Jo and Mal piled out of the back, Jo rolling her shoulder and blinking sleepily as Mal interlaced their fingers and lifted their arms high above their head, stretching until their knuckles popped. John watched as they rose up onto their toes and arched their back, their sinuous frame like a line of calligraphy against the parking lot’s dim lights. Their nose ring and the studs in their ears caught the muted glow and for a moment John could remember nothing but the way their ass felt cupped in his hands and their breath—smelling of cinnamon chewing gum—washing over his cheek and ear and the corner of his mouth. It was easy to forget the silent treatments, the sneering remarks in the grocery store and at the table, the fake concern concealing a desire to wound he’d never fully understood. They were beautiful and brilliant and sometimes when you touched them you pulled your hand back and found it cut to ribbons.
They went in. The others were waiting in the hotel room with Chinese takeout cartons spread over the side tables and on the quilted nylon comforters. Three beds and a cot set up blocking the closet, Lara already curled asleep on it with her mouth hanging open and her hair across her face. She snored softly while Felix pored over a dog-eared road atlas annotated in black Sharpie. “Day after tomorrow,” he said, not looking up as they dumped their backpacks by the door.
John stifled a yawn with the back of his hand. “What?”
“We’ll be there.”
John sank down onto the unoccupied bed and ran a hand over his jaw. He needed to shave. He needed to shower. He needed to find some way to stop seeing that thing with Lara’s face whenever he closed his eyes, to stop seeing the things that had been her family drooling and twitching among the overgrowth spilling from the hydroponic towers. They were ashes now. The house had gone up like a pile of greasy rags.
“Drive okay?” Shelby asked around a mouthful of eggroll. She had her headphones in and John could just hear the tinny beat of some hyperpop earworm. She’d always been his favorite. They went together easily, the only two fat kids in the bunch, but her taste in music made him want to follow his own grandfather’s example and go deaf. Oji had hated it, too, though he’d been too kind to say it to her face.
What’s wrong with Bob Dylan? Akira had asked once over coffee, some morning when it was just the two of them awake. At least with him, the words make sense!
“Not bad,” said Jo, snatching up a carton of beef and broccoli and shoveling it into her mouth. “Some idiot hit a deer on the highway. I-70’s all backed up for about twenty miles.” She swallowed. “Other than that, fine.”
“This is scintillating, but I’m getting cigarettes,” said Mal, turning back toward the door. “Anyone want anything?”
“Remember, no credit cards,” Felix answered automatically. He was busy making a note on one of his printouts. “We can’t leave a trail.”
They did their best Vanna White strut and gesture, presenting a sheaf of ones and fives to an imaginary audience with a wave of their free hand and flashing a dazzling fake grin. “I’m not a fucking idiot,” they said, still smiling. “Thanks.”
The door slammed, a blast of cold air washing over the rest of them, and John wondered how often he’d sat in other rooms with the same feeling of leaden failure in his chest, the sense that there had been some test, inscrutable and swift, and he had failed it.
Mal’s cracked phone screen glowed in the dark under the stairs at the end of the motel’s first-floor gallery as they thumbed back through days of Charlie’s texts, the words flowing through the spidered and flaking section of the faceplate like water rushing under the surface of a frozen river. Distorted. Deformed. They’d thrown away an old protein bar when the others tossed their phones. Nice to be able to afford to do that. They couldn’t throw Charlie away. They couldn’t.
i canr lbelieve ur doing this to me
ur so fckikng selfish
i should have linstend tos ara and fucking left u
For the first time it felt less like an imperative and more like a glimpse through a window into a room they didn’t live in but where they knew something terrible was happening. How many times had they ranted like this at John and Dorian and all their other boys? How many times had their own therapy sessions, when they’d been on state insurance and could afford them, devolved into embittered recitations of every petty slight—real and imagined—they’d endured in their week? Jo texted me on my birthday, just a fucking text, and last year I bought her that face cream and pitched in for her septum piercing. Lane hates me. Lane, at work. I heard him talking about me, saying it’s “weird” that I’m vegan. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same everywhere; I try so fucking hard and nobody wants me, nobody gives a shit what I go through.
And then, inevitably, the stiff-lipped smile, the I can’t help you and the referrals to other offices, half of which had already brushed them aside like bird shit off a porch. Borderline. Narcissism. Their body eaten through with the invisible leprosy of a cluster B personality disorder and none of these hard-faced white women with their pin-straight hair and their Buddha statues willing to cut into the necrosis creeping up the limbs of the grinning, joking Black transsexual who went on and off their estrogen every few months and sometimes dissolved into screaming fits over unwashed dishes or partners forgetting to text after traveling.
They’d had Dr. Paris for a while, before his heart attack. The first Black therapist they’d seen. He’d been better. Gentle but firm, pushing back against their explosions of venomous temper until little by little they began to emerge from the cocoon of their own aggrieved self-victimization, to set aside the defense of presuming themself loathed and persecuted at every turn. It was like picking glass out of bathwater, even two years in.
As they played their messages and lifted the phone to their ear, though, it felt clearer than it ever had before. Charlie’s voice crackled and hissed.
“You used me, and now you don’t need me anymore and you’re throwing me away like garbage, because you never loved—hate me—fucking bitch fucking cunt shit cunt I hate you, I’m going to kill myself—” and then it was just an unintelligible wail, a whining, sobbing shriek that poured out of the phone like sewage from a burst pipe, garbled words lost in the dark rush of it and Mal could feel a tugging in the pit of their stomach, a single filthy, dripping thread pulling them tight against the phone’s sweat-damp screen. They wanted to climb through it and into Charlie’s shaking arms, to let their partner close the circle they had ruptured by leaving the house, by running away when they should have stayed and let the door slam shut on their hand like it had on Mary’s, like it must have again and again on those delicate little fingers when Malcolm never came home, when there was no one to stand between those big, frightened dark eyes and the thing that had wormed its way beneath their mother’s skin long before they’d seen the horror under the Glover house, the thing they could feel stirring under their own skin even now, a desperate, directionless need grasping at everything and finding purchase nowhere. Nails sliding over cold and sweating glass.
No one loves me, because I am unlovable. Because I’ve failed them. Because they hate me and wanted me dead from the beginning and every kind word they ever spoke was just the flashlight held to hypnotize the stupid fucking loudmouth frog.
This is why you’ve sabotaged your life every time you’ve had the chance.
“Mal?” John’s voice, soft and gentle. He stood a little ways off, his leather jacket thrown over his pajamas. Striped, like their father had used to wear. Float like a butterfly. “Are you okay?”
For an instant they imagined throwing themself at him and falling into his strong arms. Then they remembered the cell phone, and in the same second realized he’d already seen it. “I really fucked up,” they said, the words half a sob. “John, I fucked up.” They wanted to scream at him, to push it onto him somehow, make it his fault for not asking them politely enough to toss their electronics, or not explaining himself adequately. Glass in the bathwater. They took a steadying breath and said: “Help me.”
John came close and took their phone without a word, worked one of its rubber guards open, and teased out the SIM card between his thumb and forefinger. He snapped the card, then went to the hooded trash can sitting on the curb and tossed the pieces and the phone into the bin together. His shoulders slumped. He looked much older than thirty-two, and for the first time they noticed that his hair was thinning, that there were lines at the corners of his warm blue eyes. For a moment as he turned back toward them his stare wasn’t warm at all, but cold and black in the long shadows of the parking lot’s lamp posts, and Mal thought fleetingly of all the nights they’d lain awake in the little room they shared with Felix, wondering if one of them had carried something out of Camp Resolution, if it was waiting for its moment hidden behind the face of someone they loved.
It’s John, they told themself, wishing they’d had time to fill their Klonopin script, wishing they had weed or Benadryl or anything to declaw the thoughts racing back and forth through their head. It’s really him, or he’d have killed you already.
John took their hand and a wave of revulsion washed over them, not at John but at their own stupidity and worthlessness. He pulled them into his arms and they thought they might scream, but it passed. They cried for a while and thought of all the times they’d been cruel to him. “I’m sorry,” they sniffled. “I’m sorry for everything. All of it.”
He kept stroking their back. “I know.”
“Do you think we have a chance?”
He was quiet for a long time before answering. “I think more than anything, it wants to stay hidden. That’s why it uses us. Queers. No one comes after us. No one believes us if we get away from it.” He stepped back and let go of them, though he kept holding their hand. They wanted him with every fiber of their being then, wanted his big, soft hands and the huge muscles buried under the warm and giving curve of his ass.
His fingers slipped from theirs. “I don’t know if we have a chance,” he said, “but I know it doesn’t want us coming after it. I know it depends on nobody caring about the kids it preys on. Nadine died getting us out of that place; we owe it to her.”
That long, beautiful body pierced by hooks and spines and claws. The fire. The shock wave, carrying broken glass. Mal still had a little scar on their left cheek, and another just above their collarbones. They all dreamed of Nadine, sometimes.
“Come on,” said John, not unkindly. “We should get everyone else. We need to go.”
He was halfway to the door before they called after him. “Do you think we could—would you ever—would you try again, with me?” They knew it was a mistake as soon as they opened their mouth, but the words wouldn’t stop coming, slipping out of them like entrails through a wound. “I’ve done a lot of work, I know last time it was bad, I fucked up, I hurt you a lot, but I keep thinking of you, John.” Their voice broke. “I’m always thinking of you.”
He stood there, not moving, and they thought their heart would burst until finally John said, his eyes welling with tears: “We have to go.”
“Right,” they said. “Of course.”
Lara had one of her headaches. She got them three or four times a year, and even through the gauzy film of her dream—she was trying to clean her parents’ house as slick, hairy flesh spilled from the cabinets and pushed its way up through the floorboards—she could feel the sick pulse of low-grade pain and nausea washing over her in waves. When John shook her awake it was all she could do to scramble to the toilet before she started heaving up half-digested sesame chicken while he tried to explain something about cell phones and Mal and GPS. Five minutes later they were piling back into the cars and she was leaning out—Felix holding on to the back of her top as she vomited again out the rear driver’s-side door. A man’s voice echoed through the silent parking lot from one of the second-floor rooms, loose and drunk and cruel.
Cunt bitch, he shouted, but he wanted her. He wanted her so badly, not like a man wants a woman but like a baby wants its mother or a dying dog a cool, dry place to crawl into and curl up. Faggot. Something breaking. Lamp. TV. Not mine. He’s not mine.
That was when she saw the woman walking toward them from across the parking lot. She looked like any other older white woman, maybe sixty, careworn and a little weathered, with long, wavy gray hair. She had a pistol in her hand.
