Chapter 17
SOW RECKLESS, REAP REGRET
Oscar was a construction site, and someone had decided to jackhammer through his skull, pounding pounding pounding relentlessly. His body was a plank, stiff and aching. He groaned, his eyes unsticking as the lull of sleep began to dissipate, making way for the scent of his own apartment.
Luigi’s whiskers tickled as he leapt onto the arm of the couch and leaned in to sniff Oscar’s face. It was his black velvety fur Oscar saw first when his vision settled.
Oscar groaned, the temperature in his body rising—an all-consuming wave that crashed against his stomach, pulling him from the couch and across the living room. He crashed knees-first on the tile just in time to stick his head in the toilet and vomit yellow.
The sound of running water startled him. In his panic, he hadn’t even heard Aaron coming in, hadn’t sensed his presence anywhere, but here he was, hand reaching into the shower, testing the temperature, eyes fixed on the tile ahead.
“Hey,” Oscar croaked.
“A shower will make you feel better. Brush your teeth and then come out and have something to eat.” Aaron turned to go.
“Hey, wait.” Oscar ignored the pounding in his head and pressed his hand flat on the toilet seat, pushing himself up to stand. “Aaron, wait.”
“I have to get back, Oscar,” Aaron said, whirling to face him.
Maybe Oscar had slept right through autumn, because the ocean of Aaron’s eyes had turned to frost, and it cut him.
“Back where?” Oscar murmured.
“Back to the kitchen. You have class today, remember?” Aaron crossed his arms, eyes darting away. “Please. Take a shower and brush your teeth. I don’t like the smell.”
Sorry tasted like bile and acid as it climbed into Oscar’s mouth, felt cold as it scraped the ridges of his teeth, sounded like nothing but air as he tried and failed to say it.
A moment later, he was alone and the door was clicking shut behind Aaron, muffling Luigi’s inquisitive mew.
The water was lukewarm when Oscar stepped in, but he needed it cold.
Oscar needed to slip into the glacier water that had been Aaron’s gaze, to drown in the depths of the disappointment he’d spied in his expression.
He contained a yelp as cold spray hit his back, drenching his hair and weighing it down nearly to his collarbones.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood there but his skin was raw from scrubbing when he finally emerged, his hair green-apple-scented and his mouth as minty as the After Eights Grandma kept in her kitchen drawer.
Freshly dressed in the clean clothes Aaron must have set out for him while he was asleep, Oscar came out to the scent of toasted bread. He wondered if his cheeks were as red as the tinge of color in Aaron’s hair when it caught the sunlight as he crossed the kitchen.
“Eat,” Aaron said, sitting down in front of Oscar’s silent laptop with his earbuds in and leaving him with a plate of buttered toast.
“Thank you.” Oscar cleared his throat and took a sip of water. “I—there’s something I need to tell you.”
“If it’s that you got me fired, I already know. The agency called this morning to let me know they won’t be placing me anywhere again,” Aaron said, taking out an earbud.
It cut worse than the razor blades in Oscar’s parents’ bathroom, almost as bad as the nib of a fountain pen signing the death certificate of a perfectly healthy man.
“I’ll call them. I’ll explain,” Oscar said, fumbling around with his toast. He shook his head. Aaron couldn’t have been fired over an altercation between Oscar and his mother.
“I’d rather you explained why you started typing out a message, then thought it might be better to get drunk off your ass and ignore all my calls and texts.
I’d rather know how you ended up being carried home by your sister and a stranger from a bar.
It’s not exactly how I thought I’d be meeting your family, Oscar.
” Aaron crossed his arms, leaning back into the bench.
“It was just a lapse,” Oscar said, shaking his head, “I don’t normally—”
“You’d better not.” Aaron’s nostrils flared, and Oscar could look at nothing but his freckles, rising and falling with each deep breath. “My father was a fucking drunk, and I’m not about to become my mother.”
There was the sixteen-wheeler Oscar had yearned for the previous day.
He’d imagined himself a pancake then, but now he felt no better than roadkill, no better than a piece of shit flattened by a shoe that had stepped on him without meaning to, curling its nose at the sight.
Better to have sidestepped him altogether.
“I—” Oscar started to say.
“I can’t believe I said that,” Aaron murmured. He traced a circle with his thumb over his lip. Oscar imagined that in Aaron’s head, this was a cassette tape and Aaron’s thumb was the pencil, desperate to rewind it, to unspill his confession.
“You didn’t mean it like that,” Oscar replied. He slid his hand across the distance between them, turning his palm up, but Aaron didn’t accept the invitation.
“Well, I said it, didn’t I? And it’s not even a lie.
Who would want to become my mother?” Aaron’s entire face wobbled as his own blatant honesty struck him.
He shook his head, sliding off the bench and walking away.
“I can’t talk about this right now. I’m going to watch something.
I took notes on your morning classes. You had Networks, something with Signals, and Security something.
Anyway, your schedule is clear for the rest of the afternoon. Took you long enough to wake up.”
“You didn’t have to cover for me.”
Oscar was a seven-year-old boy again, standing in front of his mother with his bangs on the floor, blinking as she screamed in his face.
Except Aaron wasn’t screaming, and Oscar wished he would.
He hated how quiet he’d gone, how subdued he sounded.
He hated that he’d done this to him, that he’d made everything worse.
“I know. But I did. And you need to pay your sister. She covered your massive bill at the bar. I asked.”
When Aaron turned to go, Oscar didn’t stop him.
He owed him better than that. So as he sat down on the couch and browsed until he settled on Schitt’s Creek, curling up against the other arm and patting the cushion for Luigi, Oscar said nothing and carried on eating his bread.
It had grown cold and hard and went down like cardboard, scratching the inside of his throat.
And all Oscar could think as the discomfort settled was that he deserved it.
Oscar had never been beaten as a child, nor sent to dinner on an empty stomach.
Despite the screaming matches between him and his mother, the punishments at home had always been fairly calm.
On some nights, he had been banned from watching a beloved show.
On other occasions, he’d missed a trip to the cinema.
Unfailingly, whenever Oscar and his mother argued, he went to sleep without a goodnight kiss.
Eventually, the kisses stopped coming altogether.
Maybe it was because the fighting raged on day and night without pause.
Or maybe Oscar’s mother had decided that the best way to punish him was to make it clear as crystal that she didn’t love him anymore.
Somehow, this felt different. His entire skin prickled as he paced around the kitchen, sipping water while he wiped down already clean counters and cleaned the coffee machine, eyes skittering to the tuft of hair poking out where Aaron lay across the couch, Season 1 of Schitt’s Creek on a way lower volume than normal.
When the kitchen failed to provide more distraction, Oscar found himself in possession of far too many hands and nowhere to put them. His mind was a broken record, playing the opening segment of a Mitski song over and over again.
He hadn’t been able to shake the clarity in Aaron’s gaze as he’d compared him to the man who had made his life so miserable, the father he hadn’t spoken to in so long.
Oscar couldn’t imagine ever comparing Aaron to Marjorie Peters, couldn’t imagine loving him if he had reason to.
So maybe Aaron wouldn’t anymore. Maybe Aaron was only here because he was afraid Oscar would go to sleep alone and choke on his own vomit.
A part of Oscar wished he would. It was the same part of him that lingered from the previous afternoon, the ugly woodpeckering that had wasted so much of his parents’ toilet paper when Oscar was a teenager, the same that had him on his knees scrubbing his own blood out of the tile grout in the bathroom just across from where he stood that one time he’d relapsed and done it again.
The same voice had carried him to that bar.
It had made him hurt Aaron by costing him a job and reminding him of his own personal monster.
It’s you. That voice is you.
Aaron sighed, not even bothering to pause the show, which he could recite by heart for the most part, as he got up and headed to the toilet.
Oscar fixed his eyes on the closed door.
Its orange-toned wood reminded him that autumn was the most beautiful among the seasons, and it had only just begun, that he had dreamt all summer of walking through the farmers’ market arm in arm with Aaron when the trees changed color.
Autumn reminded him that winter would be just around the corner, and Oscar wanted Christmas together; he’d dreamt of pink and white marshmallows floating on the surface of their hot chocolates, cuddling in their sweaters, eating candy through the end of January.
As the water ran in the sink while Aaron washed his hands, Oscar thought about the ice melting as spring came around and remembered how he’d imagined celebrating the anniversary of their surgeries together, kissing each other’s scars while they made love all morning long.