Chapter Text
Andrew doesn’t really pay attention when there’s a match and a new family expresses interest in adopting him. When his caseworker, Clara, gently reminds him about the upcoming meet-and-greet, she also tempers his expectations with a few well-worded warnings.
Nothing is promised.
It’s not a guarantee.
Of course it’s not.
He’s only nine, but he knows this, has done this before.
He should have paid attention.
Years later, Andrew will try to remember that first meeting, but every time he does, it slips through his fingers like the shape of water, a drizzle of memory lost to the haze of time.
Neil was there, from the first day. That much, Andrew is sure of. The indigo of his eyes was irreverent. It scared Andrew, a little. He couldn’t escape the gaze of that strange boy, even when he closed his eyes at night.
And Andrew had thought he was the strangest one of them all.
Neil’s father was there too.
“Does he talk?” he asked, a feeble attempt to break the ice.
But the ice was unrelenting. Andrew’s fingers were so very cold, encrusted in it.
Clara, looking much older than she was—grey streaks already threading through her hair—chastised him: “You must be patient. This is going to be a very slow process. The progress will come in increments.”
Mary must have been there too. But Andrew doesn’t remember her at all from that meeting.
That’s how she would go on to exist in his memory: a silence quieter than the break of dawn, a negative space strung up in the darkroom of his mind.
More meetings with the Wesninskis followed. Day visits. Overnight stays at the care center.
And Andrew remained silent.
He should have spoken up.
A year later, Andrew finds himself at the doorstep of the Wesninski residence. The memory sharpens after that, palpable as the metallic taste of a blade pressed to the tongue.
The house is an unremarkable two-story, white-sided with a single wide living room window, the inside shrouded by heavy brown curtains. Even the roof is white, courtesy of a recent storm that’s done little more than blacken the sidewalks. But it’s only November. Give it time, Andrew thinks, and the whole world—this forgotten town at the intersection of the Rust Belt and the Midwest—will go under.
The house is a white phantom against the sleet-colored sky, a sore spot in Andrew’s vision. He feels queasy looking at it directly and doesn’t know why, but he’s too old not to trust that feeling. His instincts are rarely wrong.
Nathan Wesninski nudges him toward the door—he’s the only one who came to pick Andrew up from the center. Inside, Mary and the little boy rise from the couch with the abruptness of a jack-in-the-box springing to life.
Nathan had been quiet for most of the drive, used to Andrew’s silence. But once they entered the neighborhood, he started pointing things out: Here’s the school you’ll attend with Nathaniel. That’s the park with the lake where we like to walk. This is the corner store you can run to if we ever need anything.
Just a simple tour. But something about the way he spoke was off. The words came out oddly shaped, slightly too careful, as if they’d been rearranged at the last second and were missing their mark on purpose.
It softens him, that awkwardness, or makes him more terrifying. Andrew isn’t sure which. Maybe it’s the absence of charm on a face that’s otherwise striking. Maybe it’s how clearly the man is hiding it.
Mary is the same—blank, nervous. She tries to make Andrew feel welcome. She always does. But she’s barely half a person in the shadow of her husband.
She offers him food right away. Andrew’s had it before—he stayed here for a few days before the adoption was finalized. It’s decent. Always too hot. He has to swirl the food on his plate for a long time, the steam rising into his face, scalding.
“You’ve got a cat’s tongue, don’t you,” Mary says when she sees him doing it.
The rest of dinner is tense, and Andrew will come to find out that’s not an anomaly in this household.
Then there’s the boy.
He answers to “Junior” from his father, to “Abram” from his mother, but he once confided in Andrew, during one of their long visits at the center, that he prefers to be called Neil.
He’s neither nervous nor concealed. But Andrew can’t pin him down yet. He won’t look him in the eyes, and avoids the color of them just in case.
After the welcome dinner—or lunch; it’s 4 p.m., the winter dark has already fallen and nothing can be seen through the windows—Nathaniel, or Abram, or Neil takes him upstairs to their room. The one where Andrew had earlier dropped off his duffel bag filled with clothes, a few books, and toiletries. It still doesn’t quite register that this is his room too, and he treats it accordingly. Foreign territory.
He documents his surroundings and watches Neil.
He decides to call him that—Neil—because it’s short and easy and sort of rolls off the tongue. Neil, who buzzes a little with some strange energy, crouches in front of a wooden bookshelf and pulls out several decks of cards.
“Check this out,” he breathes, like it’s sacred, and spreads the decks in front of him.
It’s Pokémon, Andrew realizes a beat later. He’s caught a few episodes here and there, vaguely familiar with the concept of trading cards, but he’s never been less interested in anything in his life. Still, he pretends to take a closer look. Wants to take the measure of the boy in front of him, and the shortcut to that is always conflict.
So he pulls the cards from Neil’s hands and tips the deck over his head, sending them scattering in a messy heap across the floor.
Neil blinks, startled. Picks a card that got caught in the hem of his collar, looks down at it like its purpose has suddenly been lost, then lifts his eyes, brimming with amusement, and flings it at Andrew.
Andrew just barely has time to deflect.
They watch each other tensely, breath held—
Then both move at once, scrambling for the cards and launching them at each other in wild handfuls.
Andrew hadn’t counted on a full-out war between them, but he finds he can’t make himself stop. Even through the disorder and chaos, cards scraping his face, he sees that Neil’s wearing a wicked smile. When the cards no longer feel like enough, they start grabbing at anything within reach—pogs, action figures, Legos that take longer to wrestle from their box.
And when they call a mutual ceasefire, they find sturdier things to throw. Books. Journals. Pillows. An Exy racquet.
By the time they collapse, out of breath and ammunition, Neil’s room, their room, is wrecked.
It’s at that moment that Mary chooses to bring them some fruit.
She opens the door. Freezes.
Sets the bowl on the dresser.
“Clean up before you go to bed,” she says, then leaves them to it.
Andrew lets Neil do all the work, retreating to a nearby wall for a better vantage point.
Neil, still panting, makes a half-hearted attempt to restore order, nudging toys back into piles with his foot. At one point, Andrew tries to trip him, just to get one more read on the boy.
Neil retaliates with a sharp jab to Andrew’s kneecap.
The flare in his eyes is easier to withstand after that, or maybe Andrew just thinks he can finally discern something human in them. Something he could scrutinize and solve, if given enough time.
They aren’t so jarring now, those otherworldly eyes—swirls of violet and blue, so stark against his pearlescent skin.
The threat of them doesn’t hang over him.
But the night brings its own terror.
Andrew is graciously given the top bunk, and though he manages not to vomit up his late lunch—or early dinner—he doesn’t sleep.
He listens for any disturbance. Observes the shadows dance and mock him in the dark. Strains to see the outline of the door.
It stays stubbornly closed through the long hours, and only creaks open in the morning when Mary comes in to wake them and asks them down for breakfast.
The day the snow flurries more, Neil asks if Andrew wants to go outside and play.
The draft whispers through the well-sealed windows, promising a hellish kind of cold and a bitter wind if they dare to brave it.
It wouldn’t be so cold if it snowed properly.
Andrew shakes his head in refusal and goes upstairs to sit in their room, because he thinks he’s allowed to do that, at least.
He palms through the books he picked out from the donation bin at the foster center and looks at the pages, though the letters blur. He waits, impatiently, for the next day. When he can trace the shape of the routine to follow. The outline of the rest of his life here.
It goes something like this:
Mary wakes them up and asks them to come down to help with breakfast.
Andrew joins them at the counter and watches as Neil gets in the way, dripping egg whites on the floor or messing up the pancake on the flip. It lands on the edge of the pan and burns.
Mary doesn’t seem to mind.
And Nathan isn’t there. He runs a small butcher shop in town and leaves before dawn.
Then Neil and Andrew get ready and walk to school together. It isn’t far, but far enough for Andrew to see his breath plume in the air, for the cold to permeate and cling to his bones well after he’s stepped inside the building.
Andrew is a year older than Neil, but he’s assigned to Neil’s grade anyway.
For convenience, Mary and Nathan explain. Nathaniel will help you settle into the new school.
Andrew has always found school to be the easiest aspect of his life to bear. He only has to glance down at a textbook once or twice before it imprints itself in his memory. He’s good at listening, at tucking knowledge away, at acing any test without studying.
So repeating a year just bores him out of his mind. It makes him feel contempt for his peers, who seem young and painfully immature. It makes him want to claw at the walls of his prison until something gives.
Mary helps Nathan at the shop during the day but comes home sometime after they’re back from school. She provides snacks to sustain them until dinner and then leaves them alone. More often than not, Neil and Andrew sit on the floor in the living room, propped against the couch, their homework spread in a heap on the coffee table.
Neil twirls his pen for hours, pretending to work, too distracted by the TV screen to get anything done.
Andrew, who finishes his homework in under an hour, doesn’t have to pretend. He can tune everything out or watch the screen in earnest if something catches his attention.
Two days a week, Mary drives Neil an hour away to the city center for Little League Exy practice.
On those days, Nathan closes the shop early to stay with Andrew.
Or rather, for Andrew to go up to his room and hide there until dinner.
On those days, the house is preternaturally quiet, the walls heaving with unspoken truths, ones Andrew could uncover if he pressed his palms to them.
But he’s hesitant.
He’s not sure he’s ready yet.
Those are the days.
The nights at the Wesninski residence get progressively worse.
Squeak. Knock. Whine. Squeak again.
That’s the symphony Andrew is subjected to nearly every night.
It sounds like a rattle being dragged along the floor. Or a seesaw groaning under the weight of something heavy. Or someone polishing the rusted edge of a butcher’s knife. It’s all of those sounds at once, and none of them.
“What is that?” Andrew asks Neil one night. He knows he’s awake. He’s learned how to tell.
“Nothing,” Neil says.
Andrew believes him for now, even though it’s obviously a lie. Neil doesn’t even pretend to be confused by the sudden question.
Andrew is so delirious from lack of sleep in this strange, unsettling house that he can’t fully rule out the possibility that the sounds are coming from inside his own skull—his mind bleeding at the seams, leaking into the dark.
Days progress. Andrew starts falling asleep in class, at lunch. He’s taken to the school nurse because he faints, and Mary is called. But it’s Nathan who comes.
And Andrew, so sleep-deprived he’s barely tethered to his own body, sees things he shouldn’t.
Like a long stretch of shadow trailing behind the man.
A festering dark that clings to him, follows him, and topples Andrew’s already crumbling composure.
Dinner is always variations on the same theme: pasta with meat, lasagna with meat, burgers, meatloaf.
There is so much meat that Andrew gets sick of it. He feels ill after every dinner. The meat sits in his stomach for hours, undigested, and it takes everything in him, clenching his abdomen with all his might, not to bring it back up.
Mary notices and makes an effort: more vegetables, more carbs like rice. But she’s a bit powerless. Leftover meat from Nathan’s shop is what they have on hand. And besides, Andrew soon learns that Nathan is severely allergic to a few food groups—shellfish, nuts, soy—and that’s why they always eat the same safe dishes.
The man is perpetually pale when he sits at the table. Consistently batters Mary with questions like, “Did you make the sauce from scratch?”
And Mary answers dutifully, “Yes, darling. I got the onions and tomatoes at the farmer’s market and soaked them in hot water for a few hours.”
Nathan takes a bite and looks down at his arms, the hairs standing up under his own scrutiny. But he never breaks out in hives.
There are EpiPens scattered around the house—Andrew finds them in drawers, on shelves, tucked beside the salt.
But they seem to do little for Nathan’s paranoia. It’s ever-present, heavy, infectious. It crawls up Andrew’s own arms and makes them erupt in goosebumps every time he brings a bite of food to his lips.
Over the next few months, they only have one real scare.
It starts with bulging, vein-streaked eyes and a deep redness rising at the tips of Nathan’s ears.
Andrew watches, dispassionately, as it spreads down his neck. Nathan slams a hand on the table and yells hoarsely, “What did you do?”—like Mary is the immune system incarnate, turning against him now, killing him slowly.
It’s the first outburst Andrew sees from a man who usually keeps himself shackled. And it should scare him. But instead, it fills him with an odd sense of satisfaction. Accomplishment, even.
Mary tumbles out of her dining chair and disappears momentarily to retrieve an EpiPen. She stabs it into Nathan’s thigh, then calls the paramedics.
Nathan is completely fine by the time they arrive. His skin has returned to its usual pallor, but they pump him full of Benadryl anyway, which slurs his speech and eventually knocks him out cold in the armchair.
“Go up to your room, boys. I’ll clean up,” Mary says, and quietly takes care of everything behind the scenes, just like she always does.
Squeak. Knock. Whine. Squeak again.
Andrew presses his hands to his ears, but he can still hear it. He can’t take it anymore. He’s going to snap, splinter, cede into nothing.
He climbs down the ladder of the bunk bed, intent on finding out what the noise is.
Neil’s voice rises from the dark, stopping him dead in his tracks. “Don’t go out there.”
“Why?” Andrew asks, and realizes his voice is fractured from disuse. “What’s out there?”
“Nothing,” Neil lies. “Just—don’t.”
Andrew hums, with scorn or disbelief, he isn’t sure himself—but peels himself from the ladder and forces himself onward. To the door. Then beyond it.
The sounds aren’t any louder in the hallway, but they feel more solid somehow—a rhythm he could almost reach out and touch, even if it already threatens to crumble beneath his fingertips.
He descends the stairs quietly. It isn’t courage that sustains him, but a sense of finality laced with impatience. He wants to face this. Whatever this is. He wants to lay eyes on the horror that conspires to consume him.
And he does—
The horror is Nathan.
Or something like Nathan. An outline against the window.
The curtain billows around him, rippling like it’s caught in a breeze. But the window is shut, and the room is windless.
Still, the chill is there, deep and eerie, intensifying, as Nathan cradles his butcher’s cleaver and drags it along a whetstone. Then sets it down. Then picks up a cloth and runs it along the blade. Over and over.
He doesn’t see Andrew. Even with Andrew standing there at the bottom of the stairs, staring directly at him. But Andrew isn’t sure it’s Nathan at all.
He bolts—up the stairs, nearly in a gallop. Climbs into bed and pulls the covers over his head.
But the chill won’t leave him. He shivers. And shivers. Until morning finally comes.
Squeak. Knock. Whine. Squeak again.
Andrew jolts out of his stupor. He’s definitely hallucinating now. There’s daylight in his eyes, but the symphony plays on.
It couldn’t be, he thinks, deliriously. Not now.
So he listens, straining to make out the sound against the inconvenient thudding of his heart, and finally registers that the rhythm isn’t quite right.
And it’s not coming from downstairs, either.
It’s beating against the window.
Andrew turns and looks outside.
The old, rusted swing in their backyard sways in the wind.
There’s no one in it.
But when he blinks, Neil is there—feet scraping the muddy snow.
Andrew’s breath fogs the glass. Neil lifts his eyes and looks straight at him.
The look is piercing, the full force of those eyes unleashed for the first time since it first terrified Andrew and wormed inside his head.
And Andrew flinches, despite his best efforts to remain calm.
He steps away from the window, trying to shake the strangeness loose, but it won’t come off. It clings, burrows deep under his skin.
With no other recourse, he bundles up and makes his way outside, boots crunching over days-old snow, dead leaves snapping beneath the surface.
Neil acknowledges him with a curt nod. He’s stopped swinging, and the intensity of his eyes has dimmed, or maybe he’s pulled it back, like a switch. Or a summon. It worked, because Andrew is here. Has answered their call.
It’s the only color in the gray-washed world. And Andrew seeks it, wants to keep looking at it, even if he still fears it a bit.
“How can you stand it?” Andrew asks, gesturing around—at the colorless sky, the snow that settles on the black earth like a crust of old blood, at the chipped paint of the swing.
Neil’s gloved grip tightens on the swing’s chain. He looks at Andrew for far too long before he speaks.
When he does, the words form softly, carefully, in his mouth: “Can you keep a secret?”
Andrew is nothing but secrets—ones that corrupt him from the inside out.
“Yes,” he says.
Neil takes him to an abandoned building with a concrete facade, indistinguishable from the sky above it—gray dripping into gray. Its shattered windows stare like blind eyes, unmoving but watchful from the top floor.
They approach slowly, following the path Neil maps out.
They climb a wall that’s been perforated, its guts on display, frozen cement and nails, then squeeze through a torn gap in the iron fence. The corroded metal claws at the fabric of their jackets, trying to pull them back. They bend low to crawl through a hole carved out for someone their size.
Andrew rises to his feet, brushes dust from his knees, and looks down the corridor they’ve entered. The light from the windows barely reaches this far, but it’s enough to reveal their surroundings: a hallway falling apart, the walls pocked with holes, plaster flaking off in strips.
But it’s warmer here, Andrew notices. Already running hot from the climb and crawl. He pulls off his hat and gloves, then follows Neil deeper in. The corridor veers right and opens into a room.
The roof has caved in across the center, sloping into the floor like an elegant ramp. Light spills in through the gaping sky, illuminating the shell of an old aircraft—resting, half-sunken, decaying in the tender arms of time.
Snowmelt pools at the edges of the room, sending steady streams of water down the walls, feeding a colony of moss and lichens that thrive in the inexplicable warmth.
Andrew unwinds the scarf from his neck and face, breathing in the humid air. It licks at his skin like mist. Nearly soothing.
“This used to be an old air base,” Neil says. “Back in the sixties.”
Andrew joins him against the wall, drinking in the color—the greens of the moss, the blues and purples of Neil’s eyes.
“There’s probably asbestos here.”
“Will it kill us?” Neil asks.
“Hopefully,” Andrew replies.
It’s nice, that secret place. The warmth and color of it. But it’s not a real secret.
The real secret is what lies in the basement of their house, where Andrew isn’t allowed to go.
The real secret is a patch of skin on Neil’s back, and the sketch of an iron burned into it.
“It was an accident,” Neil says defensively, the first time they’re changing in front of each other and he feels Andrew’s eyes on him.
“Sure,” Andrew replies.
Neil frowns.
They’ve only spent a few months together, but they’re already good at reading each other.
The real secret is what Nathan is. What he hides from them. What he holds back.
And it’s not a secret Andrew can contain the way he does others, with impunity.
So one day, during one of those evenings when Mary and Neil are out for Exy practice, and Andrew hears the clatter of dishes from the kitchen, he decides to ignore it.
Let it pass.
Let it remain an accident—lest it disturb his ignorance.
But then comes another clatter.
And after it, a deathly hush.
By the time Andrew makes it downstairs, he becomes privy to a gruesome scene: Nathan, sprawled on the floor, fingers clawing at his inflamed throat, eyes bulging, pleading.
There’s an EpiPen sticking out of his thigh, but it must be expired. Or a fake.
There are other EpiPens around the house. Andrew knows where they are.
There’s a phone in the living room he could pick up.
But the thing is—Andrew doesn’t really want to take chances. Not with this. Not with this secret, that pulses inside this man.
So he just stands there. Watches Nathan sputter and suffocate, his chest barely rising as the seconds tick by.
He stands there, until that too—stops.
Then he goes back upstairs to his room.
Mary is devastated. She turns to ash, sits in the living room, and smokes cigarettes.
Neil is wordless, in a way he never is, for months after.
He doesn’t cry, not even at the funeral, but one night he breaks, and the grief chokes out of him into the inky dark between them.
Andrew doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know if he has the right to offer comfort.
But he climbs down the ladder just in case, and hovers at the edge of Neil’s bed.
Neil senses it. Grapples for his hand. Holds on.
The touch is sticky, and a little uncomfortable, but Andrew surrenders to it; for as long as it takes Neil to fall back asleep.
Mary’s mourning, or a convincing show of it, runs its course into spring.
After the initial interlude, color returns to her cheeks, and the sun invites itself back, coaxing saplings from damp earth nourished by a long winter.
The butcher shop in town closes permanently.
Mary starts taking night classes to renew her nursing certification.
“Life insurance will only last so long. I have to take care of you boys now.”
It’s the kind of proclamation Andrew thinks should be followed by an affectionate touch—maybe a rumple of hair, an embrace.
But Mary isn’t physical. She’s never touched Andrew, and he hasn’t seen her reach for Neil, either.
Secretly, Andrew is grateful.
Andrew is fourteen when Mary is out on a long overnight shift, and they’re left to their own devices—not for the first time that week.
“Stay still,” Andrew admonishes.
Neil squirms.
“Stop,” Andrew says again.
Neil lets out a soft sigh of frustration. “This burns.”
“It’s ice,” Andrew replies. “It’s supposed to.”
Andrew’s fingers have gone numb from holding the melting cube to Neil’s ear. Water drips everywhere, soaking into the carpet. He flings the droplets off his fingers, then pinches the reddened skin. Neil doesn’t flinch.
So Andrew reaches for his tool of trade, a sharp sewing needle he’d nicked from Mary’s kit, and submerges it into a mug filled with vodka. He counts to ten under his breath, then pulls it out. Takes a generous sip himself, trying not to gag as the vodka scorches a path down his throat, then passes the mug to Neil.
Neil shakes his head. “I’m fine.”
Andrew shrugs, returns to Neil’s earlobe, flaming red from the ice, and feels along the cartilage to find the thickest point. Where he calculates the piercing will look best.
Then he drives the needle through, with no warning.
There’s some resistance at first, but Andrew applies more pressure, not brutal, just focused, and watches with satisfaction as the tip breaks through the other side.
Neil is good during the process. Barely moves. Just mutters, “Ow,” as if obligated to.
Andrew ignores him, fishing out a tiny silver earring that he dips into the vodka too before sliding it into the new hole. There isn’t even any blood.
Anticlimactic, Andrew thinks.
“Ow. Ow,” Neil protests more earnestly now as Andrew fumbles to fasten the clasp behind his ear. It’s slippery, but he manages. Then tilts his head, inspecting his handiwork.
The earring glints faintly in the dim light—perfect placement. Exactly where it needs to be.
Neil disappears into the bathroom to check the mirror. He rubs at his earlobe, even though the ache is higher up.
Andrew watches from the doorway, still sipping his disinfectant-slash-vodka, and notices Neil nodding at his reflection. Satisfied. Then Neil pulls a strand of unruly auburn hair over his ear, already hiding it.
He’ll need to keep it secret from Mary for as long as possible.
She wouldn’t be mad, exactly. She hadn’t been when she noticed Andrew’s own self-inflicted piercings.
But the look of disappointment was unmistakable. Predictable too.
It was endlessly frustrating, that coddling. But Andrew took it the way he took everything else he was given but hadn’t asked for—with a rage that had nowhere to go, and eventually fizzled out into nothing.
And he knows how Neil will take it too. It would upset him enough to take the piercing out.
Not that it matters to Andrew. He has no stakes in Neil’s commitment to this endeavor. He only agreed to do it because Neil wouldn’t leave him alone, always wanting to emulate Andrew, always hot on his heels with every asinine idea.
Andrew walks back to the room and retrieves the needle. Joins Neil in front of the mirror and raises it to the hollow just under his bottom lip.
“Do you want me to?” Neil asks, gaze fixed on Andrew’s mouth.
Andrew shoots him a sideways glance. This is the best part—the anticipation in his own hands, the promise of pain brimming at his fingertips. He wouldn’t give it up for the world.
He pushes the needle through the soft flesh there. There’s a flare of pain, then a rush of endorphins. He doesn’t moan, but he gets close, and yanks the needle out, hears it clatter into the sink.
There’s more blood than expected. He holds gauze to the puncture, then heads back to the room to find the curved earring he bought just for this.
He’s still fiddling with it when another scent wafts into the room, overpowering the stench of alcohol—something burning. Or very close to it.
“Neil?” he calls, half an earring sticking through his lip. “Pizza?”
“Oh, shit,” Neil says, and bolts.
Andrew holds out some vague hope for salvaged dinner as he descends the stairs. That hope dies when he steps into the kitchen and sees Neil next to what might’ve once been pizza—a blackened mess of cheese and crust pulled from the oven.
Andrew’s tempted to blame Neil entirely. But he didn’t remember either.
Neil glances at him guiltily and starts digging through the cabinets. Andrew knows where this is going and fills a pot with water while Neil pulls out a box of mac and cheese.
Then Neil grabs something else, and Andrew wrinkles his nose.
“Help?” Neil asks, holding out a jar of pickles—the one thing Andrew loathes with a passion.
Andrew wants to refuse.
But Neil is still looking at him, corners of his mouth curled into a smile, flashing two white canines like he just stepped out of a vampire movie.
It’s infuriating. And Andrew is helpless against it.
He snatches the jar, twists the lid off with a few hard grunts, and sets it safely away from himself.
An obnoxious crunch follows, then Neil’s satisfied murmur: “So hungry.”
Andrew just shakes his head in disbelief, willing the water to boil faster. He’s starving too, but it feels like the more they stare at the pot, the slower time ticks—out of pure spite.
To distract himself, Andrew rolls the new ring in his lip, twisting it, sending a ripple of pain through the wound.
Then suddenly, Neil’s too close. He flicks the ring with a finger. “Stop that. You need to let it heal.”
Andrew swats his hand away. “Get your disgusting pickle fingers off me,” he grumbles.
Neil just laughs, breath reeking of vinegar and dill. “Would you eat a pickle for a hundred dollars?”
“No,” Andrew says flatly. But he already knows he’s in trouble.
That glint in Neil’s eyes, the one that means he won’t stop until he finds Andrew’s price, is Andrew’s doom too. Because Neil won’t stop digging. Not until he’s reached the bottom of it all—the deepest layer of every single one of Andrew’s secrets.
Andrew is fifteen when they go to Siesta Beach, Florida, and he gets sick of it on the second day, but there are still five more days of their vacation.
Neil spends too much time in the water, disappearing under the swell of the waves, swimming laps along the seashore, floating like a starfish, letting the water carry him to shore over and over like he’s playacting a drowning victim, a corpse that won’t stay sunk.
It’s entertaining, for a time, to watch him do this: his skin reddened by a sunburn he can’t avoid no matter how much sunscreen Mary makes him put on, his hair a rust crown spilling around him, his swimming trunks an offensive yellow that clashes with everything around him.
Andrew finishes a 700-page Agatha Christie doorstopper. Neil and Andrew bury each other in the sand five times. They collect a bounty of boring beige shells. Andrew walks the shore by himself, the ocean licking at his bare feet, the seagulls screeching in his ears, nothing but brine and a horizon that bleeds into itself, and he thinks it might be awe, this thing that flits and beats and fights with dissolution somewhere behind his ribcage.
That wears off too, eventually.
Neil doesn’t ask him to go in the water with him—he knows Andrew can’t swim. But Andrew wishes he would. The prospect of danger seems alluring enough to break up the monotony of the endless sun and the glare off the sea, blinding even behind his sunglasses—a cheap matching pair Mary got them from a CVS on the long drive to Florida.
Eventually, he can’t take it anymore and dips his toes into the water again.
Neil has been swimming for far too long. There’s a bluish tint to his lips that should tell him it’s time to get out, but he doesn’t. He drifts toward Andrew with the waves, limbs loose and aimless. Watching.
The water’s colder than Andrew expected. The cerulean color is a lie. At least in December, when the temperature drops and the sea bites at his skin.
Still, it isn’t unbearable. He eases forward, inch by inch. Ankles. Knees. Just above the knees, knees, which turns out to be a mistake. A wave smacks up to his waist, icy and brutal. He hisses.
Neil swims closer, the sparkle in his deep blue eyes concealing amusement. The waves toss him like a rag doll; occasionally one crashes over his head and he sputters. But he always recovers, grinning.
Andrew naively thought going up to his waist would be the worst of it, but then waves come for his chest, and he can’t help but hiss again.
“You get used to it,” Neil says.
Andrew glares at him. He knows this. His legs are comfortable at this point, or maybe he just can’t feel them anymore. The sun overhead blazes down, but in the water, it’s tolerable. Less like being flayed alive, the way it had felt on the sand.
But he still can’t swim, and he’s not going deeper than his chest. The sea floor clutches his feet in a cold, remorseless grip. He tries not to think about the creatures down there. Tries not to flinch when something brushes his leg.
It’s nothing, he tells himself. Nothing. Nothing—
Then a giant wave comes—out of nowhere, as if spat from the mouth of some sea beast—and covers him entirely. The shock of the blow on his head is forgotten in the spiraling sensation of being knocked off his feet.
Disoriented, Andrew lurches for balance, and finds it in the warm, solid feel of Neil’s chest.
“I got you,” Neil says, steadying him by the arms. He’s dripping wet himself, still spitting out salt water, but watching Andrew closely.
The salt burns on Andrew’s lips. He licks them, surprised by how strong the taste is. Something you never forget.
Another wave slams into him, knocking him forward right against Neil again.
Inexplicably, Neil laughs, the sound crystal as sea glass clinking together, and Andrew hates this.
Hates that he needs Neil to hold onto, just to keep from being dragged under.
They drift in the ocean’s lull for a time—for an infinity—and the sky isn’t above them anymore, but around them. The stars tug at Andrew’s feet and ask him to surrender. He sinks deeper and deeper, the pressure rising in his ears, his chest caving in with all the air he can’t contain.
But Neil still holds him—the brightest light—his arms a rocking lullaby, a cradle that carries Andrew ashore.