by Callie Hart
“Book? What book? Fuck the book.” He laughs quietly. “This is big, Sil. You’re so grown up, way too grown up, but this is bigger than you. It’s definitely bigger than Alex. Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe having me there will help.”
My eyes prick, burning the way they’ve been burning for the past week, every time I think about the knock on the door that echoed through Alex’s apartment. I’m barely holding onto the strands of my sanity right now. I’ve unwittingly found myself participating in an unwinnable game of tug-of-war, and every second I have to fight to keep my hands wrapped around the rope, to keep pulling, to drag myself back over an imaginary line in the sand, where I might be able to think and breathe and exist without feeling like I have a knife plunged into the fragile meat of my heart.
Sometimes minutes, even hours will pass in a day, and the pain will dim. I won’t forget. I can’t forget. But, for brief snatches of time, my exhausted nerves become numb, anesthetized and I trick myself into thinking I can handle this. That I might finally have my shit together. And then someone will say something about Alex, or Ben, or offer me help, and the rope will tear through my hands, drawing blood, dragging me off my feet and pulling me into the chaos again.
And Alex…god, Ben wasn’t even my brother. It goes without saying that Alex is a train wreck. I know it’s stupid, he’d never do it, but I get scared at night, when I’m alone and he’s sent me away, that I’m going to wake up to a text message telling me that he’s fucking killed himself.
Dad doesn’t mean any harm—he’s only offering to come with us because he loves me more than life itself, and he cares about Alex, too—but his kindness has inadvertently taken me out at the knees. I close my eyes, blowing out a steady breath, pleading with myself.
Don’t.
Don’t do it.
Don’t you fucking dare, Silver Parisi.
You are not going to fucking cry.
I’ve had to reapply my make-up twice already; if I start crying again now, I’m still going to be bloodshot and sniffling when I arrive to pick Alex up, and I can’t. I can’t fucking do that to him. He’s been strong for me so many times before. I need to be strong for him now.
Absently, I collect the black headband that’s clipped over the top of my mirror, running my fingers over the cluster of small black silk flowers that adorn it. My throat throbs as I look up, finding my own eyes in the reflection. I don’t look at Dad. If I do, I’m definitely going to lose my shit. “Alex didn’t even want me to go. I think…” God, damn it. This is so hard already. How the hell am I going to get through today? How am I ever going to be able to look my boyfriend in the eye again without bursting into tears?
Not too long ago, he said something that stuck with me. “I can’t bear for anything to happen to you. I can’t see you hurt and not feel it. I can’t see you suffer and not have something wither and die inside me. I can’t see you wounded and not feel like I’m fucking failing you.” The emotion in his voice had startled me. I could see that he really meant what he was saying, that he was suffering because I was suffering, but I thought it was a gesture, some token of affection. An attempt on his part to try and shoulder some of the misery that was crushing me. I understand now, though. I wasn’t entirely wrong; I want to take on the crippling burden that’s grinding Alex into the dirt, but this feeling inside me is more than that. It’s worse. I feel like I’m dying. I feel like I am failing him, because nothing I can do or say will ever temper this pain. Whatever measure a soul is weighed in, I feel like mine is seeping away, piece by piece, ounce by ounce, whisper by whisper. Every second that Alessandro Moretti has to live with the knowledge that his little brother is dead, I feel like I will die from the hurt of it.
From the moment I met him, Alex has been the light that has lifted the shadows. He’s been the strength that’s held me up. He’s been a sheer force of nature, incomprehensible in his complexity, who has astonished and amazed me at every turn. When his mouth crooks into that lopsided, suggestive smirk, I fall in love with him all over again, and I can’t bear the thought that perhaps he’ll never be able to smile again.
If Max died…
Christ. No. No, no, no. I can’t entertain the thought, not even for a second. There’s no room left inside me for any more hurt, theoretical or otherwise. I’m already brimming over, too full and swollen with grief to house one drop more.
Steeling myself, I place the band of black silk flowers onto my head, quickly arranging my hair around it. I look so fucking normal. Even with the bruises, I still look like me. How is that even possible, when I feel like I’ve morphed into someone completely not myself? “I appreciate it, Dad. I really do,” I say stiffly. “But Alex is… he’s…”
What is he, exactly? Traumatized? Mourning? I can’t tell. I’ve been searching for all of the usual signs of grief a normal person might exhibit when they lose someone close to them, but it’s been hard to pin-point signs of anything with Alex. He seems empty. Null. Hollowed out. When he looks at me, he doesn’t see me. He stares through me, into some dark, forbidden void. He was sucked into that void a week ago, a place where I can’t follow after him, and he hasn’t been able to find his way back out ever of it since. I’m beginning to think, beginning to worry, that he might not want to surface from the inky black depths of it.
“Okay. You know him best. If it has to be just the two of you, then it has to be just the two of you. But...”
I turn around and face my dad. “But you’re worried about me? You’re scared that this will be the final thing that sends me spiraling into a nervous breakdown?”
He huffs out a laugh on an exhale, looking down at his feet. “Nah. You’re stronger than the rest of us combined. A wrecking ball couldn’t put a dent in you, kid.”
He’s playing. I know this, because I know him well, and I also know that he is worried about me. “All you need to do is call, Silver,” he says. “You know I’ll come. You know I’ll be there if either of you change your minds.”
My chest pinches tightly, not with pain this time, but with love. To look at my father, you wouldn’t peg him as the knight-in-shining-armor type. His glasses are always just a fraction lopsided, the lenses perpetually smudged by fingerprints. His hair typically looks a little wild, his waves refusing to lay flat and be tamed. The beard he’s been sporting of late isn’t the well-manicured hipster kind that he believes it to be, nor is it the beard of a woodcutter or some sort of cabin-dwelling lumberjack. It’s the kind of beard a writer grows when he’s been crouched over a laptop keyboard, hammering away, living off caffeine and bagels for six months, trading in every spare second of the day in return for a handful of precious words.
That violent, hard spark inherent in many other men doesn’t exist within him. It isn’t in his nature to lose his temper or throw his fists, which is why it’s all the more impressive when he leaps to the defense of those he loves without a second thought to what it might cost him, or how much it might hurt. I know what he was planning with Alex the night Jacob Weaving came to the house and took me. We haven’t spoken about it, but the truth has lain heavily between us all the same. He went with Alex to hurt the bastard who hurt me. He went to draw blood…and he went there carrying a gun.
Cameron Parisi, the architect.
Cameron Parisi, the novelist.
Cameron Parisi, the father.
Cameron Parisi, the would-be executioner.
“Love you, Dad,” I croak out, rummaging in my jewelry box. I’m already wearing a pair of simple gold studs and the fine gold chain that Gram gave me for my birthday last year. I don’t need any more bling. I just need to be busy. I can’t stand straight-backed and motionless and tell my father that I love him without falling to pieces.
“Love you, too, kiddo.” His voice is soft and warm, and I feel like I’m floating, like I could fall into his words and be cushioned by them, protected and safe and eight-years-old again. “All right. Well…it’s nearly time. The car’ll be here in five. I’ve already made sure the driver kn
ows you’re stopping at Henry’s on the way.” My father’s feet make shushing sounds as he crosses the carpet in his socks. He kisses the back of my head lightly, laying a steadying hand on my shoulder, and I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. I’m so grateful for him. So grateful, lucky and blessed that I have him here, ready for me to lean on if I need him. Having a father like mine is basically like winning the lottery. I’m so fucking lucky to have him in my life…which only serves to remind me that right now, the guy I love is alone, without either of his parents to lean on.
The engine of the black Lincoln town car purrs like a cat as we glide across Raleigh. The world outside is crisp and white, shrouded with snow. The sky is a leached duck egg blue, practically devoid of all color. In the front seat, the driver adjusts his trim chauffeur’s hat and tries to make eye contact with me in the rear-view mirror. I avoid doing so at all costs, however my carefully crafted blank stare out of the window doesn’t deter him. “Well, then? What you got planned? A party? Some sort of girly sleepover?”
My eyes snap up and to the left, locking with his watery blue irises in the small expanse of mirror. “I’m sorry? What?”
The driver—now that I’m looking at him, I see he’s older than I originally thought—grins at me. “Yeah, y’know. New Year’s Eve? Bullshit if you high school kids don’t celebrate New Year’s anymore. I know you do. I was cleaning puke out of this car for a week after last year. Gotta say, that get-up’s a little depressing for a party, though. Figured you kids were all still into neon and shit. Looks like you’re going to a fucking funeral.”
I almost laugh. Almost. I’ve clean forgotten that it’s New Year’s Eve.
The car was Dad’s idea. He didn’t think I should have to drive today, and he knew Alex wouldn’t be capable, so he forked out for a professional driver to transport us to the church and then on to the cemetery. Clearly whatever agency Dad used hasn’t passed on the particulars of today’s journey to their driver.
I’ll break into pieces if I have to fill him in. I lean my head against the window beside me and the glass is cold and wet, anchoring me into place. “Yeah, well. You know how it goes,” I mutter. “Fashion’s a fickle thing. One week it’s electric pink. The next, it’s black lace and memento mori.”
“What’s that? Latin?” He grunts. “You Raleigh kids are fancy. Didn’t teach us no Latin at Bellingham.” All of a sudden, he doesn’t sound too impressed. I think I’ve offended him with my use of a foreign language, and a dead one at that. He thinks I’m being pompous. “What are memento mori, anyway? Three-hundred-dollar sneakers?” he grumbles.
I’m so drained, wrecked from night after night of insomnia. I dig deep for the energy necessary to explain that memento mori have nothing to do with sneakers, but I come up empty. For the remainder of the car ride, I close my eyes, head tilted back, resting on the seat behind me, and I pretend to be asleep. Weak, yes, but I’ve realized that sometimes you have to play dead in order to survive.
When we reach Raleigh’s main street, a deep cavern of sadness pulls at me; swarming the snowy sidewalks, gathered in front of the decorated store fronts, the residents of Raleigh are rosy-cheeked and smiling, still drunk on the holidays and the fact that most of them didn’t have to show up for work this morning. The town’s small enough that I recognize a number of faces loitering on the corner in front of the hardware store. They recognize me as I climb out of the Town Car, too, and their festive smiles tactfully fade as I sidle past them, heading around the back of Henry’s to the fire escape that leads to Alex’s front door.
When I was raped in that bathroom, I didn’t want to broadcast what had happened to the world. I told one person, Principal Darhower, who summarily dismissed my accusation as, in his words, a ‘storm in a teacup. Something and nothing.’ I kept my mouth shut after that. No one knew what Jake, Sam and Cillian did to me. They know now. It was impossible to keep the information quiet once I was hospitalized, Jake was arrested, and people started to talk. It came out, all of it, every gory, hideous, ugly detail, and now everyone within a twenty-mile radius of Raleigh knows who I am: Silver Parisi, seventeen years of age, raped, kidnapped, assaulted, attempted murder victim.
Victim. Victim. Victim. Victim. Victim. Victim.
I hate that word. No matter how hard I reject it, people keep trying to pin it to me like one of those red and white, Hi! My name is_________! stickers. They want me to be broken. If I’m a mess, whimpering and crying in public, then they can get behind my story. They can make sense of it. I was bullied, kicked, punched, spat on, embarrassed and humiliated too many times before Jake dragged my unconscious body out of my house, though. I’d already learned to set my jaw, lift my head high, and dole out a look of defiance that screamed ‘FUCK YOU’ very loudly whenever I felt judgmental eyes on me. That defiance doesn’t sit well with people. It gives them the impression that whatever happened to me couldn’t have been that bad…which is so untrue it’s almost funny. This morning, I keep my head down, avoiding making eye contact with anyone in the first place. No sense in fueling gossip or feeding the rumor mill.
The studded metal steps that lead up to Alex’s place are slippery. I hold onto the handrail nice and tight as I ascend the stairs, and dread seeps into my veins. Alex has been a supercharged magnet over the past week; I’m pulled toward him so fiercely that it sometimes feels as though it physically hurts to be apart from him. At the same time, it also seems like Alex has been doing his level best to push me away. I’ve been both drawn to and repelled by him so badly since the news about Ben that I barely know if I’m coming or going anymore.
I knock on the door—the doorbell hasn’t worked since Alex moved in—and tuck my chin into the collar of my thick wool coat, waiting nervously for him to answer. It’s nine thirty in the morning. The service doesn’t start until ten, but we need to get across town and settled into the church, so we need to leave pretty much immediately.
The door remains closed.
“Come on, Alex,” I mutter under my breath, knocking again, this time with a little more force. If he’s in the shower, we’re going to be late…
Just as I’m about to knock for a third time, the door flies open, sending a cloud of weed smoke and red light billowing out into the early morning. Zander Hawkins greets me with a flat, bored smile. He’s wearing a Chicago Bulls basketball shirt underneath a red silk robe that looks like it belongs to a forty-five-year-old woman named Maura. “’S’up Parisi?” He brings a pipe to his lips and takes a deep pull.
This is becoming a really bad habit. Why, whenever I show up at Alex’s place, does Zander Hawkins end up answering the door? He’s like a bad fucking smell that will not go away. “Where is he?” I shove past Zander, making my way down the hallway toward the bedroom, briefly scanning the living room through its open doorway as I pass. Alex might be a hard ass, and he might give off the impression that he will gladly punch a hole through someone’s head so much as look at them, but he’s not what most people expect him to be. He’s meticulously clean—tidy, to the point that even I get embarrassed by my own messiness whenever I’m around him. He needs his environment to be controlled. Everything has its place, everything has an order, which is why I’m so confused when I see the state of the apartment. The place is a fucking shit show.
“What the fuck, Zander? How has this place gotten so trashed? I was here yesterday, for Christ’s sake. It did not look like this then.”
Empty beer bottles; pizza boxes; actual pizza crusts discarded on the coffee table; a pool of something dark red and sticky-looking, half-dried on the hardwood floor outside the bathroom. The place reeks of cigarette smoke.
“Don’t blame me, sweetheart.” Zander smirks, holding up his hands as he follows me toward the end of the hallway. “Our boy got himself a little sideways last night. I only came by to watch the fireworks.”
A stab of anxiety, cold and piercing, knifes into my chest. “Alex did not do this by himself.” My tone’s confident, like I’m one hundred perc
ent sure that my boyfriend would never trash his own hard-won apartment like this, but in truth I can believe it. I’ve been waiting for him to blow for days. There was no way he was going to be able to maintain his flat, sketchy, I-feel-nothing level of detachment forever. He was bound to snap. I was hoping I’d be there when it happened, so I could do some firefighting, try to minimize the damage both to Alex and to his surroundings, but it looks like I got here a little late.
I should never have left him in the first place. I should have refused to leave. He was so adamant that he was fine, though. He swore he just wanted to sleep…
“You’re wasting your time,” Zander calls after me. I walk through Alex’s bedroom door, and inside his room, the bed is unmade, a welter of tangled sheets hanging half off the mattress, showing the shiny silver fabric of the pillowtop underneath. Piles of clothes have been dumped all over the room, the odd shoe, separated from its partner, abandoned on the polished wood like a forgotten landmine, waiting to be tripped over or trodden on. Alex’s bedside table is crowded with crushed cigarette packets, pens, loose change, scraps of paper, receipts, and small plastic baggies—empty, bar a faint white residue that tells a disturbing story all of its own.
Alex is nowhere to be seen.
Spinning around in the three-inch heels I borrowed from Mom’s designer shoe collection, I lock onto Zander with a laser beam focus. He immediately retreats, backing into the doorframe. “Whoa, now, sweetheart. I really had nothing to do with this. Alex was on a tear when I got here. He didn’t stop until his eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the deck somewhere ’round three this morning.”
“Where is he now?” I’m not used to hissing at people. I don’t think Zander’s accustomed to people speaking to him this way, either. He scowls, a disdainful dimple punctuating his cheek.
“Who the fuck knows? Haven’t got a clue. He woke up at six-thirty, threw up in his guitar case, took a cold shower, and then he left. And before you accuse me of being a shitty friend, I did ask where the hell he thought he was going. He declined to part with the information.”
