Chapter 8 River #2
“I was thirteen when Dad gave me the sex talk. Mostly warning me that if I got a girl pregnant, it would derail our plans. But he never asked me if I was interested in girls in the first place. It never occurred to him, so I didn’t know it could occur to me.
” I hunched over the beer bottle, peeling.
“It’s like everyone assumes we’re all built the same way—as if we have a default setting.
If you’re different, you start to believe something’s wrong with you. ”
Holden nodded. “I know what you mean.”
The twinge in his voice told me there was a story there too—and not a good one. But he was waiting for me to continue. Letting me talk when I’d never talked this much about anything before.
I kept peeling. The label was nearly off.
“Once, when I was fourteen, I was hanging out with a buddy of mine. I found myself watching how he laughed, how his mouth moved when he talked. Whenever he touched me—if our hands brushed or whatever—it went straight through me. Like electricity. But no one had to tell me that you can’t have those kinds of feelings and play football. ”
“Football has a default setting,” Holden said.
My eyes shot up to his, relief and gratitude flooding me that someone else got it. That I wasn’t crazy. The solidity of my life cracked a little but refused to break.
“Yeah, and to try to change it is impossible, so I played along. I dated girls a few times but never had those same reactions, so I just…shut down. Refused to question it.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m questioning everything. All the time. Which is totally your fault.”
“I’m totally okay with that,” Holden said. “In every possible way.”
The few feet of space between us thickened and grew heavy. His gaze, fiery hot under all that ice, watched me, promising answers. All I had to do was ask…
I tore my eyes off him and shook my head. “It’s too late.”
“Why?”
“Because my mom is dying.” The label came off, whole and curling on itself, and I tore it to shreds, my heart tearing along with it.
“My father turned his dream into my future, and now he’s losing the love of his life.
My career is the only thing that makes him happy.
It gives back something he lost. If he knew I wanted a different life, it’d destroy him. ”
“Quite the predicament,” Holden said, though there was no mocking in his tone. Only a heaviness, as if he felt the weight of it too. “And what does your different life look like?”
“You’ll think it’s dumb. Or cheesy.”
“Try me.”
“In the offseason, I work at our family’s auto body shop. I want to do it full-time and eventually take over the business and stay in Santa Cruz. I love this town. I want to have a home and…raise a family. Somehow.”
Holden stared at me for long moments, then he downed the rest of his martini in one go and held the glass against his shirt, eyes closed.
My ears burned. “I told you it was cheesy.”
“It’s not. It’s just…different. My ideal life is light-years from yours.”
“Oh yeah? Well, it’s your turn now. What’s the title to your life story?”
“Misery,” Holden said. “It. The Dead Zone. Desperation… Goddamn, that Stephen King hogged the best ones.”
“What a bastard,” I said with a grin.
Holden peeked open one eye and heaved a sigh. “If I’m going to tell this dark and depressing tragedy, I’m going to need more alcohol. You probably should too.”
“I’m good.”
“You sure? My story is R-rated. Borderline NC-17.”
“And I suppose mine was PG?”
“I’ll give you PG-13.”
I laughed. “Fuck off.”
“Have you ever given a blow job to a married psychiatrist in a sanitarium?”
I coughed. “Um…no.”
“See? NC-17.”
“I’ll take another beer.”
***
Holden mixed another martini and then filled a silver flask from his coat pocket with more vodka.
“For backup,” he said.
I wrinkled my brow, watching him pocket the flask. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen in February. But I’m an overachiever in the booze department. Ahead of my class. Vodka valedictorian…”
“I’m eighteen in February too,” I said. “The fifth. You?”
“The twenty-ninth.”
“No shit? Leap year.”
Holden nodded. “Three years out of four, my birthday doesn’t exist.” He gave me a pointed look. “Make of that what you will.”
“I think it’s kind of cool.”
“I think it’s the universe trying to remedy a cosmic mistake.” His voice lowered. “God knows my parents would agree.”
I started to ask what he meant by that, but he’d been poking at the state-of-the-art sound system next to the minibar. Cage the Elephant’s “Night Running” filled the space, and instead of heading back out to the patio, Holden beckoned me into the dark of the house.
“What…” I cleared my throat. “What are you doing?”
“It’s time to go exploring.”
“At least turn a light on.”
“No lights,” he said with a wicked grin. “Everything’s more fun in the dark.”
We made our way slowly past chairs and couches with only moonlight from the huge windows to guide us.
I bumped an end table, and Holden shot me a look over his shoulder.
“Try not to tackle anything out of habit.”
I smirked. “I’m a quarterback. I throw things.”
We passed through a formal living room and dining room for entertaining and into a game room with a pool table. A half dozen balls of an abandoned game were still on the green felt.
“Besides,” I said, “if I chuck a vase out the window, won’t you just replace it like you did the Blaylocks’ dining room table?”
Holden drained his martini and set the empty glass on a bookshelf. “Does that offend your noble sensibilities?”
“No. I just don’t like to throw money around.”
“I do.” He picked up a cue stick and bent over the table to line up a shot. The song coming in from hidden speakers sang of secrets and demons.
“Why?” I asked. “Because you have so much of it?”
“That, and because it’s my parents’ money until I graduate. When it’s mine, I’ll take better care of it.”
“Theirs is disposable because…?”
“Because fuck them.”
With smooth power, he drove the stick into the white cue ball. It struck with a clack that shattered the relative quiet. Balls ricocheted around the table, two dropping into pockets.
“They care more about money than they do about my happiness,” Holden said, his perfect face fierce and cold. “I spend it as fast as I can, but there’s always more.”
He sank another ball with precision and offered me the pool cue. I waved it off.
“Not a fan of the game?” he asked.
“I don’t want to leave fingerprints.”
He chuckled, and I was glad to see some of the anger drain out of him as we left the game room.
“When you say there’s always more, you mean like…millions?” I asked, feeling slightly tacky, but the beer had loosened my curiosity.
“Billions.” Holden peeked into a guest bathroom and a linen closet before starting up the stairs. “The Parish family is the last of the old money dynasties, like Vanderbilt or Rockefeller. You ever seen Titanic?”
“Sure.”
“My parents are the first-class assholes sitting in lifeboats while the people from steerage freeze to death in the icy water.” Holden’s eyes looked distant for a moment, and then he gave his head a shake and kept walking.
“They were born old. I’m positive they fucked only once to create an heir for their legacy—me.
Which is ridiculous. Even if I hadn’t failed spectacularly, there is no legacy.
They’re not building or making anything worthwhile.
They do nothing but sit around being rich. ”
“Wait, what do you mean, you failed?”
Holden stopped at the top of the stairs. “They thought being straight was my default setting too.”
A moment of silent commiseration passed between us in the dark. Understanding that heated quickly. For a crazy, heart-pounding second, I had a vision of him grabbing me—or maybe I’d grab him—and we’d crush our mouths together…
I blinked and gave myself a shake. Jesus…
Holden’s green eyes glittered in the dark as if they held the same thoughts, and then he tore his gaze away and continued down the hallway.
I followed him into a bedroom that belonged to a little boy, with a race car–shaped bed, video game console, and TV. Holden toyed with a model airplane from the kid’s dresser as if it were a relic from a world he didn’t understand.
“It was clear early on that I wasn’t going to quietly settle down and marry a nice girl to carry on the family line.
I was a Tasmanian devil born in a glass factory.
They tried to do everything to ‘cure’ me, sending me to psychiatrists, reform school, and threats to disown me, which I never took seriously. Then they got desperate.”
“How?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“They sent me to conversion therapy in Alaska for six months,” he said all in one breath.
“Conversion therapy,” I murmured, feeling sick. “That shit still happens?”
He nodded. The song playing through the house sang of living through tidal waves, parishes, and biblical floods.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Christ.”
Holden carefully set the airplane down. “After the Great Alaskan Experiment, they expected me to make a triumphant return to the world as a straight boy. Instead, I was ready to check out.”
My skin went cold all over. “Check out?”
“I locked myself in my room with my notebooks, pens, and liters of booze, ready to drink myself into oblivion. This wasn’t in Mom and Dad’s plans. I mean, think of the bad press! So they hustled me off to a year’s stay in a Swiss sanitarium.”
My stomach felt as if I’d swallowed a boulder of ice. “The conversion therapy was so bad you needed a year in an institution to recover?”
“In a nutshell.”
He said it lightly, but I remembered how he’d dared Frankie to stab him in the heart at Chance’s party. Holden had laughed it off, but it hadn’t been a game. In that moment, it had been real. A crazy desire washed over me to protect him from something that had already happened.
“What the fuck did they do to you in Alaska?”