Page 7

After that, no matter how I tried to move the investigation forward, nothing seemed to go anywhere.

I did what I could; it didn’t seem like much. I still had to do my actual job, which meant running down a group of teenagers who had taken their neighbor’s car for a joyride, trying to track down a witness for a case against a drug dealer, and that stupid collaboration with Wroxall’s campus security. What little time I had left during the day, I tried to figure out who might have wanted to hurt Tip.

I interviewed Tip again—after he’d been released, and without Jordan hovering over him—but I only got the same bullshit story. I asked for names, anyone he remembered from the party, and I got nothing. I did my own fucking legwork, asking guys I knew in the area—hookups, friends, anyone who might have their finger on the pulse of gay life. Some of them knew Tip or had seen him around. That didn’t surprise me too much. Others knew about the party at Sunny’s lake house, and a few even gave me some names. I ran down the ones I could, but none of them knew anything helpful.

At night, alone in bed, I tried to remember something from the party. Anything. But I’d pre-gamed hard, and what memories I had of the party were disjointed—more flashes of sensation, like the weight of a body on my back, or the rasp of a day’s stubble on my neck, than anything helpful. Only the end of it was really clear: the girls and the boy I’d bummed a toke from. And I didn’t have any idea who they were or how to track them down.

The rational part of me knew that what Red Alvin had said was true: if cases like this didn’t get solved immediately, they almost never did. If someone had seen Tip get hurt, and if they wanted to help, they would have come forward by now. Since no one had, it meant that nobody was going to. And without a witness—or a confession—the case was dead in the water.

I even tried calling Brother Gary and Red Alvin. The first time, they were professional enough about it—it didn’t take a psych degree to understand why I had an above-average interest in the case, and even though they were a pair of tools, they told me what they could. The second time, when they didn’t have anything new to share, things got frosty. The third time, it was worse. And the fourth. And the fifth. Eventually, the admin who answered the phone stopped transferring my calls, and Peterson pulled me aside in the bullpen to ask me if I needed to talk about anything, and if I didn’t, to let the sheriff’s detectives do their jobs.

Days turned into weeks.

In some ways, the investigation had altered something in the rhythm I’d set over the last year. I was drinking less. I was exercising more. I was also vaping more, but fuck, you’ve got to die somehow. I spent less time on the apps—Prowler, Grindr, Scruff. I had enough self-awareness to know that having a new obsession wasn’t necessarily any healthier than the old ones, but at least it was something different.

Darnell, for his part, took it all as a good sign. I was home more, and he liked that. I was making healthier choices—in his opinion—and he liked that too.

He’d made a sticker chart for me, back when things had been really bad. I wasn’t supposed to call it a sticker chart, of course, but that’s what it was. He had it in the kitchen. We never had people over, not in the last year, but I imagined it would be really fucking fun if we had to explain that. I would have said it was a sex thing. I do this many chores, and Daddy takes off my chastity cage. Maybe if the Mormons knocked on our door.

Anyway, I got stickers every time I did something “healthy.” Some of the things were stuff that I’d struggled to do at the beginning. Basic stuff, self-care, like taking a shower. Exercise was up there, too. Eating. You can make it a long time on nothing but Vicodin and a good vape. Those things weren’t really an issue anymore, but Darnell still put the stickers up. He said things like “Good job going to the gym today” and “That was a healthy choice for lunch.”

Other parts of the sticker chart looked pretty fucking sad in contrast.

There was one area for emotional and mental health, with a row for expressing emotions, seeking support, and using healthy coping mechanisms. And there was one for personal growth and positive behavior, like trying new things, positive self-talk ( shove a dick in me , I learned, is not positive self-talk), and resisting self-destructive behavior.

So, yeah, those sections of the chart were gapingly empty of stickers. Maybe if the stickers had been dick shaped.

Darnell had done lots of reading and research. He was a smart guy. He’d worked hard to figure out all the best ways he could support me—although about once a week we still had a version of the conversation where he told me, The only person who can really help you now is you . But that didn’t stop Darnell from trying his hardest.

There was the sticker chart.

There were our evening check-ins—fifteen or twenty godawful minutes we had to sit on the couch, making eye contact, while we asked each other about the day and practiced our active listening skills.

There were all the ways Darnell enabled a “supportive atmosphere.” Routine was part of it; doing the same thing, more or less, every day, to minimize surprises or changes. He got up every morning before me and turned on all the lights. All of them. Every fucking light in that fucking house, and they stayed on all fucking day so that I wouldn’t have to touch a light switch.

Once a week, we practiced a new healthy coping mechanism. It was yoga one week. It was meditation another. Once, it was an art night. He’d found these paint-by-number pieces that ended up super porny—like, you painted a giant cock inside a hot dog bun, or an asshole, but it looked like one of those flowers that lady was famous for painting.

He made sure to model self-care. I knew that’s what it was called because he left those stupid books all over the house, and he’d highlighted something on every page. He said things like “I had a hard day, so I’m going to take a long bath. Do you want to join me?” Or “I’m feeling very dysregulated right now, so I’m going to take a moment to center myself, if you want to sit with me for minute.” Or “I’m going to take a walk. Is that something you’re feeling up to?” I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to. I’m going to go out of my fucking mind, I wanted to tell him.

And then there were the cards.

When I started doing things again, when things started to get a little better, we’d agreed to try an open relationship. Darnell had a few conditions, of course—no one we knew, no one who was already in a relationship, and no staying out all night. And one other thing: we had to work on our relationship. Really work on it.

Part of that was the cards.

It was a deck of those cards that have questions you’re supposed to ask your partner—he got them at Walmart. And you draw a card and get a question at random and ask each other the question. In theory, you learn more about each other, and you fall even more deeply in love, and all that bullshit. Every night, he drew a card.

Some nights, it was easier than others. Because he was Darnell. Because he wanted so badly to save me.

One night, for example.

We were sitting there on the couch. It had been Darnell’s; when we’d moved in together, most of my stuff had either gone into the basement or been donated. That was fine. My stuff had been cheap bachelor crap—nothing to look at, not particularly comfortable, and most of it already falling apart after the move from Springfield. Darnell’s stuff, on the other hand, was nice bachelor crap—really fucking ugly, but also really fucking comfortable. Think, lots of plaid and leather and La-Z-Boy, like if you put a bunch of sixty-year-old straight men in charge of decorating a hunting cabin. We didn’t have any animal heads mounted on the walls, but it was a close thing.

Darnell drew that night’s card from the deck. He glanced at it, and he cut his eyes to me, and he discarded it on the couch.

“I thought you couldn’t skip a card,” I said.

“That one’s not a good fit for us.”

But then he drew the next one, and his mouth tightened, and he discarded that one as well.

“You’re cheating,” I said.

“It’s not a game. Nobody wins or loses.”

Everything was a game, I almost said. But that might have cost me a sticker.

Instead, I picked up the two cards he’d discarded. Darnell tried to get them first, but I was faster. Iread the questions. The first said, When did you feel loneliest in your childhood? And the second: What things about your parents’ relationship do you absolutely not want to have in ours?

“This is a good one,” Darnell said, and then he gently took the two rejects from me and put them in his pocket. Not, I noticed, at the bottom of the deck, which is where he usually put the cards. He read from the one he was holding. “What was the soundtrack of your childhood?”

I had been seven or eight; or, at least, when I’d first started thinking about the memory, and trying to make sense of it, that had been my best guess. I’d been in the living room, holding Optimus Prime, and standing totally, perfectly still because if I didn’t move, they couldn’t see me. They were in the kitchen because my dad had been getting a beer. They were screaming at each other. It had started the way it always started, my dad coming home from work at the plant, my mom bored from another day at home. She started getting the vodka out of the freezer around noon. He wanted peace and quiet. She wanted to talk. He turned on the ball game. She turned on music. He turned off the music. She turned it back on again, louder. She wanted to dance. The sound of his fist. The door slamming shut. Her sobbing, and the volume on the ball game going up, up, up.

And now they were standing in the kitchen. He’d gone to get a beer. And she’d come out of their room. And I remembered how tight my body felt, every muscle rigid and locked. I remembered the plastic of Optimus Prime’s body biting into my hands. I remembered how badly I needed to pee, and the thought, full of its own, secondary urgency: Big boys don’t pee their pants.

She’d changed; she was wearing a red babydoll trimmed in black; I didn’t know that’s what it was called until I started looking at porn. The mark on her cheek was red. He was holding the beer, the fridge door still open between them, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he was standing behind it because, in some way, he’d been afraid. This time, she hit him—a big, openhanded slap that he must have seen coming from a mile away. He dropped the beer. The bottle broke on the floor. Beer foamed and hissed and sprayed. Glass spun across the tile, winking under the light. He grabbed her by the hair. He was still shouting. She was screaming, but different now, as he dragged her to their room. The door slammed shut. They kept screaming. The thud of furniture, of bodies, of small, hard things thrown.

The fights always ended the same way: they turned on the radio. And then, the rhythmic thumping would begin. I was too young to know, at the time, what it meant—only that the fight was over. For now. It was AC/DC that time. “Hells Bells.” I was in college when I learned the term pork track .

“AC/DC,” I said.

Darnell laughed. “For real? I was sure you were going to say NSYNC.”

And that was it. We moved on.

Things might have gone on like that forever, I guess. Until one evening, late in June, when I found myself once again sitting outside Tip Wheeler’s apartment.