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Full Circle

It took Owen a moment to realize where he was.

For a while, he just stood there, bracing himself against the wood paneling. Owen had to stoop over, chin to his chest, drool easing out over his lower lip before dangling there in a gooey drip. His head spun like he’d been drinking all night.

It was the simple touch from his finger that pinged his memory radar.

The pad of his index finger found a hole in the wood paneling—a hole that had been filled with something not quite flush against the surface. Something pushed in a little too far.

The memory was full-fledged, then—

Nick, fourteen years old, a bow and arrow in his hand, stoned. He let fly with the arrow—one topped with the barebones target tip, just a pointy metal bit straight off the shaft. It flew right into the wall, thud-d-d-d, and stuck there, waggling. All of them were there, and their jaws dropped because, well, none of them could just shoot a fucking arrow into the fucking wall and expect to get away with it. But Nick had been mad, pouty, shouldering his way through every conversation with brute contempt—nobody knew why he was so salty, but he was, and that’s when he, out of nowhere, got the bow and the arrow and shot his own basement wall.

Thing was, Nick probably could’ve gotten away with it, or so they figured. Nick’s dad was famously cool—he waved everything off and was Good Times Guy. He had a high-profile money job somewhere— banking or investments or something. But after hours, he let that all go and was A Cool Dude. Lore joked that he was Wall Street in the streets, Jimmy Buffett in the sheets, but Nick told her that joke sucked because street in the streets sounded dumb. Lore didn’t like to be criticized, though, so she sack-tapped Nick hard with the back of her hand. That, though, was another day—on this day, the day of the arrow-into-the-wall, Nick did it and seemed immediately freaked out that he’d done it.

They all told him, relax, your dad won’t care, but he didn’t want to hear boo about it. Said he had to fix it. Like he was in a panic. So, like always, they set to figuring out how to fix his fuckup, and it was Owen who had the idea:

Take a number two pencil.

Stick it into the hole.

Then get a saw and cut it flush against the wall.

The faux-wood grain on the paneling was pretty light. The pencil, he theorized, might just disappear from view. It would look like a “knot” in the “wood.” So that’s what they did. It wasn’t perfect—when they cut through it, it wasn’t pushed forward all the way, so it still sank a little deeper. But even still, for the most part? It worked. Owen felt weirdly like a champion for once, as if he’d had the good idea, not Matty, not Lore. And he remembered that Nick was nicer to him that day. How special that felt. And how stupid he felt remembering it.

That divot was what his finger was finding right now.

Which meant—

This was Nick’s basement.

He lifted his head up, spit slicking his chin.

The shitty couch. The stairs up. The card table mounded high with all kinds of shit: D they called it the Slumbering Beast.

There sat Nick.

“Nick,” Owen said, his voice small.

But this wasn’t Current Era Nick.

This was Nick from Back When.

He looked…young, but how old? It was the hair that gave it away. For a year, when he was fifteen, Nick had the faux-hawk thing going on. (A year later, he shaved it all off, though everyone said he looked like a skinhead, which made him immediately grow it back out, because “fuck that neo-Nazi shit.”) It was the faux-hawk Owen was looking at now.

Nick, at fifteen.

He was sitting in the chair. Hands in his lap, staring at his knees.

Softly crying. A bubble of snot in the one side of his nose.

His belt was undone.

From the other side of the room, a rattle-and-clink of bottles. There was a low wooden cabinet there. The fridge was upstairs, but down here, that IKEA-level cabinet had in it a bunch of bottles of liquor. Mostly cheap, nasty stuff: Goldschl?ger and Yukon Jack and J?ger, maybe some schnapps, stuff Nick loved and that all of the rest of them hated but drank anyway—and usually ended up throwing up. (Even now the memory of the taste of them was so visceral, Owen could taste the sour-sweet bile at the back of his throat.)

Owen turned his head—which took what honestly felt like a Herculean effort, like the whole room smeared as he looked that way—and expected to see Hamish, or Lore, or Matty there. Maybe even himself. (And there, a new question: Am I in here somewhere? Some teenage version of me, an Old Timer penknife in his hand, his arms bleeding from the cuts, his feelings hurt from his father’s vigorous disdain? ) But it wasn’t any of them.

It was Nick’s father.

The man stood there, shoulders sagged, a troubled look on his face. He had a polo shirt on, with a tropical print. No pants, just underwear, and he was tugging on the elastic of them, pulling them up tighter as he stood, fetching a bottle of what looked like peach schnapps. Jacquin’s brand, with the squared-off bottle.

He looked to his son, asked, “You want some, kiddo?” Pause. “You know, if it hurts, this helps.”

Nick just stayed in that chair, staring at his knees. Through them. Through his body, through the floor, to some great emptiness beyond them all.

He shook his head in a small, barely perceptible way.

“If you’re sure,” Nick’s father said, then spun the cap off with his thumb and took a swig of it. He headed toward the staircase, then shot a look at Owen—

Right at Owen.

He winked.

Then headed upstairs and was gone.

Owen turned to look back toward Nick—

And Nick from Back When was here. Directly in front of him. Damn near nose to nose. Still had that snot oozing. Still had tears brimming at the bottom lids of his eyes. “You never noticed,” he said, his voice a raw, chewed-up sound. Like night bugs. Like cicadas . “And it kept happening. The things he did to me. But it didn’t break me, Zuikas. Not till I came here.”

And then Nick was gone. But the imprint of him remained, like a feeling in the air, a strange pocket of disturbed space. It shimmered like a cloud of flies.

Again, his gorge rose. Owen wanted to vomit. The taste of that peach schnapps crawled up the back of his tongue like a wet slug.

He pivoted back to the door from whence he came, shoving it open and stumbling into a filthy guest room piled with rags and mess, smelling of a gas leak—he gagged, not even making it to the bed before he threw up what he had eaten from the pantry. Everything swam around him.

Sweat streamed off his skull as his consciousness bled out—veins of shadow closing in like the black mold from the Black Mold Bedroom.

He cried out in the agony of both pain and the revelation of how much pain was here in this place and in the world beyond. And in all that, he thought of Nick. Poor Nick. Nick in that basement. Nick with his father.