by Amy Lane
Jonah nodded again, wanting to talk some more but wishing he had something else, something better to add to the conversation.
Then Tommy eyeballed him again, assessingly, and said the thing that made Jonah’s day. “Besides—you’re a little thin, but you’re not bad. You got some pretty features. I think you just need to get out more. Man, I needed to get out of the public eye, but you might gotta get into it a little.”
And he couldn’t stop the grin that took over his face. “Well, Ethan and I are going to the movies with my little sister,” he said, trying not to jump up and down at this like a hyperactive schnauzer. Of course, he’d come outside to talk to Tommy in nothing but his work uniform, so that could have been the seeping chill of the funky day too.
Tommy did not seem nearly as excited as he was. “Yeah? You and Ethan? A date?” He said it cautiously, like that could be a bad thing, and Jonah’s excitement sort of deflated.
“No—I think it’s just friends.”
“Yeah, well, that’s probably best. Ethan, he’s got shit to sort, you know?”
“Well, yeah. I came out to tell you that he had even more shit to sort, remember?”
Tommy laughed a little, like he approved of Jonah’s mouth. “Yeah, I hear ya. I just….” His mouth pinched at the corners, and his eyes did too. For a moment, everything about Tommy was sad. “Okay, here’s the thing, Jonah. You seem like a sweet kid—and Ethan wouldn’t be going anywhere if he didn’t like you. But… you know, just don’t get too big-eyed around my friends, okay? They’re going to seem really fuckin’ awesome, and they are. They’re all fucking awesome. And gorgeous, and built, and hella sexy. And gay—’cause that seems to be your thing. But part of the reason we all hang together is that we’ve all got shit to sort. And it’s not run-of-the-mill shit, either. It’s like me and the throwing up. Dex and me are goin’ to dinner—Dex’ll probably pick health food, ’cause he knows that’s what I’m doin’. If it was me and anyone else I used to work with, they’d do the same thing, because they did hospital watch over me, and they were hella fuckin’ worried. But you, you didn’t see that—you just thought I was pretty. Well, all of us are that fucked up. And you might be thinkin’ whatever you’re doin’ with one of my friends is just, I don’t know, pizza—but it could be the thing that’s gonna fuck ’em over for life.”
Jonah tried to control the hurt constricting his chest. “No, I get it. You know, like, pretty people, pretty people problems—”
“No! Jesus, kid, don’t freak out like that. I mean fucked-up people’s problems, okay? I mean, I’m going out to eat and then I’m visiting my boyfriend in the fucking hospital because that’s just how bad life is right now. How many problems do you want? Because if you want ours, you’d better have a big fucking plate, okay?”
Oh. Okay. This Jonah could deal with. “Everyone’s got problems,” he said with dignity. “You just learn how to deal, that’s all.”
“Okay, then, don’t say I didn’t warn ya. Thanks for the message.”
“No problem.”
He took a step then to go back inside the store when a big black Lincoln Navigator pulled up close enough to the curb for the heat to be comforting, and Tommy wrinkled his nose.
The passenger door popped open and Jonah got a look inside to maybe the prettiest, most angelic-looking man he’d ever seen, the kind with blond hair, big blue eyes, and a lush Kewpie-doll mouth.
Tommy was giving him a ration of shit before he even got into the Navigator. “Jesus, isn’t this Psycho’s car? What the hell are you doing driving Psycho’s car?”
“I don’t know,” the angel-faced blond guy answered. “It’s a mystery. Who’s that?”
“Dex, this is Jonah. Jonah, Dex. Jonah and Ethan are going to the movies next week.”
Dex frowned. “Oo-kay,” he said, like it was something on his plate too now. “Nice to meet you, Jonah. I’ll probably say a real hi later. Get your ass in the car, Tommy, we got shit to do.”
Tommy hopped up into the Navigator and Jonah gave a halfhearted little wave as it pulled away. He wandered back into the store with considerably less enthusiasm than he’d had when he first talked to Tommy. Man, he knew the world was a bigger place than him and his problems, but wouldn’t it be nice if the world stopped rubbing his nose in that shit?
THE next day was Tommy’s first shift, and Jonah was appalled to learn that, with two years of junior college under his belt and some work references from his last job, Tommy would be his manager.
He saw the guy coming in with the nice little manager name tag and sputtered for a second, looking at Freddy with betrayal in his eyes. “But… but… but you couldn’t have asked me? Dammit, Freddy, I’m trying to save for college here!”
Freddy scowled at him and ran his hand through his water-combed blond hair. It was actually a good idea—Freddy had a widow’s peak that got deeper every month. Dislodging that perpetual water comb made it look sexy instead of balding and sad.
“Okay—great. Did you tell me, Jonah? I got someone with some qualifications applying for management and you, with no qualifications and, as far as I can see, no ambition whatsoever. Who am I going to promote?”
Jonah grimaced. “Yeah,” he muttered, suddenly embarrassed. “I should have said something. I guess I thought you’d see me working hard and—”
“And think you were going away to college after we trained you up,” Freddy said.
Jonah grunted. On the one hand, he had a point. On the other, three years of his life had earned him something, right? Even if it was just training up?
“Yeah, right,” he muttered. “Way to have your employees’ backs, Freddy. I’m gonna go slack off now since working my ass off gets me jack and shit, okay?”
Except Tommy didn’t really give him a chance to slack off. As soon as Jonah cleared the break room and the manager’s office, Tommy was there with a tense arm around his shoulders.
“Hey, Jonah—two things, okay?”
Jonah glared at him, trying hard not to hate him for something that was obviously not his fault. “Shoot.”
“The first is that I’m going to need your help. They gave me the manager gig, which is great because otherwise I can’t pay my bills and I’m back at the barforama, but I don’t know this store and you do. I asked Freddy if I could give someone a bonus for showing me the ropes, and Pokémon, I choose you!”
Jonah laughed a little, because the geek animation joke really did make him that easy. “What’s the other thing?”
Tommy reached into his pocket and pulled out a little envelope. “Ethan told me to give you these. His life got really weird, but he still wants to go see that movie, so he bought the tickets in case he can’t show. He said he asked—they’ll trade ’em in for a different time if that doesn’t work.”
Jonah looked at the tickets and grinned shyly. “That’s real nice,” he said and then looked at Tommy for confirmation. “That was real nice, right?”
Tommy grimaced. “Yeah, kid—it was great. He needs to go out and do something fun.”
Jonah glanced up from the tickets for a moment and saw the hesitation on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Not my business to say.”
And that was that. Jonah toured Tommy through the reptiles, and the fish, and the cat place they helped tend. He showed him where the cleaning supplies were, and the hand trucks, and gave him the buck-fifty tour, and Tommy paid attention, asked good questions, and was generally respectful the entire time. Jonah realized midtour that he’d lost his bitterness: he was just glad Tommy wasn’t stupid or an asshole or a stupid asshole. He was a smart guy, and he knew animals and even brands. When he told Jonah he’d worked in a pet-supply store in Boston for three years, Jonah was even more surprised—and ashamed. God, of all people, he should know you don’t get free handouts, right?
And that was brought home even more when they both saw Tommy’s angelic friend walk through the door. He looked tired and freshly showered and… fragile someho
w.
“Dex! Jesus—is it that time already?”
“Yeah—sorry, Tommy. We gotta get a move on if you’re gonna see him tonight. He was pretty wrecked.”
Tommy grimaced. “Yeah, well, join the club.”
“I went there and worked out this morning. He….” Dex looked pointedly at Jonah. “Is your shift done?”
Tommy nodded. “Thanks a lot, Jonah. I’ll go around with you tomorrow again—I’ll have Freddy add that to your check.”
Jonah knew a dismissal when he heard one, and he turned around and left. Before he did, he did hear the words “just started sobbing” and “they had to sedate him.” His last look of Tommy showed his face blotching hard and his jaw locked as he tried not to cry.
Fucked up, he’d said. Yeah. Jonah was starting to know the feeling.
But that didn’t stop him from bringing a change of clothes to the gym when he went with his sister that night. He asked for his one personal training session to set up a workout regime, and put himself through his paces.
When he was done, his arms ached, his chest ached—hell, his ass ached.
But Ethan was right—he felt more in control of his life than he had in a while.
Step 4—kicking the habit
DANNI looked like hell. Her face was thin and sallow and lined, her shaking fingers were nicotine stained, and her teeth were turning yellow. She took a drag off her cigarette and sneered as she blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. She was two years older than Ethan and she looked forty.
“Jesus, Evan, you couldn’t just sneak me a fucking tweak, could you? You had to tell the whole goddamned family? You have enough time between whoring your gay ass around and butt-fucking your buddies to stage a fucking intervention? Just go to fucking hell, okay?” She was on her second cigarette of the meeting, and that was the first thing she’d said. Ethan and the other girls sat around the horrible Formica table with rubber stops on all the corners and said things like, “Danni, are you okay? How they treating you? The facility doesn’t look bad. Seriously, it could be worse. Are the doctors nice?”
And until this moment, Danni hadn’t said a word. But apparently she’d endured more than enough solicitous concern in the shitty visiting room and decided to cut through the shit.
Ethan sort of liked the shit. It kept things civil. Now he cringed and tried desperately to crawl out of his own skin. “You had drugs in the house, Danni—the baby was in the house, and your filthy habit was there too.”
He didn’t want to look at Belladonna, Mina, or Allie, all of them in the visiting room of the rehab wing of the mental health institution. Dex had found the place for him, and he’d passed on the info to his sisters. What he hadn’t expected when he’d been talking to Jonah was the text from Danni herself, asking him to sneak her drugs.
He might have been kicked off the island, but he still felt responsible for the inmates left behind. He’d spent the past three days dealing with legal shit and his sisters and trying to get a mandatory blood test to make sure Danni hadn’t found some way to snort drain cleaner or something just to stay high.
She hadn’t—but that was probably because she was snorting bitterness instead.
Belladonna’s reassuring hand on his shoulder made him want to crawl into her arms. The last few days on Tommy’s couch had been sort of a revelation on how much he took for granted. Yeah, his mom was deep-end, and not a nice person, and she’d basically wrecked all their lives—but him and his sisters, they’d lived through that shit together. And now he wasn’t part of that anymore. No Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer, no Allie and the baby, no Belladonna giving him shit or Mina needing encouragement and sharing her music with him or even Danni, before the drugs, being vain and self-absorbed and playing bubblegum pop at all hours because a particular song made her feel good.
Nobody but the guys from Johnnies, whom he loved a lot, but he was afraid of them too. Their problems were as big as his, and he didn’t want to give them anything else to worry about. He’d been Tommy, terrified for someone he cared about who was stuck in a mental health institution. He’d been Chase, so needy and so helpless and dependent upon the love and kindness of the people around him to get through. He’d been Dex too, trying to take care of his tiny little makeshift family and having his efforts go horribly, horribly wrong. And he’d been Kane, worried about his sister’s baby and hoping that thing they all did, that thing with their bodies that filled them all in different ways, wasn’t going to destroy his chances to have that perfect trust aimed at him.
He’d felt all that, and it sucked, and he didn’t want to add poor Evan Costa’s problems to their big fat festering load of dirty laundry, because he’d had help, dammit. He’d had Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer for thirteen years, and that put him about thirteen years up on all the rest of his friends, and he needed to shoulder that weight. He would take their hugs, because those fed his soul, and whatever help they could give him, but he’d reached his limit talking about it. He’d thought he could talk about anything to anyone—Kane, Tommy, Dex—don’t hoard your demons, right? But he was through with that. His heart ached, and the mixture of pity and resentment and self-loathing coursing through his veins would probably turn black when exposed to air. Who wanted to know any of that shit anyway?
Which meant that he was going this bout with Danni and his sisters solo. About the only one who knew he’d even changed his plans at all was that sweet kid at PetSmart.
Ethan was really starting to like that kid.
He was pretty, for one—round gray eyes, curly hair, a surprising strength to a slender jawline. Ethan thought that if he worked for Johnnies, he’d probably start coloring his hair to make it really blond, and he’d definitely start working out, but that wasn’t what Ethan was looking at. He was looking at the innocent curiosity and the quiet sense of humor and the pure, awesome averageness of the guy.
He was everything Ethan had wanted to be growing up.
But even Jonah’s life wasn’t perfect, and Ethan needed to remember that, because hey, hello, his life right now? Had gone round the shitty side of the bend.
“So what?” Danni snapped, yanking his attention away from that rather ingenuous face in his memory.
Ethan pulled himself to the miserable present. “So what? Danni, Allie almost lost the baby!”
“Well, the kid’s better off somewhere else, you ever think of that?”
Ethan pulled in a breath, because that one hurt, and behind him, Allie delivered the final shot.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “Yeah. In fact, Devon and I agree on it. In fact, that’s something we wanted to talk to you and Evan about.”
Which was how Ethan found out his family was moving to Portland. Without him.
“I’m sorry,” Allie said, her face set in solid lines. She was crying—had been, in fact, since she’d started talking—and as Ethan stood up and tried to absorb the whole idea, he reached into his pocket for a little travel thing of Kleenex he’d brought, pretty much for all of them. She took it from his hand and then let out a little sob.
He hovered for a second, grabbing the back of the aluminum chair. “You’re all moving to Portland?” he echoed blankly, just to make sure he’d heard it all right.
Allie blew her nose and nodded. “Devon wants us back—wants his family. But I told him I couldn’t just leave Belladonna and Mina—”
“What about me?” Danni asked. The bitterness and hardened bitch was gone, and Ethan’s lost sister sat in her place. “You’re all moving to Portland without me?”
Allie shook her head. “You can come. Dev found a rehab there—it’s a real nice place, Danni, we looked. It’s like, celebrity rehab, right? He’ll foot the bill and everything, just….” She trailed off and looked at Danni unhappily.
“It’ll be a while before I can live with you,” Danni supplied bleakly. “If at all.”
Allie nodded. “Is that too much?”
Danni shook her head and reached over to Ethan with a shaking hand. “Give
me a tissue, Ev,” she said, and it sounded so natural, so… so Ethan’s sister, that he would have bought her a whole room full of them just to hear her be normal. He gave her a tissue instead, and as she reached for it, she grabbed his fingers in her shaking hand and squeezed. He squeezed back, wondering when his turn with the tissue would be. It was coming, he was sure.
“You could be someone brand-new,” Ethan said, thinking this was something she would need. “No one there would have to know about the drugs, or Mom, or about you in high school”—when she’d almost had a future. “You could be like a whole new Daniela.”
Danni raised her eyebrows and then looked down at her yellowed fingers, at her shaking hands. She looked up again, meeting Ethan’s eyes with something like honesty. The brittle mask was gone, and the vestiges of youth, and even of beauty, shone through with the hope.
“I’ll do it,” Danni said into the Kleenex. She’d dyed her hair blonde on black, but she had about two inches of brown roots at the base. Ethan wanted to stroke that sad, split, brittle hair back from her face, but he was still afraid. Afraid they’d reject him, afraid that besides just leaving him, they’d leave him with their contempt. “I’ll do it,” Danni repeated. “I’ll… hell… it’ll get me out of here. It’ll get me away from Mom. That’s all I wanted. I don’t want to be alone, but God, I don’t want to be with her either.”
“I’m going,” Mina said. She shrugged, her short, practical cap of hair hardly moving. “It’s not like I have a mind of my own anyway.” Mina had always tried the hardest to please Carolina and had been so afraid of doing the wrong thing—and had received the least attention of any of them.
“You’ll find one,” Ethan said, catching her eyes—warm brown; they all had the prettiest eyes—and smiling. “Once you’re away from her, you’ll find yourself. You will.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not going,” Belladonna said. She’d stood by Allie holding her hand as Allie explained that Devon wanted his family back, and would take her back if they could only move from the one person who had so damaged their relationship in the first place.
