Release

by Patrick Ness

  “He’s telling you and Dad this weekend. They’re going to get married and live in housing the school provides for families.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, then closed it, then opened it again. “I don’t like this kind of story, Adam. You think it’s very amusing, but in the end, it’s just a lie. And about your brother.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Adam said, “and in he drives.” For indeed, with timing so perfect he could have laughed, there was Marty’s truck, cresting the gully behind him.

  His mom was severe now. “This isn’t funny, Adam.”

  “No. I don’t suppose it is. I don’t know where he’s going to get the money to raise a baby and pay for his last year of school. Not with how strapped we are for cash right now.”

  They watched Marty pull to a stop. He looked out at their faces, trying to figure out how much trouble he was in. It was probably this that made it start to sink in for his mother.

  “Katya?” she almost whispered.

  “Nope,” Adam said, turning his music back on and heading inside before all the shouting started.

  He went straight to the shower, but within moments, he could hear them, even under the pouring water. His mother, mainly, wailing – there was really no other word for it – though possibly only because here was an opportunity to have a good wail rather than that she was genuinely that upset.

  Marty came and pounded on the door of the bathroom. “Why?” he shouted through it. “Why, bro?”

  Adam just laced his hands behind his neck and stuck his head under the torrent.

  Why indeed?

  His chest still burned, so much he couldn’t tell where the anger stopped and the wound began. Because there was always a wound, it seemed, kept freshly opened by a family who also kept saying they loved him.

  This was a day for crying, he knew that already, with Enzo leaving at the end of it. But not now. No. He wouldn’t.

  They sure did know where to shoot the arrow, though.

  Because what if they were right? What if there was something wrong with him? What if, on some level, way down deep inside, right down to the very simplest, purified form of who he was, what if he was corrupted? What if there was some tiny, tiny fault in the first building blocks of who he was, and everything since that first moment of life was just papering over an essential crack? And he was just a carapace built on a facade built on scaffolding and there was no real core to him, no real central worth? At all?

  Can I love? he thought. Can I?

  Can I be loved?

  He finished the shower, dried himself, and – making sure Marty had left – snuck down the hall to his bedroom. He changed into his uniform for the Evil International Mega-Conglomerate – polyester, of course, but with some actual tailoring; the Evil International Mega-Conglomerate didn’t want to make its customers uncomfortable by having them think they were being assisted by the poor – and picked up his keys, an outfit to change into at Linus’s, and his phone.

  He hesitated, then messaged, Sorry for telling them, bro. But you need to say sorry, too.

  He sent it and tapped another name. Marty got a girl pregnant, he messaged. Not even kidding.

  WHAT?!?! Angela messaged back. Did he even READ Judy Blume?

  Things are kinda hairy over here. My mom is wailing.

  You’re so lucky. My parents never get upset about anything.

  He smiled to himself, but only because he knew he was supposed to, that this was what he’d been asking for. He didn’t feel it, though.

  He waited and listened, trying to guess the right moment to slip out of the house without anybody seeing him.

  EVIL INTERNATIONAL MEGA-CONGLOMERATE

  The simple fact of it was that the Thorns were poorer than they looked. The house – chrysanthemums included – was owned by the church for tax reasons, and the Thorns, as the job’s best perk, paid no rent on it. But nor did they own it, so they couldn’t borrow against it to pay for things like Marty’s and, presumably, Adam’s upcoming tuition. Plus, the salary from The House Upon The Rock took into account the home as a benefit and was surprisingly not very much at all.

  The situation was apparently different at The Ark of Life, Frome’s largest evangelical church. It wasn’t a rival to The House Upon The Rock – for how could churches be rivals, perish the thought, we’re all doing God’s Work – but Big Brian Thorn had competitiveness down to his bones. His years at The House Upon The Rock had been one long, unsuccessful plan to topple The Ark in both attendance and holiness in the God’s Work team standings.

  But it was still Ark Pastor Terry “The Hair” LaGrande and his wife Holly-June who had four congregations of a thousand-plus each stretching over even Saturday night. It was Terry and Holly-June whose sermons on the Prosperity Gospel didn’t sound hollow because they drove a gold Mercedes. It was Terry and Holly-June who had three perfect brunette daughters, the eldest of whom had signed a recording contract with a contemporary Christian music label and was just about to release her first song, “Single Ladies (For Jesus)”.

  The Thorns did their best to have their externals match the LaGrandes. The internals – what with Adam’s mom being laid off last year as a linguistic analyst for the Defense Department in Seattle – were held together pay cheque by precarious pay cheque. Adam worked all the hours possible just to keep himself in fresh clothes and gas to put into the twenty-year-old Honda he’d found on craigslist for four hundred dollars.

  Which meant shifts in the massive stockroom of the Evil International Mega-Conglomerate under Wade Gillings, who still managed a stockroom, however massive, at thirty-eight, whose slacks were of alarming tightness, and who was way, way too handsy.

  “Thorn!” he yelled as Adam passed the closet that served as Wade’s insulting little office. A hand came out of the doorway to slap Adam’s left butt cheek.

  Adam closed his eyes. “We’ve had this discussion, Wade. I will go to human resources.”

  Wade, his moustache and feathered hair both several decades out of sync with anything modern, made a sad puppy-dog face and whimpered, faux tearfully, “I’m Adam Thorn and my pussy hurts.”

  “Jesus, Wade–”

  “You’re late.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Almost. I could write you up for that.”

  “I’ll only be late if you hold me here and stop me from clocking in.”

  Wade leered. “You want me to hold you, is that what you’re saying?”

  Adam turned to the pad on the wall installed with the time-keeping app, realizing too late he was keeping his back to Wade, who slapped Adam’s right butt cheek, saying, “Get to work. Karen and Renee are in housewares.”

  Adam sighed and clocked in. His phone buzzed as he made his way to the houseware section of the vast warehouse at the back of the main store.

  I’m sensing some lack of okayness about the ruckus at home, Angela had just messaged. Am I high?

  No, he messaged back. Just the usual.

  The usual hasn’t historically been good. We’ll make it better tonight tho.

  Everything okay? What do we need to talk about?

  All fine, worry hamster. Wade feel you up yet? Because, inappropriate.

  Adam had known Angela since the third grade, but they hadn’t become friends until their fifth-grade class took an overnight field trip to an observatory. It was Washington in October, so of course it was overcast, but the canny observatory owners had a planetarium as backup. Thirty ten-year-olds lay down their sleeping bags, heavily chaperoned by parents including Marieke Darlington, Angela’s mom. They watched the universe unspool above them. But that only took fourteen minutes, so the observatory just ran it again. After the fourth run-through, mutiny fomented and an observatory worker ran a “laser show” that hadn’t been on public view since the early eighties. Thirty drowsy ten-year-olds drifted off to the light-filled lullaby of Dark Side of the Moon.

  Adam’s dad texted the next morning to say he’d be an hour late picking
him up because Mrs Navarre had requested a faith healing for her rheumatoid arthritis. “Is that a real reason?” Angela’s mother had asked, but she offered him a ride home anyway. Adam and Angela sat quietly in the back seat as Mrs Darlington, a good ten years older than Adam’s own mother, did most of the talking via the rear-view mirror.

  “Did you have a good time?” she asked. “I mean, I know you didn’t see any proper space stuff, but the planetarium show was nice, maybe not the last three times, and the laser show, my goodness, that took me back. I remember sneaking into one as a teenager in Holland with my sister and the pot smoke was so heavy, the lasers were almost 3-D. That’s when your aunty Famke met your uncle Dirk, Angela, and might even be the night she got pregnant with your cousin Lucas.”

  “Mom,” Angela said, putting her face in her hands.

  “What?” She glanced at Adam in the mirror. “I’m sorry, Adam, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “You didn’t embarrass me,” Adam said. Quite the contrary, Mrs Darlington talked like no other mother he’d ever met. He wanted her to keep doing it at length.

  “My parents believed,” she continued, “that baby talk and avoiding topics was almost child abuse. That you’d end up raising swaddled little morons to send out into the world to be eaten alive. I preferred it when adults expected me to reach up to them rather than always leaning down to me. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I do, actually,” Adam said, which was how he spoke, even at ten. He saw Angela give him an astonished side-eye from underneath her hands. “I think my mom and dad would still rather not reach up.”

  Mrs Darlington laughed out loud at exactly the same moment a truck ran a stop sign and hit Mrs Darlington’s car just behind Angela, spinning it across the intersection and over an embankment, down which it rolled sideways a complete circle and a half, coming to rest on its roof in what was luckily a very shallow creek.

  Mrs Darlington was badly injured: a broken arm and hip surgery kept her out of farmwork for nearly a year. But in the back seat, tiny Angela and prepubescent Adam had been small enough to be shaken in their seat belts as the car tumbled but without having been struck by anything worse than a loose textbook that knocked out one of Angela’s side teeth and blackened Adam’s eye.

  Adam remembered the seconds after they came to a stop, before Mrs Darlington regained consciousness and tried not to scare the children by moaning too loudly, when he and Angela were side by side, hanging upside down, still buckled in, blinking in shock. She had looked over to him in the sudden violent silence and reached out for his dangling hand.

  She asked him, very seriously, “Is there homework?”

  “I did mine after breakfast,” he said back, “when Jennifer Pulowski was having that meltdown about her parents’ divorce.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Angela said, still stunned. “Me, too.” That’s when she turned back to the front seat and said, her voice breaking, “Momma?”

  Adam and Angela had been firm friends ever since. They’d nearly died together, after all, which seemed a solid basis. He kind of loved the Darlingtons. He definitely loved Angela. If you could choose your family, he’d definitely choose them. And maybe he already had. He looked at his phone again and wondered about her as he found Karen and Renee in housewares.

  “All I know is,” Karen said, scanning the label for some non-stick frying pans, “my dad said that if I ever got near a meth lab, he’d send me to live with my grandmother in Alaska. Alaska. There are supposed to be twenty-three of these.”

  “Please,” Renee said, nodding at Adam as she saw him approaching. “Like black people ever do meth. Six, twelve, eighteen, there’s twenty-two.”

  “The black people in Alaska probably do,” Karen said, typing in the stock loss. “The ones who aren’t my grandmother.”

  “Both of them?” Renee said. “Hey, Adam. Why is this a three-person job?”

  “I shelve and unshelve,” he said. “Wade wants housewares and guns done by this afternoon.”

  “Wade wants to look at your ass in that uniform, is what he wants,” Karen said, scanning a slightly larger non-stick frying pan. “This says we’re supposed to have 27.2. How can you have point two of a frying pan?”

  “How can you scan point two of a frying pan?” Renee said.

  Adam took the scanning wand, whacked it hard with his hand, and handed it back. Karen scanned again. “Twenty-seven.” She looked up, deadpan. “Thank you for whacking my wand, Adam.”

  “Any time.” He started unshelving the next section of housewares, which was every variety of saucepan.

  Karen and Renee were cousins, in Adam’s year at school, inseparable convention-going geeks, and worked every shift together. One time they came in pre-con cosplay as two-fifths of a black Jem and the Holograms under their uniforms. Wade didn’t even notice.

  “You guys talking about the murder?” Adam asked.

  “Yeah,” Karen said, the smaller of the two. “Renee knew Katherine van Leuwen in Girl Scouts.”

  “A million years ago, when she was still Katie,” Renee said, taller but quieter around anyone else besides Karen. She had the beginnings of insulin injection scars on her torso. She’d shown him once. “She was nice. Kinda lost, though. Even then.”

  “Little girls aren’t naturally lost,” Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. “Someone makes them that way.”

  “You sound like Angela,” Adam said, reshelving frying pans.

  “More people should sound like Angela.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  “I get nightmares about being strangled,” Renee said. “You know I can’t even wear scarves.”

  “She really can’t,” Karen said. “Fire would be worse, though. Fire would be way worse.”

  “Fire’s faster. You know for a long time you can’t breathe before you get strangled.”

  They worked in silence for a minute while they all considered this. Adam reshelved the counted saucepans and unshelved the uncounted bundles of cutlery, which weighed a ton.

  “Do black people really not do meth?” he asked.

  “Nope,” Karen said. “That’s just stupid crackers out in the woods.”

  She stands in the backyard of a cabin. It’s quiet, closed in by trees on three sides, a gravel drive and a second cabin on the fourth. The cabins are long unused; the grass reaches her knees.

  But there is yellow police tape around this one.

  She starts a slow walk, pressing down the grass until she comes across newer tracks near the front, left by many feet, into and out of the small front door.

  “I know this place,” she says, to no one, to the faun, who she cannot see but who watches from the edge of the trees.

  This is the lake cabin, she thinks, one of the cheap ones, across a forlorn road and away from the lake shore. One that used to be serviced by the convenience store she’s just come from. One that was closed around the same time the convenience store was.

  But one that was still used, illegally.

  “How do I know these things?” she says, frowning to herself.

  The faun wishes to tell her, tell her that she is caught, his Queen, snagged and bound by a frightened soul. He needs to tell her that she is in danger of becoming lost forever, but he cannot. He can only look at the sun, less than an hour from its midday peak. The faun is worried. The faun is very worried.

  She crosses the grass to the front of the cabin. Hesitating only for a second, she steps up, onto the porch, pulling aside the yellow tape. The front door is open, and she pauses there.

  She can smell violence. Terrible things have happened here. Not once, but many times, over many years. The despair of humans. Their fear. The violence they do themselves.

  “The violence we do ourselves,” she whispers.

  An anger rises. She pushes the door, sudden, fast, so hard it falls off its hinges. She storms in, her bare feet raising burn marks on the floor, whiffs of smoke vanishing as she steps. “You are here! You are here!
You would do this to me?”

  She stops in the middle of the room. She is alone, wonders why she thought she wasn’t.

  But it was the past, of course.

  “I know this place,” she says once more.

  She kneels and touches a bare spot on the knotty wooden floor, cleared among the detritus of junkies: food wrappers, used toilet paper, syringes, and a stench that’s almost a presence in itself.

  “It was here.” She turns suddenly to the faun, now in the doorway himself. “Wasn’t it?”

  He starts for a moment. “Yes,” he says, “it was, my lady, can you–”

  But she does not see him. She is not speaking to him.

  “It was here,” she says again.

  He watches as she places her palm flat against the floorboards. Smoke rises from where she burns it.

  “This is where I died.”

  “You going to Enzo’s thing tonight?” Renee asked him, shyly.

  Karen and Renee didn’t officially know about Adam and Enzo, no one officially did, maybe not even Adam and Enzo, but they knew it in the unofficial way everyone who had been even slightly observant knew (and not wilfully blind like certain parents he could name). No one under twenty seemed to care, but they weren’t the ones who ruled his life at home.

  “Yeah,” Adam answered. “You guys?”

  “Yep,” Karen said. “I’m not a big fan of the lake, though. Too cold.”

  “No one’s going to swim.” Renee looked mildly terrified. “Are they?”

  Adam said he didn’t know. “Angela and I are bringing pizzas from her work, though.”

  “Why?” Karen asked, scanning end tables, which was easy, as there were only ever one or two. Renee and Adam didn’t have to do anything, so everyone was taking their time.

  “Why?” Adam repeated. “Why not?”

  “His mom’s a doctor. It’s not like they can’t get their own son’s pizza.”