1: Crazy Boys Join Forces
May. 18th, 2026 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeCh. 1: Crazy Boys Join Forces
Summary: When shit gets bad for LB, a friend of theirs steps in and changes everything.Series: Crazy Boy Diaries (personal autobio; explanation here)
Word Count: 6500
Notes: The winner of the May fan poll, and the official start of the Crazy Boy Diaries!
Content Warnings (contain spoilers!)
Content warnings for sexual assault, hallucinations, homelessness, performing sex for laundry privileges, haranguing and slapping, paranoia, self-loathing, and lots and lots of crying,
Dramatis Personae:
We are multi (AKA: multiple personalities). Here’s what you need to know for this book:
LB Folk (we share a body):
Anna: the “real” girl, the name D knows, and a creation of narrative convenience. Teenage girl.
Sneak: cheerful little superhero. Preteen.Other-Bodied (“Real”) People:
the family: our younger brother, parents, etc.
Jeff: Miranda and Anna’s shitty boyfriend. 21.
Spring, Junior Year: Rogan 
It’s before class, on the first floor by the lockers, and my little brother wants me to jerk him off.“Come onnn, Mom and Dad said you have to!”
“Not at school!”
He keeps trying to grab my hand and shove it down his pants. He says it’ll wake him up, I have to do it, it’s the rules, and all I can think is that someone will see me and then I’ll be the dicksleeve for the whole fucking school.
“Come onnn, or I’ll tell Mom!”
“Anna?”
I look up. It’s D, standing beyond the lockers, looking alarmed. I don’t know if my friend wandered by and heard our voices, what he has or hasn’t seen, but the sight of him breaks my paralysis. I slap my brother across the face as hard as I can and power-walk away like a mall mom trying to dodge a panhandler.
D effortlessly keeps pace with me. “What was that?”
I just keep power-walking, shake my head, and scrub the tears from my cheeks.
“I’ve never seen you hit someone before…” he says.
I can’t stop feeling my brother’s erection against my hand. I need to hide, somewhere private, somewhere D and Bro can’t go, and there’s only one place like that in high school.
“I need to wash my hands!” I blurt, and bolt into the girls’ restroom.
D stays outside—stays, leaning fake-casually against the wall and crossing his arms so I know that this conversation isn’t over. Whatever, I can worry about him later.
I scour my hands. I blink, and they’re covered in jizz. I blink again and it’s blood.
No. Not here, not now. This isn’t real. Stop it.
Bang!
I jump. The sound is coming from inside the mirror, and I must not look at it. I shut my eyes, but the banging continues, something trying to break out, something dead and rotting and not real.
Keeping my eyes shut, I scrub my hands. It doesn’t help; they won’t get clean.
No help for it. I retreat into a stall, latch the door, put my face in my hands, and bawl silently. I have to; it’s the only thing that makes the hallucinations go away, and I can’t freak out during class. If I take long enough, maybe D will go away.
The tears pass. The pounding on the mirror stops. My skin goes still. When I raise my head, drained but sane(ish), I hear Bro’s voice, breathless and cocky and excited:
“C’mon, let me in. She’s my sister.”
“No! Can’t you read, freshman?” D is a senior, got the letter jacket and everything. I can’t see him, but I’m sure he’s pointing to the bathroom sign. “Why do you want in so bad?”
“She’s my sister.” Bro says it like he’s speaking some ancient guy code.
If so, D doesn’t speak it. “I know. She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“C’mon,” Bro says with a snicker, “you know what she’s like.”
D’s voice goes calm and flat and cold. “What are you talking about?”
Silence.
The warning bell rings. “Get out of here, man,” D says.
More silence, then a knock on the door. I jump.
“Hey.” D’s voice. “He’s gone.”
I slink out. There’s no hiding that I’ve been crying, but there’s no disgust or contempt in D’s expression, only something kind and sad.
“Hey,” he says. He looks like he’s trying to think of something to say, and finally settles on: “I don’t like your brother.”
Despite everything, it makes me smile and laugh a little. D’s a social wizard like that. “Thanks.”
“You… wanna talk about it?”
He sounds like he expects me to say no but doesn’t want me to. Nonetheless, I shake my head.
“Okay.” His voice stays soft and sad, and then the bell rings and we have to part ways.
D and us met in marching band, which is the only way we would’ve become friends. D was a year older, on both track and football teams, and seemed to know half of everybody, presumably because he never slept. Still, he probably wouldn’t have managed to meet us, had we not both been in pit percussion, him playing the bass drum with holes in the frame, us playing the vibraphone with the busted middle C and D#.
D was a famous horndog. (That fall, he declared, “my goal: make you lose your virginity before your junior year,” and then dodged our smack with the ease of long practice.) But his horndoggery didn’t make us want to climb out of our skin, and that made him… unusual.
It wasn’t a matter of him being handsome. Handsome people made us feel just as bad. There was just something about how he acted, how he spoke… somehow, it didn’t feel like a threat. He didn’t feel like a threat. Even now, we don’t know how he did it; he was black, an athlete, exactly the sort of person we were taught to distrust. But it never felt personal. It was like small talk: his role was to make the offer, and ours was to shoot him down. Indeed, we caught him flatfooted the one time we did flip the script, one morning when something honked him off and he swore, “Fuck!”
To which we promptly responded, “Here? Now? With you?”
He was so mad, he didn’t realize at first. Then he turned to face us like he’d just witnessed a rickety old dog doing a delightful new trick.
“Yes, now!” he declared.
“No, later!” we replied.
And then we both laughed.
It wasn’t hard to get along with D (he was the most gifted social chameleon we ever met, relentlessly personable), but we weren’t sure what to make of him until a month later, on the last game of the year.
It was one of those long away games that required a charter bus. We’d gotten up early for rehearsal, packed in a full school day, run all over hill and dale loading up the band trailer, pulling on our uniforms, going through inspection, and wolfing cheap pizza, only to then pile into the bus, dash to faraway Crockett, rehearse some more, do our best to single-handedly musically inspire our football team into respectable performance (we succeeded; they won), and then it was time to reload the trailer, pile back into the bus, and drag home. By the end of all that, everyone had gotten a bit punchy.
The bus seat next to D was missing its headrest, leaving metal prongs too blunt and uncomfortable for even the most exhausted band geek, but when we clambered in, he gave us wheedling puppy dog eyes, and said, “be my friend?” We decided, what the heck, and sat down next to him, only to quickly discover that the prongs felt just as bad as they looked. Nevertheless, we contorted ourself into as restful a position as we could and closed our eyes. D, presuming us asleep, took off the cheerful horndog mask and started pouring his heart out to the person in front of us (who didn’t seem to be paying much attention). At first, we were too tired to tell him we could still hear him; then it was too late to say anything.
“…Thing is, I gotta be happy. Otherwise everyone gets down. I did it at my church once—everyone was down all day. So I make myself happy.”
The other person must’ve asked how.
“By playing football, by hanging out with my friends—like with [Section Leader], I’m fine, sure. But it’s getting hard. I’m screwed up in the head right now. When I look over there…” he must’ve looked out the window, “I can’t even look at the moon now.” It’d set.
We’d known beforehand that D’s home life wasn’t exactly stellar, but we felt bad for him. He sounded so tired, and we knew what it felt like to need to look happy. We shed silent tears for him, and when we were done and our eyes were clear, we sat up and looked at him.
D hid his mortification well, but not entirely. Give him a break, he was fifteen. “Did you hear all that?”
We smiled guiltily. “Sorry.”
D snapped back into horndog mode so fast it practically left a breeze. “Are you really planning to grow up and be single, a virgin, with cats and a computer?” We had only said single with cats and computer, but he had his own conclusions. “You were joking, right?”
“About the cats, maybe,” we said with perfect honesty.
He put on the comedic expression of someone faced with his own personal hell. “You’re never going to have kids?”
“No way.”
“You’re going to be a virgin forever?”
“I said I’d be single,” we said primly.
“Then you’ll be a virgin,” D said confidently.
We threw up our hands and gave up.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
We squinted at him suspiciously.
“I’m not going to do anything, come on.”
We gave him our hand. D took it, turned it around a couple of times with an attitude of scientific study, then let go.
“Yup, you’re oppo-feminine,” he pronounced.
“What?”
“Your hands are soft—must be genetic or something—but you have no nails.”
“Okay, so I chew,” we said. “I’ve done it since I was three.”
“Also, you and Audrey,” our best friend, the marimba player, “are the only girls I’ve seen who don’t shave.”
“Well, congratulations, you’ve seen.”
“How come you don’t?”
“It’ll save me a fortune in razor blades,” we joked.
“You know what not shaving makes you?”
“A hideous creature, crawling from the primordial ooze?” We tried to sound evil, bared our teeth, and curled our fingers like claws.
D was surprisingly gallant. “Well, no… but you’re oppo-feminine! You don’t even like the mall.”
“Eeew.”
“See?” He shook his head. “You’re going to grow up to be a lesbian.”
Sigh. “Whatever you say, chief.”
He could clown all he liked; we’d caught him breaking character, and he knew it. There was a lot more to D than his mask, and no amount of smoke and mirrors could hide that now. We didn’t mind. We understood about masks.
As for D, well… he basically stopped hitting on us. It’s like he stopped needing to. And I guess he remembered us, because he stuck around, long after he left marching band…
I’m eating my cafeteria food with D, and he’s watching me with a look that says I am not fooling him as much as I’d like.
“You know I always eat fast,” I say, trying to head him off.
He just goes, “are you still wearing the same clothes?”
“I washed them.” A lie.
I’ve worked out my procedure; I’ve got it mostly down. Days at school and/or the neighborhood sewer plant, nights in my culvert. Calories come from school lunches or the pool soda machine at night. I do my homework on time and behave well at school, impenetrable armor against teachers. I wash myself with hand soap or whatever I can get in the park bathroom or the school gym showers, which sometimes have forgotten toiletries in them, which I stash in my locker. My period will become a problem, as will laundry, but for now, I’m treading water, keeping my head up.
Bro mostly cold-shoulders me or sneers. He definitely thinks I’m spending my days on a chaise lounge, being hand-fed grapes by Anna and Miranda’s shitty boyfriend, Jeff. Bro thinks I’m a whore, and I’m not sure he’s wrong, though the price I command is way lower than he thinks.
One day, after school, he tries to catch me at the door. I automatically move to avoid him.
“Dad’s here,” he says.
I hesitate. Dad works late; he shouldn’t be here.
We go out. Dad’s standing there by his SUV, expression cold.
“Grampa’s dying,” he says. “Get in.”
I pause. I get in. Gigi wafts in from behind me, trying to be a ghost, invisible wallpaper. The less attention we garner, the better. (She tosses a strategic thought to me: maybe we can get more supplies—clothes, tampons. I acknowledge and agree.)
(I don’t know if D’s there, watching this from behind the school windows. I don’t know what he sees or hears.)
After Dad gets us all into the car, he explains that I need to stay home until the death because he’s not chasing us all over the creekbed when there’s a funeral to plan and Bro can’t be trusted to keep track of us. No one will bother me, Dad says, with a pointed look in the rear view mirror to Bro.
Bro’s response is to kick me in the leg with a sullen, rebellious look.
When we get home, there’s mail on our desk, something for Harvard: a summer-school opportunity. Gigi and I snatch it, a box of tampons, a couple changes of clothes, and quick shove them in our backpack.
Mom is a zombie. She barely seems to notice we’re there, which is good. (Thanks, Gigi.) We eat enough to be polite, always watching to make sure it’s not too much. Zombie Mom can become Rage Mom super-fast.
Dad, meanwhile, seems calm, cold, and preoccupied. With Mom like this, he has to take up the slack, and Gigi and I diagnose that he has little leftover to bother with us. He, at least, isn’t an immediate threat. (And even if he is, Dad is the most manageable human in the house.)
Bro, unfortunately, still has that sullen, dangerous look on his face. If our spots at the dinner table weren’t furthest from each other, he’d totally be kicking me in the shins. He is absolutely going to attack tonight, and if he calls Mom, it’s a coin-toss how it’ll go. We can’t trust that. We ain’t sleeping here, Gigi and I agree.
We hope Grampa dies soon, so we can go back to our safer way of life. The extra calories ain’t worth this.
As night comes, I gather up towels. Gigi’s left, so Dad catches me doing it.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sleeping somewhere else.”
“Oh really?” Sardonic. “What about Grampa?”
“I’ll be back in the morning, and I’ll stay during the day. But you can’t stop Bro, so either give me a door lock or let me sleep outside.” I can afford to be blunt. Dad probably can’t afford my death right next to Grampa’s. It’ll look weird.
Dad thinks. He nods. I leave with my improvised bedding, make it to the creekbed, and crawl into my culvert. It swallows me into the earth like a cold concrete throat. I curl up as best I can.
I hope no one finds me. I wish I could sleep in the earth forever.
D left marching band after our freshman year, and we never shared a class. It would’ve been easy to drift out of touch, but D treated relationships like an endurance sport, one he was determined to win, so he found ways to see us in the brief windows before and after classes… and during lunch.
Somehow, we both ended up at loose ends at lunch, his junior year. D had some kind of falling out with his buddies, the details of which we can’t remember, if he ever disclosed them in the first place, and the rest of our friends must’ve had a different lunch period. We were both cafeteria food eaters, and we discovered that if we left Algebra II at a breakneck sprint, galloped down the three flights of stairs, and beelined straight for the lunch line, we would not only beat the crowds, but happen to arrive right as D did. (He himself also seemed to learn the timing. Not bad, for two teens before cell phones!) The line was way less of a bore with a friend to chat with.
Then, one day, I had a bad day. I don’t know why. I met D at the top of the stairs like normal, and then in the lunch line, I just… broke. Suddenly I just felt horrible, like nothing was going right, like everything good was rotting in shallow graves. I started to cry.
I tried to leave D to his conversation with [Marching Band Friend], leaned my head against the door hinge so my hair hid my face and stared at my hands.
“Whoa, change in tempo here.” I heard D say. He’d noticed.
I just kept staring at my hands.
Someone poked my shoulder a couple times. I didn’t react. I was making a jerk out of myself and just wished I could go invisible.
Then an arm gently wrapped around my shoulders. I knew it was D.
That was too much. I turned and buried my face in his shoulder, clinging to his shirtfront and started to really cry, though I still didn’t make much noise, thank god.
[Marching Band Friend] made a questioning sound, but D shushed him. Dammit, I was making asses out of both of us in the lunch line.
“Sorry,” I gasped.
“Ssh. It’s okay.”
That pretty much undid me. I let go and just hung on to him. Through some act of God, the line didn’t move an inch during that time. I just cried.
After a minute or so, I finally calmed down. I still felt like an ass, but I also felt… relieved, I guess.
“Thanks.” I mumbled into his shirt.
“It’s okay. I’m only a jerk half the time.” I actually managed to chuckle. “If you ever need to talk, you know, I’m good for it.”
I finally let go of him, though I still stared at the floor. “You’re a good friend, D. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”
He said, “Maybe it’s stress. Sometimes I feel like that too.”
Even though I felt like the biggest moron alive, it felt good, just letting go like that. To be told it’s okay.
We remembered that.
Most of the time, sleeping outside works. It’s Texas, savanna country, where two out of every three years are drought years. Unfortunately, the other one is flood.
I’m in the car we and Bro share. It’s pouring. I’m wet and shivering and resentful, moving the seat to get out the old towels I stashed. They’re supposed to be bedding, not this.
Shit. My clothes are soaked, and I can’t safely strip down. I have to go to Jeff. He has a drier, clothes I can wear.
The rain drums hard on the roof of the car. In the future, I’ll have to stash some clothes here; it’ll make everything easier. Poor planning, I chide myself, poor planning.
Full of grim resignation, I turn on the car and drive to Jeff’s. He’s twenty-one, and he wanted somewhere he could fuck me without parental oversight, so he has an apartment, paid for by his wealthy, overindulgent parents. They know my age; they do not care.
Jeff answers the door. “Where have you been? What, am I convenient for you now?”
“My grampa’s dying. I need your drier.” I push in.
“Your grampa’s been dying forever! I have needs too, you know—”
I tune out his whining, go to the washer and drier in his apartment. I find his hamper and start doing his laundry while he follows me around, complaining. He only starts to shut up once I start stripping off my soaked clothes.
“Can I borrow some clothes?”
“Hmm… no. You’re cuter this way.”
I pull out some random T-shirt and cargo shorts from his dirty hamper and put them on. They smell like Axe body spray. I hate it. I’ll always hate it.
He tries to touch me. “Come on, what’s your rush? I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
I shrug off his hands, start the wash. “My grampa’s dying. I’m not in the mood.”
He presses against me, thrusts his dick aggressively against my ass. “That’s what you always say—my grampa’s dying, I don’t feel good, I’m not in the mood…”
I sigh. I yank open his shorts. I jerk him off like a spiteful robot. The moment he’s done, I pull my shirt down, his shorts up, and go back to laundry.
“That wasn’t good,” he complains. “Haven’t you heard of service with a smile?”
“Grampa’s dying. I don’t feel like smiling.”
“You really want me to feel bad for you, don’t you? Aw, poor widdle Anna, her grampy’s dying, boo hoo hoo. I haven’t seen you in weeks! Your stupid parents wouldn’t tell me anything. Why were you avoiding me?”
“I wasn’t avoiding you.” I’m washing his jizz off my hands. “I wasn’t home.”
“Oh, really?” Sarcasm. “Where were you supposed to be, a field trip?”
If I tell him I’m sleeping outside, he’ll be furious that I chose not to sleep with him. I can’t say anything.
“Uh huh. Exactly. You avoid me for weeks, then just come here all ‘I need to use your laundry,’ no I’m sorry or anything. Do you think a shitty handjob makes up for that?”
I let him rant, one eye on the washer. Tick tick tick.
He’s crying now, saying how badly I hurt him, how shitty I treat him, what a user I am. It all feels true—I am only here to use his laundry. If I had a better option, I wouldn’t be here. Maybe I am a using bitch; I just don’t know what else to do.
“Look,” I say. “Things have gotten really bad at home. Grampa dying means everything’s really messed up. I haven’t been avoiding you; I’ve been avoiding them. I really haven’t been home.”
He squints at me dubiously, sees I’m upset. “Where have you been staying?”
“A friend.” The creekbed counts, right?
That just pisses him off. “Who? Someone I know?”
“No.”
“Boy or girl?”
Easy: “Girl. Someone from school.”
His voice gets low and dangerous. “It’s not some guy like D, is it?”
“What? No!” I don’t even know where in town D lives.
“Oh, I can just see it now—perfect pimp D, just sweeping in while you go ‘oh, my hero! Let me suck your dick!’”
Where the hell did this come from? I’m sleeping in a culvert! D has zero part in this! Shit, one of the others must’ve mentioned him being friendly. “Don’t talk about him like that. He’s my friend—just my friend. You’re being really gross.”
“No, you are! Keeping secrets, avoiding me, lying… it’s him, isn’t it? A football player.” He spits it with disgust.
D isn’t even on the football team anymore; he quit all his extracurriculars without saying why. “Don’t talk about him like that.”
I’m getting angry. I’m a captive audience for as long as my clothes are in the machine; if I come home in Jeff’s clothing, I’m ruined. And even though I myself am not attracted to D, he doesn’t deserve this. He’s done nothing wrong, and here Jeff is, just trashing him for no reason! It’s okay if it’s me, but—
“Stop talking about him like that!” I’m starting to cry, to my rage and shame. “He hasn’t done anything!”
Jeff sees my tears, and his face becomes something scary. “So there is something between you.”
I want to rip out my fucking hair and scream. “No, Jeff, my grampa is dying, my parents hate me, I’ve barely been home in weeks, and you’re acting like a jerk!”
But the more I tell him to stop, the angrier he gets. His face turns this horrible puce, like he’s a man having a toddler’s tantrum. He calls D horrible names, me too, and at the pinnacle of his fit, he grabs me and slaps me in the face.
Jeff has never hit me before. I’m not ready. I need to look good for the funeral, Dad’s commanded it, what if it shows? At the same time, the whole thing feels unreal. I expected Jeff to be nasty, he usually is these days, but accusing me of cheating with a random guy? Hitting me? What the fuck?
That’s when I break down, and that’s what calms Jeff. Hurting me makes him feel better.
Hurting me makes them all feel better.
“Aw, shh, shh, it’s okay,” he croons, hugging me. I go stiff. He rocks me in what he must think is a comforting way. “I’m sorry I’ve been so harsh, you know how many people have abandoned me over the years…”
I don’t even know what’s happening anymore; I just know I need to keep Jeff happy til my clothes are dry. The moment they are, I’m out of there, yanking them on (safe, warm, clean, smelling like nothing but fabric softener), dashing out. I drive off like a crazy woman and when I find somewhere to park, I just sit there, quaking.
What just happened?
What was that?
I start sobbing hysterically onto the steering wheel.
That night, I sleep wrapped in towels, bone deep cold, and I know I can never go back to Jeff’s place. It’s not worth it. He can trash me all he wants, but he doesn’t get to trash my friends. (And behind that thought, I think: D, horndog extraordinaire, doesn’t treat me like this. Why should Jeff get to?)
What am I going to do about D?
Obviously I’m not going to stop being friends with him just because Jeff’s mad. That’s stupid. D’s the one person I don’t feel like I have to perform for, and he seems to be making himself conspicuously available after that whole bathroom thing. He said if I wanted to talk to him, I could.
Can I, though?
Should I?
How?
This is not something I can “accidentally” arrange. I’m going to have to ask, flat-out, and if D says oh hell no, I’m not touching this mess… well, then, that’s it. I’ve lost a friend I really can’t afford to lose.
But I can’t keep doing this. I need to sleep somewhere.
By the time I get to school the next day, I’m a nervous wreck. D is there, somehow having learned exactly where to idle in my line of sight without making it obvious he’s doing it, and the moment I see him, I drag him off to a somewhat sequestered locker forest. (“Whoa, hey, hi, take it easy!”) When we get there, I go, “I need to talk to you. Can I talk to you?”
Off comes the mask. D is instantly calm and serious. “Yeah. You can talk to me.”
My throat is choked with panic. Before I can bolt, I blurt out, “things’re bad at home.”
He just looks at me quietly and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I thought so.”
No anger. No disgust. I want to cry with relief. After holding all these secrets inside my guts, it’s a relief to finally tell someone something.
“I was staying with my boyfriend, but…” But what? I can’t tell D all those horrible things Jeff said about him. “But he’s gotten real bad too.”
“Do you need somewhere to go?”
The question takes me aback. Somewhere… to go? Like, a non-imaginary place? Indoors? With humans in it?
I can’t afford the price. But…
“Maybe. I don’t know.” I wring my hands.
D reaches into his backpack, rips off a bit of paper from somewhere, and grabs a pen. Click-click, it goes. He scribbles a number down. He seems brisk, efficient, confident, like he’s done this before and knows what to do.
He gives me the number. “I’ve got a cell now. If you’re in trouble, doesn’t matter what, call me, and I’ll come pick you up, okay? No questions asked.”
“Really?” I sound watery and snotty but can’t help it.
“Yeah. It won’t work once I’m at Texas U, but until then, for a few months anyway,” he spreads his arms and grins that golden boy smile, the one that works on everyone, even me who knows it’s half bluff, “I’m all yours.”
Now I am crying, but I’m smiling too, because I’ve told somebody something, and I’m not in trouble. My grampa’s dying and my family’s rotting and my boyfriend’s acting like a crazy person, but at least I have this.
“You okay?” D asks. “I hate it when girls cry.”
It makes me laugh, as intended. “Yeah,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I’m okay. Thanks, D. You’re a good friend.”
He opens his arms, pops the cornball mask back on, does the “you want this used car” face. “Hug?”
“Don’t push it.” But I do give him a little hug. It feels weird but not painful.
As we disengage, though, I realize: if I get caught with D’s number on me, the family might find it, find him… and people have already assumed the worst about why he befriended us. He’s vulnerable in a way Jeff isn’t, younger, lawyerless, black, and it seems utterly insane to put him at risk like this.
I can’t keep his number. And there is no way in hell I’m going to be able to memorize it this fast.
I pass the number back. D sees the look on my face. “Oh boy,” he says.
“Okay, it’s like this,” I say, sweating like a waterfall. “During the day, I’m fine, I’ve got a place to be. It’s just… sometimes nights are tricky. I just… need somewhere to sleep sometimes.”
God, I sound like I’m trying to sleep with him. I sound insane.
But D isn’t looking at me like I’m crazy. He breathes out. “Okay. Do you have somewhere to sleep now?”
“Ye-es,” I say, but too slowly, too stiffly.
His eyelids lower. I think he’s insulted. “Uh huh. Where is it?”
I just stand there and sweat.
“Your boyfriend…?”
“No,” I say, repelled beyond words. “Just… around.” God that sounds stupid. D’s going to say no. Where’s he going to put me? He can’t just bring some random feral white girl home! What will his family say? What will my family do? I try to backpedal. “Look, it’s fine, don’t worry about it, I can make it work—” I’ve got a culvert and condoms. If I can’t use the former, I can probably get Bro to use the latter…
D sighs. “Can you keep a secret?”
Something about his tone pauses my panic spiral. “What? Sure.”
“I’ve got my own place.”
Panic instantly forgotten. “Seriously?”
“Ssh! Keep it down, huh? Yeah, I’m eighteen now,” barely, “I can swing it, but you cannot tell anybody, understand? They’ll think—”
I know what they’ll think. “You… you have a…?”
“Yeah.” He looks uncomfortable. Whatever the reason he’s living independently, he doesn’t want to talk about it. “My house, my rules, right? So, you want in?”
I just goggle at him. I have never met anyone but Jeff who lived on their own, and Jeff is 21 and subsidized by his parents. I know D has an after-school job, but still. Besides, he was my hail Mary. I didn’t expect him to have, like, an answer. A solution.
But he’s looking more and more antsy—whatever this is, it’s something personal, something I could hurt him with—so I say, “You’re a real man of mystery, you know that?”
His shoulders relax. “Yeah, well, you know me. It ain’t fancy, but it’s got a couch.”
“A couch sounds great.” A couch sounds amazing.
“Cool, cool.” D nods a few times. He looks awkward. “And hey, uh…”
“Yeah?”
He fidgets with his hair—it’s growing out into springs. “Don’t take this the wrong way… but I don’t want to sleep with you, okay?”
Apocalyptic relief washes over me. “Oh, thank god! Me neither!”
We both laugh. He looks as relieved as I feel.
“Good, good, just wanted to get that out of the way, in case this was all some crazy plan to get me…”
I snort. “Oh yeah, like I’d really pull all this for that. And I won’t tell anyone. My boyfriend would kill me.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. So… this boyfriend… how’s he involved in all this…?”
“He’s not,” I say firmly, and D backs off.
The bell rings. We go our separate ways. But I’m not desperate or afraid or crying anymore, because I have a plan. We have a plan.
…
I’m standing at the corner of Home Street and the Circle, backpack over my shoulder, looking a million ways at once, hoping no snitches are watching. Turns out, D was a super easy person to negotiate with:
“Look, I can’t call you. If they find your number on caller ID, we’ll both be in big trouble.”
“Yeah? How do you want to do this?”
“I’ll tell you at school if I need a pick-up.”
“It might take me a while. I have work.”
“It’s fine. I have books.”
So here I am, waiting. When D’s red muscle car pulls up (oh, how I will come to despair of that red muscle car), I jump in.
“Let’s go,” I say.
We leave the neighborhood. I keep expecting someone to jump out, pointing and screaming at us, but nobody does.
“Hey,” D says. “All good?”
“Yeah.” I take a breath, trying to unclench my shoulders. “Yeah, I think we’re good.”
“Pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah.” That’s all I have to say. He… gets it. “Thanks for this, D. I really hope you don’t get in trouble.”
“Aw,” he says, waving a hand, “what can they do to me?”
I say nothing. Oh, they can do things to him, if they find out. I have to make sure they never do.
I kind of keep it together until we get to his place. Then I start shaking all over.
D sees it; he can’t not. “Ooh, man, that bad, huh?” Somehow, he can tell it’s not him I’m afraid of.
I nod, sure that if I talk, I’ll start blubbering. As long as I keep my mouth shut, my eyes will stay dry.
“You wanna come in?”
Nod nod nod.
I don’t remember much of anything about the apartment: just a big empty beige box. My clearest memory is of the enormous saggy black faux leather couch, clearly a Dumpster save. I will love that shitty couch til the day I die; it will be replicated in headspace from 2007 on. The original version is placed across from the game station, but other than that, there’s barely any furniture. Beige carpet, stained. My legs feel wobbly. Everything is catching up to me, I guess.
D sees I’m in no condition for a tour. He pats the couch. “All yours.”
I don’t so much sit as collapse, glassy-eyed and shaking. D sits down next to me, giving me a polite amount of space: friendly but not pushy. His expression is ginger.
“Hey. …You want to talk about it?”
I don’t even know how to begin to explain any of this. It’s too much. It’s unbelievable. My throat is locked up like a safe, sealing all the screaming demons inside. I can’t. I can’t.
But I want to. He feels… safe.
Maybe he sees me struggling. “Is it your brother?”
God. If only. Finally, I manage to get out: “it’s all of them.”
“Oh,” he says. His expression is tragic. “Oh man.”
I hide my face in my hands and start crying. He puts an arm around us like he did a year prior in the lunch line, not getting too close, but still being there.
“Sorry,” I stutter.
“It’s okay.”
When he says it, I even believe him.
He lets me calm down on my own, then says, “you need anything to eat?”
I shake my head no, wiping my eyes. I ate dinner with the family, cold and tense, Mom collapsed and blank, staring at her plate, Bro glaring at me, Dad ignoring it all. A fragile fake armistice.
D gets a plate for himself, returns to the couch. I don’t know if it’s to keep me company or because it’s the only furniture.
I feel like making a bad joke so he knows I’m okay now, so I open my backpack and whip out the pink cube. “I got a box of tampons for your bathroom.”
“Aw, man…”
“Hey, you signed up for this.”
“All right, all right, put ‘em under the sink or something.” He waves me in the direction. There’s nothing to say about the bathroom, except that it too is empty.
“Trust me, it’ll make you a hit,” I say as I place the box. “All the girls will love you.”
“They already love me.” It sounds automatic. “Hey, I’m gonna play Halo. You wanna play?”
“I’m good. You don’t have to do anything.” I open my backpack and pull something out—that Harvard summer school thing from home. I’d forgotten about it. “I’ll watch, maybe.”
So D plays Halo. At first, I try to fill out the Harvard application, but I’m exhausted. Even though I’m in a strange place with a guy, I’m not clocking exits, planning for the worst. I’m not afraid, not numb, just so very tired.
And that’s okay, because D looks almost as tired as me. His mask is off, like he doesn’t have the energy for it, and he’s keeping me company, but in a way that doesn’t require talking or anything. This is good. This is perfect. I can just watch the little armor man on the screen. I can just sit and be.
“This is a nice place,” I say.
D snorts. “No it’s not.”
“It feels nice,” I amend. “Thanks for letting me stay here. I mean it. Things had gotten real bad.”
“Yeah. I know.” The words are simple but sincere. “I’m glad you asked me.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I lean my head on his shoulder and he lets me, and I doze off watching him play. For once, there’s no threat equation to crunch. I’m not afraid. This is a safe place, this empty beige apartment, and D is a safe person to be in it with.
Everything’s okay now.
“Not at school!”
He keeps trying to grab my hand and shove it down his pants. He says it’ll wake him up, I have to do it, it’s the rules, and all I can think is that someone will see me and then I’ll be the dicksleeve for the whole fucking school.
“Come onnn, or I’ll tell Mom!”
“Anna?”
I look up. It’s D, standing beyond the lockers, looking alarmed. I don’t know if my friend wandered by and heard our voices, what he has or hasn’t seen, but the sight of him breaks my paralysis. I slap my brother across the face as hard as I can and power-walk away like a mall mom trying to dodge a panhandler.
D effortlessly keeps pace with me. “What was that?”
I just keep power-walking, shake my head, and scrub the tears from my cheeks.
“I’ve never seen you hit someone before…” he says.
I can’t stop feeling my brother’s erection against my hand. I need to hide, somewhere private, somewhere D and Bro can’t go, and there’s only one place like that in high school.
“I need to wash my hands!” I blurt, and bolt into the girls’ restroom.
D stays outside—stays, leaning fake-casually against the wall and crossing his arms so I know that this conversation isn’t over. Whatever, I can worry about him later.
I scour my hands. I blink, and they’re covered in jizz. I blink again and it’s blood.
No. Not here, not now. This isn’t real. Stop it.
Bang!
I jump. The sound is coming from inside the mirror, and I must not look at it. I shut my eyes, but the banging continues, something trying to break out, something dead and rotting and not real.
Keeping my eyes shut, I scrub my hands. It doesn’t help; they won’t get clean.
No help for it. I retreat into a stall, latch the door, put my face in my hands, and bawl silently. I have to; it’s the only thing that makes the hallucinations go away, and I can’t freak out during class. If I take long enough, maybe D will go away.
The tears pass. The pounding on the mirror stops. My skin goes still. When I raise my head, drained but sane(ish), I hear Bro’s voice, breathless and cocky and excited:
“C’mon, let me in. She’s my sister.”
“No! Can’t you read, freshman?” D is a senior, got the letter jacket and everything. I can’t see him, but I’m sure he’s pointing to the bathroom sign. “Why do you want in so bad?”
“She’s my sister.” Bro says it like he’s speaking some ancient guy code.
If so, D doesn’t speak it. “I know. She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“C’mon,” Bro says with a snicker, “you know what she’s like.”
D’s voice goes calm and flat and cold. “What are you talking about?”
Silence.
The warning bell rings. “Get out of here, man,” D says.
More silence, then a knock on the door. I jump.
“Hey.” D’s voice. “He’s gone.”
I slink out. There’s no hiding that I’ve been crying, but there’s no disgust or contempt in D’s expression, only something kind and sad.
“Hey,” he says. He looks like he’s trying to think of something to say, and finally settles on: “I don’t like your brother.”
Despite everything, it makes me smile and laugh a little. D’s a social wizard like that. “Thanks.”
“You… wanna talk about it?”
He sounds like he expects me to say no but doesn’t want me to. Nonetheless, I shake my head.
“Okay.” His voice stays soft and sad, and then the bell rings and we have to part ways.
Fall, Freshman Year: Anna
D and us met in marching band, which is the only way we would’ve become friends. D was a year older, on both track and football teams, and seemed to know half of everybody, presumably because he never slept. Still, he probably wouldn’t have managed to meet us, had we not both been in pit percussion, him playing the bass drum with holes in the frame, us playing the vibraphone with the busted middle C and D#.
D was a famous horndog. (That fall, he declared, “my goal: make you lose your virginity before your junior year,” and then dodged our smack with the ease of long practice.) But his horndoggery didn’t make us want to climb out of our skin, and that made him… unusual.
It wasn’t a matter of him being handsome. Handsome people made us feel just as bad. There was just something about how he acted, how he spoke… somehow, it didn’t feel like a threat. He didn’t feel like a threat. Even now, we don’t know how he did it; he was black, an athlete, exactly the sort of person we were taught to distrust. But it never felt personal. It was like small talk: his role was to make the offer, and ours was to shoot him down. Indeed, we caught him flatfooted the one time we did flip the script, one morning when something honked him off and he swore, “Fuck!”
To which we promptly responded, “Here? Now? With you?”
He was so mad, he didn’t realize at first. Then he turned to face us like he’d just witnessed a rickety old dog doing a delightful new trick.
“Yes, now!” he declared.
“No, later!” we replied.
And then we both laughed.
It wasn’t hard to get along with D (he was the most gifted social chameleon we ever met, relentlessly personable), but we weren’t sure what to make of him until a month later, on the last game of the year.
It was one of those long away games that required a charter bus. We’d gotten up early for rehearsal, packed in a full school day, run all over hill and dale loading up the band trailer, pulling on our uniforms, going through inspection, and wolfing cheap pizza, only to then pile into the bus, dash to faraway Crockett, rehearse some more, do our best to single-handedly musically inspire our football team into respectable performance (we succeeded; they won), and then it was time to reload the trailer, pile back into the bus, and drag home. By the end of all that, everyone had gotten a bit punchy.
The bus seat next to D was missing its headrest, leaving metal prongs too blunt and uncomfortable for even the most exhausted band geek, but when we clambered in, he gave us wheedling puppy dog eyes, and said, “be my friend?” We decided, what the heck, and sat down next to him, only to quickly discover that the prongs felt just as bad as they looked. Nevertheless, we contorted ourself into as restful a position as we could and closed our eyes. D, presuming us asleep, took off the cheerful horndog mask and started pouring his heart out to the person in front of us (who didn’t seem to be paying much attention). At first, we were too tired to tell him we could still hear him; then it was too late to say anything.
“…Thing is, I gotta be happy. Otherwise everyone gets down. I did it at my church once—everyone was down all day. So I make myself happy.”
The other person must’ve asked how.
“By playing football, by hanging out with my friends—like with [Section Leader], I’m fine, sure. But it’s getting hard. I’m screwed up in the head right now. When I look over there…” he must’ve looked out the window, “I can’t even look at the moon now.” It’d set.
We’d known beforehand that D’s home life wasn’t exactly stellar, but we felt bad for him. He sounded so tired, and we knew what it felt like to need to look happy. We shed silent tears for him, and when we were done and our eyes were clear, we sat up and looked at him.
D hid his mortification well, but not entirely. Give him a break, he was fifteen. “Did you hear all that?”
We smiled guiltily. “Sorry.”
D snapped back into horndog mode so fast it practically left a breeze. “Are you really planning to grow up and be single, a virgin, with cats and a computer?” We had only said single with cats and computer, but he had his own conclusions. “You were joking, right?”
“About the cats, maybe,” we said with perfect honesty.
He put on the comedic expression of someone faced with his own personal hell. “You’re never going to have kids?”
“No way.”
“You’re going to be a virgin forever?”
“I said I’d be single,” we said primly.
“Then you’ll be a virgin,” D said confidently.
We threw up our hands and gave up.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
We squinted at him suspiciously.
“I’m not going to do anything, come on.”
We gave him our hand. D took it, turned it around a couple of times with an attitude of scientific study, then let go.
“Yup, you’re oppo-feminine,” he pronounced.
“What?”
“Your hands are soft—must be genetic or something—but you have no nails.”
“Okay, so I chew,” we said. “I’ve done it since I was three.”
“Also, you and Audrey,” our best friend, the marimba player, “are the only girls I’ve seen who don’t shave.”
“Well, congratulations, you’ve seen.”
“How come you don’t?”
“It’ll save me a fortune in razor blades,” we joked.
“You know what not shaving makes you?”
“A hideous creature, crawling from the primordial ooze?” We tried to sound evil, bared our teeth, and curled our fingers like claws.
D was surprisingly gallant. “Well, no… but you’re oppo-feminine! You don’t even like the mall.”
“Eeew.”
“See?” He shook his head. “You’re going to grow up to be a lesbian.”
Sigh. “Whatever you say, chief.”
He could clown all he liked; we’d caught him breaking character, and he knew it. There was a lot more to D than his mask, and no amount of smoke and mirrors could hide that now. We didn’t mind. We understood about masks.
As for D, well… he basically stopped hitting on us. It’s like he stopped needing to. And I guess he remembered us, because he stuck around, long after he left marching band…
Junior Year, Spring: Rogan
I’m eating my cafeteria food with D, and he’s watching me with a look that says I am not fooling him as much as I’d like.
“You know I always eat fast,” I say, trying to head him off.
He just goes, “are you still wearing the same clothes?”
“I washed them.” A lie.
I’ve worked out my procedure; I’ve got it mostly down. Days at school and/or the neighborhood sewer plant, nights in my culvert. Calories come from school lunches or the pool soda machine at night. I do my homework on time and behave well at school, impenetrable armor against teachers. I wash myself with hand soap or whatever I can get in the park bathroom or the school gym showers, which sometimes have forgotten toiletries in them, which I stash in my locker. My period will become a problem, as will laundry, but for now, I’m treading water, keeping my head up.
Bro mostly cold-shoulders me or sneers. He definitely thinks I’m spending my days on a chaise lounge, being hand-fed grapes by Anna and Miranda’s shitty boyfriend, Jeff. Bro thinks I’m a whore, and I’m not sure he’s wrong, though the price I command is way lower than he thinks.
One day, after school, he tries to catch me at the door. I automatically move to avoid him.
“Dad’s here,” he says.
I hesitate. Dad works late; he shouldn’t be here.
We go out. Dad’s standing there by his SUV, expression cold.
“Grampa’s dying,” he says. “Get in.”
I pause. I get in. Gigi wafts in from behind me, trying to be a ghost, invisible wallpaper. The less attention we garner, the better. (She tosses a strategic thought to me: maybe we can get more supplies—clothes, tampons. I acknowledge and agree.)
(I don’t know if D’s there, watching this from behind the school windows. I don’t know what he sees or hears.)
After Dad gets us all into the car, he explains that I need to stay home until the death because he’s not chasing us all over the creekbed when there’s a funeral to plan and Bro can’t be trusted to keep track of us. No one will bother me, Dad says, with a pointed look in the rear view mirror to Bro.
Bro’s response is to kick me in the leg with a sullen, rebellious look.
When we get home, there’s mail on our desk, something for Harvard: a summer-school opportunity. Gigi and I snatch it, a box of tampons, a couple changes of clothes, and quick shove them in our backpack.
Mom is a zombie. She barely seems to notice we’re there, which is good. (Thanks, Gigi.) We eat enough to be polite, always watching to make sure it’s not too much. Zombie Mom can become Rage Mom super-fast.
Dad, meanwhile, seems calm, cold, and preoccupied. With Mom like this, he has to take up the slack, and Gigi and I diagnose that he has little leftover to bother with us. He, at least, isn’t an immediate threat. (And even if he is, Dad is the most manageable human in the house.)
Bro, unfortunately, still has that sullen, dangerous look on his face. If our spots at the dinner table weren’t furthest from each other, he’d totally be kicking me in the shins. He is absolutely going to attack tonight, and if he calls Mom, it’s a coin-toss how it’ll go. We can’t trust that. We ain’t sleeping here, Gigi and I agree.
We hope Grampa dies soon, so we can go back to our safer way of life. The extra calories ain’t worth this.
As night comes, I gather up towels. Gigi’s left, so Dad catches me doing it.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sleeping somewhere else.”
“Oh really?” Sardonic. “What about Grampa?”
“I’ll be back in the morning, and I’ll stay during the day. But you can’t stop Bro, so either give me a door lock or let me sleep outside.” I can afford to be blunt. Dad probably can’t afford my death right next to Grampa’s. It’ll look weird.
Dad thinks. He nods. I leave with my improvised bedding, make it to the creekbed, and crawl into my culvert. It swallows me into the earth like a cold concrete throat. I curl up as best I can.
I hope no one finds me. I wish I could sleep in the earth forever.
Sophomore Year, Spring: Anna
D left marching band after our freshman year, and we never shared a class. It would’ve been easy to drift out of touch, but D treated relationships like an endurance sport, one he was determined to win, so he found ways to see us in the brief windows before and after classes… and during lunch.
Somehow, we both ended up at loose ends at lunch, his junior year. D had some kind of falling out with his buddies, the details of which we can’t remember, if he ever disclosed them in the first place, and the rest of our friends must’ve had a different lunch period. We were both cafeteria food eaters, and we discovered that if we left Algebra II at a breakneck sprint, galloped down the three flights of stairs, and beelined straight for the lunch line, we would not only beat the crowds, but happen to arrive right as D did. (He himself also seemed to learn the timing. Not bad, for two teens before cell phones!) The line was way less of a bore with a friend to chat with.
Then, one day, I had a bad day. I don’t know why. I met D at the top of the stairs like normal, and then in the lunch line, I just… broke. Suddenly I just felt horrible, like nothing was going right, like everything good was rotting in shallow graves. I started to cry.
I tried to leave D to his conversation with [Marching Band Friend], leaned my head against the door hinge so my hair hid my face and stared at my hands.
“Whoa, change in tempo here.” I heard D say. He’d noticed.
I just kept staring at my hands.
Someone poked my shoulder a couple times. I didn’t react. I was making a jerk out of myself and just wished I could go invisible.
Then an arm gently wrapped around my shoulders. I knew it was D.
That was too much. I turned and buried my face in his shoulder, clinging to his shirtfront and started to really cry, though I still didn’t make much noise, thank god.
[Marching Band Friend] made a questioning sound, but D shushed him. Dammit, I was making asses out of both of us in the lunch line.
“Sorry,” I gasped.
“Ssh. It’s okay.”
That pretty much undid me. I let go and just hung on to him. Through some act of God, the line didn’t move an inch during that time. I just cried.
After a minute or so, I finally calmed down. I still felt like an ass, but I also felt… relieved, I guess.
“Thanks.” I mumbled into his shirt.
“It’s okay. I’m only a jerk half the time.” I actually managed to chuckle. “If you ever need to talk, you know, I’m good for it.”
I finally let go of him, though I still stared at the floor. “You’re a good friend, D. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”
He said, “Maybe it’s stress. Sometimes I feel like that too.”
Even though I felt like the biggest moron alive, it felt good, just letting go like that. To be told it’s okay.
We remembered that.
Junior Year, Spring: Rogan
Most of the time, sleeping outside works. It’s Texas, savanna country, where two out of every three years are drought years. Unfortunately, the other one is flood.
I’m in the car we and Bro share. It’s pouring. I’m wet and shivering and resentful, moving the seat to get out the old towels I stashed. They’re supposed to be bedding, not this.
Shit. My clothes are soaked, and I can’t safely strip down. I have to go to Jeff. He has a drier, clothes I can wear.
The rain drums hard on the roof of the car. In the future, I’ll have to stash some clothes here; it’ll make everything easier. Poor planning, I chide myself, poor planning.
Full of grim resignation, I turn on the car and drive to Jeff’s. He’s twenty-one, and he wanted somewhere he could fuck me without parental oversight, so he has an apartment, paid for by his wealthy, overindulgent parents. They know my age; they do not care.
Jeff answers the door. “Where have you been? What, am I convenient for you now?”
“My grampa’s dying. I need your drier.” I push in.
“Your grampa’s been dying forever! I have needs too, you know—”
I tune out his whining, go to the washer and drier in his apartment. I find his hamper and start doing his laundry while he follows me around, complaining. He only starts to shut up once I start stripping off my soaked clothes.
“Can I borrow some clothes?”
“Hmm… no. You’re cuter this way.”
I pull out some random T-shirt and cargo shorts from his dirty hamper and put them on. They smell like Axe body spray. I hate it. I’ll always hate it.
He tries to touch me. “Come on, what’s your rush? I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
I shrug off his hands, start the wash. “My grampa’s dying. I’m not in the mood.”
He presses against me, thrusts his dick aggressively against my ass. “That’s what you always say—my grampa’s dying, I don’t feel good, I’m not in the mood…”
I sigh. I yank open his shorts. I jerk him off like a spiteful robot. The moment he’s done, I pull my shirt down, his shorts up, and go back to laundry.
“That wasn’t good,” he complains. “Haven’t you heard of service with a smile?”
“Grampa’s dying. I don’t feel like smiling.”
“You really want me to feel bad for you, don’t you? Aw, poor widdle Anna, her grampy’s dying, boo hoo hoo. I haven’t seen you in weeks! Your stupid parents wouldn’t tell me anything. Why were you avoiding me?”
“I wasn’t avoiding you.” I’m washing his jizz off my hands. “I wasn’t home.”
“Oh, really?” Sarcasm. “Where were you supposed to be, a field trip?”
If I tell him I’m sleeping outside, he’ll be furious that I chose not to sleep with him. I can’t say anything.
“Uh huh. Exactly. You avoid me for weeks, then just come here all ‘I need to use your laundry,’ no I’m sorry or anything. Do you think a shitty handjob makes up for that?”
I let him rant, one eye on the washer. Tick tick tick.
He’s crying now, saying how badly I hurt him, how shitty I treat him, what a user I am. It all feels true—I am only here to use his laundry. If I had a better option, I wouldn’t be here. Maybe I am a using bitch; I just don’t know what else to do.
“Look,” I say. “Things have gotten really bad at home. Grampa dying means everything’s really messed up. I haven’t been avoiding you; I’ve been avoiding them. I really haven’t been home.”
He squints at me dubiously, sees I’m upset. “Where have you been staying?”
“A friend.” The creekbed counts, right?
That just pisses him off. “Who? Someone I know?”
“No.”
“Boy or girl?”
Easy: “Girl. Someone from school.”
His voice gets low and dangerous. “It’s not some guy like D, is it?”
“What? No!” I don’t even know where in town D lives.
“Oh, I can just see it now—perfect pimp D, just sweeping in while you go ‘oh, my hero! Let me suck your dick!’”
Where the hell did this come from? I’m sleeping in a culvert! D has zero part in this! Shit, one of the others must’ve mentioned him being friendly. “Don’t talk about him like that. He’s my friend—just my friend. You’re being really gross.”
“No, you are! Keeping secrets, avoiding me, lying… it’s him, isn’t it? A football player.” He spits it with disgust.
D isn’t even on the football team anymore; he quit all his extracurriculars without saying why. “Don’t talk about him like that.”
I’m getting angry. I’m a captive audience for as long as my clothes are in the machine; if I come home in Jeff’s clothing, I’m ruined. And even though I myself am not attracted to D, he doesn’t deserve this. He’s done nothing wrong, and here Jeff is, just trashing him for no reason! It’s okay if it’s me, but—
“Stop talking about him like that!” I’m starting to cry, to my rage and shame. “He hasn’t done anything!”
Jeff sees my tears, and his face becomes something scary. “So there is something between you.”
I want to rip out my fucking hair and scream. “No, Jeff, my grampa is dying, my parents hate me, I’ve barely been home in weeks, and you’re acting like a jerk!”
But the more I tell him to stop, the angrier he gets. His face turns this horrible puce, like he’s a man having a toddler’s tantrum. He calls D horrible names, me too, and at the pinnacle of his fit, he grabs me and slaps me in the face.
Jeff has never hit me before. I’m not ready. I need to look good for the funeral, Dad’s commanded it, what if it shows? At the same time, the whole thing feels unreal. I expected Jeff to be nasty, he usually is these days, but accusing me of cheating with a random guy? Hitting me? What the fuck?
That’s when I break down, and that’s what calms Jeff. Hurting me makes him feel better.
Hurting me makes them all feel better.
“Aw, shh, shh, it’s okay,” he croons, hugging me. I go stiff. He rocks me in what he must think is a comforting way. “I’m sorry I’ve been so harsh, you know how many people have abandoned me over the years…”
I don’t even know what’s happening anymore; I just know I need to keep Jeff happy til my clothes are dry. The moment they are, I’m out of there, yanking them on (safe, warm, clean, smelling like nothing but fabric softener), dashing out. I drive off like a crazy woman and when I find somewhere to park, I just sit there, quaking.
What just happened?
What was that?
I start sobbing hysterically onto the steering wheel.
That night, I sleep wrapped in towels, bone deep cold, and I know I can never go back to Jeff’s place. It’s not worth it. He can trash me all he wants, but he doesn’t get to trash my friends. (And behind that thought, I think: D, horndog extraordinaire, doesn’t treat me like this. Why should Jeff get to?)
What am I going to do about D?
Obviously I’m not going to stop being friends with him just because Jeff’s mad. That’s stupid. D’s the one person I don’t feel like I have to perform for, and he seems to be making himself conspicuously available after that whole bathroom thing. He said if I wanted to talk to him, I could.
Can I, though?
Should I?
How?
This is not something I can “accidentally” arrange. I’m going to have to ask, flat-out, and if D says oh hell no, I’m not touching this mess… well, then, that’s it. I’ve lost a friend I really can’t afford to lose.
But I can’t keep doing this. I need to sleep somewhere.
By the time I get to school the next day, I’m a nervous wreck. D is there, somehow having learned exactly where to idle in my line of sight without making it obvious he’s doing it, and the moment I see him, I drag him off to a somewhat sequestered locker forest. (“Whoa, hey, hi, take it easy!”) When we get there, I go, “I need to talk to you. Can I talk to you?”
Off comes the mask. D is instantly calm and serious. “Yeah. You can talk to me.”
My throat is choked with panic. Before I can bolt, I blurt out, “things’re bad at home.”
He just looks at me quietly and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I thought so.”
No anger. No disgust. I want to cry with relief. After holding all these secrets inside my guts, it’s a relief to finally tell someone something.
“I was staying with my boyfriend, but…” But what? I can’t tell D all those horrible things Jeff said about him. “But he’s gotten real bad too.”
“Do you need somewhere to go?”
The question takes me aback. Somewhere… to go? Like, a non-imaginary place? Indoors? With humans in it?
I can’t afford the price. But…
“Maybe. I don’t know.” I wring my hands.
D reaches into his backpack, rips off a bit of paper from somewhere, and grabs a pen. Click-click, it goes. He scribbles a number down. He seems brisk, efficient, confident, like he’s done this before and knows what to do.
He gives me the number. “I’ve got a cell now. If you’re in trouble, doesn’t matter what, call me, and I’ll come pick you up, okay? No questions asked.”
“Really?” I sound watery and snotty but can’t help it.
“Yeah. It won’t work once I’m at Texas U, but until then, for a few months anyway,” he spreads his arms and grins that golden boy smile, the one that works on everyone, even me who knows it’s half bluff, “I’m all yours.”
Now I am crying, but I’m smiling too, because I’ve told somebody something, and I’m not in trouble. My grampa’s dying and my family’s rotting and my boyfriend’s acting like a crazy person, but at least I have this.
“You okay?” D asks. “I hate it when girls cry.”
It makes me laugh, as intended. “Yeah,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I’m okay. Thanks, D. You’re a good friend.”
He opens his arms, pops the cornball mask back on, does the “you want this used car” face. “Hug?”
“Don’t push it.” But I do give him a little hug. It feels weird but not painful.
As we disengage, though, I realize: if I get caught with D’s number on me, the family might find it, find him… and people have already assumed the worst about why he befriended us. He’s vulnerable in a way Jeff isn’t, younger, lawyerless, black, and it seems utterly insane to put him at risk like this.
I can’t keep his number. And there is no way in hell I’m going to be able to memorize it this fast.
I pass the number back. D sees the look on my face. “Oh boy,” he says.
“Okay, it’s like this,” I say, sweating like a waterfall. “During the day, I’m fine, I’ve got a place to be. It’s just… sometimes nights are tricky. I just… need somewhere to sleep sometimes.”
God, I sound like I’m trying to sleep with him. I sound insane.
But D isn’t looking at me like I’m crazy. He breathes out. “Okay. Do you have somewhere to sleep now?”
“Ye-es,” I say, but too slowly, too stiffly.
His eyelids lower. I think he’s insulted. “Uh huh. Where is it?”
I just stand there and sweat.
“Your boyfriend…?”
“No,” I say, repelled beyond words. “Just… around.” God that sounds stupid. D’s going to say no. Where’s he going to put me? He can’t just bring some random feral white girl home! What will his family say? What will my family do? I try to backpedal. “Look, it’s fine, don’t worry about it, I can make it work—” I’ve got a culvert and condoms. If I can’t use the former, I can probably get Bro to use the latter…
D sighs. “Can you keep a secret?”
Something about his tone pauses my panic spiral. “What? Sure.”
“I’ve got my own place.”
Panic instantly forgotten. “Seriously?”
“Ssh! Keep it down, huh? Yeah, I’m eighteen now,” barely, “I can swing it, but you cannot tell anybody, understand? They’ll think—”
I know what they’ll think. “You… you have a…?”
“Yeah.” He looks uncomfortable. Whatever the reason he’s living independently, he doesn’t want to talk about it. “My house, my rules, right? So, you want in?”
I just goggle at him. I have never met anyone but Jeff who lived on their own, and Jeff is 21 and subsidized by his parents. I know D has an after-school job, but still. Besides, he was my hail Mary. I didn’t expect him to have, like, an answer. A solution.
But he’s looking more and more antsy—whatever this is, it’s something personal, something I could hurt him with—so I say, “You’re a real man of mystery, you know that?”
His shoulders relax. “Yeah, well, you know me. It ain’t fancy, but it’s got a couch.”
“A couch sounds great.” A couch sounds amazing.
“Cool, cool.” D nods a few times. He looks awkward. “And hey, uh…”
“Yeah?”
He fidgets with his hair—it’s growing out into springs. “Don’t take this the wrong way… but I don’t want to sleep with you, okay?”
Apocalyptic relief washes over me. “Oh, thank god! Me neither!”
We both laugh. He looks as relieved as I feel.
“Good, good, just wanted to get that out of the way, in case this was all some crazy plan to get me…”
I snort. “Oh yeah, like I’d really pull all this for that. And I won’t tell anyone. My boyfriend would kill me.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. So… this boyfriend… how’s he involved in all this…?”
“He’s not,” I say firmly, and D backs off.
The bell rings. We go our separate ways. But I’m not desperate or afraid or crying anymore, because I have a plan. We have a plan.
…
I’m standing at the corner of Home Street and the Circle, backpack over my shoulder, looking a million ways at once, hoping no snitches are watching. Turns out, D was a super easy person to negotiate with:
“Look, I can’t call you. If they find your number on caller ID, we’ll both be in big trouble.”
“Yeah? How do you want to do this?”
“I’ll tell you at school if I need a pick-up.”
“It might take me a while. I have work.”
“It’s fine. I have books.”
So here I am, waiting. When D’s red muscle car pulls up (oh, how I will come to despair of that red muscle car), I jump in.
“Let’s go,” I say.
We leave the neighborhood. I keep expecting someone to jump out, pointing and screaming at us, but nobody does.
“Hey,” D says. “All good?”
“Yeah.” I take a breath, trying to unclench my shoulders. “Yeah, I think we’re good.”
“Pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah.” That’s all I have to say. He… gets it. “Thanks for this, D. I really hope you don’t get in trouble.”
“Aw,” he says, waving a hand, “what can they do to me?”
I say nothing. Oh, they can do things to him, if they find out. I have to make sure they never do.
I kind of keep it together until we get to his place. Then I start shaking all over.
D sees it; he can’t not. “Ooh, man, that bad, huh?” Somehow, he can tell it’s not him I’m afraid of.
I nod, sure that if I talk, I’ll start blubbering. As long as I keep my mouth shut, my eyes will stay dry.
“You wanna come in?”
Nod nod nod.
I don’t remember much of anything about the apartment: just a big empty beige box. My clearest memory is of the enormous saggy black faux leather couch, clearly a Dumpster save. I will love that shitty couch til the day I die; it will be replicated in headspace from 2007 on. The original version is placed across from the game station, but other than that, there’s barely any furniture. Beige carpet, stained. My legs feel wobbly. Everything is catching up to me, I guess.
D sees I’m in no condition for a tour. He pats the couch. “All yours.”
I don’t so much sit as collapse, glassy-eyed and shaking. D sits down next to me, giving me a polite amount of space: friendly but not pushy. His expression is ginger.
“Hey. …You want to talk about it?”
I don’t even know how to begin to explain any of this. It’s too much. It’s unbelievable. My throat is locked up like a safe, sealing all the screaming demons inside. I can’t. I can’t.
But I want to. He feels… safe.
Maybe he sees me struggling. “Is it your brother?”
God. If only. Finally, I manage to get out: “it’s all of them.”
“Oh,” he says. His expression is tragic. “Oh man.”
I hide my face in my hands and start crying. He puts an arm around us like he did a year prior in the lunch line, not getting too close, but still being there.
“Sorry,” I stutter.
“It’s okay.”
When he says it, I even believe him.
He lets me calm down on my own, then says, “you need anything to eat?”
I shake my head no, wiping my eyes. I ate dinner with the family, cold and tense, Mom collapsed and blank, staring at her plate, Bro glaring at me, Dad ignoring it all. A fragile fake armistice.
D gets a plate for himself, returns to the couch. I don’t know if it’s to keep me company or because it’s the only furniture.
I feel like making a bad joke so he knows I’m okay now, so I open my backpack and whip out the pink cube. “I got a box of tampons for your bathroom.”
“Aw, man…”
“Hey, you signed up for this.”
“All right, all right, put ‘em under the sink or something.” He waves me in the direction. There’s nothing to say about the bathroom, except that it too is empty.
“Trust me, it’ll make you a hit,” I say as I place the box. “All the girls will love you.”
“They already love me.” It sounds automatic. “Hey, I’m gonna play Halo. You wanna play?”
“I’m good. You don’t have to do anything.” I open my backpack and pull something out—that Harvard summer school thing from home. I’d forgotten about it. “I’ll watch, maybe.”
So D plays Halo. At first, I try to fill out the Harvard application, but I’m exhausted. Even though I’m in a strange place with a guy, I’m not clocking exits, planning for the worst. I’m not afraid, not numb, just so very tired.
And that’s okay, because D looks almost as tired as me. His mask is off, like he doesn’t have the energy for it, and he’s keeping me company, but in a way that doesn’t require talking or anything. This is good. This is perfect. I can just watch the little armor man on the screen. I can just sit and be.
“This is a nice place,” I say.
D snorts. “No it’s not.”
“It feels nice,” I amend. “Thanks for letting me stay here. I mean it. Things had gotten real bad.”
“Yeah. I know.” The words are simple but sincere. “I’m glad you asked me.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I lean my head on his shoulder and he lets me, and I doze off watching him play. For once, there’s no threat equation to crunch. I’m not afraid. This is a safe place, this empty beige apartment, and D is a safe person to be in it with.
Everything’s okay now.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-19 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-22 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-19 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-22 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-21 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-22 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-23 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-23 05:43 pm (UTC)Random thought: we see Eric and Charles playing chess... but do they play other, less dignified games? Checkers, or... well, not Twister, Charles can’t do Twister, but Chutes and Ladders or pinball or whatever?
(Eric would cheat at pinball. But in fairness, Charles probably cheats at chess.)