Chapter 4 Holden #2
Tension hung in the air like power lines, connecting everyone in the room to the same humming anticipation. And though Tall, Dark, and Psychotic was certifiably hot, him being stabbed would put a serious damper on the party. Him killing Frankie would be slightly worse.
Neither one of them deserved the imminent violence and danger, but I could take it. In that moment, with the shadows of yesterday’s nightmares coursing through my veins, I wanted it.
I jumped off the table, putting myself between them. I tore open my coat and the shirt beneath, baring my chest to Frankie.
“Right here,” I hissed, tapping the skin over my heart. “Put it right here. Go on. Do it. Do it.”
The crowd froze like a still frame in a movie. Frankie’s eyes were wide with shock as I silently dared him to stab me, curious to know if he’d actually do it.
The musician put a hand on my arm, his voice low and soothing. “Hey, man. Come on. Hey…”
His comforting touch and the soft cadence of his voice infiltrated my racing thoughts. I let him pull me back while River relieved Frankie of the broken bottle.
I guess tonight’s not the night.
Murmurs began all around, and I felt a hundred pairs of eyes on me. Shock mixed with pity as they stared at the crazy guy with a death wish. I pulled my coat closed and reached for a smoke, smiling wide, all sunshine and rainbows. Because fuck them and their pity.
“Anyone got a light?”
Chance’s jaw unhinged stupidly. “What the… Get out. You three.” He jabbed a finger at me, the musician, and the tattooed beast in black. “Get out of my house.”
I put a hand on my chest and turned to the musician, horribly affronted. “Rude, right?”
He burst out laughing, surprising even himself, and then convulsed harder, pulling me in as if it were contagious.
“Get out!” Chance thundered.
We turned and ran for the door, both laughing like idiots while Frankie screamed impotent threats behind us. We raced down the front steps, and the musician stumbled and crashed hard on the front lawn. I followed, and we lay on our backs, laughing between wheezing breaths.
“I don’t believe we’ve officially met.” I offered my hand. “Holden Parish.”
“Miller Stratton.”
We shook, and then a menacing sex-on-a-stick shadow fell over us.
“And who’s the Brute Squad?”
Miller clutched his sides, barely able to speak. “R-Ronan Wentz.”
I thrust my hand straight up. “A pleasure.”
Ronan crossed his arms, one of which had blood smeared down to his wrist. “Crazy bastards.”
“How did you do that?” I asked Miller, wiping my eyes.
“Do what?”
“Play and sing like you did. Like…a fucking miracle.”
He shook his head, though I could see my words had touched him. “Nah. Everyone’s heard that song. It’s a million years old.”
“They’ve heard the song, but you put your soul out there. That’s not something people hear every day.”
Chance slammed open the front door. “I said, get the fuck off my property!”
He charged down the stairs toward us, River following after, his expression still hard and carefully composed.
I did that. I sucked his smile away like the vampire I am.
A blond girl brought Miller’s guitar case to him, and then it was time to go. He and Ronan and I raced for the refuge of James and his Mafia-looking sedan.
“Good evening, James,” I said. “Would you be so kind as to remove my friends and me from the immediate area?”
James didn’t ask questions but did as I asked, which was what I loved best about him. That and he drove like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction.
“Home, sir?” he asked, calmly weaving the sedan down darkened streets at breakneck speeds.
“Fuck no.” I turned to my new companions. “Thoughts, gentlemen?”
Miller and Ronan exchanged glances, and then the big guy nodded once.
“My place,” Miller said. “The Lighthouse Apartments.”
James navigated tree-lined streets to a poorer neighborhood called the Cliffs. It was a ten-minute drive. He made it in five, then parked the car in a crappy parking lot with cracked pavement and carports made of aluminum siding.
“Cozy,” I said. “After-party at Chez Stratton?”
“Not quite.” Miller jerked his chin at James. “How long will he wait?”
“As long as I need him to.” I lit a clove cigarette and waved away the smoke and their curious stares. “Fear not. James is being well compensated for his time.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
***
Miller and Ronan led me down an isolated stretch of beach that grew increasingly difficult to navigate. Cliffs loomed over us, and the path became narrow and strewn with rocks. Water lapped at my boots, ruining them with sand and salt.
Maybe they’re going to murder me and dump my body in the ocean.
After the insanity of the party, I wouldn’t have been too surprised.
Eventually, the path led away from the surf and became easier to navigate.
After climbing over a particularly large porous rock, we arrived at a small fisherman’s shack, built against a heavy boulder.
It had its own stretch of beach and a bonfire pit that faced the ocean, now a safe distance back.
Rocks that had spilled down from the cliffside blocked the way farther east, protecting the shack from interlopers.
I peered inside the small space. Not much to see. Moonlight poured in from a window roughly cut into the wall, illuminating a wooden bench and table.
“Not bad. Could use a few upgrades.”
Ronan lit a bonfire while Miller crashed heavily onto one of the three rocks that ringed the firepit like makeshift chairs. He rummaged in his backpack and poured a few gummies into his palm.
“CBD?” I asked. “Sharing is caring, Stratton.”
“Not CBD. Glucose. I have diabetes.”
I sank down on my own rock chair, the news hitting me surprisingly hard. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks,” he said as Ronan got the fire roaring with a bottle of lighter fluid. “What did you do to piss off River Whitmore?”
I put him on the spot, like an asshole.
“I pissed off a lot of people tonight. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The quarterback. When you were playing that seven minutes game.”
“Ah yes,” I said and cast my gaze to the black ocean bearded in white froth as it crashed and retreated. “Don’t remember.”
“You sure?”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I was hoping you kicked him in the nuts.”
“Do tell.”
Miller thought about answering for a moment, then shook his head tiredly. “Not tonight.”
“Fair enough,” I said, glad that the subject was dropped.
Ronan went inside the shack and emerged with beer bottles in his hands. I gratefully took one, but Miller passed.
“Still feeling low,” he said and took a bottle of orange juice from his backpack.
Twenty yards away, the ocean crashed and retreated, and the wind was cool and bracing. Calming.
An ocean, I decided, wasn’t like a lake. An ocean was alive and moving—energy flowing through it, rising up and crashing, washing against jagged, broken rock and leaving it smooth.
A lake was sinister. Still. Its cold, black water suffused your every pore, and if it sucked you down, it wouldn’t leave a trace.
I shivered and tried to do what Dr. Lange had always suggested—ground myself in the present moment where the past couldn’t touch me.
“It’s nice here,” I said. “Really fucking nice. Like I can just…breathe.”
Miller nodded. “Same.”
“Same,” said Ronan from his rock chair on the other side of Miller.
On the drive over, I’d learned that Ronan had recently moved to Santa Cruz from Wisconsin, which meant he and Miller had only known each other for a handful of days and yet were already perfectly at ease.
I glanced around at the fire, the shack, the ocean, and the two friends sitting in companionable silence.
I have all the money in the world, but the things I want most cannot be bought.
“Do you guys hang out here a lot?”
“All the time,” Miller said. “You’re welcome to come here too. Anytime. Mi casa es su casa. Except it’s not a house. How do you say, our shitty shack is your shitty shack in Spanish?”
“Nuestra choza de mierda es tu choza de mierda,” I said quickly to cover the swell of happiness that threatened to turn me into a puddle of goop the way Beatriz tried to do with her lunch.
Miller’s brows rose. “You speak Spanish?”
“And French. Italian. A little Portuguese and some Greek.”
“You some kind of genius?” Ronan asked.
“So they say. My IQ is one fifty-three.”
Miller whistled his disbelief.
“Sounds as if it could be helpful, right?”
“Helpful?” He scoffed. “That’s like having the answer key to life.”
“If only,” I said, relishing how easily I fell into conversation with these guys. “As far as I can tell, it just means the nonstop thoughts in my head are more cunning and can torment me in multiple languages.”
A short silence fell, and I held my breath, waiting for ridicule or for them to kick me off their beach.
“So,” Miller said finally. “Do I email you all my homework assignments directly, or do you prefer hard copy?”
Warmth flooded me. “No chance, Stratton.”
“Worth a shot.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty damn perfect right here,” I said after a few minutes. “Like we’re at the edge of the world and no one can touch us.”
“Yep,” Miller said, and Ronan nodded.
I sucked in a deep breath. Here goes nothing. Or everything.
“I’m gay,” I said. “I just wanted to get that out there. In case it wasn’t obvious. Is that going to be a problem?”
Miller’s brows came together. “No. Why would it?”
“Ask my father,” I said, hope rising in my chest. I looked to Ronan. “How about you?”
Ronan downed the rest of his beer and threw the bottle aside. “No, I’m not gay.”
Miller and I exchanged glances then, and our laughter came roaring back.
The kind of laughter that keeps going until you’ve forgotten what was so funny in the first place.
The kind that cements friendships instantly.
A warm balloon expanded in me, lifting me for a few moments out of the shadows.
When I caught my breath and came back to earth, I belonged around this fire, with these guys.
“You’re a crazy motherfucker, you know that?” Miller said to me, still laughing.
“So I’m told.”
“You could have been in with them, you know? The popular kids.”
“Why would I do that when fucking with them is so much more fun?”
“Fun,” Ronan said, his eyes on the roaring flames. “Is that what that shit with Frankie was about? Fun?”
“I did it to throw him off guard,” I lied. “That’s all.”
Miller and Ronan wore twin expressions of doubt and concern, but they let it alone, and I understood that giving each other space was one of the key tenets of their friendship.
“Where are you from?” Miller asked after a while.
“The pits of hell. Seattle,” I clarified. “Not that Seattle is hell, only my parents’ house. I live with my aunt and uncle now. They have a vacation home here in the Seabright neighborhood and are living in it year-round while I finish school.”
“Why even bother with school at all?” Miller asked. “With an IQ like yours, shouldn’t you be curing cancer or building robots at MIT?”
“Medicine takes discipline. I have none.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Be a writer,” I said, rubbing my ink-stained fingers. “Don’t know that I’ll be any good at it.”
“Why not? You’re smart enough.”
“A giant IQ means I have facility with language and words, but it doesn’t guarantee those words will have heart.” I turned to Miller. “Like your music. That was all heart. When I write like you play, my friend, I’ll call myself a writer.”
He seemed stunned by the compliment and didn’t know what to do with it. But I knew the rules here, and I didn’t push it.
Like I should’ve done with River.
“You had only one more year of high school,” Miller said finally. “Why leave?”
“Not up to me. After my sophomore year, my father arranged for me to take a little detour into the wilderness.”
“You mean like a camp?”
“Sure,” I said, bitterness flooding my mouth. “A camp. And that camp necessitated that I spend a year in Switzerland. At the Sanitarium du lac Léman. That’s Lake Geneva to you and me.”
“Sanitarium?”
“Loony bin. Crazy house. Mental institution. Take your pick.”
He looked away. “Jesus.”
“There was no Jesus as far as I could see,” I said ruefully. “Believe me. I looked.”
Another few moments of silence fell, and I worried I was too much for a night like this. Then Ronan, who’d been quiet for a while, made the fire flare by shooting an arc of lighter fluid at it.
“That must’ve been one helluva wilderness camp.”
I stared as the warmth flooded back, bringing more laughter. “Is this guy for real?”
“One hundred fucking percent.” Miller tapped his juice to my beer. “To you for surviving the camp. And Switzerland.”
I swallowed sudden tears. “To Ronan, you magnificent bastard,” I said gruffly and reached to clink bottles with him. “For being one hundred percent fucking real.”
Ronan dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black device. “To Frankie, the stupid fucker who didn’t notice I swiped his police Taser.”
The earth stood still for a split second, and then we laughed. We laughed until I wanted to cry, sure this strange happiness wouldn’t last. Eventually, I’d mess it up. Miller and Ronan would get sick of my shit, or my lack of filter would cross a line, and they’d decide I wasn’t worth knowing.
But in the meantime, I was here, and that was more than I could have hoped for.
It was everything.