Chapter 16
Will
Clasping arms with his high school buds felt so good. Those solid hands on his shoulders, their thundering rhythm as they
chanted, ““Jump around! Jump around!” Will felt the power of their bond filling his body. Maybe he could find his strength here, tonight, to get the help he needed.
The help that had felt so impossible to ask for . . . Could it be right here?
The song cut out abruptly, right in the middle of the chorus.
“It’s my data. Fucking AT&T,” swore a crimson-faced Doug as they all stopped jumping and he looked at his phone. “What’s your
Wi-Fi password, Phelps?”
Jenn said loudly, cheerfully, “Aren’t we decorating hats?”
The energy shifted, Will was released, and everyone dispersed, talking all at once. Will felt cold. No, the help was not right
here. Even if he told them . . . even if he revealed every awful detail . . . what then? Was Doug going to ride in on a white
horse and save Will? Hah! Doug couldn’t even stay sober after multiple instances of professional help.
Which, by the way, was eating at Will. Hellie had given Doug an ultimatum.
She’d told Will all about it. All Doug had to do was stay sober and hold down a job, but based on the size of his pupils, Doug had already broken his promise.
And yet . . . here Hellie remained. Will had tried to encourage her to leave, years ago.
You have a place with me and Jenn while you get back on your feet, he’d promised.
You tell me the amount, I’ll write you a check—first month’s rent and security deposit.
Jenn hadn’t liked that, of course. There’d been hell to pay on the marital front for that promise. But he couldn’t bear the
thought of money holding Hellie back from leaving.
Jenn’s voice drew his attention.
“Wow, did Doug really get promoted?” Jenn was addressing herself to Hellie, touching her back as they headed toward the dining
room, where the craft supplies were laid out. Will hung back. He had the same question, of course. No one in their right mind
could look at Doug and think promotable. Still. Did his wife not realize how she could come across?
“What do you mean?” Hellie said.
Jenn laughed. “I just mean . . . wow! Like, that’s great news! What a fun surprise!”
“He’s really good at gutter sales,” said Hellie with a chilly edge.
They had moved beyond Will. Instead of entering the dining room with the rest of the group, Will leaned against the arched
frame that divided the rooms.
“I set out some fun supplies to decorate them with,” Allie was saying as the group began to explore the craft material. “Glitter
glue, confetti . . . Help yourselves, but please be careful with the hot glue gun—we don’t want anyone getting hurt!”
“Kindergarten teacher,” announced Phelps. “And you’re all getting an end-of-party evaluation, so use your kind words and keep
your hands to yourselves, children!”
Laughter followed.
“Also,” said Phelps, “I’m confiscating car keys! It’s that time. Everyone hand ’em over! Time-honored tradition. No one is
driving drunk. You want to leave, you have to pass the sobriety test.”
“Backward alphabet while you do this,” said Doug as he stood on one foot and began to tap his head and rub his stomach. “Z . . . Y . . . W . . . no, X . . . fuck . . .” A few people laughed.
Will dug his car keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Phelps.
“So I hear this party has an epic history,” Allie said as she coaxed a piece of silver construction paper into a conical shape.
“Remind me—when was the first party? And who all was there?”
“2005,” said Phelps as he bent a pipe cleaner into the shape of what looked like a penis. “First party was at Doug’s mom’s
house.”
“It was all of us here, right?” began Doug. “Plus, let’s see, Ted, and Bunny, and, uh . . .”
“Oscar,” said Hellie.
“Oscar!” various people echoed as if in the shock of having forgotten him.
Waves of adrenaline pounded through Will at the name.
“Who’s Oscar?” said Allie in a politely interested voice.
“My boyfriend before Will,” said Jenn quickly. “And our first craft was decorating our wineglasses with stick-on jewels and
stuff, remember? So we could find our own glass?”
And my friend, thought Will. My friend who needed me, and I wasn’t there for him.
“Is Oscar coming tonight?” said Allie.
“No,” said Jenn shortly.
“Dude, he killed himself,” said Doug.
“Doug!” reproved Hellie.
“What? It’s true!”
“Oh, my God,” said Allie. “I’m so sorry—”
“Thank you,” said Jenn.
“I barely knew him,” said Doug. “He was into that Christian group Jenn and Will were part of at Ball State, what was it called?
North? South? East?”
Will almost said it, but Olivia beat him to it.
“Compass,” she said.
“That’s it!” said Doug. “He got deep that night, man, he got deep . . . Do you guys remember that? We were sitting in the kitchen, it was, like three in the morning
or something and Oscar was going on about how we’re naturally corrupt and powerless to change ourselves or some evangelical
bullshit, pardon my French . . .” He slung an arm around Hellie’s neck, pulling her close. “People can change, man. People
can turn their lives around if they just—if they just have someone who fucking believes in them, you know, someone who doesn’t put them in a box.
If you get put into a box, if people trap you like that, that’s what breaks you, right?
Am I right?” His grin was looking more and more manic.
“Think about it, it’s like money, right, like
the US economy, because the gold standard’s gone, man, it’s all fake, it’s just numbers on the computer . . . it’s just our
belief in our money that makes it have any value, right? When things turn sour, when everything takes a shit, it’s when people stop
fucking trusting, when they assume the fucking worst of each other . . .”
Will had no idea what Doug was going on about, but something he said stuck to Will’s mind like a burr. If you get put into a box, that’s what breaks you.
Was Doug talking about Oscar? He might as well have been talking about Will. Just when you’d written Doug off, he said something
incredibly insightful.
“. . . and once that trust is lost, it’s not a failure of whatever failed, okay, it’s a failure of belief, of the people who were supposed to back that system, are you guys tracking, a failure of decent fucking trust—”
“I think everyone’s eyes are glazing over, Dougie,” interrupted Hellie, wiggling out from under his arm and picking up a piece
of shiny blue paper. “I think I’m going to do a wizard’s hat with the phases of the moon in a circle.”
“Who’s doing devil horns? Someone has to have devil horns,” said Phelps.
“What are you making there, Phelps?” said Bennett.
“A dick,” said Phelps with a grin as he connected the pipe cleaner to his cone hat. “That way I can be a dickhead.”
Doug roared with laughter. Bennett guffawed. Allie groaned.
As the group settled deeper in around the dining room table with Doug trying to resurrect his currency metaphor, Will was
surprised to find himself still hanging back, as if he was wearing cement boots that were physically preventing him from moving
fully into the dining room with the others.
At one point, Bennett joined him in the threshold, adjusting a very basic cone-shaped hat on his head.
“Not into hats?” said Bennett.
“Waiting for inspiration to strike,” said Will, stuffing his hands into his pockets.
But it wasn’t that. Memories of Oscar were gathering momentum, slamming through Will. He, too, remembered that three-in-the-morning
conversation fourteen years ago. It was Oscar and Jenn who were dating at the time, with Will as the third wheel. They were
twenty-one. Kids, tossing around big untested ideas, as if they could know anything at all without living it out first. Will
used to believe, like their leaders in Compass had taught them, that even though you were powerless to change yourself, whatever
problem you had, God wanted to fix it, would fix it. That’s what it meant to be a Christian: to be heated like iron in God’s workshop, where he would bang you into the
right shape with his mallet. Smooth out all the flawed parts of you. Sometimes it hurt, but it all had a purpose. In Compass,
they called it sanctification.
Will had tried to let himself be banged into the right shape. He’d tried, year after painful year. But instead of feeling
closer to perfection, he felt warped beyond recognition. Though . . . had God really wielded that mallet, or was it Jenn?
Why Oscar had killed himself that February following the party was technically unexplained, since no note had been found.
But Will remembered that fateful moment at the first New Year’s party, when he and Oscar were on the same team in that crazy game of Clue, and suddenly found themselves in the pantry of Doug’s mom’s house .
. . He remembered Oscar’s tearful explanation of his “struggles.” Then, in January, Compass had stripped him of his leadership role, and Will couldn’t help but wonder if their moment in the pantry was to blame.
He couldn’t help but imagine that Oscar might have felt just like Will did now.
Backed into a corner. Faced with an impossible choice.
And Will knew how he started to feel when he was cornered, after the surge of fear wore off: violent.
Maybe that’s why Will had encouraged Hellie to leave Doug. That was years ago, of course—and the conversation hadn’t gone
well, to say the least. In retrospect, maybe he’d said that less for her, and more for himself. Maybe he’d wanted to experience
salvation vicariously, to see the proof in Hellie that it was possible to escape, that caged animals could run free again . . .
Of course, it wasn’t as simple for Will as it could be for Hellie: he had kids. And Will was under no illusion that divorcing
Jenn would result in him getting the girls. Who would believe Will’s story? He lost either way: he couldn’t let his girls
be raised by Jenn, who would poison them against Will, but he couldn’t stay either, or he would break. Even though during
the day, at his job, he felt normal, competent, and in control, in the deep of the night, next to his gently snoring wife,
he imagined himself doing awful things—strangling her, smothering her while she struggled under him, drawing a paring knife
across her throat and hearing her helplessly gurgle out the last of her life—
Even now he was breathless with the ugliness inside him.
A monster was rising up within him, and soon Will would be too weak to stop it.
He looked at Bennett, standing there, tall and good-looking, with his stupid party hat and his gorgeous wife and his perfect life.
Bennett had thought the fifteen grand was a big deal—hah! It was nothing. Nothing.
Will glanced at Jenn. She was at the far end of the dining room, in conversation with Allie, who was helping her attach a
pipe cleaner in the shape of a star to the top of her hat. He had fallen for her back in college for so many reasons. Her
smile. Her energy. Her passionate single-mindedness. She was clear where Will felt blurry, decisive where Will could get caught
up in a merry-go-round of deliberations. She completed him, he’d thought. With Jenn, he would become a better man. A focused,
purpose-driven person. How he ached for those hopeful days. That sense of potential in himself. Now look at what he’d become.
“She took my phone,” said Will to Bennett in a strained sotto voce, turning his face slightly so he wasn’t facing the crowd
in the dining room. The monster was pressing against his ribs.
“Sorry, what?” said Bennett, too loudly.
Will shook his head quickly. Was Jenn looking their way? No, she was measuring the hat against her head. The head that sat,
so fragile, on her neck—
“Jenn,” he hissed. His eyes remained locked on his wife. His fingers twitched in his pockets. “She took my phone. Last year.
That’s why I haven’t—”
“What?” said Bennett, finally stepping closer and touching Will’s arm lightly. “Wait—”
Jenn’s head snapped up, and she was looking straight at them.
“Will? Aren’t you making a hat?” Her clear voice cut into their moment.
Like she cut into everything. Will clenched his fists.
She waggled her hat playfully. “Isn’t this craft so cute?
The girls would love these! We’ll have to make extra so we have three to take home!
You should do a pink one. Mackenzie would love it! ”
“Sure! Yeah, I’ll do a pink one,” said Will in the normal, stable voice he had to use on purpose so that the other strangled,
crazy voice didn’t come out. His fingers were fisted so tightly he could feel his nails digging into his palms.
“Will—” said Bennett in a whisper.
“Hats,” Will said, loud and jovial.
Telling Bennett had felt like a mad reach toward salvation—a final grasp at the strength of the brotherhood he’d felt coursing
through him as they jumped together like fools. But in the end, it was still Will’s impossible choice. No one could save him
from it. There was no help here. There would be no help anywhere. He released his fingers from the useless fists that he could
never use. “Let’s make some hats, man.”
He couldn’t bear to look at Bennett again as he moved into the dining room. There was glitter and there were sequins. Colorful
bottle cleaners and markers and all colors of construction paper. His hands moved over the craft materials, but they didn’t
seem like his hands at all.
“Hey, we need to document this!” cried Jenn, holding her phone high up above, her arm fully extended, to capture the group.
“Get in here, everyone! Smile!”
Everyone leaned in, smiled, and froze, Will included. Such was her power.
“Perfect!” she cooed. Motion resumed. She set her hat down and typed furiously on her phone.
Will could already imagine the subsequent post. So grateful for our village! Or that awful so blessed. People loved her posts on Facebook. Will’s own parents loved her posts. Probably loved her posts more than they loved Will.
But they didn’t, couldn’t possibly, love them as much as Will hated them.
“So . . . what are you making, sweetie?” said Jenn, baring her teeth in a smile. Will could see the glint of poison on her teeth.
“One pink hat, coming up,” he said loudly, returning a fierce smile of his own as, inside him, the monster stretched.