String Boys, page 19
Be at your dorm by eleven. Trust me.
Okay. Why?
But Kelly put his phone back in his pocket and laughed.
THE TRIP down to Bridgford went fast, because he and his dad didn’t let any silences fill it. His dad pulled him up to the front of this big Gone with the Wind kind of building and parked. Then he took Kelly in to check him in as a visitor.
“He’s here to see a friend,” his dad said. “He’ll be taking a train back tomorrow, and he can sleep on the floor tonight. Is that okay?”
The young man at the desk—his name badge said Kent—nodded. “Yeah, no problem. As long as he’s not seeing a girl. That’s the rule.”
Kelly controlled a smirk, and his dad rolled his eyes. But Seth had a roommate. And besides, that’s not the reason Kelly was there, and they both knew it.
His dad turned around and gave him a hug. “Okay. I’ll text you to let you know when your train leaves and order you an Uber—”
“I can take him,” Kent said quietly. “It’s supposed to be part of my job.”
Kelly grinned. “That would be great! Thanks!” Then he went back to hugging his dad. “Thanks, Daddy. This makes you the best, you know that, right?”
“Well, you know. I can’t compare to Seth’s dad and pizza Friday.”
Kelly just held his dad closer, feeling lucky, damned lucky, and then his dad kissed his brow and headed home.
HE WAS actually there a half an hour early. He followed Kent’s directions up the stairs and down the hallway, and found the door. Then he threw his bag of clothes on the ground, making sure the one school book he’d brought was flat to the floor, and slid down on top of it, leaning his back against the wall.
Kicking back, he closed his eyes and prepared to wait for Seth to get home. He’d been there for maybe five minutes, arms crossed, catching some z’s, when the door opened and he found himself looking into the face of one of the prettiest boys he’d ever seen.
“Hello?”
“Hi. I’m just waiting for Seth Arnold. He’s coming back in half an hour, right?”
The boy rolled his eyes. “If you say so. I mentioned missing root beer, since the school went soda free, and he and that girl just sort of took off. It was weird.”
Kelly pushed himself up, using the wall as a brace. “He’s going to get you root beer. You know that, right?”
The boy just stared at him. “How would you think that?”
Because I went for root beer in May and almost didn’t come back. “Superstition. Leave it at that. Anyway, I’m just waiting. You can go back to doing what you were doing.”
“You could come in?” Vince asked, opening the door and gesturing.
Kelly cocked his head and regarded the tiny room, and an absurd part of his brain had a giant flameout.
Seth wasn’t in that room.
Kelly didn’t want to be in that room without Seth.
“I’ll just sit here,” he said, ignoring the way his body burned with cold sweat.
Vince cocked his head back. “I’ll bring you a chair,” he said.
And then he brought two and sat out with Kelly and talked.
Mostly they talked about Seth, and Kelly was surprised to find that his dreamy boy was not the same boy everybody else saw.
“Yeah,” Vince sighed, handing Kelly a water after they got their chairs situated. “At first, I thought he was deliberately being an asshole, you know? Not talking, practicing until the last possible moment, spending every available minute doing homework. It actually surprised me that Amara liked him, because she’s so sweet, right? Everybody loves her, and I couldn’t figure out what she was doing hanging out with this silent, brooding prick. I was like, ‘abusive boyfriend’?”
Kelly burst out laughing. “Seth? No!”
“Seth, yes!” Vince protested.
“He’s shy,” Kelly said. “And… and not here all the time.”
“You think?”
Kelly had to appreciate Vince—he was beautiful, yes, but he was also a smartass. “I know,” he said mildly. “He’d….” Kelly shrugged. “He’d go to fetch you root beer because you wanted some and he didn’t want you to get lost if you went yourself.”
Vince shook his head. “What is it you two have against root beer?”
Fuck. “I went to get root beer in May and almost didn’t come back,” he said bluntly, and Vince clapped his hand over his forehead.
“Oh! He said you got beat up—that’s what happened?”
And then because Kelly had spent months talking about it to the counselor and drawing it in pictures and dealing with how real it was and how it wasn’t all he was, he said, “A group of… well, they like to think they’re a gang, but they were just druggie shitheads mostly. They all beat me, and one of them sexually assaulted me. It sucked all around. Seth—he blames himself a little, because he was arguing with his dad, and I was gonna go get us root beer floats, and they’d be done arguing when I got back.”
Vince had gasped when he said “sexually assaulted,” but now he nodded a little.
“What was he arguing about? Because he seems okay with his dad now.”
Kelly rolled his eyes. “About coming here. He didn’t want to leave either of us, mostly.”
“Bummer. So he talked more before?”
“No. I’m the one who talks. I’ve got, like, this big family—”
“Wait, wait, don’t tell me—Lily, Lulu, Agnes, and your older brother, Dickhead!”
Kelly snickered. “Yeah, those people. Anyway, Dickhead was super good at sports, so I had to be super good at talking, and I guess it worked, ’cause Dickhead is home getting bitched at for knocking up his girlfriend, and I got a ride down here so I can sleep on my boyfriend’s floor.” He punctuated this with a yawn, and Vince laughed.
“So, you want to come in and nap on his cot? They were taking the local bus, and sometimes that takes forever.”
Kelly yawned and thought about the room again. He knew Vince now. It didn’t seem quite so small.
“Sure.”
By the time Seth got back—with root beer and Vince’s favorite cookies and a bag of cheddar potato chips for himself—Kelly was sleeping on his cot, happy just to smell him on the sheets.
ALL TOLD, the weekend wasn’t a big deal.
They had a quiet junk food party in Seth and Vince’s dorm room, smuggling Amara in because they all liked her and because she also brought marshmallow chocolate graham cracker cookies and she’d share.
They watched scary movies on Vince’s computer—because it had the biggest screen—and Amara slept on the floor with Vince’s pillow, and Kelly slept on Seth’s bed, mashing him back against the wall.
The next morning, Seth and Kelly got up super early and went for coffee, and for once Seth talked, pointing out the landmarks of the little town of Almond Falls, which appeared to be not much more than a wealthy commuter community into San Francisco.
“If you had more time, we could take a bus to the city,” Seth told him as they sipped coffee in a charming little shop that was not Starbucks. “I haven’t done it yet. I want you to come.”
Kelly looked at him. Seth was still wearing a sweatshirt that had been rotting off his body in high school, and his hair was too long because nobody was nagging him to go to the barber shop two blocks down and get it cut close to his head. “You need to not save everything for me,” he said after a moment. “You… you need to go have life without me and then show me what it looks like later.”
Seth frowned unhappily. “But—”
Kelly looked around—comfy chairs, some very rich food in the glass case, some indie art on the walls. “This is a good place,” he said. “You knew to take me here. Go to the city with your friends, Seth. Show me the best parts when I come visit.”
Seth gave a tremendous sigh. “I hate this.”
“Well, you know the only difference between how we’re living our lives now and how we’d be living our lives if all that shit didn’t go down?”
He shook his head, because unlike Kelly, who could draw things that weren’t there, Seth could only play things that were. “You can’t come home,” Kelly told him baldly. “That’s it. That’s the only thing. Because you and me, if we were gonna make it, we were gonna have to figure out how to make it while you were out in the world being special. Big question is, can we still do that?”
“You’re special,” Seth told him soberly.
“But I’m homegrown special.”
“Until you graduate,” Seth said with some authority. “Then you can be out-in-the-world special too.”
Kelly nodded. That was doable. “Deal.”
SO THAT was the plan. That was the conversation that got Kelly back on the train and didn’t let him cry too much. That was the promise that got him through the next few months of Matty this and Matty that and we gotta cut down on everything so Matty can have an apartment when he marries his girlfriend right outta high school in what was probably the most doomed relationship of all fucking time.
But the one thing that never got cut down was that somebody’s dad, once a month, took Kelly down to see Seth.
Once a month. It wasn’t so bad, right?
Once a month, they could touch each other and pretend everything was normal. Pretend all the bad shit never happened. Pretend that they had a future waiting as soon as Kelly graduated.
They just didn’t know it was pretend.
Matty got married the weekend after graduation. Seth’s dad was invited, and Kelly begged him to come, so he did.
Seth was not—but not because Mom and Dad didn’t want him to be there.
Matty said it. “His dad can come, but that little psycho’s not invited. He’s bad for the kids.”
Which was probably Kelly’s first inkling of something larger, but Kelly was too pissed off to deal.
“Well, no, Seth, get another best man. And for that matter, get ready to fork out some money from your own pocket for the chair rental, ’cause Seth’s dad was doing that from work. And if you’re feeling really rich, by all means pay for the cake, ’cause that’s a friend of his receptionist, and he’s paying her for you.”
Matty stared at him, his mouth opening and closing, and Kelly stared back, jaw thrust out just like their dad when he was mad.
He knew this.
His mother had told him so.
“Isela…,” Matty whined, and Kelly flipped him off.
“Get a new best man. I know you’re fucking broke and trying to afford an apartment and shit, but God, Matty, who died and made you king of everything?”
So while Kelly was at the wedding, Matty’s other forward from his soccer team was his best man.
And Kelly didn’t want to burst Matty’s bubble, but Randall had hit on him twice.
So the wedding happened in Isela’s church, and Isela wore white over her baby bump, and Kelly told Seth it was incredibly boring, but that wasn’t entirely true.
Kelly cried a little, not for his dickheaded brother, but because he wanted one of these someday, and the boy he wanted it with hadn’t even been invited to this one.
But finally—finally—Matty was out of the house.
Kelly spent less time with Seth’s dad over his senior year, which was too bad, but he had a license now, and once school started, it was his job to drop Lily and Lulu off at the good junior high, where Seth had gone, because they were both super geniuses or something. Agnes was still in grade school; she only had one more year.
Kelly wished he’d gotten the room to himself, but they moved Agnes out of Lily and Lulu’s room, put a little silk screen in the corner so she could change, and everybody breathed just a little easier.
Kelly figured it was really only fair.
He told Seth almost everything—leaving out stuff like Matty’s groomsman grabbing his ass whenever they met or scholarships he was applying for in San Francisco. He figured if it came true, he could surprise Seth, and if it didn’t, well, they were still planning.
How to move out.
How much money they’d have to make.
Where they’d go to school.
Dreams. So many dreams.
“Mm….” Kelly was lying on top of Seth in his bunk, in one of their rare moments alone. Vince and Amara had opted for the fast-food run this time, and Kelly had discovered—much to his surprise—that he felt like making out.
He’d pounced on Seth, mouth open, hands busy and everywhere, and his shock when he wanted to stick his hand down Seth’s nylon shorts and stroke him off was nowhere near his excitement when he welcomed Seth’s touch to do the same.
Ah! Oh God, oh God, oh God….
Damn.
It had taken about two minutes, and after they’d changed and washed off, Kelly made Seth lie down so he could lie on top of him.
“What are we gonna do for the next hour?” He laughed, and Seth chuckled and wrapped his arms tighter around Kelly’s shoulders.
“Plan for your graduation,” Seth murmured. “I can come, right?”
“Absolutely.” He hadn’t invited Matty.
“Good. I… I really want to be there. Next week, right?”
“Thursday afternoon.”
“Good. I have my train ticket all ready, and I’m set for time out of school.” Seth hugged him super tight. “I know it’s just for your graduation and dinner, but I’m so happy to be going home for you.”
“I’ll be happier when I know where I’m going to school next year,” Kelly said glumly. He’d been accepted by all sorts of state colleges, but Matty wasn’t making enough to keep the apartment without help, and Isela wouldn’t get a job. She kept saying she had to be home with her baby, but Kelly spent more time taking care of baby Chloe than Isela did. Isela dropped her off at least four times a week to go have a church meeting or something with her girlfriends.
Kelly’s mom—who had been looking forward to working outside the house and actually doing the books for the restaurant in the restaurant and seeing other people besides her family once in a while—actually cried last Saturday. Kelly was all set to take the girls to a movie, leave their mom and dad alone, and boom! There’s Isela with Chloe, who was dressed the same way she’d been dressed two days ago, but stinkier, and with diaper rash that Kelly could see from across the room.
Kelly had taken the baby, told his mom that he and the girls would go play with her at the gym—it had water games and those pipes that made rain and stuff—and gone to change her and put on some ointment.
The girls had been disappointed, but even Agnes had told him that Mom needed a frickin’ break.
Agnes had also told him that Isela was the worst mother since Grendel’s mother, because apparently his baby sister was also a genius and getting Beowulf in the fifth grade. Kelly could have been jealous that his sisters were such geniuses, but they seemed to think he walked on water and Matty was the suck, so he could forgive them for being way smarter than he was and getting twin 4.0s or the “you’re so smart you’re smarter than the teacher” awards in grade school.
Kelly liked baby Chloe, but he’d noticed, and so had his mom and dad, that she seemed, well, needier than his sisters had. When Lily and Lulu were born, Matty and Kelly had spent as much time as they could holding the girls. They’d gotten home and vied for the one who’d been awake or not nursing. When they’d started playing, they always had a Matty or a Kelly to lie on the floor with them and show them the bright colors or the squeaky sound. Agnes had a Matty and a Kelly and a Seth and a Lulu and a Lily to play with.
There’d been times when Agnes had been like, “No, fuck off, go away!” His parents said they’d never seen a baby roll into a corner before so she could coo at the wall, but it was probably just too many people up in her grill watching her being cute and all.
But not Chloe.
Chloe needed someone—anyone—all the time. She cried if they so much as set the car seat down.
She cried like she was used to crying, because nobody heard her.
Kelly wanted to live with Seth—they’d been waiting, waiting to see if they could be grown-ups together. Waiting to see if they could make love in their own apartment, free from watching eyes and fear of discovery and the stomach-cramping terror that a policeman would knock on their door the minute Seth arrived at his dad’s apartment and ask Seth what he’d been doing two nights after Kelly had been attacked.
Not even Kelly wanted to know the answer to that question.
He hadn’t asked either.
Two things going on at that crime scene.
But he couldn’t think about that, couldn’t think about if the pretty policeman who’d barely survived his own hell had been wrong, and the only thing that had been going on had been Seth getting blood on his hands.
But he still wanted them to be together.
That didn’t mean he didn’t worry about his mom, dealing without him, or the girls, who wouldn’t have Kelly to help with their homework so they could keep being super geniuses, or Chloe, whose father seemed to have forgotten how to make babies happy and whose mother had probably never known.
He tried hard not to burden Seth with this, but Seth wouldn’t let him be quiet about family. He asked about the girls, made him show pictures, and even cooed over the baby. Here, in his arms, as Seth searched through his phone and talked about how he wished Lily and Lulu could come visit, and asked if he could send Agnes her own stuffies from Amara’s seemingly inexhaustible supply, it hit Kelly hard that even though Seth hadn’t lived downstairs for almost two years, his family was still Seth’s.
Seth didn’t talk about why he didn’t go upstairs often and visit, even when he was home, and Kelly didn’t talk about why Seth couldn’t go home that often.
When Castor Durant’s name came up, it came up in context with Kelly’s assault, and not with Seth showing up with choke marks around his neck and an eye the color of blood and the pathetic body found in a field with the head almost cut off.
As Kelly grew older, assumed the responsibilities of his sisters, of his niece, acutely aware of how his brother had failed his family and determined not to do the same thing, he realized that loving his dreamy boy could be the ultimate of foolish recklessness.
