Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CALEB
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Being back in his hometown will always come with a mixed bag of feelings.
As in previous years, Caleb holes himself up in a hotel room, tossing and turning on his bed every couple minutes like a depressed doner kebab.
He watches the clock on his phone, counts down the minutes until he can get out of here.
All his energy is put into kicking his feet and trying to stay afloat, keeping his nose above memories of biking through Arnold Arboretum, watching the Red Sox at Fenway alongside his father and a crowd that sang and swayed with hands in the air along to “Sweet Caroline,” walking down the narrow cobblestone streets of North End with his parents and shouldering through the throng of people at Saint Anthony’s Feast.
Along the way, he started thinking that coming back here might not be so bad with Asher by his side.
He’d lose himself in a daydream, twisted in bedsheets, in bottles of champagne and salt on lips.
New memories to override the old. He could learn to walk its streets again, inhale without feeling like choking on air.
He’d been hopelessly hopeful, but they never had it at all.
The possibilities slip away like water through his fingers.
A rap on the door startles him out of his thoughts. When he cracks it open, three muscled bodies push their way in.
“’Sup fucko,” Thea says. She shrugs off her coat and drops it in Caleb’s arms.
Caleb feels himself visibly buffer as Bailey and Alexei follow. He turns his attention back to Thea, blinking dumbly as she settles onto a chaise sectional, swinging her feet over its back and crossing them at the ankles.
Thea throws up her hands. “Dude, you don’t have to look so surprised,” she says. “Did you really think we’d ditch you?”
“Um,” Caleb says.
“Okay, well. Rude. And wildly incorrect.”
En route to the minibar, Bailey stops to wrap her arms around Caleb.
“I miss my worstie,” she tells him before proceeding to rifle through the fridge’s contents.
With a triumphant puff of air, she pulls out a small bag of assorted peanuts and launches herself onto the bed.
Hot pink flats dangle precariously from her toes.
“Are you really going to do it?” Alexei asks. He leans against the window, arms crossed.
“What choice do I have?” Caleb counters.
He hovers by the thermostat, mentally running through all possible options for what must be the thousandth time.
“We were never going to make it. This is the best-case scenario—Asher doesn’t get buried into his next life, and I’ll .
. .” His nails have been chewed down to stubs. “I’ll watch him from afar.”
Bailey wrinkles her nose. “You self-sacrificial asshole.”
“I’d rather love him from a distance than not at all,” Caleb admits quietly.
“Do you want me to slash his tires again?” asks Thea.
Three heads whip around to stare at her. “No!”
“At least let me hire an Etsy witch,” Thea argues. “Vengeance is sweet. That’s what Do Revenge taught me.”
“I think you’re missing the point of the film.”
“Maya Hawke is the point.”
Bailey points a chip at Thea. “Correct.”
“No offense,” Caleb says, “but if someone else’s career gets destroyed because of me, I will walk into the ocean with concrete shoes.” He rests his temple against the wall. “Why are you guys actually here?”
Alexei yawns. “No reason. Honestly.”
“We just wanted to check in on you,” Bailey says. She rolls on her back like a lizard sunning itself. “You barely replied to any of our texts, and we got worried, so here we are. That’s what friends do.”
“Friends,” Caleb echoes softly.
This entire time, a voice from deep inside his brain has been telling him that they’d come as a package deal with Asher, that nobody would deign to have him around when that tether snapped.
Which seems like a fair assumption given that, one, he was an asshole, and, two, he possesses the social skills of a potato.
He stares at them, adjusting to the idea of having friends the same way Alexei does when Thea throws a deep-cut meme at him: bewildered but filled with affection.
He sinks down onto the bed and listens to them talk, letting their animated, overlapping voices settle over his bones not unlike the way Asher’s voice does.
They stay for hours. Caleb lies there with his eyes closed, at peace knowing he isn’t expected to contribute to the conversation, and grateful for their easy and unobtrusive company.
Thea puts on a playlist, and Caleb lets himself stop overthinking for once and just be present as the closing guitar shreds from “Master of Puppets” spill into the acoustic guitar intro of “Enter Sandman.”
At some point, Bailey rolls over and looks at Caleb as the music plays on, Thea and Alexei squabbling good-naturedly in the background.
“We’ll figure it out, okay?” she says.
“And if we don’t?”
Bailey groans. “Ugh, fine, maybe we won’t. You’re harshing my rah-rah personality.” Caleb scowls and Bailey jabs his shoulder. “Seriously. Whatever happens, you won’t lose everything. You’ll always have us.”
Caleb blinks up at the ceiling and smiles. He finally understands that they aren’t just being nice. They’re being true.
There is another knock on his door a couple minutes after his friends step out to get lunch.
“Yes, Thea,” he says, swinging open the door, “I solemnly swear to listen to ‘South Elroy’—”
Except it isn’t Thea.
A small older woman with familiar blue eyes and a straight nose waits outside.
Her hand is still raised, fingers curled mid-knock.
She wears a thick gray cardigan with a beige scarf wrapped around her neck.
Beside her is a slightly older man, barely recognizable since Caleb last saw him.
Tremendously gray hair recedes about the hairline.
He’s rounder now. A collared shirt pokes out of a dark blue wool jumper.
"Mom?" Caleb blinks. "Dad?"
“Hi, sweetie,” his mom says, and Caleb lets her pull him into her arms, body rigid as she plants a wet kiss on his cheek.
Bergamot, he thinks as his parents push past him into the room.
She still smells like bergamot. The familiar feeling of water up his nose comes back with a vengeance.
“Can I get you anything?” he asks. It’s faraway, echoey.
He hovers over his body, watching himself gesture at the sachets of coffees and teas lined in neat rows on the cabinet above the minibar.
“A chamomile tea and a coffee black, please,” his mother tells him.
The room is quiet, filled with the soft tinkling of teaspoons against ceramic as Caleb makes their drinks.
He moves on autopilot, his head nothing but a yawning void.
He dumps a large amount of bourbon into his own cup of coffee.
When he turns to them, saucers in hand, they almost clatter to the ground.
His mom sits at the table by the window, half her face illuminated by the sun, sandy hair glowing.
It’s like she’s plucked straight out of his memories, the woman he says good morning and goodnight to in his head every day.
He always liked how similar they looked.
It’s solid evidence that they are related, that they are a family no matter what.
Then there’s his father—tangible proof of how much time has passed. Caleb didn’t get to watch the lines grow on his forehead or the papery skin beneath his eyes sag. To Caleb, they just appeared in a moment in time. He missed it. All those years that he will never get back.
It’s cruel, he thinks, how much he still loves them.
His hands shake when he joins them at the small round table, sliding into a seat farthest from the window.
“How have you been, son?” his father asks.
Caleb blinks at a spot on the carpet. His father’s voice sounds different, roughened by age yet familiar all the same.
“I’m all right,” he answers slowly, deliberately. Cautious not to stutter in the way his parents constantly gave him grief over. “How about the both of you?”
“Good. We’ve been good.”
His father’s response lingers uncomfortably in the air. Caleb wants to fucking scream. Then his mother cuts to the chase and says the words he’s waited his whole life for.
“Come home.”
What?
“We saw what happened with”—his mom swallows audibly—“that boy.” She tries to mask it, but there’s a disgusted lilt to her overly pleasant tone, one that Caleb recognizes immediately.
He was once on the receiving end of it when he came out to her.
“And, well. Everyone saw—the neighbors, the pastors, our friends. Please, sweetie. Just stop this madness.”
Caleb blinks, his throat almost too thick to answer. “It doesn’t matter what those people think.”
Another pause. A long one. Long enough for Caleb’s heart to plummet.
His voice fractures. “I’m your son.”
“Just come home,” his mom insists, gentler this time. She reaches across the table and squeezes Caleb’s hand. She used to do the same when he was still a kid, hiding under the sheets during thunderstorms. “We’ll set you up with a proper job, a nice girl, and we’ll fix this mess. We forgive you.”
A girl.
The past couple of months flash by in a supercut of some of the best days of his life.
Asher’s wicked smile and his staunch belief that Caleb could be something more.
A hand stuck out in apology, being given the grace and support to change for the better.
Meeting Asher’s parents and being allowed to exist the way he is without guilt or question.
Sunlight filtering in through the curtains and the waking knowledge that Asher had stayed.
Asher’s mom’s hand on his cheek, warm and comforting.
Her words: I’ll swim with you in the deep end, said with a quiet ferocity.
Being seen by all of them—Asher, Thea, Bailey, Alexei. Being known. Being loved anyway.