Every Visible Thing, page 22
“Hold him down,” Danny barks, and Brian and Mark dive for Tom, pushing him back so he’s lying with a gravestone at his head. They each pin one of his arms to the ground, digging their knees into his shoulder sockets for extra security. Tom’s face contorts in pain.
“Let me go, you morons,” Tom wheezes as soon as his breath is back. They settle their grips and look to Danny for instruction.
Danny takes out a cigarette and a matchbook, lights it, inhales, and tosses the still-burning match at Tom. It lands on Tom’s stomach, where the rugby shirt has ridden up in his struggles, sticking for a brief second before Tom’s thrusting flicks it off. A small, red welt is left in the spot where it briefly smoldered.
Owen is not sure how things have gotten out of control so fast. If this were one of Danny’s games, his role now would be to push it further. But what rules apply if it’s real? He wonders suddenly if the games themselves were supposed to be real all along.
Owen glances at Tom again. He looks terrified now, and loyalty rises in Owen like a rush of adrenaline.
“Leave him alone,” he says to Danny. “He’s got nothing to do with this.”
“He’s your new boyfriend,” Danny says simply. “He asked for this, just like you did.”
Something occurs to Owen then, and he throws it out before wondering if it’s wise.
“What’s that make you, my ex-boyfriend?” Owen says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. He gestures to Brian and Mark, holding down the no longer struggling Tom. “They’re going to think you’re jealous.”
Though he knows on one level what he has done, he is still surprised at the look that lowers over Danny’s face. He actually changes color, his amber skin growing a deep russet, his eyes retreating under his brows with fury. For an instant, Owen thinks he looks hurt. Then he sees nothing but danger.
“Take his pants off,” Danny says to Brian and Mark, who are eagerly awaiting a response to Owen’s challenge. This seems to baffle them, though, and they continue to look up, waiting for an instruction that makes sense.
“Take his fucking pants off,” Danny says, enraged at their hesitation. He reaches behind his back, under his army jacket, and pulls his father’s gun out from the waistband of his jeans. Owen has been waiting to see it. They’ve been practicing for this all along.
Mark takes over, holding both of Tom’s arms while Brian unbuttons and unzips his jeans, which Owen notices now have been ironed so there is a crease running down the front of each leg.
“Look,” Brian calls out with delight, “Underoos!”
The briefs Tom is wearing are decorated like the uniform of Spider-Man. Despite what happens next, Owen will remember this later as the worst moment of all—that glimpse of Tom’s underwear, a fashion meant for a seven-year-old, clearly a vestige from childhood he has held on to, the image of a superhero’s belt stretched out of shape across his groin.
“Danny,” Owen says in a low voice. “Please stop.”
Danny, who has been holding the gun by his side, now points it at him.
“What did you say?” he says. He gestures with the gun and Owen flinches. He tries to remember whether Danny knows where his mother keeps the bullets.
“Show us how you do it, Furey,” Danny says. “We want to see you suck dick.”
Tom, whose jeans are now bunched at his ankles, makes a small, miserable noise, pressing his shaking thighs together and bending his knees up to cover himself. Owen just stares at Danny, still waiting for that moment where Danny laughs and calls it all off. But Danny doesn’t budge.
“I can’t,” Owen says finally. What he wants to say is that he doesn’t know how. But he can see this won’t go over well.
“Take his underwear off,” Danny says to Brian. Brian pins Tom’s legs down with his knee, then hesitates, his fingers spread over the area, uncertain about going so far. As if he, too, is waiting for Danny to fold.
“Do it!” Danny yells. Brian sticks two fingers of each hand under the elastic band decorated to look like Spider-Man’s belt and pulls. He has to fight, as Tom presses his butt into the ground to hold them on. Eventually, with a tearing noise, he succeeds, jostling Tom’s pink, curled-up penis. Tom closes his eyes and averts his head, the tears he has been fighting run over the bridge of his nose.
Danny steps forward and presses the barrel of the gun against Owen’s temple.
“Do it,” he says. He presses hard, forcing Owen down to his knees. “Or you’ll be as dead as your faggot of a brother.”
Owen drops to his knees, the gun such a sharp pain in his head, he wonders if Danny has fired. His vision pops with silver swimming circles. Just before what he later learns is the moment he passes out, he sees a figure standing a few graves away, backlit by weak winter sun. It is the rescue he has been waiting for. His brother, wearing boots and a long black overcoat, his face, hair, expression, and everything Owen once knew about him shadowed by the full extension of his muscular wings.
When Owen comes to and sees his fifth-grade teacher, he thinks he has fallen asleep in class and wonders how much of the last winter has been a dream. But then he sees gray sky framing Mr. Gabriel, and feels the cold ground beneath his throbbing head.
“I think you hit it on the stone,” Mr. Gabriel says, helping Owen sit up. Owen’s skull feels like it has split in two, the pain escalating like an unbearable noise. He looks carefully around. Tom is sitting, fully dressed, against a nearby headstone, knees pulled to his chest. He won’t look at Owen and is trying very hard to stop crying, wiping angrily at the stubborn tears with his sleeve. There is a strange man behind him, sitting a few graves away as if waiting politely for an invitation to comfort him.
“Where…” Owen starts. Mr. Gabriel leans against a grave, half sitting so he is closer to Owen’s level, putting his hands on his thighs.
“They ran off,” he says. “Not before Danny took a shot at me, though.”
“He shot you?” Owen shrieks.
“Missed, of course. He seems to know how to threaten with a gun, but not much about aiming it.”
“But if he got away…” Owen hears the panic in his voice.
“Don’t worry, he dropped it.” Mr. Gabriel shows him the pistol, wrapped in a handkerchief and stowed in the pocket of his long wool coat. He jingles the leftover bullets in his deep pants pocket.
“As soon as we get you home, I’ll call the police.”
“The police are at my house,” Owen mutters. Mr. Gabriel smiles, something he does so rarely in class that he looks like a different person. The lines around his mouth conform to this smile, suggesting that, in his private life, he does not wear the scowl he is famous for.
“I’m going home,” Owen hears. Tom is standing now, his arms crossed, shivering from more than cold.
“I don’t think you should go alone, Tom,” Mr. Gabriel says. “Wait one minute and we’ll leave together.”
“No,” Tom says firmly, glancing at Owen and then away. “I’m going now.” Mr. Gabriel sighs.
“You might have to give a statement to the police later. I can help you explain things to your mother.”
“I just want to go home,” Tom repeats. Owen flinches at the sound of a sob held back in Tom’s throat.
“Mike?” Mr. Gabriel calls. The strange man, who has turned his back to it all out of apparent respect for privacy, stands up and turns around. He is younger than Mr. Gabriel and handsome, with gel in his short blond hair, wearing a trendy leather jacket and Levi’s. He has a glinting gold hoop in one ear.
“Walk Tom home, okay?” Mr. Gabriel says. “I’ll call his mother later.”
“C’mon, buddy,” the guy says, smiling gently. He doesn’t try to touch Tom, simply follows alongside him toward the exit.
“Can you walk?” Mr. Gabriel asks when they’re out of sight. Owen nods. He braces himself on a white granite slab and stands up, the pain shooting anew from the back of his head down his neck. Mr. Gabriel takes hold of his arm to steady him, then lets go. They begin to walk the opposite direction from Mike and Tom, toward the back gate that lets out a street away from Owen’s house.
As they walk, Owen starts to wonder how much Mr. Gabriel saw before Danny fired the gun. When Mr. Gabriel clears his throat, he is sure he is about to ask for an explanation. But what he says is unexpected.
“I had your brother in my class.”
“I know,” Owen says wearily. He has had teachers say this before, praise his brother’s memory as if they expect Owen will not live up to it. If they didn’t have Hugh, they had Lena. The worst teachers are the ones who had both. Owen can’t hide from them.
“Smart kid,” Mr. Gabriel says. “Couldn’t do multiplication tables to save his life, though.”
Owen looks up. “Really?” he says.
“Time tests.” Mr. Gabriel smiles. “They were his worst subject.”
“Huh,” Owen says. He can’t think of anything to say to this.
“You must miss him still,” Mr. Gabriel says. Owen stiffens.
“I can’t even remember him,” he says, knowing and liking how cruel and dismissive this sounds.
“You were calling for him,” Mr. Gabriel says. “When Danny had that gun to your head.”
Owen shrugs and shows the face that never fails to make his mother give up in disgust. They have reached the stone wall. Mr. Gabriel stops, turning around, as if to confront him. Owen picks at the moss in the cracks of the wall, satisfied by even this little bit of destruction.
“C’mon, Owen,” Mr. Gabriel says. “Don’t expect me to fall for the mean-guy pose. It’s unconvincing and a waste of your time. I know who you are. You should, too.”
Owen is quiet for a moment, considering this little speech. The urge to insult Mr. Gabriel is huge, but he is tired, he realizes suddenly, of being angry. And of being quiet.
“Do you know anyone with AIDS?” he says quickly.
“Yes, Owen,” Mr. Gabriel says. “I do.”
“I think I might have it,” Owen says. He holds his breath, waiting for the moment of shock and realization, his teacher backing away from him in confusion. Instead, Mr. Gabriel smiles.
“I think that’s highly unlikely,” he says.
“But you don’t know—” Owen starts.
“You don’t have AIDS, Owen,” Mr. Gabriel says. “You’re a perfectly healthy, normal young boy.”
They are quiet for a minute, and as they turn down Owen’s street, he dares to ask one more question.
“Do you believe in guardian angels?”
Mr. Gabriel sighs. “No, I don’t,” he says. “I believe it is the responsibility of human beings to watch out for one another.”
Owen considers this quietly, the pain in his head moving down, feeding the heaviness in his chest. Like a slab of stone pressing there, making it almost impossible for him to get out what he says next.
“What happens if they don’t?”
But his teacher has no answer for this.
17. fish tank
“You’re not going to make a big thing out of this, right?” Sebastian says.
It’s almost noon, I’ve been feeling awful ever since I woke up, not just hungover and sore but wrong, like everything is off somehow. Lights seem too bright, my mind can’t stay on one thing without pinging off to another, and then I have trouble getting back to the first thing. I’ve been waiting a long time for Sebastian to wake up and say something and now my vision is screwed up. There’s a blind spot floating in my left eye so that depending on where I focus, either his mouth or his nose or one of his eyes is simply not there. This makes it kind of hard to concentrate on him.
“What?” I say.
“Girls tend to make a big deal out of it. Especially virgins. I just wanted to make sure you’re cool.”
“Oh.” I can’t think of anything else to say. Or, I can think of things, but none of them stays still long enough for me to understand it.
“Nothing’s changed, that’s all I’m saying. We’re still buddies.”
“Oh,” I say again. I swallow. “Sure.” His eyes narrow, his nose disappears.
“Don’t,” he warns.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do that. That chick guilt thing.”
“Sorry,” I mumble. I immediately regret this. I’m always telling people sorry when I should say something else. Like fuck you in this case.
I’d really just rather he’d drop it. I’m not worried about what happened right now. I was worried last night after he passed out and I started thinking about how he hadn’t used a condom, and then at four this morning, when I was so sore I could barely pee and I had to sit on the toilet for twenty minutes smelling him between my legs until it finally came out in a disappointing trickle. I was worried when I got dressed and my pants seemed tighter than yesterday, and I had an odd ache in my lower abdomen, one that still hasn’t gone away, and I wondered if getting pregnant showed so fast. I’d been warned by my mother’s gynecologist that I could get pregnant even though I hadn’t had my period, because I wouldn’t know if it was going to arrive the next month. I always thought that was kind of unfair but also that it didn’t matter because I had no interest in having sex until I was older and in love. There goes that plan.
Right now all I really care about is this weird blind spot and the fact that the sun coming through the motel room’s one window is making me feel raw, like it’s closer than it should be. Like I’m looking directly into an eclipse or something, which they say can make you blind.
Sebastian doesn’t believe me. He just keeps asking if I’m all right with “it” until I snap that I don’t give a shit. Then he’s mad at me. It’s a long walk back to town. I walk a few paces behind Sebastian, concentrating on my feet. One of them keeps disappearing when it moves into my blind spot. Though this is disturbing, it is better than watching pedestrians vanish just when they’re close enough to attack. There’s snow on everything and the sun glinting off it is like needles in my eyeballs.
We go into a coffee shop when Sebastian sees Anorexia and her boys through the window. They look like they never went to bed. I don’t really trust myself to talk to anyone so I go to a table and drink my coffee alone and try to calm down. I have this weird thing happening now where I keep imagining I can actually feel my blood running through my veins and I can tell it’s going way too fast. I’m sure if I look at my wrists I will see it moving under the skin, but when I do the blind spot keeps getting in the way so I start to worry about that again.
Sebastian comes over in a few minutes, straddling the flimsy metal chair.
“There’s a party at some farmhouse,” he says.
“I want to find Emily,” I say.
“We can do that later.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “You go to the party.” When I look up, his face is whole, my vision is normal again.
“Don’t you want me to go with you?” He pouts. I can’t help but laugh. “What?” he says, defensive now.
I’m wondering why I don’t even care that he’s being such an ass-hole. I guess I’m not surprised.
“I’ll meet you later,” I say.
“Back here?” he says. He reaches out and straightens the collar of Hugh’s jacket. He can afford to be sweet now. I’m letting him off the hook.
“Sure,” I say, and he grins that grin that’s like a punch in my stomach and suddenly I don’t feel so uncaring anymore. But before I can say anything, and really, what would I say, since he likes me best when I say nothing, he’s loping off, Anorexia smiling triumphantly as he makes his way toward her. When the waitress comes by I order another coffee. She looks at me strangely, like she’s about to ask what’s wrong with me but decides against it. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
Back at UMASS I ask a teacher where I can find out the location of a student’s dorm. He looks at me suspiciously but points me to the administration building. He’s not the only one looking at me weird. Everyone I pass by does a double take, until I wish I still had that blind spot so I couldn’t see what they were really thinking.
It takes me a while to convince the lady in the office to give me Emily’s room number. I tell her I’m Emily’s younger brother, and I’m surprising her. She gives in and shows me the location of Emily’s high-rise dorm on a map.
Emily isn’t in her room. I try waiting in the lobby, but the furniture is stained and reeks of B.O. and old cigarettes and I’m still sick to my stomach. Plus the whole place is kind of lacking in personality and is depressing: navy furniture and industrial carpet and a half-empty vending machine with candy bars and little packages of peanut butter crackers.
I go outside and wait for her on the steps. Some guys are playing touch football in the snow. I wish I’d thought to buy sunglasses while I was still in town. The light is blinding. My head is hurting in this liquid way, the pain sloshing from one side of it to the other.
“Want to play?” one of the football guys asks me, when he’s retrieving the ball from a bush to my left.
“I’m a girl,” I say snippily.
“I didn’t think you were a rock,” the guy says. He’s smiling. He’s blond and handsome and normal and miles away from everything I feel. If I talked to him, he’d think I was nuts.
“No, thanks,” I say. He shrugs and jogs back into the game.
I don’t recognize her at first. She’s gotten kind of chubby and dresses like a hippie instead of a punk, in a long gauzy skirt and peasant shirt. She jingles with beads and bracelets. Her hair is really long now, dirty blond, kind of greasy. But she’s got a distinctive laugh, kind of goofy like a seal. That’s how I know it’s her. I can still hear her laughing behind my brother’s closed bedroom door.
She has no clue who I am. I say my first name and she looks dumbly at me, so I say Lena Furey and she still looks confused, though she’s now staring at my jacket, so finally I have to swallow and squeak out: Hugh’s sister. She puts a hand over her mouth and takes a step away. Then she steps forward and grabs my arm. She’s one of those easy touchers.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s like seeing a ghost.” Standing up to talk to her has left me kind of dizzy and my head is throbbing on one side.
