by Holly Black
“Is that why you need a hug?”
“No. Where’s your dad?”
“In the sanctum sanctorum, I think.”
He peered around the living room. “That’s why you’re out here.”
“Well, the TV’s bigger. But yeah. The sound effects bother him when he’s trying to work.” My bedroom shared a wall with Big Dad’s office.
“Max,” Little Dad said. He sounded really serious, like he was about to tell me all the bad things I was trying not to imagine about him not having a job anymore. “That’s why we’re here, for you to bother. Don’t you dare ever forget that.”
Then he hugged me because maybe I needed a hug. “Dad,” I said, “does Dad know? He doesn’t make very much money.”
“Baby boy,” my dad said, “you’re not allowed to worry. That’s the rule. First, I know this is going to come as a shock: You—are—not—a—luxury. Second: You are not a luxury like broadband that we could ever do without. Third: You are not a luxury. Fourth: I got a decent severance package and I’ll file for unemployment. We’ve got some money socked away. Nothing’s going to change right away except I’ll be under your and your dad’s feet all the time. Maybe you can teach me how to play your game.”
Maybe Big Dad’s ears were burning. When I looked up, he was standing across the room looking kind of sleepy and content like he’d just woken up from a nap. “Actually,” he said, “I’m expecting two rather substantial cheques. And I’ve been agitating at your dad for I don’t know how long to get the hell out of this town, so I take this as an opportunity.”
Which meant he knew before Little Dad came home. Which meant he could have prepared me. Which meant trust issues were all ready to raise their heads except Big Dad came around the back of the sofa and plunked down on my other side. The cushion inflated under me and Little Dad so we bounced but Big Dad’s arm was already around our shoulders holding us down.
“So … whaddya think about the whole summer at the lake ’stead of just a measly week? Then, if it comes to it, which it won’t, we can put that place on the market.”
No, further back.
See, what happened was Ramiro, my mom’s boyfriend, an extremely handsome man who didn’t have a real job so he mostly worked out a lot, decided the way I looked at him when he admired himself in the mirror in just his underpants was queer. Which it was, but that’s no excuse. When I got out of the hospital, the group home didn’t go so well because the other boys knew why I didn’t have a family anymore. The records were sealed and my name had never been in the papers because I was a minor but just try to keep that kind of rumor quiet. Then Stuart and Esteban (mostly Stuart because he had more free time) descended from the heavens like shining angels to tell me they liked me and wanted to get to know me better. I still kind of halfway hoped my mom would get it together because she was what I knew and, you know, my mom. But during a mandated and supervised trip to Mickey D’s she clutched the new gold crucifix around her neck and said in the steady voice that meant Don’t you doubt that I am clean now, “I can’t help loving you, Aaron, but I can’t forgive you either. You’re evil—evil. I signed the papers.”
Evil? I thought back at her even though maybe I believed it but not right that minute because she was the evil one in that Mickey D’s. Chewed-up burger and acidy Coke gurgled in the back of my throat and I asked my case-worker to take me back to the home right away. The look in my mom’s eyes when I got up made me feel sick. I didn’t deserve to feel that. I cried later.
My mom didn’t want me but the big guy and the little guy, Stuart and Esteban, they did. I didn’t ask them to come to the funeral. I didn’t even tell them, they just came. I didn’t know if I was crying for a dead mother who never took care of me or the two sweet men knocking down every roadblock the agency and the state threw up just to give me another hug and tell me I was special and good.
I felt too good to believe I was happy the afternoon the state said I could live full time with Stuart and Esteban—formal adoption would take another year but this counted. I was sitting in my new bedroom with the video-game system and all the books nobody but me had ever read and a closetful of clothes I’d chosen for myself. I got called out to the living room and presented with cake and pomegranate juice (I didn’t really like it). Stuart said, “You certainly don’t have to if it’d make you uncomfortable and of course it’s not official yet, but it would make us both very happy for you to call us your dads.” He was grinning and getting ready to go teary—I knew that about him already.
I said, “There’s two of you.” You know that was the weirdest, best part for a queer fourteen year old who’d never had one. “I’m too big to call you Daddy and Papa.” I pointed at six-foot-six Stuart and said, “Big Dad,” then at five-eight Esteban: “Little Dad. That work?”
Big relieved grins, some snuffling, some cake. I said, “How about me? Can I have a new name too?”
Forward.
There was a breeze but it was hot in the back yard. I hadn’t seen Rory. Figured he was with his friends who I didn’t enjoy spending time with because they made it clear I didn’t belong. That was fine. He’d known them longer than me. I didn’t know where Little Dad was—Big Dad was in the attic where he’d set up his office, fighting with his deadline. The bigger of those two cheques he’d been expecting was the first instalment of the advance for a new book. He complained about it, in a happy, deranged sort of way: the first book he’d ever sold to a real New York publisher (scare quotes), the first book he’d ever sold from a proposal before it was written, the first book that wasn’t a novel and that would come out under his real name. It was going to be a memoir when he finished it. About me.
About him and Little Dad and getting married the minute it was legal and wanting a kid together and all the trials of going about getting one and the first year of living with him. That kid. Me.
I didn’t like thinking about it. I sure didn’t want to read it, though both dads told me I’d have to eventually so if there was something I absolutely didn’t want the world knowing about me I could try to argue Big Dad out of including it.
Until then I wasn’t going to worry about it (of course I was), but it had made me curious. So I was lying in the backyard hammock wearing my reading glasses—they figured out I needed them at the group home—with Little Dad’s e-reader loaded up with a bunch of Big Dad’s earlier books.
Not Stuart Ackles-Echeverría’s books. Samantha Argyll wrote girl-boy romances. Sebastian Albrecht wrote boy-boy romances. S.S. Aldershot wrote paranormal romances, mostly girl (witch, weretigress, fairy)-boy (vampire, werewolf, fairy) but the audience liked edgy so S.S. could go a little polymorphous around the edges. Serena Allen wrote BDSM Girl-boy and Boy-girl romances but Little Dad made sure there weren’t any of those on the e-reader before he let me borrow it. Sidney Anderson wrote horror stories and dark fantasy.
Big Dad wrote straight-up gay porn too, but I wasn’t allowed to know what name(s) he used for that. He said he wanted to try girl-girl romance someday just for the heck of it, and maybe girl-boy-girl and boy-girl-boy, but there were only so many hours in a day and only so many little presses adventurous enough for that kind of thing.
I’d whipped through one of Samantha Argyll’s—didn’t make much impression—and one of Sebastian Albrecht’s—The Camera’s Eye, about a fashion photographer and a male model. It was pretty dumb but kind of hot, and sweet at the end when they finally figured out they needed to be together and out of the business. Then, for a change of pace, I decided to try Sidney Anderson. I’ve never really enjoyed scary stories (real life’s plenty scary enough), but maybe Go Down That Road was dark fantasy instead of horror—Big Dad tried to explain the difference to me once—and I could always stop reading if it threatened to make me unhappy.
Not scared or unhappy. Quivery. I didn’t appreciate the cavalcade of dead animals. It gave me a turn when the smoke-demon possessed Kev because I’d come to really like him (I thought he was gay) but maybe he w
ouldn’t be made to do terrible things, or people would realize it was the demon and not blame him, and I was hoping real hard the plan he was working on to get the demon out of his skin would work. The pig-monster was gross, just gross.
Then something like a pig-monster snuffled at my ass hanging low above the lawn and I squealed and almost threw the e-reader and myself out of the hammock—and Peony yapped and Rory laughed.
“Goddamn!” I yelled, hurting Peony’s feelings so she whimpered and I had to get down and hug her till she felt better and kissed half my cheek with her slobbery tongue and knocked my glasses off. Rory was still laughing. “You scared the hell out of me!” I said.
“Sorry—sorry.” Rory steadied the swinging hammock and sprawled into it, making it swing again. “Whatcha doing?”
“I was reading.”
“Oh.” Pulling the e-reader out from under him, Rory just glanced at it, then said, “Oh, hey, does this thing get internet?”
I gave Peony’s ear a last tug and stood up. “No, it’s just a reader. Why?”
“Never mind. I’ll show you later.”
Wait a minute.
One afternoon, Fitz got out. My dads’ ten-year-old tortoiseshell cat they’d had almost as long as they’d been together. She’d been peeved when I moved in but got over it, to the point that now and then I was an acceptable lap. Not a friend. Fitz didn’t have friends, but she tolerated me about as well as she did the dads. Then we put her in a cage in the car for an hour and a half, pissing her right off, and took her away to live in a scary, different place. She spent two days under Big Dad and Little Dad’s bed. Then she got interested in the windows and the outside world because she’d always lived in the city on the third floor and didn’t know what nature was except maybe a pigeon flying by. Little Dad made sure to tell me repeatedly she wasn’t allowed out. Very bad to let her out. Keep your eyes open when you go out. Latch the door every time. In the yard or on the deck, sometimes I’d catch her staring through the screen like I was nature, a squirrel or a bluejay.
I’d gone out for a walk in the woods.
Okay, alone. It was a thing I did sometimes, a nothing thing. There was a little clearing I’d found, real private, no poison ivy. I’d go there and take off all my clothes and think dirty thoughts about some guy I liked to look at (okay, Rory) and beat my meat.
So I’d gone for my walk (scare quotes). For some reason, all those sacrificial small animals from Go Down That Road were on my mind so my beat-off session hadn’t been as satisfactory as usual. I was almost home, almost right into the back yard, when I heard Little Dad swearing. “Goddamn, goddammit, fucking cat! Stuart! Max!”
So I started running, thinking, Oh, oh no—I didn’t—
Just as I burst through the trees, all ready to start apologizing and begging, Rory called from somewhere, “Got her!” and he came through the trees on the other side, holding Fitz up by the scruff of her neck. For a second I almost hated him. For a second I thought he was grinning at me. “I’ve got her, Stevie. It’s all right. Well—” He held her out farther away from his body. “Well, except for the bird.” Fitz hung limp from his fist, her eyes blazing like all the devils in hell and a handful of brown feathers in her mouth.
“God damn it.” Little Dad swooped over to Rory (Rory was taller than my dad) and grabbed her and turned around. “Bloodthirsty little fucker—first time she ever gets out.” And Little Dad saw me.
I was standing there. Just standing there. Crying. “I—” I tried to say.
“Max.” Little Dad saw me, and I knew he was going to say terrible things I deserved having said to me because what if it wasn’t a dead bird? What if it was dead Fitz? My tummy hurt bad but I held it in. But Little Dad’s voice didn’t sound terrible. “Max. Wait—just … wait.” And he ran up onto the deck hollering for Big Dad, and I heard the screen door slam and something something lock her in the bathroom and get your ass outside and I was still crying, I couldn’t see I was crying so hard, and my dads were going to send me away and I deserved it because I’m evil—evil. Like my mom said before she died.
“Max.” Little Dad grabbed me really hard. “Max. Baby.” I’m almost taller than him but he was hugging me so hard. “Baby boy, it wasn’t you. You didn’t let her out, it was me, goddammit, Max! It wasn’t your fault. Nothing’s your fault, baby, you never did anything wrong, anything. Listen to me, Max, please, please, please stop crying.”
“Please stop,” Big Dad said, and he was hugging me too. “Don’t cry, Max, Maxie, you don’t have to cry, it’s nothing, you’re everything, Maxwell Echeverría-Ackles, we love you so much, please don’t cry, you’re everything, everything in the world.”
My dads.
My dads.
My dads.
They brought me indoors and put me to bed and gave me ginger ale. My stomach started to feel a little better. Big Dad sat on the floor by my bed holding my hand while Little Dad made an emergency call to the doctor’s office in Boston, and then Little Dad gave me the extra meds and held my glass while I swallowed. He climbed over me and leaned up against the headboard so I could lean against him, and they stayed with me until the meds knocked me under, telling me my name again and again and again.
Later that night, after Fitz let me stroke her and call her a wicked bad girl, Little Dad said like it had just occurred to him, “Actually, I think it was Rory left the door unlatched, not me.”
Back up again.
Maybe twenty minutes’ walk from the house, along the lakeshore where there weren’t any other summer cabins and then a ways back into the woods, Rory started leading me up a slope that got steep fast. Peony wasn’t with us this time. I was out of breath when we reached the top of a cliff so high I could see the far shore of the lake, not just the hills beyond. Rory shuffled closer to the edge than I wanted to get, looked down, looked back. “Jump?”
“You’re kidding!”
“No.” I guess he saw I was about to freak because he came a couple steps back toward me. “The water’s deep enough, it’s safe, really truly. Scary as fuck, that’s the point, but safe. I’ve done it three times this summer already.”
“No.” My heart was hammering loud as thunder and he was about to argue at me, maybe call me names, which I didn’t want. Not because I wasn’t a yellow coward. Because if Rory called me a coward I couldn’t be his friend. I was thinking real hard. “Alone? Were you alone those three times?”
“Of course not. Bunch of my friends.” Who weren’t yellow like me.
“Anybody ever hurt themself?”
“No—I don’t know. Not when I did it.” He cocked his head, like maybe I was getting my point across.
“It’s just the two of us. If we both jump, if we both get hurt, who’s going to go get help?”
“You really don’t want to do it, do you?” He came back to me, away from that dangerous precipice.
“I really don’t.”
He punched my shoulder. “I really do.” He smiled like it didn’t matter and punched me again. “Okay, you be sensible and go down to the bottom and watch me. Here, take my phone—” He handed it to me. “If I break something, call my mom. Take my shirt.”
When he pulled it off, his abs made me catch my breath. “You sure about this?”
“Yes, indeedy.” Tilting his head again, he got a sly grin. “When you see me survive it, you’ll want to do it too.” (Not effing likely.) “Go on.”
Every minute or two of my clamber down Rory would yell to ask if I was there yet. When I was, not the bottom of the cliff but on some rocks along the shore where I could see him up at the top, he yelled and waved and I waved back. I felt a little sick. He backed up and disappeared. Then he came running, running right over the edge like Wile E. Coyote in a cartoon. My heart stopped and turned to ice when he launched himself into all that air, hollering, arms wheeling, and then he fell. Then there was a big huge splash and it was over.
When his head popped up to the surface I could breathe again. “Whoo!�
� he shouted and started dog-paddling toward me. Still ten or fifteen feet out, he called, “I bet you didn’t take any pictures.”
“Oh.” I felt stupid.
“’Sokay. Forgot to ask you.”
He was climbing out, and I was breathing because he was safe and cheerful, and something sloppy and wet smacked my chest and flopped to my feet. I looked down. Rory’s board shorts. I looked up. He was climbing out of the water naked except for his sneakers. I must have looked stupid—he guffawed. “They came undone when I hit the water. Easier to kick ’em all the way off.”
I looked at his dick. Of course I did. He saw me look and his hand went down. Not to hide it. Fluff it up a bit because chilly water’d made it tiny. But pretty. Looking away, I crouched for his shorts to toss them back, but he said, “Just us dudes, dude,” and kept coming like it wasn’t a thing for him to be waggling his pretty dick at me. He took the shorts from my stupid hand, squeezed some of the water out, spread them out on the rock, and sat down to pull his shoes off. He turned them upside down to drain. I was standing there like an idiot. After a moment, he slapped my leg. “You ready to try it?”
“No.” Don’t start, I thought.
“Okay,” he said.
I sat down two feet away, looking at the lake, not at Rory, thinking, It’s time, Aar—Max, but not sure if it was time to say I’m gay, you know—like my dads or I think you’re cute, so I didn’t say anything. Maybe it was time to strip my own shorts off and jump in the water, skinny-dipping like country boys did in books—just us dudes, dude—but I didn’t do that either.
Eventually, Rory put his shorts back on, took his shirt and phone back, stuffed feet into sneakers, and we headed home, him squelching loudly, me tingling.
What was that.
We were sitting on the dock (jetty) below his house again. Me and Rory and Peony—Peony was lying between us, her tummy warm under my hand, snorfling in her sleep. I don’t know what made me say it. I wish I hadn’t. “You never talk about your dad.”
