Chapter 19 - Connor
Connor
Iwake up the next morning crusted in cum and drool and bathed in light.
The sheets are warm and smell like Dane, provoking my eyes to stay shut a minute longer, until my mind grows conscious enough to realize I’m alone.
I yawn and sit myself up into a hunch, scratching my head and wondering what time it is.
Where’s my phone?
And I have class at eleven.
Fuck.
I bolt into the bathroom and crank the shower on, not even waiting for the water to warm before jumping in. I brush my teeth with a towel around my waist, but I forgo flossing to race into my bedroom to dress.
It isn’t until I’m pulling clothes out of my dresser drawer that I notice one of my duffel bags sits on the foot of the bed. Once I’ve slowed myself down enough, I realize there’s a rustling sound coming from the closet. When Thalia emerges with a couple of my shirts on hangers, I ask what’s up.
“I’m packing your things,” she answers shortly.
“Wh—why?”
“Your alarm kept going off.” She points to my phone, lying screen side up on my pillow. “Don’t worry, I was able to shut it off. You should really pick a better password than your own birthday.”
My heart pounds as I recall the last thing I was looking at on my phone before sneaking off to Dane’s bedroom last night. I drop my clothes and snatch my phone, thumbing my birthday into the keypad to swipe the screen unlocked.
If she saw that video, I’m—
Fucked.
It’s not the video that pops up, but mine and Margot’s text thread.
Margot:
Hey C, hope you’re not still freaking out and you got home okay. I know breaking up is hard, but it’s for the best. You don’t have to tell her everything that happened, but you have to be honest at the same time, ya know? Luv you.
Sour bile stings my throat. I gulp my sickness down before attempting to open my mouth.
“Thal, this is not—”
“No.” She shoots me a jagged glare. “I don’t care what you have to say.” She switches around, dipping back into the closet for a breath before storming right back out. “Actually, I do care. How long have you been fucking her?”
“It’s not—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me.”
The room spins. I drop into the accent chair and hang my head to ease the vertigo. “We’re not fucking. We’re just friends. This is—”
“Where were you last night, then? You sneak out after I fall asleep, and the first thing you do when you come home is shower? Do you think I’m an idiot? You left your phone behind to cheat on me, you fucking dumbass.”
“That text isn’t about me and her. I wasn’t with her last night.”
“Then where the fuck were you, Connor? Huh?”
The grinding in my skull explodes a careless confession out of me. “I was in Dane’s room.” The silence that follows gives me time to blink—time to lift my head and meet Thalia’s stare. In a soft, quavering voice, I say, “There’s nothing going on between me and Margot.”
“Holy shit,” she soon mutters. “He actually did it, that fucking snake.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“I don’t have time for this.” Thalia flees into the bathroom, ignoring me when I say her name.
Half of me wants to leave things where they are, but the other half is too sick of uncertainty to not hash this out to the finish.
But when I follow Thalia into the bathroom, she’s barging into Dane’s room—through the door I left unlocked.
“Thalia.” I hurry after her, panic regenerating while I watch her rummage through Dane’s room like a TV mom searching for her kid’s drug stash.
She picks up a pair of shorts from the mattress, a Sac State Hornets logo on the leg. “I assume these are yours.” She flings them at me, and I put them on just so I can take this towel off and not be totally naked.
“I’m sorry,” I say, like it matters at this point.
“Fuck you, Connor.” She zeros in on Dane’s closet and marches inside. When she emerges with a red shoebox dusted in a child’s doodles, I don’t know what to make of it, but I know it’s Dane’s.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer, only heads for the hall door. When I try to take the box back, she whips the opposite way and seethes, “Don’t fucking touch me.”
Not knowing what to do, I follow her. Down the hall, through the main room, and right out the back slider.
“Thalia!” I shout as she marches straight for the pool.
Halting at the very edge of the deep end, Thalia flips the lid, turns over the box, and lets a deluge of mismatched papers spill into the water before she chucks the box in with them.
Stunned and confounded, I don’t even realize Joselyn is out here until she pops up from one of the pool loungers and whips the shades off her face.
“What the heck is going on?” Joselyn asks, but Thalia is already marching back toward the house.
I linger, staring down at the water and seeing torn out leaves of notebook and construction paper scribbled on in childlike writing. The pages float and swirl along the rippling water. When I crouch down, I can only reach a single page without getting dizzy.
The ink bleeds together and several words are misspelled, but I begin to read anyway.
How old was I when you decided I was unlovable?
“What’s going on?” Joselyn asks me again, but before I can make sense of it myself, a ruckus behind me turns me around.
Thalia’s marching back this way like a woman on a mission, arms cradling a heavy PC console.
“Thalia, please don’t,” I beg, but she doesn’t pay me one glance as she drops the console straight into the water. It splashes and sinks, more ripples carrying Dane’s childhood letters even farther from the edge.
“Now wait just a minute, missy!” Joselyn tries, but Thalia shoulders right past her stepmom. “I’m going to call your father about this!”
“Good!” Thalia swings back around and tosses her arms up in a bitter shrug. “Call him and tell him his son has been fucking my boyfriend!”
Joselyn gapes, eyes wide with scandal, but there’s more pressing damage to control. I chase Thalia all the way back to Dane’s room where she’s still rampaging and ransacking. Anything breakable, she breaks. Anything not, she scatters to the floor.
“Stop, Thalia! It’s on me, okay? I’m the one who lied. I’m the one who cheated.”
She throws Dane’s Youth League soccer medals at his computer monitor until it cracks, all the while saying, “You know it’s just a game, right?
Dane thinks I stole our mom from him, and now he gets to say he stole you from me.
I’m actually impressed! As gullible as you can be, I never thought Dane could convince you to suck his dick willingly, but looks like I was wrong! ”
She halts her terror to squint a mean glare at me. “You, though? I’m not impressed by you at all. I think you’re pathetic. And I hope you enjoy being gay for the rest of your life, because guess what? Women don’t want to get fucked by men who get fucked by other men.”
I roll my eyes with more sorrow than annoyance, and shame that I can’t hold the tears back while she continues:
“Do you think your parents will be proud when you tell them why you need to find a new place to live? Or will you lie to them and say it’s all my fault?”
“I already told you it’s my fault. I’ll tell them the truth.”
She scoffs, switching around to go through Dane’s nightstand drawers. “And what’s the truth, Connor? How long have you been fucking gay behind my back?”
“I’m not gay. I’m just…”
“Just what?” Thalia seethes to the rhythm of two hard bashes of a Bluetooth speaker against the corner of Dane’s nightstand. Shards of plastic scatter the rug.
“I love him.”
The battered speaker drops from Thalia’s hand. Chestnut eyes soften to something solemn as they trace me head to toe. “You don’t even know who he is.”
I gulp, crisscrossing my arms over my chest like some biological reflex to shield my heart from an attack.
In her newfound calm, Thalia says, “I’m sure Dane has been spinning you all sorts of stories that make him out to be a victim, but that’s because he doesn’t live in reality.
The truth is, Dane was an evil brat as soon as he was born.
He made my life hell, and he completely destroyed Mom and Dad’s marriage.
Everything was always about Dane. Dane, Dane, Dane.
Everything was a tantrum with him, and every day was a new issue that demanded all of Mom’s attention.
He was needy, spiteful, and violent. He hit people, bit people, cursed at people—”
“Thalia, he was a kid. A child. It doesn’t matter now.”
“Maybe not to you, since you clearly care more about him than you ever cared about me.”
“That’s not—”
“But I actually cared about you,” she says, a pout slipping through her resolve.
“Apparently, I still do, or else I wouldn’t bother warning you about what you’re getting yourself into with him.
Once the novelty of him wears off, you’ll realize that everything is still always about him.
Just look at what he did to you. I promise, once he finds out I want nothing to do with you anymore, he’ll drop you like that. ”
I flinch at the snapping of her fingers, but I don’t believe her. I can’t. It hasn’t just been a game. He said he wants to be with me. He wouldn’t say that unless it were true. He’s a liar sometimes, but not to me.
Thalia must see my disbelief, because the next thing she says is, “You know he tried to kill our mom, right? He didn’t tell you that during any of your bro-hangouts?
Why do you think my mom had to leave Dane in San Diego after the split?
He was volatile and wouldn’t respond to therapy.
Mom’s a small lady. She was afraid of him.
She and my dad made an agreement that Dane had to stay here. For everyone’s safety.”
“No.” I shake my head more, as I just flat out don’t believe it. Dane is impulsive and occasionally reckless, but that boy is as violent as a kitten. He may take a warning swipe if you rub him wrong, but he’d never harm someone intentionally. “That’s not true.”
She scoffs, smiling like she’s nearly amused. “You think you know everything just because you spent a few months kicking a ball around with him?”
“I know he’s not violent. I know he’s not dangerous.”
“Okay, Connor.” She glances back into the top drawer of Dane’s nightstand and plucks something out of it.
“Here.” She walks whatever it is to me and shoves it against my chest. A skinny black box with the word Magnums on the front.
“Better keep those. Lord knows what diseases that man is infested with.”
Finally simmered enough to give Dane’s room a rest, Thalia trudges back toward our room via the bathroom, calling out as she goes, “And I want you out of my fucking house!”
Standing amid the rubble of Dane’s sanctum, I swipe my tears away, not dwelling so much on what Thalia said but on what I did. I swore I’d leave Dane out of it, and now I don’t know what I’m going to tell him. I don’t know what I’ll do if he holds this against me.
What was that he told me the morning after our first kiss? I’ll pack my shit, and you’ll never see me again.
Thalia leaves the house in a huff, and Joselyn peeks into Dane’s room during my futile tidying long enough to gasp and grumble under her breath.
If she is going to call Artie, I don’t have much time to pack.
But I put that off until after I fish as much of Dane’s keepsakes out of the pool that I can reach with the long-pole net.
The letters written in marker and felt pens are toast, but I salvage a handful that are scribed in ball-point.
Sifting through sodden leaves of paper, I uncover a single Polaroid photograph, a half-faded smudge of red on the back.
On the front is the image of a younger version of the woman I know as Lori Lassiter, formerly Lori Calvo.
On her lap is a little boy with a pale belly and a head of brunette curls.
A shadow casts over me before Joselyn’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “You should call Dane. Tell him not to come home. It’s for his own good.”
Squinting up at her, I find the sympathy in her eyes frustrating, when I don’t deserve any and Dane deserves so much more. “Just like that?”
Joselyn stoops to scoop mushy paper trash into her hands. “I heard you say you love him. I hope that’s true.”