9 Brandon
Brandon
There should be a body. There was before. Brandon is positive there was one before. He can still see it in his head: the weird white shards stained with pink, like someone dropped a ceramic bowl of skinned peaches and everything had run together, sharp and fleshy and—
He stops, takes a breath, but can’t take his eyes away from where the body was. Should be.
“Okay,” Nicole says, in a voice that suggests she’s humored them long enough.
“No,” Brandon says quickly, turning to her, eyes finally peeling off the empty space. “I promise there was a body. Right, Ollie?”
Ollie nods, walking over to the spot where the body should have been. “It’s wet here. Someone washed it.”
“That doesn’t mean there was a body,” Nicole says, her expression already tired. “Maybe someone dropped a bowl of Jell-O and you two were high and drunk enough—”
“Peaches,” Brandon says softly. “It looked like a bowl of peaches.”
Nicole narrows her eyes at him. “Are you okay?”
Brandon doesn’t have an answer for that. He thought he was. He thought he was better than okay—he was going to be Prince Charming! Jon was going to thank him for returning the phone, and they’d go on another date and another and get married and live happily ever after.
Except then there was the shattered skull on the ground, dropped peaches, and now it’s gone.
Is Jon in trouble? Could Jon be mixed up in this?
No, Ollie said he turned away before the shot was fired.
So Brandon needs to rescue Jon, right? That’s what Prince Charming does.
Destiny. It never runs smoothly. Maybe this is all just a trial for true love.
Except it also feels like he’s losing his mind.
“Did you take one of Ollie’s edibles?”
His phone buzzes, and he takes it out.
IAN
I think someone robbed our place!
Brandon can’t even try to think of that. Too many bad things are happening at once. They come in threes, right? Murder, theft—what’s left?
IAN
False alarm
It’s just a mess—were you looking for something?
“Are you really on your phone?” Nicole asks, hands on her hips. “You dragged me out of work for a nonexistent body, and now you’re on your phone?”
“It was Ian,” Brandon says, slipping the phone away. “I don’t want to tell them because—” He looks back at the empty spot a body was lying on just a little while ago. “There was a body.” He’s almost positive.
“Because you’re afraid you’ll look ridiculous, you mean,” Nicole says.
“Look,” Ollie says, pointing at the asphalt in the street. The dogs are all sniffing the wet spot on the pavement but not stepping on it, like they’re patrolling the border. “There’s a little hole.”
Nicole shakes her head. “It’s a street. There are holes everywhere.”
“This one is sharp, fresh,” Ollie says, getting down on his knees, surrounded by the sniffing dogs.
A big one about head level with Ollie licks him, and Ollie scratches him behind an ear, still staring at the street.
Brandon goes over to look at the hole. Just a dent in the asphalt really.
Nothing. If he imagined a whole body, that means he’s losing his mind.
“Wait,” Ollie says, standing and then lifting Pete, excited. “His limp!” He extends Pete’s paw to Nicole.
“What? What are you doing?” she asks.
Brandon watches, also not understanding.
“Put out your hand,” Ollie says. She does; Pete licks it. Ollie pulls Pete back, and Pete starts licking his wrist.
“What is going on?” Nicole asks, shaking her empty hand.
“Sorry,” Ollie says, holding Pete’s foot over her hand as Pete continues to lick him. Ollie pops something out from between Pete’s toes with his finger. It bounces into Nicole’s hand, white and pink like the inside of a peach.
Brandon lets out a deep breath, his posture dropping with relief, his shaking legs going still.
“Bone,” he says, smiling as a wave of relief hits him.
He’s not losing his mind. Then he realizes that means they saw someone killed.
His smile turns into a grimace. He was half hoping it was a hallucination somehow.
But no, he saw a murder. He’s a witness.
It sinks into him and feels like something he needs to shower off, even though he knows he can’t.
“Yikes,” he says. Everyone is quiet, politely ignoring that understatement.
Nicole studies the shard in her hand, her expression rippling with disgust, then worry, then landing on her determined expression, the one she always wore before talking to a professor about a grade.
“All right,” she says, pocketing the maybe bone shard. “If you’re right, to make an entire body vanish that quickly means major players. Scary big.”
Brandon swallows.
“Like the mob?” Ollie asks, undaunted. Maybe even thrilled.
Nicole nods. “Or cartels. The government. Corrupt cops. Any kind of syndicate.” She leans back on the brick wall, looking more tired than Brandon has ever seen her, even after that time she worked for three days with only one hour of sleep and a twenty-four-ounce water bottle filled with an unholy mixture of Red Bull, espresso, pureed ginseng, and cherry Coke Zero.
“I don’t really know; this isn’t my field exactly.
But I know making a body vanish is a lot of work. ”
“We need to find Jon,” Brandon says, voice louder than he meant it to be. It bounces off the walls of the alley. One of the dogs whines. “He could be in trouble.”
“No, we don’t. He’s clearly mixed up in this,” Nicole says. “We need to keep you safe. Make sure no one saw you. Witnesses get offed all the time.”
Brandon feels his body ripple with cold.
Mixed up in this? He didn’t shoot the guy.
The guy he was with was shot. “He’s in danger—we can’t just leave him!
” He doesn’t say anything about true love or destiny or Cinderella; he knows what Nicole would say to that.
Judging by her expression, she wants to say it anyway.
“ You’re in danger!” Nicole shouts, arms flying up as she pushes off the wall.
“Who cares about some random hookup?” She shakes her head and leans back again, her eyes going somewhere else.
“Should we go to the cops? That could be more dangerous. Maybe the phone… It had this location. Jon is probably part of this. But you can trade the phone for your life, maybe. I don’t know…
” She slides down the brick wall, ass on the sidewalk, and stares up at him. “How do you not get what is happening?”
“He gets it,” Ollie says suddenly. “He’s just in love.”
“With a guy he met yesterday?” Nicole asks Ollie, dismayed, like Brandon isn’t even there. Brandon huffs, and one of the dogs lifts its leg and starts peeing by his shoe, so he has to dance away.
Ollie shrugs. “Love is stupid a lot of the time. But he might be right. If we want to know if anyone saw anything, if anyone is in danger and from who, Jon might know.”
Brandon shakes his head. He’s not in love, and Jon isn’t mixed up in this.
Or maybe…maybe he is. Mixed up in it. This location was on his phone after all.
He checked out so suddenly. Maybe it was to protect Brandon.
He feels light inside realizing that. If Jon wanted to protect him, not ghost him, then Brandon needs to help him. For sure. They had a connection.
“So let’s find Jon,” Brandon says, reassured by his realization.
“Let’s figure out who was murdered, and by who,” Ollie says. “Let’s solve the case. That’ll help us find Jon. And it’ll keep us safe, right?” He looks at Nicole.
“Maybe,” she says, shrugging. “Let me…” She stands up. “There’s someone at work who deals with criminal stuff. I can ask her for help. Until then, lie low. Act normal. Don’t text about this. And don’t tell anyone either; it could put them in danger, too.”
“We need to figure it out though,” Ollie says.
“Look, this is definitely where the bullet hit the street. And judging from the angle, it was fired from…” He puts his finger in the hole, rotating it for a moment, and then takes his other hand and puts another finger on top of the one in the hole, pointing the other way.
He then lowers his head to stare the way his second hand is pointing.
Brandon can’t decide if it looks more like that time they all tried to play Twister in college and Nicole said Ian was cheating—Brandon’s still not sure if they were—or like the one time he tried to take hot yoga but it was all super-attractive men in their underwear doing weird bends, and he couldn’t keep up and eventually farted the most foul-smelling gas of his life and had to leave and never return.
Ollie stands back up, pointing at a rooftop. The dogs have started to weave their leashes around him again, but he seems not to notice. “There. But they should have had time to line it up if they were prepared. It was a hasty shot, like they were—”
“Are you okay?” Nicole interrupts.
Ollie shrugs, eyes a little glassy. “Just solving the case.”
“Let’s leave that to the professionals,” Nicole says.
“How did you know all that?” Brandon asks.
Ollie shrugs again. “Podcasts.”
“He’s stoned,” Nicole says, shaking her head. “And you’re drunk. Neither of you knows anything. Maybe that wasn’t even bone in the dog’s toes—”
“His name is Pete,” Ollie says.
“And maybe I’m losing my mind, too!”
Everyone is quiet for a moment.
“At least you got out of the office though,” Brandon says, trying to cheer her up. “Got some fresh air.”
Nicole sighs. “Go home, lie low. Call me if anything else turns up.”
“Like what?” Brandon asks.
“I don’t know, anything weird. A gun, a ransom note, a video telling you to keep your mouth shut. Anything that feels like it’s part of this.”
Brandon looks at Ollie, still not quite understanding. Ollie shrugs.
“Be careful,” Nicole says, walking away. “And don’t tell anyone anything.” She steps artfully through the net of leashes and vanishes down the street.
“Do you think she believed us?” Brandon asks. “I don’t know if I would.”
“I think she did enough. She seems worried. You don’t worry about something you don’t believe.”
Brandon nods. That sounds true. “Did I drag us into something scary?”
Ollie shakes his head. “Exciting.” He has a look in his eyes that Brandon hasn’t seen in a long time.
Not that slightly glazed one he usually does.
Something bigger, like when he was about to check something off his list. Something like his old self, which Brandon guiltily realizes Ollie maybe hasn’t been in a while.
“‘Exciting’? This seems bad.” Brandon wonders briefly if this is down to his taste in men, if the universe isn’t trying to tell him Jon is his true love, but rather the opposite—that he doesn’t have a true love waiting out there for him, and in fact his endless quest to fall in love is less likely than someone getting shot on the street. He laughs suddenly.
“What’s funny?” Ollie asks.
“Just that when I think I’ve finally met a great guy, someone’s head explodes.”
Ollie laughs. “That is pretty funny.” He claps Brandon on the back and then pulls the dogs away from the street.
Brandon goes after him. “Don’t worry,” Ollie says.
“Maybe Jon is the guy for you; maybe not. But what’s important right now is we find him and figure out who was shot, who shot him and why, who cleaned up the body, and what it has to do with Jon. ”
“I feel like you’re making one of those bulletin boards with red string in your mind,” Brandon says.
“I am!” Ollie says. “Once I drop off the dogs, I’m going to make one for real, too. There’s an office-supply store two blocks from the Strongs.”
Brandon sighs.
“Want to help?” Ollie asks.
Brandon thinks for a minute. He wants to find Jon, but he doesn’t want to do whatever all this is. Not yet. His head hurts, and he’s not sure if it’s a hangover or something else.
“Maybe later?” he says. “I gotta nap. Eat.”
“Oh, sure, sure, we’ll regroup later. Text me—no, call me. That’s what Nicole said. No evidence.” He grins and leads the dogs away, leaving Brandon standing alone at the entrance to the alley.
***
andon walks home in a daze, wondering how much of what he saw was real. His body feels shaky, like he hasn’t eaten, and all he can think of is Jon, next to him, holding his hand like they did in bed, whispering something in his ear: They’ll kill me next, then you.
Brandon shakes his head, dispelling the fantasy, or whatever the fantasy turned into.
He will not think, he decides. Much better to not think.
He counts his steps instead, all the way back to his apartment, where he finds Ian on the floor, dusting under a shelf, the apartment spotless except for half a bottle of bourbon on the counter.
Ian looks up as Brandon comes in. They’re wearing a pink wig. They sigh heavily. “You will not believe the day I’ve had.”