Page 149 of Beneath the Stain

“I am so tired of these fuckers!” he yelled. He was off his rocker—heknewhe was off his rocker,knewit wasn’t the same thing,knewBriony had taken care of herself when he hadn’t been able to, but he couldn’t seem to jump the track, couldn’t swerve or leap or change grooves. He was just a massive nuclear train barreling down the track, hitting every goddamned barbed-wired brick wall in his fucking path!

“Mackey?” Cheever said, and to his credit, he began to cry. “Mackey, I didn’t… I mean, she was pretty, and the guys at school say that girls like it—”

“The guys at school arebullshit!” he screamed, spitting as he did it. “Don’t you get it? What’s it fuckin’take, Cheever? We got you out of the town, we got you someplace nice—where we gotta put you to get you away from this? Do you know what it’s like? Have you ever thought what it would be like, people just thinking they own you like that? Yeah, it’s okay, she’s a girl, I can grab her ass, grab her tit—she’s a thing, I can own her. What if someone ownedyou? What if you were everybody’s fuckin’ meat? What if it was you, naked and unconscious in a fuckin’ alleyway with your ass ripped open where anybody could fucking see—”

“Mackey!”

Jefferson lunged over his back, anchoring his arms to his sides, screaming in his ear.

“Mackey, you gotta shut up! You gotta fuckin’ shut up. We can’t trust him—he’s not one of us, man. We can’t tell him that shit—it’syours, it’sprivate, wasn’t no one supposed to know!”

“Oh hell, Jeff….” Stevie sounded, if anything, resigned, but it wasn’t Stevie Mackey saw.

It was Kell, eyes wide on the three of them, then zeroing in on Mackey. “Oh hell. Is there any fucking thing this familydoestell me about?”

“Oh, like I fucking knew until I couldn’t sit down,” Mackey said miserably. “God, Kell… I was so fucked-up back then—all I wanted was to fucking forget. And man, I thought I did.” He closed his eyes tight, but he knew that when he opened them, his life would still be his life, and he couldn’t make it different. “I thought I’d forgotten, because I had a year of being sober, and all that time with Trav, but last night… and fuckin’ Grant… and—” Mackey turned to Cheever, naked and in tears. “—and this asshole, who thinks that he’s got a right to shit he don’t got no right to—man,Briony. You don’t evenknowthis girl. But she’s our sister, and our friend, and she hauled her sick ass down the Pacific Coast to be here for us when we needed her, andyougotta treat her like shit. Man, I’m ashamed to call you my fuckin’ brother.”

Mackey sat down on the kitchen floor in his underwear.

His legs couldn’t hold him no more. The sadness, the pain he’d been trying to parse out so he had some good for every bit of bad, was suddenly right there on his shoulders, and his legs couldn’t hold him no more.

He leaned his head against his knees and closed his eyes. His breaths were shaking, ragged things, and he wasn’t getting enough oxygen because he could see spots in front of his eyes, but he wasn’t sobbing.

That was someone else.

Jefferson, Stevie, Blake, and Kell were wrapped around his back, shaking, and Mackey’s mom was trying to comfort Cheever.

“C’mon, kid. You need to go to your room and pull yourself together.”

“It’s just like my whole life,” Cheever whimpered, “they had the music and they had each other, and I was just the bratty little brother. Why’s it gotta be like that, Mom? Why can’t I be a brother too?”

“He didn’t mean that,” Mom said, but she sounded doubtful.

“Yeah, he did,” Kell said from over Mackey’s head. “If he didn’t, I would. Cheever, it’s not that you’re younger than us—but man, all that shit you keep doing to ‘fit in,’ that’s the shit that we fought against our whole lives. If you can’t see that, see what you do to us every time you think the moneyweearned for you got you a pass, you’re going to be less and less our brother and more and more a weight hanging from our neck. Man, you hadbetterapologize to Briony, or I will take a belt to your ass, boy!”

“I’m sorry,” Cheever whispered. “I’m sorry I grabbed your girl, Kell. I… she was just real pretty, and she was surprised, and….”

“And she’s sorry she started the whole damned thing,” Briony grumbled.

Mackey looked up from the lace of arms holding him tight and saw that she was wearing a pair of Kell’s sweats and his T-shirt and the zip-up hoodie he’d been wearing over his underwear because he didn’t have the sense God gave a goat.

“You shouldn’t be sorry,” Kell said, sounding almost deferential.

When did that happen?It was like everything in Mackey’s life was free floating in his head right now.

“Briony?” he said, feeling suddenly lucid.

“Yeah?” She crouched down, looking at him through all those arms.

“I donotwant coke or Xanax right now,” he said because it wasthemost important thing in the world.

“Whatdoyou want?” Like it had never occurred to her that this would be a Xanax moment.

“I want Trav,” he said, determination firming up his voice. “Guys, I love you, but I’m about to go kung fu on your asses, okay?”

The arms dropped and he hugged Kell first, hard. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you,” he said by Kell’s ear. “We had other shit that Mackey had to do at that exact moment.”

“If you’re going to refer to yourself in the third person, I’m disowning you,” Kell muttered, and Mackey smiled. Kell had learned to banter this past year.