30. Jonny
Chapter thirty
Jonny
“Jonny Bishop,” I tell the man with the clipboard when I enter the auditorium. “Checking in.”
He smiles at his clipboard. “You’re right on time,” he says, checking my name off his list. “Come with me.” He looks over the pre-printed tabs and curses.
“Who even are these people?” he mutters.
“Here.” He takes a sharpie and writes my name on a sticker.
I glance at the names. Half of them are names like Candee Edifafa and Sheldo McGilliguffy-Rhodes and the other half have first names: Annie. Stevie. And, of course, YoMama.
“Looks like you’ve been pranked.”
“And how,” he says, slapping the sticker onto my breast pocket. “The lights are stuck at the wrong setting, the microphones have had to be swapped out at the last second, and we’ve had to jerry-rig the presentations to run from a laptop behind the curtain. At least you’re on time.”
I look over my shoulder at Lance, who’s trying not to smile in that irritating I-told-you-so way. We’re fifteen minutes early, but Lance runs on a different clock, and he was hustling me out the door so fast I was chewing coffee and eggs in the elevator.
It’s the kind of auditorium normally used for choir recitals.
There’s a stage with a heavy blue curtain pulled shut and the screen for a projector lowered in the middle, a single podium with a screen and a row of tables hugging the lip of the stage.
The man guides me up a set of side stairs and motions me to one of the tables.
Ahead of me is a sea of heads, and in the front row, Lance.
He smiles at me. I smile back and take out my notes.
Last night was a nightmare. I sat at our only table with Lance four feet away, writing and rewriting my presentation until at least two in the morning.
At one point I even offered to go to my aunt’s to which he acted like I had personally offended him.
Apparently, he requires no sleep at all, and while I’m sure that he had some real thoughts about the fact that I was throwing together my presentation with literally hours left to go, he kept them—wisely—to himself.
In my defense, I’m not used to adhering to other people’s deadlines.
Lance settles into the front row and winks at me.
“So that’s your guy?” Ryan says next to me.
“Hi, Ryan. Yeah, that’s him. How did your rewrites go?”
“I emailed them to the coordinator last night and they lost them.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Fortunately, I had a backup copy on the cloud, but man, it’s been a mess.” He lowers his voice. “Good thing you didn’t come in earlier. They had us locked out. We were waiting out in the hall for about twenty minutes.”
Lance stands, crosses to the stage, and climbs onto it in one easy motion that makes me catch my breath. He crouches in front of me. “How’re you doing?”
“A little underslept. I’ll make it. Lance, this is Ryan.”
Lance turns his gaze. “Hi. Lance. Boyfriend.”
I try not to roll my eyes.
“Five minutes,” the organizer says, hovering at the edge of us. “Sir, you’ll need to take your seat,” he tells Lance. “Try running the test audio now,” he tells someone else.
The auditorium fills with the opening chords to Takin’ Care of Business, played so loud that we jump. Lance pivots, searching the back rows of the auditorium like he’s got a rifle in his hand. The volume decreases. “Sorry!” someone calls from the back. “Audio’s working now!”
Lance breathes a little more easily.
“You okay?”
He nods and gives me a thumbs up.
“That was intense,” Ryan observes in an undertone as Lance goes to sit down.
“Marine Corps,” I answer. “We’ve had a couple of intense days lately.” He sits down and smiles at me.
A man I don’t know welcomes us and rattles off our names. When I glance at Lance, he gives me a wide smile that lifts my whole soul and does silent jazz hands to cheer me on—and it works. Color floods my face and I can’t suppress the grin as I look back down at my notes.
The first speaker takes the podium and I tune him out, trying not to sneak glances at Lance and failing miserably. If I angle my head just right, I can make eye contact while appearing to study my own things. Lance catches on instantly and treats me to a grin that puts me on top of the world.
The organizer crouches beside me, half-hidden by the tables. “Please tell me that you have an extra copy of your presentation on a flash drive.”
“Yes.” I pass it over from where it’s been sitting beside the printout of my speech. “Fairhaven Presentation, central folder,” I whisper back. “How soon?”
“Not long,” he says, with a glance at the tax man now hitting his stride on digital entrepreneurship in the tax industry. “Although it might feel longer.”
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve had to update everything and we can’t open half the files.”
I try not to agree too loudly. This conference has been a snooze.
The opening speaker was a toxic blend of patronizing and underinformed, delivering platitudes about the stunning world awaiting tomorrow’s workers as though he—a mid-level administrator at a mid-level university—had ever once been an entrepreneur.
And now the tax man, who is at least earnest, if dull, and isn’t trying to bamboozle anyone.
A scatter of tepid applause tells me the tax man has, if not run out of steam, at least ground to a halt.
“Thank you!” the organizer says. “We’ve got a short break, and then the second half—real-life stories, starting with Jonny Bishop, who built a digital-entrepreneurship business in Indonesia.
After that, Ryan Otto, who is here to talk about digital brand building.
” I make a note on my speech to gently clarify that I’ve spent no meaningful time in Indonesia.
The attendees stand to stretch and try to wake themselves up.
A shadow falls across my notes. Lance crouches to my level. “You need something? Something to drink?”
“I’m fine, my love. Shoo. You’re distracting me.”
“Signal me if you need me.”
I stare at him. “Okay. You’ve got advice and you’re almost coming apart at the seams to give it. What’s your take.”
He smiles and runs his tongue against his teeth. “Lead with expectations versus reality. We’ve had a lot of enthusiasm and not a lot of down-to-earth, this-is-hard messaging. That’s what I noticed, anyway. What do you think?”
“I think you’re right. Thanks.” It feels awkward to fold him in like this. I’m not used to it, but I like it.
Someone drops a book two tables over, and Lance’s neck snaps around. His whole posture goes rigid; I watch his pupils blow wide. His hand comes halfway across the table toward me before he catches himself and reels it back.
“Lance?”
He lets his gaze rest on the source of the noise a beat too long, then turns to me. “Yeah?”
“Lance. We’re in public, a hundred witnesses. Nothing can happen to me here. You don’t have to worry about me.”
He gives me an amused look.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” He flashes me a boyish smile. “Call me if you need me.”
“Wow,” Ryan says. “That’s intense.”
“Jonny?” The organizer says over my shoulder. “It won’t open. I mean, we can get the presentation but we can’t quite get it to work. Our volunteer asks if you have it on the cloud.”
I sigh. “I’ll go and sign in. How long until I go live?”
“About a minute.” The organizer looks up at Dr. Ackerman, who is chairing this half. “Maybe less.”
I stand up and edge along behind the tables; there’s almost no room between the chair backs and the curtain. “Stall Ackerman,” I tell the organizer, clapping him on the shoulder and sending him in the direction of the man who is about to announce me, who has already taken possession of the podium.
“And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” One of the presenters taps the microphone. “Straight into the second half. Our first speaker this afternoon has built an audience of four hundred thousand people from a laptop and a backpack—”
Okay. Not a disaster. Worst case I wing it, or fall back on the second version—weaker, but serviceable if the good file’s corrupted.
“Hello?” I call into the backstage. I’ve never been back here, and now it’s just dim and creepy—choir risers stacked in the dark, side curtains, coils of cable.
“What’s going on?” Lance says behind me.
I jump and glance instinctively out toward the stage. “How did you get back here?”
“I followed you.”
“Stand down, Marine.” It comes out sharper than I mean it.
“You don’t have to protect me every goddamned minute, Lance.
There’s a problem with my presentation, that’s all.
I just need to log into something so they can pull the file.
Otherwise I’m up there with no slides at all.
” A figure moves at the far side of the backstage, and I feel a stupid flush of relief.
“Oh, good! I know that guy! That’s Roger!
” I go toward him, glancing at the laptop, which is sitting on an plastic chair.
“They’re about to call my name. What do we need? ”
Lance grabs me by the arm so hard it hurts. He pulls me behind him. “Go back to your seat,” he growls at me.
“What’s gotten into you?” I whisper. “Roger, I’m so sorry. Listen, if we can log into—”
“Go home, Nash.” Lance’s voice is just a hint above a snarl. He’s moved me behind him almost completely.
I freeze and look back and forth between them. The floor tilts under me. I step back. “What’s going on here?”
Roger looks at me. “Roger Nash, at your service. I believe you know my husband.” He looks at Lance. “Jonny on the Spot and I have some things to talk about,” he says, unhurried, a man with all the time in the world. His eyes settle on me and stay. “You’re coming with me.”
“I’d rather not,” I say.
“Walk away,” Lance says. “Now, while you still can.”
I think fast. “Why don’t we sit down somewhere public, have coffee, hash it out like grown-ups. My treat. The Bean Stop.”
“Oh, fuck this,” Roger says. His hand comes out of the hoodie pocket with something small and black and angular.
There’s a hard electric crack and the stink of a struck match.
Lance goes down in front of me on the planks like a tree being felled.
I stare at him. “Lance?” I get down on my knees, touching him.
“Lance! What did he do to you?” I roll him over.
His eyes are open and his face is contorted in a mixture of pain and rage.
There are two thin wires running from his chest back across the planks to the thing in Roger’s hand, and at this end of them, two barbs sunk into him—one high on the chest, one through the sleeve into his upper arm.
I realize what’s happened: Lance has been tased.
Roger drops the thing in his hand and strides over and grabs me by the hair.
I try to shout as he wrenches me away from Lance.
I kick him in the shins and he loosens his grip enough that I can get away.
I back into the risers, stumbling over the plastic chair.
The laptop cracks against the floor and the lights flicker.
His hand closes on my arm, and it’s the calm of it that undoes me, the businesslike ease, like I’m luggage he’s collecting.
He’s pulling at me. A sound comes out of the dark I have never heard a person make.
Not a shout—a roar, huge and wordless and animal, torn out of a man pulling barbed wire out of his own chest. Lance is up off the floor and into Nash and both of them go into the stacked risers, and the whole rack comes down on top of them with a noise like a building falling.
I shout as the lights come back on, all of them at once, like every fluorescent tube in the ceiling has been thrown at the same moment.
I’m on the ground. I don’t remember getting here. Through the gap in the fallen risers I can see them, and I try to make what I’m seeing into a fight. I can’t, because it doesn’t move like a fight.
A fight is wild. This is methodical. Lance’s left arm hangs half-dead at his side where the current went through it, so he does everything with the other, and he does it the way you’d take apart a machine.
He catches Nash’s arm and bends it back past where an arm is meant to go, patient, adjusting his grip, and there’s a wet, terrible pop and Nash screams and Lance’s face does not change at all.
That’s the part I can’t stop looking at.
He isn’t angry. Anger would be better; anger I could reach.
He’s simply gone, somewhere cold and clean where Nash isn’t a person but a problem to be solved.
He turns Nash face-up and closes both hands around his throat.
Footsteps. Voices at the mouth of the wings, hushed and then not hushed.
Somebody says oh my God. Somebody’s already saying call 9-1-1.
The side curtain rips back and the backstage floods with light, and there are people crowding the gap—the harried techbro, a security guard, faces I don’t know—and one of them is screaming, and none of it matters.
None of it reaches him. Nash is thrashing under him.
His face is turning violet, his eyes rolling, and all at once he looks small and broken and mean.
Lance is going to kill this man, here, in front of all of them, and he isn’t going to know he’s done it until it’s done.
I get up and stumble to them.
“Lance.”
He doesn’t look at me.
“Lance. It’s me. Come back. Please.”
He looks up at me.
“Please,” I beg. “If they take you away I don’t know what I’d do. Please let him go.”
Lance takes a deep breath and releases Roger’s neck. Roger takes a whooping, rushing breath and starts to cough. Lance reaches down and pulls out the barbs from the taser out of his chest. It pops out with a bloom of blood the size of a coin. Then he drops both of them on the floor.
Lance leans down close to his ex-husband’s ear.
When he speaks it isn’t the red-mist snarl of a moment ago—it’s quiet, and level, and absolutely certain, which is so much worse.
“You come near my family again,” he says, “and I will put you in the ground like a god-damned dog.” And he spits in his ex-husband’s face.