs.
I hugged him tightly. When Eric’s depression boiled over, his mind would often create terribly sad scenarios like this for him to obsess over. Some little detail he observed would lead his imagination down the darkest possible roads, and he’d wind up bawling and retreating into himself, all because of some hypothetical—and, generally, exceedingly unlikely—situation. When he was feeling calmer, he’d admit the absurdity of letting fictional situations get to him so much when he reacted to real-world problems as such a stone badass. But for now, I would try to offer my Eric an alternate path.
“Funyun and Byron never got separated,” I confidently said. “Between classes, immediately after Byron had tossed this notebook in his locker and grabbed his English notebook, Angie found him and pulled him aside. Then she unceremoniously dumped him. That’s why he never gave her the note.”
Eric sniffled.
“Byron skipped the rest of the school day and biked home, devastated,” I continued. “He didn’t even bother to get his coat out of his locker when he left. He sped home and ran upstairs to his room, with Funyun following him, of course. Then Byron buried his face in Funyun’s fur and cried all afternoon.”
Eric stuffed-nosedly asked, “What kind of dog is Funyun? I’m picturing him as a Chow.”
“Funyun’s a Chow/Shar Pei mix. Tons of fluffy fur and tons of wrinkles for a heartsick teenager to hold onto.”
“Ah. Continue.”
“That afternoon the school held a pep rally, and a kid in the middle of the bleachers hadn’t told anyone he’d been bitten that morning. So naturally, he turned, and then the usual happened: hysteria, biting, trampling. Oh—you know what? The boy for whom Angie dumped Byron got stomped. Big mess. But Byron missed it all, and he and Funyun took off that night after he heard the news. They are now safely living in Mr. DePauw’s cabin.”
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 30