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lb_leeTen Years to Vanish
Prompt: Stuff100 'Years,' H/C Bingo 'atonement'
Word count: 12,726
Summary: It takes Biff ten years to learn how to disappear.
Notes: First of all, the cave of light is a real place; it exists in my hometown. Also, this story involves graphic violence, suicide gone wrong, dysfunctional family dynamics, and general disturbing imagery. Consider yourself warned. Also, Part One is here, and you should read that first.
Four
Biff is twelve when Kevin Hendrickson moves down the street.
Until now, the MacGilligans were the only mixed family in the neighborhood. Biff gets off a lot easier than JoJo or Millie; except for sometimes in the summer, when he gets really dark, he can pass for white. Not that it means much; everyone in town knows about them.
He knows the Hendricksons won’t last long. They’re on the white side of town, they’re divorced, and they’re out-of-towners. Goners for sure, not worth paying attention to.
Around the time the Hendricksons move in is also when Biff decides he’s going to read the entire Bible. This is no light undertaking. He can read, but he hates doing it, especially in front of other people, because either they’ll make fun of him for it (“Hey look! They trained it to read!”) or expect him to start reading everything else. (“Now, if you’d just apply yourself to the books you’re supposed to be reading…”)
So it’s not his idea of a good time. But Biff still doesn’t have any words for what he can do, the vanishing, the darkness, the making of images. And since he can’t talk about it to anyone, he figures the Bible will tell him what it is, and whether it’s right to do or not. Then he’ll know and it’ll stop bugging him.
So he steals one of the King James Bibles from St. Columbkille’s (he doesn’t dare touch his father’s) and takes it down to his fort in the creek bed. He sits against trees and fights his way through it, one ponderous verse at a time. When he can’t take the begats and thou shalt nots anymore (often), he practices.
By now, he’s gotten almost decent at vanishing—he can hold it for almost a minute now, and he can do it a few times before wearing out, but he still can’t do it without affecting the stuff right next to him, and there’s still some distortion. Plus, he always has to dodge people and cars because they don’t know he’s there. He almost got clobbered by an F-150 last week, and that was enough to make him decide he needs to learn something else. He wants to be visible, just not visible as him. That way, people don’t bang into him all the time.
Changing his face is even harder than vanishing. Even if it needs fine-tuning, the basic act of vanishing is getting to be second nature; he relaxes his shoulders, shoves his hands in his pockets, slips his mind into that special gear, and that’s it, he’s gone. Changing himself doesn’t have the area warp effect, but it takes even more attention to detail. It’s creating something, and then holding it and mapping it to his motions. It’s hard, but good hard.
Not like reading the Book of Leviticus, which is bad hard. He’s been forging through it all day, and it’s like banging his head against a wall. Genesis at least has the creation of the world and the Great Flood, and Exodus has Moses and the plagues, but Leviticus is just one long list of rules. So far, all Biff’s gotten out of it is (A) don’t be a faggot, and (B) thank God he isn’t Jewish, so he doesn’t have to care about the rest of this crap. He can barely get through a verse at a time before he has to jump up and do something else.
He’s doing that now, pacing through the grass, trying to walk and move like Heather so he can slap her looks on himself more easy, when someone goes, “Hey!”
By now, the reaction is automatic: he vanishes.
There’s a crashing, and Kevin Hendrickson pushes through the grass from behind a tree. He’s obviously new to creek-stomping; his jacket catches on the thorns, and he nearly tears it yanking it free.
Biff holds stock still. He might—might—be good enough to keep Kevin from seeing the grass move, but he isn’t that quiet. Kevin moves past him, so close his sleeve brushes Biff’s elbow, but Kevin doesn’t notice, or that there’s still a fuzzy halo around where Biff is.
Kevin walks past, then stops, scratching his head, looking back and forth with confusion.
“Hello?” He calls.
Biff knows he should just keep holding still, like he has for the drunk teenagers, the hobos, the deer. But this time, he lets himself reappear behind Kevin and go, “Boo.”
Kevin swoops around, nearly hitting Biff by mistake. When he sees how close Biff is, he scrambles backwards, and his heel skids on a loose rock, sending him falling on his ass.
“Jesus!” He says, clutching his heart. “Where’d you come from?”
Biff shrugs and offers his hand. “Behind you.”
Kevin takes the hand and Biff pulls him up. He’s taller than Biff by a good bit, but nowhere near as dense. Biff could pick him up, if he wanted.
“You sneaky, boy,” Kevin says, and looks at Biff appraisingly. “Strong too.”
Biff shrugs. People are always surprised when they see him move. He’s used to it. What’s more startling to him is being called ‘boy.’ Only a newcomer in town would make the mistake, but he doesn’t try to change Kevin’s mind. It’s nice to be called right for once. Eventually, someone will let Kevin know that Biff’s real name is Beth, but until then…
“What you doing?” Kevin asks. “I saw you.” He walks with a mince and a swish, an exaggeration of Biff’s attempt at imitating Heather. It hadn’t come naturally.
Biff feels his cheeks flame. Worse, he can’t think of a good lie—it’s not like he’s in theatre class or anything. So he tells the truth: “Pretending to be someone else.”
Kevin cocks his head. “Why?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. Especially if it mean moving like that. You looked like a drag queen.”
“What?”
But Kevin’s already moved on. He goes to sit by the tree, and he picks up the Bible.
“I was imitating a girl I know,” Biff persists. “Okay? Just to see if I could.”
Kevin’s flipping through the Bible. “Which girl?”
“Heather Monahan. She in my—”
“Oh yeah!” Kevin snaps his fingers. “I think I seen her. We got Language Arts together. Yeah, now that you said it, I see it. Pretty good, with the…” He holds his elbows tight to his sides, letting his lower arms hang loose as he gestures. “You got to turn your knees in more, though.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, she got that kinda pigeon-toed walk, like…” he demonstrates, and it’s a little rough, but Biff has to admit he sees the resemblance. Kevin’s not a bad impersonator. “You know?”
“Yeah.”
“So why you imitating her? She your girlfriend or something?”
“No!” Biff protests. “We go to Saint Columbkille’s together. We used to be friends.”
“Used to?”
Biff shrugs.
“So why you pretending to be her?”
“I know how she move.” Also, she’s not much taller than him yet… and he’s rapidly becoming one of the shortest in the class. Faking height is way harder.
“Weirdo.” But Kevin’s laughing as he says it. He holds up the Bible. “You reading this?”
“Yeah.”
“How is it?”
“Boring. What you doing down here?”
“Huh?” Kevin looks up from the Bible.
“In Stonefall. In the creek bed. Your family’s—” Biff catches himself just in time. “Your family’s rich.”
Kevin looks at him knowingly. “You ain’t all white either. I seen your family.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t move here.” Nobody moves to Stonefall. It’s the kind of town you get born in, work in, and die in.
Kevin shrugs and flips through the Bible pages with one smooth sweep of his thumb. “I see you come down here all the time. Maybe I was curious what was so cool it bring you in.”
Biff blinks. He never thought Kevin noticed him at all, never mind where he went. Then again, they do live close to each other and go to the same school. He scratches his neck and goes, “Well, you ain’t in it the best time. The berries grow in summer.”
“So why you down here now then?”
“Peace and quiet.”
“Jeez. Don’t you got friends or Nintendo or something?”
Biff glares at him. “Not everybody got Nintendo, okay?” And as for friends, nobody’s really come up after Heather. What’s the point? He can’t take them home, can’t tell them about the thing he loves most, the thing he does all day. Faking normal around everyone at school and at home takes enough energy; he doesn’t have the juice to do it around much anyone else. It’s not hard; except for his family, not a lot of people want to hang around him either.
Except Kevin, now. “Okay, okay, no Nintendo, got it.” He sits down, folds his arms behind his head. “It’s cool. I like peace and quiet too. Hey!” He jumps up. “Wanna build something?”
Biff tries not to look too smug when he smiles and crosses his arms. “Already did.”
“You serious? No way! What you build?”
Biff just waves at Kevin to follow and turns around to tromp through the underbrush.
The fort isn’t too far from his practice clearing. It’s got two trees and a risen line of concrete from some age-old building project. One of the trees have fallen over in such a way that the roots offer a wall, and the other tree’s greenery gives a bit of a roof. Over the years, Biff has made another wall out of stacked rocks and wedged boards into the branches to make shelves, where he keeps the things he finds. During flood season, it all washes away, but that’s okay. Biff rebuilds bigger and better each time.
“Jeez, if I’d known about this, I would’ve chased after you ages ago,” Kevin says.
“C’mon,” Biff says. “Nobody knows down here better’n me. I’ll show you around.”
Three
By the time Biff is thirteen, Kevin knows the creek bed almost as well as he does. He knows the cave under the bridge, which was discovered when a tractor half-fell into it during construction and still has chunks of crystal and broken stalactites, if you’re willing to dig for them. He knows the deeper end when the creek bed flows into the greenbelt and the river. He knows about the hawk’s nest, which is a huge mess of sticks high up in one of the oaks, which also has the best mistletoe come Christmastime.
And Kevin’s good company. He’s seems to be enthusiastic about everything. Not just about the creek bed, but science and math and computers too, almost anything. Biff might know the rhythms of the outdoors, but Kevin’s able to put an explanation and a reason behind them. He knows why the creek bed is usually dry, and why the hawk nests so high, and Biff can already tell that Kevin is a lot smarter than he is, but Kevin seems to be okay with that. He laughs and learns and claps Biff on the shoulder, and hey, having friends is kinda nice, after so long.
Not the most sensible, though. It takes a couple explanations before Kevin learns to pretend to ignore Biff during school—two mixed kids make twice the target, and anyway, nobody wants to be associated with him. But Kevin must’ve been brought up right, because he never asks Biff why he’s outside all the time, and surely he’s figured out Biff is Beth by now, but he hasn’t said anything and still treats Biff like a boy, which is fine.
Maybe that’s why Biff is so tempted to tell him. Vanish, make it snow, put on Heather’s face and body because he’s pretty sure he can. Kevin’s so bouncy and happy and smart, surely he’ll be okay with it. Surely he’ll have an explanation.
But then Biff remembers Heather. His mom. Kevin’s the closest thing to a real friend he’s had since he became a freakshow. Is he really that eager to go back to that?
So he keeps reading the Bible. He’s made it to the New Testament by now, but still isn’t getting much of use. Some offhand references to witchcraft, but Biff isn’t worshipping the devil or talking to dead people or anything, and hey, he’s read Numbers, he knows that Moses did that whole copper snake thing that saved people from snakebite, so it’s obvious not all weird shit is the Devil. Unfortunately, he hasn’t found anything distinguishing one from the other, and neither God nor the Devil seems interested in popping up and telling him outright.
So Biff keeps his mouth shut. He catches Kevin looking at him sometimes, like he suspects something is going on, and sometimes it looks like he wants to ask Biff about it, but he always shuts his mouth at the last moment and says, “never mind.” He always looks a little sad, though.
“Look, you got your secrets, I get that,” Kevin said. “Really. But. You know. You ever want to talk about it…”
Biff never does. But he doesn’t want Kevin to feel bad about it, which is why, when he’s thirteen, he shows Kevin the most secret space in the creek bed.
The creek bed runs through beds of limestone all through Stonefall. Over the millennia, the floodwaters (and the creek proper, further down) have worn through the stone. In some places way down in the greenbelt, water even spurts through holes in the rocks.
It takes a good hour and a half of hiking, but one day, Biff takes Kevin down in the depths of the greenbelt, down to a small cave. Though water gushes from the rocks next to it, it’s dusty and dry inside.
Biff pulls a flashlight out of his pocket; he never comes down here without one. “S’okay. Just daddy-longlegs down here.”
He turns the flashlight on, and he clenches it in his teeth and bends over to walk into the cave. One of the benefits of being one of the short kids; it means he doesn’t have to bend over double. Kevin just gets on his knees and crawls, careful not to crush any bugs.
The secret spot is a bit of a trick to get to—otherwise Kevin likely would’ve found it already. The cave goes back deep enough that it gets pitch black pretty fast. Biff’s flashlight doesn’t have all that great of batteries either. They go in, turn left, and climb up maybe twenty feet of stone. Biff knows all the handholds by heart by now, so he clambers up and holds the flashlight for Kevin to come up. Clouds of daddy-longlegs scatter, but Kevin’s in the adventuring spirit now, and he climbs up.
When Kevin reaches the top, Biff turns off the flashlight.
“Hey! What—”
“C’mon. I got you.” Biff takes his arm, leads him a couple steps forward. After a moment of hesitancy, Kevin lets Biff guide him to an outcrop of stone, put hands on his shoulders, and press down. “Sit down.”
Kevin sits, and Biff reaches into his pocket again. He puts the flashlight away, and he pulls out a disposable cigarette lighter, stolen from his mom’s purse.
“Close your eyes till I say open them, okay?” Biff says.
“What you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
After a few minutes, Biff lets the lighter go out and tucks it back in his pocket. He checks to make sure everything’s all set.
“Okay, open them.”
Kevin does, and he laughs with delight. Biff crosses his arms and grins.
He isn’t the only person to have found this cave, of course. The stone is worn smooth from generations of people climbing it, but now even the teen pot-smokers have forgotten about it, and Biff’s cleaned the place out. The ceiling is low, and this area is small, roughly the size of a big hot tub, but there’s a ledge along one side that’s good for sitting on, and plenty of nooks and crannies, and all of them are crammed with years’ worth of candles. Some of them are just useless pools of melted wax now; others are still a couple inches high. Biff’s lit about all of them that have anything left to light, and the tiny flames fill the cave with flickers of white and gold, gleaming off the smooth stone.
After Kevin gets over the excitement, he asks, “How long you known about this place?”
“Aw, ages,” Biff says, playing cool. “Nobody come up here but me now. I usually just bring a flashlight; all the candles, once you light ‘em, it’s a pain putting ‘em out again. Cool, huh?”
Kevin Hendrickson is looking at him funny now, but not in a bad way. It’s something Biff hasn’t seen before, something that makes him feel weird but happy. “Cool. Yeah.”
“What? What you looking at me like that for?”
And Kevin shakes his head and laughs and says, “Man, you really something. Anybody ever told you that? You’re like, King of the Nowheres.”
“Thanks.”
“No, no man, that’s a good thing! I mean, all these folks, they think… well hell, I dunno what they think, but they don’t think you know this. It’s like you look at rocks and stuff, and most people, they just go on, don’t even notice, but you go crawling around in the dirt and find stuff like this! You notice hawk nests and how people move and shit, and I don’t know what you are, but it really something. I like finding out the whys and hows, but you the one who sees the whats.”
Just as well the candles are all flickery and not good for seeing detail, because nobody’s ever gushed about Biff like that before in his life, except maybe his sisters and they don’t count, because little sisters always think their big sister is queen of the world. It’s embarrassing, but also kinda nice, so Biff just scratches his neck and stares at the candles.
“Seriously, man, how you notice stuff like that?”
Biff shrugs. “I dunno. Just… you gotta notice stuff like that, you know? Just in case something happen.”
“Something happen? Like what?”
“I dunno. Like… you got to get away from something. Keep yourself safe. You got to notice things or you… fall down the stairs or something.”
It sounds stupid, but he’s never been good with words anyway, and Kevin still goes, “Yeah,” like it makes sense, and then he waves Biff over and makes room on the outcropping for him.
“You weird, man,” he says, “but you cool weird.”
He claps Biff on the shoulder, and Biff just shrugs and pretends he’s cool.
Two
Biff is fourteen when things start going wrong.
The old man’s hours get cut. This means Mom has to work more evening shifts to cover the bills, so she’s home less and he’s home more… and grouchy besides. Which means Biff can’t spend his evenings out in the creek bed anymore, because that’d leave JoJo and Millie alone with the old man, and they’re still just in the fourth grade. So he stays home and starts cooking more, which his dad doesn’t approve of (“tell your sisters to do it; they’re old enough,”) but Biff doesn’t mind. He likes that he can make it up as he goes along. Some meat here, some sour cream there, some chives and yellow onion and garlic, and bam! Delicious. Even the old man gets in a better mood after it.
And anything that puts him in a good mood, Biff will happily do.
Most of the girls at school already had their growth spurts; now the boys are starting too. Except Biff. He’s still runty, still has the child’s singing voice. He quits the church choir.
Kevin’s still his friend. He’s going to the fancy magnet high school in the next town over now, hitting the books like crazy to learn about science and stuff, and he’s also joined up with some martial arts dojo out there. With all that going on, he’s not around as much, but that’s okay. It just means it’s easier for Biff to stay home… and he doesn’t have to make excuses for why he can’t bring friends over. They still hang in the creek bed on the weekends, hitting the caves, the trees, wrestling and laughing, so they still see each other.
Just not at school. And maybe it’s because Kevin’s going to nerd school, because he doesn’t do this, but everyone at Biff’s school is weird. Everyone’s talking about who’s crushing on, going out with, screwing who, and Biff really couldn’t care less. One of the girls in his grade has already gotten pregnant, which sucks for her since her folks don’t believe in kids out of wedlock.
Luckily, Biff is outside it all. Five years of being a loner (except Kevin, but he doesn’t count here) means he’s off the radar. He doesn’t even need to vanish; he’s already invisible.
Which means he mostly gets to stand back, watch, and wonder what the hell everyone’s deal is.
The girls have been weird for a while. Now the guys are getting weird too. They pick fights at the drop of a hat, usually in front of the popular girls, and apparently, since Biff is short and still wears his K-Mart clothes two sizes too big, they think he’s some kind of punching bag.
One day, Ralph Meyers corners him in the hall and starts tearing into him. Biff hardly notices what he says—it’s all the same old stuff. He’s busy paying attention to Meyers’s eyes, which say he’s nothing in a fight, no matter if he’s shaving already. He’s also busy noticing Chelsea Green, who’s standing nearby, and she’s very blond and very white and (he guesses) very pretty. Whatever. If she’s impressed by this, he figures, she and Meyers deserve each other. He just ignores Meyers and waits for him to start looking stupid—picking on people is only fun when it makes you look like a big shot. When it makes you look like a bad comedian trying for a laugh, that’s when people start rolling their eyes at you.
But then Ralph Meyers says something about his sisters. About their curly hair and dark skin.
Biff goes rigid.
Scenting blood, Ralph Meyers says something else.
Biff grabs him by the throat and knees him. Then things get red for a while.
Ralph goes to the nurse. Biff goes to the principal. When she rubs her forehead and asks what happened, Biff just shrugs and gets suspended for a day. He doesn’t care about that. He cares about what the old man is going to think about it when he has to leave work and come pick up Biff in the middle of the day. He’s not going to be happy.
He isn’t.
JoJo and Millie are old enough to walk home from school now—they have to be, since the old man doesn’t pick them up. Biff is sure to meet them at the door when they arrive. When they see him, their eyes go wide and they draw back.
“Why you home early?” JoJo asks.
Millie doesn’t say anything at all. She just starts to hyperventilate.
“Don’t you got something to do at Linda’s?” Biff says to them.
They glance back behind him, through the door. The TV’s playing. Their eyes return to Biff and they nod.
“Yeah,” JoJo says. “We forgot.” She already has an arm on Millie’s, and they’re backing away. “We’ll be back…” She lets it hang.
“I’ll come get you,” Biff says, halfway out the door himself.
They go, and he leaves, heading towards the creek bed. Peace and quiet and clinging for dear life to that stillness inside him, which still coughs up gentle joy even after all these years. If it is the Devil in him, at least it’s reliable.
Except when he gets to the fort, Kevin Hendrickson is there at the mouth, playing Gameboy. For a moment, Biff gears up to vanish, but he doesn’t have it in him, not today, and anyway, Kevin’s seen him.
“Hey!” Kevin jumps up, tucking the Gameboy under his arm. “How’s—Jesus, what happened to you?”
Biff shrugs. “Fight.”
“At school? Whoa.”
Biff doesn’t want to talk, so he just shakes his head and ducks his head behind his bangs. The bruises are starting to show now, and Kevin puts a hand on his shoulder, takes him gently by the chin, making him jump. He’s a lot taller than Biff now, but his voice hasn’t changed, and he looks over the rising bruises with an expression Biff doesn’t recognize.
“It hurt?”
Biff shrugs.
“Jeez. What happened?”
Biff hesitates, but Kevin’s family is mixed too, so he tells Kevin what Ralph Meyers said about his sisters, his family.
Kevin’s eyes get big and bright in a way that makes Biff’s insides twist. “Wow. That why you fought him?”
“Beat him,” Biff corrects. Kevin still hasn’t let go of him, and usually, Biff would pull back but right now, it’s not bad. The soft touch feels nice on sore skin.
“Yeah? Ain’t Ralph Meyers bigger’n you?”
“Everyone bigger than me,” Biff says. “It ain’t about bigness.”
“Wow,” Kevin says, and his voice sounds funny. “I can’t imagine anyone doing that for me.”
And Kevin bends over and kisses him.
For a second, Biff is too startled to react. Nobody but his mom and sisters has ever kissed him. Then he realizes he likes it and punches Kevin in the stomach as hard as he can.
Kevin falls hard with a wheeze. He might do judo, but he’s not a fighter, not really, he doesn’t know how to deal with someone he knows and likes hitting him, so he just clutches his stomach and stares up at Biff with fear in his eyes.
Biff doesn’t move. He can’t, because no, it’s not fair, he can handle being a freakshow, he can handle being a lez, he can even handle being alone, but no, he can’t be a fag. Part of him wants to run, and a small part of him (very small) wants to say he’s sorry and ask if Kevin wants to do that again. But most of him just wants to hit Kevin again, hurt him, make him sorry for ever even thinking—
Biff runs. He hears Kevin calling after him, breathless and high from getting the wind knocked out of him, but he doesn’t look back, just vanishes. He doesn’t care if Kevin sees it or not.
He fights through underbrush and poison ivy, not caring if he’s quiet or if he’s covering his movements well enough. All he knows is that if he doesn’t keep running, he’ll go back, and he’ll hurt somebody, so he runs until his lungs burn and his side stitches, runs until he reaches the bridge and that’s it, the end of the line, he’s out of breath and can’t run anymore. But the violence is still there tearing him up inside, needing to get out, so Biff turns on the overpass and attacks it, smashes his hands against the concrete till the anger runs out. Then he just slumps back against the underpass, lets his legs fold up under him and he just sits there with his head in his hands, trying not to cry.
It’s not fair. It’s just not fucking fair. Only friend he’s had in fucking years, and—and—
He can fix this. This will be okay. He’s been a freak six years now, and nobody knows but Heather and his mom, and they aren’t telling. He can keep this quiet too. Kevin sure as hell won’t tell anybody, so long as he never sees Kevin again, long as he doesn’t do nothing stupid, no one will ever know. He can’t be normal, but he can at least keep from being a complete fuck-up.
Everything will be just fine.
Eventually, it starts getting dark, and Biff has to leave the overpass and go pick up JoJo and Millie. They look at his bruised hands nervously, but he smiles at them and takes them home. They get there just as Mom is.
“We were staying at Linda’s,” JoJo says without prompting. “She has a puppy.”
“That’s nice,” Mom says, then stops short when she gets a good look at Biff. “What happened to you?”
For a moment, Biff panics, thinking she knows. Then he shrugs and says, “Fight at school. I won.”
His mom’s eyes look tired and she leans down to take him by the chin and turn his head to the porch-light so she can see better. He jerks away from her hand, and she sighs.
“You look more like your father everyday,” she says.
Biff just rubs his knuckles and lets the pain wipe away feeling.
One
Biff is fifteen, and he’s given up the creek bed. He doesn’t know if Kevin still goes there or not, but he doesn’t want to run into him. He doesn’t know what he’d say or do. Besides, the memories bug him.
He wishes Kevin had never kissed him. Now all the days spent building and exploring in the creek bed are suspect, all the play fighting and grappling that’s full of laughter. How much was he supposed to enjoy that? When did it get too much?
How can he keep it from happening again?
Turns out, the problem solves itself. People at school always left Biff alone, but after the fight with Ralph Meyers, they flat-out avoid him. Biff is okay with this; the fewer folks who get close to him, the less likely he’ll fuck it up. He watches girls and boys get together, kiss, grind in the hall, and break up a month later, and he feels no jealousy. He doesn’t feel anything at all. He doesn’t look at guys in gym class funny or join theatre or anything. He’s got it all under control. He’s like Saint Augustine.
But sometimes, every once in a while, when he’s tired or not feeling so good, he finds himself remembering what it felt like when Kevin tilted his chin up and kissed him. for the split second of shock before he remembered to feel bad about it. But then he always catches himself, and then he has to go run hard or hit something to make the ache go away. Pain works best, he finds. It clears him out, leaves him clean and numb. Turns out the old man was right all along about that.
Given a choice, he’d rather beat on a wall or something that won’t get hurt, so mostly he does that, but sometimes he doesn’t make it, so he gets into a lot of fights that year. He wins some, loses some. It doesn’t really matter which; they both work. Whether he’s the one beating or getting beaten, it makes everything feel under control.
So everything’s fine. Everything’s good. He spends his time in church, which works almost as good as pain, and outside.
Now that he can’t go to the creek bed anymore, the streets become his practice grounds. It’s the only thing left to do. He wanders the streets at night, packs of stolen cigarettes in his back pocket, practicing vanishing into the shadows and wearing other people’s faces and bodies. With all that practice, he’s getting pretty good at it, though he’s not sure he’d want to try it in daylight yet.
In the darkness, though, nobody can see him unless he lets them. And the best part is… people don’t notice. He can practically disappear right under their noses, and the most they’ll do is double-take.
He likes it. He walks by, bumps into them, and when they turn to bark at him, he’s gone. Sometimes they look perplexed or creeped out, sometimes they shake their heads, but they never try to reach out and grab him. None of them even seem that disturbed for long. They just shake it off, let their minds talk them out of it, and they walk on, while Biff smiles.
He’s not stupid. He avoids bumping into anyone twice. But it gives him some satisfaction. Maybe he has to fake it everywhere else, and maybe he’s not doing very well at it, but here, in the dark on the street, the world belongs to him. He is free, he is safe, he is invisible, and as long as he’s out there, he’s okay.
Of course, he gets home later and later. But it’s fine. He’s quiet and vanished and he can slip in and out of the house like a ghost, and nobody notices. Nobody ever notices.
Sure, he starts falling asleep in class, and his grades, never good in the first place, take a dip, but it’s okay. Starlight and cool night air trump English class any day. He only makes it through the hours in class fantasizing about getting out again. Not like he’ll need grades to work in the factories like his old man does.
He starts smoking. It doesn’t work as good as pain or church, but it helps. He just sits on the overpass, smoking cigarettes and watching the cars and people go by, like he’s not even there.
Everything’s good. Everything’s fine. He’s got it all figured out.
Zero
Biff is sixteen when he gets out of the ’67 T-bird.
He feels… weird. Like the thoughts are falling out of his head before he can grip them. He feels empty and blank and shaky inside, like wrung-out laundry.
He suspects that something is wrong with him. He should be happy. He should be fixed. It’s proof now, he’s not a faggot. This is a good thing.
He feels nothing.
Somehow, he makes it home, though he has no memory of the journey. Everything just fades to gray for a while until the screen door slams behind him, jerking him back from… wherever.
Millie and JoJo are at the kitchen table. JoJo’s drawing a horse on the homework she’s supposed to be doing, and Millie’s reading one of the Boxcar Children books, but they both look up when they hear the screen door.
“Hey,” JoJo says, “Where you been?”
For a while, the question doesn’t register. The words are just meaningless sounds fluttering in his ear. Then they put themselves together. Where has he been? He’s been—he’s been—
The blankness shatters, and he starts to shake.
His sisters stare at him. He sees Millie’s careful shift in position, gathering her things in case she needs to make a quick break for it. JoJo does it too, but less; mostly, she looks a different kind of worried.
They’re afraid of him.
“You okay?” She asks.
And he feels the white-hot fire surge up in him like bile, the rage and the violence, and he doesn’t know why.
“Go upstairs,” he tells them.
Millie’s already going. (She knows, she’s afraid, she wants to get away from him.) But JoJo hesitates.
“What happened?” She asks.
“Go the fuck upstairs!”
The kitchen is empty, and he hears the bedroom door slam. And that’s good, it gets them away from him, but it doesn’t help, it just makes him angrier, because they’re afraid of him, after all he’s done, after all he’s taken for them. And part of him wants to smash down their doors, scream at them, hurt them for daring to disrespect him by being afraid, because he’s their sister—
The violence has to go somewhere, the only way he knows to vent it is pain, and he can’t just start pounding on the walls, they’ve got enough cracks and holes in them as it is. And he’s already scared the shit out of his sisters; he isn’t going to make it any worse for them.
He just needs pain. Something quick, something quiet, something that’ll hurt.
He sees the stuff JoJo and Millie got out for him for dinner. A frying pan, thawing hamburger, vegetables, a cutting board, a knife.
Perfect. Problem solved.
But he hasn’t used sharp stuff before, he doesn’t know how to do it right, and shit, shit that’s a lot of blood, and for a moment, he doesn’t know what to do because he needs a doctor, but he can’t tell his sisters. And before he can figure that one out, he hears screaming, and it looks like JoJo still didn’t have the sense to run…
She ends up being the one to call 911, while Millie sobs hysterically and grabs the First Aid kit, telling him over and over that she’s sorry, she didn’t mean it, even though she hasn’t done anything. He tries to tell her that, but he’s not feeling so good and the words aren’t coming, and he passes out before he can reassure them.
He wakes up when the EMTs bandage up his arm and try to get him into the ambulance. They get the bleeding to stop, but shit, he knows one of them, she goes to his church, and she’s telling him he’s going to be fine, that his sisters were just hysterical, it looks worse than it is. Just a kitchen accident…
At first, he’s too weak and confused up to feel anything, but the moment he can, he panics.
Shit. Shit. He’s ruined everything. His folks have been uninsured ever since the old man got laid off, and now they’re going to go broke because their useless faggot lez firstborn accidentally tried to kill himself. (And it was an accident. Right? How does God feel about accidental suicide? Is it as bad as the intentional kind?) How much is this shit going to cost?
What is he going to tell his sisters? His parents? How can he explain something this stupid? And they’ll want answers, want to know what happened, why, and—
And there’s nothing to tell them. Nothing he can make up. Just… nothing.
Mom and the old man aren’t home yet. That’s good, that means there’s time, but there’s no way for him to know when they’ll be back, which means he has to lose the EMTs immediately—and the police and fire department who’re outside and standing around all over the kitchen, trying to talk to his sisters. (He can still hear Millie sobbing hysterically, apologizing over and over.)
He’s hurting and scared, and he can’t get his head into that balance that lets him vanish. There’s no way to go to that still place when everything is noise and chaos. So he defaults to what he did with Raymond Grenier at the Extend-A-Care: he plunges the house into darkness.
He crashes into half a dozen people on his way out, but he makes it out, and he just keeps running. Old instincts take over, and he doesn’t even realize what he’s done until he’s back in the creekbed and at his fort. Despite the flood season, it’s rebuilt. Kevin apparently still hangs around here, despite everything.
Kevin.
Biff’s arm is bleeding again. He buckles and collapses in the fort, pressing down on the bandage, tries to slow his breathing. Fine, this is fine, the EMT said it was nothing serious…
He’s still waiting out the pain when Kevin arrives.
He’s filled out a little over the past couple years, and he still has his backpack on, like he came straight to the creekbed on arriving home. His face is grim.
“Thought I’d find you here,” he says. “Everyone looking for you.”
Biff is silent.
“What happen?”
Biff just ducks his head behind his bangs. Kevin sighs.
“Look. Think me a fag. Hate me if you want, don’t tell me shit. Fine. But you need to get to a doctor. The whole neighborhood gone crazy, looking for you, and sooner or later, they gonna come right down here and drag you out.”
Biff shudders. “I can’t go back.”
Kevin squats down, a good distance away. Looks like he’s afraid of Biff too. Biff wants to get angry, but he’s too drained, and hell, maybe people should be afraid of him. “You gonna just run?” Kevin asks. “Leave everyone?”
Biff knows that about now, he’s supposed to come clean, realize he has to go back, talk to the doctors and his sisters and his mother and the old man and tell them everything. If this were a movie, it’d be the point he turns around and turns into a decent person again.
But he’s already hit the point of no return. It’s too late for him to get any better, but at least he can run. Leave. Go far, far away, where he can’t hurt anyone, and nobody will have to be afraid of him, and his sisters won’t have to worry about one more monster in the house. Maybe he can’t fix this, but at least he can keep it from getting worse, and save his folks a chunk of money in the bargain.
There’s a bus depot on the other side of town. Biff doesn’t have any money, but Kevin does, and Kevin can drive, and Kevin’s afraid of him.
Biff raises his head and looks at Kevin.
“Yup,” he says. “I’m gonna vanish. And you gonna help me.”
And he does.
Prompt: Stuff100 'Years,' H/C Bingo 'atonement'
Word count: 12,726
Summary: It takes Biff ten years to learn how to disappear.
Notes: First of all, the cave of light is a real place; it exists in my hometown. Also, this story involves graphic violence, suicide gone wrong, dysfunctional family dynamics, and general disturbing imagery. Consider yourself warned. Also, Part One is here, and you should read that first.
Four
Biff is twelve when Kevin Hendrickson moves down the street.
Until now, the MacGilligans were the only mixed family in the neighborhood. Biff gets off a lot easier than JoJo or Millie; except for sometimes in the summer, when he gets really dark, he can pass for white. Not that it means much; everyone in town knows about them.
He knows the Hendricksons won’t last long. They’re on the white side of town, they’re divorced, and they’re out-of-towners. Goners for sure, not worth paying attention to.
Around the time the Hendricksons move in is also when Biff decides he’s going to read the entire Bible. This is no light undertaking. He can read, but he hates doing it, especially in front of other people, because either they’ll make fun of him for it (“Hey look! They trained it to read!”) or expect him to start reading everything else. (“Now, if you’d just apply yourself to the books you’re supposed to be reading…”)
So it’s not his idea of a good time. But Biff still doesn’t have any words for what he can do, the vanishing, the darkness, the making of images. And since he can’t talk about it to anyone, he figures the Bible will tell him what it is, and whether it’s right to do or not. Then he’ll know and it’ll stop bugging him.
So he steals one of the King James Bibles from St. Columbkille’s (he doesn’t dare touch his father’s) and takes it down to his fort in the creek bed. He sits against trees and fights his way through it, one ponderous verse at a time. When he can’t take the begats and thou shalt nots anymore (often), he practices.
By now, he’s gotten almost decent at vanishing—he can hold it for almost a minute now, and he can do it a few times before wearing out, but he still can’t do it without affecting the stuff right next to him, and there’s still some distortion. Plus, he always has to dodge people and cars because they don’t know he’s there. He almost got clobbered by an F-150 last week, and that was enough to make him decide he needs to learn something else. He wants to be visible, just not visible as him. That way, people don’t bang into him all the time.
Changing his face is even harder than vanishing. Even if it needs fine-tuning, the basic act of vanishing is getting to be second nature; he relaxes his shoulders, shoves his hands in his pockets, slips his mind into that special gear, and that’s it, he’s gone. Changing himself doesn’t have the area warp effect, but it takes even more attention to detail. It’s creating something, and then holding it and mapping it to his motions. It’s hard, but good hard.
Not like reading the Book of Leviticus, which is bad hard. He’s been forging through it all day, and it’s like banging his head against a wall. Genesis at least has the creation of the world and the Great Flood, and Exodus has Moses and the plagues, but Leviticus is just one long list of rules. So far, all Biff’s gotten out of it is (A) don’t be a faggot, and (B) thank God he isn’t Jewish, so he doesn’t have to care about the rest of this crap. He can barely get through a verse at a time before he has to jump up and do something else.
He’s doing that now, pacing through the grass, trying to walk and move like Heather so he can slap her looks on himself more easy, when someone goes, “Hey!”
By now, the reaction is automatic: he vanishes.
There’s a crashing, and Kevin Hendrickson pushes through the grass from behind a tree. He’s obviously new to creek-stomping; his jacket catches on the thorns, and he nearly tears it yanking it free.
Biff holds stock still. He might—might—be good enough to keep Kevin from seeing the grass move, but he isn’t that quiet. Kevin moves past him, so close his sleeve brushes Biff’s elbow, but Kevin doesn’t notice, or that there’s still a fuzzy halo around where Biff is.
Kevin walks past, then stops, scratching his head, looking back and forth with confusion.
“Hello?” He calls.
Biff knows he should just keep holding still, like he has for the drunk teenagers, the hobos, the deer. But this time, he lets himself reappear behind Kevin and go, “Boo.”
Kevin swoops around, nearly hitting Biff by mistake. When he sees how close Biff is, he scrambles backwards, and his heel skids on a loose rock, sending him falling on his ass.
“Jesus!” He says, clutching his heart. “Where’d you come from?”
Biff shrugs and offers his hand. “Behind you.”
Kevin takes the hand and Biff pulls him up. He’s taller than Biff by a good bit, but nowhere near as dense. Biff could pick him up, if he wanted.
“You sneaky, boy,” Kevin says, and looks at Biff appraisingly. “Strong too.”
Biff shrugs. People are always surprised when they see him move. He’s used to it. What’s more startling to him is being called ‘boy.’ Only a newcomer in town would make the mistake, but he doesn’t try to change Kevin’s mind. It’s nice to be called right for once. Eventually, someone will let Kevin know that Biff’s real name is Beth, but until then…
“What you doing?” Kevin asks. “I saw you.” He walks with a mince and a swish, an exaggeration of Biff’s attempt at imitating Heather. It hadn’t come naturally.
Biff feels his cheeks flame. Worse, he can’t think of a good lie—it’s not like he’s in theatre class or anything. So he tells the truth: “Pretending to be someone else.”
Kevin cocks his head. “Why?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. Especially if it mean moving like that. You looked like a drag queen.”
“What?”
But Kevin’s already moved on. He goes to sit by the tree, and he picks up the Bible.
“I was imitating a girl I know,” Biff persists. “Okay? Just to see if I could.”
Kevin’s flipping through the Bible. “Which girl?”
“Heather Monahan. She in my—”
“Oh yeah!” Kevin snaps his fingers. “I think I seen her. We got Language Arts together. Yeah, now that you said it, I see it. Pretty good, with the…” He holds his elbows tight to his sides, letting his lower arms hang loose as he gestures. “You got to turn your knees in more, though.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, she got that kinda pigeon-toed walk, like…” he demonstrates, and it’s a little rough, but Biff has to admit he sees the resemblance. Kevin’s not a bad impersonator. “You know?”
“Yeah.”
“So why you imitating her? She your girlfriend or something?”
“No!” Biff protests. “We go to Saint Columbkille’s together. We used to be friends.”
“Used to?”
Biff shrugs.
“So why you pretending to be her?”
“I know how she move.” Also, she’s not much taller than him yet… and he’s rapidly becoming one of the shortest in the class. Faking height is way harder.
“Weirdo.” But Kevin’s laughing as he says it. He holds up the Bible. “You reading this?”
“Yeah.”
“How is it?”
“Boring. What you doing down here?”
“Huh?” Kevin looks up from the Bible.
“In Stonefall. In the creek bed. Your family’s—” Biff catches himself just in time. “Your family’s rich.”
Kevin looks at him knowingly. “You ain’t all white either. I seen your family.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t move here.” Nobody moves to Stonefall. It’s the kind of town you get born in, work in, and die in.
Kevin shrugs and flips through the Bible pages with one smooth sweep of his thumb. “I see you come down here all the time. Maybe I was curious what was so cool it bring you in.”
Biff blinks. He never thought Kevin noticed him at all, never mind where he went. Then again, they do live close to each other and go to the same school. He scratches his neck and goes, “Well, you ain’t in it the best time. The berries grow in summer.”
“So why you down here now then?”
“Peace and quiet.”
“Jeez. Don’t you got friends or Nintendo or something?”
Biff glares at him. “Not everybody got Nintendo, okay?” And as for friends, nobody’s really come up after Heather. What’s the point? He can’t take them home, can’t tell them about the thing he loves most, the thing he does all day. Faking normal around everyone at school and at home takes enough energy; he doesn’t have the juice to do it around much anyone else. It’s not hard; except for his family, not a lot of people want to hang around him either.
Except Kevin, now. “Okay, okay, no Nintendo, got it.” He sits down, folds his arms behind his head. “It’s cool. I like peace and quiet too. Hey!” He jumps up. “Wanna build something?”
Biff tries not to look too smug when he smiles and crosses his arms. “Already did.”
“You serious? No way! What you build?”
Biff just waves at Kevin to follow and turns around to tromp through the underbrush.
The fort isn’t too far from his practice clearing. It’s got two trees and a risen line of concrete from some age-old building project. One of the trees have fallen over in such a way that the roots offer a wall, and the other tree’s greenery gives a bit of a roof. Over the years, Biff has made another wall out of stacked rocks and wedged boards into the branches to make shelves, where he keeps the things he finds. During flood season, it all washes away, but that’s okay. Biff rebuilds bigger and better each time.
“Jeez, if I’d known about this, I would’ve chased after you ages ago,” Kevin says.
“C’mon,” Biff says. “Nobody knows down here better’n me. I’ll show you around.”
Three
By the time Biff is thirteen, Kevin knows the creek bed almost as well as he does. He knows the cave under the bridge, which was discovered when a tractor half-fell into it during construction and still has chunks of crystal and broken stalactites, if you’re willing to dig for them. He knows the deeper end when the creek bed flows into the greenbelt and the river. He knows about the hawk’s nest, which is a huge mess of sticks high up in one of the oaks, which also has the best mistletoe come Christmastime.
And Kevin’s good company. He’s seems to be enthusiastic about everything. Not just about the creek bed, but science and math and computers too, almost anything. Biff might know the rhythms of the outdoors, but Kevin’s able to put an explanation and a reason behind them. He knows why the creek bed is usually dry, and why the hawk nests so high, and Biff can already tell that Kevin is a lot smarter than he is, but Kevin seems to be okay with that. He laughs and learns and claps Biff on the shoulder, and hey, having friends is kinda nice, after so long.
Not the most sensible, though. It takes a couple explanations before Kevin learns to pretend to ignore Biff during school—two mixed kids make twice the target, and anyway, nobody wants to be associated with him. But Kevin must’ve been brought up right, because he never asks Biff why he’s outside all the time, and surely he’s figured out Biff is Beth by now, but he hasn’t said anything and still treats Biff like a boy, which is fine.
Maybe that’s why Biff is so tempted to tell him. Vanish, make it snow, put on Heather’s face and body because he’s pretty sure he can. Kevin’s so bouncy and happy and smart, surely he’ll be okay with it. Surely he’ll have an explanation.
But then Biff remembers Heather. His mom. Kevin’s the closest thing to a real friend he’s had since he became a freakshow. Is he really that eager to go back to that?
So he keeps reading the Bible. He’s made it to the New Testament by now, but still isn’t getting much of use. Some offhand references to witchcraft, but Biff isn’t worshipping the devil or talking to dead people or anything, and hey, he’s read Numbers, he knows that Moses did that whole copper snake thing that saved people from snakebite, so it’s obvious not all weird shit is the Devil. Unfortunately, he hasn’t found anything distinguishing one from the other, and neither God nor the Devil seems interested in popping up and telling him outright.
So Biff keeps his mouth shut. He catches Kevin looking at him sometimes, like he suspects something is going on, and sometimes it looks like he wants to ask Biff about it, but he always shuts his mouth at the last moment and says, “never mind.” He always looks a little sad, though.
“Look, you got your secrets, I get that,” Kevin said. “Really. But. You know. You ever want to talk about it…”
Biff never does. But he doesn’t want Kevin to feel bad about it, which is why, when he’s thirteen, he shows Kevin the most secret space in the creek bed.
The creek bed runs through beds of limestone all through Stonefall. Over the millennia, the floodwaters (and the creek proper, further down) have worn through the stone. In some places way down in the greenbelt, water even spurts through holes in the rocks.
It takes a good hour and a half of hiking, but one day, Biff takes Kevin down in the depths of the greenbelt, down to a small cave. Though water gushes from the rocks next to it, it’s dusty and dry inside.
Biff pulls a flashlight out of his pocket; he never comes down here without one. “S’okay. Just daddy-longlegs down here.”
He turns the flashlight on, and he clenches it in his teeth and bends over to walk into the cave. One of the benefits of being one of the short kids; it means he doesn’t have to bend over double. Kevin just gets on his knees and crawls, careful not to crush any bugs.
The secret spot is a bit of a trick to get to—otherwise Kevin likely would’ve found it already. The cave goes back deep enough that it gets pitch black pretty fast. Biff’s flashlight doesn’t have all that great of batteries either. They go in, turn left, and climb up maybe twenty feet of stone. Biff knows all the handholds by heart by now, so he clambers up and holds the flashlight for Kevin to come up. Clouds of daddy-longlegs scatter, but Kevin’s in the adventuring spirit now, and he climbs up.
When Kevin reaches the top, Biff turns off the flashlight.
“Hey! What—”
“C’mon. I got you.” Biff takes his arm, leads him a couple steps forward. After a moment of hesitancy, Kevin lets Biff guide him to an outcrop of stone, put hands on his shoulders, and press down. “Sit down.”
Kevin sits, and Biff reaches into his pocket again. He puts the flashlight away, and he pulls out a disposable cigarette lighter, stolen from his mom’s purse.
“Close your eyes till I say open them, okay?” Biff says.
“What you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
After a few minutes, Biff lets the lighter go out and tucks it back in his pocket. He checks to make sure everything’s all set.
“Okay, open them.”
Kevin does, and he laughs with delight. Biff crosses his arms and grins.
He isn’t the only person to have found this cave, of course. The stone is worn smooth from generations of people climbing it, but now even the teen pot-smokers have forgotten about it, and Biff’s cleaned the place out. The ceiling is low, and this area is small, roughly the size of a big hot tub, but there’s a ledge along one side that’s good for sitting on, and plenty of nooks and crannies, and all of them are crammed with years’ worth of candles. Some of them are just useless pools of melted wax now; others are still a couple inches high. Biff’s lit about all of them that have anything left to light, and the tiny flames fill the cave with flickers of white and gold, gleaming off the smooth stone.
After Kevin gets over the excitement, he asks, “How long you known about this place?”
“Aw, ages,” Biff says, playing cool. “Nobody come up here but me now. I usually just bring a flashlight; all the candles, once you light ‘em, it’s a pain putting ‘em out again. Cool, huh?”
Kevin Hendrickson is looking at him funny now, but not in a bad way. It’s something Biff hasn’t seen before, something that makes him feel weird but happy. “Cool. Yeah.”
“What? What you looking at me like that for?”
And Kevin shakes his head and laughs and says, “Man, you really something. Anybody ever told you that? You’re like, King of the Nowheres.”
“Thanks.”
“No, no man, that’s a good thing! I mean, all these folks, they think… well hell, I dunno what they think, but they don’t think you know this. It’s like you look at rocks and stuff, and most people, they just go on, don’t even notice, but you go crawling around in the dirt and find stuff like this! You notice hawk nests and how people move and shit, and I don’t know what you are, but it really something. I like finding out the whys and hows, but you the one who sees the whats.”
Just as well the candles are all flickery and not good for seeing detail, because nobody’s ever gushed about Biff like that before in his life, except maybe his sisters and they don’t count, because little sisters always think their big sister is queen of the world. It’s embarrassing, but also kinda nice, so Biff just scratches his neck and stares at the candles.
“Seriously, man, how you notice stuff like that?”
Biff shrugs. “I dunno. Just… you gotta notice stuff like that, you know? Just in case something happen.”
“Something happen? Like what?”
“I dunno. Like… you got to get away from something. Keep yourself safe. You got to notice things or you… fall down the stairs or something.”
It sounds stupid, but he’s never been good with words anyway, and Kevin still goes, “Yeah,” like it makes sense, and then he waves Biff over and makes room on the outcropping for him.
“You weird, man,” he says, “but you cool weird.”
He claps Biff on the shoulder, and Biff just shrugs and pretends he’s cool.
Two
Biff is fourteen when things start going wrong.
The old man’s hours get cut. This means Mom has to work more evening shifts to cover the bills, so she’s home less and he’s home more… and grouchy besides. Which means Biff can’t spend his evenings out in the creek bed anymore, because that’d leave JoJo and Millie alone with the old man, and they’re still just in the fourth grade. So he stays home and starts cooking more, which his dad doesn’t approve of (“tell your sisters to do it; they’re old enough,”) but Biff doesn’t mind. He likes that he can make it up as he goes along. Some meat here, some sour cream there, some chives and yellow onion and garlic, and bam! Delicious. Even the old man gets in a better mood after it.
And anything that puts him in a good mood, Biff will happily do.
Most of the girls at school already had their growth spurts; now the boys are starting too. Except Biff. He’s still runty, still has the child’s singing voice. He quits the church choir.
Kevin’s still his friend. He’s going to the fancy magnet high school in the next town over now, hitting the books like crazy to learn about science and stuff, and he’s also joined up with some martial arts dojo out there. With all that going on, he’s not around as much, but that’s okay. It just means it’s easier for Biff to stay home… and he doesn’t have to make excuses for why he can’t bring friends over. They still hang in the creek bed on the weekends, hitting the caves, the trees, wrestling and laughing, so they still see each other.
Just not at school. And maybe it’s because Kevin’s going to nerd school, because he doesn’t do this, but everyone at Biff’s school is weird. Everyone’s talking about who’s crushing on, going out with, screwing who, and Biff really couldn’t care less. One of the girls in his grade has already gotten pregnant, which sucks for her since her folks don’t believe in kids out of wedlock.
Luckily, Biff is outside it all. Five years of being a loner (except Kevin, but he doesn’t count here) means he’s off the radar. He doesn’t even need to vanish; he’s already invisible.
Which means he mostly gets to stand back, watch, and wonder what the hell everyone’s deal is.
The girls have been weird for a while. Now the guys are getting weird too. They pick fights at the drop of a hat, usually in front of the popular girls, and apparently, since Biff is short and still wears his K-Mart clothes two sizes too big, they think he’s some kind of punching bag.
One day, Ralph Meyers corners him in the hall and starts tearing into him. Biff hardly notices what he says—it’s all the same old stuff. He’s busy paying attention to Meyers’s eyes, which say he’s nothing in a fight, no matter if he’s shaving already. He’s also busy noticing Chelsea Green, who’s standing nearby, and she’s very blond and very white and (he guesses) very pretty. Whatever. If she’s impressed by this, he figures, she and Meyers deserve each other. He just ignores Meyers and waits for him to start looking stupid—picking on people is only fun when it makes you look like a big shot. When it makes you look like a bad comedian trying for a laugh, that’s when people start rolling their eyes at you.
But then Ralph Meyers says something about his sisters. About their curly hair and dark skin.
Biff goes rigid.
Scenting blood, Ralph Meyers says something else.
Biff grabs him by the throat and knees him. Then things get red for a while.
Ralph goes to the nurse. Biff goes to the principal. When she rubs her forehead and asks what happened, Biff just shrugs and gets suspended for a day. He doesn’t care about that. He cares about what the old man is going to think about it when he has to leave work and come pick up Biff in the middle of the day. He’s not going to be happy.
He isn’t.
JoJo and Millie are old enough to walk home from school now—they have to be, since the old man doesn’t pick them up. Biff is sure to meet them at the door when they arrive. When they see him, their eyes go wide and they draw back.
“Why you home early?” JoJo asks.
Millie doesn’t say anything at all. She just starts to hyperventilate.
“Don’t you got something to do at Linda’s?” Biff says to them.
They glance back behind him, through the door. The TV’s playing. Their eyes return to Biff and they nod.
“Yeah,” JoJo says. “We forgot.” She already has an arm on Millie’s, and they’re backing away. “We’ll be back…” She lets it hang.
“I’ll come get you,” Biff says, halfway out the door himself.
They go, and he leaves, heading towards the creek bed. Peace and quiet and clinging for dear life to that stillness inside him, which still coughs up gentle joy even after all these years. If it is the Devil in him, at least it’s reliable.
Except when he gets to the fort, Kevin Hendrickson is there at the mouth, playing Gameboy. For a moment, Biff gears up to vanish, but he doesn’t have it in him, not today, and anyway, Kevin’s seen him.
“Hey!” Kevin jumps up, tucking the Gameboy under his arm. “How’s—Jesus, what happened to you?”
Biff shrugs. “Fight.”
“At school? Whoa.”
Biff doesn’t want to talk, so he just shakes his head and ducks his head behind his bangs. The bruises are starting to show now, and Kevin puts a hand on his shoulder, takes him gently by the chin, making him jump. He’s a lot taller than Biff now, but his voice hasn’t changed, and he looks over the rising bruises with an expression Biff doesn’t recognize.
“It hurt?”
Biff shrugs.
“Jeez. What happened?”
Biff hesitates, but Kevin’s family is mixed too, so he tells Kevin what Ralph Meyers said about his sisters, his family.
Kevin’s eyes get big and bright in a way that makes Biff’s insides twist. “Wow. That why you fought him?”
“Beat him,” Biff corrects. Kevin still hasn’t let go of him, and usually, Biff would pull back but right now, it’s not bad. The soft touch feels nice on sore skin.
“Yeah? Ain’t Ralph Meyers bigger’n you?”
“Everyone bigger than me,” Biff says. “It ain’t about bigness.”
“Wow,” Kevin says, and his voice sounds funny. “I can’t imagine anyone doing that for me.”
And Kevin bends over and kisses him.
For a second, Biff is too startled to react. Nobody but his mom and sisters has ever kissed him. Then he realizes he likes it and punches Kevin in the stomach as hard as he can.
Kevin falls hard with a wheeze. He might do judo, but he’s not a fighter, not really, he doesn’t know how to deal with someone he knows and likes hitting him, so he just clutches his stomach and stares up at Biff with fear in his eyes.
Biff doesn’t move. He can’t, because no, it’s not fair, he can handle being a freakshow, he can handle being a lez, he can even handle being alone, but no, he can’t be a fag. Part of him wants to run, and a small part of him (very small) wants to say he’s sorry and ask if Kevin wants to do that again. But most of him just wants to hit Kevin again, hurt him, make him sorry for ever even thinking—
Biff runs. He hears Kevin calling after him, breathless and high from getting the wind knocked out of him, but he doesn’t look back, just vanishes. He doesn’t care if Kevin sees it or not.
He fights through underbrush and poison ivy, not caring if he’s quiet or if he’s covering his movements well enough. All he knows is that if he doesn’t keep running, he’ll go back, and he’ll hurt somebody, so he runs until his lungs burn and his side stitches, runs until he reaches the bridge and that’s it, the end of the line, he’s out of breath and can’t run anymore. But the violence is still there tearing him up inside, needing to get out, so Biff turns on the overpass and attacks it, smashes his hands against the concrete till the anger runs out. Then he just slumps back against the underpass, lets his legs fold up under him and he just sits there with his head in his hands, trying not to cry.
It’s not fair. It’s just not fucking fair. Only friend he’s had in fucking years, and—and—
He can fix this. This will be okay. He’s been a freak six years now, and nobody knows but Heather and his mom, and they aren’t telling. He can keep this quiet too. Kevin sure as hell won’t tell anybody, so long as he never sees Kevin again, long as he doesn’t do nothing stupid, no one will ever know. He can’t be normal, but he can at least keep from being a complete fuck-up.
Everything will be just fine.
Eventually, it starts getting dark, and Biff has to leave the overpass and go pick up JoJo and Millie. They look at his bruised hands nervously, but he smiles at them and takes them home. They get there just as Mom is.
“We were staying at Linda’s,” JoJo says without prompting. “She has a puppy.”
“That’s nice,” Mom says, then stops short when she gets a good look at Biff. “What happened to you?”
For a moment, Biff panics, thinking she knows. Then he shrugs and says, “Fight at school. I won.”
His mom’s eyes look tired and she leans down to take him by the chin and turn his head to the porch-light so she can see better. He jerks away from her hand, and she sighs.
“You look more like your father everyday,” she says.
Biff just rubs his knuckles and lets the pain wipe away feeling.
One
Biff is fifteen, and he’s given up the creek bed. He doesn’t know if Kevin still goes there or not, but he doesn’t want to run into him. He doesn’t know what he’d say or do. Besides, the memories bug him.
He wishes Kevin had never kissed him. Now all the days spent building and exploring in the creek bed are suspect, all the play fighting and grappling that’s full of laughter. How much was he supposed to enjoy that? When did it get too much?
How can he keep it from happening again?
Turns out, the problem solves itself. People at school always left Biff alone, but after the fight with Ralph Meyers, they flat-out avoid him. Biff is okay with this; the fewer folks who get close to him, the less likely he’ll fuck it up. He watches girls and boys get together, kiss, grind in the hall, and break up a month later, and he feels no jealousy. He doesn’t feel anything at all. He doesn’t look at guys in gym class funny or join theatre or anything. He’s got it all under control. He’s like Saint Augustine.
But sometimes, every once in a while, when he’s tired or not feeling so good, he finds himself remembering what it felt like when Kevin tilted his chin up and kissed him. for the split second of shock before he remembered to feel bad about it. But then he always catches himself, and then he has to go run hard or hit something to make the ache go away. Pain works best, he finds. It clears him out, leaves him clean and numb. Turns out the old man was right all along about that.
Given a choice, he’d rather beat on a wall or something that won’t get hurt, so mostly he does that, but sometimes he doesn’t make it, so he gets into a lot of fights that year. He wins some, loses some. It doesn’t really matter which; they both work. Whether he’s the one beating or getting beaten, it makes everything feel under control.
So everything’s fine. Everything’s good. He spends his time in church, which works almost as good as pain, and outside.
Now that he can’t go to the creek bed anymore, the streets become his practice grounds. It’s the only thing left to do. He wanders the streets at night, packs of stolen cigarettes in his back pocket, practicing vanishing into the shadows and wearing other people’s faces and bodies. With all that practice, he’s getting pretty good at it, though he’s not sure he’d want to try it in daylight yet.
In the darkness, though, nobody can see him unless he lets them. And the best part is… people don’t notice. He can practically disappear right under their noses, and the most they’ll do is double-take.
He likes it. He walks by, bumps into them, and when they turn to bark at him, he’s gone. Sometimes they look perplexed or creeped out, sometimes they shake their heads, but they never try to reach out and grab him. None of them even seem that disturbed for long. They just shake it off, let their minds talk them out of it, and they walk on, while Biff smiles.
He’s not stupid. He avoids bumping into anyone twice. But it gives him some satisfaction. Maybe he has to fake it everywhere else, and maybe he’s not doing very well at it, but here, in the dark on the street, the world belongs to him. He is free, he is safe, he is invisible, and as long as he’s out there, he’s okay.
Of course, he gets home later and later. But it’s fine. He’s quiet and vanished and he can slip in and out of the house like a ghost, and nobody notices. Nobody ever notices.
Sure, he starts falling asleep in class, and his grades, never good in the first place, take a dip, but it’s okay. Starlight and cool night air trump English class any day. He only makes it through the hours in class fantasizing about getting out again. Not like he’ll need grades to work in the factories like his old man does.
He starts smoking. It doesn’t work as good as pain or church, but it helps. He just sits on the overpass, smoking cigarettes and watching the cars and people go by, like he’s not even there.
Everything’s good. Everything’s fine. He’s got it all figured out.
Zero
Biff is sixteen when he gets out of the ’67 T-bird.
He feels… weird. Like the thoughts are falling out of his head before he can grip them. He feels empty and blank and shaky inside, like wrung-out laundry.
He suspects that something is wrong with him. He should be happy. He should be fixed. It’s proof now, he’s not a faggot. This is a good thing.
He feels nothing.
Somehow, he makes it home, though he has no memory of the journey. Everything just fades to gray for a while until the screen door slams behind him, jerking him back from… wherever.
Millie and JoJo are at the kitchen table. JoJo’s drawing a horse on the homework she’s supposed to be doing, and Millie’s reading one of the Boxcar Children books, but they both look up when they hear the screen door.
“Hey,” JoJo says, “Where you been?”
For a while, the question doesn’t register. The words are just meaningless sounds fluttering in his ear. Then they put themselves together. Where has he been? He’s been—he’s been—
The blankness shatters, and he starts to shake.
His sisters stare at him. He sees Millie’s careful shift in position, gathering her things in case she needs to make a quick break for it. JoJo does it too, but less; mostly, she looks a different kind of worried.
They’re afraid of him.
“You okay?” She asks.
And he feels the white-hot fire surge up in him like bile, the rage and the violence, and he doesn’t know why.
“Go upstairs,” he tells them.
Millie’s already going. (She knows, she’s afraid, she wants to get away from him.) But JoJo hesitates.
“What happened?” She asks.
“Go the fuck upstairs!”
The kitchen is empty, and he hears the bedroom door slam. And that’s good, it gets them away from him, but it doesn’t help, it just makes him angrier, because they’re afraid of him, after all he’s done, after all he’s taken for them. And part of him wants to smash down their doors, scream at them, hurt them for daring to disrespect him by being afraid, because he’s their sister—
The violence has to go somewhere, the only way he knows to vent it is pain, and he can’t just start pounding on the walls, they’ve got enough cracks and holes in them as it is. And he’s already scared the shit out of his sisters; he isn’t going to make it any worse for them.
He just needs pain. Something quick, something quiet, something that’ll hurt.
He sees the stuff JoJo and Millie got out for him for dinner. A frying pan, thawing hamburger, vegetables, a cutting board, a knife.
Perfect. Problem solved.
But he hasn’t used sharp stuff before, he doesn’t know how to do it right, and shit, shit that’s a lot of blood, and for a moment, he doesn’t know what to do because he needs a doctor, but he can’t tell his sisters. And before he can figure that one out, he hears screaming, and it looks like JoJo still didn’t have the sense to run…
She ends up being the one to call 911, while Millie sobs hysterically and grabs the First Aid kit, telling him over and over that she’s sorry, she didn’t mean it, even though she hasn’t done anything. He tries to tell her that, but he’s not feeling so good and the words aren’t coming, and he passes out before he can reassure them.
He wakes up when the EMTs bandage up his arm and try to get him into the ambulance. They get the bleeding to stop, but shit, he knows one of them, she goes to his church, and she’s telling him he’s going to be fine, that his sisters were just hysterical, it looks worse than it is. Just a kitchen accident…
At first, he’s too weak and confused up to feel anything, but the moment he can, he panics.
Shit. Shit. He’s ruined everything. His folks have been uninsured ever since the old man got laid off, and now they’re going to go broke because their useless faggot lez firstborn accidentally tried to kill himself. (And it was an accident. Right? How does God feel about accidental suicide? Is it as bad as the intentional kind?) How much is this shit going to cost?
What is he going to tell his sisters? His parents? How can he explain something this stupid? And they’ll want answers, want to know what happened, why, and—
And there’s nothing to tell them. Nothing he can make up. Just… nothing.
Mom and the old man aren’t home yet. That’s good, that means there’s time, but there’s no way for him to know when they’ll be back, which means he has to lose the EMTs immediately—and the police and fire department who’re outside and standing around all over the kitchen, trying to talk to his sisters. (He can still hear Millie sobbing hysterically, apologizing over and over.)
He’s hurting and scared, and he can’t get his head into that balance that lets him vanish. There’s no way to go to that still place when everything is noise and chaos. So he defaults to what he did with Raymond Grenier at the Extend-A-Care: he plunges the house into darkness.
He crashes into half a dozen people on his way out, but he makes it out, and he just keeps running. Old instincts take over, and he doesn’t even realize what he’s done until he’s back in the creekbed and at his fort. Despite the flood season, it’s rebuilt. Kevin apparently still hangs around here, despite everything.
Kevin.
Biff’s arm is bleeding again. He buckles and collapses in the fort, pressing down on the bandage, tries to slow his breathing. Fine, this is fine, the EMT said it was nothing serious…
He’s still waiting out the pain when Kevin arrives.
He’s filled out a little over the past couple years, and he still has his backpack on, like he came straight to the creekbed on arriving home. His face is grim.
“Thought I’d find you here,” he says. “Everyone looking for you.”
Biff is silent.
“What happen?”
Biff just ducks his head behind his bangs. Kevin sighs.
“Look. Think me a fag. Hate me if you want, don’t tell me shit. Fine. But you need to get to a doctor. The whole neighborhood gone crazy, looking for you, and sooner or later, they gonna come right down here and drag you out.”
Biff shudders. “I can’t go back.”
Kevin squats down, a good distance away. Looks like he’s afraid of Biff too. Biff wants to get angry, but he’s too drained, and hell, maybe people should be afraid of him. “You gonna just run?” Kevin asks. “Leave everyone?”
Biff knows that about now, he’s supposed to come clean, realize he has to go back, talk to the doctors and his sisters and his mother and the old man and tell them everything. If this were a movie, it’d be the point he turns around and turns into a decent person again.
But he’s already hit the point of no return. It’s too late for him to get any better, but at least he can run. Leave. Go far, far away, where he can’t hurt anyone, and nobody will have to be afraid of him, and his sisters won’t have to worry about one more monster in the house. Maybe he can’t fix this, but at least he can keep it from getting worse, and save his folks a chunk of money in the bargain.
There’s a bus depot on the other side of town. Biff doesn’t have any money, but Kevin does, and Kevin can drive, and Kevin’s afraid of him.
Biff raises his head and looks at Kevin.
“Yup,” he says. “I’m gonna vanish. And you gonna help me.”
And he does.
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Date: 2014-04-09 05:43 am (UTC)(Looka that, you got me talkin like them.)
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Date: 2014-04-09 04:52 pm (UTC)The rest of his main plot, unfortunately, is still under construction.
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Date: 2018-07-11 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-11 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-09 11:03 pm (UTC)Homecoming: After disappearing over a decade ago when she was eleven, Josephine's big sister comes home, and it turns out she was keeping a lot of secrets.
This story is up for sponsorship at $45.
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Date: 2018-05-12 08:34 am (UTC)