Chapter Text

A Preface

It’s already gotten to be the twenty-first century,  

And that boy with his ashen face and his ashen clothes lays on my newly-ashen sofa.  

A refugee.  

How did we get here?

It was earlier this night, October 31, the anniversary of my daughter’s murder, but as I write it is November 1, I found him half-crouched against my doorstep. He really did look worse than Hell, but he couldn’t help but tell me everything would be fine in a few hours. That I had to let him go. That they’d find him here. Sure, sure they will. If he’s dumb enough to stand up straight in the living room, shouting out “It’s me! Mr. Schmidt! Come on and arrest me already!”, as they come knocking on the door.  

But he isn’t, is he? He might be one of the smartest men I’ve ever met.  

When I first let him inside, he nearly passed out on my rug, and I wonder just how on Earth he managed to make it to my house in the first place. Before he did pass out, on the sofa of my bedroom, I was able to coerce a pack of chips into him, which are now spilling onto the hard-wood floor.  

He has been doing this exact thing for a very long time. Moving in and out of the shadows, through the corner of my and everyone else’s eye. I think he must want to understand what it’s like, to live like the rest of them: isolated and unheard.  

How did we get here?  

Rumors of arson spread when a scorched matchstick, a single, scorched matchstick was found on the floor of that barely-legal Halloween attraction that called itself the revival of my business prospects. Right below the body , or where it had stood before the firemen arrived.  

That disgrace of a person will never let me not think about him. And that is okay. That is okay.  

Because none of this is over like the public wants to believe. There is something to be done. There is something to be said. There is a boy sleeping on my sofa.  

Now listen, I am writing this because I have something that I believe is worth telling. Let me explain.  

Somewhere out there, there is an old soul. Or two, or three, or nine.  

What do I know.  

They flounder around for a goal stolen from them,  

By something paradoxical.  

So, why did it happen?  

What are we even doing here? What have we done?  

Does any of that even matter?  

Maybe. Though I don’t think I am meant to know that.  

But you might.  

Do you know how much those children love each other?  

What they carve each other into?  

Just to live. As they ought to.  

And what about Mike Schmidt?  

Do you know what he dreams of?  

What he fears the most?  

Does even he?  

Do any of us, really?  

I think I can explain. As I ought to.  

This notebook I will dedicate for:  

All who have endured the jaws of greed and grief, with fangs so ragged and a venom so harsh it presses everything we are into shame.  

And for all the little paradoxes that we’ve chained to the ground. For my family, for his. For the dozen others we’ve poisoned. For what could have been if we all tried a little harder.  

And it is for you, their listener, wherever this writing finds you.  

I have thought long and hard about this, how to undo what we’ve done, and I think they are crying out for meaning. I can hear them in my skull at night, singing “Did you forget us?”  

No. But me and the boy on the sofa are broken.  

And we are the only ones that want to remember.  

Let me explain.  

You see, it is more than a spectacle.  

It was grief and laughter and pain and joy.  

And I know, somewhere, it still is.  

It is everything they could never tell you.  

They are still here. We are still here. We are ugly and broken, but we are still here.  

And that can’t count for nothing.  

There is still something worth telling.  

Don’t be fooled — I am no good person. I let this happen. And I’m doing nothing to end it but picking up a pen.  

But that can’t count for nothing.  

Let us explain. Let us explain how we got here.  

Mike has told me many times that he believes it all began in the May of 1983.  

And I trust him with my life.  

He believes it was a Sunday.  

He believes it was the late morning.  

He believes it was the moment we all first started to slip.  

Into what, neither of us can understand.  

But that isn’t the thing that matters.  

When he wakes up, I will ask him what happened that day. And he will show me.  

Let us explain how we got here.

Chapter Text

Brother, Brother,

Evan lay on his side and watched his slice of Mother’s strawberry shortcake slowly go limp in the spring heat. Which was a bit funny. It was all overcast today, and the whole ground was soaked from yesterday’s storm. The cake had been good and puffy when she’d brought it out with the rest of the food and dropped a piece over his plate. Fresh from the fridge. But now it sunk into itself, into a little pool of swirling white icing, clouded red by the juice of fallen berries, and it dripped onto the yellow picnic blanket. Here and there an ant would saunter over to suck on the crumbs Evan had left when he first tried picking it apart. He traced the rim of the plate with his fingers.  

Not hungry this morning.  

“Evan?” 

Liz appeared in front of his plate, cross-legged on the blanket, staring at him from above while her prickly orange hair dangled down and grazed his skin. She wore two layers. And one of them was a dark pink sweater. He seriously had no idea how she wasn’t in the same condition as that cake today. It didn’t even look like she had broken a sweat. 

“Why aren’t you eating that?” she asked. 

“Not hungry.” 

Liz nearly gasped. “Why not?” 

“Just not.” 

“Well ... listen! That’s your problem.” She raised her chin and tilted her head. “My shortcake is wonderful!” 

Mother looked up from her book from the other side of the blanket. “Ours, sweetheart. Ours.” 

Mother had her usually long waves of hair obscured behind her back in some sort of lax ponytail. Even in the heat, there was the faintest breeze, and she never left her hair loose when there was a breeze. But Mother never would do a thing to her hair in any other situation. She always left it plain. 

“I suppose...” Liz tumbled over the blanket back to her plate, and she shoveled all the rest of her slice into her mouth. “So why not let me have yours? Be a shame if it goes to waste.” 

Evan sat up and put a hand on the plate, and Liz scooted closer to him, as if she wondered why on Earth he would want to keep it. “No. I just like looking at it.” 

“Oh. Don’t you think that’s a bit dumb?” 

“No.” 

“But please can I?” Her multicolored fingernails drummed on the yellow fabric. 

“No.” 

“Mummy!” 

All Mother did for a moment was stare at Liz, then she frowned. “Elizabeth, he’s said what he’s said.” And she gripped Liz’s shoulder. “Do you really want a second helping?” 

“Very much.” 

Mother’s eyes trailed away to the other side of the yard. But satisfied enough, Evan curled up again and began twirling his fork in the creamy froth that he could’ve called cake once. Mother opened her mouth to say something, but only a breath escaped. 

“So?” prodded Liz lightly. 

“You can just take Michael’s plate. I’m sure he won’t mind...” 

Oh.  

Evan rolled over and spotted his older brother slumped in the nook of their dogwood tree, ready to bloom and slick from rain, with his head turned away. His arms and legs hung wild and loose along the branch. 

“Isn’t that somewhat rude? And, it’s even more sodden than Evan’s piece!” 

As he’d been getting older, it was becoming apparent to Evan that his brother disappeared like this. Often. Though it was hard to say he was ever really all there in the first place, either. More and more often Evan realized that, whenever it was just their family, all together, Mike always looked like he’d rather be in any other place in the world. So, obviously, that’s where he’d gone. 

“No, sweetheart. Believe me, he doesn’t mind.” 

Are you a bit blind, Mother?  

Liz swiped the plate away from Mike’s empty spot on the blanket and started plucking away the beady little strawberries from the melted husk with as much spirit as a starving animal. Evan watched until no trace was left of Mike’s slice. Except for what the ants would eat up. 

He’s still here.  

Evan raised his plate into the air. The dripping quickened, and he examined its glossy mess, eyeing his cake from about every angle. Swiping a few stray ants off to the grass that had capsized into the icing, he pressed it back into a proper shape and put all the berries back on top. Not good, but it was going to do okay. 

He lifted himself and the plate and hung his head down, staring only at his own two feet. 

“May I excuse myself?” he mumbled. 

“Sure.” Mother sounded distant. She was pulling at a loose strand of her hair and coiling it around her finger. 

He turned himself around and trudged through the sticky, dewy grass towards the dogwood tree, arms tense and outstretched so his cake wouldn’t splatter all over the ground. Since Evan could see better, Mike was resting on a really skinny branch, and half his body was leaning off the edge. It was a miracle he hadn’t careened off by now. 

Evan treaded a few steps from the trunk. Mike didn’t move an inch. 

Does he not know I’m here? Is he asleep or something?  

“Mike?” 

A half-crumpled DC comic book covered up his face. “Piss off.” 

“I brought you a slice of cake!” Evan got onto his toes and stretched himself as far upward as he could. 

He sat up, and the comic book unceremoniously fell to the grass. “I said, piss off.” 

“I know it’s gone all soft, but I thought you’d like to have it.” 

“Well, here’s an idea,” Mike slid to the crook of the tree, almost losing his balance, and glared down at Evan, “why don’t I go ahead and take the plate...” 

Evan lifted it just a little higher for him. 

“And sock you in the head with it!” 

A hand shoved Evan backwards. He nearly lost his balance, but figured it would be best not to drop his cake and fell backwards onto the trunk of the tree. He should apologize. For disturbing his peace. 

Don’t do that. That’s silly. You’ll make it worse.  

Maybe peace was the best thing. 

“I will just leave this here. At the trunk. Be careful to not step on it.” And he set his cake snugly between two roots. And if Mike didn’t like it, the insects would. 

“Just go away.” 

“’Course.” 

When Evan got back to the yellow blanket, Mother took him under her arm and wiped some stray bits of icing off of his wrists with a cotton cloth that she kept in her purse for stuff like this. He slinked his hand backwards so it wouldn’t spill on her flowery dress. Mother bowed her head right next to his ear and whispered, “Thank you.” 

“’Course.” 

“I’m very sorry about the cake.” She still kept her voice low, like her mistake was unforgivable. 

“I forgive you, Mother.” 

“Oh, it’s not ... you don’t have to—” 

“Why did you do that, Evan? I saw the whole thing!” Liz again materialized in front of him with her wide green eyes. 

“Just thought he’d like some.” 

“Yeah, maybe when it wasn’t a sludge pile. And he probably left because he didn’t even want any anyway.” She pointed a finger at him. “ You could have been seriously injured.” 

Evan blinked. “I’m fine.” 

“Sure, sure, and what if—” 

A BANG! erupted from the porch behind them. Evan nearly spit out his heart, and he ducked under Mother’s elbow. Father, in front of the screen doors, which were swinging berserk, leaned on the railing with his head propped atop his hand, glaring down at the three of them. He smiled. 

“A picnic? How lovely.” 

But we were having an alright time.  

As Father came closer to the blanket, a stronger wind started rustling in the neighbor’s trees. The still leaves would flutter, then rest again. Flutter, then rest again, in a wave that crept towards their home. Then a whistle of cool air ricocheted against Evan’s face. Father stood still in the open grass, a white-knuckled fist clutching his violet tie and tugging it away from the gust, like any less, and it would slip away from him. Then he continued his pursuit and sat down with a shiver. There were dark circles beneath his eyes. 

“It’s quite a bitter day to be out here, don’t you think?” He weaved his arm around Mother. 

“You want me to bring them in.”  

“No, no, it was just a passing thought...”  

Liz raised a plate of maybe four, five crumbs, beaming, “Daddy? Won’t you try it? Won’t you try the cake? I promise, it’s still very good.” 

He pushed it away with a finger. “Oh, I’m afraid I don’t have the time.” 

The plate sunk back towards her chest, and for a split second she looked like she could’ve started crying. “I’m sorry.” 

“But may I tell you a secret?” 

It must have been a very good secret, because her face brightened even more than it had before. Liz stood up and stepped into the middle of the blanket. 

“I have a very special announcement.” She cleared her throat and put her hands on her hips. 

You aren’t supposed to tell secrets.  

“You and me. We will both be going to the pizzeria. We will be having lots of fun. We must be getting home by...” 

“6 p.m., dear.” 

“6 p.m.!” 

Evan’s limbs went all soft. He didn’t know why Father was so determined to keep sending them there. Sending Evan there. But from the corner of the blanket, a self-satisfied grin etched itself onto his face. 

Did you forget him?  

Evan looked to the nook of the dogwood tree, and it was vacant. But no, Mike sat at the trunk. He pushed his knees up to his chest, and he prodded his cake with a fork. They looked at each other for a moment, but his eyes quickly veered down into the grass. 

“Did you forget him?” Evan whispered. 

“What’s that, boy?”  Father turned towards him. 

“You forgot Mike.” 

He must have recognized the shape in the grass, because his eyes darkened. 

“Silly me,” he shook Evan on the shoulder. “How could I be so forgetful?” 

I have always found it interesting  

That everyone sitting on this blanket  

Would be gone in only a decade.  

It keeps me up at night.  

But not Mike. Not Mike.  

I’m too unlucky for that.  

The wind whistled louder as they passed through the glass doors, under the spray of dancing neon bulbs. Surely it was going to storm that evening. Again. It always stormed when the wind caught up so roughly. But it would be a nice thing, to wash away the heat. No more melting platters. 

The first thing Evan noticed when the doors shut was the roaring and hollering echoing through every room ahead of him. It was nearly drowned out by the bass of some song he couldn’t have named if he tried. The second thing he noticed was a dying fluorescent light off in the rear of the prize corner booth that flickered on and off, sprinkled with old flies. No one paid it any attention. 

I think I ought to sit down for a little while.  

But through the colorful, arching corridor ahead, Liz linked arms with him and lightly skipped towards the horrible cacophony. She must’ve known he had no idea how to skip, but even when his legs trailed on behind her, she didn’t stop. 

Until Father stepped out in front of them at the end of the corridor, nearly knocking Liz backwards, and turned on his heel to the right. 

“There you are!” 

“We need to talk. Henry.” 

When Liz dragged Evan out into the main room, Father was leaning with his back hard against the wall next to Uncle Henry, who was frozen in place. Father’s shoulders hunched, and his palms splayed out, but his fingertips curled in tightly. It looked like he could hit something. 

“About...?” 

Father started gesturing stiffly with his hands. “The ‘legal issue’. The ‘legal issue’ that I just spent the last night trying to resolve myself.” 

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea.” Uncle Henry flashed his sister and him the quickest smile. 

“I ... what?” 

“Look at who you brought with you! Couldn’t this at least wait five minutes?” He fished out a wallet from the front pocket of his jeans. “Let me handle them.” 

“Fine. Go on then.” Father strode away, over through a corridor. Presumably to his office. 

Crouching down in front of the two of them, Uncle Henry dug his hand through his wallet and pulled out a quarter. “Twenty-five cents. For the arcade.” 

“Let me have it. I’m over there much more than Evan. I bet he didn’t even want to come!” Liz outstretched her hand expectantly. 

“Oh, you really think I’d let you two fight over a single quarter?” He firmly planted the coin in her hand and went to pull out another one, which he waved in front of Evan. Evan’s arms lay flat at his sides. 

But Evan plucked it from his loose grip anyway, staring at the thing. 

“Now, what good does one twenty-five cent coin do?” Meticulously he began pulling more quarters from his wallet, turning them over in his palm and squinting at them, like they were worth analyzing, and forming a pile in each of their hands. One for Liz and one for him. One for Liz and one for him. One for Liz and one for... 

Uncle Henry’s expression turned sour. “Where’s your brother? Did he not come?” 

“Probably slipped away someplace.” Liz was searing holes into the coin pile with her gaze. 

“That’s too bad ... There. Fifteen for you and fifteen for you. Don’t lose them!” 

As Uncle Henry got up and left along the path Father had taken, Evan looked down at his mound of ... three dollars and seventy-five cents. At least he was pretty sure. It just sat there in his hands. Liz was already stuffing hers into the mini purse she’d brought with her. 

Am I supposed to pretend I’d like to be here with this?  

“Here, you take mine, Liz.” 

“What? Are you sure?” 

“Very very sure.” He slid his quarters into her open bag. Hairpins, crumpled single dollar bills, and many stray crayons that had stained the inside fabric were crammed into the bottom. 

“Okay, then I hope you have fun with whatever you manage to do!” Liz darted off without another word. 

Well, he managed to stand unmoving in corner for several minutes. At least it felt that way. A few kids would stare at him from time to time. Maybe they knew who he was and why he was taken here. Maybe he just stuck out like a sore thumb. Every now and then, when the crowds fizzled out, he could see the animatronics , who always lurked lifelessly in a room just adjacent to where they came in. He really should’ve kept those quarters. 

But there was still Mike. Wherever he’d gone. 

The first place Evan checked was an area of the dining booths that was tucked into the edge of the pizzeria. The booths were squashed awkwardly close together. Like using it for dining had been an afterthought once the tacky compartment was entirely furbished. There was always a thin layer of dust on the empty, plastic seats and tables whenever he went in here. Apart from himself, there was no sign of life. Except for the basket of french-fries sitting in the far corner. 

Mike sat up from that booth, clutching a half-eaten french-fry in his hand. It took him a moment to notice Evan, but when he did, he scrunched up his face in confusion. 

“Hey,” he said slowly. 

“Hey.” 

“Why are you here?” 

“Didn’t feel like doing much of anything. Wanted to know where you went.” Evan walked over to his booth. 

“Then congratulations.” He slipped the rest of the half-eaten fry into his mouth. 

“Could I sit here?” 

“Really? Here?” 

“I am tired.” Evan crouched down to sit eye-level with the fry basket. “And you have fries.” 

“Fine.” 

Evan slouched into the bumpy seat next to him and reached for a single fry, now cold. It had looked so appetizing before he’d picked it up. The fries here always got soggy when they got old, so it fell limp in his fingers, the buckets of grease and salt glistening in the fluorescent light. “So why are you here?” 

“Same as you. Don’t wanna be a part of this catastrophe.” Mike leaned across the table, his stringy hair half-covering his eyes. “Dad nearly popped a vein, don’t you think?” 

“You were there when that happened?” 

“I left when that happened, idiot.” 

“Oh.” 

Mike’s eyes switched between the sad little fry Evan continued holding in his hand and the basket. “Just take the whole thing. I don’t even want them.” It slid to the other side of the table with a push from his hand. 

Like Evan wanted them. But it would’ve been awful to let perfectly good subpar french-fries go to waste. He slumped down to the bottom of the booth, staring at the ceiling, and slowly ate the oversalted, sticky mess. He didn’t know what he was savoring it for. There was literally nothing to savor. He lifted one of his hands to rest on the rim of the basket. Just in case it was worth another try. 

“You know...” Mike began, grabbing a fry from across the table, “Dad is quite a desperate, malignant piece of shit.” 

“What makes you say that?” Evan said from below the table. 

“Just wanted it off my chest.” 

“Right.” 

“But really, he is.” 

“Yeah.” Evan shifted in his seat. “What is ‘malignant’?” 

“Like cancer.” 

“Yeah...” he murmured. 

Malignant. Malignant. Malignant. I’ve learned something new today.  

And they both sat there in quiet for what could have been the better part of an hour. The booth was getting cold and uncomfortable on Evan’s back, but that sensation began falling into the background. Nothing but the fluorescent lights that were all installed a little too bright. The hum of the air conditioning system. The jagged edges of the seat. The funky colors on the walls. Blue, yellow, some red over there. The ambient sounds of Mike chewing away at the fries he swore he didn’t need. And the seat. The seat that was currently pressing into his spine. 

Evan broke the silence. “I think I’m going to go walk around for a bit.” 

No answer. Evan quietly got up and padded to the entrance. 

“Hey.” Mike looked up at him from the corner. “I’m sorry for being a dick earlier.” 

“It’s fine.” 

“The cake ... it was good.” 

“That’s good,” he sighed, “I’ll see you.” 

No answer. 

Evan left and retraced his steps through the maze of dining booths much more populated than the oh-so-brilliantly isolated spot Mike had found, and he wound up right back where his sister had abandoned him. Running, hollering toddlers and all. He searched the area until he came across a worn-down bench to sit on (that was right next to an array of candy dispensers ... for a quarter each). Curse his empty pockets. 

I could’ve just told Mother I was sick. Maybe then I could be curled in my bed.  

Then Liz came barreling into the middle of the main room from the corridor, holding the largest stuffed animal he’d ever seen. She whipped her head around until she found Evan and locked eyes with him, raising the toy in the air. “Look what I won!” 

It was a smiling cat with fur the color and texture of pink and blue cotton candy, holding a tiny fish in its mouth. He’d seen it before, hanging in the dead center of the prize corner earlier that day. It was probably the most expensive thing she could manage to get. 

“He smells like candy floss! What should I call him?” 

“I dunno.” 

“Well, you think about it, because I have...” Liz messily counted the strings of tickets in her hands. “Fifty-sixish more tickets to use up. Here, you take him!” 

She had started plopping the cheery, oversized kitten down next to him when the sounds of crashing waves, creaking boards, and a parrot’s cry rung out in the room adjacent. 

Neat. Show’s starting.  

The lights around them dimmed. In the very corner, which was really all Evan could see, the tall, dark, half-moon of curtains of Pirate’s Cove swayed and shimmied. A few people jumped back as if something was actually going to come out and eat them. In the parting of the curtains, the hook slowly crept out into the open, turning side to side, assessing the crowd, and when the spotlights homed onto it, the steel of his hand glittered. 

They weren’t scary when they were themselves. 

“Be ye friend or foe, landlubbers? Come closer, come closer, so I can get a good look at ye!” The hook flicked up and down towards the onlookers. 

But only some of them complied. Still the curtains opened, revealing Foxy brightly lit in all his glory, awkwardly curled over. His metallic eye dashed side to side, side to side. 

“Well, all of ye be itty little pipsqueaks! HAH-HAH! Afraid of nothin’, I was!” Out of the voice box in his chest came wheezy cackles. 

Liz had drifted away from Evan and now stood directly at the back of the crowd. “I’m going over there. You should join me!” 

“No.” 

“Your loss then. Keep Mister Cat company.” The spotlights illuminated her eyes as she veered away from him. 

“...Yes, yes. I can tell many of ye have a keen eye,” His hooked arm thrust forward, beyond the Cove, “Fer this! Be ye wonderin’... how I got it?” 

The bigger stage, the one obscured from Evan’s view, whirred to life. 

“You poor soul! Were you hurt in a duel?!” asked the chicken. 

“HAH! To think. Me, ol’ Foxy, bested in a duel?” 

“Gee, did you come down with scurvy?” asked the bear. 

“Hardly.” 

“What, were you swallowed by a kraken or something?” asked the rabbit. 

“Now that isn’t so far from the truth.” 

“Tell us! Tell us!” their voices echoed in unison. 

“Aye, if ye insist. Fer the pipsqueaks!” The curtains swished closer together, and the spotlight glowed a deep blue. Foxy’s head twitched as it looked down at the ever-growing crowd. “Thar I was, on the precipice of the abyss, starin’ down that scallywag squid. And he, oh he was a real nasty one. Thrashin’ about, diggin’ his razor fangs into me ship! Then I be hearing the sharpest cry come out of his beak, it nearly blasted me fine ears to bits! And I said to meself, ‘Ain’t no comin’ out from this one. The ship, she’ll be a goner for sure!’ But then, ye see, I had a brilliant thought: I ran to the deck and shot a cannon ball straight through his eye!” 

“But what about your hook?” asked one of them. Evan didn’t bother figuring out which. 

“Well, ye see, cannons can be very dangerous.” 

The colossal “Mister Cat”, if that was even his real name, collapsed head first onto his side, filling up the rest of the bench Evan sat on. His head was turned up, the dead plush fish hanging limp in his fluffy jaws. Mister Cat still looked so happy to be here. 

Why? I’m sure you don’t understand any of what’s going on.  

“But, of course, thar always be another mystery...” 

There were smatters of many different shouts throughout the crowd, but they all amounted to “The eye! The eye!” 

“What. Be under. Me eyepatch ? Any guesses? Any guesses from the pipsqueaks?” And then, an outcry. “All very good guesses.” 

“I don’t think I can stomach that.” 

“Me too.” 

“Me three.” 

“HAH-HAH-HAH! Aww, what be the matter? Afraid of a little grime and gore are ye?” 

“YES!” Again. In unison. 

The curtains shrunk away. They no longer hid the fox anymore. But Evan knew what was under that eyepatch. It couldn’t scare him. The other band members did too. They had done this a thousand million times in a thousand million places. They knew how to pretend. The eyepatch lifted straight up, revealing his other, perfectly intact eye. Then, like normal, everyone yowled in fear while he keeled over in an uproarious laughter. 

Do you really enjoy this, Mister Cat? I expected you to be a bit more aloof. It’s nice to see you coming out of your shell. Or fur.  

A figure whizzed past Evan from the hallway to Father’s office. It startled him into hitting the back of the bench, but when he looked up into the dim light to recollect himself, he saw the fuzzy picture of Father slipping away. Into the dining booths. 

Where are you going? Let’s investigate.  

He hoisted Mister Cat into his arms and followed far behind Father. Past the densely packed seats, deeper into the maze. 

Oh.  

Evan heard it before he looked. 

“I shouldn’t have even brought you here. Oh, I really shouldn’t’ve. It was his damn idea! All you want to do is sit and rot in the back of my restaurant, taking up my space and time!” 

“Tell Mom to pick me up.” 

“Isn’t that just too much trouble? Don’t you think? It’s that poor woman’s only day off!” 

Evan looked. 

Mike shrunk into the corner of his booth. “So, um, make me go out there and engage with everybody I don’t know and don’t care about then.” 

“Fine. Just stay here then.” Father stood over the table, wildly motioning with his hands. “Don’t be shocked if we forget to pick you up from your little crevice.” 

Evan walked into the room, stopping a few booths behind them. 

“You look pretty tired, Dad.” Mike met eyes with Evan, and he stammered. 

“I...” Father slowly craned his neck around. “ Evan. You should leave.” 

No. Evan came closer. Evan had something to say. 

What was that word again?  

“Did I not just tell you to—” 

Malignant. Like cancer.  

“Father. You are desperate, mal ... malignant piece of shit.” 

Father turned pale. He held a stiff expression of shock for a very long time, tapping his foot on the tile and balling his hands into fists. Slowly his brow knitted together, and a tight smile formed across his face. “Your brother teach you that?” 

Evan clutched Mister Cat for dear life under his arm. “No, sir.” 

“What about you? Did you teach him that?” Father sat down in the booth across from Mike. 

Mike looked between the two of them, melting into the cold plastic. 

Oh no.  

“He didn’t, Father. I heard your conversation. I didn’t like it. I wanted to speak my mind.” 

Father clasped his hands together and stared at the ceiling. “You shouldn’t have done that.” He grabbed Evan’s wrist and pulled it to his chest, and Mister Cat tumbled to the floor before Evan could break free. “We are leaving. Mike. Get his sister.” 

Mike slid out of the booth in a flash, but stopped to pick up Mister Cat. “This hers?” 

Evan nodded. He took him away. 

Goodbye.  

When his footsteps faded, Father grabbed Evan’s hand. “Follow me.” 

It hurt a lot. Father must’ve held on tight. Evan’s hand was all hot and red by the time he made it close to the bench. It hurt even more when Father dragged it through the pouring rain. 

I could have stopped him that day.  

Held him in conversation for just a moment longer.  

I didn’t know what he was about to do.  

It was cold inside the car. Water smashed against every window. Incredibly, the interior was dry and pristine. Surely the rain would’ve soaked it to bits, too. The rain. It was a nice distraction from impending doom. 

“Fishy.” Liz, beside him, whispered to Mister Cat, whose fur was now dotted with water. 

“Huh?” Evan said. 

“That’s his name. Fishy. I was inspired.” She gazed out the window. 

“I like Mister Cat.” 

“That was a placeholder, dummy.” 

“Okay.” 

Evan fiddled with a button on his shorts. It would be better if he didn’t look at anyone or anything right now. But out of the corner of his eye, Mike, on his other side, sat stiff, eyes locked on the window and the trickling raindrops. 

I wish I could tell you I’m sorry.  

“Should I name the fish too? Well, that would be a bit weird, wouldn’t it? If his name is Fishy. People say you aren’t supposed to name things that die. You get attached to them, then you get all sad.” 

Father turned into the driveway. Here it was. 

“Everything dies eventually,” Mike muttered. 

“Not Fishy!” 

“Everyone out of the car.” The thrumming of water exploded in intensity when Father opened the door. 

Evan climbed out through the same side as Liz. The poor Mister Cat’s fur drooped now, and rain leaked out of him like a watering can. On his first day into this world. 

Father clutched Evan’s forearm. It wasn’t as strong as before. Their skin was turning slippery. But he took Evan ahead, to the front steps of their home, digging his other hand into the marigold flower pot and pulling out the house key. His grip tightened when they made it inside. 

Mother spotted them from across the house, in the living room. She was watching something on television. “You’re...” 

The door shut behind them. She must’ve realized something bad, because whatever she wanted to say was not worth it anymore. 

“Home early.” Father said. 

Mother rose and approached them carefully. Evan’s arm was on fire. A pulse went through it so badly that the tips of his fingers prickled in protest. 

“This one cursed me out today.” 

“Oh. I see.” She stepped out. Into the kitchen. 

“Evan did what?” Liz asked from behind him. So, the rest had made it in. Even Mister Cat, who, when he cautiously looked behind him, was excreting a pool of water at her feet. 

Father didn’t even look her way, but he let go of his grasp. The numbness slowly faded from Evan’s fingers and sick, pale marks blotted onto his skin where Father’s hand had been. He turned around, staring them down, his fist instead clenched around the house key. 

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” he said to Evan, but his eyes flashed off to the side. 

“No.” 

“Why would you lie to me, then?” 

“I didn’t lie to you.” 

“So, you knew all of those words, in that order?” 

“Yes, sir.” Evan’s legs were shaking. 

“Why would you lie to me, Evan?” 

Father crouched down to meet his eye, putting his hands on both his shoulders. The house key, he slipped it between his fingers, the end jutting out like a spike. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Yes, yes you do.” Father nodded along with his own words. 

“Would you leave him the fuck alone, Will?” Mother cried from the kitchen. 

“Oh, so I can't just...” 

When Father stood up, a stinging pain erupted inside Evan’s head. He stumbled back, and a new warmth bubbled. On the side of his scalp. Father’s jaw hung open, and the key dangled from his fingers. 

“Now, boy, I didn’t mean that...” 

Father inched closer to him, his hands trembling. Now the blood was running to his ear. Pooling there. 

“What did you do? What did you just do?!” Mother had crept out of the kitchen, now. She marched over to them. “Oh my God. Give me that! You should’ve known you’d hurt him!” 

“Clara, it’s a fucking key.” But he handed it to her anyway. The edges looked like they had been glossed in a fine red paint. “Go to your rooms!” 

Whenever Father said that, it was for Evan and his brother. Mike, he saw from the edge of his eye for the first time, slinked away up the darkened staircase. Like a shadow. He probably left before he was told. 

“No, no, I can get him a compress.” Mother finally acknowledged his existence. “Are you alright, baby?” 

“I am going to go ... and sit down for a while.” 

So he climbed the staircase, one red hand on his one red face. 

Had to wash it all down the sink. Too messy. One red fingerprint, and it was over. He had turned the faucet stream pink. Little tendrils of his blood circling the drain. But his room was dark. The only thing in it was the cold of his wet hair fighting against the warm spot above his ear. And it kept trickling down. Less so when he cocked his head. 

And the throbbing. 

Couldn’t hear himself think. 

Just couldn’t do it. 

But it didn’t hurt anymore. Not here. 

There was a knock! on the door. 

Father was here to finish the job. 

Knock, knock- knock!  

That was the secret knock. Only two people knew the secret knock, and Father was not one of them. 

“Mike?” he heard himself whisper. It probably wasn’t loud enough. 

“Yeah.” Mike was faint, muffled by the door. 

“You can.” 

A crack of light expanded, and he was right there, in the hallway. The light disappeared, and Mike fell to the floor. 

“I am so. Sorry.” They stared at each other. Evan could’ve been miles away from him, across the carpet. 

Evan traced a finger around his pinkish palm. “No. I said it.” 

Mike crawled next to him and looked him in the eyes. “I’m gonna get you something, okay?” 

“Okay.” 

Whatever “something” was. 

Minutes passed, maybe. The “something” he returned with was a waterlogged washcloth, a pack of frozen vegetables, and a cup of water. 

“I think .... I think you take this and press it on there. And ... and then you can take this thing and...” 

“Okay.” 

Mike just set it up it himself, anyway. Maybe he didn’t trust Evan enough. To be fair, Evan didn’t either. But he held the contraption to his head. The washcloth was spongy and cool, unlike the harsh spray of the faucet. And the vegetables lowered the incoherent throbbing. 

“I think you lost a lot of blood.” 

“Maybe.” 

“You might’ve gotten a concussion.” Mike cursed under his breath. “What day were you born?” 

“I am not concussed.” 

“Please just answer.” 

“The twenty-first of July, nineteen seventy-five.” 

“Where do you live?” 

“Here.” 

Mike sighed. “Nevermind. Just take this.” He presented the cup of water. 

“I’m not thirsty.” 

“Yes you are. Just drink it.” 

“Okay.” It slid down his throat like he was swallowing thick air. “Done.” 

Mike sat down beside him, and a hint of the window’s light caught on his face. He looked out into nothing. His brow was deeply furrowed. Once or twice he opened his mouth to speak, but sucked the words back in. Then he took Evan’s free hand. This time, gentle. 

Evan lifted the vegetables from his head (half of it was numb) and looked at the washcloth that peeled off. Stained pink, too. But his scalp didn’t bleed anymore. Not so much. 

“I really am sorry, Evan.” 

“I know. I forgive you.” 

He lowered his head to sit on Mike’s knee. He didn’t even flinch. Like he was away somewhere. In the silence, the loudest thing became the faraway chatter of birds. 

“Hey, aren’t those your toys?” Mike’s head was turned to the plastic chest shoved against the wall. 

“Yeah.” 

He reached over, grabbing the edge of the chest, and pulled out the topmost character. 

A bright red fox with a big, dumb-looking eye. 

“Oh, sure, he’s pretty cool,” Evan said. 

Foxy nestled in across from him, onto the edge of Mike’s leg. His lone eye gazed into the sea of darkness. At nothing. 

“I think he’s my favorite.” 

Sometimes all I want to do  

Is punch that stupid teenager in the face.  

Tell his how wrong he is.  

Tell him how fucked up he is.  

But that didn’t work for Dad, did it?  

What makes me any different?

Chapter Text

...734. 

735.

736.

737. Yeah, sure. Like it could’ve gone somewhere else when Mike wasn’t looking. But the thought of a moldy locker with precious, pristine textbooks vanishing into thin air? Textbooks that would take terrible, grueling months to replace on Dad’s measly hoard of Benjamins? Now that would really suck.

But locker 737 was right here, down to the gaping hole in the back that his stuff had once or twice escaped into. Wow. That could’ve been a disaster. 

And then it was, because a cold finger with its pointed midnight blue nail tapped his shoulder. If he could’ve just gotten out before she got here. 

“So, how was algebra?” Hello there, Charlotte.  

He didn’t even turn to look at her. The beaming faces of the people on the cover of his World History textbook as he slid it and the others into his backpack were far more comforting. “Fine, I guess.” 

Lies, lies. Everything. Charlie was tutoring him, so she thought it was funny to sneak up to locker 737 and interrogate him after school was over. He had too, until today. Probably for the rest of his life. The kids in algebra were okay. Sort of. Half of them were stuck up prudes. The rest didn’t want to be there, like him. But they’d nagged him today: “I heard your brother didn’t come to school ... You beat him up again or somethin’? ... Oh come on, no harm in telling!” Because when people wanted to conveniently recognize Mike, he was either “The Rich Kid Whose Dad’s Restaurant I Used to Go to When I Was Five” or “The Guy Who Can Make His Brother Cry on Command, Just Watch!” 

There was a thud and a rustle from Charlie’s giant leather backpack. “Alright, okay, I have my Unit 7 papers from last semester that, correct me if I’m wrong, I think you went through today, if you want them of course.” 

“That’s great,” he mumbled with absolute, undoubtful zeal. Undoubtedly. 

“Oh, and I saved you a stick of gum. It’s cinnamon.” 

“Wonderful.” 

“Are ... are you okay?” she asked. 

His packing excuse was dead and gone, the locker empty now, so he slammed it shut and the door caught on his thumb. The nail immediately pooled blood somewhere under its base. 

Oh joy. Yes, Charlie, I am obviously okay.  

The papers fell limp in Charlie’s hand. “Oh no.” 

He shook his wrist to ward off the throbbing, and it did—for, like, three seconds. Charlie glared at his hand like she was trying to figure out if he’d just done something that would wind him up in a coffin tomorrow. Mike took this ample opportunity to slip the cinnamon gum out from her fingers. 

“Thanks.” It was all hot and soft now. Too bad. 

“We should … um … really get going.” Somehow she knew he couldn’t care less right now and shoved the Unit 7 Papers from Last Semester back in her bag. 

It took him one moment of putting the freaking cinnamon gum away and suddenly she was halfway down the musty hallway, her straight auburn hair flying out behind her like a clothesline caught in high winds. Another moment and she was gone in the sea of everybody else. 

What was it he said? Disaster. At the very least Evan wasn’t at the hospital getting a tetanus shot from that disgusting house key Dad wanted to keep in the marigold pot, explaining away every bit of his head wound. Or dying from tetanus. 

When Mike finally caught up to the blur ahead of him he called his friend, she smiled expectantly. 

“So … is Evan doing okay?” 

Just the thing he wanted to hear. Seriously, she was on a mission to see through his soul today. 

“Huh?” he stalled, trying to walk behind her, but she was adamant about being as parallel to him as possible. 

“You know what I’m talking about.” 

“I dunno. I guess.” 

“So is he okay?” 

“Oh my God, maybe .” 

“Well, since he’s in pain he probably won’t want to eat, you have to make sure he eats. And drinks. That’s really important. Did the bleeding stop? Wait. Wait, hang on. Did he need stitches?” 

“Can we not talk about this right now?” 

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Charlie pressed her fingers together, rolling her thumbs over each other. “… How’s your hand?” 

“Peachy.” 

It was, in fact, not peachy. Half his nail was a brilliant, sprightly shade of midnight blue. If this went on much longer, he would have to lodge the other nine in a door. Or ask her to color them. Whichever was easier. Losing it would probably do him a favor. 

By now they had gone past the entrance and reached the front steps. The front steps that for some reason the architects, or whoever came up with this genius idea, decided to leave in direct sunlight for anyone who wanted to, you know, die when school was over. Then Charlie disappeared around the side, hoisting her bicycle before him. 

“I can still tutor you if we go straight to Cornertree!” She rang her bell for extra pizazz, or something. 

Actually, I’d rather die on these steps.  

“Sorry. Staying here. I’ll come later,” he said. 

“Okay! I’ll be there!” Charlie grinned a stupid little smile as she dragged the bike away, her top teeth poking into her cherry-colored lip. “Seeya later, Mike!” 

Cornertree was a probably thousand-year-old oak, maple, something like that, on the edge of their neighborhood that stood over a drop-off into miles-wide desert. Neat view of the sky. Charlie liked it there. It was alright. It was just a tree, though. 

But melting alone on the bare concrete wasn’t doing him good, so he left to scout shade on the even barer concrete. However, there was only Pure Utah Sun around the front of the school, the side of the school, the back of the … who does this? Maybe people who wanted the goddamn youth off their lawn. Maybe, just maybe, it was his English genes that made his body a coward. When he passed the basketball court in the rear of the building, lo and shitting behold, there was one thin tree casting an even thinner shadow. 

It wasn’t worth planting himself in the grass, so sun scorched concrete for Michael. He sat down, back against the school building, on a pathway he might try to trip kids on if they trusted him enough to walk near his feet. It was fine. He could get used to this. If he didn’t die of heat stroke. However, that was a viable option in postponing his visit to the man who cut up his brother’s skull. And in spending less time graphing a twelve x cubed minus zero into the fourth dimension. 

On the other side of the building, three boys came out into the sun through a pair of glass doors, now walking to the court. He couldn’t make out who they were, but they strode tough and quickly to where he was. Probably Seniors. Except for one. He was scrawny and anxious and constantly dragging behind the other two. 

When they made it to this deceptive refuge, one of them grabbed a basketball and held his arms up to punt it towards the others, but Mike must’ve caught his eye because he turned around and stared at him like he was stupid. 

“Go away,” he said, dropping the ball. He was tall and stick-thin, a mass of black hair swept over his forehead. Something akin to a burnt match. 

“No.” 

This guy, he picked it back up and walked over to the pathway, putting at least ten feet between himself and Mike. What was he going to do, bludgeon him to death with a basketball? 

“I said go away!”  

“Not happening.” 

“Kirk!” The kid with the basketball turned to the larger of the two left standing in the court. “He won’t move. Tell him to move!” 

Great. He was apparently crossing paths with Kirk What’shisface, eleventh grader, and his slew of friends he committed into doing whatever he felt like on any given day. And his brother. Jeremy What’shisface, who he could now see only hung with him because he had nothing better to do. He was also in eighth. They had shared maybe five, six words as long as he had lived. Now he knew to keep it that way. 

“Shut up, Gabe.” Kirk shoved the kid with the basketball into the grass and crouched down to Mike’s level. “Hey … you’re—” 

“I know.” 

“—that Afton kid.” 

“Yeah. I know.”  

When the immediate fascination, disgust, or whatever, of being before one of the Aftons’ children subsided, Kirk put an alarmingly sweaty palm out in front of him to … shake? Take? No telling. 

“Kirk Fitzgerald,” he smiled. This was some sort of stunt, right? 

Kirk had a large frame, which was exacerbated by the various denim jackets he wore to school every single day. And made a joke by the bright blue raspberry flavored shoes down below that quite literally glowed in the sunlight.  

No matter what, Mike wasn’t touching that hand. 

“Hey, Gabe. Reintroduce yourself.” 

Oh, we’re doing this now?  

“You got grass stains on my jeans, idiot!” Basketball kid wiped himself down incessantly, pulling off stems and blades that stuck to his t-shirt. Finally he gave up and glared directly at Mike, an ear-to-ear grin frozen stiff on his face. “It’s Gabriel. Gabriel Reyes.” 

Kirk took the ball from a distracted Gabriel Reyes and bounced it between his palms. “You want to play?”  

Mike shrugged. 

Kirk stood up and positioned himself in the middle of the court. “Come on, Afton. Shoot.” 

He wasn’t stupid. He knew how to and was capable of playing basketball. But they might very well psych him out if he crossed the concrete. Or attack him. Or hold him for ransom. Whatever these people did. 

No one just did that. No one made a scene out of him without expecting to get some fix from it. That’s just what he was. No one stuck their hand out in front of something destructive for a good reason. Maybe to see if it’d bite. 

Oh, that was a brilliant idea. Maybe it does.  

Mike stepped onto the sun-bleached court lines. Immediately the ball hit him square in the gut, and he was quick enough that it hung for dear life in his fingers instead of catapulting pathetically to the ground. All three of them were perched along the edge of the court, and as he crept closer to the goal they inspected every tiny little move he made like he was some helpless zoo animal. And that Jeremy kid, he sent him an oblivious thumbs up, for some reason. Yeah, Jeremy Iforgotyourlastname, that’ll really do the trick.  

When he threw the ball, it bounced off the rim of the hoop and got its chance to catapult pathetically to the ground. 

“You got this,” said the dumb idiot loser wearing denim in 90 degrees Fahrenheit. 

And oh wow was he right, because Mike’s second attempt barreled right through the net, ricocheted off the base of the goal, and slowly rolled back to his feet. 

Kirk stepped out in front of him. “See? I knew you could do it.” 

Mike took this moment to throw the basketball at his face. 

It was only a basketball. He would be fine. Probably. 

Kirk wheezed, clutching his nose in both his hands. He shook his head around a couple times before coming to. 

“Oh, that’s a new one,” he said. 

“Oh my God, he really got you! Look at your nose!” 

And then he laughed. Like, a deep, primal, “My Friend Just Said the Funniest Thing I’ve Ever Heard” laugh. 

“You’re crazy, man. Come here.” 

If Mike was quick enough now, he could scramble out of there, mount his bicycle, and ride home. Sadly, in the event that vengeful pricks prowl through his neighborhood waiting for him, he would not have time to sit in the open doing extra homework. 

Who was he kidding. He wasn’t getting out of this. Mike gingerly approached his imminent demise. 

Past his bruising nose, Kirk’s eyes lit up. “That was wild. I mean … I thought you were … you were inept, or something, but then BAM! Basketball. That was wild. ”  

“Yeah. Sure,” Mike said. 

Jeez. This guy talks like an amoeba pilots his head.  

“Hey. You should take a seat.” Kirk motioned to the grass, where his cronies were watching them. 

“But I’m riding home.” 

If there was a half-decent time for Mike to grab his shit and go, it had already sped past him. 

“Dude, it’s still gonna be there when you get back.” 

“No. I can’t. I mean—” 

Limply splayed out on the dying grass, beneath the tree, Gabriel pitched his voice into the open. “Just sit down, stupid. The grass is cooler.” 

Hypocrite. 

The grass was cooler once, with definitely too little consideration, Mike sat down to effectively get himself killed. In one way or another. There was just the feeling. Whatever these people actually were, he wasn’t meant to know. But a timely little chitchat just sounded so lovely, yeah? 

“You play?” Kirk narrowed his eyes. 

“Sometimes.” 

“Then why haven’t I caught you earlier?” 

“I said ‘sometimes’ … wait, what?” 

“I’m messing with you.” 

Kirk got up and leaned against the skinny tree. It pitifully bent back behind him. 

“So…” Kirk watched him, poking his nose and wincing, as he crushed a shard of bark in his hand. “Man, you rich kids are a different breed.” 

“Are you sure he is? I mean, look at him.” Gabriel opened his arms wide as if he was presenting Mike for some dog show. 

Oh, did they really expect more than overgrown hair and discount tank tops from the son of a man who could buy out the entire school if he wanted? News to Mike. 

“Yeah. His dad’s that British snob a few streets up who…” His hand froze, the bark a dust. “You don’t have the accent.” 

Gabriel burst out laughing. “You’re that one! Oh my God, say something like he does!” 

“It’s so I don’t get relentlessly bullied.” About that, Michael.  

“What is it … can you say ‘oregano’?” 

“No.” Mike began to stand up. “This is all very funny, but—" 

“Wait. You’re in eighth, right?” Kirk loomed over them now. 

“Yes.” 

He pressed his hands together. “Look, Jerry, we finally found you a friend!” 

He just now realized, Jeremy was somewhere else completely. He sat with his arms crossed tight and stared blankly into an open field, tracing the path of a distant tractor-trailer with his eyes. Until Kirk prodded him on the shoulder. 

“Momma wants you to talk to someone other than me, your sister, and him. So here you go. Talk to someone other than me, your sister, and him.” 

Jeremy looked between the three of them like he needed to figure out who on Earth Kirk could’ve been referring to. Or maybe he just really, really didn’t want to talk to Mike. Or, he was actually that socially maladroit. His gaze lingered on him for a moment before he extended a tentative hand. It was a tawny brown scorched deeper along the back of his palm by the beating sun, covered in little cuts and flays along his fingertips that seemed to sand them down. 

Mike took it. He didn’t know what he was thinking, but he took the hand. He shook it slowly, barely even holding on to his fingers. 

“Hey, Mike.” He smiled firmly. 

And at least you haven’t hurt me yet.  

After this, the time seemed to fall away. The four of them sat in a compressed circle in the dead and dying grass while Mike had to flick crickets and moths off of his legs. He tried to talk to the three as little as humanly possible, but it was official: he was their guinea pig now. They tried to get every ounce of information out of him—how much money his dad made, whether or not was really born in America, how old he was, what his favorite movie was, if he was free tomorrow… 

It could’ve been at least two hours before they were asked to leave by a man who had been weed eating by the side of the building and was considerate enough to travel all the way to the court and shout profanities in their direction, waving his weed eater around like a jousting stick. I couldn’t think of any way to logically improve that approach for you, sir.  

Being ground through the blades of a gardening utensil had its humiliating downsides, so avoiding that became Mike’s exit strategy. But things had changed. Separating was wrong of him in some sick and twisted way. 

Jesus, what was wrong with him? The evening had come. The tree’s shadow ran all the way to the edge of the court, now. It wasn’t even hot anymore. He had no excuse. He had forgotten all about her. And home. 

Mike always drove when there was still light. He made sure to. Since half of the streetlamps needed fixing. But from sheer stupidity, a black abyss now flew out beneath him as he got onto the road. He swerved once to miss a puddle, then a pothole, then what could’ve been either a rock or roadkill. 

Cornertree was nestled far back in the lawn of the turn on Charlie’s street, which he now approached, he hoped. He couldn’t see anything. It hung back enough that she’d discovered it was public property. On the turn, there was a streetlamp. It glowed different than all the others that still worked. A dim indigo. He had no idea why. Charlie probably knew all about it. 

The turn, the lawn, and the tree were devoid of her bicycle. In the leaves, a faint breeze rustled through just loud enough to signal they were there in the dark. But everything was still and sunless. No Charlie. 

She’d sat here for hours patiently watching the sun weaken, maybe even delayed dinner, just to help him. And Mike just had to be too good for her. 

“Up here, ground-dweller.” 

Nevermind. Right there, between the two biggest branches. He was an idiot. 

A light flickered on between her hands, illuminating her face pale against the shadows. “Climb!” 

Mike took a step away from the tree. “I need to go home. Like, now. I’m sorry.” 

Her expression hardened. “Hey, it’s okay. Just lie. Say you were here all evening. Let me give you the papers, and I’ll show you the answers.” 

The tree was not easy to scale. The first branches that could hold his weight came above his head and split in a y-pattern. But Charlie tried to help hoist him up by his arms—whether or not she made a difference was hard to tell. As his back collapsed onto the bark of the branch opposite of her, he realized Charlie had her hands on a lighter. 

“Where did you get that?”  

“Oh. My dad gave it to me after I went back out.” 

“Back out?” 

“Sorry. So, I was wanting to wait for you, but he found me sitting here and told me I had to eat dinner, so I brought my bike in, because then you would think something happened to me, and he told me I didn’t need to go back out there and that you wouldn’t come here so late, but there was a chance, so I protested , and he let me use his lighter! And I was right!” Charlie’s eyes widened. “Oh, right, the papers!” 

She held the lighter far out as she reached behind her. It’s white-hot light flickered and rippled like a fluid. 

From her backpack that teetered extremely precariously behind her, she pulled out the algebra papers. Wrinkles and creases obscured most of the lettering—erratic scribbles, for the most part—at first glance. His was honestly no better, and probably less legible, as he pulled it out from its space crammed between an unopened stack of notebook paper and an art project crushed by the walls of his bag. 

“You can just copy it down. Don’t talk about it unless he asks you, remember?” 

“Yeah,” he murmured. “What’s one?” 

“False.” 

“Two?” 

“Three.” 

“No, two.” 

“Mike. It’s three.” 

“Okay. Um … four? Wait—" 

“Three is seventy-six point nine. Four is true. Five is yes, six is yes…” 

“I don’t think I can do this right now.” 

“Alright.” 

“I’ll just … deal with it.” 

“No … you keep these and you can look over them.” 

“I meant him.”  

“Oh.” Charlie slid her papers into his hands. “He could be asleep. He does that sometimes, right?” 

“He won’t be asleep.” Mike said, turning to lean his legs off the branch. 

“Wait.” She reached for his shoulder. 

There was a click, and the light vanished. 

For a moment it could’ve just been him in that tree. Everything else vanished again. The indigo lamp was the only thing left to brush their skin, imprinting two pinprick dots of blue in Charlie’s eyes. The only thing left to prove she hadn’t disappeared. Except for the… 

“Look up.” 

… stars. 

Just a handful were bright enough. There was still a sliver of sun on the horizon. But he could single them out because of her. Arcturus. Spica, maybe. Vega, probably. Venus, definitely. Or it might have been Mars. He only knew what he’d learned from her shelf of astronomy books. 

Charlie did not talk. She usually didn’t when she was face-to-face with stars. But he had never sat so close to her and seen her bewitched beyond speech so intimately. It was like she wanted to communicate with it. Or like she was. She was. The indigo lamp was out of sight, now, laying only the softest light on their backs. Otherwise, they were gone. But, like magic, every ounce of the night sky contained itself within Charlie’s eyes. 

So, it is you, and you are it.  

But then she snapped out of it. 

“Where’d you end up going?” she whispered. 

“I didn’t. I … hung around.” Oh man, if she bought that. 

The lighter, Charlie clicked it to life again. “You know, if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have seen this.” 

A few stragglers were left standing from the field of its warmth. 

That’s … easy for you to say.  

A faint smell of smoke invaded the air, now. Charlie must’ve noticed because she turned her head and raised her arm into the open. 

“I think we both need to go home, now.” She blinked hard. “So we … Let’s go home.” 

But you’re right.  

Now. He had to do it. He had to tell himself he would never even look at those people again. He couldn’t become someone like that. Someone Charlie would despise, too. 

“Seeya later, Mike.” 

Damned if he did. Damned if he didn’t. 

Dad still kept the house key in the dirt. What a joke. When Mike opened the front door, what he found was a dead, vacant, horridly ritzy series of rooms. Every light was off except for the TV, hissing static, which frankly didn’t count, and the doors to the porch were left ajar. The analog clock perched atop the fireplace read quarter to nine. Holy shit. 

Everyone had gone off to sleep, clearly. Except that was a lie. In that hopeful scenario, he might’ve been able to get away to his room and copy down Charlie’s incomprehensible handwriting until he fell asleep. But, on the coffee table, in front of the TV, there was a half-empty glass of wine. Dad always finished those. He sat there, waiting for him, and now couldn’t even show his face? 

“Oh. I thought you must’ve run off…” 

From the porch, he slid through the back doors. His figure stood watching from across the house, leaning on a wall. 

Mike froze in place. “I was at the tree.” 

“…Or were abducted by some stranger,” he breathed, stepping out to pace the living room. 

“I was at the tree. I was studying. With Charlie.” 

“And just when I could’ve been rid of you, I have to see … that stupefied look from you again.” Planting his arms on the sofa, the cold glare from the TV caught Dad’s face. The corners of his thin mouth had risen ever so slightly. “Yes, Michael. You studied. For six hours. I am pleased to know that you care about your education again. Enough to make me wait here.” 

With that, Dad sat down, taking the glass and loosely cupping it in his fingers, glazed eyes fixated on the nothing of the TV. Now, for an indefinite amount of time, Mike didn’t exist. 

He took a few paces to the staircase. To test his luck. 

“How is Evan, Dad?” 

His head snapped towards Mike’s exact place in the dark. “He’s been fine,” he lowered his voice, “since you stopped bloody influencing him.” 

Then he sat up, silently trailing to the kitchen, save for the click of his Oxfords. 

His hand traced the counter. “She left your dinner in the fridge.” 

But Mike wasn’t hungry. His life was on the line. 

I had a lot of chances to tell her the truth.  

If I’d done it sooner,  

Like in that tree,  

She would’ve helped me, too.  

Chapter Text

The Long Way Home

Whether or not Mike had slept that night was beyond him. He had lain in some sort of nebulous nonexistence for a solid six hours before finally becoming fed up with himself and deciding to do the same thing but with his eyes open, staring at his ceiling fan until he heard literally anything else in the house besides Dad’s footsteps.

To paraphrase, he was tired. Tired was him.

For the last two class periods, he’d taken the luxury of sleeping through everything every teacher told him. He could get away with it by portraying a startlingly low level of competence. At a certain point, most adults realized they were beating a dead horse when they tried to get him to do what they wanted.

It was extremely simple. Mike didn’t care about people. People shouldn’t care about Mike.

Except for one who vehemently tried to. Well, two, obviously. But there was one.

He was now very much not sleeping in the back row of Ms. Snyder’s third period English. Arguably the worst class he had ever taken. Which was really funny, since that was because she actually had faith in him to pass. He could understand her class just fine, but man, did she do everything in her minuscule power to worsen his life.

“Can anyone please tell me the type of verb underlined in example sentence nine?” she croaked. Oh. He wished.

If it’s me, I’m putting this grimy 10-dollar workbook wherever you keep your paper shredder, and I’m letting it start an electrical fire.

To stave her off, Mike picked up his pencil and started sketching on the page. A crude little stickman with manic angry eyes, whom he dutifully gave a giant mallet to aim at example sentence nine. And a pair of nunchucks to aim at example sentence ten. And a rocket launcher for eleven… Don’t bother me, Snyder, I’m doing something extremely important to my education.

From the corner of his eye, a girl he didn’t know and didn’t care to meet who sat far too close to him shot her arm into the air, jewellery clamoring while her hand soared around her.

“What about you, Sara-Jane?” Snyder announced.

“Trick question!” The girl paused. “It’s a gerund, Ms. Snyder!”

And that was when he saw, next to her, or really, remembered, for probably the first time since school started, the person who sat three seats right and one seat up from his hideout in the back.

Oh no.

Jeremy.

That Jeremy.

Hunched over with his sleeves shielding his face, he was very blatantly doing something he shouldn’t. Invisible bolts chained his hand flat on the desk, a pencil emerged through a blanket of matted black hair, and the edge of a sheet of paper poked out from underneath his elbow.

Like Mike’s life physically couldn’t get any worse, he now had to sit next to the friendly one for an hour and thirty minutes every single day. And from the looks of it, he already had some sort of plot cooking in his enigmatic head.

“Very good. I’d like to remind everyone that there are only eighteen days left this year. It is in your best interests…”

If he didn’t do something, he would surely be indoctrinated. He could probably move over a seat or two. A dingy,  empty one cowered in the corner that he shouldn’t be bothered in. Yeah. The next day, he could do that. No one would notice. He just had to survive this one.

“… pages three hundred and seventy-six, seventy-seven…”

The cre-eak of old wood struck his right ear, and when he turned his head, Jeremy strained to reach out, half of himself nearly falling from his seat, with a piece of paper awkwardly held in his grasp. He stared Mike down, nodding profusely.

“… and I’ll have your review quiz on Friday…”

Mike took the paper. Not because he wanted to, but out of sheer mercy for Jeremy’s reeling upper body.

“… which will cover…”

What Mike put on his desk was a piece of run of the mill loose leaf notebook paper that had been folded and crushed so abhorrently that it could probably pass for old gum if he left it out on the sidewalk.

Once he finally found a way to open it, the crumpled, scratchy graphite that almost resembled some form of communication read:

you should come to THE COURT

again after school!

:)

Yep.

There it was.

Indoctrination.

He stuffed that thing into the darkest cavity of his desk, where he prayed he wouldn’t have to ever look at it or think about it again.

What a dumb prayer.

Of course some son of a bitch in the sky is going to help you right now.

“Ohmygosh, Ms. Snyder! Did you see that?” That girl, that Sara-Whatever-Or-Whoever, ogled at Mike’s open textbook. “He literally passed it three whole seats!”

What a wonderful day Mike was about to have.

“Who, Sara-Jane?”

She nudged Jeremy’s shoulder. Only then did a glimmer of fear flicker in his eyes that something bad was going to happen to them.

“This guy. Duh. Down to the…”

Snyder trekked towards their ensemble of seats, stepping slowly. There were snickers in the front the moment she trailed away from the first rows of desks.

Snyder was young. He didn’t know how young she was, really. But she wore an aged and drooping face, aged and drooping hair, aged and drooping dirt-brown dress. And she didn’t make much use of this, either—Snyder never smiled. Probably, she was constantly upset that she didn’t even look alive.

She appeared before Jeremy’s desk and planted three fingers on its edge, dark-rimmed glasses warping her lifeless eyes into pinholes.

“Fitzgerald, would you like to answer example sentence ten?”

He shifted in his seat, holding the textbook to his face. “ The horses tried to escape the barn. To escape. It’s … just an infinitive, Ms. … Snyder…?”

“And that’s all it needs to be.”

She left as soon as her words left her mouth. Deathly silence followed her to her seat at the head of the room.

“Worksheets tomorrow.”

And it stayed that way.

You should come to the court again after school.

The bell would ring at one. That was eight minutes from now. Then again at two thirty.

Mike had … ninety-eight minutes to decide if it was worth it to ruin his life.

And there he was, so nonchalant about the thing he’d just caused, now passed out completely on his rickety slab of wood.

Privilege.

That note was a threat, actually. They were threatening Mike. Were they going to jump out and stab him with knives when he got there because they’d realized their mistake, or what? If he didn’t follow them, he’d look like a coward. He would look dishonest. Or, hell, they were actually airheads, and were about to try him again in the hopes that he wouldn’t disappoint them.

Yes. Yes he would. That was the only thing he’d done for the last three days.

When the final bell rang, Mike made sure to take everything out of his locker without stalling for Charlie’s sake. She didn’t need to be there for what he was about to do. Apparently, even a self-contained promise wasn’t enough to hold his dumb brain back.

If the other two really did leave him bleeding to death on the chalked lines, maybe he deserved it.

The court still reeked of warmth that billowed from the concrete. But anyone who had wanted to greet him was taking their time. The steaming waves of heat and himself were the only signs of any conceivable life.

Here came the goddamn knives.

Behind him, footsteps.

“Hey! You actually did it!”

He should’ve known this would involve a conversation with the weirdo who had set him up in the first place.

“Okay, okay, I can explain! It was because we share a class.” Jeremy pointed at something absolutely nondescript in the distance. “My brother needs you to come with me so he can do something really important.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Really. Please.”

“Why?”

“I thought … because we were friends now.”

“No.”

“... Okay.” 

“What is it, anyway?”

“... I don’t know, actually.”

Chances were, Mike’s life was already ruined. He just couldn’t come to terms with that. He had already done something to ruin his life somewhere else down the line. Being born? Is that possible? This was like the “Domino Effect”, or whatever it was called. He would probably be toying with his own fate if he tried to steer out of the hole he’d dug himself down into.

Well, what a stroke of luck. Three more shovels.

“Just get it over with.”

“Oh … great!”

Only one of them had chosen to bring a bicycle today. He was forced to drag it along like a stiff and useless limb while they trudged through the road to God knew where. His neighborhood was involved, at least. The houses they passed sparked some level of familiarity. At least Jeremy wasn’t taking him to some cryptid death forest, or abandoned warehouse, or …

“I think it’s up here.”

“ What’s up here, man?”

“Oh. I thought I told you.” Jeremy said, pointing farther up the street.

Mike frowned. “No.”

“You see that? Gabriel’s house.”

It could’ve been worse. Ahead of them, at the very far end of a cul-de-sac, stood a brick house, narrow, pepper grey, with mortar overflowing from its crevices. Nothing that sent sirens off in the back of his head, which was really the bare minimum at this point.

“Here. We’re probably not gonna be able to eat a dinner tonight, so,” He fumbled for the rear pocket of his backpack and hoisted out three packs of Pop Rocks and a Twix that was … molten, by this point. “I prepared!”

“What do you mean?” Mike started. “Why would you—”

The front door of the house swung open, and three human-shaped specs started for their direction.

“It’s going to take a while. That’s all.”

“Dude, can you not give me a straight answer or what?”

“I told you,” Jeremy veered onto the sidewalk, pacing away from him. “I don’t know what we’re doing.”

“I thought this was everything.”

He held out his hand. “Nope. Here, have some.”

In it was one of the flimsy, highlighter red packs of exploding sugar that would end up being Mike’s dinner if he didn’t just leave right now.

He had a bicycle. He could…

“No thanks,” he mumbled. “Maybe … later.” You wanted this.

The three from the house were hurrying along the sidewalk now, well within earshot. He could make them out to be the other half of who’d unearthed him the day before. Plus some … stranger.

“Kirk! Look, the note worked! He made it all in one piece!”

They didn’t acknowledge Jeremy and him, but made a sharp turn into the overgrown lawn beside them that depressed into a ditch.

“Let’s go! You’ll see!” Kirk hollered. “Take that bike, Jeremy. We’ll come back for it!”

And there his poor bicycle went, teetering over against his will towards the cul-de-sac.

And there he was, stranded on the far side of a road by a newly formed path of stampeded grass.

What the fuck.

This is totally illegal, isn’t it?

I’m completely daft.

I’m really stupid.

Enough to follow them.

The lawn held rainwater from days ago. For each step he planted, the soles of his shoes could’ve been dunked in a thin syrup, and it would’ve been no different an experience. What a spectacular job this ditch was doing at being a ditch.

The beaten path began trailing into a sparse and bone-dry forest, away from the joint of homes. Faintly within, the outlines of the other three flickered in and out of the underbrush, growing dimmer. Mom used to take him and his siblings here in the summer whenever it got too hot to stay in direct sunlight. No one used its absolute shit conditions for a single thing. But this patch of land still existed to just conjoin, or really, separate. If they kept going straight, for long enough, they'd smack right into more houses. Bigger houses.

Mike broke out into a run because by now he couldn’t even see what he was following anymore. Keeping his backpack intact became incredibly difficult, as with every leaping bound he took it dared to slide clean off of one of his shoulders. And through the wild grass he nearly tripped and collapsed over a root, stumbling so hard he had to push himself off the crumbling soul so he didn’t tumble over. His lungs burned now. All the way up to his throat. He was probably about to choke on the dry air. Or die in some other horrific, tragic event they’d set him up to fall into.

He reached a small break in the trees and finally saw them again. They had actually waited for him, apparently, in the middle of the clearing. Kirk and Gabriel sat on a decomposing log watching him drag his way towards it. The other, whom he still couldn’t identify, was shrouded in a hoodie and fidgeting with something in his grasp over in the corner. In front of the three of them lay a blue tarp overgrown with lichen and an overturned bucket. For some reason.

“You made it, British kid!” Gabriel yelled.

Kirk shoved him, and he nearly fell off the log.

The woods, if a barren expanse of trees could even be called “the woods”, ended right behind them, and a giant white monolith of a house began in its place. When Mike entered the clearing, Kirk stood up and thrust out his palm.

“We are waiting here and we are not going any further,” he hissed. “Get over here and don’t split anyone’s ears.”

Mike sat down on the tarp, and, God, was it actually ancient . Embedded so ruggedly in the soil that parts of it were wet, inundated with leaves. A stick jutted into his leg from deep within the moment he tried to move any further. What the hell was something like this still doing out here?

Not its job, that was for sure.

Wrenches, torches, prybars, and a thousand smaller tools spilled out onto the ground from the bucket that vegetated on its side.

“Until it’s dark out, we stay here.” Kirk leaned back on the chunk of wood. “I really hope your parents aren’t the type to come looking for you when you’re missing.”

You’re kidding, right? “No.”

“Well,” Kirk pushed himself off the log and started pacing towards the guy in the hoodie. “You should say ‘hi’ to Cesar. Gabe’s brother. He’s nineteen and is gonna make sure we don’t all get arrested.”

“Arrested?”

There, the alarm sirens in his head. Right on cue.

“Oh, c’mon. You didn’t think I was taking you to one of your dad’s gigs or something, did you?”

Funnily enough, that sounded worse.

Cesar lowered his hood and set the thing in his hands into the dirt, a black battery. “Hey, he is messing with you. Wanted you here to be an extra because he found you yesterday. You aren’t doing anything. He planned this months ago.”

“He always could, though.” Gabriel whispered, leaning over the edge of the log.

“That is not your job right now.”

Ever since he’d tried to steal a bag of gummy bears in Dad’s presence when he was, what, five, Mike had been formulating an emergency plan in case he brushed up against the law. Did something bad. If Mike wasn’t caught in time, he’d run off under a new name, probably Mom’s maiden name, change his face and his clothes and his hair and probably never deal with his family ever again. If Mike was caught, he would either find the opportunity to escape or die in his cell. It wouldn’t matter, really, as long as he was absent for the consequences.

Mike was something of a coward.

A rustling in the grass echoed behind him, and he recoiled, whipping his head around. Jeremy was sprinting to them as if he was trying, and succeeding, to outrun a stampede. When he broke into the clearing, he swung his backpack onto the ground, clutching his chest and heaving as it flung leaves into the air.

“Alright … when do we … go?”

The more he thought about it,

“Not until her car’s left the garage, Jerry.”

Jeremy was extensively good at lying.

“What if they … stay home?”

Mike had been played for a complete sucker.

“I already figured out that that won’t happen.”

Cesar grabbed the battery and chucked it into the bucket, righting it and picking up its scattered tools. “You should just let him know.”

“Okay,” Kirk started. He took a sharp breath. “We’re breaking into a young, affluent man’s house because I really don’t fucking like him anymore.”

Mike’s heart dropped. “Why…?”

“Because,” Kirk turned around, peering over the log, “He put my dad in federal prison.”

A chill crept through his back. This was exactly what he wanted. This was going to work. It could’ve been worse. He could’ve been killing someone. He could’ve been … whatever. This was fine and decent and every other option was insurmountably more dreadful.

“So, I hope you’re happy right now.” Kirk crouched onto the dirt, pulling the bucket towards him and muddling through it for a torch, prying off the battery cover. “Your shit double A’s better last, Cesar.”

Leave at dark. And smash through this guy's house.

Oh God, Dad is gonna murder me and throw me in the bin himself.

Mike slowly rose from the egregious tarp and backed away, craning his neck around to watch his steps so he didn’t trip and fall and break it. He couldn’t go anywhere. It was too late for that. They would probably rat him out, and he would have to testify in court as a witness.

He collapsed to slam his back against the trunk of a tree, stupidly sharp bark itching into his spine. And almost like he was in a forest or something, dirt stained his jeans. Again. But Mike faced the whole of the clearing, now. And everyone else was too far away to start a conversation with him. Heaven.

Yeah, except for one. Jeremy dragged his backpack out of its leaf pile and over to the one place he should’ve realized he wasn’t supposed to go right now.

He nearly let out a word, but he ended up just … staring at him. His eyes trailed down to Mike’s right hand, and he squinted.

“Hey, um … what’d you do there?”

“Oh.” Mike pressed on his thumb. “Yesterday, I—”

“No. Look.”

When he tried opening his hand, clenched into a fist, a burning shot through his palm. Blood pooled into the creases and leaked from an opening that extended across most of the length of his hand. But it was a scrape. It was probably shallow, not even every layer.

“I was running … I guess … I don’t know.”

Hands are deceptive. Hands are deceptive ‘cause you bleed buckets from a single prick. You don’t die.

“That’s … that’s bad.” Jeremy sat down in the dirt, lifting Mike’s hand by the index finger. “But I brought water.”

It hasn’t killed you before. You’re fine. You won’t die.

He took a plastic bottle from his backpack and poured half its contents over Mike’s hand. Far inside his skin, a sting spiked beneath the cut and burned out towards his fingers. Free from blood, the cut was razor-thin and mechanically cleanly sliced, and it bubbled up again in seconds. He’d need to find the world’s largest plaster if he ever wanted to regain proper locomotive function again.

How did he not notice he’d been bleeding out? What the hell did he even run into to gash himself so badly? Why did no one tell him?

“Y’know,” Jeremy moved away, “Kirk isn’t usually like this. He doesn’t usually do this. He’s upset. I’m sorry. I should’ve told him I wouldn’t ask you. You’re not … someone who would do something like this.” 

“It’s okay.” Maybe I am. Maybe I am. Maybe —

He traced his finger in the dirt. “Do you remember four years ago, when a girl named Linda Wheeler died over at the high school?”

“Oh. You’re…"

Jeremy whispered. “Our dad, the basketball coach, was the only witness, so people wanted to assume he killed her. I don’t know why. So did her older brother. I think that’s what did us in.”

Mike pressed his injured arm against his abdomen. The stinging crept through to his wrist, and the more he stretched his palm in protest, a ripping sensation grew within his entire hand. But if the blood reached his clothes, he would die.

“That’s why we’re here, Mike. I’m sorry.”

Jeremy looked down at his arm and turned to pull something out of his backpack. He dug for a few moments and appeared back with one of the bright red packs of Pop Rocks in his hands. Extremely delicately he tore one edge off, spilling a few dozen pink shreds onto the ground.

He reached out, holding the thing upright.

Mike had left his appetite in English and had no plans on walking over there now to ask for it back. But this was literally the only positive thing that was going to happen to him today.

With his good hand, he took the pack. The scent was revolting. Like a conglomerate of every periodic element boiled together in a pot of acid.

They tasted alright, though. For as long as it took him to eat them.

Jeremy took out another pack and sank into his backpack that sank into the grass, downing it in about a half a second. It fell empty to his side and he went still, dazed, looking up into the canopy. 

Gone from sight. Like he’d set up a one-way mirror.

Damn, his hand hurt.

Waiting for “her car” to “leave the garage”, whoever the crud “she” was, became the most excruciatingly mind-numbing game of “Try Not to Ruin It All And Run For the Hills and Just Keep Sitting Here Like a Moron, Michael”. Because nobody did anything until dark. He had to sit next to his stupid tree and pretend he didn’t stupid exist until the sound of roaring exhaust while the other three huddled over tools and Jeremy recovered from a sugar crash.

The only marginally gripping thing he experienced was when Gabriel expressed that he surely heard the car driving off, pointed through the trees like that helped his case, and said he would go make sure everything was clear. Gabriel was dragged back mouthing curses before a shred of him reached the lawn.

But he was right, apparently.

Her, she, whoever, whatever’s car had left the garage. What a day to be alive. This fact changed absolutely nothing about his situation because Mike quickly learned that Cesar was the only one who’d thought of bringing a watch. It took about a half an hour after he sat Gabriel down, away from the view of the house, for him to mention it was a “good idea” to stay in the clearing until eight thirty because “people’ll have a hard time seeing us.”

And that it was five o’clock.

On a good day, someone might have been thinking about Mike by now. Wondering why he couldn’t show up on time for God knew what he’d chosen to ditch.

Today was not a good day.

Three more hours of hell, and he could finally tarnish his botched existence.

The little sleep he’d retained caught up to him once the sun set and the ground chilled, but if anything it could’ve been blood loss. In the darkness, the palm of his hand stood out as a discolored spot on his skin and dead reeked of iron. If the cops came here, they were gonna find his funny little pool of blood and extract his DNA and…

“Take extras. Clean up your … your lona. Rug thing. Tarp. Follow me.” Too dark to discern what was going on. His head too fuzzy to care.

Pure sugar and chocolate currently ran Mike’s entire body, and that didn’t lend itself all too well to, y’know, any form of physical exertion. So when the five of them left the clearing, took small steps through the remaining trees, and bolted across the damp, sparkly lawn, his legs naturally folded out from under him when the edge of his shoe snagged something, and he slammed hard into the ground.

Arms pulled his body upward, and he had no center of balance, stumbling forward to grab onto the white siding of the house. The chipping wood dug into his sliced skin and ignited it all over again. He stood still, he was shaking. And when he raised his head, there was a small, dark window they’d brought him to stagger underneath. The only one on this face of the house. The rest was blank and nondescript, apart from the four-pane, old and crusted, bacterial window.

“You take this one. Be on my opposite.” Cesar dropped a prybar at Kirk’s feet, taking another shoved into his pocket and wedging it into the bottom of the window. “You both sit there until we are done.” He left it stuck and turned around to grab Gabriel’s shoulder. “You stay the crap out until he tells you it’s okay, okay?”

“Fine.” Gabriel crouched down and stared at the forest.

Mike slunk to the lawn, his clothes stained with wet grass on one half of his body, and the cold air was finally hitting him. A whine echoed from the window.

“Shit, don’t do that!” said Kirk.

Cesar tapped the wood with the prybar. “It did that itself.” 

A backpack, turned soggy at its base, fell next to Mike. So did he.

“Yeah … um, yeah. I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry,” Jeremy whispered, putting a dirt-covered hand over his forehead. “I think it’s just gonna take a few minutes. Then you can go home. I’m sorry.”

The window shot open when Kirk and Cesar pushed it upwards with their hands, the sides creaking as they crushed through layers of grit. Tiny flakes of dried mould fluttered overhead, and fell to disappear in the grass. 

“Oye. Gabriel. Le puedes ayudar.”

“I am already. I’m listening.”

Mike lifted himself by his good hand to look through into the room. Pale curtains went back and forth as the house took in air. Glossy, dusty furniture on furniture pressed against the cramped walls. Crude ceramics of trinkets, tea sets, and dolls, lit only with the dimness behind them, huddled on top of each other, filling the faces of desks and cabinets and chairs and tables.

Cesar climbed up, lodging his foot into the nook of the window. He slid half himself through and sent something inside crashing to the floor, which would have been fine, probably, Mike guessed, if not for the fact that the farther in Cesar writhed, the louder the room got.

His legs disappeared, accompanied by the very distinctive sound of heavy furniture crashing (and breaking) onto hardwood floors.

“Hoooly God. He’s gonna hate me even more, Cesar,” Kirk snickered, scooping dirt from the end of his prybar. “You don’t even know.”

Mike heaved over to his side, shielding his damp clothes from the air to hopefully conserve what little body heat he had left. For once, his presence as a living, breathing, not-dead human being actually had some sort of meaning to it, and he was forced to deal with that.

This became a dumber and dumber idea the longer it went on.

From the corner of his half-closed eye, Jeremy was still there, why would he not be. He stared blankly as he pulled a string out from his shirt.

“Is anyone, like, actually even home, I guess? I dunno,” Mike muttered.

“No. Lemme tell you…” Jeremy rose to his knees, swept hair from his eyes, and started making bizarre hand motions. “Two people live here. And they went away hours ago. Linda’s older brother, and his … fiancé?”

“Fiancé,” Kirk said.

“Fiancé.” Jeremy clasped his hands together. “Brother’s name was, um, is, um, he’s called Randy. Never knew him, but people say he’s a real, a real…”

“Cunt,” Kirk whispered.

“Kirk says he has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it, so he spends it all on his girl’s crazy ceramic hoarding obsession.

A smash echoed within the house. Then another. Then, another. Then, oh well, there it goes. Crime. Crime. Felony. Crime.

Kirk closed the window halfway, muffling the pandemonium. He pulled Gabriel back towards him by his arm and stuck his own head in between the wood and the panes to snap something out into the dark.

“No, Kirk, it’s … it’s not enough time,” Gabriel cried. “Kirk, they’re gonna—”

CLANG SMASH KSHHHHHK—

This is my last day on this planet Earth.

“So, um … what other classes do you have, Mike?”

He could not even process what had been said or who had said it until Jeremy tapped him on the arm, his body jerking in response.

“I— oh. Y’know. I dunno. Algebra. Everything else.” Mike squeezed his hand open and closed. “I take art on Wednesdays.”

Jeremy stared at him through the dark. “That’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah.”

The sun had fallen so fast now that his mangled and red arm blurred into the murky shadow cast by the house. It stopped being anything but pain once there was nothing to watch. 

“So, have you ever done anything like this before?”— CRACK. SNA-AAP. FWUUUSH— “I mean, um, something … illegal.”

“No,” he lied.

“Yeah. Me either!”

“Why are you even here, then?” Finally, there was a terrible throbbing that split beneath Mike’s skin. He’d thought his body had given up and refused to heal him after taking enough blows. Which would’ve been fine, because oh God, did this hurt . Entirely, this was probably what Evan felt when—

“... decision, since I love my dad. And I love my brother.” Oh no. “He should be able to be happy.”

“Um, yeah. Makes sense.” You idiot.

Jeremy smiled, as if Mike had heard him.

BANG! CREEAAAKK!! BANG!

The window grated as Kirk shoved it open again. “Hey, I said to leave his room clear!”

“No, no, you need to see this, man!” Cesar yelled. “He has, like, a full two cases of pot in here!”

“Randy has what?”

“I said, ‘two cases of—’”

“I know!” Kirk shouted halfway through the window. “Don’t just sit around in there. Take some! Hell, take all of it! What’ll he care?”

“Kirk…” Gabriel gazed out into the lawn.

“And while you’re at it, let’s write him a great big thank you note for everything he’s done!”

“Kirk…”

“What?”

Gabriel stood up slowly as his eyes darted between the window and an invisible threat at the far edge of the house. He shook his head stiffly, shuddering with shallow breaths.

“Car,” he stammered. “Car.”

“Aw, jeez…”

“It … it pulled in … it—”

Kirk grabbed him by the shoulders. “Are you sure it wasn’t somethin’—”

Ducking below him, Gabriel ran to the window. Without stopping himself, so as to slam into the wood siding, probably nearly breaking it. He grasped its frame in his arms, bending his head inside.

“¡CESAR, CESAR VUELVE! ¡YA ESTÁN AQUÍ! ¡VUELVE!”

Kirk pulled him away and tugged him by the collar of his shirt. “They’ll hear you, Gabe!”

“No—you— CESAR! LEAVE ALL THE—Leave ... Wait!”

Footsteps reverberated into the ceramics hoard. “I can’t. I can’t.” Cesar’s voice shook. “They’ll call the cops. If I leave, they’ll look for me and they’ll look for you.”

Shit.

“You just ... stay out there. I stay in here. Like we said.”

Why now?

“We planned. We planned for this,” said Cesar. A door slammed from inside the house. “I’m so sorry. Get out of here.”

Why him?

Cesar shut the window hard, and there was a muffled clamor before he moved into the shadows.

You should’ve prevented this.

Gabriel collapsed backwards onto the grass. “Fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Open it back! Can you open it back? Kirk. Help.” His words quickly blurred to a hoarse mumble.

You knew.

A constant dampened noise came from within the house. The hum of voices. A shard of broken glass. A phone. A scream. Oh God, another scream.

“He’s…” Kirk slouched to the muddy base of the house, raking his hands through his hair. “No,” he exhaled. “We just need to … God. Uhh. We need to … hang on. No. Oh jeez. This wasn’t supposed to … they weren’t…”

Should’ve not shown up at all.

Gabriel hunkered with his knees to his chest, head sunk in his jeans, a ragged rising and falling in his back. Silent. Kirk tried to stir him, but he shook his head and buried farther into himself.

“He can’t go to prison. If we’re quick, um, I mean, Randy’s a piece o’ work, but if I actually do something this time, maybe he hasn’t called them yet, or— oh jeez…”

Forgot he had a body, forgot he existed there at all, to probably protect himself, somehow. Until something brushed Mike’s arm, and he recalled the wretched shutting-down of his internal systems. If the second he touched something he wasn’t supposed to, it killed him, then that’s what was supposed to happen. But you’re not dying, stupid. They are.

The hand lingered a moment before leaving. When he moved his sore neck, Jeremy was getting to his feet, having bolstered himself on his good arm. He looked down at him. A flat smile ran across his face but his eyes were completely hollow. Poised beneath the house’s shadow before he stepped away.

You selfish freak, Mike, what’s your problem?

“We need to get out, Kirk,” he said, far enough into the lawn that moonlight glinted off of his hair.

“No.”

“If we stay here, they’re gonna come and get us for trespassing.” He stepped out farther. “We have to go. We have to get our stuff. Kirk. It’s not worth it.”

“Too dark.”

If you just…

“Too dark to see anymore. In the dark.” Kirk gasped. “Oh no. Oh my God.”

“Kirk. It’s not happening again.” Jeremy breathed in. “Take them with you.”

He whipped around and disappeared into the trees.

The creak of a footstep rang from the mouth of the desolated ceramics room.

“WAIT— Jeremy. No.”

Kirk ducked below the window, crawling to his feet, huddling on his knees. He moved his cowering silhouette into the dim light.

“Don’t. Please,” Gabriel whispered. “He’s still—”

The silhouette grabbed Gabriel and ripped through the lawn.

He stumbled behind, prying at the grip on his arm. “ Kirk!” 

Before the trees enveloped them both.

Ditching this garbage fire was wrong. There were more consequences that way. Someone had to take the fall. And why the hell was that? Couldn’t he exhibit some level of self-preservation? For once? So as to not get arrested for sitting here like an idiot, instead of doing something cool?

Think about it. Look at what you’ve become. Do you really deserve to walk out of this uncuffed?

“Dude. Do you want to DIE or something?!”

Kirk was standing plain in the open again. Honestly, Mike wouldn’t have been surprised if that was what was wrong with himself.

But he followed anyway.

First, a branch struck his face. Then the rest, the needles and pricks at his shins, the stumbles at tree roots, the times his skin grazed bark, didn’t touch him.

It must’ve been the adrenaline.

He could’ve run for miles on that Twix and Pop Rocks. He was warm for the first time in hours. He was … terrified. At least he thought so. He couldn’t even tell anymore.

In his blind pursuit, he nearly collided straight into the rest of them, who’d stopped together, all at once, without warning.

“You need to quit, Jeremy!” Kirk said. “You don’t know where the hell we’re going!” 

“Away!” he shouted. “I’m trying to help you!”

Jeremy turned around, fumbling into a sprint.

“Wait!”

Mike reached out to pull him back, but he’d gone too far.

But he stopped. He stopped and turned around, so far into the brush that he’d become an outline.

“The river,” Mike said. “I know how to get to the river … from here.”

It was past the edge of the farthest houses, there was a slope, a jagged one, that had ripped up his legs several times when he hadn’t paid attention, that trickled down to a river, a small one, that snaked around the north of the town. He’d gone fishing there a few times. Begrudgingly. On Charlie’s insistence.

Jeremy came slowly again to linger in front of them, glancing behind their backs.

“Okay.” He nodded. “Go.”

Leading a group of criminals through the dead of night, running as his chest smouldered, running from the law, snapping branches and tripping through cavities, praying to a god he didn’t believe in that he wouldn’t spend the night out here, that he was right and was not leading them astray, were not things he’d left on his bucket list today.

Where the trees cut out, he just had to veer right. If he veered right, he’d find the slope. If he found the slope—

A glow fell onto his feet, and they hit crumbling ground.

A dark blotch of flatness, spiked grasses jutting out to gnarl its silhouette, expanded almost forever. Light from the moon couldn’t grace it, not here. As he listened, there was a faint running of water that wound around below the haze of grass.

Mike had never been this far out.

And neither had the cops.

“You know, sometimes our parents … would take us there!” Jeremy panted, taking a step forward. “To play in the shallow bits … when we were little!”

Traversing The Void was like walking through a minefield. At least, based on Mike’s primitive knowledge of how mines worked. Every now and then he’d get his foot caught in some foreign substance or beast’s pit and was waiting and ready to be pulled under, bitten, or atomized by every next thing he came into contact with.

Kirk now headed their train from a widening distance, hunched over with his hands glued into the pockets of his jacket. “At least they’re gonna find Randy’s stuff and lock him up too, right? … That’s good, right?”

He craned his neck back, still in motion, like he expected any of them to be able to answer him.

“Im fuckin’ trying.”

Reaching the slope warranted slipping and falling down the slope. At least for Mike, who had once claimed to be the one true expert of where they were going that would lead them all to safety. Apparently, River had other plans.

Well, not all of the slope. He wasn’t that cool. Just far enough to scrape up his knees.

The river had trees. Actual, regular trees. Not whatever they had just run through that leeched off of the almost always dry and dying soil (and that cut up people’s hands—which still hurt, and had probably opened up again somewhere).

As the river came closer, the adrenaline practically flooded out of him. He could feel it draining from his veins, or wherever that shit went to.

Mike sat down. He was the first to sit. He honestly couldn’t help it anymore. Dizziness shook his body and sent specks of light through his vision. Hunger keeled him over. His legs erupted with invisible cuts that sprinkled his skin red. He could not feel his hand. He didn’t even know if it was still there.

“I could’a just…” The second Kirk sat down, he threw his sleeve across the water. “Fuck!” He did it again. “I'm so stupid. I’m so stupid! You told me not to. I know what you both thought about him taking it up. And I …” He scoffed. “It’s only been one day, Afton.”

Kirk offered a hand to Gabriel. His limbs boxed him in, left the rest of him exposed. He was staring at the river, so intensely that he’d soon boil it where his eyes struck the water. Until, after too long, it was interrupted, and he nearly looked frightened when he glanced at the hand beside him. It was only a glance. He went away again.

“Listen. It’s … it’s not over. We messed up. But it’s not over. Right? No. No. We messed up, and it’s okay. We just have to … get over ourselves and never do this again.”

Kirk leaned over the water, pressing his hands into his face. He was like that for a long time. Never moving. Never talking.

It took everything Mike had to not completely throw himself into the river, or at least not submerge his arm. The only thing it managed to touch and feel and grasp for was this disgusting, numb pain that carried through to his shoulder.

He clasped his wrist, shaking it.

He splayed his fingers, flexing them.

He collapsed to the rocks below him.

He shoved it behind his back.

Something leaned over him.

It pressed through the ridges of his hand bones.

The dust-clogged fingerprints wouldn’t grip his skin.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get you caught up in … in this. ” Jeremy turned his hand over. “In that. Oh God, I am so sorry.”

No one did that anymore. Because he wasn’t the sort that could handle an apology. They’d drive him to becoming a grody, selfish monster, like a few people he knew. And after everything, he didn’t even deserve one.

“You know, you should wash it once you’re home. Neosporin. Bandage. You probably need to see a doctor, but I … I get it. It’ll take a while, but you’ll be okay. Once you’re home…”

But what was he already if not a grody, selfish monster? Not the type to cut corners in his business then sit on his cash, but the type who’d actually get in trouble for it.

He dunked his hand into the water.

He was being watched, by a kid he knew didn’t deserve his forgiveness either.

“It’s okay,” he said.

The cold, murky water numbed the stinging of his wound the longer it lingered below.

I finally found my future.

Chapter Text

The New You

Do you know what terrifies me?

I’ve forgotten the sound of my own daughter's voice.

It first struck me a few years ago, and I scrambled together as many home videos as I could find that were still intact.

But the memory would slip. I kept trying, trying and trying, but she wouldn’t stay with me.

I fear it will only get worse. She takes up the tiniest fifteen-year sliver of my life.

What was her favorite food? What color were her eyes? How can I not remember the color of her eyes, when I looked into them every single day?

I hate myself for being incapable of describing the blessing she was , but there is nothing I can do anymore.

Sometimes I think to myself, “It would be easier if they were dead.”

Easier for who?

Hazel.

It’s hazel.

It’s got all the colors.

That’s what she told me.

Mike wasn’t the kind of person to run away, but nobody believed her.

Well, really, it was Mike’s dad who wouldn’t believe her. But he was the only one who mattered.

Hang on, restart.

A fuzzy prick of light penetrated her cocoon of blankets. The television hummed something muffled by the fabric. The family argued in the dining room. They had been in there long before she arrived. And that was ironic, considering midnight would come any minute now. No, not ironic. It wasn’t funny at all. She was completely trapped.

But that wasn’t where it started. Jump back five hours.

The call had come through just as she and her dad were putting a pan of salmon into the oven. It’d sounded, apparently, so urgent to him that he came back putting a coat on with the receiver still to his ear before even telling her what or who it was.

In retrospect, that was only just seven o’clock. Not urgent at all. Not for what Mike’s dad should’ve thought.

Nor should his dad have been surprised or upset when they had to ( because of him ) raid his pantries for dinner.

He had tried to hide it, he always did, but the politeness couldn’t reach his eyes.

Through the night, nobody had really, really believed his … concerns … about Mike until everyone would’ve rather gone to bed. Which, of course, probably included Mike.

Unless he was a runaway. It kept becoming, “unless he’s a runaway.”

In all honesty, his dad had prompted the idea and kept pushing it until he was agreed with.

The most important thing she came to realize was that Mike wasn’t welcome back by the one person with a stake in his disappearance.

His dad saw this as a means to an end.

So obviously, Mike couldn’t have wanted to come home either.

Here’s the thing: Mike wouldn’t have … done that. He wasn’t the type. But most people assumed him to be exactly the type to abandon the people he cared about and the people who cared about him.

Which meant something was wrong.

Any time now midnight would come.

His dad would’ve started something no matter when he came home late.

But this stood out, because twice in a row didn’t go over well with him. And she hadn’t been there to offer an excuse.

If he really did come back.

If his dad was wrong.

But, the thing was…

… there were so, so many ways he could’ve been right.

No.

C’mon, Char.

Those are some bad thoughts.

Restart.

You can do this.

What can you hear around you?

“Right now, you can get twenty-percent off boots, sneakers, and sandals at…”

“And what if he never comes back? Have you even considered that he might be unreachable?”

The blankets wouldn’t drown out the noises. Or the cold. No matter how tightly she wound them around her body. The pinhole crack in the fabric bled the blinding flashing colors of the television right into her eye, even when she shut them tight.

“What will we do?”

“Introducing the new Ford Thunderbird, with sleek proportions, a practical design…”

“We have no control over where he’s gone. I’m asking you, what happens now?”

“Try our Quarter Pounder for just eighty cents! That’s right, eighty cents!”

I need the remote.

It’s too cold to get up.

Is he really gone?

Groping the cushion for the hard edge, straining her eyes shut against the cold light as her body stretched for it, she mashed the volume button. She mashed it until she couldn’t hear them anymore. They couldn’t hear themselves either, for all she cared. She couldn’t take it anymore. She sat up, and goosebumps raised on her skin. Someone had toyed with the AC again. It was nice to stay in a house with AC that didn’t break every few months, but the kids had no idea how to use a thermostat. She just needed her jacket. Then she could bury her head away from this stupid family argument.

Oh, but it was all the way over there. Why did she have to leave it so far away?

When she got up, the chill only grew, but there were no vents. She took the jacket by its dark green sleeve, and that’s when she saw it: a sliver of air came through the doors, shifted like a fault line after an earthquake. The cold hissed inward, expelling itself throughout the room.

But … it was May. There was no cold air.

Funnelling her arm through the first sleeve, she grabbed the doorknob. Through the second sleeve, she grabbed the second doorknob. There was only a blank shadow outside, except for the echo of Mike’s own house.

She pushed open the doors, a damp wind pummeled her, screaming into her ears. She grabbed onto the railing with her head down as it whipped her hair across her eyes and mouth. A horizontal spray of water freckled half of her body. Through the mist she could make out an upside down sea of churning clouds. She wiped away the water from her eyes, strangled her hair behind her, into her fist, and squinted out into the distance. Of course. That’s why they weren’t doing anything.

Oh my God. What an idiot.

Didn’t he look for the clouds?

Did he…?

Why today, of all days?

No. That’s cruel.

She turned back, and the doors came together with a shudder and a swift suck of air.

“Thanks.”

Her blood ran cold.

She shot around and pinned herself to the glass. But there was nothing and no one visible along the deck, aside from the disfigured shapes of the chairs and tables piled against the mortar. Her eyes strained to make it out, to confirm it, but she was frozen underneath the porchlight, against the soft glow of the living room, effectively blind.

And then something rose.

“You okay? Didn’t mean to, uh, startle you or anything. Sorry.”

It was him. A moving shadow, nothing more. One that came closer, hobbling along the railing, only identifiable by his voice.

Everything stopped inside her before she could answer.

Because it wasn’t him.

His voice was just … too thin.

“What time is it?” Mike said.

“It’s…” She leaned hesitantly towards him, a dot of porchlight revealing his eye. “It’s midnight.”

“Yeah. Uh … thanks for closing the door. Sorry. Anyway, I really shouldn’t be here right now. I don’t know why I came back. I can tell you all about it later. But, like, you should probably get out of this. I’m sorry.”

Mike leaned towards her, and his head and shoulders came past the shadows. Uneven patches of darkness discolored his face. He stared through them expectantly. Trying to answer, her mouth wouldn’t even open. There was something wrong with him. What was wrong with him?

She pressed her nails into the railing, and instead they scratched something rough and flaky. Looking down, looking back, she could see him now. Maybe he’d been so invisible before because … blood. Mike was covered in blood.

“Oh my God. Are you … are you okay?” The harder she looked, there was a gaping dark shadow along his arm.

“Um, you know, it’s better if—”

“What happened? No, hang on. No. Let me get some gauze and … and… hang on. It’s okay. Let me get some gauze and—”

“Charlie.”

“Yeah?”

“Please. Please go away.”
He recoiled, and there was an uncomfortably long silence. Again, she couldn’t do it. He stood there swaying in the wind, everything stripped right out of him. The harder she squinted, she could see droplets forming at the base of his right fingertips. She couldn’t leave him here. But what was going to happen to him if she tried anything else?

“No,” her voice shivered with him.

She stepped away, silently begging that she wouldn’t trip over the invisible ground beneath her. Turning her back on Mike made him disappear, or really, seem to disappear, because her mind kept wandering to what was still behind her. It was like he barely existed out here.

“Y’know, I need to do this by myself,” he mumbled through the walls of wind.

“Mike, you’re bleeding.” She looked back. The porchlight clouded everything. “Do what?”

“I mean … you shouldn’t have to get hurt too.”

Charlie grabbed the doorknobs. Her palms flushed cold. Inside the TV still ran, and it buzzed through the glass. So did the voices. And just before the knobs began to turn, her arms went rigid.

Where’s the gauze again?

He doesn’t want this.

Left pantry.

He’ll die.

Or was it right?

Quit over-exaggerating.

“Could you keep it closed? Or, I dunno. You're probably cold too. Maybe you’re just … I dunno. Do what you want. Just don’t hurt yourself, too.”

She glanced over to look for him.

“Maybe I deserve it. But you don’t,” he said.

Charlie searched for anything, his eyes, his face, his figure, but he was invisible in the porchlight. “Can I at least ask what happened?”

There was a slight casting of his voice. Maybe a laugh. “Long story. Hope I’ll have enough blood in me to stay conscious. But, like, I got this note in…”

Charlie glanced inside, an inch from the glass.

“…English. Sorry for ditching you by the way. I’ll get to that.”

The television had gone dark.

The television had gone dark.

“But this guy who gave it to me, real douche, could never associate, just had a run-in the day before, sorry about that too, and…”

Her dad walked into the room, leaning next to the couch, and in less than a moment they locked eyes.

No, no,

“I am so sorry,” Charlie muttered.

Oh, no, no no no,

“You— What?”

“Mike, it’s … it’s gonna be fine. It’s fine.”

A coat hung from his hand, and a warm smile sat on his face.

“Which—which pantry had the gauze again?”

All as he approached her.

“Right, I think,” said the voice in the dark.

The hardest part was watching Mike get worse the minute he was met with help.

Or maybe, he was already like that, just exposing himself and his injuries.

Except, it all felt so deeply unfixable at its core.

It was easy, getting to his room unnoticed.

The rest of the family still cramped themselves in the dining room.

Which, really, just made her realize how short a time she had been outside.

But, no.

That wasn’t it.

The hardest part was knowing they were all trapped.

She didn’t know it instinctively or anything.

She had been, frankly, clueless for the last few hours.

She had hoped, maybe wistfully, that things would calm down once she succeeded.

Sure.

But she couldn’t do that today.

Charlie opened the inside of his bedroom door by a margin and pressed her ear to the crevice, the hallway air hot and stuffy. From the corner of her eye, Mike leaned half-off his bed, glaring directly at her. The second she turned to him, he threw up his hands like it was obvious.

“Don’t open the door.”

“Gotcha,” she clicked the door closed as quietly as possible, “But he doesn’t even know you’re home.”

“Charlie,” he grinned, “That’s the point.”

She got up from the carpet and came towards him, grazing her hand over the knob one more time, kicking a pile of t-shirts out of the way. He shifted back against the bed frame, watching her with an odd curiosity as she collapsed onto his mattress.

“Hey, um, so about—” Charlie started.

A creak interrupted her as the door quickly flew open and fell shut. Mike’s head shot towards it. Her dad now stood in the middle of the room, his sleeves damp, carrying dry washcloths in one hand and a long, coiled up strip of gauze in the other. His arms precariously hugged two tiny mixing bowls, one that spilled out a wave of liquid the moment he set everything down.

“Now, we’ve got to do this quickly, you understand?” He shuffled the full and empty bowls to her and Mike’s feet, respectively. “I want you both to help me.” A washcloth fell to her lap, and she saw Mike curl his hand inward. “I have to be back down there … Before I take too long. I already said we were heading out.”

“It’s okay. It won’t hurt.” Charlie said.

Mike glared. “You have no idea.”

He’s right.

Her dad took a washcloth, dunked it into the water, overturned Mike’s arm, and flushed dried blood away.  “Listen to me. That little mark can kill you. Where did you get it?” When he pressed on the cut, Mike flinched backwards, and his eyes latched onto Charlie for dear life.

“Um.  I dunno. Forest,” he stammered.

“Okay.” Her dad sighed, digging the washcloth into the blood-soaked creases of his hand. “Okay … You feel sick, you see it get worse: tell someone.”

“Yeah.”

She forced herself to forget Mike’s protests and finally wet her own. She raised it to his face, expecting him to dodge her, but he was completely still, like he could hardly register the cloth an inch from his skin.

“And don’t mess with it,” her dad said.

“Yeah.”

First she dabbed it to his forehead. A bead of water fell from the cloth, snaking his torn face, catching flecks of something dark matted through his skin. Turning gray as it fell to his jaw.

Her arm froze up. She shouldn’t do this to him. She knew why this was happening. But she had to. She had to. If she—

The cloth slunk from her grasp, and she watched as Mike squeezed it over his own face.

A light smile crept out from underneath it.

“Is that any better?” her dad took a step back.

“...Yeah.”

“Char, could you fix the gauze?”

She mumbled. “Don’t worry.”

He juggled it all back into his arms, save for what was left, and quietly tugged on the door knob.

“Please be safe. Both of you.” The shut, however hushed her dad may have wanted it to be, suddenly filled this room with the loudest silence Charlie had ever experienced.

It was like her mind was playing a trick on her, or something. Making her associate nondescript factors with her own anxieties about the thing she had caused. But she may have been right.

A so-called “calm.”

Before a so-called “storm.”

They couldn’t even look at each other.

This is deeply incorrect.

But is it really unfixable?

Charlie grabbed the gauze from where it had been left: half-rolled up, sunken in the bedsheets. She tugged at its edges, and the porous, loose threading spread against her fingers. She glanced to Mike’s hand. She couldn’t keep doing this back and forth forever. Charlie searched for him in his face, and when she couldn’t find him, she gave his good arm a tug.

“Have any Neosporin?” she asked.

“Oh … is that … Oh. No. Sorry.” He stared at her absentmindedly. “Some downstairs, but—”

“It’s okay. It’s better than before.”

She held up the gauze, waiting for him, but the arm was suspended in place, followed by a sheepish grin.

It sure feels like it.

Taking the arm, it was shockingly limp. She stretched the gauze tight against his palm.

“If the blood permeates through, you’ve gotta take it off. Here. I can show you how to wrap it.”

He spoke nothing to her all the while and took over. Before Mike could try anything, Charlie strengthened her grasp on his hand. It was cold, even past the water, and had this enduring feeling of grit. He pulled the gauze upward, and she saw his arm turn white.

“Not too tight, you’ll lose your hand.”

Charlie took the strip.

“Scissors? I need…” When she saw him hesitate, that’s when the realization finally struck her.

You really didn’t need all this, did you?

“What’d you get up to out there?” she asked.

He leaned backward and scoffed, stretching his good arm over and yanking the drawer to his nightstand. Out he plucked a pair of scissors, and he swung them around his finger.

“Thought I’d aim a little lower. Made friends with douches. Real … real good-for-nuffins. Too tired to care about it.”

“How’d you do that?”

“Didn’t. Well—no, that’s dumb. They did. Made me want to do it.”

“Is that what held you up yesterday?”

“I appreciate the interrogation.” He said, snipping the gauze undone. “Yeah.”

“What did you do, anyway?” She was repeating herself.

“I dunno. Nothing, really. Um…”

He bowed his head to stare at the loosened strip as its end unfurled around his hand. She felt it twitch in her hold, then go rigid, like how she would imagine the wound first shook his body.

“Fuck. It’s so hard to lie to you,” Mike whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Something began making its way from her throat, and she snapped her mouth shut. Whatever she did, it would just mess with his head. She felt the corners of her mouth pinch themselves into a smile. She tried to hold his gaze, but he kept trying to let go. His brown irises flickered so lightly, so quickly. They would shiver every time he blinked, malforming the sheen glazed across his eyes, like he could not or would not grasp what was in front of him.

She let it go. She opened her mouth. “Just a shitty day.”

He looked confused, by her profanity. But a harsh smirk crept onto his face. He started to giggle, faint at first. Then somehow, it reached her too. She got the urge to stop it, but he was already keeling over into a ball. Like a virus, it kept spreading, spreading and spreading. The laughter tickled her insides, made her head fuzzy. It was the best thing she could’ve ever been experiencing. She fell backwards into the yellow and white bed sheets, clutching her knees to her sore stomach and blinking away the blurriness in her eyes. The greatest distraction from what had to happen.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Mike stared into her with wet eyes.

Charlie nodded.

He put his bandaged hand against his face and clawed at the skin of his cheek. “I almost went to jail, Charlie.”

She must’ve needed tears. Plummeting into a fit of laughter, on the chance it would squeeze a tear from her eyes. She  didn’t need that anymore, though. This was doing just fine.

But she held it all shut. She grabbed him and she hugged him. She hugged him so hard she could have crumpled his swaying body. When the pressure fell on her back, when the skin and the gauze and dirt and blood grazed her shirt, a sob emerged from her throat.

And she told him, “Shitty day.”

The first day of summer struck with a heat “good enough to grill our dinner straight from the driveway,” as her dad had so nicely put it. Which meant Charlie could only leave the house in the passenger’s seat of his dusty Chevy pickup. So they did, and on the ride, she pressed her cheek against the radiating glass window, still cracked, just enough that a bump tickled the ridges of her finger if she ran it across.

That was twenty-four days later. Charlie kept counting. And yet, it felt like she was the only one who was uneasy. Maybe Mike hid his feelings. Or she just couldn’t let go of something so trivial. But there was something wrong, like the world was holding its breath, waiting for the first crack of the dam.

Whatever. While she had avoided all conversation emanation from the dining room that night, it’d always bugged her how long they took. Today, she finally got an answer.

It didn’t take too long for her curiosity to get the best of her, especially after she’d “gotten word” that Mike was “found.” When she initially questioned her dad, he’d lit up, and far from whatever awkward explanation she’d expected, begun pulling papers and diagrams from his workroom for the hour-long tangent of demonstrating to Charlie that, of course, everything had worked out fine, along with a newfound permission to design and build a character who would breath life back into the prize corner (if there had ever been any). Ever since then, he had always come home late, to his own dismay he had no clue he couldn’t hide, but he’d bring back notepads and blueprints, strips of felt and circuit boards, asking for her insight.

Today, she finally got to see.

On weekends, the amber glow at the end of an unlit hallway would lead her to her dad’s office easier than her own memory. A little desk lamp spewing light sat peculiarly atop a dingy file cabinet, which gave the room, shoved to the back of the pizzeria, a bit more normalcy.

“Now, be mindful, he is a little beat up at the moment.”

“Beat up?”

Her dad opened up a toolbox on his desk and turned the corner. “I’d say so. His noggin keeps falling off.”

She peered around to look. A wire skeleton slouched uneven, attached to a stand. His metal frame caged the sticks and placeholder tubes of his torso harshly. Two deep set green eyes with wide irises covered his face. Thin wisps of arms came limp at his side, and his legs tapered into half-chiseled points. They grazed the ground at awkward angles, raised too far to hold his own weight.

“Is he supposed to stand up?” Charlie asked.

“Aw, throw him a bone. He’s three weeks old.” Her dad hoisted out its spindly arm. “Could you help me adjust this servo?”

She gingerly touched the arm, like it would shatter, and took a screwdriver to its ill-fitted, out of place servo. “So, what is he supposed to be, anyway? A little guy in a box? A … He’s kind of like a jack in the box, right?” Charlie clicked her tongue. “I don’t know, I feel like there’s more to him…”

“Well, we always have questioned his marketability…”

“That’s not what I mean. I think he’d be adorable—”

The head teetered and thudded to the floor, knocking over trays of tools and decorations. In the crash it left behind bolts and screws and shrapnel, an eye here or there, in a trail that led to the other end of the room.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Sweetie, it’s not your fault. I told you he does that sometimes. Still haven’t figured out why.”

“Is he top heavy?”

Her dad sighed. “I’ll mark it as a possibility.”

Charlie poised herself to scramble the scattered head back together, but a footstep echoed down the hall. A sharp click against the tile, and then another and another. Before she could react, they ended against the doorway.

“Your project seems to be going … well.”

Charlie’s uncle came to the center of the office, looming over the head. He tilted it with the tip of his shoe.

“Gosh, I didn’t think you were coming in! I thought you’d be—”

“At home. I know. Been here for a while. Since seven this morning. Let me tell you, it’s quite the relief.” He took the head in his hands, glaring right into its eyeless sockets. “Did you know, they added f our more days of summer to the high school calendar this year? It’s sixty-four now. The least I could do is get away from my—”

Her uncle finally looked up from the head and realized she was here. He smiled.

“Good morning, Charlie.”

He brought himself closer, still fixated on the head’s deep dents, until his eyes glanced up towards its body, and his face turned sour.

“Ah, yeah, you know,” her dad muttered, “I’m very sorry about that. I’ll figure it out. You know, I’m pretty sure it—”

The head fell into her dad’s hands. “Don’t worry about it. He’s your robot.”

They hoisted it onto its crudely shaped neck, bent from force. Charlie offered her dad two wrenches and slipped away, back slanted against the workbench. As they pulled at the loose wires and bolts in its ligaments and marked where to drill between its plating, the silence was crushing.

Why are you really here?

Our calendar never changed.

When his head fell into place, he stared forward with hollow sockets and a broken jaw.

She hesitated to break the quiet. “I like him without the eyes.”

“Why’s that?” Her dad asked, facing away.

“I don’t know. He’s different than the others.”

Her uncle squinted at its face. “He’s quite grim. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Well … there isn’t much to go off of yet, but…” Setting down a wrench, he met her eyes and suddenly beamed. “Hey, Char, go grab the mask!”

“What mask?”

“I … don’t think that's explicitly necessary.”

“The one that—Oh, it probably fell!”

When she looked to her feet, she realized it was pinned against her heel, slipped beneath the workbench. Leaning down, she brushed off lint and dust bunnies. The mask had a gloss like porcelain, but chipped on the sides like plastic. A cheapened and cartoonish mold, chalk-white, dotted red on its cheeks, and chiseled with a boxy smile and eyes. Yet it remained expressionless. Barely visible, penciled delineations ran down its cheeks.

There were a few other things down here too. Miscellaneous parts rolled across the floor (probably not just from today), and a piece of paper had fallen into the corner. Charlie reached to grab it. A little diagram of the prototype, dated June 6, with … strings?

Charlie held it close to her, giving away the mask. The mask snapped onto its head, so much smoother than any other rickety part of its figure.

She tapped her dad on the shoulder, pulling out the diagram. “Is that why there’s a stand?”

“Oh.” He furrowed his brow, taking the paper. “Well, it was only an idea, though I guess I kept it in mind when I…”

“I guess you could take out most of the internal machinery, including the eyes and mandible servos, and…” She gave the prototype a long look, taking hold of its flimsy hand. “Use some sort of elevated arm, hook it to the strings, hook the strings to him, and suspend him, given he’s light enough…”

Her dad looked between her and the diagram. “Think, is that really cost effective?”

“It defeats the purpose for individual mechanical pieces within the whole of his set, doesn’t it? Sure, you wouldn’t know until you sum up the materials and run some trials, but what’s the worst that could happen? Kids will love him either way.”

In the corner of her eye, her uncle held up its arm, fist clenched over his mouth.

“It’ll break down.” His hand danced over the stray wires. “The strings will snap.”

A sinking hate bubbled in the back of her throat, and she wanted to spit it out back at him, but she couldn’t do that. Not here. Not now. Not about a stupid prototype.

“That’s true,” her dad stuttered. She watched his eyes dart to hers for the smallest of moments. “You’re right.”

Her uncle paced the room now, shoving scattered parts into a pile as they interfered with his path. Then all of a sudden he stopped, looked between the two of them, and sat down in her dad’s swivel chair. “Listen. Why don’t you picture this: you are a child, statistically speaking, between the ages of four and eleven. You know nothing but food and love and happiness. So your parent takes you to a place that, like you, knows nothing but food and love and happiness. And there you are, past the double doors, bursting from excitement, when you spot it and it spots you. It’s friendly. But it reaches out for you, and it goes limp, struggling and twitching, loose from its cords, the illusion broken. You never want to come back, and you’ve barely set a foot through the door. Unfortunate.” He fished something from the pile, cupping the dented green eyes.

Her dad left from where he stood and took them from his palm.

“I’ll make arrangements.” He rolled them in his hand, completely mashed and unusable. “Don’t worry.”

There would never have been any harm. It never had to make everyone happy. Her uncle came back to examine the prototype, and she swiftly slipped into the other half of the room, plunging back into the same swivel chair and cornering herself beside the doorway.

“It’s safer,” she heard.

“I know.”

“Monetarily.”

“I know.”

“Allowing her to dictate our financial decisions is something that’s going to catch up to you one day. You know that too, right?”

There was no answer. No shuffle or turn of the wrench.

Silence.

Crushing.

“You’d best be off. I hear the crowds funneling in.”

“Right.”

Charlie’s dad turned the corner and flashed her a smile, whisking past her through the doorway. It was like, very nearly, he needed to escape, which scared her, because she had never recalled him so tense.

But they were alone now.

Her uncle stood to face her, but turned his head the moment he opened his mouth.

“It’s not as simple as you want it to be, Charlie. There’s not enough money left in the world to have it your way. We make sacrifices. If you’re going to be part of a business someday, you’ve got to let it go.”

That’s why you’re here.

To help me succeed.

I don’t want to own a business.

I don’t want to succeed.

I want to help your son.

And you won’t let me.

Charlie left him there. Now, she had something more important to do.

The tile against her legs was cold, and she had a subconscious fear that she was inhaling dust, but she’d measured this corner before, and it was just shy of forty-six inches. It would work, just like the diagrams had shown. On a slip of paper, she drew out the elevated arm, bolted to the wall.

Echoing, a cacophony of cheers and caterwauls. A bass thumped in her chest.

She couldn’t just secure them on both ends.

The tension would still build.

Though it was eerily quiet around her.

No one manned the prize corner right now.

That’s why she could tinker.

Maybe, by changing the makeup of the strings… No. Wouldn’t that ruin the illusion? Wait! Maybe, if they slid instead of pulled. But then, how would he be hoisted?

Some children hovered against the arcade machines.

They clenched mounds of tickets in their fists.

There is nothing I can do to stop them from snapping, is there?

But is it really as bad as everyone says?

“Whatcha doing on the floor?” Mike’s voice made her jump. She raised her head, and he was craning himself over her, hair falling over his eyes. His hand came down and nabbed the piece of paper, swiped it up, gave it a quick glance, and pulled himself away.

“Hey,” Charlie droned. “Planning.”

“Planning what?”

“Nothing.” She got to her feet, wiping dust from her jeans. She had to pretend she hadn’t been caught completely off guard by him being here.

Mike scoffed as he twirled the paper around his finger. “Seems to be putting you in a hell of a mood for ‘nothing.’”

“It’s just—I don’t know. I can’t talk to you about it.”

“Well … you know what would be a better use of your time?” He tilted his head to the prize corner. “Getting me one of those two-fifty-ticket masks up there.”

The special display lights were out, so all of the prizes were fuzzy and bathed in shadow. At the very top, character masks hung one over the other in four rows with “250!” stapled above them in bold rainbow letters.

Charlie looked to the growing crowd of fidgety children. “... Is that why you came over here?”

“No shit.”

Mike wagged the paper around in his hand, smirking, like he was holding it hostage, ready to dangle it over her head until she paid her ransom. God, couldn’t he read the room? He looked like … He looked stupid.

Three weeks later, it was still bandaged.

There were more this time. No, was she imagining it?

“Why, anyway?” Charlie sighed.

“Oh,” he laughed, “you really didn’t see?”

“See what?”

Mike shoved the paper back into her hand. “That dopey white eyesore in Pirate Cove? Where the hell have you been all day?”

He grabbed her wrist and started walking. She couldn’t even process what was happening, let alone tell him she didn’t actually care right now. But in the distance, a shrill voice cut through the loud music. It warbled in its own grainy tune.

“I heard Dad say that Foxy’s cut too many people, so instead of child-proofing him, they’ve shoved him away.”

“I can’t believe they never said anything.”

“Oh, he said plenty.”

He stopped in the center of the showroom. A group was gathering around … something. He was right. A white, bushy-tailed fox with a plastic fur shell beamed down at them with glittery eyes. Her plating was scuffed and cloudy, and dust flickered off of her as she swayed. The fox blinked a few times and cocked her head to the side, jittering.

“My, aren’t you all dar-dar-darlings!”

Charlie stepped back, feeling around for loose change in her pockets. When she finally pulled out a quarter, she looked around, and she was alone. Mike had enveloped himself in the crowd. She funneled herself in between the rows of people as cheers and outcries bounced off of her until she was launched to the front, running right into him. He did not look at her, or even notice her. Charlie peered around him, and saw his face completely void. Yet he stared daggers into the fox as she performed. Well, as she tried to keep herself on two legs.

“I think some-someone’s in need of a makeover!”

His eyes flickered to her, and he mumbled something indiscernible. He looked around and sighed. “Probably better like this, anyway.”

A bright pink vest rippled down to the floor, and its ends were grayed and flayed. Where had they even gotten her from? How old was she? She was jeweled with fake, oversized pearls and seashells from her eartips down to her wrists. A hook. She had a hook. It was on the opposite hand, and it was made of rubber, or maybe plastic. How come they went to this length? How was it any cheaper?

Charlie rolled the quarter in her palm. “Let’s go.”

Grabbing him by the hand, she felt gauze and nearly let go, but he took hold too, and she led him out of the crowd. A plethora of kids still huddled around the counter, some trying to sneak past it. Still, no one was there. Charlie went behind the counter, turned on the display lights, and pulled out the ticket basket as loose piles of the red coiling strips formed in front of her. She had counted tickets before. In fact, she had been in this exact scenario many times. It was the one job she ever felt like doing here.

Mike was leaning against the counter, head tilted back, gazing up at the sets of masks. He slowly inched his hand toward one of the piles and plucked a ticket from it, squinted at it, then put it back. A smile crept onto his face as he turned around to face Charlie, pointing above her head.

“Just come over here, Mike.”

He slipped behind the counter, and just as she reached to get a box set of slinkies, she threw down a Foxy mask from the highest shelf.

“You’re lucky,” Charlie whispered. “Don’t tell anyone.”

He turned it around in his hands.

“What, that you gave it out for free?” he said, loudly.

“Yeah.”

“No one cares about that part.” It sank over him, constricting tight around his hair, as shadows fell over his eyes. The crimson face stood still for a moment, slumped in the corner, before looking up at her. Or at least, she assumed. “Thank you.”

Charlie still didn’t understand him.

But he meant well.

One thing leads to another.

Chapter Text

Antipathy, Pulsing Red in the Dark

What an idiot he was. 

Actually, no. “Idiot” wasn’t good enough anymore for the shitstorm Mike had just descended into. There probably weren’t enough words out there in the first place. But he was, at the very least, an idiot.  

Stuck loitering the aisles of the convenience store with a bright red, clunky Foxy mask dangling from his arm. What a first impression: “I’m a grubby weirdo in touch with his inner child, and I love rickety pirate foxes that don’t even goddamn exist anymore!”

Why didn’t he just bring a backpack? 

Idiot.  

Why hadn’t he just gone to Freddy’s tomorrow?  

Stupid idiot.  

But hey, on the bright side: he cheated Charlie out of a few bucks. 

The only reason Mike had to be here instead of going straight home (like that would honestly be any better) was Liz’s never-ending demand that he pick up at least one bag of Sugar Toasted Marshmallow Puffs whenever he stopped by this place, because for some reason she thought she thought convenience store marshmallows were the height of luxury right now. If he didn’t bring them back whenever she told him, there was a very real chance she would throw a tantrum. And either his brain had melted some time in the last few weeks, or Mike could not find them anywhere.

If Dad wasn’t there, what could she achieve, anyway? 

He couldn’t take a chance. 

The mask swung loose on his elbow, pinching his skin. He cringed. But in all honesty, there was nothing he could do. Mike raised his head over the aisles. There was no one but him moping around under the mustard yellow fluorescent lights. Pressing the mask into his stomach, he meandered through the aisle, flipping over bags of gummies, peppermints, unsalted cashews. Sweat beaded across his forehead. It felt like people were … watching him. Scrutinizing him. 

You’re alone. Idiot.  

A sneaker squeaked against the tile. 

Mike shot his head up to glare at the sound, behind the aisle. A slight rustle of a bag. Footsteps fell in uneven patterns. There it was again. The squeak. 

How was he that blind? 

Mike went back to picking through the snacks, turning himself away. He unwrangled a bag of lumpy, orange circus peanuts from its spot on the shelf. Jeez, who was he kidding? He was better off bringing back nothing at this point. 

Skreeek.  

He nearly flung the bag across the shelf when footsteps bound into the aisle. 

At the other end, a scrawny girl with some bleach-white, knockoff shoe brand stood with her back to him, holding a Walkman. She spun around, prancing over the tile floor, tip-toeing and strutting out her legs, mouthing some unknowable song that radiated from the headphones. Her pale blonde ponytail and creeping dark roots kept whipping her in the face. She leaned over the chips, tilting her head to the side, dancing her fingers over the bags. They crinkled under pressure.

Her gaze met his. 

Punishment for staring at a stranger for more than five seconds. 

This girl looked Mike up and down with wide eyes, like he was some sort of zoo animal. A smile inched its way over her face, and she lowered the headphones. 

“Cute mask.” An odd, snorting laughter burst from her, and she covered her mouth. “Where’d you get it?”  

Mike wanted to run, but his hands held a distinct surplus of circus peanuts and a distinct lack of Sugar Toasted Marshmallow Puffs. Or really, it was this girl, this child in front of him, the way she leaned against the aisles and sneered at him, ogled at his idiocy, kept him stupefied like a deer in headlights, or something. 

“Aren’t you that kid?” She stepped closer. 

There it was: The Question. Hurricane wasn’t even that small a town, especially in the last few years. 

But Mike had the short end of the stick. Forever, until Fazbear Entertainment went bankrupt or blew up or something, he would be known as “that kid.” 

“Unfortunately,” he muttered. 

“What was it like at that house?” the girl asked. “I heard the police showed up, but you guys outran them or something.” 

Mike went stiff. Plastic thudded on tile. The peanuts were on the ground. “How did you…?” 

“Oh, like, everyone knows now.” 

Oh no. 

He opened his mouth, but a sensation of extreme dryness completely shrouded his throat. 

Oh no.  

“Just kidding! I’m family. Oops. Probably should’ve said that earlier.” 

Mike glared into her, letting out a sigh through his nose. People like that deserved to be cursed out, but she honestly looked too young to even know half the words he could spit at her. 

I hate kids.  

Clutching the mask at its cheaply thin ear tip, he backed out of the aisle as quickly as possible, crashing into a stand towering with action figures. A few tumbled to the ground, but he pushed himself off, speeding to the other side of the store, grazing his eyes over the shelves for anything he could use. The back was dimly lit, and the yellow lights sputtered on and off, every few times powering down completely, sending the whole corner into darkness. 

Drink machines churned and hummed. 

If nothing else, he could just grab himself nothing but a Coca-Cola and drink it right in front of Liz. 

A squeak. 

Mike turned around. A wisp of hair was peeking around the corner of the aisle. 

He was this close to clobbering her over the head with… 

He looked down through his weapon’s eyeholes. Its chipping, toothy grin. 

“I just wanted to … ask you something,” she sprung up, “seeing … seeing as you’re here.” 

Mike hoped he was invisible, beneath the dead lights. He could evade her a little longer, and grab something on the way out. Maybe even pay for it, too. 

“My brothers really want you to come over. They keep talking about it. But they never want to go right to your doorstep or anything, I don’t know why. Maybe just … eventually. Think about it. Or don’t. I don’t know. Do what you want.” 

Suddenly, he was bathed in a strobing light. 

Exposed. 

Then gone again. 

He swallowed hard. “Why?” 

“Beats me. You’re the friend.” She ruffled something out of her pocket. It was awfully crushed, but she filled it out with her hands and pulled out something from a hole in the side, squishing it between her fingers. 

Through the creases, in thick red letters: “Sugar Toasted Marshmallow Puffs.” 

“Wait!” 

She halted, mouth half-open. 

“Um … could I … have that?” Mike said. 

She smiled at him. “No.” 

“I’ll … I'll pay you.” 

“Um … no.” 

“Please?” 

“Nope.” 

“Can I have it if I come over?” 

“Still no.” 

As he forced himself closer to her, she raised an eyebrow. He felt a pit form in his stomach, but he knew what he had to do. “My dad will get mad at me if I don’t buy this.” 

“Are you just saying that?” 

“No.” 

“Damn, that sucks. But I’m still not…” The girl’s eyes fluttered to the ground, and she drew her face away, brows furrowed. “Fine. Jeez. Just let me keep the ones I touched.” 

While she counted loose, flattened marshmallows, the bag fell into his hands. She held it out by the tips of her fingers, like she was repulsed by it. 

Or him. 

Mike stormed away, through the back of the store, buzzing and flashing. 

He pushed against the door handle. 

The little bell began to ring. 

“Hey.” That sarcastic voice hit his ears again. “You gonna pay for that, buddy?” 

…Shit.  

The cashier at the register was asleep, her silvery nest for hair tucked in her arms. Only when he dropped the marshmallows on the counter did she realize they were there and laxly picked them up, stumbling to punch in the price. The marshmallow bag sat there deflated, spilling, curling in on itself. It was just sugary gelatine, yeah? Liz would get over it. He could pour it in a bowl, throw away the packaging… 

A tapping noise interrupted his thoughts. The girl leaned her face against the counter, rhythmically drumming her glossy nails over useless trinkets. 

Maybe she was right. Maybe it was for the best. If anything, it gave him an option. He was all out of those. 

“So, what’s your address?” he muttered, fishing money from his pocket. 

“Pssh. I’ll take you there.” 

cha-ching!  

“Fifty-four cents,” hummed the cashier. 

“Also, don’t call me ‘buddy,’” Mike snapped under his breath. 

He turned to the girl, who was fixated on an ant chewing on the cardboard of a display case. She kept poking at it, the poor thing scattering blindly. She looked at him, raised her eyebrows, and put her headphones on. 

The sky had turned to dusk when he crept outside, and a faint wind ruffled the back of his hair. It wasn’t a far walk to his home. A mile, if he had to guess. But he had no idea where this girl meant to take him. It could have been halfway across town for all he knew, but Mike had already walked all this way so Dad wouldn’t get the “pleasure” of taking him home. Or maybe she didn’t even have a house, that was why she didn’t bother to tell him, so he was going to wind up stuck in the dirt and grass with the wrong people for the second time in a goddamn month. It didn’t even matter at this point. She could take him anywhere, and he would be chewed out the same. Wherever he went, he wouldn’t be back before nightfall. Again.   

The girl strolled in front of him, skipping and swaying her arms, kicking rocks and gravel up in the air that fizzled out into dust against his legs. Her ponytail bobbed and swayed with every movement she made, whisking with the breeze. She sped up, growing smaller and smaller, to the point he had to speed-walk behind her just to see which way she turned. 

Left.  

Left.  

Right.  

Left.  

Right.  

Right.  

No, left.  

Wait a minute.  

Mike had no idea where he was. She had led him to an array of streets with thickly packed single-story houses. No two were alike, sprinkled along the lawns. 

He didn’t care, either. He was better off anywhere else. 

“Hey, what’s your name anyway?” he called. 

She looked back to him, confused at first, and pressed her lips together, tapping her headphones. 

Honestly, he should’ve just gone looking for the place himself. 

After a while, the girl stopped still in the middle of the sidewalk. They were in front of a small blue house. It was weathered a pale, bleachy color with chipping paint along the wood of its porch. A skinny tree overshadowed the whole of the brownish lawn as the sun set. A loose rope and tire swung below it in the wind. She took a step into the dirt but halted as her foot met the ground, staring into the darkened lawn at two people. One by the porch, back to them, hosing a pit of flowering bushes. That looked like Kirk. The other under the tree, completely in shadow. Jeremy. 

Was it happening all over again? 

The girl swung her head around to face him and took a step into the yard. 

“You—” he began. 

She extended her hand, nearly slapping Mike in the face. The girl furiously shook her head, tip-toeing further into the grass, taking large strides, keeping her finger lifted out towards him. She mouthed something to him, all the way past the tree, because Mike obviously looked like someone who could read lips. He took a step forward, utterly confused, and she froze in place. With her arms outstretched like there was something below them to fall into, she waved them loose and frantic, repeatedly pointing to him like Mike knew what she meant. 

The girl’s stare flickered to the side. As if she were a spooked rabbit, she leapt away from the tree, the skirting of her shoes in the dirt the only sound she made. She now held out two hands, trying to push them back, as if they didn’t understand. Frankly, it was the only thing Mike did understand. 

Jeremy, a blurred silhouette, raised his head and waved at Mike. 

Mike did not reciprocate. 

String rubbed against his wrists and pushed on his bandage as he hurriedly pulled it to the side. Mike dug his nails into the waxy coating of the mask as it swayed against his back. Hopefully it was dark enough out here. Hopefully he was far enough away. 

The girl finally turned her back. She stopped right behind Kirk, still shushing with her fingers. She shrunk down, reaching for the length of the hose. 

It was funny how she wanted to trust Mike, after everything he’d done. 

He walked through the yard, setting his good hand free and spreading it over the bark. It chipped and crumbled beneath, splintering his fingertips. He slid down the tree that bent with his weight into the cold, grainy dirt. 

“Hey,” Jeremy whispered. 

“Hi,” he whispered back. 

The girl whipped around. He heard her draw in a breath. 

A jet of water sputtered out into the air. She staggered backwards, her face half-drenched. 

“What the hell?!” Kirk exclaimed. 

“What the hell you!”  

“I thought you were out, Cass!” 

“You didn’t have to attack me!” 

“I didn’t attack you.” 

She pointed to her face. “You are so freaking lame.” 

The girl turned back to them, smiling painfully. So did Kirk, realizing Mike was there. He opened his mouth but stopped, confusion on his face, looking between his hosed sister and the two of them at the tree. 

He came closer, hanging over its shadow. “Long time no see.” 

“Sure.” 

Kirk rested his arm against the bark. “Honestly, I didn’t think you’d come back.” 

“Oh, yeah, just let me go turn off the hose allll by myself then!” the girl shouted. 

Mike tried to stop his voice from quivering, blanketing it with a laugh. “I dunno. I guess I didn’t either.” 

“I’m still using that!” he shouted back to her, sighing. “Cassidy really dragged you out here, of all people?” 

“Is that … a bad thing?” 

Kirk took a few steps backward, shaking his head, keeping his eyes set between the two of them. “Hah. No. You’re both just so stubborn. I really thought she cared less.” Leaning down, he nudged Jeremy with his foot. “We’ve got snacks in the house. Our Mom’s not home yet, so you could crash on the couch if you want.” 

Jeremy nodded vacantly. 

“No, uh, I don’t have to.” It was happening all over again. 

“No, you don’t, but we have pizza rolls.” 

“I … I can’t stay long,” Mike stammered. 

“Sure you can.” 

It was sunset. Dad said they would be leaving late. Though seriously, there was no way he could have genuinely expected Mike to stay with him. Maybe if he’d threatened him. That was only ever over things he cared about. But late was … subjective. Late could’ve been five hours ago. It could’ve been midnight. 

Jesus, he needed a watch. 

“Seriously, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I’ve got tons of shit I can show you. You’ve done worse. I’ve done plenty worse. Just say you were at a friend’s house. Or, y’know, whatever lie works for you. I mean, it’s partly true, right? What’s the worst your parents are gonna do? You just helped break into a house, and they still let you do whatever you want.” 

Stop caving, Mike.  

He was better off like this, anyway. Dad was always right about how he’d turn out. 

Cassidy’s shadow fell over them. A faded green towel with pink and blue hibiscus flowers hung over her shoulder, which she morphed into a ball and threw at Kirk. 

“Have you shown them the mask?” she said flatly. 

She stared at him. And then they stared at him. By some instinct he grabbed at it. His wrists were getting tired. Wait, was that odd? Did they know? He hadn’t been using his hands, surely— 

“What mask?” Jeremy said. 

Heat was creeping into his head. He tried shaking it, nothing. No, he couldn’t move. He scratched the plastic. Could they hear it? Maybe this was all just a setup for— 

“Hey, what mask?” he repeated. 

Stop being an idiot.  

Stop being an idiot.  

Stop being an idiot.  

“You know,” Cassidy started. “The ones they have at—” 

Mike thrust his hand outward. The mask's muzzle caught dust as it swung. They looked taken aback, drawing nearer as he squeezed his eyes shut, hopefully forever. 

The weight on his hand suddenly lifted. 

“Why in the hell have you got this with you?” Kirk said. 

“Shut up.”
“I’m serious.” 

He had it lifted above Mike’s hand, bringing it dangerously close to his own face. But the string still caught on Mike’s fingers. 

“It’s just … dumb merchandise. It’s dumb merchandise that nobody wants anymore. Me too. Seriously, I just got it to throw it away so it doesn’t have to rot on the shelves.” 

“That so?” 

No, actually.  

That’s not mine.  

Where did that come from?  

If only they were that stupid. 

“So you wouldn’t mind if I…” Kirk yanked it into the air. 

Honestly, Mike didn’t know what he was thinking. He reached out. It was just going to solidify what everyone thought. When Kirk only raised it higher, his arm flinched back against his chest. 

There was a soft thud as it fell into the grass. “I’m kidding, dude.” 

Mike’s eyes darted between the three of them. They stared inquisitively, almost innocently, boring holes straight into him. Except for Cassidy, who hid her face in her hands. 

He wanted to throw up right now. 

“It’s cute.” Jeremy got to his knees and shifted away the blades of grass, picking it up. “If you don’t want it, I could—” 

“No. It’s fine. Never mind.” 

Mike wanted to take it from him. He wanted to rip the mask from Jeremy’s hands so badly. He couldn’t even nod to him; tell him he wanted it back. Maybe he was just really, really desperate to seem like a normal human being. It was a lie, anyway. And they knew it. 

So he sat there, his legs curled to his chest, while the mask got passed around. 

Kirk stood up and walked back to the bushes, gathering the hose around his arm. It was still spraying, though faintly. He did not turn around. 

Jeremy laughed slightly, looking at the mask. “I used to really like going there. It was like, the thing, you know? Yeah, of course you know.” 

“Because there’s literally nothing else to do around here.” 

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying!” He set the mask right at Mike’s feet. “When we first moved here, I remember Kirk screaming to eat at the Diner every time we passed it ‘cause of the bright colors and fuzzy animals. Our parents wouldn’t stop taking us after that. It was like, literally the only place we weren’t picky eaters for. Everything else here was so bland, until you guys expanded ‘n stuff.” 

Cassidy stood up and fanned the towel, shaking out dead grass. “You actually liked that food?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Nah, no way. I still wonder what they put in it. It was always so…” her eyes trailed off into the distance, “gummy?” 

“That’d be the preservatives,” Mike muttered. 

Snickering, Jeremy crawled over to spread out the towel as Cassidy let it fall into a crumpled mess. “Man, we’ve got so many tiny prizes split up between the two of us. Cass always wanted the big ones, but I was never patient enough with the arcade machines. Are they rigged? I bet they are.” He pointed back to Mike, down at the mask. “How much was that?” 

“Two hundred fifty,” he said hesitantly. 

“I guess you have loads of time if you’re stuck there all day.” 

Mike swallowed, shaking his head. “I stole it.” 

They both looked at him. 

“Took it right from the prize shelf when no one was there. A couple of kids protested, but what were they gonna do?” 

“That’d be impressive if it was, I don’t know, anything but a fox mask,” Cassidy said. 

“Oh, you have no idea how angry my dad would be if he saw me do it.” He cleared his throat, slamming a hand to his chest. “Michael, how could you waste three whole dollars, what kind of insolent son did I raise? We’re surely going in because of you!” 

They giggled together on the towel, and if he thought hard enough he almost wanted to as well. 

Kirk raised his voice over the flowing water. “That’s funny. Do it again.” 

“Do what?” Having basically huddled himself behind the tree, Mike craned his neck forward. When there was no answer, he knew he was in denial, and probably sounded like an idiot right now. So, he flipped on The Accent. “Impersonate my father?” 

Kirk nodded. 

With a sly grin, he stood up. “Bloody hell, what’s all of this? Shouldn’t you be in school, doing maths, God forbid, picking up a book? When I was your age, I already had twelve patents and a Guinness World Record!” Now, he felt himself pacing across the yard, raising his voice, flapping his hands about in every which way. “‘Oh, but it’s Saturday! You see, it’s summertime now!’ ‘Mister, why do you sound so funny? Have you and your family got some sort of sinus infection that makes them think they’re better than everyone else?’” 

His words stumbled to a close, and he needed to say more, so much more. He could’ve gone on for hours. But when he looked back, the others had their heads turned to the darkening street. 

Maybe he’d just let his guard down, being here. 

Maybe he should’ve thought this through a little more. 

Yeah. That one. 

Because from across the lawn, he heard Charlie’s voice: friendly, faint. 

“Mike?” 

And it scared the shit out of him. 

Mike turned around. She stood on the edge of the sidewalk, her legs splayed like she had been turned to stone mid pace. Her silhouette fluttered in the wind. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find her face, or any indication of how badly he’d just messed up. With his arms outstretched foolishly, theatrically over his head, of course she knew it was him. He was obvious. Everything he ever did was obvious. 

It only took a few moments for Charlie to move. She kept her head down, packing her arms to her sides, and took a cautious step into the lawn. 

“What’s going on?” she voiced. 

Lie.  

What’s the lie?  

Come on, think. She’s right here.  

What’s the lie?  

“Friend's house.” Mike said. 

“Oh.” She’s seeing through you, you know it.  

Charlie waved invisibly to the others before coming towards him. Her long hair trailed behind her, a frayed mess. She smiled something warm and artificial to him. He could tell. It was the way she carried herself that gave it away, whenever she went small. 

Suddenly, Mike got the urge to stop her, or at least, stop her from reaching him. He fumbled out of his stillness. His heart raced. He began to trip over the uneven grass. He heard the hose thud to the ground. Everything was going to end here. 

Everything. 

Kirk had gone up to greet her. 

She looked between the two of them. “…Hello.” 

With wide eyes Charlie tried to pull herself towards him. Kirk opened his mouth to speak, but she interrupted him, still staring Mike down. 

“It’s really late.” She came closer. Her voice trembled slightly, turning to a whisper, “Don’t you think you should … get going? I mean, I could walk with you. But I don’t know if, um…” 

Mike slightly shook his head. “No. No. I wasn’t gonna be here long, I was just going to—” 

“Don’t you wanna stay awhile? I’m sure your girlfriend wouldn’t mind.” Kirk lowered his voice. “Girlfriend, do you mind?” 

Charlie stood still. She kept glancing at him, trying to form words, like he could do any better. 

“I’m not,” she muttered. 

“Sister?” 

Charlie was smart. Charlie knew what she was doing. Charlie would leave. 

“That’s crazy. I swear you told me you didn’t have any friends.” 

She took a step back, grabbing his hand in the process. 

“Don’t say that to him!” 

Kirk put up his hands. “It’s a joke. Jeez.” He looked Mike in the eye, grinning. “Or is it?” 

Charlie would leave.  

She whispered, “Why are you doing this again?” 

He couldn’t respond. 

When she let go of him, warmth rushed back into his fingers. She marched out into the middle of the yard, her face contorted with frustration. “Why are you doing this again?” 

Kirk shrugged. 

Her gaze darted to him, and she let out a deep sigh. “I don’t know if you understand, but it’s not right to keep … pulling people down like this. He’s not in a place where he can just … Get away! Scot-free!” 

Kirk suppressed a laugh, cocking his head. 

“Oh no, am I being too mean to you, Mike?” 

He looked down to his sneakers. His sneakers and his jeans. Then back to the tree. They were watching. Back to his sneakers. His sneakers and his jeans. A few specks of dirt. One, two, three, four… 

“Girl. Look. Listen. I haven’t done anything to this guy.” He swiped his arm right above Mike’s shoulder. “He’s a natural.” 

Five, six, seven, eight… 

“You got him to do something —he almost went to jail because of you!” 

“And I told him I was sorry.” He gestured to Mike. “Yeah?” 

“That doesn’t negate the fact you endangered his life!” 

“ He endangered his life.” 

“You know, I think you both should probably stop…” a voice quivered in the shadows. 

“Because he was vulnerable!” 

“You know what: this is boring,” Kirk backed away, putting a foot on the porch steps, “and I’m going to go get a bag of chips. You know what you should do?” 

Charlie dug her heel into the dirt, drilling down and twisting her knee. A tattered seam on her jacket she tugged so hard her knuckles had flushed white. With the same intensity, she kept flicking the ends of her hair back and forth, curling and tangling them over her fingers. She finally met Mike’s eyes, and surprise washed over her. 

There was a creak as the front door opened. “Leave my property.” 

And shut. 

Mike knew what the risks were when he came here. Mike knew what the risks were when he kept coming here. That he may end up in a wooden box buried in the earth, or locked in a cell for the rest of his life. Or as someone so deplorable even Charlie would realize she was wasting her time. In a way, it had excited him. Getting burrs and sticks snagged on his clothes. Pushing himself. Feeling scared, but not in a bad way. There was a strange, hypnotic fascination in watching your own blood pulse down the grooves of your skin, when it’s all numbed out of you. And strangely, nobody had ever understood that but him, until a few weeks ago. No matter how hard she thought she was trying. 

She didn’t move but still rigidly flexed her hands, staring in all directions. With a dark queasiness in his gut, Mike stepped up to her, though he kept his distance. He hoped the sound of his feet dragging through the grass would be evidence enough that he was here. He was trying. Charlie lifted her head towards him, whether intentionally or not, but lit up ever so slightly. Her hands fell to her sides, incomplete thoughts forming restlessly on her lips. 

It was terrifying. 

And there was no other way. 

“Just leave, Charlie.” 

“What?” 

“I said you should leave.” His words fell into a rapid mumble. 

Charlie had come closer now, paradoxically. She anxiously shook her head.  

“No.” 

Why did she even care at this point? Why would anyone go this far?  

Sharply taking in a breath, she raised her voice. “Not unless you come with me.” 

Charlie let out her hand, and it shook against his. She watched him for an answer. Mike drew back. 

“I’m not doing that.” 

He turned away. 

He started to walk. 

“Why?” Charlie trailed him, grabbing his hand. “Where are you going?” 

“You obviously wouldn’t get it, Charlie.” 

Mike shook her free, turning away, again, but before he knew it, she was standing in front of him, again. 

“I just want to help you!” 

“You think this is helping me?” he retorted. 

She went quiet. “What do you mean?” 

He was sick from lying. 

He was sick of her. 

And that stupid, anxious smile she wore. 

He could tear it right off. 

He really could. 

“Do you seriously think you can magically make me feel better? That there’s some sort of secret code that’s going to make it easier for you to deal with me?” 

It was like he expected, she wouldn’t answer. Charlie looked away. A pinch of anger grew between her eyes. When she spoke, it was small and calculated, like one faulty slip of her hand, and she’d be setting off the bomb: “You’re not a bad person, Mike.” 

She’d better stop.  

“Really? I’m not? Explain this. Explain this, Charlie. Go on. Explain it.” Mike paced away from her, enveloped back in the shadows of the familiar yard. The leaves ruffled and whistled faintly here, he hadn’t noticed. But Charlie just stood there where he’d left her. And the others, they were still under the tree, trapped between. Charlie hadn’t realized. She hadn’t cared. All she did was stare at him, paralyzed, from across the grass. She didn’t even open her mouth. Why? He felt himself walk across the yard again. Why wouldn’t she just get angry at him? The one person who accidentally let her guard down, she had so many things to hate him for. Yeah, he’d break the facade. He’d yell, he’d shove, he’d curse her out. She’d have no excuses. He found himself stopped right back where he started. “Explain how I broke into a house! Explain how I’m shouting in your face! Tell me Charlie!” 

She still did nothing, apart from a trembling nod. 

Mike crossed his arms tight against his ribs, and they shook so bad he couldn’t hold them up. 

“I can’t,” she blurted out. “You’re wrong.” 

Blood thudded in his ears. “I. Feel. Alive!” 

“Well you aren’t!” 

“I already know that!” 

“I didn’t mean—” 

“Just quit lying and tell me you hate me like everybody else!” 

“I don’t!” 

“Yes you do. Admit it! You hate me—” 

“SHUT UP!”  

She stunned him, baring her teeth. 

“Just shut up!” she cried. “I get it, okay? No, maybe I don’t. I don’t know! But it’s not fair. It’s not fair! You get it for this kind of stuff, you get it and nobody else does. I know, it—it doesn’t make sense. I can stay out. I can have friends. Is that … is that a bad thing? Is that wrong? I don’t know, Mike. I try to understand. I do. I really do. I just can’t … imagine it. I mean, how come? Why do you do this, huh? When will you stop believing what you tell yourself? Because I’m terrible at this, you said it! Everything just keeps happening and happening and happening, and I can’t do anything about it.” 

“Just stop caring, then!” 

“Let me finish!” 

“No!” 

“Why are you so selfish?” Charlie’s voice quivered. “Mike, I was on a walk, I didn’t—I didn’t come to antagonize you. Oh my God, you know, I actually wanted to meet these people at first. I thought it would help—” 

“Why are you such a coward?” Mike’s stomach churned. 

“I’m not.” 

“Yeah. You are.” 

Tears finally welled in the corners of her eyes. “Shut up.” 

Mike drew in a breath. 

“Shut up, Mike.” 

A high-pitched choke escaped her throat. She turned to the street. 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I came here.” 

She stepped away, breaking into a run, disappearing against the black night. 

When Mike looked back, all three were there, huddled together on the porch steps. He wasn’t aware of any change. It made him even weaker in the knees, but he walked up to them. They didn’t react; they didn’t move. They didn’t say anything. But surely it would come back to them? If anything, in the long run, this was going to be a good thing. 

Something lumpy crushed beneath his foot. A dirty, deflated bag. He leaned down to pick it up, the mask lamentably preserved by its side, grit packed over its logo, but by some grace sparing the disgusting chewy cylinders within. 

It really was night now. The dark reds and oranges that had hung from the edge of his skin, illuminated the road and what was past it, had been swapped for a dark fuzziness. Surely there was nothing he could do but follow her, now. He would just wait a minute, then catch her in the dark. Follow behind, where she couldn’t see. Take a left, where she took a right. Or wherever these streets led. Then he’d look for the maroon Eldorado. 

Everything was a gamble. Nothing was worth it. Not anymore. 

Mike pinched the hole closed and wrapped up the bag, throwing it to Cassidy. 

“I hope we can go soon. Maybe we can go tomorrow. I don’t know why he didn’t let us go. Mike never wants to go. I told Daddy I wanted to see her, because I know she looks so pretty. She’s got this dress, and she twirls it and it shimmers. Did you know that? Yes, it’s covered in glitter, or maybe diamonds. I think diamonds. That’s more majestic. Did you know she was ‘discontinued?’ That’s what he told me. Maybe we have to wait because she’s needing a clean up, to be all continued again. That would make a lot of sense! Oh, I can’t wait. I hope he gets home soon. Would you stay up with me? We’ll do it together.” 

“I sort of liked Foxy.” 

It had been a few minutes since he came through the door. His siblings tussled around on the carpet. The pale television burned through his retinas. Somewhere, a faucet dripped. 

“Well, that’s silly. She’s probably all new and shiny, why wouldn’t you?” 

“I just don’t. He was better.” 

He curled against the sofa’s arm, pressing his fingernails down the soft skin of his temple. Liz battered with a toy brachiosaurus the blue block tower Evan had just finished stacking, coiling back to lay on that oversized cat she’d won too long ago. 

“He was all ugly and scraggly and broke all the time! I bet he attracted bugs and rats and smelled like an old wet carcass!”

“That’s very rude.”

“It can’t hear me. It doesn’t have feelings.”

The television hummed the muffled volume of a passionate argument, a man, a woman, flailing their bodies and choking on silent words, gilded white and black. One of Mom’s shows, turned down because of them. She rested next to him, wrapped in a knit white blanket, staring blankly through the screen.

Mom shifted her legs, raising her head to look at him. “You’re really not going to eat?” Though he only noticed through the corner of his peripheral: a blurry face he had no intention to sharpen. 

Mike shook his head. 

He heard Mom let in and out a saturated sigh. “It’s there, anyway.” 

He gripped the arm harder. He needed to get to his room, and quickly, too. There was something paralyzing about this sofa, or maybe the people around it. Lack thereof. If Mike could just get off his sorry— 

“It’s kind of nice, isn’t it? Getting to be by ourselves.” Mom chuckled lightly. “Less I have to do. It’s funny how that works.” 

The response, it echoed out of him. 

“Yeah.” 

She leaned across the couch. “I’m not mad, you know. If it were me, and it is me, I’d let you go.” 

Finally, he broke eye contact with the no one of the arm. Mom with her knees to her chest, blanket breaking loosely away from her, saw him with a numb expression. When she was sad, a dark crease fell between her eyes, a nearly scornful look. When she was angry, it would grow. Today, apparently, Mom felt nothing. 

“I think your father is just…” she tucked a wave of hair behind her ear, “worried. He’s forgotten what it’s like. Being young, breaking rules.” 

Mike hugged his stomach as her eyes searched the room for what else she could tell him that would make it all better. Somewhere, a faucet dripped. Liz and Evan chattered and mauled plastic toys. 

“He really does mean well. He’s just got an unhandsome way of showing it, I know.” Mom stifled another laugh, sending her hand to her lips. 

She turned to the television, washed out. Her freckles, usually invisible, were kindled in its light. 

“He’ll come around…” she said wistfully, trailing off. Her stare became distant. 

A chill made its way through Mike’s body. It travelled from his bad forearm, down to his shoulder, blooming through his chest. But the room was not cold. How much was this thing taking from him? He needed to sleep. No, there was dinner. No, neither. It wasn’t that complex. He could stay here—let it flow out of him. It was jitters, after all. Jitters. Soon he would figure it all out. Once he got the simple damn courage to be what he knew he was. 

A hand pushed at his sneaker. 

Liz peered at him. 

“Why did you take so long?” 

He narrowed his eyes. So did she. 

“Why?” she repeated. 

He still didn’t answer. She frowned, her nostrils flaring. She leaned down and came back up, dangling the mask between her hands, staring intently. 

“Where’s the sugar marshmallows?” 

Mike stood up and swiped the mask away from her, walking to the banister. “I didn’t get your goddamn marshmallows.” 

“Hey!” The pitter-patter of grip socks trailed him up the steps, through the hallway. “I told you I was making a deal! You have to because I have no money! It’s literally impossible!”  

“Leave me alone.” 

A door slam had never been so satisfying. He waited with his back to the wall, hovering his fingers over the knob in the obscure darkness. 

Her tiny, tired, frustrated breaths would not relent. She whispered. “Maybe you just don’t care about us anymore.” 

And then there was silence. 

Mike pressed his back to the door. 

Light leaked into his room from the window, the only light, a faint wisp from the porch, cold and dim, funnelled downward by the blinds. Aside from the clock, fifteen hours behind, that still read “4:01” from when the power had cut, a red pinhole cutting through the black. His eyes would not adjust, but he would not turn on the light. Faintly, the room smelled like left out nachos. Mike twisted the mask’s thread around his wrist. 

Knock, knock-knock!  

Mike flinched. 

“Hello,” Evan said, after a moment. 

If he knew what was good for him, he’d leave. He’d leave on his own like she did. 

“The television is very loud.” 

Evan shifted against the door, continually mumbling something or other. Then, he didn’t. He didn’t speak for a long while. Mike began wondering if he really had left. 

“I think you’re alright.” His voice piped back up, though weakly. “Is that bad?” 

The mask buzzed a striking dark red against the formless carpet. An idea struck him. 

“Do you think I could come in now?” 

The thread tugged against the back of his head, begging to break away. His own breath was stuffy against his skin. The mask itched, too. 

But hell, it would all be worth it. 

Mike clasped the door knob, pulling it hard enough it could’ve come off right then and there, hearing the click. He let his face creep through the slit, first, second, third plastic tooth rhythmically grazing the wooden frame. Evan’s head slowly came up from the cradle he had kept it in, and the shock settled. 

Flinging open the door, pouncing, arms raised, roaring, growling, about to attack, eat him alive. Below, he was stuck still on his back, hands against his face, heavy tears forming in his eyes. 

What’s with the face? It’s me!  

Mike leaned behind into the shadows, stumbling onto his backside, mask still strapped to his face. Evan slowly got to his knobbly knees, wide eyed and tear stained, staring down the carpet, fidgeting with his hands. He would’ve expected a sob by now. If anything, he shook so bad, he was probably bottling it all in somewhere. Evan glanced to him.  

Mike laughed deep and quiet, an uncontrollable urge, but it took so much of his energy he had to stop himself, sputtering down into a cough. 

When he came to, Evan was gone. 

Good. 

He should be scared. He should be angry. 

They all should.

I’d like to think I knew what I was getting myself into.

In a way, sure. Yeah.

There were consequences, and I knew those consequences.

I embraced those consequences.

The ones I came up with in my head.

I was a kid. I was naive.

I didn’t know.

Chapter Text

Severed and Untethered

My Dad was the only person I could never bring myself to hurt. 

It’s silly in hindsight. 

The basement seemed far away from the rest of the world. It was older, darker, dustier, meaner. Quieter. Every now and then, the loose board of the dining room would creak above him, he would hear muttering voices, feel the different footfalls as they shook the weakening framework. The same went for above, where everything was pristine and prim, hiding a vast and empty chasm, illuminated by remnants of the dim Victorian lamp that travelled up the tight stairwell. File cabinets lined the already crowding walls, so full they could not close, and brimmed with the crushed tabs of yellow and white manila folders. Misaligned piling books teetered in their mahogany cases, like any jab of the finger would send them one by one to the ground. The room widened into a garage refitted with rows and rows of steel shelves and a working table covered completely with tools, mechanical parts, and loose papers. Along the peeling wallpaper were posters and newspaper clippings, some framed, spilling out from the corkboard. Headlines like: “Local Restaurant Reshapes The Playing Field” among bright cartoon caricatures and dated advertisements. Mike sat in an undersized folding chair, pinned in the brightest corner of the room. The lamp buzzed faintly through his ears, and it messed with his thoughts. Across from him was the mask, propped against a copy of The Double Helix, the only other thing that hadn’t been cleared from the desk and set discreetly under the shadow of the wicker bin. 

After the first time he’d pulled out the mask, no one had noticed Evan’s objective paranoia, cowering behind furniture, puffy eyed. That was a few weeks ago. It was like this for days, while he kept hoping someone would come up to him and give him a stern slap on the wrist, pull the kid’s tear stained cheeks away from him—anything. So he did it again—he did it again and again and again. The second time, unimaginatively like the first, the third he burst from the television, the fourth from the end of a hallway, the fifth, he began standing behind doors and convincing him they were locked. There were so many times, they bled together in his mind. It was so methodical, so predictable. He would wait, and he would pounce; he didn’t even have to do that. Eventually, he couldn’t do anything but scare the kid. When they passed each other, ate together at the table, did so much as exist in the same house, Evan would freeze up with glazed eyes like he had just watched someone die. 

Still, no one noticed. 

The door hinges rasped, and quick, heavy footsteps echoed down the stairs, suddenly slowing. Dad appeared first by the rim of his reading glasses, wavering on the last step. He came into the light and leaned back into the plush armchair across from Mike, without a word. 

He rested his hands on the desk, pressing them into a pyramid, shifting a finger against the mask. Mike could feel a cold smile eating away at his stoic rehearsal the longer he kept his head down. Why wouldn’t he just admit it? Why did he always have to play these stupid games? 

But everyone had changed, whether they liked it or not. He’d made a pact with himself the night he ditched Charlie that he was going to stay all isolated until they practically whined and moaned to claw him out the front door. It wouldn’t have taken long for outsiders to look back at the perfect facade and find it impossible that someone like him could ever be the son of a family like that. Even her. Not long ago Uncle Henry came over, and so had she. Mike had gotten no good look because he bolted up the stairs to glare at his bedroom ceiling. He knew she would come knocking. Hours passed to prove him wrong. And somehow, it was so overwhelmingly frustrating. He really did want to hate her. 

“It’s peculiar weather we’ve had lately,” Dad’s voice was laden with niceness. “The soil’s not made for this kind of precipitation.” 

When Mike met his gaze, it was deep-set, pinched by a smile, creases gathering on the edges of his eyes. 

It’s your turn to talk, Michael, said each crease on his face. 

He had so much he could say. He had so much he could sit here and not say. 

Fine, thank you. The weather is ass, and so are you.  

It didn’t matter. 

No one would notice. 

Over those weeks, Mike developed a way of pulling off his stunts in the living room, or any open area, because that way anyone who saw him couldn’t bring up the excuse that they didn’t see it, they would’ve stopped it, honest! His favourite spot to catch Evan had been from behind the television, where he would fall back, completely exposed, and Mom would drop what she was doing in another room and come to hang stiffly by a corner, legs tensed to move. For all the times he’d done it, she had never spoken a word to them. Minutes would pass, then hours, and any trace of fear was washed clean from her face like she had never been there—or happened to forget. 

Dad let out a sigh. He freed his hands and placed one on the mask. 

“I just don’t understand…” He stared at it, furrowing his brow. “Why do you take pleasure from other people’s pain?” 

Mike felt himself pulling at his gauze. 

Dad’s skin was drained of the little color it had. The hair he would neatly comb across the back of his head until each strand lay lifeless now draped raggedly to shadow his eyes. His grey button-up shirt sunk against him. If anything, Dad probably wanted nothing more than to sit here in morbid isolation, too. It sucked that they had to go and ruin each other’s fun. 

“That poor boy has never done anything wrong in his life,” Dad continued. He turned his head wistfully to the decrepit yellow wallpaper, then his eyes shot back to Mike. “Tell me, why are you so intent on making me angry?” 

Dad picked up the mask, waving it, twisting it front and back through his fingers. He flashed him the ugly fox’s mug, over and over, as if taunting him with the choice. He nearly looked bored. 

For every opportunity he’d had to do something, Dad had turned away. He was always “Too busy.” Or so he kept telling them and telling them. In the evenings, the basement door held shut, a muffled voice leaking from the gap. When he was around, he would only care enough to slide him and Evan a look of disapproval, sheer denial, and turn back to whatever the hell else he had time for: taxes, a brand new model, finishing his tea or his wine or his coffee, things too complex for their tiny heads to understand, or the birthday party. The birthday party that wasn’t even here yet, that he was pouring his time and his soul and his money into. It was ironic, really, when Mike was currently tearing half of it to shreds. 

“You know, Michael, it occurs to me that you and I have had this conversation before, in this exact same room.” 

Dad gently laid the mask down against the burnished wood, sitting back. He reached down and a drawer rolled loose in front of him. He came up to hold a little black pen with a flaking gold trim. 

“I had higher hopes for you. You know I only do what’s necessary.” 

He clicked it once, twice. 

“For someone so brash in his element, you really do lose it all down here. You know, Michael, it almost makes me sad for you. But you don’t want that, do you?” There was something dark inside the gentleness he plastered over his grey eyes. There always was, but Mike could never put it into words, put those words into anything he could use to walk out the door before he sunk further into the hell he’d made for himself. 

Mike opened his mouth. 

“I’m sorry.” 

“I know, Michael.” He leaned forward, as if studying him, dangling the pen by its ink tip. “Accidents happen.” 

Of course, Evan had known when his birthday was. He wasn’t stupid. Though it was none about him; hardly, to be generous. He’d get to show up. He’d get his portion of the cake he wasn’t allowed to decorate. There was just something different about Elizabeth. A familiar flavour of haughtiness, that got all the burdens stockpiled onto her. When the two of them were smaller, she’d become the favourite, anyone would’ve fallen for it. It was how she thrived here. And yet Liz was so completely oblivious Mike had to show her for himself what the world thought of her twin brother. After the first few times he scared Evan, she began to stalk Mike in the halls through the corner of his eye, hovered round his door past her own bedtime. When he’d spoken to her, she would yell, tugging at the ends of her hair as she shook its wavy mass, grimacing, gnashing her teeth, storming off to some other place. It didn’t take long for her to try Dad as well, tugging on the cuff of his sleeve as he worked at the dining room table, nodding off at the basement door. 

Only then did Dad notice. 

And now, here they fucking were.  

Mike’s throat tightened. “They’re not accidents.” 

“What would you call them, then?” 

“I like seeing him cry.” 

“That’s a shame.” 

“Just tell me already.” 

Dad would not relent. He raised an eyebrow, saying nothing. 

“What I have to do,” Mike added. 

Dad slowly leaned his body over the desk, and it shuddered from the pressure of his arms. His eyes drew near and hovered above the top of Mike’s head. He wanted to shrink against the back of his seat, but he couldn’t find the courage. “Bury this worthless shit,” Dad lowered his glare, nose to nose. “I never want to see it on your face again.” 

“No.” Mike swallowed 

“Why not?” 

“I don’t want to.” 

“You know I can always tell when you lie.” 

His words stung against Mike’s cheek. When he spoke, his breath was cold, minty, masking cigarette smoke. 

“I’m gonna keep doing it. I’ll just go buy another one. You can’t make me.” 

He retreated back into the armchair, crossing his arms over his chest. “I can’t make you?” 

“No.” 

“You really were born with no manners,” Dad whispered. 

These disgusting walls were closing in. He needed to scream. He needed to roll out of this rickety chair, crawl on his stomach below the table legs and fallen papers into the shadow of the stairwell, struggle on the knob, because by all means it was locked. Dad knew better. Then he’d just belt and hound at the splintering wood as footsteps echoed behind. 

Just let it out already. I can see it. You don’t hide it. You don’t even try. Stop lying to me. Tell me what I’ve done. Raise your voice. Hit me. Anything.  

“I know,” Mike whispered back. 

Dad fiddled the black pen in his hand. He pushed it open and picked up the mask by its string, eyeing its hollow inside. 

“The rules you live by are so alien to me, Michael. Some days I look at you and wonder if you really are my son.” Scratches rung against the surface. Dad moved his hand swiftly over the back of the face, words hidden by its rim. He pulled the pen gracefully, stopping and starting, looping it back and forth across the surface, muttering half to himself. “Some days you’re so docile, like you don’t exist. Like you have convinced yourself into obscurity. I ask myself, ‘Am I speaking to a wall?’ And then you go off ripping us to shreds, one by one. It confuses me.” He looked up from the mask. “What are you, Michael?” 

His heart thrummed around his chest with the force of an engine. “I don’t know.” 

“And how unfortunate it is. How unfortunate you have to do these things. Oh, I know. You put on a show so that someone might hear you,” He smiled, bringing up his hand to drop the pen. It rolled quietly to the other end of the desk. “But no one listens. Do you know why no one listens?” Dad slid the mask slowly across the dark brown wood, tipping it around. Over the eyeholes, Mike began to make out a vague, scratchy cursive. 

“Read it,” Dad said. 

Mike took the thing, holding it by its string. The words stretched out in an arc so harshly the letters dug into the plastic, ink bleeding out along the edges, staining the inside in tiny, snaking patterns. A residue was left on the edges of the letters, building up where the pen would dig. Like red dirt. Mike stared at the sentence, over and over, he couldn’t break contact. It kept reeling him back in. 

His wrists started shaking. 

Mike looked up, and the room was spinning. “I won’t do it anymore. I won’t. I promise,” he stammered. 

Dad soared from the armchair. Was it finally over? 

He felt fingers clasp around his jaw. 

The desk shook as they lifted him forward, out of the chair. 

“Read. It.” 

His grip shook against the bone. It was disorienting. The way his thumb fell, pressing cold against his larynx, Mike could tell he was restraining himself. From what, there was no telling. Mike didn’t want to know. He heard himself panting, his breath carrying up his throat in a shiver. His cheeks pushed between his teeth as they chattered. Scratching, stinging, bruising. Saliva bubbling against the wounds, dripping down his chin. He was a terrible, pathetic sight. 

Mike looked down at the mask. 

His eyes began to water. 

Everything was blurry. 

“I am a desperate, malignant piece of shit,” he murmured. 

The grip slowly faded. A soreness seeped into its place. 

His eyes, they watered more, and it stung. It stung so badly. He curled against the chair, holding his mouth. He shut his eyes, but the feelings wouldn’t go away. Water ran down his sore cheeks. A sour metal he could taste between his teeth. 

I’m still here.  

I’m still breathing.  

Footsteps. They receded, hanging again on the first step of the stairwell. That step would always creak, as well as the fourth, the fifteenth, the eighteenth. 

And just like that, he was alone again. 

Just like before. 

Everything was the same. 

Nothing had changed. 

Quickly he left from his seat, following up the stairwell to find an open door and the murmur of voices, a blast of cool air, all that peeled away the dank oppressiveness. He didn’t dare shut it behind him. Mike went to his room, pressing the lock so carefully into place that it did not make a sound, and he turned on his lamp, crouching against the leg of the nightstand, again clutching the mask, he nearly forgot it was with him. Did he mean to bring it? Would it have been better to forget it? Maybe it was instinct. It was. He knew it. He ran over the words, over and over. Over and over. He felt his eyes running left to right, back and forth. Suddenly, his heart leapt and he dropped it, throwing open the nightstand. He looked inside the drawer. He picked up the mask again, his hands numb from a shaking he could hardly register. Mike gently put it inside, nestled next to a pair of scissors and a few crumpled pieces of paper. It flattened from the pressure when he pushed it closed. But it fit. The words were gone. 

One of the first things Dad had planned for their birthday, which he had announced nearly six months prior, was getting Liz her own room. There was a spare guest room fitted with nothing but a mirror and a few paintings, greyed with dust. Now it was changing. The walls stripped bare, a vacant hole where the cold bed had once stood. Cardboard boxes stuffed the corners. Some opened, some spilling with flashy color. 

Mike, crouched to his knees, was shuffling through these boxes, piled unevenly over one another, blocking the light of the window. He had made a habit of throwing them behind his back and their contents to his left, but each pile was overflowing towards him. Decorations, dolls and figurines, a plush butterfly, great many sets of crayons. He stood up, squeezing between them with an odd sense of restraint. 

“Please don’t mess that up.” 

Liz was rocking in place, cross-legged on the thin grey rug where the bed had been. 

“You’re things are fine. They’ve lasted this long,” he said. 

“You act so careless, though.” 

“Because it isn’t a big deal. Your things are fine.” 

“I don’t know. I don’t like it.” 

“Don’t like what?” 

She drew in a breath, then frowned. “I … don’t know.” Liz gazed down at her socks, then around the room. ”Why does it matter? What do you want?” 

He had no interest in her fantasies. Mike sighed, audibly enough, and turned around to the rest of the cardboard boxes. He pulled one out, halfway full with crumpled notebook pages and premature drawings, and began the process all over again. 

Desperate.  

“Hey, I’m … I’m talking to you! We are talking!” 

Mike slouched as he held a piece of crayon vomit with a faded stain at the corner. It slipped from his hand, into the box. Liz was on her knees now, restlessly craning her neck to get a better look at him. Mike met her gaze. “Do you … just want to help me?” 

For a moment, Liz froze. Her lip was quivering. “I don’t know.” It looked like she wanted to continue, but she went silent. 

Mike curled up against the pile of undone boxes. It really was amazing that anyone would go to this length. Sorting by toys, photographs, art supplies, ten, twenty boxes, wrapping them nearly with tape, carrying them only down the hall, when anything less would’ve gotten them just as far. 

It was almost like he wanted Evan to feel small. 

“Do you think I’ll still be able to see him in there? Or, do you think this room will be big enough for sleepovers?” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Maybe we can trick Daddy, and I can get him in here all the time, like a stowaway.” 

Within the lumpy pandemonium, a bushy, clumped tail dyed pink and blue jutted out like a wire. He knew that thing anywhere, not on his own accord. 

“I still don’t understand why it is,” Liz said faintly. 

He also knew that wasn’t meant for his ears. 

Mike bent over to wrestle the toy cat free. It wouldn’t budge when he tried tugging its tail, and he felt it shake the pile from way down at its base. 

“I’m sorry Mike!” she declared. “I think you just make me all angry now. I get all angry and then I can’t stop it. I’m sorry.” 

There really was no point in arguing with her. 

There never had been. 

It didn’t take long for Dad to come back. He’d just been away for a short time, to “carry up supplies.” Truly, that was the only reason Mike was here in the first place. Feigning enthusiasm always left him better off when Dad had something to orchestrate. So it was comforting, the absence of a looming presence behind his shoulders, even with his anxious sister taking his place. But it was broken so abruptly. First it was his voice in the hallway, then he hung within the doorway holding some long rod, a roller, a paint bucket, and she leapt from the cradle of her legs, babbling half to him, the rest to herself. 

Mike slipped out of the bedroom. 

A warm light leaked dimly into the hallway from her old room, far across at the banister. Their old room. It was all Evan’s now. Soon, the little pink bed would be dragged out to press back down on the imprinted carpet. And then, on another birthday, it would be replaced with a bigger one. Mike travelled quietly to the edge of the door, and tensely, he drummed his fingers along the frame. Faint rustles echoed from inside. He couldn’t tell what. 

When Mike edged his nose out from behind the frame, he saw Evan lying on the floor. Belongings were strewn out around him, his chest of stuffed things tumbled over and hanging open. Before, the room had looked like a turf war; it was dinosaurs for a few months, then it wasn’t, then it was again, then she’d hang fake ivy from the curtains, let it fall over her princess teepee, and he’d cram his action figures on shelves neither of them could reach. Any trace of Liz was gone, now. The walls, split down the middle, stripped bare. Evan clutched something between his arms. He shuffled through the toys and objects on the carpet, picked them up, gave them a second’s inspection, and whisked them away in random directions, where he’d already formed a few things that could’ve been considered piles. 

Taking a step into the light, Mike said, as casually as he could, “What’re you doing?”  

Evan flinched backward and froze. 

“Sorting,” he mumbled. 

Evan constricted himself, pulling up his knees, squeezing the thing to his chest. He pulled his fingers against his dark hair, sweeping it behind his ears. A little blotch of red discoloration ran to the edge of his forehead, and a moulding scar crept out from just behind the hanging strands. He’d hid it well. This was the first time Mike had seen it, since it happened. 

He almost felt bad for him. 

Almost. 

“Why are you not helping?” Evan asked. 

There wasn’t a point to this. Neither of them wanted to be here. 

Desperate.  

Mike slunk back against the wall out of the way of the light. The shrill murmur of his sister echoed out of the other room, and again, like an intruder in his own home, he hung against the frame of her door and pulled back his unbrushed hair so that its wild flyaways wouldn’t give him away just yet. 

Unnoticed, Mike walked in. 

Dad was muttering to himself and circling around the boxes while she trailed him and nervously danced about. He stopped, glaring. “Off somewhere?” 

The lie slipped out easily. “Bathroom.” 

Mike paced over to the two piles he’d left as inconspicuously as he could. And he got back to work. He tuned them both out, for what it was worth. For as long as he could. 

“Hard worker. You seem to be in better spirits,” Dad said. 

“Hard worker? What’dyou mean ‘hard worker?’ He’s been a bum this whole time!”  

“Doing fantastic.” Mike turned back. 

Dad watched him with curiosity from behind a stack of boxes, but he smiled, genuinely, like nothing was wrong. “I’m pleased to hear—” 

One of Liz’s ear-splitting caterwauls interrupted his retort, and she flung herself from one end of the room to the other, landing at the foot of the door, wrapping her arms around her brother, who’d been perched outside, glum and stiff, so tightly that he dragged along with her, fidgeting and squirming in her hold as she showed him inside. 

“You did it! You came! I’m so happy you came!” When she let go, Evan let out an exasperated cough. “Isn’t it so nice? It’s so space-y!” 

“Sure.” 

“There’s the room for the bed, there’s the part for the dresser, there’s where your waterbed can go!” 

“Yeah.” 

“Stop looking sad. Don’t you like it?” 

“I dunno. Yes I do.” 

“I told you we would have sleepovers.” 

“Sure.” 

“We get to be independent grown-ups now. With secret, private lives from each other.” 

“I don’t want to be a grown-up. I don’t want to be alone.” 

“That’s silly. Everybody grows up.” 

“No, I won’t.” 

“Yes you will, dummy. Stop worrying. You look so worried and it makes me sad. This is a really really really good thing that is really really really good for us.” 

“Sorry. Yeah.” 

It’d always been like this, as far back as he could remember. It was something like the matching moles on their cheeks she used to prove they were twins. It was something like the great divide in what used to be their room. He didn’t know, really. Liz and Evan were separate people, but at the same time, how much of that severance was artificial? Well, she didn’t seem to give a damn about it. Maybe Evan was just shaken out of his sense. Maybe it’d be a good idea to stop giving him so much sympathy. He’d get over it. This was life. 

A painted metal rod fell in front of Mike’s legs. He looked up from the boxes and above his shoulder towered Dad. He stared down blankly, just long enough to turn away the second Mike registered he was there. Dad walked slowly away, towards the door, and was gone.  

The rod teetered along the floor, brushing against his foot. It was for a set of curtains. Of course. Mike was blocking the window, and any amount of work that could be saddled onto him was a net positive. 

He stood up, letting it roll forward. 

Neither of them noticed. 

Malignant.  

Evan tucked his hands behind his back, his eyes darting all over the room. “I don’t get that. I don’t get how it’s supposed to be a good thing. Because when I’m alone in there, when it’s all dark, I get all queasy and I want to cry, and I stop moving ‘cause I can’t see or hear anyone like I’m supposed to. I don’t sleep ‘cause I get scared. I don’t want you to go off. I don’t want you to be alone. I don’t wanna be alone. The house is funny at night.” 

“No it’s not. You’re funny at night! Case in point! Just have a midnight snack—that always makes me feel better.” 

“That’s not what I mean.” 

“Ugh. You’re impossible sometimes. This was supposed to be our birthday!” 

Chasing each other in a circle, going nowhere; they would keep this up for days. The rest of their lives, if they could somehow find a way. He stepped away from the corner, just by a few paces, pulling his tall and gnarled body out into the open, and they hushed and turned their heads. 

“Let it go already,” he said. 

Liz snapped back immediately, deflecting her hand to Evan’s shoulder. “Who asked you?” 

Mike roamed around them—they were small within the wide, bare floor, looking up at him with expectant, wary eyes. He backed up against the dim floral patterned wall. “Dad made his decision. He’s not gonna repack your shit. He doesn’t care that you’re afraid of the dark.” 

Evan huddled closer to her, grasping her sleeve. A crimson fox hung from Evan’s fingers. So that’s what he’d been holding. The one he called his favourite. It was ironic. 

“That’s not true.” Liz hesitated. But her voice quivered in childish anger. “Daddy said he’d put a nightlight in here.” 

“Oh, yeah?” Mike scoffed, stretching against the wall. “What about it? How’s it gonna protect you? Bet he’d never give one to Evan. Isn’t that funny? Yeah, you’d be awfully dense to not notice. ‘Our birthday, our birthday,’ oh, but it’s ‘My room, my room, isn’t he so lucky not to get anything?’ And you sit here all the time so fuckin’ clueless, but really, he’s just doing it to mess with you. He wants you to wonder why you’re so different from each other. He wants you to hate each other, he wants you to squabble over it for the rest of your lives. And honestly, what the hell are you gonna do about it?” 

Liz’s face shook with irritation. It was a normal kind of outburst. She struggled to get it out, whatever was in her head, and stuttered on her words. She fell silent and grabbed Evan by his hand. 

He was half-there, intentionally looking off to the floor. His eyes fluttered up, down and up, and he hoisted the toy between both his arms, squeezing it. “Maybe … maybe we could—” 

“Whatcha got there?” 

Evan recoiled, like usual. 

“Looks familiar.” 

He shook his head, murmuring, “No … No. Don’t.” 

Mike lunged forward. He tugged at its head. And Evan tugged on it back, protesting and crying. He could feel Liz beating her weak fists against his arms. 

Rip.  

He hadn’t planned it. Even expected it, really. But they both stumbled backwards, and the head fell from his hands and rolled onto the wood, billowing clouds of stuffing from its nub of a neck. Evan shook, mumbling and sniffling, and scrambled to his knees to pick up the ugly mess. He pressed the decapitated head against the mangled corpse, but it just toppled back to the ground, and his cries turned into sobs. 

Mike stepped away as she began consoling him. 

Suddenly, Dad’s footsteps were ricocheting up the stairs. When Mike turned around, they already stood face to face, and Dad glanced away in synthetic horror at the scene behind them. A pit was forming in his stomach. He really couldn’t go any more than a day without disappointing him. But he wasn’t, was he? There were no masks in sight. He could go on until Dad came up to him and threw him in the basement again, and even then, what would that do? He was practically untouchable. Mike flashed him a grin. 

But he didn’t even notice. 

Piece of shit.  

Liz’s bed was gone by dinnertime. It left a great hole in the room filled only by the creeping night shadows. They spilled over and shrouded the wall with a featureless black. The world was nothing. It spun around him. It rung, rung, rung in his ears. 

When I hold out my hand, it brushes your little linen face in the dark. A thread weaves in and out of your neck and squeezes it shut.  

You are gone.  

I’ll keep staring at the pillows. I know it’s you. I sleep here every night.  

So do you.  

Maybe I imagined it, watching Mother put you back together,  

because your head is still falling out of my arms. When I picture you there, where you sit.  

You’re such a trickster, fox.  

It’s getting to be a great pain.  

Evan pulled Foxy close to him, by the cushion of his paw. He stumbled lightly onto the bed sheets, and a soft rustle shook the void of silence. Off a little ways, seeping through the creases in the dim window like cold air, dogs yelped and cried, here and there, near and far over the drone of crickets. The walls tremored and groaned. The bed smelled of things that were no longer there. He ran his nail across the little stitch. It caught on a broken edge. The thread was thicker, meaner, clumsier than the ones drilled into him at his paws. Mother only wanted to make things right. She only wanted him to be happy. 

I’m all hollow, fox.  

I’m all hollow.  

It’s like the me has been taken out,  

and I can’t go and find it because there’s no one at the controls.  

It’s the same with you, isn’t it? I know stuffing loss takes quite a toll.  

We’ll be right again.  

A thud. 

A thud. 

Shuffle, shuffle. 

Footsteps. 

He was heard before he was seen. He liked to wear the kind of dress shoes that gave people time to compose themselves before he came and tore them down. 

A knock. 

A pause. 

Knock, knock. 

Everything is going to be okay.  

“Evan.” 

I locked the door, fox.  

Isn’t that funny?  

Father held himself behind the door. Faint whispers of his hoarse breath carried through the wood. But still, Evan had an innate ability to tell when Father was around. Things went bleaker, twisted, and cloudier, like he sent chills through the very flesh and bone of the house. 

“I’m sorry,” said the door. 

Jitters sparked in his stomach. A deep, quick pulse beat inside his head. He couldn’t move, but part of him wanted to. Part of him wanted to reach for the knob. 

For all he could remember, and he really tried to remember, Father had never said those words to him. 

“Had I gotten there in time, I would have set him straight.” 

His throat was clogging up to his eyes with heavy stinging. He shut them, and the sticky tears pooled in his blindness. A cry pushed itself back down his swollen throat. A perpetual silence. No more breathing. No more noises. No, it was all wrong. He needed to hide. He needed to get away. 

“Elizabeth is a very smart girl. She knows her way around other people.” Father lowered his voice. ”When you’re older, you’ll learn to accept what is and what isn’t. Otherwise, you’ll drive yourself mad.” 

Evan squeezed Foxy. His arms began to quiver. He leaned down and pulled him up to his face. A speck of light on his rubbery nose, the faraway streetlamps, or maybe the moon. It all came into focus now: a dark red thing, head hanging loose, dull deformed eye bulging from its head.

That is not my friend.  

You are not my friend.  

What have you done with my friend?  

He stared hard into Foxy’s eye, who stared back with null indifference. 

“I love you. You know that, right?” 

Warm droplets ran slowly down his face. Evan let go of the tension building in his throat and smothered his head beneath a thin blanket. He couldn’t stop himself from choking on a hoarse squeak when he breathed out, or back in. He curled up and hugged Foxy against his nose and mouth, shuddering. 

“You’re a good kid, Evan. I try. I do try. But life’s not fair to any one of us. We have to make sacrifices.” 

Running a nail across the stitch, the terrifying, Frankenstein stitch, a sudden anger flowed through him. He sprung upright and grasped Foxy tight in his hands. It wasn’t the same anymore. It would never be the same. 

“I’ll tell you what. We’ll do something spectacular for your birthday. Anything you’d like. And I promise you, it’ll blow all these little grievances out of proportion.” 

He tugged, he twisted, the fabric crackled and tore open with gross finality. A soft thud against the carpet, and Evan was left holding a limp, hollow body. Its powdery insides drained from its neck. 

“Wouldn’t you like that?” 

He wasn’t the same anymore. He would never be the same. 

Hurling back his arm, the bottom half thudded against Liz’s wall, and it sputtered out clumps in the darkness. They littered the ground like snow, a trail from head to body. Like an animal had pulled out his fuzzy throat. 

Footsteps. 

Shuffle, shuffle 

A thud. 

A thud. 

Are you still here?  

Are you still breathing?  

We never really saw each other again.  

That is, 

we were gone from each other’s sight. 

Everything left was hate. 

I think we stopped being a family that day, 

him and me. But really, 

no one was there to keep us together anyway, 

none of us had a sense of familial commitment, 

like I’m sure you’re supposed to. 

Our lives just happened to intertwine, 

we were nothing but strangers on a path, 

friends or enemies, useful or harmful. 

But I really mean this, 

We never saw each other again. 

 That day had morbid hotness,  

and I choked on it at night, 

on the thickened air. 

Time dragged on, and it still drags on. 

My Brother was dead in five days.

Chapter Text

Nightmare's End

Evan fiddled with the shaggy carpet, curled in a ball up to his knees. The door was half-open, and warm light from the hall seeped into the room, grazing the stray fibers of the carpet with orange, just barely giving shape to a clutter of things towering around him, in piles and heaps, toys and books and furniture. He could feel the poorly insulated window biting against his neck, see a cold light on his fingertips. But he could not turn around. Evan’s body was sealed shut. 

The further his eyes strayed from the door, the room spiraled out into a dark and formless mess. The carpet began to buzz beneath him with something low and rhythmic. No, farther than that. It sank deep below his consciousness, past reality. And it scurried through the wooden framework, legs clamoring in tandem like a cockroach. 

Circling. 

Faint, ringing warbles clouded Evan’s head. It was all around him. A choppy voice and bounding footsteps. Metal searing. Metal scraping. Metal clicking. Metal creaking. It grew nearer and louder, rocking his paralyzed body in its struggle to reach him. Then slowly quieter. Then louder again. In an ebb and flow. The hairs on Evan’s neck stood on end, and he began to shake. A cold set of teeth grazed the back of his head, expelling a hoarse laughter. All he could do was stare ahead. 

And it retreated as it had come. His room was suffocatingly silent. 

The door creaked, opening slightly. 

“Is everyone alright in there?” 

It was his sister’s voice. She echoed from far away. 

He looked up to the door and saw the head of an animal, cloaked black, with two dark, large, beady irises and white teeth. Like liquid, it ducked from his sight into the hallway. There was something familiar about it. Now, Evan felt himself panicking. If the animal found Liz, she’d be even more frightened than him. It had a mouth for puncturing flesh. She didn’t know that, but he did. When he tried to move his legs again, they jerked, and he staggered to his feet. 

The air was murky. He’d been dunked inside a vat of dark, flowing honey. 

As he stepped into the hallway, Evan’s panic surged. Everything had turned dark, and he stumbled into the wall. When he backed up, he couldn’t get free, caught between both walls in a space the width of his body. The hallway glowed a sickly dim orange in either direction, out of sight, from the overhead lamps. It extended out in a winding direction farther than he could see or comprehend. Something was telling him that this was the wrong way. But when he looked back, his door had slammed shut. Evan shuffled along towards the light. His chest compressed against the drywall, and his breath grew hot and suffocating. The hallway would break at some point. Maybe when he found the banister, it’d all go back to normal. Wherever it was. 

Where are you?  

The hallway broke away into a dark opening far away. A doorway. It was almost too dark, but he knew it was her room. He stopped and listened. 

He could hear shuffling, humming. 

A low murmur came from the doorway as the dark animal head peered out again, cocking to the side. It stared directly into him from his pinned place. Black smoke billowed from it, and it pulled up its black lips, as if to smile—before it disappeared into the crevice. A crash rang out from inside, travelling to the ceiling. Heavy, spontaneous footfalls scraped the walls, bounding blindly towards him. A high-pitched giggle and cackle reverberated through the oppressive air. The walls grated against the ceiling in its might. The only thing he could hear, all he could feel. His death on four legs. A shattering house. It was coming, and it was delighted. A comedic earthquake. And he tried to lower himself into a ball, but Evan was trapped inside this hallway, suffocating. 

He screamed. 

It was slow, long, agonizing. 

He couldn’t even hear it anyway. 

He cowered away from the animal and opened his eyes, barely aware they were shut. Evan was sent sprawling to the kitchen floor. 

His face landed against the stinging cold tile, and pain coursed up his shoulder, so severely it pulsed through the right side of his head. The moment he got to his feet, the thickness of the air got to him again and he nearly slipped on the slick tile. He clutched the kitchen island in a painful grip, by the tips of his fingers, turning white, and slowly got his bearings. 

It was dark here. Pale light from a small window doused the room in a glaze. The air sent prickles through his tongue, bitter and icy. 

Nails skid on the tile, low to the ground, glowering out of sight. A scratch, a crack against the wood. A whine and a hiss. A vision of black crept slowly from the side opposite of Evan, and he ducked beneath the island. He gasped for air and clutched his mouth. He slowly slid with the animal as it sniffed and snorted. His paling hand would not ungrasp, and it slunk behind him rigidly. 

Creaking, groaning, chuckling. It knew where he was. 

This was a game. First to slip. 

The sound of shuffling metal rang out. His hand shook in place, interrupted. 

It had brushed the wooden block of knives. The wooden block of knives. Teetering over the edge of the island. The little bread knife. The little bread knife. Had clattered to the floor, glistening like jewels. 

And it slipped, silently, down, down, down. A hollow ricochet on the tile. The knives glimmered as they spun, released, unsheathed, ringing against one another, crashing, striking, reflecting the room a million times infinitely. 

And they shattered. Against the tile. Like a gunshot. 

They bounced around. And they shook. Against each other. 

Ringing and ringing. Louder and louder. 

They shattered the tile. 

They shattered the kitchen. 

They shattered sight. 

They shattered noise. 

Evan collapsed, covering his ears. His shirt sagged damp and cold against his skin, doused bright red from his stomach to his chest. Ragged little holes dug deep and dark. He could barely look away, as they soaked in the sound. Instead of pain, they clouded him with numbness. They drained him hollow, and dizziness fell over him. Like too much heat, for too long. Or a great arctic chill. 

The sounds permeated his hands, echoed in his head. A shrill ringing that shook his whole body in vibrations. Evan pressed himself together, with his arms shielding his head, his knees locked against his injured body. And the sounds slowly dissolved into a voice. 

Something shook his arms. Evan uncovered his face. 

A warm, intense light stung his eyes. He blinked, blinked and blinked to shake it out. But something was wrong, like nothing had changed. 

Soft fingers raked his skin. The nails … blue, yellow, pink … blue, yellow, pink. But she was an indiscernible blur, sitting in front of him. Murmuring hazy exclamations. The room itself was just as obscured. A pool of colors, shoved in the corner, looking out. A bed here, a bed there. 

We are here again.  

She shook him. Her voice rose, it fell, it rose again. Liz was crying, he could tell. She pointed. She pointed and pointed to his red stomach. Her mouth moved in exasperation. 

Something is not quite right.  

You should be gone. But you are not.  

The walls shivered. 

Evan looked at Liz as directly as he could. He tried to focus on her wavy, unkempt hair, her great green eyes. Anything. “There’s a fox around here,” he said. 

He pointed up to the now shaking ceiling, but his arms still held him in a cradle. Rigid. 

Why can’t I move?  

The figure giggled. She got up cheerfully and walked away. “A fox? Silly, it’s got great legs for leaping and running, and a fluffy cottontail! It’s got beautiful black feathers that can carry it off in the wind! It’s got hungry jaws, a hungry stomach, and great claws that scare its prey!” 

She stopped in front of the doorway, shuffling in place. Shadows completely shrouded it. A face—two beady eyes and a shiny smile—emerged from within. 

“What’s so ‘fox’ about that?” Liz snickered. 

A pitch-black hook slowly seeped from the lightless hallway, dangling like fishing wire. Though it was thick and gnarled and jutted out, curling unnaturally, almost organically. A steak knife shimmered against the hook, loose in its inhuman grip. 

Liz stood in place, silently. 

Something is not right.  

He tried to say something to Liz from across the room, but the words fell silent as he pushed them out his mouth. Evan sat still in his paralyzed self. A shell. And something strange happened. 

Sweat on his forehead. He was burning up. His skin was prickling all over. 

Something is not right.  

The hook lowered, aligning with Liz’s head. She did not move. 

He twisted around to relieve the heat, and cold air soothed his body. 

He… 

The sound of distant crickets. 

Fabric. Warm and stuffy. 

I feel bedsheets.  

Liz gazed back at him, smiling softly. Her eyes darted to the hook as it coddled the knife. “Don’t be scared.” 

Hand. Move hand. Feel fabric. Blink. Breathe. Blink.  

Please.  

This isn’t real.  

Liz isn’t real.  

The hook with the knif blink e sharply sta blink, blink bbe blink d he blink r he blink ad. WAKE UP. 

The room vanished. 

He could feel the cushion of his mattress below him, see the bleak walls above him. He gasped heavy and shallow, and each breath struggled tight in his chest. When he tried to move, Evan sank further into rigidity. His fingertips desperately twitched and ticked for a way out. 

A black mass crept from the popcorn ceiling, shifting in its form, slowly flowing around the corners of his bedroom. The animal and its icy stare flashed back into his vision. Its appendages floated in its pool of shadow: legs and paws, hands and faces, flashes of light and color. When he closed his eyes, it filled in the darkness with its own dread, closing in on him. It grinned with its layer of waxy, wet teeth and bright white eyes. A wisp of a top hat came into focus at it bowed its head down to him. 

They had met many times. 

But not like this. 

Evan had seen her before, too. 

But not like that. Never like that.  

She would always wake him up when it got too scary. She would always say, “I heard you whimpering in your sleep!” And it would all vanish before the nightmare’s end. He would wake in a fit as she grasped his shoulder by the edge of his bed, once a month, once a week, and it was all the same: a vanquished demon, evil voices cast away by the sound of her voice. 

But there was no one left to notice. 

The jaw slowly creaked open, gaping, revealing a hole where something should have been. The animal’s exhales grazed his skin, chilling him, biting to get through. The groans of a sunken ship. 

A hair’s length. 

Evan flinched backward. He gasped for breath. 

Had he been holding it this whole time? 

His body flung itself, unbound, into his pillow. 

He lay there, shaking. When he looked up, the animal was gone. 

When Evan died, we began to see it too.  

I can’t say for certain what it is, or what it meant,  

but it is alive, and it is evil.  

Charlie grew painfully stiff, jaw snapped shut and grinding, as she stared at the plate of food below her. The little chandelier that twinkled in all its dangling glass jewels was too bright. One of the shades was chipped, and the bulb underneath glared right into her eye. Still, she couldn’t move. Her body was sealed shut. 

Charlie prodded her food with the fork. A slice of warm, spongy raisin toast with grape jelly running down the sides, two fried eggs, a pile of hash, a bit of bacon that was cracking up as it swam in its own grease, all glistening in the light. The very thought of eating made her stomach recoil. All around her, everyone talked and talked. She couldn’t make out anything but a word every now and then over the scrape and clink of plates, glass, silverware. 

A red flannel sleeve came down next to her. Her dad’s fist shook the wood and rustled the water in her glass. He leaned back in his chair, laughing heartily like he would when he took pity on other people’s jokes. He was amidst conversation with the rest of the table. Had been all morning. His face was turned away, to the head of the table; like usual. The only invisible seat, since Charlie was slumped against the back of the chair. Her uncle was telling some sort of story, the way he gasped and sneered and caricatured his words. He must have been talking half with his hands. Her aunt ignored them both, until she was prompted, and she would look up from the meal she’d made for them and smile or speak.  

Opposite from Charlie was the only other person who looked like they’d rather be somewhere else. Evan sunk low into himself, his hair nearly dipping into his plate. It obscured his face, and so did his hunched body. 

The longer she stared, Charlie wanted to whisper something to him from across the table.

But a strange phenomenon, that her throat had been cemented closed, and nothing would come to

crack it open.

Dang nerves.

Liz hung onto Evan from beside him giddily. She was probably chasing mental circles around him in the seat too small for her swaying legs. She was practically punching him on the shoulder to cheer him up and get him awake. But he would only sway, weakly. Liz didn’t seem to recognize his absence at all, because she would constantly turn away and join into whatever conversation their parents were a part of or gaze up and dreamily watch it unfurl. 

There it was. A crack. 

Charlie opened her mouth to speak, immediately turning to the seat next to her. 

But the words just sat there. 

Oh yeah.  

How could I forget.

Mike’s chair was empty this morning. She didn’t know why. When she hovered her hand over the seat it passed through something empty, like he was still there. It felt wrong.  

There was too much to wrap her head around without him. He always made her forget how crushing it could be here in the way he poked fun at every single thing she dreaded. 

When she’d come over, they’d sit together. Every single time since … well, since she could chew and swallow. Nothing made sense. He always complained about how terribly hungry he’d get in the mornings when he ate breakfast too late, or none at all. 

And Mike Afton would’ve loved his mother’s breakfast. She’d sprinkled the leftover steak of the hash with a mixture of rosemary. Or Charlie assumed.

It lay bare on her plate. Cooling. 

Where is he?

His plate was barren and clean. 

It’d been left out with all the others, but no one had been there to ask for a meal. 

Really, Charlie wasn’t hungry. 

Charlie shook off her anxiety and swallowed hard. She eyed both of their plates and pushed off from the table to get herself to stand up. When the chair squeaked behind her, she winced, but all heads were turned away. She garnered the courage to speak. 

When it came out, it really was nothing more than a whisper. “May I be excused?” 

She could see everything, and likewise, no one noticed her. She was such a fool, standing so rigid. 

He would’ve told her so, and she would’ve stopped believing it. 

“May I be excused?” she exclaimed. 

The noise numbed down for a split second. Her uncle tore his gaze away to look at her. He stared expectantly, raising his eyebrows. 

Yes.  

I may.  

She swiped her own plate from the table and sped away into the kitchen. Charlie halted, glancing back to the brightly lit dining room before making a sharp turn towards the staircase. 

Charlie got to Mike’s door and lightly knocked on it, pressing her ear to the wood. But within, she could only hear the inert air flowing. She knocked again, hovering her hand against the knob. 

“I brought you breakfast,” she said hesitantly. 

Charlie hesitantly opened the door. 

He wasn’t here. The bed was unmade, a tangle of sheets that spilled to the floor, compressed to the left in the place he’d slept for the last eight years. His lamp, right next to it, had a nice warm light. It was dimmer than most bulbs in the house. 

Where are you?  

She sunk into the worn mattress, clutching the plate. The springs creaked a little under her weight. 

Anywhere from me.  

Maybe he was avoiding her. 

He must have been avoiding her. 

It didn’t make sense. 

Charlie set the plate of food on the nightstand. If he didn’t come back soon, it would get cold. He could always use his microwave, but the thought was what mattered. 

Just below, something red and crumpled jutted out from the drawer. 

She leaned closer to it and carefully pulled open the drawer. It shot outward like the drawer had held it back, a compressed mess flattened and squished in the tiny space. Its wrinkles and mangled creases still obscured whatever it was supposed to resemble. 

She took it out and a string fell loose against a scratchy snout. 

He still had the mask. 

She’d always wondered why he’d wanted it so badly, but honestly, it’d never been a big deal. It was just merchandise. 

Charlie stretched it back out into proportion of those ones on the shelves. As good as she could manage, at least. It was pretty banged up. Really, all she could do was make the fox’s face recognizable again. 

What will he think of this?  

She turned it around.

At first the mask’s paint had apparently been scrubbed off. No big deal. She could fix that when she got home or borrow a can from the basement. Frankly, he probably didn’t even mind, considering he’d left the mask like this in the first place. But then, the chipping, black pattern weaved and looped like it had intention. And suddenly, the words of the arch jumped out at her. Charlie reread the careless cursive strokes. She’d misread it. To her, it was barely legible, even though she could read cursive. So obviously, it was just a misinterpretation of sloppy handwriting. There was no ill intention. Her mind had traveled there itself. But the coarse engravings made it crystal clear the longer she looked. She couldn’t decide whether to drop the mask or clutch it harder, and horror sunk into her chest. 

“You are a desperate, malignant, piece of shit.”  

What will he…  

She stammered, looking around the room. A flood of realization came over her and she pushed the mask back into the drawer, slamming it shut louder than she’d anticipated. 

...do?

The pizzeria closed every day at eight o’clock, and when that happened, the lights would eventually be shut off. Everywhere from deep within was illuminated by nothing but the dim and pale moonlight that came in through the windows and glass doors, and the bright green backdoor exit sign. The overhead nest of dangling stars and moons swayed in the ventilation, twinkling with each spin of each quaint decoration. They matched the rough carpet below, though she could hardly see it in the dark. Still, it jumped out to her in its typical serene colors and noises, littered styrofoam cups and lingering trails of overpowering mozzarella. Both of which still hung around in the night. But a heavy stillness blanketed heavier air, broken by the occasional drum of machinery within the walls. 

“Scary” wasn’t the right word, considering how familiar she was with the ins and outs of the place. She’d stabbed screwdrivers right through the heart of bare endoskeletons, something that would make anyone else she knew completely nauseous. But still, the pizzeria was different at night. It was everything it wasn’t supposed to be, and nothing it was. 

Charlie had her head propped against the cuffs of her shirt, laying on the prize counter. She reached far from the seat behind her, practically falling off it. This was the only place that had any bit of light. The display lights on the shelves behind weren’t operated from the main power, so they’d set up here. 

In front of her, the prize counter animatronic jutted out his arm, body jolting in place within the red and white box that had been made for him to sit his clumsy legs inside. His body was less a mess now and filled out with proper rods and shiny coils. Now, a plastic shell covered nearly half of him, running down his slender body in patches. And he had the workings of a facade, too, with black felt loosely coiled round his forearm. He still looked like a robot though. That was why he couldn’t be here, where he was meant to be, during the day. 

When it was extended, his hand flopped downward, fingers extending independently into a grasp. Then his other arm shakily repeated the same movement. 

Her dad was at work on the animatronic’s other side, ducked down and opening up its shoulder, rattling its bones. He clicked his tongue and murmured something, probably to himself, before raising his voice. 

“Well, it’s meant to happen at the same time,” he said, “but at least now, he doesn’t nearly break his own arm when he hands out prizes.” 

Something caught her eye from the corner of her vision. She looked behind her and saw the row of hanging masks. Immediately, she looked away. 

Charlie could still feel them, lined up, looking down at her. She could still feel the coarse paint as it chipped away from the words. The words.  

They stuck to her mind. Every time she blinked, they were there. 

And he was not. 

He was not.  

She had to do something. 

“ Would you look at that, he works now!” her dad exclaimed, rising above the animatronic and smiling at her. The arms extended in tandem. 

When she met his eyes, she could feel herself frowning. It was lucky that he fell right back into his fixing, like they’d exchanged nothing at all. But she couldn’t keep lying here and pretending things were normal. She pulled the chair closer to her and sat up, which made the creak of his wrench fall silent. 

“I … I think I have to tell you something.” 

“Tell away,” he pulled a bolt tight on the animatronic’s shoulder. 

“Me and Mike aren’t friends anymore.” Charlie looked down, stuttering. “No, it’s not that. We’re not talking. Is that a thing? Is that a thing you go through? We got into an argument like a month ago, and we never get into arguments. He was….” She couldn’t finish, so she stood up and fought her nerves. “I’m worried about him. He’s hurting himself and he’s hurting me and he’s hurting other people, and he doesn’t understand what any of it means. He doesn’t know what’s going on. He tells me … He would just dismiss me. He would say it’s no big deal, and I swear I thought it was normal, but it’s just turned into so much more than I ever thought. I would have done something, I swear. I would have. I didn’t know. I would have. But he’s gone … He’s gone and I don’t know where he’s gone.” Charlie’s head was a fog, and it drowned her voice down to a broken whisper. “He’s gotta be back, Dad. I just want him back.” 

His eyes darkened, and he rested his arm on the counter. “Hey. Don’t you be hard on yourself. You’re a good friend, and you know it. I know it. I see it. And he knows it, too. But he’s his own human being. What he does is none of your fault.” 

Every time she thought about him now, she felt the urge to break down in tears. It made her sick. But she couldn’t, not anymore. Charlie shriveled into herself and scowled, shutting her eyes. For Christ’s sake, all she needed was a level head. 

A hand fell on her shoulder and her eyes shot open. It led up to her dad, a blankly disturbed look on his face. He held out his other arm, weakly. She trudged into him and buried her forehead in his jacket pocket. His warm arms lightly cloaked her at the shoulders. She couldn’t even force a grin. 

She mumbled, “It’s not his fault.” 

He had no reply. He must’ve known what she wanted to say. 

“Why did you ever become friends with him?” 

“Char, I know you don’t think well of him. I understand. He can be a sure idiot sometimes, and I wish there was a way of talking sense into him. Believe me, I used to try. I really do think he’s convinced to never change a thing about himself. I guess it rubs off, doesn’t it?” 

She stepped away from him and hit her back on the counter, shuffling over through the swinging gate and into the main room, which darkened with every step she took. “You don’t get it. He’s not a good person … You know him better than anyone! Whenever I see any of them, there’s just something off. It’s like, a morbid joke out of place … or, or an argument when we’re not supposed to fight, or splitting up his kids’ rooms. I don’t know how to explain it, I don’t think I can. I can’t tell you what’s wrong, but when I think about it … there’s always something off. I just never put it together. I knew what he did, and I knew who he was … but I didn’t know.” She stopped pacing and looked back at the counter, frozen in place. “He loves them, right?” 

They stared between each other as her pace quickened, and he sat down in the seat she’d used. “What’s wrong?” 

“Dad, I found a mask.” 

He was silent. 

Charlie strode farther out to the edge of the dark arcade. “A month ago. I gave him a Foxy mask. One of those.” She pointed to the top row. “I didn’t think about it at all, but I found it today in his room. It had words on it.” 

“What did they say?” 

She breathed in the air around her. It bit her throat. “I can’t say it, Dad.” The arcade was pitch black except for the dim rectangular reflections of the exit sign contorting on the rows of metal cabinets. Her own memory traced the layout like a blueprint. It trailed off into scattered booths before the silent, lurking band beyond. “But he wrote them.” 

A silhouette peeked out from behind a cabinet close enough to her that she could make out its small frame. Made smaller as he curled into himself. She knew immediately who it was, and she stopped dead in her tracks. 

Evan. 

“What are you doing here?” she whispered shakily. She put out a hand. 

He got to his feet and took it, albeit hesitantly. Evan’s grasp was cold and clammy. 

“I think I got lost,” he said. 

She started walking him back the counter. Evan was still, except for his legs, looking down and away from the darkness. She didn’t want to think about why he was here. She could put it together in her head to an extent that said as much as it needed to. He just needed to come to the soft counter light. He’d go home with a warm spare blanket in the back seat of the Chevy. Back to his house. 

There really was no winning. 

When they got there, her dad had turned back to the animatronic, tightening the same bolt. She stood there tensely, glancing between Evan and her dad. His head still hung to the spacey carpet, waiting for her to do something. 

“Hey,” she said. 

Her dad turned around. When his eyes traveled down to Evan, he nearly crashed into the animatronic behind him. 

“He says he got lost,” she blurted. Evan nodded. 

Charlie crouched down to meet his eyes. “Are you okay?” 

He was fiddling with the rim of his shirt and actively leaning away from her face. “I didn’t like when the lights went out. I didn’t know the lights went out.” 

Her dad had gone over to the counter now and was packing up his tools and spare parts in his large case. After a moment he stopped, smiling, stretching over the counter.  “Hey Evan, do you want to test out our new character?” 

Evan looked up at the animatronic with a distant gaze: tall and slender with a slight uneven hunch, towering over him with its arms half-extended. He seemed to inspect it. He shrugged his shoulders. 

Her dad took something, a yellow plushie, from the shelf. It was a little ironic that he would break his own rules and effectively steal from his own establishment. 

It was also ironic, coming from her. 

He nested it in the animatronic’s hand, and she saw he’d picked out Fredbear. Of course her dad would pick him. A little egocentric, maybe, but it was a sweet looking doll. It was barely sold anywhere other than the Diner, for one. It sat snugly in the animatronic's hands as the arms began to rumble. Evan watched them slowly extend out toward him, hands opening out to present the little yellow bear. They thudded to a halt, and Fredbear teetered right above his head like it was looking down on him. 

“Go on, take him. An early birthday present,” her dad said. 

Evan looked up at the metal hands. He prodded one of its fingers and slowly took the bear from their grasp. He stared at it for a long time, in total awe, and slowly let go of Charlie’s hand to hold the plushie with both of his. 

He smiled. 

“Thank you.” 

The back of the truck tumbled over the road. It was dark inside. A deep yellow from the faint light of the streetlamps. It would come and go, slow, then flash over the seats in a blinding light. Evan heard the engines of other cars soaring by every now and then. He heard voices, choppy and dispersed. But he didn’t know what they were saying. Maybe, he was imagining it all anyway. Maybe it was all a dream. 

Evan gripped Fredbear tightly, but not enough to hurt him. He couldn’t be seen well in the dark of the truck, but each streetlamp traveled along the edge of his black nose and faintly glowed on the fuzzy edges of his thin fur. He had bright yellow fur. More like gold, or amber. When Evan dug his fingers through, there was a soothing fluffiness. Like petting the head of a dandelion. He had a bright purple bow and a fashionable ribbon tied round his neck and a little top hat that sat on his head of fuzz. His eyes looked out into the leather seating Wistfully, dazed. Sunken, drowsy. A light blue. 

A little like you.  

They stared. 

I think you might be right, Fredbear.  

The truck shook as it lurched onto the concrete driveway. 

Will you keep me safe?  

Of course.  

Be careful.  

Don’t go any further.  

This place gives me the creeps.  

They backed up against the front door, within the house. Fredbear sank glumly in his arms. He looked around the living room and adjacent doorways, obscured in the night. The TV glowed from afar, murmuring an inaudible voice. A pile of blankets had gathered on the couch. It stood up. 

“I knew it!” Liz was in her pajamas, her hair frizzy and tangled. 

She scrambled over to him, dragging the blankets behind her for a few paces, half-tripping. She stopped right in front of him, grinning ear-to-ear, but she knitted her brows in worry. 

“How’ve you been? I’m so sorry we left you. We really really didn’t mean to. I tried to tell Daddy that you were coming but he wouldn’t listen. How did you get back? He said that you’d be just fine, but I didn’t believe him. I guess I should have! He was right!” 

Evan lowered his head and locked eyes with the hardwood floor beneath him.  “It’s okay.” 

He felt himself pulled into a vicious hug as she clawed her colorful nails against his back and pushed her nose into his shoulder then very quickly shoved him back into place. She grasped him by his arms. She looked him straight in the eye. Liz was on the verge of tears. 

“Don’t scare me like that. Stay with me next time,” she whimpered. He felt the pressure release from his skin, and she had stepped away from him. She sniffed and pressed her nose against her pink sleeve, her eyes traveling down. “What have you got?” 

He raised Fredbear up. “Birthday present.” 

Her eyes followed him, and she pressed up against the door, brushing by his shoulder and stretching out her arm. She tried to take Fredbear, but he held his grip and turned away, sliding to the floor. So did she, and she craned her neck over to him, nose-to-plastic-nose with Fredbear. 

She squinted. “It’s a bit small for a birthday present, Evan.” 

But you like me better.  

Evan pulled him away from her, but she just picked Fredbear up like she’d wanted, turning him every which way in her hands, tugging at his bow. 

Could you rescue me, Evan?  

“I like him better,” Evan said. 

Liz dropped Fredbear onto their laps and stared directly at him with wide eyes. “Could you sleep in my room tonight?” 

He nodded. Anxiety and hope rose in his chest. 

She kept staring into him for a moment before quickly saying, “Okay.” Her smile was overly cheery: a little too wide and lost in her eyes. She quickly turned away to gaze into the rest of the living room, her body and her face became rigid. 

“Why?” he asked hesitantly. 

“Oh. I had a nightmare.” She wouldn’t look at him. 

You, too.  

“Me too.” 

Liz untensed but still looked out. The room was uncomfortably silent. 

“What happened in yours?” Evan whispered. 

She clenched her fists and started bouncing in place, and she began to stutter before catching up on her words. “Well, um … I … let’s see. It was … was very strange. I was in my bed and all the lights were out. The room was pink. Like before! All my things were there. It was very nice. I thought I was dreaming, but then I got distracted by how nice it all was. It was so nice I thought it was real. Then I started to feel dizzy, and I saw the floor disappear but it didn’t disappear, it was all red and it was murky. All my things were floating off the ground and I tried to get off the bed but I couldn’t because it rose above the skirt and stained the sheets and everything was turning all red and gross. I heard a voice, I can’t remember, it was behind me, it said, it started repeating over and over, ‘Pleasant, pleasant, taste it, pleasant, strawberry jam, taste it, pleasant,’ and it wouldn’t stop but I hit my head on the backboard because the red stuff kept rising and came to my feet and I caught my toe in it and it stung really cold, and when I turned my head I saw a tiny silver spoon next to me and I didn’t want it to float away so I picked it up and the voice came back again saying all those things to me, and I could feel a chill rising to my back and I dipped my hand under the surface and had a taste and it was right. It was strawberry jam. So, when you think about it, it’s really quite a nice dream.” Liz smiled weakly. “What did you dream about?”

Psst.

Want to hear a joke?

No.  

What did one plate say to the other plate?

Nothing is funny anymore.  

He’s just going to come back and  

rip you apart.  

Rip me a p ar t.  

I am not safe here.  

I am not safe anywhere.  

I don’t even know who I am anymore.  

I don’t even know if I’m real.  

I thought I could go back  

to normal  

but it’s  

all the same  

nothing is normal  

everything is going   

wrong  

Dinner is on me.

You’re a very good friend.  

Did you know that?  

When I hold you, I’m not lonely anymore.  

I think I feel at home.  

I’m not scared anymore.  

Yes, you are.

You’re terrified.

I don’t blame you, it’s okay.

Tomorrow is another day.

Maybe I could have stopped it, on my own.  

I surely was in the position, I am led to believe.  

But when I imagine the repeat scenario, with all I know now,  

it reminds me that it was a drop of water in an ocean.  

I would not have changed either of them that day.  

I would have to go back to a time when we did not know each other,  

and we were both still impressionable. Nothing had gone wrong.  

But still, it haunts me,

every word she said was true.

And still, it haunts me,

that I knew it and did nothing.

But you did, didn’t you?  

You gave him more than me.  

A friend.

Chapter Text

The Party Is For You

… A fuzzy grey light pierced through Mike’s sinking eyelids, and the first thing he felt was a deep ache inside his head. He could hardly recognize the rough fabric around him, burying his face and nose—an under stuffed pillow with a bright yellow stitch mark running down the side pressed against a couch that more resembled garden foliage. It smelled worn and loved, but at the same time, cold, static, and new. Like what he imagined would wait for him at the homes of relatives he’d never had. When he held up his heavy head, it felt like half of it had detached completely, hurting in an entirely numb way.

Mike blinked it away.

Wisps of light hung in the room, it really was just a room, creeping from the unopened blinds. They fell away to a dark oblivion inside the narrow hallway, and underneath the furniture pinned against the cramped corners. There were pictures, sparsely, on the wooden walls, and a cramped crayon mural half-shielded by the things and things and things stacked on the table. There were two eyes on that table. They pierced knowingly into him through the dark. They licked a starch white paw.

He shifted to the side and sunk back into the unfamiliar pillow. From a dusty vent, cold air pelted against the upper half of his body, and now a hum drained from the ceiling—the only stirring thing.

Apart from…

They cowered under the coffee table with a thin blanket to share that they had ripped clean from the couch. Their breath was so low and unchallenged that he could not hear it, and only the shifting fabric beneath the dust-covered glass could convince him they were really sleeping.

The coffee table.

Littered with a decomposing pizza box (with a logo that didn’t make his insides curl up and die), tomato sauce had a sort of grave quality. Sputtered on napkins. Nothing to tell him what he was looking at was edible. And when he stopped to forget, the coffee table was the ending, no, the beginning of a terrible thing … Funny stuff the brain could pick up on.

A shift on his ears, behind his head. Nails picked at the chipping leather of that faraway armchair. Gabriel breathed in, as if to assert his existence. “Wonder how they do it.”

“Do what?” Mike’s sliver of a voice croaked.

He was silent for a moment. “Sleep.”

“It’s their house.”

“That means nothing,” he whispered indignantly

Mike raised himself up and twisted around. Gabriel was curled to his knees, arching against the leather arm. His hair stuck out at its ends in a tangle he’d swept from his glazed eyes. This shook off of him immediately, and he stared at Mike expectantly. Mike reached over and pressed his fingers through the slits of the blinds, rattling with force. The sky was dark blue and dawning. Surely not even six.

Mike laughed. Or heaved, really.

“My brother’s birthday is today. I can’t believe…” The sound came from him again. “They’re gonna kill me for it.” He looked back to the lumpy little blanket. “Even though they couldn’t give a damn.”

Gabriel took in a sharp breath, but all that escaped him was a lazy and mumbled “Yeah.” He shuffled in place, bringing himself inward.

“You should come with me. It would be … it would be funner. I wouldn’t have to pretend I care about it any longer.”

“Me…” Gabriel scoffed.

“You should wake them up.”

His face grew sullen, a little angry. “You’re so pushy on this, what for?”

He couldn’t do anything but part his lips. They stung against the air as he breathed. Mike’s chest rose and fell, and he felt it in his lungs and in his head, like one small departure in thought and he’d suffocate right here and now.

“It’d be nice to be noticed,” he finally admitted.

A smile crept onto Gabriel’s face, and he chuckled tightly, turning away. “Yeah, fuck. What’s there to lose?”

They reached down to shake the others awake.

“Happy birthday!”

“Oh, happy birthday!”

“Just look at that cake!”

“The big eight! Time flies!”

“Are you having fun?”

Well, are you?

A blue, paper-thin cloth. It sparkled with red and yellow confetti that contorted in its ripples. The red checkers peeked out from underneath. It didn’t fit the table like Father had hoped, but no one seemed to pay it any attention. They passed by and lingered and gave slight smiles and then they were gone again. Or they jumped around, beaming and giddy and circling, like they were turning eight too.

He realized, the further away he stood, the more they forgot it was his birthday too.

Liz had pinned herself to the wall, inside the booth. Now she constantly gazed outward into the crowd, tracking every person, among the presents culminating as her company.

And then she found him. She pointed to the cake. The white cake with the bright red letters loosely pressed onto the top. The cake that crumbled at the bottom because the car had bumped on the way here. The cake with the sixteen candles.

“I’ll get you some,” she whispered, pinching the serrated bread knife. When she held it up, she froze. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

Evan came forward, hesitantly, to brush against the booth.

She held the sharp metal stick absentmindedly to her chest. One of its teeth caught on the fold of her sweater. “I’m not supposed to.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Do you know how to cut a cake?”

“I said I don’t want any.”

“Well, you will be later. You have to be. You always have to have cake on your birthday. If you don’t, then it isn’t even a birthday, really. I think that’s what separates a birthday from all the other days.” Liz leaned in towards him. “We can save yours for later. If you would like. That way no one takes it all too quickly.”

“Okay.”

Her eyes darted away from him and scanned the room. She turned around to peer over the booth but flinched back as her knife-clutching hand brushed the seat, like she just now realized she hadn’t dropped it. Liz gazed at it intently.

Her hand crept away and braced the white shell with the metal teeth. Bits of icing fell to the cloth in a dust. It gave. She sawed, rustling the cloth. She sawed, scrunching up her face. She sawed and sawed, straining and crumbling the cake.

“Oh no. It’s gone all bad. I’m sorry, I can’t…” Liz tugged on the knife, but now they were one and the same.

“It tastes the same.”

She looked at him, exasperated, but she immediately whipped back to the cake. Pressing her fingers in the sticky icing, she lifted it out and let it flop onto a flimsy red plate. “Here. For later. I’m sorry.” And she smiled. “It’ll stay safe with me.”

Evan nodded, letting his head fall to the black and white tiles at his feet. He could hear her slide out the booth. Her low heels clomped away and away, and she brightened into a half-holler somewhere deep in the crowd.

He backed away from the table and shuffled away,

You know, I asked you a question.

away from the view of shifting, jittery crowds,

You really do want that cake, don’t you?

away from everything. 

You have to go back there.

Voices rolled like thunder, in and out, back and forth. 

The party is for you.

He turned around. 

They all care about you today.

Everything was so small.

You could eat it, and everything would be nice again.

A limp and staling blank blot.

Look inside, we both know you’re starving.

Look at me: a bear would know a thing or two.

Wow.

They were right when they said you weren’t a talker.

But hey, that makes two!

He would not be eating that cake.

Bright, melting colors. Screams. Cabinet whirrs. Brushed, shoved, he stumbled over his own feet into nothingness. He gasped on the noiseless and touchless air like his head had broken from water. The stage was dimmed dark, the curtains drawn, the only living sights hanging on the far corners of his vision.

One of those living sights was his brother.

Mike slouched on a bench with his head rolled to the side, sharply pressed into the arm. When Evan stepped forward, his head raised to look him through. In a flash, it had fallen back.

He really thought he’d never see him again.

Evan pressed his thumb against the short fuzz, digging a break in the stuffing. Fredbear held on by a paw. There was something he was trying to communicate, like he would conjure a sick feeling in Evan’s stomach if he came any closer.

Evan sat down. Murals and curling animal faces turned towards him, painted in delicate strokes, arching the darkened entrance to the flickering arcade. A pale-yellow rabbit and a pale-yellow bear on either side. Their fur crumpled on their jaws in snarling smiles, muffling bows and buttons. Full and beady eyes. Eyes that were living. Eyes that were knowing. They stretched and twisted their melting, swirling bodies as they tried to reach past their own flatness.

“We had the same idea, huh?”

This was good. This was natural. This was quiet.

“Quiet,” Evan whispered.

His voice was not there. It was not there for a long time. “Yeah. Quiet.”

The darkness leeched and drained out their colors, deadening their eyes. Longer and longer and longer, they drifted away into a numb tangle of light and movement.

Nothing and no one.

Melting away.

Cold like death.

It felt like a dream.

His eyes stung. Evan picked at the bow, twisting a thread between his fingers.

When his stare flickered away, it flooded his blurry vision with new, new, different, because Mike was alert, sitting up, staring down at Fredbear’s weak figure with confusion.

I warned you.

It didn’t take him long to leave that crevice. They were virtually begging him. He could pick their voices out among the noticeably shrewder, younger voices the closer he strode to the arch with its … tasteful creative liberties. All they’d wanted to do when they came here was crash in the arcade, and who was he to stop them . They acted like it was any other day. Technically, that was true. For them. But things were worse now. Without company, Mike existed without an excuse. And even then, if he couldn’t duck and hide, the thought of being caught with, oh, “that crowd” among these stupid leeching party-dwellers made him want to throw up everything he had ever eaten.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

If I dig myself into a really big fucking hole, at least I can be known as the guy who digs really big fucking holes. And dies.

This arcade was dark compared to the other, only helped by its three-wall, windowless enclosure, which probably made it seem smaller than it was, since the cabinets were jam-packed from wall to wall. The only real illumination came from the screens themselves. Mike stepped cautiously through the maze, peeking through the slits, bowing his head around corners. He heard an outcry.

“It’s jammed. It’s jammed.”

“Put your hand through it. Kick it!”

“What's a quarter to you man? Don’t break the thing.”

“That’s the thing, it’s not a…”

When Mike turned around, the three of them were hunched over some game at the end of the row. Jeremy was squinting and had practically attached his eye to the coin slot of the cabinet. He kept pressing the tip of his finger in and out, like it would achieve something. Gabriel stood right above him and kept assessing the cabinet, shaking it, kicking it, swaying his head to each side. He even ducked down to pick up the outer wiring. Kirk hung off, stiff.

Mike slowly came over to them. They muttered greetings through gritted teeth, which resembled something like smiles.

“Oh, I bet you can help us.” Jeremy said. “Yeah, what do you know about—”

Mike pushed himself between them.  This was a fighter game he’d played at least two dozen times, but that was in the lows. Its thin metal shell was newly dented at the base and warped and scratched around the slot: not even worth a five-dollar repair. They could’ve at least tried a little harder.

“I put in a half-dollar. It just sorta … slipped in. These slots are real wide.”

He could feel the pressure of six eyes digging through him as he stared at the little button with the rubbed down, peeling “twenty-five cents” barely any more than a memory imprinted on its glass. He pressed its corner and jostled the button. There was a clink, clink, clink on the tile below.

Jeremy picked up the half-dollar from the floor and flipped its face back to front in his fingers, grinning wickedly. “Nice, how’d you do that?”

He shrugged. He thought his demonstration was simple enough to understand.

“Take it. Like a reward. Compensation, or something.” The half-dollar nestled into Mike’s half-open palm.

And they scoured the rest of the arcade for some time, appropriately half-of-half-dollars jingling in their fists in their back-and-forth swinging gaits, trampling forward with heads high like they owned the place. It wasn’t like they had a choice. The yelling, punching, and glaring of the biggest kids to give a damn couldn’t put a dent in anyone but themselves.

“Having any fun?”

“You look like shit. Y’know that?”

“How old are they turning, anyway?”

He held his breath, and his chest began to burn. He lowered his head and let his hair obscure his eyes, his face. Only jeers and footsteps. He wasn’t here. If they forgot hard enough, maybe he never was.

Maybe this wasn’t such a—

Mike’s main problem was that he couldn’t commit. He couldn’t attach. He couldn’t detach. So he was left as a sorry, directionless pit of anger. He needed to get a fucking grip already.

“Oh, so that’s what your detour was for,” came behind him.

He flinched and turned around. The mask had lifted from his side and fallen into Jeremy’s hand, who gazed into the crumpled eyeholes like it was the first time. Apparently, his grip had been too loose to stop curiosity.

At this point, he barely even cared.

“I needed it. For something.” Mike responded.

Jeremy held it closer to his face. His fingers kept a strong grip on the now flimsy edges, but they didn’t graze the other side. Jeremy couldn’t see through plastic.

It felt like minutes waiting for Jeremy’s arms to jolt the thing upright. Mike’s body tensed. He could feel everything that wouldn’t be said.

Until Mike said it himself. “Want to get matching ones?”

He pressed the mask back to Mike’s side. Face-forward. “They have more here, right?”

“They keep spares in the basket behind the gate.”

“But it’ll take so long. You said they’re mega expensive.”

“I didn’t say I paid for it though, did I?”

Jeremy turned to the prize corner in apprehensive delight. Then he turned to the other two, who were about to turn a corner, and called them over.

The plan was simple.

Mike pressed his back to the confetti-showered wall and pulled up his knees. Next to him, Gabriel dived beneath the gate and strained for the basket. His nails scratched against the tile as he pushed himself inward. Jeremy stood to his other side, bouncing from foot to foot, looking out at the arcade.

With a dreading glance down to Mike, Kirk walked up to the counter and trapped himself with the often recently stoned yawns of Ms. Nicky. She was here on a part-time summer job. Why, he couldn’t imagine.

“So, you know, oh, I don’t know, um, do you sell anything different on Tuesdays?” Kirk fumbled to raise his shoulders.

“No,” her voice smiled.

“I already have the entire day booked and just need the extra clarification. You know. As a responsible parent. Because I have a son, little tyke, love him to death, and his birthday is on Tuesday! What a coincidence, huh?”

“Any luck?” Mike whispered.

Gabriel jolted backwards and nearly slammed his head into the gate, but he ducked down in time to look Mike in the eyes silently. “What do you think?” He held up his hands and dove head-first.

“If you have complaints or concerns, you can phone the number on the bright, blue, obvious poster you passed when you walked in.”

Kirk glanced at them and started with a heaving sigh. “Well, you see, jeez, my son, he’s allergic to everything. All the things. If it has hair, this guy, he goes into anaphylactic shock. And that includes him. Poor guy, we have to shave him twice a week. Which is why he hates animals. Hates them. Hates to see them. So I am just wondering, will you have an assortment of decidedly less … animalistic merchandise on Tuesday?”

Jeremy sputtered out a laugh and quickly covered his mouth. Gabriel’s arm awkwardly jutted out from halfway through and raised to swat. It beat unceremoniously, blindly, against Mike’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry … How old are you?”

“Thirty-five. Lotion works wonders.”

“Everything we have is right behind me … sir.”

Gabriel suddenly burst from the gate and sprawled onto the tile, cradling three different masks. Mike exposed himself and saw Ms. Nicky staring dumbfounded at the defiled baskets and their contents splayed over the corner tile.

“Actually, scratch that. Scratch everything,” Kirk announced.

Kirk slid into the dark and onto the wall with shaking legs. He beckoned them to follow him and, inching forward, they ducked behind an arcade cabinet.

The masks clattered onto the floor in a pile. Gabriel quickly pulled off the topmost, Freddy, and stretched it around his face. They were barely made for someone over six, but unlike most things here, they didn’t snap at a single misuse. Jeremy swiped right as he pulled away and triumphantly raised a sorrowfully lop-eared rabbit in the air, since no one could quite yet figure out how to make fingernail-thin plastic stand on its own. Which left Kirk scoffing, edging away, as Jeremy elbowed him and pinned the girl’s one to his chest.

Kirk turned to Mike and pointed to his side. “Hey, if you want to keep ourselves a secret, we could always switch.”

Mike shook his head and pulled it closer, this time to his face.

They could have been fireflies from here. All the blinking buttons of white and red and yellow and blue buzzing in the pitch black: low, high, low again, all at once. In a tangle of pipes and wires and faintly glimmering metal that shattered the illusion. Backstage. Control modules. Control. The place that kept them living. Or kept people from seeing what they really were: dead. But nothing could be dead without living.

A lie.

That’s what they were.

Evan could not stop staring between two walls that created a sort of doorway tucked away where no one would find it at a sliver of light that rippled like a cloth fold because he knew behind those walls was the stage and on that stage was something he never wanted to see again. Their eyes went tik and rattle when a finger was flicked against the flaking edges of their glossy blue irises that stared gleefully into nothing, unblinking. And when that sliver gave way to a floodlight of praising people, those eyes flickered on with warmth at the edges. That was when the lie began, and when the truth ended.

Maybe it was the opposite.

The people were right. They were the ones who smiled today. They weren’t here, and they weren’t seeing it, too.

Every day.

Every day. 

The backstage choked him with fear. But nothing compared to everything outside the backstage.

What is wrong with you?

Evan left to see.

The only way he could go was deeper.

“Something wrong?”

Pale light caught on the edge of a warped floorboard then came up to shine against something deep within the neck of that colossal bear.

It washed out the color in his beard and drew jagged shadows across the smile Uncle Henry tried to convey. The torch fell from his face, and he was gone. At least everything welcoming.

“No, sir.”

“Oh, what’s up with you to use that sort of talk around me?” He came out from behind … Fredbear and dropped the torch to the side. There was even less of him now. His silhouette bent slowly to its knees and bore into Evan with two tiny glints of torchlight. “Why aren’t you out there?”

Evan’s shoes grated against the wood as he shuffled a step backward. He pressed his fingers into Fredbear’s fur to make sure it was still there.

I am honest.

I am not a liar.

His lips trembled on the word, “Quiet.”

“Well,” He got up with a strain. “If this isn’t the place to be.”

Evan slunk cross-legged to the floorboards and raised his head, squinting just enough to blot them from his vision. Hoisted above him, cardboard clouds and suns and smiling bugs and banjos hung in rows, shivering against each other as cold air hummed through the silence.

The tap of metal on metal.

“So, you and Elizabeth must be having fun.”

Too many questions.

But that wasn’t a —

“Yes. Lots. Of fun. Cake. And sorts.”

“It’s just … a shame…” The light bled into its mouth, illuminating the wedges of teeth. Uncle Henry set something inside of it and the mandible came swinging down like a flap. “Ah, nevermind.”

“What?”

“Just—Mike isn’t here.”

Evan did not answer.

A creak echoed from backstage, followed by soft, irregular footsteps and a disembodied voice: “Hey, Henry, if someone were to steal something from here, y’know, loss and all that, couldn’t you just compensate with more tickets?”

Evan gasped and could not let the air back out. He scrambled to his feet and dragged himself over the wood, into their shadows. They blocked the view with their … cold, dull bodies.

“Speak of the devil! Where’d you come from?”

“Oh, uh, changed my mind.”

The torch fell to the floor with a thud as Uncle Henry rushed to the doorway. “So, what did you do?”

“Nothing. Just curious is all.”

“Just curious, huh?” He chuckled. “I don’t think you understand how loss works.”

Mike shifted his head to peer into the stage. He was so far back in shadow that his eyes could’ve been anywhere.

For a split second, Mike froze.

Passing, falling dust flickered in the path of the fallen torch. Faint light crept onto the tip of Evan’s shoe, so he backed up farther. A cold ripple grazed his back, and when he tore his gaze away, a thin strip of the rest of the world was staring back at him. Evan clutched the curtains and held them shut, and he did not turn around.

“Hey … on the table, your left, mind passing me that tool?” A floorboard creaked. Something clicked up high inside of … it. “The socket on this jaw’s been busted since yesterday. He needs to work before twelve fifteen sharp. We can’t delay it any further. You’ve seen it: the whole day’s booked. It’s amazing what a little hot weather and publicity will do.”

Whatever it was whistled from one end of the stage to the other.

“And, please, don’t run off like that again. I promise, we wanted you here today. I’m glad you came.”

…

No, he would not turn around. Stuck up like a wooden block, so they said some animals died standing. Taxidermied with stiff knees, frozen solid rosy cheeks. That darkened, thinned sandpaper fur, flattened by prying fingers and operations, came closer and closer to prick at the back of his neck. Either of them. Any of them. No, it didn’t make sense. They were shells. They had nothing. Inside was everything, and inside was nothing. They were less than death, they were—

Tumble…

Tumble…

I fear for my safety.

He pulled open the curtains and saw Fredbear face down on the tile.

Before Evan could even release his grip on the cloth, someone snatched him by the paw.

Evan shrunk backward and returned again through a blurry, pinhole view. A big kid. He kept staring down at Fredbear, then looked around for a while. But he never decided he came from the stage. That was a little ironic.

He had a lot of hair, and it ran past his back. But most of it was obscured by a Chica mask.

What a party.

Really, what a stellar fucking job he’d done here.

When Mike was eight, all he’d gotten was an excuse to use up one of his already dwindling sick days because “Wouldn’t it be better to save these presents for Christmas? It’s only three weeks!”

Apparently, his family did not have the same sort of affinity for, say, Independence Day. That was close enough.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was never about Christmas.

Balloons pressed against the ceiling and drifted against each other, pivoting to the sunlit walls. Almost like jellyfish. There was a wall of traffic that shielded him from the booth: a few lines of moving people making little wrecks here and there and changing course. Some would jump up for the plastic tendrils, but each one so far had been far too short to be stung.

Through this he could see Liz. In the gaps of bodies, she sat despondent in the left booth, though it was her right. There was a cake next to her. Honestly, he thought it would’ve been bigger.

He made his way over to her.

“What flavour?” he asked.

“Oh. Hello.” She did not look at him. “I can’t try it. It’s spare.”

“Aren’t those coconut shavings?”

Her head turned to the cake.

“Oh. I don’t know. Everything’s more than coconut shavings.” Her half-lidded eyes met his and filled with small shock. “Why have you got that with you?”

“Got what?”

“That.”

He felt for his face, and it wasn’t there.

Idiot.

Mike tore off the mask and pressed it to his jeans. “You—It doesn’t concern you.”

She opened her mouth and started to smile, but a hand thrust itself against his shoulder.

“You made it.”

Mike held his breath, and it turned his words hoarse. “How could I miss this.”

He tried to step back but he was shaken and held in place.

“It’s a shame. We planned everything out for one less. I was convinced the idea of having to play nice with your brother disgusted you so much that you left for good this time.”

Mike strained the muscles in his neck to make sure they wouldn’t move as he shifted his eyes. A white cuff with a gold button bulged beneath a leather wristwatch. It was off by two seconds, and that annoyed him endlessly. It was set for repair this Thursday, so help his five hundred dollars. A tie littered with multi-colored balloons and a two-piece purple suit. That two-piece purple suit. There were four of them and he had picked it out eight months ago, then changed his mind.

“But there’s just nothing that feeds your sick little mind out there, is there? You come crawling back every time, asking for one more chance.” It came to Mike’s attention that his shoulder was in pain. “God, you’re insufferable. Look at yourself. Take a good long look at yourself.”

Three spots of tomato sauce dribbled down the base of Mike’s faded The Wall T-shirt. Silly of him to not pack for survival.

“Nobody wants you here. You don’t belong here. You never have.”

He looked up. Liz stiffly shook her head.

“I know,” he said.

“I know you know," Dad said. "You are never going to forget it. Do you understand me?”

He looked down to the mask but kept it pressed to his leg. “Yes.” He started to stammer. “Why … why are you…”

The hand lifted softly and Dad was here now, in front of him.

“I’ve come to a conclusion.” A smile rose on his face, and he sighed deeply. “I’m not going to stop you.”

“...From what?”

He pointed downward. “Wearing your mask. Wear it. I’m not going to stop you.”

That smile persisted, and persisted. It tore apart so many of the well-worn points on his face that told so minutely and effectively what was wrong, why it was wrong, and why it would never, ever be fixed. It did none of that.

“Thanks,” Mike muttered, searching anywhere else.

Foreign.

Stranger.

Just leave me here. It isn’t worth it.

Suffocate in that dust, I’m sure you’ll be fine.

There were darker and lighter veins in the wood and they slithered up and down, swirling into knotted holes. Again and again, past the table leg, up and down, up and down. The inside of the tablecloths were much paler than the outside. The red became pink and the white became whiter.

The cracking half of a pizza crust sat opposite of him, along with a styrofoam cup. He could only assume it was a cup. The leg obscured its lid if it had one. Maybe it was a white rock, or a bowl, or a wadded-up piece of…

He looked. It was a styrofoam cup. This was good. He could stay here and he could live here until everyone had left and then he could leave.

No, don’t you realize?

We all saw you.

He knows you’re here.

Everyone knows you’re here.

You can’t hide.

The party is for you.

It had just been for a moment. As far away as he could, he’d breathed in for a “Please, can I…” but the eyes inside that mask shredded every pulling force in his body and all he could do was run. 

Evan hardly realized he wasn’t breathing, but his throat was getting scratchy from the blanket of sticky dust along the baseboard. He clamped his hands over his mouth and shut his eyes. Some sort of sound tried to escape him, but he could not let it, so he silently convulsed.

A shadow fell over the tablecloth. The dirt-smeared tip of a large blue sneaker nestled itself into the tile and made way for its companion. Abruptly they turned around and the table jolted.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Ground.” The mutter shook so close to him that his skin turned cold.

“Give it here.”

Clothes rustled.

“Hey, let me see.”

“Bet it’s his?”

“Hey, I want to see.”

“Bet it’s whose?” Again. He wished it would stop.

“Oh. It’s so shoddy.”

“His brother’s.”

The sneakers shuffled. “Maybe.”

Circling his ears, “Wanna … I don’t know, chuck it in the trash or something? He usually throws fits at that sort of stuff, right?” irregular footsteps.

“He’s not my brother. Don’t ask me.”

They halted in a whisper. “But you know. You know what they say about him. About them.”

Nasally laughter. “Oh, sure, let me get out my list.”

The sneakers stepped forward. “You sure are sticking your neck out for him all of a sudden.”

“Huh?”

“No, no, quiet. It was a good idea.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because—”

“Hang on, I just thought … You can tell Mike hates it here, so if we just did something to—”

“Because, look at me. No, look at me, you really want to stir up beef with toddlers and their mothers right now?”

“Fuck off, man. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He meant—”

“Okay. Tell me, expert.”

For a very short time he could hear their heavy breathing.

“He means—”

“Shut up Jeremy, I’m—”

“It was my idea!”

“And it sounded absolutely nothing like you, so, enlighten me, Gabrie—”

“Maybe there don’t have to be consequences, okay? We can have a nice time. I just want him to be happy. I just want everyone to be happy. If it’s so terrible why don’t we leave? We can go to Denny’s, we can get a nice stack of pancakes. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

A long pause.

“Give me the bear.”

“I just wanted to … I don’t know … I just wanted to—”

“Not like either of you need it for anything.”

“Come on. Give it back. Please.” A pause. “Jerry, I agree with you.”

“Why don’t you just return it to him if you’re so heartfelt.”

“Let me deal with it. I found it. Keep jamming up the machines with your half-dollars. Jeez.”

Something happened, and the sneakers were gone.

He waited. He didn’t even know he was waiting. For a long time he was not there. For a long time he was everything he heard and nothing more. Now there was nothing to hear.

We will stay here and we will live here until everyone has left and then we will leave.

Something like the crinkling of sheets at daybreak. His head turned.

“Hey, buddy. Hi. Um … happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday.”

The tablecloth was being held up by a hand draping down to propel fluorescent light against his skin. The hand belonged to a face. The same face. The same eyes. They were dark brown and shot wide, dragged up and darting around his enclosure, shadowed as he bent his head beneath and slumped to the floor. The boy with the blue sneakers ducked and looked up and ducked again, slowly craning his face to Evan’s.

His mouth parted, then closed in a stammer, and he shook his head and pulled something from behind his back.

Fredbear sank against the boy’s palm as his fingers came around him like a claw. He held his hand out flat, awkwardly pinning Fredbear in place so that he wouldn’t topple over.

But Fredbear couldn’t topple over.

Don’t believe him.

The boy swallowed and glanced at the tablecloth. Gray light caught the coiling ends of his hair from the opening he held onto. The mask pressed into it from behind, and Evan pretended it was not there.

The tile thudded softly again as Fredbear looked up at him from the floor.

“I’m sorry. Forget everything, okay?”

The tablecloth swished, and the sneakers were gone.

Hold me close.

It’s important we stick together.

Back on that bench, Mike lay on his back.

One of the lights was out.

All the others were on.

He’d have to watch it for the rest of time on the off chance it would flicker again, just to be sure.

For the first time, the mask felt slippery. Some revelation. Like a hot cloud emanating from every part of him. Especially his hands. Shit. He couldn’t breathe. Shit. Get it together you moron just put it on.

He fiddled with it for too long, the inside glaring him down as he stared at the dark grey fluorescent. It slowly slid over his face, and the string trailed uselessly behind.

Mike slipped it behind his ears.

His forehead stung so, so, so badly. He could feel sweat seeping against the ink and pulling it to his skin. His blood. His brain.

Here they came. They hovered and said nothing. They couldn’t recognize him.

“You sleeping?” A fist knocked on his face. Twice.

When he sat up, Gabriel was halfway through a bite on a “Very Beary” Candy Cruncher that he stuffed through his mask, and they stared unmoving at each other long enough to make his hands go hot again.

The candy bar fell to his side as he shrugged and turned away. The three of them huddled together and moved as one with their own conversation, in arms, swaying, snickering, maybe something or other about him.

Mike looked down at the stripe of white gauze that folded with his palm. Every now and then, it still flickered with pain.

The only thing left was to gouge out his eye.

With his back turned, he got up and slowly walked to the middle of the room. He could feel it flinch. The saying was right: you really could tell when you were being watched. Mike’s heart was pounding.

Be someone.

He touched the metal-lined lip of the stage that jutted out from the purple curtains. Everything was inches away.

You are no one.

He went numb. It was swimming in his head like the warmth in that featureless, painless smile. If they would think of him, every once in a while. If he could turn around they would know his name and first they’d be mortified. Then they’d swarm him like flies and run him off this place for good. His throat began to tighten. The thought tuned something deep inside him and he felt his mind reaching out and tugging those curtains like a baby.

And you are going to fucking prove it.

No one would be able to see him cry. Not even himself. He wasn’t even here. Who would’ve thought something so stupid? Not him, that was for sure. He wasn’t here.

Light and sound pulsed from the curtains. They rolled open slowly to reveal a terrible, aching pit in Mike’s stomach. He pretended it wasn’t there.

He turned around.

“I have an idea.”

They were still there among a growing crowd, and they lowered their eyes to his.

“Come out.”

—Don’t do it—

“I want to show you something.”

Don’t do it.

Please, don’t do it.

Evan mumbled and shook his head.

“I’ll take you out if you aren’t going to come out”

“No, no, no, no. Not again. Not again.”

Foxy emerged under the tablecloth. “Do I look like I’m going to hurt you right now? Scare you?”

Yes.

“Didn’t think so. Let’s go.”

He grabbed Evan’s arm and pulled it. He fought back a scream as he fell through the fabric and onto the tile. His neck banged the table when he scrambled to his knees. Tall people with funny masks were looking down to him, shuffling closer.

He shuddered and choked and ran. He ran beneath a table but when he stopped moving it gave him goosebumps so he ran beneath another table and when he stopped moving it gave him goosebumps and he realized he was trapped. Evan collapsed in his shivering body and sobbed.

“You know, you’d be a fantastic salesman, Mike—”

His arm was pried from its cradle. Again. The gray light blinded him. Again. This time the grip still burned. Half of him dangled uselessly below. The rest of him flowed limply into Foxy’s grasp

Laughter.

“Help me,” Mike said.

Hands.

He thrashed.

His shoes dragged helplessly.

His cheeks were puffed and burned.

He gasped through his nose.

Plastered hair.

The skin would break.

His arms would bruise.

Traveling faces.

Two circled the side.

But Freddy and Foxy were close enough that

he caught sight of them smiling.

The thump-thump of each tile

bled into the beating bass.

He held Fredbear close.

But there was nothing

to hold

on

to.

“Aww, is he gonna cry?”

I’m sorry.

Evan cried out and thrashed forward. The hands gave like nothing was there at all, letting him collapse to the floor in stiff, heaving sobs.

He reached his arm towards Fredbear and his nails dug hard into the cold tile, an inch away. Evan anxiously unfurled his cocoon and raised his hand to—

A blue sneaker kicked Fredbear away.

All of them began to back up. The one in the Bonnie mask went the farthest. “Hey, we did enough. Holy shit, I didn’t think…”

Red. The snout grazed his cheek, nestling up beside him. Breath echoed and insulated inside. “You want a closer look?”

They both looked out to Fredbear. His tiny body was covered in dust. Evan looked back and Mike was staring at him. His eyes were glazed and unfocused.

Evan nodded lightly.

Mike shot up, holding his arm. “Hey, I think he wants a closer look!”

He was lifted, his back crushed backward against the stage. He’d have nearly hit his head had they not cushioned him. They pulled him up. They pushed him back. Indecisive. This was fun. This was a game. Stop crying. Please stop crying.

He was at its feet. The bear swiveled and hung its arms open wide, pivoting into stillness for its audience, then going back the other way, tiling its head and fluttering its industrial eyelids. Clicking.

Whirring.

Groaning.

It shuddered when it opened and closed its mouth.

Foxy bowed to his shoulder, and he leaned away and violently shook his head.  “No, I don’t wanna! I don’t wanna!”

“You heard him. Closer.”

“Let him go!” Bonnie clawed and shoved at their arms. “Let him go!”

Pressure released, and Evan’s torso crumpled with relief. Mike was in front of him now, stiff with his arms at his sides. Mike breathed heavily, and his mask was angled to the floor. His muscles suddenly twitched and he turned around.

People:

clinging to their mother’s dresses

with Polaroid cameras

whining

guffawing

murmuring.

Every face an absolute stranger.

Mike’s hands were shaking. He turned around.

“Can you lift.” Foxy moved past him methodically and mindlessly. “Help me.”

He climbed onto the stage.

“Lift. Yeah. C’mon.”

There stopped being a ground. The lights of the segmented ceiling spun into one great blinding soup. Like dentist’s lamps that left dots when reality was back again. He reached out for nothing. There was him and then there was air.

His ribs hurt.

He watched them rise and fall above everything. Above the people and the hands and the music and the grainy undertone to the music only audible a foot from the speakers. Nothing was here but him and nothing was going to happen.

“On three.”

A jolt shook the metal body behind his head. Evan rolled back his eyes, and two tan hands with bitten fingernails held down the jaw. Its entire head lurched forward, and it shook in place. The rest of them bolted their arms around its arms when it started to swivel.

“One … Two…”

He could not tell what had just happened. Many things had just happened. First it was dark. Then it was cold. Then it was cramped. Creaking flooded his ears. Air sucked in and out between rods threaded into his skin. Wires slithered over and under like guitar strings. It rendered him deaf. It rendered his cries deaf. His neck bent down on its bruised tissue. His body was useless. His arm moved but it did not sway. He breathed and it tasted wet. It tasted like iron. His fingertips caressed fur. He grabbed it. He pulled. Something caught on his skin. Dizzy. Scratched the scab. A sinking, painless feeling on the side of his head, and it trickled over his nose. And spread and spread and spread and spr ead and spr ead and spre ad and spr ead a nd spr e ad  and s pre an d an d spre ad and sp  rea  d  a nd spr  ead a n  d s p r  e ad  a n d sp r  r e e  n d  d  a nd spr  ead a n  d s p r  e ad  a n d sp r  e a d  a n     d s p  r      e  a     d   a n         d s    p r e  a   d n d  d  a nd spr  ead a n  d sp r  e ad  a n d sp r  e a d  a n     d s p  r      e  a     d   a n         d s    p r e e  n d  d  a nd spr  ead a n  d s p r  e ad  a n d sp r  e a d  a n     d s p  r      e  a     d   a n         d s    p r e a n d  d  a nd spr  ead a n  d s p r  e ad  a n d sp r  e a d  a n     d s p  r      e  a     d   a n         d    s p r e a  d  . . .. .

A stick of celery snapped in two.

That was all.

Someone was eating lunch in the crowd.

That was all.

Mike hadn’t changed his shirt.

That was all.

It was tomato sauce.

That was all.

That was all.

That was all.

That was all.

That was all.

That was all.

The world had shut off. Really, the world came through in waves. It reeled him in. Again. It pulled him under. Again. Everything filled with haze. He sank in open ocean. Someone screamed his name. Someone pulled his shirt. Someone called the ambulance. His spine hit the floor. Nice and cold. He hurt so much. Dad didn’t even look him in the eye. Nobody looked him in the eye. People pushed him and whispered things to him. Mom’s voice shook. That was how she cried. Strange men came in wrinkled uniforms. He covered his ears and then he was in the Chevy.

.

.

.

Liz rocked and mumbled in place. He turned away. Charlie was there. He turned away again. Three potholes. A pink house with a metal sunflower next to the window. A palm tree. The mountains looked small from here. Pine scented ornaments hung from his rearview mirror. A crumb of bread vibrated on the air vent. His body lurched forward with the car. A normal double story house. Henry gave the toy to Liz.

No.

No, he didn’t give her anything.

There was nothing to give.

He didn’t say, “We’re going to take it to him in the morning.” He said nothing.

Charlie didn’t look at him and say, “I don’t know why you did it, but, whatever happens, I’m so sorry.” She said nothing.

They went inside without a word.

.

   .

             .

He shut the blinds and the door. He buried himself in a pillow till the pain in his throat stopped him from screaming. Oh God, he couldn’t even cry. A husk. Robotic something. Blood pounded in his ears. It rushed beneath his skin. His lungs stuttered and gargled. Good. Die. Please, die.

That hand grasped the fur. It shook and fell limp over and over and over again. He shut his eyes. Over and over and over again.

Light crept out from below his door. He would run out of breath before those two dark spots came to stand behind. He wouldn’t be able to open the door for them to come inside and take away what was left of him.

         .

                                        .

                                        .

                                                                                       .

.

Hello?

Chapter Text

I must admit, I have no intention to deceive.  

Which is why I must explain myself.  

If this has found itself in the hands of someone unbeknownst to me,  

and everything has gone as intended,  

then I am dead.  

I have made attempts to expand these pieces of memorabilia into something more than what brought me to them.  

Perhaps, a way to appreciate the living. Perhaps, a way to remember what we lost. Perhaps, a way to retain what we still have.  

This is none of those things.  

I apologize for the deception. I truly do.  

You must understand that there is nothing left to do. My body and mind have grown brittle from the effort. Shame consumes me for each word I write. How silly is that?  

Understand, and please, don’t fret,  

this is the world’s longest suicide note.  

(Do Not) Resuscitate

He had heard those three words twice in his life, discounting this very instance. The memory persisted largely as a footnote on menial documents which prevented hospitals from the accusation of murder. It was never such, if one consented to it. Simply put, in the event his son’s breathing were to stop or his heart were to go into cardiac arrest, nothing would be done. 

Death was peculiar in that it both took and gave, like drilling a hole and driving in a screw. It could be said that nothing was there, at least semantically, for these were two separate entities conjoined by the absence in the other. The concept of absence was borderline incomprehensible to the human mind, which was why it must compensate with all its depressive self-puppetry. The idea that one could be here one day and never graze a hand again: everyone had some level of dread for it that lay dormant until death was brought into the room again. It intermingled every ugly side into a little sick fight. Poor to watch. 

But there was nothing to worry over. 

Over his readings of these words he had come to understand that certain people treated them like advice from God. But God did not exist, and those same words were as thin as the air they breathed. Throwing up one’s hands to the will of the world was the weakest thing a human being could achieve. Trust was enigmatic and corrosive, in the sense that it left the self in an unreliable position. This had led him to the assumption, though admittedly a base one, that there were two kinds of people in the world: ones who submitted to it and ones who did not. 

William was the latter. 

The clipboard fell to his lap around six o’clock, requesting his signature that he was happy with the above. He and his wife ate a dinner of two chocolate chip granola bars from the downstairs vending machine. They talked about numbing, meaningless things to pad the time and fill up their minds. The outer hall itself glistened a sterile white and green, rushing by from their corner adjacent room 308. They were let in at half-past nine by an unfriendly face in blue smocks. She muttered something incoherent and swiftly let them alone. 

The cocoon of his son diluted its tiny vitality and splayed it amongst churning machinery. They roared, mumbled and beeped inconsistently, like a mouthpiece. His flat body did not move upon mutual sight. It bore a hulking tube that obscured the only part of his face not wrapped in bandage, and this left him barely recognisable as anything more than an unpressed crease in the pale white sheets. 

They did not move once this revealed itself. All Clara could muster was a stare forward. She rocked from her heels to the pointed tip of her toe box as if once more and her anxiety would spring her out of place. Instead, her lips and shoulders trembled. 

“You saw it.” She finally glanced in William’s direction, startled by his company enough to return to her rigidity. 

“I did.” 

“Was it quick.” 

“I don’t know … Don’t talk like that.” 

“W-what do you want me to say…” 

“Nothing.” 

Something came over him, and he could not help but despise her for the brief moments she remained by his side. He slowly backed up into a thinly padded chair, propping his hands against his face and breathing in, breathing out. Again they shared a meaningless glance, and she was off for the bedside. 

Clara had forgotten to pull up a chair, so she crouched and furrowed her neck along the edge of the covers with her head and hair loosely strewn against his son’s body. She picked up his hand and turned it over. It reacted as lamely, languidly and limply as William had expected it to. Her thumb dug into the drained skin of his palm and rolled his knuckles white as slippery whispers left her tongue. Clara’s eyes began to dart pleadingly over. He was distant. He could not pull her from her choice. 

“I love you, I love you, I love you … Hey, Mother loves you, I love you. I love you. We love you. Lizzy loves you. Father loves you. Henry and … Charlie love you. Mike, he loves you. I promise he loves you.” Her long dark hair ran in rivulets down her back. It was dishevelled, but shreds of its keeping showed as pink, plastic flowers buried in the strands. “All your little friends love you. We love you. Oh God, we love you. We’re going to … It’s okay. Don’t be scared, everyone is going to come back and say hi in the morning. You’re nice and comfortable and warm.” Clara seldom did her makeup, but today it pooled beneath her eyes. “Everything is okay. Evie, everything is okay. Everything is okay, Evie.” 

She cracked into a sob, into a high-pitched mumble. Immediately she tore her choking grip and whipped her head and body to the wall, crumpling into herself as she began to stand. William’s shoulder became inundated with nails and snot and salt. The bridge of her nose buried into the wet threading of his suit as her sniffles and shudders shook his arm. She cried out like a wounded animal, again and again, breathlessly. Eventually she quieted into a slow, hot wheeze, and strands of loose split-ends pricked his skin. 

William did not move. He watched the sheets drape over his son’s pinned up feet like a dead man’s as she squeezed her eyes shut from the very tempting thought. But at his chest they rose with breath, however small and slim and however alien to anything but the rhythmic beeping of the ventilator. He clenched his jaw hard. She attempted to wed their slackened fingers beneath the seats. 

“It reminds me of…” Clara’s voice cracked under its own weight. “It reminds me of…” 

“Diane,” he explained. 

The digging of her nose fell away to cold air. “Don’t.” 

He could see, from the corner of his eye, that she held herself stupefied in that position for a long time. 

William breathed sharply inward and leaned down to meet her. “It isn’t. That was slow. We knew it was coming.” 

She politely shook her head with a transfixed vacancy. “Don’t.” 

As he strained backward Clara’s gaze of pure horror shot to him. She searched the room before climbing to her feet. 

“Oh, God.” She went to the door and reached for the handle but drew back as if repulsed, pacing in small circles from him to its base. “We have to go home. We have to…” 

Her red stilettos struck the tile in a miniature display of fireworks. The noise was unbearable, and he put up a hand. 

“And what if he does?” William spoke these words to no one, but the incessant heel bombings had stopped. Clara looked at him inquisitively, with an upturned nose, from her place far beyond the bedside light. “Twelve fractures. Do you understand what ‘twelve fractures’ means? Do you understand what ‘likely irreversible damage to frontal and temporal lobes’ means? Do you understand how delicate the human brain is? Clara, when he wakes up, he won’t even know his name. Months or years of rehabilitation clinic after rehabilitation clinic. And for what, hmm? He won’t eat. He won’t talk. He won’t walk. He won’t love you or fear you or laugh or cry. A vegetable, Clara.” 

There was an amusing pity in her eyes when she spoke. “Don’t lie to yourself.”  

He smiled warmly and put up his hands in grand defeat. 

Clara had gone. 

William now lay on a long, thin, foam-filled bench that only slightly resembled something created with the intention to sit on, which had prompted him to question it for a long time before arching out his aching back. Here they could almost face each other. The hands on the clock across from him pointed three-past two. Everything but his own volition willed him to rest, so he stared onward as he had for the past six hours. 

And he also rose from the bench. Evan seemed to sleep through his coma. Air hissed between the exposed beatings of his heart. His little palms did not flicker at his sides, but they could have in the moments William blinked. An IV needle impaled his far hand, speckled once with blood beneath the plaster. 

He could not remember what his son looked like underneath. Comparatively, it was fruitless. This was a thing wrapped in bandages. This was not Evan. “Evan” was an intangible concept eroded yesterday. 

He grabbed his son’s hand. 

“Won’t you look at your father who loves you?” 

It left a grossly familiar feeling in his stomach. Everything would go awry, if improperly managed. Perpetually and forever a man without a son whom others took out their diluted pity on and immortalised as their cryptic, tragic entrepreneur in snapshot headlines. No graduation. No arm swinging on trips around town. He wanted to pull away. But that sick dread of death was not inevitable. It had never been, and it never would be. Late that afternoon he and Henry would lumber over a pot of coffee and discover the most efficient way to remain a functioning business. The thought of losing the Diner was grave, and, frankly, unrealistic. They were capable. Others said it was comparable to a crocodile, but no, something had pulled just out of place, enough to squeeze itself unnaturally shut. It could happen to anything and anyone. 

God, no one would believe that. The truth escaped even him. 

Michael remained an option. The public knew him as an animal that put its snout too close to shiny fires, too stupid to know they burnt. Reckless endangerment, manslaughter … With bitter persuasion, he could face a life sentence. But it only took a soul to find out that Michael was not the only responsible party. Only a soul, and it would all crumble to pieces. He ruined everything. 

He ruined everything. 

Dear God, he ruined absolutely everything. 

William let go of his son’s hand and came to stand against the bed. His own body shook in slithering chills. 

How fervent his hate had become. How justified. 

William plucked at the rim of his watch. 

“I am going to kill him.”

“Oh, you’re right. Too harsh.” 

“Well then, 

           what do you propose?” 

                 .

                           .

“...she thinks it’s all doom, every day, 

     doom, she thinks you’re taking out her second lung, 

                 isn’t that funny, Evan? it’s like you’re part of her and you’re 

                vanishing … vanishing, vanishing, 

what do you know about vanishing,  

            hmm?” 

                                .

                                       .

           .

“...No, you don’t end like this. 

                .

                                           .

                                                .

                            I don’t end like this.  

Why would you …               .

                                         .

                             .              No,  

no  

no.” 

                                                                                               .

                                                          .

        .

 .

“It’s under control, child.” 

 .

                                                        .

“Despite your oblivious protests I’ve come to the conclusion that your brother 

         .           .      .

.                                  . .   .

deserves everything 

that could ever 

be coming for 

. 

 .

 .

him.” 

“Do you understand what I’m saying to you? 

 .

     .

Do you understand? 

               .

 .

I’m going to kill him. 

 .

            .

I promise. 

                            …

 .        .                                   …

I’m going to choke out his                       …

            little burrow with gasoline.  …

 …           …          .                              .   ….

                              Does that scare you?   .  . .     .        …..

      …                   …    .    .                                    .

…                          Does that make you happy?” .

 ….                   .          …. . 

                                                     . … . .. .. .       .     ..

..        .

    ..

.

 .

 .

    .

. 

 .

“They say laughter is the best medicine.” 

         . 

                                                   .

                                                                                      .

. 

                                                                   .

“What did the bear say to the rabbit?” 

. 

                                                       .   

I 

. 

 .

 .

                     have  

                                                 .

 .

                                                      .

. 

something 

                           .

                                         .

                                                                 .

                                                                        stuck 

                                                  .

 .

 .

                in 

                        .

                           .

                                                                                 .                                     

 .

 .

                        .

                                .

my 

 .

                      . 

. 

 .

. 

 .

 .

 .

. 

 .

 .

 .

 teeth! 

 .

 .

 .

 .

. 

 .

 .

 .

 .

Just laugh. Laugh, goddamnit. Look me in the eyes when you’re being spoken to. Goddamnit. Please, say something. 

. 

 .

  .

 .

           .

                                                                  .

                                                       .

                                      .

                       .

            .                          I know you’re in there. 

     .

 .

. 

 .

 .

 .

      .

          He 

yawned and he woke up 

    and 

there was wind that 

sounded 

                                  both familiar and 

kind and 

     familiar 

and unkind and there 

     was 

                     a screaming voice that 

would stop before 

                 pelting in his ear again that 

he did not feel 

         he did not 

have ears he could not see 

      he realized 

                   this a light flickered 

back and forth 

                       like a firefly no 

he counted 

        four 

five six fireflies 

      chopped 

       up in the rain again 

the wind howled 

      no it growled       stomping its 

feet around 

      him 

he ran but he did not run his 

      limbs 

    detached like invisible balloons 

flower petals wafted when he 

looked    for them it was very dark 

out so he looked 

  for the 

light he looked for the 

   moon 

            but it was very dark 

out the 

fireflies shimmered 

ahead yellow 

     and purple and blue 

pretty 

morphed and fell to the ground 

    they buzzed they 

screamed a 

loud 

drone overhead 

    a 

monster 

       a voice a voice a voice a 

voice a voice 

a voice 

a voice 

unreachable inaudible 

   voice 

i hear you    i’m sorry too 

why 

              are we sorry 

what happened 

             are        you 

okay 

okay am i okay 

is everything okay 

hi i love you      i can’t leave you 

where did i leave you again 

i can 

see 

you 

yes 

you are right 

there and your 

                   face is smiling at me 

i am sorry  

i forgot all 

        about        you 

please i will 

     i will 

never leave you 

again 

hold 

me 

i’m 

sorry 

it 

won’t 

it 

won’t 

happen 

again 

. 

it 

. 

. 

 . 

won’t 

    . 

    . 

. 

. 

. 

happen 

. 

    . 

   . 

. 

. 

again 

  . 

 . 

. 

i 

. 

love 

. 

. 

. 

y 

. 

o 

u 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

we 

are 

still 

. 

your 

friends 

do 

. 

you 

believe 

. 

that 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

you’re 

. 

broken 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

i 

. 

will 

. 

. 

put 

. 

. 

. 

y 

. 

. 

o 

. 

u 

. 

. 

. 

back 

. 

. 

. 

. 

together. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

. 

Take 

my 

paw. 

Every sound bled into a ringing, then the soft shuffle of air. Little checkerboards spun around his fluttering eyelids. They sank below two white dots. Strands of fur clumped together and flowed down in silky waves. He felt for it. 

It was warm.

The checkerboards fell to his feet which connected to his legs. He curled them to his chest. The air tasted hazy and cold. Fredbear looked down at him inquisitively. The scruffy fluff of his mouth hid the frown that made his eyes so spacey. He nearly swayed from the dragging on his arm, but it didn’t stop him.

“You must have fallen. That looks like it hurts. Need a hand?”

Evan hoisted himself to sit on his knees.

The wide, open room pulsed in a circle, dizzying, squeezing his temples, sending sparks against his forehead.

“How long was I asleep?”

“I don’t know.” Fredbear turned him around. “Looks like the party’s over. Let’s go home.”

Tables. Streamers. Balloons. Flattened on the floor. A lovely silence. A pretty twilight sprinkled in the windows.

“My head hurts. I’ll stay here.”

“But you want to feel better, don’t you?”

Evan stood up, his mind a fog. He put out a shaky, fluid leg to cross the black-white ocean, cradling Fredbear in one arm and pushing the glass door open with the other. The pink of day faded into twinkling stars. A silent road curved and gave way to dark, geometric buildings.

“Which way?” he asked.

“Left,” he answered.

Hey.

All I can say is I’m sorry.

Really, I can’t think of anything.

I’m sorry.

Chapter Text

It is November 14.

Today marks two weeks. In fact today has always marked two weeks, It’s a silly coincidence.

I have had time to reflect. But most of my time during these two weeks has been taken up by replenishing my house to nurture more than just one person. And, lying to police officers.

I don’t mean to sound blunt. I probably shouldn’t be writing this down at all I just feel out of sorts, about Mike, about everything, in a sort of intangible way.

But you aren’t here for me. You were never here for me.

At it’s its core this is for them.  But what good are tangible memories, anyway? A tangible memory doesn’t raise the dead. A tangible memory doesn’t get my daughter into UC Boulder. The “reflection” I mentioned in passing is on whether or not this is worth what I think it is. I’m going such a length to absolve myself from guilt that I may turn a blind eye to the ramifications of my own nonexistence. It’s all a sham that I’m too numb to wrap my head around.

Do I trust myself to complete the task? Do you trust me to complete the task? Have I frightened your ears shut? Who even are you, to be complicit with something so pathetic? I’m sorry, that came out wrong. No part of me is mad at you. You could be one of them. I hope you are.

Maybe I am right. Maybe I can have it both ways and she can find her way after I am gone if I do enough. The trouble is, I’m stumbling in the dark too.

Ash Eyes

The funeral had been alright, 

apparently. 

Not like he wanted to go anyway. 

Nobody wanted him to go anyway. 

Only one place left for him to turn up, now. 

The sea green door stood out because many other houses did not paint their doors. But it was a bad paint job. Needed redoing years ago. Little rocks crackled beneath his sneakers as he shifted to the side. The grip on his hand still remained. 

Dad looked down at him. His dull grey eyes danced back and forth, through him. Two faux flowers, one yellow, one purple, sprouted from the pocket of his all-black suit. Why would he do that? It all seemed like a game. The edge of his lips tugged into a smile as he squeezed Mike’s hand harder. 

“Go on, knock.” 

It stung, pulsing, surely red and inflamed again. His bones bent and ground in an arch, skin squeezing against the scabbed wound. The pain shot up his wrist in quick bursts. It was not happening all over again. No, it was not. Nothing was happening all over again. He’s dead and I—  

Dad’s fingers fell away, leaving a mangled thing that could not open or close. Or knock. 

Mike still had a left hand. Nothing stopped him from using it—but neither of them really wanted that. 

He sharply splintered his knuckles on the wood. The first time. The second. The third. By the fourth, he couldn’t feel a thing. 

Voices echoed closer and closer, until the knob clicked. A tiny gap of warmth creaked into view. Her chipping fingernail polish dipped out from the light, hesitantly, before sliding back to fling the door open. Charlie stood rigid and compact in the doorway. She had replaced her sullen black dress with an oversized, orange Halloween T-shirt she threw on when she couldn’t be bothered to find something nice. Because she was always so bothered to find something nice. But who was he to judge her. 

The edges of her eyes shot white from the shock. They couldn’t decide which intruder to address first, quivering aimlessly. She started to stutter, locked in a desperate, half-second stare with Mike. 

“Greetings,” Dad muttered, pulling him inside. 

This was a nice house full of nice things, but today made him sick and he felt nothing of it at all. It was usually a haven. He had never told anyone that. Frankly he had never made the thought tangible. But it was nothing like that anymore, and it never would be again. Really that was his fault, but what wasn’t his fault. He was sick now: he couldn’t feel things, he couldn’t see things for what they were. Broken piece of shit. My brother is dead and I did it.

But the couch was nice the couch was always nice. Had a good spring. When they were smaller they would jump on it while watching TV. No don’t think about that please don’t think about that. Charlie watched him from across the room, in the armchair. No, her eyes fell down to his hand. Liquid crackled on a skillet somewhere behind him. The sink ran in hissing droplets. Dad checked the time on his wrist. Dad wrung Mike’s. It didn’t hurt, he couldn’t feel it. 

“I think you’re hurting him,” she quietly stammered. 

Dad smiled at him expectantly—as if Mike could form something, articulate anything, out of nothing and no one. 

“He’s fine,” he said. 

She just wouldn’t stop staring. With horrifying, petrified eyes. She teetered herself on the edge of the seat as the muscles in her arms and legs tensed, glued together. Whatever she was holding back, it escaped in tiny twitches beneath her nose. 

Charlie slowly rose, turning her head very roughly in Mike’s direction. What, to get his attention? She had it. “I can help you unpack.” 

“There’s no need. I want him to hear this,” Dad said. 

“It’ll just take a minute, I swear…” 

The pressure released from Mike’s hand, and Dad raised his own palm next to his head. Dad looked at Charlie. He was expressionless, but Mike didn’t want to look into his eyes long enough to understand what he really meant. He opened his mouth and took a breath— 

“Syrup or no syrup? Actually, never mind, never mind. I’ll leave it on the table.” 

—Dad frowned and turned himself backward to watch the kitchen. 

Four small plates now lay on the low-down coffee table as Henry came to sit next to her. His replacement was a grey polo shirt. Funnily, the shade was dark enough that it could have been no replacement at all. Except, he had accidentally left on his jet-black dress shoes. 

Orange juice. Eggs. Waffles. Mike suppressed a gag and looked away, but the smell followed him, assaulted him. God, if he could just disappear. And sink into the couch and into the dirt and never be found again. 

“Yeah, I singed the edges a bit, didn’t I?” He reluctantly watched Henry raise a particle of waffle. “Look at that. I’ll say, the iron’s faulty. You know, the other one short circuited so we had to replace it.” 

Dad sighed and came forward, pressing his already cramped legs against the coffee table. Mike’s orange juice vibrated in its glass. He was putting his hands together, splaying out his fingers, looking Henry dead in the eye. 

That’s the “firing” pose.  

Henry whispered, “Not in front of them.” 

“Ah. I’ll be going, then.” He mumbled the words, almost playfully, happily. But there was a bitterness to it that left the room fidgeting and silent. Too silent.

My fault.  

None of this would be happening if  

Everything would be  

Piece of shit 

I hate you. Fucking garbage. 

God  

No  

God  

Shit  

Gotta fix myself what’s wrong with me why did I do that?  

No, no there’s nothing anymore  

Have to leave. I have to go. I  

“Look, there’s nothing more we can do.” 

Papers. Dad brought papers he brought a suitcase full of them. Brimming out the edge. He shoved the plates out of the way they were basically paperweights really. And made room to pull out three, four, five documents. He sank into the back pillowing of the couch. He struggled at his front pocket, and out came the little white box with the little white sticks. He dragged one against his mouth and laughed, leaning over the coffee table, rolling it at the tips of his fingers. With shrunken shoulders, Henry took it and set it alight, then back into Dad’s grasp.  

“Nothing more?” Dad sucked in and cleared his throat, staining the table with his smoke. “Henry, you’ll take the fall for me, right?” 

“Just put it out soon,” he grumbled. 

“I’d have to do it on your kitchen towels.” Dad giggled at his own joke and slid the documents to Henry. “So, which scares you the least? We’ll go over that one first.” 

“I don’t want to have that conversation right now.” 

“And why not?” 

For just a sliver of a moment, Mike became real, and vile, when Henry motioned to him. 

“I made breakfast for a reason.” 

Dad slid them even farther. “We have to prove that this was a mechanical malfunction that we had no grounds to prevent. I need you to look through our blueprints, as well as each individual part. Oh, and once they’ve cleaned up the—” 

“Listen, that’s not feasible. You need to focus on the cards we’ve been dealt. When I fixed the jaw—” 

“What?” Dad forced his focused crane into an upright posture, eyes shot wide. From the slit of his mouth, the cigarette hung precariously. “You knew?” 

“Well … I, I didn’t—” 

“Then why did it happen?” 

“I couldn’t … I was fixing it. It wouldn’t work right. I had no reason to believe that would happen.” 

He turned to face Mike. “You knew, too?” 

With skin beginning to blare as red and clammy as Mike’s palm, Dad smothered the cigarette between his lips and breathed in deep. Did he want him to feel the sting? Everything in his face was wiped of meaning, except for his eyes. They shook. 

Yeah. I knew.  

Henry’s voice faltered. “No, he was just—” 

“You’re saying you knew.” The sting escaped him, and Mike shut his eyes. 

“No. No he didn’t. Nobody knew.“ 

Dad gritted his teeth. “And you killed him.” 

Henry rose and planted himself in the middle of the room. “Why don’t we talk this over later, okay? Why don’t we eat first?” 

Dad thrust himself upward, rattling the table. Mike slinked limply to his side with his hand balled into a numb red fist. Dad shook it fiercely, and with it his whole shell of a body. 

“What possessed you … you fucking…” He rolled his head back to shimmer his eyes with kindness again, then only pulled Mike closer. “Talk to me. Eh? Spit it out. Spit it out!” 

A hand came down and ripped them apart. Charlie held his, her gaze darting down to its swollen state. Her fingers were cool, and she grasped it so lightly he could barely feel anything. There was something inexplicably nice about the feeling of her fingers. Maybe it was just sweet relief from the baking heat of Dad’s palm. 

And then it slipped away. 

Almost perplexed, Dad stepped back, holding up his hands for all three of them. 

“Of course. Breakfast.” 

Please stop holding back.  

Charlie’s lips moved. 

But she hadn’t said anything, was he really that inattentive. 

He looked up. 

Her lips moved again. 

“I’m sorry,” 

they said. 

Something was happening inside of everyone. But nothing happened outside of anyone. They pretended to pick at the food and pretended they’d eat it soon. They pretended today was a Thursday instead of the week's anniversary of his brother’s— It is a Thursday it is a Thursday you destroyed it. Mike rolled the deep, internal sore of his wrist over and over as forks murmured in cold syrup. Its cracking creases glistened with sweat and blood. The scab’s corner had broken, just a little, from the force. Good. Great. 

He was sick. He was ill. He was going to throw up. His head was not real but pounded like a joke and his chest had solidified but wouldn’t choke him, like a joke. He lived on spikes. No, he was the spikes. If he could just push it all out in a scream or a cry or no actually he didn’t want anything like that. No. No he didn’t. No he didn’t. He would continue to hurt. Good. Great. 

Dad clinked his fork on the rim on his plate, and Mike flinched. “You could have prevented it.” 

“What do you mean?” Henry asked. 

Dad’s gaze fell to Mike. He turned away and shielded his hand beneath the coffee table. 

Cold fingers crept to brush against his hand. 

“You know exactly what I mean,” Dad said. 

They lightly curled and intertwined with the ridges of his bones. Mike flinched, again, and they jolted backward. When Charlie bent closer so that he could see the concern in her eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to turn any farther. 

“I did everything I could. I didn’t even think it would—” 

“ Henry. You could have told them to delay it. You could have cancelled it. You could’ve sent in a technician.” Dad rolled the fork in his hand, scraping the edge of the plate. “And you didn’t tell me. That night. You told me nothing. What could be more important?” 

She came back. Her thumb grazed his pulsing palm, shifting the broken skin in a circle. He shut his eyes tight to pretend she wasn’t there at all. But Mike held on, too. 

“I’m sorry,” Henry whispered. 

I want to say those words too.

Dad punctured his fork into the stack of waffles. He held the bite to his face, turning it on the prongs. A net of ash sprinkled the entire surface, masking a light brown middle. 

He raised his eyebrows, as if entertained. “It would have been perfect. You know, nothing should be perfect. That’s good.” 

Dad’s hand thrust under the coffee table, grabbing both of theirs. But it was repelled and hit the underside of the wood before retreating to his side. Dad turned and, slowly, bared his teeth in an ear-to-ear smile. He leaned closer and scrambled for Mike’s wrist. 

“You two have been awfully silent,” he spat. 

Mike slipped his hand out from under the coffee table. 

“Will.”  

Charlie stood up. “We’re gonna go unpack. C’mon, let’s go unpack.” 

Hoisting up his bag from the floor and onto her shoulder, she raced to the staircase. A wavering “C’mon” left her before she disappeared. 

Hands in his pockets, blocking out all the wrong things, Mike stood up. I’ll only make it worse.

“Why did you do that?” he hissed to Charlie’s back as she led him stumbling up the stairs. 

“I had to.” 

“No you didn’t. Did you see the way he looked at me?” He pulled at her arm, but her head stayed down as they came to the doorway. 

“I’m sorry.” 

“Stop saying that!” He flung himself onto the bedsheets and smothered his face inside them. 

There was a slam, and through the softly obscured corner of his eye he watched Charlie fall to the base of the door, heaving sigh after sigh. 

“Okay,” she forced out. 

It was bleak here. The walls, the sheets, the furniture, were a light blue, but washed grey in the daylight and stripped completely bare. Everything in this house was always so mismatched, it didn’t make sense to have something so sterile. So goddamn familiar. Dad’s muffled voice travelled up the stairs, quieting, heightening into laced laughter. Like he’d never left home. 

Her weight fell upon the bed, and she keeled over to clutch her chest. The bright orange fabric of her shirt rose and fell in irregular jolts. She hiccuped and clawed her hair over her face. 

“You alright?” he mumbled. 

“Give me a minute.” Charlie’s arm and face dug into his side. “I’m sorry.” 

Maybe he was missing something. Mike was always missing something. So as she swayed him in her arms he stared out at the grey wall. By a certain point her shudders died down and he nearly thought he was alone with it. The “nearly” stung so badly. All he needed was to be alone and think.

Her fingers traced his closed fist. She pushed his bitten fingernails backward to expose the wound and ran her thumb against the bruised skin until it stopped beating. She looked up and said, “Tell me when to stop,” but if Mike opened his mouth he would start sobbing. 

He hadn’t cried when it happened or after it happened. He hadn’t cried in seven days. He could take the chance. He could. Just shut his eyes and pretend she nearly wasn’t there. And let them out. If they existed at all. 

But it was fine. It passed over him. 

He waited in the numbness for something more. 

As the downstairs voices droned. 

And droned. 

And faded. 

Charlie watched the world go by. She propped her arms on the windowsill, resting against a pale wooden nightstand. The open window wafted in a faint humid breeze and the spitting sound of cars on roadways. 

Why do you forgive me?  

The dreamcatcher, nailed into the ceiling, swayed back and forth, feathers fluttering. Every now and then the gilded yellow beads would catch the sun just right and flash him in the eye. 

“It’s the real thing. Mom got it back in Wisconsin when she was a kid.” Charlie must’ve been watching him. She chuckled. “She put it up in every room she ever slept in.” 

‘Why’d you not take it down?” 

“I don’t know. I guess … It's kind of like finality that way. And maybe she’s still having good dreams somewhere.” 

“It works?” 

“She thought so. Sure, I think so. You can try it out for her.” 

She tried to hold his gaze a moment longer, then sighed as she fell back against her arms. The wind tugged at her hair, whisking up loose strands. Sunlight turned them to a frizzy halo. 

Charlie’s head shot to something past his vision, and she pulled herself halfway through the window, coming back with another smile on her face. 

“Your dad’s Eldorado is gone.” 

One day they’ll give up on you.

Hunger drilled a cavity in his gut, twisting and spreading the pain until he nearly suffocated on it. His tongue grated against the roof of his mouth. Arms and legs sank flat at his sides. 

Mike curled up to the base of the ajar door. Murmurs bled through the drone of the television, and the air was heavy with butter and root vegetables. Climbing the stairs, echoing in the hallway—Flooding through this tiny yellow crack. Mike could do nothing but shut his eyes and hope the world went black.

In its low rattles his body seemed to drift off entirely. 

Fried onions, again.  

You deserve to starve.

I don’t care anymore.

When he got to his feet, he had to catch himself on the wall and slap himself awake. Their voices were getting louder, now. Slowly, shakily, he gripped the banister and ducked down to peer into the living room. 

On the couch, Charlie and Henry’s backs were turned. She was curled up off to the side and vaguely entranced by the cartoons playing in front of them. The coffee table was completely cloaked in papers, and when Henry reached to compile some in his hands, others slid off like a sheet of snow. 

The wooden step whined under his foot, and he squeezed his eyes shut. They couldn’t see him in his state. 

Henry collapsed over the table in a sob that he quickly stifled by running a hand over his face. “He told me to watch for them. For anything. He said … He said something wasn’t right. I couldn’t even…” Mike blocked out his cries and slinked down the stairs. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. Shit—Oh no, I’m sorry.” 

As he crept behind them, his legs trembled with warm blood like they would buckle any moment. 

“No, hey. It’ll be fine. I think. No, it’ll be fine. He’s wrong. He’s not blaming you because you did something wrong, he … he just doesn’t want to deal with it. Think about it. He could’ve done something. He knew things you didn’t know, but you get all the blame because … I don’t know, it looks worse? But nobody is gonna believe that. They’re not gonna believe that. He’s being dumb. This makes him look bad. He doesn’t realize that. Do you realize that? I mean … When it’s a kid, most people judge the parents. Right? Isn’t that what happens? Please—It’s just…” 

Nothing felt real. Soft, damp, and whizzing by his shaking hands. A deer in headlights. But he floated forward to the kitchen counter. It wasn’t Mike. That person still choked dumbly on her words. 

A long, heavy sigh. “You should go upstairs.” 

In the middle of the kitchen there was silence. For once Mike actually caught his breath and stared at the half-eaten tray, on the stove, of warm food. A sort of casserole doused in cheese, a million things, and the prophesied fried onions. 

If they were raw I could stare at them awhile.

“Please,” Henry continued. 

“Dad, I don’t—” 

“You can’t keep—” After a while, there was a short, aggressive inhale. “—putting yourself in her place.” 

Henry started to cry. This time there was no stifling. 

Mike entertained the thought of eating the casserole. His stomach turned. He had to make it back upstairs. Had to be conscious. So he stumbled for the cabinet and pulled out a glass. Took their good soda. He watched the bubbles rise and dissipate and hated the shrill pops. 

“I’m sorry,” Henry mumbled. 

The rim grazed his lips but he didn’t let it in. Instead it crackled on his skin. And when it came rushing, he had no urge to stop himself from drowning. But then it was down, and the glass was empty. He felt a hiccuping laugh scratch his throat. He could do it over and over again, over and over, and maybe once they wouldn’t lift up his sputtering mess. 

Mike hardly heard the shatter beneath him. 

You can’t do anything but cause a scene.

“Oh! I’ve never seen this one before.” Charlie shuffled a crumpled magazine in her hands. “And apparently, it’s a ‘Limited Edition.’ Isn’t that neat? Oh, look here, it says, ‘Dollfus confirms the celestial body orbiting Saturn is its tenth classified moon, provisionally designated “S/1966 S2.” Identified last week, on December 15.’ That’s cool! That’s five days away from your…” Birthday.

She set the magazine on the nightstand and looked at him, sighing. 

“I should shut up, shouldn’t I?” 

“Yeah.” No.

After they had found him and swept up the remains, Mike lay frozen on the bed like an autopsy patient below her gaze. Deep inside it, something was analyzing and scrutinizing him, probably weighing its options. Weighing if he was worth the insanity. She smiled too much to tell anyone about it, though—or tell anything straight. That was what bugged him. 

Here he was, badmouthing the victim. All Mike could do was badmouth victims. So selfish.

“Could you…” He squeezed his eyes shut. Shamefully this was becoming a habit. “Unpack my stuff?” 

“It’s just that, right?” 

“Sure.” 

As Charlie’s footsteps receded to the corner of the room, Mike pulled the blanket over his face. His breath quickened with the agonizingly slow r-r-r of the zipper and the shuffle of his bag. It stopped altogether when she went silent. 

Then, her voice came shaking. “Where do you … um … Where should I…” 

Mike ripped off the blanket and sat up. Daintily, like she would break it more than it already was, Charlie pinched a string in her fingers that connected to a washed-out mask, blotted in dirty pinks and oranges that peeled away to a chalky white middle, with a crushed snout and disfigured eye holes. The string snapped, and Charlie flinched as it flailed from its remaining sticker. 

They stared at each other. 

“I couldn’t leave it at home,” Mike started. 

She leaned down to put it back in the bag. 

“No. It’s fine,” he said. 

Charlie came over to sit on the edge of the bed, with that thing in her hands, caressing her thumb over the broken sticker. 

She huffed and smiled that autopsy smile. “Can I tell you something?” 

He murmured something. He didn’t even know what. 

“I know, uh, that you probably didn’t want me to, but … I saw what he wrote. Just for a moment.” 

“You’re the reason it was out of place.” 

“Yeah.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

She shifted closer. “No, it’s okay.” 

“I didn’t think about it. I didn’t mean to scare you.” 

“Really. Mike.” She took his shoulder. “It’s okay.” 

She didn’t let go. Charlie’s pointed fingernails stayed there as she inspected the mask. 

Blue, pale ink stained the plastic, which was scraped of its paint. The etching was bare and exposed and couldn’t have been clearer. —Piece of shit he’s right you’re such a fucking— Charlie rubbed the back of her hand against the stain. When that didn’t work, she took the bottom of her shirt and scrubbed it, checking once, twice. When that didn’t work, she wet her finger on her tongue. When that didn’t work, she scoffed, threw it against her knee, and started the whole process over again. 

Mike mumbled, “Can I say something bad?” 

She looked up from the mask with grave concern and nodded. 

“I need you to stop. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” 

She nodded again as her hand and the mask fell limp. 

“It won’t work … anyway. It’s—It’s etched … It’s etched, Charlie…” Mike’s voice trailed off. Words tangled incomprehensibly at the back of his throat. “He etched it.” 

The weight of her side fell against him, and she squeezed him between her arms, burrowing her head against his neck. Mike was unmoving. 

“I don’t know, I don’t know…” He groaned, “I’m so sorry.” 

Charlie bowed down, facing away. She was silent, and every now and then her chest would convulse. Eventually his breathing fell in line with the rise and fall of her shoulders. 

“We could burn it,” she whispered. Charlie glanced at him and quickly averted her eyes. “Fire makes you feel alive.” 

He put an arm around her back, cautiously. But something about it didn’t make him want to curl up and die. Something felt … normal. If there was such a thing as “normal.” 

Mike raised his head, and she shook herself alert. 

“Okay,” he whispered flatly. 

The remaining day crept out from the conglomerate black shape of the night: rolling hills and spiked rooftops speckled by far off yellow dots. Windows, streetlights, or something like that. The backyard dissolved into it smoothly at the soft edge of the overhead lamplight. No borders. No shackles. No shitty neighbours. 

Mike plucked spare twigs and dying grass stems from the sand until they filled his good palm. She tucked them under her arm and paced away, swallowed by the black. He stood up and searched for her. There was proof in the lamp’s tiny, double reflection. 

“Race you to the pit,” Charlie said. She was stiff, looking back at him hopefully. 

In so many yards the brush would slope down to the river—the bend where they fished. 

Gashes from bushes and thorns that stuck to his skin, his slumped figure on his own deck that she took a gamble on. This was an odd reversal. The oddest part was how badly she wanted it. 

Her foot stomped once, and then she disappeared into a fading shuffle of leaves. 

Mike burst into a sprint. Branches bit his legs as he leapt from rock to pointed rock and followed the trail of Charlie’s rustling. She kept whipping around to look for him and yelped and giggled when she did, leaping forward out of sight. Weakness creeped in his legs, they shivered when he slowed down, but it only fuelled the pumping of his heart. By the time they reached the slope, only he, Charlie, and the way forward remained. Everything else had washed away. They tumbled down through the thicket, shuffling their feet against the steep sands. Then Charlie shoved him back into a bush and made a run for it. She collapsed onto the riverbank, rolling in the sand, laughing, with her hand on the firepit. 

Once Mike unstuck himself and trudged down to admit defeat, she got to her knees and messily threw the kindling to the ground. 

“Last one there is … a blue cheese pizza! Remember that one?” Charlie panted, grinning, shaking the sand from her shirt. 

Mike sat down next to her and the rough ring of thickly packed stones. “Yeah.” 

Her smile faded. As she turned away, she began digging in the pit and lining sticks against the sand. “Sorry.” 

Mike didn’t have the energy. The mask made a heavy scraping sound as he dragged it out from behind his back, nestling it into the sticks and leaves. He still hid it behind his back like that meant something anymore.  

Above the pit Charlie hovered the lighter. “Don’t worry, we basically share it. He won’t even realize it’s missing.”  She nervously flicked it open and closed. “Do you want to…?” 

Mike shook his head, so she raised the lighter, but her arm was stuck in place. She recoiled and scrunched up her shadowed face, transfixed to the wiry mass below them, and took in a deep breath like she was plunging headfirst into it. So, Mike swiped the lighter from her grasp. He wasn’t trusted with flames. His pulse thrummed when he held matches, and he got sticky fingers when he tried to strike them. The sight of fire entrusted to him, the sight of fire out of its cage, left Mike paralyzed. 

A small, wiggling flame sparked in his hands and he pressed it into the sagging ear tip. He pressed and pressed until it sank into waxen beads and drooled down the sticks, setting them aglow. 

Through the dark orange sparkle in her eyes, Charlie watched him with confusion. She muttered something like “Thank you,” and they both turned to the toothy face below them that glowed and weaned through its eyes and mouth, flesh and skin dragging down and down. The world’s worst jack-o-lantern. 

Third time’s the charm; she shuffled to lean on his shoulder. It could’ve been something close to forever as the flames danced their way from underneath the mask, slowly coiling and caressing each piece of kindling until it fractured from the heat and curled in on itself. They would combine and climb higher, engulfing the unrecognizable creature in a white wave. Rocking back and forth, rising up and up and up and up. 

She would raise her head against the pull of the wind, the drag of the smoke. She buried it behind him as the bitter smell assaulted his nostrils. But he didn’t even blink. Mike leaned closer, taking in a breath. 

His eyes pinched to slits, involuntarily, as he stared through the billowing trail. Mike stretched them open and suppressed a scream. The black fumes rolled over him. They beat against his face. Acrid acids crawled up his nose and down his throat. Now, his chest was going to explode. The sting came blinding, then faded altogether. Maybe he was getting numb to it. His eyelids fluttered from the pressure, and it all turned to water.

Mike threw back his head and gasped for air. He ducked so that the water could drain down his cheek, but it never did. So he shuddered and closed his eyes. They were cold and full. 

Behind him, Charlie choked out a laugh. “That must be nice.” 

He opened them and found her flickering shape as best as he could, stiffly shaking his head. A terrible, ragged inhale came from somewhere inside him and he could do nothing but fall into the sand. 

Charlie was like a mosquito, or a dog. She never left, and only divine intervention could stop her from being the things that she was. She trusted blindly. There was always some reason, some justification, she found in anything she cared about that made it worth her while. But when she lay down next to him on the sand, picking at a broken snail shell, the warm light bounced off stray grains stuck in her stressed hair like when they used to play Sandcastles out by the brush with pails of dirty water and kiddie shovels, and for the first time in a long time the noise died down. 

He let her pull his head against her stomach, and they both stared up at the sky. Fire popped and crackled. 

She pointed weakly upwards to a place he couldn’t see. “Draco. There’s the curve, and the head. To me it looks like a wonky Big Dipper. I think it guarded a bunch of fruit, or something, before getting thrown up there like the rest of them. That’s Ursa Minor beside it. You know, Little Dipper. Little Bear. Oh, did you know the Big Dipper, yeah, right there, did you know it’s a caribou in Inuit astronomy? Uh huh, the handle is its head. I think that’s really special, you know, how everyone has the same sky. And it’s so unlike … everything. Think about it, all we can do is look at it and go ‘Why does it go dark?’ and ‘Why is it sparkling?’ but we never got answers. We never knew we were a meaningless dot, I bet our heads would’ve exploded if we figured that out sooner than this century. So we made up pretty answers. I think they aren’t wrong, though. They knew how faraway and incomprehensible it was.” She finally lowered her arm. “It’s all just hydrogen and helium, basically. On fire. Like our fire. It’s all about perception because they’re both so small you can’t even see them and larger than you can conceptualize. Mythical, floating space chemicals. Want me to shut up?” 

“No.” 

“Oh. Neat,” she mused. A tiny smile crept into her voice. “‘Blue Cheese Pizza.’” 

Mike shifted slightly to face her. 

Charlie chuckled, “When I told Liz, ‘Daddy made a new pizza flavor and it’s blue cheese!’ and she ran screaming like, ‘I’m gonna find this man and tell him blue cheese does not belong on pizza,’ and you said, I remember it word for word—” 

“I did not sign up for this,” he grunted. 

“Yes! It was just like that!” She giggled. “Like a cranky toddler! And then, and then didn’t she … What was she holding when she came back downstairs?” 

“Foam sword.” 

“And she was dragging Evan behind her shouting, ‘Blue cheese pizza, blue cheese garlic knots, blue cheese mozzarella sticks,’ and he made a weird fake coughing sound each time she said it.” Charlie was oblivious. “I feel like I should’ve told them your dad’s idea got shot down on conception, but, y’know, where would we be otherwise? I think I—oh. Oh, I’m sorry.” 

“Stop saying that. You didn’t do it, Charlie.” 

A cold wind carried away the smoke and softened the fire. Embers sprung from the base and died quietly. The mask was an intangible mess of blackened sludge and ash that glowed red with smoulder. Now the flames only prickled beneath the dark, flattened surface. 

The mask was gone.

The words were gone.

You are gone.

Her nails rested at the crown of his forehead and ran through his hair, tugging on knots, letting the bad ones rest. Mike turned on his side, to the smoking pile, away from her, and it persisted. He slurred the beginning of a word, devolving into a weak laugh. 

“I just want it to be over. I don’t … I don’t know how to fix me.” Something welled up in his eyes and his nose, just below the surface. “I didn’t mean it. I swear, I didn’t. I didn’t want it. Charlie, I didn’t. I didn’t.” 

The world spun as he was forced upright. She spun him around and grasped him by the shoulders, gritting her teeth. “I know. Listen to me. No matter what happens, I am with you, we are together, and that is not going to change. I love you. You’re like my brother. You could never make me hate you.” How long will it take?  

He sank against her as the last internal sparks disintegrated, momentarily roaring back to orange and red and yellow life as they hopped from ash to ash until they laid themselves to rest, floating down to join the cold and still monolith. 

The stars shined a little clearer now. 

How long, Michael?