Chapter 12 #2
No stats.
No doom spirals.
Just silence.
Ammon’s arrest should have triggered a doom spiral.
Tonight, with the state police jamming their bullshit down their throats, that should have triggered a doom spiral.
Hell, before everything had changed, something as simple as an Egg McMuffin could have sent Tean to some seriously dark places.
Tonight, he walked past the dog like he wasn’t there and went to bed. That’s it. The end.
More and more frequently over the last year, Jem had found it hard to breathe.
He couldn’t say why, not exactly. It was like he was standing neck-deep in water, and his body had to work against all that pressure.
And the water kept crawling higher, like someone was still filling the pool, and now it was lapping at the bottom of his chin, and he could still breathe, he could totally still breathe, except sometimes he forgot and then, when he felt it again, he had these lung-collapsing moments when he couldn’t. Fucking. Breathe.
He squeezed his eyes shut until sparks danced in front of his eyes.
A box of Cap’n Crunch. The torn cardboard flap.
And the little white bowls, and the cheap spoons from Dollar Tree that bent every time you used them, and the vinyl tablecloth printed with slices of oranges and limes and grapefruits.
It had been the third or the fourth or the fifth foster home.
People always wanted him, because he was White and blond and he knew how to make adults smile.
And then, after a few weeks, he’d be sent back.
And the woman whose name he couldn’t even remember, standing over the box of Cap’n Crunch in a housedress and curlers, sobbing because she was off her meds or on her meds or who the fuck knew, screaming, You ruin everything! This is why no one wants you!
Jem sat up, scrubbing his face. He swung his legs off the sofa and sat, elbows on knees, until he could breathe again, and that invisible pressure shrank back down.
After a while, he realized he was staring into the open mouth of the fireplace, and he blinked and leaned back.
He hadn’t thought about that in years. Hadn’t really remembered it, because there had been so many homes after.
Because there had been LouElla, and she’d been worse than anything, and then there’d been Decker.
But for those flash-bulb heartbeats, it had all been there again, like he could reach out and touch that sticky tablecloth. The brain is a fucked-up place, man.
It was easy—it had always been easy—to shove all that junk to the back of his head.
For one dizzy moment, he didn’t have anything. Then he latched onto the night’s events, began to flip through them like a deck of cards: that girl, Tilar, and her story about her dad and Daniel, and then the conversation with Kazen, and how fucked-up it had been, and then finding the wallet.
Brennon’s wallet changed everything. How did Kazen have it? And why? And what did it mean?
For starters, it meant that Kazen was lying about something.
At the bare minimum, he was lying about not having seen Brennon in over a year.
Maybe he was lying about more—about how they’d ended things, or about how he felt about Brennon having a new boy to fall in love with.
The idea hit Jem like a jolt. Was that what this was?
Jealousy? Kazen certainly hadn’t been happy about how Brennon had been out, catting around, while Kazen had to stay home and be a good little boy.
Had Brennon tossed Kazen aside when Kazen started looking too much like an adult?
And Kazen had stewed about it, getting angrier and angrier, until he learned about Ammon attacking Brennon?
Maybe that had been the trigger, knowing Brennon had someone new?
The phrase someone younger made Jem want to be sick.
Jem wasn’t sure he bought that version, though.
Better than anyone, he knew that people could lie, trick, manipulate, and deceive.
And true, his bullshit meter had dinged a couple of times during Kazen’s story.
But for the most part, Kazen’s account had rung true to Jem.
A lot of guys, gay and straight, wanted to grow up as fast as they could.
Sex was one of the ways they tried to prove it to themselves.
And Jem thought Kazen’s mom might have been on to something; whatever Kazen told himself, sex with an older man—at such a young age—had a distinct whiff of daddy issues.
There had been details, like how Brennon had used Kazen’s name for his password, that made the story believable.
But if all of that was true, then what had happened? And why had Kazen lied to them?
He grabbed the laptop they shared—Tean called it Jem’s laptop, because Tean usually used his work one, but this one belonged to both of them—and headed for the bedroom. After tapping on the door, he eased it open and whispered, “Tean, babe, you awake?”
Scipio raised his head; his eyes gleamed in the dark. Tean was a shapeless stretch of darkness. “Yes.”
“What’s Daniel’s birthday?”
Several seconds passed. “Why?”
“I just had an idea.”
Scipio sprawled out on his side, in case Jem was in the mood to give belly rubs.
“It’s in May,” Tean finally said. “It’s in my phone.”
“Do you know what year?”
“He’s fifteen, so two thousand and four.”
“Can I check?”
“Of course.”
Jem unlocked Tean’s phone—the wallpaper was a picture of them sitting on an outcrop of gray stone, trees coming to life around them, the sky a painted blue.
Back when it seemed like things had been getting better.
The whole world was getting better. He found the calendar, scrolled back to May, and found it—the tenth.
“Thanks, babe.”
“Do you need help?”
“No, I’m just checking something.” Jem began to shut the door. Then he said, “Do you need anything?”
“No.”
“You know those cops were just trying to jam us up. You know that, right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what they want.”
It took Jem longer to build up the courage to ask, “Are you okay?”
“I’m just tired.”
“I’ll let you get some sleep. Goodnight. I love you.”
“I love you too” floated back out of the dark.
Jem shut the door and hurried back to the front of the house.
On his phone, he searched find my device iphone.
The iCloud website came up first, with Find Devices as one of the options.
He clicked on this. When he went to sign in, he entered Brennon’s cell number, the one Kazen had given them.
The site accepted it and asked for a password.
Okay. So.
Daniel, capital D. Because passwords usually had a capital letter. And because it made sense—the first letter of a name was supposed to be capitalized.
It felt, weirdly, like one of his lessons with Tean, trying to memorize all the rules for what got uppercase letters and what didn’t.
Daniel0510, for Daniel’s name and birthday. Maybe.
The sign-in boxes turned red, and a little yellow flag popped up, telling him the account information was wrong and suggesting he try again.
What about a special character? Passwords needed special characters sometimes. Daniel0510!, maybe.
Red boxes. That aggressively polite little flag.
So, what could it be? Jem’s gut told him he was on the right track—if Kazen had been telling the truth, anyway, with that story about Brennon’s password.
Jem stared at the password in front of him.
His own password for most things was Sc!
pio19 because his birthday was May 19th. So, he tried Dan!el10.
Wrong again.
He wasn’t sure how many chances he’d have before the system locked him out. How many had he tried so far? Three? And he’d get—what? Maybe five?
Dan!el0510
Shit. Fuck. Damn.
Before he could overthink it, he typed in Daniel05!0
And the screen changed.
It showed a rough map—blue-green, with gray lines for roads and blocky shapes that must have been houses. On the left was a list of devices: Brennon’s Apple watch, Brennon’s AirPods, Brennon’s iPhone. Brennon’s Apple Watch and Brennon’s AirPods both said No location found. Not connected.
But Brennon’s iPhone said 2 min ago.
Holy shit.
Holy fucking shit.
That didn’t make any sense. That cop had told Tean that the last place they’d seen Brennon’s phone before the GPS stopped transmitting had been at Ammon’s house. But here it was, broadcasting its location right now.
The urge to laugh rose up in Jem. Dumbass cops. They’d tried once, and when they’d seen that the phone wasn’t transmitting, they hadn’t tried again.
But here it was. Live.
Jem clicked on the phone, and the map zoomed. A circle formed over a green wedge that had a blue squiggle running through it—a park.
“Fuck me,” Jem said aloud.
He stared at the circle for a minute. And then another.
It didn’t move.
Jem cast a glance at the hallway. Beyond it, the bedroom.
And then he grabbed his jacket and his keys and let himself out of the house.