Page 78 of Bobby Green

Bobby scowled at them all. “Okay. I know this isn’t fair, but I need Trey and Lance to come with me to the hardware store.” He stripped off his gloves. “And someone else to rinse this shit off in the kitchen.”

“Hm,” Skylar mused. “Physical vomit or emotional vomit? Pass me the gloves, Bobby. I’m getting off easy.”

“I’ll go get trash bags,” Billy offered, and Rick groaned.

“Great—I’ll go get dish gloves from under the sink.”

Bobby set the gloves down and scowled at his two former roommates, neither of whom could meet his eyes.

“This is gonna be a treat,” he muttered. “Like I can fucking manage my own goddamned life?” They stood, like little kids, and Bobby had a thought.

Holy fuck. They wereall children. No wonder Dex had seemed so overwhelmed.

“Everybody out to the truck,” he muttered. “We’ve got about five minutes to get to the store before you guys are sneaking into McDonald’s to take your morning poop.”

Lance and Trey turned on their heels and trotted out, and Bobby turned to the vomit detail. “You guys got any ideas?” he asked, because… because he didn’t get paid for this!

“You put the fear of God into them,” Skylar said, sober as Bobby had never seen him. “Me and Rick’ll get ’em addicted to health food. It’s all we got.”

Billy grunted. “I know the name of Chase and Tommy’s shrink,” he said, out of the blue. “I can call him and see if we can make an appointment.”

Oh damn. Okay. Backup.

“Great. You guys do that shit, and I’ll see what I can fuck up.”

The three of them rolled their eyes, and Skylar spoke first. “Dude, you are scary grown-up compared to the rest of us assholes. I mean….” He gestured at the corroding pipes in the plastic tub. “They were literally rotting our plumbing with their problems. Go—fix everybody’s pipes. We’re there for you.”

Bobby shook his head and followed Lance and Trey out the door.

GOD. LOWE’S.Bobby hated it—but he hated Home Depot too. Giant warehouses withso much shit. He always felt like he could wander those damned corridors for years and nobody would ever find him. Fortunately, Lance and Trey were super eager to help him find the plumbing supplies and the various pipes and shit, and Bobby wondered if they thought finding plumbing supplies would make it all okay.

But they weren’t opening up, so he guessed it was his turn to talk.

“So when I was eleven years old, my dad beat my mom up until he had to take her to the hospital. He left me at home, hiding under the fucking bed, took her to the ER, and took off for I don’t give a fuck where.”

“Jesus,” Trey muttered, and Lance just grimaced. Yeah, well, Lance was hella smart—he probably knew where this was going.

“So I was home for five days before my mom could ask anybody where her kid was, and the police sent someone to get me. And I’ll give you ten guesses what happened.”

“You ran out of food,” Lance muttered.

“You bet your ass I did. The breakfast cereal and milk were gone by the second day, and then the tinned soup and the bread. By the time they sent somebody to my house, I was sifting old oatmeal through a strainer, getting rid of the bugs.”

“That’s fucking gross,” Trey muttered.

“You think?” Bobby threw an extra U-joint into the basket he was holding with undue force. “And when I came to Sacramento—you guys saw me on the upswing. ’Cause I spent a month—a fuckingmonth—sleeping in my truck so I didn’t cook like a sardine withfortyother poor bastards in the trailer. We had to live off fast food, but we were all saving money, so guess what. That was one meal a fucking day, and if you were loopy as a fucking butterfly by the end of the day, guess what happened.”

“I know this one,” Lance said, voice dry and quiet. “That’s where you got the fresh scars on your thumb and your thigh.”

Well, yeah. They’d been together, even if Lance hadn’t seen his porn.

“You’re damned straight,” Bobby snarled, throwing six brackets in his basket, one at a time, hard enough that they bounced around a bit before they hit bottom. “And when Igot firedfrom that fucking job, because—and get this—I wasclumsy, I was living out of the back of my goddamned truck and trying to get a job. I went home and blew my girlfriend’s brother ’cause he was fuckingblackmailing me, and he shoved forty dollars in my back pocket. And you know what I did?”

“Kept it,” Trey whispered.

Finally Bobby looked at him, because he sounded near tears. “You’re goddamned right I did. I was fucking starving. So c’mon, guys—I don’t get it. I don’t fucking get it. Why? You’re both fucking hot. You’re both fucking smart. Neither of you are stuck in porn for fucking ever—you got prospects. So tell me. Help me understand here.Why?”

“Because I look in the mirror and I still see a fat kid,” Lance said, sounding broken. “I work out, I work my rotation, I do my classwork, I shoot my scenes, and I feel so in control. And I go home, and all I can hear is my parents telling me to do better, and stories about what a fat little kid I was. And how… how much it sucks to be gay. And… I just… food is the thing I can’t have. It’s the one goddamned thing I can’t have and—”